The Catholic World, Vol. XV, April to September, 1872

In so far as we may judge from the notices in periodicals and newspapers, this work appears to have been received, both in England and the United States, not only with general favor, but with enthusiastic admiration.

A history of English literature based on a system new to the great body of English readers, and written with freshness, verve, and certain attractive peculiarities of style, could not fail to fix their attention and engage their interest from the beginning to the end of its two bulky octavo volumes. The author of the work in question is so well known in the world of letters by his essays on the philosophy of art that he needs no introduction to our readers.

M. Taine starts out with the assumption that the literature of any given country is the exponent of its mental life, or, as he states it (p. 20), “I am about to write the history of a literature, and to seek in it for the psychology of a people.” In France and Germany, we are told, history has been revolutionized by the study of their literatures.

Unquestionably the style of man’s feelings may be traced in literature for centuries back. That is M. Taine’s first approach. But between the successful insight into this or that writer’s opinions and modes of thought and the opinions and modes of thought of a nation, the void is so enormous—unless, indeed, we dangerously reason from particulars to generals—as to require to fill it more subjective literary productions than any country has ever yet produced.

From this system it would follow that if a nation has no literature it can have no history. If it have—as is too often the case—no literature but that of a despotism or of a dominant minority, it follows that you cannot discern a single idea nor hear a single pulsation of the heart of a great people. But granting the literature to exist, although we are told that a work “is not a mere play of the imagination,” we nevertheless know full well that some of the most brilliant portions of every literature are precisely what that phrase describes. Beyond that, we also know that all writers are not only not sincere, but too often unfaithful because too often venal, and cannot therefore be relied upon.

In certain writings enumerated by him, M. Taine says: “The reader will see all the wealth that may be drawn from a literary work: when the work is rich, and one knows how to interpret it, we find there the psychology of a soul, frequently of an age, now and then of a race.” Partially true. And M. Taine might have instanced the Confessions of St. Augustine, but he does not. We may indeed find what he indicates under certain conditions, for, as he very correctly adds, “their utility grows with their perfection.” Unfortunately, such works occur in literature at the rarest intervals.

It cannot be questioned that M. Taine’s theory contains a germ of truth. But, in fact, so far as it is true it is a very old story. What is true in his theory is not new, and what is new is questionable. Since history has risen to be something more and something better than a mere roll of warriors and a correct list of kings and queens—which latter class of good people are fast disappearing, never again, we trust, to return—since the historian has been elevated from the rank of a mere annalist to be the interpreter to his own age of not only the acts and sufferings, but the mind and the heart of dead generations, he has become avid of the most trifling details concerning their transitory passage here on earth. He desires to discover and relate how they lived, slept, and ate—how they talked, toiled, and travelled—what they said, what they thought—what, in a word, was their social and psychological life. To obtain the knowledge he seeks, all sources are equally valuable—written manuscripts that speak as well as stone ruins that are dumb.

Such knowledge as this the new school of German historians, having first exhausted all literary material, have sought to gather from the most remote and even repulsive sources; and from philological analysis, from works of art, from monuments, old roads, half-corroded coins, almost obliterated inscriptions, broken pottery, partially effaced frescoes, and from the very fragments of mere kitchen utensils, they have created afresh and revealed to us, in all its details, the daily and familiar life of ancient Rome, and poured a flood of light upon the living man of the that day.

And yet, before the results of their archæological and ethnological labors were given to the world, we thought we knew our Roman well and familiarly. For what literature, unless it be that of Greece, presents so rich and so complete a portrait gallery of all the types of its people as the literature of Rome? From Virgil, who gives us the ploughman and vinedresser, and Cæsar, through whose pages marches the Roman soldier, to Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Horace, we have a score of writers in whose pages all the virtues and vices, the grandeur and the shame, the nobility and the grovelling sensuality, of Rome are spread before us in language so attractive and so grand as to promise to outlast many modern masterpieces.

M. Taine sneers at “Latin literature as worth nothing at the outset,” being “borrowed and imitative.” To this we reply, Adhuc sub judice, etc., and, bad or not, it tells the story of the Roman people, and very nearly reveals to us the ancient Roman as he walked on earth.

We have no such faithful picture of the English people in English literature.

We fear that M. Taine mistakes a part for the whole. Unquestionably, literature has its uses, and high ones, for the elucidation of many a problem and the illumination of many a page of history; but, if we set out to find the history of a nation in its literature, outside of history proper and the new aids to historical research we have referred to, we merely adopt a deceptive guide that can lead us only to disappointment. For these grand theories, so symmetrical and so plausible, when presented by their generally eloquent framers, stand, when put into actual service, very little wear and tear. Accordingly, we find that there happens to M. Taine precisely what happens to every man who starts out to construct a work strictly according to a given system. And what thus happens is a serious matter. This it is. Facts are treated as of secondary importance. They are put upon their best behavior. They must show themselves up to a certain standard, or they are counted as worthless. If they are so wrong-headed as to come in conflict with the author’s theory—the old story—why, so much the worse for the facts, and our theorist ruthlessly tramples upon and walks over them straight to his objective point, which is, necessarily, his foregone conclusion.

It would detain us too long to present an analysis of M. Taine’s introduction, from which alone it would not be difficult to demonstrate the insufficiency of his theory. It contains passages which, in the stately march of his eloquent phrase, seem to sound as though they announced newly discovered truths of startling import, but which, translated into familiar language, turn out to be but little more than the text-book enunciation of some familiar principle. Thus:

M. Taine, it is evident, cannot be charged with sparing his readers either the enunciation or the elucidation of first principles.

The author commences by disposing of the Anglo-Saxons, their literature, and six centuries of their annals, in a short chapter of twenty-three pages, which, so far as our observation has extended, has been passed over both by English and American criticism almost without remark. Some reviewers account for its conciseness by saying that Anglo-Saxon literature has but little interest for the general reader, except as a question of philology. As of general application, the remark is not widely incorrect, but it is signally out of place with reference to M. Taine’s work, for he announces as part of his task that of “developing the recondite mechanism whereby the Saxon barbarian has been transformed into the Englishman of to-day.”

Now, fairly to understand the Englishman of to-day, we must, by M. Taine’s own announcement, have the Saxon original placed before us; for, he says, “the modern Englishman existed entire in this Saxon” (p. 31). The Saxon must be produced to our sight, and we must have him evolved strictly on M. Taine’s principles, viz., as the psychological product of his literature. If this is done, he will fulfil his engagement of “developing the recondite mechanism,” etc., or, in other words, of presenting us a full exposition of Anglo-Saxon literature.

We feel bound to say that none of these promises are kept, and none of these results are reached, by M. Taine; nay, more, that he not only totally fails in presenting a fair or even intelligible abstract of Anglo-Saxon literature, but that he appears to be wanting in the necessary information which might enable him to do it. We think it less derogatory to him to say that his knowledge of the subject is defective than to make the necessarily alternative charge.

We find, however, some excuse for M. Taine’s limited acquirements in Anglo-Saxon literature in the fact that he appears to have relied to a great extent on Warton and on Sharon Turner. Dr. Warton’s well-known history of English poetry is unquestionably a work of great merit and utility, in so far as it treats of English poetry from the period of Chaucer down, but as authority on any matter connected with Anglo-Saxon literature, it is next to worthless. Warton knew very little about it. Sharon Turner as authority on Anglo-Saxon history, and Sharon Turner as authority on Anglo-Saxon literature, are two very different persons. The knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature has made great strides since his day. For his history he was not dependent on Anglo-Saxon documents. Latin material was abundant.

It must be borne in mind that, although the English tongue is so directly derived from it, Anglo-Saxon is, nevertheless, a dead language, and when, in the sixteenth century, its study was to some extent revived, it had not only been dead four hundred years, but buried and forgotten. That revival occurred at a time when religious controversy ran high in England, the motive prompting it being to discover testimony among Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical MSS. as to the existence of an English Catholic Church separate from and independent of Papal authority. Thus far the search has not been attended with any marked success. In the seventeenth century, Anglo-Saxon was studied for the light it threw on the early history and legislation of England. Since the commencement of the present century, the study has been pursued with greater success than ever for objects purely literary and philological. Indeed, it may be said that, until within some forty years, the cultivation of Anglo-Saxon was confined to a very small circle of scholars.

The most remarkable monuments of its literature are of comparatively recent publication, and there happened at the outset to the study of Anglo-Saxon precisely what happened to the study of Sanskrit. It was that many scholars, aware of its literary wealth, and, possibly, in possession of copies of some of its productions, were without adequate means of pursuing or even of commencing their studies on account of the want of dictionaries and grammars. It was for this reason that Frederick Schlegel, before writing his great work on The Language and Wisdom of the Indians, was obliged to leave Germany and go to England, in order to avail himself of the resources of the British Museum; and when we consider the difficulties under which Dr. Lingard made his Anglo-Saxon studies, and wrote his Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church, of which work M. Taine does not appear to have heard, we are more than ever surprised at the ability displayed by the great English historian.

When we undertake to trace the gradual development of the Anglo-Saxon of Anno 500 into the Englishman of 1800, the first phase is immeasurably the most interesting and the most important, for in that phase he was at once civilized and christianized. Take away the introduction and development of Christianity from Anglo-Saxon history, and you have left nothing but a list of kings and two or three battles. Now, M. Taine’s exposition of how, when, and through what agencies civilization and Christianity were brought into England may be descriptively characterized as “how not to do it.” His great effort in his introductory chapter is to eliminate Christianity from Anglo-Saxon history, and to give us, as it were, the play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted—an effort so systematic and persistent as to make us almost regret our volunteered plea for his excuse on the ground of want of familiarity with his subject. Here is his device to escape the necessity of relating the all essential story of the conversion to Christianity: “A race so constituted was predisposed to Christianity by its gloom, its aversion to sensual and reckless living, its inclination for the serious and sublime.” M. Taine has just described (pp. 41-43) the leading characteristics of the pagan Anglo-Saxon mind as manifested in its poetry—“a race so constituted”—and cites in support of his exposition two passages translated from what he asserts to be pagan Anglo-Saxon poetry. The first, Battle of Finsborough, we know was found on the cover of a ms. book of homilies, written by some monk, although it may, perhaps, be of pagan origin. The second, and more important one, The Battle of Brunanburh, containing the line, “The sun on high, the great star, God’s brilliant candle, the noble creature”[2] (p. 43), is Christian and monkish beyond all peradventure, for it forms a portion of the Saxon Chronicle, begun as late as the days of Alfred. The battle was fought in the year 939!

We continue: “Its aversion to sensual and reckless living.” This is simply astounding when we remember that M. Taine has just been telling us, through twenty pages, of their “ravenous stomachs filled with meat and cheese, heated by strong drinks,” “prone to brutal drunkenness,” becoming “more gluttonous, carving their hogs, filling themselves with flesh; swallowing all the strong, coarse drinks which they could procure,” etc.

And then follows the far more surprising psychological result: “These utter barbarians embrace Christianity straightway, through sheer force of mood and clime” (p. 44).

Now, M. Taine knows—as we all know—that these pagan Anglo-Saxons were brutal and sensual to the last degree. In personal indulgence, they were what he describes and more. They were pirates, robbers, and murderers.

The rewards promised them by their gods after death were that they should have nothing to do but eat and drink. Even the paganism of their Scandinavian and Teutonic forefathers, a mixture of massacre and sensuality, was corrupted by them, and the emblems of their bloody and obscene gods were naked swords and hammers, with which they broke the heads of their victims. The immortality promised them in their Walhalla was a long continuance of new days of slaughter, and nights of debauch spent in drinking from their enemies’ skulls. Such was the race found by M. Taine so constituted as to be “predisposed to Christianity by its gloom, its aversion to sensual and reckless living”; such the people who “through sheer force of mood and clime” laid aside their cruelty, brutality, carnage, and sensuality, gave up feasting for fasting, proud independence for obedience, indulgence for self-denial! Truly remarkable effects of atmosphere. The climate of England must have greatly changed since the year 597.

In the course of a debate which once arose in the British House of Commons on the subject of negro emancipation, it was urged against the measure that you could not civilize the negro; he belonged to an inferior race which offered human sacrifices and sold their own children into slavery. Whereupon, a member promptly replied that was just what our ancestors in England did—they offered human sacrifices and sold their children into slavery. This will naturally recall to the reader’s mind the touching incident which led to the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, the fair-haired and blue-eyed children offered for sale, and their redemption by the great Gregory, who said they were not only Angles, but angels. From that moment the mission to England was resolved upon. We all know the story. Gregory’s departure, his capture by the citizens of Rome and forcible return, his elevation to the pontifical throne, the departure of St. Augustine and his forty companions, their trials, sufferings, and danger of death on the route, their arrival in England, their labors, the gradual and peaceful conversion of the people, their successful efforts in bringing the Saviour, his Gospel, and his church to benighted heathens, and their civilization and social amelioration of the Anglo-Saxons. To the immortal glory of these men be it said that neither violence nor persecution was resorted to by them, their disciples, or their protectors for the triumph of civilization and religion. It is one of the grandest Christian victories on record. Of all this, here is M. Taine’s record:

The Protestant historian, Sharon Turner, says of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons: “It was accomplished in a manner worthy of the benevolence and purity [of the Christian religion]. Genuine piety seems to have led the first missionaries to our shores. Their zeal, their perseverance, and the excellence of the system they diffused made their labors successful.” He gives a detailed narrative of the action of Gregory the Great, of the devotion and self-sacrifice of St. Augustine and his companions, of their long and perilous journey, their landing in England, and, in describing their procession on the Isle of Thanet, writes: “With a silver cross and a picture of Christ, they advanced singing the litany.” M. Taine, with a stroke of the pen, copies this line almost word for word, and makes it do duty for a full and detailed account of the labors of St. Augustine and his forty companions for two score years!

What period of time the word presently represents to M. Taine we do not know. It may be an hour, or a day, or a month, but the incident which he refers to as occurring “presently” took place about forty years after the “procession.”

And now it is sought to belittle or decry the victory of the Christian missionaries in two ways: 1st. It was the most natural thing in the world for the brutal, bloody, slave-dealing, drunken barbarian to embrace the new religion, because his paganism so strongly resembled Christianity. 2d. But after conversion they remained, after all, substantially, barbarous pagans as before, and their songs remind M. Taine of “the songs of the servants of Odin, tonsured and clad in the garments of monks.” “The Christian hymns embody the pagan” (p. 46).

To demonstrate this, and to show that the songs of these converted Saxons are “but a concrete of exclamations,” have “no development,” and are nothing but paganism after all, M. Taine gives five prose lines of imperfect translation from a poem by Cædmon. Here is a correct rendering of the opening of the poem in the original metre. Let the reader judge of the amount of pagan inspiration it contains:

M. Taine continues:

M. Taine has here given rein to his imagination, and made terrible work with Saxon chronology and other matters. For Adhelm read Aldhelm, in Saxon Ealdhelm, so King Alfred spelt it. The name signifies Old Helmet; Aldhelm was of princely extraction. “Warlike and profane odes” does not correctly translate “carmen triviale.” Aldhelm was a learned priest, a Greek, Latin, and Hebrew scholar, with a profound knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. His present reputation rests on his Latin works. His contemporary reputation was founded on his Anglo-Saxon productions. He composed canticles and ballads in his native tongue, and, remarking the haste of many of the Anglo-Saxon peasants to leave church as soon as the Sunday Mass was over, in order to avoid the sermon, he would lie in wait for them at the bridge or wayside, and, singing to them as a bard, attract their attention, and in the fascination of a musical verse teach them the truths of religion they would not wait to hear from the pulpit. It was not for the pleasure of singing that Aldhelm thus labored: it was to save souls. Without the slightest authority, M. Taine puts in his mouth this beautiful Anglo-Saxon fragment:

The composition is not by Aldhelm, who, probably, never heard of it. All of Aldhelm’s Anglo-Saxon mss. perished when the magnificent monastery at Malmesbury was sacked under Henry VIII. The Protestant historian, Maitland, thus tells the story: “The precious mss. of his [Aldhelm’s] library were long employed to fill up broken windows in the neighboring houses, or to light the bakers’ fires.”

All that we know of The Grave is that it was found written in the margin of a volume of Anglo-Saxon homilies, preserved in the Bodleian Library. It is of a period following Aldhelm’s era, and is in the dialect of East Anglia, while Aldhelm was of Wessex. But M. Taine himself demonstrates that it could not be Aldhelm’s. At page 50, he tells us Aldhelm died in 709, having previously stated (p. 46) that the fragment “was one of the last Anglo-Saxon compositions.” But among the finest Anglo-Saxon poetical compositions are the celebrated Ormulum, and various poems by Layamon, which were written about the year 1225. The Grave, moreover, so far from containing “a terrible Christianity,” has so essentially the tone and spirit of many well-known Catholic meditations on death, that it might have been written in a Spanish monastery or taken from a book of Christian devotions.

Of course, “the poor monks” can do nothing creditable in M. Taine’s eyes, and he comes to sad grief in undertaking to go, by specification, beyond the common counts of the ordinary declaration dictated by bigotry. At page 53, vol. i., he thus refers in contemptuous terms to the monks who compiled the Saxon Chronicle:

And here a word as to this Chronicle, which is a national history generally conceded to have been established by King Alfred, under the advice of his counsellor Pflegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, about 870 A.D. It begins with a brief account of Britain from Cæsar’s invasion, and becomes very full in its narrative after the year 853.

The Chronicle shares with Bede’s history the highest place among authorities for early English history. Seven original copies of it are still in existence, and, making due allowance for the ravages of time and the elements, and the destruction by war, demolition of the monasteries, theft, spoliation, and the wilful mischief of religious bigotry, the survival of these seven copies would go far to prove the former existence of several hundreds. The copies yet extant are all evidently based upon a single original text, and it is presumed that the Chronicle was continued at all the monasteries in England, each one forwarding its local annals to some one special monastery, where a brief summary was compiled of the whole, copies of which were supplied to all the religious houses, to be incorporated with the general Chronicle, thus keeping up from year to year the general history of the nation. M. Taine gives some half-dozen dry-as-dust extracts from the Chronicle of this nature:

He adds:

But at page 42, M. Taine has given us as belonging to a period preceding Christianity in England, as a part of “the pagan current,” an extract from the song on Athelstan’s victory, of which he speaks in terms of enthusiastic admiration. “If there has ever been anywhere a deep and serious poetic sentiment, it is here,” etc. Now, this song, under the date of A.D. 937, is a part of the Saxon Chronicle, written by some poor monk “after Alfred’s time.”

“It is thus the monks speak with monotonous dryness”! And so speak they often in their Chronicle. The death of Byrhtnoth referred to by M. Taine in note 2, p. 36, is also from the Saxon Chronicle, and Mr. Morley specifies numerous other poetical passages in it. Nevertheless, we find that M. Taine is not at all embarrassed by his somewhat uncertain and limited command of Anglo-Saxon literature. On the contrary, he qualifies as amusing (p. 30) a discussion on a point of Anglo-Saxon history by two such distinguished scholars as Dr. Lingard and Sharon Turner! These historians “amuse” M. Taine!

In this we almost agree with our author. It is well to study shells, and well to study men in the shells of leaves, sheets, manuscripts, or other literary exuviæ they may have left. Our objection to M. Taine is that he has piles and heaps of such shells, which he resolutely refuses to study, behind which he persistently refuses to look. The trouble with him lies here. Behind every shell is a monk, a priest, or a bishop, whose piety and whose virtues are not subjects of agreeable contemplation to a writer who announces his belief that religion is a mere human invention; that man makes a religion as he paints a portrait or constructs a steam-engine. Thus M. Taine states it: “Let us take first the three chief works of human intelligence—religion, art, philosophy” (p. 15).

Accordingly, of the great minds of Anglo-Saxon England during whole centuries we see nothing in M. Taine’s pages. They are carefully kept out of sight. One of the most majestic figures in all literary history, that of the Venerable Bede, is absent from his chapters, being referred to only twice by name, once as “Bede, their old poet”! The learned Aldhelm is made a mere gleeman on the highway. Roger Bacon’s name is not mentioned—the name of the man who was a prodigy of learning, and who announced the principles of the inductive system nearly four hundred years before Lord Verulam appropriated the glory of its discovery.[6] Augustine, Paulinus, Wilfred, Cuthbert, and scores of others are not referred to. These men and their companions were at once monks, preachers, schoolmasters, book-makers, scribes, authors, physicians, architects, builders, surveyors, and farmers. Laborare est orare, Labor is prayer, was their device. Barren moors, repulsive marshes, fever-bearing fens, and wasted tracts they cultivated, and made glad fields of gloomy swamps.

The sandy plains and barren heaths of Northumbria, and the marshes of East Anglia and Mercia, the monks transformed by intelligent labor and enduring toil from uninhabited deserts into rich fields yielding abundant harvests. Around these isolated monasteries soon sprang up, as around so many centres of life, schools, workshops, and settlements. The wilderness blossomed. And the monks wrote Christianity and civilization on the hearts of the people and on the soil of England. Not to mention the grand literary monuments dedicated to the record of their pious labors by Count Montalembert in his Monks of the West, all these victories for humanity are clearly discernible to scores of modern Protestant writers, who have borne eloquent testimony to the noble devotion and glorious services of these holy men, whose real merits have been too long obscured by the historical conspiracy against truth. They have looked behind shells and manuscripts, and found something to reward their search.

Thus Carlyle finds a man behind the old MS. of Jocelin of Brakelond:

With the advantage of eleven hundred years of accumulated knowledge in his favor, the cultivated M. Taine can well afford to sneer at “a kind of literature” with which he credits these monks. The “kind of literature” they most affected, and in which they unceasingly labored, was the kind known as “the Scriptures.” Of a verity, strange occupation for “sons of Odin,” for the most meagre summary of Anglo-Saxon, monastic labor in this field is a magnificent memorial of their imperishable glory.

In default of types and power-presses, volumes of the Scriptures were multiplied by copying, and every talent and gift of man was enlisted to preserve, beautify, and bring them within the reach and comprehension of the great body of the people. Its light was not hidden in the obscurity of an unfamiliar tongue. In the fourth century, on the banks of the Danube, Ulphilas had translated the entire Scriptures into the then barbarous Mœso-Gothic. In England, Cædmon had sung the Scripture story of God’s power and mercy, and put into verse all of Genesis and Exodus, with other portions of the Old Testament, besides the life and passion of our Lord and the Acts of the Apostles. The Venerable Bede had translated St. John’s Gospel, and written numerous expositions of the Old and New Testaments. Aldhelm had translated the Psalms. The entire four Gospels have come down to us in the Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred’s day. Ælfric translated the whole of the Pentateuch and the Book of Job. The Normans in England had various translations besides their metrical romance, and a verse translation of the Bible. In 1327, William of Shoreham translated the Psalter into English. A few years later, Richard Rolle translated the Psalms and part of the Book of Job into the dialect of Northumberland. The four Gospels issued in 1571 by Parker, with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth by Foxe, the martyrologist, are copied from two Anglo-Saxon versions of the tenth and eleventh centuries. From the original copy, Tha Halgan Godspel on Englisc, they appear to have been divided and arranged for reading aloud to the people. Many of these, it will be noticed, are versions adorned and heightened by literary labor and poetic inspiration. Plain prose Bible translations existed in large numbers, which, as being more exposed, were the first to perish from the effects of time, the elements, and the wilful destruction of bigotry. The metrical versions were generally better bound and better cared for in special libraries, and in the hands of the wealthy. And yet of these how few copies survive! And who shall tell us of scores of hundreds more of which we have never heard? An immense body of Anglo-Saxon Scriptural literature has perished and left no trace.

But M. Taine, it may be objected, was surely under no obligation to write the history of your Anglo-Saxon monks! Certainly not. But he was under some sort of obligation not to represent the product of Christianity, viz., the Anglo-Saxon man, as the product of pure paganism. That he has done so, we have shown from the remarkable manner in which he has spoken of the products of Anglo-Saxon literature, and we have not taken into account the full and rich material at command, written in the Latin language by the Anglo-Saxons.

When we get further on in M. Taine’s work, we find in his fifth chapter, book the second, a yet more flagrant violation of his promise to show us the Englishman as the psychological product of his literature, and to “develop the recondite mechanism whereby the Saxon barbarian has been transformed into the Englishman of to-day.” Does he present to us the nature of the English Reformation as evolved from the writings of Englishmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Not at all. It would not be pleasant to show that, as politics was the leverage of the Reformation in Germany, plunder was the leverage in England, and he candidly admits, in phrase of studied delicacy (p. 362), that “the Reformation entered England by a side door.”

And so he travels all the way to Germany, and gives us, instead of English opinion and English mind, the echoes of Martin Luther’s “bellowing in bad Latin,”[7] and passages from his beery, boozy Table-Talk, bolstered up with extracts from a modern history of England by the late Mr. Froude. No study of shells and animals and manuscripts here. No elaborate development of recondite mechanism!

But we have scarcely space left for a few remarks we desire to make concerning

And, at the outset, we do not agree with those critics who ascribe M. Taine’s utterly fantastic and distorted appreciation of Shakespeare to the general incapacity of the Gallic mind to grasp the great dramatist. We find something more than this. We discover a labored effort at depreciation, negatively, positively, and by comparison. Of Shakespeare the man, the careful student must admit that we know very little—almost nothing, indeed. Hence the sharpened avidity of his biographers to seize upon every floating piece of gossip, every stray tradition concerning him, whereof to make history. With aid of such loose and unreliable material, M. Taine makes of Shakespeare a man of licentious morals and loose habits.

Our author’s æsthetic starting-point renders simply impossible for him any fair appreciation of the great English poet. Corneille and Racine are his models in tragedy—Molière in comedy. To them and to their productions he subordinates Shakespeare at every step. Listen!

At page 326, we are told: “If, in fact, Shakespeare comes across a heroic character worthy of Corneille, a Roman, such as the mother of Coriolanus, he will explain by passion[8] what Corneille would have explained by heroism.” “Reason,” M. Taine further informs us, “tells us that our manners should be measured; this is why the manners which Shakespeare paints are not so.” Again, “Shakespeare paints us as we are; his heroes bow, ask people for news, speak of rain and fine weather,” etc. (p. 312). As M. Taine finds that Shakespeare’s heroes bow, we should like to know his opinion of the exordium of the grand rhetorical effort which Corneille puts in the mouth of the master of the world, Cæsar Augustus:

It cannot in reason be expected that the man who admires the stiff and frigid artificiality of French tragedy should reach any clear perception of Shakespeare. Nor can we expect the appreciator of Shakespeare to find any superiority in Corneille and Racine. A distinguished German scholar (Grimm) admirably expresses the general German and English estimate of these French poets in a letter he addressed to Michelet: “Must I tell you the opinion commonly expressed among us here in Germany? With the greatest possible amount of good-will, I have again and again opened Racine, Corneille, and Boileau, and I fully appreciate their superior talents; but I cannot read them for any length of time [mais je ne puis en soutenir la lecture], so strong upon me is the impression that a portion of the most profound sentiments awakened by poetry are a sealed book for these authors.”

A French writer so able and so thoroughly skilled as M. Taine, is at home in persiflage, and throughout his work he freely indulges in it at the expense of “those excellent English.” From the moment the Norman sets his foot in England, he is the Englishman’s superior. With the Norman came in education and intelligence. These poor Anglo-Saxons appear to have been their inferiors. Wherever opportunity occurs, English models suffer in comparison with French throughout the work, which closes with an extravagant rhapsody on Alfred de Musset, and this line: “I prefer Alfred de Musset to Tennyson.”

Many scholars of high acquirements, admirers of Shakespeare, having exhausted with praise the catalogue of Shakespeare’s serious and solid qualities, find that his pre-eminent superiority lies in wit and humor—the wit bright and sparkling, the humor kindly and genial, more akin to wisdom than to wit, and, indeed, in itself a particular form of wisdom, so that it might almost be said that his fools give us more wisdom than the philosophers of ordinary dramatists. M. Taine is of a diametrically opposite opinion. Here it is: “The mechanical imagination produces Shakespeare’s fool-characters: a quick, venturesome, dazzling, unquiet imagination produces his men of wit.”

Would you know what is true wit? You may learn from page 320, vol. i.:

The conclusion is thus forced upon us that this is by no means the wit of Shakespeare. M. Taine falls into a mistake common to many persons who understand Shakespeare but imperfectly. It is that of attributing to him a certain style: “Let us, then, look for the man, and in his style. The style explains the work.” Ordinary writers have a style easily recognizable after slight study, but Shakespeare has fifty styles, certainly at least one for every character of marked individualism. This is not M. Taine’s view, for he says: “Shakespeare’s style is a compound of furious expressions. No man has submitted words to such a contortion. Mingled contrasts, raving exaggerations, apostrophes, exclamations, the whole fury of the ode, inversion of ideas, accumulation of images, the horrible and the divine jumbled into the same line; it seems, to my fancy, as though he never writes a word without shouting it” (p. 308).

If there is one peculiarity or merit of Shakespeare which, more than another, has received the general assent of critics and scholars, it is his eminently objective power. It is looked upon as a striking proof of the great dramatist’s deep, clear insight into the depths of the human heart, that he never thrusts his individuality into his conception of characters. He never mistakes the operations of his own mind for those of others, and never confounds his personality with that of any of his dramatic personages. Every page of Milton’s writings, it is said, exhibits a full-length portrait of the author. Byron’s heroes, Lara, Conrad, Manfred, and the rest, might interchange reflections and speeches, and not seriously interfere with each other’s identity, and the sentimental rubbish and trashy sophistry poured out from the mouths of any of Bulwer’s men and women might answer for all of them. But nothing that Romeo says could by possibility enter the mind of Hamlet, and King Lear has not a line which would be fitting in the mouth of Othello.

But M. Taine is not of this way of thinking. His theory is diametrically opposed to this, and he finds Shakespeare eminently subjective. He is always Shakespeare. “These characters are all of the same family. Good or bad, gross or delicate, refined or awkward, Shakespeare gives them all the same kind of spirit which is his own” (p. 317). Hamlet is Shakespeare, the melancholy Jaques[10] is Shakespeare, Othello is Shakespeare, and—Falstaff is Shakespeare!

No, we do not exaggerate. Here are M. Taine’s words: “Hamlet, it will be said, is half-mad; this explains his vehemence of expression. The truth is that Hamlet here is Shakespeare” (p. 308). “Hamlet is Shakespeare, and, at the close of this gallery of portraits, which have all some features of his own, Shakespeare has painted himself in the most striking of all” (p. 340).

Things equal to the same are equal to each other. Lara being George Gordon Noel Byron, and Conrad also being the same George, we see at once why there exists a striking resemblance between them; but when we are told that Hamlet and Falstaff, morally as far apart as the poles, are yet painted from the same model, we find that too much is asked of our credulity. Of Falstaff M. Taine says: “This big, pot-bellied fellow, a coward, a jester, a brawler, a drunkard, a lewd rascal, a pot-house poet, is one of Shakespeare’s favorites. The reason is that his manners are those of pure nature, and Shakespeare’s mind is congenial with his own” (p. 323). Wherein this “drunkard and lewd rascal” resembles Prince Hamlet, and wherein Shakespeare resembles either or both of them, is beyond the range of any Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic mind to comprehend. Perhaps M. Taine may be able to explain it. His book totally fails to do so.

No one can read this long chapter of fifty-five octavo pages on Shakespeare without being struck by the skill with which the author avoids mention of or reference to the dramatist’s most admirable passages, and also by his elaborate and painstaking exposition of the defects of Shakespeare’s inferior characters. Of the beauties of Romeo and Juliet—the Queen Mab description alone excepted—we hear nothing, but are regaled with two pages concerning “the most complete of all these characters—the nurse,” and a long and severe commentary on her “never-ending gossip’s babble.”[11] The same remark may be made of Hamlet, a play of which M. Taine evidently has no comprehension, if Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, Ulrici, Tieck, Goethe, and Schlegel at all understand it. Concerning Othello, many paragraphs are frittered away in small criticism on the characters of Iago and Cassio. Of the grand features of Othello the reader obtains no glimpse, while a scandalous industry is exercised in bringing out from under the cover of obscure texts shocking pruriencies that are not perceived by the average reader of Shakespeare.

We may be told that tastes differ, that what through tradition or habit, perhaps, to us appear beauties, do not so strike a foreigner.

Let us test this by the criticism of another foreigner—not a German, but a Frenchman—and we will find him selecting, as prominent beauties on the first hearing of the play, the very passages which also strike us on long and familiar acquaintance.

In the winter of 1829-30, a French version of Othello was represented in a Parisian theatre, and that theatre—shades of Corneille and Racine—the Théâtre Français! Mademoiselle Mars was the Desdemona. The piece was a decided success, and in the Revue Française for January, 1830, there appeared an admirably written article which was at once a compte-rendu of the representation and a criticism of the tragedy. It was from the pen of the Duc de Broglie, and commanded universal attention. His description of the desperate struggles of the two cliques—the Classical and the Romantic—who were, of course, present in force, his account of the effect of the piece upon the general audience, his analysis of the motives of French admiration or blame of Shakespeare, are all most interesting. But what we specially have to do with is his criticism on the play and the dramatist. Here it is:

Even as the Christian Anglo-Saxon was doomed to suffer at M. Taine’s hands the outrage of attributed paganism, so also was Shakespeare ignominiously foreordained (from the thirty-sixth page of his first volume) to be a maniac Berserkir. And all because the author has his little theory to carry out. Do you find it wonderful that under such treatment the facts should suffer? Alas! other and more important things must also suffer if such a work as this is to receive the sanction of recognized critical authority, and be placed in the hands of the rising generation.

To do M. Taine justice, he does not for a moment lose sight of his Berserkir, and keeps him, in the soul of Shakespeare, well up to his work. And so, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is “an athlete of war, with a voice like a trumpet; whose eyes by contradiction are filled with a rush of blood and anger, proud and terrible in mood, a lion’s soul in the body of a steer” (vol. i. p. 329).

For M. Taine, the grand trial act in the Merchant of Venice is “the horrible scene in which Shylock brandished his butcher’s knife before Antonio’s bare breast,” and King Lear is “the supreme effort of pure imagination, a disease of reason which reason could never have conceived.” But reason has so decidedly done the contrary that an experienced physician of long practice in an insane asylum (in the United States) has written an essay[12] to show that Shakespeare’s physiological and psychological knowledge and acquirements, as displayed in his tragedies, were in advance of those of his age by fully two centuries, and, he adds, that the wonderful skill and sagacity manifested by the great dramatist in seizing upon the premonitory signs of insanity (as in King Lear), which are usually overlooked by all, even the patient’s most intimate friends and the members of his family, and weaving them into the character of his hero as a necessary element, without which it would be incomplete, like those of inferior artists, is a matter of wonder to all modern psychologists.

To the Voltairian school of literature in the last century, the plays of Shakespeare were “ces monstrueuses farces que l’on appelle des tragedies,” and Hamlet, in particular, in Voltaire’s judgment, “seems the work of a drunken savage.” When you have read M. Taine on Shakespeare, first let the coruscations of his verbal pyrotechnics subside, await the end of his epileptic contortions of style, then scratch off a thin varnish of polite concession, and you will find under it a Voltairian: although not, we hope, brutal and cynical as was the great original in his denunciation of those Frenchmen who were willing to claim some talent for Shakespeare. Voltaire called them faquins, impudents, imbéciles, monstres, etc. Such people were, he said, a source of calamity and horror, and France did not contain a sufficient number of pillories to punish such a crime. (“Letter of Voltaire to Count d’Argental,” July 19, 1776.)

One of the most interesting books to be found in the English language is Carlyle’s French Revolution. But it is interesting only on condition that the reader is already familiar with the history of that period. And we pay M. Taine’s work a high compliment in saying that, in like manner, his History of English Literature will be found an interesting work to those whose opinions on art and literature are formed, whose religious principles are fixed, and whose judgments are sufficiently mature to be in no danger of being affected by the artificial, erroneous, and false views of man and his responsibilities, with which the book abounds.

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Warton, in his History of English Poetry, has published a few fragments of poems on the Passion, which he ascribes to the reigns of Henry III. and Edward I. There is a harmony in the versification of the following that one scarcely looks for at so early a date:

One fragment more, which is taken from a sort of dialogue between our Lord on the Cross and the devout soul:

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It was rather late when Mr. Yorke came down Sunday morning. The storm was yet violent, and he did not mean to go out; and besides, he had been tormented all night with disagreeable dreams. When he appeared in the breakfast-room, Patrick had been to the village, and had seen Father Rasle. The priest was resolutely keeping his fast, and even hearing confessions.

The occurrence of the night before had stirred up the sluggish faith and piety of those few Catholics who had not meant to attend to their religious duties, and they crowded about their pastor at the last moment.

It would, perhaps, be just as well not to describe the manner in which Mr. Yorke received the news they had to tell him, for his anger was scarcely greater toward the mob than toward his own family. He would eat no breakfast, would scarcely stop to change his slippers for boots, but started off to see Father Rasle.

“I shall bring the priest home with me; or, if he will not come, shall stay with him, and defend him with my life from any further outrage,” he said as he went out the door, addressing no one in particular.

“We expect him to return with you, Charles,” his wife said; but he paid no attention to her.

“Coddled like a great booby!” he muttered to himself as he strode down the avenue. “Amy should have more respect for me, or, at least, more regard for my reputation. It is a wonder she does not dress me in petticoats, and set me spinning.”

“Never mind, mamma!” Clara said, kissing her mother, and leading her into the house. “This storm will cool papa off nicely. He will come home penitent, you may be sure. I only hope that you will hold off a little, and not forgive him too readily.”

Mrs. Yorke wiped away the tears which had started at her husband’s unusual severity.

“Never think to comfort your mother, my dear, by speaking disrespectfully of your father,” she said, but, while chiding, returned her daughter’s caress. “And do not think that I could remember one moment any hasty word or act of his when I knew that he was sorry for it. I do not at all wonder that your father is annoyed at not having been called: I quite expected it.”

“Mother, I give you up,” Clara exclaimed. “Where Mr. Charles Yorke is concerned, you have not a sign of—may I say spunk? That is what I mean.”

“No, you may not,” replied Mrs. Yorke with decision. And so the conversation dropped.

Patrick drove Edith to the church. When they entered, they found the people all gathered; and in a few minutes Mass began. The scene was touching. The congregation, prostrate before the altar, wept silently; the choir, attempting to sing, faltered, and stopped in the first hymn; and the priest, in turning toward his people, could not trust himself to look at them, but closed his eyes or glanced over their heads. Tears rolled down the faces of the communicants when they knelt at the altar; and at the benediction many wept aloud.

It was a Low Mass, and when it was over the priest addressed them. He talked only a little while, but in those few words they found both comfort and courage. They were not to mourn, but rather to rejoice that he had been found worthy to suffer ignominy for Christ’s sake. He translated and gave them for their motto these words of St. Bernard: “Pudeat sub spinato capite membrum fieri delicatum.” They should not seek persecution, indeed, but when God sent it upon them they should accept it joyfully. For pain was the only real treasure of earth, and real happiness was unknown, save in anticipation, outside heaven. They belonged to the church militant; and as their great Captain had marched in the van, with shoulders bleeding from the lash, and forehead bleeding from the thorn, they should blush to walk delicately and at ease in his ensanguined footsteps. He implored them to pray constantly, and keep themselves from sin, and, since they might for some time be deprived of the sacraments, to take more than ordinary pains to preserve the sacramental grace which they had just received. There were a few words of farewell, uttered with difficulty, then he ceased speaking.

When Father Rasle went out with Mr. Yorke, the weeping congregation gathered about him, falling on their knees, some of them catching at his robe as he passed by. He was obliged to tear himself away.

The storm was now over, and the sun burst forth brilliantly as they stepped into the air. A carriage was in waiting, and, when he had seated himself in it, with Mr. Yorke and Edith, Father Rasle leaned out, looked once more with suffused eyes at his mourning people, and raised his hand in benediction. Then the door closed upon him, and they were alone.

A second carriage followed this containing four men, well armed, and several other men, armed also, took the shorter road, through East Street and the woods, to Mr. Yorke’s house. Whatever they might suffer, these men did not mean that any further violence should be offered to their priest or to the man who protected him.

As the carriage drove up the avenue, Mrs. Yorke and her two daughters came down the steps to receive their guest. Both Mrs. Yorke and Clara, who were speechless with emotion, gave a silent welcome; but Melicent, much to her own satisfaction, was able to pronounce an eloquent little oration. In the entry Betsey stood stiffly, the two young Pattens in perspective. Thinking, probably, that one of her abrupt courtesies was not enough for the occasion, this good creature made a succession of them as long as the priest was visible, young Sally bobbing in unison. Paul, duly instructed by his mother, waited till the proper moment, then bowed from the waist, till he made a pretty accurate right-angle of himself.

All that day, besides the regular guard, the Irish were coming and going about the house, and when toward night they retired to their homes, the guard was doubled.

Sally Patten came over in the evening and offered her services. Joe could take care of the young ones, and her desire was to stay all night and keep watch at the Yorkes’. It was in vain for them to say that she was not needed. With every sort of compliment, and every demonstration of respect, she persisted in staying. Betsey, she said, had slept none the night before, and would be needed about the house the next day, and they might all rest better if there were a vigilant watcher in-doors as well as out. Men were slow and stupid sometimes, but there was no danger of her letting slumber steal over her eyelids.

“Well, it is true, my head does feel like a soggy batter-pudding,” Betsey owned, beginning to waver. “I had a jumping toothache all Friday night, and last night I never slept one wink.”

“Besides,” continued Boadicea, growing heroic, “when the two eldest of my offspring are in the jaws of destruction, my place is beside them.”

It was impossible to resist such an argument, and she was permitted to have her way.

“I was going to leave the door unlocked, so that the men could come in and get their luncheon,” Betsey said. “But as you are here, perhaps you will carry it out to them.”

A dignified bow was the only reply. Mrs. Patten considered so trivial a subject as luncheon irrelevant to these thrilling circumstances. The question in her mind at this moment was what weapon she should use in the event of an attack. Her taste was for the mediæval, and she would have welcomed with enthusiasm the sight of a battle-axe or a halberd; but since these were not to be had, she inclined toward a long iron shovel that stood in the chimney-corner, reaching nearly to the mantelpiece. This would give a telling blow, and would, moreover, allow of a fine swing of the arms in its wielding.

“Now, here are two coffee-pots full,” Betsey said. “This is done, I think, and will do to begin with. You might put water to the other so as to have it ready about twelve o’clock. I believe in having something to eat and drink, no matter what happens. About all that keeps me from joining the Catholic Church is their fasting. I couldn’t praise God on an empty stomach; I should be all the time thinking how hungry I was. If it warn’t for that, I do believe, the folks here act so like the old boy, I’d turn Catholic just for spite, if nothing else. Give ’em as many of them pumpkin-pies as they want to eat. Give ’em all there is in the closet, if they want it.”

Sally listened, superior, and merely bowed in reply.

Betsey set out a private lunch, and poured a cup of coffee. “Now, you take this, Mrs. Patten,” she said, “and make yourself as comfortable as you can. It will help you to keep awake.”

Boadicea hesitated, then, with a smile of lofty disdain, swallowed the coffee. Why should she attempt the vain task of making that unheroic soul comprehend the emotions which agitated her own spirit? Pumpkin pies and coffee help to keep her awake! Well, she swallowed them, but merely to escape the multiplying of trivial and inconsequent words.

At length the happy moment came when all in the house had gone to bed, and she was left alone.

And now indeed her soul swelled within her, and visions of possible heroic adventure rose before her mind’s eye. She put out the lamp, and pushed the logs of the fire so closely together that only a dull-red glow escaped. She set the doors all open, and walked stealthily from room to room, gazing from window after window, stopping now and then to listen, with her head aside and her arms extended. There was a smoldering knot of wood in both the parlor and sitting-room fireplaces, and the faint light from them and from the kitchen threw gigantic fantastic shadows of her on the walls and ceiling as she moved about.

Clara, feeling restless, came softly down once, and, seeing this strange figure, stole quickly back to bed again, and lay there trembling with fear all night.

But Boadicea kept her watch in glorious unconsciousness of realities. The place had undergone a change to her mind during those lonely hours. It was no longer a common, wooden country house, but a castle, with walls of stone, and battlements, barbacan, and drawbridge. Mrs. Yorke was a fair ladie sleeping in her bower (not even in thought would Sally have spelt lady with a y), Mr. Yorke was a battle-worn warrior, Father Rasle the family chaplain and my lady’s confessor. Without, the retainers watched, and an insidious foe lurked in the darkness, ready for bold attack or treacherous entry through a chink in the wall. Even now some vile caitiff might have obtained entrance, and be lurking behind yonder arras.

At that thought, Sally seized the kitchen shovel, and crept stealthily toward the parlor window, a grotesque shadow accompanying her, leaping across the ceiling in one breathless bound. She paused, and stared at the heavy drapery that seemed to outline a human form, and the shadow paused. She crept a step or two nearer, and the shadow dropped down and confronted her. She grasped the weapon firmly in her right hand, and, stretching the left, with one vigorous twitch pulled down Mrs. Yorke’s damask curtain.

For a moment Sally felt rather foolish. She put the curtain up as best she could, and then went to give the garrison their midnight lunch.

“And what is it ails the old lady?” asked one of the men of a companion. “Is it dumb that she is?” For this great, gaunt creature had given them their refreshments in utter silence and with many a tragical gesture.

She bent suddenly toward the speaker, raised her hand in warning, and whispered sharply, “Be vigilant!”

“What does she mean at all?” exclaimed the man in alarm, as Sally stalked away, very much bent forward, and looking to right and left at every step, as one sees people do on the stage sometimes. His impression was that something awful had taken place in the house.

In short, it was a glorious night for this poor addled soul—a night which would grow more and more in her imagination, till, after the passage of years, her most sincere description of it would never be recognized by one of the real actors.

Daylight came at length without there having been the slightest disturbance. Betsey came down to relieve guard, and Sally, weary but enthusiastic still, went home to electrify Joe with the recital of her adventures.

Clara, coming down before the rest of the family, was astonished to find the kitchen shovel reclining on one of the parlor chairs, and a crimson curtain put up with the yellow lining inside the room.

Father Rasle appeared in a few minutes, and took an affectionate leave of the men who had spent the night in guarding his rest; and, as soon as breakfast was over, he and Mr. Yorke started for Bragon.

Edith saw him go without any poignant regret for her own part, for she was to remain in Seaton but a few weeks longer. But her heart ached for the poor people who were so soon to be left utterly friendless. The burden of the pain had fallen, where it always falls, on the poor. A group of them stood at the gate when the travellers went through, and others met them in North Street, and all gazed after the carriage, with breaking hearts, as long as it was in sight. When might they hope to see a priest again? When again would the Mass-bell summon them to bow before the uplifted Host, and the communion cloth be spread for their heavenly banquet? They cared little for the mocking smile and word, but covered their faces and wept when their pastor disappeared from their gaze.

Patrick went down to the post-office, and came back bringing a letter for Edith, which had lain in the office since Sunday morning. The letter was from Mrs. Rowan-Williams, and contained but a line: “My son is at home, dangerously sick with a fever.”

“The sentiment which attends the sudden revelation that all is lost,” says De Quincey, “silently is gathered up into the heart; it is too deep for gestures or for words, and no part of it passes to the outside.”

Nor is the silence more profound when a slight possibility, over which we have no control, still interposes between the heart and utter loss.

Edith put the letter into her aunt’s hand. “I must go immediately to Bragon, to take the cars,” she said quietly. “Will you tell Patrick to get a carriage? I will be ready in a little while.”

She went up-stairs to put on a travelling-dress, and pack what she wished to take with her. The selection was calmly and carefully made. There was no need of haste. In less than an hour everything was ready, and the carriage at the door.

“I have sent a telegram to your uncle, and he will meet you, and go on to Boston with you to-night,” her aunt said.

Melicent offered her a cup of coffee, and she put it to her lips, and tried to drink it; but all the muscles of her mouth and throat seemed to be fixed, and she could not swallow a drop. She gave back the cup, without uttering a word.

“I have put some fruit and a small bottle of sherry into this luncheon-bag for you,” Mrs. Yorke said hastily. “You must try to take a little on the way. You do not want to lose your strength, and these will be refreshing.”

No one mentioned Dick Rowan’s name to Edith, or offered a word of comfort. They even refrained from expressing too much solicitude and affection, and only kissed her silently when she went out. “Do nothing but what is necessary,” Mrs. Yorke had said to her daughters. “There is no greater torture, at such a time, than to be fretted about trifles. Think of her feelings, not of expressing your own.”

Neither Betsey nor her assistants were allowed to appear, and Patrick had orders to speak only when he was spoken to, and not on any account to mention Mr. Rowan’s name.

“If he dies, it will kill Edith,” Mrs. Yorke said, letting her tears flow when her niece was out of sight.

Some such thought was in Edith’s own mind during that long drive. If Dick Rowan should die, her peace and joy would die with him; not that he was everything to her, but because she could never accept a happiness which was only to be reached over his grave. Edith loved Carl Yorke with all her heart, he attracted her irresistibly, and seemed rather a part of herself than a separate being; yet at that moment the thought of his death would have been to her more tolerable than the thought of Dick Rowan’s.

Mrs. Yorke’s telegram was at the priest’s house awaiting her husband when he arrived, and he went at once to the hotel where his niece was to meet him. Soon they were on the way.

“The Catholics here are in a state of the wildest excitement,” he said. “The news arrived before we did, and the Irish want to go down and burn Seaton to the ground. Father Rasle will have difficulty in quieting them. The better class of Protestants, even, cry out against the outrage. They have called an indignation meeting for to-night, and the Protestant gentlemen are contributing to buy the priest a watch. His watch and pocket-book were stolen Saturday night, you know.”

Though Edith said but little in reply, it was not because she had more important matter in her mind. The number of seats in the car she counted over with weary persistence, the number of narrow boards in the side of the car she learned by heart. She knew just how the lamp swung, and could have described accurately afterward the face and costume of the boy who sold papers and lemonade and pop-corn. Not till the weary night was over, and her uncle said, “Here we are in Boston!” did she awaken from that nightmare entanglement of littlenesses. Then first she showed some agitation.

“Drive directly to Mrs. Williams’s,” she said, “and, while I sit in the carriage, go to the door, and ask how he is. If they tell you that he is better, say it out loud, quickly, but if—if the news is not good, don’t say one word to me, only take me into the house.”

A telegram had been sent to Mrs. Williams, and Edith was expected. As Mr. Yorke went up the step, the door opened, and Dick’s mother stood there.

Edith leaned back in the carriage, and covered her face with her hands. She had not dared to look at the house, lest some sign of mourning should meet her glance. “O Mother of Perpetual Succor!” she exclaimed.

“He is no worse, my dear,” her uncle said at the carriage-door. “I think you need not fear. Come! Mrs. Williams is waiting for you.”

Edith lifted her hands and eyes, and repeated her aspiration, “O Mother of Perpetual Succor!” but with what a difference!—not with anguish and imploring, but with passionate gratitude. Dick would live, she saw that at once. If the blow had not fallen, then it was not to fall now.

When Dick Rowan came home the first time after his mother’s marriage, both she and her husband had desired him to select a chamber in their house which should always be his. He chose an unfurnished one nearly at the top of the house, and, after several playful skirmishes with his mother, who would fain have adorned it with velvet and lace, fitted it up to suit himself. It was large, sunny, and quiet; and there was but little in it besides an Indian matting, an iron bed, a writing-table, wicker chairs, and white muslin curtains, that did not even pretend to shut out the light. There was nothing on the walls but a book-case and a crucifix, nothing on the mantelpiece but a clock. The young man’s tastes were simple, almost ascetical, and he protested that he could not draw free breath in a room smothered in thick upholstery. Sunshine, fresh air, pure water, and cleanliness—those he must have. Other things might be dispensed with.

In this chamber Dick lay now, his body a prey to fever, his mind wandering in wild and tumultuous scenes. He was at sea, in a storm, and the ship was going down; he was wrecked, and parched with thirst in a wilderness of waters; he was sailing into a strange port, and suddenly the shore swarmed with enemies, and he saw huge cannon-mouths just breaking into flame, and flights of poisoned arrows just twanging from their bows; he was at Seaton again, a poor, friendless boy, and his father was reeling home drunk, with a rabble shouting at his heels. And always, whatever scene his fancy might conjure up, his ears were deafened by the strong rush of waves, adding confusion to terror and pain.

One day, when he had been crying out against this torment, a pair of cool, small hands were clasped tightly about his forehead, and a voice asked, low and clear, “Doesn’t that make the waves seem less, Dick?”

He left off speaking, and lay listening intently.

“There are no waves nor storm,” the voice said calmly. “You are not at sea. You are safe at home. But your head aches so that it makes you fancy things. What you hear is blood rushing through the arteries. I am going to put a bandage round your head. That will do you good.”

Dick turned his head as Edith took her hands away, and followed her with his eyes while she took a few steps to get what she wanted. She smiled at him as she stood measuring off the strip of linen, and making up little rolls of linen to press on the arteries of the temples; and though her face was thin and white, and her eyes filled, in spite of her, when she smiled, the image was a cheerful one in that darkened room. She wore a dress of green cloth, soft and lustrous, and had a rosebud in her hair. The effect was cool and sweet. As she moved quietly about, the patient gazed at her, and his gaze seemed to be wondering and confused, rather than insane.

She drew the bandage tightly about his head, pressed hard on the throbbing arteries, and sprinkled cold water on the linen and his hair. She had observed that he started whenever ice was put to his head, and therefore kept it cool, and avoided giving a shock.

“You are sick, and I am going to make you well,” she said. “You are not to think, but to obey. I will do the thinking. Will you trust me?”

“Yes, Edith,” he answered, after a pause, looking steadfastly at her, seeming in doubt whether it were a real form he saw, a real voice he heard.

“This is your room, you see,” she said, laying one hand on his, and pointing with the other. “That is your book-shelf, there is your table and your crucifix. You know it all; but sickness and darkness are so confusing. Now, I’m going to give you one little glimpse of out-doors, only for a minute, though, because it would hurt your head to have too much light.”

She went to the window, and drew aside the thick green curtain, and a golden ray from the setting sun flew in like a bird, and alighted on the clock. Those sick eyes shrank a little, but brightened. She returned, and leaned over the pillow, so as to have the same view through the window with him. “That green hill is Longwood,” she said; “and there is the flagstaff on the top of Mr. B——’s house, looking like the mast of a ship. Now I shall drop the curtain, and you are to go to sleep.”

So, as his feverish fancies rose like mists, her calm denial or explanation swept them away; or, if the delirium fit was too strong for that, she held his hand, to assure him of companionship, and went with him wherever his tyrannical imagination dragged him, and found help there. When he sank in deeps of ocean, he heard a voice, as if from heaven, saying, “He who made the waves is stronger than they. Hold on to God, and he will not let you go.” If foes threatened him, he heard the reassuring text: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the protector of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” If he groped in desolation, and cried out that every one had deserted him, she repeated: “For my father and my mother have left me, but the Lord hath taken me up.” “Expect the Lord, do manfully, and let thy heart take courage, and wait thou for the Lord.”

She followed him thus from terror to terror, imagining all the bitterness of them, trying to take that bitterness to herself, till they began to grow real to her, and she was glad to escape into the wholesome outer world, and see with her own eyes that the universe was not a sick-room.

Hester had come up, and she called and took Edith out for a drive every day; and sometimes she went home to Hester’s house, and played with the children a while. She found their childish gayety and carelessness very soothing.

“Carl and I are fitting up the house for the family,” Hester said one day. “They are all to come up the last of the month. I shall be so glad! It is delightful to go through the dear old familiar rooms, and look from the windows, just as I used to. We new-furnish the parlors only. Mamma wishes to use all the old things she can.”

“I cannot stop to-day,” Edith said; “but I would like to see the house soon. You know I saw only the outside of it when I was here before.”

“Carl is going to England before they come up,” Hester said hesitatingly. “I don’t know why he does not wait for them, but he has engaged passage for next week. I believe he means to be gone only a month or two.”

Edith leaned back in the carriage, and made no reply. When she spoke, after a while, it was to ask to be taken back to Mrs. Williams’.

From Dick Rowan’s wandering talk, she had learned the history of his last few weeks. She perceived that Father John and his household must have known perfectly well what their visitor’s trouble was, and that they had watched over and sympathized with him most tenderly. Dick’s pride was not of a kind that would lead him to dissemble his feelings or conceal them from those of whose friendship and sympathy he was assured. Why should he conceal what he was not ashamed of? he would have asked. She learned that he had spent hours before the altar, that he had fasted and prayed, that he had gone out in the storm at night, and walked the yard of the priest’s house, going in only when Father John had peremptorily commanded him to. These reckless exposures, combined with mental distress, had caused his illness. Dick had never before been ill a day, and could not believe that a physical inconvenience and discomfort, which he despised, would at last overpower him.

One Sunday afternoon, a week after Edith’s arrival, the patient opened his eyes, and looked about with a languid but conscious gaze, all the fever and delirium gone, and, also, all the human dross burned out of him. No person was in sight, and his heavy lids were dropping again, when his glance was arrested by a pictured face so perfect, that, to his misty sense, it seemed alive. It was an exquisite engraving of Rubens’ portrait of St. Ignatius, not the weak and sentimental copy we most frequently see, but one full of expression. Large, slow tears, unnoted by him, rolled down his face. The lips, slightly parted, and tremulous with a divine sorrow, were more eloquent than any words could be. His finger pointed to the legend, “Ad majorem Dei gloriam,” and one could see plainly that in his fervent soul there was room for no other thought. With such a face might St. John have looked, bearing for ever in his heart the image of the Crucified.

The first glance of Dick Rowan’s eyes was startled, as though he saw a vision, then his gaze became so intense that, from very weakness, his lids dropped, and he slept again. In that slumber, long, deep, and strengthening, the slackened thread of vitality in him began to knit itself together again.

“All we have to do now is to prevent his getting up too soon,” the doctor said. “It would be like him to insist on going out to-morrow.”

The danger over, a breath of spring seemed to blow through the house. The servants told each other, with smiling faces, that Mr. Rowan was better. Mrs. Williams waked up to the fact that her personal appearance had been notably neglected of late, and, after kissing Edith with joyful effusion, went to put on her hair and a clean collar. Miss Williams opened her piano, put her foot on the soft pedal, and played a composition which made her father look at her wonderingly over his spectacles. Had it not been Sunday, he would have thought that Ellen was playing a polka. In fact, it was a polka, and sounded so very much like what it was that Mr. Williams presently ventured a faint remonstrance.

“Oh! nonsense, papa!” laughed the musician over her shoulder. “It is a hymn of praise, by Strauss.”

“Strauss?” repeated her father doubtfully. He thought the name sounded familiar.

“Mendelssohn, I mean,” corrected she, with the greatest hardihood, and shook a shower of sparkling notes from her finger-ends.

Miss Ellen was one of the progressive damsels of the time.

Mr. Williams looked toward the door, and smiled pleasantly, seeing Miss Yorke come in, and she returned his greeting with one as friendly. There was a feeling of kindness between the two. This gentleman was not very gallant, but, being in his wife’s confidence, and aware therefore that Edith had been looked on by her as a culprit, he had taken pains to make her feel at ease with him. Moreover, in common with a good many other middle-aged, matter-of-fact men, he had a carefully-concealed vein of sentimentality in his composition, and was capable of being deeply interested in a genuine love affair. With a great affectation of contempt, Mr. Williams would yet devour every word of a romantic story at which his daughter would most sincerely turn up her nose. It is indeed on record, in the diary of the first Mrs. Williams, that her husband sat up late one night, on pretence of posting his books, and that, after twelve o’clock, she went down-stairs and found him, as she expressed it, “snivelling over” The Hungarian Brothers. “Which astonished me in so sensible a man as John,” the lady added.

Edith took a chair by a window and looked out into the street, and Mr. Williams turned over the book on his knee. It was a volume of sermons which he was in the habit of pretending to read every Sunday afternoon. Intellectually, Mr. Williams was sceptical; and had one propounded to him, one by one, the doctrines he heard preached every Sunday, and asked him if he believed them, he would probably have answered, “Well, no, I don’t know as I do exactly”; but early education by a mother whose religion was earnest if mistaken, and that necessity for some supernatural element in the life which is the mark of our divine origin, impelled him to an observance of what he did not believe, for the want of something better which he could believe.

When Dick waked again, the first object he saw was his mother’s face, full of tearful joy. She smiled, quivered, tried to speak, and could not.

“Poor mother! what a trouble I am to you!” he said, and would have held his hand out to her, but found himself unable to raise it. He looked, and saw it thin and transparent, glanced with an expression of astonished inquiry into his mother’s face, and understood it all. “I must have been sick a long time, mother,” he said.

She kissed him tenderly. “Yes, my dear boy. But it is all over now, thank God!”

“Poor mother!” he said again. “I must have worn you out. Have you taken all the care of me?”

“No! Edith was here,” she answered timidly. “She is a good nurse, Dick.”

“Edith?” he echoed with surprise; and, after a moment’s thought, added quietly, “Yes, I recollect seeing her. She helped me a great deal, I think, dear child!”

“Would you like to see her?” his mother asked. “She has only just left the room.”

“Not now, mother,” he answered. “She will come presently. I cannot talk much now.”

He closed his eyes again, and lay in that delicious trance of convalescence, when simply to breathe is enough for contentment—the lips slightly parted, the form absolutely at rest, the eyes not so closed but a faint twilight enters through the lashes—a sweet, happy mood. When his mother moved softly about, Dick lifted his lids now and then, but was not disturbed. Sometimes, before closing them again, his half-seeing eyes dwelt a moment on some object in the room. After one of these dreamy glances, there entered through his lashes the vision of a face that seemed to cry aloud to him a piercing summons.

He started up as if electrified, and stretched his arms out. “Stay! stay!” he cried, and saw that it was no vision, but a pictured, saintly face, with tears on the cheeks, and lips from which a message seemed to have just escaped.

“Dick, what is the matter?” his mother exclaimed in terror.

He sank back on the pillows. “I saw it before, and thought it was a dream,” he whispered. “I was thinking of it as I lay here.”

“The picture?” his mother asked. “Edith hung it there. I will take it away if you don’t like it.”

“I do like it,” he answered faintly. “It is a blessed, blessed vision.” He lay looking at it a while, then slipped his hand under the pillow and found a little crucifix that he had always kept there. At the beginning of his illness his mother had taken it away, but Edith had returned and kept it there, seeing that he sometimes sought for it. He drew it forth now, pressed it passionately to his lips, then, holding it in the open palm of his hand, on the pillow, turned his cheek to it with a gesture of childlike fondness. “O my Love!” he whispered.

“Shall I tell Edith to come in?” his mother asked, catching the whisper.

“Not now, not to-night, mother,” he answered softly.

But the next morning he asked to see the whole family, with the servants, and, when they came, thanked them affectionately for what they had done for him, taking each one by the hand. When Edith approached, a slight color flickered in his cheeks, and he looked at her earnestly. Her changed face seemed to distress him. “Dear child, I have been killing you!” he said.

At his perfectly unembarrassed and friendly address, Edith’s worst fear took flight. If Dick had reproached or been cold to her, she would have defended herself without difficulty; but if he had shrunk from her, she could scarcely have borne it.

The doctor was quite right in saying that their only difficulty would be in keeping their patient quiet, for Dick insisted on sitting up that very day.

“The doctor wishes you to lie still,” his mother said.

“And I wish to get up,” he retorted, smiling, but wilful.

“The Lord wishes you to lie still, Dick,” Edith said.

He became quiet at once. “Do you think so?” he asked.

“Father John will tell you,” she answered, as the door opened to give admittance to the priest.

Of course Father John confirmed her assertion. “Everything in its time, young man,” he said cheerfully. “This enforced physical illness may be to you a time of richest spiritual benefit. You have now leisure for reading and contemplation which you will not have when you go out into active life again. You must let Miss Edith read to you.”

Before leaving his penitent, the priest proposed to give him Holy Communion the next morning; but Dick hesitatingly objected. “Not that I do not long for it, father,” he made haste to add; “but I wish to recollect myself. Like St. Paul, I desire to be dissolved and be with Christ, but I wish to endure that desire a little longer, till I shall be better prepared to be with him.”

Seeing the priest look at him attentively, he blushed, and added: “Of course I do not mean to compare myself with St. Paul, sir,” and was for a moment mortified and disconcerted at what he supposed Father John would think his presumption.

“There is no reason why you and I may not have precisely the same feelings that St. Paul had,” the priest said quietly.

Edith found letters in her room from Seaton. Her aunt wrote that they were busily making the last arrangements for their moving, and gave her many kind messages from her friends. The house in Seaton had been leased advantageously, and they hoped that the lessee might be able to buy it after a while, as he wished to. They were to bring all their household with them, Betsey, Patrick, and the young Pattens. The prospect of being left behind had so afflicted these faithful creatures that she had not the heart to desert them.

Clara wrote a long, gossiping letter. “I must tell you what an absurd little stale romance is being acted here,” she wrote, “for mamma is sure to tell you nothing about it. Prepare to be astonished by the most surprising, the most bewildering, etc. (see Mme. de Sévigné). Mr. Griffeth has proposed for Melicent, and Melicent is willing, so she says! Papa and mamma are frantic, and Mel goes about with a persecuted, inscrutable look which distracts me. I sometimes think that she is only pretending in order to have a fuss made over her, but one cannot be sure. You know she always prided herself on her good sense and judgment, and my experience is that when such persons do a foolish thing,

“We highfliers commit follies with a certain grace, and we know when we reach the step between the sublime and the ridiculous; but these clumsy sensible people are like dancing elephants, and have no conception how absurd they are. (Did you ever observe that people who have no uncommon sense always claim to have a monopoly of the common sense?)

“It seems that Mel has had no intercourse with the man lately, except what we have known, but he has been giving her some of those expressive glances which are so effective when one has practised them long enough. ‘Oh! those looks which have so little force in law, but so much in equity!’ Mamma said that she would rather see a daughter of hers married to Mr. Conway than to Mr. Griffeth, for Mr. Conway had principle if he was not clever, and Mel made a pretty good answer. ‘There is always hope,’ she said, ‘that an irreligious person may be converted, but there is no conversion for the commonplace.’ Mel thinks Mr. Griffeth remarkably intellectual, and papa ridiculed the idea. The little man, he said, resembled Cæsar in one respect, for whereas Cæsar wore the laurel wreath to cover his bald pate, the minister took refuge in verbiage to hide his baldness of thought. This having no effect, I gave the ‘most unkindest cut of all.’ I reminded her that he had tried both you and me first, and we didn’t know how many more. Her reply was to hand me a copy of Browning’s Men and Women, open at “Misconceptions.” She had marked the words:

“But I thought that her smile was something like that of one who is taking medicine heroically, a sort of quinine-smile.

“There is but one way if we do not wish to have this howling dervish in the family: we must exhibit, as the doctors say, a counter-irritant—that is, find Mel another lover. I am convinced that she will never voluntarily relinquish one romance except in favor of one more.”

As Dick Rowan gained strength in those first days of convalescence, Edith perceived that he had changed toward her. The manifestations of this change were slight, she was not sure that he was himself conscious of them, but they were decided. It was not that he showed any unkindness, or even indifference, but his being seemed to be—scarcely yet revolving round, but—brooding round a new centre. He frequently became absorbed in contemplation, from which he recalled himself with difficulty, though always cheerfully. Not a tinge of pain marred the peaceful silence of his mood. It was like that exquisite pause we sometimes see in the weather, when, after a violent storm, the winds and blackness withdraw, and there comes an hour of tender, misty silence before the sunshine breaks forth. His eyes would turn upon her kindly, and, still looking, forget her, and she saw that something of more importance had usurped her image.

He was decided and self-reliant, too, in some things, and seemed rather displeased than grateful for too much solicitude on the part of others. He put aside entirely the usual sick-room inquiries. “I am getting well,” he said, “and need not count how often I stumble in learning to walk again. My miserable body has received attention enough. Let us forget it, now that we may.”

Edith began to read, in obedience to Father John, but the books she chose at first did not quite suit the listener. Even the St. Theresa and The Following of Christ, which she found on his shelves, did not seem to be what he wanted then. She brought some of her books, but could see that his own meditations were more agreeable to him.

“I do not like to find fault with a pious writer,” Dick said uneasily. “They are all good, but I have thought that some of them sometimes—” He broke off abruptly. “Edith, is there such a word as platitudinize?”

“I do not think that it is in the dictionary,” she replied, smiling.

“It is, then, an omission,” said Dick.

“Try the Gospels,” Father John said, when Edith told him her difficulty. “Different states of mind require different reading, just as different states of the body require different food and medicine. I frequently advise people, whom I find having a distaste for spiritual reading, to read the Gospels, and refresh their memory of all the events recorded there by the simply-told story. I always find that they return with delight and profit to the meditations of those holy souls whose lives have been spent in the study of these mysteries. These writers assume that the reader has freshly in his mind that of which they treat. You cannot meditate on a subject, nor follow clearly the meditations of another, when the facts are not familiar to your own mind.”

Edith read the Gospels, therefore, and was astonished at their effect on Dick. Either his perceptions had been sharpened during his illness, or some obstructions had been cleared away from the passage to his heart. This was not to him an old story, worn and deadened with much telling, and slipping past his hearing without leaving a trace, but a tragedy newly enacted, none of its edge gone, every circumstance as sharp as a thorn, tearing in the telling. While Edith read the story of the Lord as told by the four great witnesses, and added the outpourings of those fiery Epistles, the listener’s agitation was so great that she was often compelled to stop. At the chapters which related to the passion, Dick’s hands trembled and grew cold, and his head dropped back against the cushions of his chair. The Epistles of St. Paul stirred him especially.

“Now, Dick, if you don’t behave I won’t read you another word!” Edith exclaimed, one day, when he had started out of his chair, and begun to walk about.

He came back with a stumbling step, and seated himself, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.

“I believe I shall have to postpone St. Paul till I am able to go out-doors,” he said breathlessly.

Observing his eyes frequently wander to the St. Ignatius, she remarked: “He looks as though he were present when our Lord was crucified, and could not forget the sight.”

“We were all present!” he exclaimed. “How can we forget it?”

Long and intimate as their acquaintance had been, Edith thought now that she had not known Dick Rowan well. She had praised, defended, and loved him with sisterly fondness, but always, involuntarily, almost unconsciously, from a higher plane than his. Now she looked up to him as her superior. But, in truth, she had know him well, and done him full justice. The difference now was that the full current of his nature was turned into a higher channel.

One day Hester sent the carriage to take Edith to see the family house, which was as complete as it could be before the arrival of the family. Hester herself was detained at home by company, but she sent a line: “Carl will be there, and the man who is putting up the curtains, and the woman who is cleaning the closet in your room. So you will not be lost, nor want for information.”

Edith had just begun her reading when the note was given to her. She handed it to Dick to read.

“That settles the question,” he said, holding out his hand for the book. “While you read to me yesterday, the thought occurred to me that I could do it for myself, and I meant that this should be your last reading. Go and take the air, Edith. You have been too much shut up. This is your last day but one with me as an invalid.”

She looked at him with a startled expression.

“Because,” he answered smilingly to her look, “to-morrow I drive out, the day after I shall sit down-stairs, and the next day I shall forget that I have ever been sick.”

He looked thoroughly contented and cheerful. There was no lurking sadness, nor reluctance to have her go. Dick was too transparent to hide it if there were. As well might the lake show a smooth surface while waves were rolling below. His soul had, indeed, always been more placid than his manner.

Before Edith had left the room, he was turning over the leaves of the book, a new one to him; and when she stepped into the carriage at the curbstone, he was so absorbed in reading as not to know that she was looking up at the window where he sat. The book rested on the wide arm of his chair, his elbow near it, the hand supporting his forehead. His hair had been cut off, and thus his full brow and finely shaped head were clearly displayed. His hands were beginning to look alive, his cheeks to get back their color. So he leaned and read, and she drove away.

She was going to meet Carl, and she was glad of it, though at Seaton she had thought that she must not see him again. The second thought had shown her how unnecessary and Quixotic this resolution had been, made in the first shock and confusion caused by Dick Rowan’s distress, and her own discovery of the depth of her own affection for Carl. She had since then put aside her own imagination and that of others, and examined her heart as it was, not as it might become under circumstances which she no longer expected to find herself in. She and Carl were nearly related by marriage, and he had been her teacher, and kind and delicate friend. She had lived in the same house with him seven years, a longer time than she had been associated intimately with Dick Rowan, and her intercourse with him had been such as to call out all that was most amiable in his character, and that at a time when her own mind was maturing, and capable of receiving its most profound impressions. She asked herself what the charm had been in her intercourse with him, and the answer was immediate: a quick and thorough sympathy in everything natural. For the supernatural, so careful had he been not to offend her conscience, and so highly had he appreciated religion in her, she had felt no sense of discordance, but only that he lacked a faith which she hoped and expected he would one day possess. Carl had never intruded his scepticism on her. What, she asked herself then, had she wished regarding him? and the answer was no more doubtful; she had wished to be his most confidential and sympathizing friend, and had shrunk with pain from the thought of any one coming nearer to his heart than herself, or as near. Even of these wishes she had been almost unconscious till others had forced them on her attention. Of Dick Rowan’s friendships she could never have been jealous, and she could never have suffered from them. Here she stopped, and set her Christian will and her maiden reserve as a firm barrier against her own imagination or the intrusive imaginations of others taking one step further. She was ready to fling her Honni soit qui mal y pense in the face of any evil speaker.

“Dick Rowan was a good friend to my childhood,” she said, “and protected me from all physical danger and insult, and petted me with childlike fondness; and I have been grateful to him beyond the point of duty, and to my own hurt. Carl Yorke helped to form my opening mind, and patiently and carefully strove to endow me with his own knowledge, and my debt to him is a still higher one. I have a right, when he is going away, to bid him a friendly good-by, and I should be ashamed of myself if I were afraid to!”

Carl stood in the door of his old home, and came down the steps, hat in hand, to assist her. She saw in his face that he felt doubtful whether his presence might not displease her.

“I am glad to see you, Carl,” she said cordially. “I could not believe that you meant to go away without bidding me farewell.”

“I would not have gone away without seeing you,” Carl replied quietly; and they went into the house together. His face had lighted at her greeting. Evidently he liked its frank kindliness, and the entire setting aside of all embarrassing recollections. He had been in the cruel position of a man who, with a high natural sense of honor, has suffered himself to be betrayed into an act which he cannot justify, and is ashamed to excuse. Silence was best.

Edith was delighted with the home-like look of everything in the house, and the good taste displayed in its arrangement.

“I can easily understand,” Carl said, “why you and my mother wished to have as little new furniture as possible. I think we all prefer that which has friendly or beautiful associations.”

He lead her to a portrait, conspicuously placed in the sitting-room.

“I hung dear Alice’s picture here,” he said, “because I thought that her place was in the family-circle.” He sighed. “It is astonishing how cruelly selfish men can sometimes be, without knowing it. Poor, dear Alice thought of me, and I thought of myself. Well, she is safe dead, with no more need of me, and I am left with an unfailing regret.”

Edith was grieved and touched by his self-reproach, and was about to say some comforting word, when he turned to her with a smile. “And I am committing again the same fault which I confess,” he said. “Edith comes out of a sick-room, weary and depressed, and I sadden instead of cheering her. Shall we look about the house?”

They went up-stairs, and he showed her the different chambers. “But we all concluded that you would prefer the one I used to have for my painting-room,” he said. “It is up another flight of stairs, but well repays you for the climbing. You are an early bird, and there you will have the morning sunshine. It is the largest chamber in the house, and has the best view. How do you like it?”

Edith exclaimed with delight. Nothing could have suited her better. Through the windows were visible a wide sweep of sky and a pretty city view. Inside, the room was large, charmingly irregular, with alcoves and niches, and the partial furnishing was fresh and of her own colors. Sea-green and white lace made it a home fit for a mermaid. It was evident that a good deal of care had been used in preparing the place for her.

“You are so kind!” she said rather tremulously.

He affected not to notice her emotion. “All I have done in this house has been a labor of love and delight,” he said, and led her to a picture which bore the mark of his own exquisite brush, the only picture on the walls. “This is to remember Carl by,” he said. “It is painted partly from nature, partly from a description of the scene. It is a glimpse into what was called the Kentucky Barrens.”

An opening in a forest of luxuriant beech, ash, and oak trees showed a level of rich green, profusely flower-sprinkled. The morning sky was of a pure blue, with thin flecks of white cloud, and everything was thickly laden with dew. The fringe of the picture glittered with light, but all the centre was overshadowed by a vast slanting canopy of messenger-pigeons, settling toward the earth. The sunlight on their glossy backs glanced off in brilliant azure reflections, looking as though a cataract of sapphires was flowing down the sky. Here and there, a ray of sunshine broke through the screen of their countless wings, and lit up a flower or bit of green. An oriole was perched on a twig in the foreground, and from the hanging nest close by, his mate pushed a pretty head and throat. Startled by the soft thunder of that winged host, they gazed out at it from the safe covert of their leafy home.

The two went down-stairs into the sitting-room again. “Now, I want to tell you all my plans,” Carl said.

They seated themselves, and he began: “I have thought best to make now the tour which I contemplated years ago. It must be now, or never, and I am not willing to relinquish it entirely. But I am not sorry that I was disappointed in going when I first thought of it, for I was not then prepared to derive the benefit from the journey which I now hope for. I should have gone then for pleasure and adventure; now I make a pilgrimage to gather knowledge. I tell you of this, Edith, but I have concluded not to tell my mother. It seems cruel, and there has been a struggle in my mind, but I cannot do otherwise. I well remember how hard it was to win her consent before, and I believe she was truly glad of our loss of wealth, since it kept me at home. If I should tell her now, the struggle would be renewed, and she would be ill. I am afraid, too, that I might be impatient with her, for I have no more time to throw away. So I shall let her suppose that I am going to make a short visit in England, which is true. Once there, she will not be disturbed at my going over to France for a few weeks. After France, Switzerland follows of course, Italy is next door, and the East is not far from Italy. I have always observed that, when a thing is done, my mother makes up her mind to it with fortitude; but, if it is left to her to decide on anything painful, she is unable to decide, and the suspense is terrible to her. My father knows that. When he really means to do a thing, he is prompt, and makes no talk about it. And, Edith, I shall not tell my sisters nor father, because it will seem more unkind if she is the only one who does not know, and it might compel them to practise evasion. I tell you alone, and I want you to promise me that, if my mother should begin to suspect, you will at once tell her all, and do what you can to quiet her.”

“I promise you, Carl,” Edith answered.

“You can also tell Mr. Rowan, if you have occasion to, if you wish to,” he said, looking at her attentively.

She merely bowed.

“I think that you will approve of my plans,” he went on with earnestness. “I have found what I believe to be my place and work in this vortex of the nineteenth century, and I wish to fill that place and do that work in the best manner I can. I have been offered a position as attaché at one of our embassies, but I am not ready for that yet. I am not fit for anything that I wish to do.”

Warming with his subject, Carl stood up, and leaned on a high chair-back opposite Edith while he talked. His face became animated, his manner had a charming cordiality and frankness. When his time should come for speaking or writing, or taking any part in the affairs of his country, he wished to be considered an authority, and to deserve that consideration. To that end, he must have more knowledge, not of courts, or camps, or books, though these were worth knowing, but of people as they live in their own homes, in their own lands, under laws strange to us. He wanted to know the world’s poor, and the world’s criminals, and the world’s saints, wherever he could find them. “You have observed, in drawing faces,” he said, “how one little line will alter the whole expression. It is the same with arguments. A great, loose, sophistical generalization may be as completely upset by one sharp little fact, as Goliath was by David. I want to have a sling full of those facts. A plain hard truth may be made attractive by a single beautiful illustration; and I wish to gather illustrations from the whole world. I hate a sour patriotism, and I would not think, nor speak, nor write narrowly on any subject.

“I can perceive, Edith, that we have much to learn in this country, and I wish to be first taught myself, then to do my part in helping to teach others. We need to learn that the order of society, as well as of the heavenly bodies, depends on a centripetal, no less than a centrifugal force. At present we are all flying off on tangents. We need to learn that there is beauty and dignity in obedience, as well as in independence. We should see that it is better for a people to be nobler than their laws, than for laws to be nobler than the people; and that the living constitution of a living nation is not found on any parchment, but is the national conscience brought to a focus. Why, Edith, those very persons who boast themselves the most on the glorious fathers of our country are, perhaps, the persons of whom those same fathers, could they behold them, would be most unutterably ashamed. I do not mean to be presumptuous, dear; but I see which way my influence should go, and I mean to do my best to make that influence great, first by leading an honest life, and next by polishing my weapons to the utmost. I am talking confusedly. I give you but a rough sketch of my design. Two years, I think, will be the limit of my stay. I am so well prepared by my studies that I shall lose no time, and I have every facility of access to all places I wish to visit. What do you say to it, Edith?”

“I say God-speed, with all my heart, Carl! Your aims are noble. I like to see you in earnest.”

“I am in earnest, dear,” he said. “I feel as a new planet might, that has been turning on its own centre without progress, and is all at once set spinning off on its orbit.”

In the momentary silence that followed, Edith went to a book-shelf filled with pamphlets, and looked them over. “O Carl!” she said brightly, “do you read these?”

They were the numbers of Brownson’s Review.

“I have read them more attentively than anything else,” he answered, “and learned more from them. An American best understands the American mind. Pure reason is, of course, cosmopolitan; but reason is seldom so pure but a colored ray of individual or national character intrudes; and I like to choose my color. I think,” he said, smiling, “that I have been quoting that Review to you. I leave them for my father to read.”

Edith’s eyes sparkled. “I thank God that you are on this track, Carl!” she said. “The first I ever read in this Review was an article on De Maistre, and it solved for me a great difficulty. The fragments of truth that I had seen in the mythologies of different nations, and the beautiful Christian sentiments I had found among the pagans, had been a stumbling-block to me; but, when I read that, all became plain. You make me very happy, dear Carl!”

“I do not think that I am pious,” he said, after a moment. “My mind is clear on the subject, but my heart is unmoved. I do not wonder at that, and I am not sure but I prefer it so; to have light pour over my mind till my heart melts underneath, rather than have a mind imperfectly illuminated, and a heart starting up at intervals in little evanescent flames, which die out again, and leave ashes. The former is light from heaven, the latter suggests the lucifer-match to me. As soon as the time shall come, which I calmly await, when I have a clearer realization of the necessity of baptism, I shall ask to be baptized. Till then, I wish my intellectual convictions to be getting acclimated. My sacrifice must be ready before I invoke upon it fire from heaven.”

“Oh! you remind me of St. John of the Cross,” Edith said. “He says, ‘Reason is but the candlestick to hold the light of faith.’”

“Precisely!” Carl replied. “Behold me, then, illuminated by a candlestick, instead of a candle, but—aware of that lack. A friend of mine, a convert, told me lately that he had always regretted having hurried into the church, and to the sacraments, as he did. He did not realize anything, but received supernatural favors like one in a dream. He said that, though he was sincere, and would have given his life for the faith that was in him, he was, for a long time, tormented by the habit of doubt. When, at length, that habit was broken, he used sometimes to long to receive baptism over again, or wished, at least, that his first communion had been postponed to the time of peace. A strong movement of the heart might, perhaps, have saved this trouble; but neither he nor I have been so favored.”

“And yet,” Edith said thoughtfully, “I should have supposed that the first conviction of truth would have moved your feelings. When my mind pointed that way, my heart followed quickly, and pretty soon took wings, and flew along by itself, and left my thoughts behind. I am not sure that I have any intellect in religion. I can think of reasons for everything, if I try, but it does not seem to me worth while, unless some one outside of the church wishes to know.”

“That is a woman’s way,” Carl said, pleased with her pretty earnestness. “A woman goes heart first, or her head and heart go hand in hand, and her finest mental power is the intellect of noble passions. A man goes head first, and his highest power is reason.”

The silvery bell of a clock warned them how long their interview had been. Edith rose. “I must say good-by to you for two years, then, Carl; but you have taken away the sting of parting. While you are on the road to truth, I am not afraid of any road for you on sea or land.”

She gave him her hand. Large, bright tears stood in her eyes.

“Dear Edith, good-by!” he said, and could not utter another word.

They went down the steps together. The carriage-door opened and closed, there was one last glance, and they lost sight of each other.

They parted with pain, yet not unwillingly; for duty and honor yet stood with hands clasped between to separate them. Dick Rowan’s pale face, as they had seen it that night sinking backward into the river, could be forgotten by neither.

When we have wronged a person, though it were unconsciously, we can no longer take the same delight in that pleasure which has given him pain. The pleasure may be no less dear to us, but the thought that it is to be reached only through the sufferings of one who has even a fancied claim on us makes renunciation seem almost preferable to possession.

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Under this head we include duties toward certain classes or individuals who are dependent on the rich for their well-being and happiness. The rich furnish employment to those who live by labor. By their wealth, their knowledge, their power of various kinds, they set agoing and direct those great branches of human enterprise and industry in which the majority of persons in civilized society are the workmen. The welfare and happiness of the majority depend, therefore, in a great measure upon the right discharge of their duties by the minority, in whose hands the direction is placed. In order that these duties may be rightly discharged according to Christian principles, the small number who possess the largest portion of wealth and power must be stimulated and governed by the motive of true philanthropy, the love of their fellow-men, Christian charity. Those who are dependent need, on their part, the spirit of resignation to the will of God, contentment with their lot, respect and affection toward those who are in a superior position. Where this mutual charity, springing from Christian principles, does not exist in great strength, binding all classes together, sooner or later the rich will despise and oppress the poor; and the poor will hate the rich, biding their time to revolt against and destroy them. The rich ought, therefore, to devote all their thoughts and energies to such an administration of the trust committed to them as may produce the greatest possible amount of well-being and happiness among the dependent classes in society, and earn for themselves the respect, love, and gratitude of all.

We will now leave off generalizing, and descend to some particulars. Merchants and others in similar positions ought to take more interest than they do in the welfare and happiness of their clerks. Those who know something of the hardships, privations, and moral danger to which this class of young men are exposed in New York will not dispute the assertion we have made.[13] It may be extended to the corresponding class of young women. And we have here the opportunity of citing the example of a work undertaken by one of our merchants, which illustrates our thesis much better than pages of explanation. We refer to the great institution contrived, and now almost completed, by Mr. Stewart, which may be seen, and is worth being seen by every one, on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Thirty-third Street. This princely undertaking is a sample of that benevolent and magnanimous effort in behalf of a numerous and interesting class of the employees of the rich which we are aiming to recommend.

The need of looking after the interests of those who are engaged in the harder and rougher kinds of labor is much more stringent. The tenements and daily surroundings of the laboring class of people in great cities, the many squalid discomforts and miseries which invest their lot in life, have been the frequent theme of those who, either from real or pretended philanthropy, concern themselves with social questions. Here again, we may cite the example of another princely merchant, Mr. Peabody, as an illustration of what might be undertaken and accomplished, if the whole body of wealthy men had the same spirit and would make similar efforts. The condition of the laboring class is too hard. They are too much neglected. It is not safe to leave them in this condition, and, more than this, it is not right to do so. Let us specify some particular instances of the ill-treatment or neglect of certain classes of workingmen. There are not a few who are most unreasonably and cruelly overworked both by day and by night, especially such as fill the most arduous kinds of employments about railroads. The life of the Southern negro slave was paradisaic, compared to that of the miserable drudges who work in the stables of our horse railways. The conductors and drivers of our city cars and omnibuses are worked to death on a pay so meagre that stealing has become a kind of recognized necessity of their situation. How can these men go to church on Sundays, approach the sacraments, or enjoy an innocent holiday? There is a wonderful amount of breath and ink expended in our enlightened city upon our religious rights and liberties. Yet the men who are employed to take care of the Central Park cannot find even a single half-hour on a Sunday morning to go to Mass.

Let any one who wishes to appreciate the blessing of living in this nineteenth century, in this land of light and liberty, and enjoying the fruits of that advanced civilization which communicates the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number, take a tour of the New England factories. He will there see spectacles to rejoice his heart, if he is both a wealthy and a righteous man, and cause him to exclaim: “God, I thank thee that I am not as other men, especially as these Irishmen, and that my wife and children are not like theirs!” The writer of these articles has had a long and extensive experience as a missionary among the Catholic population of the factory towns of New England. In almost every instance, the persons who have had charge of the factories have been extremely polite and obliging during the continuance of the missions. Often they have manifested an interest in their success, and have granted facilities to the operatives to attend the exercises. So, undoubtedly, has it been with the masters of slaves on the Southern plantations. These things cannot, however, make slavery to be freedom, or the condition of operatives in factories one that is fit to exist in a society which pretends to be Christian or civilized. There are plenty of kind-hearted, philanthropic men among New England capitalists. We do not suppose that all those who give so largely to foreign missions and Bible societies have either made their fortunes by selling opium and rum to the heathen, or are seeking merely to salve over a remorseful conscience and gain applause from men by their liberality. Yet even those who are conscientious and benevolent are carried along by a system which is bad and cruel. We do not mean that it is bad and cruel by accident merely. Many of its crimes and cruelties are purely accidental, and prove only the wickedness of particular persons. If a building is put up in such a slight manner that it falls and crushes hundreds, this is the crime of those particular persons who caused it to be built in such a manner. If the superintendent of a factory abuses his power to corrupt those who are under him, that is his own sin. But if the principles and laws of the system produce moral and physical misery independently of the individuals who carry it on, the system is essentially vicious. It is even the cause of the accidental and exceptional villanies which occur under it, because it tends to produce a cruel and tyrannical spirit.

The essential vice of the system lies in this. Capitalists seek to make exorbitant profits, without regard to anything but their own selfish interests. They care not for their operatives. These are, consequently, overworked, and employed at too tender an age, and to a great extent are underpaid. They are regarded and treated as working machines, and not as moral and religious beings. There is something repulsive, gloomy, and uncivilized about the aspect and surroundings of a factory or a factory town. The life which is led there has the most stern and sombre elements of the monastic institute, without the compensating charms and attractions. It has something also of the state-prison discipline, something of the poor-house, and a great deal of the Commune. There is a dismal and frightful regularity, like that of a treadmill, in the existence of the population of our factory towns of New England. Everything is arranged both in the mills and the boarding-houses with such clock-work regularity, and with such scanty allowance for any other functions of life except those which are physical, that the place would suit much better for a variety of apes with sufficient intelligence to work machines than for human beings. Sunday is free, it is true, thanks to the small amount of Christian law which still survives in our country. Catholics can therefore go to Mass and sermon, as they do in thousands, crowding the vast churches which they have built for themselves, in spite of the weariness of their week’s labor. But as for confession, it is made almost impossible, and without that they cannot enjoy the greatest of their Sunday privileges, holy communion. We will not enlarge on the obvious fact that the regular amount of work exacted is excessive. But what is to be said of those who take even more than the regular and excessive number of hours in the day from their overworked rational animals? At Manchester, N. H., during a mission in which the writer was engaged, the operatives of one factory were employed until half-past nine in the evening. Some of them, who made a desperate effort to snatch what they could of the advantages of the mission, complained to us that they were half-dead with fatigue, and too jaded to care whether they had souls or not. We asked if the extra hours of work were not voluntary. The answer was, that they were so in appearance and in pretence, but that they did not dare to refuse volunteering for extra work, for fear of being punished by the ill-will of their overseers, and even discharged at the first convenient opportunity.

At another New England town, West Rutland, Vermont, we found that for a considerable time the workmen in the marble quarries had been forced to take store-pay for their wages. All the land, the houses, the different branches of business, were in the hands or under the control of a few capitalists, who would not permit any of the Irish laborers to acquire property or gain a permanent and independent footing on the soil.

These are scattered instances, but they tell a great deal, and well-informed readers will know how to fill up the picture for themselves. Many persons engaged in the system of which we are speaking will admit its evils and hardships. They excuse themselves, however, by the plea that they can personally do nothing toward changing it for a better one. Private efforts, they say, would only injure those who made them, by enabling the merciless and unscrupulous to fill up the market and sweep up all the profits. Legislation, they say, is hopeless, because controlled by these very unscrupulous capitalists. Senator Wilson has made this assertion in regard to New York. He says it is controlled by what he calls a feudal moneyed aristocracy. Others would probably extend the observation to a much wider sphere than New York. We do not generally agree in opinion with Senator Wilson. But we agree with him most heartily in condemning and denouncing such a regime as this. Only, we would suggest that a more appropriate name for it would be, instead of feudal, Foodle Aristocracy. It is not only cruel, but despicable. Mammon was the “meanest spirit that fell,” and the worship of the golden calf is the most degrading of all idolatries.

The miserably poor, the helpless, the suffering, and even the morally degraded and vicious classes of the community have also their claims on the charity of the rich. We have no wish to deny that these claims are very generally acknowledged in modern society, and a great deal done to acquit them, both by organized and by individual liberality and effort. We occasionally see extraordinary instances of generous philanthropy towards one or another suffering class of men. Very lately, we have seen the Roosevelt Hospital opened, an extensive institution founded by one of the old Knickerbocker gentlemen of New York, who left $900,000, the bulk of his fortune, for this purpose. The miseries of our social system are nevertheless so vast and fearful that the remedies furnished by either public or private care are wholly inadequate. Perhaps many persons will say that they are remediless. There are those who look on the world and life with cold and merciless eyes. It is a struggle of animals for their selfish enjoyment. Let each one look out for himself, and the unlucky take their chance. When such persons are prosperous and powerful, they scorn and oppress the weaker individuals who are dependent on them. Knowing their own depravity, they believe in that of all other men. They are therefore perfectly pitiless toward their fellow-men. “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.” Others who are not cruel are sad and disheartened. Although they mourn over the appalling miseries of life, they look on them as the inevitable destiny of the human race, and do not believe it is possible to help them. The philosophy of the first class is diabolical, that of the second is unworthy of Christians. We do not mean that they err in respect to the point of fact that these miseries have always existed and will exist. But we do say that they err in ascribing them to the essential order of the world, to the constitution of society, to human destiny, and not to the wilful sins and negligences of men; they err in not believing that God has provided a remedy which on his part is sufficient and adequate for these miseries; and, therefore, they err practically, if they do not endeavor to apply that remedy as far as they can to those miseries with which they come in contact. Does one of these ask what hope there is of a fundamental reformation in society which will remedy the crying evils all benevolent persons see and deplore? We answer, that, with all its faults, the nineteenth century is really remarkable on account of the general interest which is felt in the improvement of the condition of the working and suffering classes. What is wanted is the knowledge and application of the right principles and means for accomplishing the result. Communism, secularism, and every kind of system which denies or ignores Christianity, is a remedy worse than the disease, which can only produce death. Imperfect or sectarian Christianity, although capable of producing partial and limited improvement, is too weak for the task which its more generous and enterprising professors exact from it, and endeavor to stimulate it to undertake. It is only the Catholic Church which is competent to such great and universal works. She alone has the wellspring of divine charity, and the supernatural agencies for distributing its health-giving, fructifying streams. Therefore, the hope of a thorough application of the divine remedy to the dreadful diseases of humanity is precisely commensurate with the hope of a return of the whole people of nominal Christendom to true Catholic Christianity.

Meanwhile, the duty of each individual is to do what he can for the benefit of those who are within the sphere of his own efforts or influence. Let him pay attention to his own dependents, and to the poor and suffering who are immediately around him. No one who has wealth, power, or influence of any kind will have any reason to complain that he lacks the opportunity of doing good to his fellow-men, if he is really desirous of doing it. Even if his position is altogether that of a private person, he can do his part, and that a good and noble one, in the general work of human redemption. If he has the power and the opportunity to act upon society, as a public man in a greater or lesser sphere, let him remember that he is a Christian, and act accordingly, and he will be doing precisely what those great and good men did in former times who were the creators and improvers of our Christian civilization.

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The midnight chimes had just done ringing, and the old church was very still. All day long there had been comers and goers, and the altar had been wreathed, the stone church carpeted, the clustered pillars entwined with flowers and with evergreens. Round the altar, that stood among the carven stalls like a May-shrine in a dark forest-glade, was an amphitheatre of blossoming verdure; boys’ hands had piled up the lilies, the violets, the roses, the fuchsias; and monks’ hands had reared up the pyramid of palm, and ivory magnolia, and many-colored rhododendron beyond. The palms were golden, not green it is true, but they were very precious, and could not be spared to-day from the festive decoration, for they had come from Palestine, and only last Sunday had been offered to the church. An Eastern guest had walked in the procession on Palm Sunday, and had dedicated these lovely foreign boughs to the God of East and West alike.

Everything was ready for the early celebration of the Paschal Mass—even the golden chalice lay under its pall of satin upon the altar of sculptured cedar-wood. Perhaps the transverse timbers of the rare wood had not forgotten the time when the sea-breezes blew on them on Lebanon’s heights, and when the voice of the young crusader, Hugh of Devereux, had bidden them fall in the service of God and help to build him another sepulchre in a Christian land.

“The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars!”

And now there was no one in the old church but the youngest chorister, Benignus, the nephew of the monk Cuthbert. The child was never happy save by the altar, and had no friend but Cuthbert, because he was of the blood of the lords of Devereux, and his poor betrayed mother was no more.

Midnight chimes are sweet, and the child had a weird passion for their sound, and would sit entranced while they slowly rang out an old well-known church-chant. But when they had done, and he thought there was silence, he heard a sound he knew not growing out of the chimes, but different from them, something graver than his childish companions’ prattle, something sweeter than the monks’ low tones, something that seemed like his own soul speaking to itself.

It came from the belfry, straight like an arrow of sound, and muffled itself in a faint echo among the flower-forest round the altar.

And presently he could make out the words:

“I have spoken to God, and offered him the last vows of dying Lent, and woven into song the speechless prayers breathed over and yet trembling on thy jewelled brim.”

And the child knew it was the angel of the bell who spoke.

And presently there rose a sound from the dim-robed altar, and the voice of the angel of the chalice made answer: “My cup is as a bell uplifted, with its song of joy hushed in the very words of God, and drowned in the flood of ruby light that quivers, living and sensitive, within my golden walls.”

“And my cup,” returned the voice of the bell, “is as a chalice inverted, with its saving wealth outpoured in strains that reach the human ken; endowed with a speaking, living tongue that can touch the human heart.”

“I speak of men to God, while my fragile stem bears the wondrous purple flower of the precious blood, and while I am reared aloft with the divine burden weighing on me, even as the cross was reared up high over Jerusalem’s walls.”

“And I speak of God to men while my brazen clangor is heard afar like the trumpets of Israel before the crumbling walls of Jericho.”

And here the soft breeze from the open lancet-windows rustled among the sweet-smelling shrubs around the altar’s base, and, as the night-wind passed over them, their voices seemed to be blended into its sighs, and to have found an interpreter in its fitful sound.

“We are children of many climes, and some of us are exiles in this land, but under this roof we are at home again, and at this festival none of us are strangers. We too, in all our variety, have scarce one blossom among us that is not a chalice or a bell; that holds not high its crimson cup towards heaven to receive the crystal dew, or hangs not its white or purple bell with golden tongue towards the unheeding earth. On the altar of green turf, on the swaying columns of interwoven boughs, on the storm-tossed belfries of vine-surrounded trees, in southern swamp or northern forest, in tropical wilderness or rosy-tinted orchard, everywhere is stamped the semblance of the church, with chalices upreared, with bells anxiously bent human-ward. O brothers of the altar and the tower, let us sing together the same hymn.”

And the child Benignus said softly to himself:

“O God! make my heart a chalice, and my lips a Christian bell.”

The voices of the flower-chorus spoke again, and the lilies of the valley sang a silver peal behind their grass-green curtains:

“Every day we die by thousands, but our seed is borne afar, and drops in some fair nook at last, beside a running brook or beneath a spreading beech, even as the last echo of the unwearied bell that knocks at some heart’s door, far away in the mountains of worldly care, and strikes a well-known, long-silent chord, and draws the exile back to the fruitful plains of God’s own church.”

The voice from the wind-rocked steeple came in swift and loving answer:

“Even so, my blossom-sisters, for to us the word was given to increase and multiply and fill the earth, and at every step bring forth fresh glory and conquer fresh realms for the God of our creation.” Then the living gems stirred again under the breath of the still midnight breeze, and the voice came forth anew as the royal cactus and the purple morning-glories flashed like sun-touched clouds in the dusky foliage:

“Every day our lives are drained and our treasures rifled to adorn with living beauty the banquets of great men, and to strew the halls of marble palaces, and yet every day, as the sun comes forth again, our parent stem is laden once more with exhaustless riches and a more abundant harvest of loveliness, even as the lavished treasures and the scattered wealth of the daily chalice are ever being shed without intermission from the altar into the hearts of thankless men.”

And the sweet low voice came back from the shrouded altar: “Yes, dear emblems of God’s loving prodigality, for hath he not said: ‘Cast your bread upon the waters, and after many days it shall return to thee‘’?”

The scarlet fuchsia shook its clusters of purple bells, planted on a blood-red cross, as if it would say to men that none could proclaim God save they proclaimed him from Calvary. The tall Nile lily, whose cup is as a spotless shroud wrapped round a golden nail, swayed in the night air as if whispering that the way to the resurrection lay across the instruments of the passion: the ivory-tinted roses, the first-born among their kind, whose clustering, half-blown buds made a sculptured reredos of living alabaster behind the altar-cross, wept tears of dew when the midnight breeze shook their curled petals, as if weeping like sinless virgins over the wrongs they knew only by name. A carpet of violets was spread below, the last offering of Lent, the fringes of the sweet pall of penance under whose folds the church spends her yearly vigil of reparation.

The heart of the child Benignus was breaking with joy and love, and he longed to be a flower himself, that he might sing the hymn the living grove had sung.

The voice of the angel of the bell answered his unspoken wish:

“Wish not that thou wert other than that thou art, for Jesus said, ‘Unless ye become even as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’”

And the flowers sighed, and gave forth a sweeter fragrance, because they longed to be little children, and could not.

Then Benignus wished he might be an angel, if he could not be a flower, and the voice from the altar sounded very softly, so low he thought no one could hear it but himself:

“This wish will I put into my cup, and when to-morrow dawns, and Jesus finds the first-fruits of this new Easter laid at his feet, thou shalt have thy answer.”

Then came a soft chorus of welcome and congratulation, breaking forth among the flowery worshippers, but the angel of the bell held his peace.

And in the morning, when the sun flung his golden curtains across the east window and crowned the saints and virgins thereon with richer gems than living monarchs wear, the Paschal procession came winding through All Hallow’s church, and no one missed the little chorister Benignus. But when his turn in the anthem came, a voice seemed to float from some unseen corner, and a shower of bell-like crystal tones rang in triumphant cadence to the very roof, and no one could tell if it were Benignus or an angel singing. The organ ceased, and the monk Cuthbert looked anxiously along the lines of white-robed choristers, but the child was not there. Still the voice sang on, and it seemed as if it floated now from the chalice on the altar to the distant belfry-tower, and then back again to the fragrant forest of exotics in the choir. And Cuthbert, looking up among the half-opened buds of the early roses that were piled up directly over the tabernacle, thought he saw one more lovely than the others just break gently from the frail green stem, and fall in showering petals around the pall-covered chalice, at the very minute the wondrous voice ceased in one long reverberating “Alleluia.”

Then Cuthbert knew who had been singing and where Benignus was, and he sang the “Gloria in Excelsis” as he had never done before.

But the angel of the bell was sad, because the child would have helped him to bear abroad the message of God’s truth to men.

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It is evident that we have reached a turning-point in the history of the world; that a crisis of terrible interest for the church, for Christian Europe, for peoples, and for nations, is at hand. It must, indeed, soon be decided whether Christianity shall continue to be, in the life of the nations, what from its very nature and design it is intended to be; whether it shall remain what it has been acknowledged to be since it overcame the heathenism of old, the light of the world, the supernatural leaven permeating all the relations of life, purifying and ennobling them; or whether it shall be cast out of public life as an illusion, and at most—and who knows how long even that?—be tolerated as a species of superstition. The nations—and especially the recently founded German Empire—must soon decide whether they shall accept as their basis the laws of eternal justice, whose root is in the holy and personal God, and in him alone; whether they will hold to that Christian civilization which reposes on the public recognition of Christianity, of the church as a divine institution not subject to the arbitrament of man; in fine, whether they will respect as sacred those prescriptive rights of mankind which every one must respect who believes in the divine government of the world—rights of which history is the evidence; or whether they will yield to the pressure of the revolution and of false science, throw Christianity and Christian civilization overboard, proclaim the present will of the dominant political powers or party the only and highest law of the state, and, having done this, to use their immense power to infuse this “modern” spirit and these “modern” principles into the life of the people, and force it on them by every means at their disposal, through legislation, government patronage, their system of public instruction, and the whole organization of society; in short, whether they will place naturalism and rationalism instead of Christianity, the vital principle of national and popular life, and thereby—no intelligent person can doubt it, for reason and experience conspire to teach it—hasten for the nations the inevitable catastrophe of which the burning of Paris was only a premonitory symptom.

And precisely at this fatal moment in the history of the world it is that, in Germany, a number of men, among them a few who have deserved well of the church, blinded to a degree which it seems hard to account for, have raised the standard of rebellion against their mother, the church, because the Œcumenical Council did not think fit to decide as they thought best, because it decided as it pleased the pastors of the church and the Holy Ghost. The foundation-stone of the church, laid by Christ himself, to preserve unity and love within it for ever, has become a stumbling-block to them. They have made shipwreck of the faith, and burst the bonds of love that held them in union with their brethren in the faith. Following the example of those who before them rebelled against the church, they call themselves defenders of the faith, while denying the very principle on which all faith reposes. Proclaiming human science the supreme authority in matters of religion, placing it above the highest authority in the church, above the Pope and the council, above the assent of the whole Catholic world, they have ceased to be servants of God and of his church; they have gone over to the rationalism and naturalism which are striving so hard to do away with Christianity entirely, and to constitute themselves in its place a new cosmopolitan religion.

The turpitude of their rebellion against the church is equalled only by that of the means which they have adopted to defend it and to spread its principles. Repeating the worst and most perfidious slanders of the past against the church, and giving them out as the result of science, they proclaim to the world that the Apostolic See has for a thousand years been the seat of well-concocted fraud and deceit, and that in the most sacred of matters; that the Catholic Church is dangerous both to the state and to morals; and that the decree solemnly proclaimed by the Œcumenical Council, that Christ will for ever preserve his visible representative on earth from all error in faith and morals—a belief which has always been the key-stone of Catholic faith, Catholic life, and Catholic practice—is a doctrine inimical to the rights of the state. Under these pretexts, they require the state to deprive the Catholic Church of its rights, and of the liberty which has been guaranteed to it by the state, and not to recognize the church represented by the bishops and the Pope, but themselves, who have renounced all allegiance to it, as the legal Catholic Church, the only one recognized and promised protection by the state. Moreover, they desire that those Catholics who have remained faithful to the church shall be looked upon as recreant to the state, accusing them of want of patriotism. Designating all those peoples embraced in the Catholic Church by the name of the Romanists, they, in the name of what they designate Germanism, demand their oppression and extirpation.

And, we are sorry to say, these attempts have not been without some success. Individual governments have been induced to take steps against the church which, a short time ago, it was supposed it would be impossible to take, and which the Catholics living under those governments did nothing to warrant.

During this condition of affairs, the one hundred and twentieth Catholic Congress met in the second week of September in Mayence, to give expression in no weak or ambiguous terms to their faith, and to their views on the condition of things; and they did it with that unanimity and certainty which Catholic faith alone can give—a faith neither anxious nor troubled with doubt, or weakened by the spirit of the age.

This they did by their resolutions on the Roman question, on the Vatican Council, and on the more recent opposition that has been made to its decrees—and rightly; for, in the Roman question, the question of all external Christian law and order reaches its culminating point, as do theirs the constitution of the church itself, and the whole of Catholic faith, in the decrees of the Vatican Council.

The occupation of Rome is simply robbery—a crime against the church, against every individual Catholic which nothing can justify, which no principle of international law can excuse or cover, which no prescription can make valid. The so-called guarantees made to the church by the Italian government can never be accepted, because they are based upon the false principle that the state alone has the right to declare under what conditions the church and its pastors shall exercise their functions as teachers, priests, and shepherds of the flock—functions which they exercise in virtue of the power conferred upon them by Jesus Christ himself; because these laws do not by any means guarantee to the Pope the free discharge of his supreme authority as chief pastor, and, moreover, because there is not the least security that these guarantees will be respected. The occupation of Rome and of the Quirinal is the culmination of the policy of the Italian revolution, and the success of that policy the disgrace of this age. That the governments of European nations have done nothing to defend the Pope is an injustice to their Catholic subjects, a violation of the law of nations, and paves the way, necessarily, to the violation of all law and the overthrow of all order. And this is why it is that Catholics must for ever discountenance all these acts, and oppose them by all legitimate means. And their opposition cannot be rightfully construed as insubordination to the powers that be, or as a want of patriotism on their part. On the contrary, Catholics may be sure that in so acting they will be doing their government and their country the greatest possible service. Such service has been rendered by the resolutions of the Catholic Congress in Mayence.

It was well that, at the first general meeting of the society after the occupation of Rome, its members should give expression to their thought on the wicked act by which, for the third time in this century, it was attempted to destroy the work founded by divine Providence since the christianizing of the world, in order to secure to the head of the church his liberty and the efficient discharge of the duties of his high office. Nor could the members of the society express themselves concerning this crime otherwise than in bold words of truth and justice—in words becoming an occasion when the interests of God and man are alike at stake—in words such as nature itself puts into the mouth of those who have been the victims of great injustice or great misfortune. Worldly policy may wait, and consider itself justified in waiting, to take account of circumstances; but for us Catholics there is but one thing to do when the question is simply this—whether Christ or Antichrist shall reign, namely, what the martyrs did under circumstances still more aggravating, what God himself has commanded us to do, what we see his representative on earth doing—to proclaim the truth to those in power before kings and peoples.

It was, if possible, yet more necessary that the Catholic Congress should make a public profession of its faith in the decrees of the Œcumenical Council of the Vatican, that it should raise its voice against those proceedings of the government which have no object but to hinder the Catholic Church in the declaration of its doctrines, and to lead or force Catholics into heresy. And on these points again the association, in its resolutions, speaks the truth, and expresses the Catholic view on them, in the plainest and most direct manner, without any show of diplomacy or of pedantry. We joyfully profess, say they, our faith in everything which the church requires, particularly in the infallibility of the Pope teaching the universal church, and in the very sense in which the Vatican Council has defined it, do we believe it. And we are convinced that the definition of this truth in our time is no evil, but the work of a kind and good Providence, intended to strengthen the church, to preserve unity, to reclaim the erring. We reject with horror the caricature of the doctrine of Papal infallibility which the opponents of the Vatican Council have drawn, and we repudiate the slander that this doctrine or any other article of our faith is in conflict with our duties as subjects of our government, or with the allegiance which we owe our fatherland. We protest against the course of those governments which have endeavored to hinder the propagation of Catholic doctrine within their territories, and to favor the opposition to the church by their protecting the rebellion against it. In this manner, they have overstepped the bounds of their rightful authority, infringed the rights of conscience of their Catholic subjects, and made themselves responsible before God for a host of evils. The political principles which have led to these things are in conflict with the law of God, in fact with all law and order, and can never be recognized by Catholics as right or just. Yet are we not without the hope that the governments which have been guilty of these things will at no distant future forsake the unholy path upon which they have entered.

But the members of the Catholic Congress did not confine themselves to professing the Catholic faith, to raising a protesting voice against the encroachments on their liberties and on their rights—rights which should be ever inviolate; they pointed out the fertile source from which have flown as well the most recent evils as the more ancient ones which have done so much injury to the Catholic life of Germany. The source of all these evils, past as well as present, is in a science grounded on false principles, and which appropriates to itself exclusively, but not with any show of reason, the name of German science. These evils can be healed only by the cultivation of real Catholic science in Germany, and the most recent events demand absolutely that the reign of such a science should be inaugurated at once. But so long as the ancient institutions founded for Catholic purposes ignore, for the most part, the object of their being; when they have gone over, to a great extent, to infidelity or to secular management, it is extremely important, both to pastors and people, that new seats of science, of education, of real science and Christian education, should be established.

Such are the principal resolutions of the Catholic Congress held during the present year. What these resolutions contain is only the echo and essence of the thought of the assembly expressed in the orations and sayings of the members—the deep, unanimous, and undoubted convictions of all. These same thoughts found expression also in their addresses to the Holy Father, to the Bishop of Ermeland, to the Bavarian Episcopate, to the Bishops of Switzerland, as well as to the defenders of the Catholic faith in Italy and Austria. But is it right to assume that the voice of all Catholic Germany has been heard, and is heard, in the voice of this general meeting of Catholics? True it is that they would entirely misunderstand the essence and the spirit of the principles of the members of those meetings who would invest their doings or their sayings as a society with any authority; but they would err no less grossly who would consider these meetings as mere party meetings, or as meaning nothing as merely the coming together of a few private individuals. From the very significance of this year’s meeting’s resolutions, it may not be amiss to examine the question somewhat more closely—how much importance is to be attached, what significance and authority such Catholic meetings may have.

These general meetings are nothing more than the coming together of believing Catholics. They do not assume to have any power or authority ecclesiastical or political. They have nothing in their own right that entitles them to be considered as possessed of such power or authority, nor have they a power of attorney of any kind to represent any one else in these meetings.

In the church no one has any power whatever except those to whom Christ has granted it, and only such power as he conferred upon them. But he has granted no power to any one in the church but to Peter and the apostles. On this account the Catholic Church recognizes no representatives, save only the pope and the bishops. There is no such thing among Catholics as lay-participation in the government of the church. Laymen have no power in church government that is theirs of right, and they in no manner take the place of or represent even the inferior clergy. Every tendency in that direction is heretical and schismatical.

The society in question, and all other societies of the same nature, have recognized, acted upon, this principle from the beginning. Being Catholics and wishing to remain Catholics, they have never interfered in the government of the church. On the contrary, they consider it their duty to show to others the example of the most religious submission to the Pope and the bishops in matters relating to faith and ecclesiastical discipline. They, therefore, represent no party in the church. The church wants no parties and recognizes no parties within its bosom. Following the church, the general meeting of Catholics negatives every division in the body of the church. Its only desire is to find itself always one with the church in all things, to be simply Catholic and nothing else.

There is no use in wasting words to show that the Catholic Congress and other Catholic societies claim no power of any kind whatever in the state. They neither represent a political party, nor do they belong to any, nor will they ever constitute themselves a political party in the state.

True, the members of the societies are very far removed, as they ought to be, from an unreasonable, unmanly, unchristian, and un-Catholic indifference in matters pertaining to the nation. They are by no means of opinion that it matters nothing to a Catholic to which party in the country he belongs. They believe firmly that it is the duty of Catholics, as well as their right, to watch over the rights of the church and of its members, and to defend them by the exercise of their political franchises. They do not, however, doubt that it is perfectly legitimate for Catholics, wherever they are, to organize themselves into a party for the exercise of their political rights. But as the political life of every individual Catholic is different from his religious life, and that, although he may be guided in his politics by the principles of Christianity, in like manner these associations of Catholics, inasmuch as they are Catholic, are something higher and broader than mere political associations. Their objects are not the political, but the religious and ecclesiastical rights of Catholics. This has been the universal understanding of the members of these associations from the very beginning of their organizations. These have been the principles which have always guided them, and which they have found it well to be guided by. These associations have never allowed themselves to forget these principles. They have never forgotten them, not even in times of the greatest political excitement. And in the last general meeting, the members of the association did not swerve from these principles by as much as a hair’s breadth.

And precisely because these associations have held to their principles as Catholics, to the very principles we have been mentioning above, are they entitled to attention. They manifest, in a manner that can be relied upon, the mind and conviction, the determination and feeling, of those who are true to the church and to the faith. It thus happens that this general meeting of Catholics has given expression to the thought and feeling of the Catholic clergy and Catholic people. And hence it is that those who would learn what Catholics think and feel on the stirring questions of the present must turn their attention to the resolutions of this Catholic Congress. There is unmistakable evidence that these general meetings express the feeling and ideas common to all Catholics. For twenty-three years they have enjoyed the complete confidence of the bishops of the church. The Holy Father and the bishops of Germany have never hesitated to bless and to approve the efforts of the Catholic association. This were impossible if these meetings did not give expression to the Catholic mind on the questions of the day, if there were any danger in them of a departure from the principles of the faith or of the church. Moreover, we may ask, Who are they that take part in these meetings? They are precisely those persons who with living faith partake of the sacraments, and are in habitual attendance at the services of the church, and in the life of the church generally. During the twenty-three years of their existence, these Catholic associations have in every German diocese and everywhere been one with the clergy on all subjects. Zealous and true Catholics of every social position have been largely represented in them. Hither have come the Catholic nobleman, the Catholic of the middle class, the Catholic peasant, the physician of souls—the priest himself sprung from the people—the Catholic savant, the teacher, author, and publicist. Here, too, have been represented those Catholic societies made up of those who really love the church. In short, in those societies are represented those even who are most despised and seldom represented anywhere else. The members of the Catholic Congress are not representatives of their individual opinions; they seek no worldly interest. It were more than folly for any one to come to those meetings with any such intention. Neither do these meetings represent any party on which they are dependent. They represent no majority or minority to whom they are responsible. Their faith and Catholic feeling it is that bring them to these meetings, and those they have in common with the hundreds and thousands from whose midst they come. There is a yet stronger argument to show that these general assemblies really represent the mind of all true Catholics. It is their unanimity on all questions bearing on religion and on the church—a mark which belongs to Catholics exclusively.

After all this, we feel ourselves warranted to say that these meetings express decidedly the feelings and convictions of those Catholics who are worthy of the name.

But these general assemblies not only give expression to the principles and sentiments of Catholics on the questions of the day, they also tend to keep Catholic life awake and active. And just here is the great use of Catholic societies. There never was a more senseless saying than this: “We need no special societies; our society is the Catholic Church.” Precisely because the Catholic Church is a divine and all-embracing society, the society of societies, does it from its inexhaustible fertility call forth from its own bosom, in all times, other smaller societies—societies calculated to meet the peculiar wants of the time. The life of Christian societies, of church societies, is, indeed, a standard by which Catholic life at any particular time or place may be measured. And in our own day, when the spirit of evil more than ever seeks the destruction of the church, mimicking it as he does after his own fashion—to leave the power which societies are calculated to wield entirely to the enemies of Christianity, to those governed exclusively by the spirit of the world, would be to be more than blind.

At the general meeting held at Düsseldorf, Dr. Marx agreed to take upon himself the difficult task of collecting the statistics of the Catholic societies of Germany. At the assembly held this year, he presented the results of his labors. His work is imperfect, it is true, but it is a foundation on which others may build. It embraces the statistics of most of the German dioceses, and of a number of those of Austria.

The amount of vitality in anything or anywhere cannot be made to appear in a table of statistics, and the best things often thrive in secret. Hence it is that the Catholic life of Germany is much greater than even these tables or any others would give one reason to believe. On the other hand, much that appears on paper in statistics of this kind is of no importance whatever, or of almost no importance. Yet the statistical tables before us demonstrate that numerous live Catholic associations, and of the most varied character, have arisen during the last twenty-three years, and that each general assembly has made itself felt—now in one place, now in another—furthering the creation of such local associations. Societies purely religious, such as brotherhoods, sodalities, congregations, are not at all or scarcely at all referred to in these tables. It was part of the plan of the work that they should be excluded from its tables. Yet they are of the very first importance to the life of the church. Well-conducted societies and sodalities for young people and of adults like those which, thanks be to God, are springing up on every side, and particularly in the Rhine lands, are the best nurseries of real Catholics. Rightly, therefore, do these general assemblies continue to commend such societies, as the general assembly did this year the “Society of Young Merchants,” which was so worthily represented at the meeting. Neither have our Christian social societies and associations been noticed in these tables. And for this reason, again, are we much richer in associations than we should suppose from these tables. On the other hand, these statistics combine with daily experience to show that we are yet only in the beginning of the development of this society-life; that, much as we have to be thankful for, the time has not yet come when we can repose upon our laurels. Rather must we work with all our strength, with inexhaustible patience and devotion at the establishment of Catholic societies. In many parts of Catholic Germany there are no, or scarcely any, Catholic societies, that is, live societies, while in others those which have been begun are now neglected. It is so convenient to allow things to go on in the old way, and so hard—for the most modest association demands some sacrifice on the part of individuals—to establish anything new. Yet a thing which in the great struggle between the church and Antichrist is one of the most powerful means of victory is really worth the highest sacrifice. Is it not time to see that all Christian men should organize themselves into societies, when infidels and free-thinkers so-called are organizing on every side to draw everything to themselves? Our indolence would be all the worse, all the more inexcusable, were we to yield the field to our adversaries, since we, whenever there is a question of real live associations, possess so great an advantage over every other body, not on account of our own merits, but because of the spirit and strength of Catholic Christendom. Let the world surpass us in material means, let it be far above us in its appeal to worldly interests; it is wasting the vital power of faith and Catholic love, which alone are able to establish and to develop associations possessed of real life—associations which can be productive of real good.

How true this is, is shown by the history of the Catholic association founded by the departed but never-to-be-forgotten Kolping. Based only on Catholic faith and relying for support on the very simplest of human means, it has during the past twenty-five years had a steady growth and accomplished untold good. And it will ever be so, so long as it holds to the simple Catholic principles of Kolping. To these associations of young people founded by Kolping others have been joined recently—associations in which the masters of these young people meet. To complete the good work, there is nothing now needed but similar societies for apprentices.

What Kolping did for young mechanics must, with suitable modifications, be now done for those of both sexes occupied in factories and other such establishments. This is the most important step that can be taken by Catholics, to solve certain social questions, and which can be solved only on Catholic principles. Indeed, the greatest social danger of the age is the dechristianization and demoralization of the laboring classes of mechanics and the employees in manufacturing establishments. This dechristianization and demoralization are, to a great extent, the cause of the wretchedness of these classes, and make that wretchedness, even under the most favorable circumstances, incurable. What enormous dimensions has this evil assumed under the, in part at least, so unnatural, social, and economic relations which modern liberal political economy has brought about! But even the evils resulting from this condition of affairs might be healed, if the laboring classes could be restored to Christianity. The Society of Young Mechanics, founded by Kolping, demonstrates that, even under the most unfavorable circumstances, the laboring classes can be redeemed from evil and reclaimed to right, provided they can be made to enter the atmosphere of Christianity in which the members of these societies live. Let us work unanimously and for the same object, and we shall see the number of Christian laborers increase. We shall see them living more and more in one another, associating with one another, and being strengthened by that association. When we have such men, and not before, it will be possible to make those associations really useful in the improvement of the material condition of the laboring classes. So long, indeed, as the laboring classes themselves remain unchristian and immoral, it will be impossible to do anything for their material improvement; for they will never be satisfied. Only by strengthening the spirit of Christianity in all classes of society can legislation itself be made Christian, and it will become Christian just in proportion as the several classes of society become Christian.

Let us now examine in brief the most important movements which the general assembly of this year has initiated toward the establishing of Catholic societies.

For a number of years, the principal subject that has engaged one section of the Catholic Congress is the Christian solution of the so-called social question. Through the efforts of the assembly, the question has been fairly brought before the clergy and the laity. The session of this year has, under this head, recommended the establishment of Christian social associations, the raising of helping funds, the encouragement of appropriate literature, the circulation of the Christian Social Journal, and the erection of dwellings for the laboring classes. They have pointed out how important it is to study on every hand the condition of the laboring classes, in order to discover the principles on which we must proceed, in order to legislate concerning labor and the laboring classes in a just and Christian manner.

The general assembly has, moreover, recommended the Catholic missionary associations in the most emphatic manner. Among these, the first place belongs to the Society of St. Francis Xavier for Foreign Missions, and the Society of St. Boniface.

Considering the terrible blows that have fallen upon France and upon Rome, it has become our duty to redouble our efforts in behalf of the missions to foreign parts, and in behalf of the Society of St. Francis Xavier; for on those efforts must depend, in a great measure, the permanency and spread of Catholic missions the world over. Unfortunately, the Society of St. Francis Xavier has gone backward rather than forward, in Germany, during the last ten years. In many places it has ceded to other societies. And yet it should not be so. The Society of St. Francis Xavier is and must remain the first and most important of all missionary associations. It embraces the missions to all parts of the world, and they all look to it for support. Even Germany has been helped by it more than by any other association; and now, although the Society of St. Boniface has extended so widely, it cannot be dispensed with. Therefore it is that all Catholics, and, above all, the clergy, who are always in all matters pertaining to Christianity the divinely appointed leaders of the people, should take the deepest interest in the Society of St. Francis Xavier. The Society of St. Boniface will suffer nothing from this. On the contrary, the more the Catholic spirit is strengthened, the more will this and every other Catholic society thrive. As truly as the church embraces the whole world, so truly can we not be real Catholics if we feel an interest only in the missions of our own country, but none in the missions to other parts of the world.

True it is that charity demands us to look first to the wants of those who are our nearest neighbors. And on this account the Society of St. Boniface cannot be too strongly recommended to our benevolence. The general meeting has done its duty in this matter. It has recommended the society in very earnest terms.

Besides these great societies, there are other smaller ones with special objects of charity in view—smaller, but by no means unimportant. The Society of the Holy Sepulchre is, independently of its religious object, the most powerful auxiliary of the missions in the East. The Society of St. Joseph is doing the work of the Society of St. Boniface among the large and exposed Catholic German population in large and foreign cities, and especially such cosmopolitan cities as Paris and London.

A work of the highest importance is to care for the emigrants to America. Here it is possible to do a great deal with little means. The Committee on Emigration, presided over by Prince von Isenburg, has placed its cards of recommendation at the disposal of all parish priests, in order that emigrants presenting those cards to the agents of the Catholic Emigration Society in America may receive proper advice and direction in their new homes, and—who would have imagined it?—those cards of recommendation have been used much less than one might rightfully expect.

How great is sometimes our ignorance or indifference concerning the interests of religion! It was, certainly, only right that the general assembly of this year should have approved the founding of an association, that of the Archangel Raphael, whose sole object it is, besides the saying of a few prayers for the success of this movement in behalf of the emigrants, to defray the heavy expenses of the same, and thus to relieve the president of the committee of that charge. We hear many exclaim just here, We have too many associations, too many meetings! We know very well that, when societies increase beyond measure, even when those societies are benevolent ones, there may be danger. But that there may be danger is no reason why we should not encourage the organization of such societies when they may be necessary or useful. We do not, however, wish to blame the taking of steps to prevent too great a competition of societies having charitable or other objects in view.

The Catholic Congress this year could not well help—as, indeed, all those which preceded it did—considering the school question. There can be no question that the anti-Christian party in the state is straining every nerve to do away, by means of legislation, with the right of Catholic parents to a Catholic education of their children in Catholic schools—with the right of the church to instruct her people in a Catholic manner, and to found institutions for that purpose. The members of the assembly spoke on these matters in no ambiguous terms, and took, besides, into consideration what they should do in case the state, siding with the liberalism of the day, should banish the Catholic religion, the Catholic Church, from the schools of the nation. Should this happen, there was nothing left but to appeal to the consciences of parents. It then became the duty of bishops to tell their people that it was not allowed them to send their children to unchristian schools. Liberty of education must be defended to the utmost, and every sacrifice made in order to give Catholic children opportunities for a Catholic education from the primary schools to the university. But the impression is not hereby intended to be conveyed that in this Catholics see the salvation of the church, of her children, and of the nation. No; they will always remind princes and states that it is their solemn duty to govern a Christian people in a Christian manner, and, leaving out of consideration the sacredness of the foundations and the right of the church to teach, to give their Catholic subjects Catholic schools—schools standing in proper relations with the church.

Yet, on account of the more universal questions, and the great contests which the church is waging for her most important possessions, for the independence and for the integrity of its faith, the school question, even at this meeting, was held somewhat in the background.

The general assembly was content with adopting a few resolutions, embodying the simple principles which must guide Catholics, should the state break with the church on the school question, and, violating the natural and prescriptive rights of Catholics, introduce a system of non-Catholic schools—principles not sufficiently recognized by even well-meaning Catholics. These resolutions are worded thus: “The monopoly of the school system by the state is an unwarranted restriction of liberty of conscience, and therefore to be opposed by all Catholics. Very many of the schools have notoriously been founded by Catholics, and it is only just that they should continue to accomplish those ends for which they are established. In these schools, and in all Catholic schools yet to be established, the Catholic Church must possess perfect and unrestricted liberty in its capacity as a teacher.” Thus, while the school question was not the most prominent before the general assembly, the words spoken at that meeting will not, we hope, be without beneficial results in the province of Catholic education.

All rights and liberties avail nothing in the end if Catholic education itself is not what it ought to be. And the great battle that is waging, that education may not be deprived of its Christian character, can be won by us only on condition that teachers and educators themselves, as well as parents and the clergy, understand precisely the full bearing of the question.

It was, therefore, a happy thought to unite teachers, clergy, and parents into one grand society, in order to further the great matter of Christian education—a matter on which our whole future for weal or woe depends. The association of teachers founded in Bavaria, approved by the bishops, embracing among its members many distinguished men, and directed by one evidently called by God to fill that very position, Ludwig Aner, has sought and is seeking to carry this thought into practice. The Catholic Congress held at Düsseldorf had already called attention to the importance of establishing similar societies elsewhere, only modified in their character by the different nature of place or other circumstances. The realization of this thought was a matter for the meeting at Mayence to consider more closely yet. There was here assembled a goodly number of educators and friends of youth from every part of Germany, among them a number of the most widely known teachers in the country; and they took occasion to most earnestly confer on this matter each day of the meeting. They gave a general plan, and threw out some very practical hints for the organization of Catholic educational associations.

We give them here with the hope that they may prove as fertile in blessings as did those thrown out on a former occasion, and which resulted in the Society of St. Boniface, and in the Catholic Association for Young Men, so often recommended by those meetings since.

The matter is one of at least as much importance, and the general plan of the organization of these societies at least as simple and practical. Here are the broad outlines of the plan: “The task of education, rendered more than ever before difficult on account of the times in which we live, and the school question, now everywhere looming into such immense proportions, render the foundation of Catholic educational institutions imperative.”

The Mayence Association of Teachers—pointing to the association already existing in Bavaria—suggests the following as the ground principles of the new associations:

I. The Catholic educational associations recognize as their foundation, first and last, the faith of the Catholic Church.

II. Excluding all party issues, their only object is the furtherance of the temporal and eternal welfare of youth.

III. The Catholic educational associations desire that the youth of the age should profit by all that the world has of good, and that in their education all that it has of evil should be avoided.

Therefore, they are ready to accept and to use all that there is of real worth in the educational systems of the age, all that can promote real progress.

IV. These associations consider the proper education of youth in the family, the schools, and later in life, that is, after the youth have left the schools, as their exclusive object.

Therefore is it that they accept as members, parents, teachers, the clergy, and all who, in any manner, are interested in the education of youth.

V. They recommend to these associations, 1. The defence and propagation of Catholic principles in education by word, writing, and action. 2. The defence of the rights of parents to the Christian education and Christian instruction of their children. 3. The improvement of the family education of children, of schools, and the providing of means for the continuance of education after children leave schools. 4. The furtherance of the interests of teachers, to support them in their efforts in the direction of education, and particularly to help to elevate their material and social position; the collecting of funds to aid in the education of teachers, and in the support of their widows. 5. The encouragement of literature bearing on the interests of education. 6. Founding and caring for educational institutions of all kinds—schools for children, boys, girls, apprentices, etc.

VI. The means for attaining the objects of these associations are, besides the means suggested by the very nature of our holy religion, 1. Periodicals; 2. Appropriate publications for teachers and for families; 3. The establishment of libraries and literary associations; 4. Co-operating with other associations—the pecuniary assistance needed in any case to be obtained by regular fees from the members, presents, etc.

VII. The getting up of particular by-laws to be left to the associations from each separate province, but the by-laws to be got up in such a manner that the above principles be not ignored.

The elevation of the tone and the support of the Catholic press must ever be one of the principal objects of all Catholic associations, and of the general meetings.

This year a great number of Catholic publishers and editors came together at this meeting. All the principal organs of the Catholic daily press were represented. The principal object gained was that they became acquainted with one another, which is the first step towards their understanding and appreciating one another.

As far as the press is concerned, we Catholics have nothing to do but to look at things just as they stand. It is certain that the unrestricted freedom of the press, which every one is ready to abuse, and which allows every one to constitute himself a teacher of the public, can be defended neither on principles of reason nor of faith. It is certain, too, that the rank growth of periodicals which has followed with all its attendant evils, and the heterogeneous character of the reading of a great many people, is a deplorable evil. But as, unfortunately, an unchristian press is guaranteed the fullest liberty and the evils that flow from that liberty, are widely spread, it becomes not only our privilege, but our solemn duty to combat the unchristian by a really Christian press—a matter on which the church and the head of the church have spoken in an unmistakable manner. Yes, it is absolutely necessary to call a Catholic journal into existence on every hand, and to spare no sacrifice to do so. The beginnings of the Catholic press have been everywhere small, and those who have interested themselves in it have everywhere had to contend with untold difficulties. This is true particularly of the larger journals, which, to enable them to compete with other journals, need support from other sources besides that derived from subscriptions and advertisements. It is certainly the duty of Catholics, out of pure love for God and for the church, to establish Catholic press associations, in order to provide means for the support of Catholic papers, just as the government and political parties find funds to support their own organs. The financial difficulties which the larger journals have to fear consist sometimes only in the apprehension of too great a competition on the part of smaller or other journals. There may be such a thing as a reprehensible competition, when, for example, as in the same locality attempts are made to found or establish new journals of the same nature as those already existing, when those already existing are sufficient to supply the demand. But, on the whole, we have by no means thus far enough Catholic papers. There was a time, and it is not yet entirely over, when Catholic Germany had very few papers among the daily press of the country. And almost every one of these few papers had an equal prospect, and it naturally enough seemed to be the ambition of the editor or proprietor of each to make his paper the central organ of the whole of Catholic Germany.

Naturally enough, too, those pecuniarily or otherwise interested in these journals looked with a rather jealous eye upon all attempts to found other Catholic journals. Whenever a new paper was established, the old ones lost a number of subscribers, and sometimes fears were entertained for the existence of the older papers themselves. But experience has shown that these fears were unfounded. Wherever and whenever a paper was properly managed and ably edited, it has contrived to live and to do well. Thus competition has, on the whole, worked advantageously rather than otherwise.

If we look at the matter closely, we will see that it is quite an abnormal state of affairs that Catholic Germany should possess so few of the larger political papers. Compared with the time when Catholics had no press at all, the existence of even one good paper through which they can give expression to their thoughts is a great blessing and a great gain; but that certainly does not enable them to give their voice that weight in the questions of the day to which it is entitled. Besides, it must be remembered that, if Catholics have not this class of papers, they will take periodicals which are not Catholic. Experience teaches, and it might be expected from the very nature of things that a paper can rarely obtain a very large circulation outside of the locality in which it is published. Outside of these bounds it will find only a few isolated subscribers. Hence it follows that every large city ought to have its own Catholic paper, one that will worthily represent it.

These papers outside of the place of their publication will thus find a number of subscribers—a number which will always depend upon the ability with which they are edited, the reliability of the views they advocate, and the interest which on other grounds they may awaken. We cannot, however, be satisfied with a so-called central organ, or with a small number of large papers. No, every large city should have its Catholic paper, and support it, cost what it may. We thank God that such papers have, during the past year, been established in many parts. That such a journal should be established in the capital of the new German Empire, at the seat of government, was an evident necessity; and it is one of the most pleasant events in the history of our time that a paper like the Germania should have in a short time taken its position as a first-class and widely circulated Catholic journal.

All our already existing Catholic journals, and all those to be hereafter established, instead of hindering, will help one another, and that from the very fact that they exist; for, the stronger the Catholic press becomes, the more the attention of the nation is called to it, the more secure must become the existence of each individual journal. Therefore, we hope that there will be no jealousy between those interested in different Catholic journals; that, on the contrary, they will help support one another at all times. Still more important is it to take a proper view of the smaller local press. It would be a great absurdity were Catholics to neglect the establishment of smaller Catholic journals lest they should interfere or compete with the larger ones. This competition is not dangerous; but it is dangerous to put no antagonist in the field to meet and to oppose the unchristian press in smaller places. The large journals can neither be paid for nor read by the vast majority of the inhabitants of such places—and does it not seem wrong to leave them, or the Catholics among them, to the evil influence of a press totally antagonistic to the faith? The establishment and support of such papers is not hard, and the financial difficulties which stand in the way of the larger papers for the larger cities are not to be here encountered. Wherever the matter of the establishment of such papers has been rightly taken in hand, it has proved successful. If the clergy only take the matter under advisement, they will find those willing and able to carry the matter through. It is not a very hard matter to purchase a press and find subscribers in such places. A feature which will contribute not a little to aid in the matter is the finding of the proper person to carry the papers around and to canvass for subscribers and advertisements. By being thus practical, Catholic men have established Catholic papers in localities where one might have despaired of ever establishing them; and not only have they been established, but they have succeeded. No matter what the condition of our press, it is far from being in a state to despair of. Oh! if the children of light were only as wise as the children of the world, we should witness wonders. It is true that evil makes its way in this world better than goodness does; but it is also true that goodness does not prosper, because those who represent it take the matter too lightly, or do not go about it as they should. More is often done for the worst cause than men are willing to do or to sacrifice for the best. A great deal has of late years been done for the local press, and we sincerely hope that a great deal more will be done and more universally, and need requires us not only to pray, but to act and make sacrifices.

Other proposals were made at the general meeting to carry out projects, which of course the general meeting itself could neither undertake nor perfect, as, for instance, the furtherance of this or that literary undertaking; yet these proposals are not without their use. They suggest something or call attention to something already existing. Thus, at the present general meeting the establishment of a journal as the organ for the various associations of young Catholics was recommended. The proposer of the resolution was informed that there already existed a journal of that character, and a very good one; that it was published by the associations of young Catholics in Austria, and edited in a very able manner, under the name of the Bund in Vienna; and the general meeting, therefore, recommended it for the purpose named. Many other things relating to the press were touched upon. We feel assured that the general meeting has done much for the Catholic press of the whole country.

We pass over many things bearing on Catholic charity, which ever engages anew the attention of the general meeting. We can only mention that the members of St. Vincent’s Association held a special meeting.

May the blessing of God, which has never failed the Catholic Congress, bless their efforts of this year!

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Fleurange’s education did not allow her to yield to her feelings without bringing herself to an account for them, and it was surprising she had thus unresistingly allowed herself to be swayed so long by a vague and unreasonable preoccupation. And could there be one more so than this about an unknown person—a stranger she had only had a glimpse of, with whom she had not exchanged a single word, and whom she would probably never behold again? This was the third time she had heard him spoken of since the day she saw him in her father’s studio, and each time she felt agitated and disturbed. When questioned by Dr. Leblanc, her first emotion was overpowered by surprise, and especially by the sad remembrances awakened. Afterwards, when Julian Steinberg mentioned Count George at the Christmas dinner, his name gave her a thrill, but she attributed this keen sensation to a natural interest in the hitherto unknown individual who purchased the picture which had played so important a rôle in her life. But this time the quickened pulsations of her heart and the ardent curiosity with which she listened to every word that was uttered were succeeded by a prolonged reverie which almost merited the name of madness. “Yes, Julian was right! That is really what he looks like!” she exclaimed aloud. And every hero with whom history, poetry, or old legends had peopled her imagination, passed one by one before her, but always under the same form. Then, as there is no hero without heroic feats, and no heroism without combats and perils, a series of terrible events succeeded each other in her waking dream—battles, shipwrecks, desperate enterprises, and dangers of all kinds, in which the same person was the chief actor, and in all these phantasmagoric adventures she saw herself enacting an inexplicable and indistinct part.

A whole hour passed thus, but the declining day recalled a habit contracted in childhood which changed the current of her thoughts and brought her to herself. It was sunset—in Italy, the hour of the Ave Maria. Fleurange never forgot it. Every evening at that hour, a short prayer rose from her heart to her lips.

Every one is aware of the power of association. We have all felt the influence of a tone, a flower, a perfume, and even things more trifling, in recalling a host of remembrances of which no one else could see the connection. What a natural and touching thought, then, to associate a holy memory with the hour that links day with night!—the hour of twilight, when the dazzling sunlight is fading away, work is suspended, and propitious leisure brings on long, sweet, and sometimes dangerous reveries! In such a case, it is not surprising the evening star becomes a safeguard. Has not the effect it had on Fleurange been experienced a thousand times by others?

A sudden clearness of perception, strength to prevail over all earthly phantoms, an aspiration towards heaven, an instantaneous revival of early impressions, an influx of salutary thoughts dispelling the confused, illusory ideas floating in her mind—such was the effect now produced by the remembrance indissolubly associated with that evening hour. She resolutely got up. Her attitude, that had been languishing, her look lost in space, were now transformed. She awoke to a sense of duty, and the feeling was not a transient one. What was this madness that had overpowered her? Putting this question to herself brought a blush of confusion to her face, and made her resolve to resist and overcome reveries so vain and absurd. And to this end she would cut them short. She reopened her note-book, and began by tearing out the page on which was the name but just written; then, with no further examination of her thoughts, even for the purpose of self-reproach, which would have been another way of prolonging them, she seated herself at her table, and took up a volume of Dante which lay there. She had promised Clement to mark some passages of the canto they read together the evening before, and to add some notes from her own memory. She at once set herself to work, and endeavored to give her whole mind to the occupation. It is often easier, we all know, to abstain from an act than to repress a thought. Perhaps the volition is at fault in the latter case; but Fleurange was so firmly resolved to obtain a victory of this kind that, at the end of half an hour’s effort to keep her mind on her work, she thought herself successful. She would have been more sure of herself had she foreseen all that was so soon to come to her aid, and banish from her mind for a long time all vain illusions, vague reveries, and especially all exclusive self-preoccupation.

It was quite dark when she rose from the table. She heard the clock strike, and felt ashamed of remaining so long in her room by herself, at a time she should have been unusually attentive to others. This was the last evening Clara would spend at home previous to her marriage, and it ended a period of unalloyed happiness in the Old Mansion. One place in the family was about to be vacated, a beloved form disappear, a cherished one cease to make part of their daily life. They would probably see each other again, but it would not be as before. The happiness of her who was to leave them would change its nature, but even her mother hoped she would be so happy as never to regret the paternal roof. Clara’s smiling face was grave and tearful to-day, as her tender glances wandered from her parents to her brothers and sisters, and lingered lovingly on the old walls she was about to leave. Julian was terrified by her melancholy appearance, but felt reassured when Clara, smiling and weeping at the same time, said to him naïvely:

“Julian, it is you that I love! To-morrow I shall leave them all for you, and I truly feel I never could give you up for them. Is not this enough?”

“No. If I do not see you calm and full of trust, I shall not enjoy my happiness.”

“My trust in you is boundless.”

“And yet you tremble, and your eyes are turned away.”

“Because the unknown happiness of a new life makes me anxious, and terrifies me in spite of myself.—I tremble, I acknowledge, but I do not hesitate. I am afraid, but I wish to be yours, and no fear would induce me to resume the past or repulse the future—for the future is you!”

It may surprise some to learn that this young girl, in speaking to her betrothed of their approaching union, expressed unawares the sentiments death inspires in those souls whose love extends beyond the grave, and who, triumphing over their weakness and limited knowledge, ardently long, in spite of their fears, for the eternal union that awaits them.

One of these beings, holy and gifted, being asked, as her life was ebbing away, what impression the prospect of death made on her, hesitated, and then replied:

“The impression that the thought of marriage produces on a young girl who loves, and yet trembles—who fears union, but desires it.”

Fleurange, when she left her chamber, went down to the gallery, where she expected to find her cousins, but it was empty. The preparations for the morrow caused an unusual disorder throughout the house, generally so quiet and well-ordered. Clara was doubtless with her mother, but where was Hilda? The latter, she knew, would have another sad farewell to utter the following day, and she reproached herself for having so long lost sight of this fact. She passed through the gallery and opened the door of the library, where she found her whom she was seeking. Ludwig Dornthal and Hansfelt were talking together, and near them Hilda, mute, pale, and motionless, was listening, without taking any part in the conversation that was going on before her.

Hansfelt was talking to this friend of his departure, and spoke as one who was never to return. He was apparently thinking of nothing but their long friendship, their youth passed together, and the end of their companionship, but his accents were profoundly melancholy, and all the harmony of his soul seemed disturbed.

Ludwig, however, was extremely agitated, and, while replying to his friend, looked attentively and anxiously, from time to time, at his daughter. Fleurange softly approached her; Hilda’s cold hand returned her pressure. “I am glad you have come,” she said in a low tone, “very glad.” Fleurange did not venture to make any reply, and scarcely looked at her, for fear of increasing her emotion by appearing to observe it. Seeing an open jewel-case lying on the table, she exclaimed—glad to find something to say: “What a beautiful bracelet!”

“It is a wedding present Hansfelt has just brought Clara,” said the professor.

“Yes, a wedding present, and a parting gift which Ludwig has allowed me to offer one of his daughters,” said Hansfelt. “As for the other,” continued he in a troubled tone, “the time for her wedding presents will doubtless soon come also, but the time for a parting gift has already arrived. Ludwig, in memory of the pleasant years during which I have seen her grow up, and as a souvenir of this last day, will you allow me to give Hilda this ring?”

The professor made no reply.

Hansfelt continued: “In truth, a departure like mine is so much like death, that it gives me a similar liberty to say anything. Hilda, why should I not acknowledge it to you now in his presence? It will do no harm. Well, you shall know, then, that the old poet, whose forehead is more wrinkled than your father’s, would perhaps be foolish enough to forget his age were he to remain near you. It is therefore well for him to go.”

He took the young girl’s icy hand in his. “If he were younger,” he continued, forcing himself to smile, “he might perhaps obtain the right to give you a different ring than this.”—He stopped alarmed. Hilda’s face had become frightfully pale, and she leaned her head against Fleurange’s shoulder. She seemed ready to faint.

“Hilda, good heavens!”

“Zounds, Karl,” cried the professor, rising abruptly. “You try my patience at last. Where are your wits?”

“Ludwig!”

“Yes, where, if you cannot see that you are yet young enough to force me to give you my daughter, if I would not behold her die with grief?”

“Ludwig!” repeated Hansfelt, quite beside himself.

“Of course I am displeased with her for her folly, and I am angry with you too, but I suppose I must forgive you both because—because she loves you.”

“Beware, beware! Ludwig,” said Hansfelt, growing pale. “There are hopes that prove fatal when blasted!”

“Come, now, you must not die yet, nor she either!” Then he tenderly folded his daughter in his arms, and, as she opened her eyes and looked around in confusion, he said in a low tone:

“Hilda, my child, I give my consent. May you be as happy as you desire. You have your father’s blessing.—Come, now,” said he to Fleurange, “let us go to your aunt, and leave them to make their own disclosures.”

Madame Dornthal was affected but not surprised at hearing what had just taken place. She had never been deceived as to her daughter’s sentiments, and for a long time had endeavored to open her husband’s eyes. But he was incredulous, and persisted in declaring it was impossible for his friend, his contemporary, his “old Karl,” even to win the heart of a girl of twenty. “It is a mere fancy, which will pass away as soon as she meets a man of her own age who is worthy of her,” he obstinately repeated.

“Perhaps so, but that is the difficulty,” replied the sagacious, clear-sighted mother. “Between you and Hansfelt, Hilda has become accustomed to live in a rarer atmosphere than generally surrounds youth. Whether this is fortunate or unfortunate, I know not; but as long as I perceive only pure and noble sentiments in her heart, which I read like an open page, I do not feel I have a right to oppose them. Believe me, we must not think too much of our children’s happiness, and, above all, we must not plan for them to be happy according to our notions. The important thing, after all, is not for them to be as happy as possible, but to fully develop their worth. Let their souls, confided to us, bear all the fruit of which they are capable. Is not this the chief thing, Ludwig?”

The more worthy one is to hear such language, the less easy it is to reply, and this conversation, which took place the evening before, made Ludwig waver at the interview in the library, and drew from him unawares his consent.

“We shall now lose them both,” said the professor sadly.

“I should rather see them happy, as we are, than happy for our benefit,” courageously replied his wife, with a greater effort than she wished to appear.

All misunderstanding being now cleared away, and the consent of every one obtained, it was at once decided that Hansfelt’s departure should be delayed a fortnight, and at the end of that time he should go, but not alone! The last evening the two sisters spent together under the paternal roof became therefore, doubly memorable; but they were all calmer than might have been expected. The professor, in spite of the suggestions of his reason, in spite of the evident wisdom of his opinion and opposition, could not look at his daughter without feeling that the profound and tranquil joy which beamed from her eyes was permanent and satisfying, and the reflection of that joy on Hansfelt’s inspired brow and softened look involuntarily showed the secret of her affection for him.

“Well, my venerable Karl, it must be acknowledged you look quite youthful to-night!”

“How could it be otherwise? I was withering away, and now my freshness has returned; my life seemed hopeless, and now it is lit up. This resurrection, this new existence, is like the restoration of youth, and, more than that, it elevates and ennobles. If noblesse oblige, so does happiness, and what would I not do now to merit mine?”

The following day, the bright sun cast a brilliancy around the form of the young bride, which was declared a lucky omen, in addition to many others carefully noted by the superstitious affection of those who surrounded her.

The Mansion, as we have said, was very near the church, and the wedding procession was made on foot, to the great satisfaction of those who composed it, as well as of the curious spectators. Clara, crowned with myrtle and clad in white, was as lovely a bride as one could wish to see, but there was no less admiration for the two young girls who, followed by several others, two by two, walked immediately behind. It will be guessed they were Hilda, whose beauty was now radiant, and Fleurange, whose black hair and general appearance distinguished her from the rest. The latter, as she passed along, might have noticed more than one look, and heard more than one word, calculated to satisfy her vanity, but she was wholly occupied in observing all the details of the wedding array which surrounded her for the first time in her life. They found a great crowd in church, and as the cortége slowly approached the altar, Fleurange, casting her eyes around, suddenly met a friendly look, accompanied by a respectful salutation. She bowed slightly in return, but without recognizing the person who saluted her, though his face was familiar. Nor did she know the fresh young woman leaning on his arm. A few steps further on, and she recalled her travelling companion, and Wilhelm, her husband, who was her uncle’s clerk. It was he, she felt sure, and she eagerly turned to look at him. She even stopped. At that moment she heard Felix Dornthal’s name mentioned, followed by these words: “They say that is his intended who has just passed by.” Fleurange felt they were speaking of her, and she blushed with displeasure. Then she heard Wilhelm’s reply: “Would it might be so! She might, perhaps, yet save him from—” The rest escaped her as she was borne along by the throng. She did not see Wilhelm or his wife again, and for the present thought no more of this incident.

The ceremony, the return, and the wedding dinner, all passed off with joyful simplicity. At the end of the repast, Clara took off her myrtle wreath, and divided it among her young companions, wishing that they too, in their turn, might find good husbands, and a happiness equal to her own.

It was Hilda who was first honored in this distribution. This signified she would be married before the rest. She took the myrtle from her sister’s hand without any embarrassment, as if she were not ashamed to let others see she joyfully accepted the offering, and regarded it as more than a mere omen.

After Hilda, came Fleurange, and then all the others down to little Frida, who had joined them with several other companions of her age.

“In your turn, Gabrielle!” said Hilda, as Fleurange fastened the sprig of myrtle in her belt. “Your turn will soon come also to wear this crown.”

Fleurange shook her head, and replied with a seriousness she herself could not have accounted for: “That day will never come for me—no, never!”

“Why do you say so?” said Hilda, astonished.

“I do not know.” And then she laughed.

An hour after, she perceived the myrtle had fallen from her belt. She searched for it, having been charged by her cousin to wear it the remainder of the day, but she could not find it.

At nightfall the newly married couple left the Old Mansion, escorted over the threshold and down the steps by all the family, who, with kind wishes and congratulations, there bade them adieu with more affection than sadness, for they were not to be widely separated, or for any great length of time.

Clara’s father and mother accompanied her to her new home. It was a modest, pleasant house in one of the faubourgs of the city, which Julian, with loving interest, had been preparing more than a year for her who was now to take possession of it. Her parents took leave of her at the threshold. Madame Dornthal embraced her daughter, and, while clasping her in her arms, said: “Remember you are now beginning a new life. Continue to give us our share of your affection; but let nothing henceforth prevail over the love which is now your duty.”

“I shall merit a severe penalty,” said Julian, “if this duty ever becomes a burden—if she ever regrets the day she joined her lot to mine.”

The father and mother stood looking at them a moment as they paused at the entrance of the house. They observed the moved and respectful look of the bridegroom. They saw, too, the confiding glance of the bride amid her tears, and they left them without fear under the protection of God!

On their way homeward, the poor father, breaking the long silence, said: “Years hence, when she in her turn is separated from a child, she will understand all we have suffered to-day!”

“Yes, my Ludwig,” said Madame Dornthal, wiping away her tears; “and Heaven grant she may then have, like us, a stronger feeling in her heart than that of grief, which will enable her to bear it!”

They pressed each other’s hands. Never, even in the brightest days of their youth, had this old couple felt so tenderly, so closely united!

They found the Old Mansion brilliantly lighted up. The gallery and library, illuminated and ornamented with flowers and wreaths, were filled not only by the customary friends and relatives, but the two brothers’ whole circle of acquaintance in the city.

It was the custom at that time to end the wedding day with a soirée, but a delicate sentiment forbade the newly-married pair taking a part in the festivities, their happiness being considered too profound, too concentrated, to enjoy the noisy gaiety. But here, the unrestrained gaiety was natural, infectious, and wholly exempt from an ingredient too often found in the corrupting influences of society—a sad and fatal ingredient, which inspires ill-toned pleasantries whose effect is to excite smiles and blushes, and a gaiety as different from the other as the laughter of fiends from the smiles of angels! The gaiety here did not profane by a word, a glance, or even a smile, the end of the day which had witnessed a Christian espousal.

Felix Dornthal himself seemed less disposed to jest than usual. He was even grave, absent-minded, and gloomy to such a degree as to excite attention in the morning at church, where he arrived late, and at the wedding dinner, where, appointed to propose the health of the newly married pair, he acquitted himself of the duty with ease, but only to resume afterwards a complete silence. Family festivals were doubtless little to his taste, and perhaps it was ennui that produced so gloomy an aspect. Such, at least, was the supposition of his cousins, who, after declaring him disagreeable, left him to himself. He disappeared at the end of the repast, and now in these crowded rooms he alone was wanting. His absence, noticed by several persons, greatly excited his father’s impatience, who, to-day more than ever, ardently desired to witness before he died the marriage of his son. Illness had brought on the irritability of old age, and Heinrich Dornthal could no longer bear contradiction.

“Where can he be?” repeated he for the tenth time to his neighbor, who, with his look fastened on the door, seemed to share the uneasy expectation of the banker. At that instant Fleurange passed by. She stopped as she saw Wilhelm Müller again, at her uncle’s side. This time she recognized him at once, and, with the natural grace that gave a charm to her every movement, she approached and renewed her acquaintance with him. She learned in a few words that he had been absent, that his wife was restored to health, and had not forgotten her. Fleurange, in return, sent her many affectionate messages. Then she passed on, while her uncle, gazing at her, felt an increased regret, which she was as far from imagining as sympathizing with.

The piano was open. Several pieces had already been played with great success, and now all the younger members of the party were seized with the unanimous desire of dancing, which is so contagious, and in youth often a kind of necessary manifestation of joyousness. The Germans are all musicians, and Clement excelled. He at once divined the general feeling, and seized his violin. Hilda seated herself at the piano. Hansfelt took his place at her side, and the gaiety she fully participated in did not inspire her, like the rest, to leave her place. She was, therefore, in the best mood possible to acquit herself of the rôle which Clement with a glance assigned her in this improvised orchestra. The brother and sister struck up a waltz, and played with that skill, perfect time, and particular animation which, like the waltz itself, is peculiar to the German nation. In an instant there was universal animation.

Fleurange had occasionally danced with her cousins in the winter evenings, but she had never experienced, as on this occasion, the inspiriting effect of so much liveliness and so general an impulse. She involuntarily rose up with a desire to take a part in it, and at that very moment she heard these words addressed her: “Will you favor me with this waltz?”—an invitation so in accordance with the wish of the moment that she replied in the affirmative, and left the place before realizing it was her cousin Felix who was her partner. They danced around twice. Poor Heinrich Dornthal saw them sweep by, and uttered a joyful exclamation—the last that a feeling of hope or of paternal joy would ever draw from him again in this world!

Felix conducted Fleurange back to her seat. She was breathless, pale, and annoyed. While waltzing, he had uttered words she wished had never been said. Scarcely seated, her first impulse was to leave the spot where he stood, and even the room, but she could not. Felix’s hand, placed on hers, forced her to sit down again. Then Fleurange rose above her embarrassment. She comprehended that the time had come to be firm, calm, and decided—not a difficult thing when the heart and the will are perfectly in accord. That was the case in this instance, and Fleurange almost coolly awaited what her cousin had to say.

“I only beseech you for one word, Gabrielle,” said Felix, with more emotion and respect than usual—“one word, and, if you understood me, an answer.”

“I heard you,” said Fleurange.

“And understood?”

“Yes; and with regret, Felix.”

“Tell me plainly, Gabrielle, do you understand that I love you?”

Fleurange blushed and made no reply.

“That I love you to such a degree, my happiness, my future prospects, and my life are in your hands?” continued he vehemently. “And this is true, literally true.”

Fleurange frowned. “Do you wish to frighten me?” she said coldly, turning her large eyes toward him.

“No; I have told you the truth without thinking I could frighten you; but, since you ask the question, here is my sincere reply: Only promise to accept my hand, promise it through fear or love, terror or joy, I will be satisfied, and ask for no more.”

“Then,” said Fleurange slowly, “it is all the same to you whether I esteem or despise you, love or detest?”

“No woman can for ever detest a man who endeavors to win her love—when that man is her husband, and could be her master, but only wishes to be her slave.”

“There is great fatuity in your humility, Felix; but you are frank, and I wish to be so too. I shall never—mark my words—never be your wife!”

Felix turned pale, and his face assumed a frightful expression. “Take more time, Gabrielle,” said he—“take more time to think of it. But, first, listen to me. I am going to say something that may touch you more than a threat or a declaration—” He stopped an instant and then continued: “If you saw a man on the edge of a precipice, would you stretch forth a hand to save him?”

“What do you mean?” said Fleurange, affected in spite of herself, and suddenly recalling the words she heard that morning in the church.

“I ask if you would put out your hand to aid a man in such peril?” He had, in truth, found the means of making her hesitate, but it was only for a moment.

“You are speaking figuratively, I suppose,” said she at length; “and it is a question of a soul in peril, is it not?”

“A soul in peril? Yes,” replied Felix, with a bitter smile.

“Well, I tell you, in a danger of this kind, I would offer no assistance that would inevitably lead to my own destruction.”

Felix rose: “And is this your final decision?”

“Yes, Felix, a decision unhesitatingly made, but not without sorrow, if it afflicts you.”

His only reply was a loud laugh which made Fleurange shudder. She turned towards him, but there was no longer in his look the respect, or the sadness, or the emotion he had so recently shown. His face had resumed its habitual expression of irony and proud assurance.

“I thank you for your frankness, cousin. That is a trait I trust you will retain. It somewhat detracts from the charm you are endowed with, but it will preserve you from some of the dangers to which your eloquent glances expose you. Adieu!”

“Felix, give me your hand as a token you bear me no ill-will,” said Fleurange softly.

“Ill-will?” replied Felix. “Oh! be assured I am too good a player not to bear bad luck cheerfully. Besides, one is not always, and in everything, unfortunate. Certain defeats, they say, are pledges of victory. Come, Gabrielle, forget it all. Give me your hand, and wish me good luck.”

Before Fleurange could make any reply, he was gone. This conversation had been so rapid that the waltz was not yet ended. The noise, motion, and music, added to Fleurange’s agitation, made her dizzy. She went to an open window near the piano. At that moment the music ceased, and all resumed their places. Fleurange found herself nearly alone. Clement was still near, and, observing her, quickly laid down the violin he held in his hand.

“You are very pale. Are you ill?”

“No, no, let me go out. I only wish to take the air a moment.”

Clement cast a rapid glance around the room, and then followed her into the garden:

“You were dancing just now?”

“Yes, and I did wrong.”

“Your partner left you before the waltz was over?”

“Yes.”

Clement remained thoughtful a few moments, and then said: “Gabrielle, pardon me if I am indiscreet, but I wish I dared ask you one question.”

“What a preamble! Did we not agree to speak freely to each other?”

“Well, will you tell me why Felix went away?”

“Yes, Clement, and I think you will be surprised. He asked me to marry him. What do you think of that?”

“And you gave him his answer?”

“Assuredly. I said no, without hesitating.”

Clement started so abruptly that Fleurange looked at him with surprise. She saw an expression of joy on his countenance which he could not conceal.

“I see you are no fonder than I of our cousin,” she said, “and are delighted with his ill-success.”

“Delighted? No. Were he my worst enemy, I should pity him at such a moment; but I am very glad of—glad of—” Clement hesitated, contrary to his usual practice, which was to go straight to the point. “I am very glad of a decision,” said he at length, “which will dispense me from ever speaking of him again to you.”

“What would you have done if I had accepted him?”

“What I am glad not to be obliged to do.”

“Now you are talking enigmatically in your turn.”

“No; enigmas are intended to be guessed, and I beg you to forget what I have just said.”

It is uncertain what answer Fleurange was about to make Clement, who was less candid than usual, and therefore provoking, but at that instant she noticed a sprig of myrtle in the button-hole of his coat.

“What! you with myrtle?” she said. “I thought it was only worn by young maidens on such a day.”

Clement blushed, and snatched the myrtle from his coat: “It is yours, Gabrielle. Pardon me. I saw it fall from your girdle, and picked it up.”

“Mine? Indeed!”

“Yes; here, take it, unless,” said he, hesitating a little—“unless you will consent to give it back to me.”

“Very willingly, Clement; keep it as a gift from me. It is a good omen, they say, predicting a fair bride when your turn comes.”

Clement replaced the myrtle in his coat, and gravely said: “That day will never come for me; no, never!”

“Never; no, never! Oh! how strange!” cried Fleurange, in a tone that surprised Clement.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

What struck her as strange was that Clement, à propos of this piece of myrtle, had, without being aware of it, uttered precisely the same words she herself had said some hours before.

On the whole, this soirée she found so pleasant at its commencement, ended in a painful manner. She returned to her chamber less cheerful than she left it, but with the satisfaction of feeling she had had no difficulty throughout the day in banishing from her mind the fantastic image she had formed the evening before of Count George.

More than a fortnight had elapsed. Hilda was married and gone from the paternal roof. Clara and her husband were on their way to Italy, where they intended to remain till spring. Those who remained in the Old Mansion were suffering from the reaction that always follows the confusion and agitation of any event however pleasant—a reaction always depressing even when there is no real sadness in the heart. But this was not exactly the case with Fleurange. Her cousins were both married and happy. She loved them too sincerely not to rejoice at this, but it was not the less true that the house seemed to have grown more spacious, the table around which they gathered enlarged, the library immense, and the garden deserted. The least to be pitied was Fritz, who still had his brother, and was not so much affected by the change; but little Frida mourned for her sisters, and clung more than ever to Fleurange, whose talent for amusing and diverting children was again brought into exercise. Fleurange, on her part, greatly appreciated this distraction as a benefit. The child seldom left her cousin’s room, and they became almost inseparable. One day, while there as usual, Fleurange singing a long ballad in a low tone, and Frida listening with her head against her cousin’s shoulder, a knock at the door made them both start. And yet it was but a slight rap, that gave no cause for the alarm with which she put the child down and hastily ran to the door. She found her kind of presentiment justified.

It was Wilhelm Müller, Heinrich Dornthal’s clerk, who knocked. It was quite evident from the expression of his countenance and his agitated manner, as well as his unexpected appearance at such an hour, that something unusually sad had occurred.

“Excuse me, mademoiselle,” he said hurriedly. “I was not looking for you; but M. Clement has gone out, and the professor also, they tell me. Do you know where they are to be found?”

“I do not know where Clement is, but my uncle and aunt are gone to M. Steinberg’s. They have charge of the garden during his absence.”

“Steinberg’s! It would take more than an hour to go there. What is to be done! What is to be done!”

“What has happened, Monsieur Wilhelm? For pity’s sake, tell me what misfortune has occurred.”

“Misfortune!” he replied, after a moment’s hesitation. “Ah! yes, mademoiselle, a great misfortune has befallen us—but I cannot stop an instant. Pray send for M. Ludwig with all possible speed, and tell him his brother—his brother is dying!”

“Dying!” cried Fleurange. “Uncle Heinrich! Oh! take me to see him while they are gone for his brother.”

“No, no, mademoiselle, you must not go. I cannot consent to it.”

Fleurange insisted, and had already left her room when she met Clement, who had just returned, and heard his uncle’s clerk was in search of him.

“Uncle Heinrich is dying!” exclaimed Fleurange, before he could ask a question. “Let us go to him instantly, Clement, while they are gone for your parents.” And she drew him toward the stairs. Meanwhile, Wilhelm approached and whispered a few words in Clement’s ear. The latter turned pale, but, instantly surmounting his violent emotion, he took Fleurange by the hand.

“Remain here,” he said. “You must not go. Believe me, you must not. When it is suitable, I will come for you.” And he led her back kindly, but firmly, into her chamber, and then went out, closing the door behind him. In less than two minutes the street door was heard to shut in its turn. Fleurange was left alone, or, at least, with only little Frida, who, frightened, was crying. She tried to soothe her, endeavoring at the same time to be calm herself, and patiently bear the torture of waiting anxiously, without the power of action.

It was about five o’clock when Wilhelm came to her door, and of course still light, as it was summer. But day declined, and night came on, finding Fleurange still waiting. Frida, after crying a long time, had gone to sleep in her arms. Fleurange, in spite of her usual activity, wished to remain where she was, that Clement might find her at once when he returned. She heard him order the carriage as he went out, and knew he had sent for his father and mother. She looked at the clock, and counted the hours. Not a third of the time was required to go to the faubourg, and yet they had not returned. They had evidently gone directly to the dying man’s house. And what was now taking place there? Why had Clement dissuaded her from going? She joined her hands in silent prayer: then began to listen again with a feverish and ever-increasing anxiety.

At last she heard the rumbling of a carriage. She softly placed the sleeping child on the bed, and was about to go down-stairs to meet her uncle and aunt, whom she supposed to have arrived. But before she had time, she heard Clement ascending the stairs in great haste. An instant more and he opened the door. Before she could ask the question on her lips, he said:

“Gabrielle, poor Uncle Heinrich is no more!” Then he added after a moment’s silence: “A dreadful shock caused his instantaneous death.”

“Ah! my heart told me I should hear sad news.”

“Yes, sad indeed,” said Clement. And in spite of himself he seemed for a moment suffocated by an emotion too violent to be surmounted.

Fleurange looked at him. There was something besides the shock and grief caused by this sudden death. “Clement, what else has happened? Tell me everything. Tell me at once, I implore you!”

“Yes, Gabrielle,” he said, making an effort to command his voice, usually so firm and mild. “Yes, I am going to tell you everything. I came on purpose to spare my poor father and mother this additional pain. Listen, or, rather, read this yourself!”

Fleurange with a trembling hand took the letter he offered her, and read as follows:

Fleurange silently clasped her hands. Pity mingled with the repugnance, now so well justified, with which Felix had always inspired her, and she could not utter a word. Clement continued:

“This letter, imprudently given to my unhappy uncle this morning, immediately brought on one of the attacks to which he was liable, and which (perhaps happily for him) has proved fatal. He had not time to realize the blow that had befallen him.”

Fleurange herself hardly comprehended its extent. “But where is Felix, then?” she said at length.

“He has been gone a fortnight.”

“A fortnight!” she exclaimed, with a painful remembrance of their last interview.

“He left the day after the soirée at the time of Clara’s marriage.”

“That evening,” she said with emotion, “he spoke of an abyss into which my hand would prevent him from falling. O God!” she continued with the greatest agitation, “could I really have saved him by consenting? Would the sacrifice of my life have prevented this terrible disaster?”

“No; the great stake he made that night was his sole resource against ruin. Why did he talk to you in such a manner? Was it through madness or perversity? It must have been madness, the unfortunate fellow loved you without doubt. I pity him, but—” Clement hesitated and then rapidly continued: “Listen to me, Gabrielle. I am going to tell you something it might be better to keep to myself, but I must justify myself and reassure you, and it cannot injure him now. I regarded Felix with contempt because,” and for a moment there was a flash in Clement’s eye—“because he wished to make me as despicable as himself, and once played the vile rôle of a tempter to me who was then but a boy—because he would, if he could, have drawn me after him into the path which to-day has ended so fatally. Therefore, cousin,” he continued with still more emotion, “had he succeeded in winning your hand, I should have felt it my duty to have warned you of his unworthiness, of which I was too well aware, for I have never forgotten you called me your brother. But I was reluctant to denounce him, and glad, oh! so glad, that evening, not to be obliged to do so—glad you were saved by your own self! And if I tell you all this now, it is to put an end to the fears you have just expressed.”

“And I am grateful to you for banishing them. But, Clement, tell me once more—here, in the presence of God, have I nothing to reproach myself with?”

“Nothing, on my honor, Gabrielle, believe me!”

Clement, as we have remarked, possessed great firmness of character, and a kind of premature wisdom which gave him great ascendency over others. When this trait is natural, it is manifest at an early age, and a day often suffices for its complete development. That day had arrived for Clement, and henceforth no one would ever dream of calling him a boy.

Ruin!—a word at once positive and yet extremely vague—very plain in itself, and yet conveying the idea of a multitude of undefined consequences, often more alarming than actual misfortune, and sometimes suggesting chimerical hopes. And it has a deeper signification when it happens to a person unaccustomed to the calculations of material life, given up to thought and study, and moreover delivered from the necessity of exertion through long years of prosperous ease.

Such was the nature, and hitherto such the position, of Professor Ludwig Dornthal. Of all the misfortunes in the world, that which had now befallen him was the last he would have dreamed of, and he was less capable of comprehending it than of supporting it courageously. Besides, the word ruin may also be taken in a relative sense which mitigates its severity, and this was the way the professor regarded it. With only a faint idea of the extent of the catastrophe, he remained inactively expectant of something to partially remedy what merely related to his finances, being more preoccupied about his nephew’s shameful flight and its fatal consequence—the death of his brother.

Meanwhile, Clement, with the aid of Wilhelm Müller, examined the state of affairs with a promptitude and sagacity that greatly edified the honest and intelligent clerk who initiated him into this new business. Seeing him so quick of comprehension, so firm in decision and prompt in action, he exclaimed with despair in the midst of their frightful discoveries:

“Alas! alas! if your unfortunate cousin had only had your head on his shoulders!”

“My head! It is not equal to his,” responded Clement to one of his companions. “No, no, it is not that, but something else, he lacks. Why have not I, on the contrary, his capacity and wit! Then I might be capable of retrieving our fortunes, whereas my only talent is that of knowing how to endure poverty. Oh! if it threatened me alone, how little I should dread it!”

“Poverty!” interrupted Wilhelm. “But do you not understand all I have explained to you?”

“With respect to my uncle’s creditors?”

“Yes. Do you not see that the principal creditor, the first of all on the list, is M. Ludwig Dornthal, whose whole fortune nearly can be saved from shipwreck?”

“Yes, on condition of the ruin of the remainder.”

“But their claims are not equal to his: he was not his brother’s partner. He had only entrusted his property to him, like so many others.”

Clement made no reply. After a short silence he observed: “The entire renunciation of my father’s property would enable us to repay all the creditors without exception, would it not?”

“Yes, all.”

“Would there not be a single debt in this case?”

“No,” replied Wilhelm, smiling; “not a debt—not a penny.”

Clement again took up one of the papers on the table, and silently read it over once more with the most profound attention.

“Yes, it is really so,” said he rising. “Everything is plain now. I must leave you, Wilhelm. It is after four o’clock, and I am expected at home. I shall see you again this evening, and we will decide on some definite course of action.”

This conversation took place in a lower room of the banker’s house, which had been Wilhelm Müller’s office for many years. He pressed the young man’s hand, and Clement proceeded rapidly towards home.

It was their dinner hour, and his parents were waiting for him. The habits of the family had resumed their ordinary course. The sad routine of life is seldom interrupted more than a day even by the most overwhelming disaster, and this exterior regularity, however painful a contrast to the grief that has changed everything interiorly, helped restore calmness to the soul, and with calmness the courage and strength to act.

Clement was a quarter of an hour late. He went directly to the dining-room, knowing his father’s punctuality. As he supposed, the family were at dinner, and he took his place after some hasty words of apology at his entrance, and then fell into a profound silence.

The fine, spacious room in which they were was one of the pleasantest in the house. Rare old china lined the étagères, and the dark panels were relieved by old portraits, all original and of great value, and the most celebrated part of the professor’s collection. The open windows commanded a view of the garden. Verdure refreshed the eye, and the perfume of the flowers pervaded the room. The glass and silver reflected the rays of the sun, though there was a large awning before one of the windows. An air of quiet, opulent comfort everywhere reigned.

Clement look around. All these things, to which he was daily accustomed, now made a new impression on him. He noticed to-day the objects he often forgot to observe, but this examination did not have the effect of weaning him from his sad thoughts. On the contrary, it only increased them, and Clement was deeply plunged in gloomy reverie when he was aroused by his little sister’s voice:

“Papa,” said Frida, “we shall start for the sea-shore in a week, shall we not?”

“Yes, my child,” replied the professor.

“And then we shall go to see Hilda?”

“Yes, she expects us in a month.”

“And after that?”

“We shall return home. It will be time, I think, after two months‘’ absence.”

In fact, that was the longest time the professor had ever been absent from his cherished home.

These few words produced an expression of suffering on Clement’s face which he could not conceal. His mother observed it and questioned him with a look. But Clement turned his eyes away, and did not raise them again till the end of the silent meal, though he keenly felt another look besides his mother’s fastened on him.

“Clement, I have something to say to you,” said his mother as soon as dinner was over. He rose instantly, and followed her into the garden, but before leaving the room he said:

“Father, will you allow me a few minutes‘’ conversation with you afterwards? I have several things to tell you.”

“Yes, my dear son, I will wait for you.” And the professor turned towards the library, where he always spent an hour after dinner.

“Come, tell me everything now,” said Madame Dornthal, leading the way to a bench where they could not be seen from the house.

“Yes, mother, dear mother, it is to you I will refer a decision which my honor and my conscience tell me is required. You shall decide whether we ought to evade or submit to it.”

He began his account, and, while she was attentively listening without interrupting him once, laid before her the details, in all their reality, of the situation in which his uncle’s death and his cousin’s flight had left them.

Madame Dornthal, more accustomed to the practical details of life than her husband, had not shared his illusions. She was much better prepared than he for the sad consequences of a reverse of fortune, but had been far from anticipating its extent. They would be much less wealthy than before, have some privations to endure, and for a time be obliged to practise considerable economy; such had been the extent of her fears. But all this did not appear to so excellent a manager a trial beyond her strength. During the past week she had declared, as often as her husband, that the loss of money was the smallest part of the misfortune that had befallen them.

Now she realized that this loss was something real, something almost as appalling as death, for it involved the end of the life she had been accustomed to for twenty years—an end she must face and at once accept. And she was courageous enough not to hesitate. She embraced her son, and said:

“God be blessed for giving me a son like you! Yes, dear Clement, yes, you are right—a thousand times right.”

“Then you agree with me, mother, that the ruin of the Dornthals should not cause the ruin of any one else?”

“Yes, my child.”

“Our name must remain without reproach, and nobody in the world have a right to curse it?”

“Certainly, Clement, whatever be the consequence.”

“Whatever be the consequence!” repeated Clement firmly. “Thanks, dear mother. I must leave you. It is not my place, but yours, to inform my father.”

“Yes, Clement, it is my place.” She put back her son’s thick hair, and gazed silently at him for a moment with profound attention and emotion. Never had Clement’s eyes expressed more clearly than now the firmness, integrity, and energy of his nature.

“No!” thought she, “there is not among those who effect great things in the world, and leave behind them a glorious and illustrious name, a nobler or more courageous heart than yours, my son! God be praised! Your life will be blessed, even though your worth and all the faculties you possess remain hidden and for ever unknown but to him alone!”

Such were Madame Dornthal’s thoughts, as she gazed with maternal fondness into her son’s eyes, but she did not give them utterance. She pressed her lips once more to his brow, and placed her hand on his head as if in benediction. Clement in return kissed her hand with grave and tender respect. Then he rose and left the garden at once, and, soon after, the house.

He remained absent several hours. It was nearly nine o’clock when he returned. His mother was waiting in the entry for him, and opened the door when he rang. He was very pale, and held a pile of papers in his hand.

“Well,” said Madame Dornthal, “is everything arranged?”

“Yes, mother, everything! These papers only lack my father’s signature. He is willing to give it, is he not?”

“You cannot doubt it, I think.”

“No, but my poor father was so far from supposing—”

“Yes, that was it, I did not fear any hesitation on his part, but only the complete illusion he was under. I only dreaded the effect of surprise and the shock. O Clement! I know not what terror came over me from the frightful remembrance of the other day! My poor Ludwig!”

Madame Dornthal stopped a moment to brush away her tears, then smiled as she continued:

“But be easy, he knows everything now. He comprehends the state of affairs, and feels as we do. It is better, however, that I alone should see him this evening. Give me those papers. And you, my boy, see after your brother and sister. I have not had time to think of them. Ah! and Gabrielle, poor child, perhaps it would be well to look for her also and tell her all. We have nothing to conceal from any one, above all from her.”

Without awaiting a reply, Madame Dornthal abruptly left her son to rejoin her husband in the library, where she remained the rest of the evening.

---

---

“Instead of considering the physical condition of a nation determining its moral character, we must always regard the moral as determining, as well as moulding and modifying, the physical.”

“As the divine modifies the moral, so the moral modifies the physical, or external.”

“In education all sight has been lost of the reality which is regeneration, and only when this is brought into the soul, will it be fit to receive the spirit.”

“As the body grows older, the mind grows younger, when the will conceives with the divine will in the permanent ground.”

“Christ is desirous to divorce the soul from Satan, and to do this he begins by making the soul uneasy.”

“There are thousands who have been taught to think from learning have yet to be taught to think from the living basis within the will that sustains the thinker.”

“Know thyself is a false maxim. Be whole—or one—and one with thy Lord.”

“Only does the Jesus spirit in the soul make the soul exhibit the divine essence.”

---

Women are receiving just now, at the hands of a certain class of agitators, a degree of attention which may be flattering to some, but which certainly is not only intrusive, but unnecessary with regard to many. They are told that their rights are trampled upon, that they must assert and defend themselves, and take their place in the great battle of life. Now, these exhortations have generally been met by copious references to all the undoubted precepts of old, which made the domestic life woman’s own sphere, and consecrated her the minister of all man’s comforts. This sphere of home duties is incontestably theirs; and what is more, while they can help man in his avocations, man, on the other hand, can scarcely help them in their own. But in addition to this, their inviolable territory which they intend never to abandon, let them boldly claim a share of man’s kingdom, and let them make good their claim. People have listened to many women and to a few men on the subject of the so-called “Women’s Rights:” let them listen with indulgence to one woman more, who comes claiming far greater things than they dream of, and yet showing that her claims are but long-established and real rights, recognized, defined, limited, and protected by an older code of jurisprudence, and a longer tradition of immemorial custom, than they have as yet been told of by the press or in the lecture-room.

The existence of woman is a fact: it is equally a fact that everything that exists has some work to do in the order of the universe. God himself, in a few simple words, stated what her work was: “Let us make him a help like unto himself” (Gen. ii. 18). The words indeed are so simple that they hardly arrest attention, yet in them lies the whole relation of woman to man. She is to be a help; but no restrictive detail is added, so that it is clearly open to her to help man intellectually, religiously, morally, as well as domestically. She is to be like unto him; that is, emphatically not masculine, not a creature that is a mere copy or reproduction of himself, but like unto him, that is, sufficiently like to understand him, sufficiently unlike to love him. Again, no precise relation in which she is to stand to man is defined: she may therefore be a help as a wife, mother, sister, in the domestic circle; she may be a help as a consecrated virgin, as an adviser, as an intercessor, in the religious order; she may be a help as a governor, a regent, a queen, in the political order: lastly, she may be a help as a friend and confidant in the social order.

Now, having seen that God distinctly gave woman a mission, as he has to every animate and inanimate creature, we must suppose that he has also provided her with the means of fulfilling it. We look around us to see how he has done so, and whether, when the means were at hand, woman used them to her own distinction and advantage. In one place and under one set of circumstances alone do we find that it was so, and this not by exception, but by rule. This place is the Catholic Church; these circumstances are her laws and her history. The reason why it remained for our times to form “women’s rights” associations, is simply that women’s wrongs have, under the influence of the Reformation, been so shamefully multiplied. The present movement is a reaction against the Protestant atmosphere of repression which has suffocated woman’s highest aspirations for three hundred years. The tribute unconsciously paid to the Catholic Church by the Anglican communities of monks and sisters is a proof of the wisdom of the old church in regard to its treatment of women. Sensitive, enthusiastic, earnest souls found themselves without the outward means of satisfying their craving after a more perfect life; others with superabundance of energy and devotion, with the gift of tending the sick or instructing the young, found themselves confined to the circle of their own unaided efforts and unorganized activity. They hailed “sisterhoods” as the newly opened gates of heaven, not knowing that sisterhoods were no new invention, but had their source in the very beginnings of the days of which the then unwritten Gospels became the after-history.

In a sermon recently delivered by one of the most popular preachers of New York, and reported in the columns of a widely-read journal, occur the following words, which are a singular corroboration of what we have just said: “There is nothing more dangerous than an educated community with nothing to do. There are thousands of educated women who do not work.... I do not wonder the bold, eagle-like natures fret in their limits and detest life, or that the great hearts dash themselves out in waste. There must be outlet for these immense forces, or society will go on getting worse and worse to the end.” A few days after these words were spoken, the following appeared in a letter referring to the attempt made by a woman to drop her vote in the ballot-box, at the New York City election of the 7th of November, 1871. She gives a lamentable account of woman’s world, as it has grown to be under the shade of Protestantism. “The condition of involuntary servitude is favorable to the cultivation of all the vices of secrecy and deceit. As women, we have been schooled in hypocrisy and duplicity, until our deep souls revolt against the oppression that so compels us to belie our sincere and earnest natures. The most docile wife has that latent fire in her heart which only needs the air of freedom to fan into a flame. Many seemingly contented wives would almost risk the salvation of their souls to make their masters feel for one day the humiliation they have endured uncomplainingly for years. If this is true of the favorites of fortune, what may not be said of the great crowd of women who rush into every folly, or are doomed to severest trial by stringent laws and the oppressive customs growing out of them—laws and customs that disfranchise them, prescribe their pleasures, limit their fields of labor, and curtail their wages, all on the plea of sex? We have, gentlemen, very generally arrived at the knowledge that sex is a crime punishable by law.” The writer of this subscribes herself “Mary Leland,” and is, no doubt, a fair representative of the indignant champions of indiscriminate equality between men and women. If the slumbering volcano she describes is really hidden beneath the frivolous life of ordinary women, what a fearful responsibility lies at the door of the system whose effect it is! This spirit of rebellion can only exist as a reaction against the forced inactivity of woman’s mind and will, and against the torpor induced by the delicate flattery of those who would make her a sultana, or the brutality of those who would fain turn her into a beast of burden. Both alike are forms of slavery; both alike are anti-Christian; both are contradictions against nature, and will inevitably bear their evil fruit. Since their true rights have been denied them by the spirit of the Reformation; since the education of their children is taken out of their hands by the state; since nothing but a savory meal and a pleasant face are expected from them—what wonder that the displaced pendulum of their mind should sway violently aside, and thus come in rude contact with the more arduous sphere of man?

But it is not our purpose to give a lecture on the abstract principles concerned in the question of the rights of women; facts speak more loudly and more convincingly than the most eloquent arguments, the most fascinating pleas: we aim only at giving a few of these facts to our sisters of the present day, and showing them how the church has ever regarded, and has long ago settled, the question now agitating them so painfully.

Our only difficulty is in the mass of evidence from which to make selections, the matter that is to serve us as a witness being simply the history of the church, and its abundance so rich that we hesitate which of the countless examples to draw forth for the admiration of woman-kind, and which to leave in undeserved oblivion. If we take a cursory glance at the infant church on the shores of the Lake of Galilee, we shall find woman already in a conspicuous and honorable position. It is a remarkable fact that no nation of antiquity, save the Jews, had any respect for the female sex, beyond that which included women in the possessions of their husbands and fathers, and consequently could make no difference between an insult to a virgin or a wife and a theft of any other precious chattel. The Jews—that is, the people whom God himself guided and taught, and whose laws were his immediate decrees—hedged in the chastity of women with the most stringent safeguards, and defended it by the severest penalties. They allowed women to inherit from their parents and perpetuate their own name, and to be preferred before the male relations, that is, the brothers or nephews of their father (Numb. xxvii. 8). Not only were the wives and daughters of the Israelites inviolable; their hired servants, whether Jew or Gentile, and their captives, were equally protected from the licentiousness of man. The Old Testament has numberless chapters consecrated to the praises of women, and to the precepts necessary for the education of their sex. In Genesis, chap. xxxiv., we find the sons of Jacob making war upon the Sichemites, to revenge the insult done to their sister Dina by the prince Sichem; in the Book of Judges, chap. xx., we read of a bloody and protracted war waged by the Israelites against one of their own tribes, the Benjaminites, to revenge the Levite’s wife, outraged by strange men in the town of Gabaa; in the Second Book of Kings, chap. xiii., we see how promptly and fearfully Absalom resented the wrong done to his sister Thamar by their brother Amnon. In the Book of Judith, we are astounded at seeing the high and solemn eulogium pronounced upon this valiant woman. She speaks to the elders of Bethulia as one having authority, yet, with such humility as befits even the most highly favored servant of God, she comforts them and bids them hope, so that they acknowledge that her words are true, and ask her to pray for them (chap. viii. 29). Her own prayer for guidance and success is full of wisdom, of poetry, of confidence in God and the right: her speech to Holofernes is conspicuous for tact, and the heathen general himself exclaims, “There is not such another woman upon earth ... in sense of words.” When the great deed is done and Judith returns to the besieged city, she sings a noble canticle, a true poem, full of grave beauty and deep meaning, and we are then told how highly she was honored by the high-priest Joachim, who came from Jerusalem, with all his elders, to see her and bless her. He calls her the “glory of Jerusalem, the joy of Israel, and the honor of the people” (chap. xv. 10), and bestows upon her precious vessels from the spoils of the Assyrians. He does not forget to extol her chastity as intimately connected with her success; indeed, this praise seems to supersede the blessings with which she is hailed as a deliverer. When she died, the people publicly mourned for her seven days, and to the time of her death it is recorded that “she came forth with great glory on festival days.”

This is not the only instance where we find woman in a responsible and elevated position, surrounded by friends of high degree, vying with each other in bestowing upon her marks of esteem and respect. Later on we find Christian prelates acting the part of Joachim to some new Judith, some woman distinguished for piety and virtue, and whose influence or example is a powerful auxiliary of their own efforts.

Reverting for a few moments to the history of the Jews, we see how in numberless instances women were the instruments of grace and deliverance, how they were gifted, and how they were esteemed. Instead of a marriage that was nothing but a bargain such as was in use among heathen nations, the betrothal of Rebecca was a most grave and solemn ceremony, and the consent of the maiden was formally asked. Jacob had such a high idea of Rachel’s worth that he served her for fourteen years. When the walls of Jericho fell and the inhabitants were put to the sword, the woman Rahab was spared, together with all those who chose to take refuge in her house. The child Moses was rescued and educated by a woman, and his sister, Mary, was a great prophetess whose canticle has come down to us almost as a national hymn. Anna, the mother of Samuel, sang praises to God in language which the inspired writers thought worthy of transmitting to the perpetual remembrance of all generations; the Queen of Sheba was so enamored of wisdom and learning that she came a long and tedious journey to pay homage to the superior gifts of Solomon; Anna, the wife of Tobias, after her husband had lost his sight, earned the wherewithal for their humble home at “weaving-work” (Tob. ii. 19). Sara, the wife of the younger Tobias, prayed God in words that have always been incorporated in the sacred text. Mardochai said pointedly to Queen Esther, “Who knoweth whether thou art therefore come to the kingdom that thou mightest be ready at such a time as this?” and she answered by effectually interceding for her people, though, notwithstanding her regal position, it was only at the risk of her life that she could approach the king unbidden. Her prayer, like all the rest recorded in the Scriptures, is a poem in itself, and points to the true source whence all real courage springs, while it also hallows with religious feeling the deep patriotism peculiar to the Hebrew race. Later on, the mother of the Machabees showed such heroic fortitude under persecution that the Scriptures say of her that she “was to be admired above measure, and was worthy to be remembered by good men.”

Turning to the New Testament, we find woman in equally prominent positions, honored by the special notice of the Man-God himself, and materially aiding in the establishment of his church. Not to speak of the Mother of God, whose influence on the fate of woman has been simply paramount, and leaving aside the fact of his undoubted voluntary subjection to her, as well as that of her intercession, being the immediate occasion of his first public miracle and manifestation at Cana of Galilee—the place of woman in the Gospel history is one that may justly be the pride of her sex. The greater part of our Lord’s miracles were worked in favor of women, most often on their own persons, at other times on persons whom they held dearer than life. Of the first, witness the cure of the mother-in-law of Peter, of the woman healed of an issue of blood, of the daughter of the Chanaanitish woman, to whom Jesus said, “O woman, great is thy faith; be it done to thee as thou wilt” (St. Matt. xv. 28); of the woman bowed down with an infirmity that had afflicted her for eighteen years; also the raising of the daughter of Jairus. Of the second, witness the restoring to the widow of Naim of her only son, whom Jesus raised to life “being moved with mercy towards her” (St. Luke vii. 13), and whom, when he had raised him, he “gave to his mother.” Lazarus, too, dear as he was personally to the Master, was yet raised to a new life chiefly through the prayers and the faith of his sisters, whose sorrow had touched the heart of the divine Saviour. Not only in temporal things, but much more in spiritual, did our Lord seek out women for their cure and salvation. He did not disdain to speak long and patiently with the woman of Samaria, and, instead of heralding his saving presence to her countrymen through his own disciples, he preferred to let her be his messenger. He proposed the modest almsgiving of the poor widow as a model of all true charity. He protected the woman taken in adultery against her pharisaical judges; he commended the woman Magdalen, and prophesied that, wherever the Gospel should be preached, there should her name be also remembered. When he was teaching the multitudes, it was a woman who cried out in touching boldness and pathetic directness of speech: “Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the breasts that gave thee suck.” Again it was to women that he spoke when, on the path to Calvary, he turned, and said, “Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.” Women followed him bravely when men deserted, betrayed, and denied him; women stood beneath his cross while his apostles were hiding in fear, and the solitary friend who never left him was the most woman-like of all his disciples. His last legacy on earth, the last precious thing on which he turned his thoughts, was a woman, and the first person to whom he appeared after his resurrection was also a woman. When the disciples were gathered together awaiting the coming of the Paraclete, a woman was among them: “The mother of Jesus,” as the Gospel says, was there.

Later on, in the Acts of the Apostles, we find women mentioned as most efficacious helpers in the work of the infant church. Tabitha, for instance, a “woman full of good works, and almsdeeds” (Acts ix. 36), and Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, a woman who accompanied St. Paul from Corinth to Ephesus, and there took Apollo, an eloquent and fervent man, and “expounded to him the way of the Lord more diligently” (Acts xviii. 26). Again, Lydia, a seller of purple, “one that worshipped God,” offered hospitality to St. Paul, and “constrained” him to dwell in her house (Acts xvi. 14, 15). St. Paul has been quoted and misquoted so often that one almost shrinks from appealing to his arguments and precepts; yet perhaps even here we may find something new to say, something to point out in a new light, something that the controversialists on the subject of Women’s Rights, on both sides, have, apparently at least, overlooked. We will not dwell on such portions of his Epistles as are always in the mouth of those who aim at relegating woman to an exclusively domestic sphere, but, on the contrary, we will point out words of his, honoring woman so highly that no law of modern times has been able to rival such deference, and no claim of strong-minded female associations would dare to lift itself to such importance. In his First Epistle to the Romans, chapter xvi., he says: “And I commend to you Phebe, our sister, who is in the ministry of the church ... that you receive her in the Lord as becometh saints, and that you assist her in whatsoever business she shall have need of you: for she also hath assisted many, and myself also.” Ministry, of course, stands for help, and is used here in its strict and original sense, as when the Gospel says of our Lord, “And angels came and ministered unto him,” and as when we say the ministrations of charity. Some persons, indeed, have affected to see in this text an implied permission for women to act as priests; common sense and the general tone of the Epistles are sufficiently explicit, however, to undeceive all such as do not on this head voluntarily deceive themselves. The same Epistle we have quoted goes on to say: “Salute Prisca [Priscilla] and Aquila [her husband], my helpers in Christ Jesus; who have for my life laid down their own necks; to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles; and the church which is in their house.” Observe how St. Paul speaks of them without distinction of sex as equally helpers, and how he even mentions the woman’s name first. Again he continues: “Salute Mary, who hath labored much among you ... salute Julia, Nereus, and his sister, and Olympias, and all the saints that are with them.” We have no space for recalling the well-known precepts St. Paul gives concerning both the state of marriage and that of virginity; we would only indicate by a passing notice how truly liberal is his teaching, including both states as honorable, commanding neither marriage nor continence, and providing with minute foresight for each circumstance that human mutability can create. And in one of these, the case being the desertion by an unbelieving consort of the Christian yoke-fellow, he distinctly says: “If the unbeliever depart, let him depart; for a brother or sister is not under servitude in such cases; but God hath called us in peace” (1 Cor. vii. 15). The very custom of calling women “sisters,” universal in the early church, is a token of the respect that was paid them, and of the Christian equality which denied them no legitimate share in the spiritual and social life of man. St. Paul has traced out in one word the whole duty of man to woman when he said, “The elder women entreat as mothers, the younger as sisters, in all chastity” (1 Tim. v. 2). In the First Epistle to the Philippians, he says: “Help those women who have labored with me in the Gospel, ... and whose names are in the book of life.” St. John dedicated a whole Epistle, or letter, to the “Lady Elect and her children, whom I love in the truth, and not I only, but also all they that have known the truth.... And now I beseech thee, lady, not as writing a new commandment, but that which we have had from the beginning, that we love one another.... Having more things to write to you, I would not by paper and ink, for I hope that I shall be with you, and speak face to face, that your joy may be full.” St. Peter, in his First Epistle, does not disdain to give counsel as to the outward dress of women, thus dignifying the subject through the symbolism he wishes it to express. And let not any one of our own times call these counsels either frivolous or interfering, for has not every sect that arose as a self-appointed reformer begun by the restraint on female apparel, typical of moral restraint over our passions and inclinations? Even now, in a mistaken and distorted interpretation of the significance of dress, have not the ultra-advocates of Woman’s Rights laid their “reforming” hands upon the current fashions?

When St. Peter came to Rome, the first house that received him was that of Pudens, a Roman senator, whose wife Priscilla, and whose daughters Pudentiana and Praxedes, became his first converts and his most powerful co-laborers. The two virgins, having become the heiresses of their parents and brothers, sold their vast estates, and gave the price to the suffering and persecuted among their brethren; and, though we read of hundreds of such cases among the women of the early church, we seldom find it so with the men, except in such families where the influence of some female relative resulted in this heroic renunciation. The palace of Pudentiana and Praxedes was converted into a church which for centuries has borne their name, and in which is shown as well the temporary receptacle and hiding-place, says time-honored tradition, of the bodies of the martyrs, carefully collected by these brave women. This church is the oldest in Rome, says a reliable authority, the Rev. Joachim Ventura, whom we shall often have reason to quote in these pages, and it is also the first among those giving titular rank to the order of cardinals.

Among the apostolic women whose names stand beside those of the great saints to whom the church owes her wide sway, St. Thecla has ever been foremost; St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Isidore of Pelusium, St. Epiphanius, and St. Methodius, bishops and fathers of the church, have vied with one another in extolling her constancy and her greatness. The last mentioned of these tells us, in his book the Banquet of Virgins, that she was well versed in secular philosophy, and in the various branches of polite literature; he also exceedingly commends her eloquence, and the ease, strength, sweetness, and modesty of her discourse (Butler’s Lives of the Saints). Of the persecution she suffered at the hands of the young pagan to whom she had, before her conversion, been betrothed, we will not speak, neither will we touch upon her miraculous deliverance from the wild beasts to whom she had been thrown, further than to point out, however, that woman has shown more than masculine courage long before modern agitators began to accuse her of degeneracy and tameness. But the secret lay then, as it does now, in the teaching of a church that sees in her children only hierarchies of souls, and that looks upon the body as a mere form, determining respective duties, it is true, but certainly not conferring de jure on the possessors of such forms any superiority or difference of intellectual or moral capacity. A proof of this lies open to all in the fact that women’s names as well as men’s are incorporated in the text of the Mass, and are repeated every day with as much honor, before the altar of God. After the “Commemoration of the Dead,” and in the prayer beginning, “Nobis quoque peccatoribus,” the names of Felicitas, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, are coupled with those of the apostles and martyrs John, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, and Peter, that is, with some of the greatest saints whom even Protestants consent to admire. The church, too, shows her appreciation of the sex and its capabilities by the express words, often used in her liturgy, “devoto femineo sexu,” which, whether translated as usual, the “devout female sex,” or the “devoted,” seems equally honorable to woman and her special characteristics. Virgins and widows are mentioned by name in the prayers used in public on Good Friday, and immediately before them are named the seven orders of the priesthood. The mere fact of so many churches being dedicated to God under the special invocation of some female saint, often one whose history has become obscure and traditional from very remoteness, serves to illustrate the high respect of the Catholic Church for womanhood, and the perfect equality with which she looks upon both her sons and her daughters. The cathedral of Milan, one of the most renowned shrines in the world, is under the patronage of the virgin of whom we have just spoken, the proto-martyr, St. Thecla. The fathers of the church, following the example of St. Paul, call the help of faithful Christian women a ministry, and Ventura tells us that Origen, St. Chrysostom, and Haymon speak of “women having through their good offices deserved to attain to the glorious title of apostles, and having supplemented the work of the evangelists and apostles by their preaching in private houses, especially to persons of their own sex” (Ventura, La Donna Cattolica, vol. i. p. 279). It is related in the Breviarium Romanum, at the part appointed to be read on the 19th of May, that St. Pudentiana once presented ninety persons to St. Pius, Pope, to be baptized, all of them being perfectly instructed in the faith through her teaching alone. St. Martina, who was a deaconess (which answers to religious in the later church), converted and instructed many persons, principally women. The Breviarium honors her as the protectress of Rome. She has also a hymn specially set apart for her office in the Breviarium, and the church dedicated to her in Rome is the richest and most magnificent of those under the patronage of the martyrs. The house of Lucina, a noble Roman matron, was converted into a church, afterwards dedicated to the holy Pope Marcellus. Another church, now called San Lorenzo in Lucina, stands over the tomb which Lucina prepared for that saint. Priscilla, also a Roman lady of high lineage, the wife of the before-mentioned senator Pudens, gave her fortune and her land for a cemetery, to which her name was justly appended. Natalia, the wife of the martyr Adrian, after publicly exhorting her husband to be steadfast in the faith, boldly put on man’s attire to elude the order recently given that no Christian woman should be allowed to visit the prisoners. The Breviarium tells us that St. Justina, upon whom a famous magician named Cyprian had tried all manner of unhallowed arts, so far prevailed over him that she brought him to know the true God, and to abandon his idols and sorceries. But examples such as these of the intellectual influence of women upon their friends, and even upon strangers and enemies, would multiply under our hands into a volume, if we could stop to collect them all.

Martyrdom was, in the early ages, the almost inevitable end of zealous faith and active evangelization. St. Cecilia ranks among the most prominent of those who, strong with a supernatural strength, gladly gave up life, youth, health, and beauty, for the sake of principle. Let us put it in that form, for even now there are many who respect in the abstract a single-minded devotion to principle. This devotion would be essentially called manliness in our day; yet the women of the early church—some mere children in years, some threatened with what would make a woman waver in her determination far more than mere physical torture could, the loss of her honor, some again with natural diseases or weakness upon them—showed a superabundant amount of this very manliness. Cecilia has long been the patroness of music, and we read in her Acts that she employed both vocal and instrumental music in the service of the Most High, fitly using the most beautiful of arts to glorify Supreme Beauty. Her love for the Holy Scriptures was such that she often wore them on her bosom in the folds of her robe, and that long before the Canon of Scripture had been fixed, and before the Holy Book could have the world-wide reputation which the church has now bestowed upon it. Cecilia’s will, made in presence of Pope Urban, consisted in the giving of her palace for a church, and the distributing of her remaining wealth to the poor. Her death was heroic, and, as her life-blood was ebbing slowly from her, she only thought of converting her executioners. Oblivious of bodily pain, she exhorted them to throw off the yoke of idolatry, and succeeded so far as to cause them to exclaim, “It is only a God who could have created such a prodigy as his servant Cecilia!” The body of the martyr was interred in the Catacomb of St. Callixtus, in a chapel hollowed out of the earth, and somewhat larger than the other chambers of the same catacomb: it was the sepulchre of the popes, and the placing of her body in this sepulchre was a mark of the extraordinary respect due to her generous munificence and her heroic courage. Thus has the old church, so truly called the “mother church,” always recognized and rewarded merit, whether in man or woman. Susannah, a relation both of Pope Caius and of the Emperor Diocletian, and daughter to Gabinius, a man as learned as he was noble, was another instance of how religion can reconcile profound instruction with deep piety, and unite both to beauty of person and grace of manner. She was learned, say her Acts, in philosophy, in literature, and in religion. The emperor sent one of his nobles, Claudius, Susannah’s own uncle, to entreat her to marry Maximinus Cæsar, Diocletian’s son. The noble and learned virgin not only refused the alliance, but, strengthened by the approbation of her Christian father and her other uncle, Pope Caius, who were present, spoke so eloquently that Claudius was converted to Christianity. The Acts of the Martyrs record his words in announcing this conversion to his wife: “It is chiefly my niece Susannah who has conquered me. I owe to the prayers of this young girl the happiness of having received God’s grace.” His wife, Prepedigna, and Maximus, his brother, were also won over by her influence, and the latter bears tribute equally to her wisdom, holiness, and her beauty. There could be but one end to such proceedings, a glorious end for all: her friends all suffered martyrdom before her, and she who had braved an emperor’s displeasure without a sign of so-called womanly weakness, met her death in secret with equal courage and joy.

Agnes, the maiden of twelve or thirteen years, is praised by Ambrose, a Christian priest, for her contempt of the jewels with which the son of Symphronius attempted to bribe her: she is also pictured as the very incarnation of youthful bravery, when with holy defiance she scorns the threat of her impure and cruel judge to send her to a place of ill-fame. This threat, often executed, was more than any other the touch-stone of their faith to the Christian virgins of antiquity, while their invariable deliverance from this danger was the reward of their unflinching denial of the power of the false gods, even in the face of this shameful threat. Death would seem a bridal, to judge by the loving alacrity with which these child-virgins ran to meet it. Who can say that the church does not admire and inculcate courage and self-respect in women, since half the martyrs defended their honor as well as their faith with the last drop of their blood?

St. Ambrose, speaking to his sister Marcellina of the martyr Sothera, in whose praises he is enthusiastic, says: “What need for me to seek for examples for thee, who hast been formed to holiness by thy martyred relative? [Sothera was their great-aunt.] ... Brought up thyself in the country, having no companion to set thee examples, no master to teach thee precepts, there were at hand no human means to teach thee what thou has learnt. Thou art no disciple, therefore—for there can be no disciple where there is no master—but the heiress of the virtues of thy ancestress. Let us speak of the example of our holy relative, for we priests have a nobility of our own, preferable to that which counts it an honor to have prefects and consuls among our forefathers: we have the nobility of faith, which cannot die.” These words of grave import are addressed to a woman, and the boast of holy ancestry they contain also refers to a woman. Agatha, the heroine of Catana, and Lucy, the martyr of Syracuse, both noble Sicilian maidens, speak the boldest language to their barbarous judges, and meet death as bravely as any man could face it for his country and his home.

Victoria, a lady of Abyssinia, in Africa, accused of being a Christian, and defended by her pagan brother, who swore she had been deluded into connivance with the Christians, vehemently contradicted him in open court. “I came here of my own accord,” she averred, “and neither Dativus nor any one else beguiled me; I can bring witnesses among my fellow-townspeople to the fact that I came simply because I knew there would be a gathering of our brethren here, under our priest Saturninus, and that the holy mysteries would be celebrated.” She persists when her brother excuses her again as being insane, and eagerly criminates herself in the eyes of the judge, till she succeeds in winning her crown. Forty-eight other martyrs, men and women, heroically suffer the same penalty, greatly comforted and encouraged by her dauntless attitude. At Thessalonica, a woman named Irene was apprehended, together with her five sisters, and was herself chiefly accused of having kept and concealed the books of Scripture, and other papers relating to the Christian religion. Dulcetius, the judge before whom she was brought, and who was president of Macedonia, could elicit from her nothing that could endanger any one but herself, her sisters having been tried and martyred upon the charge of refusing to eat meats consecrated to idols. Her firmness both in screening others and in avowing her eager care for the holy writings, not only gives us a high idea of her moral courage, but also of her intellectual interest in those scarce and valuable works. She suffered death for her dauntless custody of these treasures, and it is related that she sang psalms of praise while ascending the funeral pile.

St. Catherine of Alexandria is a most noted example of the erudition often attained and displayed by Christian women. At the age of eighteen, says the Breviarium Romanum, she outstripped in knowledge the most learned men of her day: Maximinus, who was both a libertine and a tyrant, was cruelly persecuting the Christians of Alexandria, and dishonoring the noble matrons of that city. Catherine boldly and publicly upbraided him, and forced him to listen to her arguments. Her Acts and the Greek Menology of the Emperor Basil affirm that she supported her thesis of Christianity against the arguments of forty of the ablest heathen philosophers, and so effectually confuted them that they preceded her in her martyrdom by declaring themselves Christians, and being forthwith condemned to be burned alive. Catherine, during her imprisonment, converted the wife of Maximinus, and the commander of his army, and further made such an impression upon the crowd assembled to witness her death that many became Christians on the spot. The interesting Church of San Clemente, in Rome, contains one chapel, the walls of which are covered with frescoes illustrative of each of these occurrences; this chapel is supposed to date from the fourth or fifth century, and is a mute witness to the honor with which the memory of the illustrious and learned maiden of Alexandria was, even at that early age, surrounded. Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, says of her: “From this martyr’s uncommon erudition, ... and the use she made of it, she is chosen in the schools the patroness and model of Christian philosophers.” This is by no means the only instance of a woman being honored as patroness in the roads of learning or of art. Later on, we shall have occasion to speak of other saints equally distinguished for their talents and zeal for true philosophy. Butler says in a foot-note to the Life of St. Catherine: “The female sex is not less capable of the sublime sciences, nor less remarkable for liveliness of genius. Witness, among numberless instances in polite literature and in theology, the celebrated Venetian lady, Helen Lucretia Cornaro, doctress in theology at Padua in 1678, the wonder of her age for her skill in every branch of literature, and, still more, for the austerity of her life and her extraordinary piety.”

Most of the martyrs we have hitherto mentioned were virgins: among widows and widowed mothers, we find other heroines whom no bodily torture nor that more bitter anguish of witnessing their children’s sufferings could daunt or even cause to waver.

Symphorosa, a noble Roman matron, denounced by the astrologers of Rome to the Emperor Adrian, bravely confessed her faith in the presence of her seven sons, whom she thus encouraged to do the same. She spoke of herself as honored in being the widow and sister of martyrs, and utterly scorned the proposal to forsake the truth for which they had bled. Here is a foreshadowing of the times of mediæval chivalry, which were but the legitimate offshoot from such a moral atmosphere of pure chivalric heroism as enveloped the lives of the early Christians. Invincible strength and a courage that smiled in the face of death was with the children of the primitive church a point of honor, a family tradition, a hereditary legacy. Another widow and mother, Felicitas, suffered more cruelly yet than Symphorosa; for, under the reign of Marcus Aurelius, she beheld her seven children butchered before her eyes, and never ceased exhorting them to constancy, while her mother’s heart and more natural feeling were suffering a sevenfold martyrdom. She followed her sons to death with fervent joy. St. Augustine was eloquent in her praise, and on one anniversary of her triumph called her death a “great spectacle offered to the eyes of faith,” and herself “more fruitful by reason of her many virtues than of her many children.” St. Gregory, the great father, exalted her by likening her example to a new and spiritual birth of the Saviour in each soul that she thus secured to God, according to the interpretation of the words of the Gospel: “He who does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and my sister, and my mother.”

Another St. Felicitas, a Christian slave and widow, with her mistress Perpetua, who had also lately lost her husband, suffered death in the amphitheatre of Tharbacium, near Carthage, in Africa, rather than give up what they knew to be divine truth. Felicitas was martyred a day or two after the premature birth in prison of her child, and, when brutally jeered by the guards at her inability to suffer the pains of childbirth in silence, answered in words that to this day furnish the key to all woman’s superiority as proved by the facts of church history: “It is I that suffer to-day, and nature is weak: to-morrow Jesus himself will suffer in me, and his grace will give my nature the strength it needs” (Acts of the Martyrs). Perpetua, her mistress, but also her sister in Christ (for in the church alone resides true equality), resisted the pleadings of her aged father and the mute appeals of her infant’s unprotected condition, and bore her sufferings as it is said the Spartan women knew how to bear theirs. But while the enduringness both of men and women was in Sparta only the artificial result of compulsory laws, and soon disappeared before the shameful voluptuousness that was natural to all heathen beliefs, that of Christians of both sexes made its mark through successive generations, and lives yet in our less hardy times, because it is intrinsic to the nature of a faith whose God had no more hospitable birthplace than a cold stable, and no better death-bed than a cross.

Blandina, the martyr of Lyons, is justly celebrated for her extraordinary constancy, and the Christians of Lyons who wrote a letter preserved to history by Eusebius, and addressed to their brethren of Asia and Phrygia, extol her as the soul of the heroic stand made by many of their number against idolatry. She was a slave, very young and very weak in health, says this letter, and yet even her executioners marvelled at her powers of endurance, exclaiming: One of the tortures she has suffered ought to have killed her, and she is alive yet after them all! Further on, she is likened to a bold athlete. Some of her companions having wavered, her example and exhortations recalled them to their duty, and Ponticus, a young boy, was the last to die under her eyes, encouraged and upheld by Blandina. Potamiana, another slave, who died in defence of her honor as well as her faith, chose a more lingering death than that to which she was condemned, rather than uncover herself in public, the judge consenting to this change not in pity, but in cruelty. Her executioner became her first convert; many other men likewise came to the faith through visions of this young and steadfast virgin.

We have mentioned women in every sphere and state of life, social and domestic, as endowed with confessedly heroic powers, and capable of attaining high and noble ends in the field of religion, of art, and of philosophy. One class of women, however, remains still to be noticed, and it is perhaps the greatest proof of the church’s universal and instinctive tenderness toward the sex, that among that unhappy class she alone has been able to make fruitful the call of God. The Catholic Church has set upon her altars and in her calendar the names of many illustrious penitents and anchorites, side by side with stainless virgins and matrons of unblemished fame. The Catholic Church alone can restore to fallen woman her rightful inheritance, and so efface the brand of sin that its shame shall be merged into a glory as pure as that of baptismal innocence. To take among the martyrs but one instance of this rehabilitation, let us see what history relates of Afra, the courtesan of Augsburg, in the Roman province of Rhetia, and the present kingdom of Bavaria. Afra was of noble birth, and had many slaves and possessions. She was converted by St. Narcissus, a Christian bishop who was fleeing from the persecution then raging in Gaul. Her household as well as her mother followed her example. She succeeded in concealing Narcissus and his deacon Felix for some time in her own house, and meanwhile diligently applied herself to making converts of her friends and former associates. Denounced in her turn a little later, and sneered at for the contradiction between her past and present life, she answers the judge boldly, admitting humbly that she is unworthy to be called a Christian, yet affirming that the threatened torments will cleanse and purify her body, while the proposed sacrifice to the gods would only further stain and disfigure her soul. Bound to a stake and burned with slow fire, her intrepidity only redoubles, and, having sinned through the weakness of undisciplined nature, she shows a more than manly courage through the new-born strength of grace.

With her, we close the few practical examples of the greatness of woman during the ages of martyrdom, but the spirit that made the martyrs did not die with the last of the canonized victims of the pagan persecutions. St. Jerome speaks of a “daily martyrdom, which consists not in the shedding of blood as a testimony, but in the devout and undefiled service of the mind” (De Laud. S. Paulæ). This we propose to illustrate in a subsequent article, giving historical instances of the actual honor paid in the church to learned, holy, and influential women, rather than entering into abstract controversy on the subject of what is and is not due to her sex. What we have already said in these pages will tend, please God, to remove prejudices, and at least clear the way for evidence still more appreciable by our ambitious non-Catholic sisters, namely, that which goes to show that not only in social and home life, but also in the wide sphere of statecraft and public influence, the church has marked out a noble margin for women’s genius.

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Lent, 1872.

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Jans von Steufle was a happy man until he got that donkey. Now, you might think the donkey was left him as a legacy by some dear friend or rich relation, or that Jans found him in the highway some cold wintry night and took him home in pity, or the donkey might have strayed into Jans’ enclosure and refused to go out, but no such thing; Jans bought and paid for all his trouble in good silver coin.

Jans had some comforts, however to compensate: he had a good wife. Some say, “A good wife is a rare thing,” but you never hear that sneer in German-land, for German wives and German children are taught betimes to be good. Jans’ wife kept the house clean and the kettles bright; and made Sauerkraut, [14] and Wurst,[15]and delicious Rahmkäse[16] —ah! it would melt in your mouth—and had always such nicely browned Rinderbraten,[17] and delicate gedämpftes Fleisch,[18] and put vinegar in everything.

Then such beautiful patchwork Bettdecke[19] she stitched together, and such snowy Bettwäsche,[20] you would be floated off to dream of Arabian Nights just to sleep under them. And when her fingers had nothing particular to do, that is, when she walked about the house and garden a little just before supper-time, to see that every corner was clean, and everything in good order, and the pot-herbs coming up properly, or when she went down the lane to drive home the truant chickens and little ducks who were out on some juvenile frolic, did her ten fingers rest? Oh! no, then a thread of yarn came creeping out of her pocket, and click, click, went the needles, and such stockings! You might wear them to the North Pole, only they’d be too warm.

But her great genius and tact lay in garden-making. We do wrong to apply these words to her, for she understood neither, and Jans despised both; rather be it said that her industry was made most manifest when she betook herself (under Jans’ direction, of course) to digging and planting.

Jans had a pleasant way of imparting knowledge, and at the same time making himself comfortable. Seated on a wooden bench in some shaded gravel-walk near the scene of her rural operations, with a pipe in his mouth, he would sit patiently the long hot summer afternoon, directing the putting down of pea-sticks, the tying up of hop-vines, and apportioning off the territory to be allowed to the marauding pumpkins. Some people profess to discover a striking resemblance between the human family and the great family of animals each to each, and they even run a parallel between them in physiognomy; but in a garden the similitude is perfect. No one who cultivates a garden for very love of it but what unconsciously invests his community there with a sort of intelligent existence. They are well-behaved or troublesome; in good health or pining under little ailments. Here a hardy native pushes his way to upper air, heedless alike of deluge or drought, while that other one from some far-away country, like any discontented foreigner, finds nothing to its taste, but must be sheltered, and watered, and gives a deal of trouble. Some are orderly and upright; others are inclined to crooked ways, and seldom amend until tied to a stake. The roots generally stay underground until they are wanted, while some, like the bold, conceited turnips, climb to the surface when not more than half-grown, and bask in the sunlight as if they were roses. The vine tribe care as little as human climbers whom they crush down in their aspiring efforts; onward they trail and take possession, reckless of those who have a better right. Many a pretty little plant have those green vines tyrannized over! As for flowers, we call them modest, bold, gaudy, retiring, even in common speech; and many a habit and inclination do they exhibit to a humble admirer which has never been entered in scientific books. Yes, a garden is a community of wonderful creations, where each one has its peculiarities, and yet each one conforms in a certain degree to the type of its family.

With such loving eyes did Jans and his gute Frau look on their flower-beds and their edibles; and such like matters did they often discourse about, when the spading and raking for the day were done, and she sat on the bench by his side knitting, knitting.

It is doubtful, however, whether they would have noticed matters quite so particularly, not having been educated to abstractions, comparisons, generalizations, and such like metaphysical flights, had not their attention been directed to them occasionally by a third member of their family, the very learned Herr von Heine.

Now, Jans in his efforts at amassing riches had neglected no honest means of success. Consequently, when their two children had both married well and gone to live in distant cities, and he found himself with a spare room in his house, he looked about for a tenant. Then mein herr (as he was called for brevity’s sake) presented himself, and, as his testimonials for respectability and prompt pay were satisfactory, he was soon established in the pretty little chamber with its white curtains, its patchwork bedspread, and a floor so well scrubbed you might have eaten off of it. He somewhat marred the beauty of the spot by an importation of certain odd things which he professed to consider indispensable. There was a regiment of ragged-looking old leather books, and some well-worn coats and dingy dressing-gowns, not to mention an assortment of pipes and tobacco jars and old boots, and a few warlike weapons which stuck out in a protecting way from the top of his book-shelves.

Mein herr was just now direct from the Collegienhaus[21] of the famous University at Königsberg, where he had been giving short lectures and receiving long pay, and being, therefore, on good terms with himself and the world in general, he resolved to rusticate in some secluded spot for the summer, and renovate his faculties for the next winter’s campaign.

No place could be more quiet or better suited for his purpose than his present abode. Here he could spin all kinds of cobweb theories hour after hour, with not a sound to ripple the air and demolish them, for neither Jans nor his wife ever intruded into his apartment. It was only in the soft summer evening twilight that he made his descent to the garden, and indulged in a brief social intercourse with his host and hostess. Indeed, he came almost as regularly as the sun set. His tall, straight figure enveloped in a long black sort of ecclesiastical gown, a jaunty cap on his head, with its tassel hanging down behind, a meerschaum in hand which he was bound to finish before he should retire, behold Mein Herr von Heine!—the embodiment of profound and extended erudition out for a little recreation. Mein herr was always welcome. Pleasant enough was the discourse they all held as he slowly walked up and down the gravel-walk, or took a seat beside them, especially when the subject was farm-matters; and mutually profitable was the exchange between theory and practice; many a pleasant laugh they had, too; and as to the gute Frau, she listened and smiled, and occasionally put in a modest little word, this being, according to her best belief, the extent of “woman’s rights.”

They were sitting thus one June evening, when Jans laid aside his pipe, and said, in his usual deliberate way:

“I think I’ll buy a horse, or a donkey, or a dog-cart, or something, to take all these cabbages to market.”

“Buy a donkey by all means,” said mein herr, “for a donkey, that is an ass, is classical. They are famous in sacred as well as in profane literature. No animal has always been so much the companion of man as the donkey, no one more valuable. An ox and an ass are what we are warned in the commandments not to covet, showing their universality in the days of Moses, besides being what any man in his senses would be most likely to covet. Asses are repeatedly mentioned in the Old Testament. Every one has heard of Balaam’s ass, who was so much wiser than his master. I have often noted the great injustice done to that ass. Balaam bestowed on him three very decided beatings; and although he was fully convinced afterwards that they were entirely undeserved, we have no record that he made the least apology or expressed the least regret. Now, even a donkey deserves justice. Asses have pervaded all ranks in life. There was Debbora the prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth; in the Canticle, where she addresses the brave princes of Israel, she adjures them as ‘you that ride upon fair asses, and sit in judgment, and walk in the way’; on the other hand, Job predicts woe to him ‘who hath driven away the ass of the fatherless.’ Certainly, asses were everywhere. When the wealth of Abraham was counted, he-asses and she-asses made a part of it; and when he was about to ascend the mountain to sacrifice his son Isaac, we are told that ‘he arose and saddled his ass.’ Then there was Abdon, eight years a judge of Israel, who had forty sons and thirty grandsons, ‘all mounted on seventy asses,’ are the words of history. Then there was the Levite of Mount Ephraim—ah! I forget his name—his wife left him and went to stay four months with her father in Bethlehem Juda, and when he went to bring her back, he took with him ‘a servant and two asses,’ one doubtless for her use. Then the jaw-bone of the ass made famous by Samson is well known, I mean the jaw-bone he wielded at Ramathlechi, when he put his thousand enemies to flight. Some of these animals possess virtues worthy of our own imitation; they have displayed oftentimes very great intelligence, and affection for those they serve; as in the case of a certain old prophet who went forth from Juda to Bethel to denounce Jeroboam, and, being misled and turned from his duty by a pretended friend, was killed by the way on his return home; his ass was found standing patient and watchful by the side of his dead master.”

Thus discoursed mein herr; his colloquial efforts were apt to be rather prolix and oratorical, but this was to be ascribed to his profession as lecturer; he was so much accustomed, when he had unearthed an idea, to follow it up and make the most of it—a sort of intellectual fox-chase.

Failing to keep pace with him over such extended and erudite ground, Jans had, nevertheless, a dim notion that it was something to own even one donkey, so he said:

“To-morrow I will buy a donkey.”

“Ah! yes,” said the Frau von Steufle, “and next market-day we will go with a donkey.”

“You will be wise to buy a donkey,” repeated mein herr, “for now I call to mind that Sancho Panza had one whose labors, as he tells us, half-supported his family. I am reminded, also, that the great Cervantes himself rode an ass, as he relates, on a pleasant journey from Equivias with two of his friends. They heard some one clattering up from behind and calling to them to stop, and when he at length overtook them it proved to be a student, who was mounted on an animal of the same sort; he no sooner learned their names than he flung himself off of his ass, says Cervantes, whilst his cloak-bag tumbled on one side, and his portmanteau on the other, and he hastened to express his admiration of the great author of Don Quixote.”[22]

Just at this point both meerschaum and pipe had given forth their last whiff, and the knitting-work had arrived at the middle of a needle; and as the great matter under discussion, the purchase, was considered as wisely decided in the affirmative, they mutually exchanged a kind “Gute Nacht” with the inevitable “Schlafen Sie wohl!”[23]

The day after the above conversation, Jans left his home for a little business in a distant city, and several more elapsed before he returned with his purchase.

Oh! vain boast when Jans von Steufle declared, “To-morrow I will buy a donkey.”

What is a donkey? In one phase of his character, he is the very personification of the stoical philosophy of the ancients; the type of that perfect indifference to all sublunary mutations to which Zeno vainly strives to elevate humankind; patient and enduring under any amount of rain, hail, snow, and sleet that can pour down on him, and any amount of luggage that can be piled upon him; totally, indifferent, in the road he travels, as to its length, direction, hostelries, or hardships, and satisfied, as far as food and sleep are concerned, with the smallest quantity and the poorest quality.

This was Jans’ idea of a donkey, but it was not what he got for his money; he got a little gray beast, with a shaggy hide, a large head, long ears, and a temper.

It was quite dark when Jackey with a boy astride him arrived from the place of his last abode; so he was quietly taken to the comfortable quarters prepared for him not far from brindle-cow, and particular introductions to him were deferred until the next morning.

The next morning ushered in market-day. The edibles had all been gathered in and nicely washed the night before; the flowers also had been culled and tastefully arranged in beautiful bouquets—some small for sweet little love tokens; some larger to decorate the tables and mantel-shelves of those people who are unhappily forced to dwell always among the bricks and mortar of the town, who paid large prices for them, and took them thankfully, as their very minute share of all the glorious and beautiful works of the Creator which are spread around life in the country. Others, again, were tied together in tall pyramid-like forms, the apex a pure white lily or perhaps a white rose, and spreading down from that to the base in blossoms that mingled all the colors of the rainbow. These were destined for the grand altar of the great church; for there were always pious souls in the town ready to expend their good groschen and thalers in adornments for the sanctuary. Very skilful are the fingers of German wives, and great their taste in making up all these tempting little articles of merchandise; and as they lay waiting in the Wohnzimmer[24] of the Von Steufle dwelling-house, you might have thought the whole garden had moved for a departure.

Breakfast was disposed of early, and immediately after it Jackey was brought out for his first load.

“He has good points,” said the learned herr, after taking a leisurely survey.

Jans knew not much about points, but he knew how to put a good load on his back, and this he now proceeded to do.

“Much discretion is necessary in purchasing a donkey,” observed the Herr von Heine—“much discrimination; wisdom and foolishness are so much alike on a cursory view. A demure aspect may represent either; and, then, a staid, dignified manner may proceed from lack of ideas, nay, even absolute stupidity, as well as from profound thought. In dealing with an animal which exhibits these traits, great penetration is called for, or you will be deceived. Then, there is a brightness of the eye, nothing vicious. Ah! I think your animal has it, a sort of exuberance of spirit, a repressed strength which can accomplish deeds almost incredible when opportunity offers. You seldom see this in pictures of the donkey race; painters seem to think it necessary to represent them dull and imbecile, which is far from being correct.”

Mein herr paused, but his friends were both too busy to reply, so he was only met by a “Freilich, mein Herr”[25] from Jans, and a smiling “Ja Wohl”[26] from his helpmate. In German-land, social life has no sharp points and corners to prick and scratch. All is polished and polite, and such a little acknowledgment of attention to a speaker could never be neglected. It was sufficient encouragement for the herr, and he proceeded. He was so accustomed to vibrate between his study and his lecture-room, that to be quite silent or to have all the talking to himself had become most natural to him, so, as we have said, he proceeded.

“Painting recalls to me Polygnotus, mentioned, I think, by Pausanias, yet I’m not quite certain. He was an Athenian painter of great celebrity, and one of his works was an allegorical picture, in which unavailing labor was symbolized by a man twisting a rope which an ass nibbles in pieces as fast as he advanced. These allegorical pictures are pleasant studies, and it is truly surprising to compare all the different interpretations of them by all the different people, who call the same object by totally different names, and of course draw from the entire composition very different conclusions. Things are generally contradictory to themselves as well as to other things, especially when viewed in that dim light which I would call, if I may be allowed an original expression, the mist of ages. We may cite for this Silenus. He is the only heathen god depicted on an ass. Now, the morals and manners of Silenus are very well known, and his association with this quadruped is complimentary to it or not, according to the view taken. It may be a panegyric on a patient, sure-footed, philosophical animal, who could put aside personal feeling in choosing his company, and bear his bibulous rider in safety when he was totally unable to walk. Or was Silenus an immortal in disgrace—degraded from horse, tiger, lion, panther, not to mention chariots and wings, all that gods and men delight in, and doomed to the indignity of donkey-back? If the latter, certainly the creature rose superior to his situation in the end; his voice must have been tremendous! In battle between the gods and giants, when Silenus rode in among them, it was his sonorous bray that threw the giant ranks in confusion and actually put them to flight. He was well rewarded for this service, for justice is in the sky if not on earth. He was exalted to the constellations. Search the star-lighted sky for Cancer, and you will find in it the once humble Asellus of Silenus.

“Midæ aures, the asinine appendages which the king was forced to accept so unwillingly on Mount Tmolus (a proper reproof to captious criticism),

‘Induiturque aures lente gradientis aselli,’[27]

were evidently a compliment to the quadruped; for certainly Apollo meant them for an improvement on his own, which had so signally failed him.”

Here mein herr came to a decided stop necessarily, for the donkey was at last loaded, and such a load! Nothing but a donkey could have stood under it, much less walk! It was cabbages this side, potatoes that side, cauliflowers in the middle. Then salad laid on loose; then celery stuck in endwise; then great bunches of sage and savory and thyme, and herbs for the soup, Petersilie and der Rettig. All these, hung on everywhere, made Jack so fragrant that his coming could be known long before he was in sight. Lastly, was a delicate little basket of eggs, engaged long ago by a dainty customer, swinging easily, so as not to break, under all.

As Jack was pretty nearly buried out of sight under the substantials of trade, the Frau von Steufle took the flowers for her share, and she was equally well laden. She could only be said to resemble an immense walking bouquet, with a pleasant, happy face peering out from its midst. Truly, the two were worth seeing. As for Jans, his great responsibility was load enough for him, and so, with good wishes and great expectations, they departed.

The Herr von Heine was alone all that long summer day. It was rather a pleasant variety at first. Solitude has charms about it. He wandered through the house, and explored every nook in the garden, and went a long way over the grass to look at the pigs; he fed the chickens and even patted the cow. The old cat seemed to think it incumbent on her to show him the premises. At all events, she escorted him hither and thither, now turning somersaults in front of him, now flying up a tree to take a bird’s-eye view of him, or perhaps to show him there were some feats not to be learned in books; then down again, in a sentimental sort of humor rubbing her head and ears against him, under his very steps; she quite disturbed his equilibrium.

The large house-dog, or, rather, yard-dog, for there he lived, looked on with a more suspicious air, as if he should like to be informed what this new state of things meant; and after returning the learned Herr von Heine’s proferred intimacy with the slightest possible wag of his tail, he walked off to attend to his own business.

Perhaps mein herr added a trifle that holiday to his stock of knowledge. He had evidently descended from his pedestal of dignity, and he enjoyed it vastly; besides, he had often introduced such things in an illustrative or figurative manner to his classes, and it was as well to make himself familiar with their surroundings.

But it was getting late now, the sun had set, twilight deepened into darkness, or rather moonlight. Where could the three be staying? Jans and his good wife were always home from market long before this hour, even when each carried a load with a barrow to wheel by turns!

He walked down to the road-way, and gazed long and anxiously into the distance. No signs of them yet! Where could they be? He returned to the house, and, ascending to his chamber, selected from among his books a volume in Latin by the renowned Cornelius Agrippa. He turned to the last chapter, “Ad Encomium Asini Digressio.”[28] He felt an intense interest at this moment in asses. It was possible some of their peculiarities had escaped his knowledge; he desired to ascertain. But he failed, under the peculiar circumstances, to fix his attention, so he laid the book aside, and returned to the regions below; to his solitary stroll up and down the gravel-walk, with an occasional pause for a long and anxious survey of the road. Even his meerschaum was forgotten or uncared for.

Time, which does so much, at length brought them home. To his great relief, the trio reappeared, and, creeping slowly along, turned from the road into the gravel-walk and reached the house, all three evidently depressed in spirits.

Jackey had been turned loose in the paddock on his return, not for good behavior; and he alternated there between nibbling the grass as assiduously as if he had engaged to mow the whole before next daylight, and standing still with his head thrust down and fixed, as motionless as if he had been carved out of stone.

“A singular animal truly,” said mein herr to himself as he looked down from his chamber window. “He reminds me—”

Here a summons to supper interrupted the reminiscence; and, when they were all revived with the delicious hot coffee and cream which the Frau von Steufle knew so well how to mix, Jans entered on his adventures as follows:

“I thought a donkey was a great traveller, and very careful and mindful, and to be trusted, and good on bad roads, and could eat what a donkey ought to eat, and not steal what was not meant for him.”

“Of course,” said the Herr von Heine; “you are right, he is a great traveller. I tried one myself on the Alps, that is, I began the Alps on a donkey; most people begin the Alps on a donkey, next a mule, then on foot, if they try Mont Blanc. I well remember the last view I took of the Jungfrau and its avalanches from the Wengern Alps. At the Hospice of St. Bernard I took a comfortable meal from the good monks, and then on foot and mule-back I mounted by way of Martigny and Tête Noire to Chamouni. In Egypt there is nothing like a donkey for the desert; when I was at Cairo (that was in my student life), many a pleasant morning I started out on a donkey, and spent the day among the ruins about there. Great climbers they are, so obedient and sure-footed. The little white donkeys of Egypt are beauties, long silky hair; the pashas value them highly. Certainly the ass is a traveller; the wild asses of Syria are fleet as the wind. Then, what would Rome be without donkeys? or any part of Italy, for that matter? Along the coasts, the bay of Naples, Mount Vesuvius, now over sand and stones and lava, and volcanic ashes fetlock-deep, now to explore pleasant fields, and woody paths, and old highways, always picking his way so carefully up and down steep places, by some path of his own you fail to see—why, you may ride on one to the very verge of a precipice, and take your view from his back, as safely as if you crept there on hands and knees! Oh! yes, they are great travellers, though sometimes slow.”

“Very slow is Jackey,” responded his owner, “so slow that a good part of the time he stood still.”

“Possible?” queried mein herr. “Perhaps his load was rather—but yet, you can hardly overload a donkey. Why, in Rome they are perfect moving heaps of fagots, hay, fruit, old clothes, mats, brooms, and brushes, and everything, in fact, that is salable and movable, with a dirty, swarthy peasant striding beside him as driver, or, it may be, a boy; but, no, I should say they are always driven by a mob of boys. I hold that the most gregarious of all animals is the human biped in its youth; and if I were called upon for a centre-piece, with most power to collect around it these juvenile swarms of the genus homo, I should name a Roman donkey. Before him, behind him, a body-guard on each side, all sizes, in all sorts of garments, or, rather, in all degrees of nudity, shouting, yelling, laughing, talking, and each one using all his powers to increase the speed of the poor little beast—there you have a Roman donkey! I have been told of a scene in Rome. A little ass whose panniers were two good-sized baskets of eggs; it was about Easter time, when eggs are valuable. To hasten him, his driver, a tall, ragged peasant, struck him smartly, which offended him. He stood still a moment, then deliberately laid himself down, and rolled over. The peals of laughter which greeted the donkey as he arose, daubed and dripping with the yellow semi-liquid, the bewailings of his owner, all together were worth seeing. In no place in Europe are they as poorly fed and as much abused as by the lower classes in Paris; truly they are miserable-looking wretches there, bony, sulky, dirty. I have often wished to apply to the back of the ragged, screaming boy-driver the stick with which he was cudgelling his poor donkey. Monsieur Chateaubriand says he would gladly be the advocate of certain creatures, works of God, despised by men, and ‘en première ligne,’ says he, ‘figuereraient l’âne et le chat.’

“The heavy-laden ass is a verity in ancient lore; even its name is used to express hardship and endurance; as from the Greek word ὄνος, an ass, is supposed to be derived the Latin onus, signifying a burden.”

Mein herr made a pause, he was evidently lapsing into the delusion that he was in his Collegienhaus, lecturing on donkeys. The gentle frau recalled his wandering wits by observing, in a low, sad voice:

“Oh! he shook so many things off; all lost; he shook half his load off in the creek!”

“Indeed!” exclaimed the herr, “is it possible! that was not to be expected of him. Many classical writers mention loading the ass, but I cannot recall a single instance where he unloaded himself in a creek!

“Horace, it is true, refers to what might be a little sulkiness under a heavy load, when he represents himself as a sort of discontented donkey under the infliction of some of his troublesome friends:

“Then, the poor creature has been at times imposed on in a manner which might excuse resentment. In ancient Rome, for instance, on sacred days all labor was forbidden, with the exception of some certain kinds considered necessary.

“The works allowed were setting traps for birds which were hurtful, ordering the trenches which irrigated the fields, and some few others of like kind. To the rustics, permission was granted to carry their farm produce to market on sacred days, and they also might bring a load back. This was allowed them in order that this business might not interrupt them on working-days. Now, a load with them necessarily demanded an ass; consequently the ass knew no sacred day, no day of rest from his burdens, and such loads, Mynheer von Steufle!

“Oil, cheap fruits, millstones, black pitch! Ah! mein lieber Freund what a load! I hardly believe they prefer thistles to grass, as some say, but they will subsist on one-third of what is required by a horse under all this labor.”

Jans looked at him ruefully and incredulous:

“Some may—some of them may—but I count Jack two horses at the least. He must have been eating all night, for he had enough put before him; and to-day, why, you’d think he hadn’t seen a corn-husk in a month. He ate apples and cauliflowers, and a peck of peas, and—and—”

The Frau von Steufle supplemented the catalogue of enormities.

“All my roses, thorns and all, and Katrina von Dyke’s beautiful tulips that she had just sold, and my tallest bouquet, the one that was engaged for the grand altar. O dear! what will they do? Then he chewed up a nice bonnet, and he overset the things! Dear me, so much mischief! Ah me!”

“Yes, yes,” said Jans, “it is well to say, ah me! Look at the bills that will come in to-morrow!”

“Truly,” said the herr in a tone of commiseration, “it is surprising. It was not to be expected! Yet we must look at the best of it. Horace says:

“I know not what that may mean, Mein Herr von Heine,” said Jans, “nor do I know the Herr Horace; but I wish, if he wants a donkey, he would take mine. I wish he had him.”

The herr was silenced.

Morning came, and with it a heavy bill to Jans von Steufle for damages done by a certain donkey, who did kick, bite, tear, trample on, and devour a long list of things belonging to a long list of persons.

Evening came, and with it came a lad, halter in hand, which he quietly knotted round Jackey’s neck, and led him away, looking as solemn and as amiable as when he first arrived.

---

“Our clock strikes when there is a change from hour to hour; but no hammer in the horologe of time peals through the universe when there is a change from era to era.”[33] So writes Mr. Carlyle in one of his powerful essays; and he is correct. As gradually and as silently as childhood passes into youth, and youth into manhood, and manhood again into old age, so does a nation and the world itself pass from one era into another. But if the signal of such a change is not heard sounding through the world, the moment of the transition is foreknown and has been preordained by God, under whose eye all agents throughout the universe are ever acting out their parts. Men are sometimes taken by surprise, but God never. Men are often mistaken in their calculations of the action of natural forces, but it cannot be so with God. A revolution brews like an angry storm, all in silence; and bursts; and a nation is shivered into fragments. Men are amazed; they have made a false reckoning; but the storm has brewed under the eye of God, and gathered its hidden forces, and burst at the very moment that God allowed it, and the havoc has been done up to the time which he has marked out. This is the expression of a great Catholic principle of history which it is well, especially in this age of godless theories, to keep constantly before our minds. We are about to endeavor to show how powerfully the truth of this great historical principle is brought out in that part of history to which our subject refers, for it is well said by Cesare Cantu in his Storia Universale,[34] “If ever history was manifested as a visible order of Providence, it was in these times.”

As we pass from the fourth into the fifth century, we come into a new era of the history of the church. The fourth age was one of mental strife; it was an age of great minds. The enemy of the church in the time of the persecutions had been brute force; now it was power of intellect. But God always has his champions ready. In the persecutions, they were the martyrs; in the fourth age, they were the Athanasiuses and the Ambroses. But in the fifth age the men of God’s choice are of another type. They are men out of the darkness, savages of the forest, wild dwellers amid the ice-mountains and the swamps. They have known no civilizing influences; they are nature’s children, and hardy as the rock and granite. They have reason, it is true; but it does not guide them on their strange, savage mission. They are all driven on by an instinct that is irresistible.

The words of Alaric are the expression of the feelings of all those wild warriors. As the Gothic leader is marching towards Rome at the head of his army, a solitary goes out from his grotto to arrest him in his course. “No,” replies Alaric, “a mysterious voice within me says: March on, go and sack Rome.” So we are told by Socrates[35] and Sozomen[36] in their histories. Thus, then, they go to their stupendous work of destruction. That work is characterized by blood, and smoke, and the crash of falling cities. The age is one of chaos. Never before since the world began were there such wild ruin and devastation; never such terrible levelling to the ground of human grandeur; never such savage smashing up of the monuments of luxury and worldly greatness. It would, indeed, be difficult to describe adequately what is so confused and so chaotic. When the storm-clouds have gathered and overshadowed us with darkness, when the lightning-fires flame through the sky and scathe the forest-trees, and the blinding raindrops drive in fury through the air, can we see any order in it all? Can we draw lines and mark out clearly the different elements of the storm? No. It is only when the storm is spent and the air becomes clear again that the eye can discern what havoc has been done. The giant oak has been cleft by the storm-spirit’s fiery sword; the lofty tower has been hurled down from its stately height; the rocks have been split, and the earth’s surface torn up, as by the bursting of some mighty engine of war. So it would be difficult to describe, with anything like clearness of method, the mighty storm which burst upon the Roman Empire in the fifth century. However long we pore over the pages of Paul Orosius or Salvian, we still rise from our study with bewildered brain. God lets loose his wild messengers of wrath, and they do their savage work in their own savage way. We can see no order in it—to our eye there is none. We hear the wailing cries of despair, and the frenzied howls of the conquering barbarians, and the loud re-echoing crashes of the falling empire. But it is only when the smoke has cleared off and the dust has subsided that we can form any idea of the ruin and devastation which have been accomplished. If our task, then, were mainly to draw an accurate and true picture, we should fail. But it is rather to give a view of a period of history from a Catholic philosophical standpoint: it is to show, as far as we can, the action of God on human affairs. It will be necessary, then, first to point out what the mission of the Roman Empire was—a mission to build up: and then the causes which prepared the way for the mission of the barbarians—a mission of sweeping destruction.

At the time when the Son of God came down upon earth, the Roman Empire was at the height of its splendor and power. Never in the history of the world had there been an empire in every way so wonderful. Never before had there been a power so mighty and all-embracing in its dominion. All that had been great and brilliant in the civilization of the empires of old had come down to Rome, and had undergone a boundless development there. This truth is powerfully put forth in the words of the first professor of the philosophy of history at the Catholic University of Ireland. We will quote his words: “The Empire of Augustus,” he says, “inherited the whole civilization of the ancient world. Whatever political and social knowledge, whatever moral or intellectual truth, whatever useful or elegant arts the enterprising race of Japheth had acquired, preserved, and accumulated in the long course of centuries since the beginning of history, had descended without a break to Rome, with the dominion of all the countries washed by the Mediterranean. For her the wisdom of Egypt and all the East had been stored up; for her Pythagoras and Thales, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and all the schools besides of Grecian philosophy suggested by these names, had thought; for her Zoroaster, as well as Solon and Lycurgus, legislated; for her Alexander conquered, the races which he subdued forming but a portion of her empire. Every city in the ears of whose youth the Poems of Homer were familiar as household words, owned her sway. Her magistrates, from the Northern Sea to the confines of Arabia, issued their decrees in the language of empire—the Latin tongue; while, as men of letters, they spoke and wrote in Greek. For her Carthage had risen, founded colonies, discovered distant coasts, set up a world-wide trade, and then fallen, leaving her the empire of Africa and the West, with the lessons of a long experience. Not only so, but likewise Spain, Gaul, and all the frontier provinces from the Alps to the mouth of the Danube, spent in her service their strength and skill; supplied her armies with their bravest youths; gave to her senate and her knights their choicest minds. The vigor of new, and the culture of long-polished, races were alike employed in the vast fabric of her power. In fact, every science and art, all human thought, experience, and discovery had poured their treasure in one stream into the bosom of that society which, after forty-four years of undisputed rule, Augustus had consolidated into a new system of government, and bequeathed to the charge of Tiberius.”[37]

This passage from Mr. Allies is like a brilliant flash of light thrown on Rome’s greatness; but yet it only gives us a glimpse. It would take us long to form to ourselves an adequate idea of this greatest of empires. We should have to make long journeys through her extensive provinces, measure her vast cities, march along her grand roads, and, after we had journeyed over all the civilized world of those days, we should still be within the circuit of the mighty empire. Her sway extended over the three then known continents: “Gaul and Spain, Britain and North Africa, Switzerland and the greater part of Austria, Turkey in Europe, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, formed but single limbs of her mighty body.”[38]

It is wonderful, again, to think of what Pliny calls the “immensa Romanæ pacis majestas.” The inconceivable majesty of Rome in the time of peace was, perhaps, more overpowering than anything else about her. Having a boundlessness of empire such as we have described, containing within her circuit a population, according to Gibbon, of 120,000,000, looking round from her throne of supreme authority, and claiming all as her own that was visible to the eye of civilization, she could stretch forth her sceptre over all this immeasurable area and over these countless peoples, and hold all in submission and peace. We cannot, then, be surprised that Rome ruled over the nations as a goddess; that divine power and majesty were believed to belong to her. Her sway was felt from the Rhine and the Danube to the deserts of Africa, from utmost Spain to the Euphrates, like an ubiquitous presence. Her eye of authority reached from one extremity of the world to the other, and she had her 340,000 men stationed on the frontiers, looking with watchful ken into the vast unknown solitudes beyond, and ever ready to hurl back the savage hordes of external foes, if perchance they stepped forward for a moment from their native darkness. Very few forces were needed to preserve internal order. That same Gaul which in 1860 required 626,000 armed men to preserve internal order and for external security in time of peace, had a garrison of only 1,200 men in the days of old Rome.[39] Well then may Pliny and the old Roman authors speak with such admiration of the “immensa Romanæ pacis majestas.” Nothing had ever been seen on the earth so imposing and so grand. No empire had ever existed with such a boundless sway, such wonderful internal organization, such a union of strength, such compactness of power, and such an awe-inspiring name. And at the time of Augustus there was no sign of decay or deterioration. Rome was, on the contrary, rising higher and higher in cultivation and refinement. We may here quote the words of Tertullian in his treatise De Anima; they give us a vivid and beautiful picture of the Roman Empire of his day. “The world itself,” he says, “is opened up, and becomes from day to day more civilized, and increases the sum of human enjoyment. Every place is reached, is become known, is full of business. Solitudes, famous of old, have changed their aspects under the richest cultivation. The plough has levelled forests, and the beasts that prey on man have given place to those that serve him. Corn waves on the sea-shore, rocks are opened out into roads; marshes are drained, cities are more numerous now than villages in former times. The island has lost its savageness, and the cliff its desolation. Houses spring up everywhere, and men to dwell in them. On all sides are government and life.” And so we might go on indefinitely, describing Rome’s power, and riches, and civilization, and never succeed in giving an idea equal to the great reality. Then, as we think of all this, we are led to ask ourselves, How is this mighty empire ever to fall? Other empires, we know, rose and fell, but at their highest point of greatness they could not be compared to the Empire of Rome. All that they had of might and majesty and durability Rome has, and immeasurably more. Men have not known how to qualify her power, nor how to designate her except by calling her “Eternal Rome.” Where, then, can another power come from that shall be able to cope with her? She looked as durable as the very firmament which God had set on immovable pillars, more lasting than the rock-built earth on which she had grown and developed for nearly a thousand years. Her existence was inconceivable before she began to be; her ceasing to exist was as inconceivable afterwards. It seemed as if to destroy her would be to split the earth itself on which she was based, or to shiver the universe, which she seemed to embrace in her mighty arms. Of her capital itself a great living writer says: “Look at the Palatine Hill, penetrated, traversed, cased with brick-work, till it appears a work of man, not of nature; run your eye along the cliffs from Ostia to Terracina, covered with the débris of masonry; gaze around the bay of Baiæ, whose rocks have been made to serve as the foundations and the walls of palaces; and in those mere remains, lasting to this day, you will have a type of the moral and political strength of the establishments of Rome. Think of the aqueducts making for the imperial city for miles across the plain; think of the straight roads stretching off again from that one centre to the ends of the earth; consider that vast territory round about it, strewn to this day with countless ruins; follow in your mind its suburbs, extending along its roads for as much, at least in some directions, as forty miles; and number up its continuous mass of population, amounting, as grave authors say, to almost six million; and answer the question, How was Rome ever to be got rid of? Why was it not to progress? Why was it not to progress for ever? Where was that ancient civilization to end?”[40] After looking at Rome with a human eye, this is the way we should speak; these are questions we should ask. To the human eye, Rome was based on everlasting foundations, and was to be immortal. There was no power—there could be no power sufficiently mighty to move her from her seat. But looking at her from the standpoint of the great Catholic principles of history, we shall use language very different. We shall say that Rome, however mighty and well based, will last no longer than serves the wise designs of God’s providence. He raised her up, as he has raised other empires, for a mission; when that mission is fulfilled, he will say to her, “Perish,” and she will wither away and gradually die, or, if so be his pleasure, she will be swept, as by the fury of a storm, from the face of the earth. It was the latter judgment that actually fell upon her, and we have to see in the course of this essay with what terrible reality it was carried out.

Mighty as Rome was, so was she intended for a mighty mission. She had subdued the world, and the world was at her feet. Her great highways cut through her immense empire in every direction. By these broad roads the riches of the provinces were carried to her bosom, and by these roads went forth her legions to guard the distant frontier. She had given her own language to the various races which she had bent under her sway, so that her word of command was understood and obeyed in every part of her wide empire. At this point, then, in the course of her history, God had determined to appear, in visible form, on the scene of human events. When the world was thus at peace, and under the sway of this mightiest of empires, the Prince of Peace came on earth. Circumstances never could have been more favorable for the establishment of his kingdom. It strikes us, then, here at once, that the evident mission of the Roman Empire was to prepare the way for Christianity. In spite of the opposition of pagan gods; in spite of sensual passions and human pride, the Crucified will have Rome, as has been long ago preordained, for the seat of his own wonderful empire. Thence his missionaries will go forth, like Rome’s own conquering legions, but unto still more glorious conquests than they. The broad Roman roads will rejoice more under the footsteps of these new conquerors than ever they did in days before under the tramp of warlike battalions returning booty-laden to the great capital. Everything is ready for the prosecution of these new conquests. The provinces are at peace and ready to receive these Heaven-sent messengers. Men seem to be waiting for some voice that shall be heard sounding through the world telling them to lay down their swords for ever, to forget their strifes, and that they are all brothers. Such a voice is now to be heard. The language of Rome has made itself universal in order that it may be the organ of a universal religion. When the first revelation was made, the language of the human race was one; so was it necessary that, when a new revelation was about to be given to men, they should be brought back again to unity of language, in order that revelation might be universally received, and be transmitted to future ages. The great Roman conquerors had no thought, whilst they went forth to conquest with their countless warriors, full of ideas of human glory and lust of booty, that they were the simple instruments of him who was ruling in the heavens, and whom they knew not. But so it was. And we see how God’s designs were carried out. We see, in course of time, the aged fisherman, from the Galilean Lake, wending his way toward the great Roman capital. As he walks along the Via Appia with his scrip and staff, he is the symbol of simplicity and human weakness. But mark you well that old way-worn form. There walks the first of the great race of Popes. He represents no contemptible power, that weak-looking wayfarer. He bears with him a secret source of strength which will give him courage against all obstacles. Though he looks so mean in his Jewish garb, yet he is a conqueror such as the world has not yet seen. He has no legends at his back, no surroundings of earthly might to make the world tremble before him. But he bears with him something mightier than Roman armies, and far more irresistible: it is the Cross of Jesus Christ. March on, old man, to the great city that is called the mistress of nations and omnipotent. Fear not; thou shalt subdue her with thy poor wooden cross, and plant in her midst thy everlasting throne. Yea, of a truth, the throne which that old man shall establish there shall be the first immovable throne which the world has ever seen. The throne of Cambyses has passed away; the throne of Alexander has crumbled to dust; and the throne of the Roman Cæsars will soon be buried in the wreck of barbarian invasion. But the throne of the fisherman will stand firm where he planted it, whilst everything around perishes and crumbles away. Nations and kings will mistake it for a human thing, and they will, in their blind rage, rush against it to overturn it; but they will dash themselves to pieces in the collision, and they will be seen lying around in scattered fragments, whilst that throne itself still remains immovable. So, then, the fisherman, conscious of his great mission, enters into the mighty city which God had been preparing for him those long ages. That was a solemn moment for the world, though the world knew it not. Other conquerors enter into the capitals of kingdoms with great pomp and a mighty array of armed men; and perhaps their hold upon the subdued cities is of short duration. The tide of human affairs quickly changes, and perhaps the conquerors themselves are in their turn the conquered and the captive. But this meek old man has no armed force to awe men into submission. He is the centre of no pageant. He walks on his way in silence. He has nothing but his staff and his scrip and his little wooden cross, which in reality is his sceptre. But he enters Rome to take a lasting possession of it. Not all the world in arms will ever again be able to make a permanent conquest of that city. A mystery will henceforth hang about it for ever. It will always look like a city of the past, and yet it will hold within it the life of all peoples and nations to come. By degrees, other kings shall leave it altogether to Peter and his successors, as if scared away by the mysterious presence of Christ’s vicar. And if, in the course of ages, men dream like Rienzi of the great days of ancient Rome, and long to see the old pagan prestige of the city brought back, and then come with their mailed hands and strike the mysterious power that God has established there, their mailed hands shall wither, and they will fall back stricken by Heaven in their turn, as Oza was in past days for his irreverence.

When, then, Peter had taken possession of his city, the rapid spread of Christianity began. Here was the throne of the head of the church established in the very centre of civilization and of the Western World. We cannot think that Romulus and his wild robber-followers had any profound design in fixing the site of their city on those seven hills. No; but God had. It is remarkable that Rome seems built to be even naturally and physically the centre of the world. “Nothing,” says Father Lacordaire, “is isolated in things; the body, the soul, divine grace, everything is united; all is harmonious. The body of man is not that of the irrational animal; the configuration of a country intended for one destiny is not the same as that of a country appointed to another destiny, and the general form of our globe is as full of reason as of mystery.”[41] The ancients seem to have had a traditional knowledge of this; hence it was that, when they built their cities, they made a deep and religious study of the spot which was chosen as the site. Looking, then, first at Italy, we see that God formed it for a great purpose. It is curious to remark how Asia, Africa, and Europe are united, as it were, together by the basin of the Mediterranean Sea, which also opens toward the West to allow the vessels of all nations to sail to the American continent. Into this central Mediterranean Sea, Italy shoots out its long length. On its northern side it is strongly guarded by ridges of mountains, and seems thus designed to be defended from Europe, whilst it is its heart. Almost in the centre of this Italian peninsula, more to the south than the north, and more westward than eastward, Rome is seated. She is built on seven hills, and by the borders of the Tiber, whose yellow waters roll sluggishly along between banks bare and uninteresting, and destitute of that green verdure which gives such a charm to the rivers of our own country. At a distance of six leagues eastward rises the dark line of the Apennines; looking westward, you may catch a view from some elevated spot of the bright-glancing waters of the Mediterranean; northward rises the isolated Soracte, towering up like a mighty giant, and seeming to stand as guardian of the plain. Directing your gaze southward, your eye falls on the pleasant hamlets of Castel-Gandolfo, Marino, Frascati, and Colonna.[42] In this centre of the world, then, made such by God when he formed the globe; in this centre, so wonderfully adapted for easy communication with the rest of the world, God has his central city built, and when the hour comes which he preordained in his wise Providence, he conducts the Fisherman-Pope there, and bids him there abide till the end of time. It is not likely, then, that any other city of the world, either Jerusalem or Constantinople, or any great capital yet to be built, can supplant Rome in the honor of being the city of the Popes, or that any other country will be in as true a sense the chosen country of God as Italy is. Italy was chosen, as we have seen, to be the heart of the world. Then God chose to have this great central capital from which the light of Christianity was to radiate to the four quarters of the globe. It would be easy to show what a glorious and conspicuous part she has acted in all ages through the church’s history. It is Italy which has given to the church almost the whole long line of Pontiffs who have filled the chair of St. Peter. From Italy have gone forth almost all the greatest missionaries of the world. St. Innocent says, in his Epistle to Decentius, that all the great founders of Christian churches in Gaul, Sicily, Spain, and Africa came from this favored county. To her also is Germany indebted for her first apostles; and, unless we credit the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, we must own that Christianity was first brought over into Britain by missionaries from Rome. And we are not surprised that Italy is so prolific in apostles and preachers. Nearest to the heart does the life-blood flow most quickly. Under the eye of Christ’s Vicar, and under the shadow of his presence, has the Christian life always been best realized. We cannot, then, wonder that the history of Christian Italy should furnish the highest and the most glorious pages of the history of the church. She is glorious in her countless martyrs, in her learned doctors, in her great founders of religious orders. With all this before us, we can understand the soul-stirring words of Luigi Tosti to the Italian clergy. “State sa,” he cries out, “Leviti dell’ Italiano chericato, abitatori della terra in cui la chiesa impresse sempre la prima orma dei suoi passi, quando procede all’ assunzione di una forma novella. Scalza, perseguitata, cruenta di martirio in Pietro: ricca, guistiziera, fulminatrice in Ildebrando; bella, copulatrice di due civiltà nel decimo Leone; e sempre in Italia.” We lose much of the fire and vigor of the original by translating these words into our own language, but yet we may, perhaps, venture to render them thus: “Arise, Levites of the Italian clergy, dwellers in that land on which the church always imprints her first foot-mark whenever she is about to take up a new form. Barefooted, persecuted, red with the blood of martyrdom in Peter; rich, rigid, hurling anathemas in Hildebrand; beautiful, uniting the two civilizations in the tenth Leo; and always in Italy.”[43]

Returning, then, to what we have already said regarding the Roman Empire, and seeing how wonderfully God has arranged all things for the establishment of his holy religion, we may form to ourselves an idea how rapidly the truths of Christianity would spread throughout the world. Now we see a nobler and higher use for those grand Roman roads than ever entered into the minds of those who designed and constructed them; now we perceive the advantage of that one noble Latin language being the established language of the empire; now we take in more perfectly the great design of God in laying so many nations at the feet of Rome, and inspiring them with such veneration for her very name. Thus favored on all sides, Christianity soon made its way into the cities and towns of the wide-spreading empire. We have been amazed as we have observed God working out in detail this grand scheme for the propagation of his religion. We have seen and wondered at the mighty power of that Word which was confided by Jesus Christ to the apostles and their successors. We have seen it captivating the rich and the poor alike, and baffling and finally humbling at its feet the proud philosophers themselves. We know how in a few years the Christians could be counted by thousands in Rome itself, and how they were found wherever the Roman legions had penetrated. From Rome, as from a great central sun, the light of truth shone far out in all directions, and Christian churches seemed to rise as by an invisible power, in all cities and towns near and far distant, and then shoot forth their beautiful brightness into the surrounding darkness. In Africa, as Alzog and Döllinger relate, the Christians soon outnumbered the pagans. And we know well, for there is no one who has not read them, the famous words of Tertullian, in his Apologetica: “We are but of yesterday, and already we fill your towns, your villages, your fortresses, your islands, your assemblies and your camps, the senate and the imperial court; we leave you nothing but the temples.” In studying the first ages of the church’s history, what glorious things do we witness, and how strongly is the conviction forced upon us that God is there ruling events and using men for his own great purposes! We see the Roman legions transforming themselves, as did the Thundering Legion, into so many phalanxes of conquering Christians, who rushed to victory under the impulse of the grand idea that they were thus subduing new countries to the rule of Christ.[44] We see those victorious legions carrying with them their laws, their customs, and their schools to the banks of the Rhine and the Danube, and there planting civilization and the faith of Christ. We wonder less at this when we think what noble Christian hearts were burning in the breasts of those brave men, and how oftentimes they laid down their lives as martyrs for Christ’s name. We can never forget the noble Theban legions dying at the foot of the Alps, thus giving by their heroic martyrdom the first lessons of Christian teaching to the people of Switzerland. In the camps of Rhætia, Noricum, and Vindelicia, again, we see Christian soldiers sowing the seeds of their holy religion on every side of them. How beautiful a thing did it appear to the devoted Ozanam to follow the footsteps of these early missionaries, to represent to himself the hymns of redemption rising heavenwards amidst the silence of the pagan forests, and to see in imagination the barbarians receiving the waters of baptism at the same fountains which their fathers adored![45] The more closely, then, we study the manner in which Christianity was propagated in the first ages, the more clearly does the mission of the Roman Empire stand out before our eyes. It becomes more and more evident, the longer we look at facts, that Rome’s conquering legions, her great far-reaching roads, her laws, and her one universal language were all made use of by God in a wonderful way, not only to prepare the way for, but also for the establishment of his great spiritual kingdom upon earth.

Thus far we have considered the Roman Empire as working for God, as aiding in a remarkable manner the propagation of Christianity. Thus viewed, the Roman Empire was on God’s side. But from another point of view we know how bitterly she opposed God’s work. Never was there such dire war made against God as during the three hundred years of the persecutions. We have now to glance at these years of blood and hatred, since they are a part of the explanation why in later times there came, by God’s sending, such a whirlwind of wrath on the mighty empire that it was shaken to its very foundations, and fell with a crash which made the whole universe tremble. We do not intend to dwell on the more minute details of these strange, sad years, but only to refer in a general way to the cruelty of the persecutors and the heroic conduct of the children of the cross in the presence of death.

Towards the end of the first seventy years of the Christian church, we see the imperial garden at Rome the scene of a strange festivity. The Roman people are there assembled on a dark night for an entertainment. The Emperor Nero is seen passing to and fro in his imperial carriage, followed by the senators in their costly equipages amidst the shouts and plaudits of the people. It is the opening of the first persecution. The long, shady avenues are lighted up by living torches—human beings covered over with burning pitch are serving as festal lamps. In the open squares of this garden we see women and children, belonging to some of the noblest families of Rome, clothed with the skins of wild beasts, and cast to hungry dogs, which devour them alive. Meanwhile Nero laughs with savage glee at the success of his new invention, and his myrmidons congratulate him on the ingenuity he has displayed in it. This is only a glimpse—but we need no more.

Later on we see that other monster Domitian, shut up in a dark chamber of his palace, holding with fiendish satisfaction the end of the chain which binds the limbs of those who are brought before him for trial. We see him oftentimes presiding in person and gloating with a wild beast’s gusto over the tortures inflicted on innocent Christians. In his reign, virtue became a crime, and the followers of Christ were put to death throughout the whole extent of the empire as being the declared enemies of the state. We do not wonder that Domitian acquired for himself the odious name of “the tyrant whom the universe detested,” as Suetonius tells us in his Life of this emperor. Neither can we wonder that the Roman people endeavored to blot out even his very name from their memory. Lactantius tells us, in his De Morte Persecutorum, that his statues were broken to pieces, and his inscriptions effaced from the proud monuments which his hands had raised.

As we pass on to Trajan and Adrian, we find no reason to be partial to their memories. Though no new edicts of persecution were published during their reign, yet Christians were put to death in great numbers throughout the empire. When we think of Trajan’s persecution, a grand, saintly figure always rises before our minds—it is St. Ignatius of Antioch, as he himself has sketched in striking outlines, in his famous Epistle to the Romans, the sublime ideal of the Christian martyr, and he realized with wonderful exactitude that ideal in his own person.

The student of church history well remembers the bold independence of the holy man as he stood before the emperor at Antioch; and the courageous joy with which he went to the amphitheatre to be the victim of wild beasts and a spectacle to the bloodthirsty Romans, is one of those glorious things which the church points to as characteristic of her great martyr-bishops.

Again, when we think of Adrian, we recall that symbol of his cruelty, the brazen bull, into which, when heated to red-heat, the faithful veteran Eustachius with his wife and family was cast. His name, too, brings back to our memory the brave widow Symphorosa and her seven sons. The cruel scene of torment is again enacted before our minds. We think how the poor mother was suspended aloft by the hair, all bruised and mangled as she was by hard lashes, whilst the bodies of her children were opened before her eyes with knives and iron hooks. Such facts as these are certainly not calculated to persuade us that Adrian’s character was one of mildness and clemency, as profane historians would have us believe. To this emperor belongs, as Tillemont tells us, the odious distinction of having profaned in the vilest manner those holy places which are so dear to Christian hearts. He defiled the holy Mount of Calvary by erecting thereon the sensual figure of Venus; he desecrated the sacred Cave at Bethlehem by setting up the statue of Adonis; and he placed, as though in jeering triumph, the image of Jupiter over the tomb of our blessed Saviour. Under the influence of Adrian’s zeal, paganism experienced a temporary revival; idolatry seemed to regain new life and vigor, and made a great effort to substitute the trophies of the devil for those of Jesus Christ. Adrian went so far as to erect temples in his own honor, which, as Döllinger says, have been falsely supposed by some to have been places of Christian worship. Adrian died at last a wretched prey to his crimes. As he writhed in agony and rotted away under the violence of a loathsome disease, he called a thousand times upon death to come to his deliverance. But death came slowly to the cruel torturer of Symphorosa and her sons.

As we pass rapidly on down these years of blood, our eye is again arrested, in the time of Marcus Aurelius, by the grand figure of glorious Polycarp, who rises then distinct and clear to our view, as he stands up bravely on his funeral pile above the heads of the Roman rabble, overspanned by his triumphal arch of fire. As the venerable martyr went to his trial, a voice from heaven spoke to him these words: “Courage, Polycarp, quit thyself like a brave man.” And so he did. No one can read without emotion the beautiful, calm answer which the old man gave to the proconsul who ordered him to “blaspheme against Christ.” “It is now eighty-six years,” the aged martyr replied, “that I have served him. How then can I blaspheme against my Lord and Saviour?” His noble words and his heroic death inspired courage in thousands of Christians who afterwards gave their lives for Christ. We learn, also, that during this persecution Christians who had been for some time detained in the prisons were massacred en masse, and that the Rhone flowed all red and ghastly with the blood which countless martyrs had shed on its banks. But the emperor-philosopher felt his impotence to destroy the ever-dying yet ever-multiplying race of Christians. “Vary their torments,” he writes, in his despair, to the governors of the provinces; and then we see the victims of his hatred crucified, burned, or cast to the wild beasts. Modern men of science may rank Marcus Aurelius with philosophers, but we are inclined to believe, with M. Leroy, that it was his infamous cruelty towards the Christians rather than true wisdom which has made them pass over in silence his shameless turpitudes and grant him this proud distinction.

During the raging persecution which Septimius Severus had enkindled against the Christians, we see St. Perpetua going boldly to death, bearing in her arms her new-born child. Her aged pagan father, kneeling in tears at her feet and begging her to sacrifice to the gods, could not deter her from advancing, with firm step and calm look, to meet the wild beasts of the circus. We see Felicitas, Saturninus, Revocatus, and others accompanying her through the savage crowd to the same fate. What a grand procession of heroes—something to look at till our tears flow and our hearts are set on fire! As they advance proudly along, the voice of Satur, one of their number, is heard giving forth those scathing words to the wild crowd that surrounded them: “Look well at us, that you may know us again at the judgment-day.”

Turning our eyes to Alexandria, we find that city a great centre of persecution at this time. There it was that the most intrepid defenders of religion, and the stern, penitential men of the Thebaid, were summoned to crown their noble lives by the heroism of martyrdom. And again is the blood of martyrs flowing like water in the streets of Lyons. St. Irenæus and twenty thousand Christians are immolated in honor of Christ’s name. The work of extermination is continued with unrelenting vigor under the gigantic son of the Thracian peasant. Maximin deals out his blows of death with the power and fury of a Cyclops. But the brave Christian hearts, braced up to noble deeds by the secret indwelling presence of their Lord, do not quail before his terrors. And in the midst of the bloody fray, we hear the soul-inspiring voice of great Origen, calling aloud to his brethren in these words: “Behold, generous athletes, your portion—a tribulation above all tribulations, but yet a hope above all hopes; for the Lord knows how to glorify, by his rewards, those who have thought little of this poor earthen vessel, which death so easily breaks to pieces. I should like to see you, when the combat is at hand, bounding with joy as did the apostles in their day, who rejoiced that they were found worthy to suffer outrages for the name of Jesus. Remember ye the words of Isaiah, ‘Fear not the reproach which comes from men, and let not yourselves be cast down by their contempt.’ Men laugh to-day, and to-morrow they are no more; already the eternal pit swallows them up for ever. When you shall be on the arena of combat, think with Paul that you are a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. If you triumph, Christians will applaud your courage; the heavenly spirits will rejoice at your victory. But if you yield, the powers of hell will shout for joy, and will come forth in myriads from their fiery abyss to meet you. Fight, then, valiantly, and, in imitation of Eleazar, leave behind you, as a remembrance of your death, a noble example of constancy and virtue.”[46] These noble words are worthy of the generous soul and the marvellously gifted mind of the great doctor of Alexandria. They sound forth with a soul-stirring, awakening power, like a trumpet-blast from heaven. And, no doubt, many a trembling heart was nerved into courageous daring by them; many a glorious victory was won under their influence which would otherwise have been lost. And it was in the next persecution under Decius that such powerful, encouraging words were needed. Never yet since the empire began to make bloody war against Christ’s followers had the Christians more need of strength and help; never had they more need than now to picture to themselves the depths of the fiery abyss, and the bright glories of God’s kingdom. Decius came to his bloody work with a resolution to succeed at any cost. His orders went abroad over the empire to all governors and public functionaries, that every conceivable torture was to be used in order to force the Christians to renounce their faith. It was not, then, prompt, quick death that was now the order of the day, but slow, cruel torture. We have a picture of the horrors of this persecution in the words of St. Gregory of Nyssa. “The magistrates,” he says, “suspended all cases, private or public, to apply themselves to the great, the important affair—the arrest and punishment of the faithful. The heated iron chains, the steel claws, the pyre, the sword, the beasts, all the instruments invented by the cruelty of man, lacerated, by night and by day, the bodies of martyrs; and each tormentor seemed to fear that he might not be as barbarous as his fellows. Neighbors, relatives, friends, heartlessly betrayed each other, and denounced Christians before the magistrates. The provinces were in consternation; families were decimated; cities became deserts; and the deserts were peopled. Soon the prisons were insufficient for the multitudes arrested for their faith, and most of the public edifices were converted into prisons.”[47] We find, also, St. Denis of Alexandria speaking in moving language of the persecution which he witnessed in his own city. He tells us that the numbers of the martyrs were past counting. No regard was paid to sex, age, or rank; men, women, children, and old men were tormented with equal cruelty. Every species of torture was employed, and every imaginable cruelty used to increase the horrors of death.[48] Again, at Smyrna, Antioch, Lampsacus, Toulouse, Nîmes, and Marseilles, martyrs died in thousands. In fact, wherever we turn our gaze, we see throughout the length and breadth of the empire the blood of Christians flowing.

During the reign of Valerian the monotonous work of death goes on, but, perhaps, as we advance, the destruction of Christians becomes more wholesale. At Utica the heads of one hundred and fifty followers of Christ fell at once, and at Cirta in Numidia we see an atrocious butchery taking place which lasts the greater part of a day. The martyrs are led into a valley with ranges of hills rising to a great height on both sides, as if to favor the spectacle. They are ranged in line, their eyes bandaged, along the river-side; and the executioner passes on from one to another, striking off their heads.[49] It was, perhaps, a glad sight for the savage idolaters who thronged the high hill-sides to witness the bloody slaughter, but it was a sublime spectacle, too, for the angels of heaven, as they looked down upon those brave soldiers of Christ, and saw them standing in calm, joyful silence by that African river-bank and receiving their bright martyrs’ crowns.

The ages of blood came to an end with the Diocletian persecution. It would be difficult to imagine that anything new in the way of torture could be invented at this date. Ingenuity and malice had already done their worst in the matter of inventions; but Diocletian and his associates brought with them a qualification in which they were surpassed by none of their predecessors, and that was an intense hatred for the Christian religion. Never had the rage and fury of persecutors been greater than was displayed by these “three ferocious wild beasts,” as Lactantius calls them; and never, consequently, did the blood of Christians flow more copiously. Hell was making its last great effort. Though we are accustomed, in traversing these centuries of terrible bloodshed, to read of cruelties which are almost beyond belief, yet we are startled into new horror when we find in this tenth persecution an entire town with its twelve or fifteen thousand inhabitants consumed by fire because it is a town of Christians. Each province has its peculiar species of torture. In Mesopotamia, it is fire; in Pontus, the wheel; in Syria, the gridiron; in Arabia, the hatchet; in Cappadocia, iron bars for breaking limbs; in Africa, hanging; the wooden horse in Gaul, and wild beasts at Rome.[50] Where, we ask, as we gaze over the wide-stretching empire, is not the blood of Christians flowing? Its voice rises heavenwards from the cliffs of Tangiers; it saturates the plains of Mauritania; it springs from wounded combatants on the shores of Tyr; but nowhere over the wide earth is it poured out for God’s glory without his taking count of it. The blood of martyrs will not cry to heaven in vain; God’s day of reckoning with the empire will surely come.

But we can dwell no longer on these ages of heroic sacrifice. Pascal has truly said that “the history of the rest of the Romans pales beside the history of the martyrs.” Whoever wishes to see the full force of this remark, let him read the Acts of the Martyrs, in the history of Eusebius, or the charming pages of Ruinart, or in the ponderous tomes of the Bollandists. Nowhere in Christian literature is there anything so simply and touchingly eloquent. The Acts of the Martyrs constitute a drama whose character is most sublime, and the interest of which is more than ravishing. In order to express our idea more perfectly, we will borrow the words of Mgr. Freppel. “If there be a drama,” he says, “each of whose acts bears a special character, whilst at the same time perfect unity is preserved, it is the Acts of the Martyrs. Here we have a bishop who puts to confusion a proconsul by the calm constancy of his faith; there we have a virgin who mingles with her answers that enthusiasm of love with which her heart is on fire. In another place, we have the Christian mother surrounded by her sons, who confess one after another the simple faith of their infancy, and pass from mouth to mouth the testimony of truth. Again, we have the Christian soldier, who reveres in Cæsar the majesty of power, but who places above all imperial honors the worship of the King of kings. In this magnificent epopee of martyrdom, to which each persecution adds a new song, the scene varies according to time and place; it is the fidelity of love and the grandeur of sacrifice which constitute its unity.”[51] It is there that we have put before us the most beautiful and the most noble characters that have ever done honor to the human race. We find nothing sordid, nothing selfish, nothing haughty in these heroes. They are meek and humble, yet brave and high-souled, and strikingly grand in the face of death. Profane history may ransack its annals, but it will never be able to show us characters so noble and so admirable. Their equals are not to be found in the Lives of Plutarch, nor in the pages of Eutropius. How true is it that the Catholic Church alone is the Mother of Heroes! The heroism of the martyrs was of that kind for which all ordinary theories fail to account. It gave strength to the tottering frames of venerable old men; it made timid virgins courageous in the presence of hideous racks; it spoke by the lisping tongues of frail infants. Let the profane historian point to any scene that can equal in simple grandeur the trial and death of the gentle, sweet St. Agnes, or in heroic endurance the painful, slow martyrdom of the beautiful Agatha, the glory of Sicilian virgins. Let him tell us of anything, either in profane fact or fable, which can equal in purity and strange boldness the beautiful history of Eulalia, the child-saint of twelve summers, whose name is celebrated in touching harmonies by Prudentius as the glory of Merida, the sweet Lusitanian city which stands on the flowery banks of the rapid Guadiana. Let him tell us of anything, even in the fancied facts of strangest romance, that is half as marvellous as the history of St. Cyr, the child-confessor and martyr of three years old, who, when he was taken up into the governor’s embrace to be coaxed into apostasy, lisped out his brave confession, “Christianus sum,” and was dashed to pieces on the steps of the tribunal. Will the profane historian speak of wonderful endurance? We invite him to look at the child Barallah, in his seventh year, who was suspended in the air and scourged before his mother’s eyes, and who, as his blood sprang out on all sides, and his little bones were stripped of their flesh, could be brave and unflinching whilst the rough executioners themselves shed tears of pity. As the blood flowed from his body, the little martyr cried out in the burning heat of his torments, “I am thirsty; give me a little water.” His brave mother reproved him, saying, “Soon, my son, thou wilt be at the source of living waters”; and she carried her child in her arms to the spot where he was to be beheaded, and as his head was severed from his body she received it into her veil. Tell us, profane historian, of great mothers like this. Tell us if your greatest heroes could be so invincible in the midst of suffering as the child-martyrs of the Catholic Church.

The three ages of martyrdom in the church’s history are emphatically the ages of great heroes. No brave man that ever went to death for any other cause went so boldly or was so calm and dignified as the Christian martyr in the presence of the executioner. Never before in the annals of the human race were men known to go to death rejoicing; never before were they seen to smile and be glad when brought in sight of the rack and the gibbet. This perfection of courage and sublime self-possession were seen every day among the martyrs of the church. This it was that amazed the frantic rabble which witnessed their sufferings; it was this that oftentimes enraged the Roman governors so far as to drive them to order the death-blow to be inflicted before the torturers had done their appointed work. The joy with which the martyrs gave their blood for Christ’s holy name is one of the problems which unchristian philosophers have never been able to solve. These so-called thinkers have never been able to comprehend the long, mysterious blood-shedding of those three hundred years. The Christian philosopher alone, with his great Catholic principles of history, can understand that blood-shedding is the mysterious law which characterizes in such a striking manner the great work of the Incarnation. As he gazes into the past, he sees the sacrificial blood flowing in every nation’s worship. Far back in the ages of the patriarchs, he can discern the red stream glistening; and as his eye still gazes, he sees it flowing ever onward, with typical significance, through the centuries, until it meets the God-man’s sacred blood pouring down from the Cross of Calvary. There the typical was merged in the real. He can see, again, how congruous it seems that, after the great sacrifice of the cross had been typified through the proceding ages by an ever-flowing stream of blood, and after Christ had poured out all his own blood on the hill of Calvary, and it had flowed down so copiously on the sinful world, his first followers and disciples should in their turn shed their blood for him. This abundant blood-shedding, this wondrous heroic self-sacrifice, was a testimony which honest men could not withstand, for, as Pascal says, “men believe witnesses who shed their blood.” To die willingly and joyfully for another was something of which the world had not yet heard. Jesus Christ, then, wished to show the mighty power of his doctrine. He would let the world see what wonders his cross could work in the souls of men. He wished to make it manifest to all men’s eyes what courage it could give in the presence of the most terrible racks; how it could so influence the weak and timid as to make them joyful when they were taken to die; how it could be a consolation and an ineffable sweetness in the midst of torments the most painful. All this he did manifest to the world in the most striking light. His martyrs were such characters as the world had not seen before; what was terrible to others was not so to them; when others would shriek with agony, they would smile with joy; when others would languish and faint under the lash and the knife, they could calmly remark with St. Eulalia as she looked at her wounds: “They write your name all over my body, sweet Jesus.” Truly, the cross planted amidst a very sea of blood, generously shed for the love of the Crucified, is the grand central point of all history, which men may look back at, and gaze upon with admiration and ravishment to the end of time.

But, returning to our former point of view, and looking upon these centuries of terrible blood-shedding as the fierce, furious war which the Roman Empire waged against God and his religion, we naturally ask ourselves a question, Where is the great God of the Christians whilst his children are being immolated to pagan savagery throughout the whole earth? Does he from his high heaven take note of what is done? Oh! he who sees the sparrow fall does not lose sight of his children, nor does his eye fail to see the sufferings which they endure for him. The voice of his martyrs rose heavenwards with a mighty cry during those three hundred years. It rose from the saturated floor of the Roman amphitheatre; it spoke with pleading eloquence from the depths of the mines of Numidia; it echoed incessantly in the ear of God from amid the solitudes of Pannonia. God was not at any time deaf to that cry. He was slow in his anger, but, then, on that account he was the more terrible. Whilst Nero was shedding the first Christian blood at Rome, God was silently gathering together his avenging armies in the forests of the north. It took him more than three hundred years to marshal his overwhelming warrior-hosts; but, O heavens! what a direful shaking of the universe when they did come!

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Every effort to elucidate what is obscure, or to provide a remedy for acknowledged evils, is a just title to that friendly acknowledgment which the writer of this little book bespeaks. It is a step in the direction of progress. But it is of the highest importance in the attempt to impart clear ideas upon any subject, that they should be so distinctly expressed as to leave no doubt concerning the identity of their subject. Thus, in treating of sound, it seems to us that the question first presented is this: What is sound? Our author says that it “receives its vitality or its life through the air, and without air sound loses it and becomes extinct.”

We object to this statement of the origin of sound, as both unsatisfactory and indistinct. It implies that sound is something born and floating in the air, and external to the mind perceiving. We fancy that, without an ear to hear, sound would not become extinct, but have no existence; and that the vitality of which our writer treats is not in or on the air, but in the mind itself. This exception to the supposed origin of the life of sound may not seem to affect the discussion of acoustics as far as the practical purpose of the architect is concerned; but we insist that neither the drumsticks nor the drum, nor the air within it or without, nor even all these at work, are sound, more than the telegraph wire and the electric current are the message sent from one operator to another.

That inaccuracy which we discover in our author’s use of terms, we find also in his quotations from others. For example: “The intensity of sound depends on the density of the air in which the sound is generated, and not on that of the air in which it is heard. A feeble sound becomes instantly louder as soon as the air becomes more dense. So you will always find, on great elevations in the atmosphere, the sound sensibly diminished in loudness. If two cannon are equally charged, and one fired at [from] the top of a high mountain, and the other in a valley, the one fired below, in the heavy air, may be heard above, while the one fired in the higher air will not be heard below; owing to its origin, the sound generated in the denser air is louder than that generated in the rarer. Peals of thunder are unable to penetrate the air to a distance commensurate with their intensity on account of the non-homogeneous character of the atmosphere which accompanies them; from the same cause, battles have raged and have been lost within a short distance of the reserves of the defeated army, while they were waiting for the sound of artillery to call them to the scene of action.”

It seems to us that the truth here expressed is not unmixed with error. In the very first sentence, we think that accuracy would require the suppression of the word not. The intensity of sound depends not only upon the density and elasticity of the air whose pulsation is an antecedent condition, but also upon the density and elasticity of the air through which the pulse is transmitted. While it is true that a pulse given to the denser column or stratum of air may be transmitted through a rarer medium with greater resultant force than if its origin and direction were reversed, it by no means follows that the intensity of sound is unaffected by the density of the air in which it is heard. We apprehend the truth to be that the pulse given to highly rarefied air is very feeble; and its secondary effect upon a denser and more elastic fluid, correspondingly slight; while the pulse from the denser air would be transmitted with greater—but still diminished—force, through the rarer atmosphere in which it reaches the ear. An absolute vacuum could not transmit the pulse given through a column or stratum of elastic fluid. A rarefied atmosphere could but transmit it with a force always varying with its own elasticity. And were it possible to preserve one’s consciousness within the exhausted receiver of an air-pump, we doubt if the most sensitive ear could be made to hear the roar of a cataract without.

“A feeble sound becomes instantly louder as soon as the air becomes more dense;” but not as loud as if the same initial pulse were immediately given to the denser air. In the case of two cannon equally charged, one of which is fired on the top of a mountain, and the other in a valley below it, to say that “owing to its origin, the sound generated in the denser air is louder than that generated in the rarer,” sounds much like saying it is because it is. If it be more than this, it is wrong. It is a clear case of non causa pro causa. The origin [of the pulse] of sound is in either case the same: the explosion of equal charges of gunpowder, in guns supposed to be of like material and equal size. The effects are not the same, because the effect of a force depends upon its transmission as well as upon its origin.

Does the atmosphere “accompany” peals of thunder? Or does this expression convey a distinct idea of the office of the atmosphere in the production of sound? We understand that the atmosphere receives the pulse or blow, and that its transmission to the ear is due to the elastic force of the intermediate air. It is not the homogeneousness of air, but its elasticity which transmits the pulse. And though, in architecture, the object sought is a uniformly elastic air throughout the auditorium, it does not follow, nor is it even desirable, that the maximum effect at a given point should be obtained by it.

“Science,” says our author, “teaches us that, whenever a shock or pressure of any sort is suddenly applied to material of any nature, whether metal, wood, gas, water, air, etc., it is immediately affected in all its parts, from the point of contact to the whole extent of the material, in displacing and replacing the particles of a determinate volume; and the velocity of the movement of the particles of the mass, created by the concussion of shocks or pressure, depends solely (?) upon its elasticity and density. Sound likewise causes motions (?) with every particle of the air, and as far as the motion reaches; so that each particle, with regard to that which lies immediately beyond it, is in a progress of rarefaction during return.”

What is meant by affecting a mass of matter “in all its parts,” by “displacing and replacing the particles of a determinate volume,” we do not precisely understand. That whatever causes motion does it “as far as the motion reaches,” is as unquestionable as any other identical proposition. But that the velocity of the movement of the particles, created by the concussion of shocks, pressure, upon an unconfined elastic fluid, depends solely upon its elasticity and density, we dispute. That pulses “are propagated from a trembling body all around in a spherical manner” may be true, if the air is on all sides equally elastic. Such might be the case with those produced by the vibrations of a bell, when the surrounding air is undisturbed by other causes, and is uniformly elastic at equal distances from it. It would not be strictly true if the initial pulse were made only in a certain direction. “Every impression made on a fluid is propagated every way throughout the fluid, whatever be the direction wherein it is made;” but it is not true that the impressions are equal at equal distances from the initial pulse, irrespective of its direction. This result would presuppose a fluid perfectly elastic; which we never have—and then we might, with equal truth, say that the impressions would be equal at all distances.

Everybody is familiar with the fact that the “transmission of sound,” the pulse which strikes upon the ear to produce the sensation, is affected by currents of air—the direction, force, and velocity of the wind—between the initial pulse and the hearer. How? and how much? directly or indirectly? are questions distinct from the fact itself. The distance through which guns are heard, as well as the loudness of their report, varies with the direction, force, and velocity of the wind; and, in very still air, with the aim of the gun itself, the direction of the initial pulse. For short distances, these differences may be so minute as to escape notice; just as the false proportions of a miniature picture are unobserved until the magnifier displays them. And for longer ranges, they are so small, in contrast with the magnitudes compared, as to seem rather like accidental than legitimate differences. But the difference is not the less real because the reality is less. Words spoken in a faint whisper are clearly heard by a listener immediately before the speaker, when quite inaudible or indistinct to one at an equal distance behind him.

The actual velocities of wind and sound differ so widely that the small fraction by which their relative velocity is denoted is held as proof that the propagation of sound—the pulse—through distances of a few yards or feet, is not affected by currents of air: that there are no differences in the “velocity of sound.” Yet the ear detects them as one of the small differences between discord and harmony in music; distinctness and confusion of speech. In music these differences may be blended by the prolonged intonation of vowel sounds; but in speech, whose distinct significance is due to consonants, “which cannot be sounded without the aid of a vowel,” these differences are fatally evident. The sharp edges of the vocal pulses, which give shape and meaning to vowel sounds, are destroyed alike by a husky voice and a puff of air. What remains is vox et præterea nihil.

It seems to us that some of the many failures in practical acoustics come from considering the air—the material involved—as perfectly elastic. From this it is inferred that sound is not affected by the direction of the initial pulse: that the direction and velocity of the effective pulse are not varied by currents and blasts of air. In short, that the slight inaccuracy of these assumptions will be the actual measurement of resultant error.

Were the purpose only to ascertain the acoustic properties of unadulterated air, varied experiments might eliminate the errors of anomalous results. But when the process is reversed, and we deduce effects from only one among concurrent and conflicting causes, theory is confounded by discordant facts. Theories of sound in purely elastic air might give results approximately realized in practice, if the actual pulses with which we are concerned were given by a flail; but are pregnant of error when the atmosphere is mixed with vicious vapors, and the pulse is a breath of air. Then, the assumption that “pulses of sound” proceed equally in all directions from the initial point, is simply false; and theories based upon it can only complicate the problems to be solved.

Water, as well as air, is a highly elastic fluid, and, if confined and subjected to pressure, the force applied is exerted on all sides of the confined volume. But the effect of a pulse or blow upon a surface of large extent varies with the direction of the force as well as with its power and velocity. We have seen fish swimming near the surface killed or paralyzed by a blow upon the water immediately over them. And we have seen the blow fail of its intended effect solely because it was misdirected. Perhaps the water in the latter case was not perfectly elastic! Neither is the air of churches and public halls, when their atmosphere has yielded a portion of its oxygen, and, in return, is charged with carbonic acid and moist vapors from the breath of crowded assemblies. Carbonic acid gas is heavier by one-half than atmospheric air. It does not, then, always rise toward the ceiling or roof, but remains in solution with impure exhalations; or else, condensed by contact with the colder walls, descends to poison the lower air and impair its elastic force—its power of transmitting the “pulse of sound” to the ear.

We have just come from one of our city churches, where we have had a striking example of this result. The church in question will accommodate (?) about two thousand people. Twenty-five hundred may be crowded into it. At the commencement of the sermon, the preacher’s voice was distinctly audible at points fifty or sixty feet from the pulpit, in spite of reflections of sound—air pulses—from galleries, wooden columns, and the arched ceiling and side-walls, of lath and plaster. Before it was ended, the exhalations of the breathing crowd had so filled the lower half of the “auditorium” that only vowel sounds could be distinguished; and the peroration seemed to consist of spasmodic utterances—scarcely sounds—of a, e, i, o, u. W and y had lost their affinity to vowels, and the rest of the alphabet were no longer consonants, for they were not heard at all.

The acoustic and sanitary problems are here identical—to find a method of preventing an accumulation of foul and inelastic vapors around the breathing and listening congregation, and to give, instead, wholesome air to their lungs, while enabling their ears to hear. And since these poisonous and inelastic gases are specifically heavier than atmospheric air, and must fall to the floor by their own weight, the problem is reduced to providing a practicable way for their escape, and guarding it against counter-currents which might obstruct the passage.

The introduction of warm air through openings in or near the floor will not readily produce uniformity of temperature within a room. The simplest experiment in proof of this is constantly made by multitudes of people, who, in crowded assemblies, find their heads surrounded by warm and moist vapors, reeking with offensive odors, while their feet are chilled, though near the “hot-air register.”

A library, whose walls were 12 feet high, and whose floor—18 by 15—contained 270 square feet, was constantly warmed by a “Latrobe heater,” placed in the chimney at one end of the room. The pot holding the coal was raised one foot above the level of the floor, which was covered by a woollen carpet. Immediately under the library was a kitchen, whose temperature was kept at about 72° F. Three thermometers were placed thus: No. 1, standing on the carpet near the centre of the library floor; No. 2, three feet, and No. 3, six feet, above it. At the expiration of half an hour, No. 1 indicated 62°; No. 2, 66°; and No. 3, 72°. Numbers 1 and 3 were then placed side by side with No. 2, three feet above the floor. At the expiration of fifteen minutes, all three indicated the same temperature of 66°. The low temperature of the inferior stratum of air was certainly not due to that of the room beneath it, for that was above 70°. It was only the heavier, colder air of the room itself, and of adjacent apartments warmed in the same way, slightly affected by contact with the stratum of warmer air above it.

Such slight differences of temperature in small apartments could not greatly affect the transmission of “the pulse of sound.” But in larger and loftier rooms, like churches and public halls, corresponding differences of temperature would, and do, produce air strata widely different in density and elasticity, and occasion serious acoustic defects. But the acoustic requirement is not satisfied by uniformly elastic air alone; for its pulses are reflected, and unity—distinctness—of sound, is lost in echoes or reverberations, from windows, columns, floors, and ceilings.

To know the difficulties to be encountered is always a step towards their alleviation; and these are sufficiently apparent throughout the little volume before us. They are, First, inelastic air—which cannot transmit its pulses to the ear. Second, strata and amorphous volumes, of unequal densities, which transmit the air-pulses with unequal force; so that they produce distinct sounds and indefinite murmurs at equal distances from the initial pulse. Third, reflecting surfaces—the floor, the ceiling, walls, columns, and furniture of the auditorium; which variously reflect the waves caused by air-pulses, and produce effects analogous to the eddies and whirlpools made by conflicting currents of running water.

The first and second of these difficulties are clearly within the province of “heat and ventilation;” and any means by which a constant tidal flow—not a current—of wholesome air, from floor to ceiling, may be produced, and by which the unwholesome, inelastic, heavier gases generated in crowded assemblies shall be prevented from accumulating but be forced to give place to the purer air, will practically solve the problem which they present.

The third difficulty is purely architectural. While surfaces reflect what are called pulses of sound, and so multiply their effects, they also create conflicting waves, which partially neutralize each other, or else strike the ear in irregular succession, to destroy the unity and harmony of sound. We cannot have buildings free from the inconveniences of walls, floors, and ceilings; but we can regulate and utilize surfaces to give aid in the transmission of air-pulses in one direction, and greatly diminish the reflecting power of those that would give back conflicting waves of air. A sounding-board or arch, whose lower surface should be a semi-paraboloid, so placed that a line drawn from its highest points, and parallel to its axis, would pierce the opposite wall four feet above the floor, while the axis itself should attain the same height at a distance of forty feet from the focus, would be an example of what we mean by utilizing surfaces to transmit air-pulses in one direction. The employment of an inelastic substance, like coarse felt, between the furring of a wall and the lathing, would undoubtedly tend to destroy its ability to reflect the “pulse of sound.” And hollow cast-iron columns, filled with clay, would hardly vibrate from a pulse of air.

In one of the Protestant churches of our city, we were shown a sounding-board, whose authors seemed to have halted between the acoustic merits of the paraboloid and the graceful shape of the pilgrim’s scallop-shell. We were told that “it helps the voice of the preacher.” There seemed to be too much of it for ornament, if its principle be wrong or inefficient, and too little for usefulness if right. Many attempts to improve the acoustic properties of halls designed for public lectures are failures through faulty execution of correct designs.

We once saw the working-plans of a lecture-room, where the line of intersection of the end wall with the floor of the stage or platform was a parabola, the arch above and behind the lecturer’s desk being a semi-paraboloid, springing from the wall at the height of the speaker’s voice. Thus, it was supposed that the pulses reflected from the walls and arch would proceed in parallel lines or “waves of sound,” because the initial pulse would always be given at the focus of the reflector.

The place of every joist in the cylindrical wall was carefully marked, and the dimensions and place of each rib of the paraboloidal arch accurately given. But in executing the design, the builder discovered a mistake!—“the floor of the stage would not be a true circular segment!” So he “corrected it”—with stunning effect upon the lecturer, and to the utter confusion of his audience. And the design was pronounced a failure.

In looking through the work before us, we almost unconsciously began to say: “This is nothing new; we have seen this, and more than this, before.” And in the same sense, we suppose it might as well be said that nothing is essentially new.

We have lately seen a notice of an invention for tracing patterns on glass by means of a jet of sand. Of course, it is nothing new. The wind has been doing the same trick with the sand of the sea-shore for ages. We have seen it long ago, and often. Doubtless, the same effect has been noticed by many others. A thought of the possible utility of a process whose result was seen may have flitted through many minds, and, like the outline of a passing cloud, have been forgotten as it passed. But honestly, we never thought of tracing lace patterns on glass by any such process. And while new combinations of well-known truths give new and useful results, we hope they may never cease to be made.

Mr. Saeltzer’s book is full of good hints. But that is not its chief merit. It recognizes the inseparable connection of sound and ventilation, and insists upon observance of the laws which govern them. As he is so evidently alive to the sanitary and acoustic defects in public buildings, we shall be disappointed if his little volume does not prove to be the preface to more specific, practical directions for their removal. He has put his finger upon the principal cause of failures. The laws of light, and heat, and sound are sufficiently understood to render their phenomena as controllable as time, space, and velocity in mechanics. The more intelligent efforts are therefore directed not to the discovery of new principles involved, but to utilize what knowledge we possess. And when the effort is made at the right point and in the right direction, we can heartily say, Go on and conquer. The world is full of wonderful monuments signalizing defeat. Let us see just one crowned with victory.

As yet, modern ecclesiastical architecture, especially, is but the imperfect reproduction of ancient and mediæval models. It is the heathen temple or the Gothic minster, or, more recently, an attempt to vary the monotony with Byzantine forms of old basilicas, without their grandeur. In decoration, we have crude, unmeaning imitations of Moorish tracery, weak in imagery of form and symbolism, without those glowing contrasts and harmonies of colors which are to architecture as rhythm to poetry of sound. We know the cause and history of this poverty in constructive and decorative art. History tells us how men became so spiritual, in their own conceit, that symbolism was held to be a sin; and how, by losing the sign, the thing signified was forgotten or denied. But it seems almost unaccountable that the world should be teeming with philosophers, to whom the laws of nature, even their least tangible phenomena, seem familiar as things of daily use, while great temples are so constructed that they who have ears to hear cannot hear.

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There are a great many rounds in the ladder of life, though simple youths have always fancied that a few gallant steps would take them to the summit of riches and power. Now, the top round of this ladder is not the presidency of any railroad or country, nor even the possession of renowned genius; for it oddly happens that when one sits down upon it, then, be he ever so high up in life, he has really begun to descend. Those who put velvet cushions to their particular rounds, and squat at ease with a view of blocking the rise of other good folks, do not know they are going down the other side of the ladder; but such is the fact. Many thrifty men have, in their own mind, gone far up its life-steps when, verily, they were descending them fast; and poor people without number have in all men’s eyes been travelling downward, though in truth they have journeyed higher by descent than others could by rising. So many slippery and delusive ways has this magical ladder that we may say it is as various as men’s minds. One may slip through its rungs out of the common way of ascent, and find himself going down when he ought to be going up; and vain toilers have ever fancied that they were mounting to the clouds when everybody else must have seen they were still at the same old rounds. Ambitious heroes have made the same mistake, if, indeed, the particular ladder which they have imagined to themselves has not itself been sliding down all the while they have been seeking vain glory by its steps.

The ladder of life is an infinite ladder. It is full of indirections to suit the abilities, and of attractions to please the tastes, of climbers. You may work at a forge, or sail the sea, or trade in money and merchandise, or hear operas, or write romances, or take part in politics, or wander over mountains, or go to church, while living thereon; but you must go up or go down, and either way will have some sort of climbing and toiling to do. Everywhere on the ladder is trouble, save in careful steps; and since human progress is so illusory, many honest persons rather fear to fall than aspire too eagerly, or felicitate themselves on precarious elevations. Prudence forbids us to say at what real round of the ladder are all our bankers, brokers, showmen, advertisers, and other millionaires; but it is certain that good little children, and simple citizens, and poor geniuses, and suffering men and women have gone higher up than the world knows. Indeed, they have gone quite out of sight, for there is a place on the great ladder which few men know, and where only saints can see the angels ascending and descending. Moreover, the ladder of life reaches from the pit to the stars, so that they who climb up or climb down, as it were, may see a firmament at either end: the good, their lights and joys; the evil, their chimeras and fire of darkness.

Obed, the young man, came to Father Isaac for his blessing, who thus said to him with few words: “Thou shalt have five sons, and to the first shall be given might, to the second cunning, to the third beauty, to the fourth knowledge, to the fifth patience, and to all in accord wisdom: but God giveth naught for nothing.” And as Father Isaac had promised, so was it fulfilled in prayer. The first of the sons of Obed became a mighty hunter; the second excelled in craft’s of all kinds; the third was of a comely figure, well to look upon; the fourth was learned in wise traditions; the fifth was patient, as none other of the family of Obed had been before him. Now, the five sons ill-agreed in their husbandry in the field of their fathers, and they went their several ways, some near, some far, to seek their fortunes, leaving the last and youngest to be the staff of their sire. Then poverty fell upon the house of Obed, and infirmity upon the limbs of the patient man; and, dying, his father blessed him, saying: “The Lord bless thy patience that it fail not.”

At this time, the fame of him that slew lions with his arms, and men with his right hand, was very great; but a devil entered into him, so that he did no work, and fell to great sloth, and men scorned him, and he lifted up his voice and cried: “Oh! that I had the cunning of my brother, that my hands might know their work; and the beauty of my brother, that maids should not turn from me; and the knowledge and patience of my brethren, that I might with wisdom bide my time.”

From all sides was he sought that had the gift of cunning; but being greedy in his craft, and seeking not knowledge, nor patience, he lost his cunning, and cried with a face in which there was no beauty: “Wisdom was not given me, nor patience, neither comeliness nor might, and so have I been abandoned to devices of misery.”

Rejoicing in his fair proportions, the third son of Obed danced before the daughters of his tribe, but, taken in the wiles of flattery and of pleasure, he became as a drunken man whose face is a warning, and whose life is a scandal, and he lamented: “Oh! that I had the cunning or patience or might of my brethren, then should none withstand me, or I be overthrown.”

And he to whom it was given to know much in many tongues, and to counsel with scholars, lost the kindly ways of men, seeking vain and dark sciences, till he exclaimed in the bitterness of his heart: “Knowledge is given me without wisdom: henceforth must I seek counsel in patience, and observe the prudence of my brethren.” And he set out for the house of his fathers.

Now had the infirm brother tilled the fields of his brethren, and taught the laborers thereof the arts of handiwork, and when the sons of Obed returned to the house of their sire, one after another, the first averred that he was strong, the second that he was cunning, the third that he was comely, the fourth that he had knowledge. But Father Isaac, the shepherd of his flock, hearing them, said: “Yea, for he hath one virtue which maketh many: the staff of thy brother hath devoured thy rods.”

“Wherefore, then, lov’d Isaac,” spake the eldest, “are we robbed of our gifts, and wit, and might, and beauty gone from us, leave us in sorrow of heart?”

“Told I not thy sire Obed,” said the patriarch, “that the Lord of lords gave naught for naught. Have ye earned your wages—have ye paid back your gifts? He that had might, why was he not taught of knowledge and invention, and, being skilled, why learned he not the patience of toil? He that had beauty, why sought he not counsel of strength and skill, that judgment might be his? He of knowledge, why sought he not help of patience and craft? Each had his virtue to purchase a share in the virtues of the rest, and to win gifts to his gift, that God might be praised. But only goodness bringeth fit wisdom, and wisdom dwelleth not in discord.”

Then the sons of Obed, answering, asked: “Why hath one virtue, as thou sayest, devoured ours?”

“For that thou hast thrown thine own to the dogs, my sons, and patience hath picked them up. He that suffereth much with patience winneth much with wisdom.”

“Even so, Father Isaac, but have we not, too, suffered?”

“Yea, my children, that so God may teach thee wisdom, and thy gifts abound tenfold. He that hath much, let him save it by bounty: he that hath little, let him increase it with patience: he that hath won, let him divide the victory. Share ye each other’s virtues, that each may possess the gifts of all.”

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These essays are here reprinted from the original editions of each, with only the addition of a few bracketed notes, and with some slight emendation of the wording of a few sentences of the text of a merely literary character. For many years, Dr. Newman has been a public man in the English theological world, so much so that, as he himself expressed it, “he is obliged to think aloud.” His writings have passed into the domain of English literature, and are public property. It is not now in his power to withdraw any portion of them, much as he might desire to do so. Under existing circumstances, he has judged it the better course—or, at least, the lesser evil—that they should be republished under his own eye, with such corrections in bracketed notes as will indicate what he would now correct or retract.

These two essays mark very distinctly two stages in the career through which, as he fully explains in his Apologia, Dr. Newman has passed.

The first one, written to defend the miracles recorded in the Holy Scriptures against the attacks of Hume, Gibbon, and other infidels, dates from 1825-26, while he was yet young, and a staunch Protestant, somewhat imbued with evangelical feelings, especially in the matter of Popery. Hence, while ably conducting the exposition and defence of the Scripture miracles, he omits no opportunity of hitting at the other miracles recorded to have occurred in the Catholic Church since the days of the apostles. In fact, he had, as he tells us elsewhere, read the work of Middleton on The Miracles of the Early Church, and had imbibed his spirit. He was guided also by Bishop Douglas, whose Criterion he often quotes.

Seventeen years of continuous study and mature thought produced their fruit in his clear and candid mind. In 1842-43, he wrote the second essay as a preface or introduction to a portion of Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History, then being published in an English translation.

Though still a Protestant, he had entirely changed his views on these ecclesiastical miracles. So much so, that this essay may be read as his own confutation of what he had said against them in his earlier essay. In the present volume, the bracketed foot-notes subjoined to that essay are, for the most part, mere references to the paragraphs of the second essay, in which the immature errors of the first are corrected. With the traditional prejudices of Protestantism then strong in him, he had looked on these ecclesiastical miracles as rivals, and as, in some way, antagonistic to the miracles of Scripture which he was upholding; and he had striven to find points of difference as well in their internal character as in the evidence needed to prove them. All this he fully meets in the second essay. In the second, third, and fourth chapters of it, treating of “The Antecedent Probability of Ecclesiastical Miracles,” of their internal character, and of the evidence in support of their credibility, he shows how the admission of Scripture miracles utterly does away with the ground taken by some against the possibility or probability of ecclesiastical miracles, how the two classes agree in their chief and essential characteristics, and how, in fact, they rather merge into one general class of events, under the moral order of divine Providence, established for man’s salvation—an order distinct from and superior to the physical order of nature. Nothing can be more lucid than his replies to the objections of Douglas, Warburton, Middleton, and other Protestant writers on this subject. He shows, with the utmost clearness, how all that they urge against these ecclesiastical miracles in the Catholic Church can be turned by unbelievers, with equal plausibility, and in the same sophistical spirit, against the miracles of the apostles themselves.

Dr. Newman, in both dissertations, frankly admits—what indeed cannot be denied—that not a few of the Scripture miracles are to be believed by us simply because they have been recorded by divinely inspired writers. We have no other knowledge of them, no other evidence of their having occurred, than that we read them on the inspired page. Such miracles are for us matters of faith, not proofs in evidence. They are themselves proved by Scripture. Whatever they were to those who witnessed the occurrence, they are not now for us historical evidence in support of divine revelation. Writing as a Protestant, Dr. Newman did not advert to another important truth lying further back which Protestant writers generally ignore. Our knowledge of the inspiration and divine authority of the Scriptures as we have them—distinguished, that is, from the numerous other gospels, acts, epistles, apocalypses, and other pretended sacred writings, more or less current among and accepted by the sectaries of the early Christian ages—depends entirely on the decision of the Catholic Church, made after the death of the apostles. Hence, the value of the Scripture testimony as to these miracles, and our duty to recognize and accept it as divinely inspired, and therefore unerring, depend, in the last analysis, on the divine authority and character of the Catholic Church—of that same church which has always claimed that God continues to work miracles within her fold. To say that she errs on this latter point leaves room, to say the least, for the imputation or the suspicion that she may have erred in the other decision likewise; and so those Scripture miracles which lack, as most of them do, other corroborative testimony, would stand without sufficient proof. On the contrary, for the ecclesiastical miracles, because they occurred nearer our own times, there might still remain, as in many cases there does remain, ample historical evidence from contemporary witnesses.

After devoting four chapters to a thorough discussion of the subject of ecclesiastical miracles in general, Dr. Newman proceeds, in the fifth and last chapter, to sum up and discuss the evidences we still have, in nine special cases, held to be miraculous interventions, in the early ages of the church. For a clear and orderly presentation of the evidence, the logical application of the principles established in the earlier chapters, and the happy and often overwhelming retorting of their own propositions on Douglas, Leslie, and other anti-Catholic writers, each one of these cases deserves and will amply repay a special study.

Here, as in his other volumes, Dr. Newman displays that intellectual acumen and that plain common sense which are as characteristic of his writings as is the singular mastery over the English language which has caused him to be recognized as one of the classical writers of our day.

Valuable as this volume is to the careful student for its erudition and acute reasoning, and for the aid it gives in the polemical controversies that rise from time to time with Protestants, it is chiefly valuable, in our eyes, as a well-reasoned and, as it were, practical refutation of that rationalistic or materialistic system of false philosophy which is taught in some of our colleges, and is being spread through the land, and which either leaves God out of sight altogether, or at most acknowledges him only as the Creator and founder of the physical order. Dr. Newman, in discussing what some would term the philosophy of miracles, sets forth strongly and clearly the necessity of recognizing and taking into account the moral order, established by God, equally with the physical order, and superior to it in rank. The world is under both. To leave either out is to take only a partial view. To exclude the moral order from our consideration is to err at the very commencement of our course, and our progress will be but from error to error. The action of both orders may, and often does, coincide—would have always coincided had not sin brought in jarring and confusion. But in point of fact, they are sometimes found in opposition. A wise and good sovereign dies immaturely, leaving his sceptre to a wicked and unscrupulous successor; a good father dies early in life, and his orphans are left to grow up in ignorance and vice; a just and benevolent man dies or is ruined, and debts are left unpaid, and a stream of charity fails at the fount. And if we class the evil actions of men as belonging to this physical order, and the rationalists refuse to class them otherwise, do they not present a continual opposition between the physical and the moral orders? And if the physical order so asserts itself, should we not reasonably look for corresponding, if not greater, manifestations in the moral order?

Divine revelation itself is a fact in the moral order entirely beyond and above the physical order of nature—by its nature, a miracle. It can be proved only by miracles; and miracles are the appropriate accompaniment of its continuance as a dispensation of divine Providence. Hence, in the church—the kingdom of heaven—in which God specially reigns and rules, and in which the moral order is endowed with supernatural force, and interworks with the physical order of nature, we should as readily and as reasonably look for miracles, as, if we may be allowed a trivial comparison, we should expect, when examining a piece of complicated machinery, to find that one set of wheels will control and at times arrest the ordinary action of other wheels, and interpose some result due to their own special action in the general series of results. Not to take account of the moral and supernatural order in God’s ruling the world is not to recognize the highest and greatest of his acts. The rationalist is like a deaf man before an exquisite musical clock. His eye may follow the hands as they move round the dial; but he has closed his ears to the sweet melodies that float around him.

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The Liquefaction of the Blood of St. Januarius, at Naples. An Historical and Critical Examination of the Miracle. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

This is a republication of several very able and interesting articles which have lately appeared on this subject in The Catholic World. Their appearance in the present form cannot but be welcomed by all well-disposed persons, whether they be desirous to ascertain the truth or anxious to have the means for defending it. Catholics, who are accustomed to hear this miracle, as well as the many others which have occurred in the church from the earliest times, coolly dismissed by their Protestant acquaintances as undoubted impostures or superstitions, will find in this account all that is needed to silence, if not to convince, their opponents, and to enable them to assert their own faith; while the fair and candid non-Catholic will find in it an array of facts and of reasoning which cannot fail to produce a deep impression on his mind, and which may serve as a basis for his conversion to the faith. But we would not advise anyone who is determined in any event to remain a Protestant or an infidel to have anything to do with it. The failure to find any false but plausible theory to account for certain phenomena which do not agree with one’s preconceived ideas sometimes leads to a very unpleasant and dangerous frame of mind—that in which it impugns the known truth. The book contains seventy-nine pages, and is illustrated by an engraving representing the celebrated reliquary in which the blood of the saint is contained. It is the only complete and exhaustive treatise on the subject in the English language.

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Americanisms: The English of the New World. By M. Schele De Vere, LL.D. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1872.

This elegantly printed book has a real and solid value. It shows how the English language has been enriched by additions from various sources in the New World, while, at the same time, it indicates the deterioration and corruption to which it has been exposed by knocking about in a new country. Both these topics are important, and we commend them to the careful attention of all who wish to acquire a true knowledge of the art of speaking and writing English. We object decidedly to the definition of A Hickory Catholic, on p. 58, as one who “is free from bigotry and asceticism.” This is a vulgar cant phrase, unworthy of a scholar. A hickory Catholic is a person who makes his principles bend to his passions and interests. He believes that he is bound to go to Mass on Sundays and to the Sacraments at Easter, but neglects to do so, because he is lazy, or fond of drinking too much, or licentious, or unwilling to make restitution, or stupidly careless about his soul; hoping to sneak into heaven by an old age or death-bed repentance. We have noticed nothing else worthy of censure in Professor De Vere’s book, and we can recommend it without hesitation as most valuable to all who are engaged in teaching the English language or endeavoring to learn it. It is, moreover, extremely amusing and entertaining, as well as instructive. Would that those who have the naming of places would study it attentively, and strictly follow its suggestions! Think of Ovid, Livy, Greece, Virgil, for names of villages in a country rich in glorious Indian names! Not content with imposing absurd or unmeaning or vulgar names on places which had none before, those which have already most tasteful and appropriate ones are frequently rebaptized. For instance, in Fairfield Co., Connecticut, Saugatuck has been changed to Southport, and Green’s Farms to Westport. What a name is New York for a great state and a great city! What a change from Lake St. Sacrament, or even Horicon to Lake George! We wish that some of those who have leisure and inclination to take up this matter in earnest would do so, and try to effect a reformation. We notice also, with satisfaction, the condemnation of that wretched interloper and vagabond of a word, donate. Humbly, and with tears in our eyes, we entreat of our venerable presidents of colleges and of all in literary authority to sentence and banish donate, or he will some fine day bring into college his still shabbier and more beggarly cousin, orate, and a whole troop of poor relations, who will locate themselves, for all coming time. English has been and can be enriched from new sources, as Professor De Vere amply proves; but let us watch carefully that it do not become corrupted and be not made vulgar.

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Zeal in the Work of the Ministry. By L’Abbé Dubois. London: J. C. Newby. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

It is encouraging to see books of this kind published in the English language. We know not how to make any extracts from this volume, for every page of it is filled with good sense, practical advice, and the true spirit of the priesthood. Could we realize our wishes, we would place in the hands of every priest and candidate preparing for ordination a copy. It would be most wholesome for daily spiritual reading and meditation. The author reveals his object in writing the book in the following passage in the preface, p. viii.:

One evidence that he has not been unsuccessful in attaining his object, is that this translation is made from the fifth French edition.

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The Book of Psalms. Translated from the Latin Vulgate. Being a Revised Edition of the Douay Version. London: Burns, Oates & Co. 16mo, pp. 193. New York: The Catholic Publication Society, 9 Warren Street.

“This English version of the Book of Psalms,” says the Most Rev. Dr. Manning in the preface, “may be regarded as one more of the many gifts bequeathed to us by my learned and lamented predecessor [Cardinal Wiseman]. One-half, at least, of the psalms were revised by his own hand.” Critics will regret that there is nothing to enable them to distinguish the precise psalms on which the illustrious cardinal brought his great Biblical learning and his pure English taste to the task of revision.

The term “Douay Version” in the title is used in the loose way which his eminence himself opposed, and the basis is not the Douay, but Dr. Challoner’s text.

This edition is made in a cheap popular form, and is intended to diffuse more generally among the faithful the psalms as a manual of prayer. They are the great storehouse from which the church draws her offices, and supply the pious with ejaculations, short and fervent prayers, which are of wonderful value. No greater boon has been added recently, for, though there is no lack of pocket Bibles, they are unhandy, and the type too small for those who wish the psalms alone.

To meet this want a new translation was issued in 1700, in a neat little volume, the version being by John Caryl, a friend of Pope, and faithful adherent of the Stuarts. His Psalms is a very uncommon work, though highly esteemed.

We had thus Gregory Martin’s version in the original Douay, Caryl’s, Bishop Challoner’s, and Archbishop Kenrick’s, and we have now a version due in part at least to Cardinal Wiseman. It is a little volume that will reward study among those who wish to compare the versions, and as a convenient, well-printed manual commends itself to the pious.

“In the Book of Psalms,” says his grace, Dr. Manning, “the Spirit of Praise himself has inscribed the notes and the words of thanksgiving to be learned here, and to be continued before the eternal throne. For this use and aid I commend the present volume to the piety of the faithful.”

Some common errors have, we see, been retained in this edition, which we hope to see corrected, such as the omission of “angry” before enemies in Ps. xvii. 48; “and,” in Ps. xliii. 12; “in form,” Ps. xliv. 4.

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A Journey around my Room. By Count Xavier de Maistre. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

This work, so full of the author’s delicate humor and sentimental reverie, is the very thing for a winter evening, when one feels like giving himself up to dream away a few hours.

The author was a younger brother of the perhaps better known Count Joseph de Maistre, French Ambassador at the Russian Court in the early part of this century, and one of the ablest defenders of the Papacy. He was the author of the famous Du Pape and the philosopher of the Soirees de St. Petersbourg. Count Joseph was likewise an intimate friend of Madame Swetchine’s, whose interesting life has been published by “The Catholic Publication Society,” and was instrumental in the conversion of that remarkable woman to the Catholic Church.

The De Maistres belonged to the haute noblesse de Savoy. Count Xavier, as well as his brothers, became an exile during the first French Revolution. He went to Russia, where he married. After an absence of twenty-five years he returned to his own country.

Lamartine addressed him one of his Harmonies Poëtiques after his return, saluting him thus:

He also calls Count Xavier the Sterne of Savoy, but without his affectation, and declares him equal to Rousseau, but without his declamatory style. “He is a familiar genie, a fireside talker, a cricket chirping on the rural hearth.”

The writings of Xavier de Maistre were among the favorite volumes that composed Eugénie de Guérin’s library, and we can imagine a certain sympathy in their intellectual natures. The Lépreux in particular appealed to her sympathetic nature, and the thought of meeting its author filled her with delight. When this meeting took place at Paris, Count Xavier had just lost his children, and was so depressed in consequence that it was not equal to her expectations.

But Lamartine speaks of seeing him a few years after, and describes him as “an old man of fourscore years, gracious in manner, and with no signs of decay of body or feebleness of mind. Airiness of sentiment, a mild sensibility, a half-serious, half-indulgent smile at human affairs, a tolerance—the result of his intelligence—of all human opinions: such was the man.

“His sonorous voice had a far-off sound like an echo of the past, and was well adapted to the reminiscenses of his previous life, which he loved to tell.

“His Leper of the City of Aosta is, in the literature of the heart, equal to Paul and Virginia; the Journey around my Room is only a pleasantry. The Leper is a tear, but a tear that flows for ever!”

Lamartine, in his Confidences, gives a pleasing picture of the De Maistre family, and likens a summer passed among its illustrious members in Savoy to the conversations of Boccaccio at his country-seat near Florence. They used to assemble beneath a clump of pines at the foot of Mont du Chat, overlooking the Arcadian valley of Chambery, so redolent of St. Francis de Sales, another genius not less poetical, and with no less delicacy of sentiment, but loftier than Xavier de Maistre; and sometimes they came together on a terrace over-arched by vine-hung elms before the Château de Servolex, the residence of Madame de Vigny, De Maistre’s sister.

Count Joseph de Maistre, like a modern Plato, was the centre of this family group. His stature was lofty, his features fine and manly, his forehead broad and high, and, crowning all, floated his thin, silvery hair. His mouth was indicative of the delicate humor that characterized the family. His brothers regarded him with great respect, and used to gather around him to listen to the experiences of his exile. Even the Canon de Maistre, afterwards Bishop of Aosta, who looked like a Socrates, with features that had been softened and sanctified by the influences of Christianity, would hasten to close the breviary he had been reading in a secluded alley, and join the group.

And now and then came sweet interludes of soft Scythian airs through the open window of the château, which Mademoiselle de Maistre, a pensive, talented girl, was playing on the piano.

The writings of Count Xavier de Maistre, though not at all dogmatic, belong to Catholic literature. They are among the sweet blossoms that have unfolded under the pure light of Catholic influences, and with a delicacy of aroma not to be found in the forced hot-house plants of the world. We love to inhale their odor, and would not be the last to welcome the appearance of The Journey around my Room.

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The History of Greece. By Professor Dr. Ernest Curtius. Translated by Adolphus William Ward, M.A. Vols. I. and II. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1871.

Dr. Ernest Curtius is impartial, and metes out strict justice to all whom he summons to the tribunal of history. Neither Spartan valor nor Athenian grace influences his judgment. He passes from the Eurotas Valley to the Acropolis without leaving in his train a single notion which would weigh in his decision on the men and things in Attica. And this impartiality is a rare gift in the writers of Grecian history, be they ancient or modern. Almost all take sides. Mitford holds the Spartan oligarchy to be the height of perfection in government, and makes it the standard by which the democracy of Athens is to be judged. The result is that in his pages the fair features of Athens are caricatured and distorted, while the stern features of Sparta are so flattered that not even Lycurgus would recognize them. On the other hand, Thirlwall, and many more besides, have not been able to escape the fascination of Athenian wit and elegance, and throughout their histories Athens is unduly favored. Dr. Curtius judges not of governments and institutions in the abstract, but he judges of them with reference to the peoples for whom they were intended, and thus has avoided the error into which so many have fallen.

There are in the volumes before us two points which are particularly well handled. These are the origin of the Greek people, and the development of their religion. Mr. Mommsen, in his History of Rome, absurdly tells us that the ancient peoples of Italy were indigenous to the soil. This he does, doubtless, either to show his independence of revelation, or to save himself the trouble of further investigation, perhaps with both ends in view. Dr. Curtius is neither so disregardless of truth nor so saving of labor. By the aid of ethnography, philology, and historical research, he demonstrates that the Greeks and the Latins also belonged to the great Aryan family. He traces them back to their old homes in the Phrygian highlands, where, before their migrations westward, they occupied positions adjoining. The Latin tribes were the first to leave Asia Minor, then followed the Greeks in successive waves of migration through the Hellespont and Propontis.

The learned professor discusses at length the origin and development of the Greek Pantheon, and the conclusion arrived at is most satisfactory. He proves that the Greek tribes in their primitive simplicity worshipped the one only God—“The Zeus, who dwelt in light inaccessible.” Gradually the primitive traditions began to wane, and the “Zeus who dwelt in light inaccessible” became the “Zeus who dwelt in sacred light over the oak-tops of the Lycæan mountain,” still formless and unapproachable. But this Zeus was too near the earth to remain long formless and unapproachable. His worshippers soon began to approach him under different names, then under different forms, and, finally, they divided him up into the different gods of their Pantheon, so that the first and best known became the “Unknown God.”

We have now pointed out some of the excellences of Dr. Curtius’ history, but it has its defects, as every human work has, and one of these we deem it our duty to point out. Its chief defect is its diffuseness; for diffuse it really is in many places. And because it is diffuse it is often monotonous and even prosaic. On the whole, however, the style is good, and abounds in elegant passages, which are well rendered by the translator. This defect is indeed the only one which justifies us in doubting whether the History will become popular, and receive the appreciation which it deserves.

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Fashion: The Power that Influences the World. By George P. Fox. New York: The American News Company. 1872.

The author of this work seems to have been “born with a divine idea of cloth.” According to him, fashionable dress is a preservative of morals. Easy and graceful garments are incompatible with deeds of violence. No one who ever honored the author with his patronage was ever convicted of a crime. We are as morally bound to offer a pleasing exterior to our friends as a smiling face. In Carlyle’s language, “Man’s earthly interests (to say the least) are all hooked and buttoned together by clothes. Society is founded on cloth.” The pen was once considered mightier than the sword, but shears are now in the ascendency. “Dress makes the man, and want of it the fellow.” Dress is a duty we owe ourselves, and inattention to it indicates a want of respect to others. Man’s chief duty is to sacrifice to the graces. Our author is the high-priest of fashion. He makes dress almost a sacrament—as Hazlitt says, “an outward and visible sign of the inward harmony of the soul.” Non possumus does not seem to be in his code. There is no physical defect he cannot remedy. Witness the unhappy man in New York, with a long neck, low shoulders, and sallow complexion, at last able to hold up his head in society; the unfortunate British nobleman, whose attenuated and shapeless limbs are made to correspond more fully to our idea of sturdy John Bull; and President Fillmore’s life-long ambition for a pair of well-fitting pantaloons at length realized. Bow legs and knock-knees are all remedied. The old proverb of the Béarnais is verified: “Habillez un bâton, il aura l’air d’un baron.” A book that brings hope to all is a public benefaction. No Jonathan need despair of cutting a figure in the world after this, and he should not. Dress, its color, style, and fit, are all matters of momentous interest (being so interwoven with our morals), as well as manners and the carriage of the body, which are not overlooked in this volume. As to the latter, everybody knows a stoop in the shoulders sinks a man in public and private estimation.

The Saturday Review calls our author a Transcendental Tailor, a title he evidently merits. The devise he assumed when he entered the lists was Faire sans dire, which Daniel Webster did him the honor of quoting in an address before the New York Historical Society, as well as wearing his transcendent—we almost said transcendental—garments, both living and dead, for the blue coat with a velvet collar and gold-wove cloth buttons that shrouded the immortal statesman are almost a matter of history, and have been sworn to in the most solemn manner before the mayor of New York.

But to go back to our devise. The author forgot it when he began to write. He must now make it: Faire et dire. However, he handles the pen almost as skilfully as the shears, and throws quite a glamour of poetry over the most common duties of the toilet. He ought to be a capital hand at a hem-a-stitch, as Rogers said of Béranger. He gives some excellent advice about dress (gentlemen’s, of course) and etiquette, but some of the chapters seem rather foreign to the subject. We cordially recommend the book to Mr. and Mrs. Veneering as they endeavor to adjust themselves at the glass of fashion, and to whosoever is entirely wrapped up in cloth.

We have been particularly interested in the published correspondence at the end of the volume of the various dignitaries in the political and literary world who sought the efficient co-operation of our Prince of Tailors. If dress is really an “emanation” of the soul (as well as from Mr. Fox’s “emporium”), and indicative of character, it is well to know that Mr. Fillmore’s ill-fitting garments might be owing to a judgment awry; the attenuated limbs of the British minister, which nothing had been able to hide, to a paucity of understanding; and the long neck of our New York friend, which had to be muffled, to an overreaching disposition. Who can tell?

Dress is certainly of the utmost importance to those who are conscious of no other recommendation. Diderot saw no difference between a man and his dog but the dress, and it would sometimes be hard to give a person his proper grade in the animal world without reference to his material garments, for it really does not do in our social world to follow Carlyle’s advice to look fixedly on clothes till they became transparent. It would lead to a fearful revolution in society.

Still, there are some, like Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, who “go in neck and crop for fashion,” who can bear such a clairvoyant eye. Mrs. Boffin was “a Highflier for Fashion,” but we entirely overlook that low evening dress of black sable which she does credit to (“her make is such”), in consideration of her large heart, and the affectionate readiness to salute her lord to the great detriment of her great black velvet hat and plumes.

Our author is really a phœnix sprung from the ashes of Beau Brummel.

As we read, we share the sensation he produced at the Presidential levée at Washington, clad in a blue coat out of the very web that furnished Mr. Webster’s last suit. The meeting of the President of the United States of America, serenely conscious of his new clothes, and the President of Fashion, who so successfully cut them, reminds us of another meeting there which Irving compared to “two kings of Brentford smelling at one rose.”

We cannot close without expressing our gratitude in particular for the fine suit of black our Prince of Tailors presented Father Mathew of blessed and abstemious memory.

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The Book of the Foundations of St. Teresa of Jesus, of the Order of Our Lady of Carmel. Written by herself. Translated from the Spanish by David Lewis. London: Burns, Oates & Co. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

This volume contains, besides the work indicated in the title-page, Annals of the Saint’s Life, by Don Vicente de La Fuente, The Carmelite Rule and Constitutions, and The Visitation of Nunneries, and Maxims of St. Teresa herself. The principal work is also more complete than any previous edition in English.

Those who are familiar with the wonderful story of St. Teresa’s history will need no assurance that the spirit which animated her life also pervades her works. Indeed, the two are almost inseparable, her writings evidently being a faithful transcript of her whole history. Notwithstanding the signal favors she received from heaven, she seemed always oppressed with the idea of her own unworthiness. The prologue to the Foundations furnishes many valuable lessons to religious as well as those whose sphere of duty lies in the world. St. Teresa knew how to exert the utmost zeal and energy in the service of religion, with entire submission to her ecclesiastical superiors. The case of St. Teresa, moreover, is evidence of the way the church honors real reformers—by proposing them to the veneration of the faithful as canonized saints. As an indication of her humility, even the main work in this volume was undertaken, not to gratify any personal feeling, but in obedience to the command of her confessor. It contains a history of the religious houses, male and female, she established. In the face of great difficulties and discouragements, she persevered in her purpose, until the reform was recognized at Rome, and the Carmelite Order was divided into two branches, one under the milder observance, and her own under the stricter or primitive observance.

The lives of the saints present marvels exceeding in interest the dreams of poetry and romance, and we cannot do better than commend to those who jeopardize their innocence in the perusal of sensational figments of the imagination, to betake themselves to the more edifying and truly interesting lives and writings of the saints.

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Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects. By Henry Edward, Archbishop of Westminster. Vol. I. American Edition. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

Each new volume from Archbishop Manning is a precious addition to Catholic literature. The present collection of sermons has all the usual characteristics of the author, both as a preacher and as a writer. Great as many other sermons undoubtedly are, those of Dr. Manning possess a charm all their own. The oldest theme is never stale in his hands. His logic is always of the keenest, while his style is as clear and musical as a brook.

Of the sermons before us, we commend two especially. The first, on “The Church, the Spirit, and the Word”; and the sixth, “The Blessed Sacrament the Centre of Immutable Truth.” The thirteenth will also be found of peculiar interest for American readers. It was preached in St. Joseph’s College, Nov. 17, 1871. Its subject: “The Negro Mission.”

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An Essay on the Druids, the Ancient Churches, and the Round Towers of Ireland. By the Rev. Richard Smiddy. Dublin: W. B. Kelly. 1871. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

This is a very neat little publication, well-bound and handsomely printed. Those who have not leisure or opportunity to read Petrie’s elaborate book on the Round Towers or the works issued by the Archæological Society will find in Mr. Smiddy’s essay much valuable information regarding Irish antiquities, though in some of his views and theories he differs materially from preceding writers on the same class of subjects.

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Salad for the Solitary and the Social. By an Epicure. New York: De Witt C. Lent & Co. 8vo, pp. 526. 1872.

The author of this book, if author in the proper sense he may be called, has acted discreetly in withholding his name from the public, for, though a work not specially opposed to morality or truth, it is as little likely to increase the fame of the compiler or secure the approbation of the judicious as any of the many modern publications that teem from our metropolitan press, and depend almost altogether on the beauty of their illustrations and mechanical taste for public patronage. We have a very high appreciation of the shrewdness and foresight of publishers as a class, but upon a cursory glance at the appearance of the book, and on a comparison of it with its homogeneous contents, we were inclined to think the firm of Lent & Co. was an exception until we noticed in a brief preface that thirty thousand copies of the original, of which the book before us is said to be an enlarged and improved edition, have been sold. This may or may not be a piece of exaggeration on the part of the publishers: if it be not, then we are sorry for the lack of sense and judgment on the part of so many of our fellow-beings. The work is compiled, not written, pretty much as it is said “leading articles” in remote Western journals are produced, by the efficient aid of the scissors and mucilage, and its general contents would be more in place in the columns of those second or third hand journals, under the stereotyped headings of “Facts and Fancies” or “Mirth and Fun,” than in the imposing garb of a well-bound book. From cover to cover it is nothing but a compilation of old stories, thread-bare jokes, worn-out puns, stupid epitaphs, and references to historical and literary personages which are neither new nor original, and scarcely apropos to the subject they are intended to make interesting. There is some attempt at arrangement in the display of this useless learning, and here and there a pleasant little bit of chat, but the whole composition is so disjointed and puerile that the effect produced on the mind of the reader is anything but pleasurable. There is no discretion apparent in the selection of extracts and quotations, and no dignity in the tone of the entire work that would entitle it to the praise of even comparatively illiterate persons, though the generally good character of the engravings and its attractive exterior may secure some purchasers. Besides, its title gives no idea of its contents, and we hope not to be considered unkind when we offer the suggestion that, if the author should ever inflict another edition on a patient public, he will change it. Hash would be much more expressive and germain to the matter, salad being much too palatable a dish to be treated with such contumely.

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A Remembrance of the Living to Pray for the Dead. By James Mumford, Priest of the Society of Jesus. Reprinted from the Edition of 1661. With Appendix on the Heroic Act. By John Morris, Priest of the same Society. London: Burns, Oates & Co. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1871.

Those who have read Father Mumford’s Catholic Scripturist or Question of Questions will need no assurance from us of the excellence of the present treatise. Those who are yet strangers to this old writer will find a peculiar charm in the work, if, at least, they have any liking for terseness, directness, and unction. Father Mumford is somewhat quaint; but that only adds to his style. Good works on Purgatory are not plentiful. This is one of the very best. It particularly inculcates, too, a duty we seldom appreciate sufficiently.

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Little Prudy’s Flyaway Series. Aunt Madge’s Story. By Sophie May, author of “Little Prudy’s Stories,” “Dotty Dimple Stories,” etc. Illustrated. Boston: Lee & Shepard. New York: Lee, Shepard & Dillingham. 1872.

This is a delightful little story for children, but this is saying nothing new, for Sophie May’s stories always are. As Aunt Madge was not one of the “tremendous good” children, her story will, perhaps, have a special interest for the little ones.

P. F. Cunningham has in press and will soon publish Marion Howard, a story of much interest.

BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

From Charles Scribner & Co., New York: A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures. By J. P. Lange, D.D. Translated, enlarged, and edited by P. Schaff, D.D. Vol. IV. Containing Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. 8vo, pp. iv., 188, 261, 53.—Lectures on Science and Religion. By Max Müller, M.A. 12mo, pp. iv., 300.—Systematic Theology. By C. Hodge, D.D. Vol. II. 8vo, pp. 732.

From Carlton & Lanahan, New York: Three Score Years and Beyond. By Rev. W. H. De Puy, D.D. 8vo, pp. 512.—Jesus Christ. By E. de Pressensé, D.D. 12mo, pp. 312.—Pillars of the Temple. By Rev. W. C. Smith. 12mo, pp. 366.—Light on the Pathway of Holiness. By Rev. L. D. McCabe, D.D. 18mo, pp. 114.—The Land of the Veda. By Rev. W. Butler, D.D.

From D. Appleton & Co., New York: Ballads of Good Deeds. By H. Abbey. 18mo, pp. 129.

From P. Donahoe, Boston: The Fourfold Sovereignty of God. By Henry Edward, Archbishop of Westminster. 18mo, pp. 272.—The Council of the Vatican. By Thomas, Canon Pope. 12mo, pp. xviii., 340.

From Kelly, Piet & Co., Baltimore: The Martyrs of the Coliseum. By Rev. A. J. O’Reilly. 12mo, pp. viii., 396.

From J. R. Osgood & Co., Boston: The Divine Tragedy. By H. W. Longfellow. 18mo, pp. iv., 150.

From Lee & Shepard, Boston: Half Truths and the Truth. By Rev. J. M. Manning, D.D. 12mo, pp. xii., 398.

From the Author: Notes on Historical Evidence in Reference to Adverse Theories of the Origin and Nature of the Government of the United States. By J. B. Dillon. 8vo, pp. x., 141.

From D. &. J. Sadlier & Co., New York: The Devil. By Father Delaporte. 18mo, pp. viii., 202.

From Kreuzer Bros., Baltimore: Triumph of the Blessed Sacrament. By Rev. M. Müller, C.SS.R. 18mo, pp. 146.—The Catholic Priest. By Rev. M. Müller, C.SS.R. 18mo, pp. 163.

From G. Routledge & Sons, New York: The Moral of Accidents. By the late Rev. T. T. Lynch. 12mo, pp. xviii., 415.—Una and Her Paupers.—Memorials of Agnes E. Jones. By her Sister. With an Introduction by Florence Nightingale. First American Edition. With an Introductory Preface by Rev. H. W. Beecher. 12mo, pp. xlvi., 497.

From P. O’Shea, New York: Lectures on the Church. By Rev. D. A. Merrick, S.J. 12mo, pp. iv., 263.

From J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia: Wear and Tear. By S. W. Mitchell. 18mo, paper, pp. 59.

From R. Coddington, New York: The Church and the World. By Rev. T. S. Preston, D.D. Paper, pp. 30.

From Roberts Brothers, Boston: The To-Morrow of Death. By Louis Figuier. 12mo, pp. viii., 395.

From C. C. Chatfield & Co., New Haven: Logical Praxis. By H. N. Day. 12mo, pp. viii., 148.

Proceedings of the Third Annual Session of the American Philological Association, held at New Haven, Conn., July, 1871. [The Third Annual Meeting of the Association will be held in Providence, R. I., July 24, 1872, at 3 P.M.]

We are under obligations to the Author for a copy of Evolution and its Consequences. (Reprinted from the Contemporary Review.) A Reply to Prof. Huxley. By St. Geo. Mivart, F.R.S.

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THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

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VOL. XV., No. 86.—MAY, 1872.

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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

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If we look at one aspect of Christian society, we cannot help being overwhelmed with astonishment at the number and the greatness of the generous deeds and sacrifices which crowd and adorn its history. The noble, the powerful, the highly gifted, the wealthy, have lavished their possessions, their labors, their lives, for their fellow-men, in such a way as really to merit our wonder when we think of the weakness of human nature and the rarity of disinterested philanthropy among those who are not Christians. But, if we look at another aspect of the same, the amount of meanness, selfishness, and baseness which meets our view makes us wonder that Christian faith has, after all, produced so little really rare and rich fruit in the soil of human nature. The little which we do find is so perfect that we are astonished not to see more of the same quality produced by the same causes and influences. When we think of the motive which men have for making sacrifices, and of the example which has been given them—that is, that the Lord of heaven has died on the cross for mankind—the conduct of those Christians who have followed that example by the practice of heroic perfection seems merely the fulfilment of a plain, Christian duty of gratitude. On the other hand, the conduct of those Christians who live a selfish and unworthy life appears not only in a mean and ignoble, but even in an atrocious, light. That we belong absolutely to God, that we have been redeemed by the blood of Christ, that we have only one lawful end to our life on the earth, which is to glorify God and merit to be glorified by him hereafter, are first truths which no Catholic ever thinks of denying or doubting. These truths caused some of the saints to renounce literally everything for Jesus Christ, and others to administer the power and wealth which they retained, exclusively for the glory of God and the good of their fellow-men. The saints are only examples of the highest degrees of those virtues of the same kind which constitute the character of all really good Christians. Every rich man, therefore, who wishes to be a good Christian, must have the same devotion to the faith, to the church, to the cause of God, of Christ, and of the Vicar of Christ on earth, which the saints had. Devotion to the church sums up the whole, because it includes or implies everything. This devotion must precede, direct, and dominate over every intention, motive, object, and undertaking of life. The obligation to it lies in the very nature of baptism. The baptized person is wholly devoted to the service of the Lord who has redeemed him, signed him with his own peculiar mark, and given him a title to the crown of celestial glory. The nature and extent of the service due varies with the position and the talents of the individual. The one who receives one talent is bound to gain one more with it. This may mean, for instance, that this particular man, or that particular woman, is bound to no other service to the church than to bring up well some three or five children, to come to Mass and the sacraments with them, to live an honest life, and to make some small contributions to the treasury of the church. The one who receives five talents is also bound to gain five more. The explication of the sense of this, and its application to particular cases, are easily made. Whatever the talents conferred on any individual may be, all must be devoted primarily to the sacred cause of the Catholic Church. It is the kingdom of Christ; it is the only hope of salvation to the world; it is the ark of safety to the individual himself with whom we are speaking. Into that church he has been baptized at the font, and made its child, its citizen, and its subject. There is no escape from its allegiance except by treason. The character of baptism is ineffaceable, and no one who bears that mark has any rights over himself, his talents, or his possessions, except such as are conceded to him by the law of Christ. “Ye are not your own, ye are bought with a price.” “Henceforth, no one liveth to himself, and no one dieth to himself.” It is necessary to live and die as a member of the Catholic Church, in order to live honorably and to die happily. As it is only by partaking in the common life of the church that its individual members have any life of their own, it is their first duty to promote that common life. The law of life is the law of duty: the greater and stronger and more important the member is, the greater is the service it is bound to render to the body.

The duties of Catholics who belong to the higher and more wealthy class in society to the church are very various, numerous, and heavy. One portion of them coincides to a great extent with their obligations to the poor and miserable, of which notice was taken in our last number. The obligation of succoring their fellow-creatures because they are of the same blood through Adam, and made in the rational image of the same God, becomes more sacred towards those who are brethren in Christ through baptismal grace. How is it possible for Christians who expect to be saved through the infinite charity of Jesus Christ to revel in splendor, luxury, and enjoyment, and at the same time to look with heartless indifference on the want and suffering of those who are the dearest friends of Christ? If they are charitable and kind-hearted, as every true Christian must be, the charities of the church are so numerous and extensive as to tax their generosity to the utmost. There is great scope for private and personal charity toward individuals, but the great organized works of general charity must be carried on by the clergy or religious societies. The funds which they are ordinarily able to procure for these works are, in proportion to the necessities clamoring for relief, like the five loaves and two small fishes which the disciples of Christ set before the famishing multitude of five thousand men, besides women and children. These small funds come in great part from the almsgiving of laboring people, or from the various devices of lectures, fairs, concerts, etc., to which the managers of charitable works are obliged to resort. After all has been done, the Catholic priest, the charitable layman who makes his round of visits in the name of the St. Vincent de Paul’s Society, the Sister of Charity, are hardly able to do more than help those who are in want of the absolutely necessary clothing, food, and fire with which to keep off the gaunt death that grins at them out of every corner of their life. The demands upon charity are constant, multifarious, and pressing. They are made chiefly upon priests, who have already given up everything for God. It is plain, therefore, that it is the duty of the rich to furnish them liberally and abundantly with the means for supplying these demands.

The building of churches, their decoration, the furnishing of sacred vessels and ornaments for the sanctuary, and other works directly connected with the service and worship of the divine Majesty, are objects demanding a truly immense outlay of money. So far as concerns that which is necessary for the ministering of the word and sacraments of Christ, these spiritual wants of the people take precedence of their bodily necessities. So far as the decoration, splendor, and dignity of religion only are concerned, they come next after the more essential works of charity. Add to the buildings which are immediately devoted to divine worship, all those which belong to colleges, schools, orphanages, etc., and the work demanded of the Catholics of the United States appears colossal, and would seem impossible, did we not see before our eyes so much of it already accomplished. Then, there are the most just and imperative claims of the Holy Father, and the pathetic appeals of the foreign missions, never so pressing as at the present moment, when the downfall of the power of France has left them so denuded of the succor which they formerly received from that most generous nation. The naïve response which a most estimable French lady once gave to a priest who asked her for a donation to a good work in this city, very well expresses the true state of the case in hand: “Very much call, very little fund.” Nowhere is this more literally true than in New York. The most extreme liberality of all the Catholics of this city who have anything to spare, whether rich or poor, would not yield the means of furnishing a sufficient number of churches, schools, and other means for supplying the spiritual and corporal wants of our swarming and increasing population. Millions might be used at the present moment, if they could be had, in works of the most practical utility and even necessity. When a city or a nation is in straits through the calamities of war, pestilence, or famine, all its citizens are expected to strain every nerve and to make heroic sacrifices for its relief. No city or nation has a thousandth part of the claim to devotion from its citizens which the church possesses. And the church, always militant, is always in straits, at least in some part of her great empire, always suffering from the effects of the perpetual warfare waged against her, from pestilential vices and sins among her children, from a famine of the word and sacraments of Christ among the most neglected and abandoned of her people. God alone can help her efficiently. But men must struggle to help themselves, if they expect God to help them. Our Lord demanded of his disciples to feed the hungry multitude, and ordered them to set before them the whole of their own scanty provisions. “He himself knew what he would do,” and he did it by multiplying miraculously the loaves and fishes of his disciples. God alone can rescue the famishing and perishing multitudes of Christendom and heathendom from the abyss of temporal and spiritual ruin and death which yawns under their feet. Society must be reconstructed on a Christian basis, and by mighty, organic movements, in which the church and the state, the hierarchy, both ecclesiastical and civil, and all the powers contained in the bosom of society, in harmonious concert of action, labor together for a common end, it must work out its own regeneration and the Christian civilization of the human race; or the work will remain for ever incomplete. Christendom is full of deadly disorders and wounds, inflicted on it by the fell power of schism, heresy, and infidelity. Only Catholic unity can heal it, and combine its members in the work assigned to it by divine Providence, and only a miracle of grace can restore to that unity the severed and disorganized parts, close up the deadly gashes in the living body, and reanimate it with complete health. The zeal, activity, and wealth of the whole community, collected in the communion of the Catholic Church, would be sufficient for as thorough a regeneration of New York, and of the whole United States, as the most sanguine optimist could ever expect to see brought about in any country in the world. Christendom, united in itself, and governed on Christian principles, would absorb into itself on a century the entire world. But meanwhile, the faithful and loyal children of the church must do what they can, and await the time for God to do what he has determined, and to a great extent made conditional in the efforts of men. The most of our Catholic people in the United States have, on the whole, fulfilled the duty of contributing the funds required for carrying on the works of the church remarkably well. Whether the richer portion of them have done their fair share, is a question not so easy to answer. Instances of princely generosity have not been wanting, and to a considerable extent there has been a creditable liberality manifested by the wealthier classes of Catholics when they have been publicly or privately solicited to aid in religious or other charitable works. That there are some who are niggardly in their disposition, and many who are more sparing and moderate in their charities than they ought to be, can hardly be doubted. The comparatively small number of wealthy men in the Catholic community has necessarily thrown the great burden of supporting the institutions of the church upon the mass of the people who are not rich. There is nothing in this to complain of. If the rich do their fair share, it is no disgrace to them that they enjoy the benefits which have been chiefly purchased by the money of the laboring classes. But if they fall behind their proportion, it is a real disgrace to them, because they receive in that case for nothing, and as an alms from the poor, something which they ought to have paid for.

The church demands something more than a portion of the surplus of the wealth of the rich. She demands the consecration and devotion of the minds, the wills, the time, the efforts of all the élite of her laity, of those who are rich in intellectual gifts and acquisitions, as well as of those who are rich in gold and silver. The principal medium of the operation of this devotion at the present time are voluntary associations under the sanction and direction of the hierarchy. These associations have for their scope the organization of charitable works, the diffusion of knowledge, resistance to the enemies of the church, the defence of the Holy See, and general co-operation with the clergy in the extension of the Catholic religion. We will not enlarge on this theme, at present, as we have promised to make our articles very brief, and an essay on the subject has already appeared in our pages. What we have said will be sufficient, we trust, to stimulate all those who are imbued with the spirit of Catholic faith to greater zeal and effort in the sacred cause of the church, in which the laity have as great an interest as the clergy.

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It is well for us that faith is able to decipher what De Quincey calls “the hieroglyphic meanings of human suffering”; and that, though the interpretation should not at once be made plain to us, we may, at least, be sure that it is merciful. As St. Peter stands supreme, holding in his hand the shining keys of heaven, which none but he can set in the wards, and none but he can turn, so to each Christian on earth is given the golden key to a personal heaven, and none but he can open the door, and none but he can close it. Within that door sits the interpreter, and when the soul is still it hears his voice reading, with praise and amen, both day and night: and some riddles he makes clear, and on some he sets the seal with the Holy Name; and that is God’s secret, and one day he will speak to the soul concerning it. He who seeks to tear away that seal finds only darkness and confusion; but he who folds his hands above it will at last be illuminated.

Never once during his trial had Dick Rowan rebelled against God, or questioned him. Nature might writhe in pain, and forget for a time the words of praise, but it submitted; and, according to the tumult and darkness that had prevailed, so were the light and peace that followed. It was thorough work, as all the work in this soul had been from the first, and his convalescence was like a new birth.

On the morning after Edith’s parting with Carl Yorke, Dick remained in his room unvisited, keeping all his strength for that first drive. At length the carriage came to the door, and Mr. Williams, who had insisted on remaining at home to superintend what he called the “launching” of his step-son, came down-stairs with Dick. Mrs. Williams, all smiles, followed after, rustling in silks donned in honor of this great occasion. Edith and Ellen Williams stood in the entry, awaiting the little procession. Miss Ellen, blushing and bedizened, was to accompany the two on their drive. Edith had preferred to stay at home and prepare for her evening exodus to Hester’s.

“Why, Dick, you look like an Esquimaux!” she exclaimed. “I cannot even see your nose. How are you to get any fresh air?”

He laughed. “I told mother that I could not breathe anything but fur; but she is a tyrant.”

“It isn’t often I get the chance to play the tyrant over you,” Mrs. Williams remarked, and began giving orders to have sundry hot soap-stones, and gay afghans put into the carriage.

“Mother,” her son exclaimed, “I am ashamed of having such a fuss made over me! I will run away. I will leave the country. I will go back to bed.”

He really blushed, and seemed annoyed.

They went out, and there was the parade of getting settled in their places, Mrs. Williams pleasantly conscious, and her son distressfully so, that several of the neighbors were looking on with interest. The inquiries for Dick had, indeed, been constant from all the neighborhood, even from persons with whom they had no acquaintance. Not a woman, young or old, but had looked kindly on the young sailor, and known when he sailed away, and when he came back; not a child but smiled and nodded to him through the window when he passed. Of course they had all surmised that the lovely young girl whom they had seen there before, and who had now been taking care of him, was one day to be his wife. She divided their attention with him as she stood on the step, and watched him drive away.

It was the hour of the steamer’s departure; and when Edith was alone, she shut herself into her chamber, and, kneeling there, prayed fervently that God would keep the traveller wherever he might wander, and that, though far from her, he might be ever near to heaven.

She did not leave her room when she heard the others come home; and after a while Mrs. Williams came to say that Dick would like to see her.

“We had a delightful drive, and he is not a bit the worse for it,” the mother said. “He will be well enough to go to Mrs. Cleaveland’s to see you, now; but I think he wants to have a good talk with you before you go away. He told me not to let any one interrupt.”

Edith knew well what the summons meant, and with one upward aspiration, “O Spirit of light and truth!” she went immediately.

Dick was sitting in his arm-chair by the window when she entered, and he looked around with a bright smile and greeting, “Well, little sister!” and motioned her to a chair near him.

On hearing that title, she stopped, and clasped her hands on her bosom.

“It was a brother who sent for you,” he said. “Come!”

She seated herself, speechless, almost breathless.

“Edith, where is Carl Yorke?” he asked gently.

She gave the answer with a quiet that looked like coldness. “He left in the steamer to-day for England. From there he continues his travels to the East, I do not know where else. No person is to know this but you and me, as his mother cannot be told.”

The color and the smile left Dick Rowan’s face. Surprise and pain for a moment deprived him of the power of speech.

“I am astonished and distressed!” he said, at length. “I wished to see him, to talk with him. But that he is not a Catholic, I should have wished to see you married soon.”

A deep blush of wounded delicacy rushed to Edith’s cheeks. “Dick Rowan,” she said, “you have yet much to learn about women, or, at least, about me. Whatever feelings of sympathy and affection I may have had for Carl Yorke, my conduct and conversation with him have been irreproachable, and so have my thoughts even. The thought of marriage has not crossed my mind. I do not wish to hear you speak of it.”

Her dignified answer disconcerted him for a moment. He had made the mistake nearly always made by men, often made by women, of misinterpreting the nature, or, at least, the degree of development, of an affection as yet angelically pure, if ardent.

“You were quite right in supposing that I would marry no one but a Catholic,” she remarked.

“I have done you a great wrong, Edith,” he said hastily, “and I wish to repair it as far as I can. But, first, will you tell me why you promised to marry me?”

“Because you told me that your life hung in the balance, and that I was your only hope and aim,” she answered. Her voice trembled slightly, and her eyes softened as she remembered how nearly he had spoken the truth. “You had been my first and most faithful friend. I considered my obligations stronger to you than any one else. I could not tolerate the thought of your suffering through me, when I was the only person you cared for.”

While she spoke, his eyes were downcast, and a deep color burned in his face. “Did my dependence on you attract your affection?” he asked, still looking down.

“It attracted my pity and anxiety,” she replied, without hesitation. “I should respect more a man who would be able to live without me. I do not believe that these violent feelings are either healthy or lasting; and I would not choose to act the Eastern myth of the tortoise supporting a world.”

“Oh! how mean I was!” he exclaimed. “How contemptibly selfish! Let me tell you all. I had a strong affection for you, that is true; but I can see now that there were unworthy motives mingled with it. There were pride, ambition, and self-will. I was determined to take you away from Carl Yorke. I knew that he thought of you, and I believed that he would win you, unless I prevented it. Your antecedents of birth, your tastes and social position, your kind of education, all were the same, and made you suited to each other. I said to myself that my being a Catholic gave me the precedence; but in my heart I knew that there was no reason why he, as well as I, should not receive the gift of faith. I knew, indeed, that his friendship for Alice Mills had predisposed him toward it, and that he read Catholic books. But I was determined to have you. I did not dare to ask if you would be quite content. I would not contemplate any other possibility. When I asked you if you were willing, it was only after you had promised. I confess this with shame and contrition!”

“Dick,” Edith asked breathlessly, “have you quite got over caring very much about me? Are you not disappointed?”

He raised his face, and all the shame and distress passed away from it. “The only disappointment I am now capable of feeling,” he said, with the emphasis of truth, “would be in case any earthly object should come between me and God. In the last few weeks I have learned to shrink with fear and aversion from all earthly affection. There is nothing but harm in those attachments which are so strong that the loss of their object brings destruction. They are mistaken in their aim. Why, Edith, what I worshipped in you was not simply what you are, a good and amiable girl, but a goddess. You were magnified in my eyes, I put you in a niche. That niche is now empty. Or, no!” he added, raising his brightening eyes, “it is not empty, but the right one stands there. You could never have satisfied the enthusiasm of my expectation. The great and wonderful good which I vaguely looked for with you, I should never have won. I mistook my object.”

He looked out thoughtfully, and she sat looking at him. At length he said, with a faint smile, “I wrote you last year of a visit I paid to the island and cave of Capri. That scene is like my past life. That cave was an enchanted place, so fair, so blue, so unreal! All ordinary critical sense deserted me as I gazed. I could easily have believed that the walls and ceiling were of jewels, and the watery floor some magical blue wine. As I sat in the boat and looked back, I saw a white star in the distance. Everything but that, and a long white ray from it, was blue. I rowed toward that star, I looked at it as my goal, just as I made you my goal. But when I came near, I found that it was no star. It was only the low entrance to the cave. Or, rather, it was for me the passage to sunshine and the heavens. And that you have been to me, Edith,” he said, turning toward her. “Thank God that your influence with me has always been for good, and that, in leaving you, I progress rather than change! You inspired me, and kept me from what was low, when I had no religion to help me. I can see it all now. The very excess and enthusiasm of my affection for you was necessary in order to govern me and keep me from harm. Besides, it is my nature to do with my might what my hands find to do. I was not then capable of resolving to do right for the sake of right; but when I was strong enough, then you drew aside, and left me face to face with God!”

His breath came quickly, and his wide-opened eyes were fixed on the western sky, and caught its golden light.

“Of course there was a struggle,” he resumed, “for I was sincere. But that is over. My unreasonable affection for you is as thoroughly eradicated as if it had never been a part of my life. I am ashamed of having so given myself up to it.”

Edith hesitated, then put the test. “Dick, I must be satisfied that I am really free. If you were sure now that no other, deeper sympathy stood between me and you, and that I were ready and willing to fulfil my engagement with you, would you still say that God alone held your heart?”

His expression was one of terror and shrinking. “It is not so, Edith!” he exclaimed. “God forbid that it should be so! I could no more go back to those hopes and wishes of the past than I could be a little boy again!”

After the momentary fear and suspense that had accompanied her question, Edith’s first feeling was one of joyful relief and freedom, her second an indignant sense of the wrong that had been done her. She rose from her chair, walked to the other window, and stood there looking out with eyes that saw no object before her. Her mind glanced swiftly back over the last year and a half. She remembered the bright peacefulness of her life, yet half-enshrouded in the mists of childhood, the vision of her womanhood shining large and vague just above the line of her eyelids; for she cared not yet to look at or question that future. She recollected the hopes and aims that had begun to form themselves, of doing good, of making herself such a Catholic as would be a credit to the faith, of helping and instructing her poor, of trying to bring her uncle’s family into the church; and she remembered a faint rose-tinge of personal happiness, soft and rare, and too delicate to be seen, but felt by some finer intuition. Then came the sudden call that had put her life in confusion, the future wrenched rudely open, the many clustering interests trampled by one that demanded to be made paramount. And there was no more cause than this!

Indignation swelled to the point of speech. She turned about, and faced Dick Rowan, and her eyes flashed.

“You may well be ashamed,” she said, “for you have been unmanly! I do not speak of what I have suffered in my own mind; but you have exposed my reputation, which, next to my character, I hold sacred. You have deprived me of your mother’s friendship; for she will never cease to blame me. You have had me proclaimed as your promised wife, every one supposing that the promise was freely given. Yet, when I went down-stairs that day, I was like a victim going to be immolated. Nothing but prayer had strengthened my resolution. I thought that a refusal would be your destruction. You had said as much. You have exposed me to the condemnation of shallow judges, who will be only too glad to find fault. Those people who pronounce without knowing, and think that they can include the motives of another’s whole life in three words, will all condemn me. I, who have tried with constant watchfulness to walk to a hair’s-breadth in the path of womanly propriety, shall be pointed at as the girl who jilted you and broke your heart. And all this, not from the blindness of real affection, which would have excused you in my eyes, but from will, and pride, and a mere fascination. Don’t tell me of eradicating a real affection. It may be conquered, and made subject to duty; but sympathy is not to be eradicated. That feeling which has died in your heart was, indeed, a false blossom.”

She turned and stretched her hands out toward the East, where, far away, the steamer that bore Carl Yorke ploughed the twilight wave. “O Carl! you would not have done it,” she cried, and burst into tears; the usual womanly peroration to such a discourse.

“O God, accept my humiliation!”

She heard that tremulous prayer through her sobs, and, starting, looked at Dick. His face was bowed forward in his hands, as though he could never again raise it. She recollected herself. It was God who had cured and enlightened him. He was not a man who had turned from one fickle fancy to another. He was in the hands of God.

She wiped her eyes, and, after a little while, went and knelt beside his chair. “Forgive me, Dick, for reproaching you so,” she said. “It is over now. We all make mistakes, and those only do well who acknowledge them, and forgive others. My childhood’s dear friend, let us forget all that is painful in the past. God will direct. There is much in life besides marrying and giving in marriage, and I do not wish to think of that again, not for a long, long time, if at all. Set the seal on the events of the last two years. They never happened. I am happy now. You know that, though I was born at the North, I have a Southern temper. See! the little cyclone is past, and I am clear from every cloud. We are two sober friends, who wish each other no end of good. Tell me what you mean to do.”

He raised his head, and the one absorbing interest of his new life came back and obliterated the passing trouble. “I do not know, Edith, and I lay no plans. I have no reason to trust my own will or wish. I give myself up entirely to direction, and am certain on but one point: God will not let me go, and I will not let him go. When I lay bruised and helpless before him, he took me in his arms and healed me, and I will never know another love. He has kindled a fire in my heart which my life shall guard. I rejected him once, but will never again. That night I spent in the church, before my baptism, a voice from the altar asked me, I thought, to give up all for God; and it would have been easy then for me to promise. As I meditated on heaven, the Mother of Christ drew to herself all that is lovely in woman; all that was strong, and true, and protecting in a guide clustered around the church; all that was adorable, that passed beyond speech, was there before me in the tabernacle. I thought then that to be a brother in any religious order, or a servant in the church, to sleep under the same roof that sheltered the head of Christ, to light the candles, to care for his altar, to serve Mass, all that would be the highest honor and happiness. I think so now, but I ask nothing. I thought then with self-contempt how I had toiled to earn money, when the ‘inexhaustible riches of God’ had lain untouched at my hand; how I had travelled to see the wonders of the earth, when the wonders of God had appealed to me in vain. But when daylight came, I treated the whole as a dream, a mere exaltation of the fancy, and impracticable. I know now that what I took for a dream is the only reality, and what I thought reality is but a dream. I resisted the inspiration, and have been lacerated on the briers of my own obstinacy.”

He paused, looking out toward the west, and in the fine golden light that was left from sunset, with the new moon and the evening star half-drowned there, his face looked beautiful. Calmness, humility, solemnity, and sweetness mingled in its expression.

Edith whispered a low “Well, Dick?” to make him speak again; for he had, apparently, forgotten her.

“Father John has promised me that I may make a retreat as soon as he thinks me well enough,” he said, rousing himself at the sound of her voice. “I do not look beyond that. I do not know anything. I wait.” And again there was silence.

After a while, Edith said timidly, for he seemed buried in a reverie, “Do you remember last year, Dick, when we went about the city, like two strange sight-seers? You said then that the poor and the suffering looked at you in an asking way different from the look they gave others. Don’t you think it might have been the Lord who asked through their eyes?”

“I have not a doubt of it,” he answered.

“Nothing else is of worth!” he said after a minute, as if speaking to himself—“nothing else is of worth!” And again, “O miserable waste!”

Presently she spoke again, very softly: “Sometimes, when one has meditated a long while, everything seems unspeakably good and beautiful, as if all were in God. A warmth and sweetness flow around the soul. If your enemy should come to injure you, you would embrace him. If your friend were taken away from you, you would smile, and let him go. For, turning to the Lord, you find all there. Nothing is lost. When you go away, you feel still, and speak lowly. You want to do something for some one; and, wherever you look, you see the Lord, and whatever you do is done for him. He accepts it all, and nothing is small, and nothing is great. If you see any one suffer, you pity, and try to help, and, perhaps, you weep; but the agony of pain you feel at other times at the sight of suffering, you do not feel now. You get a glimpse of the reason why angels can witness so much pain, yet still be happy.”

Dick, looking out at the sky, smiled. “Yes!” he said, “yes!”

A carriage drove up to the door, Hester’s carriage, come for Edith. Twilight had fallen softly round them, and their faces were dim to each other in that curtained chamber.

“My dear friend,” Edith said earnestly, “is there peace between us?”

“All is peace, Edith,” he answered.

“Then, before I go,” she said, “I want you to put your hand on my head, and say, ‘God bless you!’”

He did as she bade him, laid his hand on her head, and said, “God bless you for ever! Good-night!”

Both of them knew that good-night meant good-by, yet they parted with a smile.

The family had come to Boston, and were settled in their old home. The change had not been effected without emotion, and, to the surprise of all, the one most moved was Mr. Yorke. Whether, with that noble self-control in which men so much excel women, he had carefully concealed the real misery of his life in Seaton, or whether the return to their former home reminded him that it had been lost by his act, we will not attempt to say, for he did not. He was silent and very pale, and, as he entered the house, stood on the threshold a moment, with an expression in his face which touched the hearts of all. One might read in his look the consciousness that a great change had passed over him since last he stood there, and that the return did not bring him the happiness he had anticipated.

Perhaps nothing in life is more sad than to have a boon long sought for at length accorded to us, and to find that we have lost the power to take delight in its possession.

The furniture and baggage had been sent in advance, and Hester and Edith had superintended the arrangement of everything, so that all was ready for them. Their last week in Seaton had been spent with Major Cleaveland, at his house there. He had kept it open for that purpose, and remained to assist and accompany them, while his wife and children had preceded him to the city.

Hester went to meet her family at the depot, and Edith stood in the door when they drove up, and ran joyfully out to embrace them. The house was bright, and dinner was ready. To Mrs. Yorke, there was but one blot on the occasion, and that was her son’s absence. But he had written her with such affection and cheerfulness that she did not grieve too much. Besides, she expected him soon to return.

Dinner over, Hester and her husband went to their own home, and the family sat once more together in their old, familiar sitting-room. The situation was one to provoke emotion or thoughtfulness. Clara set herself to cheer the company, and put sentiment into the background.

“The first trouble in changing one’s residence,” she said, “is to make people remember one’s address. Fortunately, our number, 96, is peculiar. It is the only created thing I know, except the planets, which is not changed nor disconcerted by being turned upside down. Turn it as you will, stand on your head and look at it, tear the house down, still the number 96 smiles on you unchanged, and as changeless as a star. It is a very proper number to have on a house.”

They all sat and looked at her, smiling slightly, glad to be amused.

“The next thing is,” she pursued, “to prevent our friends going to extremes in making their new estimate of us. They must be made to comprehend that, though we have positively renounced the German, we are not Puritans nor ascetics; and that, though we have written, do write, and mean to write in future, and to put ourselves in print whenever we feel so disposed, we do not set up as geniuses. Papa,” she said, suddenly interrupting herself, “why is not the plural of genius genii? I always want to say genii.”

“They mean about the same thing,” Mr. Yorke remarked; and there was silence again for a while.

The night was calm, the street quiet, but there was that unmistakable feeling that a great press of human life is near. It was not the presence which one feels in the woods, where nature is obedient to its Maker, and the soul is lifted by the constantly ascending homage that surrounds it, but a lateral influence, electrical and exciting, of contending human wills.

Clara was again the one to break silence. “Trees, and toads, and mosses, and no market, are all very charming for a change,” she said. “But if one does not live in the city, the city should be near. A man or a woman without society is no better than a vegetable. You remember, papa, how Bolingbroke took root among his trees. And what delights one has in the city! There is music. O the violins!—the soprano witch among instruments! If Pan invented the pipe, the original of the organ, then Æolus invented this instrument of airy octaves. Those old painters were right who put violins into the hands of their musical angels. Give a violin time enough, and the music of it will gradually eat up the whole body, or etherealize it, till some day the musician, touching carefully his precious film of a Cremona, will find it melt in his hands, and disappear in a harmonious sigh. Ladies and gentlemen, I should like to hear this moment a whirlwind of violins, ten thousand, say, blowing through a vast hall with clustered pillars, and dusky nooks and reaches, and arches everywhere, and a sultry, fragrant dimness through it all, and an immense crowd holding their breaths to listen, and, away up in the roof, little birds perched, as they are in Notre Dame, at Paris, and trembling with fear and wonder through all their downy feathers. And when it was over, people would look at each other, and some would smile, and some laugh out with delight; and the birds would venture two or three little silvery peeps, then flutter about as though nothing had happened. Yes, the city is the place to live in.”

“And then,” said Edith, “one can always go to church.”

Clara immediately gave her cousin an enthusiastic embrace. “Oh! you darling little bigoted Papist!” she exclaimed.

Melicent, sitting in the chimney-corner, was engrossed in her own thoughts. She was, perhaps, meditating on that romance of which Clara had written to Edith. A villainously ugly, but tenderly-beloved Scotch terrier lay on the hearth-rug, his eyes fixed on the fire, and seemed to muse. Mrs. Yorke bent toward him, touched him lightly, and quoted Champfleuri, apropos of cats: “‘A quoi pense l’animal qui pense?’” and added a definition she had heard somewhere: “‘The brute creation is a syllogism, of which the conclusion is in the mind of God.’”

This brought them to the point to which their thoughts naturally tended that evening. God, and the meanings of God, claimed their attention.

“We are all tired,” Melicent said. “Shall we have prayers now, papa?”

The Bible was brought, Betsey sent for, and they waited in silence for Mr. Yorke to begin the reading. He sat with his hand on the open page, and looked into the fire a moment, then looked at his wife.

“Amy, I would like, for to-night, to have all my family worship together,” he said. “After to-night, we can go our different ways. Let Patrick and Mary and Anne be called in, and, since they cannot unite with us, let us unite with them. Are you willing?”

Mrs. Yorke blushed with surprise, but made no objection. Melicent drew herself up, but no one observed her. Mr. Yorke turned smilingly to his niece. “Well, Edith, if you Catholics will listen to a chapter from me, I will listen to your prayers, and join in them as far as I can.”

She did not say anything as she rose to call the servants, but, in passing her uncle, she laid a loving hand on his shoulder, and looked her gratitude and delight.

Patrick and the girls had too much confidence in Edith to hesitate, though they wondered much at her summons. Seated in the midst of the circle, they listened while Mr. Yorke read a psalm, then they knelt down. There was a moment’s pause. The Yorkes were accustomed to sit while their prayers were read. Then Mr. Yorke knelt, and wife and daughters followed his example, Melicent involuntarily, and making a motion to get up again as soon as she was down, but concluding to stay. Episcopalians kneel, she reflected, and she could mentally kneel with them. Edith led the prayers, and her tremulous voice conciliated the good-will of the listeners.

It was the first time any of this family had ever assisted at a private Catholic devotion, and they were astonished to perceive how every circumstance and need of man was met by this perfect spiritual science. The devotion was not something apart from life, but an aspiration and petition from every thought and act of life. The invocation to the Holy Spirit, the recommendation to place themselves in the presence of God, the pause for the examination of conscience, the act of contrition following it, the preparation for death—a Catholic knows them all, but to a Protestant their effect is startling.

Never again would their own devotions seem to this family other than dry and unsatisfying; never would one of them again be in trouble or danger, but the impulse would be to utter the voice of Catholic prayer.

In taking up their old life again, the Yorkes were surprised to find that they had grown more earnest and simple during the years they had spent in retirement. Mrs. Yorke had lost much of her love for fashion and luxury, the daughters were astonished at the frivolity of some of their former pleasures, and Mr. Yorke cared less for heathen literature, and felt more interest in the poor and ignorant.

Edith was happy in her religion; but, though she went to Mass every day when she could, had a mind too enlightened and well balanced to find her religion only in going to church. She was not in the least a gushing young lady: hers was a deep and silent enthusiasm which moved to action rather than speech. The persecution of Catholics was going on in Massachusetts also, and Governor Gardner and his motley legislature were making juries the judges of the law as well as of the facts, and disbanding Irish regiments (which were allowed to reorganize for 1862), and making a law which would enable them to send a troop of men to search the dormitories and closets and cellars of convent schools. But all this troubled Edith very little. She could laugh at the Transcript’s parody:

and could see how the enemies of the church were covering themselves with ridicule and disgrace, and securing their own ultimate defeat.

“They’re hanging themselves! They’re hanging themselves!” Mr. Yorke would say with glee, at each new extravagance.

When the Yorkes first returned to the city, Melicent’s affairs chiefly occupied their minds. There was no engagement, and there had been no private intercourse between her and Mr. Griffeth; but she had not broken with him entirely, and had requested permission to receive friendly letters from him. After Mr. Griffeth had been bound over to commit no act and write no word aggressively sentimental, this permission was unwillingly given. One of these friendly missives had come the week after her arrival; and, though the writer had kept the letter of his promise, he had so broken the spirit of it that Mrs. Yorke, to whom the letter was dutifully shown, frowned on reading it, and had a mind to answer it herself. Melicent, indeed, seemed desirous to alarm her family as much as possible regarding this affair, and carried herself with such a conscious, heroine-of-a-novel air as both amused and annoyed her family.

Among their earliest visitors was the Rev. Doctor Stewart, Mrs. Yorke’s former pastor and good friend. The mother confided to him her distress, and besought him to speak to Melicent on the subject.

“She always had a high respect for you and Mrs. Stewart, and would be influenced by what you say,” she concluded.

The minister made inquiries concerning this suitor’s orthodoxy as a Universalist.

“He is orthodox in nothing, doctor!” Mrs. Yorke exclaimed. “He wears his creed as he wears his clothes, changing, when convenient, the one with as little scruple as the other. He is a moral Sybarite, who adjusts his conscience comfortably to his wishes, and looks about with an air of calm rectitude, and an assumption of pitying superiority over people who are so bigoted as to believe the same yesterday and to-day.”

“I know the kind of man,” the minister said, with an expression of severity and mortification. “They are one of the pests of the time, and a disgrace to the ministry. I will do all I can to separate Melicent from him.”

Doctor Stewart was a stately gentleman, something over fifty years of age, gray-haired, rather heavy, and slightly old-fashioned. He was amiable in disposition, believed that great respect should be paid to the clergy, wore a white neck-cloth, and was fairly educated in everything but theology. Since the Yorkes left Boston, he had lost his wife, an excellent lady several years older than himself. He was left with three children, a son of nineteen, who was a student in Harvard College; another son, ten years older, who was making his fortune in the West; and a daughter, the eldest of the family, married to a foreign missionary, and industriously distributing Bibles to the Chinese. Once a month, in the missionary-meeting, the reverend doctor read a letter from this daughter, in which she described the great work she was doing, and asked for more Bibles and money.

This was the gentleman to whose management Mrs. Yorke entrusted her eldest daughter’s love-affair.

Nothing of their first interview transpired, except that the minister seemed to be hopeful. Melicent became more inscrutable and consequential than ever.

About this time, Miss Clara Yorke began to grow exceedingly merry in her disposition. She would smile in season and out of season, and burst into laughter without apparent cause. At the mention of Doctor Stewart’s name, her eyes always began to dance, and at the sight of him approaching their house her gravity deserted her immediately. Mrs. Yorke was both astonished and puzzled by her daughter’s levity.

“I esteem Doctor Stewart very highly,” the lady said. “He is a dignified and agreeable person. I am glad he feels like running in here often. He must be lonely at home, for Charles is away during the day, and studies all the evening. Poor man! The loss of his wife was a terrible blow to him, but he bears it beautifully.”

The laughter with which Miss Clara was tremblingly full had to be restrained; for at that moment the door opened to give admittance to a smiling elderly gentleman in a white neckcloth. But, glancing at Melicent’s demure countenance a minute after, the young woman’s mirth became audible.

“Clara, you should, at least, give us the opportunity of sharing your amusement,” her mother said, rather chidingly.

Clara stammered out that there was a very witty article in the last Atlantic.

“By the way,” the minister said to her pleasantly, “I must compliment you on a very touching story of yours I have read lately. It is ‘Silent Rooms.’ I confess to you, Miss Clara, that I wept over it.”

How exquisite must be the sensibility of that person who weeps over one’s pathetic stories! Clara looked at the reverend doctor with a new interest. He certainly had a most beautiful nose, she observed, and his expression was benign. Moreover, he was a gentleman of good mind.

“I am delighted by what you tell me, doctor,” she said. “For, while such emotion is the highest compliment I could receive, it does not hurt you. Indeed, I thought that sketch would be affecting. I shed tears myself when I was writing it, and I think that a pretty good cry-tear-ion to judge by. Beg pardon, papa! I didn’t mean to. It punned itself.”

The minister then asked her to write a play and a hymn for the Christmas festival of his Sunday-school.

“I should be delighted to, doctor,” she said, but clouded over a little. “I am not much in the way of that sort of composition, but I will try.”

“Then you will succeed.” A bow and a smile accompanied the assertion.

“Do not be too sure of that,” Clara exclaimed with vivacity. “I can write easily enough what is in my own mind, but not what is in other minds; and I haven’t an idea on this subject. I am not a facile writer when I have nothing to say. When I have no thoughts, I find it hard to express them.”

“Oh! dash off some little thing,” said the doctor, with a sweep of the hand, as though he were sowing plays and poems broadcast.

“Dash off some little thing!” repeated the young lady scornfully, when their visitor had left them. “‘Dash off!’ That is all he knows. I don’t believe he cried over my story!”

“My daughter!” expostulated Mrs. Yorke; but her husband laughed. Melicent cast an indignant glance on her sister, and went out of the room. At that, Clara’s hilarity returned.

Carl wrote to his mother often, giving her an account of his movements. He stayed nowhere long, and every letter concluded with an announcement of his intention to make a flying visit to some other place. The descriptions he gave and the adventures he related were not those of an ordinary sight-seer. “I should think that the boy were gathering material for a history of the nineteenth century,” his mother said, and was evidently very proud of him.

But after a while she recollected he had not said that any one of these flying visits would be his last, and had never answered plainly her questions as to the time of his return. One day she suspected the truth. She had just received a letter from Carl, dated at Nice, in which he hinted at a projected trip to Asia Minor. After reading the letter through, she dropped it into her lap, and sat looking out through the window and off into distance.

No one else but Edith was in the room, and she had been attentively watching her aunt’s face. Seeing that strange look settle on it, she crossed the room, and seated herself close to Mrs. Yorke’s side.

“Edith,” her aunt said, her eyes still gazing far away, “I think Carl means to be gone a long while.”

Edith called up her powers of self-control; for the time of explanation had come.

“He has already been away a long while,” she said. “It is six months since he went. That is six months taken from the whole.”

Mrs. Yorke’s eyes turned on her niece with a quick searching. “You know all about it!” she exclaimed, and began to breathe quickly.

“Yes, I know all about it,” was the calm reply; “and I was to tell you as soon as it should seem best. Carl is making a long journey, but six months of it are over.”

Mrs. Yorke flung Edith’s hand away. “You knew it, and his own mother did not!” she exclaimed. “You need not tell me. If Carl deceived his mother, I wish to hear no more about it.”

She pressed her hands to her heart, which beat with thick, suffocating throbs.

Nothing but firmness would do. It was necessary to recall her to a sense of the injustice she was doing, and shame her into controlling herself, if no better could be done.

“Aunt Amy,” Edith said, “it seems to me that you should question yourself, rather than reproach others. Never was a woman more tenderly loved and cared for by her family than you are. Your husband, your children, your niece, your servants even, are constantly on the watch lest something should startle or agitate you. A door must not be slammed, the horses must not be driven too fast, ill news must be gently broken, you must not be fatigued nor worried. If we shed tears, we conceal them from you; if one of us is ill, we make light of it to you. We wish to do this, and do it with all our hearts, for your life is most precious to us. But I think that our devotion entails one duty on you, and that is to look on everything as calmly and reasonably as you can, and not agitate yourself without cause.”

Mrs. Yorke looked at her niece in astonishment. This tone of firm reproof was new to her, and, from its strangeness, effective.

“Carl did not deceive you,” Edith went on. “He has told you nothing but the truth.”

“A half-truth is a lie!” Mrs. Yorke interrupted. “I see plainly in this the influence of that pernicious Mr. Griffeth. I well remember one of his sayings: ‘As the doctors give poisons to a sick body,’ he said, ‘so we must sometimes give lies to a sick mind.’ I have a sick mind, it seems.”

“It is for you to prove whether you have or not,” Edith replied quietly.

The reproof was severe, and Mrs. Yorke’s heightened color told that she felt it. She leaned back in her chair, and was silent.

“Carl told me,” Edith said, “because I am healthy, and cannot be endangered by sorrow; and he knew, too, that I would not require any man to sacrifice his duty and prospect of a high career merely that I might have the pleasure of being always with him. When a man is twenty-nine years old, if he is not going to throw himself away, and be a miserable failure, it is time for him to go out into the world, and live his own life. Carl would gladly have told you all his plans, and it was cruel that he should be obliged to go away without your blessing, and to carry with him, as he must, this constant anxiety about you. He was doubtful and unhappy, but did what he thought was best. He told no one but me. Now, be fair, Aunt Amy, and ask yourself what you would have done if Carl had come to you and said that he was going away on a two-years’ journey?”

Mrs. Yorke put her hands over her face, and sat breathing heavily, and without uttering a word. Edith trembled. Would she see the pale hands fall nerveless, and her aunt drop dead in her arms? She sent up a silent prayer to her ever dear Mother of Perpetual Succor, then gently loosened a golden locket from Mrs. Yorke’s belt, and opened it.

“Dear Carl!” she said tenderly, kissing the miniature, “how could your mother misunderstand you so, when your true and loving face was so close to her heart? Is it only Edith who never mistakes you?”

The frail hands slipped down to hers, as she leaned on her aunt’s lap, and she looked up to meet a faint and tearful smile.

“You are all so tender, my dear, that I am afraid it makes me selfish,” Mrs. Yorke said. “Now tell me the whole story. See! I am reasonable.”

“You are an angel to let me talk so, and not be angry!” Edith answered joyfully. “Wait till I get you a granule of digitaline; then I will tell you all about Carl. You will be proud of your son, my lady.”

A few days after, Doctor Stewart proposed for Melicent, greatly to her mother’s astonishment. “Why, doctor, I am proud to consent, if Melicent does,” she said. “But I never dreamed of such a thing!”

“Melicent assures me that, with her parents’ consent, she is willing to entrust her happiness in my hands,” the minister said. “She does not find my age any obstacle. You must be aware, indeed, that your eldest daughter’s disposition is grave and dignified. My impression is, that the only attraction Mr. Griffeth had for her was through his clerical office. She has confided to me that she wrote him a decided dismissal the very day after my first conversation with her.”

Of course, if Melicent was satisfied, no one else could object; and Melicent radiated satisfaction.

“I am sure you have chosen wisely, my daughter,” her mother said.

“I never really thought I should marry Mr. Griffeth, mamma,” the daughter answered, blushing. “And I never said any more to him than that I would consider his offer.”

That very evening the engagement was tacitly announced to the public, by Mrs. Yorke and Melicent appearing at a lecture at Music Hall, escorted by Doctor Stewart. Mr. Yorke, Clara, and Edith went early, and took seats in the side balcony, overlooking the platform, where the rest of their party had places reserved.

“It will just suit Mel,” Clara said gleefully. “I saw it from the first minute, and have been laughing over it all winter, while you stupid folks never had a suspicion. Mel was cut out for just such a fate. She likes to be lofty and sphynx-like, and to sit on platforms with everybody staring at her, and to come sweeping in at the last minute, and take the highest place. The doctor, too, is just to her mind. He is tall, and large, and slow. His voice is sonorous, he has a nice nose and finger-nails, and his neckcloth compels respect. Oh! there is no fear but Mel will be happy. The only danger is on our side. For I tell you, papa, those two will walk over us in their smooth, grand way, if we are not careful. I must study how to take them down a peg.”

There was a smile in the corners of Mr. Yorke’s mouth, but he spoke reprovingly. “It doesn’t sound well for you to talk in that way of your sister, Clara,” he said.

Clara gave a little impatient sigh. “I sometimes wish that I could not see so plainly the difference between solid people and inflated people,” she said. “It is a misfortune; but I cannot help it.”

Mr. Yorke said nothing. He had already learned that there was one point on which he would have to resist encroachment. More than once he had seen Doctor Stewart turn a severe glance on the shelf where stood the numbers of Brownson’s Review left by Carl; and only that day Melicent had proposed that the books should be carried up-stairs.

“Up-stairs!” Mr. Yorke had repeated. “What for?”

“Why, on account of the doctor,” Melicent had answered, disconcerted by the sharpness of her father’s astonishment. “He does not like them, and their being here might lead to unpleasant controversy.”

The reply had been decisive:

“If Doctor Stewart does not like what he finds in my house, he is at liberty to remain out of it. And if he should forget himself so far as to begin any unpleasant controversy, I shall recommend him to increase his stock of theological knowledge by a careful study of the same Review.”

Mr. Yorke said nothing of this conversation, and Melicent had not mentioned it; but it was a warning to both.

“Papa,” Clara said, after looking down on the audience awhile, “did you ever observe how bald heads light up an assembly like this? They reflect the gas, and have a very cheerful effect. Oh! there is Mel. Attention! See, the conquering hero comes. My poor little mother is nearly invisible. Such a small duenna! How frightfully conspicuous! See the doctor smile, and show them to the very front chairs, and see the filial manner in which he behaves to Mrs. Yorke. Suppose he should take to coloring his hair! There! they are seated at last, after that display, and I must own that Mel’s stage-manners are very good. If only they would not look so conscious! Edith, why is Doctor Stewart like a verd-antique? It’s a conundrum.”

That night, after Melicent had gone to her room, the others sat talking over the wedding. Doctor Stewart had desired that it might be soon. Edith proposed to give the trousseau.

“We cannot allow you, my dear,” her aunt said. “Your uncle and I have something, and Melicent must take what we can give her. You are too bountiful already!”

Edith drew writing materials toward her, and began to make out a bill.

Miss Edith Yorke,
To Charles Yorke and family, Dr.
To seven years’ board and tuition,	$7,000
“    “    “    clothing,	1,400
“  Instruction in her religion,	20,000,000
“  Kindness to Father Rasle,	10,000,000
“  Never being anything but kind to her,	10,000,000
“  Sundries,	10,000,000
“  Joining her once in Catholic prayer,	100,000,000,000,000,000
	————————————
	$100,000,000,050,008,400

“I think that is correct,” she said, showing the bill to her uncle. “I am mathematical in my tastes, you know. I do not like the dollars, though, the association is so vulgar. We will put it in some classical gold coin. It shall be rose-nobles.”

Looking in Mr. Yorke’s face as he smiled on her, she exclaimed, “Uncle, you have a look of my father, now!”

“And you have a look of my brother,” he returned. “Your eyes are changeful, like his, and your hair has a sunny hue. When you coax, too, your ways are like his. Robert was very winning.”

She put her arm in his, and looked reproachfully across the table to her aunt. “And yet,” she said, “you are not willing that I should give Melicent a few pocket-handkerchiefs to be married with!”

Mrs. Yorke laughed. “You shall give her as many handkerchiefs as you please,” she said.

---

But what, meantime, of Dick Rowan?

Mrs. Yorke had called at once to see him on her arrival, but he had already gone to make a retreat, and they did not see him afterward.

The first part of that retreat was to him heavenly; but, when it came to making definite plans for the future, then he found himself in cruel doubt.

“Oh! if I could have had a Catholic training in early life!” he said to Father John. “It seems to me now that heaven has been within my reach, and has slipped away, without my knowing it. I do not wish to be presuming. I do not try to think of it; the thought haunts me.”

“Tell me freely all that is in your mind,” the priest said. “I am here to help you.”

Dick Rowan’s head drooped, and he spoke rapidly, as if afraid to speak: “It seems to me, father, that if I had been brought up a strict Catholic—any sort of Catholic—I should have been—” He lifted his face, looked at Father John with eyes that could not bear suspense, and added, “I should have been a priest!”

Then, since he found neither astonishment nor displeasure in that face, his distress broke forth. “And now, O God! it is too late!” he said, and wrung his hands.

“You think that you had a vocation, my son?” the priest asked calmly.

“I believe it!” he answered. “What has my whole life been but a searching and striving after some great and glorious happiness, something different from the common happiness of earth, some one delight which was to be mine here, and still more mine in the world to come? It was always my way to have but one wish, and to expect from its fulfilment what nothing on earth can give. I believe, sir, that when a man has that way of concentrating all his hopes and desires on one object, that object should be God. Otherwise, there is nothing but ruin for him. Such an end was once possible to me, and now it is lost!”

Father John laid his hand on the young man’s. “My son,” he said, “it is not lost!”

Dick uttered not a word, but gazed steadily into the priest’s face.

“I believe that you have a divine vocation.”

“You believe that I had!” Dick cried out sharply.

“I believe that you have!” the priest replied.

Dick drew a deep breath, and his pale face blushed all over with a sudden delight; but said nothing.

“When a man first thinks of choosing God,” the priest said, “he may mistake. But when God chooses a man, and tears away from him every other tie, and sets him in a place where he can see nothing surrounding him but a great solitude filled with God, then there is no mistake. I believe that God chooses you.”

“God chooses me!” repeated Dick Rowan, blenching a little, like one dazzled by a great light. “God chooses me!” he said again, and stood up, as if his swelling heart had lifted him. “Then I choose him!” He put his hands over his lifted face, and tears of joy dropped down. Father John, deeply affected, spoke to him, but he did not hear. He was repeating the words of the marriage-service: “‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us’—unite!”

The priest spoke afterward to Edith on the subject. Dick had requested him to tell her and his mother whatever they wished to know.

“Never was there a soul more ardent and single,” Father John said. “His only difficulty arose from a tender regard for the honor of God, and a great reverence for the sacred office. He fancied that it would be an insult to both for a man to seek to enter the priesthood of whom people could say that he did so because he was disappointed in love, and that he gave to God the remnant of a heart which a woman had rejected.”

“Dick rejected me,” Edith interposed hastily.

“I told him,” the priest resumed, “that if God had called him, he had no right to think of any coarse and uncharitable remarks which might be made. I reminded him that his life-long devotion to you had been a life without faith, and that, after one year in the church, he had given you up willingly. His idea of the true priest was this: one for whose sacred vocation his pious parents had prayed and hoped from the hour of his birth, who had lived from his childhood cloistered in retirement and sanctity, who had never cherished worldly hopes or desires, but, walking apart, had thus approached the altar that had never ceased to shine before him from the hour of his baptism. I owned to him that such a vocation is beautiful, and is often seen by men and angels; but told him that there are others whom the Almighty leads differently. He hides from such souls that he has sealed them also from the beginning, he allows them to drag in the mire of earth, to feel its temptations, to share in its weaknesses. We cannot penetrate the designs of God, but we may well believe that his motive is to humble that soul, and to teach it through its own failings a greater pity and tenderness for the weak and the erring. I warned him that this fear of his might be a temptation of the devil, who saw that his pride was not broken, and who pursuaded him that he was jealous for the honor of God, when in reality he thought but of his own. He was happy at that. ‘If it is nothing but my own pride,’ he said, ‘I have no more trouble.’

“And he has no more trouble, my child,” the priest concluded. “He is the happiest man I ever saw!”

---

---

M. de Lamartine tells us in his Confidences that, as the sages pause for reflection between life and death, so his mother was in the habit of devoting an interval at the close of the day in looking back on its vanished hours, and seizing its impressions before night should have dispersed them for ever.

When all the household had retired to rest, and no sound was to be heard but the breathing of her children in their little beds around her, or the howling of the wind against the casement and the bark of the dog in the court, she would softly open the door of a little closet of books, and seat herself before an inlaid cabinet of rose-wood to record the events of the day, pour out her anxieties and sorrows, her joy and gratitude, or utter a prayer all warm from her heart. Her son says: “She never wrote for the sake of writing, still less to be admired, though she wrote much for her own satisfaction, that she might have, in this register of her conscience and the domestic occurrences of her life, a moral mirror in which she could often look and compare herself with what she had been in other days, and thus constantly amend her life. This custom of recording what was passing in her soul—a habit she retained to the end—produced fifteen or twenty little volumes of intimate communings with herself and God, which I have the happiness to preserve, and where I find her once more, living and full of affection, when I feel the need of taking refuge in her bosom.”

Of course, such a journal was not intended for the public eye, and her son is so conscious of this that, even while editing this volume of extracts from his mother’s manuscripts, he says it has no interest but for those who are allied to her by blood or sympathy of soul, and prays all others to abstain from reading it. M. de Lamartine’s financial difficulties obliging him to make capital, not only out of the private emotions and experiences of his own heart, but even of his family archives, the publication of this volume was announced previous to his death, but was deferred at his earnest request.

The interest in everything connected with so eminent a poet, the charming pictures he has drawn of his mother in his Confidences, and the influence she had in moulding his character, made us look forward with interest to this work, that we might have a clearer insight into the soul to which he owed his poetical and imaginative nature. It is always refreshing and useful whenever one ventures to lift the veil of a pure soul and allows us to read its passing emotions. But such a soul should not be exposed to the eye of curiosity, but only to that of sympathy. To scan such a book—the outpourings of a mother’s heart, written solely for her own satisfaction and her children’s—with the cool eye of a critic, would be as profane as to jeer over the grave of one whose remains have just been exhumed.

But let every tender, religious heart—especially every maternal heart—that loves the sweet odor of flowers that still give out their fragrance when drawn forth from some old drawer in which they have long lain, reverently open this volume, sacred to all the outpourings of a mother’s tenderness. In her transparent nature they can read the unusual strength of the domestic affections, but a heart large enough to take in the poor and the sufferer of every grade, a charity that constantly found excuses for the asperities of others, and a piety that breathed all through her sweet life and crowned her death.

This book is a new proof of the tender piety and sincere faith among the old noblesse of France. Madame de Lamartine is worthy of being classed with the family of the Duke d’Ayen, the La Ferronnays, and the De Guérins. The simple grace of her style, the religious element so strongly infused into her daily life, the development of her emotional nature, and the intensity of her love for her family, all remind us of Eugénie de Guérin. And like her, she had one of those sweet, pensive natures that need the retirement of country life or the shade of the cloister for full development. They were similarly demonstrative in their affections and in their piety. And where one loves and follows with anxious prayer a gifted brother, the other, with the devotedness of St. Monica, weeps and prays for her son.

M. de Lamartine, after passing one gloomy All Souls’ day in recollection near his mother’s grave at St. Point, ended it by taking out the eighteen livrets in which all her thoughts and feelings had been buried for so many years, and, while the church-bell was mournfully tolling above her grave as if to reproach the living for their silence and admonish them to pray for their dead, he opened these books one after the other, and read, sadly smiling, but oftener weeping the while. It is with some such a feeling the reader will follow him. The drama of the heart is always touching, the genuine tear, even in the eye veiled in domestic obscurity, always appealing, and in this page of life’s drama there is many a one dropped. But the eyes from which they fell are always turned heavenward, and such tears have always a gleam of heaven in them, without which the sorrows of life would be unendurable.

---

Madame de Lamartine was the daughter of M. des Roys, intendant-general of finances to the Duke of Orleans. Madame des Roys was the under-governess of the children of that prince, and so great a favorite of the duchess that she was employed as the confidential agent of the latter during her exile, as we learn from this volume. After the execution of Philippe Egalité and the dispersion of his family, the duchess took refuge in Spain. Her daughter, afterwards known as Madame Adelaide, who displayed so much character and exerted so great a political influence during the reign of her brother Louis Philippe, was in a German or Swiss convent. The duchess, suspicious of Madame de Genlis’ influence over her daughter, and perhaps fearful she might be made a tool of the Orleans faction, with whose aims she did not sympathize, commissioned her devoted follower, Madame des Roys, to bring her daughter to Spain. Madame des Roys succeeded in her mission. She embarked at Leghorn about the beginning of January, 1802, and arrived safely at Barcelona with her charge. Madame de Lamartine, who had all this from her mother’s lips, says the meeting of the duchess and Mademoiselle d’Orleans was extremely affecting. Madame des Roys subsequently returned to France, and died on her estates in June, 1804, worn out with fatigue, and troubles resulting from the revolution. She gave her daughter a portrait of Mademoiselle d’Orleans—a present from the duchess, and Madame de Lamartine always showed herself loyal to that family. When the poet wrote his Chant du Sacre without mentioning the Duke of Orleans among the other members of the royal family, she entreated him with tears to be mindful of what she owed the family. Lamartine yielded, but with so ill a grace that his allusion displeased the duke. Madame de Lamartine, fearful of being thought ungrateful to the family, wrote Mademoiselle d’Orleans a full explanation of the affair.

But to go back to the time when Madame des Roys was still governess in the Duke of Orleans’ family. She and her husband had apartments at that time in the Palais Royal in winter, and at St. Cloud in summer. It appears Madame des Roys and Madame de Genlis had some pitched battles in those days, or, as Madame de Lamartine afterward expresses it, deux camps opposés. Madame de Genlis kept up the grudge after the death of her former rival, and, years after, severely attacked M. de Lamartine’s poems by way of satisfaction.

Madame de Lamartine was born at the palace of St. Cloud, and passed her childhood there with Louis Philippe, sharing the lessons and sports of the Orleans children. All her earliest recollections were connected with St. Cloud, its fountains, and broad alleys, and velvet lawns, and lovely park. Many years after (in 1813), she tells in her journal that, being at Paris, her son drove her to St. Cloud in a cabriolet, and she thus writes of her visit: “This is the place where I passed so much of my childhood when my mother was bringing up the Duke of Orleans’ children. I was very happy there. I left when fifteen years old, and had not seen the place since, though I longed to, for I retained a delightful remembrance of it. I walked all over the park with Alphonse and Eugénie, pointing out tree after tree where I played when a child. I wished to see our apartments once more, but it was impossible, as they are occupied by the Empress Maria Louisa.”

When fifteen years of age, Alix des Roys was nominated by the Duke of Orleans to a vacancy in the noble Chapter of Salles, where she was placed under the protection of the Countess Lamartine de Villars, a canoness of that chapter. The Chevalier de Lamartine, visiting his sister, fell in love with the beautiful Alix, who is said to have resembled Madame Récamier, and, instead of embracing that semi-monastic life, she ultimately married him, March 6, 1790.

We can imagine the contrast between her life in the maisons de plaisance of one of the wealthiest princes in Europe, and that she afterward led in a plain country residence a hundred miles from Paris, and in limited circumstances. She afterward alludes in her journal to this change: “In my childhood I imagined it impossible to exist unless at court, in a palace like the Palais Royal, or the park at St. Cloud, where I lived with my mother. Now, O my God, I wish to be content in every place where thy will places me!”

But her new home was not without its attractions for a nature like hers. Leaving the banks of the Saône where it winds among the fertile hills of Mâcon, and going toward the old Abbey of Cluny, where Abélard breathed his last, the traveller, turning aside into a winding mountain-path, comes after an hour or two to a sharp spire of gray stone towering above a group of peasants’ houses. Beyond these, nestling in a hollow at the foot of a mountain, is Milly, familiar to every reader of Lamartine. Five broad steps lead to the door, which opens into a corridor full of presses of carved walnut containing the household linen. From it doors open into the various apartments, and access is had to the one story above. The mountain almost insensibly begins its ascent directly back of the house. Its slope is luxuriant with vines, on which depended mainly the subsistence of the family. A small garden is in the rear of the house, with its vegetables and flower-beds and clumps of trees, and its secluded “Alley of Meditation” where Madame de Lamartine walked at sunset, saying her rosary and giving herself up to holy recollections.

She seems to have taken Milly at once to her heart. She affectionately calls it her Jerusalem—her abode of peace. She often said to her son: “It is very small, but large enough if our wishes and habits are in proportion. Happiness is from within. We should not be more so by extending the limits of our meadows and vineyards. Happiness is not measured by the acre, like land, but by the resignation of the heart; for God wishes the poor to have as much as the rich, that neither may dream of seeking it elsewhere than from him!”

And again she says: “If people were convinced that, by submissively receiving all the difficulties of the position in which they are placed, they would be at peace everywhere; they would allow themselves to be sweetly guided without anxiety by circumstances and the persons to whom they owe deference. Since I decided on this, I have been infinitely more happy. There was a time when I wished everything to yield to me, and absolutely subordinate to my will. I was then incessantly tormented about the present and the future. I often saw afterward it would have been a misfortune to have had my own way. Now I abandon myself to the Infinite Sovereign Wisdom, I feel at peace exteriorly and interiorly! God be praised for ever! He alone is wise, and should overrule all!”

Poor woman, she had enough to try her flexible will. Her husband’s elder brother, who, according to the ancient régime, was regarded as the head and guide of the family, was not disposed to give up his rights. He was unmarried, and particularly fond of interfering in the domestic regulations of the family whose future prospects somewhat depended on him, particularly those of Alphonse, who was to perpetuate the name. Another brother, the Abbé de Lamartine, lived further off, and was, of course, less tempted to interfere, but seems to have given his voice on extraordinary occasions. And then there were two unmarried aunts whom Madame de Lamartine seems to have been attached to, and whom in her charity she calls saints, but very trying saints they were with their strictures on her dainty ways, her careful dress, and her indulgence to her children. To do them justice, however, they all seem to have been sincerely anxious for the prosperity of the family.

Madame de Lamartine brought up one son and five daughters, concerning whom she gives many interesting details in her journal. The daughters appear to have been lovely in person and character. Their brother has given a delightful description of them in his Nouvelles Confidences, which is confirmed by his mother’s journal.

But M. de Lamartine makes a very strange mistake in saying his mother derived her notions of educating her children from the works of Rousseau (particularly from Emile) and St. Pierre, whom he calls “the favorite philosophers of women because the philosophers of feeling,” and “whose works,” he says, “she had read and admired.”

Some of Madame de Lamartine’s earliest recollections were certainly of Gibbon, D’Alembert, Rousseau, and others of the same stamp who frequented the society of Madame des Roys. She even remembered seeing Voltaire when but seven years of age, and “his attitude, his costume, his cane, his gestures, and his words remained imprinted on my memory as the foot of some antediluvian monster on the rocks of our mountains.” But she certainly did not esteem these men or imbibe any of their opinions, and so far from having “conservé une tendre admiration pour ce grand homme,” Jean Jacques Rousseau, as her son declares, she regarded him with a certain horror, and his genius as allied to lunacy.

In the first place, Madame de Lamartine seems to have been very scrupulous about reading dangerous books. In her journal of the year 1801, she makes a resolution to deny herself all useless reading for her children’s sake, and declares frivolous books “one of the most dangerous pleasures in the world.”

Some years after, she visits her son’s chamber, during his absence, to examine his books. Among others she finds Rousseau’s Emile. She regrets it is “empoisoned with so many inconsistencies and extravagances calculated to mislead the good sense and faith of young men. I shall burn this book,” she adds, “and particularly the Nouvelle Héloïse, still more dangerous because it inflames the passions as much as it warps the mind. What a misfortune that so much talent should be allied to madness! I have no fears for myself, for my faith is beyond temptation and not to be shaken; but my son ——”

And when toward the close of her life she saw by her son’s poem Childe Harold that he had imbibed the pernicious ideas of French philosophy, she says: “I knew these famous philosophers in my youth. Grant, O my God! he may not resemble them. I firmly represent to him the danger of such ideas, but, in the language of Scripture, the wind bloweth where it listeth. When a mother has brought a son into the world, and instilled her own faith into him, what can she do? Only put her feeble hand continually between the light of this faith and the breath of the world that would extinguish it! Ah! I am sometimes proud of my son, but I am well punished afterward by my apprehensions as to his independence of mind!

“As for me, to submit and believe seems the only true wisdom in life. They say it is less poetic, but I find as much poetry in submission as in rebellion. Are the faithful angels less poetical than those who rose up against God? I would rather my son had none of these vain talents of the world than to turn them against the dogmas that are my strength, my light, and my consolation!”

Madame de Lamartine records a fact concerning Rousseau which is by no means a proof of her esteem for him. Madame des Roys, from whom she had it, was very intimate with the Maréchale de Luxembourg. Previous to the birth of one of Rousseau’s children, the maréchale, a great friend of his, fearing he would send the child to a foundling asylum as he had done three others, begged, through a third person, to have it as soon as it was born, promising to take care of it. Rousseau gave his consent. The mother was beside herself with joy, and as soon as the child was born sent word to the person who was to take it away. He came, found it was a fine, vigorous boy, and appointed an hour to come for it. But at midnight Rousseau appeared in the sick-room wrapped in a dark cloak, and, in spite of the mother’s screams, carried off his son to drop it at the asylum without a mark by which it could be recognized. “This is the man whose sensibility so many extol,” said Madame des Roys, and Madame de Lamartine adds: “And I, I say, here is the unfeeling man whose head has corrupted his heart! Alas! genius is often only a prelude to insanity when not founded on good sense. Let us welcome genius for our children if God bestows it, but pray they may have sound sense!”

Alphonse was sent at an early age to a secular school at Lyons, the religious orders not being restored. His mother thus writes:

“November 9, 1801.—To-day I am at Lyons to bring Alphonse back to school. My heart bleeds. I went to Mass this morning. I was continually looking for his beautiful fair hair in the midst of all those little heads. My God! how frightful to thus root up this young plant from the heart where it germinated, and cast it into these mercenary institutions. I was sick at heart as I came away.”

In October, 1803, she says: “I have with difficulty obtained permission from my husband and his brothers to take Alphonse away from the school at Lyons, and place him at the Jesuits’ College at Belley, on the borders of Savoy. I came with him myself. I was too much distressed to write yesterday after confiding him to these ecclesiastics. I passed half the night weeping.

“October 27.—I went this morning to look through the guichet of the court of the Jesuits’ College at my poor child. I afterward saw him at Mass in the midst of the students. He says he is satisfied with his reception from the professors and his comrades. I went to-day to see the Abbé de Montuzet, the former prior of my Chapter of Canonesses at Salles. In the evening I left for Mâcon. In passing before the college I could see the boys from the carriage playing in the yard, and heard their joyous shouts. Happily, Alphonse did not approach the guichet and see my carriage. He would have felt too badly, and I also. It is better not to soften these poor children destined to become men. Leaning back in the carriage, I wept all alone under my veil a part of the day.”

She loved to read the Confessions of St. Augustine, and, like St. Monica, she followed her son with her prayers and tears all through the vagaries of his early life, trembling for his rich gifts and susceptible nature. And with how much reason is evident from his own account. How much more she continually desired his spiritual welfare than his success in the world is evident throughout this work. In the first flush of his fame as a poet, she writes:

“January 6, 1820.—Nothing new at Paris, except I am told Alphonse is received with distinction in the best society, where his appearance and talents have excited, according to my sister, Madame de Vaux, a kind of enthusiasm. She mentions the names of many whose mothers I knew in my youth who overwhelm him with cordiality—the Princess de Talmont, the Princess de la Trémouille, Madame de Raigecourt (the friend of Madame Elizabeth), Madame de St. Aulaire, the Duchess de Broglie (Madame de Staël’s daughter), Madame de Montcalm (the Duke de Richelieu’s sister), Madame de Dolomieu, whom I knew so well at the Duchess of Orleans’; then there are many eminent men who eagerly proffer their friendship to him who was so obscure but yesterday—the young Duke de Rohan, the virtuous Mathieu de Montmorency, M. Molé, M. Lainé, said to be such a great orator, M. Villemain, the pupil of M. de Fontanes, whom he sees at M. Decazes’, the king’s favorite, and a thousand others. Thou knowest, O my God! how proud I am of this unexpected cordiality toward my son, but thou knowest also that I ask not for him what the world calls glory and honor, but to be an upright man, and one of thy servants like his father: the rest is vanity, and often worse than vanity!”

And when, still later, she goes to Paris, and meets the distinguished circle in which he moved, is received by Madame Récamier with her incomparable grace, and hears Châteaubriand, one of her favorite authors, read, and sees the prestige which her son had acquired, she confesses to a feeling of gratification at his fame, but adds: “I pray God for something higher than all this for him.”

But to return to her life at Milly. The tenderness of her nature was not confined to her own family, but was always responsive to every appeal.

To quote from her journal: “I was told after dinner that a friendless old man, whom I saw after, that lived in a hut on the mountain, with only a goat for a companion, had just been found dead. The news greatly distressed me, for I had reproached myself for not having gone to see him lately—it was so far. It is true I thought he had recovered, but I should not have trusted to that at his age. I ought to have been more attentive to him. My heart is full of remorse. In the good I do, and in everything, I am not persevering enough. I grow weary too soon and too frequently. I am too easy led away by distractions or weariness, which are not sins, but weaknesses, and hinder from a holy use of time. Was not time given us that every day and hour something might be done for God, both in ourselves and for others? I went to walk this evening with my husband and two eldest daughters. We went through the vineyard, now in bloom. The air was perfumed with their pleasant odor. Our vines are our only source of income for ourselves, our domestics, and the poor. If there are as many bunches of grapes as of blossoms, we shall be quite well off this year. May Providence preserve them from hail!

“We approached the hut above the vineyard where the poor old man died in the morning. I wished to enter it once more in order to pray beside him. My husband was not willing, fearing the sight of him would make too great an impression on me and the children. I wished to ask pardon of his soul for not having been there to utter some words of consolation and hope during his agony, and to receive his last sigh. The door was open: his goat kept going out and in, bleating as if to call assistance in its distress. The poor creature made us weep. My husband consented for me to send for it to-morrow after the burial, and give it a place with our cow and the children’s two sheep.”

Another day she writes: “I went to see an old demoiselle of eighty years, who lives on an annuity in one of the upper chambers of the château. Her only companion is a hen, who is as attached to her as a tame bird. She is called Mademoiselle Félicité. In spite of her wrinkles and hair as white as the wool on her distaff, it is evident she must have been very handsome once. My husband has consented to my wish not to disturb her in spite of the inconvenience it causes us. Old plants must not be transplanted. The places where we live become truly a part of ourselves. She is taken care of by Jeanette, the sexton’s wife, once a servant at the château, and who knows all its past history: we love to hear about those who lived before us in the same dwelling. All this excites to reflection. Some day I shall be spoken of as having been, and perhaps the day is not far off! My God, where shall I then be? Grant it may be in thy paternal arms!”

The means of the family seem to have been quite limited during the first years of her married life. This made them anxious as to the vintage on which their income chiefly depended. She thus writes: “The day has been unfortunate. There have been several showers, and the hail has crushed our vines. This is more distressing, for they were loaded with grapes. My heart is very heavy to-night on our own account and that of our poor vinedressers. This shows how much I still involuntarily cling to the things of earth. It is as if I thought happiness due me, for the least affliction immediately casts me down. My God! make me realize at last the nothingness of the things of this world, that I may set my heart only on those that are eternal!”

And later: “The will of God be done! These were the last words I wrote in my journal at the last date. They are the first on to-day’s page. The great storm yesterday was a terrible misfortune to us. The hail completely destroyed our harvest. We should have had a fine crop, and now there remains scarcely enough for our poor laborers to exist on. I am ill with sorrow and anxiety. This misfortune will oblige us to make retrenchments and privations. All our plans to go to Mâcon for the education of our children are frustrated. We shall probably have to sell our horse and char-à-bancs. But it is the will of God: this ought to be sufficient to console me for everything. The fewer pleasures I have in the world, the less I shall cling to it, and the more I shall look forward to that world which alone is important and imperishable—our eternal home. Nothing hardens the heart and so fills it with illusions as prosperity, and what seems hard to human nature is perhaps a very great grace from God, who wishes us to cling to the only real treasures by depriving us of what is only dust. I can say this with more sincerity to-day: yesterday the blow seemed too hard. My husband showed great courage—more than I—though he was greatly distressed for the moment. He said: ‘Provided neither your nor our children are taken away from me, I can resign myself to anything. My riches are in your hearts.’ Then he prayed with me. Meanwhile we could hear the noise of the hail which was breaking the branches and the glass, and the peasants in the court sobbing in despair.”

As in all the old patriarchal Catholic families, Madame de Lamartine was not unmindful of the spiritual interests of her servants: “After dinner, which is at one, I read, then sewed awhile, after which I read a meditation on the Gospel to my domestics. I am going presently to end the day at the church, whose dim light inspires devotion and recollection. It is there I fill the void during my husband’s absence.”

“September 5, 1802.—We have just established family prayers. It is a very impressive and salutary practice, if, as the Scripture says, we wish like brethren to dwell together in unity. Nothing elevates the hearts of servants so much as this daily communion with their masters in prayer and humiliation before God, who knows neither great nor small. It is also good for masters, who are thus reminded of their Christian equality with their inferiors according to the world.

“My poor aunt, who took care of me in my infancy, is dead. I am extremely uneasy about the fate of poor old Jacqueline, her femme-de-chambre, who was a second mother to me, and is now left alone, and perhaps poor. I wish at whatever cost to receive her here. The family are opposed. My husband fears, and with reason, to contradict his brothers and sisters, on whom we rely a good deal for our children. He proposes to pay secretly Jacqueline’s board in a house at Lyons, where she will no longer lack food and care, but I would like to fulfil my obligations of gratitude toward this poor woman to their utmost extent. If I were in her place, and she in mine, nothing would prevent her from receiving me, even in her bed.”

The domestics of the old families in France seemed to have been regarded as a part of the family. Service was almost hereditary, and a bond on both sides. In the French Revolution, nine out of ten of those proscribed by law who escaped were saved by the devotedness of their domestics. Madame de Lamartine shows how fully she regarded the tie that bound her to every member of her household as a sort of spiritual relationship.

“Palm-Sunday, 1805.—There is a great commotion in town and country. The emperor arrives to-day with all his court. We are très gênés, because we are to lodge Mgr. de Pradt, Bishop of Poitiers (the emperor’s chaplain; since Archbishop of Malines, so celebrated for playing the courtier at that time, and for his subsequent ingratitude towards Napoleon after his fall). I prefer this guest to any other of the retinue.”

Of course the parenthetical clause is by M. de Lamartine. It seems Mgr. de Pradt was not wholly ungrateful to the emperor, for the declaration issued by the allied sovereigns at the Congress of Laybach in 1821, so insulting to the memory of Napoleon, called forth from the Archbishop of Malines the following noble protestation:

“It is too late to insult Napoleon now: he is defenceless, after having so many years crouched at his feet while he had the power to punish. Those who are armed should respect a disarmed enemy. The glory of a conqueror depends, in a great measure, on the just consideration shown toward the captive, particularly when he yields to superior force, not to superior genius. It is too late to call Napoleon a revolutionist after having, for such a length of time, pronounced him to be the restorer of order in France, and consequently in Europe. It is odious to see the shaft of insult aimed at him by those who once stretched forth their hands to him as a friend, pledged their faith to him as an ally, sought to prop a tottering throne by mingling their blood with his.

“This representative of a revolution which is condemned as a principle of anarchy, like another Justinian, drew up, amid the din of war and the snares of foreign policy, those codes which are the least defective portion of human legislation, and constructed the most vigorous machine of government in the whole world. This representative of a revolution, vulgarly accused of having subverted all institutions, restored universities and public schools, filled his empire with the masterpieces of art, and accomplished those stupendous and amazing works which reflect honor on human genius. And yet, in the face of the Alps which bowed down at his command; of the ocean subdued at Cherbourg, at Flushing, at the Helder, and at Antwerp; of rivers smoothly flowing beneath the bridges of Jena, Serres, Bordeaux, and Turin; of canals uniting seas together in a course beyond the control of Neptune; finally, in the face of Paris, metamorphosed, as it was, by Napoleon, he is pronounced to be the agent of general annihilation! He, who restored all, is said to be the representative of that which destroyed all! To what undiscerning men is this language supposed to be addressed?”

Napoleon himself at St. Helena, though he censured Mgr. de Pradt’s course as ambassador at Warsaw, regarded the tribute he subsequently paid him as an amende honorable.

Las Cases, alluding to his notes from the emperor’s statements and those about him, says: “I, however, strike them out in consideration of the satisfaction I am told the emperor subsequently experienced in perusing M. de Pradt’s concordats. For my own part, I am perfectly satisfied with numerous other testimonies of the same nature, and derived from the same source.”[55]

It was during this visit of Napoleon at Mâcon he held some conversation with M. de Lamartine [the poet’s uncle] in Mgr. de Pradt’s presence. “What do you wish to be?” said the emperor at the close. “Nothing, sire,” was the reply. The emperor turned away with a look of anger.

“Lyons, April 26, 1805.—I came here with my sister to see the Pope. I saw him pass from the terrace of a garden near the archevêché where he stops. Yesterday I went to the Pope’s Mass at St. Jean’s Church. I had a good view of all the ceremonies, but found it difficult to reach the throne in order to kiss his slipper. However, I had this happiness. This aged man has the aspect of a saint, as well as some of the Roman prelates who were with him, especially his confessor.”

“May 12, 1805.—Our fortunes are improving. My husband has just bought M. d’Osenay’s hôtel at Mâcon. The garden is small, but the house is immense. We are furnishing it, and shall take possession of it this summer. My husband allows me six hundred francs a month, and all the provisions from our two estates, for the household expenses, and to pay for Alphonse’s board [at school]. This is more than sufficient. I cannot cease to admire the providence of God toward us, and am ever ready to give up all he bestows on me when he wishes and as he wishes.”

There is an interesting description of this new home in the Nouvelles Confidences, and of the circle of friends whom they drew around them. Madame de Lamartine desired this change for the benefit of her daughters, but her own tastes inclined her to the retirement of the country.

She thus writes September 7: “I am again at St. Point, which I prefer to any other residence in spite of the dilapidation of the château. I long for a still more profound retreat—a moral one. We must from time to time enter into the solitude and silence of our own hearts.”—“It seems to me if I were free I would consecrate myself entirely to God, apart from the world. But we are always wishing for something different from the will of God. Is it not better to desire only his will?”

She describes the life she leads with her daughters as almost conventual. They all go to Mass every morning. After breakfast they read the Bible or some religious book, and then resume their studies—history, grammar, etc. After dinner and an hour’s recreation, they sew and study. At nightfall they say the Rosary together, and in the evening she plays chess with her husband, and sometimes reads one of Molière’s comedies. “I see no harm in it,” she says with her characteristic delicacy of conscience. “I skip every dangerous word.” They finally have family prayers, at which she improvises a short meditation aloud. Her great object, she says, is to cultivate a genuine spirit of piety in her children, and to keep them constantly occupied.

“September, 1807.—I am enjoying the seclusion at Milly alone with my children. Madame de Sévigné is my society. I took a long walk to-night on Mount Craz, above the vineyard back of the house. I was all alone. I take pleasure in such long strolls at this hour in the evening. I love the autumn time, and these walks with no other company but my own thoughts. They are as boundless as the horizon and full of God. Nature elevates my heart, and fills it with a thousand thoughts and a certain melancholy which I enjoy. I know not what it is, unless a secret consonance of the infinite soul with the infinity of the divine creation. When I turn back and see from the heights of the mountain the little lights burning in my children’s chamber, I bless Divine Providence for having given me this peaceful, hidden nest in which to shelter them!

“I finish always with a prayer without many words, which is like an interior hymn, which no one hears but thee, O Lord! who hearest the humming of the insects in the tangle of furze which I tread under my feet.”

“Milly, April 11, 1810.—I passed the night here with Cécile and Eugénie. The weather is fine, and I longed to enjoy a pleasant spring morning which I find delicious. As soon as I rose I went into the garden, where I passed three hours reading, praying, meditating, thanking God for his benefits, and endeavoring to profit by them. The weather is lovely, the trees are full of buds and blossoms which perfume the air. The leaves are beginning to put forth, the birds to sing, the little insects to hum. Everything in nature is reviving and being born again. I am inexpressibly happy when I can be at peace in the country at this sweet time of early spring. Unfortunately I am obliged to return to town for I know not how long, but I wish only the good pleasure of God, and my only desire is to fulfil my duty wherever he calls me.

“Ah! how much I have to reproach myself for. I go to extremes in everything. In the world I am too worldly, in retirement too austere. Present surroundings have too sensible an effect. I am not well. I offer my sufferings to God. I pray a little. I read a good deal. I am extremely impressed by the shortness of life, and the necessity of preparing for eternity. I often endeavor to be fully penetrated with what I remember to have once written—that this life must be regarded as a purgatory, and whatever sufferings the good God sends I should look upon as sweet in comparison with what I merit.

“What makes me tremble is the establishment of my six children, and all the difficulties I foresee in this respect. But this anticipated trouble is wrong; for, after the assistance of God in so many circumstances, I ought to expect it still more in this the great object of my life.”

In fact, she succeeds wonderfully in disposing of her daughters à la Française, and, to our American eyes, they are wonderfully docile, but perhaps edifyingly so. Her lovely daughters all marry gentlemen who are so fortunate as to have the particle de to their names—a thing of vast moment with the French gentry.

One of them, Césarine, a dazzling beauty of the Italian style and said to have a lively resemblance to Raphael’s Fornarina, has her little romance, which her mother favors, but the fates frown adversely in the person of la famille, to wit, the formidable uncles and aunts. How poor Madame de Lamartine ever got such a jury to agree on the sentence of any suitor is no small proof of her talent for diplomacy. In this case the objection was for pecuniary reasons only, for the de was not wanting—“de misérables raisons de société,” says the mother, who adds: “They would not be very rich, but I could keep them at home. I am obliged to conceal from my husband’s family my inclination for this marriage; but, if I did not oppose them sometimes, I should never get my children married.”

In this instance she was at last forced to yield, and tell the aspirant, but not without tears, that Césarine could not marry him. “The family is obstinate in its refusal. I am in despair. The young man still hopes against all hope.” Luckily—at least luckily for the family peace—Césarine, though sad, is touchingly submissive—the lovers are separated for ever. The chivalric Alphonse tells his sister not to do violence to her feelings—that he will take her part against the whole set; but the gentle maiden declares—we persist in believing, in our fondness for a bit of sentiment, that she made a virtue of necessity in view of those Gorgons and chimeras dire—declares her attachment rather a feeling of gratitude for the love that had been given her, and that she is ready to marry without repugnance the estimable man destined to replace the one she has lost!

Nothing more could be said. She marries unexceptionably—M. de Vignet, the nephew of the celebrated Count de Maistre, author of Du Pape, and goes to Chambéry to become a member of a very distinguished family. She died a few years after.

Some years later, Madame de Lamartine records a visit from the discarded suitor of six years before. “We did not speak of Césarine, but his very presence and tender manner said enough. I cried heartily.”

In 1824, she records the affecting and edifying death of her daughter Suzanne, whose loss, as well as that of Césarine, her affectionate nature never recovers from. Her heart seems now to turn more fully toward heaven. The latest records in her journal evince a constantly increasing devotional frame of mind. The surviving daughters are all married, and her son’s prospects extremely flattering. She says: “I should be a happy mother had I not lost two flowers from my crown. Ah! what a void their loss makes when I walk here in the garden in the evening, and yearn to see them and hear their voices. I must detach myself more and more from the world in spite of myself.

“I have this year formed the habit of going to Mass before light. It is better to snatch the first moments of the day from the bustle and pleasures of the world, and first render to God the things that are God’s, and then to the world what belongs to the world. I sometimes find it hard to go out in all kinds of weather from my warm room to attend what is called the servants’ Mass, to which the poor go; but are we not all poor in divine grace, and all servants to our parents, our husbands, and our children? I am abundantly repaid by the recollection I feel in the dim church, the fervor of my prayers, and the calmness and strength I derive from the Divine Presence which accompanies me throughout the day after thus fulfilling a paramount obligation.”

Only a short time before the dreadful accident that caused her death, Madame de Lamartine thus reviews her past life, as if conscious of her approaching end:

“Milly, October 21, 1829.—To-day the birth-day of my first-born. I am here alone, and have consecrated the day to meditation to strengthen my soul and prepare it for death. How many times in my life I have paced up and down this alley of meditation, where no one can see me from the house, with my rosary in my clasped hands, meditating or praying! Alas! what would have become of me in all my interior and exterior trials had God not visited me in my meditations, and suggested holier and more consoling thoughts than my own! It is a great grace to have this facility for recollection in God, which has inclined me almost every day of my life to consecrate some hours, or at least some minutes, in thinking exclusively of him. He loves these heart-to-heart appeals to his divine compassion. He inclines his ear to listen to the pulsations of the pious heart that turns toward him! I felt this more than ever to-day, and came away all bathed in tears, without perceiving it while walking in the alley. It seemed as if my whole life passed before me, and before him who is my Creator and Judge!

“Oh! may his judgment, which is approaching, be merciful.

“I saw myself, as if but yesterday, a child playing in the broad alleys of St. Cloud; then, still young, a canoness, praying and chanting in the Chapel at Salles, undecided whether to make my vows like my companions, and consecrate my whole life to praising God in a place of retreat between the world and eternity; I saw my husband, young and handsome, come in his rich uniform to visit his sister, Madame de Villars, the canoness, under whose care I had been placed because she was older and more reasonable than I. I saw his attention was particularly directed to me above all the rest, and that he profited by every opportunity of visiting his sister at the chapter. As for me, I was struck with his noble features, his somewhat military air, his frankness of expression, and a haughtiness that seemed only to unbend toward me; I remember the emotion of joy shut up in my heart when he at length asked through his sister if I would consent to his demanding me in marriage; then, our first interview in his sister’s presence, our walks in the environs of the chapter with the elder canonesses, his openly expressed wish to marry me, and the continued opposition, and the many tears shed in the presence of God during three years of uncertainty to obtain the miracle of his family’s consent, which appeared impossible; finally, our years of happiness in this poor solitude of Milly, then much more humble than at present; my despair when, scarcely married, he desperately sacrificed all, even me, to fulfil his duty at Paris, defending as a simple volunteer the palace of the king on the 10th of August: the divine protection which enabled him to escape covered with blood from the garden of the Tuileries, his flight, his return here, his imprisonment, my apprehensions as to his life, my visits to the wicket of the prison, where I took my son to kiss him through the bars; my walking with my child in my arms, through the streets of Lyons and Dijon, to appeal to the rude representatives of the people, a word from whom was life or death to me; the fall of Robespierre; the return to Milly, the successive births of my seven children, their education, their marriages, the vanishing of those two angels from earth, for whose loss the remainder cannot console me!

“And now the repose after so much weariness! Repose, yes, but old age also, for I am growing old, whatever they say. These trees that I planted; the ivy I set out on the north side of the house that my son might not tell an untruth in his Harmonies where he describes Milly, and which now covers the whole wall from the cellar to the roof; these walls themselves covered with moss; these cedars which were no higher than my daughter Sophie when she was four years of age, but under which I can now walk—all this tells me I am growing old! The graves of the old peasants whom I knew when young, which I pass as I go to church, tell me plainly this world is not my abiding-place. My final resting-place will soon be prepared. I cannot refrain from tears when I think of leaving all, especially my poor husband, the faithful companion of my early years, who is not feeble, but suffers and needs me now to suffer, as he once needed me to be happy! My children, my dear children! Alphonse, his wife, by her affection and virtue, a sixth daughter; Cécile and her charming children, a third generation of hearts that love and must be loved! And then those who are wanting, but who follow me like my shadow in the Alley of Meditation! Alas! my Césarine, my pride on account of her marvellous beauty, buried far away behind that Alpine horizon which continually recalls her remembrance! Alas! my Suzanne, the saint who wore too soon the aureola on her brow, and whom God took from me that her memory might be for me an image of one of his angels of purity! Dead or absent ones, I am here alone, having borne my fruit—some fallen to the ground like that of yonder trees, and others removed far from me by the Husbandman of the Gospel! Ah! what thoughts attract me, pursue me in this garden, and then force me to leave it when they cause my heart and my eyes to overflow! Ah! this is truly my Garden of Olives!

“O my Saviour! has not every soul such a garden? Alas, yes! this was my garden of delights—and now it is laid waste and desolate. It is my Garden of Olives where I come to watch before my death! And yet it is dear to me, in spite of the vacancies time and death have made around me, even while seeking beneath yonder linden-trees for the white dresses of my children, and listening for their gay voices exclaiming over an insect or a flower in their border!

“What had I done that God should bestow on me this corner of the earth, and this small house, of whose size and barrenness I was sometimes ashamed, but which proved so sweet a nest for my numerous brood? Ah! his name be blessed! his name be blessed! and after me may it still shelter those who will always be a part of me.

“But I hear the bell at Bussières ringing the Angelus.

“Let us leave all this—it is better to pray than to write. I will dry my tears, and all alone in my alley I will say the rosary, to which my little daughters used to respond as they followed me, but which only the sparrows in their nests and the falling leaves now hear. No; no, no, it is not good to give way too much to tears. I must keep my strength for duties to be accomplished—for we have duties even on the death-bed.

“It is the will of God! Let us abandon ourselves to him entirely! The only true wisdom consists in this—to resign ourselves to his adorable will. I have been busying myself here in putting in order my old journals, which has led me to look them over with interest. This always fills me with fresh gratitude for all the grace I have received from God, and with regret for my little progress in piety, after all the good resolutions and reflections I have so often made, but with so little profit. But there is time, always time, while God gives us life, to profit by it to prepare for heaven. This is what I beg him with my whole heart as I finish this book, praying him to shed on me, and on all who belong to me, abundant spiritual blessings. As to temporal blessings, I only ask for them as far as they may be necessary for gaining heaven, but I abandon myself with all my heart to his paternal decrees. May he bless me in my children, in my friends, in all who have loved me, and whom I have so much loved on earth!”

These are the last words Madame de Lamartine wrote in her journal. Some days after, in entering a bath, she found the water too cool, and turned the faucet. The boiling water dashed up on her chest. She fainted. Her cry was heard, but it was too late. She was removed to her chamber. Consciousness returned, and she lived two days. During her last hours she constantly exclaimed: “How happy I am! How happy I am!” Being asked why, she replied: “For dying resigned and purified.”

Her son was at Paris, and did not arrive till after the funeral. Remembering her wish to be buried at St. Point, he had her removed. The grave was opened at midnight, one cold night in December, when the ground was covered with snow.

The peasants, whom she loved and who loved her, took turns in carrying the bier eight leagues, her son on foot behind. Not a word, not a whisper, was to be heard on the way. When they approached Milly, between two and three o’clock in the morning, all the peasants stood in their door-ways, with pale faces and tearful eyes, holding lamps in their trembling hands. They all came out to follow the procession to Milly, where her coffin was placed for a while at the entrance, on the very benches where every morning sat the needy to whom she used to distribute food or medicine.

All the sobbing crowd came up to sprinkle her body with holy water and utter a prayer.

M. de Lamartine afterward built a chapel over the grave of his mother at St. Point, which bears on its cornice the inscription:

“SPERAVIT ANIMA MEA.”

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A PASSAGE FROM CICERO’S SPEECH IN SUPPORT OF L. LICINIUS MURENA’S CANDIDACY FOR THE CONSULATE, AGAINST THAT OF SERVIUS SULPICIUS—TWENTY YEARS BEFORE CICERO’S ASSASSINATION—CICERO AND C. ANTONY BEING CONSULS—SIXTY-TWO YEARS BEFORE CHRIST.

Introductory Note: Servius Sulpicius was perhaps the most eminent practitioner of his day in that branch of the law which belongs to the “special pleader” and the “conveyancer”; but so little of a speaker that he would not venture alone to recommend his own cause or to urge his claims before the Roman people. He employed Cneius Postumius, then very young, and Marcus Cato, a most weighty orator, whose character, however (and a reputation for unswerving principle and the austerest virtues), had a larger share than the mental power of his words in securing to them influence and authority. It was less important what Cato said than that it had been said by Cato. How very different was the case with Hortensius! A stranger, whose face, whose name, not one of the audience knew, fitly delivering any of Hortensius’ harangues, would have commanded attention from the first, retained it to the last, raised many an interrupting tempest of applause during its progress, and left, when he had finished, a powerful, a formidable impression.

Hortensius was that Bolingbroke of the Roman Forum to whom the huge and intelligent assemblies he addressed were what the organ is to a Smart or the violin to a Sivori. He had hewn a lane through many a group of brilliant opponents and rivals, with an Excalibar forged by genius and by study together (and few at last cared to face the weapon), to the very throne of contemporary eloquence. And there, for years, he sat at ease, a king. A suitor despaired of his cause beforehand upon learning that Hortensius had been retained on the other side. Of course, his wealth had become enormous, and his indirect influence (for, although he had had his year of the Consulate, he cared not very much about politics) was an element, a “quantity,” which had to be taken into account by statesmen and generals, by the senate, and by the consuls.

In the case of “Sulpicius against Murena” (Murena had defeated Sulpicius in the canvass for the ensuing year’s Consulate, and this was a prosecution of revenge to unseat the future and “designated” chief magistrate), Murena had retained Hortensius, M. Crassus, afterwards the Triumvir, and Marcus Tullius Cicero. Now, during about ten years past, Hortensius—although speaking with the same charm and the same glamour as ever—had ceased to sit upon the throne or to wear the crown of eloquence. A far mightier spirit, a far finer genius, a far deeper student—a master upon whom his competent and appreciative glance rested with an admiration at once boundless and hopeless—had, after a gallant struggle on his part, so utterly eclipsed him that there was now a greater distance between Tully and Hortensius than there ever had been between Hortensius himself and those accomplished but defeated competitors to whom Hortensius had long been a wonder and a despair.

Cicero, however, had passed a sleepless night before the day of this trial: his voice almost failed him; he looked haggard; his nerves had, for the moment, given way, and with them his presence of mind. In charm of manner, in vigor of delivery, in clearness and percussion of utterance, in external grace, and dignity, and ease, his ancient rival for once surpassed him; nay, till the respective speeches were reported, and could be compared on perusal, Hortensius created the illusion that he had at last, in all respects, overtaken his victor, and would yet again contend for the palm of pre-eminence.

This never was to be. The broken heart of the only orator known to human records, who might perhaps have performed such a task, had then been mouldering for three centuries in a small island of the Ægean Sea. We have bored the reader enough about the advocates, and have mentioned also what Servius Sulpicius, the prosecutor, was. The defendant, L. Licinius Murena, was, on the other hand, a distinguished soldier. He had served as a sort of adjutant-general to the famous Lucullus in that series of campaigns by which he had greatly reduced, without overthrowing (a task reserved for Pompey), the power of Mithridates. Except Hannibal, and perhaps Antiochus (we do not reckon Pyrrhus, for Rome was in the gristle then), no enemy had ever waged so formidable a warfare against the Romans as Mithridates. He was a winged beast. How his fame remains! What parties and excursions you Crimean gentlemen made to the spot where his ashes are supposed to have been inurned and intempled! Lord of every seaboard of Pontus and the Euxine, and lord of the “Evil Sea” itself; of ten thousand rich cities; of five hundred strong fortresses; of five hundred thousand armed men; of horses enough to mount the hordes of a Genghis Khan; of half-a-dozen numerous, adventurous, and well-found fleets; of treasures uncounted and uncountable; adroit, bold, proud, insatiably enterprising; no mean captain; an object of worship to his followers; magnificent and munificent; an implacable hater of the Roman name; the long-alight, far-flaming meteor of the East—he threatened to shake hands in Spain, across all Europe, with Sertorius; to make the shores of Italy quake at the white clouds of his sails, and to teach the waters of the Atlantic as well as those of the Levant to know either the sceptre or the sword of Mithridates. It was no child’s play to bring this potentate to the dust.

Against such a potentate, in the post next to that of the commander-in-chief (who happened, besides, to be a great general), Murena had served for years with the most brilliant efficiency and distinction.

Sulpicius, among other things (alleged bribery, etc.), had sneered at the presumption of Murena, a man “who had been principally with the army” and out of Rome, in entering into competition with, or daring to come forward as the rival of, a person of his, Sulpicius’, dignity, learning, and professional station, standing, rank.

We have said enough—perhaps too much—to frame the little picture which we want to present to our readers; to set it near the right window as you pass. That little picture is the argument in which Cicero (who was on terms of personal intimacy with the prosecutor, as well as with his gallant client) firmly questions—yet questions with the most exquisite urbanity—the rather exorbitant pretensions of Sulpicius, the “learned conveyancer and special pleader,” to a higher consideration than “ought to be, or could be,” allowed to the instruction, the knowledge of many sorts (geographical, historical, administrative, tactical, and technical—ay, strategical even—and of characters; of general statistics; of actual local supplies; of incidental resources, material and moral), and to the professional industry, to the labors, the wounds, the dangers, to say nothing of the valor and the genius of a patriotic and public-spirited soldier, who had led armies to victory, had stormed great strongholds, and had not only defended the frontier of the empire, but enlarged it, with every circumstance of legitimate splendor and honorable success.

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TRANSLATION—EX “PRO MURENA”—SECOND PART OF THE “CONTENTION.”[56]

“I recognize in you, Servius Sulpicius, all the respectability and distinction that family, character, intellectual toil, and such other accomplishments can confer, as may entitle any one to aspire to the Consulate.

“In all these respects I know Murena to be your equal; and so nicely your equal, that we can neither admit any inferiority on his part, nor concede the slightest precedency on yours.

“You have taunted Murena with his genealogy, and extolled your own. If you mean, in all this, that no one can be deemed of honorable parentage who is not a patrician, you will bring the masses [plebs, not populus] to withdraw [secede] once more to Mount Aventine. But if there are considerable and distinguished plebeian families—why, both the great-grandfather and the grandfather of Murena were actually prætors; and his father, when laying down the prætorian office, having received, in the amplest and most honorable form, the solemnity of a capitolian triumph, left thereby the more accessible to my client the avenue to the Consulate, inasmuch as it was for a dignity already earned by the father, and due to him, that the son became a candidate.

“Your nobility, Servius Sulpicius, although of the highest class, is best known to men of letters and to antiquaries; to the people and the electors, not so obvious: your father, you see, was of knightly rank; your grandfather—famous for nothing very remarkable—so that no loud modern voices, but rather the remote whispers of antiquity, attest the glories of your race. For which reason, I have ever claimed you as one of us; a man who, although but the son of a knight, yet have achieved for yourself a fair pretension to the honors of the chief magistracy in the republic.” [He means that he was not presumptuous in offering himself to the electors for the Consulate: “summâ amplitudine dignus” are the words.]

“Nor, for my part, have I ever looked upon Quintus Pompey, a new man, and bravery itself, as having less worth and dignity than Marcus Æmilius (Scaurus), one of the leaders of our aristocracy; for there is the same merit in the mind and the genius which hand down to posterity the glory of a name not inherited (and this Pompey has achieved), as to revive, like Scaurus, by personal services, the half-dead honor of an ancient line. However, I was under the impression, judges, that my own exertions had succeeded in rendering the objection of lowly birth obsolete in the case of persons of merit—persons who, if we recall not merely the Curii, the Catos, the Pompeys, of a former age, architects of their own station, and men of the loftiest spirit, but the Mariuses, the Didii, the Cœliuses of almost yesterday, had been left lying in the shade. But when, after so long an interval, I myself had stormed those fastnesses of nobility, and had struck wide-open for the admission of merit not less than of nobility, in the time to come (as they used to be among our ancestors), the approaches to the Consulate, I certainly did not expect, while a ‘designated’ consul, sprung from an ancient and illustrious family, was defended by an actual consul, the son of a Roman knight” [Cicero was himself at that moment vested with the Consulate], “that the accusers would venture to taunt him with the newness of his origin! For, indeed, it was my own lot to be candidate for the chief magistracy in competition with two eminent patricians, one of them as conspicuous for the abandoned audacity of his wickedness, as the other for his modesty and virtue—and to vanquish both: Catiline, by the respect in which my character was held; and Galba, in the love and confidence of the people. And, surely, had it amounted to any reproach to be a new man, I lacked neither enemies nor enviers. Let us drop, then, this discussion about family, a point in which the present competitors are both alike distinguished; let us see what the other allegations are. ‘Murena sought the Quæstorship with me: and I was made Quæstor first.’ An answer is not expected to be given to every little nothing; nor does it escape any of you, when a number of persons obtain simultaneously the same grade of the magistracy, while only one of them can stand first on the list of announcements, that to be first declared in point of time is not the same thing as to be declared first in point of rank; for the obvious reason, that there must be earlier and later entries in every catalogue, although each name on it bears, for the most part, the very same honor. But the quæstorships of both pretty nearly coincide as to the ‘partition’” [of region]: “my client, under the Titian law, had a silent and quiet province; you, that Ostian province at the mention of which the people, when quæstors are drawing lots, usually utter shouts—not so much a favorite or distinguished, as a busy and troublesome department. The names of each of you continued dormant in quæstorships; for fortune gave to neither a field wherein your valor might respectively have been exercised and displayed. The ulterior periods of time which are brought into rivalry were by each of you very differently spent. Servius pursued here, along with us, this civic warfare of replications, pleas, caveats; replete with care and vexations; learnt the civic law; kept late watches; toiled hard; was the servant of every one; endured the stupidities, bore with the arrogance, was surfeited with the perplexities of hundreds; lived at the will of others, not according to his own. It is highly honorable, and wins men’s favor, that one man should labor in a pursuit which is useful to so many others. And all this while, how was Murena engaged? He was serving as adjutant-general to the bravest and wisest of men, a consummate captain, Lucius Lucullus, in which service he led the army, engaged the enemy, was repeatedly [often] at close quarters with him; routed large forces; took cities now by storm, now by siege; so traversed that opulent Asia, that Asia famed for its seductions, as to leave behind him not one trace either of care for its wealth or pursuit after its gaieties; in short, during a war of the first magnitude, played such a part, that, while he shared, and shared with distinction, in every achievement of the commander-in-chief, the commander-in-chief had no part in numerous and notable services of his. Although I speak in Lucullus’ own presence, yet, lest it should be supposed that he allows me, on account of Murena’s actual danger in this prosecution, to exaggerate his merits, let me remind you that everything I state rests upon official and public evidence—evidence in which Lucullus awards to his second in command an amount of credit which never could have proceeded except from the most candid and the least jealous of chiefs. Each of the present competitors possesses every title both to personal respect and to social position; and I would pronounce them equal, if only Servius allowed me. But he will not allow me. He persists in his quarrel with soldiering; he inveighs against the whole of Murena’s adjutant-generalship. He will have it that the supreme magistracy is the natural reward of this, his desk and chambers [assiduitatis, etymologically sitting-ness] work; these daily labors of his. ‘What!’ quoth he, ‘you will have been with the army all these years; you will never have been seen in the Forum; and then, after such a disappearance, you pretend to compete for the highest dignities with men who have spent their lives in the Forum?’ In the first place, Servius, you are not aware how irksome, how wearisome to people, this assiduity of ours is. To me, indeed, the ‘in sight, in mind’ brought with it its conveniences; but I surmounted the danger of tiring people by my immense laboriousness: you may have done the same; but a little less of our everlasting presence would have hurt neither of us.

“However, passing over this, let us come to the comparison of your several studies and acquirements. How can there be any doubt, but that warlike glory carries with it far more likelihood than that of the law to win the Consulate? You keep night-watches, that you may give an opinion to your consulting clients; he, that he may reach his destination in good time with his army. You awake in the morning to the crowing of the cocks; he is called by the battle-breathing trumpets. You array pleadings; he, armies. You are careful not to let your clients be captured; he, to keep from capture cities and camps. He studies how the enemies’ forces, and you how neighbors’ drains and roof-rains, may be held at bay. He knows how to extend our boundaries; and you, how to litigate about our ‘boundings and buttings’”—Cætera desunt, hic.

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Mesdames Folibel occupied a double set of rooms au premier on the Boulevard des Italiens. On a door to the right a large brass plate announced that Madame Augustine Folibel presided over “lingerie et dentelles,” and invited the public to “tourner le bouton.” To the left a large steel plate proclaimed Madame Alexandrine Folibel “modiste,” and invited the public to ring the bell. But after a certain hour every day both these invitations were negatived by a page in buttons, who, stationed at either door, kept the way open for the ceaseless flow of visitors passing in and out of the two establishments. My friend Berthe de Bonton was just turning in to the lingerie department when I came up the stairs.

“How lucky!” she cried, running across the landing to me, then sotto voce: “Madame Clifford [pronounced Cliefore] is here, and wants me to choose a bonnet for her. Now, if there’s a thing I hate, it is choosing a bonnet for an Englishwoman. To begin with, they don’t possess the first rudiments of culture in dress, then they can never make up their minds, and they find everything too dear; but the crowning absurdity is that they bring their husbands with them, and consult them! Figurez-vous, ma chère!” And Berthe, with a Frenchwoman’s keen sense of the comic, laughed merrily at the ludicrous conceit. I laughed with her, though not quite from the same point of view.

“I made an excuse to get away for a few minutes, and left the ménage discussing a pink tulle with marabout and beetle-wings trimming—un petit poème, chérie—but,” she caught me by the arm, “fancy Madame Clifford’s complexion under it!”

“Ah, bonjour, mesdames! I am at the order of ces dames. Will they take the pains to seat themselves just for one second?” continued Madame Augustine, who greeted us in the first salon, where she was carrying on a warm debate on the relative merits of Alençon versus Valenciennes as a trimming for a bridal peignoir.

“I merely wanted to say a word with reference to my order of yesterday. Where is Mademoiselle Florine?” inquired Berthe, looking round the room, where there were several groups ordering pretty things.

“Florine! Florine!” called out Madame Augustine.

“Voici, madame!”

Mademoiselle Florine was a plump little boulette of a woman, who wore her nose retroussé and always looked at you as if she had reason to complain of you. Without being uncivil, she looked it; her nose had a supercilious expression that made you feel it was considering you de haut en bas. The fact is, Mademoiselle Florine was not happy. She was disappointed, not in love, but with life in general, and with lingerie in particular. She had adopted lingerie as a vocation, and now it was going down in the world; it was degenerating into pacotille; grandes dames began to grow cold about it, and to wear collars and cuffs that a petite bourgeoise would have turned up her nose at ten years ago. More grievous still was the change that had come over petticoats. The deterioration in this line she took terribly to heart, and the surest way to enlist her good graces and secure her interest in your order, be it ever so small, was to preface it with a sigh or a sneer at red Balmorals or other gaudy and economical inventions which had dethroned the snowy jupon blanc of her youth, with its tucks and frills and dainty edgings of lace or embroidery. Berthe, it so happened, very strongly shared this dislike to colored petticoats, and was guilty of considerable extravagance in the choice of white ones; Mademoiselle Florine’s sympathies consequently went out to her, and, no matter how busily she was engaged or with whom, she would fly to Berthe as to a kindred soul the moment she appeared.

“I have been thinking over those jupons à traine that I ordered yesterday,” said Berthe to the pugnacious-looking little lingère, “and I have an idea that the entre-deux anglais will be a failure. We ought to have decided on Valenciennes.”

“Ah! I thought Madame la Comtesse would come round to it!” observed Mademoiselle Florine with a smile of supreme satisfaction. “I told Madame la Comtesse it was a mistake.”

“Yes, I felt you didn’t approve; but really twelve hundred francs for six petticoats did seem a great deal,” observed Berthe deprecatingly. “Now, suppose we put alternately one row of deep entre-deux and a tuyauté de batiste edged with a narrow Valenciennes instead of all Valenciennes?”

“Voyons—réfléchissons!” said Mademoiselle Florine, putting her finger to her lips, and knitting her brow.

“It occurred to me in my bed last night,” continued Berthe, “and I fell asleep and actually dreamed of it, and you can’t think how pretty it looked, so light and at the same time très garni.”

“So much the better! Talk to me of a customer like that!” exclaimed Mademoiselle Florine, clasping her hands and turning to me with a look of admiration which was almost affecting from its earnestness. “There is some compensation in working for madame, at least. If those ladies knew what I have to endure from three-quarters of the world!” And she threw up her hands and shook her head in the direction of the premier salon. “But let me get out the models, and see how this dream of Madame la Comtesse’s looks in reality.” Boxes of lace and embroidery were ordered out by the excited lingère, and under her deft and nimble fingers the dream was illustrated in the course of a few minutes. Berthe was undecided. She sat down and surveyed the combination in silent perplexity.

“Really this question of jupons makes life too complicated!” she said presently; “and now I begin to ask myself if these will go with any of my new dresses? The crinoline éventail is going out, Monsieur Grandhomme told me, and they will never go with the queue de moineau that he is bringing in!”

Here was a predicament!

“Attendez,” said Florine, dropping a dozen rouleaux of lace on the floor as if such costly rags, the mere mortar and clay of her airy architecture, were not worth a thought. “Let us leave the question of jupons unsettled for a while; I will go myself this evening and discuss the toilettes of Madame la Comtesse with her femme de chambre; we will see the style and fall of the new skirts, and adapt the jupons to them.”

“How good you are!” exclaimed Berthe, looking and feeling grateful for this unlooked-for solution of her difficulty.

“It is a consolation to me, Madame la Comtesse,” replied Mademoiselle Florine with a sigh, “and I need a little now and then!”

We wished her good-morning. “Let us go back now to Alexandrine,” said Berthe; “I hope Mrs. Clifford has made up her mind by this time.” But the hope was vain. Mrs. Clifford was standing with her back to the long mirror, looking at herself as reflected in a hand-glass that she turned so as to view her head in every possible aspect, while Mr. Clifford looked on. “Do you think it does?” she inquired as we came up to her.

“I think a darker shade would suit you better,” I said; “that pale pink has no mercy on one’s complexion.”

“I’ve tried on nearly every bonnet on the table,” she said, looking very miserable, “and they don’t any of them seem to do.”

“Madame will not understand that the first condition of a bonnet’s suiting, after the complexion of course, is that the hair should be dressed with regard to it,” interposed Madame Alexandrine, who I could see by her flushed face and nervous manner was, as she would say herself, à bout de patience; “these bonnets are all made for the coiffure à la mode, whereas madame wears un peigne à galerie.”

“Dieu! but it is six months since the peigne à galerie has been heard of!”

I suggested, in aid of this undeniable argument, that the comb should be suppressed.

“Oh! dear, no, I wouldn’t give it up for the world!” said Mrs. Clifford, with the emphatic manner she might have used if I had proposed her giving up her spectacles.

“Then you must have one made to order.”

“Yes,” said Madame Alexandrine, “I will make one for madame after a modèle à part.”

“But then it will be dowdy and old-fashioned,” demurred the Englishwoman.

“Then let madame sacrifice le peigne à galerie! What sacrifice is it, after all? Nobody wears them now; they belong to a past age,” argued Madame Alexandrine, appealing to me.

“This one was a present from my husband,” replied Mrs. Clifford, in a tone that seemed to say: “You understand, there is nothing more to be said.”

I did not dare look at Berthe. Luckily she was beside me, so I could not see her face, but I saw the muff go up in a very expressive way, and she suddenly disappeared into a little salon to the left, set apart for caps and coiffures de bal. I heard a smothered “burst,” and a treacherous armoire à glace revealed her thrown back in an arm-chair, stuffing her handkerchief into her mouth, and convulsed with laughter.

Madame Folibel, whose risible faculties long and hard training had brought under perfect control, received the communication, however, with unruffled equanimity.

“That explains why madame holds to it,” she answered very seriously; “it is natural and affecting. Still, one must be reasonable; one must not sacrifice too much to a sentiment. Monsieur would not wish it,” turning to the gentleman, who stood with his back to the fireplace listening in solemn silence to the controversy. “Monsieur understands that the chief point in madame’s toilette is her bonnet. I grieve to say English ladies themselves do not sufficiently realize the supremacy of the bonnet; yet a moment’s reflection ought to show them how all-important it is, how necessary that every other feature in the dress should succumb to it. The complexion, the hair, the shape of the head, are all at the mercy of the chapeau. Of what avail is a handsome dress, and fashionable shawl or mantle, costly fur, lace—an irreproachable tout-ensemble, in fine—if the bonnet be unbecoming? All these are but the rez-de-chaussée and the entresol, so to speak, while the chapeau is the crown of the edifice. Le chapeau enfin c’est la femme! [The bonnet, in fact, is the woman!]” At this climax Madame Folibel paused. Mr. Clifford, who had listened as solemn as a judge, his hands in his pockets, and not a muscle of his face moving, while the modiste, looking straight at him, delivered herself of her credo, now turned to me.

“Unquestionably,” he said in a serious and impressive tone, “there must be a place in heaven for these people. They are thoroughly in earnest.” Mrs. Clifford took advantage of the aside between her husband and me to follow up Madame Folibel’s oration by a few private remarks.

Clearly she was staggered in her fidelity to the “sentiment” which interfered so alarmingly with the success of the “crown of the edifice,” but she had not the honesty to confess it outright. She was ashamed of giving in. Without being often one whit less devoted to the vanities of life, an Englishwoman is held back by this kind of mauvaise honte from proclaiming her allegiance to them. She is ashamed of being in earnest about folly. Now, this British idiosyncrasy is quite foreign to a Frenchwoman; even when she is personally, either from character or circumstances, indifferent to the great fact of dress, she is always alive to its importance in the abstract, and will discuss it without any assumption of contemning wisdom, but soberly and intelligently, as befits a grave subject of recognized importance to her sisterhood in the carrying on of life.

“What do you advise me to do, dear?” said Mrs. Clifford, appealing to her husband, the wife and the woman warring vexedly in her spirit.

“Give in,” said Mr. Clifford. “What in the name of mercy could you do else! A dozen men in your place would have capitulated after that broadside ending in the woman and the bonnet.”

“What does monsieur say?” inquired Madame Folibel.

Monsieur had answered his wife with his eyes fixed on the Frenchwoman, as if she were a wild variety of the species that he had never come upon before, and might not have an opportunity of studying again.

“I suppose I must sacrifice the comb,” observed Mrs. Clifford, affecting a sort of bored indifference and looking about for her old bonnet, “so we will leave the choice of the model open till I have had a conversation with Macravock, my maid, and see what she can do with my hair; she is very clever at hair-dressing.”

“Oh! de grâce, madame!” exclaimed La Folibel, terrified at the rough Scotch name that boded ill for the couronnement. “Your maid, instead of mending matters, will complicate them still more. You must put yourself in the hands of a coiffeur who understands physiognomy, and who will study yours before he decides upon the necessary change. If madame does not know such a man, I can recommend her mine, a coiffeur in whom I have unlimited trust. I send him numbers of my customers, he never fails to please them, and I can trust him not to compromise me. Madame understands the success of my bonnets depends in no small degree on the way in which the head is adjusted for them. Il y a des têtes impossibles that I could not commit my reputation to. I am sometimes obliged to make a bonnet for them, but I never sign it. I have my name removed from the lining, and so edit the thing anonymously. It would compromise me irremediably if my signature were seen on some of your country-women’s heads!”

Mrs. Clifford, awakened to the responsibility she was about to incur, promised to consult the artist instead of her Scotch maid; whereupon Madame Folibel handed her a large card which bore the name Monsieur de Bysterveld and his address. Under both was a note setting forth his capillary capabilities, and informing the public that—

“Monsieur de Bysterveld undertakes to prove that it is possible to become a hair-dresser and yet remain a gentleman.”

The modiste then assisted Mrs. Clifford to tie on her bonnet, observing, while she smoothed out the ribbon carefully as if trying to make the best of a bad case:

“I am glad for her own sake that madame has consented to give up that peigne à galerie. It really is an injustice to her head, and it is simply out of the question her having a chapeau convenable while that impediment exists. Madame will be quite another person,” she continued, addressing Mr. Clifford. “Monsieur will not recognize her with a new chignon and in a bonnet of mine.”

“Oh! then I protest,” said Mr. Clifford dryly; he understood French, but did not speak it—“I protest against both the chignon and the bonnet, madame.”

“Plaît-il, monsieur?” said Madame Folibel, looking from one to the other of us.

“Dear Walter! she means I shall be so much improved,” explained the wife, laughing.

“Improved!” repeated Mr. Clifford, not lifting his eye-brows, but writing incredulity on every line of his face.

His wife blushed, and her eyes rested on his for a moment. Then, turning quickly to Madame Folibel, she made some final arrangement about a meeting for the following day.

Just at this juncture Berthe came back. I was glad she was not there in time to catch the absurd little passage between the two. A husband paying a compliment to his wife, and she blushing under it after a ten years’ ménage, would have been a delicious morsel of the ridicule anglais that Berthe could not have withstood; it would have diverted her salon for a week.

“Well?” she said, five notes of interrogation plainly adding: “Are you ever going to have done?”

“C’est décidé,” answered Madame Folibel, coming forward with an air of triumph. “Madame sacrifices the comb!”

“Excellent!” exclaimed Berthe. “I congratulate you, chère madame. Even mentally, you will be the better of it. For my part, I know no little misery more demoralizing than an unbecoming bonnet.”

We all went down-stairs together, but at the street-door we parted from the Cliffords.

“Where are you going now?” asked Berthe.

“To the réunion at the Rue de Monceau,” I said. “I got the faire-part last night, and I want particularly to be there to try and get a child into the Succursale school. There is only one vacancy, and we are six trying for it, so I fear my little protégée has small chance of success. Come and give me your vote, Berthe.”

“Chérie, I would with pleasure, but I am so dreadfully busy this afternoon: I promised La Princesse M—— to look in during the rehearsal at her house; and then I’ve not been to Madame de B——’s for an age, and I almost swore I’d go to-day.”

“Well, what’s to prevent your going afterwards?” I cried. “It’s not yet four, and the réunion does not last more than an hour. Monsieur le Curé arrives at a quarter-past four, and leaves at five.”

“But one is bored to death waiting for him,” argued Berthe, “and the room is so hot chez les bonnes sœurs, and there won’t be a cat there to-day, I’m sure; everybody is at the skating.”

“Oh! the parish and the skating don’t interfere with each other,” I cried, laughing; “but I see you can’t come, so good-by. I must be off. Mademoiselle de Galliac will be waiting for me.”

“Comment! Is la petite to be there? I particularly want to see her. I want to know how her snow-storm costume went off at the Marine, for in the crowd I never caught sight of her. Chère amie, I’ll go with you to Monceau. After all,” she continued, drawing a long sigh as we stepped into her carriage, “this life won’t last for ever; one must think now and then of one’s poor soul.”

We were a little behind our time for the canvassing. Four of my rivals were before me in the field, and had robbed me of a few votes that I might have received by being there a quarter of an hour sooner.

“Now, Berthe,” I cried, “it’s your fault, so you must bestir yourself to help me. Attack those young girls in the window, and persuade them to vote for my child.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know—go and ask them.”

Berthe charged valiantly at the group in the window, introducing herself by embracing the young girls all round, and declaring her perfect confidence in their support. They gathered round her, fascinated at once by her beauty and her frank, attractive manner. I saw at a glance that the votes were safe, and that I had no need to bring up reinforcements in that quarter, so I set to work elsewhere.

Perhaps it would interest my readers to hear something of the good work itself. Its object is to take charge of orphans of the poorest class, clothe, feed, and educate them till the age of twenty-one. The members are exclusively ladies, married or single. To be a member, it is necessary to be a parishioner, to pay a small sum yearly for the maintenance of the confraternity, and to assist at the monthly meetings, where the wants, plans, and progress of the work are discussed in presence of the curé, who is always president, and another parish clergyman elected directeur, the rest of the board—treasurer, secretary, and vice-president—being chosen from amongst the members. When an orphan is proposed for admission, a written statement giving her birth, parentage, and circumstances, and setting forth the special claims of her case, is placed on the green table of the assembly-room, at which the dignitaries preside during the meeting. This preliminary fulfilled, the next step is to secure the votes of the confraternity. The demand being always much greater than the supply, when a vacancy occurs it is sure to be sharply contested. A zealous patroness takes care to canvass beforehand; but, from one circumstance or another, there are always a good many votes still to be disposed of on the day of the election, and the half-hour that elapses from the opening of the assembly to the arrival of the curé is spent in fighting for them, and presents a scene of interesting excitement. The patroness is looked upon as the mother of the little petitioner, who, once admitted into the orphanage, is called her “child.” Those who are long members and very zealous succeed in getting in many orphans, and thus become mothers of a numerous family. The most devoted of these mothers are generally the young girls. The way in which some of their hearts go out to their adopted children is touching and beautiful beyond description. They seem to anticipate their joys and cares, and to invest themselves with something of motherhood in their relations with the little outcasts, who look to them for help in a world where, but for them, they would apparently have no right to be—where no one cares for them, no one loves them, except the great Father who suffers the little ones to come to him, and will not have them sent away.

Every month the sœurs send in a special bulletin of the conduct and health of each child, addressed to the adopted mother, and read by Monsieur le Curé at the meeting. According to the contents of the bulletin, the mothers are congratulated or the reverse. Little presents are sent to the good children, and letters of reproval written to the naughty ones. In this way, the maternal character is kept up till the children leave the shelter of their convent home. Then the mothers assist in placing them as servants or apprentices, or, better still, in getting them respectably married.

While Berthe was getting up votes for me on her side, I was busy on my own, and when the bell rang, announcing, as we thought, Monsieur le Curé, I had a pretty good poll.

The buzz of talk subsided suddenly; the high functionaries broke away from the humbler participants, and took their places at the green table, near the fauteuils, waiting for the curé and the vicaire. Some of the very young mothers looked eager and flurried. One in particular, who was a rival candidate with me, seemed terribly nervous. She was about seventeen. Two young mothers on either side of her were speaking words of encouragement and trying to keep up her hopes. “You must pray hard for my success,” I heard her say to one of them; “the poor old grandfather will break his heart if Jeannette is refused. He can’t take her into Les Vieillards, even if it were not against the rules, because he hasn’t a crust of bread to give her. He has nothing but what the sœurs give him for himself. Oh! do pray hard that I may succeed!”

“Let us say another Pater and Ave before Monsieur le Curé comes in,” suggested her companions; and the three friends lowered their voices, and sent up their pure young hearts together in a last appeal to the Father of the fatherless in behalf of the little orphan.

The door opened. It was not Monsieur le Curé.

“Ah, bonjour, cher ange!” exclaimed Madame de Bérac, embracing Berthe with effusion, and talking as low as if she were “receiving” in her own salon. “What a charming surprise to meet you! I came to vote for Marguerite’s protégée, and see how my dévouement is crowned!”

I expressed my satisfaction at virtue’s proving in this case its own reward.

“But why have I not seen you before?” inquired Berthe. “I did not even know you were in town.”

“I hardly know it yet myself,” replied Madame de Bérac. “I only arrived last night. Marguerite wrote to me imploring me to be here if I could in time to vote for her. Chère aimée,” she continued, turning to me, “till you reminded me of it, I actually forgot I was a member at all!”

“Well, now that you are in town, you mean to stay?” said Berthe.

“Hélas, I only remain a week.”

“But you said you meant to spend the carnival here?”

“When I said so, I believed it.”

“And what has changed your plans?” I inquired.

Madame shrugged her shoulders. “My husband has been so impolite as to tell me that he has no money! One cannot stay in Paris without money.”

“Quel homme!” exclaimed Berthe, with a look of pity and disgust.

The door opened again. This time it was the curé. After the usual blessing and prayer, he declared the séance opened, and read the reports of the board and the bulletins. These matters disposed of, the business of the election began at once. A brisk cross-examination soon put four candidates hors de concours. Two had fathers who could support them, but wouldn’t. The confraternity found the children not qualified for its charge. Two others were not parishioners of St. Philippe du Roule. Of the six who had started, two therefore only remained in the field. One was mine, the other was the protégée of the young girl whose conversation I had just overheard. We were to divide the votes between us. Our respective orphans had the necessary qualifications. It only remained to see which of the two, as the more destitute, could establish the primary claim on the protection of the confraternity. Mine was ten years of age. She had two tiny brothers and a sister some five years older than herself who, since the death of their mother, six months ago, had supported the whole family by working as a blanchisseuse de fin by day, and as a lingère half the night. But the bread-winner gave way under the load of work, and now lay sick at the hospital, while the brothers and the sister, clinging to each other in a fireless garret, cried out for bread to the rich brothers who could not hear them. The Curé de Ste. Clothilde had promised to find shelter for the boys; but what was to be done with the girl? I had stated these plain facts in the petition, and now verbally recommended the case to the compassion of the members, and once again asked for their votes.

My rival’s child was twelve years of age. She had no brothers or sisters. She was utterly destitute, but in good health, and nearly of an age to support herself.

Monsieur le Curé listened to the two cases, and, when he had heard both, his judgment seemed strongly impressed in favor of mine.

In spite of the interest I felt in my poor little protégée, I could not help regretting the impending failure of my young competitor opposite. She had answered the curé’s questions in short, nervous monosyllables, and now sat drinking in every word he said, two fever-spots burning on her cheeks, while her eyes swam with tears that all her efforts failed to suppress. A face of seventeen is always interesting; but in this one there was something more than the mere attractiveness of early youth and innocence. There was an eager, awakened expression in the clear blue eyes, and a sensitive play about the grave, full lips that one seldom sees in so young a face. She was simply, almost quaintly dressed as contrasted with the costly elegance of most of the dresses around her. The black bonnet with the wreath of violets resting on the fair hair, and the neat but perfectly plain black reps costume, bespoke not poverty, but the very strictest economy.

“To the vote, mesdames,” said the curé. “I fear, Mademoiselle Hélène, you have a bad chance.”

“O Monsieur le Curé!” burst from Hélène, “her poor old grandfather will die of disappointment.”

“My poor child, I hope not,” said the curé, evidently touched by her distress, but unable to repress a smile at this extreme view. “Your protegée’s having a grandfather is indeed an advantage on the wrong side.”

“He’s blind, Monsieur le Curé! and paralyzed! and eighty-six years old!” urged Hélène, gaining courage from desperation, “and his one prayer is to see the petite safe somewhere before he dies. O Monsieur le Curé!—” She stopped, the big tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Voyons!” said the good old pastor, rubbing his nose, and fidgeting at his spectacles. “Let us take the vote, and then we shall see. You have a child already, have you not, mademoiselle?”

“Yes, Monsieur le Curé; I have two, but one is in the country, at the Succursale.”

The votes were taken, and, by a very small majority, I carried it. My voters congratulated me, while Hélène’s friends crowded round her, condoling. But the poor child would not be comforted; overcome by the previous emotion and the final disappointment, she sobbed as if her heart would break.

“Oh! really, it’s too cruel to let that dear child be disappointed,” said Berthe. “Can’t we do something, Monsieur le Curé? Can’t we by any possibility squeeze in another child?”

“Nothing easier, madame; you have only to create a new bourse, or get subscribers to the amount of three hundred francs a year for the term of the child’s education,” replied Monsieur le Curé.

“Then I subscribe for two years down,” said Berthe impulsively. “Who follows suit?”

“I do,” said another speaker; “I will subscribe for one year!”

“And I will give forty francs,” said a third.

“And I a hundred,” said the curé, who was always to the fore when a good work was to be helped on.

In a few minutes, the green table glistened with gold pieces and notes. It was all done so quickly that Hélène had not had time to ask what it was all about, when Berthe ran up to her with the good news that her child was taken in, and, embracing her tenderly, bade her dry her tears.

“How good you are, madame!” said the young girl, returning her caress with fervor; “but I knew you were good; you have the face of an angel!”

“It is better to have the heart of one,” said Berthe, laughing, and hastily rubbing a dew-drop from her own fair face.

“Now, I must make haste away, or I shall be late for my lesson,” said Hélène, after thanking the members who gathered about her, this time embracing and congratulating.

“What lesson are you going to take, ma petite?” inquired Berthe affectionately.

“I am going to give one, madame,” replied Hélène. “I live by giving music lessons.”

“Then you must come and give me some,” said Berthe. “Here is my address. Come to me to-morrow as early as you can.”

“You are not sorry I made you come, are you, Berthe?” I asked, as we went out together.

“Sorry! I would not have missed it for the world.”

“Au revoir, à demain soir!” said Berthe, kissing a fair-haired young girl, and conducting her to the door.

“What a sweet face! Whose is it?” inquired Madame de Beaucœur.

“Hélène de Karodel’s. Her character is sweeter still than her face. I have fallen quite in love with her,” said Berthe. And she related the story of their meeting at the réunion de Monceau, and the acquaintance that had followed.

“It is a fine old Breton name, and used to be a very wealthy one. How comes she to be earning her bread, poor child?”

“The old story,” said Berthe. “General de Karodel mismanaged his property, took to speculation by way of mending matters, and of course lost everything. He died, leaving a widow and three children to do the best they could with his pension, about a thousand francs a year. Hélène is the eldest, and what she earns pays for the education of the second sister.”

“But the rest of the family are well off. Why don’t they do something for them?” demanded Madame de Beaucœur.

“Rich relations are not given much to helping poor ones,” replied Berthe; “besides, these Karodels are as proud as Lucifer, and benefits are pills that a proud spirit finds it difficult to swallow; it takes a good deal of love to gild them.”

“Very true!” And dismissing Hélène de Karodel with a sigh, “Chère amie” said Madame de Beaucœur, “I am come to ask you to do me a service.”

Her presence indeed at so early an hour (it was not much past one) on Berthe’s “day” suggested something more important than an ordinary visit. A “day” is a thing that deserves to be noticed amongst the institutions of modern Paris life. Everybody has a day. Women in society have one from necessity, for the convenience of their visitors whose name is Legion. Women not in society have one because they like to be included amongst those with whom it is a necessity. The former speak of their day as “mon jour” and as a rule hate it, because it ties them down to stay one day in the week at home. The latter speak of it as “mon jour de réception,” and glory in it. For the former it is a mere episode, an occasion amongst many for toilette and gossip, mostly of the Grandhomme and Folibel kind, but often of a more serious character, sometimes even of conversation on such grave topics as politics, science, and theology. For the latter, it is a grand opportunity for dress, and dulness, and weary expectation. Madame, attired in state, sits on her sofa like patience on a monument, smiling, not on grief, but on hope—hope of visitors, who come like angels, few and far between. Woe be unto the false or foolish friend who, under any pretence of business, or kind inquiries, or lack of time, should pass by this day of days, and call on some insignificant day, when neither madame, nor the salon, nor the valet-de-chambre is in toilette to receive him!

But it is not into one of these dreary Saharas that we have strayed. Berthe’s day is as busy as a fair. So great is the concourse of visitors that, although the reception begins officially at three, the rooms begin to fill soon after two, those who really want to speak to her alleging, as an excuse for forcing the consigne, that, when la cour et la ville are there, it is a sheer impossibility to get a word with her.

“A service!” repeated Berthe. “I hope it is not too good to be true.”

“Toujours charmante!” Madame de Beaucœur took her hand and pressed it. “But the favor I am going to ask does not directly concern myself. You know Madame de Chassedot?”

“Slightly; I meet her here and there; we bow, but we don’t speak.”

“She has deputed me to speak for her to-day. Do you know her son at all?”

“A fair youth, tall and good-looking?”

“Precisely.”

“I think I danced with him at the Marine, the other night,” said Berthe reflectively.

“Then you know him at his best; he dances divinely; but I believe that is the only thing he excels in,” observed Madame de Beaucœur.

“He is very stupid?” said Berthe interrogatively.

“Not very. Simply stupid. But he is, as you know, good-looking, and, what is more to the purpose, of good family and very well off. He is heir to his uncle, and so will one day have two of the finest châteaux in France, each representing two millions of money. The paternal millions have grown thin since the old gentleman’s death, but the uncle’s will replenish them soon; he cannot last long, he is in bad health and seventy-six years of age. So the marquis is safe to be at the head of a very handsome fortune by the time he has settled down.”

“Meanwhile?” said Berthe, pretending not to see the drift of these preliminaries.

“Meanwhile, his mother is very anxious to marry him. She spoke confidentially to me about it, and begged me to look out for a wife for her. I promised I would do my best. Like all mothers-in-law, she wants perfection. Sixteen quarterings en règle, that is understood; equal fortune of course; but, although Edgar’s present and future fortune is nominally four millions, as he has compromised one million, she would count it as not existing, and only exact three millions with his wife. This is carrying on matters on a grand scale?” And Madame de Beaucœur waited for Berthe’s approval.

“How did he compromise the odd million?” inquired Berthe evasively.

“Mais, mon Dieu! One must not examine too closely!” replied Madame de Beaucœur, smiling at the naïveté of the question.

“And besides these?” said Berthe.

“The girl must be pretty, and well brought up. I must tell you, my dear,” continued the lady, with a sort of diffidence as if conscious that she was about to state some ludicrous or damaging fact, “that the mother-in-law is very pious, and she holds very much to having a daughter-in-law who is so also. Otherwise she is the best woman in the world, very intelligent, and will do all in her power to make her son’s wife happy.”

“And the son himself? You have not said much about him. How far does he pledge himself to the same end?”

“Ah! there is the difficulty!” said Madame de Beaucœur. “Unfortunately he won’t hear of being married at all. The moment his mother speaks of it, he either turns it off in a joke, or, if she insists, he gets into a tantrum, flies out of the house, and she doesn’t see him for a week. You can fancy how this complicates the matter for her, poor woman!”

“It certainly is a complication,” observed Berthe.

“And it makes it all the more incumbent on us to try and help her,” resumed the envoy. “So I have come to enlist your offices in her behalf. I promised her she might count on you, chère amie. Did I promise too much?”

“If you promised her that I would marry her son for her, nolens volens, you decidedly did,” answered Berthe, laughing ironically.

“Oh! I did not go that length,” protested Madame de Beaucœur, nettled, but laughing heartily to hide her pique. “I only said that you were more likely than any other woman in Paris to know the girl who united all these conditions, and that, if you knew her, you would give Madame de Chassedot an opportunity of meeting her.”

“And how about Madame Chassedot meeting her?” demanded Berthe perversely. “After all, the contracting powers must look each other in the face at least once before they are brought to swear eternal love and duty before Monsieur le Maire, and if this inconvenient young man flies out the room at the bare mention of such a catastrophe—dear madame, I have the highest opinion of your diplomatic powers, but, believe me, this enterprise is beyond their compass.”

“Leave that to his mother,” said Madame de Beaucœur. “She is equal to it. If you find the missing element, and give her a chance of managing it, the issue is certain.”

Berthe was going to reply when the door opened, and the Princess de M—— was announced. When the usual greeting had subsided, the three ladies entered on the foremost questions of the day, viz., the salon, the cholera, and the new comedy called La Beauté du Diable that was setting all Paris by the ears.

The trio were not long alone. The rooms were filling rapidly, but the new-comers, instead of checking the conversation, enlivened it, every fresh arrival falling in with the current and propelling it.

“The Empress does not believe it to be contagious, and holds it of primary importance that the popular belief to the contrary should be practically repudiated,” said an old senator, who joined the circle while the cholera was on the tapis, “This was the chief motive of her visit to Amiens. I have just been to the Tuileries, and heard the account of it.”

“Racontez, monsieur, racontez!” exclaimed Berthe, recognizing his white hairs by making room for him on the sofa beside her.

“You honor me too highly, madame!” said the old courtier, bending to his knees before he assumed the place of distinction. “I should have at least run the gantlet with the plague to deserve to be so favored. You are aware,” he continued in a more serious tone, “that it was raging furiously at Amiens. The townspeople became so panic-stricken that the victims were deserted the moment they were seized. Every house was closed. No one walked abroad for fear of rubbing against some infected thing or person. Except the sisters of charity going in and out of the condemned houses and hospitals, there was hardly a soul to be seen in the streets. In fact, it threatened to be a second edition of the plague in Milan. The Empress, hearing all this, suddenly announced her intention of visiting the city. The Emperor strongly opposed the project, and her ladies seconded him, being very loth to run the risk of accompanying her majesty. The Empress, however, held her own against them all, like a Spaniard and a woman, said she would have no one run any risk on her account, and declared herself determined to go alone. Two of her ladies, to save their credit, thereupon volunteered to go with her. They started by the first train next day, and returned the same evening, not at all the worse for the journey.”

“I dare say,” remarked a young crévé, a furious Legitimist, who always spoke of the Emperor as ce gaillard là, and who would have as soon dined with his concierge as at the Tuileries. “They made a tour in a close carriage round the town, and took precious care to keep clear of the dangerous quarters.”

“I have the word of her majesty to the contrary, monsieur. She visited the wards, inquired minutely into their organization, and spoke to several of the sufferers. The equerry who accompanied her told me that she held the hand of one poor fellow who was dying, and stooped down, putting her ear close to his lips to hear something he had to say about his little children: there were three of them, their mother had died that morning, and now they were going to be quite destitute. The Empress sent for them, embraced them in the presence of the father, and promised to take care of them. He expired soon after blessing her, as you may imagine.”

“She has a noble heart!” murmured Berthe, while a tear stood in her eye.

“Comédie, haute comédie!” sneered the crévé de faubourg.

“A stroke of policy, rather,” observed a Deputy du Centre, stroking his beard.

“A comedian’s policy!” said a Deputy de la Gauche; “but it is time and trouble lost, the people are no longer duped by that sort of charlatanism.”

“Say, rather, the people are tired of peace and prosperity, and want a change at any cost,” said the Princess de M——. “You are the most unmanageable people under the sun. The wonder is, how any one can be found willing to govern you.”

“That is quite true,” assented Berthe, whose politics, of no absolute color, leaned towards Imperialism, partly because it was the established order of things, and partly because the court was pleasant and its hospitalities magnificent. “We are an unruly nation; but whatever one thinks of the Empire, it is ungrateful and unjust not to give the Empress credit at least for good intentions in this visit to Amiens. It was an act of heroic charity and courage, and that there was as much wisdom as charity in it is proved by the fact that the pestilence has decreased sensibly from the very day of her visit.”

“O madame, madame!” protested the crévé and the two deputies in chorus.

“The bulletins of the last week are there to prove it,” affirmed Berthe.

“Where were they fabricated?” demanded the Deputy de la Gauche. “Perhaps Monsieur de Taitout could tell us?” Monsieur de Taitout was Chef de Cabinet at the Ministry of the Interior.

“They were issued at Amiens by the medical men of the hospitals and by the Commission of Public Health, I presume,” replied the ministerial functionary with repellent hauteur.

“They had at least a roll of red ribbon apiece in return for their satisfactory bulletins!” pursued the Deputy de la Gauche, with supercilious irony.

“You are evidently well informed, monsieur,” replied the Chef de l’Intérieur, provoked by the persiflage; and darting a glance of peculiar meaning at the deputy, “We may infer that you are in the confidence of the Minister of Police?”

The deputy bit his lip and reddened, while a suppressed titter ran through the company. This suspicion of complicity with the police, which the established system of compression and its inevitable consequence, espionage, engendered too readily, was apt to fall sometimes on the most unlikely subjects; in the present instance, however, it was all the more mortifying because public rumor had paved the way for credulity by ascribing the violent antagonism of the Deputy de la Gauche to the fact of his having been disappointed in obtaining a prefecture under the existing government. But Berthe, though she disliked and mistrusted him, was annoyed that he should be made uncomfortable in her salon. She disapproved of the turn the conversation was taking, and by way of diverting it, without breaking off too precipitately from the subject under discussion, she said, addressing an academician who had just joined the circle:

“Is it not quite possible, admitting panic to be the first condition of contagion, that the presence of the Empress in the midst of the sick and the dying may have had such an effect on the morale of the people as could sufficiently explain the immediate decrease in the number of deaths? Instruct us, Monsieur le Philosophe!”

“Madame, I come here to learn rather than to teach,” replied the man of science with the gallantry of his threescore years and ten; “but, since you do me the honor to ask my opinion, I confess that it has the good grace to agree with your own. The people were imbued with the belief that to breathe the infected atmosphere was to die. The Empress, of her own free impulse, came boldly into the midst of it, stood among the dying and the dead, breathed long draughts of contagion, and did not die. Therefore contagion is a fallacy, and panic, instead of killing, is forthwith killed.”

“Your therefore, monsieur, is admirable,” said the Princess de M——, tapping her parasol on the arm of her chair. “Now, let us have a truce of the plague, and talk of something else.”

“Yes,” said Berthe, “or else talking may raise a panic, and we shall all catch it. Have you been lately to the theatre, monsieur?”

“I went last night to see La Beauté du Diable,” replied the philosopher.

“Ah! And what did you think of it?”

“I think, madame—que la France est bien malade,” said the old man gravely.

“One need not be un des quarante to find that out,” remarked the Deputy de la Gauche with a sneer.

“Is it so very bad?” inquired Berthe, turning a deaf ear to the uncivil commentary.

“It is so bad,” replied the academician, “that, if I had not seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears, I could not have believed that the French drama and the French public could have fallen so low. I asked myself whether I was in Paris or in Sodom. From first to last the piece is a tissue of license and blasphemy, for which I could find no parallel, even approximately, in the most ribald productions of ancient or modern literature.”

“Dear me!” exclaimed Berthe, “you quite horrify me. Why, we had just arranged a partie fine to go and see it!”

“Take an old man’s advice, madame—don’t go,” said the academician impressively.

“It all depends,” said the Princess de M——, twirling her parasol, and lolling back in the luxurious fauteuil, “if one is prepared to risk it. I am for my part!”

The philosopher bowed to the lady, but offered no comment.

“Why does the Censure permit such bad comedies to be played?” asked Madame de Beaucœur. “I thought the reason for its existence was the protection of the public morals?”

“Political morals rather, madame,” corrected the Deputy de la Gauche, with an air of mock solemnity, “and it is most conscientious in the discharge of that duty. An irreverent insinuation against the government suffices to bring down anathemas on a comedy or a drama from which no amount of talent can redeem it. My friend Henri —— has just had a chef-d’œuvre, the result of a whole year’s labor, rejected on the plea that some odd passages, which cannot be removed without changing the whole plan, might be construed by sensitive Imperialists into a hit at the dynasty.”

“The judges would serve the dynasty better by exercising a little wholesome restraint over what may prove more fatal to it in the long run than even servile flattery,” observed the philosopher. “What think you, M. le Sénateur?”

“Que voulez-vous?” The senator shrugged his shoulders. “One must reckon with human nature; you cannot lock it in on every side. If you don’t leave a safety-valve to let off the superfluous steam, the ship will blow up.”

“Take care the valve does not turn out to be a leak, or the ship may sink!” replied the academician. “Our press and our literature are eating into the very marrow of the nation’s heart, and rotting it. The people are taught to scoff at everything—to make a jest of everything, human and divine. Nothing is sacred to the venal scribes who pander to the base passions of humanity, and prey upon its vices and its follies. When public morality has come to such a pass that one of the first writers of the day publicly vindicates the devil’s claim to our respect and pity as ‘an unsuccessful revolutionist,’ and when one of the last writes and prints such a sentence as, ‘I grant you the good God, but leave me the devil!’ and that the cynical blasphemy calls out no stronger comment than a laugh or a shrug—when, I say, we have come to this pitch of progress and civilization, it is time the ship’s hold were looked to.”

“I grant you they are dangerous symptoms,” assented the senator, shaking his head, and preparing a pinch from his enamelled snuff-box.

“A much more ominous symptom, to my mind, is that the nation is dreadfully ennuyée,” observed the Deputy du Centre, with a weighty emphasis on the adverb. “When France ennuies herself, it is time to cry, Take care.”

“Who is to take care?” said the Princess de M——.

“The government, madame. We have had this one eighteen years now; three years beyond the lease usually granted to governments in France, and the people are thoroughly tired of it. Paris especially is ennuyée of late.”

“Paris is always ennuyée unless she has a war, or an exhibition, or some kind of a carnival, to keep her in good humor,” said Berthe; “but Paris is not France.”

“Pardon, madame, Paris c’est le monde!” replied M. du Centre, in melodramatic accent.

“Le monde, non,” retorted Madame de M——; “le demi-monde peut-être.”

There was a general laugh at this sortie of the princess, and before it subsided a group of new arrivals, amongst whom were the Snow-Storm and her mother, were ushered in, and broke up the controversy. Several of the company, some who had not spoken a word to Berthe, but had merely made acte de présence in the crowd, withdrew. Madame de Beaucœur and the Princess de M—— remained on.

“Quelle charmante jeune fille!” said the former sotto voce to the princess, as Madame de Galliac and her daughter sat down near them. “Who is she?”

“Mademoiselle de Galliac. She is the partie of the season. On dit gives her four millions.”

“Indeed!” And Madame de Beaucœur, on marriageable maids intent, pricked up her ears. “How odd I should not have met her before!”

“She has only lately arrived from Brittany. Our hostess patronizes her very zealously. I suppose she is looking out for a husband for her.”

Madame de Beaucœur made no reply, but committed the remark to her mental note-book. Why had Berthe not suggested this girl to her for Madame de Chassedot? It was the very thing she was looking for. Old name, four millions—one too many, but the inequality was on the right side—beauty, and of course good principles. Madame de Galliac was known to be an excellent woman. How could Berthe have been so disobliging or so thoughtless? Big with a mighty purpose, and unable to resist the need of communicating her ideas, Madame de Beaucœur turned to the Princess de M——, and in the strictest confidence opened her heart to her.

But Madame de M—— was a foreigner, and did not fall in sympathetically with French views on the subject of marriage, and was, moreover, given to call things bluntly by their names.

“A girl with her beauty and money will find plenty of willing purchasers,” she argued, “and I see no conceivable reason for expecting that she will let herself be forced on an unwilling one. There are husbands to be had at every price; she can bid for the best, and the best are already bidding for her.”

“Ah!” said Madame de Beaucœur, alarm mingling with curiosity in the interjection.

“Why, you don’t suppose a prize like that is likely to be twenty-four hours in the Paris market without having scores of the highest bidders fighting for it?”

“How mercenary men are! They are greatly changed since my young day!” Madame de Beaucœur was somewhere between five-and-thirty and forty; but she had been married from school at eighteen, and had heard nothing of sundry interviews between notaires and mothers-in-law, etc., that had preceded the presentation of her fiancé ten days before her marriage.

“Very likely, but in this particular case it strikes me the woman is the mercenary party. You say the young man won’t let himself be married, big dower or little one?” said Madame de M——, laughing, and speaking rather louder than was desirable in the presence of the marketable dower.

“Introduce me to Madame de Galliac,” said her companion, striking a coup d’état on the spot.

The request was complied with, and the two ladies were soon absorbed in each other.

“What shall we do to amuse ourselves this week, chère madame? For Wednesday we have La Beauté du Diable with a diner fin au cabaret, and a petit souper at Tortoni’s; but what shall we do to kill the other three days?” demanded the princess, who had risen to go, and now pounced upon Berthe, who stood taking leave of some guests at the door.

“I haven’t an idea just at present; we will talk it over to-morrow night at Madame de Beaucœur’s. But you must not count on me for Wednesday,” said Berthe, “I have changed my mind about going.”

“What! You are going to play us false!” exclaimed the princess, her ugly but expressive features lighting up with irresistible humor, while her eyes shot out a cold, sardonic glance into Berthe’s. “That old perruque has put you out of conceit with it? But, no! It’s too absurd, ma chère!”

“Absurd or not, I don’t intend to go,” said Berthe resolutely. “I’m not so brave as you are. I do not want to risk myself.”

“But all Paris will laugh at you. They will say you have turned dévote. For mercy’s sake, my child, do not make such a fool of yourself!”

“Paris may say what it likes,” answered Berthe, bridling up, while a blush of defiant pride suffused her cheek. “I despise its gossip, and, in short, I don’t mean to go.”

“Seriously?”

“Quite seriously.”

The princess lifted her shoulders slowly, and as slowly let them fall.

“Then there is no use in my proposing a little distraction that we were planning, in the shape of an escapade to the Bal de l’Opéra on Saturday night? In dominos and masks, of course?”

“Thank you, I do not want to run the risk,” said Berthe, smiling.

“Adieu!” And Madame de M—— heaved a long sigh. “You will make a charming saint, but I fear I sha’n’t worship the saint as much as I loved——”

“The sinner,” added Berthe, laughing good-humoredly. “Oh! well, I’ve not donned the sackcloth and ashes, so you mustn’t denounce me yet. But don’t suppose,” she continued, seeing Madame de M——’s eyes fixed on her with a puzzled expression, “that I mean to reproach you for amusing yourself. Our positions are widely different. You have your husband to stand between you and evil tongues, and, again, you are not amongst your own people here. Honestly, would you go on at Berlin as you do in Paris?”

“Oh!” The princess threw up her parasol, caught it again, and, laughing out, said, “But Paris is a cabaret, where one does as one likes!” And with this exhaustive apology, she opened the door, and passed out.

Berthe went into the second salon, where some of the earlier visitors had gathered to leave room for new arrivals in the first, but she was hardly seated when the door was again opened, and François announced:

“Le Marquis de Chassedot!”

If he had announced Le Marquis de Carrabas, his mistress could not have been more astonished. Was it a trap that Madame de Beaucœur had laid for him? But, no, Mademoiselle de Galliac’s presence was quite fortuitous, and, moreover, Madame de Beaucœur did not know her, so she could not have had any scheme into which the heiress’ visit adjusted itself to-day.

“You were kind enough to permit me to pay my respects to you, madame,” said the young man, walking up to Berthe, with his hat in both hands, and blushing violently while he doubled himself in two before her. “I hope I am not indiscreet in availing myself so precipitately of the permission?”

Berthe smiled her gracious clemency on the indiscretion, and the gentleman, backing a few steps, carried his hat toward a group of politicians who were shaking hands in the window, and making appointments before separating.

“How extraordinary!” muttered Berthe, laughing to herself at the cool audacity of Monsieur de Chassedot. “I was kind enough to permit him! Perhaps he is under delusion, and mistakes somebody else’s permission for mine. Or perhaps it is a ruse of his mother’s to put him unawares in the way of the three millions?”

But Berthe was wrong. M. de Chassedot really had said something to her between the links of the “ladies’ chain” about placing himself at her feet, and, as she looked very smiling and gracious, he took the smiles for a permission. He had no view in asking it beyond that of being received in the salon of the fashionable beauty, and he was encouraged in presenting himself there by the knowledge that he was sure not to meet his mother. It would be a free territory where he might flit about without being in perpetual dread of falling into some net which the maternal solicitude was constantly setting for him in the salons of her devoted allies.

Madame de Beaucœur did not count amongst those redoubtable beligerents. When she called during the day at his mother’s house, he was never there, and, as the habitués of the marquise’s Tuesday evenings were recruited chiefly amongst the old fogies and devotees of the faubourg, a class of her fellow-creatures whom Madame de Beaucœur carefully avoided, there was no chance of his meeting her there in the evening. It was this precisely that made her mediation so precious to Madame de Chassedot. Edgar was disarmed before her; he did not mistrust her, and when, reconnoitring the company in the adjoining room through the broad glass-panel that divided the salon, he spied her sitting near a very pretty girl, the discovery gave him no shock, and, when Madame de Beaucœur, catching his eye, nodded familiarly to him, he at once made his way toward her, and took up a position behind her chair.

“I should like to go very much,” Madame de Beaucœur said, continuing the conversation with Madame de Galliac, “but I have not been this year since the garden opened. One cannot go without a gentleman, and M. de Beaucœur is always so busy in the evening that he can never accompany me.”

“There are hundreds who would cross swords for the honor of replacing him, madame,” declared M. de Chassedot, stooping over her chair, and throwing all the empressement into his voice and manner that her position as a married woman rendered legitimate.

“Then you shall have the honor without crossing swords for it,” replied the lady. “Come and fetch me to-morrow evening at eight o’clock; unless you are equal to undergoing a diner de ménage with myself and M. de Beaucœur, and in that case come at half-past six.”

“Madame! Such kindness overwhelms me!”

Madame de Beaucœur said au revoir to the heiress and her mother, kissed hand to Berthe in the inner salon, and, granting M. de Chassedot’s request to be allowed to see her to her carriage, they left the room together.

“Who is that young lady who was sitting beside you, madame?” he asked with some curiosity, when they were out of ear-shot on the staircase.

“Mademoiselle de Galliac. Did you never see her before?”

“Yes; but I did not know her name.”

“I ought to have presented you. How stupid of me! She is a nice girl to talk to.”

“A l’honneur, madame! to-morrow evening!”

And the carriage rolled off, leaving M. de Chassedot bowing on the sidewalk.

Punctual to the minute, he presented himself in Madame de Beaucœur’s drawing-room as the clock was chiming the half-hour. Monsieur de Beaucœur had, of course, an appointment at the club, which to his infinite regret prevented his accompanying his wife to the Concert Musard, so he remained sipping his café noir, and they set out alone.

The gardens, though only beginning to fill, presented a brilliant, animated appearance. The central pavilion, its roof and pillars girded with light, glowed like the starry temple of an Arabian tale, while from within the orchestra sent forth its melodic stream, now tender and plaintive as the zephyr wooing the rose at midnight, now loud and valiant in the rhythmic dance; balls of light came glistening through the foliage, making the trees stand out in radiant illumination.

But, artistically mindful of the worth of contrast in scenic effect, the light distributed itself so as to leave certain parts of the garden in comparative shade. There, those who shrank from the dazzling glare of the centre could walk and enjoy the scene and the music without inconvenience.

“Why, there is Madame de Galliac, I declare! Let us go and meet her!” said Madame de Beaucœur in delighted surprise, and they walked on quickly. “What an unexpected pleasure, madame! I thought you were going to the opera to-night?”

“So we intended; but there was some mistake about the box; we only found it out at the last moment, and Henriette was so disappointed that, to comfort her, I proposed coming here for an hour,” exclaimed Madame de Galliac.

“Poor child! But I assure you the music here is no despicable compensation. Let us go round by the left; the breeze is blowing from that point,” said Madame Beaucœur, and, without taking the slightest notice of Monsieur de Chassedot, she turned to walked on with Madame de Galliac.

“Madame!” whispered the young man, touching her lightly on the arm, and by a sign intimating that she had left him standing out in the cold.

“Oh! how stupid I am! Allow me to introduce you: le Marquis de Chassedot—la Baronne de Galliac.”

“My daughter, monsieur,” said the latter, pointing to Henriette.

Everybody having bowed to everybody, the party moved on, the young people walking in front of the married women.

Monsieur de Chassedot, serenely unconscious of the cruel snare into which he had fallen, and finding Henriette a lively, unaffected girl, talked away pleasantly, confining himself of course to authorized insipidities, such as the music, the decoration of the gardens, the weather, etc., and making himself, as he could do when he liked, very agreeable.

“Is not that Madame de P——’s voice?” said Henriette, stopping abruptly, and bending her ear in the direction of the sound.

“I think it is. Let us walk on and see,” answered her mother, and they quickened their steps.

Now, though Madame de Beaucœur liked Berthe, and as a rule was delighted to meet her anywhere, on this particular occasion she was the last person in Paris she cared to meet. She could not avoid her, however, without awakening suspicions in the mind of Edgar de Chassedot which might prove fatal to her own benevolent designs on him. When Berthe saw the party, her surprise was great, and, though she said nothing, her face expressed it so naïvely that Henriette, being intelligent, noticed it, and bethought herself that there must be some stronger reason for it than the ostensible one of her mother’s meeting and walking round the garden with Madame de Beaucœur.

Berthe had four gentlemen in attendance on her: a tall, distingué-looking Austrian, who spoke to no one, but shot vinegar out of his eyes at a handsome young Breton on whose arm Berthe leant; a dark Englishman, who made up in vivacity what he lacked in height; and another Englishman, whose notablest idiosyncrasy was an eye-glass that seemed to be a fixture, so faithfully did it stick in the right eye of the wearer, morning, noon, and night. Over and above this guard of honor the beautiful widow was accompanied by Hélène de Karodel. She introduced the two girls, who walked on together, while the gentlemen and the three married women followed.

Hélène and Mademoiselle de Galliac had not proceeded far when Monsieur de Chassedot broke away from the elders, and joined them.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, addressing Hélène, “I have just made a discovery so agreeable that, before I venture to believe it, I must have your corroboration.”

“Indeed!” said Hélène, puzzled at the singular apostrophe. “Couvrez-vous, monsieur.” Edgar remained bare-headed awaiting her answer—“and let us know what this wonderful discovery is.”

“You are the daughter, I am told, of that brave soldier and true gentleman, Christian de Karodel?”

“You have been told the truth,” replied Hélène, her eye moistening with grateful emotion at hearing her father so designated.

“He was my mother’s first cousin, consequently I claim close friendship with you,” resumed the young man.

“And your name is—?”

“Edgar de Chassedot.”

“Ah! we are indeed cousins; but as your family seemed quite to have forgotten the fact, we had almost forgotten it ourselves,” replied Hélène coldly.

“It is not too late for us to remember it, I hope?” said Edgar, imperceptibly emphasizing the us, and throwing a persuasive deference into his tone that subdued Hélène.

“It is strange that you should care; but, since it is so, let us be cousins!” And she held out her hand to him.

Six weeks after this promenade in the Jardin Musard there was a diner de contrat at Madame de Galliac’s. The fiancé wore the full-dress uniform of a chasseur d’Afrique. His bronzed features attested long residence under Algerian skies, and the stars and medals on his breast bore witness that his days had not been wasted there in idle dalliance.

The plot against Monsieur de Chassedot’s liberty had collapsed, to the inexpressible vexation of his mother, who, together with the family lawyer and Madame de Galliac, had arranged all the essentials for his marriage with Henriette’s four millions; but, strange as it may seem, the consent of the young people themselves, when demanded as a final condition, was actually found wanting. It had come to the young lady’s ear that Monsieur de Chassedot was no party to the business, and that, if he let himself be persuaded into marrying her, it would be quite against his will. Mademoiselle de Galliac there and then declared that she would be forced upon no man, were he Roi de France et de Navarre. And so this most eligible union, for want of a bride and a bridegroom, fell through.

Madame de Beaucœur then called to mind a nephew of her husband’s who was serving in Africa. He was two millions short of the requisite figure, but he had ‘de grandes espérances’ and was moreover willing to be married, having positively written to his family stating this fact, and requesting them to look out for a wife for him. Photographs were exchanged, character and principles inquired into, and vouched for satisfactorily—Henriette made this a sine quâ non—and within one month from the day that his aunt opened negotiations with Madame de Galliac, Alexandre de Beaucœur arrived in Paris the affianced husband of Henriette de Galliac. They were presented to each other at a morning reception, and met next day at the diner de contrat. He took her in to dinner, Madame de Galliac whispering to him with an arch smile, as Henriette accepted his arm, “Now pay your addresses!”

The position was an embarrassing one. Monsieur de Beaucœur wished to avail himself of the opportunity to win his bride’s affections, but he was ill at ease, and, the more he strove to find something agreeable to say, the less he succeeded. When dessert was served, however, he took courage, and, bending over Henriette’s wineglass, he murmured timidly in a low tone:

“Mademoiselle, what color will you have your carriage?”

“Blue, monsieur,” the young lady replied in the same low tone.

He bowed, and they relapsed into silence.

This was all that passed between them till they swore before God and man to love each other until death did part them.

It may interest my readers, and it will no doubt surprise them, to hear that this prosaic marriage turned out a singularly happy one. The young man was a gentleman with a conscience and a heart. The girl was sensible, high-principled, and affectionate. They were both sound at heart, and they did their duty by each other. After all, the most romantic union can hardly embark with surer or fairer elements of happiness.

TO BE CONTINUED.

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Among the pleasant capitals of Europe through which a long tour carried the writer of this sketch, one of the most brilliant is Vienna. It has many associations of genius to consecrate it; Mozart and Beethoven, not to mention many lesser princes of music, found there both home and appreciation; it has been the resort of elegance, the rendezvous of talent, the paradise of diplomacy, even while graver ecclesiastical and historical events have centred in it. It has its old cathedral, which, though disfigured by some unfortunate internal bungling of the style of the Renaissance, nevertheless has not lost its impression of religious solemnity, heightened by the deep, narrow, and sombre choir with the wonderful windows of old stained glass. Inimitable and unapproachable even in its fragmentary state, this old glass is perhaps the most interesting thing in the old church of St. Stephen, if we except the stone pulpit, cunningly carved and placed in a recess of the exterior wall of the building, the pulpit from which, so runs Viennese tradition, the second Crusade was publicly preached. There is among the records of the foundations at St. Stephen’s one that sets forth the desire and prayer of the people, during a pestilence in the middle ages, that a Mass should be daily offered in that church for the cessation of the epidemic. Tradition says that a great wind arose, and the pestilence was stopped. The Mass, however, continues to be said daily, and it certainly is a remarkable fact that there is not one day in the year, summer or winter, wet or dry, when the wind does not blow in Vienna. The Austrian capital, however, has yet more interesting associations for us than are called up by the cathedral, and the many other monuments and chapels by which it is historically distinguished. In the Advent season of 1865, a young Jewish convert preached in the Schotten-Kirche a short course of the most eloquent sermons it has ever been our privilege to hear in any language or any land whatever.

His name is Marie-Bernard Bauer, and his family, of Hungarian descent, is among the most influential and wealthy of those settled in Vienna. The Jews of that city have indisputably as large a share of the talent as of the riches of the country. The oldest brother of young Bauer is one of the greatest bankers in Austria. At an early age, the young Jew, fiery and enthusiastic, and already gifted with singular eloquence, threw himself into the ranks of the Revolution, and became one of its most ardent emissaries. At eighteen, he was entrusted with important missions and considered a rising Freemason. But during his travels he became acquainted with a young Frenchman, a zealous Catholic, whose influence and friendship laid the foundations of his conversion. He visited his friend’s mother, also, who by her example more even than her exhortations contributed to the work of grace begun in his soul by her son’s solicitations. Bauer wore, at the request of these two, a medal of the Immaculate Conception; and we need scarcely remind our Catholic friends of the part this blessed badge fulfilled in the conversion of another illustrious Jew, the Père Marie Ratisbonne, the founder of the Dames de Sion, who has since devoted his life to the instruction and conversion of Jewish girls at Jerusalem. After being fully instructed in the faith, Bauer required nothing but grace to believe. Being at Lyons with several worldly acquaintances, he happened to be standing on a prominent balcony, on the feast of Corpus Christi. The procession of the Blessed Sacrament was to pass below, and they, with cigars in their mouths and mockery in their hearts, were waiting for the pageant. No change came to the young Jew until the canopy under which the priest carried the Divine Host was close beneath the balcony. The change at that moment was lightning-like. Faith entered his heart, or rather—as he himself reluctantly admitted when pressed by his superiors at a later time to lay aside false humility and declare the works of God in his soul—a conviction so absolute that it distanced faith made itself felt throughout his whole being. The same knowledge, so to speak, returned to him many times since while consecrating at Mass, and he said that he could not believe merely, in a matter of which he was so blissfully and unerrably certain. As Jesus passed, Bauer threw himself on his knees and professed himself a Christian. A very short time elapsed before he entered the novitiate of the Carmelite Friars. His mother, who was living in Paris, endeavored to see him, but was refused access to him by his superiors. Later on, when he had passed through the novitiate, he might have seen her, had it not been for the machinations of his family. For five years every friend and relation he had among his own race cruelly ignored him, and he was kept away even from his mother’s death-bed by their relentless sternness. His mother alone never ceased to love him, and had a picture painted of him in his monastic cowl. This portrait hung opposite her bed, and she died with her eyes fixed on it and her hands lovingly stretched out towards it. When after her death he was allowed by his family to visit her chamber, he saw a curtained picture at the foot of the bed, and, drawing the curtain aside, stood face to face with this touching proof of a mother’s undying love. After some time, his fame as a preacher spreading fast, his family received him once more into their circle, and, with strange inconsistency, now made almost an idol of him. During his novitiate, and according to a rule of his order, he used to preach in turn with his fellow-novices in the refectory during meals, at which time the generality of the young men in training for a religious Demosthenes would receive but scant attention from their companions. When Bauer’s turn came, the contrary, however, was observed: the food was untouched, and the young audience sat transfixed, hanging upon the words of their eloquent and gifted companion. From the first his health was delicate; the effort of preaching rendered it weaker day by day, till at length the zealous and impassioned speaker, whom his friends prophesied to be the future Lacordaire, was one day carried fainting from the pulpit, having broken a blood-vessel. A year in Spain and complete rest of mind and body did nothing more than just save his life, and the Holy Father, who was very much interested in the young convert, advised him to leave the Carmelite Order, for the austerity of whose rule his shattered health now rendered him unfit. This paternal advice—or, let us say, command—proved a great trial to the enthusiastic religious; but, bowing to the will of God, he accepted his altered life, and prepared to make it as fruitful in good works as his short monastic career had proved. Although his health precluded him from the exhausting work of preaching long Lenten stations or continued missions, yet, as often as suitable opportunities offered, he was to be found indefatigably working in the pulpit; and we leave it to those who have had the good fortune to hear him, to judge of the loss the Catholic world has sustained in one whose eloquence and fervid enthusiasm rivalled that of Lacordaire, and whose steadfast faith and unerring logic far distanced that of the unhappy Hyacinthe.

In 1865, having already preached before the Emperor of the French in Paris, and been greatly commended by the most distinguished people there, both French and foreigners, he was called to Vienna, where his family resides, and where all his former associates and co-religionists awaited him with the greatest curiosity and interest. The six lectures or discourses he gave in the Schotten-Kirche, opposite his brother’s residence, at which he was an honored and fêted guest, were attended by crowds of his own Jewish friends, besides all the élite of Viennese and foreign society. The impassioned tone of his voice, his closely knit arguments, the air of apostleship about his slight figure and pale, inspired face, the presence of his nearest and dearest relations, and, above all, his own position toward them, in the very centre of his youthful Revolutionary triumphs—all concurred in making this short station of Advent one of thrilling interest. At the end of each sermon, or conférence, as the French say (they were delivered in French, which is like a second mother-tongue to Marie-Bernard Bauer), he addressed a prayer to God, and, while the language of each succeeding discourse increased in sublimity, that of the concluding prayers seemed to take such flights of unparalleled grandeur that the audience could only kneel in motionless attention and unbroken silence for some minutes after the preacher had ceased to speak—the highest tribute, perhaps which an impressed people can offer to an orator. Marie-Bernard Bauer has since received the Roman title of Monsignore, and been appointed chaplain to the Emperor of the French. He accompanied the Empress Eugénie to the opening of the Suez Canal, and preached a magnificent sermon on the occasion, in presence of the assembled potentates. But whatever else he has done, whatever else he may be destined to do in the future, he will scarcely be able to surpass his admirable achievements of the Advent station of 1865, when he became, as it were, the champion and apologist of Christianity before one of those representative Jewish assemblies which contained within itself so much enlightenment, so much talent, and so much successful individuality.

At the time when he preached these sermons, of which we will now endeavor to give some idea, as far as a translation will allow, he was only thirty-six years of age, and his frail, delicate body made him seem even younger. The following is the third in order of the Conférences, and was preached on the 17th of December, 1865. The text is given entire, and the subject, as expressed in the published edition of these sermons, was:

CHRISTIANITY AS A HISTORICAL FACT.

I would fain hope, my brethren, that the two last conférences have contributed, in some degree, to revivify in believing hearts both the energy of faith and the enthusiasm of virtue; that they have cast doubts in doubting hearts, upon the very uncertainty which creates doubt; that they have shed around hearts petrified, so to speak, in the darkness of fleshly bondage, some rays of the twilight which is the forerunner of the full light of God’s grace, and which manifests itself in such hearts through this question, solemnly and shrinkingly put: After all, might I not be in error? Might there not be, despite all, another life, a real responsibility, a moral law, supernatural duties, a judgment, a judge, a God, and this God the God of Christianity?

No matter to what level the Sun of Truth may have attained on the horizon of your inner life, you will allow me, nevertheless, to retrace, in a few short words, the doctrinal substance of the two previous discourses [conférences].

Man, such as we see him, is a fallen being; he is born with the taint of original sin, and if to this, which is the form of evil, he adds—and it is practically inevitable that he should—his own individual sins, which are evil’s natural outgrowth, he does but widen, at each moment of his existence, the abyss that parted him from God since the very hour of his birth, and which, thus ceaselessly widened, becomes such, at last, that nothing short of a miracle will suffice to bridge it over. Death then, suddenly intervening, cuts short all things here below, and hurls the man whose whole life has been spent without God into the chasm of the unknown. From a phase of being where all is transient, he is hurried to another where all is abiding, and from that instant the separation from God in which he has lived, and which before was transient in its turn, becomes abiding, and from temporal changes to eternal. Such are the conclusions of reason, which, leaning upon faith, point out to us in this eternal separation the fitting seal of an eternal woe.

It would not enter into my design toward the hearers which Providence, having gathered together before me, seems to have specially predestined to hear the words of eternal life from my unworthy lips—it would not, I say, enter into my design to show them these dark spiritual perspectives, without pointing out at the same time some vista of supernatural light, some promise and way of salvation, some hopes of life, nay, even life itself. No! God forbid that I should become as the treacherous guide who draws the lost wayfarer to the very edge of the precipice, and there leaves him to himself and to the terrors of the ravenous depths below. Yet, mark it well!—the mystery of life leads towards death, through paths that skirt a giddy abyss where no man’s self-possession is proof against danger; but there is, nevertheless, an infallible road that leads to life through and in spite of the manacles of death. It is called by a name with which my lips cannot become familiar, as with a common word indifferently bandied about in careless conversation—a name which I confess myself unable even to pronounce without feeling my whole being tremble with love and bow down in worship; a name which, when spoken from this pulpit for the first time, only a few days ago, produced an impression, or rather a mysterious shock, that neither you nor I have yet forgotten—the name of Jesus Christ.

It is of him I come to speak to you to-day. My Father! my Friend! my Master! abide with me, and, in order that I may be worthy to speak of thee, speak thou thyself through these my lips!

Among all questions put by man to his own intellect, whether they be historical, scientific, philosophical, social, or religious, there is none of more gigantic importance than this: Who and what is Jesus Christ? He and his works have been for two thousand years the most notable reality of the universe; they have been inextricably mingled with the course of history, with the family and state relations of man to man, with literature, with poetry, with politics; they have been the unseen link that binds together all social problems; they have been the mainspring of those mysteries that are convulsing the present century, and which are fraught to some minds with terror and threatenings, while to others they suggest hope and salvation. They have been, without the slightest exaggeration, all things to all men, and it follows, therefore, that according to the bent of man’s judgment on Jesus Christ and his works, so will man’s whole nature lean, his intellect with his thoughts, his heart with its feelings, his life with its acts and its shortcomings, his soul with its eternal aspirations.

This is indeed, and beyond all contradiction, the main question of life—that question which, solve it which way you will, cannot fail to produce two radically different types of men, and to open up before us two paths, as far apart from each other through the coming eternity as they are widely separated in the realms of time.

But why do I insist upon the awful importance of this problem? Do you not understand it yourselves? Nay, do you not even bear witness to it by your presence here at this moment? Why are you gathered here—men of the most varied, perhaps the most contradictory, beliefs? Why are you crowded around this pulpit in anxious silence, breathless and motionless, perhaps vaguely troubled in mind? Why but because there is not one amongst you to whom the sacred name of Jesus is wholly indifferent or wholly meaningless! If to some this holy name is the constant object of their highest adoration and of their tenderest, I would fain say the most impassioned, love, to others it is the object of their most agonizing doubts, the spiritual sphinx whose riddle baffles and tortures all ages. And further yet, while this name is to some the synonym of a smothered curse or of a hatred as open as it is relentless, it contains for all men a question of vital importance, I might even say a question of life and death. My brethren, it is of him, who is both so marvellously loved and so marvellously hated, of him whose figure meets us at every turn of the past or the present, of him whom the future cannot uncrown, that I purpose speaking to you to-day.

Every cause which has produced an effect may be considered either in this effect or in itself. Hence, there exist two methods of demonstration: the one beginning from the consideration of the effect, and tracing it up to the cause; the other starting from the study of the cause, and deducing its legitimate effect. We are now about to apply to the great cause and the great effect before us this twofold species of demonstration—this extrinsic and intrinsic touchstone used by our intellect in acquiring its noble treasure of proved facts and tried certainties in the domain of philosophy, metaphysics, history, natural sciences, and, in fact, of every branch of human knowledge. This cause is Christ, this effect Christianity, of which he is the founder; and, since it is natural to the human mind to consider first that which falls more immediately under its own observation, I shall begin by investigating the effect, namely, Christianity. This done, I shall appeal simply to your reason to connect the effect with its cause, and to discern through the beautiful proportions of the Christian system the inimitable stamp of its divine founder.

Every doctrine which has become a fact, every fact which has won for itself a place in history, may be looked at in three ways: first, with regard to its extent in material space; secondly, as to its duration in time; thirdly, as to the depth to which it has reached in human nature. This division is no invention of mine; it is the same pointed out by the Apostle St. Paul when he wrote to the Ephesians, and endeavored to explain to them the length and breadth, the depth and divinity, of the Christian faith: Ut possitis comprehendere cum omnibus sanctis quæ sit latitudo et longitudo, et sublimitas et profundum (Eph. iii. 18).

Now, as to its extent in material space, or, in other words, its territorial sway:

Open the map of the world, and scan the globe with attentive eye: a strange phenomenon will strike you. You will hardly discover one corner of earth where Christianity—and I use the word in this instance in its widest acceptation, excluding neither heresy nor schism, which, though unhappily rebellious, are nevertheless, in a certain sense, real members of the Christian household—where Christianity, therefore, has not penetrated, either in undisputed and irrevocable sway, as in Europe and America, or as a peaceful conqueror, sealing its hardly-won victories not in the blood of its enemies, but in its own. Following closely in the wake of new discoveries, it is for ever landing on new shores, making a home for itself among new populations, and winning new worshippers to bend beneath the ancient sway of the never-aging cross.

You might rise in contradiction to my statement, and remind me that the hour has not yet struck that will allow us, the soldiers of Jesus Christ, to intone the triumphant hosanna of final victory, since to this day there are many lands, many island-studded archipelagoes, many vast and populous continents, beyond the pale of our peaceful conquest, and since, after all, the standard of the cross is not yet securely reared in every clime.

I admit it; but what does this prove? That our task is not yet done? But who denies that? It is not done because time—which is our only limit—is likewise unended, nay, is perhaps only just beginning! For time is the array of all ages, and God alone, who created them, has reckoned their mysterious number. Yes, we confess it, our work is not done, and therefore we are ceaselessly and everywhere laboring; and therefore I myself, a humble but zealous worker, am laboring here at this moment. Those alone who will see the end of time will see the task completed. That which we have done during the twenty centuries that lie behind us is only an earnest of what we will do in future ages, God’s holy grace concurring.

What, my brethren! When we had no ships but frail canoes, and no compass but our untutored eyes; when we had no roads but eternal snows, virgin forests, and trackless deserts, vying with the wild beasts of the wilderness in barring our further progress; when we had no support but barefooted poverty and a pilgrim’s staff; no provision save precarious charity, and no guide save faith, hope undying, and—God; even then we succeeded in crossing rivers and seas, deserts and forests, mountain gorges and Alpine snows, that we might carry to the very confines of the world our living faith and the Word of our God. This ineffable Word has reached further than Alexander, who stopped at the Indus; further than Crassus, whom the Euphrates arrested; further even than Varus, who was stayed by the mighty Rhine—further than all conquerors, and further than all conquests. And can we believe that we have now set our foot on the fated threshold where the angel of evil would be permitted to say to the angel of virtue, as erst the latter was commanded to say it to his fallen brother, to Attila and the barbarian hordes, at the very gates of the Eternal City: “Usque huc venies, sed non ultra”—“Thus far shalt thou come, and no further”? Do not believe it, my brethren; for, on the contrary, it is but now that God’s reign is beginning, and as I believe, so I prophesy to you, with an irresistible and invincible conviction.

Forward, then, O human enterprise! Cleave the mountains, cut through the isthmuses, drain the morasses, and fill up the lakes; cast bridges over the waters, carry roads over the trackless country, build you mighty vessels, throw electric wires in the air, and gird the world with an iron girdle! Let your treaties of commerce and navigation be signed, and embassies sent to nations and kings whose names till yesterday were unknown in the civilized tongues of Europe! Know you what you are doing in thus knitting humanity together, and in connecting, with an energy unexampled in the whole history of the past, the orient and the occident, the pole and the equator? In one mighty embrace their hands are clasped, and they offer to each other, if we may so word it, that gigantic kiss of peace which, day by day, re-echoes more loudly in both hemispheres.

In all this, you are doing under the hand of God that which the war-steed does under the hand that guides him and the spur that urges him on. For, like unto the steed, who hardly knows whence he came, far less where his rapid steps are leading him and what is the burden that he bears—like unto him, thou Christ-blaspheming or God-forgetting age, thou boundest forward with maddening strength, carrying on thy broad shoulders with proud recklessness the rider whom thou scarcely knowest to the goal thou wottest not of. Every invention, every development of thy industry, far from cursing it, I bless it from the depths of my heart! Go forward and prosper! In a hundred years, thanks to thee, Truth will be sovereign of the world!

Christianity is the greatest geographical and territorial fact under the sun. It is so beyond all controversary, and if this fact, which I simply call a miracle, seems to you natural and easy of accomplishment, I only ask you this: try to spread and propagate over the universe, not a whole complicated system of metaphysics, but one single doctrine, whose mortal opponents, in the first instance, shall number every human passion which repulses it as treason against nature, and every heathen government which denounces it as treason against authority. But I will not ask even so much. Endeavor to persuade, not even one single nation, one city, one family, but one man, of the truth of a doctrine at once repulsive to his passions and hostile to his interests. I speak to you as a man whose life is devoted to this sublime and laborious mission of persuasion. And knowing as I do its wonderful consolations as well as the superhuman and apparently fruitless labor it often imposes, I tell you, my brethren, what you yourselves will tell me when the school of reality shall have taught it to you, that Christianity as it exists, spread over the whole earth by the godlike contagion of faith, is simply a fact so overwhelming that the language of men holds but one word fit to express its being—that one word, miracle.

There is, however, one thing more marvellous yet than mere propagation: it is duration, and a duration ever true to itself.

Condense the mystery of life into one short formula, capable at once of holding and adequately expressing it, and you will find none more comprehensive than this—motion and change. From the mass of inanimate being which, in the bowels of the earth and in the bosom of eternal night, is causing, by its agglomerations, its cohesions, and its fusions, a species of constant internal agitation, of blind and feverish restlessness as old as creation itself, up to the most dazzling pinnacles of life, where man figures under every name and in every relation conceivable among mortals, there exists the same law, there reigns the same spirit. In its name, by its authority, we see in private life one day swallowed up by the next, dethroned by its breathless and equally ephemeral successor, doomed beforehand to annihilation, while on the stage of public life events crowd each other out of time and of the memory of man, empires fall, dynasties grow up under the double shield of God’s grace and man’s enthusiasm, frontiers are widened and narrowed, whole nations migrate and spread, and even language itself, though but an outward sign of immaterial substances and metaphysical proportions in no way themselves subject to change, puts on divers forms, as if carried away by an irresistible impulse in the whirl of this universal frenzy. Yes, my brethren, motion is everywhere, and, in order that even death should not be permitted to fling its defiance permanently to life, this law penetrates even to the night and silence of the tomb, pierces the coffin, and installs between its four wooden walls the same unceasing restlessness which torments the great world. Worms, created to prey on man, riot with breathless agitation over the human corpse, and proclaim, by their ghastly activity in the abode of final destruction and in the very bosom of the crowning dread of earth, that life triumphs yet over death, and that the universal law of motion reigns in undisputed sway over that kingdom of darkness that owns no other created sovereignty.

And what is the result of this ceaseless motion? Nothing less than ceaseless change. Motion is a change of relations with the world and with one’s self. There is no motion but causes change, no change but presupposes motion. These terms are convertible, and so it is that I justify what I told you a few moments ago—that the concise formula of life is motion and change. It follows from this demonstration that nothing is so difficult of attainment as duration, and duration true to itself, which is to the sovereign law of motion and change a permanent defiance and a marvellous contradiction.

Let us seek in the vast sepulchre of Time, where during so many ages countless men and things, countless doctrines and institutions, have lost themselves, and in which even the shattered wrecks of once noble ruins, spectres of the past and often unconscious prophets of the future, have been swallowed up—let us seek one man or one created thing that has not succumbed to this pitiless law. Let us seek diligently in the manuscripts of old, in the caverns of forgotten magic, in the tombs of buried sages! Or stay, my brethren, and seek not! For, like unto the alchemist of mediæval ages, we should seek and not find, for that which we seek is not.

But if you would see this tremendous miracle of a duration as invulnerable as it is abiding, lifting up its solitary existence in the midst of universal change and motion, do not gaze afar, but turn your eyes to that tabernacle crowned with the cross, the standard and badge of Catholic Christianity. This, and this alone, abides where all else has been swept away by the ruthless and untiring breath which devours all that is, and ravenously awaits all that, as yet, is not. Christianity, and it alone, has lived true to itself, while all else around it was changing. Like unto God, the impassible and unchangeable, Christianity stands unmoved amidst the countless ruins with which you—men—strew the world. Christianity, with its old principles and its youthful aspect, leans on the rock of its own eternity, and gives the lie to the universal law with unassailable and ineffable calm. Yes, it defies you! It sees you pass, as the shore looks on the lapsing river, as the cliff looks on the ocean, as heaven looks upon earth, and as God looks on man.

It is strange, is it not? It takes our breath away. But this is not all: it is scarcely the beginning. Listen! To bespread over the whole earth is much; to live where all decays is more; to abide ever true to one’s self when all things change is more still. My opponents, however—I will not say my enemies, for, thank God, I know of none—are perhaps saying to themselves at this moment: “But are there not other forms of religion bearing much the same marks, at least in a certain degree? Islamism holds a considerable territorial sway. The Buddhism of India has surely been in a certain sense true to itself from time immemorial.” I do not deny it, for truth needs no dissimulation. And it is precisely on this account, and because error has been permitted to bear in some respects a certain likeness to truth, that it was imperative, for the sake of those men of good-will whom this likeness might have deceived, that truth should possess, besides those notes which she shares with error, other marks so utterly inimitable that on their appearance there could not be but instant recognition of that truth whose counterfeits are as legion, but whose equal does not exist.

The touchstone by which to gauge the worth of any doctrine is neither this doctrine’s extent in space nor its duration in time, nor even its impassibility amid universal transmutations; that is much, but it is not all. What is of more importance than the limits of its influence or the length of its spiritual reign, is the work it has done. There is its secret proof, there its most personal revelation. It can give but what it has, and it can have but what it is; it can produce outwardly but what it inwardly possesses; if it be falsehood, then falsehood; if it be error, then error; if it be evil, then evil; if it be a half-truth, then half-truth; if it be human and natural virtue, then human and natural virtue; but if it be God, then God himself.

Christianity, considered from this point of view, to which we can give but a passing glance, will vindicate itself in our eyes as standing unrivalled on earth, even as God is unrivalled in heaven.

To make my meaning clear, let me present to your minds one preliminary observation.

Man often lives amid the wonders of creation without feeling the slightest curiosity in their regard, and this because a sublime spectacle, from being too constantly before his sight, becomes only a familiar part of the daily monotony of his life. We might almost say of him that, to the abiding miracle of the material universe, he opposes the miracle of abiding indifference. Now, the visible creation contains another, both visible and invisible, and which, though far more wonderful than the material one, yet draws from you, on account of its abidingness, only the careless notice of indifference. Inhabitants of a Christian land, members perhaps of a Christian family, citizens of a Christian community, children, in a word, of Christian civilization, you are living in the midst of a world of miracles which has lost the power to interest you because it fails to surprise you. It is my mission to-day to rouse you from this indifference, to dispel this mist, to show you things as they are.

Look at any Christian country, any Christian or civilized nation of to-day; the country which harbors us at present, if you will. Who were here eighteen, fifteen, fourteen centuries ago? Not even barbarians; savages! Who was it that came and saved you from yourselves? Who was it that drew you from the materialism in which you were plunged in the person of your forefathers, and in which numberless tribes are grovelling still to this day—nations whom Christ has not yet gathered in, and who horrify the sight of the boldest explorers? Who was it that drew you from your forests, built your cities, founded your families, traced your boundaries, inspired your laws, reared your churches, anointed your kings, and created those two centres of light around which for eighteen hundred years your history has grouped itself, and your private sympathies, your public enthusiasm, has revolved—the altar and the throne, fatherland and God? Who has reclaimed your fields, and made fruitful by the labor of the plough the glorious conquests of the sword? Who has preserved in the silence and solitude of the cloisters the scattered remnants of classical learning, and through the Scriptures and traditions has kept alive the plenitude of sacred lore? Who was it that created that incomparable marvel, of which I would fain speak with tears, rather than with words—the Christian Family?—the father, the patriarch, priest, and pontiff of home; the mother, the apostle of God; the Christian virgin, that holy wonder which earth proudly points out to heaven, as if defying even heaven’s angels to surpass it? Who is it that has created virtues without number within sacrifices without name, putting by the side of every woe the voluntary service which will minister to it, giving to every misfortune some heart that will beat for it, and to the most neglected grave a mourner to weep over it? Who is it that has freed the slaves of man to create the slaves of God—those slaves who can say with the humble exultation of a supernatural sacrifice, in the words of the Jew of Tarsus, now become the great Apostle St. Paul: “Ego vinctus pro Christo”—“I, the slave of Christ.” Who is it that has created the ideal of duty and honor which inspired the troubadour and the knight—the ideal of fidelity to the pledged word, of horror at injustice, of the sacred hatred of evil? Who is it that has given you all the goods man prizes, and which you enjoy in ungrateful forgetfulness, while cursing those who accumulated them for you during centuries of untold and weary toil, and even him who won them for your sake on the cross, in a sea of tears and of blood? Who gave you the great gift which this age counts as the kingliest boon of all—the gift whose magical name we fear, not because our lips were the first to pronounce and to honor it here below: freedom—the deliverer from sin and death, from the passions of hell, and from the hell of human passions? Who made you what you are, or what you ought to be—beings regenerated, civilized, free, glorious, sacred—in a word, Christians?

Who, my brethren? Jesus Christ, he who is there present in his tabernacle, he who listens to me, who sees you, and who will judge one day between my word and your souls, between me and you.

And henceforward, when a blasphemy against his Godhead seeks passage on your lips, be it in mockery or in malediction, remember the Caribbean savage and the Red Indian, think of what he is and of what you are, and do not forget that, were it not for Christ, you would be even as that poor savage. If your soul is not yet open to the fulness of faith, at least let it hold its peace if it respects itself.

Christianity in its breadth, its length, and its depth is the principal fact of the world. No sincere and deep intellect, when glancing at this comprehensive whole, can contemplate it without developing in itself a spontaneous doubt, without saying to itself, if it be unhappily far from belief, “Might this not be really the work of God?” But if the simple consideration of the effect, that is, of Christianity, can create this inevitable doubt, what shall we say of the cause which has produced it, and of the relations of the one to the other? What, indeed, save this, that, face to face with this cause, doubt is turned into certainty, and man is irresistibly impelled to cry out, in the full conviction of his soul, that Jesus Christ is God indeed.

What, then, is the cause which has effected this mighty reality, as great as earth, as old as time, as marvellous as heaven, and whose name among us is Christianity? Nineteen hundred years ago, a little Child was borne in an obscure village of a poor country. His parents were poor and of no account; he himself lived a poor man, unknown and unnoticed, save in one or two instances plying during thirty years a lowly trade in a forgotten corner of the world. Of a sudden, however, he breaks silence: he preaches, all untaught as he seemed, a doctrine which earth had never before heard, and confirming it by signs earth had never before seen. Public attention is arrested: he becomes the hero of the hour, and parties spring up for and against him. Two years and a half go by in uneasy peace, but a day comes when his enemies get the upper hand, and denounce him to the civil tribunals of the country, whose cowardly justice, while declaring him to be innocent, yet allows popular prejudice and the threat of imperial displeasure to wrest from it an unwilling condemnation. The innovator is nailed to a gibbet, and his brief history, hardly three years old, seems for ever ended, and ended in what manner? By a sentence of capital punishment, and a memory left stained with ignominy by the hand of the public executioner.

Here, then, is the cause we seek: A Jew! a poor, unknown, untaught Jew! a Jew condemned to a shameful death by the justice of his country, and executed on the public road among other malefactors; a Jew, and, if we dare to say the word, a felon!

Listen and weigh well that which you shall hear. You have seen the cause, you have seen the effect. Between the two rises the great question. How could such a cause produce such an effect? This we purpose to examine in a few words:

There are three explanations from which your choice may be made, and which pretend to connect a cause so radically powerless with an effect so immeasurably disproportionate. They are these: Either mankind has believed for two thousand years and actually believes in Christianity without sufficient reason, without adequate proof. In that case, humanity is mad, and for twenty centuries has been so, and I myself, who am speaking to you, am out of my senses.

Or else mankind believes with fully adequate proof, perfectly calculated to convince it, and yet what it believes is false. In that case, God has deceived us during twenty, forty, sixty centuries, since the beginning of the world. In that case, Providence is a mockery, and its sway over the universe has been from the very first hour of creation but one long mystification, one scornful derision of our human reason. Or again, if you cannot believe either that mankind has mistaken God, or that God has deceived mankind, there is but one hypothesis left, namely, that Jesus Christ is God!

In order that you may choose more deliberately between these three possibilities, it will be necessary to afford them fuller development. The first of these compels you to infer that mankind for the last two thousand years has been bereft of reason, and that at the present moment a considerable portion of it, myself included, is in a hopeless state of insanity.

This may seem to you an exaggerated proposition, got up simply to prop the weakness of an untenable argument, but it is nothing if not an absolute truth, most easy of demonstration. Let us suppose that to-morrow, the 18th of December of the year of grace 1865, there shall enter into this great capital, through one of its numerous gates and towards the dusk of evening, a poor and ragged beggar, the dust of his journey still upon him, and his ignorance of the language of the country painfully conspicuous. Let us suppose this man presenting himself before the populace, the magistracy, the priesthood, the army, and before the Emperor himself, and speaking to him thus: “Sire, a few years ago, your majesty was pleased to order the public execution, in a remote province of the Empire, of a Jew. This Jew was the Messiah, the Saviour, God himself! Therefore, O Cæsar! come down from your throne, bend your knee, be baptized, and confess your sins; for, mark it well, this crucified Jew is none other than your God.” What would you say, my brethren, to the man who should speak thus to-day? You would fitly account him a madman, and madder yet the people and the priesthood, the army and the monarch, who should believe in his wild words.

Well, then, this strange tale is a true one, it is a historical fact. One day, many ages ago, an old Jew, baptized by the name of Peter, entered, a beggar, ragged, and dust-begrimed, through one of the gates of the greatest capital of the mightiest empire of the world—ancient Rome.

In Rome, he actually preached the unheard-of sermon I have just quoted, and which, repeated in that form to-day, would cause only a burst of derision. Why did Rome not mock him? Why did the priesthood not hoot him? Why did Cæsar not scorn him? Why, on the contrary, did this beggar, with his rough staff and scrip, with his barbarous Latin sounding harshly on the ears of those who could yet remember the voice of Cicero on the rostrum—why did he shake the foundations of the mightiest empire of the world, and why, instead of provoking laughter, did the people pale and tremble before him in the Forum, the magistrates quail beneath their robes of office, the priesthood shrink affrighted to their doomed temples, and Nero, the emperor, forget to trust in his blood-stained purple? Why does the deserted Palatine look to-day upon the opposite hill of the Vatican, and behold there a dome whose summit may well be said to seek to scale the heavens—a dome that crowns a tomb, that of the beggar Peter, a tomb which, though but the fane of the dead, is nevertheless the centre of Europe and the world? For this tomb bears a throne at once the most ancient and the most sacred in Europe, the only one which represents an empire whose boundaries are the boundaries of the universe. And why all this? Only because Peter proved by signs and wonders, by miracles wrought both in life and in death, that he spoke indeed in the name of him whom heaven and earth obeyed, because he was their Maker. Because he wrought these signs, his word was believed. And I am free to confess that, had the men of his time believed in him without such an irrefragable proof of his mission, they would have been madmen indeed, and we, who are now the heirs of their faith, would have been only the successors to their folly. For two thousand years, I repeat it, the history of mankind would have been a long dream of insanity, an act of stupendous folly, and, as a climax to this incalculable confusion, there would have sprung from this folly the most incomprehensible of contradictions—wisdom and glory, light and virtue, civilization and progress—in a word, that great wonder which holds all lesser marvels within itself, namely, Christianity.

If I mistake not, your common sense has already set aside this hypothesis as untenable. We admit it, you may say to me; to make mankind believe in the—humanly speaking—unbelievable, there must have been proofs capable of proving and making certain, so to speak, the very impossible itself. We must admit it, unless we accuse the whole world of madness. But if Peter and the apostles, and all the preachers of the Gospel, confirmed their teaching by signs that were accounted miracles, might this not be explained by a chain of fortuitious coincidences, happy accidents, seeming miracles, which are every day elucidated by the progress of investigation until they utterly disappear in the full light of science? A discussion of the nature and essence of the Gospel miracles would be utterly out of place at this moment. I will therefore confine myself to this: if the miracles which, among outward causes, are the principal explanation of the world’s conversion to Christianity, are false, then it is no longer mankind unconsciously duped and led away, but Heaven itself, the deceiver and seducer, whom we must indignantly accuse.

There is no alternative, my brethren: either madness on the part of earth, or crime on the part of heaven. Either man is bereft of reason, or God is no longer just. Either man unknowingly deceives himself, or God wilfully deceives him. Choose ye, therefore!

But in choosing, remember that he who accuses God of having deceived the world, or even of having permitted what is called chance to have so deceived it, blasphemes as much against mankind as against God, and commits such treason against humanity as can never be forgiven by it. To accuse God of having allowed evil to triumph in the plausible likeness of good, and to become, behind this mask, the goal, the light, the glory, the life, the very God of mankind, involves nothing less than the negation of Providence, and the abandonment of the world to the blind god of chance, the savage god of fate, the shadowy god of nothingness. Such an accusation confuses all creation, darkens the sun of understanding, casts history back into chaos, the human intellect into doubt, the human heart into despair. If Providence has betrayed mankind from its cradle, why should it not have betrayed me, individually, from my birth? At the slightest hint of such a doubt, what a fearful horizon looms up before me!

I have believed in him who has numbered every hair of my head; and I have been deceived.

I have believed in the prayer of the poor who ask for daily bread, and in the answer of him who gives it, and in whose sight even the sparrow is not forgotten; and I have been deceived! I have believed in the eloquence of tears shed at the feet and the heart of God; in the blessings of mothers registered in heaven; in the fruitfulness of suffering; in the merit of unknown virtue, and of virtue unknown to itself; in defeats that are glorious and success that is shameful; I have believed in all that showed forth God in man, and man in God! But—grief unspeakable!—I have been deceived, since there is no Providence, since for ages and ages an odious and inexplicable chance has ruled humanity, and forced it, humbled, mystified, levelled with the brute, miserably plunged in a stupid and inconceivable idolatry, to bend the knee to the very dust—before what? before whom? Before a man, a Jew—before a scourged and crucified Jew, whom it hearkens to as an oracle, invokes as a master, and worships as a god.

I have reached a limit beyond which I cannot go, and I stop a moment to ask you: Have we not seen enough of these impossibilities jostling one another, enough of absurdities crowding on our bewildered sight, and, as Scripture words it, of deep calling unto deep?

And yet, if you tear from the brow of Jesus Christ the crowning glory of the Godhead, you will be compelled to admit a thousand times more than this, and not only to admit it, but even to believe it fitting and most rational. You are therefore forced to choose between the human madness that believed in and deified an impostor, the guilty and merciless fraud practised by a God whose seal was thus solemnly set to the most appalling scandal ever witnessed by mankind, or the crowning dogma of the divinity of Jesus Christ, a dogma which alone reconciles and explains all mysteries. When you recross the threshold of this church, you must go forth believers, either in a miracle of folly, a miracle of treachery, or a miracle of mercy and love. Mankind must appear before you either as a regenerated, a deceived, or an idolatrous creation.

What will be your choice? Would to God that at the solemn moment of your decision I might come to each one of you, and on my knees beseech you, through the merits of that Precious Blood which, if you will not let it be your salvation, will most assuredly be your eternal condemnation, and the sign that will doom you to doubt in life, to agony in death, to despair in eternity—beseech you, I repeat it ere you have raised your voice in final decision, to free your soul from the interests that bind it, the human respect that fetters it, the sophisms that lead it astray—in a word, from all the passions of flesh and blood whose watchword is eternal hatred to the truth of God.

Then, and only then, in that freedom from all bondage, in the silence of your inmost hearts, make the choice that will lead you to life or to death.

But what words are these, my brethren? There will be no need of choosing then: the choice will be already made; for, as the sun swiftly reaches the last recess of the deepest cavern the moment the obstacle is removed which has hitherto resisted its light, so does Jesus Christ, the sun of the mind, the incarnate truth, flood with his radiance every soul whose own obstinate efforts do not close it against this blessed transfiguration. Open wide your hearts, my brethren, to this God of love and truth, who has vouchsafed to show himself to you in the brightness of such light and the majesty of such conviction.

And thou, Lord Jesus, who art the truth “that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world” (St. John i.), let it not come to pass that one soul out of this great assemblage should return this day from the foot of this pulpit to the common turmoil of the world without bearing within itself the ineffable wound of a dawning conviction. And if, O Lord! thou requirest unto this end the sacrifice of a human life, let this day be my last on earth, and this hour the last hour of my mortal pilgrimage.

---

“It is the child’s spirit that is to be loved and sympathized with, not his body; the body must be pampered as little as possible.”

“Principle must unite with purpose before it becomes practical.”

“Human nature must do as nature does—cling to the sustainer, and then it will be always producing new fruits.”

“We are none the better for reflecting upon our own ideas of heat, but if we would cease reflecting and let the heat warm us, the heat would itself realize what our reflected reflections never can.”

“There is a communion with God, with saints, and also with angels, and then with each other, but this is not in space and time, or with the space and time man.”

“That which Love requires for the everlasting food, the man of this world expends in heaping up rubbish.”

---

Clement remained a moment thoughtful and undecided. Before obeying his mother’s injunction, he felt the need of collecting his thoughts and regaining his self-control. Whatever strength of mind he might manifest, he was very young to experience such painful emotions as he had endured the past day. He crossed the passage of the stairs that led to Fleurange’s room, then passed on and went directly into the garden. Hitherto he had only thought of his parents. At least, he felt all that morning that, as soon as his father and mother knew everything, a great weight would be removed from his mind which would enable him to breathe quite freely. But the terrible revelation was made, and yet he was not relieved. He was still agitated, painfully agitated. Having passed the whole evening shut up in Wilhelm’s office, reckoning up the sad accounts, he felt the need of fresh air. It was the end of June. The weather was cloudy, and somewhat showery. He walked swiftly to the end of the garden, then returned slowly towards the house, and was about to go in search of the children and his cousin when he heard his name called close behind him:

“Clement!”

“Is it you, Gabrielle, here all alone?”

Fleurange was sitting on an obscure bench against the side of the house.

“Yes, I have been here an hour. You are going to tell me everything that has occurred, are you not, Clement? Remain here awhile and tell me. Do not conceal things from me any longer.”

“I do not intend to, Gabrielle, but do not detain me now. Come in, dear cousin. When the children are asleep, I will return and tell you.”

“The children are asleep, Clement, and have been for a long time. It is nearly ten o’clock. Poor little things, do you think they could keep awake till this time? After dinner I took them to the further end of the garden, that their lively prattle might not disturb the house. By eight o’clock they were tired out. I made them go up-stairs, and as soon as they fell asleep I came down to wait for you.”

Had her account been still longer, Clement would not have thought of interrupting her. He made no reply for a while, but at length said:

“Thank you, Gabrielle. You are—” He stopped. He felt an iron grasp at his throat, and feared he should sob like a child if he attempted to speak. With all his manly energy and precocious gravity, Clement’s young heart was passionately tender. And yet he had not been wanting in firmness throughout the day. Why, then, did it seem to abandon him so suddenly now? How happened it that, after considering, without shrinking, all the consequences of the resolution he was the first to make and propose—after manifesting no hesitation at the sight of his parents, and his brother and sister, he now felt terrified and almost overwhelmed at the thought of the sacrifice that had been made, and the great change about to occur in their lives? He hardly knew why himself, for he had not examined very minutely what was passing in his dreams. Clement was naturally inclined to reverie. He cared but little for the amusements of his age. His mind sought relaxation in secretly brooding over the inspirations of poetry. His friends knew he had a good memory and was familiar with a great number of poems, but they did not suspect he had a deep vein of poetry in his nature which ranked next to the influences of religion. This interior life was so completely veiled that the very eye of his mother scarcely penetrated it. Clement’s aptitude for history and the sciences, his turn for practical studies and a practical life, his skill in a thousand things of a material nature, served to conceal still more the other qualities of his mind. They depended on him to train a horse, settle an account, give a lesson in mathematics or history, plan an excursion, or make arrangements for a journey; but the idea of his wandering in imaginary or poetic regions, absorbed and lost in such waking dreams as are expressed in German by the word Schwärmen, and silently passing a part of his life in an interior world to which he never alluded, was little imagined, even by those who knew him best. And perhaps he himself, as we have said, had never thoroughly analyzed his own nature, for until to-day the actual and the imaginary had never come in conflict. But now all at once he felt there was in his ideal world a sanctuary, a palace, a throne, he must resign himself to see crumble away like the rest, and the courage he manifested at the material loss of wealth to its fullest extent seemed to forsake him now in view of the imaginary ruin of this enchanted domain!

Fleurange, seeing her cousin made no reply, waited quietly awhile, but at length she said, somewhat impatiently:

“Come, Clement, I pray you, keep me no longer in suspense. What are you afraid of? Am I a child? Am I not older than you? And did I not learn long ago the sad meaning of sorrow, suffering, and trial? Speak to me freely, then, and without fear. Nothing frightens me.”

Fleurange’s earnestness roused her cousin, and restored his calmness and self-control. Without any further hesitation, he seated himself beside her, and related the greater part of what he had told his mother some hours before. She thus learned in her turn the extent of the disaster which had befallen them—that all due reparation would be made, that the honor of her uncle’s house and name might remain intact, though his brother, Ludwig Dornthal, would be ruined—for ever ruined.

“And your good father and mother have consented to this renunciation of their rights?”

“Yes, and without any hesitation.”

“O dear and noble soul!” cried Fleurange, clasping her hands in her transport. “And it was you who proposed it?”

“Yes.”

“O Clement, my dear Clement! truly, I love you as I never loved you before!”

“Gabrielle,” said Clement in a low and trembling voice, “do not say that.”

“Why not?” said Fleurange. “I think so, and it is the truth.”

“Because—because, if they are often to be blamed who are wanting in honor and duty, there is nothing particularly praiseworthy in those who are faithful.”

“Nevertheless, my dear cousin, if I love you better than before, you must not be displeased, but I will not say so again if it offends you.”

There was a moment’s silence. Fleurange was lost in profound reverie. She soon resumed, in a grave tone: “Now I understand the state of affairs, I see our life is to assume an entirely new aspect.”

“Yes, entirely,” said Clement, with a dull anguish.

“This dear Old Mansion,” continued Fleurange, “must it be left?”

“Yes,” said Clement; “it will have to be sold, with all it contains, for the produce of this sale is all my father will have to begin life anew with.”

“Sell the house!” replied Fleurange thoughtfully. “Yes, I see it must be so; and afterwards we shall be separated.”

“And why must that be so?” cried Clement with sudden impetuosity. But he presently resumed in a different tone: “However, it would be very selfish in us to wish to retain you, now we have no longer anything to share with you but our poverty.”

“Clement,” said Fleurange hastily, “that is truly a rude and unjust speech, which I hardly merit—” She stopped an instant, then went on in a tone of emotion: “What! when poverty, misery, and hunger—yes, Clement, hunger!—were staring me in the face, your father bethought himself of me, he invited me here, received me into his house, conferred on me—not a happiness I had already experienced, but one hitherto unknown: he became my father, when mine was no more, and gave me a mother, brothers, and sisters whom I had never possessed. Life, youth, and joy had been meaningless words to me. I only comprehended them after I came under his roof, and now—now,” said she in broken accents, no longer able to restrain her tears, “it is his son—Ludwig Dornthal’s son—who tells me it is to escape the misfortunes of his family that I wish to leave them!”

“Gabrielle! Gabrielle!” said Clement in an agitated manner, “forgive me—have some pity on me. Stop, I beseech you; you will drive me mad, if you utter such reproaches at this time.”

Fleurange by degrees grew calm, and, forcing a smile, while great tears stood in her eyes, she soon resumed: “Poor Clement! I am, then, neither allowed to praise you nor blame you, this evening. Well, let us lay aside what relates merely to ourselves, or at least speak of it in a different manner. What I meant just now was that we could no longer remain idle. We must aid our dear parents all we can,” she continued in a softened tone, “and labor for them—”

“Labor!” said Clement. “I must unquestionably; that is a matter of course; but you, Gabrielle—you! There is no reason in what you say.”

“And I also,” said Fleurange calmly. “And that is a point to be considered. I must not only cease to be a burden to your parents, but I must aid them. How happy that will make me! I thank Heaven for the very thought that I may now be able to do something for them to whom I owe everything. This hope relieves my very sadness.”

She rose and held out her hand. “Good-night, cousin. To-morrow I will tell you what inspiration I have received from my good angel during the night.”

He silently pressed her hand, and allowed her to leave him without a word.

The night was cloudy. If Clement caught any glimpses of his cousin’s features during their conversation, it was because, seated beside her, and even favored by the obscurity, he ventured to look at her more closely than he would have done elsewhere. Now, the stars rose only to disappear beneath the sombre clouds. He was no longer afraid of being seen. He remained where Fleurange left him, and, burying his face in his hands, gave vent at last to the tears that for two hours had been suffocating him—tears of sorrow, regret, and affection, which he must shed to keep his young heart from breaking.

But he soon surmounted this violent emotion, and rose up ashamed of his weakness. At that moment he heard a window open above his head. It was Fleurange, who soon appeared on the balcony. He could see her white dress and the regular outline of face against the light from her chamber. He saw her soft glance lost in the darkness. Then she folded her hands and bent down her head. She was praying, but not alone to-night. Clement, kneeling unperceived in the shade, prayed with her. He was in the very place where he heard her say to Felix: “Clement is my brother, and you are not.” He recalled the words now, and renewed in his heart the solemn promise to be for ever faithful to all the obligations they imposed.

If the happy inmates of the Old Mansion had been told a month previous they only had a few weeks more to pass within its walls, they would have been greatly dismayed by the prediction, and asked how such a trial could be borne. But there is in life—even in the happiest life when it is ordered aright, that is, when its duties are daily considered and faithfully accomplished—there is, I say, in such a life a latent preparation for the most violent shocks of adversity, and, when they suddenly come, it is surprising to find that they who seemed to enjoy more than others the good things they possessed are the best able to resign themselves to their loss with firmness and serenity. And yet they are not insensible to the calamity. It falls on them with its full weight, but it comes alone, unaccompanied by the two scourges which generally follow in the train of a misfortune resulting from misconduct—trouble and confusion of mind.

Neither of these followed ruin into Ludwig Dornthal’s house. Externally the disaster was complete, but peace and order were maintained within. All their decisions—even the most painful—were made deliberately, and executed calmly and without delay. They did not dissemble the greatness of their sacrifice; they made no pretence to an insensibility they did not feel; but they quietly made their preparations—tears often blinding their eyes the while—like a brave and worthy crew wrecked by a tempest and forced to abandon their vessel.

It was thus they made all the arrangements for leaving their dear home and disposing of their library, paintings, and objects of virtu, which the professor had selected with so much care and pride, and were his only source of pleasure apart from the society of his family and friends. And from the latter also he was to be separated. When Ludwig Dornthal announced his intention of resuming the career he abandoned twenty years before, positions were offered him on all sides, especially in the city where he resided. But on account of the strict economy he must henceforth practise, as well as a secret repugnance to a different social position in a place where he had been so prosperous, he decided, after some hesitation, to leave Frankfort, and accept a modest situation offered him at the University of Heidelberg. He succeeded in purchasing a small house in that place at a low price—somewhat rustic, it is true, but situated without the city walls, on the banks of the Neckar, and surrounded by a garden. He could easily walk to the university every morning, and the perspective of the rural repose that awaited him at the end of the day would enable him to endure its labors more cheerfully. He therefore decided to take possession of it as speedily as possible, and all the necessary arrangements had to be made during the few weeks they were to remain in the Old Mansion before leaving it for ever.

Clement took charge of all the preliminaries of the somewhat extensive sale that was to take place. He wished to relieve his father from so sad a task, and perform the painful and fatiguing business without any assistance, but it was made much easier for him than he anticipated. Fleurange insisted on his accepting her aid. She set herself to work, silently going to and fro with her sleeves turned back, carrying the rare china carefully from one place to another with her small but efficient hands, and dusting, arranging, and numbering the books according to her cousin’s directions. Of course she greatly lightened his labors. In the evening they seated themselves in the library, now nearly stripped of its treasures, and wrote lists or inserted notes in the large registers concerning the precious manuscripts and books that were to be disposed of. It was, in short, a work that required the vigor and activity of youth, as well as much thought and assiduous labor. To say that, while performing this double task, they never found it tiresome, that no shade ever came over their brows, and that their eyes were never tearful while handling so many objects they were never to see again, would be false; it would be equally so to say that Clement, in spite of the fatigue, was greatly to be pitied during these days.

There came a time, long after, when, looking back on the past, it seemed to him that these hours passed in the light of Fleurange’s beautiful eyes, sometimes cast down as she bent over the large registers, and anon raised to ask a question or give him a friendly glance—it seemed to him, I say, that these vanished hours were among the most delightful of his life.

At length came the day their task would be completed, and, while they were working together for the last time, Fleurange raised her eyes. “Clement,” she said, “we are nearly done. I have been waiting for this moment to tell you something.”

Clement dropped his work at once, and looked up interrogatively.

“No, no; finish what you are doing, and I will tell you afterward.”

Clement soon finished. Fleurange closed the great book before her, and resumed: “Do you remember our conversation in the garden a fortnight ago?”

“I do, most assuredly.”

“Well, after leaving you that evening, I passed the night in reflection, and ended by writing to the best, and, indeed, the only gentleman-friend I have in the world out of this house.”

“Dr. Leblanc?” said Clement, aware, of course, of all the circumstances that preceded his cousin’s arrival.

“Yes, Dr. Leblanc. I wrote him all I had just learned. I made known the situation my uncle and his family would soon be in, and my desire, my ardent desire, not only to cease to be a burden, but to fulfil a daughter’s duty with regard to them. His own daughters have other duties, now they are married, but I have only this, and it is one so precious—so precious,” repeated Fleurange in the soft tone that sometimes made her simplest words penetrate to the depths of the listener’s heart, “that I shall consider my life happy and well-spent if I can consecrate it entirely to this duty!”

Clement bent down his head, and took up his pen as if to correct a mistake on the paper before him. She must not see the effect of her words on his countenance—no! she must not.

“Well,” said he presently, without looking up, “what did Dr. Leblanc say?”

“Here, Clement, read the letter I received from him two days ago.”

Clement took the letter, but, while reading it, he was all at once filled with a similar anguish to that he experienced after the conversation that night in the garden which Fleurange had just alluded to. He was obliged to make a violent effort to restrain his feelings, and not tear the letter in his hands into a thousand pieces. Fortunately he succeeded, for it would have been the most foolish act he ever committed. And there was really nothing in Dr. Leblanc’s letter to justify such a mad desire. It read as follows:

Clement remained silent for some time. “And you think of accepting such a proposal?” said he, at length, in a tone of irritation quite at variance with his usual manner. “What folly!”

“No, it is not folly,” replied Fleurange mildly. “If, after talking with Dr. Leblanc, I discover no reason for declining the situation, I cannot possibly see the folly of accepting it.”

“Gabrielle,” said Clement, without changing his tone, “you know the course you wish to take is insupportable to me! This rôle belongs to me—me alone. It is my place to labor for my parents, my brother and sister, and for you. If you had the least regard for me, you would feel this is a favor you have no right to refuse me.”

“Come, Clement,” said Fleurange calmly, “let us talk it over in a reasonable manner. When everything is sold, and your parents are settled in their new home at Heidelberg, you are perfectly aware that your father’s small salary, even with what you can add to it, will barely enable them and Frida to live comfortably. You will remain at Frankfort, where, notwithstanding your youth, you have the choice of several situations. But Fritz—have you forgotten our calculations yesterday? Will you have sufficient means to send him to the excellent gymnasium you were so desirous he should enter, that he might be enabled to become independent in his turn? No, Clement, you know well you could not do it. Whereas,” she continued with animation, “if this good lady likes me, I can send all my salary, with the exception of a small part, to my dear brothers. This will ensure Fritz’s education, and my dear aunt will be freed from all anxiety about him as well as me. And do you not see, Clement, that I shall be a thousand times happier far away from you all, even though treated like a slave by this princess, than among you, useless, inactive, and adding by my presence to your difficulties, instead of aiding to diminish them?”

Clement, with his elbows resting on the table, and his face buried in his hands, did not answer a word.

“Come, come, dear Clement, put off that frown,” said Fleurange in a caressing tone, taking him softly by the hand. “We shall see each other, like school-children, during our vacations. From time to time we shall meet on the banks of the Neckar! That will always be our home, where we shall all gather around the hearth, as here, on great festivals.”

What reply could poor Clement make? What objection could he offer? Must he not for ever conceal all he had hoped in his vanished dreams to confess some day? Was he not now reduced to constant labor for subsistence? Had not his life henceforth a single aim that nothing must turn him from? And were it otherwise, did she not look upon him as a mere boy? Was he not destitute of every quality that could please her? And had he not always foreseen that his enchanting dreams would vanish at the very first breath of reality?

He took his cousin’s small hand in his, and, with his usual frank and cordial look, said: “You are right, Gabrielle, forgive me. I appear ungrateful, but I am not. May God reward you! You are an angel!”

And he added in a tone too low for her to hear: “An angel from whom I am more widely separated than from the angels in heaven!”

From that day forth Clement displayed no more interest in his cousin’s project: at least, he never alluded to it, and the plan was discussed before him without his taking any part in the conversation.

Madame Dornthal, capable herself of the most generous devotedness, knew also how to accept it from others—a rarer gift, but perhaps not less noble. She thoroughly understood Fleurange’s disposition, and was unwilling at such a time to deprive a heart like hers of the most exquisite joy it can taste.

“Yes, dear child,” she said, folding her in her arms, “I accept the aid you offer me, and with gratitude. Thanks to you, I shall be relieved from all anxiety respecting two of my children, and, if Dr. Leblanc reassures me as to my Gabrielle, I shall let her follow the generous impulse of her heart.”

But Madame Dornthal kept to herself, or only communicated to her husband, another motive for her consent. Fleurange would thus be preserved from some of the privations of their new life. “She would continue to enjoy comforts we could no longer give her. She would be happier and more cheerful away from us, the poor child! than with us at such a time.”

“Yes,” replied the professor, “it would indeed be a pity to bury her youth in a cottage. I could not bear it. I have so often blessed God within a month for having assured the destiny of our dear daughters! And yet,” added poor Ludwig, sighing, “their young faces were so cheering around us!”

“We shall soon see them again, Ludwig. Hilda and Karl are awaiting our visit, and Clara will pass the winter near us, Julian having received a great number of orders from the vicinity of Heidelberg. O my dear Ludwig! as long as God leaves us these blessings, let us resign, not only without a murmur, but without regret, all he has taken from us!”

Those who are absorbed in the acquisition of wealth, and make it the special object of their lives, are no less liable to misfortune than others. Indeed, it may be said, they are more frequently overtaken by adversity. Would it not be well, then, for them to reflect a little beforehand on the means of singularly modifying the features of this stern visitant, and giving it the aspect it now wore in the Old Mansion? It is true, to do this they must begin by thinking of something higher than the mere acquisition of riches.

Dr. Leblanc arrived, as he promised, about ten days after his letter. His visit at the Old Mansion coincided with the last days its inmates were to pass within its walls, and this circumstance would have made him hesitate to come, had not the professor cordially encouraged him. They had long wished to know each other, for in their different spheres they were equally renowned, and Fleurange, under so many obligations to both, was a tie between them. The doctor was therefore received by M. Dornthal quite otherwise than as a stranger. The tendency of their minds, the nature of their studies, and even the prominent features of their character, were very dissimilar, but there was the same foundation to their nature, and they aimed at the same end by different means. They therefore soon discovered that, though their lives were drawing to a close without even having met before, they were born intimate friends.

How many unknown friends thus pass their whole lives without ever meeting, or even suspecting the sympathy that unites them! Who can tell how many ties of this kind will be discovered in heaven? And who knows but this discovery may be one of the sweetest surprises of another life, and, like all the joys we have a foretaste of here below, and perhaps more abundantly accorded to those who on earth were the most destitute?

The hospitable doors of the Old Mansion were closed, the library shelves bare, the panels stripped of the rich paintings that adorned them, and all was now humiliation and sacrifice where once reigned satisfaction and enjoyment, and yet Dr. Leblanc probably would not have felt so lively a sensation of respect and emotion had he visited the Dornthals for the first time during the days of their prosperity.

As to them, this new friend seemed to have always occupied the place he now took in their midst, and, in spite of the sadness of the present as well as of the future, Fleurange enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing them brought together for a few brief hours, and, though on the eve of leaving her friends, did not find the last days she spent among them the least happy.

Madame Dornthal gathered nothing from her conversations with Dr. Leblanc that was unfavorable to Fleurange’s project; but she learned that the Princess Catharine was only making a temporary visit at Munich on her way from a watering-place where she passed her summers and would soon leave for Florence, where she owned a palace which was her residence in winter.

After some correspondence, it was decided Fleurange should accept the princess’ offer, and go to Munich under the doctor’s care. She would thus have the double advantage of her old friend’s protection during the journey, and his presence during the first days of her new career among strangers.

While all this was being decided, the time passed sadly and rapidly away, and the last day they were to spend in the Old Mansion came—the last day their eyes would linger on the venerable walls which had witnessed all the happiness of the past, the garden with its velvet sward, the borders of flowers, and the wide alleys through the overshadowing trees, full of remembrances they would not another spring be able to retrace, or indeed any spring of their future lives.

Clement, silent as he often was, but more agitated than usual, hastily collected the small number of books which were to form part of his luggage the following day. His cousin’s generous sacrifice enabled him to fulfil his wishes at once with regard to Fritz. This only left him the more completely alone—the care of the child would have added to the young man’s difficulties and become later a serious burden; but Clement loved his little brother, and had looked upon the necessity of keeping him with him as a consoling feature of his future life. This necessity no longer existed. Clement, left free, decided to make choice of the most laborious career offered him—the one least conformed to his tastes, but the best adapted to second his desire of aiding his parents.

Wilhelm Müller proposed he should enter a large commercial house where M. Heinrich Dornthal’s worthy and intelligent clerk himself had found a situation similar to that he recently occupied at the banker’s. Clement accepted it. He was at first to receive only a small salary, but it would be increased from year to year. “And later,” explained Wilhelm, “you may have your share in the profits of the house. You are young. Who knows, whatever you may say, that you will not some day become rich again, and as happy and prosperous as you were destined to be?”

Nothing in Clement’s heart responded to this encouraging prophecy, but he did not the less follow Müller’s advice. Moreover, he accepted the kind clerk’s offer of renting him a small chamber in the house he himself occupied.

“Poor Monsieur Clement,” he said, “what I offer you is only a garret, but it is under our roof, and you will feel you have friends around you. My wife is a good housekeeper, and will always be ready to render you a service. The little ones are good children also, though somewhat noisy, and will sometimes divert your sad thoughts.”

“It is all well enough,” said Clement. “Your offer suits me every way, and I thank you, Wilhelm, with all my heart.”

Thus matters were arranged between them.

Fleurange made her appearance in the library while Clement was diligently packing his books. She remained awhile, and learned by questioning him all that has just been related, not omitting the kind clerk’s offer to become his host as well as his colleague.

“Oh! so much the better,” cried Fleurange. “The Müllers are excellent people. I know Bertha, who is an amiable little woman. You can talk with her about me.”

Bertha’s name recalled Fleurange’s journey, which they discussed. This naturally led to her arrival on Christmas Eve, the Midnight Mass, the festival of the following day, and all the other happy days that succeeded.

All these reminiscences were too touching, too poignant, at such a time. Fleurange at last became unable to utter a word. She turned her face away, and started as if to leave the room. But she stopped at the threshold, and remained leaning against the garden window, which at that season was surrounded by honeysuckle. Clement followed, and both stood gazing at the thousand objects gilded by the brilliant rays of the setting sun. There was nothing wanting in the melancholy beauty of that evening hour, either in the sweetness of the air, the clearness of the sky, the perfume of the flowers, or anything that could in their eyes add an unusual charm to all they were about to leave for ever.

And she! how did she appear in the sight of him who feared he might never, after this hour, behold her again as she now stood beside him? What did he think of the effect of the golden lights upon her fair brow and on her black and silky hair?—on the pale azure of her eyes, now so smiling and soft, and again so grave and thoughtful, but in which tenderness was overruled by a will that would ever remain dominant?

We will not state what were his unuttered thoughts. The mingling of sweetness and energy which heightened the attraction Fleurange inspired he was equally gifted with, and what he ought to conceal within his own bosom he knew how to prevent his mouth from uttering or his eyes from ever betraying. He therefore remained near her, calm in appearance, while his heart was a prey to such grief as in youth changes the entire aspect of nature, and makes it almost unendurable to live.

“To-morrow!—to-morrow I shall no longer behold her,” he repeated to himself, with a sensation that one might have in sharpening the instrument of his execution, and the thought deprived him of enjoying the few hours that remained to him.

Fleurange, on her side, dwelt on the fatality that always separated her from those she loved. She recalled the day when the bare thought of ever leaving this spot caused such a painful contraction of the heart. And now, that prophetic anguish was justified!—the frightful dream had become a reality! Sad thoughts crowded on her mind. Another moment, and she would be unable to restrain them, all her firmness was about to give way in a flood of tears, when an effort of her will made her triumph over the emotion, or, at least, prevented her from manifesting it. Putting a stop to her long reverie, she raised her head, and turned toward her cousin:

“Here, Clement,” she said softly, drawing a small book from her pocket, “here is my Dante we have so often read in: keep it, dear friend, in memory of our favorite study, and do not forget our habit of daily reading a canto in it.”

“No, I shall never forget it. Thank you, Gabrielle: the gift is very precious. I shall always prize this little book.” He opened it: “But write my name on this blank leaf. Here is my pencil.”

She took the pencil and wrote: “To Clement.”

“One word more,” said Clement in a supplicating tone. “Pray write also a word, a line, a stanza if you will, from our favorite poet.”

“What shall I write?” said she, turning over the leaves.

“There, that in the second canto,” said he, pointing it out. She wrote it immediately, and then read it over:

“To Clement.

“L’amico mio e non della Ventura.”[58]

“That is right,” said Clement. “Thank you.”

“That is a sad line: I should have chosen a different one.”

“It is appropriate to the present occasion. Now add your name.”

She was about to write it when he stopped her.

“Your real name,” said he. “Write your other name, to-night—the name that suits you so well—Fleurange!”

Fleurange smiled, and shook her head. “Oh! no,” she said. “I gave it up with regret, but I should not have thought of such a thing had I previously known you all. But I have been so happy since I have borne the name of Gabrielle—and you were the first to call me so, Clement—so happy that I no longer love the name associated with the sadness of the past, and, were I to hear any one call me Fleurange now, I should imagine it an ill omen.”

Clement made no reply, but, when she returned the book, he retained her hand a moment: “Gabrielle, one word more—perhaps my last before your departure. Listen to me. Wherever you may be, if you ever need a friend—a friend, do you understand?—that would value no sacrifice for your sake, do not forget that your brother is ready to aid you, not only willingly, but with a pleasure you have no idea of.”

Clement’s voice was grave and solemn, but at the same time agitated and tremulous, as he uttered these words. They were so in conformity with what Fleurange had reason to expect from him that they touched her, but excited no surprise.

“Yes, Clement,” she replied frankly, casting an affectionate glance toward him; “I promise to have recourse to you. I feel I have no better friend in the world than you, and doubt if I ever shall have.”

Were these words sweet or bitter? He hardly knew. The sadness that overwhelmed him it seemed impossible to increase, and equally impossible to alleviate. And yet!—she was still there—beside him—with an air of serenity and hope. There was not a single sentiment of her heart he did not share. She called him her friend, and there was no other she preferred to him. The moment, so full of anguish, was yet a happy one, and he regretted at a later day not having known how to profit more by it.

This was their last conversation in the Old Mansion. Clement preserved the little volume in which she had written the name of Gabrielle as a memento of this interview, and also a sprig of the honeysuckle that touched her forehead.

The remainder of the evening passed swiftly away. Soon after light the next morning came the farewell hour. The Dornthals left their beloved home without the hope of ever entering it again, and Fleurange once more left those she loved, to enter upon a new life that looked a thousand times gloomier and more uncertain than that which was before her when she left Paris. And Clement bade them all farewell, to endure as he could isolation, a laborious and uncongenial life, the privation of the affection and pleasures of his boyhood, and especially all the pain and love a young heart can endure.

It was a beautiful night—brilliant, serene, and starry—a night the uprising moon would soon render as light as day. A fresh breeze from the land swelled the sails of a vessel just leaving Genoa, which, far from impeding its course, only gave it a bolder and more rapid flight over the waves. There were various groups of passengers on deck, some conversing in subdued tones quite in harmony with the mysterious hour of twilight, and others aloud as if it were mid-day. One was playing on a guitar, as an accompaniment to a somewhat remarkable voice, one of those airs everybody knows, sings, or hums as long as they are in the fashion. The music, in itself indifferent, did not seem so on the water and at such an hour. It harmonized with the feelings of those who were sailing over that azure sea, beneath that starry sky, and in sight of those charming shores which the boat scarcely lost sight of during its short sail from Genoa to Leghorn.

Apart from all these groups, and belonging to none of them, we again find Fleurange, who was sitting entirely alone. She had been here some minutes, attracting general attention from the first by the gracefulness of her form, which the cloak in which she was wrapped could not wholly conceal. The hood, half-covering her head, only added a picturesqueness to the striking beauty of her regular features. More than one of her fellow-travellers would gladly have drawn near the place where she was sitting, but, though she was alone and did not appear to be under any one’s protection, there was, in the simple dignity of her attitude, in her evident indifference to the sensation she produced, in her very want of timidity, which was not boldness, but resolution, and in her whole appearance, a something undefinable which intimidated the most lively admiration, and would have disconcerted insolence itself—a remark en passant to those who regard familiarity as only a proof of the attraction they inspire. Therefore, in spite of some whispering, notwithstanding more than one look toward the charming face distinctly visible in the full light of the moon, now risen, Fleurange remained quietly in her corner, abandoned to her own meditations, undisturbed by any one, and without troubling herself in the least about those who surrounded her. Her thoughts were various and complex. A strange fate seemed to pursue her and constantly break the thread of her life, and every time it was broken she found the severance more painful. It was but recently she wept so bitterly at leaving Paris, and Dr. Leblanc, and the dear Mademoiselle Josephine. But the tears were much more bitter she shed at leaving the Old Mansion, and the loved circle where she had first known and tasted in all their fulness the sweet joys of family life.

After leaving Frankfort, Fleurange’s firmness, which had never faltered before, suddenly gave way to such a degree as to make Dr. Leblanc resolve to take her back to her friends if, after his short stay at Munich, he did not find her more resigned to her lot. But Fleurange was not a person to be easily subdued. Her natural strength of character soon asserted itself, and enabled her to persevere in the path she had chosen. Her resolution was strengthened by the very circumstances which would have discouraged many others. At their arrival at Munich, they found the Princess Catharine confined to her bed by a violent attack of her malady, and it was as nurse that Fleurange entered upon her duties. Her complaint, all the physicians declared, was not dangerous, but it was not the less painful, nor the easier to be relieved. That Dr. Leblanc was again successful in his treatment was partly owing to the sudden and lively fancy of his patient for the young companion he had brought her. To tell the truth, the doctor, knowing the princess, had foreseen this attraction, but he knew Fleurange was fully able to justify and sustain this first impression, and he sincerely hoped by bringing them together he had done something no less useful and beneficial for his wealthy patient than for his young protégée.

However this might be, nothing could have been better adapted to dispel the burden of grief that weighed on Fleurange’s heart than the immediate necessity of forgetting herself in active and assiduous care for another. It was rather a sad beginning to pass a succession of days and nights at the bedside of a sick stranger, but in the actual state of her mind it was the best thing she could have done. She possessed all the qualities that constitute an efficient nurse, and, to a degree that excited Dr. Leblanc’s surprise, firmness and promptitude, ease and gentleness in all her movements, vigor and skill, and seasonable attentions—nothing was wanting, and the result was—the never-failing effect of her beauty and grace, added to the sentiments of lively gratitude sick people generally feel for those who know how to relieve them. The princess did not cease thanking the doctor, and the latter, quite pleased with the result of his inspiration, left Fleurange not only without anxiety, but with the most favorable hopes as to her position.

Though scarcely able to travel, the Princess Catharine insisted on leaving Munich, and by easy stages she succeeded in reaching Genoa. Now she was on her way to Leghorn, and thence would go to Florence without delay, as she was eager to arrive at the palace which was her real home, having long been obliged by her health to absent herself from Russia, or at least to live there only during the brief portion of the year known as the pleasant season.

For the first time, almost, since she left her friends, Fleurange was now absolutely alone, and at liberty to indulge freely in her own reflections. She began by recalling the cherished memory of her distant friends, from whom she was every moment drifting away with frightful rapidity. It was the hour sung by the poet:

and Fleurange’s thoughts for a long time dwelt upon the recent events of her life, so rapid in their current as now to be numbered among the things for ever vanished—upon the happy family now scattered; the days—so few—in which she was permitted to be a member of it and finally, her present isolation, for, notwithstanding the kindness of the princess, she felt extremely isolated. By a singular exchange of rôles, it was she—the unprotected orphan, who now seemed to have become the support of her protectress; and the lady of rank—the rich princess, the poor woman spoiled by fortune—who seemed to seek aid and consolation from her. Fleurange’s kind heart found unexpected relief in these cares, the very success of which was ample reward. She felt her affection increase for the object of these attentions in proportion as she lavished them, but it was rather a feeling one has for a child or an inferior, than one it would have seemed natural to have for a person on whom she was dependent, and to whom she actually owed respect and obedience. She therefore felt solitary, and this loneliness was depressing. And yet in spite of herself—in spite of her melancholy (though this may seem contradictory)—an irresistible sensation of joy quickened the pulsations of her heart.

Who has not experienced this joy that has once seen the beautiful sky of Italy, and left it, and then beheld it again? Who has not greeted with transport the charming and sublime features of its glorious scenery as it appears anew on the horizon, as if beholding once more the face of a beloved friend? And who, after being long deprived of hearing the sweet accents of its musical language, has not heard them again with emotion? All these impressions must have been more deeply experienced in Fleurange’s case than in many others. And as the wind went down, and the moon ascended the clear sky, reflecting a train of light that grew brighter and brighter on the sea, like a pathway of diamonds leading to an enchanted abode, Fleurange, with her eyes fixed on the dazzling waters, felt for a moment transported with joy! All the sadness of the past as well as of the present vanished: she only realized the infinite pleasure of living, of being young, of being here under this sky, on this sea, near that coast whose odors were perceptible; and when she remembered that that coast was Italy, that she would be there in a few hours, a throng of poetic dreams and confused presentiments of happiness added their vague hopes to the secret joy with which she felt, as it were, intoxicated.

Dreams—half-understood dreams of youth—which are seldom realized, and which at a later day, according as the soul triumphs over or yields to the dangers of life, are transformed into divine and powerful aspirations, or into deceptive and fatal realities!

At this same hour, what was Clement dreaming of, seated at his garret window, and likewise gazing at the starry sky? Ah! if he could have followed her whose image filled his soul, he would now have been beside Fleurange as she was thus wafted away from him, lulled by her confused dreams. His reverie, too, was sad, but there was nothing vague or indefinite about it, and the manly tenderness of his look expressed firmness and resolution rather than softness. The future was clearly defined in his mind. Yes, though he was only twenty years old, he felt capable of cherishing a fond memory in his heart without ever being unfaithful to it. Yes, she should remain there, as in a sanctuary, and, after God, he would offer her the labors, the studies, the poetry, and the purity of his life! Every talent he had received should be cultivated, and bring forth all that was required on the part of the Giver. This motive should quicken his mental faculties, and refresh him after the exertions of the day; stimulate him to arduous labor—sacred in his eyes—which he would pursue with energy and constancy, for it was the source of his parents’ comfort and support, and the reliance of their old age. And if at length!—Perhaps some day!—But when the sudden revival of a forbidden hope gave him all at once a thrill, he repressed it. His judgment, his reason, a painful and invincible presentiment, had for a long time assured him this hope was vain. “Garder l’amour en brisant l’espoir” was his aim and devise—a task painful, difficult, and perhaps even impossible. But at this time such was his fancy and such his dream!

TO BE CONTINUED.

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No English voice in the world of letters wakes the pulses of our age to the thrill of joy which greeted Childe Harold and Rob Roy. Those monarchs of the popular heart left no successors; or if their mantle hung for a moment on the shoulders of another, it is now buried in the grave of Dickens. We have yet several novelists. We have many poets. But none has obtained universal appreciation; to none has been awarded with general consent the palm of paramount renown. Yet it will not be questioned that few living writers command a larger following, are remembered with more affection, and heard with greater eagerness than the author of “In Memoriam.”

There are few studies more delightful than the growth of a poet’s mind. In the case of Tennyson we witness the whole process of development. We have seen him in his timid beginnings and in his brilliant prime. More than forty years have passed since a slender volume of poems introduced a young graduate of Cambridge to the English-reading world. The modest offering fell upon a time which had garnered larger and riper fruit. There were giants in those days. Byron indeed was dead, but his fame, although it had passed its zenith, still shone the brightest in the firmament. Shelley had preceded him, but the reputation of that sweet singer and genuine artist was growing, and has not ceased to grow. The lovers of Campbell had not surrendered their faith that the Pleasures of Hope and the story of Gertrude of Wyoming were but a prelude to loftier strains. From the grave of Adonaïs men’s eyes had turned with regret and wonder to the bold outline of Hyperion and the rich shadows of St. Agnes’ Eve. Coleridge was a wreck, but the finger of his Ancient Mariner pointed many a thoughtful gaze toward the untravelled country which fringes the visible world. The master-hand that had swept the chords of Scottish minstrelsy had not yet lost all its original vigor. And Wordsworth’s voice gave loud and clear the signal of poetic reform, and all who were ready to desert the out-worn moulds of classic thought and classic imagery had begun to close around his banner.

Into that circle of splendid names no youthful aspirant could win admittance without a challenge. More fortunate, however, than Keats, Tennyson secured through university friendships some indulgence from the reviews. A few were eager to crown him. It is now acknowledged that their unwinnowed praise discovered less of the judge than of the partisan. The conservative temper of Wilson was provoked by the cordial welcome accorded the new-comer in certain quarters to assume an attitude of repression that was, to say the least, ungenerous. A measured severity might have been amply justified. This first venture was indeed superior to those Hours of Idleness which had drawn the sneer of the Edinburgh Review. But he would have been a bold prophet who in 1830 from “Claribel” and the “Mermaid” would have foretold the “Idylls of the King.”

Tennyson ripened slowly. His next volume was published two years later. It was enriched with the “Lady of Shalott,” the “Lotus-Eaters,” and the “Palace of Art,” but many of the poems were disfigured by his earlier mannerisms, and some discovered an affected mysticism and a hankering after novel expression that was not indicative of health or strength. The poet, too, had betrayed a sensitiveness to criticism that augured ill for the discipline of his powers. It was still an open question whether the great gifts which he unquestionably possessed would be burnished by patient labor, or after some idle brandishings rust in satisfied repose. Nor would he have been the first for whom victory too early and lightly won has twined the poppy with her laurel. A silence of ten years followed, and it seemed probable that another name must be added to those of Campbell and Coleridge on the roll of splendid disappointments.

But during this long interval he had not been idle. He had thought and he had suffered. He had learned much and discarded much. On a sudden, his treasury was opened, and the fruits of energy and discipline fell in glistening showers at the feet of a public which had almost forgotten him. The “Morte d’Arthur,” “Dora,” “Love and Duty,” “Ulysses,” “Locksley Hall,” appealed in divers tones to a charmed and astonished audience. By one sweep, and with no feeble hand, he had planted his standard in many and widely different fields. The bright forecast of his college friends was justified. He had sprung at a bound into the front rank of living poets.

We pass over the “Princess,” which added little to his reputation, and reach 1850, a cardinal point in his career. In that year it is just to say that “Lycidas” and “Adonaïs” were eclipsed by “In Memoriam.” This remarkable work, at once the noblest monody and most impressive of heart histories, interpreted the author’s life and consolidated his fame. “Maud” came next, and, morbid, incoherent, structureless as it is, would have severely tried a credit less firmly rooted. “Maud” indeed seems to owe its origin rather to the blind impulse of crude intemperate youth, or the promptings of some delirious fever, than the deliberate, healthful movement of the poet’s higher faculties. It marks the single break in the progress of his mind.

Not a few of Tennyson’s admirers had always affirmed the “Morte d’Arthur” to be the strongest of his works. That fragment was published in 1842, but it was not until 1859 that four kindred poems were drawn from that Arthurian romance which had early haunted his fancy and has chiefly employed the energies of his riper years. The “Idylls of the King” have had several successors, and the “Last Tournament” completes the cycle.

An effort has lately been made in certain quarters to depreciate Tennyson. We do not object to comparisons if they are fruitful in suggestion, and are instituted in a candid spirit. But perhaps analysis affords the surer test. We ourselves hold Tennyson to be the first of living English poets, and incline to rank him above Byron and beside Wordsworth. In the course of an attempt to indicate his place in literature, we shall quote wherever quotations may sustain or illustrate our ideas. We shall draw mainly from those works which exhibit a writer at his best. The height of mountain ranges is gauged by their loftiest peaks, and the merit of a public benefactor by his virtues, not his shortcomings. A poet is a public benefactor. Not his failures, but his masterpiece, should supply the materials of an honest judgment.

Vision, in the old Roman conception, was the distinguishing faculty of the poet. And indeed vates, not poeta, marks the fundamental condition of his art. The seer precedes the maker. It is not indispensable that he should see more than other men, but he will see more clearly. His perceptions are acute and nimble; his sensations are intense. The retina and ear-drum deliver with peculiar speed and precision their messages to his brain. His glance tracks the eagle in his circles, and numbers the hues of the western sky. He catches the whisper of fainting winds, and spells the cadence of the rippling stream. To him all outlines are sharp and crisp, every tint is vivid, every tone is clear. Senses exquisitely organized are the first essential of the poet.

Sensations are fraught with countless degrees of pleasure, with infinite shades of pain. Those objects whose ideas awaken a feeling of delight we call beautiful. To register the beautiful is an instinct of the poet. With a nice reference to the pleasure imparted, he discriminates forms, divides the chromatic scale, graduates the gamut of sound. In a word, his æsthetic judgment is wakeful and unerring. But the keenest joys of the mind are not begotten by beauty pure and simple. There is a fuller and sweeter satisfaction than that derived from kaleidoscope combinations of color, arabesques without significance, and fantasias without text or theme. Wherever design emerges, the notion of fitness is born. The Greek found it in the human body. We can trace it in the flower and the star. When we contemplate those things of which design may be predicated, there is blended with the feeling of pleasure a perception of inward adaptation. The idea of perfection is married to the idea of beauty. The ideal is their offspring. Upon it the æsthetic judgment unaided dares not pronounce. The complex faculty, whose province is the ideal, is taste. It is the second requisite of the poet.

Most persons of culture and refinement have taste in some degree. They are no strangers to the pure delight evoked by a smiling landscape. In the human form they enjoy the beauty of outline and proportion, and recognize the nice adjustment of structure to a central aim. But their joys are transient. The flower fades; sunset yields to moonlight; autumn touches with her pencil the canvas of the spring; one graceful attitude melts into another; emotions course across the countenance like winds over standing wheat. The poet comes. His mission is to chain the fleeting, to fix the evanescent, to reproduce the past. He brings you a rose with the bloom on it; calls up the buried friend; stays the sinking sun on the edge of his western bed. His life is a long revolt against the law of change. Nor is he confined to imitation. His sphere transcends realities. He may play with nature, if he will not violate her. His memory is not a store-house only, but a crucible as well, where the phenomena of sense lie fused in a glowing golden mass. Through his brain float airy shapes surpassing and yet suggesting the grace of earthly forms; ideals strange and fantastic, yet bound by subtle ties of relationship to types of the actual world. His fancy is ever in labor. Incessant gestation, incessant parturition, engage her energies. Reproduction, creation, is a law of the poet’s being. It is this which vindicates his right to the noble name of maker.

Keen senses, a just taste, creative force, compose the common dowry of artists. But art is threefold—plastic, pictorial, poetic. To each species belongs a peculiar medium in which memories are embalmed and fancies embodied. The media are solids, colors, words. In language lie certain powers and certain limitations. The poet divines them. He produces a speaking picture, but he remembers that much of a picture cannot be spoken. He demonstrates that much also may be told that cannot be painted. On his canvas vivacity and intensity do duty for light and shade. Elaboration, suggestion, silence, are the elements of his perspective. He borrows from sculpture the significance of isolation, and the incisive lesson of the group. Images, metaphors, similes, are the poet’s graving-tools. He learns their latent capacities and their inherent flaws. He secures subtle effects by climax, antithesis, evolution. He plays the chemist with ideas, and presents them in every stage of development, now vaporous, now congealed. He weighs words, detects their finer applications, and fathoms the deeper meanings which are coiled about their roots. And, finally, he masters the mechanism of speech, the organic structure of sentences, the joints and vertebræ of his native tongue. One step remains, to seize the principles of metre, the secrets of rhythm and cæsura, the march and music of verse. His panoply is finished. He is a poet.

Let us apply some of these tests to Tennyson. And, first, his power of simple imitation. At first sight this seems no lofty triumph of the poet’s art. And yet how much it implies! To translate substance into the unsubstantial. To portray the visible and tangible in that which has neither color nor dimension. Above all, to transfuse through the spirit of man the spirit of nature. It behooves him who would compass this to purge the heart of emotion, abjure self-consciousness, and forget, like the Pythian priestess, his own identity. He is not to steep his landscape in sentiment of his own, nor ascribe to it a fictitious sympathy with human moods and passions. The outward beauty he contemplates must traverse his mental atmosphere, untinctured, unrefracted, like white light. We must catch in his work the soul of the scene, a spirit rising from it like an exhalation, not drenching it with alien dews. We find a happy instance of right treatment in this cool upland valley from “Œnone”:

Beside this place the rank luxuriance of a tropic island where “Enoch Arden,” shipwrecked, waited for a sail:

Of pure imitative art Scott and Wordsworth are the great modern masters. Yet we shall all acknowledge that the passages quoted exhibit a rare excellence. It would be hard to match in Theocritus the breezy freshness of the “Brook.” As we listen, we lose ourselves, and seem to penetrate the joyous heart of nature. We too are in Arcadia. It is the morning of the world, and the infant god of some slender streamlet hums his naïve song to Pan, who lies along the sward:

We have dwelt at length on the sincerity with which Tennyson interprets nature. It is the stamp of the true poet. The dilettante, however cunning, cannot counterfeit it. He cannot keep himself out of the picture, but invests it with his own sentiment, and tricks it out in the whims and caprices of the hour. It is otherwise with Wordsworth. That high-priest of nature enters her presence reverently, with humble and candid heart. He puts off the vanities and weaknesses of man on the verge of her holy ground. From his lips her lessons fall with a simple earnestness, like oracles from the mouth of a child. Her truths he incarnates, but does not presume to clothe.

While it is false art to attribute to nature a conscious sympathy with man, it is true that she at times discovers an unconscious harmony with his moods. Our emotions are deepened by the accord. The happy are the happier for sunshine. The sad are saddest in the night and the rain. To aim at this mystic unison, to strike one note from feeling and from circumstance, is legitimate and delightful. Let us contrast an example of such treatment with the less truthful method to which we have referred. We ought always to study a theory in some felicitous expression of it, and therefore we take these graceful lines from Dr. Holmes. The stars and flowers touched by the woes of fallen man have conspired to watch and warn him. The flowers cannot bear the sight of human misery.

At the first glance this moves, and pleases; because the emotion of the moment veils the extravagant hyperbole. The writer is an artist, and makes us see, as it were, through tears. But the lines do not grow upon us like the truly beautiful. As we read them a second time, there comes over us a feeling of annoyance, almost of pain, that the flowers should be misinterpreted, the stars misconstrued. We tremble before nature’s shocks and storms, and cannot afford to darken her brightest bloom or trouble her sweet serenity. Look now at this figure of “Mariana,” weeping, forsaken, “in the moated grange!” There is no pathetic prelude, no preliminary appeal to human sympathies. A neglected garden and a lonely house. A reach of level waste, colorless, silent, cold. The desolation is contagious, and just as the heart is sinking into a state of depression and despair, the moan of the stricken girl falls quivering on the ear.

We are very far from saying that Tennyson is everywhere free from the pathetic fallacy. But his sins of the kind occur chiefly in some vein of sportive apologue, like the “Talking Oak,” or in the mouth of Maud’s morbid lover, half distraught by temper and wholly crazed by crime. And, indeed, if any could be pardoned for beholding in all things one image, it would be, no doubt, the lover. In the old myth, love guided the hand of art; but Pygmalion was a sculptor, not a landscape painter.

The portrayal of the human form is one of the painter’s triumphs, as it is the sole province of plastic art. Poetry, for the most part, evades a description of personal beauty, and is content with a suggestion. Yet there are two or three etchings in the “Palace of Art” which seem to us not unworthy of a place in that gallery of Philostratus which a poet’s hand repeopled:

These are mere outlines. But Tennyson has drawn one figure with almost pictorial finish and force. It is Aphrodite revealing herself to Paris on Mount Ida:

This is genuine painting. There is form and color in it, and, withal, the spirit of beauty bathing the whole, untainted by the faintest suggestion of wanton love.

In the temple of outward nature poetry is only the acolyte of painting. But one shrine is more exclusively her own. She is mistress of the heart. Over that ocean no other wing sustains continuous flight. There are waves of impulse which canvas cannot reflect, and currents of emotion untraced by the limner’s skill. There are dainty joys and fears that mock his grasp, and gust of passion that confound his cunning. Pictorial art must read the soul in the face, and the face is at best a clouded mirror. From the poet we hide nothing. The growth of character, the drift of habit, the pressure of inherited tendencies, springs of motive, stings of appetite—he discerns and deciphers all. But he must not speak in riddles: he is bound to make his meaning clear. He owes a duty to the humblest. They look to him to lend thought a form, shadow a substance; to explain the strange by the familiar, and flood the whole with the mellow flight of fancy. The poet is, in a certain sense, what Sidney would make him, the right popular philosopher. On the success of Tennyson in this field there is some difference of opinion. The fervor of his sympathies within a certain range and the delicacy of his intuitions are unquestioned. His style is allowed to be rich in color, and often fraught with incisive force. Let us glance at some passages which depict the finer shades of feeling, or are conspicuous for felicitous expression. We will then look at the charges, so often brought against Tennyson, of obscurity and a want of dramatic power.

It is a fact of common experience that quite opposite emotions, wrought to intensity, reach a state of fusion. They move, as it were, in converging lines, and their vanishing point is pain; or rather, they have what physicists would call a common dew-point. Thus we hear of the luxury of sorrow and of love’s sweet smart. Coleridge has touched this psychic truth with extreme tenderness in “Genevieve.” He shows us the young girl rapt in a troubled wonder before the strange feeling that storms her gentle breast. Her heart flutters like a snared bird:

So in one of Tennyson’s “Idylls,” the eyes of the happy Enid are suffused with tears. It is hardly possible to read the lines without loving human nature:

Most persons have known those transient attachments which are born of “accident, blind contact, and the strong necessity of loving.” In the “Gardener’s Daughter” some one alludes in this playful fashion to the dethroned darling of his salad days:

Few who have read the new “Maid’s Tragedy” have forgotten “Elaine.” There is no sweeter face in story. We trace a master’s hand in the passage where a passionate sympathy holds her from her sleep, and the deep lines of Lancelot’s countenance are mirrored in her white soul:

Lancelot is always gracious to her, and grateful for her tender care, but he is moody and absent, and instinct tells her that his love can never be hers. She bears home a heavy heart:

One more. A song of Tristram’s, rife with the graceful gayety that masks and half-redeems a faithless heart. It might have been made by Ronsard, and sung by Bussy d’Amboise. The husband of “Isolt of Brittany” and the lover of “Isolt of Britain” gives the rationale of broken vows:

The admirers of Byron and the poets of the Georgian era find Tennyson obscure. By obscurity they ought to mean a darkness born of confusion, the cloud of fallacy, the vagueness of incoherence. Crude thoughts, unfledged fancies, halting metaphors, are obscure. Poetasters are commonly dark, and it would be easy to show that Byron himself in his best work, the fourth canto of Childe Harold, is sometimes guilty of obscurity. And it must be admitted that some poems of Tennyson’s youth, and likewise “Maud,” are open to this objection. But if, as we believe, the charge is pointed at “In Memoriam,” “Love and Duty,” or the “Palace of Art,” then we deny its force. It may be that they who find enigmas in Paradise Lost and “In Memoriam” mistake the source of their difficulties. We incline to depreciate what we fail to comprehend. We forget that deep waters are not necessarily turbid; that novelty is not obscurity. As we climb a mountain, we gain new views of the valley beneath, yet the novel landscape may be no less vivid than the old. There is, indeed, a dulness of the ear that detects no clue to the myriad threads of harmony. There is a myoptic disease which sees nothing but indistinctness beyond its narrow horizon. In such cases the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are mystified.

We have said that the poet owes a duty to the humblest. That duty is fulfilled when he has conjured his fancies into visible shapes, and given truth a concrete form. He is not called upon to find eyes for the blind, or learning for the ignorant. It is enough if at his banquet there is food for all stomachs. The poet owes a duty not to the humble only.

There are, for example, two methods by which poetry may illuminate history. It may invest personal character with the truth and vigor of life, and portray detached scenes in correct and brilliant colors. Or it may reveal to the imagination by exact and felicitous metaphor the sequence of events, the march of knowledge, the drift of opinion, and the “long result of time.” Thus Lucan poetized a narrative, Lucretius thinks in imagery. We recall no better illustration of the former treatment than the fine stanza from Childe Harold:

The anecdote is a noble one, and has gained nobility in the telling. But anecdotes after all are not the marrow of history. Something may be learned from Montesquieu as well as from Marmontel. Two lines from “Locksley Hall” exhibit the other method of interpreting history. The lines aim at nothing less than at once to condense and illumine the most pregnant epoch of modern times, the eighteenth century. This looks certainly like a preposterous abuse of that definition assigned to the drama, “an abstract and brief chronicle of the time.” Let us recall for a moment the period of Louis Quinze. The feudal system has fallen. The flowers are withered, the chains remain. The nobles have become courtiers, municipal privilege has perished, the peasant is a slave. Dishonor on the throne, bankruptcy in the treasury, the poor starving, the rich corrupt. Oppression tightening his grasp, and knowledge learning to realize the woe and to divine the remedy. On one side, despair that has begun to think of vengeance; on the other, blind arrogance that does not dream of retribution. And now, is not the whole story told with almost terrible simplicity in the compass of these lines?

It may be said that Byron was well-read in history; but he held that only romantic characters and striking facts were fit subjects of poetic treatment. That is not our opinion. We believe Byron gave the best he had. Moreover, it is not true that poetry may borrow nothing from history but personal traits and isolated events. That narrow view of the poet’s province was corrected for English literature by the Paradise Regained. Poetry is no mendicant, to be put off with the stale scraps and shallow gossip of the servants’ hall. Her seat is at the high table, beside the masters of the house.

Tennyson, we are told, has no dramatic power. It is true that he has written no drama. Does it follow that he is wanting in dramatic power?

Derivation often tells us more of words than of men. A drama is something done, not told or sung; neither narrative nor ode, but something done. First, then, we must have doers; or, if you please, actors. Our actors must prove themselves alive, they must be impelled to move. The impelling force is incident. But detached scenes illustrative of character do not make a drama, incident is not plot. The action which develops character must at the same time tend toward a certain end, the catastrophe of the piece. A drama, then, in the strictest sense is this: a development of character in situations which excite to action in a particular direction.

Where the evolution of plot is subordinate to the portrayal of character, the drama is loose and inorganic, like many of Shakespeare’s plays. Where the elaboration of personal traits is merged in the accomplishment of the event, the drama leans toward the epic, like a tragedy of Æschylus. Perfect equimarch in the development of character and plot stamps the ideal drama. Dramatic power in this sense is one of the rarest of human gifts, and perhaps has been exerted nowhere but in the plays of Sophocles. The phrase has, in English criticism, a much narrower meaning, and points simply to the exhibition of character by action.

We acknowledge that those poems of Tennyson which preceded the “Idylls of the King” gave little evidence of dramatic talent. Like the works of Byron, they are for the most part lyrical, reflective. In them the “beings of the mind” are rather analyzed than animated. The poet interprets them. They do not speak for themselves. Even dramatic insight, which is another thing than dramatic power, seems at times to be wanting. Thus his “Ulysses” is a modern soul grappling with the framework of Homeric times. “Margaret,” “Madeleine,” “Isabel,” are lovely dreams, not lovely women. In the “Princess,” if anywhere, we should look for the development of character. But as the persons of the tale pass across the stage, we incline to suspect with the prince that they are but shadows, “and all the mind is clouded with a doubt.” Indeed, little Lillia, whose burst of pretty petulance suggests the theme, is by far the most lifelike figure.

But the judgment passed upon living poets is at best provisional, and subject to reversal on appeal. The writer of pastorals will perhaps produce an Æneid in his riper years; “L’Allegro” and “Lycidas” may be succeeded by an epic. In the cluster of poems which embodies the Arthurian legends, there is much discrimination of character. The courtly flippancy of “Gawain” is distinguished from Tristram’s joyous levity. “Etarre” is vicious, “Vivien” is base. “Enid” is not a gentler being than “Elaine,” yet her meekness is finely contrasted with the latter’s emotional nature. In “Lancelot” we have a noble spirit in the toils of a great crime. In “Arthur,” the perfect equipose of character, illumined by a sublime resolve.

Nor are the foremost persons of the poems mere portraits. They are actors as well. They approach for the most part unheralded. Their temper and motives are self-betrayed, or hinted with a wise reserve. Their personal traits are evoked by incident or emphasized in dialogue. Here certainly is dramatic power of a certain kind. Not the highest which creates a drama—is it high enough for an epic? We incline to doubt. At least, it has produced none. We cannot allow that the “Idylls” which are grouped around the figure of the king constitute an epic poem.

The epic—we speak of the Æneid—is distinguished from the drama by this, that the development of character is subordinate to the evolution of plot, the actors are merged in the action. And as the drama may lean toward the epic, so the epic may lean toward history. That the poet unites in his own person the functions of scene-painter, machinist, and chorēgus, is only a difference of form.

Now, it is not so much grasp of character as nexus of plot that we miss in the “Idylls.” Scott’s Rokeby is an epic, yet Bertram Risingham is not more lifelike than “Lancelot.” But in Rokeby the story grows; one event generates another, the catastrophe is inevitable. Episodes are admitted in the epic, but they must be natural growths, or at least successful grafts. For example, “Elaine” and “Guinevere” stand in true organic relation, but “Enid” and “Vivien” have nothing in common with the rest of the cycle but their social atmosphere and casual reference to familiar names. In the poet’s mind, no doubt, the old Arthurian romances have been fused into a kind of unity. They present to him a coherent picture; discover a central thought. It is the soul at war with flesh, aspiration foiled by appetite, the eagle stung by the serpent. But he has conveyed the idea by short and random strokes. We catch only glimpses of it, and are not permitted to watch the progressive development. In the “Idylls of the King” there is the matter of an epic, but not the form. We should prefer to place them in a class apart, which might include the Faerie Queen.

On the range, finish, and accuracy of Tennyson’s diction, we need not dwell. But no view of a poet’s artistic powers would be complete without a glance at his command of melody and rhythm. For sweetness and clearness of tone, the choral hymn in the “Lotus-Eaters,” and the “Bugle” and “Cradle” songs which beguile entr’actes in the “Princess” are excelled by few English lyrics. In grasp of rhythm Tennyson yields to no recent poet, except Shelley. There is a striking instance of rhythmic effect in the “Palace of Sin.” A strain of music floats in upon the ear, deepens, swells, and at length bursts forth in an orchestral symphony.

Most of Tennyson’s later poems have been written in unrhymed pentameter, and his management of the verse suggests a comparison with his master. In dignity of movement, Milton has never been equalled by any English poet. It seems that no line but his could express the lost archangel, or embody that vision of imperial Rome where sonorous names load as with cloth of gold the march of the stately iambics. Yet nothing could stoop more awkwardly to the quiet talk and joys of the married pair in Eden. While Tennyson’s blank verse falls short of his model in majesty and serried force, we must allow it to be more flexible. We cannot imagine the little novice using the Miltonic line. Her gentle thoughts would have been drowned in the mighty current, whereas Tennyson’s tripping vocables deliver with easy grace her artless prattle.

We can only allude to those experiments in metre which amuse the leisure of an artist, although one of them deserves attention. It is an ode to Milton:

Let the reader compare these lines with some familiar model of Alcaics like “Vides ut altâ,” and then ask himself whether quantity has hitherto had fair play in English verse.

What has art to do with morals? With what propriety shall a poet play the moralist? His purpose is distinct, his method is radically different, is his object ever identical? We know that it is not always so. In the face of outward nature the truthful artist is forbidden to read humanity. Hardly is Wordsworth suffered to discover here divinity. The Greek sculptor sought beauty, not goodness, in the daughters of men, and the lines that grew beneath his fingers breathe the harmony of grace, not the harmony of character. Does the application of these rigorous principles bound the sphere of genuine art? Do the good and the beautiful nowhere cohere and interfuse? They may—in the ideal. For what is beauty in things which disclose design but the reflex of perfection? And what is goodness but the perfection of the heart? In the scheme of ethics, vice is ugliness, error a discord, and weakness disproportion, character means equipoise, and virtue expresses harmony. But how shall art or ethics discern a moral symmetry, and crown a spiritual perfection, without a right conception of man’s nature, of his place and purpose, his relation to the universe and to God? So far as he portrays the heart, the poet must be a moralist. Within this domain the truest art will utter the purest morals.

It is a blessed law by which he who aims to please is constrained to edify. For reason is a disinherited prince, and the estate is too often squandered before he comes to his own. Pride rears the head against precept. The imagination flutters and beats her bars, until experience has clipped her wings. The ideal republic could ill afford to dispense with poets, for there is no lesson like the modest lesson of a lovely life. To our gaze perhaps the influence seems wholly lost, and yet may be only latent. This is sure, that virtue has still a foothold in the heart that keeps an altar to the beautiful. We know how many seeds of goodness, what germs of aspiration, are flung broadcast by the poet’s hand. Who will say that his random sowings may not stir in a genial hour, strike root in the depths of motive, and blossom in act and life? No thoughtful mind has failed to recognize the insight of Sidney’s words in his Defence of Poesy: “For even those hard-hearted evil men who think virtue a school name, and know no other good but indulgere genio, yet will be content to be delighted, which is all the good-fellow poet seems to promise, and so steal to see the form of goodness, which, seen, they cannot but love ere themselves be aware, as if they had taken a medicine of cherries.”

The ethical standard is sensitive to the influence of climate and of race. The Italian and the German recognize the same virtues, but write them in different scales referred to a national key-note. The growth of knowledge and the expansion of sympathy determine a deeper change. From the age of Pericles to the age of Napoleon, the ideal of character has undergone alterations which have penetrated the essence and affected the type. Of certain virtues which fired the heart of an Athenian, we have kept nothing but the names, and we have canonized others of which he had no conception. The attitude of the individual man toward nature and society is constantly shifting under the pressure of ideas. The wave of inquiry which rose in civic revolution has swept in widening circles over the whole surface of opinion, and now dashes on the primal verities which declare the origin and destiny of man. The mind is active, but the heart of the age is perplexed and sad. She ponders painfully the riddle of the painful earth. She is lost in the great forest, the new paths are uncertain, the old to her seem overgrown. She is troubled with a vague unrest, beset with dark misgivings, by results she loathes to accept, doubts which she longs to silence, and hopes she dare not forego. Her mood is too grave and earnest for blithe and heedless carol. She cannot pause to hear the idle singer of an empty day. The music which holds her ear must be attuned to serious sympathy, must echo her own self-questionings, and breathe her aspirations. She puts aside from her lip the cup of distilled water, and turns to the mineral spring that savors of the rugged earth.

De Musset is not more essentially a child of the age than Tennyson. Both inherited in rare perfection the exquisite sensibility and high tension of the nervous system which are developed by modern life. In both the violence of emotion is succeeded by prolonged depression. Their joy is often rapture, and their sorrow anguish, but the prevailing tone is a dreamy languor that betrays fatigue. Their intellects were plunged in the same bath of learning, and tempered in the furnace of the time. They unite in regretting the trustful past, and complain that they were born too late into a sick and decrepit world. They pace together the shore of life, and gaze with wistful eyes over the expanse of ocean. But here the parallel ends. Their roads diverge in youth. Each obeys a different impulse, and learns a different lesson. The one hears a growing harmony in the voices of science, and perceives an increasing purpose in the movement of mankind. The other bows the head in stupor before the howling storm. Tennyson has a kindly glance and a cheery word for his fellow-men, they are his brothers, his co-workers, ever reaping something new. De Musset loads the heart with a sense of utter misery, and paralyzes the will by the infusion of his self-contempt. He is half-indignant that his spirit should be still haunted by a sublime aspiration, and confesses almost with a groan:

“Une immense espérance a traversé la terre.”[60]

It is in another mood that Tennyson hails the promise which he sees in the aspiration of the soul:

There are few words more painful to read than the prayer in “L’Espoir en Dieu.” The passionate queries are wrung from a breaking heart. We offer a rude but passably close translation of two stanzas. The poet demands:

Compare the rooted faith and serene calm of the poem to “In Memoriam:”

Much, no doubt, of the peculiar spirit that pervades the work of either poet may be traced to the social atmosphere in which he moved. Much also is only to be explained by the history of his life. Behind the “In Memoriam,” an unselfish and ennobling sorrow weeps and prays above a cherished grave. “In Rolla,” remorse sobs bitterly amid the ruins of a wasted life. The song has betrayed the singer. The one is the laureate of hope: the other, a prophet of despair. Tennyson is a night-worn pilgrim whose kindling eye has caught the glimmer of a lovely dawn; De Musset, a tired swimmer whose drowning cry leaps toward us from the gates of death. The poetry of De Musset is a convex lens which draws to a fiery focus the doubts and longings of the time; Tennyson’s, a stained rose-window, that subdues the flaring sunlight to a mild and tender radiance.

While man’s moral nature is developed and determined by his attitude toward society and his Maker, it is also profoundly affected by his attitude toward women. The relative position of woman has been rather raised than lowered by the movement of modern thought. Much has been deciphered by speculation, and much dissected by science, but the deep significance of the female character remains intact. In the fine atmosphere which nourished the musings of Richter, two earthly forms move freely, the maiden and the wife. In the long process of comparative anatomy, the beautiful first reveals itself in the sweet instinct that binds a mother to her offspring. Then first does the fire of Prometheus fairly catch the clay. The noblest instinct and the noblest aspiration have one element in common—the abnegation of self. Perhaps the one is but a reflex of the other. It is certain that the highest art has done the fullest justice to women. Let us measure Byron and Tennyson by this standard. To Byron, woman was an exquisite instrument which responds in perfect tune to the master-touch of passion. To Tennyson, she is an embodied spirit, who inspires and tempers man while she seems to obey his impulse. It is a shallow criticism which would excuse Byron’s low conception by an unfortunate experience. If personal experience be narrow, why not look beyond it? If the feet stumble in the mire, the eyes may still be lifted. The fact is, an irresistible instinct compels a genuine artist to discern and to preach the truth. His life may prove a rebel, but his work will pay tribute to Cæsar.

The author of “Godiva,” of “Enid” and “Elaine” is eminently the poet of woman. It is especially worthy of remark that he should have maintained a distinct and lofty ideal throughout the Arthurian cycle. In the mediæval myths, the lineaments of the female character were sometimes clouded by the admixture of masculine traits. Through the Carlovingian romance that lives in Ariosto’s verse, there roves an unsexed and warlike virgin, whom the poet means us to admire; at whom we smile in secret. Tennyson has read woman’s nature with an insight too fine and delicate to place her in so false an attitude. There is no Bradamant in the “Idylls of the King.”

The unswerving justice of true genius finds consummate expression in the treatment of “Guinevere.” The wrong-doing of imperial beauty was a dangerous theme, and we may guess how it would have been handled by the author of “Parasina.” In the original legend the queen commanded sympathy, but she is now positively degraded by her preference for a meaner soul. It is Arthur’s doom, and no merit of hers, that he loves her still. There is little likelihood that a modern Francesca will borrow impulse or pretext from her story. It is amusing to find the lovers of Haidee and Gulnare scandalized by “Vivien.” If ever a vile nature was scorched and shrivelled by the flame of an honest wrath, that poem affords the spectacle. In wily Vivien, vice is neither condoned nor glozed, but simply stripped and gibbeted. The pure air which breathes throughout the “Idylls” is condensed in the lines of “Guinevere,” which declare the great purpose of the king. We may say with assurance that no other English poet, except Wordsworth, would have written them.

Tennyson has spoken words of comfort to many English hearts, and inspired with a noble purpose many English lives. His spirit has crossed the seas. To him and Wordsworth the youth of America owe much that they will not speedily forget. Other benefactors may receive some form of recompense, but how shall we repay a poet? It is not praise, but thanks we would offer Alfred Tennyson. Rare artist, and high teacher, sweet voice, pure heart, there are many who admire, and not a few who love him.

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When the Christian religion had triumphed over idolatry, the principle of evil took refuge in heresy, and vigorously began a new attack upon the church. As women had once sealed their faith with their blood, so now they came eagerly forward to preach it by their learning. The centuries which produced the fathers of the church produced women also, to whom these great lights of the true faith were mainly indebted for their early education. The same circumstances also created women who, on the throne and in the council-chamber, governed turbulent nations and guided fierce passions, according to the rules of justice, honesty, and religion.

The mother of St. Gregory Nazianzen, Doctor of the Church, was Nonna, and is honored as a saint. Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, says: “She drew down the blessing of heaven upon her family by most bountiful and continual alms-deeds; ... yet, to satisfy the obligation of justice which she owed to her children, she, by her prudent economy, improved at the same time their patrimony.”

Here, therefore, in the fourth century, we find a woman commended for her practical knowledge of business and her skill in managing property. Ventura relates that, as soon as her son Gregory came into the world, she placed the Scriptures in his infant hands, and ever after inculcated in her teaching the greatest love and reverence for sacred learning. Nonna’s other children were both canonized, one of them, Gorgonia, having led the most exemplary life in the holy state of matrimony. (La Donna Cattolica, vol. i. pp. 431, 432.) St. Basil, who counted among his ancestry many martyrs of both sexes, was the son of St. Emelia, and the great-nephew of St. Macrina the Elder, of whom he says himself that he “counts it as one of the greatest benefits of Almighty God, and the truest of honors, to have been brought up by such a woman.” His elder sister, also named Macrina, was greatly instrumental in conducting his education. When after his death his brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, went to visit their sister, and open his heart to her concerning their common sorrow, he found her dying, it is true, but so vigorous in mind that her discourse on the providence of God and the state of the soul after death was no less striking than comforting. He could hardly believe, says Ventura, that it was not a doctor of the church, a learned theologian, who was speaking to him; and so much did he treasure his sister’s words that he compiled his admirable Treatise of the Soul and The Resurrection chiefly from the matter furnished by her discourse. Macrina’s funeral was an ovation, and the bishop of the diocese held it an honor to be present thereat.

Olympias, the widow of Nembridius, the treasurer of the Emperor Theodosius the Great, flourished about the end of the fourth century, and was the friend and helper of St. John Chrysostom. His letters to her are part of his published works, and Nectarius, his predecessor in the Patriarchal chair of Constantinople, often consulted her on matters of ecclesiastical importance. When Chrysostom was persecuted and banished, she did not escape vexatious notice from heathen and heretical rulers; but through all, her fortitude would have done credit to the bravest man. The great patriarch charged her to continue, during his absence, “to serve the church with the same care and zeal” (Ventura, Donna Cattolica, p. 443), and elsewhere in his works says emphatically that “women, as well as men, can take part in any struggle for the cause of God and of the church.” (Epistle 124, to the Italians.) In a letter to her, he says that her presence was required at Constantinople to encourage the persecuted brethren, and in another he bids her exert all her resources to save the Bishop Maruthas from the abyss (he having given signs of yielding to heresy). Further on, in the same letter, he gives her instructions, almost amounting to a diplomatic and official mission, with regard to the request of the King of the Goths for a bishop and missionary in place of Aubinus the Apostle, who had just died, after converting many thousand of these barbarians. When St. Chrysostom sent a messenger to the Pope St. Innocent, at the beginning of the persecutions at Constantinople, he gave him letters of recommendation to none but a few Roman ladies—Proba, Juliana, and Demetrias.

The influence of Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, upon her wayward son, is so well known that it is almost superfluous to dwell on it; and St. Jerome, eminently a learned saint, was scarcely less connected with holy and well-taught women. He himself tells us that it was especially his friend and spiritual daughter Paula who engaged him in the study of the Old and New Testaments, and who induced him to translate the former from the original Hebrew. Rohrbacher, in his Ecclesiastical History, corroborates this statement; and Capefigue, in his Four First Ages of the Church, says that “the pure society of women had imparted to Jerome a heartfelt exaltation, a deep enthusiasm for all purity and nobility in themselves.” We learn from Butler (Lives of the Saints) that Marcella, one of the many matrons under St. Jerome’s instruction in Rome, made great progress in the critical learning of the Holy Scriptures, and learned in a short time many things which had cost him abundance of labor (vol. ix.). Other women, of whom we shall speak hereafter, were collected under his guidance; almost all are now canonized saints, and were celebrated even in their own day for their skill and erudition. The great Paula was the most illustrious among them, and he tells us of her as also of five or six others that they were as well acquainted with Hebrew as with Latin and Greek. To the daughter-in-law of St. Paula, Jerome wrote a letter full of minute and seemingly trivial details, concerning the education of her little daughter, who afterwards became St. Paula the Younger. It is of such quaint interest, and so calculated to give a high idea of the importance attached by the great doctor of the church to the minutiæ of a little girl’s daily life, that we cannot resist the temptation of quoting a few extracts from it:

“Let her be brought up as Samuel was in the temple, and the Baptist in the desert, in utter ignorance of vanity and vice; ... let her never hear bad words nor learn profane songs; ... let her have an alphabet of little letters made of box or ivory, the names of all which she must know, that she may play with them, and that learning may be made a diversion. When a little older, let her form each letter in wax with her finger, guided by another’s hand; then let her be invited, by prizes and presents suited to her age, to join syllables together.... Let her have companions to learn with her, that she may be spurred on by emulation.... She is not to be scolded or browbeaten if slower, but to be encouraged that she may rejoice to surpass, and be sorry to see herself outstripped and behind others, not envying their progress, but rejoicing at it while she reproaches herself with her own backwardness. Great care is to be taken that she conceive no aversion to studies, lest their bitterness remain in after-years. A master must be found for her, a man both of virtue and learning: nor will a great scholar think it beneath him to teach her the first elements of letters.... That is not to be contemned without which nothing great can be acquired. The very sounds of letters and the first rudiments are very different in a learned and in an unskilful mouth. Care must be taken that she be not accustomed by fond nurses to pronounce half-words, as it would prejudice her speech. Great care is necessary that she never learn what she will have afterwards to unlearn. The eloquence of the Gracchi derived its perfection from the mother’s elegance (of speech). No paint must ever touch her face or hair.” He is no less sensible and moderate in physical instructions than strict in things of the spiritual order. He says: “She should eat so as always to be hungry, and to be able to read or sing psalms immediately after meals. The immoderate long fasts of many displease me. I have learned by experience that the ass, much fatigued on the road, seeks rest at any cost. In a long journey, strength must be supported, lest, by running the first stage too fast, we should fall in the middle. In Lent, full scope is to be given to severe fasting.” He advises the young girl, when old enough, to read the works of St. Cyprian, the epistles of St. Athanasius, and the writings of St. Hilary. These are grave and abstruse studies, requiring much time and application, and as fully up to the standard of a modern male education as any woman could desire. St. Jerome himself was living at Bethlehem when he wrote this letter, and while recommending her mother to send little Paula to St. Paula the Elder for her later education, he himself promises to instruct her, adding that “he should be more honored by teaching the spouse of Christ than the philosopher [Aristotle] was in being preceptor to the Macedonian King.” It was the elder Paula who built St. Jerome the monastery of Bethlehem, in which he spent a great part of his life. She governed a monastery of women not far from it. St. Jerome, in his panegyric of her life, addressed to her daughter Eustochium, expresses himself in the following unequivocal language: “Were all the members of my body to be changed into tongues, and each fibre to utter articulate and human sounds, even then I could not worthily celebrate the virtues of the holy and venerable Paula.” As soon as her husband’s death left her the free use of a magnificent fortune, she liberated all the numerous retinue of slaves that formed not only her household but her possessions. Hundreds of Christian masters and mistresses did the same, and treated their freed retainers as brethren and sisters in the faith, long before the philanthropy of modern times had begun to envelop in a halo of unusual heroism the sacrifice of slave property. From a noble Roman matron, placed by her birth in an assured position of great prominence, she became a voluntary exile and wanderer for the sake of planting the faith more firmly in the East. St. Jerome describes, in words full of sympathetic admiration, her pious visits to the Holy Places of Judea. She also made a pilgrimage to the home of monasticism, the Thebaïd and the Lybian desert. Humble as she was, fame followed and surrounded her. Pilgrims to Jerusalem counted her as one of the most consoling and admirable of the objects that claimed their devotion. Macarius, Arsenius, Serapion, famous lights of the church and patriarchs of the eremitical life, came from long distances and inaccessible solitudes to confer with her. At Jerusalem, she founded places of shelter and entertainment for the many pilgrims who flocked there; both at Rome and in the East, she was the mother and the idol of the poor, whose wants she relieved untiringly, and for whose sake she was often not only penniless, but in debt. Her last illness was like a royal levee, and bishops and patriarchs hastened to her bedside; her funeral, says Ventura, was almost a canonization. Bishops carried her body to its tomb, and for seven days sacred hymns and psalms echoed ceaselessly in the church of the Holy Grotto at Bethlehem, where the funeral service was performed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Capefigue calls her the “most remarkably erudite woman of her age,” and her instincts of faith and learning alike made her intuitively aware of the artifices of the heretic Palladius, whose well-concealed Origenism she unmasked and denounced in presence of St. Jerome, when the wolf would have put on sheep’s clothing and deceived her simple nuns. Paula’s daughters—Blesilla, the learned and accomplished widow; Eustochium, the celebrated virgin to whom many of St. Jerome’s works are addressed or dedicated; Paulina, the model wife to whose influence over her saintly husband the first hospitals in the West are due—and their sister-in-law, Læta, the happy mother of the younger St. Paula, are all canonized saints of the church, and each of them the just pride of their sex in the respective walks of life to which they were destined. Fabiola, another of St. Jerome’s scholars, was the foundress of the first hospital absolutely established in Rome.

The church has never been chary of tendering graceful homage to the influence and ability of woman, and perhaps no more singular or flattering proof of this can be found than the pictorial honor which, Ventura assures us (Donna Cattolica, vol. i. p. 466), was offered by St. Gregory the Great to St. Sylvia, his mother. She was represented as sitting by his side, robed in white, and crowned with the mitre worn by doctors of theology, while the left hand held an open Psalter, and the right was raised with two fingers extended, in the attitude of benediction.

St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, who was born and died in the fourth century, owed his early training of piety and solid learning to his mother, who was left a widow during his infancy, and to his elder sister Marcellina, to whom later on Christendom became indebted for the three admirable books he wrote on The State of Virginity. Another of his famous works is a treatise on Widowhood. In one of his books on Virginity he meets the common though worn-out argument that virginity is a foe to the propagation of the human race. As this bears upon our general subject, though it be not immediately akin to it, we will stop to quote it. “Some complain,” he says, “that mankind will shortly fail if so many are consecrated virgins. I desire to know who ever wanted a wife and could not find one? The killing of an adulterer, the pursuing of waging war against a ravisher, are the consequences of marriage. The number of people is greatest where virginity is most esteemed. Inquire how many virgins are consecrated every year at Alexandria, all over the East, and in Africa, where there are more virgins than there are men in this country [Italy].” And Butler, in his Life of St. Ambrose, goes on to explain: “May not the French and Austrian Netherlands, full of numerous monasteries, yet covered with populous cities, be at present esteemed a proof of this remark? The populousness of China, where great numbers of new-born infants are daily exposed to perish, is a terrible proof that the voluntary virginity of some is no prejudice to the human race. Wars and the sea, not the number of virgins, are the destroyers of the human race, as St. Ambrose observes; though the state of virginity is not to be rashly engaged in, and marriage is not only holy, but the general state of mankind in the world.” Not only did St. Ambrose occupy his mind and pen with the concerns of holy and spotless women, but he did not think it beneath his dignity to write for those unhappy virgins who had fallen from their vows and thus been reft of their most precious heirloom. In the third book of his work on Virginity, he pays the following homage to Christian woman, such as she was in his age: “I have been a priest but three years,” he says, “and my experience has not been long enough to teach me what I have written. But what my own experience could not teach, the sight of your conduct has suggested. If, in this work, you find any flowers of thought, know that I have gathered them from your own lives. I do not so much give you precepts, as I draw examples from the behavior of living virgins, and set them before the eyes of the world. My discourse has only reproduced the image of your virtues. It is but the portrait of your own life, so grave and earnest, which you will see here, beaming with light as reflected from a mirror. If you find grace in these words, it is you who have inspired my mind with it. All that is good in this book belongs to you.” (Third book on Virgins.) What more graceful tribute, more appreciative homage, could man render to the opposite sex? Yet he who wrote this was a great and powerful bishop, a doctor of the church, a profoundly learned man, whose influence was spread through kingdoms, and whose advice was sought and followed by emperors. Here is yet another example of the distinguished part played by woman in affairs of the highest public importance. Capefigue, in his Four First Ages of the Church, says that in the churches of Rome might be seen the most noble matrons of the city, “who gave the first and greatest impulse to all Christian sentiments.” This was at the end of the fourth century, and the two Melanias were then foremost among the active and energetic women mentioned. The elder Melania, whose fortune was immense, and who was married early by her father, the Consul Marcellinus, became a widow after a few years of married life, and thereafter devoted herself to the church. She travelled to Egypt and Palestine in the interests of the persecuted Patriarch Athanasius, whom she protected and supported with all the moral influence and temporal means at her command. The zealous and open protectress of more than five thousand Christians, the harborer of priests and bishops driven from their sees and parishes during the Arian persecutions of the Emperor Valens, she was herself cast into prison by the Governor of Jerusalem, to whom she spoke thus boldly and fearlessly: “Do not think to despise me because I wear poor garments: I might wear the robes of a princess, did I choose to do so. Do not think to intimidate me by your threats, for I have sufficient influence to protect me against the slightest aggression on your part. I tell you this, and give you this advice, that you may not through ignorance commit any error that might lead you into danger.” The courageous woman was released, and continued her ministrations of mercy. Her granddaughter, St. Melania, married young to a noble Roman, the descendant of the great Publicola, and the son of the Prefect of Rome, was even a more prominent personage than the elder Melania. After the birth and death of two children, she and her husband renounced their high position, freed eight thousand slaves, and sold their immense possessions in several parts of the Roman Empire for the benefit of the poor. They then retired to a quiet country solitude in Campania, and with several associates began leading “the perfect life” which we have so often seen attempted in vain in this age by refined and earnest souls without the bosom of the church. Here, their chief occupation was the study and the propagation of the Scriptures and other solid works of learning and faith. The works of the fathers were foremost among the latter, and Ventura says with truth that we may well thank woman when we read these admirable treatises, for without her help, care, and zeal they would be considerably less in number than they are. The love of the Scriptures and of Biblical lore seems thus to have been a distinctive mark of the sex in the early days of the church.

Melania and her companions after a time left Italy, and settled in Africa near Hippo, and there became the most active allies of St. Augustine. They also journeyed through Spain, Palestine, and Asia Minor, always in the interests of the faith, founding monasteries and schools, and assisting the poor and the persecuted. After her husband’s death, Melania, having been wrecked on the coast of Sicily, and having found several thousand Christians in bondage to barbarian idolaters, she redeemed and freed them all. At one time she held a high post at court, and exerted herself successfully in favor of orthodoxy. When the Nestorian heresy was making great progress in Asia and Africa, she uncompromisingly combated it by her influence and social talents, by the persuasion of her manner and the force of her arguments, as Ribadeneira testifies in the sketch he wrote of her life. Ventura asserts that she confounded Pelagius himself, who by all manner of arts endeavored to win her to his side; and it is known that, when St. Augustine failed to convert Volusian, the Prefect of Rome, and uncle to Melania, this heroic woman, according to Baronius, undertook to convince him, and succeeded most triumphantly. Melania’s funeral at Jerusalem was the occasion of lavish homage to the power and influence of her sex; bishops and confessors were eager to show their respect and admiration, and the Christian world proved once more that “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”

Marcella, one of St. Jerome’s spiritual daughters, and whose funeral eulogy he wrote, was, according to this great saint’s own words, “the greatest glory of the city of Rome.” When Alaric and his Goths invaded Rome, her house was broken into, and herself cruelly beaten and disfigured. All her reply was, “My gold I have given to the poor: you will find nothing in my possession but the tunic I wear.” She collected many holy and learned women around her, and her house was the rallying point of all Christians. All good works received their impetus from her, and she was often consulted by bishops and priests on questions of Biblical learning, after St. Jerome, who had taught her the Scriptures, had left Rome. Although consecrated virgins of both sexes abounded in her time, as yet no distinct community under a recognized rule had been formed in Rome. She undertook to establish the monastic life in the capital of the empire, and was the first to reduce to order the elements of which such a community might be formed. With the advice of St. Athanasius, and some fugitive priests of Alexandria, who took refuge in Rome in 340, during the Arian persecution in the East, Marcella gave up a country-seat of hers for a monastery, and adopted for the future religious the rule of St. Pachomius. The men followed her example, and assembled in concert to found communities of their own. Rome vied with the Thebaïd for sanctity and learning, and this was the work of a woman. When, in the seventh century, St. Benedict, the reformer and patriarch of all religious orders in Europe, reduced monasticism in the West to the state in which we know it in our own days, he was only, says Ventura (Donna Cattolica, vol. i. p. 488), walking in the path which the heroic women of Christendom had hewn out before him in imitation of the hermits and anchorites of the East. But Marcella shines no less as a pillar of orthodoxy than as the institutrix of Western monachism. When the Origenists, through the aid of the cunning Rufinus and the intriguing Macarius, who disseminated skilfully veiled errors in Rome, began to attack the integrity of the Christian faith, Marcella left her solitude, and came to the capital to confront the heresiarchs. The following details are all vouched for by St. Jerome in the funeral eulogy addressed by him to her friend and scholar Principia: “The faith of the Roman people had been weakened on many points.... The new heresy had made many victims, even among priests and monks.... The Sovereign Pontiff himself, Siricius, who was as conspicuous for holy simplicity as for sanctity of life, and who judged of others by the candor of his own soul, seemed for a moment to have become the dupe of the hypocrisy of these new pharisees. The orthodoxy of the bishops Vincent, Eusebius, Paulinian, and Jerome had even been suspected, and, when they cried out that the wolf was in the fold, no one vouchsafed to listen to them. In this grave emergency, in presence of much coldness, indifference, and weakness on the part of men, God made use of the far-sightedness, the zeal, the courage of a woman to keep the faith intact in Rome. Marcella, more eager to please God than men, resisted the Origenist heresy publicly, vigorously, and efficaciously. She it was who by the very testimony of those who had first been deceived by the new errors and then abjured them, convinced every one of the real nature of the heretical doctrine. She stimulated the zeal of the Sovereign Pastor by proving to him how many souls had already gone astray.... She was the first to point out to him the disguised impieties of the garbled translations of Origen’s book on Principles, which Rufinus had translated and altered, and was now selling everywhere. She often summoned the heretics to come and justify themselves in Rome, but they dared not answer, and preferred being condemned as absent and contumacious, rather than be publicly confounded by a woman. At last, when a general condemnation was pronounced upon their doctrines, it was chiefly the result of Marcella’s vigilance.” Here, therefore, is a woman exerting a guiding influence on the destinies of the church by her learning, subtleness, and eloquence. If the women of the early centuries achieved such successes with the natural weapons of their sex and position, why do our sisters of the present day desire a reorganization of society, and a new accession of hitherto unknown and unnatural weapons? Why indeed but because the order of society sanctioned and regulated by the church has been subverted by the Reformation; the holy charter of woman abolished; and elegant and veiled Islamism, or in some instances a coarse and degrading barbarianism, inculcated and forcibly brought into action concerning woman, and the sex gradually forced out of its legitimate orbit, with its capabilities dwarfed, its intellect narrowed, its talents sneered at, and its affections repressed? The broad river of woman’s influence, flowing so calmly and majestically through the centuries of the church’s undisturbed unity, has been dammed up by the Protestant tradition of the last three hundred years, till it has broken forth again as a turbulent torrent, devastating where it once fertilized, disturbing where once it conciliated. In its new form and its strange aggressiveness, it now horrifies mankind, where in early days, in its legitimate sphere, it guided the greatest statesmen, orators, and saints, and gravely helped them on the road to heaven, to science, and to happiness. But we are digressing, for we have undertaken to speak of facts, not to declaim about theories. We have much ground to travel over yet before we come to the end of the list of glorious women who have made the church, so to speak, their panegyrist, and the world their debtor. We have once before mentioned the Roman ladies, Proba, Juliana, and Demetrias, to whom St. Chrysostom recommended his envoys and their mission to Pope St. Innocent. Demetrias was the daughter of the Consul Olibrius and of St. Juliana; Proba was her grandmother on her father’s side. The two widows, having converted their husbands, consecrated their after-lives to the education of Demetrias. St. Augustine was their friend and counsellor, and wrote them letters that are among the most prominent of his works. One to Proba is on the efficacy and the nature of prayer; another to Juliana treats of the advantages and duties of widowhood. When Demetrias announced her intention of remaining a virgin, the holy joy of the family knew no bounds, and the day of her formally receiving the veil was a festival for all Rome. St. Jerome honored her with a discourse which has come down to us in the shape of a Letter to Demetrias, followed by a treatise on Virginity, and not only did he interrupt for this purpose the grave commentaries on the Scriptures in which he was engaged, but he also addressed to the parents of the virgin such congratulations as rang throughout Italy, and made the holy and happy trio the envy of every matron and maiden in the Christian world. (Ventura, Donna Cattolica, vol. i. p. 520.) The heresiarch Pelagius so little understood the importance of woman that he took the trouble to address to Demetrias a letter so long that it almost forms a book, which is still extant, and was intended to instil into her mind his insidious errors. St. Augustine, however, cautioned her against Pelagius, and bid her keep staunch to “the faith of Pope Innocent.”

There was one sphere which more than any other was christianized and influenced for good by women, and indeed could not have been otherwise sanctified—the sphere of the imperial court, both in Rome and in Constantinople. We have already seen empresses and relatives of the Cæsars becoming Christians and often martyrs, but it remained for the women of the fourth and fifth centuries to make the palace into a sanctuary and add the lustre of a heavenly crown to the majesty of an earthly sceptre. Constantine, under whose auspices Christianity first emerged from the Catacombs, was the gift of woman to the church. His mother Helena, his wife Fausta, and his mother-in-law Eutropia (the two latter being respectively the wife and daughter of Maximian-Herculeus) were zealous and devoted Christians, and to their influence are due the toleration and subsequently the favor with which the faith was treated by Constantine. Eusebius relates that Eutropia on her pilgrimage to the Holy Places found idols and sacrificial rites still flourishing near the famous oak of Mambre, where tradition places the scene of the visit of the three angels to Abraham. She wrote to her son-in-law in unconcealed indignation, and thus procured after a time the destruction of the shameful altars. Later on we find the emperor building a church on the identical spot. The progress of the Empress Helen through Palestine is as an ovation to the faith, and a record of churches built and monasteries founded in every Holy Place. She constantly besought her son’s aid and munificence in these undertakings, and extended the protection of his name to all Christian establishments in the East. We owe to her piety and energy the most solemn and the greatest of the memorials of the Passion, the Holy Cross on which our Lord suffered and died. It is likewise to her, a woman, that we owe one of the most beautiful of Christian churches, that of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, as well as one of the most interesting basilicas of Rome, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where a portion of the august relic of the cross was deposited. Her charities were numberless, her foundations magnificent. She alleviated the condition of those who were condemned to the mines, and freed many from chains and slavery. The city of Drepanum in Bythinia, where St. Lucian the martyr had died for his God, she so beautified and endowed in his honor that after her death her son changed its name to Helenopolis. Even the fame of the local and municipal life of many cities can be traced to the influence and activity of woman, and further on we shall see how some of her sex have laid colleges, schools, and universities under eternal obligations. Constance, the daughter of Constantine, was the first convert of the imperial family, and exercised no little influence over her father. She assembled numbers of holy virgins, and consecrated herself with them in a state of virginity to the service of God and the poor. When Constantius, her brother, became emperor, and, favoring Arianism, called himself head of the church, while he exiled Pope Liberius, hundreds of the Roman ladies united in a deputation to protest against this illegal act. As long as the anti-Pope Felix remained in Rome, these same women utterly scorned his authority, and encouraged the people to refuse to hold communion with him. This firm attitude of the women of Rome had its reward, and Pope Liberius was at length recalled when the emperor perceived that the forced schism was likely to result in sedition against himself. Maximus, Emperor of the West, through the influence of his Christian wife, became the friend and protector of St. Martin of Tours; and Theodosius, the contemporary of St. Ambrose, was mainly guided in his wise and, upon the whole, salutary administration by his wife Placidia and his daughter Pulcheria. But his granddaughter, also named Pulcheria, and justly honored as a saint, was pre-eminently the glory of the Eastern Empire and the honor of her sex as well as of her order. Her reign was the triumph of the church, the golden age of justice, the realization of a Christian Utopia. When the tranquillity of the age was disturbed, it was through the decline of her influence and the triumph over her of her many enemies. When her father Arcadius died and left his throne to his son Theodosius, she was chosen not as regent, but as Augusta, or co-ruler and empress, with her brother, and moreover was entrusted with the care and responsibility of his education. The historian Rohrbacher, ever eager to extol the sex says of her: “It was a marvel, the equal of which has never been known either before or since, and which God wrought in those days for the glory of woman, whom his grace sanctified and his wisdom inspired—that a maiden of sixteen should govern successfully so vast an empire.” Pulcheria reduced the imperial household to a degree of order and decorum more resembling a college than a court; her brother’s masters were all chosen and approved by her, and the utmost respect was paid by her both to the laws and the prelates of the church. Alban Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, speaks of her and her reign in these terms: “The imperial council was, through her discernment, composed of the wisest, most virtuous, and most experienced persons in the empire: yet, in deliberations, all of them readily acknowledged the superiority of her judgment and penetration. Her resolutions were the result of the most mature consideration, and she took care herself that all orders should be executed with incredible expedition, though always in the name of her brother, to whom she gave the honor and credit of all she did. She was herself well skilled in Greek and Latin, in history and other useful branches of literature, and was, as every one must be who is endowed with greatness of soul and a just idea of the dignity of the human mind, the declared patroness of the sciences and of both the useful and polite arts. Far from making religion subservient to policy, all her views and projects were regulated by it, and by this the happiness of her government was complete. She prevented by her prudence all revolts which ambition, jealousy, or envy might stir up to disturb the tranquillity of the church or state; she cemented a firm peace with all neighboring powers, and abolished the wretched remains of idolatry in several parts. Never did virtue reign in the oriental empire with greater lustre, never was the state more happy or more flourishing, nor was its name ever more respected even among barbarians, than whilst the reins of the government were in the hands of Pulcheria.” Ventura is not less explicit in praise of this great woman. After mentioning the different studies embraced in the plan of education which Pulcheria had traced for her brother, he says: “In these arrangements, both the subject-matter which was to occupy the young prince’s attention, and the time he was to spend in each occupation, were so judiciously and admirably managed that such a plan of education seemed rather the work of an experienced philosopher than that of a young girl of sixteen.... Theodosius possessed neither a generous soul nor exalted intellect; in fact, his was a nature scarcely above mediocrity. Pulcheria, however, by her enlightened efforts, succeeded in producing unexpected results from so thankless a field of labor.” (Donna Cattolica, vol. ii. pp. 23, 24.) Exiled and disgraced by the machinations of her frivolous sister-in-law, the Empress Eudocia, and the ambitious Chrysaphius, one of the courtiers, she left Constantinople and retired into the country, no more downcast in adversity than she had been elated in prosperity. Eudocia and Chrysaphius, unable to draw St. Flavian, the Patriarch of Constantinople, into their conspiracy against the noble exile, became violent partisans of Eutyches and his new heresy. Between the years 447 and 450 of the Christian era, the condition of the empire was perfectly chaotic; the heresies of the Eutychians, the Nestorians, and the Monothelites disturbed the public peace; morality was forgotten; the court became an assembly of intriguers; Theodosius himself was no longer obeyed at home or respected abroad. St. Leo the Pope, scandalized and grieved at such excesses, wrote to the emperor, the clergy, and the people of Constantinople, but reserved his most remarkable mission for Pulcheria. He says, “If you had received my former letters, you would certainly have already remedied these evils, for you have never failed the Christian faith, nor the clergy her guardians,” and towards the end of his letter he adds: “In the name of the blessed apostle St. Peter, I constitute you my special legate for the advancement of this matter before the emperor.” Referring to this magnificent elogium, the historian Rohrbacher remarks that, “when the Pope writes to the Emperor Theodosius, one would think he was addressing a woman; when, on the contrary, he writes to the ex-empress, one would imagine he was speaking to a man,” upon whose energy he could depend. In 450, the Emperor of the West, Valentinian, and his mother and wife, Placidia and Eudoxia, came to Rome, where the Pope entrusted them with the task of admonishing by letter the weak-minded Theodosius and his heretical followers. Thus was the power of woman and her influence in state affairs recognized and honored by the church from end to end of the Christian world. Pulcheria, urged by the entreaties of all these great and holy personages, boldly went to the court, reproached her brother, and by her firmness opened his eyes and restored peace, orthodoxy and morality in the distracted empire. Her brother’s death in 450 left her, by the universal consent of the people, once more ruler of the vast realm she had already so much benefited. Now again she evinced consummate wisdom in her choice of Marcian, the most renowned soldier and most talented statesman of the empire, to be her husband and fellow-ruler. Under condition of preserving her early vow of perpetual chastity, she admitted him to an entire participation of her life and counsels, and together, with a strong yet gentle hand, they upheld and protected the fathers of the Council of Chalcedon. After three years of a wise and virtuous reign, Pulcheria died, lamented by the thousands of the poor and destitute whom she had never ceased to relieve, and honored by the church as the “guardian of the faith, the peace-maker, the defender of orthodoxy,” as the Chalcedonian fathers expressed it. The historian Gibbon, whose testimony can hardly be deemed interested, has thus outlined the history of her reign: “Her piety did not prevent Pulcheria from indefatigably devoting her attention to the affairs of the state, and indeed this princess was the only descendant of Theodosius the Great who seems to have inherited any part of his high courage and noble genius. She had acquired the familiar use of the Greek and Latin tongues, which she spoke and wrote with ease and grace in her speeches and writings relative to public affairs. Prudence always dictated her resolves. Her execution was prompt and decisive. Managing without ostentation all the intricacies of the government, she discreetly attributed to the talents of the emperor the long tranquillity of his reign. During the last years of his life, Europe was suffering cruelly under the invasion and ravages of Attila, King of the Huns, while peace continued to reign in the vast provinces of Asia.” (History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. vi. chapter xxxii.)

The holy Pope St. Gregory the Great did not owe less to the influence and friendship of woman than Pope St. Leo. Among his many and remarkable letters, those addressed to the Empress Constantina and the Princess Theoclissa, wife and sister of Maurice, Emperor of the East, are not the least admirable. The emperor being both imbecile and miserly, and of a nature utterly despicable, the only bulwark of orthodoxy against the heretics lay in the strenuous and continued efforts of these two women in favor of the church. When Phocus, a general of Maurice, freed the indignant empire from its supine and debased ruler, his wife the Empress Leontia took the place of the former princesses, and continued their work of protecting the faith of the Councils. In the West, where the Lombards were successfully laying the foundation of the future power they were destined to wield, it was chiefly to a woman that Gregory the Great looked to defend the interests of religion, and saw among these half-reclaimed barbarians the seeds of Christian chivalry. Theodolinda was his pupil and correspondent, and by her care the future King of the Lombards, Adoloaldus, was baptized and brought up a Christian. In the matter of the great expedition which resulted in the final conversion of England, the same Pope testifies by his letters that Bertha, the wife of King Ethelbert, and Brunehault, Queen of the Franks, were chiefly instrumental in aiding and countenancing St. Augustine in his mission. He says to Brunehault: “We are not ignorant of the help you have afforded our brother Augustine.... It must be a source of great rejoicing to you that no one has had a greater share in this work than yourself. For, if that nation [the Saxons] has had the blessing of hearing the Word of God and the preaching of the Gospel, it is to you, under God, that they owe it.”

The throne of Constantinople was to be honored yet by another sainted empress, the worthy successor of Pulcheria, and, like her, an able ally of the Pope and the orthodox patriarch of her own capital. Once more, through the vices and indifference of men, a heresy had arisen and flourished, the heresy of the Iconoclasts. Great persecution had been suffered by the faithful, during the reign of Leo, the husband of our heroine Irene, and the new heretics, had completely triumphed. At his death, his widow became regent for her young son. The clergy, the nobility, and especially the army, were arrayed on the side of the Iconoclasts. Irene was as prudent in action as she was zealous in heart. The persecutions against the followers of the Pope were first merely suspended, thought and speech were once more free, and gradually a reaction began to take place. The patriarchal see of Constantinople becoming vacant by the death of Paul, the finally repentant abettor of the unhappy heresy, it was Irene who proposed the election of Tarasius, the most popular, most pious, and most talented man among her subjects. He, too, was the product of a wise and holy woman’s training, and the name of his mother, Eucratia, is among the saints. Having thus paved the way, the empress wrote to Pope Adrian about the year 786, and begged him to assemble a general council to further the interests of religion and cement the peace of Christendom. The council, which was the second of Nicea, took place according to this suggestion, upon which the Pope, through his legates, formally congratulated the empress. The utmost success having attended the sittings of the council, and the faith having been triumphantly vindicated against the Iconoclasts and their errors, the empress sent to entreat the assembled fathers to hold one final and ceremonial sitting in Constantinople itself. She procured an efficient guard among the orthodox cohorts of the imperial army, and prepared an immense hall in the palace for the gathering of the council. Ventura describes the scene thus: “The Pope’s legates waived their right of precedence in favor of Irene, and the astonishing spectacle was seen of a woman, accompanied by a child twelve years old (her son), presiding over one of the most august assemblies of the church. The sitting was opened by a discourse by the empress, in which she spoke, both in her son’s name and in her own, with so much eloquence, warmth, and grace, that the greatest emotion was manifested throughout the assembly; tears of joy flowed from the eyes of all present, and the last words of Irene were followed by the most heartfelt acclamations.... The enthusiasm was at its height, when, in the assembly and also to the people without, the decree or definition of faith made by the council was read, and the empress claimed her right to be the first to sign it.... It must never be forgotten that this great council, as well as its consequences, which put an end to a great heresy and restored Catholicism in the East, was the thought and work of a woman, and that it was a woman-sovereign (un empereur-femme) who alone by her discreet and courageous zeal knew how to blot out and destroy the scandals caused by three men-sovereigns and even a great number of bishops themselves.” (Donna Cattolica, vol. ii. pp. 55, 56.)

Before the Empire of the East became totally degraded, another sovereign, another woman, lent it the glory of her reputation. The Iconoclasts, profiting by the treacherous support of succeeding emperors, again renewed their hostilities against orthodoxy, but were speedily checked once more by a brave Christian woman, the Empress Theodosia, widow of Theophilus, and of whom Rohrbacher says: “If in the West the temporal sovereigns were insignificant, in the East they were detestable. There was but one exception, and that was a woman, the Empress St. Theodosia. She began her reign after the death of her unworthy husband—whom she had succeeded, however, in converting on his death-bed—by threatening the heretical patriarch, Lecanomantes, with the condemnation of the coming council unless he consented to vacate his see and renounce his errors. He refused, and the council assembled within the walls of the imperial palace. The Iconoclast heresy was again solemnly denounced, and the previous Council of Nicea confirmed. For the countenance and protection afforded by her to the church, the empress only asked as a reward that the prelates should pray for the forgiveness of the sin of heresy which her husband had committed. Theodosia celebrated this new victory of the church with becoming solemnity, and instituted in its honor a festival, which is observed to this day under the name of the ‘festival of orthodoxy.’ When Methodius, the holy Patriarch of Constantinople, died, she replaced him by St. Ignatius, the friend of the Pope, St. Nicholas I. She made peace with the Bulgarians, whom the Pope was interested in converting to the faith, and seconded his efforts by procuring the conversion of the captive Bulgarian princess, sister to King Bogoris, whom she afterward freed and sent back to her brother. This princess became the Clotildis of her people, and, together with Formosus, the Pope’s legate, and St. Cyril, Theodosia’s envoy, effected the conversion of the whole Bulgarian nation in 861.”

Other Danubian tribes also owed their conversion to Theodosia; she sent missionaries to the Khazars and the Moravians, whose chief specially addressed himself to her for instruction. Her son Michael, when he came to the throne, renewed the horrors of the pagan empire of Caligula and Domitian, persecuted his mother and sisters, exiled and deposed the Patriarch Ignatius, and put the heretic Photius into his place. One of his captains, Basil, put a violent end to his infamous reign, and, though inexcusable in the eyes of the ecclesiastical law, yet redeemed his act by the utmost deference to Theodosia and devotion to religion. The empire breathed again, and Theodosia’s counsels procured another general assembly of the church at Constantinople, when Photius was condemned and the rightful patriarch reinstated in his authority. After the death of the empress, the heresy of Photius revived and spread, and, schism becoming more or less general, the empire began to degenerate, until its very name, the “Lower Empire,” became a synonym for all degradation and hopeless ruin. Ventura, who says truly that real sanctity is impossible in the bosom of voluntary schism, attributes the degeneracy of the Empire of the East to the want of strong and generous women, such as those whom we have briefly sketched in this article, and asserts that the very accumulation of evils which this scarcity of holy women has heaped upon the church during some of the darkest periods of her history, is in itself a proof of the paramount importance of woman in the work of the propagation and protection of true religion.

We are now close upon the mediæval times, when the glory of the sex shone forth again in the West, and counted as many champions as there were kingdoms to convert, universities to endow, courts to reform, and infidel powers to overthrow. The influence of woman began to be recognized in society as it had always been in the church; chivalry taught men to place the honor of woman next in their estimation to faith in God, and equal with loyalty to their king and patriotism to their country. We can find no more beautiful, no more Catholic, expression of this sovereignty of woman’s pure and ennobling influence, as consecrated by the church’s approbation, and guarded by all that is noblest and most generous in man, than the following extract from a modern poet, whose inspiration, like that of all true artists, is drawn perforce from the legends of Catholic antiquity. The poet of the Holy Grail is also the poet of woman; the legends of the deeds of the prowess of knights, whose names are perchance but myths as to actual history, but nevertheless are human types of the exalted ideal of the old Catholic days, are inevitably mingled with legends of the vows of holy chastity, and the pure and stainless lives of many of those renowned heroes of the field and tournament. Let the following serve as an introduction to our next article, which will treat chiefly of the great women of the Middle Ages:

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Very recently, the Liberal Italian party, finding that their Catholic opponents were in no wise damaged by arguments drawn from a denial of God’s concern in human affairs, has changed its tactics, and proposes now to convert us clericals by appeals to our religious sensibilities. We are assaulted by a theological attack ad hominem, which they tell us is so conclusive that, if we do not acknowledge ourselves beaten, it is because we have lost our reason and renounced the faith.

“You believe,” say they, “in the providence of God. You recognize his hand in all the events of life, and you profess to bless and bow to the divine decrees. Well, then, Providence, you perceive, has smiled graciously on us and on our work—a work which you execrate and detest. Providence is plainly on our side. He declares himself for us and against you. Submit, then, to his decrees. Lay aside this idle expectation of the triumph of your cause, which is evidently opposed to the holy will of God. Accept accomplished facts. Reconcile yourselves with Italy, our glorious new kingdom, and cease, amid your noisy professions of religion, to rebel against the will of the Most High.”

Such in its naked substance is the argument to which the Liberals now exultingly resort; more especially since the breach of Porta Pia and the successful picking of the locks of the Quirinal. They hope in this way to convict us of apostasy from the faith, and (what they deem still more atrocious) of an unpardonable outrage against the laws of “the human understanding.”

“It seems incredible,” they go on to say, “that, after such positive proofs of a special protection vouchsafed by Providence to regenerate Italy, the clerical party should cling so stubbornly to the hope of a resuscitation of the past—a past which, were it not already irrevocably condemned by the logic of events, would be condemned by their own theory of an all-seeing and all-wise God.” This is the language in which the Jewish journal L’Opinione, after taking Roman ground at the close of the year just elapsed, expressed this very formidable argument. They had already uttered it some hundred times before. Many sheets of less importance had got up an industrious echo to this cry; and one in particular, a petty Florentine print, undertakes to celebrate the new year by magnifying “the caresses of Providence” bestowed upon the little darling angel, Italy, born, as everybody knows, of the wonderful shrewdness of the Italian people and their undying love of liberty—a liberty, by the way, which never fails to exemplify itself by a free and strenuous appropriation of a weaker neighbor’s earthly goods. Strange indeed it is that men, who never were known as professed believers in any other divinity than Mammon, should now, after having derided for years, and with every mark of blasphemous scorn, “the finger of God,” suddenly assume the office of apostles of a new idea of Christian Providence. Strange it is that only now, after the plunder of a city gained by battering down walls and picking locks with forged keys—that these men, we say, should chant the praises of the God they had defied, and defend his holy decrees against the “scandalous negations” of the Catholic Church. Strangest is it of all, that the prince of these extraordinary apostles should be no other than the so-called Jew proprietor of the Opinione—who is not even a Jew; for he has always shown that he believes as little of the Old Testament as he does of the New.

But—

Solid or not, this argumentum ad hominem has for a certain class of minds an air of great plausibility. At all events, it might be well to look into it a little; for we may thereby throw some light upon several important truths which nowadays need special illumination. We let in the argument, therefore, as the new Jewish and infidel philosophers present it; and we propose to give them, in a nutshell, the proper answer to it. They will then understand why Catholics not only refuse to surrender to this showing, but, on the contrary, see in it reason to stand firm to their first faith, and to cherish unceasing hopes of the speedy triumph of their cause.

Yes, gentlemen, we Catholics believe, with all our heart and soul, in the holy providence of God. In this Providence we recognize the origin and order of all created things. We make it indeed our glory that we bless and humbly worship its adorable decrees. We confess, therefore, without reserve, that what you choose to call its “loving caresses” are really yours by divine appointment; and the very decree which to you is the source of so much joy, and to us of so much mourning, we adore as the undoubted manifestation of his most holy will. All this we freely admit as truth, as unquestionable, unanswerable truth. But while, in these explicit terms, we confess this Catholic verity, we deny, in equally explicit terms, that what you choose to call “caresses” are in any sense such to you, or that the palpable proofs of that “special protection” of which you make so vain a boast are proofs of anything but the very opposite; nay, so false is it, that the caresses you claim are marks of divine approval, that the very assertion is a blasphemy most insulting to the sovereign providence of God. To prove these propositions is an easy thing to any one who knows his catechism; and the understanding of them easier still to any one who believes as well as knows. To him who either does not know his Christian primer, or, knowing it, will not believe, they may seem incapable of either proof or comprehension. Should such a case present itself, the fault is certainly not ours. A poet tells us that:

If so, why is it that this Jew, instead of sticking like a worthy Hebrew to his stock-list, takes to teaching us the Christian catechism? And why is it that this worshipper of Voltaire, instead of chanting hymns to Venus, reads us a lecture on what he knows about the purposes of God? Sutor ne ultra crepidam.

Nevertheless, we proceed to explain the propositions advanced above.

Catholics acknowledge that every event, be it favorable or unfavorable to their prayers, is consistent with the providence of God. To Providence they refer evil as well as good, with this difference, that good and unblamable evil they ascribe to the decrees of his sovereign direction, but blamable evil they ascribe to his permissive decree. In a word, they believe and confess that God wills positively all that comes to pass without taint of moral evil, and wills negatively (that is, he does not preclude) what comes to pass so tainted by cause of man’s abuse of his free-will. They nevertheless hold and profess that whatever evil he permits, that also is ordained to good; so that nothing enters into those most just and wise decrees that does not aim effectively at the final design of the creation and redemption of mankind; which design in this life is the church militant, and, in the next, the church triumphant, the central point of his extrinsic glorification.

The reason, then, that Catholics hold and profess that God does not and cannot decree, otherwise than permissively, moral evil—that is, disobedience, injustice, or briefly sin—is that he neither participates nor can participate in evil of this nature which is essentially opposed to his infinite sanctity. He would, in fact, participate therein if he willed it positively and not merely negatively; whereas, permitting it only, he in no wise participates, though he allows man, whom he had created free, to make an evil use of the gift of liberty. He does not hinder him, because neither is he so obliged, nor can the divine hindrance of human freedom be exacted by the nature of man left free. With all this, God is in no wise the less able to secure for himself, always and in every case and from every human being, the external glory which he reserved to himself when he created man. Because, he who shall not glorify in heaven an infinite mercy granted to the good use of the free-will, shall glorify in hell an infinite justice merited by the abuse of this same free-will. Hence the Almighty will not be shorn of the least shadow of that glory, for which, among other things, he drew man out of the abyss of nothingness.

Catholics, moreover, believe and confess that the effects of moral evil are invariably directed by Almighty God to the good of mankind. They serve to punish in order to amend, or else to exercise in order to confirm. St. Augustine remarks, with his usual perspicacity, that the life of a bad man is often prolonged not only to afford an opportunity for his amendment, but to serve as an occasion of sanctification to the good. Ne putetis gratis esse malos in hoc mundo, et nihil boni de eis agere Deum. Omnis malus aut ideo vivit ut corrigatur, aut ideo vivit ut per illum bonus exerceatur.[62]

Hence it is that Catholics, in all emergencies, even in the most calamitous, nay, even in those caused by the worst iniquities of unscrupulous men, do not fail to adore the goodness and justice of Almighty God, and to acknowledge the inscrutable dispositions of his most holy will. But they never think of imputing to him the sins and transgressions of the wicked. These he neither wills nor is he capable of willing them. He permits them only as subserving his mercy or his justice.

It follows, then, that, in order to decide whether the easy successes of certain definite transactions are successes due to divine approbation, and palpable proofs of his gracious protection, or whether rather they are not facilities that Providence permits for the punishment of the wicked and for the chastening of the virtuously minded, it is essential to see first whether these definite acts are right or wrong, meritorious or sinful; that is, conformable or unconformable to the law of eternal justice, and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, certain it is that in those transactions which the enemies of Christ regard as sanctioned by the manifest “caresses” of Almighty God, Catholic Christians see nothing but acts of iniquity and sin; and accordingly, while they accept them as permitted by God for reasons and results full of justice and mercy, they nevertheless esteem it the height of blasphemy to look upon such outrages, however successful for the moment, as “caresses” bestowed by Providence upon the very men who at other times deny his existence or treat his word with open scorn and contempt.

We have thus, as briefly and as lucidly as we could, and with the Christian catechism for our guide, explained to these Jews who are no Jews, and to these philosophers who are no philosophers, the sense of the propositions we affirm.

Perhaps they will now require of us to prove that the acts referred to are acts of iniquity and sin. This is very much like asking us to prove that the sun is shining, when it is evidently blazing at mid-day. We let pass that the highest authority on earth has pronounced, again and again, that the acts are simply acts most sinful and sacrilegious. We let pass that the concurrent testimony of all minds endowed with natural rectitude of judgment (not excluding Protestants nor Israelites nor Turks) has confirmed and reconfirmed the condemnations spoken already by Pope, by church, and by the entire Catholic world. It is enough that the authors and prime movers of these outrages proclaimed and stamped them as dishonorable and base before they perpetrated them, and even in the very act of their perpetration. Can these apostolic gentlemen, now so anxious for the conversion of the Catholic Church, be ignorant, for instance, that two of the Subalpine ministry, Visconti-Venosta and Lanza, declared the invasion of Rome and the usurpation of the Papal power acts of barbarism destitute of every semblance of right? And are they not aware that they so avouched just one short month before both invasion and usurpation were consummated by burglary and breach?

Who can hope, then, to persuade a Catholic that these successful shells, pick-locks, and jimmies have not been instruments of the most iniquitous wrong-doing, seeing that these two men, in the face of heaven and earth, averred its baseness themselves only a few weeks before the formal consummation of the act? Perhaps, too, our converters have never heard how their divine Camillo Cavour said one day to their other divine Massimo d’Azeglio, who has recorded it ad perpetuam rei memoriam: “If what we are doing for Italy, you and I had done for ourselves, what a precious pair of big balossi we should have been!” The Opinione knows too well the sense of the Subalpine word balosso that we should put it into good Italian. The editor and his pharisaical colleagues have learned, no doubt, the lovely dialect of the northern masters they have chosen for Italy and for themselves. They can teach us, we dare say, the full force of this fine word balosso; that it means all that is contained in the words scamp, scoundrel, robber, rascal, villain, ruffian, knave. Can Catholics, then, be easily persuaded that the facts accomplished by Azeglio and Cavour for the regeneration of Italy have been free from sin and iniquity, seeing that these two divines have stigmatized them as the acts of men bad enough to be balossi? For be it observed that Azeglio himself admits that what is criminal in private life is no less criminal in public;[63] showing (though we are losing time in the attempt to throw light upon the sun) that our apostolic friends, in order to justify the accomplished facts resorted to for Italy’s new birth, have been obliged to invent a modern social law the converse of the ancient one ordained by God himself.

If this be admitted, what can prove more incontestably that the acts complained of were acts of sin and iniquity; sin being any act contrary to God’s commands, and iniquity an act opposed to the justice he enjoins?

But Catholics may go further, and say to the apostles of our conversion that not only are the means used for the regeneration of Italy sinful and iniquitous, but that the end itself aimed at by the ringleaders of this pretended regeneration is absolutely antichristian and diabolical, being nothing less than the demolition of the Catholic Church and the annihilation of the kingdom of God among men. Of course, the end is simply absurd, and rendered impossible by the excess of its absurdity. But nevertheless, though it cannot exist as a thing attainable, it does exist as a thing conceivable, and as such inspires the mad career of Masonry, which pursues it with satanic rage and open ostentation as the main objective point of the machinations of the sect.

Mazzini, to whom the regenerators are indebted for their grand idea, aimed as far ago as 1834 at the abolition of the temporal power, without regard to cost. His argument was that the downfall of this power carried with it, as a necessary consequence, the emancipation of the human race from the thraldom of the spiritual power. “The Vicars of Christ” he called “Vicars of the Spirit of Evil, to be exterminated, never to be restored.”[64] Visconti-Venosta, a member of the present Italian cabinet, wrote to Mazzini, in 1851, that the rallying-cry of the regeneration should be, “Down with the Monarchy, down with the Papacy.”[65]

Ferrari, the philosopher of the movement, proclaimed in 1853 that the end it proposed was the stamping out of Pope and Emperor, of Christ and Cæsar; the four tyrannies that Machiavelli had delivered over to Italian hate.[66]

To make this matter short, though we might go on for ever, the more rabid partisans of the regeneration do not blush to say that the essential end of the great Italian movement is the emancipation of human consciences from the authority of the church, by laying prostrate the colossus against whom Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII. ineffectually strove. They aim, in a word, at the radical destruction of the entire Catholic Church; to which end, nationality, unity, political liberty itself, were always to be regarded as nothing more than the means.[67]

These preliminaries being understood, our free-thinking friends ought to see that their argument, derived from what they call “providential protection” to their sacrilegious acts, strikes the Catholic mind as a shocking blasphemy, because it makes our blessed Lord an accomplice in detestable transactions, and an instigator to the worst of crimes—a deliberate plotter, in short, of the ruin of that church which is the masterpiece of his wisdom, and the object of his infinite love. We have no objections to their saying that the anger of God has unchained their barbarous allies, and for a time has left them free to do their worst against the children of the church. They may say all this, and Catholics will assent and even approve—not the animus, but the words. They will exclaim with St. Jerome of old, when the barbarians of that day were making havoc of the things of God: Peccatis nostris barbari fortes sunt[68]—“In our sins the barbarians are strong.” But let them not venture to say that Almighty God, because he allows them a fatal facility of blasphemous impiety, protects and even caresses this impiety. For religious men will answer them: Yes, he protects and caresses you, as he protected and caressed the crucifiers of his only-begotten Son.

And here we entreat the Israelitish editor of the Opinione to pay strict attention to what we have to say, inasmuch as it concerns him in his nationality; since he is an Israelite by nature and nation, and Italian only by the place of his accidental birth.

The synagogue, sustained by the coalition of Pharisees and Sadducees, undertook to regenerate Judea by taking the life of Jesus, Son of God, true God and true Man. The great sin of Jesus Christ in the eyes of the synagogue was similar to that of the church of Jesus in the eyes of the Masonic Order. He was the Son of God and the Word of Truth, as the church is his spouse and the organ of the truth.

But there stood many obstacles in the way of compassing his death. First, there needed a lawful sanction, and there was none. Secondly, it was necessary to take him captive, a very dangerous undertaking, for he was always surrounded by throngs of devoted followers and friends. Thirdly, it was necessary to keep the people in good humor, or, as Jesus was their principal benefactor, they might rebel against this public execution. Fourthly, it was necessary to ascertain that the Romans, who had cognizance of capital cases in Palestine, would connive at his trial for life and at his sentence to death. Fifthly, they had to risk the display of his miraculous power, for his miracles surpassed all that had ever been seen in Israel. It must be admitted that these difficulties were very formidable. Yet what happened? Everything was made easy. The sanction of law was found in a tissue of lies and political misindictments, successful beyond all expectation. His capture proved the easiest imaginable, through the unexpected treachery of one of his own disciples, who sold him for a bauble. The populace was led with wonderful facility not only not to rise to his rescue, but in a solemn plébiscite to save the robber Barabbas at his expense, and to sentence him to an ignominious death. The Romans made some show, through Pilate, in his defence; but after five times declaring him innocent of every charge, condemned him to the cross, following the will of the synagogue to the last; and finally Jesus, though challenged with insult to the exercise of his supernatural powers, abstained mysteriously from their use, and did nothing to withdraw himself from torture or death. Could any greater facility of consummation be imagined than was here shown in the accomplishment of this tremendous deicidal act? But will our Israelitish apostle have the heart to undertake to win over Italian Catholics to the belief that the wonderful success of the crucifixion (permitted, as it undeniably was) is to be construed as a caress bestowed by Providence upon a corrupt and apostate synagogue, and as a palpable and unmistakable proof of his protection of the bloody and treacherous council that sentenced him to death?

Between the Jewish sacrilege directed against the adorable Person of the Incarnate Word, and the Italian sacrilege against the Vicar of that Word, there is but this distinction: that the Person aimed at in the former was God present in his human nature, and the Person aimed at in the latter was God present in his church.

In the days of Pontius Pilate and Caiphas, the Jews slew the material body of our Blessed Lord: the latter-day Jews, in these days of Lanza and Visconti-Venosta, would, if they could, slay the Spiritual Body of the same Jesus Christ. And do you dare, wretched Pharisees, to ask of us Catholic believers to recognize in the facilities that have attended until now this monstrous sacrilege of yours, this second deicidal act, the smiles of an approving Providence, and the marks of a divine protection accorded to the prompt success of your heaven-defying crime?

The capital error of the gross and impious sophism now the subject of our comment, consists evidently in the assumption that easy and unexpected success (in operations ordinarily of a very arduous character) is a sure note of the divine approval, even when the accomplished facts are manifest breaches of the Decalogue.

A proposition of this sort, if it had the least value, would serve to sanction any atrocity, however monstrous, provided it were only successfully and rapidly achieved.

Such wretches as Passatori, Ninco Nanchi, Carusi, and Troppmann ought in this view to be regarded as protected and caressed by Divine Providence. Every prosperous villain would only have to quote to his judges the argument of the Opinione to conciliate their approbation, and to obtain from them not only an acquittal, but an honorable testimonial in high praise of these favorites of heaven.

True it is, however, that a striking and brilliant success dazzles the judgment of men without faith, or of men with faith as sensual as their flesh.

We Catholics, on the contrary, are rich in the possession of a divine promise which keeps us cheerful and buoyant with hope in the face of what seems like the final triumph of the wicked. And this is more especially true when we have to deal with those who plot against the church and its visible Head, adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus. Nobody that we know of has set this promise in a truer light than P. Paul Segneri, and we take the liberty to transcribe here for our readers two or three passages of his, which are just so much gold to the purpose we have in view.

“‘The prosperity of fools,’ says Solomon, ‘shall destroy them.’ He does not say ‘destroys them,’ but ‘shall destroy them.’ Why so? Because the prosperity of the wicked does not always produce immediately its disastrous effects. Sometimes the reverse comes after long delay. Wait patiently. You will see the end of what seems to begin so well. Have you never read in the Book of Job how that the Almighty takes pleasure in defeating the machinations of the impious? He brings their counsellors to a foolish end.” Not to a bad beginning. No; all seems prosperous at first. It is the end that is disastrous. He lets them raise aloft their mighty tower of Babel. But afterwards, in the confusion of their pride, they disperse and are gone. He lets them build up the beautiful towers of Siloe; but these fall, and the builders are buried beneath the ruins. For want of this reflection, many men wonder at the prosperity of the wicked. Even the prophets themselves address God sometimes with tender reproaches. They almost accuse him, I might say. We are apt to look too much at the beginning of things, and not, like holy David, at the end. Donec intelligam in novissimis eorum. As much as to say, they are so taken up with gazing upon the comely golden head of their tall Babylonian colossus, that they have not thought of lowering their eyes to see its brittle legs of clay. Now hear me, and witness the establishment of the truth. If ever since the birth of Christ there was a race of men who rose by unscrupulous arts to enormous wealth and power, it was doubtless the Greek emperors, tyrants as they may well be called. Now answer me, Have there ever existed empires which have furnished subjects for tragedy more truly horrible than theirs?

“Nicephorus succeeded at first by the employment of dishonest means to usurp the imperial power, driving away the right inheritress, Irene. What then? Crushed by a series of misfortunes, he began to look upon himself as a modern Pharaoh, hardened by defeats. Finally, vanquished and slain by the Bulgarians, his enemies made a drinking-cup of his skull, and out of joy or derision used it as such in the diversions of the camp. Stauratius by illegitimate alliances, and Leo the Armenian by repeated high-handed rebellions, succeeded in establishing themselves in the height of power. How long was it before these two men died under the blows of the assassin, the former in war, and the latter at the altar he had profaned? Michael the Stammerer was so fortunate as to step, in his famous conspiracy, from the dungeon to the throne; demanding there the worship of his subjects, the chain still on his neck and the fetters on his feet. Intoxicated by his success, he compelled a holy virgin to share his bed. All Sclavonia revolted, his entire army deserted him; nor yet repenting, he was literally devoured by a malady the most disgusting. Theophilus was successful in suppressing, for reasons of state, the veneration of sacred images; but almost immediately after, on being shamefully defeated by the Saracens, died of rage and intense mortification. Michael III., regarded as another Nero on account of his licentiousness and cruelty, succeeded so far as to put his mother and guardians out of the way, in order to reign without opposition or control. He ended his ‘prosperous’ career by kindling against himself the hatred of his subjects, and encountered rebellion after rebellion, in the last of which, in the midst of a drunken debauch, he paid the forfeit of his life. Alexander attained a sort of success in plundering the holy altars, and in appropriating the gold thus obtained to his own private use; but very soon thereafter he was seized with a sudden madness, and he had not held out a year when he ended his life in a fearful vomiting of blood. What shall I say of Romanus I.? He too was successful to all appearance; for, by a stratagem of wonderful adroitness, he expelled the legitimate possessor from the patriarchal see of Constantinople, and placed in it a mere child, his own son. The year following he himself was driven from the imperial throne by another son, and banished to a lonely isle for life. So also fared it with Romanus II. Impelled by the lust of dominion, he took the life of his own father by poison. His own life was taken very shortly after, and by the self-same means. Michael Paphlagonius, by infamous devices, carried his point of usurping the throne. Seized suddenly with demoniacal obsession, he could obtain no repose. Exorcisms and almsgivings were tried in vain. He died as he lived, with his agony unrelieved. Michael Calaphates was ‘successful’ in driving the empress into exile, that he might reign alone; but the people rose against him at once, stoned him, deprived him of sight, and dragged him through the city streets more dead than alive. Diogenes and Andronicus, two usurpers who had ‘succeeded’ in their treason, one by a courtesan’s vile aid, the other by the arm of an assassin, came to the same lamentable end.

“Now answer me! Can you look upon as truly successful the wicked arts which brought these bad men to power? Speak out! Would you be willing to enjoy their ‘prosperity’ if with it you had to accept its reverse? Is there any one so stupid as to envy their short-lived ‘good luck’? Rest assured that such has ever been the fate of those who attain for a time their unhallowed ends by iniquitous means. ‘The prosperity of fools will destroy them.’ Doubt it not, my friends. The prosperity of fools will most assuredly destroy them. It is hardly worth while to labor longer in the proof. All writings, all ages, all powers, attest in unison this truth, that ‘Justice exalteth a nation’; and this other, that ‘Injustice leadeth a nation to misery and ruin.’ These are the words of one who was the wisest among men; and elsewhere he says, ‘Man shall not be strengthened by wickedness’; and, again, ‘The unjust shall be caught in their own snares’; and then, again, ‘They who sow iniquity shall reap destruction.’”

Thus, by examples drawn from the annals of the Byzantines (a race dear to our modern liberals), the eloquent Segneri points out the end which, according to Holy Writ, awaits the criminal successes of the wicked. If he had chosen to embrace a wider range of history, he might have compiled an endless catalogue of examples the most frightful; commencing with the dreadful success of the crucifixion of our ever blessed Lord, of which the sequel was as dreadful a retribution. The synagogue nailed the Messiah to the cross, under the pretext that otherwise the Romans would come and occupy Jerusalem. And precisely because they did this wicked thing, the Romans took Jerusalem and levelled it to the ground. So that the very success of the Jews, which, execrable as it was, the Opinione would have adored as a protecting caress bestowed by Providence upon Sion, ended simply in bringing upon the guilty city a horrible siege and irremediable ruin.

We content ourselves, for our part, in citing the Roman Cæsars, who, in the first three centuries, renewed ten different times, and with all the incidents of success, the bloody persecution of the followers of Christ. All of these, without a single exception, came to a wretched end. When the fourth century arrived to witness the triumph of Christianity, the descendants of the persecuting emperors were found extinct by foul or violent deaths; the series closing with Maximin breathing his last amid the agonies of poison and the blasphemous howlings of despair, and with Candidianus (the adulterous son of Galerius, adopted by Valeria, Maximin’s wife) murdered by Licinius along with another brother, a sister in tender age, and finally Valeria herself. It thus appears that the massacre of the Christians, which our modern Caiphases would have celebrated as an edifying “divine caress,” had this one effect after all, viz., to bring around the lasting triumph of the persecuted cause. It was the children of the slaughtered ones who were victorious in the end; the progeny of the slaughterers died suffocated in the blood which their guilty fathers had shed.

We might easily continue these examples, and recount, for instance, the end to which a career of successful iniquity at last conducted Julian the Apostate, the idol and exemplar of our Italian regenerators. We might enlarge on the fates of Astolphus and Desiderius, whose “patriotism” they so much admire. We might with still more force bring out contemporary cases, the case of Cavour, for example, withdrawn suddenly away by an ominous death in the flower of life from the hosannas of the people he had misled; the case of Farini, Cavour’s right-hand man, struck also in life’s prime by a shocking frenzy which urged him to acts incredibly revolting, and soon after to a most painful death; the case of Fanti, the plunderer of Umbria, who, before he could die, was tortured for a year with all the agonies of death; the case of Persano, the bombarder of Ancona, who, after making shipwreck on the sea of Lissa of his rank and reputation, avenged himself of fortune by publishing the infamies of the successful revolution. And to these we might add the cases of Pinelli, of Valerio, of La Farina, and of a hundred others equally conclusive. We might even quote examples among the living; of a certain regenerator, who, in spite of his impious successes, roams incessantly from place to place seeking a rest he cannot find—condemned, it would seem, to endure the torments of Caina, Antenora, and Ptolomea in Dante’s ninth circle of hell, and to realize in himself the fate described by Alberigo:

To be brief, we shall confine ourselves to the two most distinguished and most successful persecutors of popes—Frederick II., a mediæval emperor of Germany, and Napoleon the First, a French emperor of the modern sort. Both of these men, in the studied outrages they inflicted, the one upon Gregory IX. and Innocent IV., the other on Pius VII., were encouraged by such marvellous successes that our Israelitish proselytizer would have had them canonized as the very Benjamins of Providence. Suffice it to say that Frederick II. had his political Cæsarism preached into right divine by the most learned jurists of his day, just as Napoleon I. made the most powerful monarchy of Europe kneel down and adore his bloodier Cæsarism of the sword. Both the one and the other returning from their triumphs, carried fortune, to all appearance, chained for ever to their cars. The more they raged against Christ’s Vicar, the more their victory seemed complete. The greater the number of excommunications they incurred, the easier seemed to be their subsequent encroachments. It was after the last papal censure that Frederick gained the adhesion of several powerful barons in Rome. It was after the Pope’s worst imprisonment that Napoleon won his greatest battles, making them the subjects of the most vainglorious boasts, that he had thus received from the God of armies special marks of approbation—“caresses,” as the Opinione calls them, when bestowed upon the enemies of the church.

Yet where did they end, these lucky sacrileges, this prodigious and prolonged prosperity of crime? Both these men outlived their glittering fortunes. The false magnificence and grandeur for which they had thrown away their souls, turned to ashes in their grasp.

King Henry, Frederick’s eldest son, dies in prison, leaving a son who was struck dead by a blow from an unknown hand. Enzio, his bastard offspring, created by him King of Sardinia, after twenty-five years of imprisonment in a cage of iron dies a miserable death. Ezzelino, his son-in-law closes with a horrible end a life, if possible, of greater horror. His great champion, Thaddeus of Suessa, is slain with every accompaniment of contempt. Pier delle Vigne, his evil genius, has his eyes thrust out, and commits suicide in his despair. Frederick himself, after surviving all these horrors, is strangled by Manfredi, another of his base-born sons, who, after bathing his gory hands in the blood of Conrad, Frederick’s lawful son, is himself stretched dead on the field of a dishonorable strife. To close this interminable tragedy, Corradino, the last scion of the hated tyrant, ends on a felon’s scaffold his seventeen short years of life. With this unfortunate youth the dynasty of Frederick is closed. The empire passes over into other hands, and Rodolph of Hapsburg reigns, the first of a better line.

The fall of Napoleon I. is still remembered as an event of recent date. Elated with his continual victories, he invaded Russia with the most formidable army the world ever saw. Warned that he had the fate of the excommunicated to encounter, he asked in scorn whether his soldiers would drop their muskets at the sight of a Papal Bull. Forced to retreat after a show of vain success, famine and frost decimated his ranks, and his soldiers’ frozen fingers refused to hold the interdicted arms. Unable to contend against fast-increasing numbers, he found himself by a strange fatality compelled to renounce the crown in the very palace at Fontainebleau which he had turned into a prison for the Pope. The Holy Father had quitted it to resume the throne. The fallen emperor left it to accept in Elba an asylum which he begged as a shelter in his friendless old age. Leaving his place of refuge, in a mad attempt to resuscitate his fortunes, he incurred at Waterloo a ruin the most disastrous ever known. Stripped of every resource, he was dragged to a prison-cell on a miserable island, scarcely noticeable in its vast expanse of sea. From this inhospitable rock, he was permitted to contemplate the plenary restoration of the mysterious Papal power, and simultaneously the downfall of all the thrones he had presented to his brothers and next of kin. After spending, in desolate captivity, the five years he had decreed of prison to the blameless Pius VII., he gave up his tortured soul to meet the just displeasure of his God. What more striking confirmation can we ask of the truth of those awful words, “They who sow injustice” sooner or later “shall reap its bitter fruits”?

It would not do to pass without notice the still living and speaking case of Napoleon III. Who but he has been the foremost leader of the regenerators of unhappy Italy? The Gog and Magog of our Italian pharisees! And are not these the men who fell down and worshipped the divine prosperity of their master’s eighteen years of empire? Have they not claimed it as a miracle of God’s favor, a long and lasting “caress” of Providence, the possible failure of which it would be impious to suspect? Have they not sung and celebrated, time and again, the famous victory of Solferino as a prodigy sent from heaven to show that the Almighty took the side of Italy, and had declared against the Pope?

Well, now, what has become of this epopee of miraculous prosperity, this note of ruin to Catholic Christianity, to the claims of the Holy See, and (as justly we might say) to the repose and peace of Europe? It came to naught in Sedan, in a military defeat and a dynastic misfortune the most appalling that ever was known or written of in the world.

And it so came to naught precisely because of the “success” at Solferino. That victory of Napoleon’s, chanted so loudly and so often by the pious Jew editor of the Opinione as an unmistakable revelation of God’s decision in favor of Bonaparte and his new Italy—that victory (when the hour of Sedan had come) was plainly seen as the manifest cause of his every subsequent reverse. Who can help perceiving now that, had not Austria lost the battle of Solferino, won by France that Italy might be “made,” Austria would not have lost the battle at Sadowa, achieved by Prussia that Germany might be “made”? And had not Austria lost at Sadowa, is it not plain that Napoleon would never have been dragged down into the horrible catastrophe of Sedan? In this catastrophe we find the meaning of the “approving smile” at Solferino. The “caress,” we are told, was intended for the third Napoleon. For whom, then, was intended the crushing dispensation at Sedan?

Will our kind converters to the new reading of the ways of Providence reflect maturely on this matter? All genuine Christian gentlemen, all admitted men of honor (except a few who were misled), regarded the war of 1859, so well characterized by the victory of Solferino, as iniquitous in its motives and as anti-Christian in its scope. It was looked upon by all as a magnum latrocinium, a godless scheme of robbery; but it had what its perpetrators called “a great success.” Eleven years roll by, and what do we see?

Napoleon III., at first so splendidly victorious by the force of an act of larceny that dispossessed four princes and displaced the Pope, is caught at last like a weasel in a trap, dethroned in his turn, driven off in scorn, steeped to the lips in indelible disgrace; all his marshals and generals, without a solitary exception, ignominiously humbled, soundly beaten, and detained in durance vile by a logical rebound from their first Italian success; all his army, four hundred thousand strong, lately invincible, now led into exile or captivity, to shiver with cold or to wince under the epithets of scorn. Victorious France, in retribution for her “new idea” of nationality, and to set the good example, yields up the costly tribute of two of her wealthiest provinces; just the number she had stolen from Italy, on the strength of the “new idea,” as her due for allowing Piedmont to absorb the entire peninsula within her ravenous maw.

How is it possible not to recognize, in this unprecedented drama, the real lesson of divine retaliation, the exclusive right of Providence to repay—to exact eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and life for life, when such extremity is required? Who will hesitate to say with the poet:

And in this most memorable reverse of Napoleon III., we invite our apostolic interpreters of Providence to note a special fact. The fallen emperor not only lives to realize the forfeiture of all his fame, differing herein from those who die before the loss, but has to endure the bitterness of witnessing the demolition of all the proud creations of his reign. He had raised France to the pinnacle of earthly greatness, had just crowned, as he himself phrased it, the glorious edifice his genius had successfully constructed. France is now dismembered, dilapidated, a mass of melancholy ruin; reduced to chaos militarily, morally, politically, and to a great extent materially, if this last trait be deemed of much account.

He had decorated the palaces of St. Cloud and the Tuileries with munificence more than Asiatic. They are stripped to the bare walls. He rose, on the wings of the plébiscite, from obscurity to a throne. The plébiscite is now an obsolete absurdity. The treaty of Paris, which crowned the triumphs of the East; the Chinese victories and ovations at Canton and Palikao; the Mexican Empire, the fruit of so much toil and treasure, the price of the good name and fame of France; the Prague conventions, intended to defeat the growth of Prussia into a vast and consolidated Germany—of all these magnificent enterprises not a trace. In short, the countless dazzling exploits of the prosperous reign of the third Napoleon have vanished for ever like so many dissolving views. One work, one only work survives—the Subalpine government of Italy, to lick which hideous monster into shape the unhappy monarch threw recklessly away his honor and his crown. We might pursue this train of thought to its logical conclusion, but we refrain. Too strict an application of the laws of logic might bring us into conflict with other laws which we prefer not to provoke. But we may perhaps venture to request our pious friends of the “Regeneration” to undertake the argument themselves—an argument which runs on almost of itself, being one of the kind which dialecticians call reasoning from analogy. Let them look to it well, and say if there be not better ground to be anxious about the life of their Italy than there is to be solicitous about converting Catholics to the modern dogma, that the voice of an accomplished fact is no less than the voice of God; that the lucky consummation of a crime is itself the signal of the divine applause. Let them reflect that not a fact, which ceases afterwards to be a fact, can come into being or go out of it, without, at least, the permissive sanction of Almighty God. Let them pause and consider that the series of events, opened by Providence in 1859, is not absolutely or finally closed. Let them ever bear in mind that, when least it is expected, Providence may complete the line of this analogy by dissolving into nothingness the only remnant left of all the Napoleonic creations. The world and the ages will then believe that not a single one of the supposed marks of the divine “caress,” claimed by Italy’s regenerators, was really a mark of favor; but simply one of the many illustrations of the way in which the scorner is caught in the midst of his devices: In insidiis suis capientur iniqui.

In what we have advanced, we have, as seems to us, fairly and fully refuted the boastful syllogism of our adversaries. We shall conclude by exhorting them to lay aside all hope of converting Catholics by a show of blasphemous successes or an appeal to the longest impunity of crime. Go on, gentlemen! Enjoy your fortune! Vaunt as loudly as you will the triumphs you have secured over us, over the church, over the rights of the Holy See. Do all this, and welcome. But when you come to tell us that Providence is “caressing your cause,” and ask our adhesion to this impiety, we warn you to desist. Satan himself would not dare to give utterance to such an insult, or even to harbor such a thought. Providence has allowed you, in the abuse of your own free-will, a certain measure of easy success; as he allowed it to the synagogue, to the Cæsars, to Julian the Apostate, to Desiderius, and to all such of your predecessors as were permitted for a time to triumph over Christ and his commandments. And this he has allowed to you, not as to his loved ones, but as to his persecutors, that you may be the rod of his justice against the sins of the world. He will make this to yourselves, if you repent not, a snare and a delusion; to the church, an assurance of greater exaltation; and to all of us, a call to better service and obedience. We as Catholics know that we must bow beneath your blows. We bear the pain of them in peace, because faith teaches us that even scourges are wielded by God, and that his hand is to be kissed as much when it strikes as when it strengthens. For this reason we can accept you as you are. And yet we see in you no higher mark than that of our flagellators and the exercisers of our patience; but be warned in time. God makes use of his scourges, and then destroys them. We have made this plain to you by innumerable examples. Beware! for the prosperous days of God’s scourges end invariably in misfortune and disaster. Beware, for the good times of the enemies of Jesus Christ and his church have ever been as pitfalls with a covering of roses; yokes of iron masked by a drapery of flowers. On the contrary, from her greatest tribulations the church has ever issued brighter, lovelier, and more radiant than before. She numbers as many victories as battles, as many prisoners as foes. All the promises of God are for her and against you, and all history attests that of these promises not a syllable has failed. The church is our mother; her cause is our own. We have, therefore, no fear for the result. You may scorn us, you may strip us, you may deny us the protection of the laws. You may tear us limb from limb during the brief occasion of your power. But conquer us, no! In all eternity, you cannot. God has ordered it that we shall be your victors. Rallying close to the Vicar of the King of heaven, and faithful to the call of his immortal Spouse, we shall announce to you, with front uplifted, that we have conquered you; or (if that better pleases you) that Christ has conquered you through us. Laugh to your hearts’ content at this faith of ours. All your predecessors have done as much. Yet who triumphed in the end? So certain are we of the victory that we scarce dare hasten it by our desires. The thought of the bolts of divine wrath impending over you appalls us, and we abstain, out of pity for you, from asking what Dante, on a like occasion, prayed for in these words:

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Little Pierre, the Pedlar of Alsace; or, The Reward of Filial Piety. Translated from the French by J. M. C. With 27 illustrations. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 236. New York: The Catholic Publication Society, 9 Warren Street. 1872.

The French can write charming stories, as every one knows. Little Pierre is one of the best we have seen in a long time—such a one as enchants a child, and makes him or her unwilling to lay it aside for supper or bed. It leads one through the romantic scenes of Alsace and the country of the Rhine, has plenty of stirring adventures, and, what is best of all, ends in a capital and satisfactory manner: Pierre and his little sister happily married, the old lady comfortable, Pierre a well-to-do merchant at Niederbronn. The illustrations, twenty-seven in all, which have been recut from the originals for the American edition, are uncommonly well executed. Little Pierre is destined to become an intimate friend of our young folks, to say nothing of Christine and Lolotte. Perhaps the most comical scene in the book is where Little Pierre is put by Madame Frank in the top of a Christmas-tree, with the name of little Cecile pinned on his breast. The most touching scene is the finding of little Lolotte in the wood, with her eyes bandaged and her hands tied. We advise our young readers not to rest until they get possession of this pretty book.

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The Men and Women of the English Reformation, from the Days of Wolsey to the Death of Cranmer. Papal and Anti-Papal Notables. By S. H. Burke, author of “The Monastic Houses of England.” 2 vols. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

This is a work which fairly answers its title, and we have in its two handsome duodecimo volumes sketches and descriptions so graphic of the men and women of the English Reformation as to place them most vividly before us.

Beginning with the unlovely correspondence of Henry VIII. with Anne Boleyn, and recounting many interesting details of the divorce question, the narrative passes on to a review of the leading incidents and the principal personages of the reign of Henry. The political murders of Sir Thomas More and of Bishop Fisher, the death of Queen Katharine, and the fall of Anne Boleyn, are described with fresh details of interest drawn from newly opened sources of historic information.

On the subject of “Clerical Reformers and their Spouses,” there is a very readable chapter, and, with a full disquisition upon the “Religious Institutions of Old England,” we have startling statements concerning the character of the “Monastic Inquisitors” under that arch-villain, Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s Secretary of State, as will open the eyes of such as are unaware of the depth of infamy fathomed by the scoundrels who stole or wasted the wealth of England’s grand mediæval charities and robbed the poor and the sick of their sole heritage of succor and consolation. At the sight of the suffering entailed by the destruction of the monasteries, those glorious asylums of religion, charity, and learning, even as enthusiastic a panegyrist of the Reformation as Froude cannot help exclaiming: “To the universities, the Reformation had brought with it desolation. To the people of England it had brought misery and want. The once open hand was closed. ... The prisons were crowded.... Monks and nuns pointed with bitter effect to the fruits of the new belief, which had been crimsoned in the blood of thousands of the English peasants.”

The second volume gives us the principal events and personages of the end of the reign of Henry VIII. and of the reigns of Edward VI. and of Mary Tudor; and effective use is made not only of authentic documentary evidence which has come to light within the past seven years, but also of the important, because impartial, testimony of distinguished Protestant writers, such as Hook, Maitland, Brewer, Blunt, and Stephenson. We commend the work as one of exceeding interest.

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The Life of Marie-Eustelle Harpain, the Sempstress of St. Pallais, called “The Angel of the Eucharist.” Second edition. London: Burns, Oates, & Co.; New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

This is one of the most interesting lives which we have read. The lives of the saints always should be interesting, but often the methodical and dry way in which they are, as we may say, constructed, has a discouraging effect upon the reader greater than that which the heroic virtues of their subjects can produce. This is not the case with this memoir of one whom we may be allowed to call a saint, though she has not yet been recognized as such by the church, always prudent, and especially so with regard to canonizations. Marie-Eustelle died in 1842, at the age of 28, and belongs entirely to this nineteenth century, which is so ignorant of its true glories. Her life is quite imitable in most respects, as well as admirable, which is an additional reason for reading a book that is so very readable.

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The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. With twenty-one Illustrations, from original designs by D. Mosler, H. Warren, and J. H. Powell, engraved by Holman and Bale. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

The Rev. Mr. Formby, whose zeal, learning, and taste have so enriched the library of Catholic books for the young, gives here a popular work on the Parables, which will be wonderfully attractive. The Parables are all given in full, with fine illustrations to fix them on the mind, and explanations of their spiritual sense, drawn from the holy fathers. These beautiful lessons of our Lord cannot be too deeply impressed on minds to serve as subjects of meditation, and, well understood, they will prove sources of many graces. Outside the church, they remain to most “mere parables, not unfrequently indeed admired, and even quoted, beautiful in their way as anecdotes, but without in the least disclosing their true meaning.”

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The Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church; or, The Seven Pillars of the House of Wisdom. A Brief Explanation of the Catholic Doctrine of the Seven Sacraments, in connection with their corresponding types in the Old Testament. Illustrated with sixteen original designs by J. Powell, engraved on wood by the brothers Dalziel. By the Rev. Henry Formby, Priest of the Diocese of Birmingham. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

Another of Mr. Formby’s charming books, “not meant as a book of piety alone, but rather intended as a book of general popular knowledge.” He saw clearly the want of our time. “The whole tone and spirit of modern civilization is built upon the denial that there either is or can be anything superior to itself, or, indeed, anything that is not of its own order of things in the world.” “The young mind cannot be too soon made aware of the contradiction between the world and our Lord, and cannot be too soon and too effectually brought up to love and abide by all that our divine Lord has taught, and made firmly to disregard and despise all that is contrary to it in the world’s doctrine, from the knowledge that our Lord is greater than the world.”

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The School Keepsake, and Monitor for After Life. By Rev. H. Formby. With illustrations. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

This perfectly beautiful little gift for the young leaving school is one so attractive in itself that it cannot fail to be kept; so sound, so clear, so distinct in its matter, that it cannot but be such a help as will gladden the guardian angel watching over the child as it steps from the school into the busy world.

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The Devotion of the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin. Translated by the Rev. Henry Formby. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

A devotion approved by the highest authority, commended by the example of saints, and one full of consolation and piety, is here presented in a form that will give it currency among many who had overlooked it. No one can sorrow with Mary over the sorrows of Jesus without a return on self, and a sense of what our sins, the cause of all, demand on our part.

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School Songs, to which music is adapted. Complete volume containing—Part I., The Junior School Song-Book; Part II., The Senior School Song-Book. Edited by the Rev. Henry Formby. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

Amid the abundance of bad books, it is delightful to find a miniature volume like this of 200 pages, containing hymns, nursery rhymes, ballads, and minor poems suited to the young selected with care. The young must laugh and play; they will sing hymns sometimes, touching ballads sometimes, nonsense sometimes; give them all this to sing, but keep them from the immoral and low, slangy songs that even our music stores are now flooding the land with. We hope this little collection will sell by the thousand. It is cheap and it is good.

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Wild Flowers of Wisconsin. By B. J. Dorward. Edited by his son. Milwaukee: Catholic News Co.

The productions of our author, under the signature of “Porte Crayon,”[69] have long been favorites of the Western public. The late Dr. J. V. Huntington, a poet and critic of no ordinary ability, sought him out and secured his contributions to the St. Louis Leader. His poems are characterized by a beautiful simplicity and spontaneity, genuine sentiment, and native good sense. Other poets may exhibit the delicate touch of the artist in elaborate and polished images, but the efforts of writers like the present must be the inspiration of the moment, and the less forethought they show, the more are they enhanced in value. To change the figure, the wild flowers lose their hues and fragrance if subjected to hot-house processes. The former excite our admiration, the latter elicit our sympathy, and perhaps live longer in the memory by those “touches of nature which make the whole world kin.”

We bespeak a welcome to these flowers of song on the part of those who love poetry in its native simplicity, who set a proper estimate on all that is gentle, pure, and kind in the sentiments of our common nature, noble and sublime in our common faith, and would cultivate an indigenous literature worthy of the name.

Among many gems of thought and feeling, we can only particularize: “To a Bird in Church,” “By the Rivulet,” “To the Memory of Dr. J. V. Huntington,” “St. Mary’s of the Pines,” “The Datura,” and “A Soldier’s Funeral.”

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A Sister’s Story. By Mrs. Augustus Craven. Translated from the French, by Emily Bowles. Fourth American edition. 1 vol. 8vo, pp. 539. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

It is with pleasure that we announce the appearance of a fourth American edition of this exquisite and charming book, whose reputation and circulation have become world-wide. Even the publications most hostile to our holy religion have been compelled to eulogize it, although evidently feeling very uneasy about its great and increasing popularity among non-Catholic readers. The great discovery of a forgery in one part of the history which the New Englander fancied itself to have made, is known to a great part of the reading public. This supposed forgery was a profession of faith by the subject of the story, differing in form from one given in a French edition (14th of Didier, Paris), which the New Englander rather hastily concluded to be the genuine and authentic form which Mrs. Craven had published. The New Englander did not, however, express any suspicion that this forgery had been perpetrated by the American editors—on the contrary, disclaimed any such suspicion. Refinement of language, cautiousness in making infamous charges against persons of high character, and similar marks which denote gentlemanly and conscientious principles in a literary man, are, however, unhappily too rare among the conductors of the “Moral Spouting Horns” of the American press. Following those instincts by which they are usually impelled, and imitating a long series of precedents furnished by those who have been their precursors in their honorable trade, several of these papers, the Independent leading off, accused the American editors and publisher of the work with having forged a “profession of faith” to suit themselves. Says the Independent of Jan. 15:

To this the publisher, in the “Literary Bulletin” of The Catholic World for April, replied that—

But this did not seem to satisfy the Independent, for in its issue of April 4 it reiterates its accusation of forgery as follows:

The Chicago Advance is another paper that took particular pleasure in re-echoing the “forgery”; but, unlike the Independent, it notices the denial put forth in the “Bulletin” of The Catholic World, and says:

To which we reply: Here is the letter.

We do not think it necessary to add anything to the above. The newspapers which have published remarks similar to those we have quoted cannot make any apology which will entitle them to notice on our part, and we take leave of them until we are compelled to refute some new libel.

Mr. P. Donahoe announces for early publication: Six Weeks Abroad, in Ireland, England, and Belgium, by Father Haskins; Sketches of the Establishment of the Church in New England, by Father Fitton; Catholic Glories of the Nineteenth Century: The Old God, translated from the German; Conversion of the Teutonic Race, by Mrs. Hope, as well as several others.

“The Catholic Publication Society” announce for early publication, in addition to the books already announced, Canon Oakeley’s two books, namely, Ceremonial of the Mass and Catholic Worship. Also, Aunt Margaret’s Little Neighbors; or, Chats about the Rosary.

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THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

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VOL. XV., No. 87.—JUNE, 1872.

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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

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That part of our subject which is included under the title of the present article is the most difficult, complicated, and extensive of the several divisions under which we have classed the various and weighty duties of the rich. A volume of the most carefully prepared sermons, or a copious moral treatise, from the hand of a master of spiritual and moral science, could alone do justice to the demands of such a theme. The question to be answered, and it is one which harasses many a heart and conscience, is, How shall one live and govern his household amid the abundance of temporal goods, so as to make his state in life subserve the great end to which a Christian must direct all his thoughts and actions? The solution of this problem is theoretically and practically difficult. The language of Jesus Christ and the apostles in respect to the difficulty is startling, and even terrifying. Our Lord said: “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God. For it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” The efforts which some critics have made to soften and diminish this fearful declaration of Christ by changing “camel” into “cable,” or making the “needle’s eye” to be a gate of the city, so-called, are frivolous and futile. The figure is that of a laden camel before the eye of a small needle, through which his driver is essaying to make him pass. And its force consists precisely in the utter and extravagant absurdity of the image which it presents to the mind. It is intended to represent that which is violently contrary to the laws of nature, and, therefore, impossible. And it is this impossibility which is taken to illustrate the difficulty of a rich man entering the kingdom of God. What follows elucidates and completes the idea which our Lord intended to present before the minds of all his followers. His astounded listeners exclaimed, “Who then can be saved?” To whom he replied: “The things that are impossible with men are possible with God.”[70] The power of God, some philosophers tell us, can compress the substance of a camel into such small dimensions that it can pass through the eye of a needle. By that almighty power, and that alone, Christ teaches, can a rich man with his substance pass through the narrow gate of the kingdom of God.

St. James addresses to the rich the following terrible invective: “Go to now, ye rich men, WEEP AND HOWL for your miseries that shall come upon you.”[71] Similar passages might be multiplied, and the comments and applications of the successors of the apostles, in a similar strain, have filled the pages of the fathers and doctors of the church, and resounded from the chair of truth, from the days of the apostles to our own. Great numbers of the rich have been impelled by the force of these alarming declarations to seek for perfection and salvation by following the counsel which our Lord gave to the rich young man. Let those who have the opportunity and the vocation to do the same imitate their example; we will not dissuade them, and let parents and others beware of dissuading, much more hindering, any who are dependent on them from obeying such a divine call. This is one of the duties of the rich, which we will specify here in passing, that we may not be obliged to recur to it hereafter—to give their best and dearest, their sons and daughters, the most gifted, the most gracious, the most loved, as Jephte gave his daughter, a sacrifice to God and the church, whenever the Lord honors them by the demand. But it is not our purpose to persuade any to follow the evangelical counsels. We are speaking of the way of keeping God’s commandments in a state of riches in the world. There must be a way of living a perfect life; and gaining heaven, not merely “so as by fire,” but with the abundant merit which wins a bright crown—in spite of the possession of riches, and even by means of those riches. Wealth is not an evil, but the abuse of wealth. Temporal goods are not in themselves an obstacle to perfection and salvation, but the sins and vices which are caused by attachment to them, and the self-indulgence for which they afford the facility. The possession of wealth increases a person’s responsibilities and dangers, but at the same time augments his power of doing good and acquiring merit. Human nature, left to itself, ordinarily swells up, through the possession of either material or intellectual riches, to such a huge bulk of pride, avarice, and sensuality, that it is like a laden camel, or, as we may say, like an elephant with a tower full of armed men on its back; and in this condition, submission to the law of Christ is like passing through the eye of a fine cambric needle. But God, with whom those things are possible which are impossible to men, has not left human nature to itself. Through the Incarnation and the cross, through regenerating and sanctifying grace, through the aids of the Holy Spirit, Catholic faith, the sacraments, the examples of the saints, Catholic principles and education, the ennobling, purifying power of religion—human nature can be kept, in the state of abundance and prosperity, as well as in that of poverty and adversity, from the contamination of worldliness and iniquity. Even more, it can glorify its state, and turn it to the best and highest use, by the practice of the most exalted Christian virtues. The proof of this may be seen in the fact that this has been done in many thousands of instances, and is being done now in every part of Christendom.

The principles upon which Christian sanctity in the great, the noble, and the wealthy is based, are all summed up by the Apostle St. James in this short sentence: “Let the brother of low condition glory in his exaltation, but the rich in his being low,”[72] which is more literally translated, “in his humility.” Humility entitles the rich man to claim all the special blessings which are so frequently and emphatically promised in the New Testament to the poor. It is poverty of spirit, or interior detachment from temporal goods for the love of God, and not mere exterior poverty, which fits a person for the kingdom of God. The poor and lowly, if they are possessed of Catholic faith, have so little of that which makes the present life brilliant and attractive that they are forced by a happy kind of necessity to find everything in the church and their religion. They find their nobility in their baptism, their glory in the sign of the cross and their Catholic profession, their treasure in the blessed sacrament, their palace with its picture gallery and service of gold and silver in the church, their royal audiences at the ever open court of the King and Queen of heaven, their gala-days and spectacles in the festivals and processions and ceremonies of the ecclesiastical year, their ideal vision of coming happiness in heaven. They are “rich in faith,” and “glory in their exaltation” as the “heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ.” The rich must do voluntarily what the poor do from necessity. They must quit the position in their own esteem which human pride loves so dearly to take, of superiority over others on account of accidental and temporal advantages, and come down to the common level at the foot of the cross, where pride of rank and power, pride of intellect, and pride of wealth are alike annihilated, to make way for a true and lasting exaltation in the Son of God.

Here, then, is the first duty of the rich—to adopt inwardly, profess openly, and act out consistently the same principles of Catholic faith which are common to all Christians, and to place their glory, their treasure, their heart’s affection, their end in life, their hope of happiness, not in the transitory things of this life, but in the kingdom of God; “because as the flower of the grass they shall fade away.”

These transitory things, however, do last for a little while, and, although worthless as a final end and object to live for, are necessary and valuable as means. Private interpretation of the Scripture might deduce from it that Christ intended to do away with all power, rank, human science, art, commerce, wealth, and civil or social polity, with marriage and the family even, and thus extinguish this present world and this life to make way for the next. This is not the interpretation of the church or the way of Catholic practice. All these worldly, transitory things are retained and made use of, notwithstanding that “the figure of this world passeth away.” The rich man who is resolved to be a perfect Christian needs, therefore, to know not only what esteem he is to place on wealth and other temporal things in reference to the real and final good, but how practically to use them for the attainment of the same, and for helping his dependents and others to attain it. The more we go into detail in regard to this matter, the more difficult it becomes to draw lines and lay down practical rules. A sound and well-directed conscience must at last be the guide of each one, and it is a sufficient though not strictly infallible guide to those who are instructed in good general principles.

One general principle which may be useful as a rule for application to a great many particular cases is this: Those indulgences which gratify the more refined and intellectual tastes may be more freely made use of than those which gratify the senses. Another principle, closely allied to this, is the following: Whatever has an honorable or useful end is allowable; whatever merely gratifies a selfish passion must be condemned and avoided. To apply these principles as rules in certain important particular cases, let us begin with the rich man’s house. The first fault and folly to be avoided is extravagance. He ought not to embarrass his estate and prejudice the interests of his family by spending more money on his houses and the decoration of his grounds than he can afford. If he does, his motive is ostentation, or some other inordinate passion, and therefore worthy of condemnation. That there has been a vast amount of extravagance in this respect in our country within the past thirty years is obvious to every one. The outside show of our towns and cities indicates an amount of wealth certainly four times greater than really exists. A man who is governed by Christian principles, with which common sense and sound reason always coincide in so far as they are competent to judge of what is right, will, of course, avoid all extravagance. More than this, he will not take the lead in splendor and magnificence of buildings and furniture, even if he has wealth enough to do so without extravagance. On the contrary, he will choose to be rather behind than before his compeers in this respect. We are not speaking now of princes and magnates, but of private citizens. There is no fitness, especially in a republic, in making private residences palaces. It is proper to provide for all the conveniences of domestic life. Moreover, architectural beauty in the construction of houses, and taste and elegance in their furniture, give decorum to life, and innocent and refining pleasure to those who behold them, and a means of living to a large class of persons who are especially fitted for a kind of work which demands artistic taste and skill. We cannot draw the line precisely where mere useless and luxurious pomp, show, and splendor begin. We can only say that a man thoroughly imbued with Christian principles and sentiments will be very anxious and careful to keep on the safe side of it, so far as he is able to do so. But whatever degree of costliness and splendor may be suitable or permissible in the residence of any Catholic gentleman, whether he be a plain, private citizen in our democratic republic, or a nobleman, prince, or monarch elsewhere, everything should be made to conform not to a pagan, but a Christian and Catholic, ideal. All that is even bordering on heathen voluptuousness should be rigidly excluded. Works of Catholic art should adorn the walls even of the most public and splendid apartments. Every private room should have its crucifix, its Madonna, its vase of holy water, its prie-dieu, and books of prayer and devotion. An oratory, fitted up with the utmost elegance and costliness that is suitable to the circumstances, should be the shrine and chief ornament of the house. The library and other receptacles for books should be pure of all that is tainted and corrupting, and filled up with everything which Catholic literature can furnish, both in English and in the other languages which the members of the highly distinguished circle we have the honor of addressing are supposed to know. In a word, the elegancies and ornaments of life should be made to minister to intellectual cultivation, to the education of the higher and more refined tastes of the soul; and these should be made all subservient to that which is highest of all—the culture and improvement of the spirit in the knowledge and love of the Supreme Truth and the Infinite Beauty.

Just at the moment of writing down these thoughts, we have come across a beautiful sketch of the family of Count Stolberg, in the pages of a German periodical. It is so appropriate as an illustration that we will postpone any further continuation of our subject, and finish the present article with a translation of the sketch alluded to.[73]

In this sketch of Count Stolberg’s parents and early home, we see the old-fashioned simplicity and piety of the best sort of the ancient Lutheran nobility of Germany. There is a sombre and austere character in the picture, partly belonging to the national temperament, but chiefly due to that shadow of sadness which Protestantism in its more earnest phase casts over the practice of virtue and religion. The count himself, as is well known to all, while preserving all that was good and truly Christian in the principles and habits given him by his early education, cast aside its sectarian prejudices and errors to embrace the Catholic religion. In him, as the model of a perfect Christian gentleman and scholar, to quote again the language of the writer in Der Katholik,

We have been tempted into a digression which will, we trust, not be ungrateful to our readers, and find that we have not been able to bring our series of short articles to a close in the present number, as we had hoped to do. We must therefore resume the same subject after another month, and we trust that our gentle readers, upon their summer excursions, will find time and inclination to listen to one more brief moral instruction.

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In the opinion of their old friends in Boston, the Yorke family had lost something during their sojourn in the wilderness. It was not that they were less charming, less kind, less well-bred, but they were not so orthodox in religion. Mrs. Yorke, it is true, resumed her regular attendance at Dr. Stewart’s church; but her husband seldom accompanied her now, and, it was ascertained, absented himself with her permission.

“I would not have him go for my sake, when he does not wish to go for his own,” she remarked tranquilly.

The time had been when Mrs. Yorke would have been horrified at such a defection, and would have called in the doctors of the church to exhort the backslider. She was evidently growing lax in her religious principles.

Melicent always accompanied her mother, and had the true down-drawn, regulation countenance; but Clara was seldom seen in their pew, and boldly answered, when questioned on the subject, that she sometimes went to the Catholic churches to hear the music. “I go wherever I can hear Wilcox play the organ,” she said. “I never tire listening to him. Others play difficult music with dexterity, and you admire their skill; but he plays the same, and you forget that there is any skill in it. Such bewitching grace! Such laughter running up and down the keys! Such picturesque improvisations! He played last Sunday something that called up to me a scene in Seaton—that bit of meadow on East Street, Edith. There was some sort of musical groundwork, soft and monotonous, with little blossoming chords springing up everywhere, and over it all swam a lovely, meandering melody with the vox humana. When the bell rang, at the Sanctus, he caught the sound, and ran straight up into the stars, as though some waiting angel had flown audibly up to heaven to announce the time of the consecration. It is delightful to hear him. In his graver music, and his choruses, I do not so much distinguish him from others; but he is the only organist I know who gives an idea of the play of the little saints and cherubim in heaven, their dancing, their singing, their swift flights to the earth and back again, and all their exquisite loves, and pranks, and delights—their very worship like the worship of birds and flowers.”

Not a word about doctrines, about the iniquities of Rome, the superstition of Papists, the idolatry of the Mass!

What wonder if these good people, who considered it blasphemy to associate cherubic music with any more rapid motion than that of the semibreve and minim, should think Miss Clara Yorke in a dangerous way? It was hoped, however, that when Dr. Stewart and Melicent were married, his influence would recall her to a sense of duty.

The doctor did try, carefully, though, warned by his wife, and by some sharp, though tacit, rebuffs from Mr. Yorke and Edith. He spoke one day philosophically of the obnoxious Review, as though there were no question of truth, but merely of cleverness in handling certain subjects, and, in a careless à propos, offered Mr. Yorke the loan of certain volumes, which, he privately believed, would triumphantly controvert the controversialist. The doctor had not read any of these Catholic authorities.

“Thank you!” Mr. Yorke replied. He wished to be friendly, and really liked the doctor when he let theology alone. Besides, he was dining there, and could not be disagreeable.

After dinner, Melicent slipped out of the room a few minutes; and when her father went home, she said sweetly, “By the way, papa, I put up those books the doctor spoke of to you, if you like to take them now. They lie on the hall table.”

“Let them lie!” replied Mr. Yorke, with a glance and an emphasis which were not even doubtful.

He might permit Dr. Stewart to exhort him, but he would not be schooled by his own daughter.

There was but little to tell of the family for a while. Mr. Yorke employed a part of his time in attending to Carl’s and Edith’s pecuniary affairs, everything being entrusted to his management. Patrick was his assistant occasionally, and was also Edith’s coachman; for the only carriage they kept belonged to Edith.

Betsey was Mrs. Yorke’s special dependence. She was a sort of housekeeper, as well as nurse. When the lady was ill, no one else could lift, and serve, and watch as Betsey could; and when she was in low spirits, Betsey could scout her vapors very refreshingly, when the others increased them, perhaps, by indulgence. On all her little journeys, Betsey accompanied Mrs. Yorke. Her quaint, country ways were a constant source of amusement, her faithful affection and sturdy good sense a staff to lean on.

Mrs. Yorke had, at the last moment, concluded not to bring the young Pattens to Boston, but had secured them places with the family who had taken her house. “I do not approve of children being separated from their parents,” she had said, “and being placed in such different circumstances that their childish associations seem discordant to them. I know no situation more cruel than that where a child is ashamed of its parents’ poverty and ignorance. Besides, I think it my duty to rescue these poor Catholic girls.”

So Mary and Anne had been brought to Boston, and were now living in a blissful state of affectionate gratitude toward their employers, and rapture with their church.

In Seaton, Catholics were still in an almost Babylonish captivity. Their church had been burned a few weeks after the Yorkes left town; but toward spring they had a priest—not Father Rasle—who came once in two months, and said Mass for them in a private house. He was not molested.

Edith had not forgotten her friends there, and, among other gifts, had sent to Mrs. Patten a small library, chiefly of controversial books. So Boadicea was now investigating the Catholic religion. She examined it severely and critically, through a pair of round-eyed, horn-bowed spectacles, missing not a sentence, nor date, nor word of title-page in those volumes. She meant to show everybody that she was searching the subject in an exhaustive manner, and that the doctors of the church would have to exert themselves to the utmost, and bring all their learning and eloquence to bear, if they wished to convince her. But, underneath this vain pretence, her heart yearned to enter that fold where her lost little one had found refuge, and where she had seen such examples of Christian endurance and charity.

And so, with no event in the family save Melicent’s marriage, the winter and summer passed away, and another winter came. In that winter, Edith had news of an event for which she had been looking and longing ever since Carl went away. His letters had all been addressed to his mother, but in one of them, about Christmas-time, came a note for Edith. He was in Asia, and his letter was dated at Bangkok. He had been across Cambodia, from the Menam to the Mekong, as far as the country of the savage Stiens. “And here, in this wild place, my dear Edith,” he wrote, “I gave up, and was baptized. I had thought, while talking with Monsignor Miche, vicar-apostolic of the mission to Cambodia and Laos, that, as soon as I should reach Europe, I would enter the church. Indeed, while I heard this, an accomplished gentleman, tell of the persecution he had suffered when he was a simple missionary in Cochin-China, the imprisonment, the beating with rods which cut the flesh so that blood followed, the asking for and taking himself the blows intended for a companion too frail to bear more—a story, Edith, which carried my mind back to St. Paul, yet which was told with a boyish gaiety and simplicity—while I heard this, my impulse was to throw myself at his feet, and ask to be baptized by his consecrated hand. But, you know, enthusiasm does not often overcome me; and, since he did not urge me then, the good minute went. When, afterward, he exhorted me, I promised him that I would not long delay. But, when I reached the Stien country, over that miserable route of swamps, cataracts, and forests filled with wild beasts, and found another soldier of Christ living there, in that horrible solitude, sick, suffering, but undismayed, my Teutonic phlegm deserted me. The chief citizens of Father Guilloux’s republic are elephants, tigers, buffaloes, wild boars, the rhinoceros; and the most frequent and intimate visitors at his house of bamboos are scorpions, serpents, and centipedes. And yet, all the complaint this heroic man made was that he had but few converts. The savages are so joined to their idols, he said. Edith, tears ran down my face. My whole heart melted. ‘Father,’ I said, ‘here is a savage convert, if you will take him. I cannot stay one hour longer out of the church which gives birth to such children!’ And so I was baptized. And, my sweet girl, I thought then that, if the time should ever come when I should be so happy as to make Edith my wife, I should like to have the same saintly hands join us. I told Father Guilloux of you, and he sends you his blessing. You see I have heard all about Mr. Rowan.

“And now I turn my face homeward, though my route will not be very direct. Since I am here, where I shall probably never come again, I think it best to carry out my programme. But the intention of it is somewhat different; for I find that a Catholic does not need to travel abroad to find out how men should be taught and governed.

“I am sure that you pray for me constantly; and, believe me, your name has been as constantly uttered by me during the whole length of my wanderings, and is strung, Edith on Edith, like a daisy-chain, two-thirds round the world.”

It was thus Carl first told Edith his wishes; and, from the moment of that reading, she considered herself betrothed to him.

She carried her letter to her aunt, who already knew from her own letter that Carl had entered the church and, placing it open in her hand, knelt before her while she read it.

Mrs. Yorke took the hands that trembled in her lap, and gazed into the fair face uplifted to hers. Edith’s cheeks were like crimson roses, her beautiful eyes shone through tears, her lips were parted by the quickened little breaths that told of her quickened heart-beats.

“There is no mistake this time?” Mrs. Yorke asked, smiling. “You say yes with all your heart?”

“Aunt Amy,” Edith exclaimed, “I’m one yes from head to foot, and the gladdest yes that ever was spoken!”

The second summer after their return to Boston, Clara went down to spend in Seaton with Hester; and, late in July, the ship Edith Yorke, Captain Cary, came sailing up Seaton River. The captain had made a prosperous voyage to India, and, having nothing else to do just now, had come down to Maine for a load of barrel-staves and boxes. To his mind, the fresh pine and ash made a pleasing contrast to his rich Eastern cargo.

Hester and her husband immediately made him at home with them. Their house was not so full but there was room for him, if he could live in the house with six boys.

“You can, perhaps, bear it better, since they are sure to be very fond of you,” Mrs. Hester said. For the boys had clustered about the sailor before he had been ten minutes with them.

Mrs. Cleaveland was wont to say that the masculine element in hers and her mother’s immediate descendants would be rather overpowering were its members not the salt of the earth.

“Poor little mamma was quite alarmed,” she said. “She protested that, if Melicent’s husband or mine called her mother, she would leave the country. So they are careful how they address her. Now, I am made of sterner stuff, and nothing else makes me so proud as to have all these boys call me mother.”

Hester’s boys presented rather an imposing array. There were Major Cleaveland’s eldest, Charles and Henry, college-students of twenty and twenty-two years of age, healthy, honest lads, not very clever, but full of energy and good sense. They were favorites at college, where the renaissance of muscle had destroyed the old empire of hollow chests and pale cheeks, and established as the watchword mens sana in corpore sano. Next to these was Eugene, now a slender youth of fifteen, cleverer than his brothers, but somewhat effeminate in character.

Then came Hester’s three boys, Philip, Carl, and Robert. The last, an infant a year old, had been named by Edith for her father, and he was, consequently, her dearest pet.

“And now my troubles begin all over again,” soliloquized Clara, as she prepared to meet the sailor. “Captain Cary’s sudden flight seemed to cut the Gordian knot; but his coming back makes the affair more double-and-twisted than ever.”

She went to meet him, however, with an air of pleasant ease which betrayed no sign of complicated emotions, and asked of his adventures, and told all that had chanced to them during his absence, in the most friendly manner.

Nor was the sailor less dignified, though the blush that overspread his face when she first appeared showed a momentary agitation.

But this highly proper and decorous demeanor did not last long. Before many days, Mrs. Cleaveland perceived that her boys were not the chief attraction which Captain Cary found in her house. It was plain that he was devoted, heart and soul, to Clara; and it was plain, also, that Clara was fully aware of that devotion, and made her sport of it, so Hester thought.

It was true, the young woman did take a very high hand with her colossal admirer. She snubbed him, ordered him about, made him dance attendance, fetch and carry, and, altogether, tyrannized over him outrageously. And he bore it all with the magnanimous patience of a great Newfoundland dog petting and bearing with the freaks of a captious child. But he grew sober and silent, and lost his smiles day by day.

Sometimes Clara’s mood changed, and there would be little flits of sunshine, momentary gleams of kindness and penitence; but her victim learned that he could not depend on the continuance of such friendliness.

One day she had treated him so much worse than usual that, instead of staying to bear her raillery, he left the room, and went out into the garden where the children were playing. Clara seated herself in the window presently, and watched him, saw him set little Bob-o’-Lincoln, as they called the baby, on his shoulder, so that the child could reach the branch of a tree, saw him gently restrain and persuade Philip from throwing stones at the birds, and talk to Carl and Philip, when they came to blows about something, till they kissed each other. And through it all she read in his face the indication of a heart sad and ill at ease.

A yellow-bird flew over the garden, and dropped a pretty feather down. “Oh! that is what Aunt Clara likes,” cried Philip, running to pick it up. “She puts ’em in her books for marks.”

He carried it to the sailor, who fastened it carefully in his button-hole, posy-wise. Even the children had perceived that what Aunt Clara liked was a matter of interest to their new friend.

A servant came out to call the children in to their early supper; and Captain Cary, catching sight of Clara in the window, went to her with the little feather in his hand. “Philip says you make book-marks of these,” he said, and offered it to her.

There was no sign of coldness or resentment, neither was there any of subservience. It was the patience and affection of a tender and generous heart, and the self-respect of one who is not humbled by the pettishness of another.

Clara dropped her eyes as she took the little offering. “Yes,” she said gently; “and see the passage I am going to mark with it.”

The book she held was Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, open at the dialogue between Æschines and Phocion.

The sailor bent his head and read: “Your generosity is more pathetic than pity or than pain;” and, looking up quickly into her face, to see what she meant, saw her eyes humid.

His face brightened a little, but he said nothing. He was like a traveller among the Alps, who knows that a breath may bring the avalanche upon him.

After a few weeks of this hide-and-seek, Hester was moved to expostulate with her sister, whose conduct had astonished her. For, however gay and reckless Clara might be in talk, exaggerating on one side when she saw people lean too much to the other, and often saying what she did not mean, taking for granted that she was too well known to have her jests taken for earnest—in spite of this liveliness and effervescence of spirits, she had never been guilty of the slightest frivolity in her intercourse with gentlemen. Mrs. Yorke had taught her daughters, or had cherished in them the pure feminine instinct, to treat with careful reserve any man who should show a marked preference for them, unless that preference was fully reciprocated. Hester, therefore, felt herself called on to admonish.

“I must say, Clara, I think you do wrong,” she said. “Any one can see that the captain sets his life by you, and you treat him cruelly.”

“Do you wish me to marry him?” Clara asked in a cold voice.

“Why, no!” exclaimed her sister. “You two are not at all suited to each other. But I would have you treat him kindly.”

“If I treat him kindly, he will think I like him,” Clara said quickly.

“Oh! I don’t mean very kindly, but with calm friendliness,” answered her preceptress.

“Calm friendliness!” repeated the culprit with emphasis. “Oh! the airs that these little married kittens put on! Hester, seat yourself there, and look me in the face, while I lecture you. Fold your hands, and attend to me. Now, allow me to remind you of two or three little facts. Firstly, I am two years older than you. Secondly, I am not a staid married woman with six boys, and I won’t try to act as if I were. Thirdly, you don’t know as much about this business as you think you do. Fourthly, women who have a great facility for being shocked on all occasions are, according to my observation, very likely to be shocking women. Fifthly, if you wish well to Captain Cary, you should wish to have him cease to care about me; and the surest way to attain that end is to treat him just as I am treating him. No man can long desire a vixen for a wife. Sixthly”—and sixthly, Clara began to cry.

Hester, who never could bear to be blamed, had been herself on the point of crying, but, seeing her sister’s tears, concluded not to.

“Why, what is the matter, Clara?” she asked in distress.

“The matter is that I am tired of being criticised,” answered her sister, wiping her eyes. “I am tired of having people tell me what I mean, instead of asking what I mean. I am tired of having people whom I know to be not so good as I am, set themselves up to be better.”

“I never meant to set myself up to be better than you, Clara,” Hester began pitifully. “I—”

“Bless me! Are you here still?” exclaimed Miss Yorke, with a laugh “I’d forgotten you. I was not talking to you at all, you little goose! The truth is, Hester, I am getting as nervous as a witch. You mustn’t bother me.”

Clara did seem to be nervous, and unlike herself.

Having failed in her attempt to admonish her sister, Mrs. Cleaveland took occasion soon after to comfort the sailor.

“You must not mind if Clara seems a little hard sometimes,” she said with gentle kindness. “She does not mean to hurt your feelings. It is only her way. I know she thinks very highly of you.”

“Oh! I understand her pretty well,” he replied gravely. “Clara has a good heart, and she never gives me a blow but she is sorry for it afterward. I don’t blame her. I suppose she sees that I rather took a liking to her”—he blushed up—“and that’s the way she makes me keep my distance. I understand Clara. She suits me.”

He said this with a certain stateliness. Not even Clara’s sister might blame her to him.

“Rather took a liking,” was Captain Cary’s way of expressing the fact that he had surrendered the whole of his honest, generous heart.

There were fires in the woods about Seaton that summer, and, August being very dry, they increased so as to be troublesome. From Major Cleaveland’s house, which stood on the hill-top west of the village, they could see smoke encircling nearly all the horizon by day; and by night flames were visible in every direction but the south, where the sea lay. The air was rank with smoke, cinders came on the wind when it rose, and vegetation turned sooty. Crops were spoiling, farm-houses were threatened, and large quantities of lumber were burned. People looked every day more anxiously for rain, prayers were offered in the churches for it, and still it did not come. The blue of the sky changed to brazen, the silver and gold of moonlight and sunlight became lurid, the springs began to dry up. Sometimes the day would darken with clouds, and they looked up hopefully, and watched to see the saving drops descend. But week followed week, and the refreshing messengers passed by on the other side. More than once, when the sun was in the west, it showed them through that canopy of smoke the dense black peaks and rolling volumes of the thunder-cloud, and at night they could see the beautiful lightning crinkling round the horizon, and hear the music of far-away thunder that came down with pelting rain on distant hills; but still their land was dry, their throats and eyes inflamed, and the fires crept nearer.

Major Cleaveland came home to tea one night with an anxious face. “They are afraid the fire will reach Arnold’s woods to-night,” he said; “and, if it does, Marvin’s house must go, and there is danger that some part of the town may burn. The wind is very high from the northwest.”

Mr. Marvin, Mrs. Yorke’s tenant, had purchased her house and land, and lived there, but the woods still bore their old name of Arnold’s woods.

Later in the evening, while they sat looking out at the baleful glow that grew every moment brighter in the northwest, Charles and Henry Cleaveland came up from the village with later news. Half the men in the town, they said, had gone out beyond Grandfather Yorke’s place to fight fire. The firemen were all there, and Mr. Marvin had his furniture packed ready to send away from the house at a moment’s warning.

“And those poor Pattens!” Clara asked anxiously. “Have they wit enough to save themselves? Has any one thought of them?”

The boys had heard no mention made of the Pattens. They supposed that, if the family had common sense, they had left their house by this time, for every one said that, unless there should be a shower with that wind, the fire was not two hours distant.

Captain Cary leaned from the window, and looked overhead. The only sign of sky was a cluster of stars in the zenith. All else was smoke. “This wind will bring a shower pretty near, at least, before the night is over,” he said. “It isn’t a wind out of a clear sky.”

“I must know about those poor creatures!” Clara exclaimed. “They are so shut in that they would not be able to see which way to go, if the fire should come upon them; and I am afraid no one will think of them. Charley, if you will have the buggy out, I will drive over to Mr. Marvin’s.”

“All right!” says Charley promptly.

Captain Cary had already risen. “I’ve been thinking that I’d go over and help the men a little,” he remarked, with a moderate air, as if he had been in the habit of fighting fire every day of his life for recreation.

“But you will have to change your clothes,” Clara said. “That linen will never do. Now, see which will be dressed first. I must take off this organdie, of course. Hester, take out your watch and count the minutes.”

She flew off merrily, her rose-colored cloud of skirts filling the doorway as she went through, and Captain Cary walked quietly after, one of his strides equal to three of her small steps. In ten minutes they were heard again, opening the doors of their rooms at the same moment, and Clara appeared in a plaided waterproof suit, and a sailor hat set jauntily over the rich black coils of her hair, and laughingly claimed the victory. “We opened our doors at the same instant,” she said; “but I stopped to button my gloves, and he has no gloves on. Never say again that a lady cannot dress as quickly as a gentleman.”

Captain Cary displayed a pair of thick boots, for which he had exchanged his summer shoes. “May I be allowed to see what you have on your feet?” he asked.

She put out a foot clad in the thinnest stocking, and a low kid slipper.

“I appeal!” said the sailor.

“And I give up!” she answered. “Now let me see if you are prepared to go into Gehenna. Are those clothes all wool?”

She made him turn round, tried with her own fingers the texture of his sleeve, ordered him to button his coat tightly at neck and wrists, so that no sparks could get in, and gave him a woollen scarf, which she commanded him to tie about his face at the proper time. Then they went out together, dropping their laughter at the door. For the wind blew in their faces a hard gale, and over the northwestern horizon glowed an angry aurora, and in the zenith still hung that cluster of stars.

They drove over to Mr. Marvin’s almost in silence. Carts partly filled with furniture stood at the avenue-gate, and trunks and packages had been set out on the steps, ready to be taken away. Two little children stood in the door, crying with fear, while a servant tried vainly to pacify them.

“Their mother told me to take them out to the village, to the Seaton House,” she said to Clara. “And they don’t want to go.”

Mrs. Marvin was up in the cupola, watching the progress of the fire.

Clara reassured the little ones, put them and the girl into the buggy with Charles Cleaveland, and sent them back home with him.

“But how are you to get back, Aunt Clara?” he asked.

“Oh! in the same way the people out here do,” she answered. “I shall not be alone. Drive along, Charley. The horse won’t bear this smoke much longer. He begins to dance now.”

As soon as they had gone, she started off through the woods. Captain Cary had already preceded her, thinking that she meant to await him at the house.

Down in the wood-path all was darkness, only a faint reflected light showing where the path lay; but the tree-tops shone as if with sunset, and the sky hung close, in a deep-red canopy. Now and then the light steps of some wild creature, driven from its forest home, flitted by, and its fleet shape was dimly seen for an instant. The voices of men were heard, and the sound of axes, not far away.

When she reached the opening where the Pattens’ house was built, the whole scene burst upon her sight. The open square of ten acres was as light as an illuminated drawing-room. Volumes of red smoke poured over it, dropping cinders, which men and boys ran about trampling out as soon as they fell. Some men were at work digging a trench along the furthest side of the opening, others felled trees, others dragged them away, and others sought for water, and threw it about the barrier they were making. They worked like tigers, for, scarcely two miles distant, the fire was leaping toward them like a courser, or like that flying flame that brought the news from Ilium to Mount Ida.

Clara’s eyes searched the space. “Do you know where the Pattens are?” she asked of some one who stood near, but without looking to see who it was.

“Here we be!” said a piteous voice in reply.

She turned her glance at that, and beheld Joe, with his children clustered about him, standing beside the path. A large bundle lay on the ground by them, containing their valuables, probably, and they were all looking back, with the light in their faces.

She asked him where his wife was.

“She’s there fighting fire among the men,” answered Joe, with an accusing gesture toward the workers. “I told her that it was my place to be there, but she sent me off. She thinks now that I and the children are down at the village; but I am going to stay to protect my wife. It shall never be said that I deserted her in the hour of danger.”

“Have you seen Captain Cary?” was the next question.

“That ’ere big sailor? Lor, yes! He’s been working like ten men. There he is, chopping down a tree.”

Miss Yorke drew her mantle over her head, as a protection against the cinders, and walked forward. The sky in front of her was like the mouth of a furnace from which a fiery blast is rushing, and the tree-trunks in the forest opposite showed a faint glimmer of light beyond them. Some of the workers were retreating at that last sign. The wind caught a burning branch, and bore it almost to her feet. The men stopped to trample it out, then ran. Not more than half their number remained.

“Good heavens!” she cried excitedly, “will he never start?”

As she spoke, a drop of water fell on her face. She looked up, and another and another fell.

On the very frontier of the battleground, midway between the woods that were on fire and those they tried to save, stood a tall maple, its arms outstretched, as if inviting the enemy. Captain Cary was cutting that tree down, swinging the axe rapidly in resounding strokes. A few courageous men still lingered near, working with renewed hope as they felt the scattering drops, and perceived that the wind began to lull. But they gave a cry of alarm, and fled also; for a fiery crest was suddenly lifted above the forest, and the enemy was upon them. No one was left but Captain Cary, and his work was not done. If there was a chance of checking the fire, it was in having that tree down.

It bent slightly under the heavy strokes that smote it, and, as it bent, a long, flickering tongue of flame shot across the space, and curled around its topmost tuft of foliage, and devoured it in a twinkling. Twigs, boughs, branches, all as dry as tinder, kindled instantly, and the whole tree, wrapped in flame, toppled over, and fell.

With a cry of terror, Clara Yorke lifted her face, that she might not see that man perish; and, looking upward, saw the redness vividly threaded with a blinding white light. Then there were a rattle and a rumble, and the rain came down in torrents.

“God be thanked!” said a deep voice near by.

There stood Captain Cary, panting, blackened, scorched, torn, wiping his face on his sleeve, and looking to see how much more effectually fire could be fought by the powers of heaven than by the powers of earth. The flames cowered down from the tree-tops under that tumultuous descent, the brands and cinders died out, hissing, and streams of water pursued the fire that fled along the ground.

“Providence arrived just in time,” observed one of the men who had gathered about him.

The sailor looked at him with a reproving glance. “Providence always does arrive in time,” he said reverently.

Here Mrs. Patten, looking like one of those witches we see in the play of Macbeth, not even lacking the long pole, made her appearance about as mysteriously as those witches do.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “since the hour of peril has gone past, and you must be fatigued by your exertions, I hope that you will take shelter from the rain in my poor mansion. You shall be welcome to such humble hospitality as I can offer you.”

They were nearly in darkness now, having only such light as came from the frequent flashes overhead.

The sailor thanked her politely. “I shall be glad if you can lend me a lantern,” he said; “for I want to get through to Mr. Marvin’s as soon as I can. Somebody is there waiting for me.”

Mrs. Patten led the way, and the others followed. In the semi-darkness, a smaller figure, which Captain Cary had not noticed before, came close to his side, and slipped a hand in his arm; and the “somebody” who should have been waiting for him at Mr. Marvin’s said quietly, “You see, I cannot walk very well without help, for I have lost one of my slippers.”

The sailor’s heart had not given such a jump when the burning tree fell and just missed him, as it gave at the sound of that voice.

“You here!” he exclaimed. “What did you come for?”

“To see the fire,” replied Miss Yorke.

“And you are barefoot?”

“Oh! no,” she said cheerfully. “I have a Lisle-thread stocking, what there is left of it, between my right foot and the sticks, and stones, and briers, and thistles, and—so forth.”

He groaned out, “Oh! you poor little dear!” and seemed on the point of saying something he was afraid to say, hesitated, almost stopped, then stammered, “I suppose it would be impudent to offer to carry you as far as the house, but I hate to have you walk that way.”

“Oh! thank you!” answered Miss Clara. “I could not think, though, of receiving so much assistance from any one but my husband, or the one who is to be my husband.”

The sailor swallowed a great sigh, and they walked on, Clara hobbling fearfully.

“I wish that he were here now, whoever he may be,” she said in a plaintive voice, after a minute. “For, really—”

Her escort said not a word.

In a few minutes they reached the log-house, where Joe and the children had already arrived; and, waiting only for the men to wash the soot from their faces and hands, and to find a shoe which Miss Yorke could keep on her foot, they set out again, with a lantern.

At Mr. Marvin’s they found Major Cleaveland’s carriage awaiting them, and in twenty minutes they were at home, without having spoken a word on the way.

But when they reached there, Clara looked anxiously at her companion. “Can’t I do anything for you?” she asked.

He thanked her gravely. No, he needed nothing. She had better see to herself.

She made a movement to leave the room, and did not go. She lingered, looking to see what was the matter with him. He was in a deplorable condition as to his clothing, his hair was singed, his hands and face blistering in places; but that did not seem to be the trouble. Neither was he angry. The deep thoughtfulness of his expression forbade that supposition.

She chose to say, though, “I hope you are not offended about anything.”

He seemed surprised, and recollected himself. “Why, no!” he answered. “Have I been cross? Excuse me! I was thinking of something.” He looked at her earnestly. “There is something I would like to know—not because I am curious, or want to interfere in any person’s private affairs, but because I think it might settle my mind to know. I’ll tell you what it is, and I hope you’ll believe that I don’t mean any offence, though it may sound impudent. You must know, Miss Clara”—his eyes dropped humbly—“that I took a liking to you at first. Of course I wasn’t such a fool as to expect anything from you; but what you said back there in the woods to-night showed me that I am a greater fool than I thought I could be. Do you want me to stop now?”

“No,” Clara answered gently. “I would like to hear what you have been thinking of, and to say anything I can to quiet your mind.”

“Well,” he went on, “I should feel better to know if you have any man in your eye that you like. It’s none of my business,” he added hastily, “but it might do me good to know the truth.”

Clara blushed to the forehead, but her laughing glance was raised to his face.

“Yes, Captain Cary,” she said, “I have a man in both my eyes whom I like and esteem.”

He was silent a moment. Perhaps his sunburnt face grew a shade paler.

“That’s all I want to know,” he said then. “I thank you for telling me; and I wish you every happiness that earth and heaven can give.”

He bowed, and took a step toward the door.

“Oh! you great stupid!” she cried out in a voice of ringing impatience, and with a laugh that seemed to be on the verge of crying.

The sailor turned at that, and drew himself up with proud indignation. For the first time his eyes flashed on her, and she saw how lofty he could be in self-assertion.

“Miss Yorke,” he said, “I’m but a rough man, not learned nor polite enough to be the husband of an accomplished lady like you; but I’m an honest man, and I won’t be scorned by any woman. My love may not be fit for your taking, but it’s too good for your mocking. I know what I am worth!”

“You do not!” she exclaimed. “You don’t know anything about it!”

He looked severely down upon her, but said nothing.

“I didn’t mean to mock you, nor treat you with any disrespect,” she said. “You misunderstand me, Captain Cary.”

His face softened. “I suppose I do,” he replied. “You have a laughing way, but I know you don’t mean any harm. Forget my rough talk, and forget all I have said to you to-night.”

He went toward the door again.

“I shall not forget it,” she said. “I shall never forget that one of the best of men liked me, yet was capable of deserting me because I would not offer myself to him.”

He looked round as if he thought she had lost her senses. “Why, Miss Clara, what do you mean?”

She clasped her hands, and raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Did you ever,” she asked, addressing, apparently, a wreath of stucco faces there—“did you ever witness such obtuseness?”

He stared at her a moment, standing; then he sat down, and continued looking at her intently.

“And did you ever witness such inconsistency?” she continued, still to the stucco faces. “He pretends to like me, and in the same breath tells me that he won’t have me—as if I had asked him to!”

“Miss Clara!”

She glanced at him disdainfully, and returned to her communication with the ceiling. “I shall not, however, break my heart for him.”

Over the sailor’s weather-beaten face a soft, uncertain light was stealing, as you may sometimes see the morning light steal over the face of a rugged bluff, covering it with beauty.

“Clara,” he said—she had heard him speak to the little ones in that low voice—“do you mean to say that you will marry me?”

“Captain Cary,” she replied, with an expression of excellent candor and good sense, “how am I to marry a man who won’t ask me?”

Then Captain Cary asked her.

A week after that she was at home with her family; and the first day, after dinner was over, when they sat quietly alone, she told her story to her father and mother.

They could scarcely believe her in earnest, and fifteen minutes were taken up with exclamations and expressions of incredulity. Clara received it all with patience, and, at length, succeeded in convincing her parents that, with their consent, she meant to become Miss Clara Cary, “which will be the first alliteration I ever purposely committed,” she said.

It happens too frequently that persons of an original turn of mind are less understood by their familiar associates, and even by their own families, than by strangers, and that those to whom they naturally look for appreciation give it only when the example is set them from abroad.

With all their affection for her, Clara’s parents often mistook her, because they took for granted that they knew her perfectly, and, therefore, never paused to examine. The consciousness of this involuntary injustice on their part had increased her natural impatience, and made her disinclined to explain herself; and, with a perversity for which, they were half to blame, she sometimes said what they evidently expected her to say, rather than what she meant. It was not surprising, therefore, that the first reasons she gave for her choice were superficial ones.

She liked brave, manly men, she said; and Captain Cary would give her just that life of adventure which she would most delight in. With him, that pretty old myth of women looking to men for protection in danger would be realized.

“Why, papa,” she said, “when I go out with any of the nice young men I know, if a dog barks, or a cow shakes her head at us, my escort is more frightened than I am. I shall call the captain Jason, and myself Medea—with a difference. There will be no Creusa. We will go after the golden fleece, and bring it home to put under little mamma’s feet. We will gather something for you in every sea, and from under every sky,

‘As we sail, as we sail.’”

Mr. and Mrs. Yorke neglected to observe the one significant sentence: “There will be no Creusa.” They did not object to the sailor on account of his character or wealth, they said. They did not even object because they would be so much separated from their daughter, though that would be a grief to them; but they thought the two incongruous in tastes and habits, and feared that Clara was mistaking that for a serious and lasting affection which was only a temporary artistic enthusiasm for a unique specimen of mankind.

“I do not choose Captain Cary because he is rough, as you call it, but in spite of his roughness,” Clara said. “Our tastes are not as dissimilar as you imagine, though. He has great delicacy of feeling and perception, and he is as true a gentleman as I ever knew. I have always looked more to the spirit than the letter, and I can perceive and admire a good mind and heart in spite of some outward defects. I trust and believe in him entirely. If he is not honest, then no one is. He is magnanimous and truthful. I don’t care if he does not know Latin and Greek. One may know too much of them. He pretends to nothing, and he never appears ignorant. I’m not ashamed of him.”

“I did not know you were so much in earnest, Clara,” her father said, looking at her with a smile of approval. “If you are really satisfied with him, I have not a word to say against your marrying him. Only I thought you would prefer a person who was more literary and enthusiastic. Captain Cary is rather taciturn, and very sober.”

“But he can be roused,” Clara replied with animation; “and when he is, it is something lyric. You remember, papa, Villemain’s definition of the true ode, as distinguished from the conventional one: ‘L’émotion d’une âme ébranlée et frémissante comme les cordes d’une lyre.’ It is no little factious stir at every touch, and snapping at a blow, but ‘smitten and vibrating’ grandly on great occasions.”

Mrs. Yorke gave a little sigh of expiring opposition. “One of my chief objections,” she said, “was that it would look so bizarre. If you do not care for that, then it is nothing.”

“Mamma,” Clara replied, “you would be astonished to know how little thought I give to the opinions of the Rose-pinks and Priscillas and pasteboard highnesses.”

And so the matter was tacitly settled.

But later, when Mr. and Mrs. Yorke sat together in the falling twilight, Clara came in softly behind them, pushed a footstool between their chairs, and sat there, holding a hand of each.

“Papa, mamma,” she said, “I want you to be satisfied that I am doing nothing without thought, and that I have chosen wisely. I tell you truly, Captain Cary is the only Protestant gentleman I know whom I can marry, and would not be afraid to marry. Look how the world is going. See what a frightful change has come over Boston since we can remember. Why, I have heard stories of some of our old acquaintances, people whom we thought respectable, which have sickened me. Your other two daughters have married good men, whom they can trust; but they are old-fashioned men, old enough to be their wives’ fathers instead of husbands. But of that class of men from whom you would think I might properly choose, would you dare to have me choose? I would not dare. Marriage has no longer any sacredness, except among Catholics. Other men desert or divorce their wives for nothing, and do the most horrible things. I should think that one-half the Protestant married ladies would look on their husbands with terror and distrust; and I wonder how any girl dares to marry. The weddings I’ve seen lately, instead of seeming happy occasions to me, have seemed most sad and painful. I heard a lady say this summer that in fifty years, or less, there would be no marriage outside the Catholic Church.”

“Charles, it is but too true,” the mother said. “I am terrified when I think of what is so evidently coming. It was the thought of this which reconciled me to Carl’s being a Catholic.”

“I wish we were all Catholics!” Clara exclaimed. “Not that I know or think much of theology; but it is better to believe too much than too little, and they are on the safe side. If we were wrecked, and our ship going to pieces, we would be glad of any vessel to pick us up. We wouldn’t quarrel with the cut of her jib.”

Mr. Yorke smiled. “See how she already draws her illustrations from the sea!” he said, and passed over her wish. “Well, Amy, she has proved herself a sensible girl, has she not? and deserves that we not only consent, but applaud.”

The mother’s answer was a silent embrace.

If the thought of either parent glanced with a momentary longing toward that strong inviolate church, against which the fiercest powers of hell beat in vain, which seems now to loom an ark indeed, while the rising waves of sin are submerging all beside, they said nothing.

Of the shock Melicent felt on learning of this engagement, we do not speak. Edith received the news with delight.

Edith had also other sources of pleasure. She had good news from Seaton. Mass was said there now once a fortnight, without any disturbance; and Mrs. Patten, with all her family, had been baptized. After that fire, which had so nearly swept away their home, and had put their lives in peril, the poor woman hesitated no longer. She had vowed that night, in the midst of her terror, that, if her life was spared, she would ask to be admitted to the church the first time the priest came again; and she kept her vow. Edith carefully read the long letter written to her descriptive of the occasion, and, through all its absurdities, rejoiced to see the spirit of a sincere faith and obedience.

This baptism excited a good deal of comment in Seaton. It was said that Boadicea had taken a stick to her husband to assist his conversion, and that, at the beginning, poor Joe was no more a Catholic than Sganarelle the wood-cutter was a doctor; but, however that may have been, he certainly became afterward a most exemplary Catholic, as far as he went. And it is likely that He who sees through all outward forms, and scorns only the scorner, received these humble penitents with a welcome as fatherly as that accorded to any illustrious convert.

Through Father John, Edith had frequent news of her childhood’s friend, and all she heard was such as to fill her with contentment. He did not wish to hold direct communication with the world, but to pursue his studies with but two thoughts in his mind—a God to serve and adore, and a world full of sinners to save for God’s sake.

Mrs. Rowan-Williams, seeing that her son was not despised and cast down, but rather elevated higher, and being convinced that, in some way she could not comprehend, he was entirely satisfied and happy, took comfort. She could not, however, any longer attend on a church where his belief and profession might at any time be traduced, and gradually, from staying at home on Sundays, began to go to his church, to listen with curiosity, then with interest, then with growing admiration, and, at last, to feel happy and at home there.

And in the spring, Carl was coming home.

But not in idle wishing was the winter passed. There was work, lightened by joyful anticipations, work persevered in in spite of doubts and fears, and work dear and joyful for its own sake. And thus the spring was earned.

The snows melted, the robins returned, tiny green leaves appeared, and there came a day when they sat with their windows open. Every one who passed by looked smiling; no one was sad that day, it seemed, so delightful is the coming of spring. Up-stairs Clara went about from room to room, singing snatches from a hymn to joy. Mrs. Yorke and Edith, sewing and talking in the parlor below, smiled to each other as they heard her.

A letter had come from Clara’s Jason that morning. He was at Havana when he wrote, and about sailing for England. In the fall he would return to America, and then he and his lady were to sail in search of the golden fleece.

The aunt and niece spoke softly together of her hopes and their own, of their poor, of their friends, of the robins that twittered just outside the windows, of the rose-vines that were so forward, of the rainbows of crocuses in the yard, of the unexpected help they had received in some benevolent projects of their own.

“People are so much better than one thinks,” Edith said. “It is delightful how much goodness there is, and how kind almost any one will be if approached in the right way. I have great hopes of the world. There’s nothing like trying to be a saint one’s self. If we should all try, there wouldn’t be a sinner on earth. If I should try, perhaps some one else would, and then, may be, some other person would be excited to try, and so it would go on round the world. It seems to me that cheerfulness, and kindness, and a helping hand, and a looking at the bright side, and a determination to find a bright side, and, altogether, a persistent shining, is what is wanted. Light is good, and joy is good, and pain is good only because it may be the birth of delight. Great is gladness, if the Lord is behind it!”

sang Clara, in the room above; then stopped, with a little outcry.

The two below glanced through the window, and saw a gentleman in the street, near their steps. He walked slowly, looking straight on, so that they saw his profile. They dropped their work, and gazed at him steadily. Mrs. Yorke put her hand to her heart, Edith held her breath, and two red, red roses bloomed in her cheeks. Up-stairs, Clara made not a sound.

This gentleman’s step was light and firm, his figure graceful and manly, his face sunburnt, and the bright spring sunshine found golden lights in his hair and long moustache.

At the step he paused, then turned and came up, rapidly now, taking off his hat, and looking eagerly, since he had ventured to look at all.

Clara came flying down the stairs, and reached the parlor-door, with her arms twined around the new-comer, leading him in triumph. Mrs. Yorke, without rising from her chair, stretched her hands out to her son.

“O Lord! let me never forget thee!” sighed Edith, waiting her turn. “Let me never forget thee!”

It is spring again, and ten years have passed since that sunny April day when we saw Carl Yorke come home from his travels—ten years lacking a month, for it is early in March. The afternoon is as still as any afternoon can be in a city. Not a twig trembles on the bare trees, not a spray swings on the dry vines that drape all the balcony railing. The sky is of a uniform gray, and so thick that it seems to contain a deluge of snow. But the day is not a gloomy one. The shadow seems protecting and tender, as when the small birds are covered in the nest beneath the downy breast of the mother-bird.

Standing on the pavement in front of Mrs. Yorke’s drawing-room windows, one can catch glimpses of warmer color within, bright curtains and cushions, and the soft crimson glow that comes from an open fire.

A tall, broad-shouldered man comes to one of these windows, nearly filling it, and looks out at the sky. He has a long beard streaked with gray, and thick black hair streaked with gray is pushed back from his sober, sunburnt face. While he makes his observations on the weather, a slight figure of a woman comes to his side, drawing more closely about her a white Shetland shawl, and giving a dainty little shiver. She has a delicate face, and the hair that shows under the black lace scarf she wears is a bright bronze, mingled with silver.

“Then you do not think we shall have a great storm, Rudolf,” she says, with another shiver. Mrs. Amy Yorke likes warmth and warm colors, and only to see such a day chills her.

“No, dear!” (Captain Cary always calls his mother-in-law “dear,” being forbidden on his peril to call her mother). “This great parade of getting up a storm seldom amounts to much. When it’s going to storm, it storms, and doesn’t stop to threaten. We may have a little flurry, though, but it will be fair weather to-morrow.”

“I do not care on our account,” Mrs. Yorke says. “We are all very happy and comfortable, thank God! but I pity the poor.”

They retire, and presently another gentleman approaches the window, and looks out. At first glance, one might think that Mr. Yorke has not changed in ten years. The hair is scarcely more gray, the face scarcely more wrinkled. But the second glance detects a certain pallor of age, which has displaced the former bilious tint. A young woman, dressed in gay, outlandish-looking silk, comes to his side. A profusion of black curls are gathered back from her brunette face, and fastened with a garnet chain, and a band of large garnets, en cabochon, is clasped round her neck.

“Papa,” she says, “what do you see overhead?”

“Clouds,” replies Mr. Yorke.

She gives his arm a little squeeze. “Oh! but I don’t mean that.”

“What! you are playing Polonius to me?” asks Mr. Yorke. “Well, it is neither like a camel, nor a weasel, nor a whale; it is a tent.”

“Oh! papa!” cries Clara, “put on your spectacles, your second-sighted ones. You have no eyes at all. In that sky I see crops for the fields, billows of grass, heaps of leaves for the trees, foaming torrents for all the brook-channels, and no end of violets, dandelions, buttercups, and ‘other articles too numerous to mention.’”

Both turn their heads, with an affectionate smile, as Mr. Yorke’s youngest daughter takes his other arm, and leans against his shoulder.

Hester’s dress is black. Not a tinge of color nor an ornament breaks the sombre monotony of her costume. But a white ruche at the throat and wrists shows that her widow’s weeds have been long worn, and the smile on her lips, though plaintive, is not without a dawn of returning contentment. It is now three years since Hester took her children, and came back to live with her father and mother.

Why should we stand on the pavement? Open, sesame! We enter. The whole family are gathered, and it is a gala-time; for Captain Cary and his wife have just returned from their last voyage, and are going to settle down in a home with foundations more stable than green, wind-rolled waves; and, a greater event still, Carl and his wife have just arrived from a four-years’ sojourn abroad. The family are all very proud of Carl—not because he has represented his country at a foreign court, not even because he has done so with singular ability, but because he has been so truly just and honorable as to have offended prejudiced partisans on both sides, and won the applause of the few who believe that a man need not blush to be called a traitor to his party, so long as he is true to God.

“I am glad to see you with the minority, sir,” Mr. Yorke had said in welcoming him home; “and to see that you can stand there quietly, as well as firmly. I am tired of splutter.”

“I hope, sir,” Carl replied, smiling, “that you would not object to my being with the majority, if the majority were right.”

Mr. Yorke shrugged his shoulders, and made one of his favorite quotations: “Il y a à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue, est une sottise, car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre.”

But, though forced to resign his position, Carl is not without a vocation. He speaks and writes; and, such is the charm of his tongue and pen, persons most severely castigated by them listen and read with a sort of pleasure. If one must be dissected, there is surely a certain satisfaction in finding the hand skilful and the scalpel bright.

There is, indeed, danger that Carl might be too sharp, were it not for his wife. But Edith is his first reader, and often, through her influence, a sentence is softened, a sarcasm struck out.

“Love is stronger than hate,” she would say. “You have done only half the good you might do, if, in convincing a man’s reason, you at the same time inflame his will against you. You may make him hate a truth of which he was before ignorant.”

This is one of the couples which rests the heart to see in this world of discordant matches. Every taste and instinct is so in harmony that all the smaller business of life goes on without that jar which, in so many lives, makes a wrangle of pettinesses, and withdraws the attention from all that is noble. And, in higher characteristics, there is only that difference which enables each one to correct the mistakes of the other.

Edith Yorke, at thirty-one, has not yet lost, she probably never will lose, the simple earnestness of her childhood. It is the same bud blossomed, and so fresh and lovely is she, they call her the Rose of Yorke. She was much admired abroad. No other lady had combined so sweet a stateliness, and such wit, with incorruptible piety.

“I think,” she said, “that the reason why, while I kept my place in society, I never once yielded to any pernicious dissipation or extravagance, was because I was constantly afraid that I should.”

The evening shuts in, the curtains are drawn, and the room is in a glow. The wind has risen suddenly, and the snow is coming down, beating sharply with its tiny lances on the window-panes. But the family only feel more keenly the delight of being all together and at home.

“How cosy it is!” exclaims Clara, with a sigh of immense content, as she hears the doors and windows rattle. “One feels so comfortable in-doors when one knows that everybody out-doors is uncomfortable.”

Mrs. Yorke, seated in her own especial chair, with Captain Cary beside her, talks over housekeeping affairs with him, commends his wish to live in the suburbs instead of the city, and does not doubt that he will find fanning a delightful occupation.

Mrs. Yorke cannot now be made to acknowledge that she ever objected to the sailor as a son-in-law. “Why, what should we do without him?” she asks. “We should feel quite lost without this dear Hercules of ours.”

Somewhat withdrawn, at one side, Carl is talking to Hester about her boys. He advises her to send them to a private Catholic school, and she has almost consented. She will ultimately consent. Opposite them, Edith and Melicent talk together. Doctor Stewart is kept at home by a rheumatism, which will not allow him to brave March storms, and no one very much regrets his absence, least of all the doctor himself. His efforts to prevent the whole family from toppling over into Catholicism have not been agreeable to them nor to him, and in their intercourse they feel a constant restraint. But Melicent is highly pleased by the cordial interest with which Edith has inquired concerning all her husband’s symptoms, and, wishing to say something complimentary in return, observes, “I am charmed with your little girl. She will be a great belle some day.”

“God forbid!” Edith exclaimed involuntarily.

Melicent recollected herself. “Yes, to be sure, it is a position full of temptations. Still, she cannot help being admired.”

Edith’s face was very serious. “It is my dearest hope that my Eugénie may be a religious,” she said, with a soft suffusion of her eyes. “She would be such a lovely offering! Of course, I cannot tell what the will of God may be; but if it should be this, I shall be happy.”

“But how would Carl like it?” Melicent asked.

“When I first mentioned it to him, he recoiled,” was the answer. “But when he thought more of it, he became reconciled, and now he desires it as much as I do. We both feel that we would like to present unspotted to God that which is to us most sweet and precious. It may be the partial fondness of parents for their only child, but it seems to us that she is too beautiful for anything else.”

There was a chorus of children’s voices from the next room, where Betsey Bates and a French bonne were entertaining the little ones, and presently the door was opened, and a little boy came in, went to Mrs. Amy Yorke, and leaned on her lap. This child’s face told at once who he was. Brown, ruddy, black-eyed, with thick black hair which constantly fell over his forehead, gay and daring was this four-year-old sailor. He was ocean-born and ocean-bred, he had played with babes of all nations, chattered childish words in many a tongue, and was at home everywhere. His mother privately called him Captain Kidd; and his father had often sung to him the ballad of that wicked sailor, when they sat on deck as their ship cleaved the wave, and the fresh breeze sang in the rigging.

But, when night came on, there was one song that the child always asked for, and his mother always sang before he slept. Many a distant sea had heard that tender evening hymn to the Virgin, Ave Sanctissima, which the mother sang in a tremulous voice, mindful of home, and of the many dangers in her path. And, after a while, it became a tacit understanding, that, when at evening he saw the boy in his mother’s arms, with his blooming cheek laid close to hers, and their black locks flowing indistinguishably together, Captain Cary should come and stand, with bared head, beside the two, and listen as though to a prayer while the hymn was sung. Gradually his prejudices had worn away; and when he saw that mother and son, so dear to him, and so inseparable, he recognized the sacred and indissoluble union of the Divine Son with his Immaculate Mother. “Besides,” the sailor reasoned in his own mind, “there must be something more than commonly good in that religion which claims such devotion from Dick Rowan and Edith Yorke, and which my Clara thinks as good as any, and a little better.”

“I am glad that we are going to have a real home for the child, and make a citizen of him,” his father said, as the boy went slowly toward the door again. “Clara and I have been a little too easy with him, I am afraid.”

“It is odd,” Mrs. Yorke remarked, “that of my daughters, Hester, the softest, should be quite strict with her children, while Clara, whom I should have thought would need a warning not to be so, is almost too indulgent.”

“I could have told you that,” Captain Cary answered, glancing across the room to where his wife talked with her father. “Clara’s heart melts only too readily, I always knew. I never mistook her disposition. And, if she is literary, she can darn stockings the most neatly, and make a room look prettier, and get up the best little supper of any woman I know.”

Charlie Cary, loitering toward the door, had scarcely reached it, when it was pushed open, and—was it a human child, or a fairy, who entered, and flitted across the room into Edith Yorke’s arms? A little girl of five years, softly white and dainty, golden-haired and hazel-eyed, and so exquisite in shape that one examined her with delight. Her motions were full of a captivating grace, her voice silvery-fine. She was vowed to the Virgin, and wore only white and blue.

Charlie stopped inside the door to stare at her. He always did follow her about, and watch her, as though she were some strange, rare bird. He seldom volunteered to speak to her, and touched her with timid care, like something he feared to break.

Carl Yorke crossed the room, and leaned on the back of his wife’s chair. One could not see a more perfect group.

Edith bent over the child, her braids of shadowed gold touching the pure gold ringlets. “What does mamma’s little girl want?” she asked.

The child, smilingly aware that all eyes were upon her, but too much accustomed to love to be abashed by their gaze, lisped out her question: “Isn’t Philip, and Charlie, and all of ’em got guardian-angels?”

“Yes, my love!” answered Edith.

“There!” cried the child, with a glance of sparkling triumph at Charlie.

She ran to him, and put her white arms around his neck in a hug of congratulation, then, as light as air, whisked herself behind him.

“You’s got an angel, and he stands just so, and tells you what to do,” she said.

She stood on tiptoe, showing a pink and white face beside his, and two tiny hands on his shoulder. Then, with a bewitching laugh, she ended her pantomime, and ran back to her mother.

Charlie did not take it well. “I haven’t got any old angel,” he said doggedly. “My mother tells me where to go, and Ave Sanctissima takes care of us nights.”

A vivid red shot across Clara’s face as she drew the boy to her. “It is true, Charlie, and I will tell you all about it soon,” she said.

Should Edith’s child, should any other mother’s child, go guarded by angels, and upheld by a religious trust, and her son be like a heathen? All she had taught him had been such as pleased her fancy only. Sanctissima had been but a beautiful object to paint and sing, not a real being to whom honor was due. “I’ll have Father Rasle baptize this child before he is a week older!” she resolved.

Edith held out her hand to the boy, and looked at him with a beaming smile. “Come, darling, and tell me about Sanctissima,” she said.

“I’ve no objection,” Captain Cary said later that night, when his wife asked his permission to have their child baptized by a priest. “But you needn’t fret, Clara, at the boy’s speaking so. It is more natural that a little yellow-haired girl should take to religion, than that a great bouncing boy should.”

Father Rasle, it should be said, was at this time the pastor of a city church.

This little scene ended, “I am glad to see, Clara,” her father said, “that in what you write lately, you employ less pure color for your men and women, and use secondaries and tertiaries more. There is, of course, a vast difference between the good and bad; but in this life, whatever they may become in the next, all are human.”

“And yet,” she replied, “I am sometimes criticised for putting spots on the sun, and giving an amiable trait to my villain. The pretext for the criticism is that perfect examples and perfect warnings are wanted. I think, however, that the spots on the sun give most offence.

‘And if Jove err, who dare say Jove doth wrong?’”

“Nevertheless, stick to your tertiaries,” Mr. Yorke said, with a decided nod. “The lump of glass that, seeing a flaw in the diamond, went and smashed itself all to pieces, would have smashed itself to pieces if it had not seen the flaw in the diamond. It merely used that as a pretext for what it was predetermined to do. It is one thing to admire an ideal character, and another thing to imitate it; and many a lazy and insincere moralist would be delighted to have you paint all your good characters so extremely good that he could at once prove his piety by applauding, and his modesty by not striving to emulate. There are, of course, exceptions, dear souls who love to look at unadulterated goodness; but they are so charitable they will forgive you the spots on the sun, and so truthful they will not require you to be false in order to please them. My belief is that those persons do great good whose occasional missteps excite our courage to imitate the virtues by which they retrieve themselves. There are other stronger beings, who are outwardly without a fault; but they are exceptional, about in the proportion of salt to your porridge. Suppose that I were advised to go to the top of a high mountain. ‘I cannot go,’ I say. My mentor points to a man who stands on the summit. ‘Perhaps he was born there,’ I reply. ‘Not so!’ says mentor. ‘He climbed: see the steps!’ ‘But,’ I still object, ‘he must be so much stronger than I am. I should fall before I were half-way up.’ ‘He was as weak as or weaker than you,’ says my adviser; ‘and he fell after a dozen steps, and fell again and again; yet, there he is!’ Don’t you see that if anything would take me up the mountain-top, that would? No, Clara, I think that, in the long run, it’s best to tell the truth. There may be ignorant souls who will thrive for a while on pretence; but let them once find out that you have once pretended, no matter how good the motive, and, from their very ignorance, they will never be able to trust you again. If you want to be politic, honesty is the best policy.”

“If people wouldn’t classify one so!” sighed the young woman pathetically. “The science and order that are abroad appall me. You cannot say nor do the smallest thing, but instantly somebody pounces on you, and pins a label on your back before you can take breath. One would think that we were dried specimens. Say that you sometimes fancy your departed friends may hear you speak, you are without delay set down as a spiritist, a table-tipper, a planchette-roller, a spirit-seer, and everything that follows; say that you think Catholics, and even priests, have some little chance of being saved, presto! you are a Papist, you are a Jesuit, you are going to poison Protestants, you want the Pope to be president of the United States, you are going to muzzle the press, shut up the public schools, destroy the Bible, put an end to free speech, etc.; send Bridget to get your husband’s slippers, instead of going after them yourself, and oh! you woman’s-rights woman, you! How you are going to abuse your husband! How you are going to let him eat cold dinners, wear ragged stockings, and come to grief generally! Labelled you must be, if you put your nose above the earth. And how your dear friends like to pin on the little pieces of paper, and give you a pat at the same time, so that the pin shall prick! There’s Miss Minerva, who wants to pick me to pieces, and, at the same time, keep up a reputation for charity, goes round telling everybody, and me among them, that I am impressionable, using the word in a tone that makes it mean unprincipled, of no stability, frivolous, inconstant; and that, because I have eyes and a heart, I was delighted to find in a newspaper, not long ago, a little extract which I am going to send her: ‘A strong mind is more easily impressed than a weak one; you shall not as easily convince a fool that you are a philosopher, as a philosopher that you are a fool.’ Papa, I insist on being eclectic!”

“Take breath, my daughter, take breath!” said Mr. Yorke apprehensively.

Mrs. Clara took breath, and switched the last part of the conversation off the track. “A propos of colors!” she said. “You remember I always liked to find out the relations of things, and had the idea of a trinity in everything, before I heard of Delsarte. And, by the way, I do not think that the theory is original with him. It seems to me I have heard it before. You know how he does; groups everything in threes, the parts of which are co-existent, co-efficient, and co-necessary, and, as an instance, gives space, motion, and time, neither of which can be computed without the aid of the other two. See how I figure my Trinity with the three colors: the color which signifies the Father is blue, the contemplative color, the color of infinite space in which the creation floats, the intellectual color, the color of faith; the ensign of the Son is red, which is sacrifice and love; yellow is for the Holy Spirit, and is the illuminating color. It is also the color chosen by the Pope, who is the human voice of the Holy Spirit. United, these three form white, which is the seal of the Trinity. White is rest, peace, and bliss.”

“You are, then, a Catholic!” Mr. Yorke said, looking with keen eyes into his daughter’s face.

She blushed, and was embarrassed. “Æsthetically, papa!”

He dropped his eyes, and a slight frown settled on his forehead.

“Papa,” she said earnestly, “there is nothing else!”

He smiled, but said nothing.

“Would you be displeased if I should be one in earnest?” she asked.

“I should be glad!” her father replied, and rose abruptly to meet Melicent, who was going home.

The others withdrew, leaving Mr. and Mrs. Yorke with Edith and Carl. They gathered closely together before the fire, the parents sitting between their children, and, with hand clasped in hand, talked lovingly and seriously far into the night.

When they parted, all had shed tears, but they were not tears of sorrow.

“Good-night, my dear parents,” Edith said, embracing them. “You have made me happy for all my life, and yourselves happy for all eternity. I do not wonder that you find it hard to take such a step, and renounce before the world the religion which you have professed all your lives. You are not cowards; you have been willing to suffer that Catholics might have their rights; but, you know, ‘obedience is better than sacrifice.’”

“Perhaps it is a whim,” Mrs. Yorke said; “but I would like to be baptized by that dear young man I used to love so, Mr. Rowan.”

“Young man!” Carl said, smiling. “He and I are about the same age, and I am forty-three.”

“Forty-three!” echoed his mother in surprise. “And I am over sixty! Charles, we are entering on our service at the eleventh hour. We will not wait for Mr. Rowan. Let us not delay beyond to-morrow.”

“Good-night, children!” said Mr. Yorke. “Yes, Amy.”

The next day was Sunday, and Carl and Edith went to High Mass. Captain Cary’s “flurry” had passed with the night, and not a cloud was to be seen. Little heaps and drifts of snow hid under fences and trees, but the pavement was wind-swept. The sun shone joyously, and, not far from it, a waning moon dissolved in its light.

There was the dear old church again, and, just going in under the portal, Mrs. Rowan-Williams. She took holy water, and bowed before entering her pew. The same hands were on the organ-keys, the same soprano, bright as a sunbeam, broke through the cloud of bass and alto, the same slow wreath of white-robed boys curled silently, like incense, about the sanctuary, there were the same faces at the altar. It was like coming home again.

But, before the Veni Creator, who was this coming from the sacristy, palm to palm, draped in folds of spotless whiteness, and showing, even now, through his measured steps, a familiar swing and freedom? The chestnut hair, cut short, exposed the forehead, the face was slightly thin, but bright and healthy.

The glance this priest cast over the congregation, as he went toward the pulpit, was peculiar. It took in the number of his hearers, but you would say that he saw their souls, not their bodies. So many waiting souls to whom he was to carry a message. Self so completely annihilated that even humility was forgotten, he went on, wrapped in calm obedience, to speak the word that was given him.

The subject of the sermon was the uses of pain; the argument, that all real good comes through pain. The speaker’s voice was so clear and strong that it was heard without effort on his part or the listener’s, his tone was conversational, and his illustrations came naturally from his old sea-life.

Real confidence in God can be shown, he said, only when we are blind, and cannot see how our sufferings are to lead to any good end. Then trust is possible, is deserving, is saving. Then we learn quickly the lesson that God would teach us, and take a higher place. Our Master does not put back any soul. If it remain long in the region of trouble, it must be through its own stubbornness.

“We all suffer too much, because we afflict ourselves in trying to escape pain, when we cannot escape it. The chalice of this bitter sacrament is never empty, and never set aside. Friends and foes alike give it into our hands, our dearest and kindest press it to our lips, unaware, or in their own despite; the messenger of God presents it. It is useless to struggle, for we cannot escape; it is foolish to struggle; for in the bottom of that cup of bitterness is a heavenly draught of sweetness.

“Lessons are on every side, the whole creation preaches to us. Even the building of a ship is like the building of a saint. The pine and the oak grow in the forest, they grow in rain and sunshine, they swing their branches in the wind, and rock the birds to rest. What is their end? To grow, and then to decay, and feed the roots of succeeding trees with their crumbling remains. They grow only to decay, and wish no better, and know no better, and, if better come, it must come from some outside, wiser will.

“When the woodman appears, he is an object of terror, fancy, the Manichee would tell you. At the blows of the axe, the whole tree shivers, it trembles in every leaf, it falls with a groan. But its tortures are not ended. The saw, the plane, the shave, the auger, the adze, do each their work; and the mourning tree says, ‘I was made to be tormented. I am covered with ruin, and good shall no more come to me.’ Ah, then, how happy seem the far-away, peaceful woods! how dear the little nests that have been clipped off, and the intertwining branches of neighboring trees!

“But we are not like the tree. We know what hand lays us low, and clips off the unruly wishes, the foolish, twittering hopes.

“Look at the home of the iron! It lies in darkness and mystery underground, and hears the small streams trickle down or bubble up. It knows and wishes no better. The miner comes with his pick, the dark ore is dazzled with alien sunshine, is tortured by fire. In its agony it becomes more terrible than fire, and presses and glows to destroy. It replies with sparks to the blows of the hammer.

“Oh! for the cool dark, the whispering stream, the moveless rock and earth! Its pain is to no end but that it may suffer, and ruin has come.

“But we are not like the senseless iron. We know what Divine Miner digs us out of our abasement, shows us the light of truth, and moulds us into shape.

“At last the ship is built; its different elements are united into one harmonious being; and then it fancies that it understands all. It exults over the dull tree standing with its roots in earth, over the brutish ore buried in the darkness. It stands in its stocks, and grows in beauty, looks at the shining river that flows and sings for ever, and sees the children play, and the days go by.

“But the end is not yet. Some summer morning the workmen come to strike its props away. The tide comes up, and its song is the song of the siren; a crowd gathers to mock at its ruin. It was raised, then, only to be more cruelly cast down. One support after another is struck away, prop after prop falls. The ship shudders, it has learnt nothing from its lesson, it moans, it slips slowly, then rapidly, then it plunges—whither? Into annihilation? No! into its own proper element at last, into the bosom of the deep. The tides bear it up, the winds of heaven wing its course; at last it is of use.

“Take comfort, brethren, in your pain. He who permits it knows well how hard it is to bear. When you are nailed to your cross, the glorified flesh of the Man-God remembers its own agony. And, suffer not only trustingly, and with resignation, but suffer with courage. If you shrink and cover your eyes, you have hidden a ghost in your life. When a sorrow comes to you, look it in the face; and, by-and-by, the mask shall fall off, and you will see the face of an angel.”

We have given but a sketch. The words are dry, but the sermon was full of life.

When Carl and his wife walked homeward, Edith did not speak for a long time. Whenever her husband looked at her, she was gazing straight forward, and seemed absorbed in thought.

“Well, Edith,” he said at length, “what is it?”

She looked up into his face with those eyes so childlike still.

“I was wondering, Carl,” she said, “how I could ever have presumed to call him Dick!”

And so we leave our Edith, as we found her, wondering.

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To Catholics ... it is a joy and a solace to look back into past centuries, and remember that there were days when our poets drank of a purer fount than that of Castaly; and made it their pride to celebrate in their verse, not Dian nor Proserpine, but the Immaculate Queen of Heaven. Of Chaucer’s devotion to this theme, I have already spoken, but other poets before his time delighted in dedicating their verses to her who, as she inspired the most exquisite designs of the artist’s pencil, has also claimed not the least beautiful productions of the poet’s pen. Thus, one sings of her as ‘Dame Lyfe,’ and describes how

Others, according to their quaint fashion, mixed up English and Latin rhymes in a style which, barbarous as it is, is certainly not deficient in harmony. One little poem, ascribed to a writer in the reign of Henry III., commences thus:

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Summer had come, and was nearly gone. Paris was deserted. As autumn approached, lifting its fiery finger over the city, the flaneurs disappeared. All those who could flee, fled. The faubourg had fled long ago to its châteaux. The Chaussée d’Antin and the Champs Elysées were fleeing aux eaux or aux bains de mer and the boulevards, with their glittering shops and cafés and theatres, were left to the mercy of the tourist. Perhaps the tourist would retort that he was left to the mercy of the boulevards. And, perhaps he would be right. Chignoned sirens, who dwelt in glass cases surrounded by millions of glass vials ranged in rhythmic color from the ceiling to the floor, so as to make the sirens look as much as possible like the centre point of an elaborate kaleidoscope, smiled through their crystal shell at the reckless being who stood outside to peep and wonder. The door stood open. He might not hear the siren’s, “Entrez, monsieur!” but there was no being deaf to her smile; it drew him irresistibly.

“Would monsieur not like just to ‘gouter’ our last novelty, ‘cerise à la Victor Noir?’ Would he not very much like to take some little souvenir home to madame?”

Of course monsieur would. Weak mortal! He unbuttons his coat, and straightway the bees which had sipped abundantly of native porte-monnaies the rest of the year, alight on the purse of the tourist, and suck it, if not dry, as nearly dry as they can.

Busy “dead season,” when stale bonbons and faded finery are brought out, christened by new names, and sold to the barbarians across the Channel. Paris does not want any more of it, but Londres, that city which the English in their ignorance of the French language call Lon-don—Londres will find it charming!

Gaily, busily the bees were plying their task. The long white lines of Haussmann barracks glared shadowless in the fierce vertical sun; gilded railings and balconies flashed in gingerbread magnificence; the dome of the Invalides rose up against the cloudless blue and blazed like a burning mount; the red heat poured down from the zenith on the miles of asphalte that meander through the city, and pelted it till it softened and gave under your foot like india-rubber. Even the lordly chestnuts of the Tuileries, so carefully tended, so abundantly watered, were burnt brown and red, and were shedding their leaves from exhaustion; not a vestige of green was anywhere visible. The fountains were playing, but even they had a tired, worn-out look, and the water seemed to go on splashing lazily from mere force of habit; the flag was still floating above the palace, the gray old palace blinking with its myriad glass eyes in the sultry noon; the broad walks were deserted, no little feet went pattering on the gravel, no merry child-laughter rang through the shade to scare the swallows from their cool siesta; the whole scene, lately so animated and bright, had a weary, day-after-the-ball look that was premature in the first days of July.

The bees of the boulevard were buzzing loud, and bestirring themselves to good purpose. But, hark! What noise is that? Not the cannon’s opening roar, nor “the car rattling o’er the stony street,” but a sound that jars upon the lively hum, and makes the hive suspend labor and hush itself to listen. It comes from the Corps Législatif, first a faint surging sound, then a clamor as of the waves rising and lashing themselves up for a tempest. Louder it grows, and nearer. It crosses the tepid waters of the Seine, lying low between its banks; it reaches the boulevards. At first the cries are indistinguishable, a torrent of human voice, rolling and heaving and rushing like the roar of a cataract, drowning all sense in its senseless frenzy. On it comes, gathering strength in its march, waking up the echoes of the trottoir, and making the crisp leaves quiver and drop, and fly along the dusty pavement before the vociferating multitude like straws before a bellows.

“What is it? Is it a revolution?” cried Berthe, as the horses, laying back their ears, threatened mischief, and obliged the footman to get down and hold them.

“I don’t know, madame,” said the man, looking up the Rue de la Paix at the stream that was pouring along the boulevards, to the sound of beating drums, and blaring trumpets, and all manner of Parisian excitableness in the shape of noise. “It’s more likely une démonstration patriotique; the horses don’t seem to like it, or else we might drive up close and see.”

But Berthe’s curiosity was not proof against a certain mistrust of the sovereign people. The noise might mean nothing more aggressive than a démonstration patriotique, but in Paris patriotism has many moods and phases, and innumerable modes of expressing itself, and its attitudes, if always effective from a dramatic point of view, are not always agreeable to come close to, and, whatever the character of this particular one might be, Berthe preferred admiring it from a respectful distance.

“Turn back, and drive home by the Champs Elysées,” she said.

But the tide had risen too rapidly. The Rue de Rivoli was flooded. It had caught the delirium of the boulevards, and was sending back their echoes with frantic exultation. Cabs and omnibuses were seized with the sudden insanity, private coaches caught it, foot-passengers, gamins, and bourgeois, and messieurs les voyageurs careering on the top of omnibuses, all en masse caught it, and shouted as one man: “Vive la France! vive la guerre! A Berlin! à Berlin!” Ladies and gentlemen, reclining in soft-cushioned carriages, started suddenly into effervescence, waved hats and handkerchiefs, and cried: “Vive la guerre! A Berlin!” Horses neighed, and dogs barked, and the very paving-stones shook to the popular passion. All Paris shouted and shrieked till the city, like a huge belfry, rang with thundering salvos: “Vive la guerre! A Berlin! à Berlin!”

Berthe’s horses, scared anew by the uproar that was now close upon them, played their part in the general row by plunging and prancing, and eliciting screams of terror from the adjacent women and children, while the coachman brandished his whip, and the footman whirled his hat in the air, and shouted with all their might: “A Berlin! à Berlin!” A troop of gamins laid violent hands on a Savoyard who was grinding away “Non ti scordar di me,” to the delight of the concierge in the nearest porte-cochère, and, dragging him to the fore, bade him at once strike up the Marseillaise. Luckily for his limbs, the despotic command was within the limits of the Savoyard’s instrument. He turned its handle, and began vigorously grinding out the Republican chant. Every man, woman, and child within ear-shot took up the chorus, “Marchons! marchons!” till the palpitating air throbbed and thrilled with the passionate voices of the multitude.

Berthe was not long proof against the magnetic current that was whirling round her. First terrified, then bewildered, then electrified, she caught the intoxication, and yielded to its impulse: “Vive la France! Vive la guerre!” And the fair hand waved its snowy little flag from the window as the carriage moved slowly past the Tuileries gardens.

Emerging into the broad space of the Place de la Concorde, the horses seemed to breathe more freely, and, quickening their step, tore at full speed up the Champs Elysées.

“What possessed me to shout and cheer with those madmen?” said Berthe, soliloquizing aloud, and laughing at the absurdity of her recent behavior. “I must have gone mad myself for the moment. Vive la guerre indeed! Heaven help us! We shall hear another cry by-and-by, when the widows and orphans and sisters of France hear at what price her new laurels have been bought. Thank God I have no brothers!”

“Madame la Marquise de Chassedot is waiting, madame,” said François, as Berthe entered.

“Has she been waiting?”

“A short half-hour, madame.”

“What can she have to say?” thought Berthe.

Madame de Chassedot rose to meet her “with eyes that had wept,” and extended her hands with an air that asked less for greeting than for sympathy.

“Vous ange de la peine, madame!” exclaimed Berthe, her ready kindness going forth at once to the sufferer.

The two ladies were not friends. They had met at Madame de Beaucœur’s and Madame de Galliac’s; but only once had there been a personal interchange of visits; Madame de Chassedot had called on Berthe to thank her for the kindness she had shown to their young kinswoman, Hélène de Karodel, “whom the family had indeed of late lost sight of, but with whom they were delighted to renew cousinship,” the marquise declared effusively, and as a proof of this she was carrying off Hélène to the country to spend the vacation with them. Berthe did not inform her that it had taken all her own influence to induce the high-spirited young lady to accept the hospitality so tardily offered. She returned Madame de Chassedot’s visit; the latter soon left for the country, and they had not met since.

“Oui, j’ai du chagrin,” said the marquise holding Berthe’s hand, as she sat down beside her.

Berthe’s first thought was of Edgar. But the mother was not in mourning. Whatever it was, the worst had not yet come.

“Your son is ill?” she said.

Madame de Chassedot shook her head. Then, after a pause, during which she gave battle to her emotion, she looked at Berthe, and said:

“He’s going to get married!”

“What! And is not that precisely what you wanted him to do!” exclaimed Berthe.

“I wanted to make the match myself; but now he goes and does it instead,” replied the marquise.

“Ah! It is a mésalliance, then!”

The fact was startling certainly, but less so than it might have been, owing to certain rumors that prepared the public to believe in any extravagance coupled with Edgar de Chassedot’s name.

“Oh! mon Dieu, non! A thousand times no!” cried his mother with quick resentment. “Edgar a fait des bêtises, but he is incapable of dishonoring himself. Oh, no! The girl is of an excellent family, she is even our own cousin.”

“It is her principles, then, or her—character that you object to?” said Berthe with some hesitation.

“O dear! no. She is as pious as a seraph, and brought up like a lily!” exclaimed the marquise.

“Is she a hunch-back, then, or lame, or blind, or what?”

“She is a beggar! A beggar who has not a sou to buy her own trousseau. It is a beggar who has stolen the heart of my son!” And tears of bitter, disappointed motherhood flowed down the cheeks of the marquise.

“And her name is—?”

“Mademoiselle de Karodel!”

“What! Hélène? Hélène de Karodel, that brave, true, gentle creature is going to be your son’s wife! And you in tears, and not of joy! And you call her a beggar! A woman whose love, since your son has been lucky enough to win it—and Hélène is not a girl to marry him if he had not—would be a prize for a prince! And you, a Christian mother, weep over it, and expect to be pitied! Really, madame, if it were not laughable, it would be deplorable, not on your son’s account, but on your own!”

Madame de Chassedot was so staggered by this unexpected sortie that she was actually struck dumb. “Do you know,” she said, after a pause, looking steadily at Berthe, and bringing out her words with slow emphasis—“do you know, madame, that my son has four millions of patrimony, and that he could have married any girl in France?”

“As to his marrying any girl in France, admitting that they were one and all ready to marry Monsieur de Chassedot, was he ready to marry them?” demanded Berthe significantly; “and as to his four millions, they are the very reason why he should marry a girl who had none. A woman who is as well born as himself, who is, you admit, pure as a lily, and pious as an angel, and, moreover, quite graceful and beautiful enough to satisfy your pride and his, and to make her an ornament as well as a treasure in your son’s house—a wife who will rescue him from much that I should fancy would have given you greater cause for tears than his marriage with such a woman as Hélène de Karodel. Candidly, chère marquise, I am so far from sympathizing with you that, if I had heard this news in any other way, my first impulse would have been to fly to you with my congratulations.”

Madame de Chassedot’s tears were flowing still, but perhaps less bitterly; she was going to speak when a noise of steps in the ante-chamber made her rise hastily, and look round for a means of escape.

“Into my bedroom!” said Berthe, pulling aside the portière.

The marquise pressed her hand, and disappeared through the cloud of blue satin just as the drawing-room door opened, and Hélène de Karodel, holding out her arms with a cry of joy, rushed into Berthe’s.

It was something of a disappointment to Hélène to find that Berthe already knew her secret. But there was much left to tell still. Most of the tale was told with blushes and smiles, and tears that had no brine in them. Her marriage was to take place in a fortnight. Edgar, from family reasons, chose to precipitate the dénouement, and his young Bretonne fiancée had come up to town to make the few bridal preparations that he could not possibly make for her.

It happened unluckily to be Berthe’s day, so the usual stream of visitors began soon to pour in, and broke up the tête-à-tête of the two friends.

The war was the topic of every tongue; but there was no mistaking for enthusiasm the animation with which it was discussed. Some indignantly repudiated and denounced the government, and protested that, so far from being a popular war, it was universally condemned as senseless, iniquitous, and ill-timed, and that there were not ten men in France who would cry Vive la guerre! unless they were paid for it. Others, who had been on the boulevards an hour ago, thought differently.

“There are madmen to be found in every city who are glad of an opportunity to bark, and bray, and howl, and demean themselves after the usual manner of madmen,” said the Austrian habitué, “and Paris can muster as good a roll of lunatics on as short notice as any city in Europe; but I don’t believe there were ten sane men on the boulevards this morning who cried Vive la guerre!”

“I can assure you,” said Berthe, “I saw hundreds of comme-il-faut-looking men, to all appearance in their right mind, who were crying it frantically; so much so that I got quite carried away, and actually shook my handkerchief, and shouted with the rest of them.”

“Why did you shout, madame?” inquired the Austrian.

“Because, I tell you, I was carried away, I could not help myself. The excitement was catching.”

“Of course it was. Most fevers are, especially malignant ones; and if you asked nine-tenths of the crowd why they shouted, the answer, if they spoke the truth, would be precisely the same; they could not help themselves, the excitement was catching. If an arsenal blows up, who is to blame, the powder, the matches, or yourself who fired the train? You might just as logically blame the powder for blowing up, as the French people for marching and bugling and Vive-la-guerring when they hear the sound of the trumpet.”

“Do you agree with monsieur?” asked Berthe addressing a quiet-looking military man who had been listening in silence to the conversation. “Are the people not really glad of the war?”

“It is difficult to say yet,” replied the soldier. “With the people, all depends on how it turns out; success alone is in the right.”

“But you do not contemplate such an absurd alternative as the non-victoriousness of the French arms?”

There was a prompt general protest from the company. The military man alone stroked his moustache with a meditative air, and was silent.

“Answer me, I pray you, commandant,” pursued Berthe. “You are not afraid of our troops being beaten?”

“Our troops are matches, if not masters, of the best troops in Europe,” replied the commandant proudly.

“And our generals? We have no lack of good ones surely?”

“Not of veterans,” was the evasive rejoinder.

“Oh! the young ones will rise up as soon as they are wanted. We shall have a new generation of heroes that will eclipse in glory the vieux de la Vieille themselves. As for you, you will come back to us a marshal of France,” declared Berthe merrily.

The prophecy elicited gentle cheering and congratulations from the ladies, while the men approved in their own way, joking the commandant, and dubbing him Monsieur le Maréchal on the spot.

“If it be not a futile or indiscreet question to put, may I ask what you are going to war for?” demanded Mr. Clifford, addressing himself to the company in general.

“For security of the dynasty,” replied a Legitimist.

“For the honor and security of France,” said the commandant.

“Do you separate them, M. le Commandant!” exclaimed the Legitimist with mock horror. “I arraign you, de par l’Empereur, for high treason against France!”

The circle laughed, and the Commandant, not caring to challenge the persifleur, laughed good-humoredly, too.

“Shall I tell you, monsieur, why we are going to war?” said the Deputy de la Gauche to Mr. Clifford. “We are going to war to désennuyer Paris. If Paris goes on much longer ennuying herself as she has done for the last six months, she will make a revolution!”

“That may be quite true,” returned his colleague of the Droite; “but the preventive is rather violent; some milder form of excitement might be invented for the ennui of Paris than that of taking her to Berlin for a distraction. It is hardly a sufficient reason for plunging the whole nation into war. No, I prefer to think we are going to fight for the honor of France, and it may be for her aggrandizement.”

“Yes,” said Madame de Beaucœur, “M. le Maréchal will win his bâton by taking the Rhine for us!”

“Bravo,” cried in chorus the Legitimist, the Droite, and the Gauche. “Le Rhin! le Rhin! Vive le Rhin!”

“I will be willing to shake hands with ce gaillard lâ, and to cry Vive l’Empereur myself, if he comes back with the Rhine in his pocket,” declared the Legitimist with desperate patriotism.

And the sentiment was echoed by every one present. Orleanist, Bourbonist, Bonapartist, and Republican all united in a common thirst for the blue waters of the Rhine, and avowed themselves ready to vote the war, whatever its motive, a wise war and a righteous, if it gave the Rhine to France. All with one exception: the old academician shook his head, and muttered some broken sentences in which the words, démence, fanfaronnade, ruine du commerce, feu follet de la gloire, décadence des mœurs, jour de rétribution, etc., were audible through the general hubbub.

“What a people, mon Dieu!” murmured the philosopher to himself, as, descending the softly carpeted stairs, cries of “A Berlin! A Berlin dans six semaines! Vive le Rhin! Vive la guerre!” followed him through the open door of Berthe’s apartment; “fitful as the wind, passing from reason to madness, from heroism to absurdity, as the weathercock turns with the breeze.” The word that touches our vanity, touches every chord in our nature, and sets us in a blaze, just as the spark fires the powder-flask. Quel peuple? Mon Dieu, quel peuple!

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We have already called attention to the necessity of providing sound philosophical text-books and manuals in the vernacular tongues, particularly the English, with which we are specially concerned. We have also expressed our conviction that the only philosophy which has any claim or fitness to be adopted in our places of education is the scholastic philosophy. Those who are capable of studying this philosophy in the more extensive and elaborate works of our great Catholic authors, have all they need for prosecuting their studies to any degree they please. More elementary treatises and compendiums in the Latin language are also at hand for those who can make use of them with facility. But those who cannot do so need to have books in their own language, and made level to their mental capacity and actual knowledge. And even those who are able to study in Latin text-books may derive great assistance from a good manual written in their own vernacular, for many reasons which are obvious, especially if they are not perfect in their knowledge of Latin. Besides this, there are many persons whose education is already completed, who would derive great pleasure and profit from a book of this kind. The English and American educated world is so unfamiliar with the ancient philosophy of the Catholic schools, that there is need of an interpreter who can make it intelligible, and domesticate it in our vernacular scientific literature. Numbers of educated persons, and even clergymen, who are converts and have received a Protestant collegiate education, or, if old Catholics, have not been thoroughly taught philosophy according to the scholastic method, have derived their information on the subject mostly from the miscellaneous philosophical literature of England and America, and perhaps, also, of France and Germany. In this miscellaneous literature there is much that is valuable, and even of great value, the product of highly gifted and cultivated minds imbued with sound and elevated principles, containing a vast amount of truth and conclusive argument. There is wanting, however, the scientific precision, definiteness and fixedness of terminology, and completeness, which are found only in the masters and disciples of the scholastic method. Protestants, and to a great extent Catholics also, have been at sea in philosophy ever since the unfortunate epoch of the Lutheran schism. The evil began in that fresh outbreak of paganism, miscalled renaissance; a revolt against the science and the civilization founded by the Holy See, the hierarchy, and the monastic orders, the only truly Christian science and civilization; a retrograde movement of the most fatal sort under the name of progression. The vain and frivolous scholars of that period brought St. Thomas and the scholastic theology and philosophy into contempt among the crowd of their followers. They affected to be Platonists, because the philosophy of Plato was at that time something strange and novel, and afforded them the chance of displaying their knowledge of Greek. The leaders of the religious revolt of the age of Leo X., at which time the disorder culminated, pretended to go back to the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures and the Fathers; where they could evade the contest with scholastic theology, and make a show of learning and pure Biblical and patristic doctrine for a considerable time. The scholastic theology has, however, fully avenged itself. It has defeated the enemies of the church who have attacked the Catholic faith from without. Within the church, it has established its supremacy, and subdued all those who have professed and endeavored to substitute a new system of theology for the old, while retaining the dogmas of faith. The pitiable and abortive effort to produce a new renaissance, which occasioned so much both of scandal and ridicule during the time of the Vatican Council, was marked by a specially violent assault on St. Thomas and St. Alphonsus, the two great doctors of the church in dogmatic and moral theology respectively. The result has been the triumph of both. The Angel of the Schools has gone up to a pinnacle of honor and glory above that which he had ever before attained, and it is safe to predict that his supremacy as the master of sacred science will never more be seriously questioned. The great champion of the thoroughly Roman teaching in doctrine, piety and morals, has been crowned with the doctorate at the petition of a vast body of the men highest in learning and office in the church. The great theological controversies are substantially finished and settled, and Catholic theology is very nearly complete. Philosophy is now the great field for intellectual activity, and that consolidated union in philosophical teaching which has been secured in theology is the end toward which the efforts of all the ardent and loyal lovers of the divine Truth should be directed.

This end can be secured only by following the same principles and methods in philosophy which have effected and secured unity and uniformity in theological doctrine. The scholastic philosophy must accompany the scholastic theology. This is obvious, without entering into the intrinsic merits of the question. No other system has that authority, that general prevalence, that scientific precision and completeness, that sanction of the rulers of the church, the great teaching orders, and the body of directors and professors of seminaries and strictly Catholic colleges, which are requisite for producing unity and uniformity in instruction. Those who do not follow the scholastic philosophy are divided into small parties holding the most opposite opinions and mutually hostile to each other; and these parties are again subdivided into smaller sections. The subject matter of this difference is not the mere corollaries and remote conclusions, or the high speculative questions of philosophy, not essentially affecting its substance; as is the case with the differences among strict adherents to scholastic theology and philosophy; but the very substance, the first principles, the guiding rules of philosophy itself. What likelihood is there that any one of these systems will ever conquer for itself sufficient territory or unite a sufficient number of suffrages to become the reigning doctrine? The history of the disputes which have gone on within and without the church during three centuries, since the decay of the influence of scholastic philosophy, may answer the question. Either we must give up the hope of attaining unity, and let philosophy degenerate into a mere theme of endless discussion among rival parties, like doctrine among the Protestants, or we must range ourselves under the banner of the ancient and still numerous and powerful school of the Angelic Doctor.

The first of these alternatives we must decidedly reprobate, as contrary to the Catholic sense, and incompatible with the respect which is due to the judgment and authority of the church. It is evident that philosophical instruction is regarded in the church as highly important and necessary, and as an essential part of Catholic education, more especially for those who are preparing for the study of theology. The sense of its importance is increasing instead of diminishing. Everywhere longer time and greater pains are bestowed upon it, and we have been told that it is the desire of the Sovereign Pontiff that the theological course should rather be shortened if necessary, than that philosophy should fail to receive its adequate proportion of the time allotted to the curriculum of the ecclesiastical seminary. All this implies that philosophy, like theology, is a true science, having its certain principles, methods, and doctrines. And if this is so, we are to look for it where the queen of sciences, whose herald and prime minister it is—Catholic theology—announces her magisterial teaching, and not in any particular school set up by private authority. In fact, the scholastic philosophy is an intimate and essential part of scholastic theology, which would be decomposed if its other elements were separated from this one, and be resolved into a mere collection of dogmas and doctrines without logical coherence. We may infer, therefore, from the express sanction which the church has given to scholastic theology, her approbation of scholastic philosophy. This tacit and implied approbation is also manifested in her practical action. The Holy See, the greater number of bishops, and the body of those ecclesiastics in high positions of authority who have control over strictly Catholic colleges, sanction and establish the teaching of scholastic philosophy, encourage works and authors professing to follow it, and in many ways repress and discourage whatever is contrary to it. More than this, the Holy See, during the reigns of our present Sovereign Pontiff and his illustrious predecessor, Gregory XVI., has repeatedly intervened by acts of supreme authority, in which books, authors, systems, and propositions have been censured and condemned on account of their teaching philosophical errors contrary to the received doctrine, and either subversive of or dangerous to the faith. The Fathers of the Council of the Vatican were occupied during several months with discussions upon fundamental questions of philosophy, the result of which is visible in the decrees of the Council. The doctrines which all Catholics are obliged to hold and teach have thus been to a certain extent defined and declared, and the limits marked beyond which they are forbidden to stray. We have occasion, at present, to specify only two of the erroneous doctrines which have been thus condemned, viz.: that which is called Traditionalism, and another commonly known under the name of Ontologism. We notice these, because both errors arose among sincere Catholics, and were the chief cause of dissension concerning philosophical doctrines in our own ranks, so that their condemnation has had a direct effect towards unity in teaching, especially as most of the principal persons concerned submitted obediently to the decision of authority. The first of these errors was an extreme anti-rationalism, tending to subvert and sweep away all philosophy, and upon this we have no need to enlarge. The second was of far greater import, as it professed to be a new and perfect philosophy, and was the most formidable antagonist which the scholastic philosophy has ever had to encounter. The question is still a living one, and the discussion of it is not yet over. Moreover, it relates to the very foundation of philosophy and theology, and has the most wide-reaching relations, wherefore we feel it to be necessary to be very careful and exact in what we say on the subject. That ontologism which we call an error is a certain ideological doctrine professing to be a true scientia entis, or science of being, and to be, therefore, the true and only real metaphysic. It has received its name from this profession of its advocates, and from common usage, for the want of one more specific and definite. It must not be supposed, however, that it is called an error on account of its being ontological, as if there were no true ontology, since this latter is the most essential part of philosophy itself. Nor is it correct to say that the doctrine of all those who call themselves ontologists by way of distinction from those whom they call psychologists, but whom we prefer to designate rather as Platonists in distinction from Peripatetics or Aristotelians, is a condemned error. The condemned error, as we understand it, after carefully examining and reflecting upon the matter for several years, is a false and heterodox ontological doctrine, which radically and principally consists in the affirmation of a natural power in the created intellect to know God in himself, as infinite and necessary being, or in any other ideal aspect. The essence of the error consists in that part of the affirmation which is expressed by the term in himself, denoting that the very idea which is the object of the divine intelligence and is identical with it, and is really the divine essence itself considered as intelligible, is the idea of the created, and specifically of the human, intellect. The falsity of the doctrine consists in this, that it substitutes an imaginary intuition of God, which has no existence, for the real intuition of the connatural object of the created intellect; and an explicit cognition of God explicated from this intuition for that cognition which human reason is actually capable of attaining, by discursion from self-evident truths which the developed intellect possesses as its first principles. It therefore overturns true philosophy and natural theology, and destroys the very cause which its advocates are most anxious to promote. It is heterodox, because its logical consequences annihilate the distinction between the natural light of reason and the supernatural lights of faith and glory, and, by ascribing to the natural condition of the creature that which belongs only to its deific condition, tend to annihilate the essential difference between the Word of God and the creatures of God, the Only Begotten Son of God and his adopted sons; thus introducing pantheism by a covert road, into which Platonists and mystics have always been in danger of straying unawares. The authors and advocates of this doctrine have been, at least in many cases, holy men of orthodox faith, who have strenuously denied its logical consequences. Wherefore, the condemnation of their opinions has been made in a very gentle and considerate manner, and their personal character as Catholics has not been compromised, unless they have shown a spirit of contumacious resistance to the authority of the Holy See. They have not fallen into heresy, but into philosophical error, and that in good faith, and before the authority of the church had given judgment. Several of the most distinguished among them have made a formal recantation of their doctrine, others have done the same tacitly, and we may take it as a settled fact that the ontologism condemned at Rome is banished for ever from the Catholic schools.

It is equally certain, however, that there is an ideology, distinct from that of the Thomist school, and frequently called ontologism, which is not condemned. Its advocates profess to find it in St. Augustine. It is probably contained in the doctrine of St. Bonaventura. It is the doctrine taught in the later and more mature works of the great and saintly Cardinal Gerdil, who was in his youth a disciple of Malebranche the author of the theory of the vision in God. And it is still maintained, under various forms, by a considerable number of most respectable persons in the church. Rosmini is well known as the author of a system which bears an affinity to it, and, in a general sense, it may be said to include all those Catholic teachers and disciples of philosophy who are Platonists rather than Aristotelians. It is certain, we say, that this ideology, distinct alike from that of the Thomists and the pure ontologists, is not condemned. This is proved by the answers given to queries on the subject by persons connected with the Roman congregations, by the fact that the doctrines in question are openly advocated in lectures and published works under the eye of the Sovereign Pontiff, and by the express or tacit admission of the opponents of ontologism. We have been informed also by a distinguished prelate who was present at the discussions of the Vatican Council, that such was the general understanding of the bishops there assembled.

This ideology gives the human intellect an idea created by an immediate illumination of God, and preceding all apprehension and perception of particular, finite objects. It may be an idea of God, of the infinite, of being, of the necessary and universal, under any aspect, or under many distinct aspects; or it may be an assemblage of ideas representing both the infinite, and finite exterior objects. According to St. Bonaventura, it is an idea representing God; according to Rosmini it is idea of ens in genere. But in whatever way this theory of innate ideas may be expressed, the intellectual object is always an image, something created with and in the mind, and even where it represents God, or the archetypal ideas of God, it is not identified with the uncreated ens of which it is the created image. The theory is therefore free from the censures of the church. It is necessary, however, for those who still adhere to the Platonic ideology to be very careful and accurate in their expressions, in order to avoid the likelihood of being understood by their readers to teach condemned propositions. The looseness of language which is more or less found in the more ancient authors; in all authors not familiar with the scholastic method, unless they have a precise terminology of their own, which is another difficulty in the way of understanding them; and the abstruseness of the subject itself, produce a great deal of misunderstanding. There is a great deal of obscurity in the writings of Plato whenever he speaks of ideology, and his disciples have inherited the same. It has been quite possible, therefore, for writers whose doctrine is sound to use the language and adopt many of the ideas of the celebrated authors of the ontologistic party, without really apprehending the nature and bearings of that erroneous doctrine which was at the bottom of their whole system. These authors have frequently expressed their ideas under terms and forms of expression borrowed from St. Augustine, St. Bonaventura, Gerdil, Fénelon, and other well-known doctors, prelates, and theologians. Very few of them have elaborated their doctrine with sufficient completeness and precision to make it easy to be understood. Those who have done so have been the occasion of its precise formulation and condemnation in the famous seven propositions. But, now that the supreme authority in the church has distinctly specified what errors of ontologism must be rejected as dangerous to faith, it is specially important that every Catholic writer should be precise, accurate, and clear in his language, so that he may not be misunderstood even by the ordinary student or reader of philosophical essays. The supreme, infallible authority of the Holy See has not, in condemning certain errors, prescribed or defined what precisely is the true ideological doctrine. Catholic philosophers must therefore seek to come to as close an agreement as possible by the way of reason. In order to do this, it is necessary that the method and terminology sanctioned by ancient and general usage should be strictly adhered to, since, otherwise, endless discussion will be the only result. We think, moreover, as we have already said, that this agreement can only be effected by means of the ideology of St. Thomas. The church has not, indeed, formally approved it, but, in our opinion, she has condemned that which is its only logical alternative. Therefore, we trust in the power of reason and logic to bring all master-minds into agreement with St. Thomas, and in the authority of these teachers and leaders to secure the adhesion of the great majority, who must ever be their disciples. It is, we believe, ignorance or misapprehension of the scholastic philosophy, as taught in the school of St. Thomas, which has been the occasion of the attempt made by so many highly gifted and noble-hearted men to fabricate out of Platonism a better ideology. Disgust at nominalism, sensism, and psychologism, abhorrence of the scepticism into which Hume and Kant sought to resolve all knowledge and belief, have driven them to seek for a self-subsisting, objective foundation of the ideal, separate from and independent of the sensible. Irresistible logic has impelled them by degrees toward the ultimatum which the pure ontologists have reached; and which is simply the affirmation of God existing in his attribute of absolute being, the infinite, or archetypal truth, beauty, and goodness, to which Gioberti adds in the creative act; as the immediate ideal object of the intellect. They have supposed that this is the only alternative of the opposite extreme, and have put aside the scholastic ideology as halting between the two upon untenable ground. The opinion which they have of its inconsistency and insufficiency is distinctly expressed in the oft-repeated assertion that it is mere psychologism. This term properly denotes any system which makes ideas mere subjective modes of the mind. It is obvious that every species of semi-ontologism, every theory of innate ideas, every system shaped out of Platonic elements, which separates ideas from the sensible as the centre of their concretion and their focus of visibility to the human intellect, without locating them in God, is psychologism. But it is not true of the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas, that it reduces ideas to this condition of subjectivity, no better than that of the phantoms which arise in the imagination of the sleeper or the day-dreamer. In this philosophy, the intelligible object has a reality exterior to the mind, which it directly perceives, and by which as a medium it attains self-evident and demonstrated truths, having their foundation in the eternal truth, in the infinite, in absolute being, in the Word, in God; who is the object of the mediate intellectual vision of the mind, as the apostle declares. Invisibilia ipsius; per ea quæ facta sunt, intellecta, conspiciuntur. His invisible perfections are disclosed to our sight, being perceived by the intellect through those things which are made. Videmus nunc per speculum. We see even now, although only in a mirror. The scholastic philosophy is not identical with any merely sensistic, conceptualistic, or empirical system. It does not reduce ideas to mere abstractions, make philosophy a mere induction from the results of experience, or the knowledge of God by reason the sum of an aggregate mass of probabilities. It is not in any wise a system of subjectivism. On the contrary, it is objective in the highest sense of the term, and truly ontological, the real scientia entis, and not an imaginary one like that of the so-called ontologists. If this be so, the whole ground of the prejudice against the Catholic peripatetic philosophy falls away, and there is no reason to desert the common teaching of the schools for any other doctrine, either ancient or modern.

The four great masters in philosophy are Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas. Plato is rather a teacher of theology and ethics than of metaphysics. His doctrine concerning God, the immortality of the soul, and the moral ideal, is in many respects purer and more sublime than that of his pupil. Yet Aristotle deserves par excellence the title of the heathen philosopher. The name of the dæmon given to him by his fellow-pupils on account of his wonderful intellect well expresses what he really was—the greatest intellectual prodigy that has appeared in human history, the real creator of logical and metaphysical science. St. Augustine followed Plato rather than any other heathen philosopher, and does not appear to have been acquainted with the works of Aristotle. Yet his philosophy as a whole was original; it was chiefly his theology under a rational aspect; it was by no means a complete and distinct system. St. Thomas, with the Aristotelian system as a plan and basis, built the vast and sublime structure of a Catholic philosophy. Although it may be true that he derived his knowledge of Plato chiefly from Aristotle, and the latter may have misrepresented his master; yet, through St. Augustine, he obtained all that was really valuable in Plato purified and improved; and has thus incorporated into his system everything, whether pagan or Christian, which tradition had brought down to his time. As Aristotle is the dæmon, St. Thomas is the angel of philosophy. It is difficult to compare his natural gifts with those of Aristotle in such a way as to make a relative estimate of the genius of the two men. But in actual wisdom, enlightened as he was by revelation and the Christian luminaries of the ages which preceded him, and elevated above the natural capacities of man by the gifts of the Holy Ghost, he is like the bright mid-day sun compared to the pale orb of night. All other stars in the firmament must be content to shine as lesser lights, and the brightest among them are only his planets. Metaphysical genius of the highest order is the rarest of gifts. Clement of Alexandria thought that the Greek philosophy had not arisen without a special act of the divine providence which was preparing the way for Christian theology. When we consider the wonderful work accomplished by Aristotle, and the manner in which his philosophy has become blended with the theology of the church, we cannot fail to recognize the hand of God making use of the human intellect in its most consummate perfection as the servant of the Eternal Word in his mission as the teacher of divine truth. Much more must we recognize the same divine hand in the genius and work of St. Thomas. God does his work once for all. The apostles finished their special work, the fathers finished theirs, and we can have no more apostles or fathers of the church. The doctors have done their work, and, although they may have left room for successors, yet this is not in the sense that their work is to be done over again. We do not believe there can ever arise another St. Thomas to reconstruct more perfectly the edifice of theology and philosophy in those parts which he has built, and these are its essential and principal parts. Of theology we need not speak particularly. Of philosophy, the principal parts are those which give a scientific exposition of the rational basis of theology; that is, which treat scientifically of the objective reality of the intelligible which the human intellect perceives by its natural power; of the first principles of reason; of self-evident and demonstrable truth; of the process by which the mind ascends from the knowledge of things to the knowledge of their highest and creative cause, from the creature to the Creator, from the visible and ideal world to God, from the knowledge of God through the creation to the knowledge of God through revelation. It is precisely here, as we have shown, that the dispute lies between scholastic philosophy and ontologism. And it is precisely what we claim for scholastic philosophy, that it gives us the true science of ideology and theodicy, which satisfies reason and accords with faith, and is really that which is implicitly and confusedly possessed by the common sense of all men, especially of all Christians, in proportion to the degree in which reason is developed and instructed. This has been proved in the most thorough and ample manner by F. Liberatore in his great work Della Conoscenza Intelletuale, F. Kleutgen in his Philosophie der Vorzeit, and F. Ramière in his Unité de l’Enseignement Philosophique, as well as in other recent works of the same kind.

We will endeavor to give a statement as succinct and clear as possible of the scholastic theory, in order that its opposition to every form of sensism, idealism, and ontologism may be apparent.

In thought or cognition, we find by analysis these three, the subject, the object, and the intellectual light; as in vision we have the visual faculty, light, and the visible object. The subject is the human intellect; the primary, immediate object is the intelligible in the sensible, or the essences of sensible things; the light is intelligence. It is a primary maxim that nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the sense. Sensible experience is therefore the starting point of thought. The thought itself is the result of an active operation of the intellect upon a passive impression which it receives from the object. This active operation produces a similitude of the object (species) in the mind, by which it becomes cognizant of the object itself as distinct from and extrinsic to the subject. The intelligible essence which is in the sensible object is distinguished and made the object of apprehension by the process of abstraction. In this intelligible essence, or what is called in common parlance “the nature of things,” are contained the fundamental notions which are the first germs of all intellectual processes, the first product of the act of abstraction which is the beginning of intellectual activity in the infant. In these notions are given the first principles, the self-evident principles, the axioms of reason; and with these reason is able to start the discursive process, by which it demonstrates conclusions from premises, which in the last analysis are intellections a priori and self-evident. By this reasoning process, the existence and attributes of God are proved from the rational and material universe by the principle of causality, which is one of the self-evident principles. Self-consciousness begins as soon as the mind takes note of itself as acting, and thus the subject becomes objective to itself without any need of a species or impressed similitude of itself, because it is itself, and present to itself, and more vividly cognizant of itself in acting than of anything exterior to itself. The notions derived from reflection on its own operations are thus added to those which are derived by abstraction from sensible objects. The immediate perception terminates only on particular individual objects, but the notions obtained by abstraction are universal, whence it is necessary to define in what consists the objective reality of these universals. The universal is defined by Aristotle as that which is one, but having aptitude to be contained in many. That is, it is genus, with whatever is included under genus, to wit, species, differentia, essential and accidental propriety. For instance, the notion of man is the notion of a nature which is one, but apt to be contained in an indefinite number of men. It includes the genus animal, the species rational animal, the differentia rationality, the essential propriety, or the entire human constitution, mental and physical, and, in respect to the varieties of race, the accidental proprieties which distinguish each one from the others. All particular and individual objects of cognition can be classed under these five predicaments of the universal. The universal itself has its formal existence and reality, as universal, only in the intellect. It is a conception of the mind, formed by abstraction from the concrete and particular. It is not, however, a mere abstract conception, but an abstractive conception. An abstract conception is one in which a quality is considered as separated by thought from any particular subject in which it has residence, as goodness or sweetness. An abstractive conception, as that of the human species, is one formed from the consideration of men actually existing, in whom the species is actually individualized. The conception has, therefore, its foundation in the real object of mental intuition, the individual man, and in him the whole that is contained in the universal conception really exists. The conception is universal, because the intellect perceives the intrinsic possibility of an indefinite multitude of men in the very essence of man, as made known by the existence of any one man in particular. This possibility is something necessarily and eternally true, which is disclosed to the intellect by means of its outward expression and realization in the human race. That is to say, it is a thought which has been expressed and communicated, by an intelligence in which the possibility eternally and essentially subsists, to the human intelligence. The foundation of the universal conception is therefore in God. It is in God as archetype of man, as the reason of the possibility of man’s nature, and the cause of his existence. But the idea in God is totally different from the conception in the mind of man. God understands the possibility of the existence of man in the vision of his own essence, as imitable in this particular form, and of his own creative power. But man cannot see this idea as it is in God; he cannot compare the human type with its archetype. He can only produce an afterthought of the divine thought itself, a copy or imitation of the divine idea, which is wholly inaccessible to his immediate vision, and is only known to him inasmuch as it is manifested through the created type.

Let us take another example, that of a triangle. The figure drawn on the blackboard is the sensible object. The conception of a triangle is the intelligible object formed by abstraction, and universal. In this conception are contained the general notions of a point, a line, an angle; and in these notions are involved several self-evident principles or axioms. From these are demonstrated the various mathematical propositions of trigonometry. It is easy to see that, in the intellectual process of the pupil’s mind, the genesis and development of the act of cognition of mathematical truth is precisely what has been above described. In an intelligent and well-developed mind, many of the steps of the process may be made with such ease and rapidity that they appear to be instantaneous, and the conceptions gained are so clear and evident that they appear like innate or intuitive ideas. But they are not so, and this is made manifest enough in the case of dull or slow-minded pupils. The conception of the triangle, with all the mathematical truth which it contains, is necessary, universal, and eternal. It has, therefore, its foundation in necessary being, or in the divine intelligence. But it is in God in an eminent mode, and formally only in the human intellect. Geometrical truth is founded in the essence of God, who is the archetype of the triangle and of every other geometrical figure. But that which the triangle imitates the human intellect cannot see; the divine idea in which mathematical truth as apprehended by us is eminently contained is inapprehensible by any created mind; and the procession of the divine thoughts expressed in quantity and its relations in a manner intelligible to us, from the divine essence, is as much above our understanding as the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. It is impossible to think of mathematical conceptions except as having objective verity, and equally impossible to think of them as identical with the ideal being of God; they must be, therefore, as St. Thomas teaches, concrete only in particular quantities, but in their universality, conceptus mentis cum fundamento in re.

It is the same with the conceptions of time and space. These conceptions come from the apprehension of things which succeed or coexist with each other. Real time and space are relations of real and finite things. Ideal time and space are necessarily conceived as illimitable. It is equally evident that these conceptions of illimitable time and space are not purely subjective categories of the mind, and that they are not, in the formality which they have in our mind, either eternal realities in themselves or identical with God. They have a foundation in the divine essence, which we can demonstrate to be nothing else than the infinite possibility of being imitated in created existences. But this is a conclusion of reason, and not an intuition of the divine essence as infinite archetype. In our minds, the conceptions represent space and time as boundless extended locality and boundless successive duration, as Locke and Clarke have so clearly set forth, and as every one knows by his own reflections. As conceptions of the universal, they have their existence, therefore, only in the mind, while their foundation is in reality. They presuppose and demand an eternal thinker and an eternal thought; we can see immediately neither the thought nor the thinker as they are in themselves, but we behold both mediately by the conceptions of the universal and the necessary; which reflect in our minds the eternal thought of the eternal thinker, the eternal idea of the eternal God.

In point of fact, ontologists are obliged to admit that the process of the act of the cognition of the infinite is historically the same in substance with that which we have just explained. Their immediate ideal intuition is something involute and out of the reach of consciousness, until contact with sensible objects, reflection, experience and instruction bring it into the state of evolution. On the one hand, this proves that it has no existence, except in their own imagination. An innate or intuitive idea of God would make his infinite splendor to shine on the mind with such incessant and dazzling splendor, that the sunlight would appear as darkness, and finite things as nonentities, before it. It would be impossible to doubt or to forget it, if it existed. On the other hand, this shows that the scholastic theory of the origin of ideas and knowledge adequately expresses everything which they can reasonably desire in respect to the relation of the intellect to the infinite, or real and necessary being, as the object of cognition. The idea of the infinite and the knowledge of God are virtually in the intellect, because the light of reason, a participation of the divine light, gives it the potentiality which can be reduced to act by union with the intelligible object. The theory which ascribes to the newly created soul something besides its rational capacity, which it brings with it as a kind of form to vivify the sensible object, or keeps as a distinct ideal object within itself, is wholly unnecessary and superfluous. It is, moreover, not in accordance with the true doctrine respecting the human soul as forma corporis. It belongs rather to that imperfect philosophy which ascribes to the soul in this life a separate and independent subsistence, into which the body does not enter as an integral part of the personality, but which it merely serves as a machine. The scholastic doctrine preserves the unity of the essence and the operation of man, as a rational animal. That an intellectual operation should begin from our senses, and the mind commence its existence in its rudimental body as a tabula rasa, is in accordance with our humble position in the natural order. The capacity for gaining knowledge by the slow process of experience and discursion is all that we have any right to claim for ourselves. It is enough for us that we are rational, that “the light of God’s countenance is signed upon us” by the impress of an image of his intelligence upon our souls; and that we are enlightened by “that light which enlighteneth every man coming into this world” by receiving the power to know God as manifested in his works. We are certainly a “little lower than the angels,” who have no natural vision of God in his essence, and how are we essentially inferior to them, except in the necessity of beginning the process of intellectual cognition from the apprehension of sensible objects? It still remains true that God is both the author and the object of knowledge even in the natural order, and that we naturally tend to the contemplation of his being and perfections. But this process carried on for eternity could never bring us to a point where we could obtain the faintest glimpse of an intuitive vision of the divine essence. The capacity to attain to this vision is wholly gratuitous and supernatural, a gift of grace, an elevation of our nature above itself, and above the angelic nature to a similitude with the divine nature. The actual vision is reserved for the state of glory in which the blessed see God in himself and all things in God. The scholastic philosophy is therefore in conformity with Catholic theology, and a proper preparation for studying and understanding this sublime science. Every other system is either in discord with it, or deficient in the perfect logical concord which ought to make the inferior harmonize completely with the superior science.

The revival of scholastic philosophy, and the general consent with which, in all parts of the world, those who lead in the great work of Catholic education and instruction are uniting together in promoting its study and exposition, are a most hopeful sign for the coming age. It is especially encouraging to witness this revival in Germany; and to see the powerful and heavily panoplied champions of orthodox theology and sound philosophy coming forth from the German schools, to meet and overthrow the boastful giants of that land of colossal intelligence and learning; who defy the armies of the living God and aim at an imperial domination over the world of science, as its statesmen and warriors do over the political world. They are but giants of condensed cloud, like the genii of Arabian fable who escaped from the bottles of King Solomon. The wisdom of Solomon subdued these genii, and it is the true wisdom, sapientia, which must subdue the cloudy giants of critical, historical, and philosophical sophistry; the Bruno Bauers, Strausses, Döllingers, Kants, Hegels, and Büchners, who make war on the old Bible, the old church, the old religion, the old philosophy, the old God of Germany and Christendom. A nephew of Hegel and pupil of Feuerbach asked the latter what was to be done next, since the Kantian philosophy had ended in the complete dissolution of all science. The reply was, that we must return to common sense. The pupil followed the advice by returning to the old God and the old religion. To bring back the next generation to this old religion, and to educate in it the youth who have received it by their baptism in the church, is the great task of Catholic teachers. This can be done only by the aid of the old philosophy. The attempts made everywhere, but especially in Germany, to do this by a new philosophy and a new theology are all failures, and end only in betraying the whole cause of the church to the enemy. Those Catholic scholars of Germany who are sound and strong alike in their faith and in their science are beginning to see this, and are returning to the philosophy of the Angelic Doctor as the only fit companion to theology, the true wisdom in the rational order. Those who become the interpreters and teachers of this wisdom to the young are the most valuable and efficient of all laborers in the field of divine philosophy. They need to be thoroughly learned both in theology and philosophy, and at the same time to have a special gift for teaching and explaining doctrine in a condensed, lucid, and attractive manner.

In all these respects, Dr. Stöckl is pre-eminent. He has the vast and solid erudition of the great German scholars. He has, moreover, an intellect which is remarkable both for strength and clearness, a masterly reasoning faculty, great talent cultivated by long experience for instructing young students, and a style which represents his thoughts with the precision of a photograph. The German language is, moreover, of such a nature that, while it reproduces exactly the Latin terminology of scholastic writers, it brings out the idea in a new and fresh form, in which it becomes more intelligible to those who belong to the Teutonic race than it is in the Latin dress. We have never yet met with a manual of philosophy which seems to us so perfectly satisfactory as the Manual of Dr. Stöckl; and the speedy call for a second edition which followed its publication, as well as the praise given to it by competent authorities, proves that it has met the want which has been felt in Germany as in Great Britain and America. Besides the ordinary topics which are treated in our text-books, it contains also treatises on political and social morals, and has a companion volume of small size which contains a masterly treatise on “Æsthetics.” We have noticed it especially for the purpose of recommending it to the examination of those who are engaged in promoting the study of the scholastic philosophy, as a suitable work to be translated into English for the use of students. It is perhaps too large for a college text-book. It contains about one thousand pages octavo, and would require two years’ study, with an ordinary class, to be properly mastered, in connection with the Manual of the History of Philosophy, which is a volume of equal size. Nevertheless, although a smaller text-book is needed for the majority of pupils, this one would make an admirable work of reference for more advanced scholars, and supply the other needs which we have pointed out in the earlier part of our article as calling for a book of this kind in the English language. The great cost of translation and publication, coupled with the risk of a small sale, makes it somewhat difficult to undertake the task we have suggested as desirable. It cannot be done, of course, without the author’s permission, which, we suppose, he will readily grant to those who can give the proper guarantee for the faithful and scholarly performance of the work. We intended, when sitting down to begin this article, to make only a brief introduction of our own to a translation of the author’s chapter on the “Origin of Ideas,” as a specimen of the work. But we have not done so, as the reader knows, and have been unwittingly led on over such a length of space that we have left no room for any citations from the author, or minute review of the different parts of his philosophy. We trust that he will become speedily known to all lovers of the philosophy of St. Thomas, which he has so ably presented and defended, and we are sure that he needs only to be known to be most highly appreciated.

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“The princess begs Mademoiselle Gabrielle to descend.” This message was brought Fleurange by one of the servants of the princess, whose attendants were a German valet de chambre, an Italian courier, and a Russian waiting-maid. The latter, named Varinka, literally belonged to the princess, being her slave. But Varinka, skilful and intelligent like all the Russians of her class, kindly treated by her mistress, to whom she was faithfully attached, and clothed in her cast-off garments, did not look upon her condition as in the least humiliating. In French she was called Mademoiselle Barbe, in Italian the Signora Barbara, and she considered herself, and indeed was regarded, as one of the most accomplished of servants. Extremely exacting of all who were beneath her, and inclined to be jealous of those she considered her equals, she at first wished to class the princess’ new demoiselle de compagnie among the latter. But Fleurange, without even observing this, knew how to take the place that belonged to her, and oblige Mademoiselle Barbe to maintain a respectful deportment towards her. Barbara was consequently inclined to dislike her, but, after some attentive observation, she had sufficient wit to refrain. The fact was, Fleurange’s activity relieved her from a part of her cares without increasing them in the least (for the young girl never required any one’s assistance), and used her influence in a way which every one else profited by as well as Barbara. When the Princess was recovering from one of the attacks of physical suffering that all at once showed how unavailing were the comforts, luxuries, and attentions that surrounded her, she dwelt constantly on her illness, its cause, duration, and probable or improbable cure, and under the influence of this preoccupation she became capricious, whimsical, and almost impossible to satisfy. No one had ever succeeded so well as Fleurange. Mademoiselle Barbe could not help acknowledging, “She really has all the trouble of keeping madame in a good humor, and we the benefit of it,” and this plain reasoning made her decide to live at peace with the new-comer, and take all possible advantage of the accommodating turn she noticed in Fleurange, who thus unwittingly disarmed her enemy and converted her into an ally, and almost a friend.

The princess’ message, which put an end to the young girl’s pleasant dreams, was, it must be acknowledged, merely an invention of Mademoiselle Barbe’s, who, being told by the courier it was very delightful on deck, was suddenly seized with the desire of a walk by moonlight. With this end in view, she sent the courier for Fleurange. As before stated, she was sure Mademoiselle Gabrielle would come down immediately without making any objections or asking any questions, which was one of her meritorious qualities in the eyes of this sagacious servant. “That young lady does not meddle with what does not concern her, which, I must acknowledge, is very agreeable,” she said.

As she had foreseen, Fleurange left her seat in the open air without any objection, and went down to the ladies’ cabin, of which the princess had exclusive possession. She found the invalid asleep, and quietly took a seat beside her without questioning the exactness of the message she had just received. Throwing off the cloak she wore, she said: “Here, Barbara, put on this, if you like, and go up and take the air. It is delightful on deck.”

It was by such pleasing good humor she had unintentionally made a conquest of one who naturally regarded Fleurange as a rival, and this, above all the qualities she possessed, was the charm that had most power over the princess, and changed the sudden infatuation to which she was liable (like most of the ladies of her country) into something deeper and more permanent.

The Princess Catherine was lying on a couch, her head propped up by several cushions, and her feet covered with a cashmere shawl. In spite of her age and ill health, which had changed the outlines of her face and form, beauty and grace had not disappeared without leaving on her person traces much less fleeting than beauty itself. Fleurange, looking at her face by the light of a lamp suspended from the ceiling, could not help admiring her noble brow, and the expressiveness as well as the still remarkable delicacy of her features. Suddenly, as she thus sat contemplating her with more attention than ever before, it seemed as if the face before her awoke some indistinct remembrance—but before she could grasp the idea that suddenly came into her mind, the princess opened her eyes. Seeing Fleurange beside her, she smiled, and extended her beautiful hand.

“You here, Gabrielle?” she said. “So much the better.”

“I was told you wanted me.”

“No; but I am very glad you are here.”

Fleurange bent down, and kissed the hand she held with an impulse more affectionate than she had ever felt towards her before. The princess seemed touched, and pressed her hand in return without speaking. Then she went to sleep again. Fleurange remained with her eyes fastened on her a long time, then she too lay down on a couch at the other end of the cabin, to pass away the few hours that yet remained before their arrival at Leghorn, which would be about daybreak.

At that time, long before the era of railways, the route from Leghorn to Florence, a long and dusty one, was not always traversed in a single day, and our travellers stopped at Pisa for the night. The princess no longer felt any interest in the places she had visited so many times. She had only one wish, and that was—to rest, and, once rested, to resume the journey. But it was quite otherwise with Fleurange. Pisa was her birthplace. In Pisa lay buried the mother she never knew. Here her father brought her during the few happy days they passed together. How many vicissitudes her young life had passed through since that time! How many sorrows and joys she had experienced! How many ties she had formed and broken! And with what interest she already dwelt on the past at an age when others are only thinking of the future! As soon as it was light, long before the princess awoke, Fleurange went to pray beside her mother’s grave. Then she directed her steps towards the Campo Santo, around which she slowly walked. Of all the places she visited with her father, this was the one of which she retained the most vivid recollection. The paintings of the Campo Santo are like a poem which it is impossible to understand if ignorant of the language in which it is written. This language she learned from her father, and had not been allowed to forget it in her uncle’s house. She remembered that her cousin, without ever having visited this spot, was as familiar with all the paintings as herself. “How much poor Clement would enjoy all these beauties of nature and art, and these scenes of historic interest!” she said to herself. “How much he would enjoy Italy!”

She might have added that, like many of his countrymen, he already knew and loved

“The land where the lemon-trees bloom,”

without ever having seen it. Many Germans have loved it with a profound and material passion, fatal when satisfied by violent possession, but reciprocated and fruitful when the forced and hated union was broken and gave place to voluntary and acceptable alliance.

Leaving the Campo Santo, Fleurange went into the church, the wonderful Cathedral of Pisa, which cannot be compared to any other; for, if there are any finer, it is doubted or forgotten as soon as this is entered. Here Fleurange heard Mass, after which she remained a long time on her knees, praying, thinking of all those she loved, and looking around: and all this without losing her spirit of devotion. This may appear strange to those who wish to confine the soul’s impulse towards God within narrow and rigid limits. It is nevertheless certain that, in a simple and upright heart, a good will, a more ardent love of the eternal goodness, the resolutions so properly called a firm purpose of amendment, all these effects of prayer often spring from what does not naturally seem destined to produce them. In those lands where religion and the arts go hand in hand, and where the inspiration which guides the painter and the architect is the same that draws the believer to the foot of the altar, it often happens that a glance at a fresco or painting aids the soul more than a sermon in its upward flight, and in accomplishing the very act for which it is prostrate before God.

It was thus Fleurange, kneeling on the pavement, holding her closed book in her hand, meditated, looked around, and prayed. Among the thoughts floating in her mind, there was one especially which seemed to harmonize with everything around her: it was the remembrance of the cloister of Santa Maria, and the friend of her early childhood, whose features at this moment seemed to beam out of some of the holy faces on the walls around her. She was once more beneath the same sky, and sufficiently near to cherish a hope of seeing her. At this thought her eyes overflowed with tears. The remembrance of her childhood prevailed over all others, and rendered her prayer more concentrated and more fervent.

Mild and saintly Madre Maddalena!—perhaps at this same hour you, too, were praying—praying for the child that was still dear to you: perhaps, afar off, you echoed her prayer and made it more efficacious—the oft-recurring prayer now on Fleurange’s lips as she was about to leave the church: “Our Father, ... lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil!”

For the first time since her illness, the princess rose above her languor, and resumed the faculty of talking of something besides herself. As they drew near the end of their journey, Fleurange perceived she knew how to converse, and that the indifference she sometimes manifested to what seemed most worthy of interest was not the result of ignorance, but simply a preference for something else. Like other people, she admired monuments, galleries, splendid churches, and museums, but she preferred the shops where she could procure the rarities she had a taste for, and liked to adorn her house with for the admiration of others. She enjoyed the brilliant sky of Italy and the comfort of its mild climate, so necessary to her health; but, if these advantages had not been accompanied by a sumptuous palace and a large circle of fashionable acquaintances, she would have regarded her expatriation as an exile, and found it but slightly mitigated by all the wonders of nature and art by which she was surrounded.

Their journey at last came to an end. The princess descended from her carriage at the foot of the magnificent entrance to her palace, so overjoyed at finding herself once more at home that the last traces of her recent malady disappeared as if by enchantment.

Numerous servants relieved Fleurange from the care of the light baggage with which the princess’ carriage was always encumbered, and she hastily followed her protectress up the broad steps of white marble that led to the first story. Here a vast hall ornamented with statues opened into apartments whose splendor surprised the young girl. She had already visited more than one palace in Italy with a similar display of grand proportions, frescoes, ceilings richly painted and gilded, but she had never seen anything comparable to the luxury of the furniture and the richness of the long suite of rooms through which they passed. When the princess came to the last, she stopped. This salon, smaller than the others, opened, as well as the one next it, upon a large covered terrace with frescoed arches, which, filled with flowers, rare plants, and seats of all forms and sizes, resembled a garden screened from the sun, and formed an appendage to the elegant apartment they had just entered, which was the princess’ private sitting-room. A table loaded with fruit-cake and ices stood in the centre of the room. The princess threw herself on a chaise longue. “We dine late,” said she. “I will take a biscuit and an ice. Eat something also yourself. But first take off your hat, lay down your satchel, and rest yourself. It is exceedingly warm.”

Fleurange attended to the princess’ wants, and then very willingly took a slight repast, which the heat of the mid-day hour made quite acceptable. While she stood taking an ice, the princess opened the pile of notes and letters on a small table near her. She read the notes first.

“Well, there are more people here than I expected. So much the better! Let me look over my cards.”

She read out a succession of names of people from various countries, with a running commentary on each which would have given the impression that these people she was so glad to find again were individually perfectly indifferent to her. Then she took up her letters.

“Ah! at last!” she exclaimed, tearing open a large envelope. “Let me see the date.—Now I am relieved!—Thank heaven, he is still there!” She read about a page, and then suddenly cried: “In less than a month? What, in less than a month?” Then she finished the letter in silence, and afterward remained a long time without speaking, but with an anxious and thoughtful look.

“Ah! Gabrielle, are you still here?” she said, rousing at last from her reverie. “I beg your pardon.” She rang. “You must be shown to your room. I advise you to take some repose. I shall do the same. We shall see each other again at seven o’clock, which is my hour. I expect hardly any one to-day, and shall wear my morning dress.”

Fleurange, thus dismissed, gladly followed the valet de chambre, who answered the bell, through the salons and up the grand staircase to the second story where her chamber was. There he left her with a respectful bow, after pointing out the corridor that gave access to the princess’ apartments without the necessity of passing through any of the rooms.

The chamber to which she was taken was handsome and spacious, but it seemed rather ornamented than furnished. Its size, its painting and gilding would have allowed much more and much richer furniture. But such as it was, it pleased the young girl’s fancy. The broad and lofty window in a deep embrasure admitted floods of light, but would have afforded no other view than the sky, if three stone steps had not made it accessible. From the upper step the eye looked down upon the interior court of the palace, which resembled a cloister with its light colonnade. A limpid stream flowed from a white marble fountain in the midst of velvet-like turf and surrounded by rhododendrons. Birds were warbling in a large aviary. All these things combined to make up a soft, pleasing picture, crowned by the azure vault of heaven—a picture singularly quiet and dreamy, and Fleurange remained a long time seated on a stone seat within the embrasure, allowing her thoughts to wander, as often happened, in vague regions, until a servant with her trunk reminded her it was time to descend in more than one sense from her elevation, and proceed to the matter-of-fact task of unpacking and arranging her effects. About to commence, she found she had left her satchel in the salon. As it contained her keys, she was obliged to go for it, and she took the short passage which led directly to the princess’ sitting-room; but, instead of returning the same way, she could not resist the desire of examining again, alone and at leisure, the sumptuous rooms she had only passed through before. She went leisurely through them, admiring as she went, with a mixture of childlike curiosity and an innate perception of the beautiful, all the objects that were collected here in uncommon profusion; but, notwithstanding the exquisite taste displayed, she could not help observing the ostentation, which by contrast vividly recalled the remembrance of the Old Mansion—the dear Old Mansion! where simplicity was so happily combined with the magnificence of art, where everything that charmed the eye appealed to the soul, inspired serenity and peace, and inclined one to application and study; whereas here, what met the eye and struck the attention spoke of amusement, luxury, and pride.

This comparison made Fleurange melancholy. She ceased looking around with interest, and was about to return to her chamber by the grand stairway without continuing her explorations, when, in crossing the hall, a large half-opened door opposite attracted her attention, and she yielded to the curiosity of glancing into the only apartment she had not seen. She pushed the door open, and entered a room equally as large as the others, but which seemed rather a study-room than a salon. The half-open shutters allowed the volumes in Russia leather that lined the walls to be seen, as well as the ebony book-cases on all sides. Furniture systematically arranged and protected by coverings, tables loaded with books placed in order as if no one had touched them for a long time, everything showed this room was unoccupied, and had not, like the rest, been prepared for the return of the mistress of the house; but a certain atmosphere of studious repose pervaded it which was more in conformity with Fleurange’s real tastes than all the magnificence she had just beheld. She therefore advanced some steps, looking around, and, the better to see the objects scarcely to be distinguished in the obscurity, she went to one of the windows and ventured to throw the shutters entirely open. The strong light which at once filled the room revealed a picture before her which she had not previously noticed. She glanced at it, and—it is impossible to describe her feelings!—She could not herself have found words to express her extreme astonishment and the overpowering emotion that made her turn pale and then red as she almost fell.—The picture thus suddenly revealed to her was that which had played so important a part in her life—her father’s last work—in a word, the Cordelia for which she had sat so long ago, and which she had never heard mentioned since without agitation!

For some moments she was overpowered by a thousand thoughts rushing over her—thoughts similar to those she had so successfully banished some months before by a supreme effort. It is not astonishing they should be involuntarily reawakened now. The lively curiosity with which she was filled was excusable, as well as her impatience to know how this picture came here, and whose room it was.—She felt she should soon know, and, with a heart still throbbing, she closed the shutters, and softly left the room in which she had just beheld this unexpected apparition, as it were.

She crossed the hall, and was at the foot of the stairs when she met Mademoiselle Barbe in a great hurry, and in that stage of fatigue bordering on ill-humor which, on a day of departure or arrival, is to be seen (and not wholly without reason) in those on whom rests the weight of packing and unpacking. Fleurange stopped her nevertheless, having resolved to ask an explanation of the first person she met.

“Barbara,” she said, “I have been examining all the rooms.”

These words brought a smile to the servant’s face, for she prided herself on the splendor of her mistress’ palace.

“We are well quartered, aren’t we?” she said, with an air of satisfaction.

“Yes, quite. Does the whole palace belong to the princess?”

“Certainly, from the garret to the cellar.”

“And she lives here alone?”

“Alone, of course, with Monsieur le Comte.”

“The count?”

“Yes; her son, who always lives with her when here. There—in that room,” said she, pointing towards the door Fleurange had just closed.

“Her son! What is his name?”

“Count George de Walden.”

“Count George de Walden?” echoed Fleurange, as if in a dream.

“Why, yes; that was the name of the princess’ first husband. Did you not know it?”

“No, I did not.”

“He died young—that one. Madame, too, was young. She mourned for him a long time, and then married again, but had no more children. The prince is dead also, but—”

Just at that moment a servant appeared with an armful of packages of all sizes, one of which fell from his hand. Barbara left Fleurange abruptly, and sought relief from her fatigue in a severe reprimand to the awkward man, more tired than herself.

Fleurange returned to her seat on the top of the three steps that led to her window, and was again looking down on the quiet and secluded court. But what a change had been wrought in her feelings since she sat there half an hour before! What contrast between this tranquil scene, which then harmonized so perfectly with the serenity of her thoughts, and her present agitation of mind! She endeavored to be calm, but for some time could not succeed. Was the emotion caused by this unexpected discovery surprise and joy, or regret and fear? She could not clearly decide, but it was a mixture of all these different sensations; and she gave herself up for a time to be buffeted by a whirlwind of contradictory thoughts. By degrees they at last became clearer and more distinct. Fleurange recalled the last time she heard Count George’s name mentioned, as well as the resolution she made that day. That resolution had been easily kept, thanks to all that had since happened to divert and absorb her attention. She must still remain faithful to it under entirely different circumstances. It was, however, no longer a question of forgetting the very name of Count George, as she was doubtless to see him, know him, and live under the same roof. But what she must impress most seriously on her mind was—that he would be as widely separated from her here in his mother’s house as when he only lived in the world of her dreams. This of course would be extremely difficult, but it was evidently a duty she owed to herself. This point once established, her course was plain.

The gentle hand that guided her childhood did not try to extinguish the exquisite though somewhat dangerous qualities with which she was gifted. She did not stifle the liveliness of her imagination, or the ardent tenderness of her heart, or the tendency of her sentiments to extremes.

Madre Maddalena considered these precious gifts only dangerous in the absence of two other qualities which she sought to develop in Fleurange, with a care only comparable to that which is used (in an inferior sense) in developing the human voice, and transforming it into an instrument at once powerful, harmonious, and almost divine. However musical a voice may be, one cannot sing without correctness of ear, and the power of sustaining its clearness for a long time without faltering. The divine harmony of the human faculties also depends on the correctness with which the word duty is echoed in the soul, and the strength of character to act upon it unhesitatingly and unfalteringly. These were the two qualities that overruled all others in Fleurange’s nature, and had hitherto preserved her from the dangers to which the others exposed her.

More than two hours passed away: the shadows of the columns grew longer beneath the portico: the evening star, herald of holy thoughts in Fleurange’s soul, came out clear and brilliant in the cloudless sky, reminding her of her accustomed prayer. She had hardly finished it when the clock struck and abruptly recalled the young girl to herself. She hastily opened her trunk, changed her dress, and entered the dining-room the very moment the Princess Catherine appeared.

Fleurange wore a plain dress of black silk. In the present state of her wardrobe, she would have been embarrassed if required to increase the elegance of her toilet, but she had not thought of it on the present occasion, after hearing the princess say she intended dining in her morning dress. She was, therefore, somewhat surprised to see the garment thus designated was a flowing robe of white cashmere richly embroidered with gold. Her coiffure was a tissue of lace and gold, and she wore on her neck six strings of magnificent pearls which hung down over her waist. But what surprised and disconcerted the young girl more was the dissatisfied look the princess gave her when she appeared. It was the first time the kind and cordial greeting to which she had become accustomed was wanting.

But it was no time to give or receive any explanations, for the princess was not alone. There were two or three guests whose names Fleurange afterwards learned: an old savant named Dom Pomponio; Signor Livio, a young artist: and the Marquis Trombelli, who was somewhat of a bore. To tell the truth, they occupied an inferior rank among the habitués of the palace, but they preserved the mistress of the house from the mortification of seeing the products of her cook’s skill waste their sweetness on the desert air, as well as the danger of dining without a sufficient number of guests in a vast room, where a tête-à-tête with Fleurange would have been unsatisfactory. Not that she was by any means indifferent to the quality of those she received in her drawing-rooms, but with respect to her convives she attached almost as much importance to their number as to their worth, and only required in return the ability of appreciating the exquisite dishes placed before them.

Notwithstanding the simplicity of her dress, Fleurange did not escape notice. The man of letters talked a little more than usual with the hope of dazzling her; the marquis directed his eye-glass towards her several times; and the young artist ventured on some words complimentary in their tone, but as she only replied in monosyllables the conversation languished. The evening seemed long, and the princess had yawned more than once, when she was suddenly roused at hearing announced—the Marquis Adelardi! She made a joyful exclamation.

The gentleman who appeared was about forty years of age. Fleurange afterwards learned he was a Milanais. She immediately perceived he was one of those men who converse well on every subject, and know how to excite an interest in what they are talking about, whether it be fashionable gossip, a political novelty, or a social and literary question, and who have no other fault than that of treating these subjects as if they were all of equal interest!

The atmosphere of the room at once changed. The Marquis Adelardi had not been there a quarter of an hour before he found means of setting off the indifferent elements of the circle to the best advantage, making each one talk of what he knew the best. He passed from politics to history, from the sciences to the arts, showing himself capable of conversing on all these subjects, if not of sounding their depths.

Fleurange silently listened to this conversation, which amused her, but her interest redoubled and changed its nature when the new-comer, drawing near the princess’ arm-chair, said:

“And when are we to see our George again?”

The princess replied in a pleased and yet half-anxious tone: “We shall see him again soon, for the letter I received from him this morning, written at St. Petersburg, announced his return at the end of this month.”

“So much the better, I miss him everywhere, and every way, here.”

“And I assure you I do also, as you may imagine,” said the princess, with a thoughtful air, as she played with her necklace of pearls. “Nevertheless, Adelardi, you know as well as I it would be better for him to remain where he is till the end of the year.”

“Come, my dear princess, give it up. I advise you to abandon the idea of making a courtier of George.”

“That is not the only point.”

“Yes, I understand. You think the fair Vera—” Here the marquis leaned forward, and exchanged some words with the princess in a low tone. Fleurange only heard these: “And you know this is my only wish.” It was the princess who spoke.

“And he?” said the marquis.

“He! You know him well.”

“But that is precisely the reason I should not have supposed him insensible to such attractions as hers.”

“Yes, indeed, but it is never sure he is not absorbed by some fancy not to be foreseen. Moreover, I believe if she had not been at court—” Here the princess again lowered her voice.

“Do not worry. He will yield at last.”

“I truly hope so, but meanwhile acknowledge it would be better for him not to return.”

“Yes and no. I am not sure it is very judicious to expose him to compromise himself, as he is always tempted to do.”

The princess looked very grave. “You are right from that point of view,” said she. “He really terrifies me often. But I think he would become more prudent if obliged to be so. It is a necessity of which one is at last convinced by living in Russia.”

The conversation was continued for some time in a low tone. Then the princess declared herself fatigued, and an exception was made to her custom of prolonging the evening to a late hour, and they all retired.

Fleurange was about to do the same when the princess stopped her and asked the reason of her simplicity of dress. “I am particularly desirous,” she said, “that they who in some sort aid me in doing the honors of my salon should be dressed stylishly—and I pay them accordingly,” she added with the want of delicacy sometimes to be remarked even in well-bred ladies with regard to their dependents. It was a fault the princess was not often guilty of, but this side of her nature became apparent when she was in a bad humor.

Fleurange blushed. “I beg your pardon, princess,” said she, “but I cannot comply with your request—I cannot,” she repeated, her eyes filling with great tears.

“What does all this mean?”

Fleurange hesitated an instant, but, obedient to her impulses, always frank and simple, she related what the princess had hitherto been ignorant of—the ruin of her family, and the motive that had induced her to accept the place she now occupied.

“If I am obliged to expend the money I receive from you in adorning my person; if I can only aid my relatives at the risk of displeasing you, then—then—” And her voice faltered. “Alas! madame, I should be obliged to seek elsewhere the means of—”

The princess did not allow her to finish. The young girl’s accent, as she gave her simple account, excited her sympathies; her dissatisfaction vanished, and the result of this little scene was that Fleurange was allowed not only to dispose of a part of her salary as she pleased, but the whole, on one condition, which the princess insisted upon, and to which Fleurange was at length forced to consent—that the princess, and she alone, should have the direction of her young companion’s dress and ornaments.

From that time Fleurange was profusely provided with all that could satisfy the singular requirement of her protectress, and at the same time gratify her generosity, keenly stimulated by her interest in the account she had just heard. Fleurange yielded with a mixture of gratitude and repugnance, endeavoring to reconcile the simplicity of her tastes with the elegant taste of the princess. The result, however, was that, when she appeared for the first time in public, the effect she produced far surpassed the expectations of her who seemed to attach so much importance to enhancing her beauty.

Elegance and luxury seemed really to be necessary elements of the Princess Catherine’s existence, and as an inferior article of furniture or hangings of any plainness would have been considered out of place in her apartments, so Fleurange’s simple black dress would have marred the prevailing harmony, and she regarded it as a matter of importance to change what injured the general effect. But she was by no means disposed Fleurange should cease to be her protégée, which gratified her pride as well as her kind heart.

If the somewhat too enthusiastic homage paid the young girl at her first appearance had been sought or even welcomed by her, the princess’ humor would doubtless have been affected by it; but the dignified modesty of Fleurange’s deportment soon modified the admiration whose incense would only have troubled the purity and elevation of her heart had vanity given it entrance.

Fleurange was not vain. This was one of her charms, and at the same time a safeguard.

The princess’ observant eye soon assured her there was no cause for fear. This increased her confidence in Fleurange, which soon became boundless. It was the height of her wishes to be attended by one whose beauty added to the attractions of her salon and gave her no anxiety as to the consequences; to enjoy, herself, the charm of Fleurange’s presence, her activity, and a thousand little talents which made her useful at every turn; and this without requiring the least vigilance on the part of herself, which would have greatly annoyed her. She was glad she could now be indolent at her ease. Fleurange wrote her notes, arranged her flowers, and completed work she zealously commenced and then abandoned, and afterwards complacently showed as her own. Fleurange was also ready to read to her, with her harmonious voice and expression only the more rare because perfectly natural, sometimes Italian or German poetry, and sometimes articles in the reviews and journals; then, at the hour of receiving visits, she was glad to absent herself, unless the princess invited her to remain or sent for her. By thus following her own judgment, she unwittingly fulfilled the secret wishes of the princess, who was perhaps better pleased with the tact with which she knew how to anticipate her desires than the promptness of her obedience.

Meanwhile the days passed away, and it was more than a month since their arrival at Florence. During this time Count George’s name was mentioned a thousand times in Fleurange’s presence, but it ceased to produce the effect she once wisely resolved to resist. Sometimes she smiled to herself as she thought it possible, after knowing him, she might be greatly astonished at his ever having occupied her thoughts to such an extent. “Phantoms always vanish, they say, when we approach and look them in the face.”

Such was the thought that crossed her mind, one morning, as she sat alone in the small salon. The princess had gone out, and Fleurange was seated at an embroidery frame completing some work. The thought just mentioned was suggested by the news received that morning of the certain arrival of Count George by the end of the week.

“Yes, reality puts all fancies to flight; and it is very probable,” she continued, pursuing the course of her reflections, “when I know him better—” She was suddenly interrupted by the noise of hasty steps in the next apartment. Generally, no one came that way without being announced. Surprised, Fleurange hastily rose to leave the room according to her custom, but had scarcely started when she found herself face to face with the person who entered.

It was he—yes, he—Count George!

She had not time to define her sensations. The effect she herself produced surprised her, or, to speak more correctly, terrified her so much that she remained motionless, silent, and astonished.

“Fleurange!—Great God! is it possible! Is it true? Fleurange!” repeated he with an emotion more profound than that of joy. His voice, no less than his features, was graven on the memory of her who heard it. The name, the almost forgotten name of her childhood, uttered in such a tone; the hand that grasped her own as that of a friend he had found again, but with a look that made Fleurange instinctively withdraw her eyes; his rapid questions, incoherent replies, the eager, tender, passionate tone of his words—everything in this meeting was sudden, ardent, and dangerous as lightning!

A carriage was now heard; but, before the Princess Catherine entered the salon, Fleurange had reached her chamber, pale and ready to faint.

All the unreasonableness, the madness almost, of her former thoughts, all that had seemed impossible, was in an instant transformed into a sudden, unforeseen, and dangerous reality! What had she just heard? What did he say? What! The thought of her had followed him for a year; he had endeavored to banish it, but had not succeeded; and now he had returned decided to make every effort to find her again—to behold her once more whose image had been constantly present in his mind!

Yes, he said all this!—And what she heard was the counterpart of what she herself had felt and struggled against.—Poor Fleurange! was it joy her pale and troubled face expressed? Was it a transport of pride, or of tenderness, that caused her heart to beat so painfully? Was it happiness that made her shed such a torrent of tears?

Oh! no, the words so sweet to hear when it is lawful to listen; the happiness of being loved when one loves—one of the greatest in the world; the words so readily understood because they express what one has so deeply felt; all that sometimes suddenly illumines a life like the light of the sun, had just fallen on hers with the brightness, instantaneousness, and danger of a thunderbolt!

Count George de Walden possessed every exterior quality that could please or fascinate, and, though it would not have been wise to regard his chivalric air and the nobleness of his features and manners as the sure indices of a soul exempt from egoism, it was impossible not to be struck by his appearance, and difficult to forget him after he was once seen. The lively impression he made on Fleurange’s memory was not therefore so strange as might appear, and there were more excuses for it than she found herself. What was much more surprising was that, notwithstanding the charm with which she was endowed, the impression was reciprocal, and, at the end of a year, was not effaced.

We must not, of course, compare the simple, confused, and involuntary feelings of a young girl with those of such a man as Count George. Under the semblance of Cordelia, Fleurange had been constantly before his eyes as well as in his imagination. He passionately desired to behold her again. He resolved to find her without examining his intentions as to the project, and this tenacious preoccupation influenced more than he would have acknowledged the decision he recently made in spite of his almost pledged word.

Nevertheless, without being very scrupulous, the Count de Walden would have thought twice before allowing himself to make such a declaration to his mother’s companion as that with which he greeted her. But he by no means expected to find in the Gabrielle sometimes mentioned in his mother’s letters her whose singular name had remained imprinted on his memory, as well as her wonderful beauty, and the first moment of surprise deprived him of the faculty of reflection. Then, seeing the young girl’s sweet face blush and turn pale, seeing her charming eyes full of alarm, he uttered in spite of himself the words he would perhaps have been better able to suppress if she herself had been more successful at concealment.

But, as we have said, all this was quicker than thought. Five minutes had not elapsed from the moment of his sudden appearance before the princess, breathless with joy and haste, fell pale with emotion into her son’s arms. George led her to her chaise longue, and knelt beside her, and, while she was asking him—embracing him at every word—sometimes why he had returned so soon, and sometimes why he had kept them waiting for him so long, by degrees he entirely regained his self-control. When, after a long hour’s conversation, he found himself once more alone, he asked himself if the vision he beheld at his arrival was a reality or a dream of his imagination, and then, if he were pleased or not, that it had appeared to him beneath his mother’s roof.

During this time Fleurange also regained her self-possession, though slowly, and her first sensation was a kind of terror. “O dear friends! why did I leave you?” she cried, with a feeling analogous to that of one in the midst of a tempest, longing for the security of land. She felt the need of protection even more than at Paris with want staring her in the face, and more than ever did her isolation and weakness make her afraid. She wiped away her tears, folded her hands, and endeavored to reflect calmly, but it was beyond her power to be calmed yet. Her surprise and agitation had been, this time, too violent. In spite of all her efforts, the accents still ringing in her ears filled her with an acute, almost painful joy, which pierced her heart like a sword.

“No, no, I must not dwell on it,” she said, clasping her forehead with her hands as if to stay the current of her thoughts.

All at once a new idea occurred to her: “What will he tell his mother? What would she think? Would she be proud, haughty, and disdainful as she sometimes knew how to be? Would she order her new companion to leave her at once? What was to be the result?”

She was taking this new view of her position when Barbara, without the usual formality of knocking, came rushing in with the eager air of a person who brings news and a message.

“Mademoiselle Gabrielle,” she said, “the princess has sent me to inform you of the count’s arrival, and that there will be a great many at dinner. She wishes you to look your best.”

This message, in the midst of Fleurange’s reflections, was like cold water on a furnace, causing a kind of effervescence, and the confusion of her thoughts became more inextricable than ever. She looked at Barbara as if she did not comprehend her.

“You were asleep, perhaps,” said she, noticing the young girl’s pallor and bewildered look. “Are you ill?”

This question suggested an affirmative reply, and she told the servant she would be obliged to remain in her room. She was congratulating herself on this happy means of escape, when Barbara explained:

“Remain in your room! Sick! Well, what an idea! And on a day like this!—Madame would be pleased!—Come, mademoiselle, you know well she would never consent to it!”

“But if my head aches so I can hardly raise it?” said Fleurange.

Barbara looked at her. Fleurange was not deceiving her. She had a headache; she was very pale, and there was an unusual expression in her eyes and face, but she was no less beautiful than usual; rather the contrary.

“Come, Mademoiselle Gabrielle, you are not very ill, I know,” said Barbara. “Make an effort, otherwise you may be sure the princess will be up here, and then you will have to yield.”

This perspective reduced Fleurange to immediate submission.

“Then, Barbara,” she said, in a tone half plaintive and half impatient, “let her tell me what to wear! Dress!—If she only knew how I detest it!”

“Come, mademoiselle, there are many others who would be glad to be in your place,” said Barbara in an ill humored tone.

At first she was very much opposed to all her mistress’ generosity to Fleurange, but she soon softened, for the latter had a means of conciliating her which she often made use of, and always at a seasonable time.

“Here, Barbara, take this shawl. You may keep it. Come back in an hour, and tell me what the princess wishes me to wear. That is always the shortest way, and saves me the trouble of deciding.”

Barbara went away, but reappeared in an hour, bringing a dress of sky-blue gauze and some silver pins.

“Here, mademoiselle, is your toilet for to-day. Dress yourself quick; I am going to help you. Let me arrange your hair.—There!—These bright pins have a fine effect in your black hair. Now your dress, quick. The princess is already in the salon. Monsieur le Comte also, and a great many others. You will be late.—Come, what are you thinking of, Mademoiselle Gabrielle, to sit down instead of completing your toilet?”

Fleurange was indeed at once agitated and confused. She walked to and fro in her chamber, sat down, and rose up without any attention to the appeals addressed her. At length she resigned herself to let Barbara dress her as she pleased, and the latter, with a natural taste for the art, acquitted herself so well that, when the young girl, with a trembling hand, opened the door of the salon, hoping to glide in unperceived among the numerous guests already assembled, there was a general murmur of admiration. This added a mortal embarrassment to her trouble.

If any one had asked her the color of her dress she could not have told; but the idea suddenly occurred to her that Barbara had perhaps arranged her hair and dress in a different and more becoming way than usual, and she blushed, wondering what the princess would think of her unaccustomed display.

But the princess did not appear to take any notice of her. Standing in the centre of the room in the richest of dresses, she was doing the honors of the house with her usual ease. All at once Fleurange heard her name called: “Gabrielle!” It was the princess who beckoned to her. Fleurange approached, but a mist veiled her eyes, for she had seen from the first that Count George was beside his mother.

“My bracelet is unclasped. Fasten it, Gabrielle,” said the princess in her usual tone, at once kind and patronizing. Fleurange bent down and clasped the bracelet.

“George,” said the princess, “this is Gabrielle of whom I have often spoken to you. Gabrielle, this is my son.”

George bowed without attempting to speak. Fleurange did the same, but a painful sensation made the blood rush to her face. For the first time in her life, she felt tacitly guilty of a falsehood, or at least of deception, and, though comforted by the certainty the princess had no suspicion of what had taken place two hours before, a flash of haughty displeasure escaped from her eyes as she raised them and turned away her head.

Count George looked at her attentively for an instant, then became thoughtful, and it was only with an effort he took any part in the conversation at table. But in the evening, thanks to the Marquis Adelardi, whose friendship he valued and whose mind was in sympathy with his, he became more animated, and in his turn shone almost as much as his brilliant interlocutor; but he did not approach Fleurange, and did not even seem once to look towards her.

TO BE CONTINUED.

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God reveals himself to all the faculties of the soul. We not only know him as truth; we also love him as beauty. As he is infinite truth, so is he perfect beauty. Without the existence of God as absolute truth, science is impossible. Science, which is co-ordinated knowledge, can never be well grounded unless it rest upon the eternal and first cause, which is God. God as truth is at the bottom of all knowledge; as beauty, he is the ideal present to the soul in every conception of art.

Art is the expression of ideal beauty under a created form. The philosopher, in his meditations, seeks the true, which he translates into formulas; the artist in his impassioned love seeks the beautiful, which he makes to live on canvas, to breathe in marble, to speak from the living page.

The end of art is not to imitate nature. On the contrary, in the presence of natural beauty it looks beyond to the type, the idea of a still higher beauty. Hence the artist is not a mere copier of nature; for he is enamored of an ideal that disgusts him with all that he beholds in the real world. The aim and despair of his life is to give to this ideal a form and a sensible expression. Ideal beauty is that which disenchants the soul of the love of every created thing, and which in the presence of reality lifts it up to a higher love. It is a gleam from the face of God reflected through the blue heavens, the starry sky, or whatever in nature is grand or beautiful. It is the eternal allurement and eternal disenchantment of the noblest souls. True beauty is ideal beauty, and ideal beauty is a reflection of the infinite. Hence art, which aims to give expression to this beauty, is essentially religious, and tends to elevate the soul from earth to heaven, and bear it away toward the infinite.

It is the ideal side of natural beauty that gives to it its religious power.

The view of the beautiful in nature creates in us a longing for heaven, because the image of God is reflected from all those objects which so inspire the soul. When, in the spring-time we seat ourselves on the border of a lake in whose tranquil waters, as in a vast mirror, are reflected the green woods and the laughing meadows, the trees and the plants and the flowers; into whose bosom the rippling waters of rill and rivulet are flowing, all joyous like children that run to meet their gentle mother, whilst the quiet winds whisper to one another from leaf to leaf, as if afraid to dispel the enchantment of the spot—does not, in such an hour, a mysterious solitude creep over the soul, and free it from the distracting thoughts of life, giving it power to raise itself on the wings of contemplation to the very throne of God? The sight of true beauty always reminds us of heaven. Seated on the border of that enchanted lake, man grows sad and thoughtful, a sweet melancholy takes hold of him, because he has caught a glimpse of home, but is still an exile. When, on a summer’s evening, the sun has sunk to rest, and not a breath creeps through the rosy air, but all nature is bowed in silent prayer, and the stars come out one by one, the guardians of the night—in this heavenliest hour, who has not been impressed by a sense of the infinite, the unmistakable presence of God, before whom heaven and earth, “from the high host of stars to the lulled lake and mountain coast,” grow still, absorbed in adoration?

There is also in the grand and rugged scenes of nature an immense religious power.

The ocean, the desert, high mountains and mighty rivers, storm and darkness, with the voice of thunder and the lightning flash, all speak of God, and in their presence man bows in homage to the omnipotence of his Creator. Hence the child of nature, however rude and imperfect his idea of God, is essentially religious in his aspirations.

Man must isolate himself and become absorbed in his own abstract and empty thoughts before he can lose consciousness of the ever-abiding presence of the Creator. For every creature is a revelation of heaven to the human soul, reminding it of its origin and high destiny. If nature leads us to God, why may not art have the same power, since both are expressions of the same eternal beauty?

Before considering this question, we wish to advert to the immense power and universal influence of art.

Few can enter into the sanctuary of science—even the rudest mind when brought in contact with ideal beauty by the creative power of art—but feel its force and its inspiration. Art is the most lasting of national glories. Indeed, we may say that without art there is no glory either national or individual.

The greatest deeds and the proudest names sink back in death unless art embalm them in poetry or in song, give them immortality on the speaking canvas or in the breathing marble.

Brave men lived before Agamemnon, but they are forgotten, for their names never shone on the poet’s page. Those nations are most glorious in which art attained its highest development.

The muse of Homer, the eloquence of Demosthenes, and the chisel of Phidias, have done more to immortalize Greece than the deeds of her proud heroes. The greatest human actions are in themselves but little removed from the commonplace affairs of everyday life; but the creative power of art transforms them and invests them with a charm which the reality never possessed. The primeval forests of Kentucky, in the day when its name was the “dark and bloody ground,” witnessed many a deed of human daring and of warlike prowess equal to those of Achilles and Hector under the walls of Troy; but art with its celestial wand never transfigured those deeds on the poet’s page, and they are forgotten, buried with the leaves that overshadowed them. The life of man is short, even that of a nation is not long; but art dies not, and has moreover the divine power of conferring immortality upon all that it touches. Shakespeare is worth more to the glory of England than all the victories of all her generals. Dante, Raphael, and Michael Angelo, with innumerable other names which represent the highest artistic power, have made Italy the consecrated land of poetry and of song, the home of beauty and of all loveliness—the native country of the soul.

Time alone, which is the approver of all things, can give to art its full power, and it is only when we consider it in the past that we become aware of its great influence in the history of the human race. The present is always a vulgar time; too real to be beautiful. The present is the slave of power and wealth, but these soon disappear, and art remains for ever. The first impulse in the movement which has carried the European mind to its present state of enlightenment was given by art in conjunction with religion. The study of the Grecian and Roman models, in poetry, in eloquence, and in architecture, fired the nations of Europe with a love of artistic perfection, and consequently greatly contributed to our present civilization. The historic power of art is in some respects greater than that of history itself. Few men know history as a science—the masses are brought into contact with the heroes of the past by poetry and by song.

Has God, who has given to art a universal mission in the development of man’s moral and intellectual nature, banished its elevating influence from the sphere of religion? It would be foreign to our present scope to discuss the actual and possible perversions of art. There is naught on earth so holy that the free will of man may not turn it to evil. The fact that a thing may be abused simply proves that it has a right and proper use. The abuse comes from the free agency of man; the use is the mission given by God, which is always holy and elevated.

The direct aim of art is the expression of infinite beauty under a created form, and hence a true work of art should elevate the soul to the contemplation of heavenly beauty. This contemplation of the divine ideal disenchants us of the things of earth; which truth is expressed by the old proverb, that there is no great genius without melancholy.

He whose soul habitually contemplates the ideal world is necessarily saddened by the reality of life, which is so infinitely beneath the elevation of his thoughts.

There is nothing sensuous in the idea of true beauty. Its property is to purify and moderate desire, not to inflame it. Hence art addresses itself less to the sense than to the soul. It seeks to awaken not desire, but sentiment. Chastity and beauty seek each other. Chastity is beautiful, and beauty is chaste.

These considerations go to show that art, the end of which is the expression of beauty, is in its tendency moral and elevating, and consequently religious.

There can, then, be no just cause of antagonism between religion and true art, as there can be no contradiction between theology and real science.

Far from being enemies, religion and art are allies. This truth the Catholic Church has ever proclaimed. She has stigmatized no one of the arts. In her universal life, she has a mission for each and every one of them. Her churches are not alone the temples of the living God—they are also the home of the arts which point heavenward.

The Christian religion in its dogmas and aspirations is essentially spiritual. The Catholic Church is the great and only successful defender of the distinction between spirit and matter. By her teachings and practices, she has rendered man more spiritual, and consequently more beautiful. By awakening him to the consciousness of the diviner and more ethereal part of his nature, she has developed in him the instinct of art, which is essentially spiritual because its soul is the ideal.

The more we meditate upon the nature of art, the more thoroughly are we convinced that true art is the sister of true religion. Protestantism, protesting against many truths, also protested against the alliance of religion and art. We speak of the Protestantism of the past; for no man knows what Protestantism is to-day. It is anything and everything, from semi-Catholicism down to naked infidelity. It has become mere individualism, and may consequently no longer be spoken of as an organization. The Protestantism which is dead objected to the alliance of religion and art because it conceived them to be of opposite nature and contrary tendency. Religion is the worship of God in spirit and in truth, and Protestantism looked upon art as purely material.

But in this as in other matters, the Protestant view was based upon a misconception both of religion and of human nature. If man were wholly spiritual, his religion would also be purely spiritual. But matter forms part of his nature. Even that which in him is most spiritual—thought—has its sensible element. An idea is an image, whence it follows that we cannot even think without forming to ourselves a mental representation of the thing thought of. No human act can be purely spiritual. The law of our being is that we rise from the visible to the invisible, from the sensible to the supersensible. An invisible and purely spiritual religion would be to us an unreal and intangible religion. An invisible church is a contradiction in terms, and without a church there can be amongst men no authoritative religious teaching. Neither religious nor intellectual life, in our present state, can exist without language, and language addresses itself directly and primarily to the senses. It is therefore impossible for man to express the spiritual without making use of the material. Hence art, which seeks to adumbrate the infinite under a finite form, in this simply conforms to the universal law of man’s nature, which in all things, even in thought, subjects him to matter.

Is not Christianity based upon this fact? Did not God take unto himself a visible and material nature in order to manifest to the world his invisible power, and beauty, and holiness? Is not the Christian religion a system of things invisible, visibly manifested? The end of religion is spiritual, but in order to attain this end it must possess a visible and material element. This fact of itself gives to art a religious mission of the highest order.

This mission is to proclaim to the world Jesus Christ and him crucified and glorified—by poetry, by song, by painting, by architecture, in a word, by every artistic creation of which genius is capable.

Jesus Christ is the beau ideal of art—the most lovely and beautiful conception of the divine mind itself. He is the visible manifestation of God, the all-beautiful.

Purity, and gentleness, and grace, with power and majesty, all combine to make him the most beautiful of the sons of woman, the fairest and the loveliest figure in all history, to whom the whole world bows in instinctive love and homage. There is a shadow on the countenance of Jesus which gives to it its artistic completeness. It is sorrow. There is something trivial in gaiety and joy which deprives them of artistic effect. The cheek of beauty is not divine except the tear of sorrow trickle down it. Hence to preach Jesus Christ and him crucified is not to preach perfect religion alone, but also the perfect ideal of art.

Christian science, which is theology, has as its object the dogmas of the church. Christian art relates directly to religious worship, but it has incidentally a doctrinal significance. If we consider eloquence an art, which we may do, for true eloquence is always artistic, we must concede that it holds a most important place in the church of Jesus Christ. He blessed eloquence and bade it convert the world when he spoke to the apostles these memorable words: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations.” The divine command was to preach the Gospel, not to write it. The living word spoken by the divinely commissioned teacher has alone borne fruit in the world, converted the nations, and changed the face of the earth. Eloquence must be spoken. If you take from it its voice, you take away its soul. It is the cry of an impassioned nature, in which love, and faith, and deep-abiding conviction are enrooted. Add to this purity and holiness of life in him who speaks, and let him be in earnest, and he will be eloquent. Eloquence in the mouth of a consecrated teacher has a sacramental power. It is one of the divinely established ordinances for the propagation of religious truth, and for the conversion of a soul to God.

Poetry, too, is consecrated to the service of religion. The muse never soars her loftiest flight except when lifted up on the wings of religious inspiration. The most poetic word in language is that brief, immense word—God. It is the sublimest, the profoundest, the holiest word that human tongue can utter. It forms the instinctive cry of the soul in the hour of every deep emotion. In the hour of victory, in the hour of death, in the ecstasy of joy, in the agony of woe, that sacred word bursts spontaneously from the human heart. It is the first word that our mother taught our infant lips to lisp, when, pointing to heaven, she told us that there was God our Father, and bade us look above this base, contagious earth. When the mother for the first time feels her first-born’s breath, in tenderness of gratitude she pronounces the name of God; when in utter helplessness of woe she bends over the grave of her only child, and her heart is breaking, she can find no relief for her agonizing soul, until, raising her tearful eyes to heaven, she breathes in prayer the name of God.

When two young hearts that are one vow eternal love and fealty, it is in the name of God they do it; and the union of love loses half its poetry and half its charm except it be contracted before the altar of God and in his holy name.

When the mother sends her son to do battle for his country, she says, “God be with thee, my boy!”

When nations are marshalled in deadly array of arms, and the alarming drum foretells the danger nigh, and the trumpet’s clanguor sounds the charge, and contending armies meet in the death grapple, amid fire and smoke and the cannon’s awful roar, until victory crowns them that win; those banners that were borne proudly on till they floated in triumph over the field of glory are gathered together in some vast temple of religion, and there an assembled nation sings aloud in thanksgiving: “We praise thee, O God! we glorify thee, O Lord!” How often has not God chosen the muse of poetry in order to convey to the world his divine doctrines! The Bible contains much of the sublimest poetry ever written. Some of the Psalms of David, portions of Job and Isaias, equal in deep and lofty poetic feeling anything that Dante or Milton wrote. And did not these privileged minds also receive their highest inspirations from religion?

We may not separate poetry from music. Music is poetry in tones. It is the language of feeling, the universal language of man. The cry of joy and of sorrow, of triumph and of despair, of ecstasy and of agony, is understood by every human being because it is the language of nature. All the deep emotions of the soul seek expression in modulation of sound.

Cousin says: “There is physically and morally a marvellous relation between a sound and the soul. It seems as though the soul were an echo in which the sound takes a new power.”

Byron, too, seems to have felt this:

At the awakening call of music, the universal harmonies of nature stir within the soul. The ancients were wont to say that he who cultivates music imitates the divinity, and St. Augustine tells us that it was the sweet sound of psalmody which made the lives of the monks of old so beautiful and harmonious. God is eternal harmony, and the works of his hand are harmonious, and his great precept to men is that they live in harmony. Did not Jesus Christ come into the world amid the choral song of angels? Would you, then, banish music from the church of Jesus? No art has such power as music to draw the soul toward the infinite. It would seem as though the sounds of melody were the viewless spirits of heaven, calling us away from earth to our true home in the mansion of our Father. Whosoever has enjoyed the rare privilege of being present in the Sistine Chapel, during Holy Week, when the melodies of Leo, Durante, and Pergolesi, on the Miserere, are sung, has felt the immense power of religious music. For a moment, at least, he has quitted this earth, and the voice of song has borne his soul in ineffable ecstasy to the very throne of God. As music develops religious sentiment, so religion gives to music its sublimest themes. To her, Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart owe their divinest inspirations.

Painting, too, asks to be received into the temple of religion. What sentiment is there that the painter cannot express? All nature is subject to his command—the physical world and the moral world. His muse soars from earth to heaven, and contemplates all that lies between them. Above all, the human countenance divine, that mirror of the soul, belongs to the painter. His brush, dipped in the light of heaven, gives to virtue its own celestial hue; to vice, its inborn hideousness. He expresses every emotion of the human heart, every noble love, every lofty aspiration, every dark and baneful passion. Aristotle, the most comprehensive mind of the pagan world, affirms that painting teaches the same precepts of moral conduct as philosophy, with this advantage, that it employs a shorter method. Christian painting began in the Catacombs. In the rude pictures of that subterranean world we find the chief doctrines of Christianity reduced to their most simple expression under forms the most touching.

Painting there represents the Phœnix rising from its ashes, emblem of the immortality of the soul and of the resurrection of the body; the good shepherd bearing upon his shoulders the lost sheep, which teaches with touching simplicity one of the most beautiful of our Lord’s parables; the three youths in the fiery furnace, signifying the providence of God for those who fear and love him; Pharao and his hosts engulfed in the Red Sea, proclaiming to the faithful that God is the avenger of those who put their trust in him. These and similar subjects were peculiarly adapted to inspire courage in the hearts of the Christians of the first ages, when to be a follower of the cross was to be a hero.

As men of genius and learning by their life-long labors show us the divine beauties and perfections in the character of Jesus in new bearings, so the art of painting throws around his history an intenser light. His divinity is as manifest in the “Transfiguration” of Raphael as in the famous sermon of Massillon. His ineffable sufferings on Mount Calvary and the Godlike power which consented to death, but conquered agony, are as vividly and feelingly portrayed on the canvas of Rubens as in the unequalled and inimitable discourse of Bourdaloue. No one can look upon the “Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci without being inspired with a most sublime conception of that holiest event. Can we think of the passion and death of the Saviour without forming to ourselves a mental image corresponding to the scene? If, after all, we must have a picture, why not take that of genius rather than trust to our own tame plebeian fancy? And then, for those who cannot read or meditate profoundly, for the poor whom Jesus loved, what master is like painting?

St. Basil declares that painters accomplish as much by their pictures as orators by their eloquence.

The church as a lecture-room will interest only the cultivated few; the church as the temple of art sanctified by religion is the home of worship for the multitude.

Religion, if it be anything, must be popular, which science can never be, and which art always is. Then, in the name of the religion of the poor, let architecture advance to raise to God the temple of majesty and beauty, the democratic palace of the people, where the prince and the beggar sit side by side as brothers, a basilica prouder and loftier than that of the sceptred monarch.

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Some writer has remarked that “there is no purgatory in France,” meaning thereby to illustrate the great extremes of piety and irreligion in the national character; and, although on a broad ground this assertion is by no means orthodox, yet it is practically true to a certain extent, and nowhere perhaps are these traits more noticeable to a stranger than in the time-honored city of Lyons. Here faith and disbelief walk side by side through all grades of society, each stronger and more resolute from its very proximity to the other; and when the tide of revolution swept over France, nowhere have the excesses been greater or religion more monstrously profaned than here; and yet nowhere has faith been more profound, more edifying, and more uncompromising. The blood of its early Christian martyrs has been a wonderful leaven and has worked well, and the thousands of pilgrims who yearly tread the heights of Fourrière, the extraordinary solemnity and fervor of the exterior devotions and religious ceremonies, show that there is a countercurrent stronger and more powerful than any opposing force that infidelity can bring to bear against it.

It is to give a few impressions made by these latter characteristics of this old city that we now recall some reminiscences of a visit there several years ago. The antiquity of Lyons, and its many monuments of interest, are quite sufficient to induce a traveller to linger on his route, and a week can be easily filled in exploring the city proper and its environs.

Like many of the European cities, its streets are narrow, and the houses high and badly ventilated; but a great change has taken place in regard to these defects within the last ten years, and a renovation without mutilation has opened its thoroughfares, adorned it with beautiful squares, fine bridges, broad and handsome quays, and placed it on an equal footing with any city in Europe in regard to its sanitary advantages.

Dating as far back as the Christian era and beyond, there are many remnants of its Roman origin yet to be seen, which have been carefully preserved through its various vicissitudes. Christianity was here planted in blood; and under the Roman emperors, three persecutions of Christians took place, which numbered forty-five thousand martyrs on their crimson pages; and this is why faith has taken such deep root, and why it opposes itself so firmly to those subtle influences of the day which threaten to endanger a birthright so dearly bought.

To us Americans who are only familiar with Lyons in its commercial bearings, and from the superior quality of its manufactures which find their way into our market, the fact that its inhabitants are a lettered as well as a business people is rather a matter of surprise; and we gaze in wonder at its magnificent buildings, devoted to the fine arts, its lyceums, colleges, academies of science, schools and institutions of every kind for instruction and the development of the finer tastes; and the riddle is solved by knowing that their manufactures, their commerce, their business, occupy only a part of their lives, and by no means constitute the sum total, as is so nearly the case in this country. This repose is very attractive to us Cisatlantic people, who lead such restless lives; and the lovely summer days that we spent in the old city enjoying this tranquillity are never to be forgotten.

We were awaiting the celebration of the Fête du Saint Sacrament,[75] which is usually kept with so much solemnity in the provinces. On the eve of the feast we made the ascent of Mont Fourrière, though not in the garb of humble pilgrims, “with sandal shoon and scallop-shell,” but in the more commonplace character of sightseers from the Western World, attracted to this height by the far-famed shrine which crowns its summit, and by the many historic associations that cluster round it.

On our way up we visited a cemetery which almost hangs by the mountain-side, and from which there are lovely views in every direction. It made a strange impression, this city of the dead, so far above the noise and clatter of the busy world below. It was so still, nothing broke the silence except our footsteps along the gravelled walks. One tomb especially attracted our attention: it was fairly buried and hidden by the quantity of fresh flowers, and the crosses and wreaths of immortelles which covered it. While wondering who could be the silent occupant of a grave so much loved, a lady approached in deep widow’s mourning, leading two little children, clad in the same sombre hue. They came and knelt at the tomb. Our question was answered, and we moved silently away, sorry for even the momentary intrusion we had been guilty of. Near the cemetery is the church of St. Irenée, which contains the bones of 18,500 Christians, martyred by order of Septimius Severus, 193 A.C. The remains of its ancient crypt are also shown, which dates back to the second century. There is also a well in this crypt, in which it is said these bones were found. The roughly paved road then leads up to the Chapel,[76] and Terrace of Notre Dame de Fourrière. We found we were just in time for the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, which was given here every afternoon during the Triduum which preceded the feast.

This little chapel was not remarkable either for its architectural finish nor for the richness and perfection of its ornamentation; it is plain, very plain indeed, but the marvellous number of its ex-votos, the gilt and silver hearts which actually burnish its walls, the crutches and other instruments suggestive of disease which hang around, tell of the moral and physical burdens which have been brought here and left, and of the weary, sorrowing souls who have wandered up this rocky height, who have made their deposit, and returned singing alleluias.

A fine terrace is just at the side of the chapel, and the view magnificent from the parapet which guards its eastern face. Just beneath lies Lyons in all its stateliness, traversed by two superb rivers from north to south, and prominent among its most striking points is the grand old Cathedral of St. Jean, which stands directly at the base of the mountain.

The surrounding country is a succession of lovely landscapes, and beyond, looking far away, a hundred miles off into Switzerland, the glorious Alps, with Mont Blanc’s snowy peak towering far above all, bound the horizon. We were fortunate in getting this view in perfection, for frequently a veil of mist and fog shuts out entirely this latter part of the tableau. On ascending the belfry of the chapel, we found the panorama yet more extended and enchanting. In every direction the views were entirely unbroken and uninterrupted. Seven rich provinces of France unfolded their scenery before our delighted eyes. At the extreme edge of the southern horizon rose Mont Pilat; at the west, the mountains of Forey and Auvergne; toward the north, Mont d’Or; and on the east, the Alps, in their eternal mantle of snow, completed a picture that could not be surpassed. Every prominence had caught the golden light of the sinking sun, and the shadows that had crept into the valleys only enhanced the coloring of the scene and made the effect more striking.

A Jesuit college, with its garden and appurtenances, is an appendant on the southern side of the terrace, and we crossed over to take a peep at their chapel, well knowing the good taste and exquisite finish which are usually displayed in their churches. There we found them also holding a Triduum, and, their service being a little later than that of the other chapel, we had the pleasure of attending Benediction a second time. Here the music was delightful and the chapel a gem. It was very small, and seemed to be lit entirely from the altar, which was ablaze with wax-lights and natural flowers; there appeared to be no external light to enter at all, and yet from its miniature size none of its details were lost, and, with the accessories of the solemn service then going on, it was the embodiment of beauty and inspiration.

When we turned our footsteps downward, the shadow’s had lengthened, and were fast creeping out of the valleys, and by the time we reached home the heights of Fourrière, which we still had in sight, were shrouded in gloom.

The next morning we were awakened by the booming of cannon, which announced the inauguration of the fête.

We hurried through breakfast, so as to reach the cathedral in time for the procession. In the square opposite our hotel, an altar had been erected, and we passed several others on our way, but their decorations, at this early hour, were not quite complete.

Everything wore a festive look, and everybody was out in holiday attire, flags and banners were flying, and the façades of some of those immensely high houses were festooned from top to bottom with crimson and yellow hangings. One building in especial was very effective; it was the Palais de Justice, which is on the right bank of the Saône, and which we faced in crossing the bridge to the cathedral. Its extended front of Corinthian pillars was draped in crimson cloth, which contrasted finely with the gray stone of which it was built. A little to its left is the old cathedral, stately and grand in its sombre livery of centuries. It has seen generations pass away, emperors and empires, kingdoms and kings, and yet it stands to-day intact, and ready to do duty for another hundred years, unless demolished by the sacrilegious hand of the iconoclast of the nineteenth century.

On reaching the place in front of the cathedral, we found a large crowd awaiting the procession. In a short time the sound of martial music was heard, and presently several officers rode up on horseback to open a passage through the crowd.

The procession was escorted by a troop of cavalry and military band, and preceded by a number of lovely children, dressed in white, with silver wings, their hair flowing, and scattering flowers as they passed along. As it entered the church, the organ pealed forth, filling the vast aisles with its magnificent harmony. Then Pontifical High Mass began, in all the grandeur of the especial ritual which is attached to this church, and which is the oldest in France, having been introduced here by one of the first bishops of Lyons; the liturgy is also different from that ordinarily used, and the ceremonies are of the most imposing character. The band, placed in a remote part of the church, played at intervals during the service, and the harsh and deafening sounds which are usually the result of brass instruments in a close building were lost in the immense space, and only the sweetest strains swept up through the nave and aisles.

In like manner the glare of day fell through the richly stained windows in a mellow and subdued light, which diffused itself generally over the church.

A very pleasant American writer[78] has said: “If we could only bring one thing back from Europe, that one thing would be a cathedral.” And truly these old monuments have a prestige to which persons of all creeds must pay tribute; and the veriest scoffer lifts his hat with reverence as he enters, and feels the influence of that wonderful atmosphere which pervades their hallowed precincts. After Mass we prolonged our walk home to see the decorations of the city. The altars were now entirely finished, and dressed with a profusion of natural flowers.

In the afternoon the procession passed round the city in a line with the altars, at each of which benediction was given. In their liturgy there are four special hymns for each of these stations or reposoirs, and, when the latter exceed that number, the chants are repeated until they have all been visited. There is generally one altar in each ward or district of the city, to satisfy the pious devotion of those who cannot attend service at the church.

In the evening illuminations and fireworks completed the festivities of the day—of a day whose minutest detail showed how true “the Rome of Gaul” had been to the colors which she unfurled nearly seventeen hundred years ago on the ramparts of paganism.

Since then I have seen other fêtes in other lands, but none have left the impression of the first which I saw inaugurated in the old Cathedral of St. Jean, under the shadow of Mont Fourrière.

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The middle ages were undoubtedly the epoch during which the influence of woman upon the gravest affairs and most important issues in the history of the church was most widely exercised. There was hardly a single country in Europe that was evangelized and reclaimed from social barbarism without the direct intervention of the power of women, and wherever the inevitable excesses of a system in the main both useful and honorable, such as the feudalism of the middle ages, had to be checked or corrected, it was always done through the merciful intercession of holy and generous women. To begin with the country whose daughters have ever been foremost in zeal for the cause of religion, France, we have a long list of queens whose names are conspicuous in the annals of church history. They were no less honored in their own day than they have been since the voice of the faithful has proclaimed them saints. When the French monarchy was in its first military and elementary stages, the young Frankish conqueror, the heathen Clovis, who had just forced the ancient Gauls of the province of Rheims to bow before his power, found at the court of Gondebaud, King of Burgundy, the niece of that prince, Clotildis, a Christian maiden, renowned for her learning in matters of theology, and for her undaunted stand against the Arianism of her uncle’s court. St. Gregory of Tours, says Ventura,[79] represents her as evincing the most varied and reliable knowledge of Christianity, and especially of the questions at that time lately decided at the Council of Nicæa. She knew equally how to combat paganism on her husband’s part and Arianism upon her uncle’s, and displayed all the self-possession of a great apologist, with the theological science of a doctor of the church. This was as early as the year 493, not long after Clovis won the great battle of Tolbiac against the Alemanni, and became a Christian, according to his vow, made during the engagement, to the “Son of the living God, thou whom Clotildis worships.” The queen then sent for St. Remigius, the Bishop of Rheims, to instruct and baptize her husband. She instructed the women of her court and family herself, and showed herself most zealous in the propagation of the faith. The ceremony of baptism, and the anointing of the king which followed it, were performed, by the queen’s care, with extraordinary solemnity. She herself walked in the procession between the king’s two sisters, the one formerly a pagan, the other an Arian. The first, the Princess Albofleda, renounced the world and consecrated her virginity to God, thus giving a first example to the numerous royal maidens of France who have since left the court for the cloister. Clotildis so fired her husband’s heart with her holy enthusiasm that he built and endowed the church of SS. Peter and Paul in Paris, now called St. Genevieve in honor of the sainted shepherdess who, later on, shared with Clotildis herself the title of patroness of France. Clovis was afterwards buried in this church. The Visigoths and Burgundians, who were Arians, were shamed into less inhuman ways by the example and widespread influence of the victorious Clovis and his Christian warriors; the foundations of the great French monarchy were laid by the evident desire of the neighboring tribes to coalesce with the Franks; the future Catholic monarchy of Spain was consecrated by the heroic zeal and suffering of Clotildis the younger, the only daughter of Clovis, married to the Arian Amalaric, King of the Visigoths, in Spain, and the mitigation of many lawless and still half-barbarian acts during the reigns of her sons was successfully undertaken; so that it may be said with truth of this period of history that its chief glory was the supremacy of woman. Clotildis died at Tours, where for many years she had lived in solitude and humility, entirely ignoring her high rank, and employing her influence over her sons in exhortations to preserve the peace of their respective kingdoms, to protect the poor, and to treat them as brethren. But great as her services to religion and civilization had been, the church was not destined to suffer by her death, for a long succession of imitators of her virtues took her place from century to century, and protected the interests of that church whose champions cannot fail her as long as principle and honor exist in the world. Radegundes, the daughter of Bertarius, King of Thuringia, and the captive of King Clotaire I. (fourth son of St. Clotildis), was instructed in the Christian faith at the court of the latter, whom she afterwards married. Her great delight during the short period of her court life was the care of the sick in the hospital of Athies, which she had founded, and the alleviation of the miseries of the poor. She endeavored to restrain the lawlessness of the court; but, when her husband caused her brother to be treacherously assassinated, as Butler tells us,[80] in order to possess his kingdom of Thuringia, she was so grieved at the time that she begged for leave to retire into a monastery. Here her influence was greater than it had been at court. The great abbey of Poitiers was founded and the first abbess, Agnes, chosen by her. She enriched the church of this monastery with numerous gifts, and sent ambassadors to the Emperor Justin of Constantinople to obtain a relic of the True Cross. This being given her, she had it placed in a shrine, to which it was carried in solemn procession. She had already invited to Poitiers many learned and holy men, among others the orator and poet Venantius Fortunatus, who on this occasion composed the famous processional hymn “Vexilla Regis Prodeunt,” which is now one of the most prominent features of our liturgy. Thus, to a woman’s inspiration do we owe one of the hymns of world-wide renown, synonymous with the name and practice of Catholic Christianity. Butler tells us that Radegundes herself was a good scholar, and read both the Latin and Greek fathers. She procured for her monastery the rule and constitution of St. Cesarius of Arles, and had it confirmed by the Council of Tours, assembled 566. Here again, in the letter of Cesaria, the abbess of the monastery of St. John, at Arles, we have a most remarkable instance of the great discernment and prudence of a woman in her management of a numerous community. She gives the strictest cautions against all familiarities and partiality in a religious community, and also enjoins that each nun should learn the Psalter by heart and be able to read well. Biblical learning is thus proved to have been ever foremost in the minds of the pioneers of monasticism. But Radegundes, so great was her anxiety to make her monastery of Poitiers a perfect work, repaired to Arles herself, and studied the rule personally for some time, in order to help the Abbess Agnes in establishing it the more effectually. After the death of her husband, and during the shameful disturbances caused by the famous Fredegonda, the mistress of Chilperic, Radegundes became once more the support of orthodoxy and of the persecuted bishops of the realm. Among other proofs of the high esteem in which prominent churchmen held this great woman, let us cite the letter addressed to her by the assembled bishops of the Council of Tours, wherein they say: “We are rejoiced, most reverend daughter, to see such an example of divine favor repeated in your person; for the faith flourishes anew through the efforts of your zeal, and what had been languishing through the wintry coldness of the indifference of this age, lives again through the fervor of your soul. But as you claim as a birthplace almost the same spot whence St. Martin came, it is no wonder that you should imitate in your work his example and teaching. Shining with the light of his doctrine, you fill with heavenly conviction the hearts of those who listen to you.”[81]

The tradition of constant faith and resolute orthodoxy on the part of the queens of France was upheld in the century following that of Radegundes (the seventh), by Bathildis, the wife of Clovis II.; the friend of Eligius, Bishop of Noyon, and of Owen, Bishop of Rouen. Both of these had been placed in responsible positions at court through the influence of Radegundes—the co-operator of Genis, the holy almoner, who subsequently became Archbishop of Lyons, and the wielder of great power through the complaisance of her husband. Bathildis was pre-eminently the support of the episcopate and the refuge of the poor. She had herself been a captive, being by birth an Englishwoman, and having fallen to the lot of Erchinoald, the first officer of the King of Neustria, who treated her very kindly. Ventura says of her: “At the death of her husband, having been entrusted with the regency of the kingdom and the guardianship of her three little children, the oldest only five years old, she acquitted herself of this double office with such wisdom and prudence that even the great nobles and statesmen could not withhold their admiration and respect. With such counselors as the holy bishops Eligius, Owen, and Leger, it is not astonishing that she should have succeeded in banishing from the church in France the shameful simony which, through royal connivance, had hitherto dishonored it, and abolishing in civil matters the unjust and vexatious taxes that were grinding down the people. She multiplied hospitals, monasteries, and abbeys. The famous monastery of Chelles owes its origin to her.... But the most important of all her foundations was that of Corbie, which afterwards became so celebrated in France, and where this queen, as zealous for the propagation of science as for the strengthening of religion, established under able masters, gathered from all parts of the world, a system of the most complete literary and scientific education. This monastery, next to that of Lerins, was a true university and a centre of enlightenment. The regency of this woman renewed the glories and wonders of the reign of Pulcheria. Never had sovereign so exerted herself for the welfare of her people, both religiously, scientifically, and politically. But her greatest glory, which has not been sufficiently recognized, was ... that, contrary to the cold calculations of a false philosophy, she dared to do what no man had done before her. She abolished slavery in France (where it still subsisted), and was the first Christian sovereign who proclaimed as a national principle ... that a slave becomes free on setting his foot on the soil of France!”[82]

Between Bathildis and Blanche of Castille, from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, there was no lack of holy and learned women in France, but it would be impossible to enumerate them all. “The mother of St. Louis, though the church has never formally canonized her, stands out as one of the grandest figures in ecclesiastical history. Her stern and unflinching devotion to religious principle, instilled early into the mind of her son, sowed the seeds of sanctity in the exceptional life of that holy king. Her talents were no less remarkable than her austerity. Her marriage at the age of fourteen with Louis VIII., King of France, gave her the high position to which her birth, her genius, and her beauty entitled her. This union was the model of Christian marriages, and her historian, the Baron Chaillon, says that during the twenty-six years it lasted she and her husband were never separated for a single instant, and that not the slightest shadow darkened the serenity of their intercourse. Even at an early age and before her husband’s accession to the throne, her father-in-law, Philip Augustus, did not refuse to take and follow her advice in matters of state importance.”[83] At her husband’s death she became, by his desire, regent of the kingdom. Ever eager to put her son’s personal prestige foremost, she carefully initiated him into the affairs of the realm, and accustomed him early to appear in his royal character in public. She wisely averted the ever-impending coalitions of the great vassals of the crown against the royal authority. She continued the war against the Albigenses, whose dissensions were ruining the kingdom; she obtained the annexation of the territory of the Counts of Toulouse to the crown, and quelled the revolt of the Duke of Brittany, who ended by gladly recognizing his fealty to her son. When she committed to Gaulthier, the Archbishop of Sens, the mission of treating for the hand of Margaret of Provence for the young king, these were the severe instructions she gave him: Only to propose the marriage formally after he had well studied the character of the young princess, and had well satisfied himself as to the stability of her principles, the purity of her life, and the sincerity of her religion. Butler, in his life of St. Louis, says of the queen: “By her care, Louis was perfectly master of the Latin tongue, learned to speak in public, and to write with elegance, grace, and dignity, and was instructed in the art of war, the wisest maxims of government, and all the accomplishments of a king. He was also a good historian, and often read the works of the Fathers.” Thus it will be seen that, without departing from the strictest feminine delicacy, a woman may be the sole responsible preceptor of a statesman and warrior, and yet leave no stain of “petticoat government” on his education, nor any suspicion of undue asceticism on his belief.

Concerning the dissensions of the nobles and vassals who refused to be present at the young king’s coronation, Butler says: “The queen regent put herself and her son at the head of his troops, and, finding means to bring over the Count of Champagne to his duty, struck the rest with such consternation that they all retired.... The whole time of the king’s minority was disturbed by these rebels, but the regent, by several alliances and negotiations, and chiefly by her courage and diligence, by which she always prevented them in the field, continually dissipated their cabals.” Of the negotiations with the Count of Toulouse, a dangerous and powerful vassal, Butler gives these details: “In the third year of her regency, she obliged Raymund, Count of Toulouse and Duke of Narbonne, to receive her conditions, which were that he should marry his daughter Jane to Alphonsus, the king’s brother, who should inherit the county of Toulouse, and that, in case they should have no children by this marriage, the whole inheritance should revert to the crown, which last eventually happened.” The same author says of Margaret of Provence “that she surpassed her sisters in beauty, wit, and virtue.” In 1242, after the majority and marriage of her son, Blanche founded the monastery of Maubuisson. Louis was remarkable for the even-handed justice with which he protected the serfs against the encroachment of their feudal lords, and on one occasion refused to allow Mgr. Enguerrand de Coucy the privilege of being tried by his peers, and condemned him to death by the ordinary process of law, for having arbitrarily hanged three children who had been caught hunting rabbits in his woods. He afterwards spared his life, but deprived him of all his estates and exacted from him an enormous fine, which he employed in building and endowing a mortuary chapel where Mass should be offered every day for the souls of the murdered children. The rest of the fine was divided into several foundations for hospitals and monasteries. In 1248, St. Louis, according to a vow he had made in sickness, set out for the crusade against the Sultan of Egypt, leaving his mother once more regent of France. Ventura says of her during this second regency that, “being in France in the body, yet in the East in spirit, and following mentally her heroic son in his dangerous undertaking, she seemed to multiply herself. Entirely absorbed in the care of the home government of a great kingdom, that she might make justice, order, and peace supreme therein, she was also participating none the less entirely in the great struggle between the Cross and the Crescent, ... and it is impossible to entertain a correct idea of the wisdom, forethought, and activity of which Blanche, during those five years, gave proof, thus being enabled to send aid in kind, in arms, and in money, to the army in the East, yet without taxing and unduly oppressing the people at home. Thus she did not neglect the smallest details in order to assure the success of an expedition in which the rational honor of France as well as the triumph of Christianity was engaged.” Ventura then goes on to remind the would-be “emancipators” of woman that, throughout her arduous duties, Queen Blanche, notwithstanding her immense governing powers and her proud experience of fifty years, did not hesitate to take as a trusted friend and counsellor the learned Archbishop of Sens, Gaulthier-Cornu. Of this latter prelate and statesman, a contemporary historian has said, “As long as his power was in the ascendant, fraud and dishonesty hid their face, while peace and justice reigned.” Blanche of Castille died before her son’s return from Egypt, and hastened to pronounce her vows of monastic consecration to God before she breathed her last, on the first of December, 1252.

We must now go back some centuries to place before our readers a fugitive account of those French princesses who exercised in Spain a true apostolate. We have already mentioned the younger Clotildis, but Indegonda, the daughter of Sigisbert, King of Austrasia, and Rigontha, the daughter of Chilperic, King of Neustria, remain to be noticed. They were married to two brothers, the former to Hermenigild, the latter to Reccared, sons of Levigild, King of the Spanish Visigoths. Indegonda suffered great persecutions from her husband’s step-mother on account of her religion, the second wife of Levigild being a bigoted Arian, and it was even a long time before Hermenigild consented to become a Catholic. When at last Indegonda had obtained this happy conversion, she herself and her husband’s uncle, the holy Leander of Seville, were exiled, and Hermenigild so persecuted by his father that, having been betrayed by the Greeks and deserted by the Romans, he fell a victim to Arian vengeance, and, after suffering torture and imprisonment, was cruelly put to death by order of Levigild himself. This barbarian king, however, repented his unnatural cruelty before he died, and, recalling his brother-in-law Leander, entrusted him with the care of his remaining son Reccared. Rigontha, the wife of the young prince, had suffered great injustice at the hands of her own father Chilperic, the lover of the too famous Fredegonda. She had succeeded in converting her husband, and, together with his uncle Leander, exercised a salutary influence over him. Reccared assembled the Arian bishops of his kingdom, and spoke to them so persuasively that they acknowledged themselves willing to be reconciled to the church. The province of Narbonne, at that time under his dominion, followed his example, while the neighboring tribe of the Suevi, also Arians, speedily joined the church. A council was then assembled at Toledo, and the intimate union of Spain with Catholic interests was founded on a solid and reliable basis.

It is told as a pleasantry of some shrewd critic of modern times that, whenever he saw or heard a disturbance of any sort, his unfailing question was, “Who is she?” being certain that, whatever might be the effect, a woman was sure to be the cause. If this is unfortunately no longer a libel on the sex in this distracted century, at least we may point back to the so-called dark ages, and proudly say, with a certainty far more absolute than that of our cynical contemporary, when we read of any great consummation in the history of religion and civilization, “Who was she?”

Not long after the death of Blanche of Castille, another Spanish princess, the daughter of Peter III. of Aragon, and the niece of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, took up the tradition of holiness, which seemed the birthright of the royal maidens of mediæval times. Her father attributed his success in his undertakings against the Moors to her prayers and early virtues. At twelve years old she was married to Denis, King of Portugal, to whom she was not only a most faithful wife, but whom she succeeded, by her meekness and silent example, in winning back from his sinful courses. She is praised by her biographers for her ascetic virtues, and for her utter disregard of her earthly rank. But what concerns us more is to look into the influence she held on social and political affairs. Among these it is impossible not to reckon her charities, for private charity has often much to do with public honesty and morality. Butler tells us that she “made it her business to seek out and secretly relieve persons of good condition who were reduced to necessity, yet out of shame durst not make known their wants. She gave constant orders to have all pilgrims and poor strangers provided with lodging and necessaries. She was very liberal in furnishing fortunes to poor young women, that they might marry according to their condition, and not be exposed to the danger of losing their virtue. She founded in different parts of the kingdom many pious establishments, particularly a hospital near her own palace at Coimbra, a house for penitent women who had been seduced into evil courses, at Torres-Novas, and a hospital for foundlings, or those children who for want of due provision are exposed to the danger of perishing by poverty or the neglect and cruelty of unnatural parents. She visited the sick and served them with her own hands, ... not that she neglected any other duties, ... for she made it her principal study to pay to her husband the most dutiful respect, love, and obedience, and bore his infidelities with invincible meekness and patience.” Let us stop to note this last sentence, which no doubt by many of our chafing sisters of this age may be misunderstood. This meekness was not a want of spirit; it was the effect of “the subordination of our inferior nature to reason, and of our reason to God,” as one of the most lucid and most sympathetic of American exponents of Catholic truth once expressed to the writer the whole duty of man upon earth. It was no passiveness, no supineness, but the heroic endurance of the martyr, who is more concerned at another’s sin than his own wrong, and who does not consider that reprisal and resentment are efficient means to win the sinner back. When a woman stoops to retaliation, she forgets the dignity of her sex, and, if she forget it, who can she expect will remember it?

We may also be allowed to say one word about the numerous foundations constantly mentioned in the lives of these great Christian women of past ages. It is perhaps the general belief that nothing but monasteries were endowed in early times. We have sufficiently shown how fallacious such belief would be. Institutions of every kind, in which Catholic ingenuity was multiplied till it embraced every need and provided for every contingency, were sown all over the Christian world. The East was not forgotten, and, indeed, even the great orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers were originally nothing but organized bodies for the defence and shelter of the pilgrims who flocked to the holy places. Such charities as tended to diminish the temptations to crime were foremost among the many originated during the middle ages. We have only to refer to history to prove this. Even had these foundations been confined to monasteries, we must remember that the conventual abodes of old united in themselves nearly all the characteristics of other institutions, and in the less favored districts virtually supplied their place. Besides being the only secure and recognized homes of learning, the solitary centres of education, they were also the refuge of the homeless or benighted wanderer; the asylum of the oppressed poor, of threatened innocence, and of unjustly accused men; the hospital of the sick, the sure dispensary of medicines to the surrounding peasantry, and the unfailing granary of the poor during troublous times or years of famine. There was hardly one want, physical or spiritual, that could not find ready relief at the monasteries of both monks and nuns, so that in founding such retreats it is no exaggeration to say that orphanage, asylum, reformatory, hospital, and school were comprised within their walls.

We must return to the great queen whose munificence has led us into this digression, and resume, as was our purpose from the beginning, the rigid relation of mere historical facts to which we more willingly entrust the cause than to the most eloquent apologies.

When Elizabeth’s son, Alphonsus, revolted against his father and actually took up arms, she made the most prudent efforts to mediate between them, for which the Pope, John XXII., greatly praised her in a letter he wrote to her on the subject; but, certain enemies of hers having poisoned her husband’s mind against her, he banished her to the town of Alanquer. She refused all communication with the rebels, and at last was recalled by her penitent husband. Butler says: “She reconciled her husband and son when their armies were marching one against the other, and she reduced all the subjects to duty and obedience. She made peace between Ferdinand IV., King of Castille, and Alphonsus della Corda, his cousin-german, who disputed the crown; likewise between James II., King of Aragon, her own brother, and Ferdinand IV., King of Castille, her son-in-law. In order to effect this last, she took a journey with her husband into both these kingdoms, and, to the great satisfaction of the Christian world, put a happy end to all dissensions and debates between those states.” During her husband’s illness, which followed soon after, Elizabeth nursed him most devotedly, and ever exhorted him to think of his spiritual welfare. Her husband’s death was the end of her public career as queen—a fitting proof of the little value she placed upon the distinctions for which half the world is periodically laid in ashes. Her son, Alphonsus, and her grandson, also named Alphonsus, the young King of Castille, having again proclaimed war upon each other, Elizabeth set out to meet and reconcile them. She died on the way, in 1336, having obtained peace through her exhortations to her son, who attended her at her deathbed. Thus peace and brotherly love among princes and nations, as well as among the individuals of her own immediate circle, was ever nearest the heart of this great and admirable woman. How well it would be if she were taken as a model by the women of our day, and if her influence could be followed by the reward which our Lord himself attached to the noble office of peace-makers!

Turning to England, once the Island of Saints and the home of religious learning, we see the influence of woman most peremptorily asserted. There is Bertha, the daughter of Charibert, King of Paris, and wife of Ethelbert, King of Kent, whom we have already mentioned, with Brunehault, as being the apostles of the faith in England, and the zealous helpers of Gregory and Augustine. Rohrbacher says of her that she contributed mainly to the conversion of her husband and of the whole nation, and St. Lethard, her almoner and Bishop of Senlis, greatly aided her. There is Eanswide, her grand-daughter, the child of Eadbald, who was also converted later on and became abbess of the monastery at Folkestone, as Butler tells us. There is the great Edith, or Eadgith, the daughter of King Edgar, who in the tenth century was the ornament of her sex and the marvel of men. “She united,” says Butler, “the active life of Martha with the contemplation of Mary, and was particularly devoted to the care of the sick. When she was but fifteen years old, her father pressed her to undertake the government of three different monasteries, of which charge she was judged most capable, such was her extraordinary virtue and discretion. But she humbly declined all superiority.... Upon the death of her brother, Edward the Martyr, the nobility who adhered to the martyred king desired Edith to quit her monastery and ascend the throne, but she preferred a state of humility and obedience to the prospect of a crown.” Another Edith, the daughter of the great Earl of Kent, Godwin, became the queen of Edward the Confessor, with whom she lived by mutual consent in perpetual virginity, according to a vow the king had made many years before his marriage. Reading, studying, and devotion were her whole delight. Edward’s mother, Emma, is ranked among the saints, and was mainly instrumental in the religious and learned education of her son. Ventura, in his admirable work on Woman, which has become, as it were, a text-book for all those who are truly interested in the theme and history of woman’s greatness, draws attention to the fact that it was under the reign of Edward the Confessor—who is credited by prejudicial historians with “womanly” weakness, and who, on the contrary, was such an irrefragable proof of what the grave and wise influence of good women can do—that the equality of all men before the law was first recognized as a principle. Edward’s niece, Margaret, the wife of Malcolm, King of Scotland, was also a most eminent and influential princess. Her husband, whose confidence in her was unbounded, deferred to her in every particular of state government, whether internal or external, secular or religious. Their children’s education he left entirely in her hands, and, while she carefully surrounded them with masters well versed in all the knowledge then attainable, she was no less solicitous for the improvement of the nation. Butler says of her: “She labored most successfully to polish and civilize the Scottish nation, to encourage among the people the useful and polite arts, and to inspire them with a love of the sciences.... By her extensive alms, insolvent debtors were released, and decayed families restored, and foreign nations, especially the English, recovered their captives. She was solicitous to ransom those especially who fell into the hands of harsh masters. She also erected hospitals for poor strangers.” Her daughter Maud, who was the first wife of Henry I. of England, followed in her footsteps, and was highly revered, both during her life and after her death, by the two nations to which her birth and marriage linked her. Two great hospitals in London, that of Christ Church, Aldgate, and of St. Giles in the Fields, are due to her munificence and foresight.

We have no space to mention many of the Anglo-Saxon princesses who, either on the throne or in the cloister, swayed great political issues and protected learning while they shielded the virtue of their sex. We must leave the Island of Saints for other kingdoms whose queens were conspicuous not only in procuring the conversion of these realms to Christianity, but also in the territorial aggrandizement and material prosperity of the countries they governed. Bridget, Queen of Sweden, the famous author of the most interesting revelations ever written, was no less remarkable personally than fortunate in her many and distinguished children. Warriors and crusaders, holy wives and consecrated virgins, she offered them to God in every state, and instructed each with particular care. A pilgrimage to Rome in days when the journey from Scandinavia to the south was more an exploration than a safe pastime was bravely undertaken by her in her widowhood, and the foundation of her order and chief monastery at Vatzen is certainly one of the most boldly conceived systems known to the world. The monasteries of this order were double, and contained a smaller number of monks and a larger of nuns, divided by so strict an enclosure that, although contiguous, the communities never even saw each other. In spiritual matters, the monks held authority, but in temporal the nuns governed the double house; and in fact the monks were only attached to the foundation in a secondary degree of importance, and for the greater spiritual convenience of the cloistered women. Such subordination goes far to show how the pretended inferiority of woman is really an unknown thing in the church. The fanaticism and bad faith of later times affected to see an abuse in this system, and most of these monasteries were destroyed at the Reformation, but Butler says that a few exist yet in Flanders and Germany. St. Bridget’s works have been printed and reprinted from age to age, and have seemingly never lost what may be styled in modern parlance their popularity. She also procured a Swedish translation of the Bible to be written by Matthias, the Bishop of Worms, who died about the year 1410. She was altogether one of the most prominent women of the fourteenth century, and no unworthy successor to the central figure of the preceding age, Catherine of Sienna, of whom we shall have to speak briefly later on.

Two empresses of Germany deserve a passing notice here—Mathilda, the wife of Henry I. called the Fowler, and her daughter-in-law, the famous Adelaide. The former had been educated by her grandmother, who bore the same name as herself, and who was the abbess of the monastery of Erfurt. Once again we have a woman of genius, prudence, and great governing powers coming forth to rule a disturbed empire—and from what school? The world will hardly dare to call it unenlightened or narrow-minded; yet it was a monastery. During her husband’s wars against the Danes and Hungarians, then (it was in the ninth century) nothing better than barbarians, Mathilda was several times left regent, and Ventura tells us “that public affairs did not prosper less, the country was not less tranquil, nor the people less contented, because it was a woman who steered the helm of the state. When the emperor returned, he found everything in perfect order. The empress relinquished the functions of regent only to resume her former place of intercessor for the unfortunate, protectress of prisoners, and wise auxiliary to justice.” Adelaide, Princess of Burgundy, renewed in the following century the glories of Mathilda’s reign. She was married to the son of the latter, after having been for a short time the Queen of Lothair, King of the Lombards in Italy. Ventura says that her zeal for the public good and her love of the people gained her the appellation of the “mother of her kingdom.” After her husband’s death, Adelaide, says Butler, “educated her son Otho II. with great care, and his reign was happy as long as he governed by her directions.” His mother became regent after his death and that of his wife, and her biographer, Butler, tells us that she “looked upon power as merely a difficult stewardship, and applied herself to public affairs with indefatigable care.”[84]

The middle ages are so fruitful a field for historical details of the greatness of woman, that we find our materials crowding one upon the other in too great a profusion for our present limits. But some great figures in what we may call the Christian Pantheon of woman cannot be passed over without a word of notice. The tenth century gave another holy empress to Germany, Cunegonda, the wife of Henry II., himself a saint, and a descendant of St. Mathilda. His sister Giselda married King Stephen of Hungary, upon the express condition that he would endeavor to christianize his people. Cunegonda, who reigned for a short time between the death of St. Henry and the election of his successor, proved herself as competent to govern a realm as the greatest man; these are Ventura’s own words. The story of Elizabeth of Hungary has been eloquently told by the author of the Monks of the West, and pictorial art has handed down from generation to generation the touching legend of her life. Married early to a prince remarkable for his piety and generosity, she was able to indulge in her favorite pastime—working for and serving the poor. We, in these days, seem to think that philanthropy, the “love of man,” is an invention coeval with the erection of gossiping committees and wrangling “boards”; but, when we look back upon the history of our race, we are forced to remember that when man was loved for the sake of God, spiritually as well as temporally, and when the old-fashioned virtue of “charity” was not ashamed to own its created—not self-existent—origin, a broader system of benevolence was spread over Christian earth, and more daring undertakings were cheerfully and successfully carried through. Elizabeth of Hungary was not untried by adversity, and after her husband’s death suffered cruel persecutions from her brother-in-law Henry, with the undaunted fortitude which a good conscience ensures and which God’s grace strengthens. We are told of her that she spoke little and always with gravity, and especially shunned tattlers. Women are always being taxed on one side with ridiculous frivolity in speech, and urged, on the other, to a contradiction of the charge by the pedantic phraseology of surface science. We have not alluded in these pages as often as we should have done to the great love of silence which distinguished the great women whose memory is honored. Whether as religious or as seculars, the useful employment of time and a discreetness of conversation were the two special and similar characteristics of their widely different lives, and thus they provided for the devotions and the acts of charity which shared so large a portion of their days and nights. They were never idle or even uselessly occupied, and we know but few women of our own generation who could truthfully say the same of themselves. What powers, what energy, do we not see wasted in superfluous social duties; for while, as our modern phrase goes, they kill time, they are also engaged in stifling, dwarfing, or destroying the higher powers of their mind. Solitude, silence, meditation, these are essentials to a well-balanced mind; but how many minds there are who voluntarily go on, not heeding, until the world and its claims, its sham triumphs, and its petty rivalries upset this balance and obscure the mind’s eye! There are as many women whose intellect is wrecked on the shoals of Fashion with its “laws of the Medes and Persians,” as there are others whose sensibility is stranded on the rocks of Woman’s Rights Conventions with their reckless disregard of all natural ties and time-honored duties.

Poland presents us with several instances of heroic womanhood during the middle ages. Dombrowka, the daughter of Boleslas, Duke of Bohemia, married Mieczylas, Duke of Poland, on condition of his becoming a Christian. By her example he not only became a religious, but a pure, merciful, and just, man. His wife could not forget her own countrymen while evangelizing her new subjects, and it was to her repeated solicitations that Bohemia owed the establishment of the Archiepiscopal See of Prague. Christianity, which in those times we might call the dower of the royal maidens of Europe, was first carried into Hungary by the marriage of Adelaide, the sister-in-law of Dombrowka, to Geisa, chief of the Huns. This Geisa was father to St. Stephen, of whose exemplary queen, Giselda, we have already spoken. Of another Polish princess, Hedwige, the wife of Henry, Duke of Silesia and Poland, we are told that by her prudence and persuasiveness she succeeded in delivering her husband, who had been made a prisoner by her uncle, and in obtaining peace between these two princes. Even in our own days, have we not had recent examples of the high esteem in which the mediation of woman was held in a Catholic country by a Catholic sovereign? Who can forget that delicate diplomatic missions have been confided in past years to a woman who was the incarnation of social charm as she was also the most devoted and uncompromising enthusiast in the cause of the Catholic religion—the Empress Eugenie! This Hedwige, who, in 1240, was so instrumental in raising an army with which to encounter the heathen hordes of Tartars who threatened at that time to destroy civilization in Europe, was succeeded by another queen of the same name as the saintly Cunegonda of Germany. It was she who towards the beginning of the fourteenth century, as Dlugossius, her biographer, and the Bollandists relate, was the first to provide for the working of the salt mines of Wieliczka, which afterwards proved an infinite source of wealth to the kingdom. She also cheerfully contributed the whole of her princely dowry to the equipment of an army to be led against the Tartars who had made a second raid upon the frontiers of Poland. But the greatest heroine of the country whose women are to this day the bravest under misfortune, and the most faithful to their religion, was another Hedwige, to whom Poland is indebted for her territorial aggrandizement and some of the most interesting as well as useful of her public institutions. Born a princess of Hungary, the elective crown of Poland was offered to her when she was only eighteen, and, when her marriage became a matter of national importance, she made, herself, a choice which only her own consummate prudence and foresight could have justified. Jagellon, Grand Duke of Lithuania and the surrounding barbarous provinces, became her husband, on the conditions, proposed by Hedwige, that his entire domains should be incorporated for ever in the kingdom of Poland; that his people should embrace Christianity; that Christians who had been enslaved should be set free; that certain Polish provinces once alienated should be restored, and that all Lithuanian treasures, whether hereditary or conquered by Jagellon from his enemies, should be appropriated for the benefit of the kingdom of Poland. Here is a treaty in which a kingdom is consolidated and a dynasty established, through the unassisted efforts of the genius and prudence of a woman. Hedwige founded numberless hospitals, schools, churches, and monasteries; the great cathedral of Wilna and seven episcopal sees also owe their origin to her. Only through her death and her husband’s good-natured but weak indifference when once her influence was removed was a great monastic institution abandoned, which had for its object the study and preservation of the Slavic languages and peculiar rites. The University of Prague was already in her day a world-famed seat of learning. Hedwige, in concert with the King of Bohemia, founded and endowed in that city a spacious and magnificent college, where the youth of Lithuania were gratuitously received and provided for during their academical course. Education was certainly as gravely thought of in those days as in our later times, when we boast of its benefits being so widely diffused. Whether it is as deeply impressed on its ordinary recipients, let the recent “commemorations” at Oxford proclaim. Dlugossius says the college (which exists to this day) was called the Queen’s House, “a name which is in itself an undying monument to the memory of this great woman, whose worthy thought it embodied, and charity it still expresses; remaining for ever a living testimony to the world of the merits of its illustrious foundress.” Boniface IX., who reigned during the last decade of the fourteenth century, corresponded with Hedwige, upon whom he relied as the principal support and auxiliary of religion in her realms. She was always appealed to as mediatrix between the king and his subjects, as also by the vassal nobles among themselves. What the king could not do by threats, she accomplished partly by her persuasive exhortations, partly by her grave and majestic demeanor. Her historian relates that she even quelled a popular rising, and put down the abuses which had given occasion to it, before the king had time to march an army into the disaffected district and reduce it by force. Once, while her husband was fighting in Lithuania, the Hungarians, her own countrymen, invaded Poland and captured several towns. “She no sooner heard of this,” says Ventura, “than she assembled the nobles and barons, improvised an army on the spot, and, without losing an instant, herself led it on to the frontiers. There, to the great astonishment of her generals, she displayed the military talents and bravery of an old warrior. It was she who directed the sieges, organized the sallies and attacks, and gave battle on the open ground, while the whole army obeyed her enthusiastically, proud to serve under a woman-general. She conquered the enemy at every encounter, wrested from them the important stronghold of Leopol, took other cities, and not only repossessed herself of the Russian territories usurped by the Hungarians, but also added to the kingdom of Poland a vast tract of country which voluntarily surrendered itself to her rule.”[85] Hedwige is perhaps less known than other renowned women of the middle ages, and therefore we have been led to speak more at length of her extraordinary powers. It would be useless to remind the reader that she was no less remarkable for the modesty of her private life and the austerities and charities of her secret life than famed for the wonderful and versatile talents displayed in her public career. Chastity and devotion invariably accompany all greatness in Catholic womanhood, but, as we shall have occasion to illustrate this fact later on, we will not now stop to consider it in its evident bearings on the vexed question raised by certain indiscriminate apostles of the rights of woman.

We cannot pass over, among the prominent women of mediæval times the famous Countess Mathilda, of Tuscany, the friend and ally of Gregory VII., Hildebrand the Reformer. Rohrbacher calls her the modern Deborah, and adds that in Italy, whose princes were mostly traitors to the cause of truth and patriotism, “one man only, during a long reign of fifty years, showed himself ever faithful, ever devoted to the church and her head, ever ready to second them in efforts for the reformation of the clergy and the restoration of ancient discipline, ever prompt to defend them, sword in hand, from their most formidable enemies, never allured by bribes, intimidated by threats, or cast down by adversity, and this one man was a woman, the Countess Mathilda.”

Her donation of Tuscany, the Marches, Parma, Modena, Reggio, and various other cities and lands, to the Holy See, is a fact that stands alone in history, and is simply the most momentous act of practical devotion which the Chair of Peter ever received. This generous and unreserved gift, first made to Gregory VII. in 1077, and confirmed in 1102 to Pascal II., is the unparalleled expression of the whole nature of woman, in its thoroughness, its spirit of martyrdom, its enthusiastic and unerring instincts, towards the good and the true. Henry IV. of Germany, having incurred excommunication, was reconciled to the Pope through the good offices of the great countess, and met him for that purpose at the fortress of Canossa, then a fief of the Countess of Tuscany. Ventura says of her that she was as learned as she was pious, and as solicitous for the propagation of science and the interests of literature as for the reformation of clerical abuses and the consolidation of the church. She multiplied schools and colleges over her dominions, but the crowning work of her great reign was the foundation of the famous University of Bologna, confessedly the best seat of learning in Europe for many centuries. Mathilda gathered together all the enlightened and talented masters of her age in this time-honored and world-renowned university, and in honor of her munificence it has remained a custom to this day to allow women to graduate there, to take a doctorate, and “profess” in public any of the learned faculties. Women, we are told by Ventura, the earnest panegyrist of the sex, have taken advantage of this custom at all times, and even up to the present day, when (in the beginning of this century, we believe) the celebrated female professor, Tambroni, taught Latin and Greek within the Bolognese university. Cardinal Mezzofanti, the great linguist, was at one time her pupil.

We have been led so far in the search, however superficial, for instances of the greatness of woman, as recognized, protected, and rewarded by the church, that we have reached a limit to our explorations in this article without mentioning any of the great women of the middle ages save those of royal descent. There are many who claim our attention, and whose influence over public affairs and the minds of men was not less than that exercised by the royal matrons and maidens we have cursorily named. Some were destined to mingle in political struggles, others owe their fame to their learning, one of them to actual feats of arms, and all to the spirit of chivalry which rendered a woman inviolable and sacred wherever honor was known and laws revered. But this spirit itself, what was it save the offspring of that higher spirit of reverential homage ever inculcated by the church towards that sex which gave a mother to our God?

Before taking up the subject of the status of woman within the church after the sixteenth century, we may, perhaps, return for a brief space to the Catherines of Sienna, the Joans of Arc, and the Genevieves of ecclesiastical history.

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The appearance at this time and in this country of a first-rate translation of the Iliad is an event of much significance. Through the exaggerated praise which London critics bestow on our dialect poetry, there runs a quiet assumption that our culture is narrow and unsound. Our oaten pipe is well enough, but our lyre disjointed and unstrung. To such insinuations Mr. Bryant’s work is a complete and final rejoinder. We shall find it easy to show that he has made the best translation of Homer in our language, and with one exception the very best extant. In the face of such an achievement, it will henceforth be preposterous to sneer at American scholarship.

Winged words the Homeric poems may well be called, which, fledged in the dawn of time, have not yet faltered in their flight across the centuries. Their superiority as works of art is not more unquestionable than is their procreative power. They have ever been—to use Milton’s words—as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s teeth. The history of Greek letters, we might almost say, is the genesis of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Upon them Aristotle based his canons; from them the Attic tragedy drew her inspiration and her argument. To the same source the most delightful of Greek historians referred his style and his method, while the choir of lyric and erotic poets confessed their debt to him who “gave them birth, but higher sang.” The direct action of the Homeric poems upon the masters of the Latin literature has been compared to that of the sunlight, but their indirect influence through the medium of Athenian models was pervasive and quickening as the solar heat. The development of poetry among Western nations can be accurately measured by the thoroughness with which they have assimilated Homer. The Orlando and the Lusiad repeat the story of Ulysses. Even minor excellences of the Iliad are reproduced in the Jerusalem Delivered. Milton and Goethe have drawn copiously from the same stores. Nor is there a single modern poet of the first rank, with the exception of Shakespeare, whose obligations to Homer are not manifold and obvious.

It is true that the eighteenth century, which sought to shatter so many idols, chose to depreciate these poems. Embellished by Pope, dissected by Fontanelle, and patronized by Mme. Dacier, they fell, it must be confessed, upon evil times. It is a suggestive commentary upon the self-styled siècle du goût that the autocrat of letters could pronounce the Iliad “une poème qu’on admire, et qu’on ne lit pas.”[87] To the author of the Henriade, Homer was only a beau parleur. It is now many years since the stigma went home to roost. Perrault and La Motte Houdart, who knew him only in the rags and gyves of an obscure translation, point with a satisfied smirk to the “coarseness” and “barbarism” of Homer. One is reminded of those Philistine lords who flung their jests at Samson Agonistes while he leaned against the pillars in Gaza.

Of living English poets, the strongest and sweetest acknowledge gratefully in Homer a source of their melody and strength. The fragment of an epic which is perhaps the Laureate’s best work was presented by the author as “faint Homeric echoes.” From Homer, quite as truly as from Chaucer, has the Earthly Paradise caught its genial sunshine and bracing air. The world, we presume, would have lost nothing had Mr. Swinburne read Euripides less and the Iliad more. A timely reaction has set in against the morbid self-consciousness and the hankering after glitter and novelty which are sure precursors of decay. Of that reaction, Matthew Arnold, who in childhood was taught to reverence Homer, has been the prophet and protagonist. With the same movement the temper and discipline of Mr. Bryant’s mind place him in active sympathy. We do not doubt that it was the aim of his Iliad to elevate and purify the taste of his countrymen. The success which his translation has already achieved augurs for it not a little influence upon the national literature.

To the thoughtful artist, Schlegel could suggest nothing more useful than the study of casts from the antique. A faithful version of the Iliad opens whole galleries of casts. The sculptor Bouchardon, we are told, was discovered reading Homer in a translation, and that a sorry one. “Ah, monsieur!” he exclaimed, “depuis que j’ai lu ce livre, il me semble que les hommes ont quinze pieds de haut.”[88] We know what Keats beheld upon looking into Chapman’s Homer, and we know that the quarry from which he hewed Hyperion is not yet exhausted. Of the thousands who will now listen for the first time to the story of Achilles, it may well be that some will kindle at what they hear. They will know how to thank Mr. Bryant that those flames which blazed over Troy, leaping from headland to headland, have once more borne a message across the sea.

Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, repeated attempts have been made to translate the master-poems of the Greek and Latin literatures into English verse. We suppose it will be acknowledged that those attempts have for the most part failed. The truth is that translation as commonly practised in England cannot properly be called an art. There are no fundamental principles universally recognized as the conditions of its development. It is still hardly more than a trick, in which one succeeds better than another, but each proceeds upon a method of his own. Who has prefaced his work with such a definition of translation as criticism can admit to be exhaustive and final? We might have expected so much from Hobbes. We do not find it. Dryden’s cardinal idea, that translation is “a kind of drawing after the life,” has never been literally accepted by others. It did not uniformly govern himself. The face seen and the face drawn both appeal to the brain through the eye, whereas even those English translators who aim to infuse the identical thought, feeling, or fancy of their original have recourse to media of sensual metaphor, sometimes modified, sometimes distinct from those employed in their author’s language. On Sir George Cornewall Lewis’ view of translation we will not dwell, because we are not sure that we understand it, and at least cannot conceive the practical application of it. It is enough for us that he heartily commended as an instance of right treatment Hookham Frere’s Aristophanes, which is clever, fresh, and racy enough, but certainly not Attic. There is another theory, that we should ask ourselves what our author would have said had he been writing in English. One objection to this is, as Mr. Newman remarks, that no two men would agree in their answers to such a question. Homer, if an Englishman and writing in our tongue, would unquestionably have given a different turn and tinge to his verse from that which it takes in Greek. But are we not bound to make the province of translation, as discriminated from paraphrase, the reproduction of what an author did actually say? Certainly the aim of Homeric translators into our tongue should be, not of course to compass the effect produced upon an Athenian reading Homer in the age of Peisistratos or upon a consummate scholar capable, we will say, of thinking in Ionic Greek, but to make upon Englishmen or Americans of average culture an impression nearly identical with that which they derive from the Iliad itself. Achieve this, and they who are themselves not scholars will at least be assured that they are reading Homer, not Sotheby or Pope. Such an aim does not seem too ambitious, but it has never been attained, rarely approached, in English. A radical error runs through all our metrical versions of the classic poets. Literal accuracy is by some repudiated, attempted by others, and occasionally secured in detached passages, but is always subordinate to the attainment of harmonious numbers and agreeable diction. Whenever literal accuracy seems likely to conflict with these, it is sacrificed. Now, if it be true that such sacrifice is frequently inevitable, then a genuine translation of the Iliad is an impossibility. But this we are reluctant to admit. The matchless version of Voss has proved that it is possible to be at once literal and musical, to preserve in one Germanic language at least as much of the Homeric flavor as Germans of average culture can detect in the original. Perhaps one clue to his success is to be found in his employment of the hexameter. A profound artist, he could not fail to recognize the inextricable connection of rhythm and cæsura with the shape and play of thought. He saw that in some subtle sort the metre is the poem. We have not abandoned the hope of seeing the hexameter one day naturalized in English. Mr. Kingsley’s Andromeda showed a marked improvement on Evangeline, and what the Laureate might do in this way is sufficiently clear from his Ode to Milton, where he has grappled successfully with alcaics, undoubtedly the most intricate and difficult of dactylic measures. The distinction between quantitative and accentual metres has been pressed too far by men who have wanted patience to cope with those peculiarities which render our language somewhat intractable to dactylic verse.

Almost every familiar scheme of English metre has been applied to the reproduction of Homer. We have had Chapman’s fourteen-syllable line, the rhymed couplet of Pope and Sotheby, the unrhymed iambics of Cowper, Mr. Worsley’s Spenserian stanza, the ballad movement in seven beats of Mr. Newman, and many more. One or two of these are noble English poems, but as translations none can be compared with the work of Voss. We should have said, before the appearance of Mr. Bryant’s volumes, that a new version of the Iliad executed upon one of the old plans and in one of the old metres was not called for. The attempt of Lord Derby to vie with Cowper in blank-verse had proved singularly unfortunate. Failing to accredit the scholar, its publication belittled the statesman. It is not with such a performance that the conservative party can match Mr. Gladstone’s Homeric Age. We should not highly commend Mr. Bryant were we to say that he is every-way more successful than Lord Derby. He has, in our judgment, surpassed Cowper, and that was no easy task. The associations, indeed, connected with what is known as blank-verse, render it to an English ear somewhat unsuitable to a poem like the Iliad, which presents an infinite variety of incidents and situations quite as often trivial as dignified. Still, Cowper, although his muse, stooping to certain homely details, discovers a sort of prudishness which is highly amusing, is generally vigorous and noble where energy and majesty are required, and had hitherto been the least unsatisfactory of Homer’s English translators. In examining Mr. Bryant’s work we shall mainly confine ourselves—so far as English writers are concerned—to a collation of Cowper and Lord Derby. We have neither space nor inclination to quote from the rhymed versions. Faithfully to reproduce Homer in rhyme was declared by Pope to be impossible, and Mr. Worsley’s Odyssey, delightful as it is, has not availed to set aside the judgment.

It would be easy to misinterpret the views which have governed Mr. Bryant’s work by his application of Latin names to the Homeric deities, and the reason which he assigns in the preface for this practice. It is true that he is countenanced by Lord Derby, but we think we had a right to expect more from his scholarship. We cannot but deem them both in the wrong, and to our mind the error is serious and far-reaching. The denizens of Homer’s Olympus are in the strictest sense personal gods. Such superhuman attributes as they severally possess are sharply defined, the degree and scope of their authority, except, perhaps, in two instances, clearly marked. They live the life of men, eat, drink, love, quarrel. They exhibit the most passionate interest in the war which rages before Ilium. They are bitter and unscrupulous partisans, wheedle, lie, bargain, rebel, in the cause of their protégées. They forsake their dwellings to take part in the debates of mortals, mix in the fight, are pierced with spears, and the celestial ichor flows precisely like human blood. In short, they resemble rather the demigods of a later mythology, and are rarely invested with that awful sublimity and mystery which enshroud most of the elder Roman divinities. Even in the Theogony of Hesiod, the attributes of certain gods have undergone a degree of alteration which it is tax enough to bear in mind. To insist upon confounding Ares, Aphroditê, and Athenê with Mars, Venus, and Minerva, deities which, as enshrined in the literature purely and distinctively Latin, are as native and peculiar to Rome as her language, is to mystify the reader who knows anything of either. It appears to us as unreasonable to rename the gods as to miscall the heroes of the Iliad. Surely it is no apology for the confusion of things essentially distinct that the practice has been in some sort naturalized in our literature. So are the legendary chronicles of the kings of Rome, so are the distorted portraits of Shakespeare’s histories. A manifest error cannot plead undisturbed possession. Moreover, it is now many years since English scholars have labored to educate their countrymen up to something like discrimination between the Greek and Latin mythologies. Their task is well-nigh done. Lemprière’s Dictionary is at length obsolete, and the volumes of Grote are in the hands of every schoolboy. If the prevailing excellence of Mr. Bryant’s work had not disarmed us, we should be disposed to protest against the repetition of an error, as well as against the presumption of national ignorance, by which it is excused. It is certainly matter of regret that such an objection should lie on the threshold of a work in most respects so sound and scholarlike.

The new version begins well:

Seven hexameters in eight lines of blank-verse—certainly a remarkable instance of compression. Except ἡρωων, πασι (almost an expletive), and προ in προιαψεν (which, perhaps, is faintly suggested by “swept”), not a word of Homer is omitted, not a word is added. “Birds of air” is an accurate translation of οἰωνοισι. “Parted first as foes” is exceedingly close. There is but one error, διος is rendered “great.” To this word no moral attribute whatever is attached in the Homeric poems. It is equivalent to “high-born” or “noble” (as Cowper gives it) in the primitive sense of that word. Lord Derby makes it “godlike,” which is quite incorrect. If there be a fault in the lines just quoted, it is a certain coldness. They hardly lift us to the height of the great argument. But for conscientious fidelity to the original, these lines have not been approached in English, and are in this respect fully equal to Voss. Hear, for instance, Cowper, who requires an extra line:

This is pitched in the right key, although the finest line, the fourth, is perhaps too suggestively Miltonic. In his scholarship Cowper is loose. “Who” is grammatically wrong and æsthetically a blunder. It is not Achilles, but Achilles’ wrath that Homer means to sing. “Host,” “ravening,” “fierce,” “chief,” “Agamemnon,” are merely supernumeraries. “Illustrious” was inserted, we presume, for rhythmical reasons; it does not translate ἰφθιμους. “Stood” for ἐτελειετο is fine; Mr. Bryant fails to convey the notion of fulfilment, of inevitable accomplishment, which the word seems to carry. The antithesis between ψυχὰς and αὐτους, significant as regards the Homeric theory of a future life, is quite lost in Cowper, while it is cleverly projected in Mr. Bryant’s lines. “Premature” preserves the force of the preposition in προ-ιαψεν, which ought not to be overlooked.

It may be well now to quote Lord Derby. He needs ten lines:

This is hardly worth criticising in detail. First, why “Muse”? “Vengeance” is bad for μηνις. “Deadly” translates οὐλομένην well enough, but “deep and deadly” suggests the harrowing phraseology of the Ledger romance. “Viewless Shades” is possibly poetical, but Homer chooses to be geographical—he says Ἀις. “They on the battle plain unburied”; we cannot find this in the Greek, but it accounts for one extra line. “Ravening” and “carrion” raise Cowper’s expletive to the second power. “Sad day”! And so it was, but to call it so is almost maudlin. Ἐριζω does indeed mean to wrangle, but “wordy war” is petty and poetastic. “The mighty Agamemnon”! Homer is satisfied with Atrides. And now we will see if it be possible to give this magnificent prologue measure for measure, line for line, almost word for word. Hear Voss:

The figurative entbrannt for οὐλομένην is not to our taste. Bitteren is superfluous, and sendete imperfectly translates προιαψεν. Otherwise these lines are flawless.

We pass to the sixth book, to a passage which Pope and Chapman have done well, Sotheby on the whole better, where even Hobbes grows tender, where every translator has sought to do his best. The parting of Hector and Andromache is a scene (if we except the Alcestis) unique in classic literature. When we consider the state of society depicted in the Homeric poems, the figure of Andromache seems anomalous and inexplicable; or rather she almost constrains us to recast our notions of the social framework in which we find her set. In her the sexual passion is refined and sublimated to that noblest form of conjugal love which is thought to be peculiar to the civilized and christianized descendants from the chaste German stock. Through the historical ages of Greece, in the Roman Republic and Empire, we seek in vain a pendant to this portrait. The ideal would seem to have been lost. The painter who drew Alexander’s favorite could not have limned Andromache; he who sang Ariadne in Naxos would have failed to understand her. To recover the type, we must descend to a much later age—to Raphael and to Wordsworth. The sweetest words in our language—sweetheart, helpmate, wife—describe Andromache. She is not the wanton idol of a despot’s caprice, nor the dull victim of a convenient Athenian marriage, nor the selfish protégée of the cynical Roman law. She might have been bred in a Christian world and blessed an English home. We quote twenty lines from Mr. Bryant:

No man, we imagine, who examines the above lines will question the general accuracy of Mr. Bryant’s scholarship. They are at once the most succinct, literal, and beautiful reproduction of Homer’s words which has been achieved in English. As Americans, we are proud of them. Cowper, indeed, had finely rendered this passage, and it is possible that some persons unfamiliar with the Greek and habituated to the movement of the Paradise Lost may prefer his inverted construction and sonorous phrase. We will not quote him, however, but rather choose to pay Mr. Bryant the highest homage in our power by placing beside his lines the version of Voss:

We doubt if these lines can be surpassed except by the Greek itself. They echo the melody of Homer. Mr. Bryant, of course, relinquished the hope of competing with him in this respect when he adopted iambic verse. In point of compression, however, and literal accuracy, we shall find him not inferior. There are in both versions some imperfections. “Tender” (zarte) may perhaps stand for ἀταλαφρων although it represents but partially that exquisite epithet. Cowper omits this word altogether, and Lord Derby substitutes something of his own, “all unconscious.” To our mind Mr. Bryant’s “too young to speak” is most felicitous for νηπιον αὐτως. The word, however, in many passages of the Iliad shows no trace of relation to επος, and means simply “under age,” as Voss gives it. The force of the adverb is nicely preserved in the German. Both versions make ἁγαπητον “only” (einzigen). The line of the Odyssey (b. ii. 365) seems to us conclusive against the propriety of this translation. We prefer Cowper’s “darling.” And now we come to the famous simile, ἀλιγκιον ἀστερι καλῷ. Mr. Bryant, following Cowper, writes “beautiful as a star.” But Homer is far more picturesque than this. He shows us the bright cheeks and glancing eyes of Hector’s boy gleaming from his nurse’s bosom, as a star gleams. “A fair star”—Lord Derby would make it a planet, “morning star” he calls it. But stars that twinkle and glimmer are most alluring to the eye, are the fairest, and therefore Voss is right—schimmernden Sterne vergleichbar. Mr. Bryant is not successful in the next line. We cannot like “silent smile.” Can a smile be other than silent? Neither can Voss match Cowper’s

“The father silent eyed his babe, and smiled.”

“Pressed to his side” is vivid, where Cowper and Voss are tame; “clung to his hand”—the Greek is yet stronger, “grew on his hand.” Voss was certainly drowsy when he could render this “pressed kindly his hand.” Andromache’s touching first word is quite lost in the “Dear lord” of Lord Derby. Cowper’s “My noble Hector” is even worse. The truth is that Δαιμονιε is uttered by the young wife in tender reproach, and this is conveyed in good measure by “too brave,” but seltsamer Mann is perfect. “Tender child”—Cowper and Lord Derby write “helpless.” Voss’ stammelnden is based, we presume, on Il. 2, 238, where some command of speech more or less articulate seems to be conceded to νηπιαχοις. The next four lines of the new version are close and felicitous, but θαλπωρη is not so much “hope” as “comfort”; and “when thou art gone” hardly expresses the thought in ἐπει ἄν συ γε ποτμον ἐπισπῃς, whereas the German delivers it faithfully. We have reached finally a wonderful couplet which fairly throbs with passionate devotion. Here is the Greek:

Which we may venture to render thus:

Voss is exceedingly sweet:

Derby:

Cowper:

Bryant:

Lord Derby’s version is curiously bad. Strange that one striving to utter to modern ears words which in the Iliad seem to break from the heart should go out of his way for “sire” and “brethren”! And for “wedded love,” it is not only incorrect, but mawkish, and therefore in this place detestable. Cowper likewise is weak and false. “Parents” is intolerable; ποτνια and θαλερος are overlooked. And in exchange for those adjectives we have “all that I have lost” (pure Cowper). Mr. Bryant does very much better, but he is again somewhat cold; and coldness here is hardly pardonable. He was determined to give the last line literally; but to put παρακοιτης in the vocative, as Voss has done, makes the verse literal enough and more glowing. Both Voss and Mr. Bryant are wrong in ποτνια. The active participle (liebende) is out of the question, and even “dear” conveys an erroneous impression of the relations subsisting between mother and daughter in the Homeric age. Ποτνια predicates a sentiment of respect and reverence, and is often associated with the names of deities. For an exact analogue we must go back to English domestic life in the last century. We shall find it in what was then a household word—“honored mother.” We must do Lord Derby the justice to say that he had hit upon the translation in line 413. It is a pity that he did not repeat it here. Θαλερος has proved a stumbling-block to most translators. It is a beautiful word: and placed with exquisite propriety in the mouth of a young wife who gazes on the bravest face and noblest form in Ilium. Mr. Bryant’s “youthful” is not absolutely wrong, but it is rather the impression which youth and health make upon the eye, their visible glory, their “purple light,” which Homer makes in θαλερος. Blühende gives it exactly. We wish that with these perfect words Andromache might have vanished from literature. The later myths dishonor her. It seems a crime against nature to recount of this woman that

and that Hector’s widow bore children to the son of Achilles. Surely instinct would have taught her the tenet of a later philosophy: “We are in the power of no calamity while death is in our own.” Not in Euripides and Virgil, but rather in Racine, would we follow the fortunes of that Andromache whom we knew by the Scæan gate.

Let us glance next at the concluding lines of the eighth book. They have been translated by Tennyson, and it may be interesting to contrast his version. Mr. Bryant writes:

Tennyson renders the same passage thus:

Some may prefer the general effect of the Laureate’s lines, but our American version adheres quite as closely to the text. We are surprised, however, to find “warlike lines.” Mr. Tennyson’s alternative translation, “ridge of war” is an exact reproduction of the Greek, ἀνα πτολεμοιο γεφυρας. “Bridge,” which he first wrote, is post-Homeric. Lord Derby’s phrase is close enough, but wanting in pictorial power:

If one care to see what sad work may sometimes proceed from a true poet, here is Cowper’s version of these lines—ten words are required to misconstrue three:

The familiar simile of the moon and stars in the above passage is sharply and faithfully reproduced by Mr. Bryant, whereas Tennyson’s “look beautiful” for φαινετ' ἀριπρεπεα is both loose and weak. “All the winds are laid”; Cowper says “hushed.” Either is closer than Mr. Bryant’s phrase. Lord Derby’s translation of παντα δε τ' ειδεται ἀστρα is ambitious and clumsy—“Shines each particular star distinct.” The last six hexameters are given in seven lines of our version. Tennyson has compressed them into six, but with the sacrifice of Τρωων καιοντων, which the other neatly expressed by “Lit by the sons of Troy.” We could have dispensed with the Laureate’s “towers,” but are delighted to find ἐυθρονον preserved in “throned.”

To some readers our criticism may have seemed to dwell too nicely on details; but, if they will reflect a moment, they will perceive that this is itself a guarantee of sincerity. We propose to give grounds for our opinions, that others may accept them knowingly, or refute them, if they can. To flood with general praise or spatter with vague abuse belongs to the Cheapjacks of literature. Moreover, no American needs to be told that Mr. Bryant is a poet. Men do not ask whether his Iliad is a delightful poem, but whether it truthfully photographs Homer. That question, if we may judge from his performances, the average magazine critic has preferred to evade.

From the extracts already presented, it is manifest that our American translator has followed the text of his author with a scrupulous exactitude which required unusual self-command from a poet of original powers; yet he is often so truly and nobly poetical that many will overlook the superiority of his scholarship. Most countries of Western Europe have produced several translators of the Iliad. But in each language one has eventually obscured the rest, and thenceforward kept unchallenged a niche in the national literature. Some such pre-eminence among English versions belongs, in our judgment, to Mr. Bryant’s work. For conscientious adherence to the text, his version has no rival in our tongue, and ought, in justice, to be compared with Voss. In point of scholarship, Cowper had shown himself much stronger than Pope, but his translation beside Mr. Bryant’s Iliad seems to us a paraphrase. Both are masters of blank-verse, but Cowper is a pupil of Milton, while Mr. Bryant’s diction and rhythm are his own. The iambic pentameter is, in his hands, surprisingly plastic. We should not have supposed it capable of such happy adjustment to the shifting mood and varying pitch of the original; yet we cannot help a regret that this version was not executed in hexameters. We are quite sure that the achievement was possible to the author of this translation.

In such extracts as we have yet to make from Mr. Bryant’s work, we propose to compare him, not with his English rivals whom we hold him to have excelled, but with some of those translators who are most highly esteemed in other countries.

Few lines of the Iliad have been more frequently imitated than those which paint with the tints of Albano the girdle of Aphroditê. The incident which calls forth the description is well known. Determined to lull the vigilance of Zeus and rescue her darling Greeks, Herê flies to her toilet. The most truthful of poets puts no faith in beauty unadorned, and himself performs the part of tire-woman. It occurs, however, to Herê that her lord is already familiar with the resources of her wardrobe, and the fear of a cold or careless eye leads her to borrow of Aphroditê. She receives a talisman, but precisely what this was is—to men, at least—a riddle. It was an embroidered strap, so much is certain; but how used, and where? Belt or waist-girdle it was not, for that Herê had on. It was plainly a slender and dainty thing, or how could she hide it in her bosom? For our part, we believe it to have been a breast-band (Brustgürtel) worn just under the breast, although a French commentator with much heat pronounces this view an insult to the figure of the goddess. The one translator competent to decide so nice a question was Mme. Dacier. Unhappily she throws no light on it. Mr. Bryant turns the passage thus:

We must object to “zone.” Mr. Bryant has just given (Il. 14, 181) the same name to a broad, heavily-fringed belt which Herê is now wearing. But Homer makes a difference, calling that ζωνη and this ἱμας. Voss likewise is here somewhat careless, rendering both words by Gürtel. “Dalliance” translates a stubborn word, and projects the idea which lay at the root of ὀαριστυς. Let us turn to Voss:

How neatly ποικιλον and κεστον are compressed in buntgestickt! Wunderköstlichen is, of course, mere padding. Schmachtende likewise is superfluous. Neither can we altogether like “befool” for ἐκλεψε νοον. Mr. Bryant’s phrase is certainly more felicitous. On the whole, it must be conceded that Voss flickers in these lines.

When Mme. Dacier brought out her Iliad, it was affirmed on all hands that Homer could never, in the nature of things, be presented in French verse. From that verdict an appeal has from time to time been taken, but the decision has never been reversed. Mme. Dacier’s stiffness and the flippancy of La Motte are indeed equally intolerable. We decidedly prefer to any metrical version in French the prose translations of Bitaube and Dugas Montbel. Both are in the strictest sense belles-lettres works, and are generally accurate and spirited. Bitaube portrays the girdle thus: “En même temps elle détache sa ceinture riche d’une superbe broderie. Là se trouvent réunis les charmes les plus séduisants; là sont l’amour, les tendres désirs, les doux entretiens et ces accents persuasifs, qui dérobent en secret le cœur du plus sage.” There are some adjectives here for which Homer is not responsible.

Monti’s version is well known. It has been called the golden ring which links the Greek and Italian literatures, and is ranked with Caro’s Æneid. Beside La Morte d’Ettore it appears a meritorious work. No doubt the climax of false taste was reached when Cesarrotti, who had executed a good translation in prose, proceeded to metamorphose the Iliad into a strange monster which he called The Death of Hector. We will not quote Monti now, for in this place he is tame and redundant. Yet he has skilfully hit with favellio a secondary meaning of ὀαριστυς. The French have a word from the same root, babil; but we have nothing in English which so happily expresses the cooing of young lovers. Tasso’s reproduction of these lines is exquisite. He is depicting Armida’s girdle. It was fraught, he says, with—

After the short, swift strokes of Homer, this picture seems almost florid with concetti. But each poet meant to epitomize the charms he had beheld in life. The countrywomen of Tasso were skilled in lovers’ sleights, whereas the simple virgins of Homeric times had never heard of the gai scavoir. If we may trust Brantôme, who knew something of Italian manners in that age, the dames of Sienna were quite competent to instruct Aphroditê in the arts of fascination.

The range of Homeric similes is not limited to the phenomena of sky, river, and ocean, to the familiar experiences of the forge, the vineyard, and the chase. The lightning play of fancy and memory and the emotions of the heart are submitted to the same scrutiny, and portrayed with like felicity. “Rapid as thought” has become the tritest commonplace in every European language, but the guise which the simile originally wore in Homer is still novel and effective. Incensed at the trick which has just been cleverly executed, Zeus orders Herê back to Olympus. Then Mr. Bryant:

“Willingly” is supported by Voss’ willig, but has no correlative in the Greek. The context, moreover, shows that Herê departed in a pet, and her peevishness finds full vent when she reaches Olympus. Mr. Bryant omits to translate φρεσι πευκαλιμῃσι. For this phrase Voss gives spähenden Geiste, deriving the adjective from πευκη, by which, with Buttmann, he understands the pointed (not bitter) fir-tree. But if Schneider be right, these words are equivalent to πυκα φρονεοντων in the description of the girdle just quoted. The root would then be looked for in πυκνος, and the latter phrase might find an analogue, though not an exact one, in our “close schemers.” These details are worthy of notice, for Chapman, mistaking the primitive sense of this adjective, has utterly missed the point of the simile. The perversity of Hobbes is ludicrous. He condenses Homer after this fashion:

Voss and Mr. Bryant are in this place so much alike that we will not collate the German, but give instead Monti’s blank-verse:

Scorse and rianda are pictorial, and perhaps sufficiently literal. We like also suo segreto for “close mind.” Altogether the version is neat and animated, but less compact than Mr. Bryant’s. Both are quite as faithful as the prose of Bitaube and Montbel. The former writes: “Il dit, et Junon soumise à son époux s’élève des sommets d’Ida sur Olympe. Tel que le rapide essor de la pensée de l’homme lorsqu’ayant parcouru des pays d’une vaste étendue, et se rappelant en un moment tous les objets qui l’ont frappé, il dit en lui-même, j’étais ici, j’étais là.” It will be observed that Mr. Bryant’s “Here would I be, I would be there!” reproduces the optative εἰην. So does the Dorthin möcht ich, und dort of Voss. An alternative reading is ἠηv which Bitaube and Monti have preferred. The verb, however, should then be in the third person, not the first as they give it. The imperfect would impart to the thought a slightly different tinge, and make the traveller rather retrace in memory than revisit it in desire. If this reading be accepted, we might, perhaps, venture to present the passage in this form:

In the battle which opens in the twentieth book culminates the action of the poem. Achilles now enters the field, and Mr. Gladstone has justly remarked that we seem never to have heard of wars or warriors before. To frame his central figure, Homer summons from Olympus the whole hierarchy of heaven. Amid thunder and earthquake, the gods are seen rallying to either side. No part of the Iliad is pitched in a loftier key. Nowhere is a translator more strongly impelled to put forth all his powers. We quote Mr. Bryant:

We ought not, perhaps, to dislike the expansion of πατερ ἀνθρωπων τε θεων τε in the second line, for the epithets added are themselves hardly more than formulas. The next four lines exhibit Mr. Bryant’s best work. Their vigor and elegance are not extraneous, but wrought with patient fingers out of the text itself. “Leaped from his throne in terror” is a melancholy falling off. This indifferent line must stand for three Greek verbs which render with startling accuracy the staccato movement of fear. We give from Voss the three hexameters which depict the panic of Aïdoneus:

Nachtreich is not quite equal to “nether world,” but really these lines are incomparable. Beside them even the prose of Montbel seems a little wide of the text: “Dans ses retraites souterraines le roi des ombres Pluton frémit; épouvanté il s’élance de son trône, pousse un cri, de peur que le terrible Neptune entr’ouvrant la terre ne montre aux dieux et aux hommes ces demeures terribles en horreur même aux immortels.”

We are unable to speak without contempt of the Morte d’Ettore, but it is right to state that Cesarrotti’s prose translation of this passage is perhaps the closest extant. Monti’s verse will be found less literal:

Homer says nothing of intromessa luce. The words are no doubt transferred from Virgil’s paraphrase—

“Trepidentque immisso lumine Manes.”

Longinus, in his treatise On the Sublime, had quoted this passage of the Iliad, and Boileau in a translation of that work has reproduced it with considerable care. Boileau had positively condescended to defend Homer, but it is plain that his own theory of translation was that accepted by his age. La Motte has stated it in his ode. He tells Homer that he proposes

and deeming the unconscious energy of his author un peu sauvage engages to régler son ivresse. From Boileau no engagement was required. His Muse was too thoroughly the grande dame ever to forget herself, and even in Pythian convulsions retained a measure of decorum. We shall find his version at once droll and impressive. It is, so to speak, a Greek myth treated by Paul Veronese:

To us no book of the Iliad is more delightful than the twenty-fourth. There are many scenes in which we would willingly linger not alone for the tender pathos with which the poet has informed them, but also for the light they throw on the social ethics of the later as well as primitive Greek world. The figure of Achilles weeping through the long night the loss of the beloved Patroclus is the immortal type of that devoted friendship which illumines with a peculiar radiance the stream of Hellenic biography. In the incessant warfare of sympathy with selfishness, friendship between man and man seems to have played something of the master rôle which in modern times has been engrossed by the passion of love. Again, Helen in her lament over Hector’s corpse lets fall some bitter words that deserve to be weighed in connection with the peculiar attitude which Menelaus maintains throughout the poem. They would assist us to understand her strangely equivocal position, as well as the conception of the marriage relation which obtained in the Homeric age. We have space, however, but for a single extract. We will choose Priam’s prayer to Achilles. How often and with what careful hand these lines have been reproduced in English is well-known. In French there are no less than ten metrical versions, to say nothing of prose. To poets of every nation this passage has remained a bow of Ulysses which many have been eager to grasp, but none save Voss has hitherto had sinew enough to bend. The circumstances under which the prayer is made are inexpressively affecting. The fate of Troy has at length compelled the combat of Hector and Achilles. From the walls of the city Priam has beheld the fatal issue. The pride and prop of his old age, the bulwark of his kingdom, lies dead and dishonored in the hostile camp. Conducted by Hermes, Priam passes the sentinels, and gains the quarters of his foe. He enters, springs toward Pelides, clasps his knees, and kisses those “slaughter-dealing hands” which had slain so many of his sons. Then Mr. Bryant:

Had these lines been pointed at by the legend, we could well understand why Solon should have burned his epic. Let us not stay for criticism, but, with eyes fixed on the Greek, give our ears to Voss!

We hold that it lies not in the power of translation to surpass these lines of Voss. They are truly marvels in photography. To every Homeric line corresponds a German hexameter. In every verse the emphatic word stands where Homer placed it. The very pauses are for the most part preserved. The translator has not retrenched a word. He has scarcely added one. He has certainly not added an idea. On the nice propriety of his diction, and his perfect sympathy with the feeling of the Greek, we need not dwell. In these respects Mr. Bryant must be ranked next to him—with an interval, perhaps, but next. His “dreary verge of closing life” skilfully interprets an ambiguous phrase which Voss has chosen to retain. Again, unseliger Mann is somewhat cold, whereas “my lot is hard” has caught, so to speak, the genuine accents of heartbreak. “And every day he hopes that his dear son,” etc. Readers of the Holy Dying will recall the touching picture of a drowned sailor rolled upon his floating bed of waves, while at home his father “weeps with joy to think how happy he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the circle of his father’s arms.”

Voltaire has somewhere asserted that Homer never drew a tear. Yet even he could not behold this scene unmoved, and himself entered the lists as a translator. His version of this passage embodies the principles which he maintained ought to govern translators of Homer. It forms a curious chapter in the history of taste. Achilles turning discovers Priam, “ce vieillard vénérable,”

These lines are not altogether without merit, but no man, we suppose, who possesses what has been termed a historical conscience will allow them to be poetic. The elements of the scene are there, but they are worked up in accordance with the tricks and traditions of the Comédie Française. To the eye of Voltaire, Priam was simply an antitype of the père noble, and must assume the attitude and demeanor appropriate to that rôle. In short, the verses are conceived in the spirit of his age, and exhibit his best manner. But read them after the Greek, and what fresh point they impart to the familiar words, “In old times men wrote like orators, but now like rhetoricians.”

From Voltaire to Monti is a long stride toward Homer’s Olympus. The Italian has infused much sweetness into this passage. And it is a native, not a grafted, sweetness. Writing in blank-verse, he neither needs nor claims the license of French translators; yet we sometimes miss Mr. Bryant’s terseness and simplicity; as in the initial lines:

To appreciate this version one needs only to glance at Cesarrotti’s. Priam’s first three words—Μνησαι πατρος σοιο!—comprise the most effective exordium in literature. They are true projectiles shot from soul to soul. Let us see if they are easily recognized in the Morte d’Ettore:

Is it possible to place artist and word-monger in sharper antithesis? The success of his mission—perhaps his life—depends upon the first impression. Conceive royal Priam whining forth “Pity, pity!” like some professional beggar mumbling his worn-out lies. Homer said simply, “Think of thy father, Achilles!” The words, like the stroke of Moses’ rod, split the stubborn heart, and pity gushed forth in tears.

It must be admitted that Mr. Bryant’s lines are not always invested with the impassioned fervor and glowing life which have rescued the works of his English predecessors from oblivion. But it will often be found that where they were most spirited they were least Homeric. It is inevitable that a conscientious workman who resolves to copy his model in the minutest details will produce at times a mosaic rather than a casting—his materials will seem pieced and not fused. But we are sure that the sweetness of Mr. Bryant’s verse will delight the general reader, while scholars will appreciate his self-control. Animation is desirable, but fidelity is indispensable; and they who truly love the Iliad will prefer Homer in marble to Pope and Chapman in the flesh.

Over all translators of the Iliad, we confess that Voss is paramount; but no other version with which we are acquainted will bear a sustained comparison with Mr. Bryant’s. The latter’s obligations to Voss are undoubtedly great; but he has well-nigh cancelled the debt, for the next worker in the field will owe much to him. It may be that translation is not the highest function of genius; yet where it is nobly fulfilled it deserves and commands our gratitude. Nor is this all. It is something more than a figure of speech—the fine figure of Politian’s—by which Homer, assisting in the person of Ganymede at the banquet of the gods, is made to distribute to his best lovers some portion of his own ambrosia.

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A nation vegetating on old memories; a people for two centuries priest-ridden, just beginning to awaken and show some signs of the enlightenment of the age; a government liable to change every twenty-four hours; an empty treasury shifting from one to another incapable ministry; and, above all, a ridiculous pretension and holding to such an Old World phrase as national honor—such is the ordinary run of opinion on Spain. What is it coming to? What is its destiny? Has it a destiny in these busy, practical days? Or is its life played out long ago, and the nation simply drifting downwards into the yawning gulf of insignificance where many another has been swallowed up?

Have Catholics an interest in the question?

Yesterday, when mention was made of Spain, the enlightened world lifted up its eyes and hands in pious protestation against such an outrage on our nineteenth century of civilization. A superstitious race given to the worshipping of graven images, hoodwinked by the priests, those inveterate enemies of progress; no free-will among them; no understanding; nothing but memory. To-day all is changed. The dawn long delayed of enlightenment has come at last to the unhappy land—has come accompanied by the usual signs. Churches have been rifled, the sanctuary has been desecrated, the Jesuits have been scattered, nuns and monks have been robbed of their homes and driven naked into the world, blood has flowed freely, murder has been done. So, to-day the world smiles, and rubs its hands, and hopes better things for Spain.

That it was a great nation we all acknowledge, and the title is a true one. It was not alone a mighty nation; those buried under the Eastern sands were mighty nations, yet their workings in this world were as barren of fruit as the shifting covering that has hidden them away, without an oasis to redeem their barrenness. China might be called a mighty nation, but it has walled itself in from the world by the most narrow-minded and selfish policy, and we have had to fight our way through good and evil up to our present standard without a helping hand from it. Russia is a mighty nation, and we look anxiously to the development of its vast power, but up to the present its only effect on the world has been that of brute strength. But Spain has been pre-eminently a great nation; that is, a nation that has done much for its own and others’ development, in all that can make peoples sound, intelligent, prosperous, and happy.

Looking back at its history as far as we can look back, we find the same characteristics in the race as we find to-day; above all, that intense, all-absorbing nationality which has kept it unmixed and unconquered. Hannibal courted its alliance; the Roman failed ever to subdue it thoroughly. Great stubborn resistances to the Empress of the World stand out now and then in clear relief from that dim background—awful sieges wonderfully sustained, where the women play an equal part with the men. We shall always find these Spanish women leading the van in the hour of their country’s danger. The victories gained over them resembled the victory of Pyrrhus. The Romans went and the Moors came, and fastened on the heart of the kingdom, populating and flourishing there, sucking out its life. They built their cities and their palaces in the fairest spots in the land. Powerful, warlike, rich, with immense resources, they laughed at the handful of men, kingless, skulking among rocks, and starving for liberty. But that handful will not surrender what is their own while one arm can be raised to defend it. They are true to one another as Spaniards and as Catholics now; for a new element is in them binding them more firmly than the very blood that is common to their veins—religion, the religion of Christ, which they have seized upon with all their passionate nature, never to relinquish. Inch by inch the Moors are driven back over the sea. They were invaded again by a more terrible foe than all—more terrible even than France in her deep distress has lately seen. Bonaparte had drained the country of its armies, had emptied its coffers, and taken away its king, all under the shadow of friendship and alliance. When he held it thus powerless in his hands, he sent in his armies, and impudently set his brother on the throne. Kingless, moneyless, defenceless as they were, the people rose up, the women again leading the van, and the priests inflaming all. Bonaparte was driven out. The priests, for all their hoodwinking, can be good patriots, it seems. The London Times, the mouthpiece of the enlightenment of the age, certainly no great friend to Spaniards and Catholics, contrasted the conduct of France during the late invasion with that of Spain. France, in her sorest straits, was never so hard pushed as Spain when the first Napoleon entered; yet a nation of over 30,000,000 could not rid themselves of half a million. There was no Carthagena, no Saguntum, no Saragossa—no approach to such. And the Times confessed that France failed because she possessed neither the patriotism nor the religious enthusiasm of the Spaniards. Such examples has Spain given to the world of the purest patriotism, the first element of greatness in a nation; of a self-reliance that, when all seems lost, will not look without for aid, but to itself.

She has not ceased her working here. In no department has she been backward. Science owes her much. Literature is enriched by her authors. The inspirations of Murillo are the embodiment of all that our religion can feel in its deepest moments; before his canvas, the Christian prays, the infidel cannot scoff. She has given soldiers of the noblest type; statesmen the most benevolent and enlightened. The Spanish constitution in itself is from days remote admirable for equipoise and justice. In England they are just approaching the Spanish marriage laws. A Spanish merchant will tell you that for the generality of commercial questions he is his own lawyer, so clear and well-defined is the law.

What do we Catholics owe to Spain?

First of all, that high example of unswerving faith and devotion to the Holy See through ages of evil report and good report. The great heart of the nation is not moved by events that will come under our notice after. She has not only given a host of theological writers, but, what is still better, a host of theological actors—notably the Order of St. Dominic and the Society of Jesus, the names of which are enough to recall our debt.

To the Old World she opened up a New. Here Spain had a mission that is rarely given to nations. She failed, though the monarch sent priests to accompany the soldiers, to temper the conquest of the sword by that of the cross. How well the warriors of Christ demeaned themselves, our Bancroft and Prescott tell us.

She failed; but who shall cast the first stone at her? That nation only which has subdued another by Christian love and the weapon of the cross—a phenomenon that has not yet appeared even in these blessed days.

We hear much of the cruelty of these Spanish settlers, of their selfishness, of their greed of gold.

We must make a little allowance for the days in which they lived. Men were untutored then; peace congresses (save the mark!) were unknown; an Alabama case would either have been let alone or settled by the sword long ere it could have grown into a mere talking difficulty; men did not consult lawyers on the nice distinctions of meum and tuum. The Spaniards landed, and held their own by cruelty, oppression, and rapine, no doubt. We, with all our enlightenment, have followed their example pretty faithfully; except that, for men like the saintly Las Casas, we despatched an agent that worked a speedy conversion—fire-water. We have taken root here and grown up, and are a great nation, spreading out in all directions, wealthy, prosperous, enlightened, with civilization at our finger-ends, and Bibles willy-nilly in every one of our schools. Yes, we are a decided improvement on the Spaniards. But a hundred years ago there existed a race in this country to whom the land that we tread upon belonged. Where is that race now? A wretched remnant of it scowling and prowling on our outskirts; we are killing them off. We heard of them the other day joining in the great hunt. The most enterprising and powerful of our journals, one that has fitted out a purely benevolent expedition to Africa, sent its correspondent down to record it all. We had an “idyl of the plains”; the course of our great enlightenment and progress was drawn in fanciful colors, with this correspondent for central figure, riding for miles and miles under the stars to tell us at our breakfasts of the exact position of a soldier throwing an ornament round the neck of a savage maiden, and the evident appreciation the savages exhibited of champagne.

Spain failed in her mission, great and glorious as it was. Have we succeeded better? Has England, in India, or Tasmania, or wherever she set her foot?

Gold brought its own curse. When wealth comes unasked, few men will labor. The “Eldorado” filled the dreams and stopped the life of the Spaniards. One by one her rich possessions dropped from the parent nation, till Cuba was the only one left, and Cuba wishes to go also.

She has become a second-rate power in Europe, if so high—the kingdom “on whose dominions the sun never set.”

And here, with this glance at her past history to call to mind what she was, what she has achieved, the truly great elements that were always in her, we turn to look at her as she is; to consider her present bearing on the church, for we Catholics must always look at all things with a Catholic eye, knowing, as we do, that our religion is the one religion upon which the salvation of this world hangs; that, if the world is to be saved by us, we can never put our faith upon the shelf and enter the world as worldlings. The Spirit of God must permeate and pervade all people, all places, all things, at all times; and when that is accomplished, and not before, then will the world be saved.

Spain groaned under the rule of Isabella, or rather under the rule of her rulers. She was a woman far “more sinned against than sinning.” We are apt too often to blame the victim for the circumstances which make the victim. From her infancy a tool in the hands of unprincipled men; forced to marry a man utterly worthless in every respect; almost without one true friend, without a soul for her woman’s heart to cling to. We accuse her of all the evils created, fostered, encouraged by a host of powerful men, who used her as a chess-piece; while she stood, their game was safe. The revolution more than smouldered; but O’Donnell, at once a statesman and a soldier, kept it down. Narvaez, crafty and bold, succeeded him, and in turn went. These men, particularly the latter, in striking at their own foes, left a bitter legacy of hatred and revenge to the queen. What all foresaw came to pass—the last rising which ousted her. Prim came in; the nation’s destiny was at last in its own hands; now for the millennium.

Prim commenced it—a likely man for such a purpose. A bold, unscrupulous adventurer, whose chief virtue was his reckless bravery; no great talker; not a man who would astonish you by the wisdom of his words, but quick to decide, speedy to execute; a very soldier whose “voice was in his sword”—such was Prim. He found himself adored by the soldiers, glorified by the people. He did not care for the latter: when they wished to tear the crown from his cap on his entry into Malaga, he would not let them; he declared himself in plain words for monarchy from the beginning. He found the cortes split up into parties. Many for Don Carlos, a strong body, who if not crushed would have their king; so Prim resolved to crush them. A few for Montpensier; another few for Don Alfonso, the queen’s son; neither worth bothering about, Prim let them alone. A small compact party of republicans, very ably led; nearly all young, enthusiastic, lawyers many of them, excellent speakers, excellent fighters at a pinch, too. This was a dangerous party, who had been most instrumental in putting Prim where he was. He dared not turn round on them at once, the people were still armed. He coquetted with them. They were young, and many unfledged, eager to try their lungs, fond of the sound of their voices. Spain should be governed only as Spain wished; she should have a model constitution; freedom of the person, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of everything. No more conscriptions, only a few more thousands just to enable the army to quell those troublesome Carlists. He threw them a constitution, a model indeed in its construction, fit for Utopia, but scarcely for the wild spirits then raging in Spain. He let them wrangle over that, and turned himself to the army. He had always been popular with the soldiers; he moved everybody up a grade; by this means he created all the colonels, and the army was his. With this weapon secure in his grasp he could beat them all, and he did. He played them off, one against the other, in the cortes; he knew, split up as they were, the elements too opposed to coalesce, they would never agree about any single thing or any single person; he suggested this and he suggested that; if they would not take his suggestions, that was their fault. One thing was clear, they must support him, or anarchy would ensue. The Carlists left the chamber to fight. Precisely what Prim wanted; he had encouraged it, in fact; the sooner, the better for him, as he could the more easily crush them. He did so, cruelly and mercilessly. In the meantime, he was all honey to the republicans. But at last they began to see that they had been hoodwinked; that there was no hope of a republic from Prim; that the monarchy they hated would come in again, and all their efforts prove fruitless. Prim demanded the arms of the people—the arms which had been distributed to enable him to crush the monarchy. The republicans in their turn left the chamber to fight; and well they fought, too, against the overwhelming forces that Prim sent to quell them; for no half measures would do for Juan Prim. Those men who rose and fought so tenaciously at Cadiz, at Jerez, at Malaga, Valencia, had been well schooled beforehand by the preachers of the age. “You are poor, and your children will be poor after you. The labor of your hands goes to dress the fine ladies of the rich; to fatten lazy priests, who do nothing for a living; to set those brave gentlemen on horseback, who think themselves made of other flesh and blood than yours. We will change all that when the queen is driven out. We will all be equal, and do equal work or no work. Our men are men as theirs are; our women are women also.”

The queen was driven away; the friars, and the Jesuits, and the nuns banished. The government seized upon their houses and what was in them; of course it was not robbery when the government took them. Still the poor were not a penny the richer. These plausible doctrines had seized upon their simple minds. It was something worth fighting for, and they fought. No Paris barricades were ever defended with half the fury and obstinacy displayed by those Andalusians—the mountaineers and villagers whose fathers and grandfathers had harassed, surrounded, and captured a force of 4000 or more, under one of the First Napoleon’s generals. Still, we hear of none of those outrages at which the world sickened lately in Paris. “Aqui nadie se roba caballeros”—“Gentlemen, no one robs here,” was the first cry at Cadiz. A commandant of the forces was struck down in the midst of the revolutionists by a shot. They knew him well, and that he was going to fight against them; yet they were the first men to take him from the street and care for his wounds. There is all that is noble, generous, and faithful in the heart of this people, which it only requires a wise government to draw out.

They were beaten on all sides. They dared not rise in Madrid, for Prim kept his forces there, as a centre, menacing the country. In the midst of all this distraction, we see one flash of the old spirit that, however it might split against itself, was one against a common foe. Cuba saw its chance, and, though many concessions had been made, it would have liberty at once. Prim had quite enough to do at home; his hands were full with Carlists and republicans. We lent our sanction to the Cuban claims, with an after-eye to our own interests; and our minister made some representations that never quite came to light. Prim made no answer to them, at least in words. But, notwithstanding the dearth of money and of men, the strain at home requiring every nerve to sustain it, the old Spanish blood was true to itself. Volunteers sprang up in crowds; and force after force was shipped, is shipped still, to the island, ostensibly to quell a rebellion that never held a position from the first. A nation that can act so in such a moment must have something in it.

Before taking leave of Prim, in turn the hero and the terror of the revolution, much as we deplore that the destinies of such a nation at such a crisis should have fallen into the hands of such a man, we cannot help paying a tribute to his never-flagging energy, dauntless courage, and prompt decision. Men laughed at Prim, at his speeches, and wondered how he ever gained his position. Speaking on the deficiency of the national treasury, and utterly unable to tide over those rocks on which all governments break—figures: “I know we shall be able to meet the deficiency,” said Prim, “But how?” asked the deputies. “I do not know exactly how; but I have a feeling in my breast which convinces me;” the words are from memory, but they convey the substance. Men laughed, but Prim stood his ground; and gradually the question, “What will Spain do?” merged into that of “What will Prim do?” A better man and a wiser statesman, neither very difficult to obtain, would have availed himself of such an opportunity to heal his country’s wounds. Prim could not do this; he did not know how; but he was at least “wise in his generation.” He could not save the sick man; he did the next best thing, he kept him from killing himself. The foolhardiness of the man was his destruction. He had often had warnings, but he knew not what fear was, and took no precautions.

“To have the republic is easy,” said Castelar, the leader of the republicans, after one of his defeats, to Prim. “We have only to kill one man.” “Nothing but a thunderbolt kills me,” retorted Prim, “and of those very few fall.”

The thunderbolt fell and crushed him, but failed to crush what it was aimed at, the monarchy. Amadeus landed just in time to learn that his right-hand man was gone—a fearful venture for a young king and his queen. But he braved it royally; and though the race of Victor Emanuel can never find much favor in our eyes, this son of his, we confess, has borne himself through trying scenes like a king and like a gentleman, nobly supported by his brave and Catholic lady. That he was never elected by the people is clear; that, notwithstanding his personal merit, he is not likely to stay long where he is, is the surmise of all. If a telegram, without the slightest foundation in fact, announced his expulsion to-morrow, not a man in the world would disbelieve it. The people can feel no sympathy with a man who has no sort of title to their ancient crown; who is a perfect stranger to them, and almost to the world; who after the hawking of their throne about Europe, was forced upon them against their will. Besides, the Italians, of all European nations, are despised in Spain. They are considered there as good singers, dancers, cooks, and such like, but not the men for anything manly or great: how much less for the throne of Ferdinand the Catholic! “King Macaroni the First” was the burlesque that greeted Amadeus on his arrival in the capital. With him we will not trouble ourselves further, but with the revolution that gave occasion to the accident of his accession, and which will displace him to-morrow or the next day.

Spain undoubtedly was in a bad state under the régime of Isabella. The question is, Has she bettered herself by driving out the queen? The new order came in with a grand flourish of trumpets. Progress was the watchword: the “Progressistas” were Prim’s party till he broke them up. We have touched already on the blood shed in civil strife for this party and for that, but there are other things to consider. Education is the word of the day; let us see what the revolution effected in this direction.

The Jesuits under great difficulties were organizing colleges and missions; they were straining every nerve to educate and improve the people, and were just beginning to make some headway when the revolution came; and of course the first “abuse” to be abolished was the Order of Jesus—that order that flourishes even in Protestant countries like England, where the government, under such a chancellor as Mr. Lowe, grants them a pension for their observatory at Stonyhurst. They had to fly the country; their establishments were all broken up and seized upon by the government. A case in point:

At Port St. Mary’s, between Cadiz and Jerez, the gentlemen of the town, seeing the good effected by the Jesuits in their missions, and feeling it in the improved conduct of the men they employed, as more than one of them assured the writer, united and raised funds sufficient to build a magnificent college which they presented to the society. The government, then of Isabella, had nothing to do with it. When the revolution broke out, there were three hundred students there, many of them from the first families of Spain. In addition to these, forty of the poor children of the district were admitted to the course of studies free. The Jesuits were banished, and escaped with their lives, thanks to the courage of a noble-hearted gentleman of the town and his sons, who at the risk of their own lives and property gave them shelter till Topete himself went and conducted them to the sea. The college was closed and seized by the government. The gentlemen who built it demanded the building to be used at least for educational purposes, no matter under whom. To all their remonstrances a deaf ear was turned; and the college stands tenantless to this day. Those who had the means sent their children out of the country to England, France, or elsewhere. Many could not, and for them there was no remedy. Their children must do without education while the work of enlightenment goes on.

They drove out the friars and the nuns destitute into the world; seized upon their property, and possessed themselves of their treasures, the vessels of the sanctuary, vestments, paintings, gifts given in expiation of sins or propitiation of heaven by men and women long ago resting in their graves. Not a year back the writer, then in London, saw an announcement in the Times of the accession of some rare Spanish jewelry to the curiosities of the very interesting Museum at Kensington. He went, and found the ornaments that had decked the images and altars of the Virgen del Pilar at Saragossa, neatly arranged in two large cases, each ornament ticketed off as in a Jew’s shop, with the estimated value underneath in sums varying from over a hundred, sometimes over two or three hundred, pounds downwards. This sacrilegious robbery was repeated throughout the country—a dangerous example to the poor, whom they had indoctrinated with the pernicious ideas so prevalent in these times, the climax of which we saw the other day in Paris.

There was to be no state religion, and the clergy no longer to be salaried by the government. We must observe how all these movements strike at the church first; as is right they should do, for, that power destroyed, there is an end to morality, and the rest is easy. After a fierce and prolonged debate, in which the republicans came out in their true colors, and gave utterance, not the greater number happily, to open-mouthed blasphemy not simply against the church, but against the God whom Protestant and Catholic adore in common, the motion was not carried. The Catholic Church continues the church of the state, as it is the church of the whole nation.

“There are three things I hate intensely (que me odian): God, the monarchy, and phthisis,” said an alcalde in the north. It is a comfort to know that the wretch who said this craved a priest on his dying bed when attacked by the last object of his hatred, and God, ever merciful, allowed him one.

Emilio Castelar, the prime mover in the motion, spoke differently. He is the leader of the republicans: young, gifted beyond measure in all that can give a man influence among his fellows, a marvellous orator, whom the whole cortes, from the prelate to the red-hot republican, listens to spell-bound when he speaks. His attacks on Prim were terrible, unceasing, unsparing; he lashed the cortes into foam; but Prim, conscious of his power, had a dry, sarcastic manner of meeting them that took a good deal of the eloquent edge off. On the religious question Castelar said, “For my own part, if I chose any religion, it would be the Catholic, in which I was born and in which my mother died. A Protestant I could never be: it is too frigid for me.”

Liberty of the press, in these days the bulwark of our rights, liberty of public discussion, were proclaimed. The press was free to attack everything and every institution we consider holy. The republican papers poured forth floods of blasphemy unchecked. The Carlist, the Catholic organs alone were suppressed. Villaslada, the editor of the Pensamiento Español, the leading Carlist and Catholic newspaper, which bears the Holy Father’s blessing on its page, was forced to fly the country, and his papers seized. He has since returned, and has now a seat in the cortes. His offence was attacking the government and advocating the cause of Don Carlos at a time when Prim professed to await the expression of the will of the people to declare the king. So much for free discussion.

It would be tedious as well as profitless to take every item in the catalogue of a nation, and contrast them now with what they were before the overthrow of the Bourbon line. Certain it is that, bad as things were in Spain under Isabella, they are worse at present. Her commerce has deteriorated wofully. “We know not what to expect in Spain at any moment. The men we employ have been so preached to by the apostles of the revolution that they are ready to turn on us we know not when. We dare not keep a large stock on hand. We are trying to sell things off even at a sacrifice, we get our money safe banked in England, and, if the revolution and ruin come, well, at least we shall have some provision for our wives and children.” That is how any merchant will speak to-day on Spanish affairs.

“The shortest road to peace is through the revolution,” said Villaslada, and that is the opinion of all the thoughtful men the writer has met. They look upon a revolution as inevitable, the passions of the people have been so tampered with. It is hoped for that the people may sicken of their illusions; that the fury may waste itself; that the blood-letting which must follow may allay the fever, may open their eyes to the Utopia which their frenzy pictures.

It is a sad state for such a nation. It makes us anxious about the question we asked at the beginning, What is its destiny? Its debt is increasing as its credit declines. And yet the nation might be a great nation still.

Its foreign possessions it can do without. To get rid of Cuba would really be a relief. The advantages which the island affords for commerce by no means compensate for the continual anxiety it causes—the support of an army and a fleet. Spain is self-sufficient. With an area similar to that of France, her population is only one-third as large. The country if worked could produce corn enough to feed more than half Europe. Magnificent forests of chestnut and mahogany, soft groves of orange and olive trees, clothe and beautify the soil. Splendid rivers roll through the land, while bays and safe harbors indent the coast. In a little district perhaps not more than ten miles square grows the wine that supplies the whole world with sherry. Spanish wool holds its own in the mart. The people are intelligent, peaceful, and moral by nature. In no country can an inferior talk to a superior as freely without passing beyond the bounds as in Spain. Beautiful, historic cities are scattered through the land. Treasures of art are in their churches and galleries, refining the feelings and quickening the intellect. Their language is music; their climate delicious; their soil fruitful; land and living cheap. Their fleet is a formidable one; the Biscayan mariners for boldness and skill are unsurpassed, tossed as they are from infancy in the cradle of their bay, where the wide-spreading Atlantic is for ever wroth that it can go no further. The bravery and discipline of their army is within our recollection. That the energy of the race has not died out is proved by the war in Morocco, the speedy quelling of the revolution, the readiness of the nation to engage in war with such a power as ourselves, where the final issue could not be for a moment doubtful; but that much derided phrase “national honor” kept them true to themselves and their traditions, and we were wise enough not to provoke a contest with a people ready to sell their lives so dear. Yet with all these advantages, their course to-day is a downward one, and will continue so until one of two governments comes—either a man like the First Napoleon or a Bismarck, who to the iron will of Prim shall add a genius which the latter neither possessed nor pretended to possess; strong enough to grind down if necessary, but great enough to lift up. To such a man both Spain and France to-day present fields ripe with opportunity.

Or, for Spain at least, where there is still great faith and reverence for what is great and true, where happily materialism has not yet seized upon the hearts and the intellect of the people, a government that, instead of striking at the church which still is the church of the nation, and sapping the roots of Catholic, that is, of all morality, should call that church to its aid, and say to the people, “Your God shall be my God”—such a government would have from the start the greatest ally it could hope for in a religious people. Let it tell the people boldly that it shall have liberty, but not license, that it shall march with the age, that its great possessions are gone, never to return; but that at home it has resources that cannot fail, which only require the working to make them produce a hundredfold; a government which shall educate the children in religion, and from their infancy pour into their souls lessons of truth. Such a government might regenerate Spain. Such is partly the programme of Don Carlos. But he is the disciple of another school. Could he unlearn a little the doctrines of his school, Don Carlos holds the best chance to-day not only of occupying the throne, but of occupying the hearts and hopes of the nation.

And here we close with a remark on the failure of revolutions to work their purpose.

“The driving out of one unclean spirit to make room for seven more unclean,” is the history of all movements that have ever upset a throne which tradition has set in the intellect of the people, which custom has rooted in the soil, which has literally “grown with their growth and strengthened with their strength,” and even declined with their decline or caused it, which is of them. It is a strange fact, but history bears it out. As we have shown, the Spaniards drove out their queen, and for a moment held their destiny in their own hands. The French drove out the Emperor, and held their destiny in their hands. Is either country the better for their action? In great contrast to these stands out Germany, before the war composed of a number of independent or semi-independent peoples. They united and placed themselves under the yoke, and present to the world a combination so great, so powerful, so irresistible by any single state save Russia or our own, that the world was convulsed by it, and the face of Europe changed in a day. Whether it will last or not is foreign to our present purpose. Men should “count the costs” before they overturn any government. It is a hard thing to change a nation. Even though you present something better, you must combat rooted prejudice, immemorial tradition, every spontaneous feeling that rises, before your idea can hold the popular mind. Look at the slow spread of Christianity. People would not give up their gods of wood and stone. Our Lord cast out devils before their eyes. “It is by Beelzebub you cast them out,” they cried. But the agents of revolution generally begin on the other side. They cast in devils. They uproot everything that is stable; they undermine morality; they teach men to scoff at everything; to obey no law. Man is free, and this world is his to do as he likes with. Who says no? The priest? The priest and the monarchy go hand-in-hand to bind free-born nations down in superstition and slavery. So they work, and, when their harvest is ripe, they reap their reward. They hack at everything right and left. But demons are powerful only to destroy, and they have raised those that they cannot lay, save by blood and iron, as Prim did, as Trochu and the rest were compelled to do. “And the last state of these nations is worse than the first.”

We were saved from a like fate because the monarchy was never known here; our constitution was not a new one, it was in the intelligence of the people from the first, and its exponent was George Washington.

People with their own destiny thrust upon them can do nothing with it. Men have brooded for years under evil government, and when that falls a thousand quacks are ready, each with his panacea for the cure of the nation’s woes, and one is as likely as another. As for the nation at large, it wants to be governed. It cannot sit down and think, the matter out, rejecting this and choosing that. The first that is ready, if it happens to be good, good; if not, so much the worse. They have already knocked one government on the head; why should they stop at a second, or a third, or any number? And so step in cruelty and oppression on the one side, lawlessness in every form on the other. It is better to cure than to kill; better to reform than to overthrow; and if we must overthrow, let us do it like men and not like fiends. If the joint is rotten ere you displace it, see that you can replace it. The monarch is the key-stone of the constitution in lands where monarchy prevails. Remove that, and the whole fabric is shattered. You must build anew. You may build better; at all events, time is lost; most likely you will build worse; strengthen, reform the old—beware how you destroy it.

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In these times, all is laical—that is to say, in accordance with modern language, everything is bound to bear the stamp of the state. No contract is possible without the intervention of the state; no marriage exists without the ratification of the state; no school can be opened without the sanction of the state. In short, the state puts its iron clasp on all that man possesses, even his personal liberty and right. Henceforth, then, in the name of those immortal principles which consecrated the absolute and illimitable liberty of the human family, are abolished the most sacred rights of man—liberty in the bosom of the family and individual rights. In the name of liberty, the state confiscates all; it proclaims itself, without ceremony, the original author of all its laws. It is the god-state.

It is astonishing that, following a parallel exaggeration, the state has come to proclaim itself alone capable of exercising charity, as it is alone capable of teaching it! Logic ought to forcibly bring about this result. The state which adjudicates to itself the monopoly of direction, can it not also adjudge to itself the monopoly of the charity?

Yes, charity has become a monopoly of the state. What is it, then, other than official charity? Give alms if so be, but do not forget to pass them through the hands of the state. It is it alone that can distribute your generous gifts. Found hospitals if you will, but on the express condition that you are to abandon them to the hands of the state, who will administer them as masters. Such is in substance the idea of official charity, centralizing in the hands of the state, and administering through its functionaries, the benefits and alms given in a spirit of self-sacrifice.

Very well! The church has never exercised a similar tyranny. She has crushed the heathenish proposition of the Syllabus, “39. The state, from being the source of all good, enjoys a right which is not circumscribed by any limits,” and, always free from the errors which she points out, the church has never imposed any act that even appeared as a simple pretext to accuse her of inconsistency. Though divinely commissioned to guide men, enlighten and direct their intelligence, their will, and all their steps, the church has never believed it her right to say to her faithful: “Put your alms into my hands; I alone know how to properly distribute them.” No! assiduous in stimulating charity, active in giving it birth, the church contents herself with encouraging the sacrifices that holy love inspires, and to show herself happy in having children who evince in so tender a manner the sentiment of Christian brotherhood. An exquisite sense reveals to her that charity delights in secret and mystery; a marvellous delicacy teaches her that the poor and the unfortunate neither consent to pour out their griefs indiscriminately, nor to have their wants relieved by every hand.

Thus, in reference to works of charity, the supremacy of the church consists in helping to accomplish that which the spontaneous piety of her faithful confides to her, and to exercise an exact surveillance over the faithful accomplishment of the charitable dispositions shown by her children who are numbered among the dead. Inviting, encouraging, thanking, and supervising—such is the rôle of the church. If she welcomes with gratitude the faithful who select their pastors to dispense their bounty or for a go-between in their good works, she does not impose it upon them as a duty to confide alms to the care of bishops or of priests. And all doctrine tending to create a similar obligation is rejected by canon law as tainted with an odious exaggeration. Now, then, we have a right to reject the pretensions of the state over charity. Under what title does it place itself between the man who gives the alms and he who receives it? Is the sanctuary of charity less sacred than the domestic hearth? And if the home is inviolable, should not the secrets of charity be equally so?

We protest against official charity with all the energy of indignation. We proclaim it as an injury alike to the rich who give and to the poor who receive. The demonstration does not appear difficult.

Nevertheless, before undertaking it, we hope to interest our reader in placing before his eyes the sentiments of a judge whose views modern politicians do not ordinarily challenge. Portalis, every one knows, elevated the rights and prerogatives of the state high enough. “The state is nothing if it is not all,” said he, one day, before the legislative body. Here is certainly a witness unsuspected of partiality for the theory we are about to defend. Listen, then, to what he said himself to the proposition of official charity.

Let it be remembered here, that one of the most constant preoccupations of Napoleon I. was to centralize everything into his own hands. The emperor wished to the letter to know all and to govern all. Not content with having created the formidable monopoly of the universities, he had even dared to try his hand at flattery in pretending to treat religious affairs as a simple department of his vast administration. Could it, then, be hoped that his ambition respected the liberty of charity? Napoleon, then, dreamed very seriously of controlling its exercise. Portalis hindered him.

The good sense of this celebrated counsellor of the emperor refused on this occasion to consent to the caprices of his master. Portalis declared fearlessly that official charity was the product of a hollow, weak brain, altogether an Utopia of one’s own creation to amuse the leisure hours of some philosopher seeking a distraction.

“Certain men,” wrote he to the emperor, “more jealous of their own attributes than of the public good, believe in finding abuses in all establishments that are not of their own creation. They scorn the good in the hope of finding the better; they imagine that all is resolved by calculation, and that, with two or three general maxims, they could reconstruct the world. With such ideas, states are disorganized. Such minds exhibit a greater power to destroy than an ability to construct.

“It is said with truth that the laws would be nothing without morals. It is, then, in the morals that the power of the laws will be sustained, that is to say, it is necessary to study the direction of the minds of men; that they should know the common affections of the human heart, and not govern by metaphysical abstractions and submit to cold calculation those things which cannot be other than the result of zeal, devotion, and of virtue.”[89] This was adroitly cautioning the emperor against the deleterious influences of that sad philosophy which sought to control him. Applying these principles to those hospitable communities that irreligious passions wished to banish, Portalis subjoined:

“The associations with which are connected so many touching memories were recommended to the considerate attention of your majesty by the gratitude of the people. Experience speaks loudly in favor of the imperial decrees which have authorized these associations. It is not, then, to balance between the vain theories of an infatuated sophist and the real assistance that charity administers to suffering humanity.”[90]

“These miserable objections derive their source ... in the vain theories of which experience has demonstrated the illusion.”[91] It is, then, clear that official charity found no advocate in Portalis. It presented to him the too evident imprints of a lying and anti-Christian philosophy. We will continue our citations.

Portalis was convinced that religion only could induce charity. He believed that in this case religion only is capable of receiving and executing the mandates of charitable bequests.

“Your majesty,” wrote he again, “in your great wisdom has desired to leave the care of the poor under the guard of religion. She has undertaken the service that is accompanied with so many sacrifices and discouragements, which could not be guaranteed but by the most elevated and the most generous sentiments. She has dispersed the false systems of men who would wish to enjoy the benefits of the great work we see in operation under our eyes, in draining with as much imprudence as ingratitude the source from which they are furnished.”[92]

The experience he had besides superabundantly apprised him of what reason made him sensible. He had seen the works of the state and that of the religious bodies. Doubt, then, was no longer possible. It became manifest to him that, generally speaking, charity could only be duly administered through consecrated hands. Listen to his grave remarks:

“His majesty, in his travels, has convinced himself that all the hospitals confided to simple civil administration languish; that the poor there are often treated with negligence, and even with cruelty, by mercenary agents. In consequence of this, he has directed me to send the Sisters of Charity to all the departments beyond the Alps, and in all other places where they have not been.”[93]

Is it properly to Napoleon that the honor of such an initiative reverts? Was it not Portalis who inspired him? He sent very few. It is always the imperial counsellor giving, under his report, absolutely all the confidence to the clergy and to the church.

“It is constantly urged that the ecclesiastics and the bishops have appropriated to their own benefit; but are laic functionaries impeccable? Men, wherever they may be, commit abuses because they are men; but it is clear that there will be less abuse in all things when each kind of administration shall be left to men who by their office and their position have the largest means and the greatest interests for right administration.”[94]

“It is argued that the needs of the poor are sufficiently guaranteed by the civil administrators of the hospitals. I am not only surprised, but also grieved at this assertion. They overlook, then, all the great good for which humanity is indebted to the Sisters of Charity, to the hospital nurses, and also to many societies of estimable women who, by their tender piety, have consecrated themselves to the service of the poor. The public administrators are forced to depend upon the care of agents, to those mercenaries whose frauds are beyond scrutiny, and who possess no virtues. The spirit of charity cannot be supplied by the spirit of administration. Other management must disburse the revenues, other means must console or help the sick.... One must be possessed of very little philosophy to believe that the cold solicitude of an administrator can replace the generous care of ardent charity.... The service of the poor, as they are attended to in the hospitals and outside of them by religious associations, is not a simple administration or the effect of a simple management. It requires a continual succession of night-watching, privation, danger, nausea, painful and disinterested fatigue. This service demands a great abnegation of self, which could not be sustained save by motives superior to all human considerations. In an association, forces are combined to multiply resources; they encourage each other by example, and are enlightened by counsel; they are directed by rules which call them to duty and guarantee its observance. They receive novices whose health, character, and disposition are tested, and to whom they transmit with the knowledge of the subject the daily lessons of experience. All these means of recruiting and encouraging, of direction and perpetuity, are wanting when the service of the poor rests upon passing administrations, or with salaried agents who can be arbitrarily replaced at any moment by others. To achieve a permanent good we must have permanent institutions.”[95]

This is certainly a complete and beautiful explanation of religious associations. The experience of more than half a century has not lessened the value of these reflections of Portalis; on the contrary, it would be easy to enumerate the frauds, the misrepresentations, and the wastefulness which too often occur in administering to the wants of the poor, but we forbear the recital of the afflicting details. Portalis had but too much reason to condemn.

In another point of view, Portalis reproved official charity. It seemed to him irreconcilable with the rights of donors to the poor, who wish to feel free in the distribution of their alms, and also with the rights of the poor, who do not consent at first sight to make acknowledgment of their misery.

“This would be,” said he, “destroying the character of charitable commissions, and perhaps even destroying their usefulness, in transforming them into exclusive institutions. Benevolence breathes as it wishes and where it wishes. If you do not let it respire freely, it stifles or becomes weakened in the midst of those who are disposed to its exercise. I argue that it would show a false estimate of the interests of the poor to isolate them in any way from the religious souls who would protect and assist them. Such people desire to place their alms in a religious organization, which will not dispose of them in any other establishment. Far from prescribing limits and imprudent conditions to benevolence, I would, on the contrary, open all avenues that benevolence might select for itself, and through which it shall choose to extend itself.”[96]

“The administration of alms is not and cannot be the exclusive privilege of any establishment whatever. Alms are free and voluntary gifts. He who gives can do no more. He is the one to charge the dispenser of his own liberality. The man who is able to give alms, and has shown his willingness to do so, can ask himself the simple question, To whom belongs their administration? To him or to them whom the donor will have charged to make the distribution? There is not and there cannot be any other rule in a similar matter. To do away with this rule would be to dry up the source of the charity.

“How is it possible to think that religious organizations should be excluded from the right of administering the alms which they receive? Under such a system, they might as well assert that they are not allowed to receive alms, that is to say, they would have to destroy the natural liberty of those men who lay aside a portion of their income to devote to charity, from charging the agents of their own alms and their liberality.”[97]

As for the poor themselves, Portalis thought, with reason, that many among them refused to receive assistance from any administration whatever, and this is why he wished that a portion of the accumulated alms might be left to the disposition of the curates of the parishes:

“Because these alms could be profitably disposed of to those poor who from circumstances and misfortunes have met with reverses and change of position, and who, not wishing to acknowledge their misery to the administrators of benevolent institutions, their equals and sometimes their enemies or rivals, go to seek from their pastors the consolations that sustain their courage, and obtain assistance that does not humiliate them. It is to this interesting use that the alms are generally consecrated by the religious organizations and the priests.”[98] Thus Portalis reasoned that, even for the interests of the poor, official charity should be energetically repulsed.

Meanwhile, if the objection should arise that, after all, these are but opinions, and that simple opinions are not sufficient always to impede the action of the state in what it believes to be its rights, Portalis meets this objection, and in a decided tone he asserts clearly that the state enjoys no right over the exercise of charity. Here are his own words, which we recommend to the minds of modern statesmen:

“The principal office of authority is to dispose of to advantage the gifts that are offered to it, to cause them to prosper in protecting them. It rarely originates them. We have not yet replaced among a multitude of reforms the institutions that have been overturned. Experience brings us back every day to the principles that we have too easily abandoned.”[99]

“This would be but imperfectly to understand the human heart, and hinder its free respiration in the things that law can protect indeed, but which sentiment alone commands. The office of a magistrate is to watch over the essential duties of a citizen, but, in works of supererogation, he must allow great latitude to a liberal arbitration.”[100]

A remarkable avowal, above all, from a lawyer of the temper of Portalis, who willingly elevated into a dogma the omnipotence of the state. He has, however, said: “No, the omnipotence of the state does not go so far as that; and that for the very simple reason that the state could exact from its citizens only the observance of precepts imposed by the natural and divine laws. It can never compel them to submit to obligations that nature has never created.”

Is it to say that we refuse to the state the right of showing itself benevolent and charitable? God forbid! If the state would practise boundless liberality, we would bless it. If it would be the protector of all the works destined for the relief of unfortunate humanity, we would exalt it with transport. But never to make this protection a monopoly, otherwise the benefaction would change to tyranny.

Listen to M. Charles Périn, who has treated with as much depth as sincerity the difficult problems of political economy:

“The action of the state in giving assistance will not be free from danger, inasmuch as it would have a purely preventive character.... That the state intervenes to assure by its civil existence the duration of those institutions founded by the free inspirations of private charity; that it assures itself that the conditions of the foundations for which it calls its meetings contain nothing which repudiates the rules of public order; that it exercises over the administrations of those foundations a watchfulness that prevents abuses and which secures the observation of the essential rules of the institution, without annulling the free action of those who have received the mission of donators to represent them among the poor, and continue the work of charity which has inspired them—under these conditions, the intervention of the state will become a benefit, because then she does no more than aid liberty.”[101]

Here is also the doctrine of the great Bishop of Arras, Mgr. Parisis:

“That which governments can and ought to do to aid charity is not to disfigure, to dry up, and to destroy it in making it entirely legal, but to reanimate it by all possible means in maintaining it Christian, in preserving the sentiment, and everywhere encouraging efforts in its regard, to make not rulers, but auxiliaries, not oppressors, but friends.”[102]

Admirable formula, that the politicians of the present day should study a little more!

We have placed before the reader the sentiments and doctrines of Portalis touching official charity. We do not think that we could give higher authority. We have found in the alleged proofs good and solid reasoning. We record a true demonstration.

We have been reluctant heretofore to discharge this great duty. Why we take up the subject at this late period is to expose the vices and the dangers of official charity.

---

The following item of news is clipped from a recent number of a leading New York publication:

We do not know what truth there may be in this report. It is intrinsically probable that the establishment of an “anti-Romanist” periodical is in contemplation, because there is always a large politico-religious party in the United States whose chief principle is bitterness against the Catholic Church, and there are certain reasons why such a party just now should be especially active. The Catholic element in our population is rapidly increasing, and many circumstances have recently combined to bring its numerical strength into prominence. A moderate estimate makes it not less than six or seven millions. The published returns of the census of 1870 have not thus far furnished any statistics of religious belief, but they give some facts from which we can get at least an idea of the rate at which the church in America is growing. There were, for example, in 1870, no fewer than 1,855,779 persons of Irish birth in the United States, and of these the preponderance of Catholics over Protestants was so large that the Protestant element may as well be disregarded. In Ireland, the ratio of Catholics to Protestants is at least as high as four to one, and here the proportion is still greater, because emigration is largely from the Catholic counties; probably the whole number of Irish-born Protestants in the United States does not equal 200,000. The German-born population, according to the same census, is 1,690,533. In Germany, about three-fifths of the inhabitants are Catholics, but emigration takes place rather more from the Protestant than from the Catholic districts, so that competent judges estimate that the Catholic Germans in this country are only two-fifths of the entire number. That would give us, for Catholics of German birth, 676,213. Then there are 193,504 natives of other Catholic countries, including 116,402 Frenchmen, but not counting Swiss, Poles, Canadians, and others of whose religious belief we have no means of making an estimate. A great many of the French and Italian immigrants are either Protestants or people of no religious profession at all; and, upon the whole, we prefer to leave out of consideration these 193,000 settlers of the Latin race, balancing with them the Protestant Irish. Now, the census shows that for every foreigner in the country there are two native-born inhabitants of foreign parentage. According to this rule, we ought to have 3,711,558 descendants in the first generation of Irish immigrants, and 1,352,426 descendants of Germans. Supposing, therefore, that the children are brought up in the faith of their parents, there ought to be the following numbers of foreign-born Catholics and Catholics born in this country of foreign fathers and mothers:

Irish birth	1,855,779
Irish parentage	3,711,558
	—————
Total Irish		5,567,337
German birth	676,213
German parentage	1,352,426
	—————
Total German		2,028,639
		—————
Grand total		7,595,976

This, of course, is too high an estimate. Unfortunately, a great many of the descendants of Catholic immigrants are not brought up in the faith. Protestant associations, mixed marriages, the want of priests and churches in a large part of our territory, the general deficiency of schools, the influence of an overpowering Protestant tone in society, politics, and literature, and the inadequacy of the Catholic press thus far to meet the intellectual needs of the day, have robbed us of many of the descendants of the Catholic settlers—how many it is impossible to say. On the other hand, it must be remembered that the figures we have given refer only to immigrants and a single generation of their descendants. Irish and German Catholics, however, have been pouring into the country ever since the Revolution, and their descendants in the second, third, and later generations must be counted by hundreds of thousands. Then we have the offspring of the original Catholic settlers of Maryland and of the French posts along the Mississippi Valley from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and the Spanish Catholics along the Pacific coast; and, finally, we have thousands of converts, whose number is increasing in a constantly growing ratio. All these elements must far outweigh the loss by neglect and perversion.

Then, the movement to extend Catholicism among the colored people of the South has occasioned no little alarm in the Protestant sects. It was thoroughly discussed at the General Council of Baltimore six years ago, and especially attracted, as our readers know, the Christian zeal of the late Archbishop Spalding. The English Church has come to our aid by sending us missionaries for this special work, and there is every reason to believe that in this long-neglected field, now open to us by the abolition of slavery, we shall reap an abundant harvest. Everybody perceives that for a long time to come, if not permanently, the colored people will hold a preponderance of power in several of the Southern States. As they advance in education and material welfare, their influence will enormously increase. In many districts, they are evidently destined to be the ruling race, for they are improving in culture, and can no longer be overlooked by the social or religious philosopher. Whether they shall be Catholic or Protestant is a momentous question, not only to their own souls, but to the country.

But not only is the formidable number of the Catholics of the United States a subject of increasing anxiety to the sects, their attitude towards political parties presents some new and perplexing problems. Heretofore they have exerted no special influence as Catholics upon political affairs. As a general rule, at least in large cities, an immense majority of them have adhered to the Democratic organization, but without giving the slightest Catholic tendency to Democratic principles and objects. They have been swallowed up and lost in the party rather than incorporated with it; they have given it votes, and got little or nothing in return. Why this has been so we need not now inquire; for it has become evident that a general reconstruction of parties is close at hand.

The next Presidential election will not be so much a contest of principles as a trial of strength between the personal adherents of the rival nominees; and before the end of another four years we may expect on both sides a new declaration of political faith, a new setting up of standards, a new mustering of opposing camps, so that the fight hereafter shall be not for a candidate, but a cause. Republicans and democrats alike are looking for a new departure, and we cannot help being interested in what the new symbols of party orthodoxy are to be.

Of course, as a religious body our duty is now, as it always has been, to keep aloof from partisanship. We have observed this duty religiously in the past; we shall observe it no less strictly hereafter. But Protestants do not comprehend our position in the matter, and they are watching eagerly for indications of the new alliance which they take it for granted we must contemplate. More than this, certain sections of them are acting upon the assumption that we must naturally rank ourselves as their political enemies, and are striving to give a distinctly anti-Catholic tendency to state and national legislation. What are we to do if they succeed? What must be our attitude if the school question, for example, become a leading topic in state politics, or if the broad question of national education be incorporated with the dogmas of the coming political parties? Leaders on the Republican side have already been trying the temper of the people on this point, and it is not at all impossible that organizations may be made so uncompromisingly hostile to us that we shall have to raise our own standard and define our lines. Protestants see all this more clearly than Catholics, and hence the instinctive gathering together of the sects, the renewed bitterness of some of their leading journals, such as the New York Times and Harper’s Weekly, the attempt to exclude our charities from the state aid to which they are fairly entitled, the attacks upon our schools, and the plans for an anti-Catholic crusade by the establishment of no-Popery organs. A paper of the class indicated in the extract at the head of this article would not, indeed, be a formidable enemy. The people at least have no taste for the violent, old-fashioned style of controversy; but, as one indication among many of the drift of Protestant sentiment, the establishment of a professedly and distinctively anti-Catholic paper as a political engine would be significant.

If evil times are coming, how are we prepared to meet them? If our schools are to be attacked, our asylums and hospitals starved out, our children led away from the church and the parish school by the strong arm of the government, our young men and young women corrupted by hostile literature, the newspapers given up to falsehood and misrepresentation about our faith and practices, we who are seven millions strong are surely not to sit idle and strike no blow in our own defence. The pulpit cannot be our only guardian. Before the altar we listen to instruction in our religious duties, we learn of the mysteries of our creed, we are roused to penitence, to charity, to the love of God and man; we do not look there for guidance in our duty as citizens, or for the answer to the slanders of our enemies. Our priests have a more sacred function to perform; there is still a work which, from the nature of the case, they cannot do. The Catholic cause must be upheld not only in the shadow of the sanctuary, but in the very midst of the hostile camp. The most eloquent sermon cannot reach a man who will not go to church. The most complete refutation of a slander will do no good if the slanderer and those who believe in him never hear the answer. But newspapers go everywhere. Their readers are not confined to any one sect or any one party; and when disputes arise which affect the relations of Catholics to the secular government and to their Protestant brethren, the heaviest of the fighting must always be done by the daily, weekly, and monthly press.

In an article published over a year ago, we touched upon this subject in connection with the duty of American Catholics towards Catholic literature. Our remarks were generally approved, we believe, but they called forth some little criticism of an unfavorable character which, upon the whole, we were not sorry to see. It is an encouraging sign of development when the religious press shows vitality enough to discuss something else than the commonplaces of controversy which have formed the staple of Catholic and Protestant polemics for generations. It is high time for us to apply to our own publications a little of that free examination which we have bestowed upon others, and to let argument among Catholic writers be something more than the foolish wrangling of ambitious rivals. In the article to which we have alluded, we said that few of the Catholic papers had a circulation of more than 10,000; and some people found fault with us for that. We wish we could give them 25,000 or 50,000 apiece; but it will not mend matters to say that all Catholic papers are powerful organs of public opinion, when we know that they are nothing of the sort. Most of them are doing excellent service within their own sphere; but why affect to deny that their sphere is a narrow one and their means are small? We have tried to impress upon the Catholic public the duty of supporting the Catholic press to the utmost of their ability. We have shown that where Protestants attack us in a million printed sheets, we give a feeble answer in perhaps ten thousand. We number 8,000,000 souls, yet our newspapers with very few exceptions languish for want of readers, and our colleges are not creating a literary class among the laity. This is one side of the picture, but there is another. If the public is doing little for the papers, are the papers doing much more for the public? We dare say they are doing what they can; but how much is that? What Catholic journal have we capable of meeting Harper’s Weekly, for instance—we do not mean in argument, but in influence? As we write, the current number of that periodical is laid upon our table. It contains a long article on “Romish Cruelty,” telling how in a Pennsylvania town “the Roman Catholics formed a plot to murder” a school-teacher. “The priest aided in encouraging the dangerous spirit of the people, and the assassins seem to have been urged on to their dreadful deed by the open countenance of the Romish Church.” The writer comes to the conclusion that “no one’s life is any longer safe who ventures to doubt the divinity of Mary or the supreme prerogatives of the Pope.” This is only a sample of many similar slanders which the unprincipled publishing firm of the Harpers are spreading all over the country. What are we doing to counteract them? Surely, we cannot afford to let them go unanswered, and we leave it to any Catholic to say whether there is a single publication of our creed in the United States which we can depend upon for a prompt and thorough reply to such falsehoods, in such form and manner as to convince not merely the Catholic, but the Protestant public. We must confront our assailants on their own ground. If they tell us that a priest and his parishioners in an obscure Pennsylvania town have conspired to murder Protestant school-teachers, we must be able to show, and to show at once, that the incidents never occurred, or that the interpretation placed upon them is unwarranted. We ought to have our sources of information as well as our enemies. We need our news-gatherers and investigators, who shall answer falsehood not with indignant invective, but with fact. This is not the work for a monthly magazine, but for a much prompter sort of publication. Long before the true story of such an affair could be told in The Catholic World, it would have been succeeded by a new slander. The poison would have run through the public veins, and it would be too late for the antidote to overtake it. Newspapers ought to do this work, and we suppose they would do it if they had the money; but investigations are expensive, and when the force of a Catholic organ consists of nobody but the editor, who writes all the fourth page, and the assistant, who makes up the rest of the forms with a paste-pot and a pair of shears, there is of course no reporter who can be sent away on excursions. The New York Times, which has long rivalled Harper’s Weekly in bigotry and anti-Catholic malice, allows a correspondent to take up this story, repeat it as a well-ascertained truth, and enforce the lesson that “a faithful son of the Romish Church cannot be a law-abiding citizen of this free Republic.” We dare say scores of Union newspapers will follow the example of the Times; and, meanwhile, if a few weekly Catholic papers succeed in getting at the truth of the incident, we may depend upon it their refutation of the falsehood will never reach Protestant ears. It is time for us to understand that calumny cannot be conquered by such means as we now employ, and that practically our enemies are having everything their own way.

Catholic questions of the most momentous character are now agitating the whole continent of Europe. Germany is shaken by the problems of education; Italy, by the contest between the rights of the Vicar of Christ and the usurpations of the godless Sardinian monarchy. The Döllinger party are encouraged by some of the secular powers to attempt a new heresy. France and Spain are both vexed by infidel and persecuting political factions. England even and Ireland have their Catholic difficulties arising out of the relations between the state and the schools. All the intelligence which reaches us on these important topics comes from the worst sources. The cable reporters who collect European news for transmission through the telegraph are usually not well informed on Catholic subjects, and not always honest. When they touch upon religious matters, they are habitually, even though not intentionally, untruthful. The impression conveyed by their meagre and blundering dispatches is almost always the direct reverse of the right one, and the press telegrams from Rome especially are marvels of ingenious and bold falsification. All the European dispatches printed in American newspapers are sent from London. They are dated at various cities on the Continent, but they all come from one central office in the English metropolis, and they are obtained there from a Jewish news-agency which has relations with the Continental press. Thus, they really give merely the statements of a few French, Italian, Spanish, and German journalists, and these are almost invariably journalists of the anti-Catholic party. In Italy, the mendacity of the anti-Papal press is almost beyond belief; and probably there is no class of persons anywhere so utterly unscrupulous, so wedded to lying, as the radicals of Italy when they speak of the Pope or the Papal Government. The German Liberal and Protestant press is only a little better. It has magnified and misrepresented the Döllinger movement, and distorted, in the grossest manner, the story of the school question in Prussia. Elsewhere, on the Continent, the difficulty is the same. A vigorous press is constantly battling against us, and it is from this press and this press alone that we get our European news. The mail correspondence of American secular newspapers is colored by the same influences which deform the telegraphic summaries. The lie which is insinuated to-day by a cable dispatch will be rubbed in by a letter in due course of the post. Here, again, our enemies have things all their own way. The best of our weekly papers, indeed, do something to correct the falsehoods of the daily journals, but the great difficulty still remains; they cannot reach the general public. Fisher Ames said that “a lie will travel from Maine to Georgia while the truth is putting on its boots.” But, if the lie has the advantage of a daily newspaper and a telegraph under the Atlantic Ocean, whilst the truth must trust to steamships, and post-offices, and a small weekly paper or a monthly magazine, what hope is there that the lie can ever be overtaken?

Secular literature is almost entirely in Protestant hands, and in a thousand unsuspected ways it is infusing into our intellectual system the poison of indifferentism, or infidelity, or miscalled liberalism, and teaching our young people to divide themselves between two incompatible lives—an active Protestant life, which absorbs all their busy and productive hours, and a sluggish Catholic life, which is confined to Sunday mornings and a few great festivals. What is the Catholic press doing to correct these literary influences? What is it doing to cultivate the art of criticism? If we want to know the characters or the literary merits of a new book, shall we turn to the journals of our own faith, or to the Tribune and the World? Our periodicals (with a few honorable exceptions) rarely give any notice at all to the productions of secular book-houses, while magazines and books bearing the imprint of a Catholic publisher are generally reviewed in some such style as the following:

This sort of journalism is worse than a waste of ink and paper. It is a direct injury to the cause it is intended to serve. There is no reason why a book that is badly printed and shabbily bound should be described as “elegantly gotten up”; nor why every number of a magazine should be called the best ever printed; nor why everything published at a Catholic house should be declared essential to the spiritual welfare of every Catholic family. But there is a reason why Catholic journalists should tell the plain truth, and sometimes the whole truth, if they expect to obtain influence in an intelligent community.

The time has come when a vigorous, enterprising, well-conducted press is essential to every community in the United States. No man in this country can do without his newspaper. He must keep abreast of the age; he must know what happens in politics, finance, trade, literature, art, and society, and he must know it promptly; otherwise the current of the world flows past him, and he is left idly floating in the pools by the shore. We cannot afford to ignore this imperative want; it is a necessity created by conditions of society far beyond our control; and it is by no means a necessity which we ought to regret. Our task should be not to oppose this demand for newspapers, but to satisfy it more thoroughly than it has ever been satisfied yet. We are numerous and rich enough to create a Catholic periodical literature which shall be the glory of America, and, next to the church and school, the noblest defence of Catholic principles. We are numerous and rich enough to make newspapers which shall meet every demand of the most active and intelligent and best educated citizen; which shall give our own people the most palatable as well as the most nourishing intellectual food, and enforce from our adversaries a respect which is not now paid us. In the providence of God, we believe such a press will some day be built up in America, and then we shall wonder how we lived and kept our faith so long without it.

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The House of Yorke. By M. A. T. 1 vol. 8vo, pp. 261. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

A thoroughly good American novel was, we suppose, a literary event which was looked for by nobody who had much knowledge of what had been done in that direction, or who had thought much about the causes which produce the painful thinness of most of our native literature. It is true enough, as Dr. Holmes says, that Protestantism in its last analysis means “none of your business,” and what it means at the root it means more or less in every branch and stem, every leaf and flower. And in America especially, which has, so to say, no history and no traditions, and whose vast material resources tempt its children to believe that the world has been started afresh for them on a different basis from that which underlies older civilizations, one of the most patent and most unpleasant results of the theories on which the new civilization was founded has been the barrenness, the hopeless mediocrity, of the literature which it has produced. How was it possible that a people who, as a people, recognized no absolute authority in any matter whatsoever, even in those of fundamental importance, and who had engrained in their minds the conviction that everybody’s opinion, especially in matters of taste and of religion, was as likely to be true as his neighbor’s, should produce a characteristic and thrifty national art and literature? Lawlessness, a lack of respect for authority, and, in most instances, a provincial ignorance that in these matters there was any recognized authority, were what made the weakness of our efforts in this direction. There were a few writers and a few works of acknowledged ability. In fiction we have had Cooper, and we had also an Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but that the latter owed much of its success to the local evil with which it dealt was evidenced by the inferior merit of the works from the same hand which preceded and which followed it. In the limits of a book-notice it is, of course, not possible to do more than to intimate a conviction that literature and art, like civilization and public morality, rest securely only when they are built upon Catholic truth. Here in America there was ample room and opportunity to prove the opposite proposition if it could be proved, and to show that on a foundation of criticism and negation a strong and sightly structure could be reared. There was no lack of ability in our writers, and there was occasional genius; but, when what they did was not an evident imitation of some foreign model, it generally showed incompleteness, a lack of definite conceptions, and an unpleasant awkwardness and indecision of purpose. We are speaking now only of what is known as light literature—essay-writing, fiction, and poetry.

To find, therefore, a distinctively American novel which one can honestly praise as a work of art, is something at which one may be legitimately surprised as well as pleased; and that we have, at last, in The House of Yorke, such a novel, is what nobody who has read it attentively will be at all likely to deny. The true story intertwined with the fictitious one is, as it should be in a work of fiction, so skilfully subordinated to the main current of the novel that it in no way mars the catholicity which is the first element in all genuine art. Pettiness and provinciality are the two rocks on which novels “founded on fact” are most apt to strike; particular facts get such a prominence in them that the larger truth which art demands is lost sight of. Our author shows, however, a thorough mastery of her materials and an accurate perception of what are the proper means to an end. She shows, too, an unusual degree of insight into character and a trained skill in delineating it. All her personages live: not one of them is an imitation of some other novelist’s creation. Their individuality is preserved, too, without recourse to tricks of speech and gesture—they are always themselves, because in the mind of their creator there existed a clear and definite image of each of them. That she has studied herself and other people very closely is evident as well when she brings her characters into action as when she analyzes their motives. The book is full of bits of delicate insight, as, for instance, where she says of the impetuous Dick Rowan that “his soul had, indeed, always been more tranquil than his manner.” The whole of this character, though, and especially the story of his vocation, may well enough be given as an instance.

She knows, too, how to be dramatic without becoming sensational, and how to be thoroughly delicate and reserved and yet make an interesting love story. Her style is easy and unembarrassed, and always level with the occasion, whether in dialogue, description, or moralizing, and her book is one to be as well liked by the ordinary novel-reader, purely for the interest of the story, as by those who are more attracted by its lofty purpose and by the skill with which that purpose is carried out.

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Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects. By John Henry Newman, sometime Fellow of Oriel College. London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 196 Piccadilly. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This is another volume of the uniform series of Dr. Newman’s works. It contains an essay on the manner of catholicizing the Church of England, one on Anti-Christ, one on the analogy of Creed and Scripture in respect to the difficulties of each, one on Secular Knowledge as a means of moral improvement, one on the Defects and Excellences of the British Constitution, and one on the argument of the Ecce Homo—the last two essays only having been written since the conversion of the illustrious author.

The republication of Dr. Newman’s Catholic writings is only something which might have been expected, and which would be considered by all as desirable. The same might be said of his previous works, so far as these contained no heretical or uncatholic statements and opinions. But the entire republication of his Anglican writings was something novel in its way, and rather calculated to startle the mind of one who had not considered the very weighty motives which have induced the author to make this bold stroke. These writings could not have been suppressed. To a very great extent, they are substantially sound, as well as masterly in thought and style, with only an accidental mixture of error. Even those which are in their substance and scope directly anti-Catholic are important documents in the history of polemics. By their incorporation with a complete series of the doctor’s works, they are reduced to the category of those arguments and objections against the faith which are incorporated into systems of theology for the purpose of exhibiting both sides of the controversy, and bringing out the truth in its contra-position to error. The work of Dr. Newman’s life has been a most remarkable and providential one. He has reasoned himself up from Protestantism, through Anglicanism, to the Catholic Church, speaking aloud, and in tones to command attention, during the whole process. It is impossible to estimate the influence for good which he has exerted as an instrument in the hand of God in bringing back Protestants to the fold of the church. The preservation of the complete history of his intellectual progress is therefore something which tends entirely to advance the cause of truth, and to illustrate the glorious conclusion which he finally drew from his premises and proved with such power of reasoning and charm of rhetoric. The present volume contains many things of the greatest intrinsic value, besides what is valuable for the reasons above given, especially the essay on Creed and Scripture, in which the present downward slide of the English toward infidelity is distinctly predicted.

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Constance Sherwood. An Autobiography of the Sixteenth Century. By Lady Georgiana Fullerton. 1 vol. 8vo, pp. 284. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

Our first feeling on reading this book was regret that we have so few similar publications in this country, where the subjects so admirably discussed in it are of such deep and lasting interest. To English-speaking people at least, no matter in what land, the persecution of Catholics during the reign of Elizabeth, the malignant attempts of her able courtiers to destroy utterly the old faith among her subjects, and the heroic struggles and sufferings of the people, particularly of those of the better class, form one of the most interesting, if painful, chapters in the entire modern history of the church. The rebellious and anti-christian spirit of the Eighth Henry descended with fourfold malice on his not unworthy daughter, and a host of recreant prelates and rapacious nobles had sprung up around the throne whose abject subserviency to royal authority was in proportion as they possessed or expected lucrative church livings and the spoils of dismantled schools, convents, and almshouses. Her penal laws made even the secret observance of the forms of worship an offence punishable by torture, death, and confiscation, while the minister of God was legally proclaimed a traitor, hunted down by professional informers, and, when caught, summarily executed with all the cruelties of the most barbarous ages. But while the fagot and the gallows had no terrors for the devoted priest, the loss of court favor, beggary, imprisonment, and the rack were as persistently disregarded by a large number of the nobility and commoners with a steadfastness and resignation which remind us of the days of the early martyrs.

It is to illustrate this period in English history, this contest between ill-gotten and despotic power on one side, and constancy, zeal, and piety on the other, that Constance Sherwood has been written by one who has already done good service in the cause of our holy religion, to the great credit of her sex and country. As a work of art, the book does not exhibit that strong dramatic power or depth of coloring which characterized the efforts of Sir Walter Scott when treating of the same epoch in Kenilworth; but it more than compensates us for these deficiencies in the greater truthfulness of its portraiture of historical personages, and its exquisite delineation of those purely fictitious, who, with all their human weaknesses and spiritual strength, are fittingly held up to us as types of Christian excellence. So delicately, indeed, and so nicely defined are some of Lady Fullerton’s touches that we have sometimes found ourselves going back over the pages of her tale to be assured that we had caught aright the gentle allusion or implied meaning in all its significance. Constance Sherwood, who is supposed to relate the story of her life and times, appears to us a most attractive creation of the author, but the character of Ann, Countess of Arundel and Surry, we venture to say could only have been drawn by a highly gifted, sympathetic, and virtuous woman, so conformable is it in its leading features to well-authenticated facts and so delicately finished in its imaginary details.

Though an historical novel, necessarily devoted to grave and often painful matters, and plentifully strewn with moral and theological reflections, there is just enough of romance and feminine gossip in its pages to enlist the attention and excite the sympathies of the more sentimental and less seriously inclined readers. Human passions, hatred, jealousy, and remorse, friendship, love, and all the other concomitants of everyday life, are neither ignored nor obtruded, but are made subservient to the main design of the work, which is to teach us true Christian principles by exhibiting to our view the virtues and constancy of our co-religionists of other times. The style of the autobiography, as the design of the book required, is slightly tinged with the quaint phraseology of the period, which, however, does not lessen, but rather adds to, its attractions, and the illustrations which accompany this edition are excellently designed and executed. As a well-written book, uniting amusement with sound instruction and pure morality, we consider it every way worthy to be placed in the hands of Catholic readers. Particularly feminine in its tone and healthful in its tendency, it is in every way vastly superior to even the best works of fiction of which the secular press has become so prolific.

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The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier. By Henry James Coleridge, S.J. Vol. I. Burns, Oates & Co. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

Father Coleridge has a happy talent for biographical composition and historical sketching. The letters of St. Francis give to this biography a most decided advantage over all others with which we are acquainted, and the original portion of the Life is equal in merit and interest to the best specimens of biography which the English language possesses. We would be greatly obliged to the author if he would collect and publish in a volume the various sketches of distinguished persons, such as Suarez, De Rancé, etc., which he has from time to time printed in The Month.

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The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. A New Translation, edited by the Rev. Marcus Dods, M.A. Vol. III.—Writings in Connection with the Donatist Controversy; Vol. IV.—The Anti-Pelagian Works of St. Augustine. Vol. I. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

The first two volumes of this series containing The City of God, received a favorable notice in a former number of this magazine, in so far as an examination which was distinctly said to be only “cursory” warranted us in expressing an opinion. A very opposite criticism, accompanied with some strictures upon The Catholic World for its favorable notice, from the pen of a learned and acute writer in the Boston Pilot, occasioned a considerable stir for the time, and we were requested by several persons to re-examine the work more carefully, and express a more matured and decisive judgment. We took the trouble to make the examination, and take this occasion to reiterate the opinion we at first expressed. A similar judgment was expressed by the Dublin Review, and, as there seems to be a general consent among critics on the subject, we think that all those who wish for a good translation of The City of God may consider it certain that the one edited by Mr. Dods is not only an elegant but an accurate version of this splendid work. There are one or two mistakes in the translation, and we remember noticing one decidedly anti-Catholic note, but these slight faults may be pardoned in a work of such great excellence and value. We have had no time as yet to collate any portion of the translation of the two new volumes before us with the original text. The quality of the translation of the preceding volumes, however, is a fair guarantee for the fidelity and elegance of the present one. The scholarship and reputation of the editors are a sufficient security that they will spare no pains to do their work well, and the works of St. Augustine afford very little room for any serious mistakes in regard to his real meaning. It is in the interpretation of his meaning and deduction from his principles that there is room for error, and that the grossest heresies have been manufactured by Lutherans, Calvinists, and Jansenists from a perversion of his doctrines on original sin, grace, and free-will. These heresies are now very unpopular and not at all dangerous. In respect to the constitutive principles of the Catholic Church, as opposed to every species of Protestantism, there is no room for mistaking or perverting the doctrine of St. Augustine. We cannot think of any way of convincing educated persons in England and the United States of the identity of the modern with the ancient Catholic Church more efficaciously than that of giving them the chance to read extensively in the works of the great Doctor through the medium of a good translation. We are rejoiced, therefore, that English scholars should engage in this work and in those of a similar kind. The quantity of pure Catholic literature thus disseminated by Protestants and among Protestants in England, and to some extent in America also, is truly inspiring. The republication of choice specimens of old English literature by an antiquarian society in London, the translation of the Venerable Bede’s History, the abbreviated Lives of the Saints from the Bollandists, and other books of the same character which are multiplying with an inconceivable rapidity, show what an avidity the English palate is acquiring for this most wholesome and pleasant medicine. The editors frequently seek to counteract the effect which their inward misgiving warns them these books must produce, by remarks of their own in notes and prefaces, for which their readers will care but little. Sometimes they avoid almost or altogether this futile procedure, and provide the Catholic reader with a valuable book in English which is a considerable accession to his library, and is free from anything which can offend his eyes—a service for which they have our sincere thanks. The volumes which are at present under notice are not, we regret to say, unexceptionable in this respect. The Preface to the anti-Pelagian works speaks in a very inexact and misleading manner upon the supposed differences of the Eastern and Western theology, upon the judgments of the Pope in the case of Pelagius, and the relation of the teaching of St. Augustine to Protestant doctrine. The very meagre sketch of the Donatist schism prefixed to Vol. III. is long enough, nevertheless, to permit the author to indulge in the only amusement which can make an English Protestant perfectly happy, and to get off the little squib he always carries in his pocket, “the despotic intolerance of the Papacy, and the horrors of the Inquisition.” A Catholic scholar cares nothing for the flippant and superficial cavils and sneers of theological amateurs who venture to criticise and judge the Fathers, the Popes, and the church of God. But he does not like to have a book in his library which has such blots on it. The editors may say that they consult the tastes and convenience of Protestants and not of Catholics. Very well. It is convenient, however for Catholics to have certain works of standard value in an English translation, and it is the interest of publishers to provide them with the same. If the publishers could furnish an edition in which the text alone was given, without the disfiguring incumbrance of prefaces and advertisements, for the convenience of Catholic purchasers, their splendid series of patristic works would undoubtedly find a much more ready and extensive sale than it is now likely to have among the clergy and studious laity of the Catholic Church in Great Britain and the United States.

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The Betrothed. By Alessandro Manzoni. 1 vol. 12mo. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

“The Catholic Publication Society” has done a good work in publishing a new edition of Alessandro Manzoni’s world-renowned I Promessi Sposi, which has been for many years before the public. It was first published in 1827. Since then the author has increased the size and interest of the volume by a thrilling description of the devastations of the plague in Milan in 1630.

While the author charms by the ease and simplicity of his style, the story is no less remarkable for originality and vigor.

Above all, the purity of the pages and the religious tone that pervades the narrative give an additional interest to the story of the rustic life of the hero and heroine.

This is the best known of the author’s works, and deservedly popular.

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French Eggs, in an English Basket. Translated from Souvestre by Miss Emily Bowles. London: Burns, Oates & Co. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This book comprises some fifteen short, readable, and well-varied stories, illustrating life and manners among the humbler classes in France, originally written by a very successful littérateur of that country, and accurately translated by the English editor. They are not moral tales in the usual acceptation of that much misused term, for the writer neither puts prosy sermons in the mouths of babes nor interlards the discourse of simple peasants with profound theological reflections, but they are natural and healthful in their tone, humorous as well as pathetic in design, and the reader will be dull indeed who is not able to draw his own moral from them. As a gift to young people, this volume would be very appropriate, and, if not exactly suited to the breakfast-table, will no doubt be found worthy a place in the boudoir or drawing-room.

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Sermons by Fathers of the Society of Jesus (in England). Vol. II. By the Rev. Thomas Harper. London: Burns, Oates & Co. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.) 1872.

These sermons are very peculiar and original, and are specially adapted for the perusal of the most intelligent and educated persons. The first series, composed of discourses for Christmas-tide, is on “Modern Principles,” as contrasted with truly Christian principles deduced from the great fact and doctrine of the Incarnation. The one on “The Last Winter of the World” has especially attracted our attention. The second series is a condensed and yet eloquent résumé of a great part of Catholic philosophy and theology respecting the great first truth of the being of God. The volume is a remarkable and an admirable one, most suitable for the times, and we earnestly recommend it to those who desire to find religious reading of the highest intellectual quality, which is at the same time really profitable for the spiritual good.

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Maggie’s Rosary, and Other Tales. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 208. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

We know of no book of this class recently issued from the press which contains more pleasing and useful reading than this. Equally instructive and entertaining, its perusal cannot prove otherwise than acceptable to those for whose especial benefit it is published. It is admirably adapted for a premium, and we hope that in the coming distributions it will occupy that prominent place which its intrinsic merits deserve. It is a handsome volume of over 200 pages, got up in that style which “The Publication Society” was the first to introduce—a style of mechanical excellence and simple elegance.

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Via Crucis; or, The Way of the Cross. Translated from the German of the Rev. Dr. Veith, Preacher of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna. By the Very Rev. Theodore Noethen. Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1872.

Did any one ever see a book on the Passion of Christ and not wish to buy it? The very title appeals to the heart. It is because we would go on for ever trying—but in vain—to sound the depths of that fathomless ocean of divine love and mercy.

We cannot have too many books on this great theme, that there may be some adapted to every cast of mind: now emotional, again embodying every tender legend and the pious imaginings of saintly hearts, or full of profound reflections on the great scheme of salvation through the sufferings of our Lord. Every person should have at least one such book in which to bathe his world-weary soul from time to time. In these days, when ease, luxury, and self-indulgence of every kind seem to be the great aim of life, the image of the Divine Sufferer cannot be too constantly presented to the mind, with its lesson of mortification and self-crucifixion.

Protestants often say the Blessed Virgin has been made by Catholics to supersede our Lord in the economy of grace. Let such read this book, and see on whom we rely for salvation, and how Christ and him crucified is preached in all the purity of the Gospel in the great Catholic centre of Vienna.

This book is the last of a series of works on the Passion which have already been noticed in our columns. The author being now blind, it was dictated to his amanuensis. Under such circumstances, his great familiarity with the Holy Scriptures is the more striking, showing that a knowledge of the sacred volume is not quite a Protestant monopoly.

A calm, dignified, thoughtful tone pervades the whole volume. The piety is not strained; it is elevated, but not exaltée; there is no false sentiment, nothing to offend the most fastidious taste. A few quotations will give an idea of the author’s style and suggestiveness:

This work was intended particularly for Lent, but is suited to any season. As the church, on the most joyful of festivals, never fails to show forth the Lord’s death at the altar, so the thought of the Passion should never be absent from the soul. The heroine of The House of Yorke, alluding to a picture of St. Ignatius of Loyola, says: “He looks as though he were present when our Lord was crucified, and could not forget the sight.” “We were all present,” exclaimed Rowan. “How can we forget it?”

So, too, when three old men came to the Abbot Stephen to ask what would be useful to their souls, he was silent awhile, and then replied: “I will show you all I have: day and night, I behold nothing but our Lord Jesus Christ hanging from the wood.”

This ably translated work, with its excellent binding, its soft paper so grateful to the eye, and its clear print, is a credit to our enterprising New England publisher.

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The Pope of Rome and the Popes of the Oriental Orthodox Church. An Essay on Monarchy in the Church, with special reference to Russia. From original documents, Russian and Greek. By the Rev. Cæsarius Tondini, Barnabite. London: Longmans & Co. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

The conversion of Count Schouvaloff, a Russian nobleman, and his profession in the Barnabite order, was the occasion of awakening a great interest in the conversion of Russia among his religious brethren. The most conspicuous among them for his zeal and efforts in this direction is F. Tondini. In the present volume he has given a full and accurate account of the organization of the Russian Church, supported by numerous citations, and evincing the thorough knowledge of the author on the subject. The utterly secular character of the Russian state church and the degrading enslavement of its hierarchy under imperial authority are clearly shown. The efforts which have been made to throw dust in the eyes of the American public on this subject make this book quite seasonable, and we recommend it to the attention both of our Catholic readers and of the amateurs of Russo-Greek Christianity.

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The Passion Play. By the Rev. Gerald Molloy, D.D. Boston: Patrick Donahoe.

Dr. Molloy, of Maynooth, has described the Ammergau Passion Play with great skill, accuracy, and beauty of language, and has enriched his work with a number of very good photographs, which add much to its interest. The republication has been executed in very pretty style, and the volume is in every sense attractive and interesting, worthy of a place on every table, and most appropriate as a premium or gift book. We trust it may have the wide circulation it deserves.

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The Divine Tragedy. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co.

A most reverently, carefully, and skilfully executed reduction of the evangelical narrative within a small poetical picture. The greater portion is an almost literal translation of the sacred text, and there are also a few passages of exquisite original poetry. Mr. Longfellow has in no way tampered with or marred the beauty of the divine original, and his copy is itself a masterpiece. All Catholics may read this poem without fear of finding anything which is not in perfect consonance with their faith. It is a beautiful offering to Christ from a place where he has received many insults, and we trust that he may give the best of all rewards to the one who has made it.

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A Manual of English Literature: A Text-book for Schools and Colleges. By John S. Hart, LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and of the English Language and Literature in the College of New Jersey.

The arrangement of this work is simple and adapted to practical use, and one may see at a glance the whole history of the English tongue. The different authors are well grouped in connection with conspicuous public events, which show at once the time in which they flourished, and the influences, political or educational, with which they were surrounded. Living writers have also received their share of attention, and are appropriately classified according to the subjects they have treated. There are a few authors omitted (among others Gerald Griffin, the most characteristic of Irish novelists) who deserve mention, and who will no doubt receive attention in another edition. We think that Dr. Hart deserves the thanks of the community for his valuable labors. Among many studies, surely there is none more important than that of our own language. There are many of our public men who would do well to learn better the genius of their mother tongue. It is certainly desirable to know and speak foreign languages, but far more necessary is it to understand the wealth and beauty of our own—so little known and so poorly appreciated by many of our speakers or writers. We are glad to learn also that Dr. Hart has in preparation a book upon American literature.

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History of the Catholic Church in California. By W. Gleeson, M.A., Professor in St. Mary’s College, San Francisco, Cal. In two volumes. Illustrated. San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Co. 1872. pp. 446, 351.

A work of this size on the church in California excites astonishment, so recent does the growth of that State seem; but the history of the church in California dates far back, and is full of interest and edification.

The discovery of the country, the strange journey of Cabeza de Vaca, the adventurous exploration of the Italian Franciscan, Mark, of Nice, and of those who followed him, and an account of the Indians, form the opening chapters of Mr. Gleeson’s work. He then devotes some space to the question whether St. Thomas ever visited America, a point discussed some years since by the Count Joannes when simple George Jones. Another chapter is devoted to the examination of early Irish missions on the northwest coast of America, the object of the author being to show the possible source of certain Christian traditions found among the California Indians. Garcia in his Origen de los Indios, Lafitau in his Mœurs et Coutumes, Boudinot in his Star in the West, and many other writers, have traced these analogies, but it seems to us were often misled by taking as primitive Indian traditions ideas acquired after missions were established.

The remainder of the first volume is devoted to the great Jesuit mission in Lower California, founded by the German Father Kühn or Kino and the Italian Father Salvatierra, a mission which excited so much interest that a special fund was gradually formed by devoted Catholics for its support, and which, under the title of the Pious Fund of California, long maintained religion there, and will still do its part if a sense of justice prevails with the Mexican Government. Of this mission, which lasted to the suppression of the order, Mr. Gleeson gives a valuable account. Three works exist on it, that of Fr. Venegas in Spanish, of Fr. Begert in German, and of Fr. Clavigero in Italian, and there are also some communications on the Lettres Edipantes and other collections.

The second volume is devoted to Upper California, or what is now the State of California. After the fall of the Society of Jesus, the Spanish government sent the Dominicans and Franciscans to continue its labors in California. The Dominicans took Lower California, but our author does not dwell on their labors, apparently not having met the Tres Cartas giving an account of them.

The labors of the Franciscans, who, under Father Juniper Serra, peopled Upper California with missions that were the wonder of that age of unbelief, for they began and rose during the latter part of the last century, is given in a most interesting manner. No missions ever rose with greater celerity, and, though missionaries laid down their lives in the struggle, the land was christianized and the wild savages became thriving Christian communities, self-supporting and gradually advancing in civilization.

If their rise is one to cheer the heart of the believer, there is nothing in history so sad as the utter destruction of missions and people in a few short years. The happy Indians who by thousands filled the missions in peace and plenty are represented by a handful of debased and fast vanishing outcasts. The civilization of the nineteenth century may be a very fine thing, but it is only necessary to read the history of the California mission to accept the Syllabus heartily.

If we find any fault with this portion of Mr. Gleeson’s work, it is that he has not given place enough to the linguistic labors of the missionaries amid the perfect Babel of languages in California. Several of their grammars and dictionaries have been printed by one of the first Catholic writers who treated in English of this mission, and it cannot be that the great California libraries do not contain the works of Father Sitjar, Cuesta, and others, or of the distinguished living missionary of California, Father Mengarini, whose philosophical study of the Selish language makes him the highest authority with American and European scholars.

The sad state of the church both as to its white and red children during the Mexican rule, and the erection of the See of California, are next treated of by our author.

The annexation to the United States and the discovery of gold brought in an entirely new element. The Mexicans were but few; the incoming tide of emigration was both Protestant and Catholic, the new government Protestant. Of this, the actual church of California, the reverend author gives an account full of edifying details, although he has allowed himself too little space to give such sketches of some of the various institutions as we should desire.

The Appendix is a partial review of the accounts of the American mounds and an attempt to show a similarity between the mound-builders and the Tuatha dè Danaans in Ireland; but such theories have been too often raised and fallen to accept this. Our Indian is the type of primitive man; as he was found by our first explorers, he used stone arrow and spear heads and knives; made his shell-beads; boiled and cooked by heated stones, just as the earlier races on the Eastern continent did, if we are to believe the lessons from the tombs of that part of the world. Side by side, you cannot distinguish the stone arrowheads and implements of America, Ireland, France, Denmark, and Germany, and we can only conclude that all men were of one family, and ascended the scale of civilization by similar steps.

This work is enriched with many illustrations, a portrait of Father Salvatierra, many views of the missions as Duflot de Mofras found them, the quasi-portrait of the venerable Father Juniper Serra in Palou’s life of that great missionary, and diagrams of some Western mounds.

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History of the Kingdom of God under the Old Testament. Translated from the German of E. W. Hengstenberg. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. (For sale in New York by Scribner & Co., 664 Broadway.) Vol. I.

The highest encomium we can pass upon the works of Hengstenberg is to mention the fact that they are several times referred to in terms of great praise in the Theology of the illustrious Jesuit, F. Perrone. He is certainly equal to any Protestant theologian of this century in learning and critical ability. In regard to soundness of doctrine and the actual value of the results of study contained in his works, we consider him to be far superior to any of those Protestant authors with whose writings we are acquainted. Indeed, we may say that his works are almost indispensable to the student of those departments of theology concerning which they treat. The great and praiseworthy end of Hengstenberg was to destroy German neology with its own weapons, and he has effectually accomplished the task.

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Lectures on the Church. Delivered in St. Francis Xavier’s Church, New York. By Rev. D. A. Merrick, S.J. New York: P. O’Shea.

Fr. Merrick’s Lectures are logical, solid, and, at the same time, easy to be understood. He refutes the Protestant doctrine on the Rule of Faith, and establishes the Catholic rule, ending with the culminating point of the supremacy of the Pope in government and doctrine. The proofs of the latter from English history are remarkably appropriate and well put. The style of the reverend author is pure and pleasing, and the book, which is of very moderate size, is tastefully printed. It is therefore admirably suited for general use, and we bespeak for it a wide circulation.

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The Relation and Duty of the Lawyer to the State: A Lecture delivered before the Law School of the University of the City of New York, February 9, 1872, by Henry D. Sedgwick.

This is an eloquent and philosophical contribution to the question of questions in this city: Are we advancing or retrograding in legal and judicial probity and learning? The author speaks like an honest lawyer jealous for the high name of his profession; but proclaiming the follies of men or corporations in the lecture-room never has nor ever will put an end to them. The lawyers on and off the bench are no more corrupt than other classes of the community, but they are more conspicuous, and more reprehensible in consequence. Corruption, like all catching diseases, when it finds shelter among legislators, will soon find its way to the lawyer’s library and to the bench of the judge.

We cordially endorse the admonition and compliment contained in the following:

“Set before you, rather, if you need an example, those who, with an earnestness and a determination never surpassed, have grappled with and overthrown the band of thieves who had seized the public coffers. No future enemy of the commonwealth can be more wily, nor can be entrenched in his lair with greater cunning, than the men who lately possessed our municipal government. Whoever that future enemy shall be, however warily he spring, however secretly he strike or stab, O’Conor can exclaim, ‘Contempsi gladios Catilinæ, non pertimescam tuos.’”

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Physiology of the Soul, etc. By Martyn Paine, A.M., M.D., LL.D., etc. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Dr. Paine is a very venerable gentleman who is a remarkable instance of intellectual activity and industry continued into a very advanced age. We sincerely admire the boldness with which he denounces materialism and professes his belief in the Bible. We do not agree with him in his opinion that the Holy Scripture requires us to reject the common theories of modern geologists, and therefore regard his attempt at a scientific refutation of those theories as something which we may leave to the consideration of experts in geological science. That part of his work which has most value in our eyes is the one which treats of the distinct existence and spiritual nature of the soul, a subject which is handled in an able and ingenious manner.

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Spectrum Analysis. Three Lectures by Profs. Roscoe, Huggins, and Lockyer. New Haven, Conn.: Charles C. Chatfield & Co. 1872.

These lectures are very interesting, and give an excellent account of what is perhaps the greatest real discovery of modern science; also of its application to the determination of the chemical and physical constitution of the sun and other celestial bodies. Their authors are men eminent in the scientific world, who have specially distinguished themselves by their researches in this particular department of investigation.

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Reports on Observations of the Total Solar Eclipse of December 22, 1870. Conducted under the Direction of Rear-Admiral B. F. Sands, U.S.N., Superintendent of the U. S. Naval Observatory, Washington, D. C. Washington: Government Printing Office. 1871.

These reports, like those on the eclipse of the preceding year in the United States, noticed in The Catholic World of April, 1870, form a valuable contribution to the literature of solar science. They are by Profs. Newcomb, Hall, Harkness, and Eastman, the first of whom was stationed at Gibraltar, the rest at Syracuse. The observations were in all cases somewhat interfered with by clouds, which, however, broke away sufficiently at the moment of totality to allow the skilful and practised observers to obtain many interesting results. It is on such occasions that the qualities required for a good practical astronomer are put to the most severe test; a moment of nervousness may lose that for which he has spent months in preparing. It hardly needs to be said that, in this instance, the test was well sustained. Prof. Harkness considers his conclusions as to the composition of the corona, spoken of in our previous notice, to be borne out by his observations on this occasion. The sun really seems to be the wearer of an iron crown. The descriptions of the general appearance and effects of the eclipse are of course the most interesting to unscientific readers.

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Half-Hour Recreations in Popular Science. No. 1. Strange Discoveries Respecting the Aurora, and Recent Solar Researches. By Richard A. Proctor, B.A., F.R.A.S., author of The Sun, Other Worlds than Ours, etc. Boston: Lee & Shepard. New York: Lee, Shepard & Dillingham.

This, as implied in the title, is the first of a series of papers on subjects of modern science by various well-known writers in that department. It is expected to publish one such “recreation” every month, at the price of twenty-five cents, which would seem to be enough, or $2 50 a year. Enough, at least, it will be for the speculations of such men as Mill, Spencer, Huxley, and Darwin, who are promised among the “eminent European scientists” in the prospectus. The present number, however, is a very good one, having in it a great deal of information, some valuable suggestions, and no humbug; and the next will be, perhaps, even better, as it will contain an explanation of the wonderful modern discovery known as “Spectrum Analysis.”

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Half-Hours with Modern Scientists—Huxley, Barker, Stirling, Cope, Tyndall. New Haven, Conn.: Charles C. Chatfield & Co. 1871.

We have in this a publication somewhat similar to the Half-Hour Recreations noticed above; there are, however, five numbers instead of one bound up together. It might be said of them, as of other such, that their facts and strictly physical theories are interesting, and their philosophical ones rather otherwise. Professors Barker and Tyndall furnish the best papers of the five, particularly the latter, who is a thoroughly scientific man, having, besides his talent, the great advantage of prudence.

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Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets. By the Rev. S. Baring-Gould, M.A. New York: Holt & Williams.

This collation of Rabbinical and Mohammedan legends has been made with great judgment and taste. The legends are very curious and interesting, some of them very poetic and beautiful. The book is one of very great value to the scholar, and most entertaining and amusing for the general reader.

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Christian Free Schools. The Subject Discussed by the Rt. Rev. Bernard J. McQuaid, D.D., Bishop of Rochester. At Rochester, N. Y. (New York: For sale by the Catholic Publication Society.)

We can only call attention to this important pamphlet at present, hoping to take up the subject in earnest at a future time. The pamphlet is replete with important testimonies of statesmen and Protestant ministers, which make it very serviceable to those who wish to write or speak on the same subject.

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Walks in Rome. By Augustus J. C. Hare. New York: George Routledge & Sons, 416 Broome Street. 1871.

This, in a qualified sense, is a readable and valuable guide to the Eternal City. It contains a great deal of information about the historic sites of old Rome, a good deal about the galleries in which the intelligent Protestant visitor is supposed to be interested, and something also about the restaurants, livery stables, etc., to which it would be rash to assume that he is indifferent. It likewise contains a good deal about the churches and holy places, giving some interesting facts, together with various remarks and stories characterized by the usual dense ignorance and stupidity as to the dogmas and practices of the Catholic Church which may be said to be the special glory of the “reformed” Anglo-Saxon. The principal value of such commonplace productions is that they suggest the necessity of having a good manual on a somewhat similar plan for the use of people who really want to see and understand Rome when they visit it.

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Travels in Arabia. Compiled and arranged by Bayard Taylor. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1872.

This is another volume of the Illustrated Library of Travel and Exploration series, and is nearly all taken up with Palgrave’s narrative of his travels in Arabia. It is well illustrated.

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Little Jakey. By Mrs. S. H. De Kroyft. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

A simple story and a sad one of the short yet not uneventful life of a little German, an inmate of the New York Institution for the Blind. It is written in a pleasing and unaffected style.

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Aunt Fanny’s Present; or, The Book of Fairy Tales.

Woodland Cottage, and Other Tales. Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham.

We recommend these neat little volumes with pleasure to those about to select books for their children.

P. F. Cunningham announces as in press: Marian Howard; or, Trials and Triumphs. The Divine Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary: Being an Abridgment of the Mystical City of God. Life of St. Augustin, Doctor of the Universal Church.

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THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

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VOL. XV., No. 88.—JULY, 1872.

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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

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The balcony of the palais Greifmann contains three persons who together represent four million florins. It is not often that one sees a group of this kind. The youthful landholder, Seraphin Gerlach, is possessor of two millions. His is a quiet disposition; very calm, and habitually thoughtful; innocence looks from his clear eye upon the world; physically, he is a man of twenty-three; morally, he is a child in purity; a profusion of rich brown hair clusters about his head; his cheeks are ruddy, and an attractive sweetness plays round his mouth.

The third million belongs to Carl Greifmann, the oldest member of the group, head pro tem. of the banking-house of the same name. This gentlemen is tall, slender, animated; his cheeks wear no bloom; they are pale. His carriage is easy and smooth. Some levity is visible in his features, which are delicate, but his keen, glancing eye is disagreeable beside Seraphin’s pure soul-mirror. Greifmann’s sister Louise, not an ordinary beauty, owns the fourth million. She is seated between the young gentlemen; the folds of her costly dress lie heaped around her; her hands are engaged with a fan, and her eyes are sending electric glances into Gerlach’s quick depths. But these flashing beams fail to kindle; they expire before they penetrate far into those depths. His eyes are bright, but they refuse to gleam with intenser fire. Strange, too, for a twofold reason; first, because glances from the eyes of beautiful women seldom suffer young men to remain cool; secondly, because a paternal scheme designs that Louise shall be engaged and married to the fire-proof hero.

Millions of money are rare; and should millions strive to form an alliance, it is in conformity with the genius of every solid banking establishment to view this as quite a natural tendency.

For eight days Mr. Seraphin has been on a visit at the palais Greifmann, but as yet he has yielded no positive evidence of intending to join his own couple of millions with the million of Miss Louise.

Whilst Seraphin converses with the beautiful young lady, Carl Greifmann cursorily examines a newspaper which a servant has just brought him on a silver salver.

“Every age has its folly,” suddenly exclaims the banker. “In the seventeenth century people were busy during thirty years cutting one another’s throats for religion’s sake—or rather, in deference to the pious hero of the faith from Sweden and his fugleman Oxenstiern. In the eighteenth century, they decorated their heads with periwigs and pigtails, making it a matter of conjecture whether both ladies and gentlemen were not in the act of developing themselves from monkeydom into manhood.

“Elections are the folly of our century. See here, my good fellow, look what is written here: In three days the municipal elections will come off throughout the country—in eighteen days the election of delegates. For eighteen days the whole country is to labor in election throes. Every man twenty-one years of age, having a wife and a homestead, is to be employed in rooting from out the soil of party councilmen, mayors, and deputies.

“And during the period these rooters not unfrequently get at loggerheads. Some are in favor of Streichein the miller, because Streichein has lavishly greased their palms; others insist upon re-electing Leimer the manufacturer, because Leimer threatens a reduction of wages if they refuse to keep him in the honorable position. In the heat of dispute, quite a storm of oaths and ugly epithets, yes, and of blows too, rages, and many is the voter who retires from the scene of action with a bloody head. The beer-shops are the chief battle-fields for this sort of skirmishing. Here, zealous voters swill down hogsheads of beer: brewers drive a brisk trade during elections. But you must not think, Seraphin, that these absurd election scenes are confined to cities. In rural districts the game is conducted with no less interest and fury. There is a village not far away, where a corpulent ploughman set his mind on becoming mayor. What does he, to get the reins of village government into his great fat fist? Two days previous to the election he butchers three fatted hogs, has several hundred ringlets of sausage made, gets ready his pots and pans for cooking and roasting, and then advertises: eating and drinking ad libitum and gratis for every voter wiping to aid him to ascend the mayor’s throne. He obtained his object.

“Now, I put the question to you Seraphin, is not this sort of election jugglery far more ridiculous and disgusting than the most preposterous periwigs of the last century?”

“Ignorance and passion may occasion the abuse of the best institutions,” answered the double millionaire. “However, if beer and pork determine the choice of councilmen and mayors, voters have no right to complain of misrule. It would be most disastrous to the state, I should think, were such corrupt means to decide also the election of the deputies of our legislative assembly.”

The banker smiled.

“The self-same manœuvring, only on a larger scale,” replied he. “Of course, in this instance, petty jealousies disappear. Streichein the miller and Leimer the manufacturer make concessions in the interest of the common party. All stand shoulder to shoulder in the cause of progress against Ultramontanes and democrats, who in these days have begun to be troublesome.

“Whilst at municipal elections office-seekers employed money and position for furthering their personal aims, at deputy elections progress men cast their means into a common cauldron, from which the mob are fed and made to drink in order to stimulate them with the spirit of progress for the coming election. At bottom it amounts to the same—the stupefaction of the multitude, the rule of a minority, in which, however, all consider themselves as having part, the folly of the nineteenth century.”

“This is an unhealthy condition of things, which gives reason to fear the corruption of the whole body politic,” remarked the landholder with seriousness. “The seats of the legislative chamber should be filled not through bribery and deception of the masses, nor through party passion, but through a right appreciation of the qualifications that fit a man for the office of deputy.”

“I ask your pardon, my dear friend,” interposed the banker with a laugh. “Being reared by a mother having a rigorous faith has prompted you to speak thus, not acquaintance with the spirit of the age. Right appreciation! Heavens, what naïveté! Are you not aware that progress, the autocrat of our times, follows a fixed, unchanging programme? It matters not whether Tom or Dick occupies the cushions of the legislative hall; the main point is to wear the color of progress, and for this no special qualifications are needed. I will give you an illustration of the way in which these things work. Let us suppose that every member is provided with a trumpet which he takes with him to the assembly. To blow this trumpet neither skill, nor quick perception, nor experience, nor knowledge—neither of these qualifications is necessary. Now, we will suppose these gentlemen assembled in the great hall where the destinies of the country are decided; should abuses need correction, should legislation for church or state be required, they have only to blow the trumpet of progress. The trumpet’s tone invariably accords with the spirit of progress, for it has been attuned to it. Should it happen that at a final vote upon a measure the trumpets bray loudly enough to drown the opposition of democrats and Ultramontanes, the matter is settled, the law is passed, the question is decided.”

“Evidently you exaggerate!” said Seraphin with a shake of the head. “Your illustration beats the enchanted horn of the fable. Do not you think so, Miss Louise?”

“Brother’s trumpet story is rather odd, ’tis true, yet I believe that at bottom such is really the state of things.”

“The instrument in question is objectionable in your opinion, my friend, only because you still bear about you the narrow conscience of an age long since buried. As you never spend more than two short winter months in the city, where alone the life-pulse of our century can be felt beating, you remain unacquainted with the present and its spirit. The rest of the year you pass in riding about on your lands, suffering yourself to be impressed by the stern rigor of nature’s laws, and concluding that human society harmonizes in the same manner with the behests of fixed principles. I shall have to brush you up a little. I shall have to let you into the mysteries of progress, so that you may cease groping like a blind man in the noonday of enlightenment. Above all, let us have no narrow-mindedness, no scrupulosity, I beg of you. Whosoever nowadays walks the grass-grown paths of rigorism is a doomed man.”

Whilst he was saying this, a smile was on the banker’s countenance. Seraphin mused in silence on the meaning and purpose of his extraordinary language.

“Look down the street, if you please,” continued Carl Greifmann. “Do you observe yon dark mass just passing under the gas-lamp?”

“I notice a pretty corpulent gentleman,” answered Seraphin.

“The corpulent gentleman is Mr. Hans Shund, formerly treasurer of this city,” explained Greifmann. “Many years ago, Mr. Shund put his hand into the public treasury, was detected, removed for dishonesty, and imprisoned for five years. When set at liberty, the ex-treasurer made the loaning of money on interest a source of revenue. He conducted this business with shrewdness, ruined many a family that needed money and in its necessity applied to him, and became rich. Shund the usurer is known to all the town, despised and hated by everybody. Even the dogs cannot endure the odor of usury that hangs about him; just see—all the dogs bark at him. Shund is moreover an extravagant admirer of the gentler sex. All the town is aware that this Jack Falstaff contributes largely to the scandal that is afloat. The pious go so far as to declare that the gallant Shund will be burned and roasted in hell for all eternity for not respecting the sixth commandment. Considered in the light of the time honored morality of Old Franconia, Shund, the thief, the usurer and adulterer, is a low, good-for-nothing scoundrel, no question about it. But in the light of the indulgent spirit of the times, no more can be said than that he has his foibles. He is about to pass by on the other side, and, as a well-bred man, will salute us.”

Seraphin had attentively observed the man thus characterized, but with the feelings with which one views an ugly blotch, a dirty page in the record of humanity.

Mr. Shund lowered his hat, his neck and back, with oriental ceremoniousness in presence of the millions on the balcony. Carl acknowledged the salute, and even Louise returned it with a friendly inclination of the head.

The landholder, on the contrary, was cold, and felt hurt at Greifmann’s bowing to a fellow whom he had just described as a scoundrel. That Louise, too, should condescend to smile to a thief, swindler, usurer, and immoral wretch! In his opinion, Louise should have followed the dictates of a noble womanhood, and have looked with honest pity on the scapegrace. She, on the contrary, greeted the bad man as though he were respectable, and this conduct wounded the young man’s feelings.

“Apropos of Hans Shund, I will take occasion to convince you of the correctness of my statements,” said Carl Greifmann. “Three days hence, the municipal election is to come off. Mr. Shund is to be elected mayor. And when the election of deputies takes place, this same Shund will command enough of the confidence and esteem of his fellow-citizens to be elected to the legislative assembly, thief and usurer though he be. You will then, I trust, learn to understand that the might of progress is far removed from the bigotry that would subject a man’s qualifications to a microscopic examination. The enlarged and liberal principles prevailing in secular concerns are opposed to the intolerance that would insist on knowing something of an able man’s antecedents before consenting to make use of him. All that Shund will have to do will be to fall in under the glorious banner of the spirit of the age; his voting trumpet will be given him; and forthwith he will turn out a finished mayor and deputy. Do you not admire the power and stretch of liberalism?”

“I certainly do admire your faculty for making up plausible stories,” answered Seraphin.

“Plausible stories? Not at all! Downright earnest, every word of it. Hans Shund, take my word for it, will be elected mayor and member of the assembly.”

“In that event,” replied the landholder, “Shund’s disreputable antecedents and disgusting conduct at present must be altogether a secret to his constituents.”

“Again you are mistaken, my dear friend. This remark proceeds from your want of acquaintance with the genius of our times. This city has thirty thousand inhabitants. Every adult among them has heard of Hans Shund the thief, usurer, and companion of harlots. And I assure you that not a voter, not a progressive member of our community, thinks himself doing what is at all reprehensible by conferring dignity and trust on Hans Shund. You have no idea how comprehensive is the soul of liberalism.”

“Let us quit a subject that appears to me impossible, nay, even unnatural,” said Gerlach.

“No, no; for this very reason you need to be convinced,” insisted the banker with earnestness. “My prospective—but hold—I was almost guilty of a want of delicacy. No matter, my actual friend, landholder and millionaire, must be made see with his eyes and touch with his fingers what marvels progress can effect. Let us make a bet: Eighteen days from now Hans Shund will be mayor and member for this city. I shall stake ten thousand florins. You may put in the pair of bays that won the best prizes at the last races.”

Seraphin hesitated.

“Come on!” urged the banker. “Since you refuse to believe my assertions, let us make a bet. May be you consider my stakes too small against yours? Very well, I will say twenty thousand florins.”

“You will be the loser, Greifmann! Your statements are too unreasonable.”

“Never mind; if I lose, you will be the winner. Do you take me up?”

“Pshaw, Carl! you are too sure,” said Louise reproachfully.

“My feeling so sure is what makes me eager to win the finest pair of horses I ever saw. Is it possible that you are a coward?”

The landholder’s face reddened. He put his right hand in the banker’s. “My dear fellow,” exclaimed he jubilantly, “I have just driven a splendid bargain. To convince you of the entire fairness of the transaction, you are to be present at the manipulation that is to decide. Even though you lose the horses, your gain is incalculable, for it consists in nothing less than being convinced of the wonderful nature and of the omnipotence of progress. I repeat, then, that, wherever progress reigns, the elections are the supreme folly of the nineteenth century; for in reality there is no electing; but what progress decrees, that is fulfilled.”

The banker was seated at his office table working for his chance in the wager with the industry of a thorough business man. Whilst he was engaged in writing notes, a smile indicative of certainty of success lit up his countenance; for he was thoroughly familiar with the figures that entered into his calculations, and, withal, Hans Shund invested with offices and dignity could not but strike him as a comical anomaly. “Happy thought! My father travels half of the globe; many wonderful things come under his observation, no doubt, but the greatest of all prodigies is to be witnessed right here: Hans Shund, the thief, swindler, usurer, wanton—mayor and law-maker! And it is the venerable sire Progress that alone could have begotten the prodigy of a Hans Shund invested with honors. My Lord Progress is therefore himself a prodigy—a very extraordinary offspring of the human mind, the culminating point of enlightenment. Admitting humanity to be ten thousand million years old, or even more, as the most learned of scientific men have accurately calculated it, during this rather long series of years nature never produced a marvel that might presume to claim rank with progress. Progress is the acme of human culture—about this there can be no question. Yes, indeed, the acme.” And he finished the last word in the last note. “Humanity will therefore have to face about and begin again at the beginning; for after progress nothing else is possible.” He rang his bell.

“Take these three notes to their respective addresses immediately,” said he to the servant who had answered the ring. Greifmann stepped into the front office, and gave an order to the cashier. Returning to his own cabinet, he locked the door that opened into the front office. He then examined several iron safes, the modest and smooth polish of which suggested neither the hardness of their iron nature nor the splendor of their treasures.

“Gold or paper?” said the banker to himself. After some indecision, he opened the second of the safes. This he effected by touching several concealed springs, using various keys, and finally shoving back a huge bolt by means of a very small blade. He drew out twenty packages of paper, and laid them in two rows on the table. He undid the tape encircling the packages, and then it appeared that every leaf of both rows was a five-hundred florin banknote. The banker had exposed a considerable sum on the table. A sudden thought caused him to smile, and he shoved the banknotes where they came more prominently into view.

The blooming double millionaire entered.

“Sit down a moment, friend Seraphin, and listen to a short account of my scheme. I have said before that our city is prospering and growing under the benign sceptre of progress. The powers and honors of the sceptre are portioned among three leaders. Everything is directed and conducted by them—of course, in harmony with the spirit of the times. I have summoned the aforesaid magnates to appear. That the business may be despatched with a comfortable degree of expedition, the time when the visit is expected has been designated in each note; and those gentlemen are punctual in all matters connected with money and the bank. You can enter this little apartment next to us, and by leaving the door open hear the conversation. The mightiest of the corypheuses is Schwefel, the straw-hat manufacturer. This potentate resides at a three-minutes walk from here, and can put in an appearance at any time.”

“I am on tiptoe!” said Gerlach. “You promise what is so utterly incredible, that the things you are preparing to reveal appear to me like adventures belonging to another world.”

“To another world!—quite right, my dear fellow! I am indeed about to display to your astounded eyes some wonders of the world of progress that hitherto have been entirely unknown to you. Within eighteen days you shall, under my tutorship, receive useful and thorough instruction. This promise I can make you, as we are just in face of the elections, a time when minds put aside their disguises, when they not unfrequently shock one another, and when many secrets come to light!”

“You put me under many obligations!”

“Only doing my duty, my most esteemed! We are both aware that, according to the wishes of parents and the desired inclinations of parties known, our respective millions are to approach each other in closer relationship. To do a relative of mine in spe a favor, gives me unspeakable satisfaction. I shall proceed with my course of instruction. See here! Every one of these twenty packages contains twenty five-hundred florin banknotes. Consequently, both rows contain just two hundred thousand florins—an imposing sum assuredly, and, for the purpose of being imposing, the two hundred thousand have been laid upon this table. Explanation: the mightiest of the spirits of progress is—Money.

“All forces, all sympathies, revolve about money as the heavenly bodies revolve about the sun. For this reason the mere proximity of a considerable sum of money acts upon every man of progress like a current of electricity: it carries him away, it intoxicates his senses. The leaders whom I have invited will at once notice the collection of five-hundred florin notes: in the rapidity of calculating, they will overestimate the amount, and obtain impressions in proportion, somewhat like the Jews that prostrated themselves in the dust in adoration of the golden calf. As for me, my dear fellow, I shall carry on my operations in the auspicious presence of this power of two hundred thousands. Such a display of power will produce in the leaders a frame of mind made up of veneration, worship, and unconditional submissiveness. Every word of mine will proceed authoritatively from the golden mouth of the two hundred thousands, and my proposals it will be impossible for them to reject. But listen! The door of the ante-room is being opened. The mightiest is approaching. Go in quick.” He pressed the spring of a concealed door, and Seraphin disappeared.

When the straw-hat manufacturer entered, the banker was sitting before the banknotes apparently absorbed in intricate calculations.

“Ah Mr. Schwefel! pardon the liberty I have taken of sending for you. The pressure of business,” motioning significantly towards the banknotes, “has made it impossible for me to call upon you.”

“No trouble, Mr. Greifmann, no trouble whatever!” rejoined the manufacturer with profound bows.

“Have the goodness to take a seat!” And he drew an arm-chair quite near to where the money lay displayed. Schwefel perceived they were five-hundreds, estimated the amount of the pile in a few rapid glances, and felt secret shudderings of awe passing through his person.

“The cause of my asking you in is a business matter of some magnitude,” began the banker. “There is a house in Vienna with which we stand in friendly relations, and which has very extensive connections in Hungary. The gentlemen of this house have contracts for furnishing large orders of straw hats destined mostly for Hungary, and they wish to know whether they can obtain favorable terms of purchase at the manufactories of this country. It is a business matter involving a great deal of money. Their confidence in the friendly interest of our firm, and in our thorough acquaintance with local circumstances, has encouraged them to apply to us for an accurate report upon this subject. They intimate, moreover, that they desire to enter into negotiations with none but solid establishments, and for this reason are supposed to be guided by our judgment. As you are aware, this country has a goodly number of straw-hat manufactories. I would feel inclined, however, as far as it may be in my power, to give your establishment the advantage of our recommendation, and would therefore like to get from you a written list of fixed prices of all the various sorts.”

“I am, indeed, under many obligations to you, Mr. Greifmann, for your kind consideration,” said the manufacturer, nodding repeatedly. “Your own experience can testify to the durability of my work, and I shall give the most favorable rates possible.”

“No doubt,” rejoined the banker with haughty reserve. “You must not forget that the straw-hat business is out of our line. It is incumbent on us, however, to oblige a friendly house. I shall therefore make a similar proposal to two other large manufactories, and, after consulting with men of experience in this branch, shall give the house in Vienna the advice we consider most to its interest, that is, shall recommend the establishment most worthy of recommendation.”

Mr. Schwefel’s excited countenance became somewhat lengthy.

“You should not fail of an acceptable acknowledgment from me, were you to do me the favor of recommending my goods,” explained the manufacturer.

The banker’s coldness was not in the slightest degree altered by the implied bribe. He appeared not even to have noticed it. “It is also my desire to be able to recommend you,” said he curtly, carelessly taking up a package of the banknotes and playing with ten thousand florins as if they were so many valueless scraps of paper. “Well, we are on the eve of the election,” remarked he ingenuously. “Have you fixed upon a magistrate and mayor?”

“All in order, thank you, Mr. Greifmann!”

“And are you quite sure of the order?”

“Yes; for we are well organized, Mr. Greifmann. If it interests you, I will consider it as an honor to be allowed to send you a list of the candidates.”

“I hope you have not passed over ex-treasurer Shund?”

This question took Mr. Schwefel by surprise, and a peculiar smile played on his features.

“The world is and ever will be ungrateful,” continued the banker, as though he did not notice the astonishment of the manufacturer. “I could hardly think of an abler and more sterling character for the office of mayor of the city than Mr. Shund. Our corporation is considerably in debt. Mr. Shund is known to be an accurate financier, and an economical householder. We just now need for the administration of our city household a mayor that understands reckoning closely, and that will curtail unnecessary expenses, so as to do away with the yearly increasing deficit in the budget. Moreover, Mr. Shund is a noble character; for he is always ready to aid those who are in want of money—on interest, of course. Then, again, he knows law, and we very much want a lawyer at the head of our city government. In short, the interests of this corporation require that Mr. Shund be chosen chief magistrate. It is a subject of wonder to me that progress, usually so clear-sighted, has heretofore passed Mr. Shund by, despite his numerous qualifications. Abilities should be called into requisition for the public weal. To be candid, Mr. Schwefel, nothing disgusts me so much as the slighting of great ability,” concluded the banker contemptuously.

“Are you acquainted with Shund’s past career?” asked the leader diffidently.

“Why, yes! Mr. Shund once put his hand in the wrong drawer, but that was a long time ago. Whosoever amongst you is innocent, let him cast the first stone at him. Besides, Shund has made good his fault by restoring what he filched. He has even atoned for the momentary weakness by five years of imprisonment.”

“’Tis true; but Shund’s theft and imprisonment are still very fresh in people’s memory,” said Schwefel. “Shund is notorious, moreover, as a hard-hearted usurer. He has gotten rich through shrewd money speculations, but he has also brought several families to utter ruin. The indignation of the whole city is excited against the usurer; and, finally, Shund indulges a certain filthy passion with such effrontery and barefacedness that every respectable female cannot but blush at being near him. These characteristics were unknown to you, Mr. Greifmann; for you too will not hesitate an instant to admit that a man of such low practices must never fill a public office.”

“I do not understand you, and I am surprised!” said the millionaire. “You call Shund a usurer, and you say that the indignation of the whole town is upon him. Might I request from you the definition of a usurer?”

“They are commonly called usurers who put out money at exorbitant, illegal interest.”

“You forget, my dear Mr. Schwefel, that speculation is no longer confined to the five per cent. rate. A correct insight into the circumstances of the times has induced our legislature to leave the rate of interest altogether free. Consequently, a usurer has gotten to be an impossibility. Were Shund to ask fifty per cent. and more, he would be entitled to it.”

“That is so; for the moment I had overlooked the existence of the law,” said the manufacturer, somewhat humiliated. “Yet I have not told you all concerning the usurer. Beasts of prey and vampires inspire an involuntary disgust or fear. Nobody could find pleasure in meeting a hungry wolf, or in having his blood sucked by a vampire. The usurer is both vampire and wolf. He hankers to suck the very marrow from the bones of those who in financial straits have recourse to him. When an embarrassed person borrows from him, that person is obliged to mortgage twice the amount that he actually receives. The usurer is a heartless strangler, an insatiable glutton. He is perpetually goaded on by covetousness to work the material ruin of others, only so that the ruin of his neighbor may benefit himself. In short, the usurer is a monster so frightful, a brute so devoid of conscience, that the very sight of him excites horror and disgust. Just such a monster is Shund in the eyes of all who know him—and the whole city knows him. Hence the man is the object of general aversion.”

“Why, this is still worse, still more astonishing!” rejoined the millionaire with animation. “I thought our city enlightened. I should have expected from the intelligence and judgment of our citizens that they would have deferred neither to the sickly sentimentalism of a bigoted morality nor to the absurdity of obsolete dogmas. If your description of the usurer, which might at least be styled poetico-religious, is an expression of the prevailing spirit of this city, I shall certainly have to lower my estimate of its intelligence and culture.”

The leader hastened to correct the misunderstanding.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Greifmann! You may rest assured that we can boast all the various conquests made by modern advancement. Religious enthusiasm and foolish credulity are poisonous plants that superannuated devotees are perhaps still continuing to cultivate here and there in pots, but which the soil will no longer produce in the open air. The sort of education prevailing hereabout is that which has freed itself from hereditary religious prejudices. Our town is blessed with all the benefits of progress, with liberty of thought, and freedom from the thraldom of a dark, designing priesthood.”

“How comes it, then, that a man is an object of contempt for acting in accordance with the principles of this much lauded progress?” asked the millionaire, with unexpected sarcasm. “We are indebted to progress for the abolition of a legal rate of interest. Shund takes advantage of this conquest, and for doing so citizens who boast of being progressive look upon him with aversion. A further triumph secured by progress is freedom from the tyranny of dogmas and the tortures of a conscience created by a contracted morality. This beautiful fruit of the tree of enlightened knowledge Shund partakes of and enjoys; and for this he has the distinction of passing for a vampire. And because he displays the spirit of an energetic business man, because his capacity for speculating occasionally overwhelms blockheads and dunces, he is decried as a ravenous wolf. It is sad! If your statements are correct, Mr. Schwefel, our city ought not to boast of being progressive. Its citizens are still groping in the midnight darkness of religious superstition, scarcely even united with modern intellectual advancement. And to me the consciousness is most uncomfortable of breathing an atmosphere poisoned by the decaying remnants of an age long since buried.”

“My own personal views accord with yours,” protested Schwefel candidly. “The subversion of the antiquated, absurd articles of faith and moral precept necessarily entails the abrogation of the consequences that flow from them for public life. For centuries the cross was a symbol of dignity, and the doctrine of the Crucified resulted in holiness. Paganism, on the contrary, looked upon the gospel as foolishness, as a hallucination, and upon the cross as a sign of shame. I belong to the classic ranks, and so do millions like myself—among them Mr. Shund. Viewed in the light of progress, Shund is neither a vampire nor a wolf; at the worst, he is merely an ill-used business man. They who suffer themselves to be humbugged and fleeced by him have their own stupidity to thank for it. This exposition will convince you that I stand on a level with yourself in the matter of advanced enlightenment. Nevertheless, you overlook, Mr. Greifmann, that, so far as the masses of the people are concerned, reverence for the cross and the holiness of its doctrines continue to prevail. The acquisitions of progress are not yet generally diffused. The mines of modern intellectual culture are being provisionally worked by a select number of independent, bold natures. The multitude, on the other hand, still continue folding about them the winding-sheet of Christianity. The views, customs, principles, and judgments of men are as yet widely controlled by Christian elements. Our city does homage to progress, pretty nearly, however, in the manner of a blind man that discourses of colors.”

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We purpose giving in this article a sketch, as far as our limited space will allow, of a costly and beautiful work published in London under the above title. Many of our readers will perhaps turn willingly to the history of a movement which is not without its echo in America, and which the future bids fair to foster and popularize wherever the Anglo-Saxon tongue and spirit have sway. A work treating of such very modern and recent events in the history of art is not easily reducible to salient divisions; yet, having to be brief, we must necessarily endeavor to be clear, and we will, therefore, pick out a few prominent ideas, which, we hope, will be more interesting to the general reader than the mass of technical detail in which Eastlake’s book naturally (and very properly) abounds. We have also to promise that we wish only to state and quote facts, or such anecdotes and professional opinions as give our history an individual interest, not to drag up the vexed questions which have made the venerable words “Gothic” and “mediæval” signs of warfare and contradiction. This is a pure chronicle of accomplished facts, and addresses itself only to such as already lean to the æsthetic principles of those “dark ages” of spiritual light which gave us along with Monasticism the great conservative power. Feudalism—the progressive power, the check on royal autocracy, the guardian of Magna Charta, the parent of constitutional liberty.

Passing by the history and literature of Gothic art since its decay in the sixteenth to its full revival in the nineteenth century, we are attracted by the subject of its symbolism, over which such fierce and sometimes ludicrous battles have been fought; but, even before the symbolism of the art, its very origin was made a subject of curious dispute. For instance, the author of this work says: “In the beginning of this century, various arguments were rife. The style was Gothic; it was Saracenic; it had been brought to England by the crusaders; it had been invented by the Moors in Spain; it might be traced to the pyramids of Egypt. One ingenious theorist endeavored to reconcile all opinions in his comprehensive hypothesis that the style of architecture which we call cathedral or monastic Gothic was manifestly a corruption of the sacred architecture of the Greeks and Romans, by a mixture of the Moorish or Saracenesque, which is formed out of a combination of Egyptian, Persian, and Hindoo!”

Of symbolism, and the intimate union of the religious and artistic spirit, Eastlake says: “In modern days, we have unconsciously drawn a distinction between religious art and popular art. In the middle ages, they were thoroughly blended;” but he goes on to infer from this blending that, according to the old adage, “Familiarity breeds contempt,” there was no reverential and spiritual idea whatever embodied in the work of the mediæval carvers and architects. We, by the light of our faith, the heirloom of the very times we speak of, believe him to be either unconsciously prejudiced or mistaken. He seems to scout the idea of the deviation of the line of the chancel from the line of the nave, an occasional feature in some old churches (for instance, the Abbey of St. Denys, near Paris), being a symbol of the inclination of Our Lord’s head upon the cross. It is but a tradition, a pious belief, it is true; but why throw doubt upon it? If it really was meant as a symbol, he asks why was it not so in all churches? And if the triplet window typified the Trinity, why were two or five light windows used? Simply because the symbol was optional, yet none the less a symbol. From the old symbolism of the forgotten artists of past days, we come to the miscalled “Pre-Raphaelite” naturalism of modern architects. Ruskin with all his merits, of which we will speak more fully further on, had an exaggerated tendency to find in carving an exact copy from nature, and to condemn anything in that line that did not absolutely reproduce some organic form. Eastlake himself expresses his own views on the subject in the following words: “In the gable [of St. Finbar’s, Cork], ... a seated figure of Christ is to occupy a vesica-shaped panel, with angels censing on each side. Of these works, executed by Mr. Thomas Nicholls from Mr. Burges’ design, it is not too much to say that no finer examples of decorative sculpture have been produced during the Revival. They exactly represent that intermediate condition between natural form and abstract idealism which is the essence of mediæval, and indeed of all noble art.” From this subject we are led to the kindred one of the contrast between old work and new. Our author repeatedly returns to this point. Here are some amusing sayings about the deplorable ‘tameness’ of modern sculpture: “The Roman Catholic churches erected at this period (1850) had one decided advantage over those designed for the Establishment, viz., the richness of their interiors.... A tamely carved reredos, generally arranged in panels to hold the Ten Commandments (!), a group of sedilia and a piscina, with perhaps a few empty inches in the clerestory, were, as a rule, all the internal features which distinguished an Anglican church from a meeting-house.” So that wherever art is concerned, an unconscious tribute is naturally offered to the church! Again and again, our author vigorously denounces the dead imitation of living and forcible models, which is in the spirit of a “Chinese engraver who should undertake to imitate, line for line and spot for spot, a damaged print.” “Every one,” he says, “who has studied the principles of mediæval art, knows how much its character and vitality depend upon the essential element of decorative sculpture, of the spirit of what Ruskin has called ‘noble grotesque,’ in its nervous types of animal life and vigorous conventionalism of vegetable form.... To copy line for line, even when sound and fresh from the chisel, and yet preserve the spirit of the original, would have been difficult in the best ages of art. The mediæval sculptors never—to use an artistic phrase—repeated themselves. If the conditions of their work required a certain degree of uniformity in design, they took care to aim at the spirit, but not the letter, of symmetry.... They took the birds of the air and the flowers of the field for their study, but seemed to know instinctively the true secret of all decorative art, which lies in the suggestion and symbolism, rather than the presumptuous illustration of natural form.” “Since,” continues Eastlake, “we cannot ‘restore’ the thoughts and stamp of the artists of old, we should the more sedulously watch what we have left of such traces, and prop up and secure that which a little common care might long preserve to us.” Of an unfortunate modern carver, he says: “Impartial critics who compare the mediæval carving with its modern substitute will probably consider the neat finish and anatomical correctness of Westmacott’s groups a poor exchange for the earnest and vigorous, though somewhat rude, treatment of the old design. King George’s loyal subjects thought they knew better than those of King Edward; ... their work was not clever; it was not interesting; it was not lifelike; it was not humorous; it was not even ugly after a good honest fashion—it was deplorably and hopelessly mean.... All these accidents combine not only to deprive the building of scale, but to give it a cold and machine-made look. In a far different spirit the mediæval designers worked.... Fifty years ago, ... there was naturalistic carving and there was ornamental carving, but the noble abstractive treatment which should find a middle place between them, and which was one of the glories of ancient art, had still to be revived.” In whimsical pursuance of his subject, he says elsewhere that before Pugin’s days “an architect would no more have thought of introducing a porch on the south aisle which had not its counterpart on the north, than he would have dared to wear a coat of which the right sleeve was longer than the left.” Ruskin, too, seems to have thought a coat a very effective instrument of illustration: here is his version of the likeness between the tailor’s and the modern architect’s occupations. “A day never passes,” he says in his Seven Lamps of Architecture, “without our hearing our English architects called upon to be original, and to invent a new style; about as sensible and necessary an exhortation as to ask of a man who has never had rags enough on his back to keep out the cold to invent a new mode of cutting a coat. Give him a whole coat first, and let him concern himself about the fashion afterwards. We want no new style of architecture. Who wants a new style of painting or of sculpture? But we want some style.” To return to Eastlake’s strongly accentuated views of mediæval carving: he has summed them up in one sentence, as terse and vigorous as the old sculptural handiwork itself. “During the Revival,” he says, “it took a decade of years to teach workmen to carve carefully. It took another to get them to carve simply. We may expect more than a third to elapse before they have learnt to carve nobly.” With one more quotation which is too humorous to miss, we will close this part of the history of the Revival: “There is no want of manipulative skill or of imitative ability, but from some cause or another there is a great want of spirit in the present carver’s work. The mediæval sculptor, with half the care and less than half the finish now bestowed on such details, managed to throw life and vigor into the capitals and panel subjects that grew beneath his chisel. The ‘angel choir’ at Lincoln is rudely executed compared with many a modern bas-relief, but the features of the winged minstrels are radiant with celestial happiness. There are figures of kings crumbling into dust in the niches of Exeter Cathedral which retain even now a dignity of attitude and lordly grace which no ‘restoration’ is likely to revive. Our nineteenth century angels look like demure Bible-readers, somewhat too conscious of their piety to be interesting. Our nineteenth century monarchs seem (in stone, at least) very well-to-do pleasant gentlemen, but are scarcely of a heroic type. The roses and lilies, the maple foliage and forked spleenwort, with which we crown our pillars or deck our cornices, are cut with wonderful precision and neatness, but somehow they miss the charm of old-world handicraft.... The truth is, that in the apparent imperfections of some arts lies the real secret of their excellence. For instance, the superior quality of color which long distinguished old (stained) glass from new was due in a great measure to its streakiness and irregularity of tint.” We would here submit to the talented and enthusiastic author that the spirit of ancient art, the loss of which he so vehemently deplores, is intimately connected with that Catholic symbolism he so cavalierly dismisses. The Reformation took away the reality of faith from the souls of modern Christians; it could not but weaken likewise the realization of faith which for so many ages had inspired the hands of Christian artists. A noble orator, who is as much an artist in soul as he is a priest in fact, and in whom Ireland and Irish America claim equal pride, said from the pulpit very recently, and in a church of New York, that animal painting, the lowest of the products of brush or pencil, was hardly known in its present development before the famous Reformation. The first painter who took to this earthy style was a German Lutheran in Naples, an emissary of the growing intellectual “disfranchisement” of the sixteenth century; and his fellow-artists, who hitherto had never looked lower than heaven itself for their models, would not speak to him, nor recognize him as one of themselves, saying in a tone of contempt, “There goes the man who paints cows and horses!” As the old spirit died away, the forms of art grew downwards more and more till we were reduced to roots and herbs, onions and cabbages, and foaming tankards of beer, and were expected to find for these some words of praise on account of their fidelity (shall we not rather say servility?) to nature. Even now, the correct texture and pattern of a bed-quilt or a woman’s dress is a thing strained after by modern painters of supposed merit. In the face of this three hundred years old debasement of art, who could expect to revive the spirit of mediæval carving without first reviving that of mediæval faith? And here we are naturally led to speak of Pugin, the great apostle of the Gothic Revival, the most mediæval-spirited of all its known leaders; the man whose art, in fact, was the instrument of his conversion. Although Eastlake tends towards depreciating the part and influence of our religion in this artistic crisis, and although, as he most truly and fairly says, our ceremonial, like our faith, can associate itself indifferently to any style, and therefore is sovereignly independent of any, yet it remains no less true that the Catholic Church is so exclusively the real patroness of art that no artist-soul can fail to be attracted and won by her. Overbeck, the great German painter, who established in Rome a school that revives and rivals the glories of Perugino, Giotto, Mantegna, and Fra Angelico, was an artist before he became a Catholic, but he found himself unable to teach his art-ideal without the spirit which of old had created that ideal. So it was with Pugin.

France and England have an equal claim to the honor of being the mother of the noblest, most earnest, truest artist, who has shared the vicissitudes and anxieties of our modern (and more beneficial) Renaissance. His father was a French refugee, an architect of great merit, who had been associated in the early part of this century with Nash, the reigning architect of that time. Pugin’s youth seems to have been very adventurous; at all events, it shows the irrepressible energy of his nature. He was an enthusiast of the noblest type; his life was influenced by the purest motives. So, with all his genius and, as far as the educated public was concerned, his popularity, he was not overburdened with this world’s goods. His work on Contrasts (of which we have had the privilege of seeing some of the original illustrations in etching) is thus noticed by Eastlake:

The list of his works is really so extensive that we must confine ourselves by preference to one or two whose beauties we have had personal opportunities of admiring.

Of these, happily, that of Ramsgate is one. “The whole church,” says our author, “is lined with stone of a warm color, the woodwork of the screens, stalls, etc., being of dark oak. The general tone of the interior, lighted as it is by stained glass, is most agreeable, and wonderfully suggestive of old work.... The church of St. Augustine may be regarded as one of Pugin’s most successful achievements. Its plan is singularly ingenious and unconventional in arrangement. The exterior is simple but picturesque in outline. No student of old English architecture can examine this interesting little church without perceiving the thoughtful, earnest care with which it has been designed and executed down to the minutest detail.”

Omitting the technical description, which would be unintelligible to the non-professional reader, we will merely remark upon one or two interesting circumstances which combine to make St. Augustine’s Priory doubly dear to the Catholic and artist heart. The founder lies buried in one of its side chapels, beneath a lovely mediæval tomb, his figure carved in the monumental repose which characterizes the shrines of former days. And truly before these calm effigies of death, which modern taste calls stiff, and for which it has substituted the nude and affected statues of weeping nymphs and cupids, no Christian can fail to be reminded of the solemnly triumphant question, “O grave, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” The church that Pugin loved is now served by the old monastic order, whose history is identified in England with most of the wonderful productions of the art he followed—the Benedictines. The plain chant, so intimately associated with that ancient art, is alone used at all the services of the church; and near the Pugin Chantry is an image of Our Lady, before which, on an iron stand of exquisite design, are constantly burned the tapers of the faithful. Were it not for the modern dress of the worshippers, nothing in the church would indicate the change between the fourteenth and the nineteenth century. Close to it stands the architect’s own house, a gem of domestic Gothic architecture, now occupied by Pugin’s widow and son, himself an enthusiastic artist. It is impossible to describe the house, save by a comprehensive expression. It has a sympathetic and Catholic air: one is reminded of the days when artists loved their faith and their art in themselves, without after-thoughts and without interest; when they saw God in their work instead of a patron or a human encourager; when they would no more sell their principles and compromise their æsthetic beliefs, than they would sell their soul to the Evil One. We have had the pleasure of experiencing familiar intercourse with this truly Christian household, and of partaking of its graceful hospitality. We have seen the very dining-room etherealized into a fane of art, as the table appeared laden with silver flagons of antique design, and decked in the centre with the virginal blossoms of lily and jessamine. This purity of taste and absence of vulgar redundancy or vanity in ornament produced upon us a most indelible and quaint impression. If it be true that the surroundings of home refine the mind and open it to the most perfect sense of the beautiful, these neighbors of St. Augustine’s Priory should consider themselves among the most favored in this age of almost hopeless utilitarianism.

St. George’s Catholic Cathedral at Southwark, London, is also one of Pugin’s great works. The ceremonies of the church are performed with more precision in this cathedral than in almost any modern one in England, and the building wonderfully lends itself to their performance. During Holy Week, all the Protestant world of art and fashion crowd its aisles, and admire equally its architectural solemnity and suggestiveness, and the impressive ritual to which it forms so noble a frame. The Church of St. Michael’s Priory, near Hereford, also a Benedictine foundation, is most beautiful and most “Puginesque” (to quote the appropriate word-coin of our author, Eastlake). The simplicity of its nave and aisles contrasts well with the richness of its choir; the stone reredos, a true “carven dream of angels,” represents the adoration of the Divine Host by the winged inhabitants of heaven; the altar is rich with marble columns and small sculptured capitals of most ingenious workmanship; the stalls rival those in the old Flemish churches (and Flanders was the birthland of perfect carving); and the peculiar arrangement which leaves a free space between choir and nave, separated from each by a vaulted arch, has a very happy effect. There are fully thirty monks in the monastery, and the plain chant is heard in all its glory at the prescribed hours of the divine office.

We have lingered too long over these reminiscences, and will now hasten on to the few other points of interest, which our limited space has allowed us to make note of, in Mr. Eastlake’s book.

A few quotations that carry one from the consideration of the dry, technical aspect of the Revival to that of its spirit and vitality will not be unacceptable, we believe, to the general reader. Here are two contrasting portraits of modern and mediæval life: “Seen in their present state, some half-modernized, some damaged by time and wilful neglect, others spoilt by injudicious restoration, many of these ancient mansions are but dimly suggestive of their former magnificence. It was Nash’s aim to represent them as they were in the days when country life was enjoyed by their owners, not for a brief interval in the year, but all the year round; in days when there were feasting in the hall and tilting in the court-yard; when the yule-log cracked on the hearth, and mummers beguiled the dulness of a winter’s evening; when the bowling-green was filled by lusty youths, and gentle dames sat spinning in their boudoirs; when the deep window recesses were filled with family groups, and gallant cavaliers rode a-hawking; when, in short, all the adjuncts and incidents of social life, dress, pastimes, manners, and whatnot formed part of a picturesque whole, of which we, in these prosaic and lack-lustre days, except by the artist’s aid, can form no conception.” On the other hand, here is what the shocked vision of a modern artist has suggested to the author of the Gothic Revival:

“Mr. Ruskin looked around him at the modern architecture of England ... and saw public buildings copied from those of a nobler age, but starved and vulgarized in the copying. He saw private houses, some modelled on what was supposed to be an Italian pattern, and others modelled on what was supposed to be a mediæval pattern, and he found too often neither grandeur in the one nor grace in the other. He saw palaces which looked mean, and cottages which looked tawdry. He saw masonry without interest, ornament without beauty, and sculpture without life. He walked through the streets of London, and found that they consisted for the most part of flaunting shop-fronts, stuccoed porticoes, and plaster cornices. It is true there were fine clubs and theatres and public institutions scattered here and there; but, after making due allowance for their size, for the beauty of materials used, and for the neatness (!) of the workmanship, how far could they be considered as genuine works of art?”

And here let us stop to point out how it has been invariably the aim of the Revival to banish the false and the meretricious from art; how it has waged relentless war against shams, against the aping in perishable clay of that which the ancients, Greek as well as mediæval, always carved in indestructible stone or marble. Unfortunately, the only residue of mediævalism that has as yet filtered its way down to the masses of the population is strongly tinged with a taste for showiness at the expense of intrinsic worth, and the flimsiness of “Gothic” sea-side lodges and Cockney villas has become a by-word. Eastlake deplores the rigid adoption in such hybrid edifices of the bands of colored brick (chiefly red and yellow), which should be used with great discretion, but which obtained a too quick popularity when Ruskin first pointed out their prominent part in Italian decorative Gothic. In a foot-note, he says: “In the suburbs this mode of decoration rose rapidly into favor for Cockney villas and public taverns, and laid the foundation of that peculiar order of Victorian architecture which has since been distinguished by the familiar but not altogether inappropriate name of the Streaky Bacon Style.”

With how many such buildings are we unhappily acquainted! In this city, we have seen counterparts to the villas here mentioned—nay, churches and public halls, with iron-work that calls itself Gothic, and does not know that it is but modern “Franco-Assyrian!” But let us not do injustice to the more enlightened disciples of Pugin and of Ruskin, who are covering this new land with buildings which, if they last two or three hundred years, will rival those of the lands from whose cathedrals they were copied. A sister to the marble cathedral of Milan will soon be finished for the Catholics of New York, not so elaborate, perhaps, but purer in style and spirit. Others are eagerly competing in this new race of art, and the city of the Dutch emigrants will one day hold fanes that will remind their children of Flanders and of Holland.

Although the Catholic Church can afford to dispense with outward ceremonial, or adapt herself to a different arrangement of church architecture, and yet remain, in custom, in doctrine, essentially immutable, such is not the privilege of the dominant church in England. Therefore it will not be surprising to any one to know how much the revived taste for art contributed some time ago to the revived sense of decorum in the services of the Episcopalian denomination. Eastlake gives us a graphic description of spiritual desolation in the ante-Gothic days in the country parishes of England:

We have seen in a country church in Rutland—one of the midland counties of England—some lingering tokens of this curious state of things. Most of the other churches of that neighborhood have been magnificently restored, and very much Catholicized, at least in externals. This exception to the rule is in a small parish, and is noticeable for a very curious ancient monument, half sunk in the earth, and covered by a recess of the church wall itself. It is supposed to be that of the founder, who chose this position as typical of his having been a support to the building: at least this was the suggestion of a friend of ours, an architect of the type of Pugin—a Christian artist in the true sense of the word. The interior of the church was a sad contrast to its beautiful outward proportions: high whitewashed pews filled it, hiding the base of the columns, thrusting their wooden cornices into and over the piscinæ, and covering from view the old brasses and monumental slabs on the stone floor. A row of hat-pegs (will it be believed?) ran round the whole church at a convenient height, and rare must have been the decoration appended to them on a Sunday. The “altar plate”—pewter pots hardly a stage better, and certainly a degree duller, than those highly-polished vessels which were no doubt in more constant use in the neighboring tavern—was kept in a worm-eaten old oak chest at the bottom of the church. The communion table was a table; and indeed Cromwell himself might have walked in and felt satisfied that there lurked no “Popery” there. By the bye, why does ignorance always call beautiful art “Popery”? Is it not through some higher and unconscious knowledge which forces itself into expression, like the sibyl’s prophecies, upon reluctant and unbelieving lips?

Eastlake speaks of Westminster Abbey as liable to many of the abuses which he deplores in country churches. “Westminster,” he says, “was not then (1826) as now guarded by circumspect vergers, who are stimulated to additional vigilance by the sixpences of the faithful. There was scarce a monument in the place which had not suffered from ruthless violence, for at that time or not long before, the choristers made a playground of the venerable abbey, and the Westminster scholars played at hockey in the cloisters.”

It is time to mention a few of the architects of the more modern phase of the Revival, and of some of their works, those especially which find a place among the fine engravings of Eastlake’s valuable book. Butterfield is selected as one of the foremost, and as the only leader after Pugin whose influence is yet appreciably felt. He is thus eulogized by our author. “It is especially characteristic of Mr. Butterfield’s design that he aims at originality, not only in form, but in the relative proportion of parts.... This indeed is the secret of the striking and picturesque character which distinguishes his works from others which are less daring in conception and therefore less liable to mistakes. Mr. Butterfield has been the leader of a school, and it is necessary for a leader to be bold.” Of the church of All Saints, in London, built by the same architect, Eastlake says: “The truth is that the design was a bold and magnificent endeavor to shake off the trammels of antiquarian precedent, which had long fettered the progress of the Revival, to create not a new style, but a development of previous styles; to carry the enrichment of ecclesiastical Gothic to an extent which even in the middle ages had been rare in England; to adorn the walls with surface ornament of a durable kind; to spare, in short, neither skill, nor pains, nor cost in making this church the model church of its day—such a building as should take a notable position in the history of modern architecture.” Further on he says of him that there is “a sober earnestness in his work widely different from that of some designers, who seem to be tossed about on the sea of popular taste.... He does not care to produce showy buildings at a sacrifice of constructive strength. To a pretty, superficial school of Gothic and fussy carving, he never condescended.... His work gives one the idea of a man who has designed it not so much to please his clients as to please himself. In estimating the value of his skill, posterity may find something to smile at as eccentric and much that will astonish as daring, but they will find nothing to despise as commonplace or mean.” Several engravings are given of details of his work on the church of St. Alban’s (a high ritualistic stronghold in London) and at All Saints’ and Balliol Chapel (Oxford). Of Carpenter, an architect who died in his prime, we find the following flattering notice: “No practitioner of his day (1840-50) understood so thoroughly the grammar of his art.... As a pupil he appears to have given remarkable attention to the character and application of mouldings.... A knowledge of the laws of proportion, of the conditions of light and shade, and the effective employment of decorative features are arrived at by most architects gradually and after a series of tentative experiments. Carpenter seems to have acquired this knowledge very early in his career, so that even his first works possess an artistic quality far in advance of their state, while those he executed in later years are regarded even now with admiration by all who have endeavored to maintain the integrity of our old national styles.” Mr. Beresford Hope was a true and enthusiastic patron of Carpenter’s artistic career. Of the many works of this talented man, whose life was unfortunately so short, our author chooses a large college in Sussex as the one most worthy of an engraving. Its proportions truly denote a mediæval spirit. Eastlake places Goldie among the later revivalists of note, and gives a fine engraving of his Abbey of St. Scholastica at Teignmouth. The building certainly looks massive and extensive enough for an ancient monastic structure, though the use of the before-mentioned bands of colored brick seems too profuse for that chasteness of design which is surely the highest standard of taste. Goldie is the architect of St. Mary’s Cathedral at Kensington, London, the Pro-Cathedral of the Archiepiscopal See of Westminster. Although we have heard many criticisms passed upon this specimen of his skill, we are by no means capable of giving any opinion, especially as we have not had the opportunity of seeing it. Eastlake gives a view of its western doorway, and goes on to say that the “interior is remarkable for the height of its nave,” a detail which receives but too little attention in many modern buildings. “The roof,” he says, “is ceiled, and follows the outline of a trefoil-headed arch—a form not often adopted, but here peculiarly effective. There are many incidents in the design of this church which are very ingenious and original.... Every detail throughout the work, even to the novel gas-standard, bears evidence of artistic care.”

We fear that, beyond naming these few artists, the richness of our remaining material will not allow us to go deeper into their merits. Yet there are many others, as well or less known, whose conscientious, enthusiastic carrying out of their beautiful principles lends powerful aid to their theory. Hanson and Hadfield, among Catholic architects, and Street and Scott among Anglicans, are well worthy of mention, and since Barry was the ostensible restorer of the Houses of Parliament, we must of course give him a place in this short review. But there is one name which from intimate and pleasant acquaintance we would fain single out, and which is honorably mentioned by Eastlake as belonging to one who with several of his Catholic brethren “have done their best, each in their several ways, to secure honest and substantial work, and to keep clear of that tawdry, superficial style of design which brings discredit on the Gothic cause.”

This is Charles Buckler, the son and successor of John Chessel Buckler, a most finished artist and wonderful draughtsman, who, it may be said with peculiar significance, has let his mantle fall on the heir to his name and art. If any one would see in modern days that oneness of being between faith and art, let him look for it in the life and works of this gifted architect. The most rigorous purist could find no fault in a man who takes for his model the simplicity of the thirteenth century, and in whose manner and address a corresponding simplicity and sweetness are ever manifest. A priest by the vocation of art, as his two brothers are by the vocation of faith and by union with one of the most art-loving orders in the church, he works more willingly for churches and other ecclesiastical buildings than for the houses of the great, and finds his highest gratification in offering to each church he designs some spontaneous gift of his genius, the carving of a piscina or the pedestal of a font. His little church of St. Thomas à Becket, at Exton in the county of Rutland, is a specimen of his design which we believe he himself would not be unwilling to call a representative one. It is the only Catholic Church in the county, and so may claim to interest those who otherwise might not care to examine it. The foundress, as devoted a lover and patroness of art as she was a holy and noble-minded Christian matron, lies buried near the high altar. The church is built in the traditional cross-shape, and has an absidal end pierced by several beautiful windows, the stone tracery of which is in the style of the thirteenth century. The rose-window at the west end is copied from one in the (now Protestant) cathedral of Lausanne, where the writer saw the sketch of it made at the foundress’ desire, by the architect to whom the future building of the church was to be entrusted. The beautiful and simple porch to the north of the church, the little belfry where an old bell found among the ruins of the old manor-house of Exton rings the daily Angelus of restored Catholic belief, the spacious and massive vault, where a plain stone altar is erected for Masses for the dead; the side chapel of St. Ida, the patron saint of the foundress; the Lady chapel, with its more elaborate yet chastely traceried window; the soft surroundings of garden, plantation, and terrace, with the view on the opposite hill of the old church, once Catholic, which three hundred years of false belief have only surrounded with a more touching pathos, as of a noble captive chained to a meaner rival’s car—all this, and the knowledge that within the Tudor mansion which has replaced the ruined manor dwell the family of the foundress, and especially the one destined to finish her church and enshrine her memory therein, makes this personal recollection of St. Thomas’ fane and its charming architect very hallowed and sweet to think on. Many pray in this church, of which the stone interior with its carven and arched tribune, and its broad oak-panelled western recess, is as lovely as its exterior with its high roof and broken outline—many pray there to whom this recollection is as dear and as holy. May those who have prayed with us remember us in their prayers, both he who has borne the burden of the day and its heat, and they to whom he has taught the way of taking up the same cross and bearing it to the same fruitful and happy end!

John Chessel Buckler, the father of our friend, was the second of the three designers chosen out of the hosts of competitors on the occasion of the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament. Eastlake says of him: “The especial merit of Buckler’s design—second only to that of Barry in the opinion of the judges—was that it avoided the multiplication of detail.... The plan in general arrangement was considered picturesque.... Mr. Buckler obtained credit for the purity of his ornamental details.” He also built Cossey Hall for Lord Stafford, and his son is now continuing his work. No wonder that the spirit of mediæval days should have descended on this favored family, since their dwelling-place for a long time was the matchless old city of Oxford. There is a magic in that name that has a creative artistic suggestion in its very sound.

The late controversy as to Pugin’s part in the Houses of Parliament must be too well known to be revived here. Suffice it to say that the volume published by Barry’s sons as a vindication of their father’s genius was of itself conclusive, and proved too much for his reputation. Hardly a single engraving illustrative of his unassisted efforts was such as could commend itself to a purist in Gothic art, while the one part of the Houses of Parliament which was entirely his own (the unbroken front on the Thames River), though imposing at first sight, was the weakest point of the work as regards the true principles of art. Still, as Eastlake observes, it was a great victory for the Revivalists, and an important fact in the history of the Revival, that such a characteristically national work should have been confided to Gothic architects. It gave the cause both weight and popularity, and threw more in the way of the masses what before had been too much of a luxury and fancy of privileged intellectual orders. And yet, before the old style could be really popularized, it was necessary that the taste for it should be carefully educated by the firm hand of uncompromising art. Eastlake descants thus on the liberty left in the architect’s hands: “He may make an art of his calling, or he may make it a mere business; and in proportion as he inclines to one or the other of these two extremes, he will generally achieve present profit or posthumous renown.” Further on he stigmatizes one of the earlier Gothic Revivalists in these terms: “In instances where he ought to have led, or at least to have tempered and corrected the vitiated taste of his day, he simply pandered to it.” Let the reader pause to apply this to the great majority of modern artists, and to deplore the interested and debased motives which have robbed God of so much glory and the moral world of so much support. And without travelling into the region of other arts, we find among the adjuncts of architecture sufficient proof of degeneracy. Eastlake very justly remarks that the interior of houses is given up to upholsterers and decorators who too frequently are allowed to execute their work independently of the architect’s control. “We enter,” he says, “a Renaissance palace or a Gothic mansion, and find them respectively fitted up in the style of the nineteenth century, which is in point of fact no style at all, but the embodiment of a taste as empirical, as empty, and as fleeting as that which finds expression in a milliner’s fashion-book.” And again: “There is perhaps no feature in the interior of even an ordinary dwelling which is capable of more artistic treatment than the fire-place of its most frequented sitting-room, and yet how long it was neglected! The Englishman’s sacred ‘hearth,’ the Scotchman’s ‘ain fireside,’ the grandsire’s ‘chimney-corner,’ have become mere verbal expressions, of which it is difficult to recall the original significance as we stand before those cold, formal slabs of gray or white marble enclosing the sprucely polished but utterly heartless grate of a modern drawing-room.”

Of course, like all arts, especially those of a more directly spiritual tendency, architecture has suffered from caricatures, sometimes hostile, sometimes blunderingly friendly. The ancient Gregorian chant and the real “Pre-Raphaelite” school of Christian painting have likewise suffered in this way. One might quote the well-known saying, “Defend me from my friends!” Eastlake puts the same thought into these words: “The barbarous and absurd specimens of modern architecture which have been erected in this generation under the general name of Gothic, have done more to damage the cause of the Revival than all that has been said or written in disparagement of the style.”

Of the many buildings of merit hidden away in poor and remote localities, Eastlake makes cheering mention. He says:

A view of the interior of St. Chad’s, in one of the London suburbs, is given, in which one can trace even a certain richness of altar decoration allied to the noble proportions of the massive pillars and tall arches. This church seems to bear a monastic look about it.

The church of St. Columba, in the same neighborhood, presents many of the same characteristics, and Eastlake says of it that the “real excellence of this work consists in grand masses of roof and wall, planned and proportioned with true artistic ability.” It is curious—and ridiculously realistic—to see in the engraving given of this church the contrast of the grand abbey-like pile with the wooden walls of an enclosed but unoccupied piece of ground, covered with the obstreperous advertisements of popular London papers, of Horniman’s “best black tea,” of theatres and bill-posters, and contemplated by a few shabbily-dressed women, a mason carrying a hod of mortar, and a very old cart-horse standing with his ungainly vehicle at the door of the vestry.

These hidden churches have their touching meaning for Christian minds—a twofold meaning indeed—and one which is often overlooked in this utilitarian age. There they stand, beautiful and unvisited, built for the glory of God more than for the admiration of men, and no less solid, no less symbolical, no less perfect in proportion and distribution because the silent God is their only visitor. How much does this all-absorbing reference to the great Master of all art govern the work of the success-hunting generations of our day? Again, these beautiful churches stand as representatives of God’s sacraments, God’s graces, God’s invitations, unheeded by those to whom they are offered, unfelt even by many who live in their very shadow, and coldly received at best by those who grudgingly take advantage of them. Or, again, they are the symbol of the hidden soul, beauties scattered in seemingly desert places in the spiritual world, of the hearts that watch with God in the midst of the turmoil of earth, of hearts whose unbroken hymn of love is never silent, because of the babel of tongues that, to all but the ear of God, seems so resolutely to drown it.

There are two more remarks to be made, with which we will close this sketch, which we have perhaps prolonged beyond the bounds of the kind reader’s patience. It has been said—we know not with what technical truth, but certainly with a beautiful suggestiveness of truth—that one of the great principles in Gothic architecture is that every curve should be the perfect segment of a circle—that is, that every curve, if continued, should inevitably describe a perfect circle. If this be so—and we have always assumed that it is—is not this meaning deducible from it, that it is the mission of art to tend to the highest perfection, and the mission of grace—the heavenly art—to fashion every single insignificant action in such a mould that it should visibly be but a part in one grand perfect whole of heroic sanctity?

And the second remark is this:

The Gothic revivalists have been accused of retrogression towards so-called barbaric forms of art. Exactly the same reproach was once made to an eminent convert—we believe a German. “My dear friend,” said an anxious companion to him, “how could you abandon the religion of your fathers?” “Simply, my dear fellow,” was the quick and humorous response, “that I might embrace that of my grandfathers.”

We leave the application to the public, pointing out to them at the same time that to denounce the civil and ecclesiastical architecture handed down to them by the founders of civic liberty in Flanders and Germany, and the founders of Christian morality in France and England, Spain and Lombardy, would be to lay themselves open to the reproach of another witty convert, who said to his father, when the latter was lamenting his son’s change of faith: “Take care, or you will make out that three hundred years ago our ancestors were nobodies.” The reply silenced the proud bearer of a proud—and Catholic—name.

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