Chapter I
In one of my summer rambles through the north of France, I came across a little seaside village which possessed so many charms that it was the greatest difficulty in the world to tear myself away from it.
It was indeed a lovely spot. The village, situated on a noble cliff, was enclosed almost in a semicircle of richly wooded hills, which stretched, as far as the eye could see, into the very heart of noble Normandy.
At your feet the glorious sea came dashing in to a shore over which great masses of bold rock were liberally scattered, and round which the waves used to play in the summertime, however little obstacle was afforded to their fury when fierce winds blew up a storm in the cruel winter-time.
But perhaps the most attractive feature of the place to me was a splendid river, within a mile's walk of the village, which was plentifully supplied with fish, and afforded me many and {111} many day's amusement, and not a little excellent sport.
My time was pretty well my own, and I had made up my mind for a tolerably long spell of idle enjoyment; so, under these circumstances, it may not appear strange that I resolved to take up my quarters at----.
The inhabitants of the place were mostly poor fishermen, who used to ply their trade nearly the whole of the week, and by great good luck frequently got back to their wives and families toward its close.
A very pretty cottage, with a bay-window commanding a splendid view of the sea, took my fancy immensely, and though it was rather a humble sort of place, I determined if possible to make an impression on its possessors, in order to secure two rooms for my use during my stay. Alphonsine was certainly not the most sweet-tempered woman I have ever met, in fact rather the contrary; at the same time I fully persuaded myself that a great many disagreeables would be counteracted by the possession of my much-coveted bay-window.
Alphonsine evidently ruled the establishment with a rod of iron. She was a tall, thin, ill-favored looking woman, who was always prepared for a wrangle, and who looked uncommonly sharp after her own interests. However, by paying pretty liberally and in advance, I soon won her heart, and flatter myself that it was by excellent generalship on my part that I contrived very soon to be entirely in her good books. Her hard face used sometimes actually to relax into a grim kind of smile in my presence, and I fancied her harsh voice used almost imperceptibly to soften in addressing me. Beside, she was accustomed to bustle about in a rough kind of way in order to get things straight and comfortable, and I really think tried to do her best to make me feel at home. What more could I want than this? And then she had two delightful children, a boy and a girl, with whom I was very soon especially friendly, and who tended to enliven me up a bit whenever I chanced to be at all dull. The boy was about thirteen years old, and his sister, who looked a year or so younger, was indeed a lovely child. She was as fair as a lily, and had that sweet expression of countenance which is so often found among the peasants in Normandy; her eyes were large and exquisitely blue, and with all this she had a decided will of her own. But then she was the daughter of Alphonsine.
It was some little time before I made the acquaintance of the master of the establishment; for he was always busy fishing, and, as I have said before, the fishermen who lived in the village seldom got home before Saturday evening, and had to be off again either on Sunday evening or by daybreak on Monday.
However, Saturday soon came round, and with it Pierre Prévost.
He was about five-and-thirty years old, very dark and singularly handsome. His hair, which was thick, fell about his head in ringlets; he was short, and had most expressive eyes. I was not long in perceiving that he was in every way a great contrast to Alphonsine. His expression was sad, and he seldom or never smiled; and I noticed he seemed to shrink rather nervously from the piercing look with which he was very frequently favored by "la belle Alphonsine." His sweet and handsome face soon disposed me favorably toward him, notwithstanding that there were circumstances which occurred on our first acquaintance which would otherwise have tended to prejudice me entirely against him.
I was smoking a pipe and chatting quietly to Alphonsine in the great chimney-corner on the evening I allude to, when all at once the two children came tearing in from school with their books under their arms.
"He is come!" cried they, in their shrill treble voices. "We saw his boat just coming near the shore. He will be on the sand almost in a {112} moment We may go and meet him, may we not, mother?"
"What's the use?" said she, in rather a more disagreeable tone than usual. "I am sure he would much prefer to come alone. Beside, I want you both. Go into the garden to get me something to make a salad of. Come now!"
These last two words settled the matter, and the children were soon off, without another word about the expedition to the sea-shore.
"That's strange," thought I to myself; "I wonder if this Pierre can be a bad father, or at any rate a bad husband?"
A few minutes afterward he came in.
As if to strengthen this bad impression of mine, I noticed that Alphonsine never moved when he entered, and did not attempt to offer her hand or cheek to him. She did not even welcome him with a smile.
No, she contented herself with taking a slate down from the wall, the pencil belonging to which was already in her hand:
"How much?" said she, coolly.
Pierre Prévost pulled out of his pocket a great leather purse, and detailed, day by day, how much he had made by the sale of his fish. After which, he put down the money upon the corner of the table.
All this time the woman was eagerly dotting down the various sums on the slate. Then she gravely added them all up, and determinedly counted out every sou.
By great good luck the figures tallied with the money. Then Alphonsine shut up the money in a drawer, and locked it very securely.
Meanwhile Pierre repocketed his leather purse, which he had just emptied, never attempting to grumble in the least, and going through the task as methodically as possible.
"I was quite wrong in forming so hasty an opinion," thought I to myself, as I witnessed this peculiar scene; "Pierre is not such a bad fellow, after all."
It was not long before the young ones made a second burst into the room, making rather more noise than they did on the first occasion.
They were not long in scrambling on to Pierre's knees, and smothering him with kisses, and it was all done so heartily, with such warmth, and so naturally, that I could not help exclaiming to myself, "Why, he's a capital father, after all!"
But, judge, of my astonishment when I heard their pretty voices call out,
"Oh! we're so glad to see you back again, dear uncle Pierre!"
Then he was their uncle, after all, and he was not married to Alphonsine. But was he her brother, or merely a brother-in-law? And yet she seemed so entirely to have the upper-hand over him. It certainly was a very remarkable coincidence.
But what surprised me most of all was the fatherly affection that Pierre Prévost seemed to have for the two children.
He took them on his knees, and played with them, and appeared to make so much of them, that I, who was a silent spectator of this little scene, became really quite interested.
This lasted for about five minutes, and then all at once it seemed as if the old pain came over him, for he turned quite sad again, and turned deathly pale, and I could see the tears starting to his eyes. And then he got up, and looking steadily into the young innocent faces of his nephew and niece, said, in an extremely soft voice,
"Go and play on the sand. Go along, my pretty ones!"
The poor children, who seemed quite astonished at the sudden change in his demeanor, hesitated for a moment. However, another beseeching look from their uncle, and an angry word or so from Alphonsine, soon persuaded them what to do; whereupon they set out very slowly for the sea-shore.
{113}
"They know perfectly well how little you care for them," said Alphonsine, very bitterly; "and it would be just as well if you would not go out of your way to show it."
Pierre made no answer. He shut his eyes, and put his hand to his heart as if to express the pain he was suffering.
Then taking a spade from the corner,
"I am going to work in the garden," said be, gently.
And then he went out, looking very sorrowful.
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Chapter II
Things seemed to be taking quite a dramatic turn, and I made up my mind to try hard and unravel the plot.
I followed Pierre, and having secured myself in a convenient hiding-place, determined to watch.
He walked quietly on, but soon stopped at a little vegetable garden, quite at the end of the village. At first he pretended to set to work vigorously, but his eyes kept wandering to a little rose-covered cottage within a stone's-throw of the garden. He soon left off working, and leaning listlessly on his spade, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on one of the windows, which was almost covered with the luxuriant growth of roses and honeysuckle.
As the wind played fitfully with the curtain of green which darkened the window, I fancied I recognized the shadow of a woman.
Immovable as a statue, Pierre Prévost remained where he was, and though night drew on, he did not leave his post till the heavens were bright with myriads of stars; and then swinging his spade over his shoulder, he began to retrace his steps to the village.
But, just before he left the garden, I thought I heard a bitter sigh borne on the wind from the cottage window.
The next day, when I was coming away from early mass, I saw Pierre standing in the porch of the church. The two children were clinging to one of his hands, while the other, still wet with holy water, was gently extended to a young woman who was in the act of passing before him. She was a lovely creature, with golden hair, large expressive blue eyes, and a face like one of Fra Angelico's angels. Although she could not have been less than thirty years old, she appeared to have all the lightness and vivacity of a girl of eighteen.
When their fingers met, an almost imperceptible thrill seemed to affect them both, and as they gazed into one another's faces they both turned deathly pale.
Could it have been the shadow that I recognized through the roses the evening before?
The tide came up very early that evening, and necessitated the departure of all the fishermen before night came on.
Pierre Prévost was one of the first to start, but he went a long way round to get to the sea-shore, and passed before the windows of the rose-covered cottage.
A flower fell at his feet. He picked it up eagerly, and kissing it passionately, thrust it into his bosom and hastened away.
As the evening wore on, and while the little boats were just fading away in the distance, I watched again, and distinctly saw a white handkerchief waving from the window of the pretty cottage.
I was naturally anxious to find out about this little romance, and was continually puzzling my poor brains to discover the truth of the story.
There were hundreds of people I might have asked, and, of course, Alphonsine would have been only too happy to have enlightened me. But I determined, if possible, to hear it all from Pierre's own lips, and accordingly made up my mind to stifle my idle curiosity.
{114}
Chapter III
Pierre and I soon became firm friends, and I persuaded him on one occasion to take me on one of his fishing expeditions.
It was a lovely night, the heavens were ablaze with stars, and the little boat tossed idly on the waves which scarcely rippled against its keel. Pierre's companions were asleep down in the cabin, waiting for a breeze to spring up before they could throw in their nets. As for myself, I was smoking quietly on deck, having my back against a coil of rope, and revelling in the delicious quiet which reigned around, when Pierre joined me, and having lighted his pipe, sat down by my side, and spoke, as far as I can remember, as follows:
I believe, monsieur, you are anxious to know why I am such a sad looking fellow? Perhaps you will laugh at me, but that can't be helped. I am sure you are sincere, and wish me well, and therefore I have no hesitation in opening my heart to you.
I love Marie! There is hardly any need, perhaps, to tell you that. And yet this love is the foundation of all my sorrow. But I firmly believe that the good God willed that we should love one another, and so I am content. Ever since our earliest childhood we have gone through life hand in hand. When we were little ones we always played together on the sand; and there has hardly been a pang of sorrow or a feeling of joy which has not been felt by both alike. I used to think once that we were one both in body and soul, and there are old folks in the village who have said it over and over again. We made our first communion on the same day, and at the same hour, side by side; and these little matters are bonds of union indeed, and are not easily forgotten. When I first began to seek my bread on the sea, she always offered up a little prayer for me at the cross in the village and she was ever the first to rush waist-deep into the sea to greet me on my return. And then I used to carry her on my shoulders back again, and kiss off the tears of joy which flowed down her pretty cheeks. Ah! we were happy indeed in those childish days, which are passed and gone. Why are we not always children?
And the years that followed were hardly less happy for either of us. In the cold winter-time we were always side by side in the chimney-corner. Spring saw us wandering over the fresh meadows gathering the early violets. We worked together in the harvest-field under the summer sun, and went off nutting when the brown leaves told us of the approaching autumn. And then came the time when we were both old enough to marry. We had neither of us dreamed of such a thing, and could not be persuaded that we were not still children. We were quite happy enough without troubling our heads about marriage.
However, others thought of it for us, and good Father Hermann began to be anxious that we should make up our minds.
But the matter was not so easily settled, and several obstacles soon presented themselves. To begin with, Marie's mother was rich. I was far from it, and an orphan into the bargain. I had been brought up by my brother Victoire--a splendid fellow. It was he who went with Father Hermann to Marie's mother, in order boldly to talk over our marriage, which they were all so anxious about.
"I had always made up my mind that Marie should never marry any one who had not quite as much as herself," replied she, "and that was her dear father's wish. However, I am sure you speak truly when you say that they both love one another very dearly. Let it be as you say."
The old lady had a kind warm heart
[As he said these last words, Pierre's voice thickened, and I noticed a tear trickling down his honest brown face. But my sailor was a {115} brave fellow, and I had hardly time to shake him warmly by the hand before he had quite mastered his grief, and was able to go on with his story.]
Marie and I were not the only happy ones then, I can assure you. Victoire, my brother. Father Hermann, the whole village in fact, for we were both very popular, rejoiced with us. It was the week before the marriage. Of course I had not gone to sea. Victoire was also very anxious to remain; however, his wife persuaded him to go. Several in the village found fault with her for doing so, on the pretext that working at a festal time was very bad luck; but they had no right to say so. Victoire's children were very young, and had to be provided for; and so Victoire went. In the evening great black clouds darkened the sky. We were evidently threatened with a dreadful storm. But we were enjoying ourselves too much to think of storms or friends at sea. All at once there was a vivid flash of lightning and then a peal of thunder, which seemed to shake every cottage to its foundation. And then came piercing cries:
"A boat in distress, and threatened with instant destruction!"
It was Victoire's boat!
I was on the shore in an instant What an awful storm! Never in my whole life had I seen its equal.
All that was in a man's power I did, you may be quite sure. Three times I dashed madly into the waves, only to be thrown back by the fury of the sea. The last time I was all but lost myself. However, I was rescued and brought back to the shore, bruised and insensible. Some thought me dead. Would that I had been, and had out side by side with that other body stretched lifeless on the rocks!
It was Victoire!
When I came to myself he was near me, quite still, and covered with blood; but with just enough breath left to whisper in my ear:
"Pierre, my boy, be a brother to my wife, a father to my children. God bless you, boy."
"Victoire," answered I, "I swear it."
And then he died without a murmur.
Chapter IV
Of course you will guess, monsieur, that this awful affair was the means of putting off our marriage. Marie and I neither of us complained, but consoled ourselves with the reflection that all would soon be well. I took up my position in my brother's house, and warmly kissed my brother's children, now mine. Alphonsine tried to show her gratitude as well as she could. And so six months slipped away, and the villagers began talking again about our marriage. I don't know how it was, but I began to feel very nervous and uneasy about the matter, and I did not so much as dare broach the subject either to Alphonsine or Marie's mother. In a little time the latter began the subject herself.
"Pierre," said she, "you have adopted your brother's children, have you not?"
"Yes, mother."
"And his wife also?"
"Yes; I must take care of his wife quite as much as her children."
"You have quite made up your mind?"
"Perfectly."
"Am I to understand that you never mean to leave them?"
"I swore I would not to my brother before he died."
Then there was a silence, and my heart beat very quick.
"Listen, Pierre," said the old woman; "don't think that I wish to deprive the widow or the orphans of one morsel of the sustenance you intend to set aside for them. Even if I did, your good heart would hardly listen to me. But you must understand that I know Alphonsine. {116} My daughter can never live with Alphonsine; and Alphonsine can never live with me. Never!"
This last word seemed to open an abyss before my very feet. I too knew Alphonsine. I too began now to understand that either of these arrangements would be perfectly impracticable.
"Mother," I began--
"I don't wish to hinder jour marriage," replied the old lady, very slowly; "I simply impose one condition. You must be quite aware that in this matter my will must be law."
Still I hesitated.
"It will be for you then to decide your own fate," added she; "and my daughter's as well."
I raised my head. Marie was there, and our eyes met. I must break my oath or lose her for ever.
It is absolute torture to recall those fearful moments. My head seemed to swim round, and when I tried to speak, there was something in my throat which nearly choked me. And still Marie looked at me; and oh, how tenderly!
"Pierre," said the old lady again, "you must answer; will you remain alone with Alphonsine, or will you come here alone? Choose for yourself."
I looked at Marie again, and was on the point of exclaiming, "I must come here!" but the words again stuck in my throat, and my tongue refused to speak. And then I began to ease my conscience with the thought that I could still work for Victoire's wife and children, and tried to think they would be equally happy, although I was not always with them. But then I thought of that dreadful night, and the storm, and the pale face, and the whisper in my ear came back again, and I fancied I heard my brother say, "It was not that you promised me, my brother; it was not that!"
At last the bitter words rose to my mouth, and in a hollow voice I answered:
"I must keep my oath!" And then, like a drunken man, I fell prostrate on the floor.
When I recovered she was near me still, and her sweet voice whispered in my ear,
"Thank God, Pierre, you are an honest man!"
Those words were my only comfort in the long dreary year which followed that fearful day. I was never myself again. I tried to rouse myself up, and take some interest in my daily work, and did my best to appear cheerful and contented at home, but I was not the same man that I used to be. The children were a great comfort to me when I was at home; but the long hopeless days and the dark dreary nights were miserable enough, God knows. I seemed to dream away my life.
I thought it best to keep away from Marie, as a meeting would be painful to both. And so we never met.
At last a report got about the village that Marie was going to be married.
I could no longer keep away from her now, and she, too, appeared anxious that we should meet. In a very few days we were once more side by side.
There was no need of me to speak. She read my question in my eyes: of her own accord she answered:
"Yes, Pierre, it is quite true."
"But, Pierre," added she in tears, "I am yours, and must be yours for ever. Unless I can get you to say, Marry Jacques, I will remain single all my life. But my mother begs me to get married; and what can I do? She is very old, and very ill just now. I feel I too have got a duty to fulfil."
I uttered a cry of despair.
"Pierre," said Marie, still weeping, "you must know how dearly I love you. My fate is that I must love you still. But, for all that, Pierre, I cannot let my mother die."
I could not bear to hear her weep; but what comfort could I give? At last the devil entered into my heart, {117} and I broke forth in bitter curses at my fate, and what I chose to call her inconstancy.
"I don't deserve this," said Marie very softly; "and I hardly expected that I should ever hear these words from your lips. Still, I believe you love me, after all. I hope you will feel, when you think over all that has passed, that I am not heartless, and that I deserve some answer to the question which my lips almost refuse to ask. You will give me an answer, I am sure, by-and-by."
And then she left me, half-mad as I was, lying coiled up in a heap at the roadside.
During the next few days I did reflect. If I could not marry Marie myself, had I any right to hinder her marriage with another? Was I justified in preparing for her a life of solitude, and in depriving her of a mother's care? And then, again, I began to perceive that no one was at all inclined to take my part in the village. My popularity was fast declining, since no one could look into my heart, or could have the least idea what I had suffered, or knew what had actually taken place. I was pitied, but considered very selfish. I was continually told that Marie's mother was ailing sadly, and that she had deserved better treatment at my hands.
At last Father Hermann comforted me, and benefitting by his good advice and by the help of our holy religion, I began to be in a better frame of mind.
I made up my mind to give Marie her freedom. But I could not bear to see her again, and so I wrote.
Chapter V
The marriage between Jaques and Marie was soon arranged, and soon the second festal day came round.
In the morning I put out to sea as usual; but as the evening wore on, I found I was under the influence of a spell and that it was quite impossible for me to remain where I was. Accordingly I returned; and, led on by the spell and attracted like a moth to the candle, wended my way to the rejoicings, in order that I might torture myself for the lost time.
I have heard of the agonies of the rack, of the thumb-screw, of saints being boiled in oil and crucified, and many other dreadful horrors; but I very much doubt if any martyr ever suffered the agony that I did that night.
It was in the dusk of the evening, and Marie was just finishing a song, while all were resting from the dances which had followed one another in quick succession. She was just singing the last verse, in which my name was accidentally introduced, when a sailor who was just behind me struck a match in order to light his pipe. The light exposed me to the view of the whole company. Directly Marie saw me, she uttered a piercing cry and fainted away. I rushed toward her, not thinking what I was doing. But Jaques was at her side before me. Instead, however, of showing the least jealousy or putting himself in a passion, he grasped me warmly by the hand, and then looked tenderly at Marie, who now began to revive.
"Never fear, and keep up a good heart," said he, in a strange kind of voice. You would never guess what he did, and perhaps will hardly believe when I tell you.
Ordinarily a very temperate, steady man, he astonished the company by giving out that he intended to throw a little life into the fête. On this he ordered wine and cider, and lastly a plentiful supply of brandy.
In a very little time he was helplessly drunk, or at least pretended to be so. As the evening wore on, he got from bad to worse, insulted and quarrelled with the men, and fairly disgusted the women. The village was in an uproar, and there was not a soul who did not speak in strong terms of the disgraceful conduct of Jaques. At the earnest entreaty of the worthy {118} fellow we kept our counsel, and accordingly the new marriage was at once broken off.
The rest of my story you know almost as well as I do myself. You see my life from day to day. You can picture to yourself my sorrow and my unhappy position. You can see how little she has changed.
And yet we can never be more to one another than we are now. Never. Never! We are married, and yet we are not. We are separated, alas, here on earth, but we must be united in heaven. Think of the years that have passed, and think how happy we might have been, and what a thread there was between our present existence and the life we long to lead. God's will be done!
Poor Pierre here let his head fall into his hands, and wept in silence.
How could I comfort the poor fellow?
It was not the kind of grief that needed consolation, and so I let him weep on.
All at once a breeze sprung up and filled the sails. Pierre immediately roused himself, but soon relapsed into his accustomed calm quiet manner.
Both the other sailors now came on deck, the nets were thrown over, and the business of the night began.
Chapter VI
Three years afterward, by the merest accident in the world, I happened to return to my favorite little village. There was evidently some excitement going on, and as I chanced to recognize my old friend Father Hermann, I went up and renewed our acquaintance.
"What is the matter?" said he; "why you do not mean to say you don't know?"
"Not in the least."
"Why your old friend Alphonsine has been dead six months."
"I really don't see why the worthy inhabitants of the village should rejoice at that," said I.
"A great obstacle has been removed," said the father; "don't you remember?"
"Of course; and what has followed?"
"The marriage of Pierre Prévost and Marie!"
I was not long in accompanying Father Hermann to the cottage in which my old friends were receiving the warm congratulations of their friends and neighbors.
They recognized me at once, and insisted that I should be present at the entertainment which was to follow in the course of the day. Of course I accepted the invitation. I never remember having enjoyed myself so much, and am quite certain that I spoke from my heart when I proposed, in my very best French, the healths of la belle Marie and Pierre Prévost.
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{119}
From The Popular Science Review.
INSIDE THE EYE: THE OPHTHALMOSCOPE AND ITS' USES.
BY ERNEST HART, OPHTHALMIC SURGEON.
There are few spectacles more affecting--and there were few more hopelessly distressing--than that which many have seen, of the blind man, with eyes unaltered in their human aspect of beauty, searching vainly to penetrate the unchangeable darkness of a noonday, bright to others, and replete with the splendor of light and color. There have always been many of these sufferers from a disease which claims the most profound sympathy, and which seemed bitterly to reproach our science that it could not timely penetrate the mystery of that obscure chamber which lies behind the iris, and had found no means for enabling us to see through the clear but darkened space of the pupil. That reproach, at least, exists in part no longer. Since some few years now we have learnt how to explain the obscurity of the interior of the eye, and by what optical contrivances we can overcome this darkness and look into the depths of the ocular globe; thus inspecting with ease, and quite painlessly to the individual, the lenses and humors of the eye, the nerve of sight and its transparent retinal expansion, and even the vascular tissue which lies behind and surrounds this. This is a great triumph of physical science, and it is no barren triumph. The insight which we gain into the host of affections of the refracting media and deep membranes of the eye has given to our diagnosis and therapeutical treatment of the most obscure forms of disease leading to blindness, a certainty and precision to which we were formerly strangers.
The optical instrument by which we are able to effect this inspection is known by the fitting title of the Ophthalmoscope ([Greek text] the eye; [Greek text], I survey). With this instrument, the manner of using it, and its valuable applications, I am necessarily professionally much occupied in daily work; and as the editor of the "Popular Science Review" has requested me to give some plain account of the matter, I will endeavor to afford an untechnical statement of what the ophthalmoscope is, and what are some of the most useful results which have been obtained by its use.
Let me first remind the general reader that in the human eye, behind the pupillary aperture of the colored iris, which presents to the unaided eye of the observer the mere aspect of black darkness, lies, first, a clear bi-convex lens; and behind this, filling the eye, and giving to it the character of a solid ball, a transparent globular mass, known as the vitreous body, or humor. It is into a depression in the front of this that the aforesaid lens is fitted, so that the whole space of the eye behind the iris is filled by the lens and vitreous body. The optic nerve, or nerve of sight, which pierces the tunics of the eye at the back and near the centre, spreads out and forms an expanded tunic of nerve-structure which enwraps the vitreous body as far as its most forward edge, where the colored iris descends in front of it. Enwrapping again this nerve-tunic or retina is a vestment, chiefly made of blood-vessels, connected by fine tissue and thickly coated with black pigment, having its own optical uses. This second outer pigmented vascular tunic is the choroid. This again is enclosed within the external strong fibrous membrane, which includes and protects all the sclerotic membrane {120} ([Greek text], hard). These are the two humors and three tunics of the eye which can to a greater or less extent be examined during life by the aid of the ophthalmoscope.
They can all be more or less investigated in the living eye by the aid of the ophthalmoscope, because by the aid of this instrument we are able to see through the pupillary space. If one considers what is the reason of the apparent darkness of the pupillary aperture and the chambers of the eye behind it, it is not difficult to gain an idea of the means by which this optical condition may be altered so as to enable us to see where all seem to the unaided vision obscure.
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This darkness of the pupillary aperture is attributable partly to obvious causes, such as the natural contraction of the pupil or iris which occurs under light--this contraction limiting the number of rays which can enter the eye. Then that black pigment which lines the iris absorbs a great deal of light; and thus, as in the case of albinos, whose eyes are deficient in pigment, or where the pupil is dilated, either through disease or by artificial agents, these obstacles for seeing into the living eye are removed. But still the main difficulties are not cleared away; and if you take for example an albino animal, such as one of those beautiful little white-furred rabbits, whose rosy eyes look like fiery opals edged with swan's down, and dilate the pupils with atropine, it is still not possible to see clearly the details of the structure within and at the back of the eye. This is by reason of the structure of the eye as an optical instrument, and because the rays of light in entering and in emerging from it undergo refraction, according to definite laws. The light which penetrates the eye traverses the transparent retina, producing the impression necessary for sight, and is partly absorbed by the black pigment of the choroid; but a great number of the rays are reflected; for here there is no exception to the general rule that some of the rays of light falling upon any substance are always reflected. These rays, in returning, are refracted through the vitreous body and lens, just as they were in entering the eye, with the object then of causing them so to converge as to produce upon the retina a clear and definite image of whatever external object they started from. Similarly, then, on their emergence they are refracted chiefly by the lens and cornea, so as to form an image in the outer air, the emergent rays coinciding in their path with that which they took when entering, and the image formed in the air being conjugated with the retinal image; being formed, therefore, on the same side, varying with the position of the lens and object, and the accommodation of the eye. Thus, then, to perceive this aerial image, derived from the retinal reflection, the eye of the observer needs to be placed in the axis of the converging rays; but since this is also the axis of the entering rays, he will of necessity in that position cut off those rays altogether of the light proceeding, say, from a lamp, or the source of light opposite to the eye to be illuminated.
The problem to be solved consists, then, in the simple illumination of the eye to be observed by a source of light so arranged that the observer can be placed in the axis of the rays entering and emerging without intercepting those rays. This may be most conveniently effected by placing the source of light aside of the eye to be observed, and observing through a pierced concave mirror, which reflects that light into the eye. We can then, by looking through the central aperture of this mirror, place ourself in the path of the entering and emerging rays. The mirror becomes the source of light to the observed eye; the rays which it flashed into the eye emerge {122} in part, and return along the same path, forming the aerial image at a distance and under circumstances regulated by the optical conditions of the eye observed, and within view of the observer who is looking through the mirror. A very simple diagram will suffice to explain this: r a is the circle of diffusion of the retina, and the lines indicate how the reflected rays will pass through the media of the eye, and form at r' a' real enlarged but inverted image of the fundus of the eye. This will be placed at the distance of distinct vision of the subject, and has relation to the accommodation of the eye.
As these are variable quantities, the practice of ophthalmoscopy demands a little address, which habit quickly gives. It is for want of understanding this, and from impatience of these preliminary difficulties, that many have been discouraged at the outset, and have abandoned unwisely the attempt to learn the use of the ophthalmoscope.
The image obtained in the way mentioned is not so distinct as to give that full perception of details which is necessary for scientific and medical purposes. A more defined image is obtained by interposing, for example, a bi-convex lens on the path of the luminous rays emerging from the eye observed. The effect of holding such a lens of short focus before the observed eye whilst examining it with a concave ophthalmoscopic mirror is to cause the rays emerging from the eye to undergo a further refraction, and to modify the actual image which they form, producing one which is smaller, more defined, but still inverted. This is the most simple and one of the most satisfactory methods of exploring the eye with the ophthalmoscope. It is that of the most general and easy application, and I will, therefore, add a few words to explain how it may most conveniently be practised.
We will suppose that it is the human eye which is to be examined. The room is to be made dark; the person to be seated; a light--the white flame of an oil-lamp or an Argand gas-burner--to be placed near his head, on the side, and at the level of the eye to be observed. The observer takes then the concave mirror in the hand of the side toward the lamp, and placing it against the front of his eye, so that the upper edge rests against his eyebrow, brings his head to the level of that of the person seated, looks through the central perforation at the eye to be observed, and by a little careful change in the direction of the mirror casts, by its aid, upon the eye examined the light of the lamp.
He will now perceive that the pupillary aperture is illuminated, and, no longer black, shines with a silvery or reddened light. He takes now the bi-convex lens of short focus in the hand hitherto free, and places it in front of the examined eye, and at such a distance as to make the focus of the lens coincide with the pupil of that eye --distance varying from two to three inches. He himself will usually need to be at a distance from twelve to eighteen inches. This is for normal eyes. The slight movements backward and forward necessary to adjust these distances correctly, are effected very easily and precisely after practice; but at first it is a little difficult to avoid changing the direction of the mirror while thus slightly advancing or retiring the head; and this is a point on which it is well to give a warning, for it is a frequent source of discouragement to beginners, who find that at every movement they interfere with the illumination of the eye, and so suffer from a series of little failures at the outset. The first thing, in fact, that every one sees amounts to a little more than a red, luminous disc; those who begin by seeing nothing more, therefore, need not to be discouraged; a little patience and time will enable them to see what more practised persons describe. The eye to be examined may be more fully observed by dilating the pupil {123} with atropine--a drop of a solution, one grain to a pint of water, or one of the atropized gelatines prepared for me by Savory and Moore, each of which contains one hundred thousandth of a grain of atropine, and will maintain dilation during several hours. This acts also perfectly well with rabbits or cats.
The first thing seen is the red reflection of the choroidal vessels showing through the transparent retina; and when the eye observed is directed upward and inward, we see the usually circular disc of the optic nerve, encircled by a double ring, cream-colored, or very faintly roseate or grey, and surrounded by the red choroid. The two rings are the apertures in the choroid and sclerotic, of which the former is the smaller. From out this disc we see springing the retinal artery and retinal veins, sometimes centric, at others excentric, in their passage. The artery is easily recognized as being somewhat smaller in calibre, and of a lighter red. The artery usually divides into a superior and inferior branch, each of which subdivides forthwith into two secondary branches, and these again continue to subdivide, dichotomously, running forward to the anterior limits of the retina. The veins, which are somewhat larger and deeper colored, usually pierce the disc of the optic nerve in two trunks. Pulsation may occasionally be detected in the veins by watching carefully their color, which seems to change at each impulse just where they pass over the edge of the optic disc and bend to pierce the nerve.
Fuller details of the ophthalmoscopic appearances of healthy eyes, both human and animal, will be found in Zander's treatise, excellently edited and translated by Mr. R. B. Carter, of Stroud. In the healthy eye the aqueous humor, lens, and vitreous humor are clear, and do not in any way obstruct the passage of the light. It is otherwise in disease; and this brings us to the discussion of some of the practical applications of the ophthalmoscope. Here, perhaps, I may be permitted to quote some of the {124} paragraphs of a paper which I read lately on the subject before the Hanveian Society:
"Taking up the diagnosis of the various forms of disease any of which would have been held to constitute the condition known as amaurosis, it may be noted, first of all, that even in the hands of the novice ophthalmoscopic examination supersedes those chapters in ophthalmology which were formerly devoted to the means of distinguishing between incipient cataract and amaurosis. In the past, and even at present, with those surgeons who are content to treat deep-seated diseases of the eye by guessing at their nature, and have not adopted the systematic use of the ophthalmoscope into their practice, the functional annoyances which commonly occur at the outset of the formation of lenticular cataract, have been, and are, fertile sources of deception. The patient complains of frontal pain, of confused vision, stars of light, and some other vague symptoms which characterize the outset alike of many forms of deep-seated disease of the eye, and of the fatty degeneration of the lens which commonly gives rise to lenticular cataract, probably from coincident swelling of the lens. An error arising from this source has many times condemned the unfortunate subject of a commencing cataract to the severe treatment thought appropriate to the unhappy class of amaurotics. The kind of alteration in the lens, imperceptible by any other means than the ophthalmoscope, is the slightly opaque striation of the substance of the lens sometimes seen in an early stage. These opaque striae may occupy either the anterior or the posterior segment of the lens, and spring from the centre of the crystalline or converge toward the centre from the circumference. In order to see the latter, the pupil must be fully dilated with atropine; as, indeed, for the purposes of complete ophthalmoscopic examination it always needs to be; and then, just as the greatest expert cannot discover them except by ophthalmoscopic illumination, so, neither with its aid, can they be passed over with ordinary care. In order to be quite sure in any delicate case, it is well to lower the light a little, and use only a feebly illuminating power, as a very strong light may overpower a {125} commencing opacity, and render us unable to detect the striae. This practical caution applies equally to all other conditions of opacity in the transparent media. In two cases, lately, I have been able to set at rest doubts of this kind, which happened to be in the persons of medical men, who were much disquieted by the symptoms--one a member of this society. In a third case I have recently detected incipient cataract (peripheric striae) in a gentleman supposed to be suffering from commencing glaucoma.
"It is of frequent occurrence to find the capsule of the lens stained with black spots; these are stains left by the uveal pigment, and occur usually after an attack of iritis, when the iris has been in contact with the lens. When the iris has been adherent, a complete ring of pigment may often be seen on the surface of the lens. A day's experience at any ophthalmic clinique can mostly show examples of this condition; but it is only when these deposits are numerous, and in the central line of vision, that they become troublesome. They are then met with as the sequences of severe choroido-iritis, and usually coincide with further mischief in the vitreous and choroid.
"The vitreous, under the influence most commonly of choroiditis, and usually syphilitic choroiditis, presents alterations of the most striking character for ophthalmoscopic observation. The patients who offer these changes complain usually of considerable dimness of sight, which on examination is found to include both diminution in the acuteness of visual perception, and restriction in the field of vision, or extent of any object seen at once. The great source of trouble to them is, that when they lift the eye or move the head, black corpuscles, or streaks, or webs float before their eyes, and obscure the object at which they are looking; and when the eyes are kept still, these fall again and disappear. Examine now the eyes of such an one, and you will see that the phenomena described are due to the existence of actual shreds, corpuscles, or webs of fibrous and albuminous exudation, which float in the vitreous, and at each motion of the eye rise in clouds and obscure the fundus, so that you can barely see it, or perhaps not at all. These conditions, I say, are mostly specific, but not invariably. They are sometimes the result of scrofula, and probably of other forms of choroiditis."
Here, then, are a large number of cases in which the ophthalmoscope transports us at once from the regions of the known to the unknown. There are other classes of cases equally striking. Let me take illustrative examples. Two persons apply for advice, complaining that the sight has been gradually growing more and more dim, perhaps in one eye,--it may be in both. The progress of the disease has been insidious and nearly painless. The eyes are to all external appearance healthy, except probably that in both patients the pupils are partially dilated and sluggish. The ophthalmoscope helps us to solve the problem.
The one is a case, it may be, of slow atrophy of the optic nerve, proceeding from central disease of the brain--from pressure on the optic tracts of nerve within the skull, or from defective nutrition following losses of blood. We find the nerve glistening white and slightly cupped, the arteries small, the fundus otherwise healthy. In the other we recognize at once, in the fulness of the veins, their pulsation, and the marked excavation of the optic disc, the indications of excessive tension of the eyeball and undue pressure of the nerve. The first requires careful constitutional treatment and a long course of studied hygiene and medication; the second calls for direct and immediate interference, with the view of relieving the intra-ocular pressure. In the diagnosis of this great class of glaucomatous disease of the eye--disease {126} characterized of loss of vision, sometimes slow and sometimes rapid, but always characterized by definite ophthalmoscopic signs: cupping of the disc, pulsation, fullness of the veins, and it may be more or less haziness of the transparent media--ophthalmoscopy has rendered a most brilliant and inestimable service. Prior to the introduction of the use of this instrument the disease was of an unknown pathology; its results were fatal to vision, but there were no means of diagnosing the conditions attending the earlier stages, and blindness followed almost certainly and inevitably. The investigation of the disease has brought us a remedy in the excision of a portion of the iris--a practice introduced by Von Gräfe, of Berlin, and of which the success is in suitable cases most gratifying.
Another series of examples may be chosen to illustrate the application of ophthalmoscopy. I avoid giving details here, but it is perhaps right to say that these are not fanciful sketches, but notices of cases in my experience and taken from my note-books of practice. Two persons are asking for advice as to the management of their eyes for short-sightedness. Are both to receive the same advice? The ophthalmoscope alone can furnish positive data. With this we may discover a staphylomatous condition of the back of the eye, a bright excentric margin around the optic disc and edge with black pigment. Examining it closely, we may find that this pigmented edge gives evidence of progressive inflammation at the back of the eye, and extending to continuous and increasing atrophy and retrocession of the coats of the eye. This person is in danger of becoming rapidly made short-sighted or of losing sight altogether. We must prohibit the use of concave glasses for a certain length of time, and must adopt active and effectual measures for subduing the atrophic inflammation. In the other patient the ophthalmoscope may show us but little stretching or waste, and that not progressive, and will enable us then to calm his fears, to prescribe appropriate glasses, and to dismiss him to his occupation with ease of mind and safety. So with sudden lose of sight from intra-ocular haemorrhage, the ophthalmoscope gives us information which could never have been guessed at without it, and guides us, not only to the local knowledge, but to the constitutional information essential for cure.
There are certain conditions of the eye which may warn any one that it is desirable that the condition of the vision ought to be investigated by the ophthalmoscope. Rapidly increasing short-sightedness is one of the most marked, and when this becomes associated with weakness of sight and loss of acuteness in the perception of small objects, the warning is very urgent. A diminution in the field of vision is another important indication of internal changes in the eye, of which only the ophthalmoscope can detect the true nature. It would be difficult, perhaps, to say whether more mischief is done and more suffering is caused by the total neglect of such symptoms or by their ignorant palliation by the aid of common spectacles, chosen empirically, because they facilitate vision for the time. The great use of the ophthalmoscope, then, is this: that it arms us with an instrument of precision, by which we can determine the precise local condition of the parts of the eye in which the function of sight is resident and through which it is regulated. If it cannot do all that we might ask, it is because the sense of sight is in truth a cerebral function, of which the eye is only an instrument; and in dealing with cerebral affections of the sight, it can indeed give us information which without it we should lack, but it leaves still to be desired more intimate acquaintance with first causes, which at present we can only discuss inferentially. To the amateur in science, and to the lover of nature, it discloses an exquisite spectacle, unknown till now, that carries {127} observation into the inner chambers of the living eye, and displays its wonders and its beauties. The observation is perfectly painless, and may easily be effected: rabbits, for example, submit to it with great calmness and composure, and at the College of Physicians' soirée last year, a little pet white rabbit of mine sat up calmly in a box which I had made for the purpose, and was examined, by the aid of a modification which I devised of Liebreich's demonstrating ophthalmoscope, by many score of observers. Mine has the advantage of being adapted for use even amid a blaze of light, and it cannot easily be disarranged; two qualities valuable in an instrument for demonstration.
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From The Lamp.
THE PILGRIMAGE TO KEVLAAR.
FROM THE GERMAN.
The mother stood at the window. The son he lay in bed; "Here's a procession, Wilhelm; Wilt not look out?" she said.
"I am so ill, my mother, In the world I have no part; I think upon dead Gretchen, And a death-pang rends my heart."
"Rise up; we will to Kevlaar; Will staff and rosary take; God's Mother there will cure thee,-- Thy sick heart whole will make."
The Church's banner fluttered, The Church's hymns arose; And unto fair Cöln city The long procession goes.
The mother joined the pilgrims, Her sick son leadeth she; And both sing in the chorus, "Gelobt seyst du, Marie!" [Footnote 22]
[Footnote 22: "Praised be thou, Mary!"]
II.
The holy Mother in Kevlaar To-day is well arrayed,-- To-day hath much to busy her. For many sick ask her aid.
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And many sick people bring her Such offerings as are meet; Many waxen limbs they bring her, Many waxen hands and feet.
And who a wax hand bringeth, His hand is healed that day; And who a wax foot bringeth, With sound feet goes away.
Many went there on crutches Who now on the rope can spring; Many play now on the viol Whose hands could not touch a string.
The mother she took a waxen light. And shaped therefrom a heart; "Take that to the Mother of Christ," she said, "And she will heal thy smart."
He sighed, and took the waxen heart, And went to the church in woe; The tears from his eyes fell streaming, The words from his heart came low.
"Thou that art highly blessed, Thou Mother of Christ!" said he; "Thou that art queen of heaven, I bring my griefs to thee.
I dwell in Cöln with my mother; In Cöln upon the Rhine, Where so many hundred chapels And so many churches shine.
And near unto us dwelt Gretchen; But dead is Gretchen now. Marie, I bring a waxen heart,-- My heart's despair heal thou.
Heal thou my sore heart-sickness; So I will sing to thee Early and late with fervent love, "Gelobt seyst du, Marie!"
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III.
The sick son and the mother In one chamber slept that night; And the holy Mother of Jesus Gild in with footsteps light
She bowed her over the sick man's bed, And one there hand did lay Upon his throbbing bosom, Then smiled and passed away.
It seemed a dream to the mother, And she had yet seen more But that her sleep was broken, For the dogs howled at the door.
Upon his bed extended Her son lay, and was dead; And o'er his thin pale visage streamed The morning's lovely red.
Her hands the mother folded. Yet not a tear wept she; But sang in low devotion, "Gelobt seyst du, Marie!"
MARY HOWITT.
------
From The Reader.
THE ANCIENT LAWS OF IRELAND.
Ancient Laws of Ireland. Vol. I. Printed for Her Majesty's Stationery Office. (London: Longman. Dublin: Thorn.)
This is a curious book, throwing some glimmerings of light upon a very remote and obscure period of Irish history. In 1852 a government commission, called the "Brehon Law Commission," was issued to the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Lord Rosse, Dean Graves, Dr. Petrie, and others, appointing them to carry into effect the selection, transcription, and translation of certain documents in the Gaelic tongue containing portions of the ancient laws of Ireland, and the preparation of the same for publication. In pursuance of this, the commissioners employed Dr. O'Donovan and Professor O'Curry, two Gaelic scholars of high distinction, to transcribe and translate various law tracts in the Irish language in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, of the Royal Irish Academy, of the British Museum, and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The transcriptions occupy more than 5,000 manuscript pages, including all the law tracts which it was thought necessary to publish, and have nearly all been translated; but the two chosen scholars did not live to complete and revise their translations. The portion now published was prepared for the press by W. Neilson, Hancock, LL.D., first in conjunction with Dr. O'Donovan, and, after his death, with the Rev. Mr. O'Mahony, professor of Irish in the university of Dublin. It is a volume of some 300 pages, the Irish on one page and the translation opposite, containing the first part of the Senchus Mor (we are not told how much is to follow), treating of the law of distress or distraint, with an Irish introduction, and various Irish glosses and commentaries on the text.
The title Senchus Mor (pronounced "Shanchus Môr") for which seven or {130} eight different derivations are suggested, appears to mean "the great old laws," or "the great old decisions." The chief manuscripts of it which are known to exist are three in Trinity College, Dublin, and one in the Harleian collection in the British Museum, and the earliest of these is assigned to circa A.D. 1300. But quotations from the Senchus Mor are found in "Cormac's Glossary," the greater part of which was probably composed in the ninth or tenth century, and the date of the original compilation is put by good judges, on various evidence, at A.D. 438 to 441. It is, in short, a codification and revision, under the direction of St. Patrick, of the judgments of the pagan Brehons. Three kings, three poets, and three Christian missionaries (of whom Patrick was one) were combined in this work, and the code then established remained the national law of Ireland for nearly twelve centuries. The pagan laws embodied in this revised code were in force during a period of unknown antiquity, prior to the introduction of Christianity to the island.
"The Senchus Mor has been selected by the commissioners for early publication as being one of the oldest and one of the most important portions of the ancient laws of Ireland which have been preserved. It exhibits the remarkable modification which these laws of pagan origin underwent, in the fifth century, on the conversion of the Irish to Christianity.
"This modification was ascribed so entirely to the influence of St. Patrick that the Senchus Mor is described as having been called in after times 'Cain Patraic,' or Patrick's law.
"The Senchus Mor was so much revered, that the Irish judges, called Brehons, were not authorized to abrogate anything contained in it.
"The original text, of high antiquity, has been made the subject of glosses and commentaries of more recent date; and the Senchus Mor would appear to have maintained its authority among the native Irish until the beginning of the seventeenth century, or for a period of 1,200 years.
"The English law, introduced by King Henry the Second in the twelfth century, for many years scarcely prevailed beyond the narrow limits of the English pale (comprising the present counties of Louth, Meath, Westmeath, Kildare, Dublin, and Wicklow). Throughout the rest of Ireland the Brehons still administered their ancient laws amongst the native Irish, who were practically excluded from the privileges of the English law. The Anglo-Irish, too, adopted the Irish laws to such an extent that efforts were made to prevent their doing so by enactments first passed at the parliament of Kilkenny in the fortieth year of King Edward III. (1367), and subsequently renewed by Stat. Henry VII., c. 8, in 1495. So late as the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years of the reign of King Henry VIII. (1534) George Cromer, archbishop of Armagh and primate of Ireland, obtained a formal pardon for having used the Brehon laws. In the reign of Queen Mary, 1554, the Earl of Kildare obtained an eric of 340 cows for the death of his foster-brother, Robert Nugent, under the Brehon law.
"The authority of the Brehon laws continued until the power of the Irish chieftains was finally broken in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and all the Irish were received into the king's immediate protection by the proclamation of James I. This proclamation, followed as it was by the complete division of Ireland into counties, and the administration of the English laws throughout the entire country, terminated at once the necessity for, and the authority of, the ancient Irish laws.
"The wars of Cromwell, the policy pursued by King Charles II. at the restoration, and the results of the revolution of 1688, prevented any revival of the Irish laws; and before the end of the seventeenth century the whole race of judges (Brehons) and professors (Ollamhs) of the Irish laws appears to have become extinct."
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Portions of the text of the Senchus Mor, as we now have it, are held by Gaelic scholars to be in the language of the fifth century, in what was called the Bérla Feini dialect; other portions translated from that ancient form into Gaelic of the thirteenth century. Various ancient Irish glosses and commentaries accompany the text, and also an introduction of high antiquity, giving an account of the origin of the Senchus Mor.
"Patrick came to Erin to baptize and to disseminate religion among the Gaeidhil--i.e., in the ninth year of, the reign of Theodosius, and in the fourth year of the reign of Laeghairè [pronounced Layorie or Layrie], son of Niall; king of Erin." The combination of the Roman pagan laws with Christian doctrine in the Theodosian code received imperial sanction in A.D. 438, and was at once adopted both in the eastern and western empires. St. Patrick, Dr. Hancock remarks, a Roman citizen, a native of a Roman province, and an eminent Christian missionary, would be certain to obtain early intelligence of the great reform of the laws of the empire and of the great triumph of the Christian church. Having now been six years in Erin, and established his influence there, he attempted successfully a similar reform in that remote island, and the composition of the Senchus Mor was accordingly commenced in that same year, 438, and completed in about four years.
"In ancient Irish books the name of the place where they were composed is usually mentioned. The introduction to the Senchus Mor contains this information, but is very peculiar in representing the book as having been composed at different places in different seasons of the year: 'It was Teamhair in the summer and in the autumn, on account of its cleanness and pleasantness during these seasons; and Rath-guthaird was the place during the winter and the spring, on account of the nearness of its fire-wood and water, and on account of its warmth in the time of winter's cold.'
"Teamhair, now Tara, was, at the time the Senchus Mor was composed, the residence of King Laeghairè, the monarch of Erin, and of his chief poet Dubhthach Mac ua Lugair, who took such a leading part in the work.
"Teamhair ceased to be the residence of the kings of Ireland after the death of King Dermot, in A.D. 565, about a century and a quarter after the Senchus Mor was composed. Remains are, after the lapse of nearly 1,400 years, to be still found, the most remarkable of their kind in Ireland, which attest the ancient importance of the place."
In the introduction a curious account is given of St. Patrick's manner of dealing with the existing "professors of the sciences," and his admission of the claim of inspiration on behalf of his pagan predecessors.
"Patrick requested of the men of Erin to come to one place to hold a conference with him. When they came to the conference the gospel of Christ was preached to them all; and when the men of Erin heard of the killing of the living and the resuscitation of the dead, and all the power of Patrick since his arrival in Erin, and when they saw Laeghairè with his Druids overcome by the great signs and miracles wrought in the presence of the men in Erin, they bowed down, in obedience to the will of God and Patrick.
"Then Laeghairè said: 'It is necessary for you, O men of Erin, that every other law should be settled and arranged by us, as well as this.' 'It is better to do so,' said Patrick. It was then that all the professors of the sciences in Erin were assembled and each of them exhibited his art before Patrick, in the presence of every chief in Erin.
"It was then that Dubhthach was ordered to exhibit the judgments and all the poetry of Erin, and every law which prevailed among the men of Erin, through the law of nature, and {132} the law of the seers, and in the judgments of the island of Erin, and in the poets.
"They had foretold that the bright word of blessing would come--i.e., the law of the letter; for it was the Holy Spirit that spoke and prophesied through the mouths of the just men who were formerly in the island of Erin, as he had prophesied through the mouths of the chief prophets and noble fathers in the patriarchal law; for the law of nature had prevailed where the written law did not reach.
"Now the judgments of true nature which the Holy Ghost had spoken through the mouths of the Brehons and just poets of the men of Erin, from the first occupation of this island down to the reception of the faith, were all exhibited by Dubhthach to Patrick. What did not clash with the Word of God in the written law and in the New Testament, and with the consciences of the believers, was confirmed in the laws of the Brehons by Patrick and by the ecclesiastics and the chieftains of Erin; for the law of nature had been quite right, except the faith and its obligations, and the harmony of the church and the people. And this is the Senchus Mor.
"Nine persons were appointed to arrange this book--viz., Patrick, and Benen, and Cairnech, three bishops; Laeghairè, and Corc, and Dairè, three kings; Rosa--i.e., Mac-Trechim, and Dubhthach--i.e., a doctor of the Bérla Feini, and Fergus--i.e., a poet.
"Nofis, therefore, is the name of this book which they arranged--i.e., the knowledge of nine persons--and we have the proof of this above."
And in one of the ancient commentaries on the introduction we are told:
"Before the coming of Patrick there had been remarkable revelations. When the Brehons deviated from the truth of nature, there appeared blotches upon their cheeks; as first of all on the right cheek of Sen Mac Aige, whenever he pronounced a false judgment, but they disappeared again when he had passed a true judgment, etc.
"Connla never passed a false judgment, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, which was upon him.
"Sencha Mac Col Cluin was not wont to pass judgment until he had pondered upon it in his breast the night before. When Fachtna, his son, had passed a false judgment, if, in the time of fruit, all the fruit of the territory in which it happened fell off in one night, etc.; if in time of milk, the cows refused their calves; but if he passed a true judgment the fruit was perfect on the trees; hence he received the name of Fachtna Tulbrethach.
"Sencha Mac Aililla never pronounced a false judgment without getting three permanent blotches on his face for each judgment. Fitliel had the truth of nature, so that he pronounced no false judgment. Morann never pronounced a judgment without having a chain around his neck. 'When he pronounced a false judgment the chain tightened around his neck. If he passed a true one it expanded down upon him."
Corc and Dairè were territorial chieftains, or minor kings. Laeghairè, son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, was monarch of Erin; his reign commenced A.D. 428, four years before the arrival of Patrick, and ended with his life in 458, one year after the foundation of Armagh by that great Christian missionary. Laeghairè is usually called the first Christian king of Ireland, but it seems more likely from the evidence we have that he himself did not become a Christian, although he acknowledged the merit of St. Patrick, and gave him permission to preach and baptize, on condition that the peace of the kingdom should not be disturbed. Travellers in our time, by mail-steamers from Holyhead and the Island of Druids, may some of them not know that Kingstown is a name given, but a few years ago, to "Dunleary"--that is, the fortress of King Laeghairè, when George IV., by graciously landing there, supplanted the {133} memory of the ancient king. Dubhthach, Fergus, and Rossa, or Rosa, were eminent poets and learned men; they exhibited "from memory what their predecessors had sung"--for much of the ancient law was preserved in the form of verse, and Dubhthach, "royal poet of Erin," at the compilation of the Senchus Mor, put a thread of poetry round it for Patrick. Many parts of the work as we have it are in verse.
The subject of that part of the Senchus Mor which is contained in the volume before us is the "Law of Distress"--that is, the legal rules under which distraint was to be made of persons, cattle, or goods, in a great variety of cases. To a general reader, the legal verbosity and trivial repetitions make the book hard to read; but imbedded in it, so to speak, are many curious little fragments of a very remote and obscure social system, and some of these we shall proceed to set before our readers.
Fines in cases of death, bodily hurt, insult, or injury of whatever kind were arranged according to the dignity of the parties concerned. The "honor-price" is the same for a king, a bishop, a chief law-professor, and a chief poet who can compose a quatrain extemporaneously.
At a feast, "his own proper kind of food" is assigned to persons of different rank--as, for example, the haunch for the king, bishop, and literary doctor; a leg for the young chief; a steak for the queen; the heads for the charioteers; and a croichet [unknown part] for "a king opposed in his government."
Should a person have property, it shall not increase his honor-price, unless he do good with it.
A king with a personal blemish was allowed with difficulty, if at all.
In case of distress by or on a person of distinction, fasting was a necessary legal form--the creditor had to "fast upon" his debtor until a pledge was given for the claim. Something very similar to this curious process is found in the ancient Hindoo laws, and appears to be practised in India to the present day, under the name of "dherna," According to Sir William Jones, the creditor sat at the debtor's door, abstaining from food, till, for fear of becoming accountable for the man's death, the debtor paid him. As to the Irish mode of "fasting upon" a debtor of the chieftain grade, exact particulars are not given; but it would seem that on presentation of the claim of distraint at the residence of the debtor the "fasting" began, and if the debtor did not pay or give a pledge, but allowed his creditor to go on fasting (it is not said for how long), he became liable to double the debt, and other penalties.
If one of inferior grade comes to sue one of the chieftain grade, he must be accompanied, on his part, by one of the chieftain grade.
Among articles enumerated as coming under various rather puzzling rules and exemptions in cases of distraint, we find, weapons for battle; a racehorse; a harp-comb, and other requisites for music; toys for the children--viz., "hurlets, balls, and hoops," and also "little dogs and cats;" the "eight parts which constitute a mill;" the fork and cauldron; the kneading-trough and sieve; the bed-furniture-- i.e., plaids and bolsters; the reflector or mirror; the chess-board; the seven valuable articles of the house of the chieftain--viz., "cauldron, vat, goblet, mug, reins, horse-bridle, and pin;" the cattle-bells, the griddle, the "branch-light of each person's house;" the lap-dog of a queen, the watch-dog, the hunting hound; implements of weaving and of spinning.
Fines and penalties were provided, among other cases, for withholding the food-tribute from a king or chief; for the deficiency of a feast; for neglecting the due clearing of roads in war, or in winter, or at time of a fair; for neglecting the due preparation of a fair-green; for neglecting any persons or things cast ashore by the sea (in this case the "territory" was liable); {134} for neglecting "the common net of the tribe;" for breaking the laws of rivers and fishing; for neglecting the due maintenance and medical treatment of the sick; for not helping in the erection of the common fort of the tribe; for not blessing a completed work. This last is a curious offence. "It was customary," we read in a note to p. 132, "for workmen, on completing any work, and delivering it to their employer, to give it their blessing. This was the 'abarta,' and if this blessing was omitted, the workman was subject to a fine, or loss of a portion of his fee, equal to a seventh part of his allowance of food while employed--the food to which a workman was entitled being settled by the law in proportion to the rank of the art or trade which he professed. And it would appear that the first person who saw it finished and neglected the blessing was also fined." To the present day, among Irish peasants, it is thought a marked omission if, in transferring or praising, or even taking notice of, any possession, especially if it be a living creature, one neglects to say "God bless it!" or "I wish you luck with it!" or some such good word; and where you see any work going on, it is right to say, "God bless the work!"
Distress was levied on defaulters for share in building "the common bridge of the tribe;" for beef to nourish the chief "during the time that he is making laws;" for the "cow from every tribe," sent on demand, "when the king is on the frontier of a territory with a host." "Now, the custom is that this cow is taken from some one man of them for the whole number. They make good that cow to him only." Also for the victualling of a fort; for guarding and feeding captives; for the maintenance of a fool, or of a madwoman, or of an aged person, or of a child. "Five cows is the fine for neglecting to provide for the maintenance of the fool who has land, and power of amusing; and his having these is the cause of the smallness of the fine. Ten cows is the fine for neglecting to provide for the maintenance of every madwoman; and the reason that the fine is greater than that of the fool is, for the madwoman is not a minstrel, and has not land. If the fool has not land, or has not power of amusing, the fine for neglecting to provide for his maintenance is equal to that of the madwoman who can do no work." "A 'cumhal' of eight cows is the fine for neglecting to maintain any family senior who has land after his eighty-eighth year. As to each man of unknown age after his ninetieth year, his land shall pass from the family who have not maintained him to an extern family who have maintained him. As to every senior of a family and man of unknown age without land, a 'cumhal' of five 'seds' is the fine for not maintaining him."
There are fines for evil words, false reports, slander, nicknames, and satire. The poets were supposed to have the power of turning a man's hair gray by force of satire, or even of killing him. There are also fines for "failure of hosting," "the head of every family of the lay grades is to go into the battle;" "every one who has a shield to shelter him, and who is fit for battle, is to go upon the plundering excursion." "Three services of attack" are enumerated--on pirates, aggressors, and wolves; and "three services of defence"--to secure "promontories [hills?], lonely passes, and boundaries."
"Distress of three days for using thy horse, thy boat, thy basket, thy cart, thy chariot, for wear of thy vessel, thy vat, thy great cauldron, thy cauldron; for 'dire'-fine in respect of thy house, for stripping thy herb-garden, for stealing thy pigs, thy sheep; for wearing down thy hatchet, thy wood-axe; for consuming the things cast upon thy beach by the sea, for injuring thy meeting-hill, for digging thy silver mine, for robbing thy bee-hive, for the fury of thy fire, for the crop of thy sea marsh, for the 'dire'-fine in respect to thy corn-rick, thy turf, thy ripe {135} corn, thy ferns, thy furze, thy rushes, if without permission; for slighting thy law, for slighting thy inter-territorial law, for enforcing thy 'Urradhus' law; in the case of good fosterage, in the case of bad fosterage, the fosterage fee in the case over fosterage for cradle clothes; for recovering the dues of the common tillage land, for recovering the dues of joint fosterage, for recovering the dues of lawful relationship, for unlawful tying, over-fettering of horses, breaking a fence to let cows into the grass; breaking it before calves to let them to the cows. The restitution of the milk is in one day."
There are also fines for quarrelling in a fort; for disturbing the meetinghill; for stripping the slain; for refusing a woman "the longed-for morsel;" for scaring the timid, with a mask or otherwise; for causing a person to blush; for carrying a boy on your back into a house so as to strike his head; for love-charms and "bed-witchcraft;" for neglect in marriage; for "setting the charmed morsel for a dog--i.e., to prove it;" for failure as to "the safety of a hostage;" for "withholding his fees from the Brehon."
For mutilation and for murder, the "eric-fine and honor-price" varied according to circumstances.
Distress of five days' stay is "for not erecting the tomb of thy chief;" "for false boasting of a dead woman;" for satirizing her after her death; for causing to wither any kind of tree; for the eric-fine for an oath of secret murder.
In certain cases, persons were exempted from distress for a longer or shorter period. For example: "A man upon whom the test of the cauldron is enjoined--i.e., to go to a testing cauldron--and he shall have exemption until he returns;" "a man whose wife is in labor;" "a man who collects the food-tribute of a chief."
The bodies and bones of the dead are protected by penalties. There is a fixed fine and "honor-price" for carrying away the remains of a bishop out of his tomb (as relics?); also breaking bones in a churchyard, "to take the marrow out of them for sorcerers." "The bone of a king drowned in the stream, or of a hermit condemned to the sea and the wind," belongs to the people of the land where it happens to be cast, until the tribe of the deceased pay for its redemption.
There are penalties for "lookers-on" at an ill deed; and these are divided into three classes: "a looker-on of full fine" is one who "instigates, and accompanies, and escorts, and exults;" of half fine, one who does not instigate, but does the other acts; of quarter-fine, one who "accompanies only, and does not prohibit, and does not save." Clerics, women, and boys are exempt.
One is accountable (in different degrees) for one's own crime, the crime of a near kinsman, the crime of a middle kinsman, and the crime of a kinsman in general.
"There are four who have an interest in every one who sues or is sued"--the tribe of the father, the tribe of the mother, the chief, the church; also the tribe of the foster-father.
"Every tribe is liable after the absconding of a member of it, after warning, after notice, and after lawful waiting."
The notes to this volume are few and unimportant, and further elucidations on many points are much to be desired. The printing of the original Gaelic along with the translation must add greatly to the cost of the work, but the value of the text to philologers may perhaps make this worth while. Only we hope that this laudable and interesting undertaking, of the publication of the ancient laws and institutes of Ireland, will not, like other Irish schemes that could be named, make a costly and elaborate beginning, and then, exhausting its means in the outset, break down altogether. This first volume gives us a strong desire to see the proposed plan carried into {136} completion without undue delay. It would appear that all the heavy part of the literary work of it is already done.
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MISCELLANY.
_The Transparency of the Sea. _--At a late meeting of the French Academy of Science, M. Cialdi and Father Secchi sent the result of some observations they have made "On the Transparency of the Sea." The experiments were made at the end of April, on board a vessel, near Civita Vecchia, from six to twelve miles from land, and at depths varying from 90 to 300 metres, the sea being perfectly clear and tranquil. Discs of different diameters and colors attached to wires being plunged horizontally under water, showed that the maximum depth at which the largest (a white disc 3-1/4 metres in diameter) could be seen was 42-1/2 metres, the sun being elevated 60-1/4° above the horizon. With a vertical sun the depth of visibility shall be 45 metres. The color of the disc appeared at first a light green, then a clear blue, which became darker as it was lowered, until it could no longer be distinguished from the surrounding medium. Discs of a yellow or sandy color disappeared at less than half the depth of the white discs--that is to say, between 17 and 24 metres. The height of the sun and the clearness of the sky greatly influence the depth at which objects may be seen. Viewing the light reflected from a submerged white disc through a spectroscope, the red and yellow colors were found to be rapidly absorbed. As it was sunk deeper in the sea a portion of the green became absorbed, the other colors remaining unaltered. The authors remark that this luminous absorption of the more refrangible rays is what would be expected from the calorific opacity and the actinic transparency of water. From the foregoing results, they doubt whether the bottom of the sea has ever been seen at a depth of 100 metres, as it is more probable that the mud and sand brought up by waves has been mistaken for such: the fact that the bottom of the sea is a worse reflector than the white disc, strengthens this supposition.
Irish Limestone Caverns.--At a late meeting of the Cork Cuvierian Society, Professor Harkness, so well known for his investigations of Scottish rocks, announced the discovery of the bones of mammals in a limestone quarry at Middleton, County Cork. The rock consists of the ordinary limestone of the district, in one part much fissured, and under this fissured portion there is a mass of brown clay, the thickness of which cannot be determined, as its base is not seen. This reddish-brown clay under the limestone is the deposit which furnishes the fossil bones, and which, doubtless, fills the space which was once a natural grotto. Beside the bones, which are in a fragmentary condition, there are also present teeth and antlers. The latter are much broken, and do not afford sufficient character to enable the species to be accurately determined. They seem, however, to belong to two forms, one of which had the beam and branches smooth and sub-compressed, features which indicate the antlers of the reindeer; and the other with the horns rounded and rough, a form of surface which marks the antlers of the common stag. Of these antlers two portions which appear to belong to the reindeer have been cut while in the fresh state; and the faces of the cuts being almost smooth, this cutting appears to have been effected by a fine regular-edged instrument rather than, by a serrated tool. The leg bones which appear in this clay have all been broken, for the most part longitudinally, except the carpal and tarsal, and other small bones of the extremities. This longitudinal fracturing of the long bones of the leg is not known to occur in any mammalian remains which belong to a period previous to that where we have evidence of the existence of {137} the human race; and these broken bones afford evidence of the occurrence of man, who, for the purpose of obtaining the marrow, divided them in the direction most available for this object. Beside the evidence afforded by the cut antlers and longitudinally divided bones, there are other circumstances indicating the occurrence of man in connection with these remains; one of these is the presence of charred wood, which is equally disseminated through the clay with the bones and teeth. This charred wood is the remains of the ancient fires by means of which former human beings cooked their food.
Is there an Open Arctic Sea?--Sir Roderick Murchison, who answers this question in the affirmative, gives the following arguments in support of his opinion:--(1.) The fact has been well ascertained by Scoresby and others, that every portion of the floating pack-ice north of Spitzbergen is made up of frozen sea-water only, without a trace of terrestrial icebergs like those which float down Baffin's Bay, or those which, carrying blocks of stone and débris, float northward from the land around the South Pole. (2.) The northern shores of Siberia tell the same tale; for in their vast expanse the absence of icebergs, or erratic blocks, or anything which could have been derived from great or lofty masses of land, has been wen ascertained. (3.) As a geologist, Sir R. Murchison could point out that this absence of erratic blocks in northern Siberia has existed from that remote glacial period when much larger tracts of northern Europe were occupied by glaciers than at the present day. (4.) The traveller Middendorf found the extreme northern promontory of Siberia, Taimyr, clad with fir trees, while the immense tract of country to the south of it was destitute of trees, showing a milder climate at that point of Siberia nearest the pole.
Food as a Means of Preventing Disease,--It seems not at all improbable that, as has been shown by Liebig in the case of plants, most of those diseases which we at present attribute to the presence of some morbid substance in the blood, are produced in the first instance by the absence of some of the proper constituents of the blood. The blood when abnormally composed will allow vegetable and other growths to take place in it, thus producing painful symptoms; but if it contained its suitable components, it is most probable that it would be then enabled to resist the development of the materials we refer to. In the case of the potato disease, there can hardly be a doubt that the sap becomes deteriorated, owing to the absence of the proper proportion of potash, prior to the development of the oïdium which commits such ravages. The idea which we have given has not had many advocates in this country, and we are glad to find that Mr. Erasmus Wilson has in some measure lent his support to the theory. Although Mr. Wilson does not go as deeply into the question as we should wish, still he shows that food may well be employed not only in preventing but in curing disease. If, he says, it be admitted that food is the source of the elements of which the body is composed, what kind of body can be expected in the case of a deficient supply of food, whether that deficiency proceed from actual want, or from some perverse theory of refinement, founded on a false conception of the nature and objects of food, and ignorance of its direct convertibility into the flesh and blood of man? We think Mr. Wilson is too determined a supporter of flesh-eating tastes. If he had his way, he would convert man into a decidedly carnivorous animal, and we do not think that either experience or an appeal to the anatomy of the human masticatory and digestive organs would bear out his views.--Vide "On Food as a Means of Prevention of Disease."
Are the Flint Implements from the Drift Authentic?--A pamphlet has appeared from the pen of Mr. Nicholas Whitley, of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, in which it is attempted to be proved that the so-called flint implements are not the result of workmanship. The Popular Science Review gives the following abstract of Mr. Whitley's argument: (1.) The "implements" are all of flint. The tools employed by men of the recognized archaeological stone age are made of stones of various kinds, of which there are examples of serpentine, granular greenstone, indurated claystone, trap greenstone, claystone, quartz, syenite, chest, etc. Why, therefore, {138} should the only weapon in the drift deposit be manufactured from flint solely? (2.) The "implements" are all of one class--axes. Were they then a race of carpenters? Man is a cooking animal; and if ten thousand axes have been found, surely one seething-pot or drinking-cup ought to have turned up. He needs shelter, but no remnant of his clothing or hut has been found. Almost everywhere where there are chalk flints we find axes, and nothing but axes. (3.) There is a gradation in form from the very rough fracture of the flint to the perfect almond-shaped implement. Let the most enthusiastic believer in their authenticity examine carefully the one thousand implements in the Abbeville museum, and he would probably reject two-thirds as bearing no evidence of the work of man. But it would be impossible for him to say where nature ended and art began. (4.) Some of the implements are admirable illustrations of the form produced by the natural fracture of the egg-shaped flint nodule. (5.) It is supposed that these weapons were used for cutting down timber and scooping out canoes. But it should be remembered that the gravels in which they are found were formed during a severe Arctic climate, in which no tree but a stunted birch could have grown, certainly none large enough to form a canoe. (6.) Their number. The implements are found by thousands in small areas, and in numbers quite out of proportion to the thinly scattered population that must have (if at all) then existed.
The Sponge Fishery.--The main industry of the island of Crete is the sponge fishery which is pursued on its coasts. It is chiefly carried on by companionships of from twenty to thirty boats, for mutual support and protection. The mode of operation preparatory to a dive is very peculiar and interesting. The diver whose turn it is takes his seat on the deck of the vessel, at either the bow or stern, and placing by his side a large flat slab of marble, weighing about 25 lbs., to which is attached a rope of the proper length and thickness (1-1/2 inch), he then strips, and is left by his companions to prepare himself. This seems to consist in devoting a certain time to clearing the passages of his lungs by expectoration, and highly inflating them afterward; thus oxidizing his blood very highly by a repetition of deep inspirations. The operation lasts from five to ten minutes, or more, according to the depth; and during it the operator is never interfered with by his companions, and seldom speaks or is spoken to; he is simply watched by two of them, but at a little distance, and they never venture to urge him or distract him in any way during the process. When from some sensation, known only to himself, after these repeated long-drawn and heavy inspirations, he deems the fitting moment to have arrived, he seizes the slab of marble, and, after crossing himself and uttering a prayer, plunges with it like a returning dolphin into the sea, and rapidly descends. The stone is always held during the descent directly in front of the head, at arm's-length, and so as to offer as little resistance as possible; and, by varying its inclination, it acts likewise as a rudder, causing the descent to be more or less vertical, as desired by the diver. As soon as he reaches the bottom he places the stone under his arm to keep himself down, and then walks about upon the rock, or crawls under its ledges, stuffing the sponges into a netted bag with a hooped mouth, which is strung round his neck to receive them; but he holds firmly to the stone or rope all the while, as his safeguard for returning and for making the known signal at the time he desires it. The hauling up is thus effected: The assistant who has hold of the rope awaiting the signal, first reaches down with both hands as low as he can, and there grasping the rope, with a great bodily effort raises it up to nearly arm's-length over his head; the second assistant is then prepared to make his grasp as low down as he can reach, and does the same; and so the two alternately, and by a fathom or more at a time, and with great rapidity, bring the anxious diver to the surface. A heavy blow from his nostrils to expel the water and exhausted air indicates to his comrades that he is conscious and breathes, a word or two is then spoken by one of his companions to encourage him if he seems much distressed, as is often the case; and the hearing of the voice is said by them to be a great support at the moment of their greatest state of exhaustion. A few seconds' rest at the surface, and then the diver returns into the boat to recover, generally putting {139} on an under-garment or jacket, to assist the restoration of the animal heat he has lost, and to prevent the loss of more by the too rapid evaporation of the water from his body.--Travels in Crete.
The Sun's Spots.--Father Secchi writes from Rome, under date of Aug. 8, to the Reader as follows: I thank you for the interest you take in the observations of the sun. The last large spot has been very interesting for science, and I hope to be able to publish all the drawings we have made of it by projection. Meanwhile I send you two of them, photographed on a large scale. You will see in the printed article which I send you, that I have been able to see the prominences and depressions produced by the spot at the edge of the sun; not only myself but also M. Tacchini. I regret that the shortness of time does not allow me to copy the drawings made on that occasion, but I send a copy of them to Mr. De la Rue, and you will see them. As to the willow-leaves and rice-grains question, I think, as you say, we are all right and all wrong. I will state clearly what I see. On first placing the eye to the telescope, and in very good moments of definition, the surface of the sun appears certainly to me made up of many oblong bodies, which I think are the willow-leaves of Mr. Nasmyth; their orientation is in every direction, but they take a converging direction in the neighborhood of the spots, where they form the tongues, currents, and such like. But this view is, as I said, rather difficult to obtain, and many times I have looked for it quite without success. Is this a defect of vision, or caused by the sun's changements? If by willow-leaves other things than these are understood, I have not seen them. M. Airy seems to understand other things, and then I am quite at a loss. This, therefore, is a matter very problematic, and to be better studied. By projection on a large scale in some beautiful moments of definition, these oblong bodies on the general surface of the sun have been seen by my assistant also; but generally they are not visible, but the sun appears like clouds. As to the mobility of the solar surface, you can judge from the two photographs that I send you; they have been made only at an interval of twenty-four hours. I think we assisted at the outbreaking of the spot, and at its arrangement from a great confusion of movements into a regular transformation of an ordinary group of spots. The appearance which I have seen is quite like that which takes place when a great movement is excited in a stream of running water, which finally resolves itself into some vortices which take their course independently. The movement of these spots even alone is capable of demonstrating materially what Mr. Carrington has found with great labor--that there is in the sun a real drift of matter, since without this it would be impossible to explain how the spot has been increased in two days to a length twice as great as its breadth, this remaining almost constant. But more of this in a particular memoir.
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
HISTORY OF MY RELIGIOUS OPINIONS. By John Henry Newman, D.D., of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green. 1865. 8vo., pp. 379.
Under this title, Dr. Newman has republished the charming autobiography which originally appeared as an answer to the calumnies of Charles Kingsley, and was entitled "Apologia pro Vita Sua," republished in a neat and attractive manner by the Appletons. We earnestly recommend all our readers, whether they be Catholics or not, who have not procured and read the "Apologia," to do so without delay, if they wish to give themselves a rich intellectual treat. The American edition is decidedly to be preferred, on account {140} of the complete history it furnishes of the controversy with Mr. Kingsley which led to the composition of the book. In England, this controversy is already well-known to the entire religious and literary world, and may be supposed by this time to have lost its interest. Dr. Newman's autobiography will never lose its interest and value while the English language remains; and for this reason, it was no doubt a wise thought in the author to prepare it for posterity in a form wherein the local and personal controversy which occasioned its being written should no longer be connected with its proper subject-matter. No doubt, too, the author felt some reluctance to perpetuate, in close connection with his own personal history, the memory of the severe castigation which he administered to his opponent. This is honorable to his delicate and charitable sentiments. At the same time, the castigation was necessary, it was just, it was not one whit too severe, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Newman for having applied the terrible lash which he possesses, but which he employs so seldom and usually so lightly, in this case with all his strength to the shoulders of a delinquent. There is a certain small class of writers in the English Church, some of whom are Puseyites, others more or less broad in their views, who violate all the laws of honorable and courteous warfare in their attacks on the Catholic Church. They take the line of charging fraud, forgery, lying, and utterly unprincipled and wicked motives and maxims upon the hierarchy, priesthood, and other advocates of the Catholic cause. One of the first and foremost of these was Mr. Meyrick, of Oxford, the author of a disingenuous work against Catholic morals, and one of Mr. Kingsley's defenders. This work of Mr. Meyrick's was republished in this country with a more offensive preface, by the Rev. A. C. Coxe, now the bishop of Western New York, a person who has abjured all regard to the rules of common civility, both in his public writings and speeches concerning the Catholic clergy, and also in his private demeanor when he has happened to be thrown into contact with them personally. This class of writers adopt what Dr. Newman happily styles a mode of warfare which consists in "poisoning the wells." That is, they seek to forestall all debate on the merits of the Catholic question, by accusing the advocates of the Catholic side of being liars by principle and on system; infamous persons, who have no claim to decent treatment or even to a hearing. There is but one course to be taken with opponents of this sort. Argument, explanation, courtesy, are alike thrown away upon them. They must be treated like guerrillas, and summary justice must be done up on them, as the only means of self-defence, and as a salutary example to others. They must be taught that they cannot have free license to calumniate and vituperate the Catholic Church or its members with impunity. How effectually this lesson was read to them by Dr. Newman, is shown by the hearty applause which his book received from all England, the evidence of which may be seen in the review of it which appeared in the principal English periodicals.
We wish to be understood that the language we have used above has no application to any but a few offending individuals, whose spirit and manner are even more severely condemned by a large class of the non-Catholic public than by Catholics themselves. It is very gratifying to observe the respectful, moderate, and courteous tone which many of the most illustrious of the recent advocates of the Protestant side maintain toward the Church of Rome and her distinguished and worthy members. Copying after Leibniz, the greatest genius which the Protestant confession can boast of, we have, among others, Guizot, Ranke, Dr. Pusey, Palmer; and in this country, William R. Alger, who, albeit he has inadvertently repeated some of the current misstatements of Catholic doctrine, has always shown a fairness and generosity of spirit and a readiness to correct mistakes which make him conspicuous among our honorable opponents. In this species of candor and courtesy the most eminent writers of the continent are still far before the most of those in England and America. Dr. Newman himself and his compeers in the early Oxford movement, even in their strongest and most pronounced expressions of opinion against Rome and against various form of dissent, furnished the most perfect specimens of the truly Christian and gentlemanly style of polemics which English literature had yet {141} seen. Never was there a man who kept his intellect and his varied gifts as a writer more completely under the discipline of a strict conscience, one who was more scrupulously just and fair, truthful and frank, yet guarded and cautious, than John Henry Newman. He has the soul of knightly chivalry in him; religious, fearless, modest, and compassionate; loyal to the death to every sacred obligation, and scorning a mean or deceitful act more than common men do treason and perjury. Such a man ought to have been secure of honorable treatment; and yet he has not been spared in the strife of tongues; and if he has at last triumphed over calumny, it has only been by overpowering his enemies with the superior weight of his armor and strength of his arm, and not because his holy retirement and spotless name have been respected. However, after long years, during whose lapse the English people have disdained and slighted the man of genius and the pure Christian who is one of the greatest ornaments of their literature, on account of their intense hostility to his religion, their love of fair play, and admiration for intellectual greatness and prowess, has gained a signal victory, and we give them due credit for it. The demand for the "Apologia" on its first publication in successive numbers was so great that the Longmans were unable to keep up with it. That it has not been unappreciated also in this country is proved by the fact that four editions of the American reprint have been exhausted. Of the book itself, it is almost superfluous to speak at this late day. It will bear to be read and re-read, and the repeated perusal, instead of wearying, only brings out new charms and occasions an increasing delight. We have read and admired Dr. Newman's writings for more than twenty years, but have never so fully appreciated the wonderful subtlety and vigor of his intellect as we have done since reading his last book. It is like the keen, bright, dexterously wielded, and irresistible scimeter of Saladin. At his conversion Anglicanism lost a champion far more capable than any other of coping with its stoutest antagonists, and the Catholic Church gained over the most formidable of her foes who wields an English pen. Even as now reproduced by himself, as a mere history of the past, his method of defending the Church of England against Rome appears to us so much more subtle and plausible, and adroitly managed, not through any designed artifice on his part, but from the acuteness with which his mind detects all the most defensible points of his own position and the most assailable ones of the opposite, than that of any other writer, that we instinctively say, no man but John Henry Newman could fully refute himself. Each successive post at which he pauses in his gradual approach to the Catholic Church seems as defensible as the others which he has abandoned as untenable. At his very last halting place, he has the air of a man who is about to defend himself there to the last, and is not to be driven further. Indeed, he was not driven by any mind more powerful than his own; for although the arguments of Cardinal Wiseman had considerable weight with him, neither he nor any other Catholic writer really answered the difficulties which were in his own mind, or fully refuted, in a manner consonant to his intellectual convictions, the plausible arguments by which he justified to himself and recommended to others a continuance in the Anglican communion. He was driven only by his innate love of truth, his conscientiousness, his logical fidelity to his own first principles, and the grace of God. Humanly speaking, his conversion was one of the most unlikely events which has ever taken place. Ten years before it occurred he was at an immense distance from the Catholic Church, and advancing toward it by a most circuitous route, with the greatest apparent, reluctance. We rise from the perusal of his own record of his journey with a sentiment of astonishment that he ever reached his destination. When we remember the light in which Dr. Newman was regarded by his own school in the days of his leadership at Oxford, it appears to us that the estimate formed of him was both singularly just and singularly incorrect. It was just in one way, inasmuch as, whatever his modesty may suggest to the contrary, he was more than any other man the leader of the movement. It was incorrect, inasmuch as a far greater originative force in causing this movement and a far greater comprehension of its principles were attributed to him than he or any other man possessed. The {142} movement itself created its own agents, and bore them on with a power infinitely greater than they possessed of themselves. Dr. Newman was a master to inferior and more backward scholars; but was himself only a scholar, who began with the first and simplest rudiments of Catholicity. His merit consisted in this, that while many paused at various stages of elementary and partial knowledge, he pushed on to the mastery of final results and completed his curriculum. Considering what he had to learn, and that he had in great measure to be his own teacher, the space of ten years was really a short rather than a long period for the process.
The history of this process constitutes the direct object and the principal value and charm of the "Apologia," and the "History of My Religious Opinions." The mind of the author is, however, one of those full streams that overflows its bounds, and whose obiter dicta are frequently the richest and most precious of its effusions. There are several passages in this work falling within the scope of this remark. We can only call attention to two, without quoting them. One is found on pp. 266-273 of the American edition of the "Apologia," and relates to the doctrine of original sin. Another, on pp. 275-291, concerns the question of the relations between faith and science and reason and authority. In the very act of giving a reason for avoiding the discussion of these questions, the author has given in a short compass, one of the most admirable disquisitions we have ever read. There is no passage in all his writings which exhibits better the fine discrimination of his thought, and the perspicuity and beauty of his style, and in both these respects it is a specimen of the most perfect logical and rhetorical art.
We feel bound, however, to enter one caveat against a part of Dr. Newman's philosophy, which we regard not so much as being a positive error as a defect, and which has been quite distinctly brought out by the Westminster Review, as a part of his defence of Catholicity which presents a weak side to the infidel. This defect is one originating in the philosophy which has prevailed in England, and in which Dr. Newman was educated; one which has always been conspicuous in the writers of the Oxford school, and which appears to us to leave a great hiatus in their theology. This defect may be described, though it is not defined, as the doctrine probability, We have no hesitation in agreeing with Dr. Newman in the maxim, that in most matters "probability is the guide of life." We have heretofore thought, however, that he extended this principle into the domain of natural and revealed religion so far as to agree with those writers who consider their fundamental verities as being merely more probable than their logical contradictories. After carefully weighing his words, we have come to the conclusion that he does not use the word in this sense, when he speaks of the great truths of religion. That is, he does not admit that there is any real probability, though a lesser one, in the infidel negations, but only a metaphysical possibility. He allows of a moral certainty which admits of no prudent doubt to the contrary, but does not reach to a metaphysical certainty. Here again we agree with him partially, and if we understand rightly the ecclesiastical decisions on the point, we think his doctrine is one that has official sanction. That is, we regard, with him, the evidence of revealed religion and of the authority of the Catholic Church, as apprehended by the light of our natural intelligence in that act which theologians call "the preamble to faith," as being in the order of probability and incapable of generating more than a moral certainty. That certitude of belief which excludes possibility of error, we regard as an effect of the gift of faith imparting a supernatural firmness to the intellectual assent. We dissent from Dr. Newman, when he extends this doctrine to our ultimate belief in God, and we think it necessary, in order to give a firm basis even to a true probability, that we should affirm the absolute intuition of that idea of God, from which we are able to deduce his attributes; and, moreover, affirm also the perfect metaphysical demonstrability of all these attributes as expressed in the Christian conception of God. We dislike very much any form of expression which implies that we believe in God on a probability, which is tantamount to saying that "it is probable there is a God." Even if we say that the being of God is morally certain, we still leave it possible that there is no God. If we deduce {143} the being of God from the ultimate principle of the certainty of our own existence, we make our self-consciousness, our reason, the laws of our own being, the standard of right and truth which we establish within ourselves, more certain, and to us more ultimate than God. We become our own centre and stand-point, our own ultimate judge, a light and a law to ourselves, really subsisting in an intellectual independence of God. This is ceding, in our view, to the pure infidel rationalist all the ground he wants, which is simply liberty for every one to speculate about the cause of all things, and their procession to the ultimate end, as he lists. It is true he will do it without our leave, whatever our way of stating Christian truth; but if we admit, or do not clearly repudiate, his first principles, he will point out a logical defect in our argument, and show that we are inconsistent; and then the philosophical proof of Christianity, which consists in demonstrating the conception of God from first principles intuitively certain, and showing that none of the Christian doctrines which we received from testimony are incompatible with these first principles, will, in our hands, be defectively managed.
It is proper to state, however, that Dr. Newman does not propose anything dogmatically on this important question, but rather indicates that he has not yet obtained a solution which satisfies him.
A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH; FROM THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA UNTIL THE PRESENT TIME. By M. l'Abbé J. E. Darras; First American from the last French edition. With an Introduction and Notes by the most Rev. M. J. Spalding, D.D., Archbishop of Baltimore. Vol. I. 8vo., pp. 675. New York: P. O'Shea.
The appearance of this volume realizes very fully all we were led to expect from its prospectus. The first impression made upon us by its exterior dress is that this is an attractive and readable book; two qualities of a work on history which, whatever be the learning, accuracy, and completeness displayed in its more intimate perusal, are not to be despised. We are glad to meet with a life of the Church which does not look like a catalogue of dried and dead specimens for a scientific museum. The majority of the volumes which issue from the press now-a-days like a literary flood, owe their success a vast deal more to their beautiful typography, chaste binding, and other general attractive features, than to the solid merit of their contents. As there are certain orators whose appearance alone captivates their auditory, and excites in us a curiosity to hear what fine things such a fine-looking man has to say, so there are books which feel well to the touch, look good to the eyes, and prejudice one's judgment in their favor. We will listen to a stupid-looking speaker, or read a commonplace featured book, on the testimony of their friends, provided they give us strong recommendations; but a speaker "of a commanding presence and a winning air," or a book that is well gotten up, we think worthy of notice at the first introduction.
It is difficult to write an interesting history. Simple facts of the past stated in dry statistical style, like the reports of an insane asylum or a poor-house, are about as interesting as they, and appear to the general reader to be of about equal importance. We may be thought weak in judgment to say it, but we should like to read history for the same reason we like to read the last novel by Dickens, in which the author wields his magic pen to paint life-pictures of the events of the world before our mind, and compels us to be living witnesses of the past in the realm of imagination. To insure a deep interest and a lasting impression all the faculties of the mind should be engaged. Our imagination must not be told to step out of doors or go to sleep whilst our memory takes an inventory of facts consigned to its storehouse by a historian. The senses of sight and of taste are given to man that he may be guided in supplying his stomach with the proper quantum and quality of the food it craves. What these senses are to the stomach, the imagination is to the mind, and if it have no hand in the choice of mental food there cannot help but be an indigestion; the brain, indeed, holding the crude mass, but unable to make any use of it.
We may sum up in a few sentences the application these remarks may have to the history before us. The volume {144} comes to us with uncut edges. Let the reader open it at random. He finds before him a fair page, printed in large cool type, with broad generous margins, looking as a page ought to look, like a goodly field of wheat or corn, and not like a stiff, prim, pinched, and gravelled parterre. Let him read down one page, and he will surely bring his paper-cutter into requisition and follow the author to the beginning of the next paragraph. He will find the style, if we mistake not, like one of those charming, shady, winding, country roads, which always entice you to go just as far as the next turning; an agreeable contrast to the ordinary page of history, which to us is so like a grievous paved military road in France, straight enough, wide enough, and direct enough, but lamentably monotonous, dry, dusty, and tiresome. There is a little stiffness and dull regularity about the division of the subject-matter; but this is inevitable to any history of a long period, and may be regarded as the signboards and finger-posts on the road, making up in convenience what they detract from the romance.
As to the character of the work of M. Darras as a history--as one in which we can learn the actual life of our mother, the Church; one which we can quote with confidence in public, and not be obliged to contradict to its back as it stands on our shelves; one which we can give to our friends, of all classes and opinions, as a good, reliable, and respectable Church history--we are content to take it as such upon the warm approbation it has received at the hands of the Holy Father, the use that is made of it in colleges and seminaries in Europe, the approval it has obtained from the Rt. Rev. bishops there and in the United States, and the good opinion universally expressed concerning it by scholars whose critical judgment is worthy of reliance. Certainly we have no Church history equal to it in the English language, and we bid this translated French one welcome, and hope it may receive an hospitable reception amongst us.
The dissertation on the perpetuity of the Church, and the immortality of the Papacy, from the pen of the Most Rev. Archbishop Spalding, which embellishes this edition under the form of an introduction, is both appropriate and well deserving of perusal. The learned prelate puts us at once on reading acquaintance with the work of M. Darras, and enkindles in us the desire to know more of the eventful course of the existence of Holy Church.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
CAPE COD. By Henry D. Thoreau. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1865. 12mo., pp. 252.
COMPLETE WORKS OF THE MOST REV. JOHN HUGHES, D.D., late Archbishop of New York. Comprising his Sermons, Letters, Lectures, Speeches, etc. Carefully compiled from the best sources, and edited by Lawrence Kehoe. Two vols. 8vo., pp. 670 and 810. New York: Lawrence Kehoe.
PASTORAL LETTER OF THE MOST RET. J. B. PURCELL, D.D., Archbishop of Cincinnati, to the Clergy and Laity of the archdiocese, on the late Encyclical Letter of his Holiness Pius IX. promulgating the Jubilee of 1865, with the Bull of Pius IX. authorizing the Jubilee of 1846. Printed at the "Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph" Office.
NATURAL HISTORY. A Manual of Zoology for Schools, Colleges, and the General Reader, by Sanborn Tenney, A.M. Illustrated. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 12mo., pp. 540.
From D. & J. Sadlier and Co., New York, we have received the following: BANIM'S COMPLETE WORKS. PARTS 1, 2, 3, AND 4; THE OLD HOUSE BY THE BOYNE, by Mrs. Sadlier; CATHOLIC ANECDOTES. Part 1. Translated from the French by Mrs. Sadlier; THE LIVES OF THE POPES, from the French of Chevalier d'Artaud, Parts 1 and 2; CAECILIA, a Roman Drama, and THE SECRET, a Drama, by Mrs. J. Sadlier.
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THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL, II., NO. 8.--NOVEMBER, 1865,
From Revue Générale, Bruxelles.
REV. DEMETRIUS AUGUSTIN GALLITZIN, AND THE CATHOLIC SETTLEMENTS IN PENNSYLVANIA.
The events of which the United States have, during late years, been the theatre of action, have revived in the recollection of the editors of the Historisch-politische Blätter of Munich the name of Loretto, a small and unpretending town of Pennsylvania, the founder of which was Prince Demetrius Angustin Gallitzin, the son of the remarkable woman of whom Germany has a right to be proud. The occasion has suggested to them a biographical sketch, which, full of interest and appositeness, will unquestionably be read in Belgium and France with as much avidity as in Germany.
Twenty years have elapsed since Prince Gallitzin, who had exchanged the luxuries of princely courts for the poverty of those who herald the glad tidings, slept in the Lord, after forty years of apostleship in the wild regions of the Alleghany mountains. The work set up by the pious missionary yet remains, marked by all the elements of thrifty life, and the little oasis will long continue to be what it was at its origin--the cradle of a Christian civilization, which will go on spreading its blessings to the remotest boundaries, still retaining the unobtrusive modesty which moved its founder's thought. Indeed, had the matter rested with Gallitzin's own wishes, his very name would have passed into vague tradition in those extended regions. It might even have slept in oblivion; for the prince, so careful was he to avoid anything that could attract the attentions of the world, lived and exercised his holy ministry for many years under the borrowed name of Schmidt.
In Father Lemcke, however, and fortunately too, a canon of the abbey of the Benedictines of St. Vincent in Pennsylvania, was found a man who, better than any other, had it in his power to preserve the reminiscences of the noble missionary, and accurately to depict for us the traits of his manly character. Not only did the biographer of the prince know him personally, but he was also his friend, his confidant, his confessor, and his co-laborer in the missions. After Gallitzin's death, Father Lemcke came into possession of his papers, letters, and memoranda, which supplied him with desirable data on the period of life preceding their ministerial connection. He, and he alone, therefore, was in a condition to write a true biography of the prince, and he deemed it a duty to {146} rescue from oblivion the memory of this distinguished man. In connection with this subject, Father Lemcke indulges in a judicious remark: "The life of Gallitzin," says he, "is so intimately inwoven with the events which occurred during his own times, that it holds out to future generations an interest like to that which is offered to us in the life of a Bonifacius or of an Ansgarius, by reason of the facts which have characterized the epochs in which they lived."
Gallitzin belonged to the phalanx of missionaries who, in the United States, scattered the seeds of spiritual life. When the prince stepped on the soil of that vast territory, there was but one prelate, Rt. Rev. John Carroll of Baltimore, the first bishop of the United States, who, from the circumstances of the Church, had been obliged to seek Europe for his episcopal consecration. [Footnote 23] He had been but two years installed--from 1790--and had but uncertain and broken intercourse with his flock. His surroundings, restricted in numbers, but devoted to the holy cause, were mainly composed of, French priests. In this infant church Gallitzin was the second priest consecrated by the Bishop of Baltimore, and missioned, as a true pioneer of civilization, to carry the cross through the untouched forests of the New World, There is an unvarying likeness in all great undertakings; yet it required but a short time--a relatively short time--considerably to increase the number of those men who had devoted themselves to the task. In contrast with the bishop, who, in the course of five years, could ordain and rely on two priests only to feed the flock of the Lord, "The Catholic Almanac" of the day exhibits to us, for the United States, seven archbishops, thirty-six bishops, and four apostolic vicars, with the ministry of two thousand priests, with the addition of convents of various orders, of seminaries, of colleges, of numberless benevolent institutions, with over 4,000,000 of Catholics living under the protection of the laws, in the practice and enjoyment of their faith.
[Footnote 23: There are new details on this distinguished man in a recently published work: "Die Katholische Kirche in den Vereinigten Staatm von Nord Amerika," etc., etc. Regensburg. 1864.]
The Germans delight in recalling to mind that one of those who helped to lay the foundations of the Church in North America was the offspring of a princely house of the Fatherland. Gallitzin was a German on the maternal side; and the noble parent could well claim both the spiritual and natural motherhood of her son, the latter of which was, perhaps, glory enough. How magnificent a mission was that of Princess Amelia Gallitzin! While gathering around her circle the choice spirits which seemed destined to keep bright the torch of faith in Germany, and its living convictions in the midst of a superficial society without belief and without its guiding lights, the princess was rearing for the New World a son who was about to turn aside from a career which his birth and his wealth justly reserved for him, and take up the arduous and thankless labors of the apostleship. This very son it was who, through the work of faith, was destined to be the founder and civilizer of a now flourishing colony.
Strangely enough, nothing in young Gallitzin gave earnest of such a vocation. His almost feminine nature had marked him for a timid, shrinking child; but what was still worse, and a source of deep anxiety to his mother, to this was added a lack of decision, which seemed so deeply rooted in him that not even the iron will of the princess could, during the course of many years, draw out any perceptible results. We have a letter of the princess of the date of 1790, two years before the departure of Demetrius for America, in which she reiterates on this ground her former complainings, her exhortations, and her admonitions. It is proper, however, to advert that the incipient {147} method of training pursued by the princess herself was not free from defect; for, daring the nonage of her son, she herself wavered and hesitated between various systems of philosophy--a course which necessarily must have drawn her into many an error.
There was, therefore, a defectiveness in the main foundation of the training of young Gallitzin, who was reared in a sort of religious indifferentism. But a complete revulsion took place when, after leaving Münster, the princess was led to rest her convictions, not on this or the other system of philosophy, but on the rock of Christian faith--when, from her relations with such men as Furstenberg and Overberg, she herself had gained a greater degree of firmness and steadfastness. This reacted on the education of the son, in the greater decision and authority exerted by the mother; and it was not without fit intention that Demetrius, in the sacrament of confirmation, received the surname of Angustin.
Born on the 22d of December, 1770, at the Hague, where his father, a favorite of the Empress Catherine, was accredited as ambassador of Russia, young Gallitzin saw before him the opening of a career bound to lead to the highest dignities of either military or administrative service. Nothing, therefore, was spared in giving him a complete education, according to the requirements of the world. This education, developed and closed under his mother's eyes, must be perfected by travel; but whither to direct it was a question of moment. The aristocratic banks of the Rhine were ravaged by the revolutions and war had converted Europe into a vast battle-field. It opportunely happened, at that time, that a young priest, by the name of Brodius, whom the princess had known through the family of the Droste, and who had been admitted to her circle, was about crossing the Atlantic as a missionary to America. The princess had had occasions to value the rare endowments of this priest, and knew how justly her confidence in him could extend. She therefore proposed to him the companionship of her son in a journey which seemed to her to be the only practicable one warranted by the times. The princess, fortunately, met with no opposition on the part of the prince, her husband. An admirer of Washington, and still more so of the philosophic Jefferson, he readily agreed that his son should devote a couple of years to a visit to the United States, so as to judge for himself of the institutions all that country. He earnestly charged him to be introduced to these two great men; while the princess on her part armed him with a letter of recommendation to the Right Reverend Bishop Carroll.
In August, 1792, when twenty-two years of age, young Gallitzin took ship at Rotterdam on his way to America. No one could, certainly, have then stirred him with the idea that the land of America was marked out as a theatre for the evolutions of his existence. Was there a presentiment in that parting hour which, he could not know, was to mark an eternal farewell? Was it a last return of the original indecision of character which made him linger at the roadstead to which his mother had accompanied him? No one can now tell; but what we can say is that when, on the crests of the foaming billows, he caught sight of the yawl which was to carry him on board, his heart failed him, and he turned back to retrace his steps. Then did his mother turn back to him and, with a look of disappointment, "Dimitri," said she, "I blush for thee"--and, grasping his arm, she urged him on to the boat. In a moment, and how no one could tell, the young prince was engulfed in the waves. As quick as thought the practised hands of the sailors fished him up from the waters, and wafted him to the vessel that was to bear him away. Such was his farewell to Europe; but this sea baptism had regenerated him into a new man, as, at a later period, he told the story to his biographer.
{148}
On the whole, a noted change had taken place in young Gallitzin. In him every weakness and every irresolution had disappeared, and made room for a firmness, a determination, and an inflexibility which, to his family, became a source of greatest astonishment. Two months had hardly passed by in the intimacies of life with the Bishop of Baltimore, when he already felt, within himself, what soon became a clearly defined resolve. With the close of the year 1792 he wrote to Münster that he had devoted himself, body and soul, to the service of God and to the salvation of souls in America. He wrote that this resolution had been determined by the urgent call for laborers in the vineyard of the Lord; for in the country in which he was then sojourning, his priests had to travel over a hundred and fifty miles of territory, and more, to bring to the faithful the word and the means of salvation.
These were the first news of him received in Münster, and they were disseminated with the rapidity of lightning. From all sides sprang up objections, doubts, and remonstrances against the scheme of the young prince and the boldness of his undertaking. His mother, however, who had at first been alarmed and steeped in agony at the idea of such a vocation, soon reasserted her unerring judgment, and looked into the matter with her wonted greatness of soul. From the moment that, from letters of distinguished persons, and especially from those of the Bishop of Baltimore, as well as from those of her son, she became satisfied that his was a real and substantial calling, she felt perfectly secure, and all human considerations vanished from her sight. She therefore wrote to Dimitri that if, after having tried himself, he was sure that he had really obeyed his vocation, she willingly accepted the reproaches and troubles which could not fail to shower upon him; and that, for herself, she could not desire a consummation dearer to her heart--a greater reward--than to see the child of her affections a minister at the altar of God. And, indeed, not light was the burden of reproaches and afflictions which she had to bear for the love of that son--especially on the part of her husband, it was anything but light. Her letters to Overberg more than amply inform us on that subject Gallitzin, however, seemed to have left his European friends to the indulgence of their astonishment. Heedless of his former social relations, in firmness and resoluteness he trod the path which he had marked for himself, and prosecuted his theological studies with such fervency that his superiors, in view of his failing health, deemed it their duty to interpose. After two years of study, however, he became a sub-deacon, and, on the sixteenth of March, 1795, he was ordained to the priesthood.
There was no lack of labor, however, in the vineyard of the Lord, and the young Levite, the second one who came out of the first Catholic seminary in North America, was immediately put to work. At Port Tobacco, on the Potomac, Gallitzin entered his apostolical career. His fervor, no doubt, carried him too far into those proverbially malarial regions; for, stricken down by a spell of fever, he was ordered by his bishop to return to Baltimore, where Gallitzin was subsequently directed to ascend the pulpit and preach to the German population which had settled that portion of the state of Maryland.
The democratic spirit of American manners, which, with its innumerable abuses, had permeated even religions existence itself, was diametrically opposed to the just conceptions of the priesthood and of the organization of the Church which Gallitzin had formed in his mind. For the primitive morals of which he was then in quest he turned to the unsettled portions of Pennsylvania. "I went there," he tells us at a later period, "to avoid the trustees and all the irregularities which they beget. For success, I had {149} no other warrant than the building of something new, that could escape the routine of inveterate custom. Had I settled where the hand had already been put to the plough, my work would have been endangered, for it had been soon assailed by the spirit of Protestantism."
In the apostolic trips which frequently took him into the then far West, on the table lands of the Alleghany range, near Huntington, where the waters of the Ohio fork away from those of the Susquehanna, Gallitzin had alighted on a settlement made up of a few Catholic families. In the midst of this Catholic nucleus he resolved to establish a permanent colony, which he destined in his mind as the centre of his missions. Several poor Maryland families, whose affections he had won, resolved to follow him; and, with the consent of his bishop, he took up his line of march with them in the summer of 1799, and travelled from Maryland with his face turned to the ranges of the Alleghany mountains. And a rough and trying journey it was;--hewing their way through primitive forests, burdened at the same time with all their worldly goods. So soon as the small caravan had reached its new home, Gallitzin took possession of this, as it were, conquered land; and, without loss of time, all the settlers addressed themselves to the work before them, and worked so zealously that, before the end of the year, they had already erected a church. The following is Father Lemcke's account of the humble origin of this establishment:
"Out of the clearings of these untrodden forests rose up two buildings, constructed out of the trunks of roughly hewn trees; of these, one was intended for a church--the other, a presbytery for their pastor. On Christmas eve of the year 1799, there was not a winking eye in the little colony. And well there might not be! The new church, decked with pine and laurel and ivy leaves, and blazing with such lights as the scant means of the faithful could afford, was awaiting its consecration to the worship of God! There Gallitzin offered up the first mass, to the great edification of his flock, that, although made up of Catholics, had never witnessed such a solemnity, and to the great astonishment of a few Indians, who, wrapped up in the pursuit of the chase, had never, in their life, dreamed of such a pageantry. Thus it was that, on a spot in which, scarcely a year previous, silence had reigned over vast solitudes, a prince, thenceforward cut off from every other country, had opened a new one to pilgrims from all nations, and that, from the wastes, which echoed no sounds but the howlings of the wild beast, welled up the divine song which spoke: 'Glory to God in the highest, and peace, on earth, to men of good will!'"
The cost of this spiritual and material colonization was at first individually borne by Gallitzin. Captain McGuire, an Irishman, one of the early settlers of the country, had acquired 400 acres of land, which he intended for the Church. These he conveyed to Gallitzin, who divided into small tracts the lands, which he had purchased with his own means, and distributed them among the poorer members of his colony, on condition of reimbursement, by instalments, at long periods--a condition, however, which, in a majority of cases, never was complied with.
The wilderness soon put on a new aspect. The settlers followed the impulses of the indefatigable missionary, who kept steadfastly in view the improvement of his work. His first care was to set up a grist-mill; then arose numerous out-buildings; additional lands were purchased, and in a short time the colony was notably enlarged.
In carrying out his work, Gallitzin received material assistance from Europe. In its origin, sums of money were regularly remitted to him by his mother; for he kept up a correspondence, which his devotion to her made {150} dear to his heart In these relations his father took little, if any, interest, as the determination of his son--his only son--had proved to him a source of bitter disappointment. Still he anxiously desired to see him return to Europe. So engrossed, however, was the young missionary by his work, that such a trip seemed next to an impossibility. Several years had thus glided by, when the idea of visiting Europe earnestly engaged his mind.
In the month of June, 1803, he wrote to his mother, in apology for a long silence; telling her that he is seriously contemplating seeing her once more, but that he is trammelled in his desire by the want of a priest to take his place;--indeed, that his work has so grown under his hands, that he doubts whether he will ever again be privileged to clasp his mother in his arms. "I may not think of it," he adds; "my heart is fraught with affection for you, and it seems to me that I should absolutely see you once more, so as to borrow courage to follow the path which is marked out for me in this perverse world." The letters from Overberg are witnesses of the tears shed by the mother, so anxious again to look upon her son, as well as of the unmurmuring mournfulness of her resignation.
The announcement of his father's death again brought up the subject of his visit to Europe. Indeed, his presence was required in the settlement of his inheritance; but now, as before, the joy of once more treading his native soil, and the happiness of embracing his mother, had to yield to what he considered his duty to his infant colony. The just and plausible reasons which he alleges to his mother for his course, allow us at the same time fairly to appreciate the extent of his work, and the hopes built upon its success. Hence he suggests the consideration due to those families that his advice had influenced, for the greater honor of religion, to follow him in the wilderness;--the money obligations, contracted with various friends, who had trusted him with large sums to speed the development of his scheme, and whose confidence, therefore, might be seriously wronged by his departure;--the interests of so many others, who had committed all their worldly hopes into his hands and whom his absence might leave an easy prey to heartless speculators;--and, finally, the pending questions, started by the scheme of erecting into a county the territory to which the lands of the colony belonged. All these motives, to which others were added, were sufficiently weighty to press on the conscience of Demetrius the duty Of remaining at his post. This final resolution his mother learned with the firmness of Christian heroism. She wrote to the prince: "Whatever sorrow may have panged my motherly heart at the idea of renouncing a hope that a while seemed within reach, I owe it to truth to tell thee that thy letter has afforded me the greatest consolation that I can look for upon earth." It is a touching picture to behold, in the sequel, this zealous mother continuing her interest in the mission founded by the prince, and providing for its success in keeping with the inspirations of her heart. Thus it was that, through the channel of the Bishop of Baltimore, she transmitted to her son a bill of exchange for a considerable amount, a box of books--a treasure in those days--rosaries for the settlers, linen for himself and friends, garments, and even baby-clothes, for the poorer members of the settlement, sacerdotal vestments, embroidered by the princess herself, by her daughter, and by Countess de Stolberg, and, lastly, a magnificent present, which the missionary during his life valued beyond all price, and with which, in accordance with his wishes, he was laid to slumber in the tomb.
In the meantime Gallitzin's colony, settled in the midst of those wild wastes, had expanded and become a town, to which he gave the name of Loretto, the beginning of which are {151} thus described by our missionary's successor: "The colony was composed of individuals who generally purchased considerable tracts, varying from one to four hundred acres in extent, which they cleared and converted to cultivation. In proportion as the population increased, they gradually emerged from the savagery of the earlier periods, and soon experienced the wants of a growing civilization. The indication of those wants suggested to Gallitzin's mind the necessity of converting the humble settlement into a town. Mechanics, of every useful trade, rapidly gathered around the nucleus--blacksmiths, millers, carpenters, shoemakers, with even storekeepers, and Loretto soon assumed the position which its founder had designed.
"Here, then, stands the town; but, with its new dignity, came a host of vexations. It marked for Gallitzin a period of struggle against every imaginable difficulty, which brought his firmness to the sorest trials, and which indeed might have jeoparded the very existence of his work. In fact, the means of reducing, under the control of a single hand, the heterogeneous components of such a colony was no easy problem to be solved. Gallitzin efforts to bring it under a normal organization had to meet many an antagonizing element, whilst the peculiar American spirit, which had even then permeated those solitudes, reared up obstacles to his scheme. Gallitzin, however, proved unshakable, and exhibited an unbending energy of character. At one time there was an actual crisis in the prospects of the colony. A member of the community, with a fair allotment of the goods of this world, with the excitable American brain and a marked tendency to speculation, suddenly conceived the idea to set up a competition with the growing colony and to lay the foundations of a rival one in the neighborhood. He went to work accordingly, and, with the assistance of a few Irishmen, actually laid the foundations of village, which he named Munster, after one of the provinces of Ireland. This rival of Loretto immediately became the headquarters of the propagators of light, in other words, of those who had little relish for the zeal of Gallitzin and the inconvenient discipline of the Church. Satisfied not only with putting the prosperity of Loretto in evident peril, the seceders also assailed the character of Gallitzin, and through these means derived an unexpected help. It happened fitly for their purposes that at the time two German vagabonds--one a priest of most questionable character, and the other a nobleman, whom the crime of forgery had driven from the Old World--presented themselves to Gallitzin, and anything but pleased, no doubt, with the welcome which they received, resolved to swell the party of malcontents. With cunning malice, they soon disseminated reports injurious to their countryman, gave a pretended substance to unfounded suspicions, feeding the animosities of the common herd. The fact, also, of Gallitzin's having assumed a borrowed name was a means of shaking the settlers and sowing distrust in their minds. Things went on from bad to worse, and a catastrophe seemed to be imminent, when came the upshot, so much the more ludicrous because the less expected. The Gordian knot, after the expeditious American fashion, was cut by an Alexander who rejoiced in the name of John Wakeland. He was an Irishman, a giant in stature and strength, famed in the settlement as a wolf and bear killer; and in reality one of the kindest men in the world, and one of the hardest to stir from his natural proprieties. These miserable intrigues and base machinations aroused his indignation, and he immediately came to the conclusion to put an end to them by the interposition of the logic of the strong hand. The agitators had concocted a plan, which was devised to extort from Gallitzin some sort of an assent, and the {152} prince could hardly have escaped their intended violence had he not sought sanctuary in the chapel of Loretto. But the mob had merely adjourned their intended excesses; and they were preparing for extreme means to achieve their ends when John Wakeland, brandishing a sturdy hickory in the midst of the infatuated mob, declared that, he would "settle," on the spot, any one who durst threaten the good priest. There was a magical spell in the hickory. The timidly good men, who there, as everywhere else, had shrunk into a circle of impassive inaction, feeling the influence of a sturdy support, borrowed courage from the hour; and had it not been for the interference of Gallitzin, his detractors, to use an American phrase, would have had 'a rough time of it' From that moment, a complete revulsion of feeling took place in behalf of the missionary; while the bishop succeeded in ultimately restoring order and peace in the little parish. He carefully inquired into all the facts, and then addressed to the parishioners a letter which was posted at the church door, and recalled the faithful to the regular order of things.
"Difficulties, however, of another kind, and of a more serious import, waited on Gallitzin. From the death of his father, he had been suddenly cut off from the pecuniary assistance which he had periodically received from Europe. He himself, as a Catholic priest, had been, by the laws of Russia, excluded from his paternal heritage; while his mother, who had exhausted her means in litigations, was compelled to forego the assistance which, from time to time, she had extended to her son. In satisfying his boundless charities, and in the achievements of his plans, the founder of Loretto had somewhat relied on this inheritance, which thus passed away from his hands. This disappointment, therefore, brought upon him a new burden of anxiety and cares. Destitution and poverty might have been easily borne by him; but he could not make up his mind to give up the idea of founding an imposing Catholic colony--to abandon the undertaking which he had initiated--to be compelled to relinquish lands which had been reclaimed by so much toil and so much care--and, especially, to face impatient creditors, who might accuse him of thoughtlessly going into debt, and from such an accusation justify their expression of contempt."
As a crowning development to all of these tribulations, the European mail brought to Gallitzin the news of his beloved mother's death. On the 17th of April, 1806, in the city of Münster, the excellent princess had closed her eyes for ever, comforting her disappointment that she had not been permitted to see her son on earth by the hope that she would surely meet him in heaven. The narrative of the last moments of the Princess Gallitzin, received, by the stout-hearted missionary, through the letters of his sister, of Overberg, and of Count de Stolberg, supplied a fund of inexpressible comfort; but from that hour the temporal claims and requirements of his position bore terribly on his endurance. It required unheard-of efforts to save his undertaking from the burden of indebtedness, and if, at the hour of his death, he quit-claimed the property of the Church and left it free from all and every charge, the blessed consummation came with the sunset of life only, and that, too, after miracles of constant energy. And here, especially, looms up the secondary phase of Gallitzin's character, which had not escaped his father's more searching eye. In fact, and in answer to a letter of his wife, in which she bitterly complained of the inertness of their son, then sixteen years of age, he wrote to her that "deep waters run still; that, to his mind, she misconceives the disposition of Demetrius, and that he is ever running against wind and tide." And indeed, to struggle against the torrent of time and of events was the whole work of his life. And against this torrent he heaved up the bulk of {153} his writings that have come down to us. It is easy to conceive that it required no common reason to induce a man of his temper of mind to write. We have the motive of this reason in the fact that a Presbyterian preacher of Huntington had thought fit to assail and calumniate the Catholic Church as an institution dangerous to the country and to its liberties. Gallitzin immediately took up the pen in answer, and the necessities of the controversy turned him into a polemica writer.
There are in America, no less than in other countries, fanatical sectarians who follow their congenial instincts in sounding the alarm-cry whenever the Catholic Church marks out new limits of lawful conquest. In this instance, the state was declared to be in peril; but Gallitzin lost no time in confounding the slanderers of Catholicity by the publication of his "Defense of Catholic Principles," which appeared in Pittsburgh in the year 1816. This work, written in English--for the author wielded the English with as much facility as he did the German language, his mother tongue--was, on both shores of the ocean, greeted with success. Father Lemcke made a German translation of the "Defense of Catholic Principles," of which two editions were published in Ireland and four in the United States, ranking "in popularity with 'Cobbett's History of the Reformation,' to which it bears a resemblance in putting a probing finger on the plague-spot of Protestantism."
The start being once made, Gallitzin followed up his first work with other publications of an entirely practical character, directed against certain prevalent moral diseases of the day, which mark an epoch in the monography of American ideas. Gallitzin was perfectly familiar with the mode of treatment of the feverish exuberance of American notions, and he handled them with all the cautious skill of a prudent practitioner. Everything which he published on these matters, both in elucidation of his views and as a muniment against the evils which he denounced, is written in the winning and popular style which was familiar to his pen. Hence his works were crowned with success, even amongst the higher classes of society. "Gallitzin's publications," says his biographer, "exerted an immense influence in the period when he lived, but especially so among the humbler members of the community, for whom they were destined. They were found, and they may still be found, in the form of unpretending pamphlets, in the hotels and steamboats of the West, for he had them printed at his own expense and distributed as the Protestant colporteurs disseminate their Bibles and tracts. The curiosity of the readers enlarged their circulation everywhere; and I myself have found them as perfectly thumbed as any spelling-book in spots where I never dreamed of meeting with them."
In the meantime, Gallitzin, who had hitherto labored under the protecting shadow of his humility, had begun to attract the attention of the American world around him. The manner in which he had marked his entrance in social life--not so much by the power of genius as by that integrity of character which commanded the respect of public opinion--had carried his reputation far beyond the limits of the frontiers, and secured for him an esteem, the proofs of which came back to him in numerous testimonials gathering from all sides. It was at this time that he published various pamphlets signed with his real name: "Demetrius Augustin Gallitzin, Catholic curate of Loretto."
It was natural, when the question of creating a new bishopric came up, that all eyes should turn to such a man as Gallitzin. There was a desire, therefore, more than once expressed to see him called to the episcopal chair; but he persistently repelled the intended dignity, and exerted his every power to counteract the efforts of {154} those who were anxious to have it conferred upon him. He asked for one favor only--that of remaining at Loretto; and, with this view, he consented to accept the functions of vicar-general to the Bishop of Philadelphia, which had been recently raised into a diocese.
Since the earlier period when Gallitzin entered on the discharge of the holy ministry, those regions had witnessed a great development of the Catholic faith. From all sides arose new parishes, while the field of labor went on enlarging under the tireless zeal of our missionary. "It may be safely affirmed," says his biographer, "that during the protracted years through which he administered to the district of country which now constitutes the sees of Pittsburg and Erie, he filled the place and discharged the duties of a bishop." In order to form a correct judgment as to the importance of his labors, we must go back, in imagination, to the exordium of the Catholic Church in those countries, where the pastors were cut off from all sustaining advice--from all diocesan organization--and where elements the most discrepant, and prejudices the most stubborn, were found in daily conflict. How many difficulties, therefore, to be encountered and overcome in the discrimination, in certain cases, between falsehood and truth! What prudence of action was required! How many and delicate problems presented to the decisions of a tender conscience! Gallitzin, however, was the man for the situation. "The writings," says his friend, "which his charge as vicar-general had compelled him from time to time to publish, bear witness not only to his vigilance and zeal, but also to the great charity which characterized the performance of his duties." His was a peculiar solicitude for the persecuted and the oppressed, because he knew from experience how readily, in America, they may be made the sport of falsehood, of malevolence, and of that thirst of revenge which exists everywhere. Hence the not inconsiderable number of persons, both ecclesiastics and laymen, who looked up to him for protection, and who might, but for its interpositions, have been for ever lost. His benevolent bearing won for him the confidence of the other priests who, like himself, had consecrated their lives to the salvation of souls. The pastor who from among them became at a later period the archbishop of Baltimore, having been in 1830 appointed coadjutor and administrator to the diocese of Philadelphia, immediately wrote to Gallitzin--whom he styled the propagandist of the faith--to ask the assistance of his experience and of his prayers, and to advise him that he not only confirmed his existing powers, but that he also authorized him to use, without the necessity of any previous application, those with which, as coadjutor, he was himself invested. These two men were bound till death by the closest ties of friendship.
All of Gallitzin's actions were stamped with the characteristics of candor and uprightness. Should the honor of the Church, or the dignity of her priesthood, be called into question, he knew no such word as compromise. He shrank from familiarity with that species of half education of which presumption is a leading feature; and ever, and everywhere, stood unshaken in his love and assertion of truth--a persistency which, on more than one occasion, called down upon him the imputation of an aristocratic and domineering spirit. Those, however, who, admitted to the closer intimacies of his life, were best qualified to judge, soon became convinced of the futility of the charge. If there were any note of distinction about him, it was to be traced in the loftiness of his conceptions; for he had long cast off all princely frippery; and the privileged society in which he especially delighted was that of the poor and the lowly, with whom he would kindly converse after possessing himself of their wishes and needs. {155} In the circuit of his missions, it was his pleasure to pass by the dwellings of opulence and seek the hospitalities of the humble cottage. There would the prince sit down to rest, surrounded by joyous children, distributing pictures among them and sharing in their humble fare.
Such was Gallitzin, shepherd of souls, polemic and vicar-general, at Loretto, whence the peaceful work of Christian civilization went on quietly progressing and gradually enlarging the circle of its benefits. Years had thus passed on, and the pioneer could already mark the slanting shadows of declining life, when a young missionary came over from Europe to share in his toils. This was Father Lemcke, a Benedictine, who, after having been his assistant, became his successor. Gallitzin was then sixty-four years of age. Father Lemcke has left us a picturesque account of his first meeting with the venerable missionary. He had set out from Philadelphia, and after several days of rough traveling reached Münster, where an Irish family gave him hospitality. From that village he procured a guide, and at this point of his narrative we find him with an Irish lad piloting him to Loretto. "As we had gone," says he, "a couple of miles through the woods, I caught sight of a sled, drawn by a pair of vigorous horses; and in the sled a half recumbent traveler, on every lineament of whose face could be read a character of distinction. He was outwardly dressed in a sort of threadbare overcoat; and, on his head, a peasant's hat, so worn and dilapidated that no one would have rescued it from the garbage of the streets. It occurred to me that some accident had happened to the old gentleman, and that he was compelled to resort to this singular mode of conveyance Whilst I was taxing my brains for a satisfactory solution of the problem, Tom, my guide, who was trotting ahead, turned round and, pointing to the old man, said: "Here comes the priest" I immediately coaxed up my nag to the sled. "Are you, really, the pastor of Loretto?" said I. "I am, sir." "Prince Gallitzin?" "At your service, sir," he said with a laugh. "You are probably astonished"--he continued, after I had handed him a letter from the Bishop of Philadelphia--"at the strangeness of my equipage? But there's no help for it. You have no doubt already found out that in these countries you need not dream of a carriage-road. You could not drive ten yards without danger of an overturn. I am prevented, since a fall which I have had, from riding on horseback, and it would be impossible for me now to travel on foot Beside, I carry along everything required for the celebration of holy mass. I am now going to a spot where I have a mission, and where the holy sacrifice has been announced for to-day. Go to Loretto and make yourself at home, until my return to night; unless, indeed, you should prefer to accompany me. You may be interested in the visit."
Father Lemcke accordingly followed Gallitzin, and after a ride of several miles they reached a sort of a hamlet, where there stood a good Pennsylvania farm, in which all the Catholics of the vicarage had gathered as on a festive day. The cabin had been transformed into a chapel, and the good people were there, crowding; some standing, others kneeling under the projecting shed; and others again, in small huts or under the foliage of the grand old trees, were awaiting the appointed hour. All had their prayer-books in their hands. At a sign from Gallitzin, Father Lemcke proceeded within to receive the confessions of the faithful; after which the prince celebrated mass, preached, and administered the sacrament of baptism. For his pious and good people it was a very festive day. The dinner which followed, and in which all shared, was a repast marked by the cheerfulness and the charity of the agapae of the primitive Christians.
{156}
By nightfall both priests had reached Loretto. On The Sunday following, Gallitzin introduced his assistant to his German parishioners, and then, with a quizzical smile, invited him, without any further ceremony, to ascend the pulpit. Father Lemcke had to undergo the ordeal, and it proved not to his disfavor. He had naturally supposed that the same roof which sheltered Gallitzin would also protect him. The old priest, however, could not see things in that light; and a few days after, he took him to Ebensburg, the principal county town, and there installed him as the pastor of the parish.
Each of the two missionaries who had thus halved the goodly work still had a respectable circuit to perform. There were stations fifty and even seventy miles apart, and over this immense extent of territory, which now constitutes the Pittsburg and Erie bishoprics, there were, with them, but three or four priests to attend to the work of the Lord. To Gallitzin was reserved the deep gratification of witnessing the branching off, from Loretto, of various Catholic parishes, which were formed in the very manner in which Loretto had been. Twelve miles north of the primitive colony, up to the head-waters of the Susquehanna, where lay cheap and rich lands, some of the more prosperous members of his parish purchased tracts for themselves and their families, and there laid the grounds of a settlement, to which they gave the name of St. Joseph, borrowed from the invocation of the church which Gallitzin had consecrated on that spot. It is now known on the maps as Carrollton. Among the early settlers and the heads of families were sturdy John Wakeland, whom the reader may not have forgotten, and his six sons, as tall and as stalwart as himself, and all, like him, devoted to the Catholic faith. On the very road to Loretto, and before the death of the prince, sprang up a rural parish under the name of St. Augustin. Another was formed with the appellation of Gallitzin--after the death of the missionary, be it understood; for his humility during his lifetime never could have consented to this endowment.
In 1836, Father Lemcke fixed his residence at St Joseph--urged somewhat to this course by Gallitzin, whose favorite idea had, for some time, been to witness on that spot the rise and growth of another Loretto. The old priest, growing into closer intimacy with the younger missionary, periodically came in his sled to St. Joseph, rejoicing to behold "a second edition of what he himself had created thirty years before." So thoroughly had he become linked to this new friend from far-off Europe, that he never but reluctantly parted from him, and even shed bitter tears on once hearing that the bishop contemplated changing Father Lemcke's residence.
Thus was it given to Gallitzin, in the decline of life, to behold trackless forests converted into fruitful fields. The transient cares and annoyances of life had disappeared, and a numerous Catholic population grew around him in the joys of contented toil. The early settlers who with him had shared the sweat and borne the burden of the day, had long bidden farewell to their humbler log-cabins. Well appointed farms, substantial barns, commodious dwellings, surrounded by beautiful gardens and smiling meadows, wooed the eye as the rewarding product of their privations and their toils.
In 1839 the old missionary's health began to fail. The load of years much less than the thousand hardships inseparably connected with the devotions of apostolic life, weighed heavily on a frame attenuated indeed, but still erect and resisting. Yet the burden went on pressing still--the body gradually bent--the step unsteady--the divine fire which always kindled still animated him; but the voice would refuse the assistance of its sounds, and the close of his sermons turn into a peroration of silent {157} tears a thousand times more eloquent then his spoken words. And yet, with all these warnings, he rejected every suggestion of precaution and care of himself. To this he would answer, in his own energetic language, that "as the days had gone by when, by martyrdom, it was possible for us to testify to God's glory upon earth, it was our duty, like the toil-worn ox, to remain hitched to the plough in the field of the Lord." And the event harmonized with his wish. On Easter Sunday, 1840, Gallitzin, being then seventy years of age, had early in the morning taken his seat in the confessional. After the discharge of its duties, he had braced up the remnants of his strength to ascend the altar for holy sacrifice. He was, however, compelled to forego the sermon of the day to betake himself to his bed, from which he was destined never again to rise. The attentive care of Dr. Rodriguez, his intimate friend, prolonged his existence for a few weeks; but it was soon ascertained that the noble missionary was fast sinking under exhausted energies. With the rapidity of lightning, the sad news was carried abroad. From far and near, old and young gathered around his dwelling, once more to receive the blessing of the man whom they revered. So great was the affluence of the people, that in order to secure a few quiet moments for the glorious veteran of faith, absorbed in the last meditations and prayers of earth, it became necessary to warn away the increasing throng of visitors--and this without his knowledge; for it was his wish to receive every one of them, and to each to speak the last farewell which welled up from his loving heart. Yet some did come for whom no such words passed his lips, which on the contrary moved in utterances of reproof and blame. Among others came in one of the parishioners, to whom the dying pastor had been particularly kind. He, however, had proved ungrateful, and had, indeed, been a cause of much annoyance to the missionary by habits of drunkenness and other excesses of an unregulated life. As he entered the room, the venerable pastor turned to him with a reproachful look and shook his head. This silent sermonizing produced a deeper impression than had any previous admonition of Gallitzin. The self-accusing culprit fell upon his knees, melted to tears, confessed his errors, and promised thenceforward to amend. The evidence of his sincerity is found in the statement of Gallitzin's successor, who informs us that he stoutly held to his promise.
The last scene of this eventful life closed on the sixth of May, when the missionary prince left this world, accompanied by the prayers of his parishioners gathered around him; for every apartment of the house, and every portion of the chapel attached to it, was literally thronged by a wailing, weeping, and praying community. This supreme hour revealed the depth and the sincerity of the love which dwelt in every heart for this man of God. On the day of his burial, whole populations swarmed from every point--from distances ranging fifty and sixty miles--to pay to the good father a last tribute of that affectionate respect which had attended him through life.
The most respectable men of the parish contended for the honor of bearing his body to the cemetery. In the body of the church, it was a perfect contest among the congregation to look for the last time on the feature of him who was thenceforward for ever lost to earth. Those who were lucky enough, through the pressure of the crowd, to reach the coffin, kissed in tearful love the icy hands of the missionary; while the attendants were compelled to resort to force in order to close the coffin for the final rites of the Church.
It were no easy task, without reference to the work of his biographer--an ocular witness of Gallitzin's labors--to convey a just conception of their bearing and extent "When," he says, "we come to consider the {158} theatre on which Gallitzin inaugurated his immense labors in so obscure and modest a manner, we realize the amount of substantial good that can be achieved by an apostolic missionary in America when, like Gallitzin, he conceives the practical sense of things and leads them on to their crowning development with the zeal and perseverance which marked his course. The small county of Cambria, in Pennsylvania, created in 1807, which is indebted to Gallitzin for a majority of its settlers, is everywhere, and with every reason, characterized as the Catholic county. Indeed, when the traveller on business, or the tourist for pleasure, strikes this point from other districts of Pennsylvania more controlled by Protestant influences, it seems to him that he has passed from a comparative desert into a smiling oasis. This may be easily understood. For all their journeyings for whole days, over counties twice and thrice more opulent than this little Catholic county, there is no indication to tell them what religion is there professed. Not till they have pressed the soil of Cambria county do they feel that they are in a truly Christian land, as they catch sight of ten Catholic churches and three monasteries--all of which cropped out of Loretto under Gallitzin's creative and fostering hands."
From all these results we can frame an accurate judgment of the prince's career, which was but one continuous struggle--a glorious struggle, teeming with usefulness. When Gallitzin opened his mission, the vicar of Christ was persecuted and proscribed. A prisoner, torn away from his spiritual family, Pius VI. heard the voices of a philosophic world applauding his abduction, as, ten years later, it applauded the violence inflicted on the person of Pius VII. It was just at that dark period which overshadowed the Holy See that the Church inaugurated her peaceful labors in the United States, and, at the end of ten years, had marked her beneficent influences by a progress so rapid that its result could not escape the eye of even the least observant. While Europe was organizing a settled persecution of the papal power, the Church in America was growing up and expanding in influence. Her very adversaries were compelled to bear even reluctant witness to her triumphs. In one of the meetings of a Bible society some years ago. Lord Barclay exhibited a summary, in which he lamented the spread of Catholicity in a country in which he said that in the year 1790 there was not even a bishop. "Strange," he said, "that while, in Europe, the power of the see of Rome is overthrown, the Pope is a prisoner, and Rome is declared to be the second city of the French empire--strange, I say, that, at this very moment, the power of the Pope should be rooted in America in this still stranger manner." Ay! strange indeed, my Lord Barclay; but in no way strange for those who know that martyrdom is the life of the Church, and that she woos triumph in persecution. Gallitzin's life is a living, convincing proof of her triumphs and her hopes.
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{159}
From The Sixpenny Magazine.
"DUM SPIRO SPERO."
(AN APOLOGUE.)
My soul was restless, and I sought The elf's wild haunt, and breath'd sweet airs: I track'd the river's devious route:-- In vain!--my heart was vext with cares.
I wandered from the noble park, The trimly gay parterre to view; Thence pluck'd a rose, without one mark To rob it of its faultless hue;
And, home returning, quaintly placed My trophy in a tiny tray Of antique silver curious traced; Then, charg'd with odor, turn'd away.
* * * * *
I enter'd yestermorn the room Where, all forgotten, dwelt my flower Unhappy fate! that tender bloom Fell, fainting for the genial shower.
Vanish'd all vigor had; and now-- The perfume fled--the tints grown dull-- It had been sin, I did allow, For this so choice a bud to pull.
Then, with sore heart, I brought a stream Of clearest water to its cup. What wonder if new life 'gan gleam, And care restored what hope gave up?
Lo! leaf by leaf was slowly raised, Till olden flashes came at length: Each plaintive petal oped, and gazed. And thank'd me with its growing strength.
* * * * *
Our hearts are like thee, little Rose; They quicken what time love-beams shine; But under dismal clouds of woes How can they choose but droop and pine?
If sympathy with lute attend To lull with some resistless psalm, Misfortune's darts can never rend: Friends soothe, hope cheers, and heaven anoints with balm!
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{160}
From The Month.
CONSTANCE SHERWOOD.
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
BY LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON.
Chapter XV
Then methought was witnessed (I speak of the time when Sir Hammond l'Estrange made the savage speech which caused his lady and me to exchange affrighted looks) a rare instance of the true womanly courage which doth sometimes lie at the core of a timid heart. The meek wife, which dared not so much as to lift up her eyes to her lord if he did only frown, or to oppose his will in any trifling matter; whose color I had seen fly from her cheek if he raised his voice, albeit not in anger against herself, now in the presence of those at table, with a face as pale as ashes, but a steady voice, and eyes fixed on him, thus addressed her husband:
"Sir, since we married I have never opposed your will, or in anything I wot of offended you, or ever would if I could help it. Do not, therefore, displeasure me so much, I beseech you, in this grave instance, as to make me an instrument in the capture. And God knoweth what should follow of one which came to me for help, and to whom the service I rendered him would prove the means of his ruin if you persist therein."
"Go to, madam, go to," cries Sir Hammond; "your business doth lie with poor people, mine with criminals. Go your way, and intrude not yourself in weightier matters than belong to your sex."
"Sir," she answers, braving his frowning looks, albeit her limbs began to tremble, "I humbly crave your patience; but I will not leave you, neither desist from my suit, except thereunto compelled by force. I would to God my tongue had been plucked out rather than that it should utter words which should betray to prison, yea, perhaps to death, the poor man whose wounds I tended."
The cloud on Sir Hammond's brow waxed darker as she spoke. He glanced at me, and methinks perceived my countenance to be as much disturbed as his lady's. A sudden thought, I ween, then passed through his mind; and with a terrible oath he swore that he misliked this strenuous urging in favor of a vile popish priest, and yet more the manner of this intercession.
"Heaven shield, madam," he cried, "you have not companied with recusants so as to become infected with a lack of zeal for the Protestant religion!"
The color returned for a moment to Lady l'Estrange's cheeks as she answered:
"Sir, I have never, from the time my mother did teach me my prayers, been of any other way of thinking than that wherein she then instructed me, or so much as allowed myself one thought contrary to true Protestant religion; or ever lent an ear, and with God's help never will, to what papists do advance; but nevertheless, if this priest do fall into any grievous trouble through my speeches, I shall be a most unhappy woman all my life."
And then the poor soul, rising from her seat, went round to her husband's side, and, kneeling, sought to take his hands, beseeching him in such moving and piteous terms to change his purpose as I could see did visibly affect some present. But I also noticed in Sir Hammond's face so resolved an intent as if nothing in earth or heaven should alter it. A drowning wretch {161} would as soon have moved a rock to advance toward him as she succeeded in swerving his will by her entreaties.
A sudden thought inspired me to approach her where she had sunk down on her knees at her husband's feet, he seeking angrily to push her away. I took her by the hand and said:
"I pray you, dear lady, come with me. These be indeed matters wherein, as Sir Hammond saith, women's words do not avail."
Both looked at me surprised; and she, loosing her hold of him, suffered me to lead her away. We went into the parlor, Mrs. l'Estrange following us. But as I did try to whisper in her ear that I desired to speak with her alone, the bell in the dining-room began to ring violently; upon which she shuddered and cried out:
"Let me go back to him, Mistress Sherwood. I'll warrant you he is about to send for the constables; but beshrew me if I die not first at his feet; for if this man should be hung, peace will be a stranger to me all my life."
Mistress l'Estrange essayed to comfort her; but failing therein, said she was very foolish to be so discomposed at what was no fault of hers, and she should think no more thereon, for in her condition to fret should be dangerous; and if people would be priests and papists none could help if they should suffer for it. And then she left the parlor somewhat ruffled, like good people sometimes feel when they perceive their words to have no effect. When we were alone, "Lady l'Estrange," I said, "where is Master Rugeley's house?"
"One mile, or thereabouts, across the heath," she answered.
"And the way to it direct?" I asked.
"Yea, by the footpath," she replied; "but much longer by the high road."
I went to the window and opened the shutter and the lattice also. The moon was shining very brightly.
"Is it that cottage near to the wood?" I inquired, pointing to a thatched roof nigh unto the darksome line of trees against the sky.
"Yea," she answered, "how near it doth seem seen in this light! Constance, what think you to do?" she exclaimed, when I went to her cupboard and took out the keys she had showed me that morning opened the doors of the kitchen garden and the orchard.
"Did you not say," I answered, "that the gentleman now in so great peril did lodge with Master Rugeley?"
"Would you go there?" she said, looking aghast. "Not alone; you durst not do it!"
"Twenty times over," I answered, "for to save a man's life, and he--he a--" But there I stopped; for it was her fellow-creature she desired to save. Her heart bled not like mine for the flock which should be left without a shepherd; and albeit our fears were the same, we felt not alike. I went into the hall, and she pursued me--one-half striving to stay me from my purpose, one-half urging me to fulfil it; yet retracting her words as soon as uttered.
"When I issue from the door of the orchard unto the heath," I said, the while wrapping round me a cloak with a hood to it, "and pursue the path in front, by what token may I find Master Rugeley's house if the moon should be obscured?"
"Where two roads do meet," she said, "at the edge of the heath, a tall oak doth stand near to a gate; a few steps to the right should then lead to it. But verily, Mistress Constance, I be frightened to let you go; and oh, I do fear my husbands's anger."
"Would you, then, have a man die by your means?" I asked, thinking for to cure one terror by another, as indeed it did; for she cried,
"Nay, I will speed you on your way, good Constance; and show so brave a face during your absence as God shall help me to do; yea, and open the door for you myself, if my husband should kill me for it!"
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Then she took the keys in her hand, and glided like unto a pale ghost before me through the passage into the hall, so noiselessly that I should have doubted if aught of flesh and blood could have moved so lightly, and undid the bars of the back door without so much as a sound. Then she would fetch some thick shoes for me to wear, which I did entreat her not to stay me for; but nothing else would content the poor soul, and, as she had the keys in her hand, I was forced to wait her return with so much impatience as may be guessed. I heard the voices of the gentlemen still carousing after supper; and then a servant's below in the hall, who said the constables had been sent for, and a warrant issued for the apprehension of a black papist at Master Rugeley's. Then Milicent returned, and whilst I put on the shoes she had brought, and she was tying with trembling fingers the hood of my cloak, the rustling of Mrs. l'Estrange's silk gown was heard on the stair above our heads, from whence we were like to be seen; and, fear awakening contrivance, I said aloud,
"Oh, what a rare pastime it should be to dress as a ghost, and frighten the good lady your sister-in-law! I pray you get me some white powder to pale my face. Methinks we need some kind of sport to drive away too much thinking on that dismal business in hand."
The steps over our head sounded more hurried, and we heard the door of the parlor close with a bang, and the lattice also violently shut.
"Now," I whispered, "give me the keys, good Lady l'Estrange, and go to your sister yourself. Say I was ashamed to have been overheard to plan so rank a piece of folly (and verily you will be speaking no other than the truth), and that you expect I shall not so much as show my face in the parlor this evening; and lock also my chamber-door, that none may for a surety know me for to be absent."
"Yea," answered the poor lady, with so deep a sigh as seemed to rend her heart; "but, God forgive me, I never did think to hide anything from my husband! And who shall tell me if I be doing right or wrong?"
I could not stay, though I grieved for her; and the sound of her voice haunted me as I went through the garden, and then the orchard, unto the common, locking the doors behind me. When this was done, I did breathe somewhat more freely, and began to run along the straight path amidst the heath. I wot not if my speed was great--the time seemed long; yet methinks I did not slacken my pace once, but rather increased it, till, perceiving the oak, and near it the gate Lady l'Estrange had mentioned, I stopped to consider where to turn; and after I had walked a little to the right I saw a cottage and a light gleaming inside. Then my heart beat very fast; and when I knocked at the door I felt scarce able to stand. I did so three times, and no answer came. Then I cried as loudly as I could, "Master Rugeley, I beseech you open the door." I heard some one stirring within, but no one came. Then I again cried out, "Oh, for our Blessed Lady's sake, some one come." At last the lattice opened, and a man's head appeared.
"Who are you?" he said, in a low voice.
"A friend," I answered, in a whisper; "a Catholic. Are yon Master Rugeley?"
"Yea," he answered.
"Oh, then, if Mr. Tunstall is here, hide him quickly, or send him away. I am a friend of Lady l'Estrange's and staying in her house. Sir Hammond hath received tidings that a priest is in this neighborhood, and a warrant is issued for to apprehend him. His lady unwittingly, and sorely troubled she is thereat, showed by her speeches touching your guest, that he is like to be Mr. Tunstall; and the constables will soon be here."
"Thank you," he replied whom I was addressing; "but Mr. Tunstall is not the name of my friend."
Then I feared he did take me for a spy, and I cried out, greatly moved, "As I do hope to go to heaven one {163} day, and not to hell, Master Rugeley, I speak the truth, and my warning is an urgent one."
Then I heard some one within the house, who said, "Open the door, Master Rugeley. I should know that voice. Let the speaker in."
Methought I, too, knew the voice of the person who thus spoke. The door was opened, and I entered a room dimly lighted by one candle.
"Oh, for God's sake," I cried, "if a priest is here, hide him forthwith."
"Are you a Catholic, my child?"
I looked up to the person who put this question to me, and gave a sudden cry, I know not whether of terror or joy; for great as was the change which the lapse of years, and great inward and outward changes, had wrought in his aspect, I saw it was my father.
"I am Constance," I cried; "Constance Sherwood! Oh, my dear father!" and then fell at his feet weeping.
After an instant's, astonishment and fixed gazing on my face, he recognized me, who was, I doubt not, more changed than himself, and received me with a great paternal kindness and the tenderest greeting imaginable, yet tempered with reserve and so much of restraint as should befit one who, for Christ's sake, had dissevered himself from the joys, albeit not from the affections, of the natural heart.
"Oh, my good child, my own dear Constance," he said; "hath God in his bounty given thy poor father a miraculous sight of thee before his death, or art thou come verily in flesh and blood to warn him of his danger?"
"My dear and honored father," I replied, "time presses; peril is indeed at hand, if you and Mr. Tunstall are the same person."
"The wounds in my hands," he answered, "must prove me such, albeit now healed by the care of that good Samaritan, Lady l'Estrange. But prithee, my good child, whence comest thou?"
"Alas!" I said; "and yet not alas, if God should be so good to me as by my means to save you, I am Sir Hammond's guest, being a friend of his lady's. I came there yesterday."
"Oh, my good child, I thought not to have seen thee in these thy grown-up years. Master Rugeley," he added, turning to his host, "this is the little girl I forsook four years ago, for to obtain the hundredfold our Lord doth promise."
"My very dear father," I said, "joy is swallowed up in fear. God help me, I came to warn a stranger (if so be any priest in these times should be a stranger to a Catholic), and I find you."
"Oh, but I am mightfully pleased," quoth he, "to see thee, my child, even in this wise, and to hear thee speak like a true daughter of Holy Church. And Lady l'Estrange is then thy friend?"
"Yea, my dear father; but for God and our lady's sake hide yourself. I warrant yon the constables may soon be here. Master Rugeley, where can he be concealed, or whither fly, and I with him?"
"Nay, prithee not so fast," quoth he. "Flight would be useless; and in the matter of hiding, one should be more easily concealed than two; beside that, the hollow of a tree, which Master Rugeley will, I ween, appoint me for a bed-chamber to-night, should hardly lodge us both with comfort."
"Oh, sir," said Rugeley, "do not tarry."
"For thy sake, no; not for more than one minute, Thomas; but ere I part from this wench, two questions I must needs ask her."
Then he drew me aside and inquired what facilities I continued to have in London for the exercise of Catholic religion, and if I was punctual in the discharge of my spiritual duties. When I had satisfied him thereon, he asked if the report was true which he heard from a prisoner for recusancy in Wisbeach Castle, concerning my troth-plight with Mr. Rookwood.
"Yea," I said, "it is true, if so be you now do add your consent to it."
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He answered he should do so with all his heart, for he knew him to be a good Catholic and a virtuous gentleman; and as we might lack the opportunity to receive his blessing later, he should now give it unto me for both his most dear children. Which he did, laying his hand on my head with many fervent benisons, couched in such words as these, that he prayed for us to be stayed up with the shore of God's grace in this world; and after this transitory life should end, to ascend to him, and appear pure and unspotted before his glorious seat. Then he asked me if it was Lady l'Estrange who had detected him; whereupon I briefly related to him what had occurred, and how sore her grief was therein.
"God bless her," he answered; "and tell her I do thank her and pray for her with all mime heart."
And more he would have added, but Master Rugeley opened the door impatiently. So, after kissing once more my father's hand, I went away, compelled thereunto by fears for his safety, if he should not at once conceal himself.
Looking back, I saw him and his guide disappear in the thicket, and then, as I walked on toward Lynn Court, it did almost seem to me as if the whole of that brief but pregnant interview should have been a dream; nor could I verily persuade myself that it was not a half habitant of another world I had seen and spoken with rather than mine own father; and in first thinking on it I scarcely did fully apprehend the danger he was in, so as to feel as much pain as I did later, when the joy and astonishment of that unexpected meeting had given way to terrifying thoughts. Ever and anon I turned round to gaze on the dark wood wherein his hopes of safety did lie, and once I knelt down on the roadside to pray that the night should be also dark and shield his escape. But still the sense of fear was dulled, and woke not until the sound of horses' feet on the road struck on my ear, and I saw a party of men riding across the common. The light in the cottage was extinguished, but the cruel moon shone out then more brightly than heretofore. Now I felt so sick and faint that I feared to sink down on the path, and hurried through the orchard-door and the garden to the house. When I had unlocked the back door and stood in the hall where a lately kindled fire made a ruddy light to glow, I tried again to think I had been dreaming, like one in a nightmare strives to shake off an oppressive fancy. I could not remain alone, and composed my countenance for to enter the parlor, when the door thereof opened and Mrs. l'Estrange came out, who, when she perceived me standing before her, gave a start, but recovering herself, said, good-naturedly:
"Marry, if this be not the ghost we have been looking for; now ashamed, I ween, to show itself. I hope, Mistress Sherwood, you do not haunt quiet folks in their beds at night; for I do, I warn you, mislike living ghosts, and should be disposed to throw a jug of water at the head of such a one." And laughing, she took my hand in a kind manner, which when she did, almost a cry broke from her: "How now, Milicent! she is as cold as a stone figure. Where has she been chilling herself?"
Milicent pressed forward and led me to my chamber, wherein a fire had been lighted, and would make me drink a hot posset. But when I thought of the cold hollow of a tree wherein my father was enclosed, if it pleased God no worse mishap had befallen him, little of it could I force myself to swallow, for now tears had come to my relief, and concealing my face in the pillow of the bed whereon for weariness I had stretched myself, I wept very bitterly.
"Is that poor man gone from Rugeley's house?" Milicent whispered.
Alas! she knew not who that poor man was to me, nor with what anguish I answered: "He is not in the {165} cottage, I hope; but God only knoweth if his pursuers shall not discover him." The thought of what would then follow overcame me, and I hid my face with mine hands.
"Oh, Constance," she exclaimed, "was this poor man known to thee, that thy grief is so great, whose conscience doth not reproach thee as mine doeth?"
I held out my hand to her without unshading my face with the other, and said: "Dear Milicent! thou shouldst not sorrow so mach for thine own part in this sore trial. It was not thy fault. He said so. He blest thee, and prays for thee."
Uncomforted by my words, she cried again, what she had so often exclaimed that night, "If this man should die, my happiness is over."
Then once more she asked me if I know this priest, and I was froward with her (God forgive me, for the suspense and fear overthrew better feelings for a moment), and I cried, angrily, "Who saith he is a priest? Who can prove it?"
"Think you so?" she said joyfully; "then all should be right."
And once more, with some misdoubting, I ween, that I concealed somewhat from her, she inquired touching my knowledge of this stranger. Then I spoke harshly, and bade her leave me, for I had sorrow enough without her intermeddling with it; but then grieving for her, and also afraid to be left alone, I denied my words, and prayed her to stay, which she did, but did not speak much again. The silence of the night seemed so deep as if the rustling of a leaf could be noticed; only now and then the voices of the gentlemen below, and some loud talking and laughter from some of them was discernible through the closed doors. Once Lady l'Estrange said: "They be sitting up very late; I suppose till the constables return. Oh, when will that be?"
The great clock in the hall then struck twelve; and soon after, starting up, I cried, "What should be that noise?"
"I do hear nothing," she answered, trembling as a leaf.
"Hush," I replied, and going to the window, opened the lattice. The sound in the road on the other side of the house was now plain. On that we looked on naught was to be seen save trees and grass, with the ghastly moonlight shining on them. A loud opening and shutting of doors and much stir now took place within the house, and, moved by the same impulse, we both went out into the passage and half way down the stairs. Milicent was first. Suddenly she turned round, and falling down on her knees, with a stifled exclamation, she hid her face against me, whisperings "He is taken!"
We seemed both turned to stone. O ye which have gone through a like trial, judge ye; and you who have never been in such straits, imagine what a daughter should feel who, after long years' absence, beholdeth a beloved father for one instant, and in the next, under the same roof where she is a guest, sees him brought in a prisoner and in jeopardy of his life. Every word which was uttered we could hear where we sat crouching, fearful to advance--she not daring to look on the man she had ruined, and I on the countenance of a dear parent, lest the sight of me should distract him from his defence, if that could be called such which he was called on to make. They asked him touching his name, if it was Tunstall. He answered he was known by that name. Then followed the murtherous question, if he was a Romish priest? To which he at once assented. Then said Sir Hammond:
"How did you presume, sir, to return into England contrary to the laws?"
"Sir," he answered, "as I was lawfully ordained a priest by a Catholic bishop, by authority derived from the see of Rome" (one person here exclaimed, "Oh, audacious papist! his {166} tongue should be cat out;" but Sir Hammond imposed silence), "so likewise," he continued, "am I lawfully sent to preach the word of God, and to administer the sacraments to my Catholic countrymen. As the mission of priests lawfully ordained is from Christ, who did send his apostles even as his Father sent him, I do humbly conceive no human laws can justly hinder my return to England, or make it criminal; for this should be to prefer the ordinances of man to the commands of the supreme legislator, which is Christ himself."
Loud murmurs were here raised by some present, which Sir Hammond again silencing, he then inquired if he would take the oath of allegiance to the queen? He answered (my straining ears taking note of every word he uttered) that he would gladly pay most willing obedience to her majesty in all civil matters; but the oath of allegiance, as it was worded, he could not take, or hold her majesty to possess any supremacy in spiritual matters. He was beginning to state the reasons thereof, but was not suffered to proceed, for Sir Hammond, interrupting him, said he was an escaped prisoner, and by his own confession condemned, so he should straightway commit him to the gaol in Norwich. Then I lost my senses almost, and seizing Lady l'Estrange's arm, I cried, "Save him! he is mine own father, Mr. Sherwood!" She uttered a sort of cry, and said, "Oh, I have feared this, since I saw his face!" and running forward, I following her, affrighted at what should happen, she called out, "It shall not be! He shall not do it!" and with a face as white as any smock, runs to her husband, and perceiving the constables to be putting chains on my father's hands and feet, which I likewise beheld with what feelings you who read this may think, she falls on her knees and gasps out these words in such a mournful tone, that I shuddered to hear her, "Oh, sir! if this man leaves this house a chained prisoner, I shall never be the like of my-self again. There shall be no more joy for me in life." And then faints right away, and Sir Hammond carries her in his arms out of the hall. Mine eyes the while met my father's; who smiled on me with kind cheer, but signed for me to keep away. I stretched my arms toward him, and with his chained hand he contrived yet once more for to bless me; then was hurried out of my sight. Far more time than I ever did perceive or could remember the length of I remained in that now deserted hall, motionless, alone, near to the dying embers, the darkness still increasing, too much confused to recall at once the comforts which sacred thoughts do yield in such mishaps, only able to clasp my hand and utter broken sentences of prayer, such as "God, ha' mercy on us," and the like; till about the middle of the night, Sir Hammond comes down the stairs, with a lamp in his hand, and a strange look in his face.
"Mistress Sherwood," he says, "come to my lady. She is very ill, and hath been in labor for some time. She doth nothing but call for you, and rave about that accursed priest she will have it she hath murthered. Come and feign to her he hath escaped."
"O God!" I cried, "my words may fall on her ear, Sir Hammond, but my face cannot deceive her."
He looked at me amazed and angry. "What meaneth this passion of grief? What is this old man to you, that his misfortune should thus disorder you?" And as I could not stay my weeping, he asked in a scornful manner, "Do papists so dote on their priests as to die of sorrow when they get their deserts?" This insulting speech did so goad me, that, unable to restrain myself, I exclaimed, "Sir Hammond, he whom you have sent to a dungeon, and perhaps to death also (God pardon you for it!), is my true father!--the best parent and the noblest gentleman that ever breathed, which for many years I had not seen; and here under your roof, myself your guest, I {167} have beheld him loaded with chains, and dared not to speak for fear to injure him yet further, which I pray God I have not now done, moved thereunto by your cruel scoffs."
"Your father!" he said amazed; "Mr. Sherwood! These cursed feignings do work strange mishaps. But he did own himself a priest."
Before I had time to answer, a serving woman ran into the hall, crying out, "Oh, sir, I pray you come to my lady. She is much worse; and the nurse says, if her mind is not eased she is like to die before the child is born."
"Oh, Milicent! sweet Milicent!" I cried, wringing my hands; and when I looked at that unhappy husband's face, anger vanished and pity took its place. He turned to me with an imploring countenance as if he should wish to say, "None but you can save her." I prayed to Our Lady, who stood and fainted not beneath the Rood, to get me strength for to do my part in that sick chamber whither I signed to him to lead the way. "God will help me," I whispered in his ear, "to comfort her."
"God bless you!" he answered in a hoarse voice, and opened the door of the room in which his sweet lady was sitting in her bed, with a wild look in her pale blue eyes, which seemed to start out of her head.
"Sir," I heard her say, as he approached, "what hath befallen the poor man you would not dismiss?"
I took a light in my hand, so that she should see my face, and smiled on her with such good cheer, as God in his mercy gave me strength to do even amidst the two-fold anguish of that moment. Then she threw her arms convulsively round my neck, and her pale lips gasped the same question as before. I bent over her, and said, "Trouble yourself no longer, dear lady, touching this prisoner. He is safe (in God's keeping, I added, internally). He is where he is carefully tended (by God's angels, I mentally subjoined); he hath no occasion to be afraid (for God is his strength), and I warrant you is as peaceful as his nearest friends should wish him to be."
"Is this the truth?" she murmured in my ear.
"Yea," I said, "the truth, the very truth," and kissed her flushed cheek. Then feeing like to faint, I went away, Sir Hammond leading me to my chamber, for I could scarce stand.
"God bless you!" he again said, when he left me, and I think he was weeping.
I fell into a heavy, albeit troubled, sleep, and when I awoke it was broad daylight. When the waiting-maid came in, she told me Lady l'Estrange had been delivered of a dead child and Sir Hammond was almost beside himself with grief. My lady's mind had wandered ever since; but she was more tranquil than in the night. Soon after he sent to ask if he could see me, and I went down to him into the parlor. A more changed man, in a few hours, I ween, could not be seen, than this poor gentleman. He spoke not of his lady; but briefly told me he had sent in the night a messenger on horseback to Norwich, with a letter to the governor of the gaol, praying him to show as much consideration, and allow so much liberty as should consist with prudence, to the prisoner in his custody, sent by him a few hours before, for that he had discovered him not to be one of the common sort, nor a lewd person, albeit by his own confession amenable to the laws, and escaped from another prison. Then he added, that if I wished to go to Norwich, and visit this prisoner, he would give me a letter to the governor, and one to a lady, who would conveniently harbor me for a while in that city, and his coach should take me there, or he would lend me a horse and a servant to attend me. I answered, I should be glad to go, and then said somewhat of his lady, hoping she should now do well. He made no reply for a moment, and then only said,
"God knoweth! she is not like herself at the present."
The words she had so mournfully {168} spoken the day before came into my mind, "I shall never be like myself again, and there shall be no more joy in this house." And, methinks, they did haunt him also.
I sat for some time by her bedside that day. She seemed not ill at ease, but there was something changed in her aspect, and her words when she spoke had no sense or connection. And here I will set down, before I relate the events which followed my brief sojourn under their roof, what I have heard touching the sequel of Sir Hammond and his wife's lives.
In that perilous and sorely troubled childbirth understanding was alienated, and the art of the best physicians in England could never restore it. She was not frantic; but had such a pretty deliration, that in her ravings there was oftentimes more attractiveness than in many sane persons' conversation. They mostly ran on pious themes, and she was wont to sing psalms, and talk of heaven, and that she hoped to see God there; and in many things she showed her old ability, such as fine embroidery and the making of preserves. One day her waiting-woman asked her to dress a person's wounds, which did greatly need it, and she set herself to do it in her accustomed manner; but at the sight of the wounds, she was seized with convulsions, and became violently delirious, so that Sir Hammond sharply reprehended the imprudent attendant, and forbade the like to be ever proposed to her again. He gave himself up to live retired with her, and ceased to be a magistrate, nor ever, that I could hear of, took any part again in the persecution of Catholics. The distemper which had estranged her mind in all things else, had left her love and obedience entire to her husband; and he entertained a more visible fondness, and evinced a greater respect for her after she was distempered than he had ever done in the early days of their marriage. Methinks, the gentleness of her heart, and delicacy of her conscience, which till that misfortune had never, I ween, been burdened by any, even the least, self-reproach, and the lack of strength in her mind to endure an unusual stress, made the stroke of that accidental harm done to another through her means too heavy for her sufferance, and, as the poet saith, unsettled reason on her throne. For mine own part, but let others consider of it as they list, I think that had she been a Catholic by early training and distinct belief, as verily I hope she was in rightful intention, albeit unconsciously to herself (as I make no doubt many are in these days, wherein persons are growing up with no knowledge of religion except what Protestant parents do instill into them), that she would have had a greater courage for to bear this singular trial; which to a feeling natural heart did prove unbearable, but which to one accustomed to look on suffering as not the greatest of evils, and to hold such as are borne for conscience sake as great and glorious, would not have been so overwhelming. But herein I write, methinks, mine own condemnation, for that in the anguish of filial grief I failed to point out to her during those cruel moments of suspense that which in retrospection I do so clearly see. And so, may God accept the blighting of her young life, and the many sufferings of mine which I have still to record, as pawns of his intended mercies to both her and to me in his everlasting kingdom!
When I was about to set out for Norwich, late in the afternoon of that same day, Sir Hammond's messenger returned from thence with a letter from the governor of the gaol; wherein he wrote that the prisoner he had sent the night before was to proceed to London in a few hours with some other priests and recusants which the government had ordered to be conveyed thither and committed to divers prisons. He added, that he had complied with Sir Hammond's request, and shown so much favor to Mr. Tunstall as to transfer him, as soon as he {169} received his letter, from the common dungeon to a private cell, and to allow him to speak with another Catholic prisoner who had desired to see him. Upon this I prayed Sir Hammond to forward me on my journey to London, as now I desired nothing so much as to go there forthwith; which he did with no small alacrity and good disposition. Then, with so much speed as was possible, and so much suffering from the lapse of each hour that it seemed to me the journey should never end, I proceeded to what was now the object of my most impatient pinings--the place where I should bear tidings of my father, and, if it should be possible, minister assistance to him in his great straits. At last I reached Holborn; and, to the no small amazement of my uncle, Mrs. Ward, and Muriel, revealed to them who Mr. Tunstall was, whose arrival at the prison of Bridewell Mrs. Ward had had notice of that morning, when she had been to visit Mr. Watson, which she had contrived to do for some time past in the manner I will soon relate.