Assunta Howard. V. Sienna…

Assunta Howard. V. Sienna

It was on a beautiful evening in June, just when spring was merging into summer, that Mr. Carlisle’s family arrived in Sienna, and found a truly delightful home awaiting them, thanks to Giovanni’s energy and thoughtful skill. The soft but somewhat enervating air of Rome had failed to restore Mr. Carlisle’s strength; and the physician imperatively ordered that panacea which seems, in the opinion of the faculty, to be the last resource when other prescriptions have failed—complete change. An almost unaccountable attraction had drawn their thoughts towards Sienna, and Giovanni had been despatched to Tuscany with carte blanche as to preparations. He had proved himself entirely worthy of confidence; and the praises bestowed upon him by all the family, as they inspected the result of his efforts, were not unmerited. He had succeeded in engaging, for the season, a pleasant, airy villa about a mile beyond the Florentine gate of that quaint, proud city, and no expense had been spared to render it comfortable and home‐like. A small grove in front of the house and a flower garden on one side promised many a pleasant hour during those days when shade and beauty afford relief and divert the mind from the power of the midsummer sun. The loggia in the rear of the house, where Mr. Carlisle, his sister, and ward were now standing, commanded a most extensive and beautiful view. Directly beneath them the land sloped down into a graceful valley covered with vineyards. Beyond was a long stretch of campagna; and in the far distance, like a giant sentinel, rose Radicofani, on the summit of which still lingered the glory of a sunset whose gorgeousness had already departed. There is much in first impressions—more, perhaps, than we are willing to acknowledge—and it may well be doubted whether any after‐sunshine would have secured for Sienna the favor it now enjoyed had Radicofani appeared for the first time before the little group assembled on the balcony, rising weird‐like from out a veil of mist and cloud.

Mrs. Grey actually sighed, as, instantly spanning with a loving, womanly thought the distance which separated her from the lover she had regretfully left in Leghorn, she turned to her companions, saying: “Oh! I wish George were here. I think Sienna is lovely. There! I have seen the new moon over my left shoulder, and now I am sure he will not come this month.”

Mrs. Grey was evidently very much in love. Mr. Sinclair’s presence and absence formed the light and shade of her life’s picture; and a picture it was whose colors were too glaring, its contrasts too striking, and it lacked deep feeling in its tone. After a pause she continued:

“But then I have always noticed that George does not like views.” And removing her pretty travelling‐hat, she went away to superintend Amalie’s unpacking.

“He certainly did not like my views,” said Mr. Carlisle in a low voice to Assunta, “when I expressed them to him rather freely the other day. But neither did I like his; so we were quits there.”

But the attention of the traveller was soon entirely engrossed in securing the rest needful after so fatiguing a journey; and it was some days before Mr. Carlisle was sufficiently strong to explore the city, whose walls and towers could be seen, in all their mediæval picturesqueness, from the loggia.

At last, however, the change recommended began to tell upon the invalid, and each day added its portion of renewed strength, until Mr. Carlisle threatened every possible and impossible herculean labor, by way of proving that he was, as he said, “ready for anything.”

The ladies had insisted upon postponing any sight‐seeing until all could enjoy it together, though Clara protested that complete stagnation was evidently her fate. One could not find much excitement in a grove and a mountain after the first hour of novelty. Still, as long as the mail brought her a daily letter from Mr. Sinclair, and took in return the dainty, perfumed envelope containing so many pretty, loving nothings, she did not appear to be hopelessly inconsolable.

Assunta had, without scruple, made one exception to the generous resolution of waiting. But it was because she knew that the expedition she wished particularly to make alone would afford no pleasure to the others, while their presence might be the occasion of much pain to herself. Of course the interest Sienna had for her was its association with S. Catherine; and she longed to see the spot consecrated by the heroic sanctity of one whose humility was as profound as her influence on the world was powerful. She took the opportunity on Sunday, after she and Marie had assisted at Mass in a little suburban church, to visit the house of the dyer whose honor and privilege it was to be the father of a woman the life and character of whom might well be studied by the women of to‐ day. S. Catherine possessed all that the most ambitious of her sex in the present day could desire—an immense public influence. How did she gain it? Only by seeking to lose herself in the obscurity of an ignoble origin; in labors and privations for the sake of a love whose consuming fire many waters of tribulation could not quench; and in that truly hidden life in which God delights to work his wonders. The only right she claimed was that of loving, and consequently of suffering, more than others. The only insignia of rank she coveted was a crown of thorns, and it was granted to her by her Eternal Lover, who could refuse her nothing. Her power was in God’s exaltation of the humble, in his use of the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. Well might those hands, which were privileged to bear in them the marks of the Lord Jesus—the sacred stigmata—be made instrumental in leading back to Rome its exiled pontiff‐king. Self‐ annihilation was the secret of the influence of those glorious women of the ages of faith who have since been placed upon the altars of the church. O restless, self‐seeking women of to‐day! striving for a power which will curse and not bless you, where is the sweet perfume of your humility? Where are the fruits of mortification? Where the aureola of sanctity? Where are those grand works for God, offspring of a faith that believes all and a love that dares all? For these are the virtues in a S. Catherine or a S. Teresa which all can imitate. Or, if these standards are too high for modern souls, where are the homely qualities of those women commended by S. Paul, who adorn themselves with modesty, learn in silence, are faithful in all things, having a care of the house? Thank God, the hand of the Lord is not shortened, and holy mother church cherishes many a hidden gem of sanctity which will one day adorn the bride at the coming of her divine Spouse! Yet these are but the exceptions, unknown in the midst of the vast, ever‐moving multitude seeking the open arena of life, and desiring a part in its contests, animated by hopes as false as they are human, placing that almost insuperable barrier of pride between their souls and the Sacred Heart of our divine Lord. S. James has given us this simple rule of a holy life: “To visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation, and to keep ourselves unspotted from the world”—in two words, charity and purity. May the ever Blessed Mother of God and her glorious servant S. Catherine intercede for the women of the church, that they may never covet those empty baubles for which the women of the world are now spending their lives!

Assunta, simple child of the faith, thought nothing of all this, as she passed reverently over the threshold of the house, whose rooms, retaining still something of their original appearance, are now converted into chapels. The sacristan, perceiving in the young girl an earnestness of piety to which he was not accustomed in most of the strangers who visited this holy spot, showed to her, without solicitation, the crucifix before which S. Catherine was kneeling when she received the stigmata. With kind attention the good man placed a prie‐dieu before the precious object of veneration and, then retiring, gave Assunta an opportunity to satisfy her devotion. Making a place for Marie beside her, she was soon absorbed in prayer. Here, where the very atmosphere was filled with a spirit of love and sacrifice, where the crucifix before her spoke so eloquently of the closeness of the union between the faithful soul and its suffering Lord, how easy it seemed to make aspirations and resolutions which would of necessity lose something of their heat when exposed to the chilling air of the world’s indifference! How far off now was Mr. Carlisle’s affection, of whose influence she never ceased to feel something; how near the divine love of the Sacred Heart, that one sole object of S. Catherine’s desire and adoration! It had been the last request of Father Du Pont, when he gave Assunta his good‐by and blessing, that, while in Sienna, she would often visit this holy house. He judged rightly that the evident presence of the supernatural would help to counteract the spirit of worldliness which surrounded her in her daily life. She herself already felt that it was good for her to be there; and though, when she returned home, the sensible fervor of the moment died away, the effects remained in reanimated strength. “Courage, my child, and perseverance; God is with you,” were the last words she had heard from the good priest’s lips; and they kept singing on in her soul a sweet, low harmony, like the music of seashells, soothing her in many an anxious hour.

When once Mr. Carlisle was able to go out without danger of fatigue, Mrs. Grey could no longer complain of stagnation. The cathedral, the academy, and the numberless places of interest within the city walls, the drives, the walks through the shady lanes near the villa, twilight strolls through the vineyards, and excursions into the surrounding country, filled up the time through all those pleasant weeks. Before they could realize it Assunta’s birthday, her day of freedom, was at hand. A week before the eventful occasion Mr. Sinclair had arrived in Sienna, making Mrs. Grey superlatively happy. The joy he imparted to the others must be expressed in something less than the positive degree.

The sun rose brightly on the 15th of August. Nature responded to the joyous Benedicite, and “all the works of the Lord” seemed to “magnify him for ever” for the great things he had done in giving to heaven a Queen, to earth an Advocate. Nor was man silent. The grave city of Sienna put off its wonted dignity, and, by the unfurling of its gay flags, the spreading of tapestries, and the ringing of bells, testified its share in the common rejoicing of Christendom. It was the Feast of the Assumption, and Assunta Howard’s twenty‐first birthday. Was it strange that the young girl should have arisen with a heavy heart but little in sympathy with the glad sights and sounds that greeted her in these first waking moments? Surely, to those who understand the workings of the human heart it was most natural. On this day ended the relations between herself and her guardian. However hard the tie which bound her had made her duty towards him, it was harder still to nature to sever the bond. She was free now to go where she would; and it would soon be right for her to separate from him who was no longer her guardian, and was not satisfied to be only her friend. She had not realized before how much happiness she had experienced in the relationship which existed no longer; how she had rested content in the very face of danger, because the peril had in it so much more of pleasure than of pain. How sweet had been the intercourse which duty had sanctioned, and which duty must now interrupt! The feeling was all wrong, and she knew it, and she would not fail to struggle against it. Her will was resolute, but it was evident that she was not to conquer in life’s battle by throwing aside her arms and withdrawing from the contest. The bearing of the cross must be daily, and not only day after day, but year after year. Only to‐day she seemed to feel its weight more, and she sank a little beneath it. Was it her guardian angel that whispered courage to her soul, or was it the Blessed Mother, to whose loving protection she had been specially confided, who reminded her that our dear Lord fell three times beneath the overwhelming burden of his cross, and bade her be comforted? Yes, it was the feast of that dear Mother, and no mere human feeling should prevent her joining in the church’s exultation and corresponding to her salutation in the Introit: “Gaudeamus omnes in Domino.”

Assunta had ordered the carriage to be in readiness to take her to San Domenico for early Mass, and Marie’s knock at the door informed her that it was waiting. She had before visited the church, but only in the way of sight‐seeing. She had then been struck with its many points of interest; she had no idea until this morning how devotional it was. After Mass, at which she had received, in the Holy Communion, strength and peace, she remained a long time before the chapel containing those most beautiful frescos, by Razzi, of incidents in the life of the great saint of Sienna. The finest of all, S. Catherine in Ecstasy, is a treasure both of art and devotion. Apparently fainting, supported by two of her nuns, the countenance of the saint has that indescribable expression of peace which we see in those whose conversation is in heaven. But, more than this, the evident absence of all sensation indicates that the soul is rapt into an ineffable union with its divine Lord, and has passed, for the moment, beyond the confines of earth. Seemingly dead, and yet alive, the frail body, with its beautiful, calm face, rests upon its knees in the arms of the two Sisters, who, with all the tranquillity of the cloister, yet form a contrast to her who is so wholly dead to the world.

Assunta gazed upon the picture until it seemed to impart rest to her own soul; and yet the impression was very different from that she always received in looking at the other S. Catherine whom angels are bearing to her sepulture. Marie at last interrupted her, and, reminding her that she was the important personage at the villa on that day, suggested that she should return to breakfast. And Assunta determined that no cloud should disturb the serenity of the occasion, which all intended should be joyous.

Mr. Carlisle met her at the door on her return, and assisted her to alight. Then he took her hand in both his, and his eyes spoke volumes, as he said:

“Let me look at you, child, and see how you bear your honors. You are more of a heroine than I thought; for even at this distance we have heard the bells and have seen the flags. What an important little body you are! No one thought it worth while to ring me into my majority.”

“It is because you did not come into the world under the same auspices,” replied Assunta.

“Auspice Maria—that is the secret, then.” And Mr. Carlisle lowered his voice as he added: “Consider me a Mariolater from this time, my devotion deriving an ever‐increasing fervor from the doctrine of the Assumption. Well, you are free, and I suppose I am expected to congratulate you. How do you enjoy the sensation of liberty?”

“I do not think that I am yet enough accustomed to the use of my wings to feel the difference between what I was yesterday and what I am to‐day. But in one point I am unchanged. I have an excellent appetite for my breakfast.”

Assunta was determined to ward off all approach to sentiment.

“And here is Clara, wondering, no doubt, if I have been left behind in Sienna.”

Mrs. Grey came out into the garden, looking very lovely in her white morning dress, and followed by Mr. Sinclair.

“Severn, you are the most selfish man I ever saw,” exclaimed the impetuous little lady. “Do you flatter yourself that you have the monopoly of Assunta, and that no one else is privileged to wish her cento di questi giorni, as Giovanni says?—though I am sure I should not like to live a hundred years. My beauty would be gone by that time.” And she looked archly at her lover standing beside her.

“I fancy that even relentless time would ‘write no wrinkles on thine antique brow,’ reluctant to spoil anything so fair,” said Mr. Sinclair in his most gallant tone; then extending his hand to Assunta, he continued:

“Miss Howard, allow me to congratulate you, and to wish that your life may be as cloudless as is this wonderful sky. The day is like yourself—exquisitely beautiful.”

The color mounted into Assunta’s cheeks, but it was with displeasure at such uncalled‐for flattery. Mr. Carlisle turned away, and walked into the house; while his sister, with that amiability which often atoned for her want of tact, exclaimed:

“Bravo! George, you have said quite enough for us both; so I will only ditto your speech, and add to it my birthday kiss. Now, dear, let us go to breakfast. Severn is already impatient.”

The table had been placed in a large hall running the whole length of the house; and as the three were about to enter, Assunta paused on the threshold, in astonishment and delight at the magical transformation. The walls were literally garlanded with flowers, and fresh greens were festooned from the ceiling, while in the centre of the breakfast‐table was a basket of the rarest exotics. Not only Sienna, but Florence, had been commissioned to furnish its choicest flowers for the occasion. Assunta’s eyes filled with tears, and for a moment she could not speak. Mr. Carlisle, perceiving her emotion, offered her his arm, and led her towards a side‐table, saying:

“And here are our trifling birthday gifts, which you must not despise because they fall so far short of expressing all that we feel for you.”

There was a beautifully‐framed proof engraving of Titian’s masterpiece, the Assumption, from Mr. Carlisle. Clara had chosen as her gift a set of pearls, “because they looked so like the darling,” she said. Mr. Sinclair’s offering was a bouquet of rare and exquisite flowers. He had all the penetration of an experienced man of the world, and understood well that Miss Howard would prefer not to accept from him anything less perishable. Assunta put her hand in Clara’s, as she said:

“I never can thank you, it is all so beautiful.” And then she paused, until Clara exclaimed:

“Why, Assunta love, what a solemn birthday face! To be sure, the flight of time is a serious thing. I begin to feel it myself, and shall very soon dispense with birthdays altogether—such disagreeable reminders as they are.”

“What is it, petite?” asked Mr. Carlisle. “You know that to‐day you have only to command us, and we will prove your most obedient subjects.”

“Oh! it was nothing of any consequence; only a thought that you would consider very foolish crossed my mind. I am sure my solemnity was quite unintentional.”

“Well, a penny for that thought, twice told.”

Assunta, perceiving that Mr. Sinclair was out of hearing, explained:

“All this for my poor worthless self and nothing for Her whom God has delighted to honor. I think I was feeling a little jealous for my dear Mother. I did not want my feast to be better than hers.”

“Is that all?” said Mr. Carlisle. “To hear is to obey.” And without another word he quickly removed from the table everything but the picture, and, taking flowers and candles from the mantel‐piece, he improvised a really artistic shrine. Giovanni, who was serving breakfast, lighted the candles, and surveyed the effect with satisfaction.

“Thank you,” said Assunta, and she would not even remember that the love was wanting which would give value to the offering. “I shall hardly dare think a wish to‐day, the consequence is so magical.”

“And now, Severn,” said his sister, “if you have finished your popery, you had better call Assunta’s attention to my ever‐increasing appetite. Giovanni, too, will not like to have his efforts to honor the occasion slighted by a want of appreciation.”

Mr. Carlisle offered the young girl his arm, and led her to the table, saying:

“This is my first attempt at Mariolatry. Quite a success, is it not?”

“If it were only an outward sign of inward grace,” said Clara, laughing, “exterior piety would be quite becoming to you, Severn. You really have an artistic taste. But you are too absent‐minded to‐day! Can you not see that we are starving?”

Assunta was so accustomed to hear sacred things spoken of lightly, and often irreverently, that she had learned to make a little solitude in her heart, into which she could retire from the strife, or even the thoughtlessness, of tongues, and many a short act of reparation was there performed for those who were unconscious of offence.

“I wonder,” said Mrs. Grey, as after breakfast the party were standing on the loggia—“I wonder if Giovanni has succeeded in finding a good balcony for the races to‐morrow. I would not miss seeing them for the world. I dote on horses.”

“I very much doubt,” replied her brother, “if the horses will excite the least admiration, judging from the specimens Sienna has thus far produced. But the races will be interesting, because they are entirely unique. I believe that Giovanni has been very successful in securing a balcony, and he intends to have it surpass all others in decoration; so I hope that the ladies will do their part, not to disgrace his efforts. He will expect the jewels to be set in a manner worthy of the casket which contains them.”

“Never fear, Severn! Do you think a lady ever failed to look her best on such an occasion? An open balcony and a crowd—surely, she needs no other occasion for vanity.”

George Sinclair removed his cigar to remark carelessly:

“And so the admiration of one is, after all, insufficient to satisfy you?”

“No, it is not, you dear, lazy, old fellow, and you know it. It is only because I like your taste to be appreciated that I want others to admire me. I do not think there is a more delicious sensation than to feel that you are pretty to begin with, and then dressed so as to show every point to the best advantage, and to know that every eye is fixed upon you. One can be so innocently unconscious of it all the time.”

“Clara, I am ashamed of you,” exclaimed her brother. “You are a perfect mirror of your sex; only, unfortunately, it is the weaknesses that you reflect to the life, and none of the virtues.”

“Hush, impertinence!” replied Clara, laughing merrily. “One cannot always be a well awfully deep and reflecting only the stars. Come, George, what will be most becoming to me for to‐morrow?”

If it had been a few months after marriage, instead of before, this devoted lover would probably have replied, “A fool’s cap and bells, for all I care!” As it was, he concealed his inward irritation, and no one would have doubted his sincerity as he said: “You cannot fail to be charming in anything; and I will not choose or suggest, because I would like to enjoy the pleasure of a surprise.”

Mr. Sinclair was sometimes fascinated by Clara’s piquancy and brightness; but she did not suit all moods, and to‐day Assunta’s quiet dignity and the antagonism that Mr. Carlisle always excited more or less, produced an interior disturbance of which a wife would surely have received the full benefit. It is strange that an entirely worldly man will often, from a selfish motive, show a power of self‐control which Christians find it difficult to practise, even for the love of God. Alas! that the devil should receive many a sacrifice, many an offering of suffering and heroism, which, the intention being changed, would produce a saint.

Mrs. Grey had not penetration enough to see below the surface, and she was entirely satisfied with her lover, whom she considered the best and handsomest man in the world, not even excepting her brother. She could rush fearlessly against a mood which would have kept a more appreciative nature at a distance; and here, perhaps, she had an advantage.

She was now about to answer Mr. Sinclair’s very gratifying speech when an interruption came in the shape of Giovanni with a note for herself, which she read hastily, and then said: “Severn, it is from Lady Gertrude. They were passing through Sienna, and have remained over a day expressly to see your humble servant. They wish me to dine with them this evening, accompanied by my preux chevalier—her own expression, George. But I do not know about leaving Assunta alone on her birthday, even for Lady Gertrude.”

“Oh! I hope you will not disappoint your friends on my account,” said Assunta. “I have already had my celebration this morning, and it is quite proper that I should devote this evening to reflections upon my coming responsibilities.”

“Besides,” said Mr. Carlisle, “I beg to inform you that Assunta will not be left alone. I flatter myself that I count for one, at least; and I will endeavor to act as your substitute, Clara, in most effectually preventing those contemplated reflections. Responsibility and golden hair are an association of ideas quite incongruous, in my opinion.”

“I see,” said Clara, “that the balance is in Lady Gertrude’s favor. What do you say, caro?”

“If you mean me,” said George Sinclair in a slightly unamiable tone, “I am always at your service.”

“You bear!” replied the irrepressible Clara, “I will not allow you to go if you are cross. Well, Giovanni, come to my room in ten minutes for the answer; and remember to order the carriage for half‐past five.”

“Truly,” said Mr. Carlisle, turning to Assunta after his sister had left the loggia, “I think I never saw so sunshiny a person as Clara. It is always high noon with her.”

While Assunta assented cordially, Mr. Sinclair said to himself:

“Too much sunshine makes an unpleasant glare, and noon is always the most disagreeable part of the day. I confess to liking a little of the shadow of repose.”

He was careful, however, to keep his thoughts to himself. If the lover could feel imperfections so keenly, it argued but poorly for the blindness of love on the part of the husband. And yet this blindness, false and unworthy as it is, seems to be the only chance of peace for worldly husbands and wives, the only protection against the evil tendencies of uncontrolled human nature. All Clara’s sunshine might fail to make even a silver lining to the cloud rising in the distant future.

The sun shone brightly enough, however, when Mrs. Grey and Mr. Sinclair took their seats in the barouche to drive into Sienna; and the lady, who so much delighted in the delicious sensation of undisguised admiration, must have been more than satisfied this afternoon. Many eyes followed the handsome pair, as they passed rapidly towards the hotel. Clara knew that she was looking uncommonly well, and she was very proud of her companion’s distinguished air and manner; so, altogether, she enjoyed quite a little triumph.

Assunta and Mr. Carlisle dined alone; and, as they rose from the table just at sunset, Mr. Carlisle proposed a walk down into the vineyards.

“It will soil that pretty white dress of yours, I know; but the air is so refreshing, and I want you to occupy for a while the new rustic seat I have had placed near the brook, in that lovely spot we discovered the other day. Take a shawl with you, petite, for it will be cooler as soon as the sun sets.”

They strolled along slowly down through the narrow paths which separated the vines heavy with the fast‐ripening fruit, pausing now and then, as some new beauty in the distant view or in their immediate surroundings excited their attention. At last, at the bottom of the valley, close beside a brook, and beneath a clump of trees, they came upon one of those fairy spots where nature seems to have arranged herself expressly to attract an artist’s eye.

“Giovanni is truly invaluable,” said Mr. Carlisle. “I had only to give him a suggestion, and see how well he has carried out my ideas. This is the very luxury of comfort.” And seating himself, he lighted a cigar, advised Assunta to put on her shawl, and was evidently prepared for a pleasant hour.

As they sat there, almost in silence, the Angelus sounded from a distant convent tower; and, as if in answer to its summons, Assunta began to sing in a sweet, low voice Schubert’s Ave Maria. Mr. Carlisle did not say a word until it was finished; then he begged for just one more, and, knowing how much he liked the simple Scotch songs, she sang “Robin Adair.”

“Assunta, your voice grows sweeter every day. It is perfect rest to me to hear you sing.” Then, after a pause, he threw away his cigar, and turned towards her a very earnest face.

“Petite, listen to me patiently a moment. I am a very proud man, as you know, and one who is not apt to sue, even where he greatly desires. It seems”—and the peculiar smile broke over his face—“that you have exercised some magic power, and with a touch of your finger have thrown down the barrier of pride against which an army might beat in vain. My child, you know what I am going to say, because I have not changed since that moonlight night in the Colosseum, except, indeed, that the feeling I then expressed has strengthened and deepened every day. I made you a promise that night. I confess that it has been poorly enough redeemed; still, you must judge me by my self‐conquests rather than by my failures. But to‐day releases me: and having ceased to be your guardian, I cannot give you up. I need not repeat to you what I have already said. You know that you are dearer to me than the life you have saved. I only ask, as before, the right to devote that life to you. May I?”

“I had hoped, Mr. Carlisle, that you would consider my former answer as final,” said Assunta; but, though her words were cold, her voice trembled. “I, too, am unchanged since that night you speak of. I am compelled to be so.”

“Assunta, you are such a child; do you, then, think it nothing to have won the love of a man who has reached middle life and has never loved before?”

“Mr. Carlisle,” said the young girl sadly, “if I thought it nothing, I should not feel the pain it costs me to repeat to you, that it cannot be. I am so unworthy of your love; you must not think I do not value it. Your friendship has been more to me than I dare tell you, lest you should misunderstand me.”

“Your heart pleads for me, child.”

“Then I must not listen to it; for the voice of God in my soul pleads more loudly.”

“Assunta,” said Mr. Carlisle, “I think you did not understand me before—you do not understand me now. Do you suppose I should interfere in your religion? No more than I have ever done. You do not know me, child.”

“I think I know you better than you know yourself, presumptuous as this sounds,” said Assunta, forcing a smile. “I am sure that, were I to marry you, you would not be satisfied to hold a place in my heart second even to God. But,” she added, as the old expression of bitterness crossed her guardian’s face, “all this is useless. Let me put a question to you, and answer me candidly. Suppose I had made a promise to you, who love me—made it, we will grant, out of love for you—and afterwards, yielding to my own weakness, I should break that promise. Would you feel that I had done rightly—that I was to be trusted?”

“Certainly not, child. You ask strange questions.”

“Well, I have, out of love for our dear Lord, made him a promise which I believed his love required of me. He is a jealous Lover, Mr. Carlisle. I dare to say this reverently. Suppose, for the sake of a human affection—for your sake—I should fail to keep my promise; would you not have reason to doubt my fidelity to you, when I could be unfaithful to my God?”

“My child, I do not comprehend such reasoning. You either do not, cannot love me, or else you have suffered religious fanaticism to get the better of your judgment. I hoped that the plea of love would be sufficient to win my cause; but it is not all. Look your future fairly in the face, Assunta. What are you going to do? You are young; I need not add, beautiful. Surely, you understand that without me you are unprotected. Have you any plans, or have you already become so independent that you prefer not to make me your confidant? My pride is gone indeed when I put my suit in another form. I ask only your hand. Let me have the right to protect you in the world you know so little. I will wait to win your heart.”

“Mr. Carlisle,” interrupted Assunta with more emotion than he had ever seen in her before, “you are cruel in your persistence. You wilfully misunderstand me. It seems to give you pleasure to make this trial as hard for me as possible. I have told you before that I can never marry you; let that be enough.” And bursting into tears, she rose hastily from her seat.

Her guardian was so taken by surprise that for an instant he sat motionless; then he followed the excited girl, and joined her before she had proceeded far along the vineyard path.

“Take my arm, petite,” he said gently, and they walked some distance in silence. At last Assunta said with regained composure:

“Mr. Carlisle, you asked me about my plans, and you have a right to know. I have thought much of the future, as you may believe. My desire is to return to Baltimore with Clara after her marriage, and pass the winter with Mary Percival. Further than this I need not look.”

There was no immediate answer. After a pause Mr. Carlisle said:

“You are your own mistress now. I shall of course place no obstacle in the way of your carrying out any wish or design which will conduce to your welfare. As for myself, the time may come when I shall cease to regret that I am in no wise necessary to your happiness. Meanwhile, it shall be as you say. Good heavens! to think that a mere girl should have the power to move me so,” he went on, as if speaking to himself.

And apparently his thoughts were so full of Assunta that he forgot her actual presence, for they reached the house in silence, and then Mr. Carlisle proceeded at once to his own room; and so ended the birthday.

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The Sienna races are a thoroughly unique spectacle—almost childish, like many features of the Roman Carnival, to the over‐cultivated and consequently over‐fastidious taste of this age. They take one back to the days when men were more simple, when hearts did not grow old and faith was strong. These childlike traits produced a race of men who were but “children of a larger growth,” and, like children, amused with even a small amount of pomp and show, heroes as they were. And a strange contrast were the races of that 16th of August to the usual occupations of the Siennese. Mr. Carlisle’s carriage passed beneath innumerable flags and between gayly‐tapestried windows, as it drove to the amphitheatre‐shaped piazza, the centre of which was already filled, while every seat placed against the houses which bounded the square was occupied. The bright colors worn by the peasant women, with their large Tuscan hats and the more subdued dress of the men, produced an effect at once very peculiar and very picturesque. A little cheer from the bystanders greeted Mr. Carlisle’s party, as they appeared upon the balcony; for no other decorations in all that vast piazza were so fine as those in which Giovanni had shown so much skill, and surely no other ladies were as beautiful. There was no appearance of heartache or disappointment on any of the four faces which now looked out upon the crowd. We all, sooner or later, learn to wear a mask before the world, and the interior life of each one of us is often a sealed book to our nearest friends.

“Clara,” said Assunta, as they seated themselves after their survey, “you seem to know more about the races than the rest of us. Please to enlighten my ignorance.”

“I heard about them at the hotel last night,” replied Mrs. Grey; “so you will find me very learned. Sienna is divided into seventeen wards; but only ten take part in the race, and these are decided by lot. The victor receives a prize and a sort of diminutive triumph, while the losers may think themselves lucky if they only get a scolding from their respective wards. The oracle has spoken, and further than this she is not informed.”

“The rest we shall now see for ourselves,” said Mr. Sinclair, “for I hear the music which I suppose accompanies the procession.” And, as he spoke, the band entered the piazza from a side street. Then followed, in turn, the representatives of the different wards, each representation consisting of two flags—the colors of the ward—a number of pages, the race‐horse led by an esquire, and the man who was afterwards to ride the racer, on horseback as a knight. The flag‐bearers, as well as all in each division, wore exactly the colors of the flag of the ward, in costumes of the olden time; and, as these flags were of entirely different combinations of colors, and most of them very brilliant, the procession would have been very effective without its peculiar charm. The flag‐bearers were men of grace and skill, and from the moment of entering the square the flags were in continual motion—waved above their heads, flung into the air, passed under their arms and legs, and all without once touching the ground. It was a very poetical combination of color and motion, and Mrs. Grey impulsively clapped her hands with delight—a performance which her dignified lover evidently looked upon as childish. After this part of the procession came a large chariot drawn by four horses, with postilions, and bearing the ten different flags tastefully arranged. This was the model of the old Siennese battle‐car, which bore the standard, and was in consequence the scene of the thickest of the fight. Upon it, in time of battle, stood a priest, invoking by his prayers protection and success. There also was the trumpeter, in readiness to give signals. A truly mediæval picture was this chariot, with associations which carried one back hundreds of years into the past. A band of music closed the procession, which, after passing around the piazza, entered the court‐yard of the Palazzo Pubblico. Here the knights exchanged their helmets and plumes for jockey‐caps, and mounted their racers. As they emerged from beneath the archway, and proceeded slowly towards the starting‐place, across which a rope was drawn, Mr. Carlisle exclaimed, with a laugh in which there was more sarcasm than merriment:

“Are you a judge of horses, Clara? If so, you, who yesterday announced your jockey proclivities, must be greatly disappointed; for truly a set of sorrier‐looking steeds I never beheld. The prize ought to be given to the one that comes in last; for, where all are so slow, there would really be no little exercise of skill in moving more slowly than a coach‐horse going up‐hill, and yet moving at all.”

“I think, Severn,” replied his sister, “that your temper was not improved by the fever. It is very disagreeable in you to inform me that the horses are not Arabian chargers, for I never should have been the wiser.”

“Most men are disagreeable,” he retorted.

“George, you hear that, and do not resent it?” said Mrs. Grey indignantly.

“I leave that for you to do when you can, from experience of the contrary, deny the charge. But the horses are starting on their three times round.” And Mr. Sinclair leaned over the balcony with an air of interest.

“Why do the men carry those short sticks in their hands?” asked Assunta.

“I believe,” said Mr. Sinclair—for Mr. Carlisle became strangely inattentive—“that the riders are allowed by rule to do all the damage they can with the sticks, which are short, so as to limit somewhat their power; for their aim is to knock each other off the horses.”

“The barbarians!” exclaimed Clara. “Oh! look, see how many are falling back on the third round. It rests with the two now. I bet on the sorrel.”

“And he has won, Clara,” said Assunta.

The whole piazza was now in motion. Shouts greeted the victor, and the defeated retired into obscurity.

“The modern Olympics are finished,” said Mr. Carlisle. “Shall we go?”

As they drove towards home in the red glow of the setting sun, Mr. Carlisle said abruptly:

“Clara, when did you tell me that you and Sinclair intend to make each other miserable?”

“I will not answer such a question, Severn. You are a perfect dog in the manger. You will not marry yourself or let any one else.”

“If you wish to know,” said Mr. Sinclair, “when your sister intends to make me the happiest of men, she has permitted me to hope that the end of September will be the term of my most impatient waiting.”

“Then,” continued Mr. Carlisle in the same abrupt tone, “we had better be on our way to Paris. We might start day after to‐morrow, I think.”

Mrs. Grey gave a little scream.

“Severn, you must be out of your mind. I thought you wished never to leave Sienna.”

“I am weary to death of it; but that is not all. I have business matters to arrange, and the preparation of your trousseau will no doubt occupy weeks.”

“But it will be so warm in Paris,” persisted Mrs. Grey.

“Do people whose hearts are filled with love and their minds with coming matrimony think of weather, then? I thought such sublunary interests were left to those whose hearts were still unthawed. However, there are fans and ices enough in Paris to cool you off. I will write to‐night to engage rooms.” And then Mr. Carlisle relapsed into silence and abstraction.

Assunta understood well enough the cause of this change in the plans; but she was powerless to act, and could only submit. It, indeed, made little difference to her.

“George,” said Clara to her lover, as they were strolling down the avenue in the moonlight, “can you imagine what is the matter with Severn? I never saw him in such a mood.”

“Disappointed in love, I should judge from appearances,” he replied indifferently.

“Nonsense! He does not know the meaning of the word,” was the not very intelligent reply of the lady.

To Be Continued.

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Swinburne And De Vere

The dramas Bothwell(94) and Alexander the Great,(95) which have so recently come into the world side by side to challenge the attention of that portion of it that speaks, or is supposed to speak, the language of Shakespeare, offer all the contrasts that might be expected from their subjects, as well as from the known thought, tone, and tendency of their respective authors. One writer has taken for his chief character a great Christian woman whose story, look at it as we may, is at least of the saddest that was ever told; the other has chosen for his subject the wonder of pagan history, the exemplar of pagan greatness, whose short career is the condensation of all earthly glory and triumph.

It will be at once manifest that to a modern writer, as far as the materials for the construction of an historical drama go, the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, is beyond measure richer than that of Alexander. Her story is religiously and politically one of the day. She is still on trial, no longer before the narrow circles of York and Fotheringay, but before Christendom. The question of her innocence or guilt, and the consequent justice or injustice of her sentence, is debated as fiercely to‐day as when alone she faced the sleuth‐hounds of Elizabeth in defence of her honor and her life.

The final judgment of Christendom may be said already to be a foregone conclusion in her favor, so fast is the long‐withheld evidence of her innocence accumulating. But her life‐blood stains a nation and a religion, or what called itself such, and the verdict that declares her “not guilty” lays a terrible and indelible blot on them. Hence every nook and cranny of history is searched, every historical cobweb disentangled, with an eagerness and minuteness so thorough and complete that the reader is better acquainted often with the history of Mary Stuart than with that of the century in which he lives.

For a dramatist a most important point is thus at once secured. His audience is interested in advance; and there is no further care for him than to make a judicious use of the wealth of material at his disposal.

And surely to one with a soul in his body never did a more fitting subject for a tragedy offer itself than Mary, Queen of Scots. The only difficulty would seem to be a right selection from a great abundance. The scenes and characters, the very speeches often, are ready made. Time, place, circumstance, are ripe with interest. The march of events is terribly rapid. The scene is ever shifting, and with it the fortunes of the queen. All the passions are there at strife. Plot and counterplot, tragedy within tragedy, love and hate, jealousy and wrath, hope and fear, the basest betrayal and the loftiest devotion, surge and make war around this one woman, and are borne along with her in a frenzied whirl to the terrible end, when the curtain drops silently on that last dread scene that stands, as it will for ever stand, in startling relief, far out from the dim background of history.

The name of Alexander the Great calls up no such interest as this. His life would seem the least likely of subjects for a modern dramatist. Great captains, such as the first Napoleon, may look to him as at once their model and their envy; but happily such great men are few and far between. Alexander might indeed have formed an admirable theme for one of the lesser lights of the English Augustan era to celebrate in those sonorous heroics whose drowsy hum might serve at need as an admirable soporific. But he and those who lived and moved about him are out of our world; and whether he conquered ten empires or fifty, whether he defeated Darius or Darius him, whether he sighed for more or fewer worlds to conquer, is now all one to us. The sands of the desert have buried or wiped out his empire ages ago; the sands of time have settled down on his memory and half obliterated it; and the mighty Alexander serves to‐day for little more than to point a moral.

On the other hand, every scene and incident in which Mary, Queen of Scots, figured is intense with dramatic force. She entered on her reign at what might be called the dawn of modern history—a lurid dawn presaging the storm that was to come and is not yet over. The Reformation was convulsing Europe. It had just entered Scotland before her, and the raven that croaked its fatal entrance was John Knox. In the person of this girl were centred the hopes of the Catholic party for Scotland and England. Mingled with the strife of creeds around her was the conflict of the great Scottish families, whose miserable contentions rent and wrecked the kingdom. Any chieftain who chose and thought himself strong enough drew the sword when and for what purpose pleased him. More than half of them—those of any note, at least—were in Elizabeth’s pay. Treason constituted much of the political life of those days, while under and over and among the fierce strife of political parties rang and resounded the clangor and wrangle of the delirious sects that had just apostatized from Rome. Such was the period when the helm of the most distracted state in distracted Christendom was set in the hand of a gentle girl, who stood there alone to guide it over unknown seas. All the tempest gathered together its fury and broke over her head. This is the figure chosen by the author of Bothwell for the centre of his tragedy. It was a time and a scene and a tragedy worthy the philosophic mind of a Shakespeare and the terrible power of an Æschylus. Mr. Swinburne’s work scarcely gives evidence of the combination of these qualities.

A subject of this kind, when attempted at all, suggests painful reflections if failure, emphatic failure, is the result. A goose essaying an eagle’s flight would scarcely present a more absurd figure. Mr. Swinburne has fallen immeasurably below the level of a subject whose level is greatness. Not because he has chosen to paint Mary, Queen of Scots, as a fiend, is this judgment passed on his work. Milton has proved that Satan can be converted by genius into the most powerful dramatic villain that ever trod the stage. Lady Macbeth may thrill us with horror, but she never causes us to yawn. The author of Bothwell was at liberty, by the license allowed to poets, to make his heroine wicked enough even to satisfy his fastidious taste, and still have given us a drama that of its own force and brilliancy and coherence would have extorted the admiration of the unfortunate queen’s most ardent defenders. But even her heartiest haters could not resist the tendency to nod over the cumbrous wickedness, the very heavy villany, of Bothwell, which is simply a dilution of Froude with a tincture of Swinburne, well watered and administered in the largest possible doses, or, in plain English, a few scenes of the history of the period stitched loosely together and set to measured lines of blank verse.

Five hundred and thirty‐two pages, with thirty lines to the page, in five acts and sixty scenes, make a tragedy indeed. Such is Bothwell. Yet, notwithstanding its alarming proportions, it only extends from the death of Rizzio to the battle of Langside, thus omitting the scene that of all others is the most thrilling and effective—Mary’s execution. This may have been done with a purpose; for even malevolence falters there. Such an end, preceded by her long captivity, so patiently borne, were she even as wicked as Mr. Swinburne would make her, might almost expiate any crime, as it sanctifies her innocence.

The entire first act, entitled “David Rizzio,” is absorbed by the murder of the character after which it is named. As far as its necessary connection with the drama goes, it might have been entirely and very profitably omitted. It serves, indeed, to introduce many of the characters, but to no special purpose that might not have been accomplished in any of the other acts. The author forgets that he is not writing history, but a drama. We do not want the minutiæ, everything that everybody said at any time, in any place, and under any circumstances while Mary, Queen of Scots, was living, which Mr. Swinburne seems to think he was bound to give us, and in blank verse too, in Bothwell. We want the situations, the great facts. What led up to them may be told or hinted at in a few lines. Mr. Swinburne does not seem to have realized this, and, as a consequence, his drama is crowded with scenes, incidents, and personages that not only hinder, but are utterly irrelevant to, the main action of the piece, if indeed the piece can be truly said to possess any main action. Thus it takes the entire first act, consisting of five scenes and eighty‐nine pages, to kill Rizzio. At last he is happily despatched, to the relief, it must be said, of the reader, who, already wearied, finds the second act entirely devoted to a similar sanguinary operation, performed on Darnley this time. With a nice sense, notwithstanding his pronounced communistic sympathies, of what is due even to second‐hand royalty of the Darnley order, Mr. Swinburne, regardless of the liberal allowance of space allotted to the stabbing of Rizzio, feels it incumbent on him to devote one hundred and forty‐seven pages and twenty‐one scenes to the blowing up of Mary’s husband. Thus, although two hundred and forty pages in all are given over mainly to the killing of these two characters, the tragedy can be scarcely said to have begun, there being still three dreary acts to face.

The question naturally suggests itself here, What in the name of common sense, if not of tragedy, has Mr. Swinburne been doing with his space? Perhaps we have reason to congratulate ourselves after all that he did not pursue his unhappy victim into England, and insist upon murdering her also; for it is impossible, in the contemplation of such an event, to form even a wild conception of when and where Mr. Swinburne’s tragedy was likely to terminate. The truth is, he is no dramatist at all; he is a writer of speeches, good, bad, or indifferent, as may be, but no more. Livy or Sallust have almost as just a title to be styled dramatists as Mr. Swinburne; Homer far more so. Speeches form perhaps the least, certainly the easiest, portion of a drama; and the speeches in Bothwell are more or less ready made. Mr. Swinburne cannot grasp a situation; he can only write about it. He cannot picture it to us in a few telling lines. He cannot hint a future; he must foretell it in full, or wait until it comes. He cannot content himself with leaving well alone. The Earl of Leicester’s historic “nod” that meant so much is of course a very amusing caricature; but the point of a caricature lies in the kernel of truth which it covers. Perhaps the most necessary of dramatic faculties is the capability of saying much in a little; and that faculty Mr. Swinburne does not possess in the slightest degree. If anything, his special tendency lies in an opposite direction; he says remarkably little in a very great deal. Instead of mastering his material, he has become hopelessly embarrassed by it, and, like the miser in the story, perishes from want in the midst of the treasures piled up around him. His characters, instead of being moved at his will, move him at theirs. When one, no matter of how great or how little importance, opens his or her mouth, not even Mr. Swinburne himself can say when it will close. Speeches pages in length are thrown into anybody’s mouth on the slightest provocation, and all pitched more or less in the same key. If Mary curses—for Mr. Swinburne is more liberal than discreet in his distribution of strong language—she is not content with one good, round, blasphemous oath once in a while, but must indulge in half a dozen or so offhand. If Knox argues or preaches, he does so at as great length almost as when in the flesh. One of his speeches fills thirteen pages without a break. If the inevitable “first, second, and third citizen” enter—who, for the manner of their speeches or the matter of them, might with equal propriety be dubbed “first citizen” or “fifty‐ second citizen,” or anything else—they talk and talk and talk until they talk themselves off, as they would beyond all doubt talk an audience out of their seats. Almost two‐thirds of the play is to the reader simply wearisome jabber, whose sense, like Gratiano’s “infinite deal of nothing,” is as “two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff.”

The drama is so interminable that we can only call attention to the chief character, which is not Bothwell, as the title would seem to imply, but Mary, whose alleged amours with Bothwell form the groundwork of the piece. As this article does not pretend to enter into an historical investigation, this is not the place to advance reasons for disagreeing with Mr. Swinburne’s estimate of Mary. One or two words, however, may be permitted.

The story that forms the foundation of this play has been torn to shreds by writers of every shade of opinion. Its truth, based mainly on the “casket letters,” was never accepted even at the English court. Elizabeth herself was compelled to acquit her cousin of all such scandalous charges. Yet on this Mr. Swinburne, with the chivalry of a poet and the honesty of a man who must have read history, builds his nauseous drama. Again, Mary was, by all concession, a lady. High and royal spirit she had indeed, of which in some notable instances she gave ample proof; but she has never been accused of indulging in language unworthy the royal woman she was, or savoring in any sense of coarseness. She was also a consistent and practical Catholic, who knew her religion and how to hold it, even against that fierce Calvinistic wolf, John Knox, to whom it were a happiness had his insulted sovereign only meted out the measure he persistently advocated for all Catholics. But she was too gentle‐natured to adopt means of enforcing silence and obedience more congenial to the spirit of her English cousin, who had a very summary manner of dealing with theological difficulties. This much being premised, let us now look at the Mary of Mr. Swinburne.

Here we have her in the very first scene of the first act. Rizzio is pleading with her the recall of Murray:

QUEEN. “What name is his who shall so strengthen me?”

RIZZIO. “Your father gave him half a brother’s name.”

QUEEN. “I have no brother; a bloodless traitor he is,

Who was my father’s bastard‐born. By heaven! I had rather have his head loose at my foot Than his tongue’s counsel rounded in mine ear.”

This is only her fourth speech in the play. It does not seem to have impressed Rizzio sufficiently; for, turning a page, we find her still railing at the subject of her wrath in this vigorous style:

... “By my hand, Too little and light to hold up his dead head, It was my hope to dip it in his life Made me ride iron‐mailed and soldieress.”

With occasional spurts of this nature the queen enlivens her somewhat tedious colloquy of thirteen pages with Rizzio concerning Murray. She is candid enough to say in one place of her half‐brother, whom the Mary of history really believed in too long and too blindly for her own happiness:

“I am gay of heart, light as a spring south wind, To feed my soul with his foretasted death....”

And again:

“Oh! I feel dancing motions in my feet And laughter moving merrily at my lips, Only to think him dead, or hearsed, or hanged—That were the better. I could dance down his life. Sing my steps through, treading on his dead neck, For love of his dead body and cast‐out soul.”

Verily, a real Highland fling! And lest there should be any possible doubt as to the meaning of “cast‐out soul,” this gentle lady pursues it to its place, and gloats over its eternal torments in this Christian fashion:

“He shall talk of me to the worm of hell, Prate in death’s ear and with a speechless tongue Of my dead doings in days gone out....”

It is surely punishment enough to be condemned to carry on a conversation of any kind with the worm of hell and in the ear of death; but to compel even a cast‐out soul to perform this unpleasant duty “with a speechless tongue” is punishment that passes ordinary comprehension. Doubtless, however, matters are or will be altered for Mr. Swinburne’s special convenience in the lower regions. Abandoning the wretched Murray to his destiny, we look for other revelations of Mary’s character, although something of her mettle may be gathered from the passages already given, which have been taken almost at random from the first twenty‐eight pages of the five hundred and thirty‐two. They are by no means the liveliest specimens to be found.

It would display a lamentable lack of knowledge of nature supposed to be human to imagine for a moment that the woman—if the expression is allowable—revealed in these passages is likely to be at all squeamish or foolishly coy about the profession of what Mr. Swinburne would probably call her love for Bothwell. The insignificant facts that her own husband, Darnley, and Bothwell’s wife, Jane Gordon, were still living, would naturally weigh lightly as feathers in the balance against her desire. Most of the scenes between the queen and Bothwell might be shortly described as “linked foulness long drawn out.” Were they even word for word true, it would still be a wonder and a shame to honest manhood that they could be dwelt upon and gloated over by any writer at all. Horace boasted of belonging to the “Epicurean herd.” Were he living now, he would, we honestly believe, feel conscientious scruples at admitting Mr. Swinburne into the company. Only such passages are quoted here as are presentable and necessary to endorse our judgment of this drama.

Without even an attempt at disguise, Mary and Bothwell discuss the best means of getting rid of Darnley. As a wife, expecting soon to be a mother, and as a Christian woman, it is only natural that she should urge on the not unwilling Bothwell in this style:

“Would I were God! Time should be quicker to lend help and hand To men that wait on him. . . . Were I a man, I had been by this a free man.”

In the course of the second act she falls sick, as she believes, to death. She makes her dying confession to the Bishop of Ross, who, it is to be presumed, knew his religion. That being the case, it was somewhat rash in Mr. Swinburne to put into his mouth a gross error. He assures the dying queen that

“The man that keeps faith sealed upon his soul Shall through the blood‐shedding of Christ be clean. And in this time of cursing and flawed faith Have you kept faith unflawed. Have no fear, therefore, but your sins of life

Shall fall from off you as a vesture changed. And leave your soul for whiteness as a child’s.”

Of course there is a sense in which this may be taken as correct. The man that really keeps his “faith sealed upon his soul” and “unflawed,” acts up to his faith and lives its life. But this is not what Mr. Swinburne means. In several passages he is at pains to show that it is not. His meaning simply is that because Mary held to the profession of the Catholic faith the bishop assured her that her sins would be remitted. That faith alone was sufficient for salvation was the heresy of Luther. We do not know whether those useful little compendiums of Christian doctrine commonly known as catechisms were much in vogue at the time. Had they been, Mary would have found in hers the following question and answer, which would have shamed the Bishop of Ross: “Will faith alone save us?” “No; it will not without good works.”

It must be remembered, however, that Mr. Swinburne, and not the bishop, is the real father confessor to his own penitent, and a very indulgent one he makes. The queen says:

“I would have absolution ere I die, But of what sins I have not strength to say Nor hardly to remember.”

After all that has gone before, that reads remarkably like a wilful lie, as Mr. Swinburne’s bishop might have hinted, particularly as she has memory enough left to enumerate her virtues, which conclude with this:

“I have held mine own faith fast, and with my lips Have borne him [God] witness if my heart were whole.”

Whereupon the worthy bishop takes occasion to repeat his blunder. Glossing beautifully over her sins in a graceful sentence or two, the queen proceeds to “remit all faults against her done,” and ends in this edifying strain:

“I will not take death’s hand With any soil of hate or wrath or wrong About me, but, being friends with this past world, Pass from it in the general peace of love.”

Just at this happy moment, by what would doubtless be considered “a stroke of genius,” Murray is made to enter and announce the arrival of Darnley, the unfortunate individual whose crime it is to persist in being Mary’s lawful husband when she is in love with one who, by her own command, was somebody else’s lawful husband. As may be supposed from what we know of her already, the contrite queen greets the announcement as contrite queens in similar situations are wont to do, thus:

“By heaven! I had rather death had leave than he. What comes he for? To vex me quick or dead With his lewd eyes and sodden, sidelong face, That I may die with loathing of him? By God, as God shall look upon my soul, I will not see him.”

After this there is clearly nothing left for the bishop to do but administer the last sacraments and bid the Christian soul depart in peace. Luckily, however, at this critical juncture, and by another “stroke of genius,” the well‐known tramp of Bothwell’s heel falls on the ear of the dying queen, who immediately feels better, and bids her attendants “bring him in.”

One more passage, and we have done with Mr. Swinburne’s Mary. Darnley is not yet murdered; Bothwell is not yet divorced from Jane Gordon; he who became James I. of England is about to be born; the queen has in the preceding scene made the “confession” noticed above; the time, therefore, was ripe for her to make the following declaration to Bothwell:

“I purge me now and perfect my desire, Which is to be no more your lover—no, But even yourself, yea, more than body and soul, One and not twain, one utter life, one fire, One will, one doom, one deed, one spirit, one God: For we twain grown and molten each in each, Surely shall be as God is, and no man.”

Were there such a thing as love in delirium tremens, surely this would be an instance; only that Mary is perfectly cool and collected in making so plain and definite a statement. And Bothwell is just the kind of man to understand and appreciate the pleasant prospect held out for them both. He responds cheerily, hopefully, and prayerfully withal:

“God speed us, then, till we grow up to God!”

The reader has probably seen enough of Mr. Swinburne’s Mary Stuart. It will be clear to any impartial mind that beheading was far too easy a fate for such a character.

In one thing at least has the author succeeded. He set out to paint a monster, and a monster indeed he has painted in Mary. The question for the reader to determine is whether his very full‐armed Minerva be an emanation from the brain of this modern Jove or one who was a real, living woman. A woman ravenous for blood, lost to all shame, hating even her unborn offspring, blasphemous as Satan, cruel and pitiless as hell, brawling as a drunkard, full of oaths and coarse expressions as a trooper—if this be a true picture of Mary, Queen of Scots, of the woman who in her day drew, as she still continues to draw, the hearts of all true men and honest women to her side, then has the author done his work well and literature a service. But if she be the opposite of all this—a woman cruelly murdered and systematically wronged, at mention of whose name the heart of that chivalry which is never dead, and will never die while Christian manhood lives, leaps up—one is at a loss to father the writer’s monster on any other than himself. Viewed in this light, it can only be looked upon as the product of an imagination diseased, an intellect debauched, and a mind distorted—the work of a man whose moral nature has gone astray, and to whom consequently all that is true, pure, womanly, manly, godly, has lost its significance and value.

From the Christian heroine to the pagan hero we turn with a feeling of relief. The very title of Mr. de Vere’s drama challenges criticism. To write about Alexander the Great is one thing; to make Alexander speak for himself is another. The world, fashionable as it is to abuse its taste, is discriminating in the conferring of titles that are universal. Local magnates of greater or less magnitude are common enough; but men whom all civilized nations in all ages have agreed to crown with greatness are very few and very far between. From the number of these the son of Philip of Macedon probably stands out pre‐eminent In his brief career he accomplished more than any human conqueror ever accomplished, and he succeeded in leaving more after him. So complete and marvellous was his success, and so gigantic his projects, while his means were proportionately limited, that, beyond all possibility of doubt, the man, young as he was, must have been a marvellous genius. Being so, he must not only have done great deeds, but thought great thoughts. He must have been fitted in every way to be a leader of men. This, perhaps the most marvellous character in human history, is the one of all others whom Mr. de Vere, with a courage which, if not justified by the result, can only be looked upon as either rashness or folly, has undertaken to set living and real before us, speaking the speech, thinking the thoughts, scheming the schemes, dreaming the dreams of Alexander. Greatness thus becomes one of the necessary standards by which we must judge Mr. de Vere’s work. If his chief character is not great in thought and word, as we know him to have been in deed, he is not Alexander, and this work can only be regarded as a more pretentious failure than the other. If he is great in thought and speech, where are the elements of his greatness to be found? In the brain of the author, in the conception of the poet—nowhere else. For in this case the speeches are not, as they were in the other, ready made and to hand. The record of Alexander’s deeds we have; but Alexander we must imagine for ourselves. What manner of man, then, is this that Mr. de Vere has given us? is the first and most natural question to be asked.

Friend and foe alike are busy about him. At the opening of the play Parmenio, the testy but honest‐hearted veteran of Philip, before Alexander has yet made his appearance, in words where the admiration of the soldier and the irritability and jealousy of old age are admirably blended, says:

“A realm his father owed me, And knew it well. The son is reverent too, But with a difference, sir. In Philip’s time My voice was Delphic on the battle‐field. This young man taps the springs of my experience, As though with water to allay his wine Of keener inspirations. ‘Speak thy thought, Parmenio!’ Ere my words are half‐way out He nods approval or he smiles dissent. Still, there is like him none! I marvell’d oft To see him breast that tempest from the north, Drowning revolt in the Danubian wave. The foe in sight, instant he knew their numbers; If distant, guess’d their whereabout—how lay The intermediate tract—if fordable The streams—the vales accessible to horse: ’Twas like the craft of beasts remote from man.”

Antisthenes, the rhetorician, describes the man of action as a rhetorician might:

“This king is valued past his worth: He nothing says that’s sage, like Ptolemy, Or keen‐edged, like Craterus. This I grant him: Sagacity supreme in observation; He sees with eye inspired. Seeing with him Is Act and Thought, not sense.”

Arsinoë, the daughter of Darius, thinks that “he neither loves nor hates.” He is royal‐faced, “albeit too eager‐eyed.” And Hephestion, the strong friend on whom alone of all men Alexander leans, tells her of him:

“He loves not many, and himself the least: His purposes to him are wife and child.”

“Free him from that conceit,” says Parmenio later on, “that he’s a god,”

“The man of men were he: None like him we have had since Marathon.”

PHILOTAS. “I grant his greatness were his god‐ship sane, But note his brow: ’tis Thought’s least earthly temple Then mark, beneath, that round, not human eye, Still glowing like a panther’s! In his body No passion dwells; but all his mind is passion, Wild, intellectual appetite, and instinct That works without a law.”

PARMENIO. “But half you know him. There is a zigzag lightning in his brain That flies in random flashes, yet not errs. Chances his victories seem; but link those chances, And under them a science you shall find, Though unauthentic, contraband, illicit, Yes, contumelious oft to laws of war. Fortune, that as a mistress smiles on others, Serves him as duty‐bound; her blood is he, Born in the purple of her royalties.”

And so they go on describing him, each in his own way; for, with felicitous art, the presence of Alexander is made to permeate the drama, yet so unobtrusively and unconsciously to all seeming that the mind of the reader, though held fast on the chief character throughout, never wearies of him. The extracts given, culled from here and there, point all in one direction. They are consistent, however they may vary in expression, about the man they describe. He is not like other men; he towers above them; he stands alone. But even this only tells us what men say of him. It may mean no more than any young‐lady novelist’s description of her hero, whose biting sarcasm and brilliant wit are gifts that it was thought were buried with Sheridan. All which we are willing to concede, only that by some untoward accident the brilliant wit and biting sarcasm never appear on the surface. How does Alexander speak for himself?

In literature, as in life, very much depends on the impression a man makes on his introduction. Alexander’s introduction is happy and suggestive. He meets us first at Troy when setting out on his expedition. Around him rise the temples of the memorable dead who died in the Ten Years’ War. He is in search of the fane of Achilles, his ancestor, as he claims. Aphrodite and Helen have no attractions for him, upon whose mind “the wise Stagirite” had impressed the high code of pagan morals, that the passions were “a yoke which Action’s strenuous sons should scorn to bear.” He stands on ground where heroes fought and strove for ten long years together, and the question comes at once to his earnest mind,

“That ten years’ war, what fruit thereof remains? What empire lives, its witness and its crown? What shall we say? That those were common men Made large by mists of Time? Or shall we rather Conclude them real, and our age a fraud?”

His friend Hephestion is reminded by the fanes around, not of the greatness, but of the littleness, of man and of the common ashes to which we come at last. In what, had he the ear to hear it, had been for his leader a solemn warning, he cries out:

“Alas! how small an urn Suffices for the earth‐o’erstriding dust Which one time shook the world!”

But Alexander cannot contemplate the end of men and things in this calm fashion. To him, as to Achilles, death is “malign and intercepting.” It bears no thought of peace or rest. He describes it as “that frustrate, stagnant, ineffectual bourn where substance melts to shadow.” Far away in “the dimness of the dolorous realm” he sees, though sad, “the unvanquishable youth” of Achilles surviving and lamenting—

“Despite the embalm’d, purpureal airs and gleam Immeasurable of amaranthine meads, The keen, reviving, strenuous airs of earth, And blasts from battle‐fields”—

that is the very breath of his nostrils—earth, life, action, with a purpose in it, and the keen intoxication of occasional “blasts from battle‐fields.”

But he is not a mere genius errant, a Don Quixote of conquerors, wasting himself on windmills and flocks of sheep. He has a clear, resolute purpose before his mind, to which he shapes all things. It is to make the world one empire, which Grecian intellect should rule. The Governor of Sardis, when the Granicus is won, he bids:

“Tell those realms Betwixt the Euxine and Pamphylian Seas, That Grecian galaxy of Lesser Asia, That Argive choir in eastern exile sad, That Doric garland on base Persia’s brow, We came not here to crush them, but exalt; This hand shall lift them to their first estate, And lodge them mid the skyey heights of Greece.”

Such is his plan; and whatever crosses him must break before or bend to that. Kings, empires, mighty cities, religion, customs and traditions, commerce, all must yield before his indomitable will. Nothing is sacred to Alexander, save what is sacred to Alexander’s plan. All things were fashioned to his purpose, and existed only to be made subservient to him. He gazes from the sea‐shore on Tyre of the ships, with its wealth, its energies, its possibilities, and the little it has done with them, and bursts forth:

“Wings without body! such—no more—is commerce Which rests not upon empire! Commerce, ruling, Disperses man’s chief energies, but, ruled By spirit heroic, increase yields of thoughts That give to greatness wider basis. Tyre! How soon thy golden feathers forth shall fly Upon the storm of War!”

Lacking the “spirit heroic,” Tyre’s opportunities and life have hitherto been thrown away, as were thrown away the letters that Phœnicia gave, useless to the inventors. He goes on:

“Men stumble thus on glories not for them, The rightful appanage of the capable. The empire I shall found shall tread the earth, Yet over it go flying. From its vans The twin‐born beams of Grecian Song and Science Shall send perpetual dawn.”

Mr. de Vere’s verse is tempting to quote; but we must hasten on. Some idea of his Alexander may be gathered from the passages given; but, as we said, he permeates the book, and we must leave it to the reader himself to trace the slow growth and development of this singularly‐rounded yet most difficult conception. We do not believe that the author in this instance has fallen below the level of his subject, high and remote as that level was. A strong, resolute, far‐seeing character, possessed with the very passion of empire, speaks to us in every line of Alexander. Many of his sayings have almost the wisdom and the brevity of proverbs. “Time takes still the conqueror’s side,” he tells Hephestion; and when that great‐ souled character puts the deep and solemn question, “Is there forgiveness for conquerors?”—his answer is:

“Aye; but for half‐conquerors, none.”

Here is his policy told in a line:

“Strong hand makes empire; hand that heals retains it.”

When, in a light moment, he asks his generals, were gods their slaves, what fortunes would they choose, and all cry out, “A kingdom!” he says aside:

“Note this, Hephestion: Imagination is economist, And vastest ends move less the appetite Than small things near and easier of access.”

Here is a truth for conquerors to ponder. In the height of his conquest he is convinced that

“The vanquish’d must connive, or victory’s self Its own grave digs in the end.”

All the littleness of greatness, all those surroundings that to small minds stamp, if they do not constitute, greatness, are for him emptiness.

“To breathe applauses is to breathe that air By breath of men defiled: I stand, and stood, On the mountain‐tops, breathing the breath of gods.”

There is another aspect to his character at which we must glance. We have called attention at the beginning to his jealous hatred of death. Life and death are to him constant enigmas, to which he sees no solution. The only, or at least the great, obstacle that he sees in the way of accomplishing his dream and passion of empire is death. No human foe he fears; but the fates. Time, he passionately says, is no friend of his. He has to build his empire in few years. He is running a constant race with time, and something seems to whisper to him ever that his years are few. In this, too, lies an humbling fact. He, like others, is human and subject to death. This inward struggle and rebellion against his humanity is constantly going on. The thought, What am I? What do I? Who am I? Whence come I? Where go I?—all these things for ever trouble him. He would be a god; but he finds his loftiest aspirations bounded by a wall of flesh, and beyond that—a blank.

With keen dramatic instinct and happy thought the author gives him the opportunity of answering for himself these questionings. He visits the temple at Jerusalem, and converses with the high‐priest. The truth is unfolded to him, and the true God made known. He hesitates, and finally rejects the truth. It clashes with his purpose.

“O’er all the earth my empire shall be just, Godlike my rule,”

he promises the high‐priest; whose answer is the solemn rebuke:

“Young man, beware! God’s prophet Awards thee Persia’s crown, but not the world’s: He who wears that should be the Prince of Peace. Thy portion lies in bounds. Limit and Term Govern the world.”

This revelation tells on his character throughout the rest of the play. He has no longer that blind confidence in himself, though his mind like a vise holds to its resolution of founding the empire he was warned he could not found. His iron will and indomitable energy overcome all obstacles; but time is creeping on, and he feels it. To unite Persian and Greek together, in order to win the Persian, he must be proclaimed a god; and a god he is proclaimed. But the emptiness and mockery of the title are shown with intense force in the workings of the king’s mind up to this madness. He strives to argue himself up to godhead only by arguing godhead down to him:

“A race of gods hath fallen: Then Zeus in turn may fall. I find for gods No thrones secure; to man’s advance no limit; No certain truth amid contending rites; No base for faith.”

He remembers the warning about limit and term, only to say scornfully,

“That’s for others: To grasp a world for me is feasible; To keep a half‐world, not.”

He turns further and further away from faith of any kind; his creed resembles that of more modern conquerors:

“The man that empire founds Must measure all things by the needs of empire.”

And the final outcome of his thoughts is this:

“This only know we— We walk upon a world not knowable, Save in those things which knowledge least deserve, Yet capable, not less, of task heroic. My trust is in my work: on that I fling me, Trampling all questionings down.”

And yet the next moment he cries out:

“I sometimes think That I am less a person than a power. Some engine in the right hand of the gods, Some fateful wheel that, round in darkness rolling, Knows this—its work, but not that work’s far scope. Hephestion, what is life? My life, since boyhood, Hath been an agony of means to ends; An ultimate end I find not. For that cause, On‐reeling in the oppression of a void, At times I welcome what I once scarce brook’d— The opprobrium of blank sleep.”

There are many scenes of strong dramatic power in this drama—the death of Darius, the quarrel with Parmenio, the rebellion of the Greeks, the last scene with Philotas, and others; but the power and intensity deepen at the close, when death at last creeps into the veins of the conqueror. He has lost Hephestion earlier in the drama, and this loss rends his heart. There is much truth in his singular, almost selfish love for his great‐souled friend, who stood to Alexander as a wife would stand to another man. But he to whom “his purposes were wife and child” could not lean on a woman. It must be a man, strong, brave, keen‐eyed as himself, but calmer, larger hearted, humbler, greater souled. Such was Hephestion, and his strong yet sweet character is not only admirably drawn, but affords an excellent foil throughout to the eager, impetuous, fiery nature and fiery words of the king.

Omens thicken around him, and the end comes at Babylon. The fever that burns at his heart seizes on his body while sailing on the Lake of Pallacopas. As the royal barge passes, a strain rises up from the waters:

“We sate beside the Babylonian river: Within the conqueror’s bound, weeping we sate: We hung our harps upon the trees that quiver Above the rushing waters desolate.

“If I forget thee, Salem, in thy sadness, May this right hand forget the harper’s art! If I forget thee, Salem, in my gladness, My tongue dry up and wither, like my heart!”

It is a relic of the Babylonian captivity. The song forces from Alexander the sad confession, significant to all conquerors:

“The ages pass, like winds; The old wrong remains, rooted like tombs, and moves not: All may be done through Time; yet Time does naught. Let kings look well to that.”

The end is on him. Though “maimed, and tamed, and shamed,” he is resolute still, but impotent, and the empire lacks completion, he confesses, while

“The years, the months, The hours, like ravening wolves that hunt a stag, Come up upon my haunches.”

Fighting time to the last, he succumbs; but he will not even die as other men. In his half‐delirium he tells Ptolemy:

“I have a secret—one for thee alone: ’Twas not the mists from that morass disastrous Nor death of him that died, nor adverse gods, Nor the Fates themselves; ’twas something mightier yet, And secreter in the great night, that slew me.”

And thus, surrounded by his warriors and his generals, with success within his grasp, but that grasp nerveless, his last moments troubled with awful visions and ill dreams, resentful to the last against what slew him, in doubt and in fear, in youth and glory and empire, in the fatality of success, staring with strained eyes into the dread void beyond that no ray of faith illumines, he whose nod was life or death to nations, Alexander, the god, passes away and dies—of a little slow fever that has entered and claimed for its own the clay of which he was made.

Mr. de Vere has written at once a magnificent poem and a powerful drama. We have devoted our attention in both instances to the chief characters, and thus many scenes and personages in Alexander the Great on which in reading we have dwelt with much pleasure and admiration must pass unnoticed. The author, if we may say so, has surprised us by the strength and finish of this work. The action of the piece is rapid; the characters, small and great, rounded and full; the scenes most varied and dramatically set. The clew to the play we take to be that old whisper which first allured our parents from their allegiance, and tempts forever the race of man: Ye shall be as gods. The whisper runs through the piece from the first line to the last, and lends to it a purpose and a plan of its own. The dramatist has taken the man who in human history came the nearest to exemplifying its truth to prove its utter and miserable falsehood, and to read with a new force the old and eternal command that alone can order the life of man wisely and well: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”

When he died, Alexander was nearly thirty‐three. With him really, though remnants lingered after him, his scheme and his empire passed away; and when to‐day we look for what is left of the world’s conqueror, of Alexander the god, we must search in musty tomes and grope in desert sands. Nothing is left of him, save some words and histories; and even were they lost also, and his very memory blotted out with them, the world to‐day would in reality be little or none the loser.

Some centuries later there died Another at the age of thirty‐three. He came into life silently; he went out of life ignominiously. He led no army; he had no following of any note; he was the son of a carpenter, and born of a despised race. He was born, he lived, he died, in poverty, sorrow, and suffering, a social outcast even from his own people. The last three years of his life he spent in preaching in and about Jerusalem. His doctrines were strange and startling. They were utterly subversive of all human glory and greatness. Like Alexander, he proclaimed himself divine, and claimed to be the Son of God. Like Alexander, he too died, but a death of ignominy. Before his name had spread far beyond Jerusalem, men rose up, Jew and Gentile, king and priest, church and state, together hanged him on a tree, nailed him there, tortured and slew him, and when he was dead sealed up the tomb in which he was buried. And there, humanly speaking, was an end to him and his.

To the world what had he left? A memory—nothing more. Men said that he had wrought wonders, that virtues flowed out of him, that his hands rained mercies, that the blind saw, the lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, the very dead rose again. Idle rumors! like that other of his bursting the tomb and rising again, walking in the flesh and ascending into the heaven from which he said he had come. And this was “the Expected of the nations,” “the Prince of Peace,” who was to accomplish what the high‐ priest warned Alexander was not for him, with all his power, to accomplish—to unite all the nations under one yoke. A likely prospect with the material he had left!

He left behind him no empire, no record, not a line of writing. He left a few words, a few maxims, a few rules of life, a few prayers, a few promises, a few men who timidly believed in him, a few commands. The world, its belief and non‐belief alike, its customs, maxims, tendencies, he condemned as wrong. He commanded it to remodel itself according to the few rules he had left—rules singularly comprehensive, simple, and clear: to believe in him, to obey him as the son of God and God, to believe and obey those, and those only, whom he sent forth in his name, armed with the powers he gave them, fighting with the weapon of the cross. And what is the result? Who is the conqueror of the world now? Jesus Christ, in whose name every knee shall bow, or Alexander the Great? Here is a mystery surely that men should ponder. What shall explain the victory over the world, over sin, and over death, of Him whom they nailed to the tree nineteen centuries ago? Nothing but the words of Peter—“Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God.” Thou art he that was to come, and we look for no other. “And he was clothed with a garment sprinkled with blood: and his name is called The Word of God. And he hath on his garment and on his thigh written King of kings and Lord of lords.”

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Requies Mea

Keep me, sweet love! Thy keeping is my rest. Not safer feels the eaglet from beneath The wings that roof the inaccessible nest, Than I when thou art with me, dearest, best, Whose love my life is, yea, my very breath! Thy Son to Egypt fled to prove our faith. Not Herod’s men had snatched him from thy breast, Or changed his thronèd slumber into death. How wonderful thy keeping, mighty Queen! So close, so tender; and as if thine eyes Had only me to watch, thine arm to screen; And this inconstant heart were such a prize! And thou the while, in beatific skies, Art reigning imperturbably serene!

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Ontologism And Psychologism

Our readers sometimes complain that the philosophical articles of THE CATHOLIC WORLD are too hard to be understood. Yet some of these very readers make a great effort to read these articles, and ask questions about metaphysical subjects—among others, about the very topic of the present article—showing a great desire to gain some knowledge about them. We are going to try to make this article intelligible to these readers, even to those who are yet quite young persons, in whose laudable efforts to improve their minds and acquire knowledge we are greatly interested.

We shall begin, therefore, by explaining some terms which need to be well understood before they can be used in a satisfactory manner, and especially the two which make up the title of this article. Ontology is the name given to one branch of metaphysics, which is also called general metaphysics, in distinction from the two other principal branches of that science—to wit, logic and special metaphysics. It is derived from two Greek words—that is, the first two syllables from a word which means being, and the last two from one which means reasoning. It is therefore a reasoning about being, or the scientific exposition of the object of the idea of real being, of metaphysical truth, good and evil, beauty, substance, accident, quantity, causality, the finite and the infinite, the contingent and the necessary, etc. Psychology is also a Greek derivative signifying a scientific exposition of the rational soul of man, its powers and operations, which is a sub‐division of special metaphysics. Therefore every philosopher must be an ontologist and a psychologist, in the proper sense of those terms. Yet, there is a difference between ontology and ontologism, psychology and psychologism. Ontologism and psychologism are names denoting opposite philosophical systems which diverge in opposite directions from the scholastic philosophy, or that philosophy commonly taught in the Catholic schools after the method and principles of the Angelic Doctor, S. Thomas Aquinas. Of the authority which this philosophy possesses in the church we cannot now treat at length. We will, however, cite here the latest utterance of the Sovereign Pontiff which has come to our knowledge, as a sample of a great number of similar official expressions of approbation from the Holy See. In a letter to Dr. Travaligni, founder of the Philosophico‐Medical Society of S. Thomas Aquinas, dated July 23, 1874, Pius IX. says: “With still greater pleasure we perceive that, faithful to your purpose, you have determined to admit only such members to your society as hold and will defend the doctrines propounded by the sacred councils and this Holy See, and in particular the principles of the Angelic Doctor concerning the union of the intellective soul with the human body, and concerning substantial form and primary matter (materia prima).” We shall take for granted at present that in all its essential parts, as well as in those specified in the above quotation, the philosophy of S. Thomas has the highest sanction and authority in the church which any system of philosophy can have, and that it is the only true and sound philosophy. The system of ontologism differs from it by proposing a totally different ontology, which is made the basis of an essentially different philosophy. The advocates of that system call themselves ontologists, as claiming to be the only philosophers who understand rightly real being and the relation of intelligence to it as the object of its intuition and knowledge. They are also called by that name by their antagonists for the sake of convenience and courtesy, as those who believe in God, but not in revelation, are called theists, although neither party has an exclusive right to the appellation given to it by usage. Psychologism is a system which makes the basis and starting‐ point of philosophy to lie exclusively in the individual soul and its modifications, like Des Cartes, whose first principle is, “I think, therefore I am.” The opponents of the scholastic philosophy who pretend to be ontologists give it the nickname of psychologism, because they either misunderstand or misinterpret its ontological and psychological doctrine. The scholastic philosophy is also frequently called Aristotelian, because S. Thomas derived a great part of his metaphysics from the great philosopher of Greece; and Peripatetic, which was the name given to the school of Aristotle, because the teachers and pupils used to walk up and down during their lectures and discussions. Those who diverge from the philosophy of S. Thomas in the same direction with the ontologists are also frequently called Platonists, because they follow, or are supposed to follow, Plato, in regard to certain opinions differing from those maintained by Aristotle.

The philosophical disputes which have been lately carried on with so much vehemence about questions of ontology are by no means of recent origin. They have been waged both within and without the limits of the Catholic Church. Des Cartes, the great modern master of psychologism, always professed to be a loyal son of the church, and had many disciples among Catholics. Malebranche, the author of modern ontologism, was a devout priest of the French Oratory; and Cardinal Gerdil, who began as an earnest advocate of the same doctrine, but gradually approached toward the scholastic philosophy in his maturer years, was really the second man to the Pope for a long time in authority and influence, as well as a most illustrious model of virtue and learning. More recently, the principal advocates of ontologism have been very devoted Catholics. The Louvain professors, Hugonin, Branchereau; for anything we know to the contrary, Fabre, and many others, have been most zealous and devoted Catholics. Only Gioberti, who was, however, the prince among them all, and one of the most gifted men of the century, among the well‐known leaders of that school, was a disloyal Catholic. We have heard on very good authority that Gioberti continued to receive the sacraments up to the time of his death, and was buried with Catholic rites. Nevertheless, as a number of priests were still in the external communion of the church at the time Gioberti was living in Paris, who were really heretics and have since apostatized, this fact alone does not count for much as a proof that he died in the Catholic faith. All his works were long before on the Index; he was at least suspended, if not ipso facto excommunicated, as a contumacious rebel against the Pope. Dr. Brownson calls him “that Italian priest of marvellous genius, and, we were about to write, Satanic power.” And again he says: “Gioberti died, we believe, excommunicated, and his last book, published before his death, contains a scurrilous attack on Pius IX., and bears not a trace of the Catholic believer, far less of the Catholic priest.”(96) For a long time the Church did not directly interfere with the philosophical discussions which went on among her children in regard to ontology. Neither Des Cartes(97) nor Malebranche was condemned, nor were any specific propositions in the works of Gioberti censured. The Holy See has never been in the habit of using its supreme magisterial authority in deciding scientific controversies considered merely as scientific. Science is left to itself, to make its own way and fight its own battles, unless the interests of the faith become involved with those of science. When these interests demand the interference of the supreme authority, it utters its disciplinary edicts or its doctrinal decisions, as in its wisdom it deems opportune and necessary. For a considerable period of time philosophy was left in the enjoyment of the largest liberty, so long as the doctrines of the church were respected and maintained. But when professed Catholics, especially in Germany, began to frame systems of philosophy manifestly dangerous to sound theology and subversive of it, the Holy See began to exercise a more special vigilance over the teaching of philosophy in Catholic schools. Gregory XVI. and Pius IX. have condemned a number of works, of systems, or of distinct propositions in which philosophical errors were contained, because these were directly or indirectly subversive of the Catholic faith. Among other errors condemned, ontologism holds a prominent position. After various means more mild and indirect of correcting the evils which the teaching of this system threatened to produce had failed, the Holy See pronounced (Sept. 18, 1861) its condemnation of seven propositions embracing the fundamental tenets common to the so‐called ontologists, and some particular tenets advanced by individual professors or writers of the same school. The professors of the Catholic University of Louvain were required to make a formal act of submission to this decision of Rome, which they did in the most exemplary manner.

The Abbé Hugonin, when nominated to an episcopal see in France, was also required to make a formal renunciation of ontologism, which he had taught in his writings, as a condition of receiving the confirmation of the pope, and complied without hesitation. The Abbé Branchereau, a distinguished French Sulpitian and professor of philosophy, voluntarily submitted a statement of the doctrine contained in his Prelections to the examination and judgment of the Holy See, and, when the judgment condemning his system was made known to him, promptly submitted and suppressed his work. In fact, there has been everywhere a most ready and edifying submission given to the judgment of Rome on a system which was rapidly spreading and gaining ground, and toward which a great number of the finest minds among Catholic scholars felt the strongest attraction. The reason of this may be found in the fact that those who had embraced this system or were inclined toward it were generally good Catholics, holding sound theological principles, and imbued with the love of truth and the love of the church, loyal to conscience, and well grounded in Christian humility and obedience. Consequently, ontologism, as a system, prevailing among Catholics and in Catholic schools, is dead, and rapidly passing into oblivion—a great gain for science, as well as for religion, since it removes a great obstacle in the way of the revival of the genuine and sound philosophy which alone contains the real and solid wisdom of the Grecian sages, the fathers of the church, and the gigantic masters of the mediæval schools, combined, harmonized, and reduced to method.

It is time now to explain in what the essence of ontologism consists. In the words of M. Fabre, a professor at the Sorbonne, “Ontologism is a system in which, after having proved the objective reality of general ideas, we establish that these ideas are not forms or modifications of our soul; that they are not anything created; that they are necessary, unchangeable, eternal, absolute objects; that they are concentrated in the being to which this name belongs in its simple signification (l’être simplement dit), and that this infinite Being is the first idea apprehended by our mind, the first intelligible, the light in which we see all the eternal, universal, and absolute truths. Ontologists say, then, that these eternal truths cannot have any reality outside of the eternal essence, whence they conclude that they do not subsist except as united to the divine substance, and consequently that it can only be in this substance that we see them.”(98)

We will now give the first two, the fourth, and the fifth of the propositions condemned at Rome, and which, with the other three, were taken from the prelections of a professor in a French seminary, never published, but extensively circulated in lithograph or MSS., and which, the reader will see, express the identical doctrine summarized so concisely and ably by M. Fabre:

I. The immediate cognition of God, at least habitual, is essential to the human intellect, so that without this it cannot know anything, since it is the intellectual light itself.

II. That being which we intellectively perceive in all things, and without which we perceive nothing intellectively (quod in omnibus et sine quo nihil intelligimus), is the divine being.

IV. The congenital knowledge of God as simply being (ens simpliciter) involves every other cognition in an eminent manner, so that by it we have implicit knowledge of every being, under whatever respect it is knowable.

V. All other ideas are only modifications of the idea in which God is intellectively perceived (intelligitur) as simply being (ens simpliciter).

Similar propositions to these are found in the fifteen submitted by M. Branchereau to the judgment of the Holy See, viz.:

1. In the act of thought two things are to be essentially distinguished—the subject thinking and the object thought.

2. Again, the object thought is distinguished into two things—that which is being simply, and that which is being in a certain respect.

3. By that which is being simply we understand real being, concrete and infinitely perfect; ... in a word, that which is being simply is God.

12. From the first instant of existence the mind enjoys ideal perception, not indeed reflexively, but directly.

13. Among the intelligible truths, which we apprehend ideally, God occupies the first place, the intellective perception of whom, although essentially distinct from the intuition of the beatified, is terminated, not at a representative image, but at God himself.

The reader will now, we trust, understand without difficulty what is the fundamental idea of ontologism—namely, that God is the immediate object of the intellect, the ideal object which faces it from its creation, is present to it as its light and its luminous, intelligible term of vision, in which all ideal, necessary, self‐evident, eternal ideas, verities, realities, are concentrated, beheld, made luminous; lighting up all objects whatsoever which exist and are perceived by sense and intellect, so that the things that are made are clearly seen by the invisible things of God, even his eternal power and Godhead; as Malebranche expressed it, “in Deo,” and Gioberti, “in Deo et per Deum”—in God, and by or through him, as clouds in a luminiferous ether. For an explanation of the scholastic doctrine of the origin of universal ideas we refer the reader to a former article on Dr. Stöckl’s Philosophy. In brief, it is the reverse of the one just delineated, viz., the universal and transcendental ideas are derived by abstraction from created things, and the knowledge of God is obtained by a discursive act of reasoning, by which we ascend from the knowledge of creatures to the knowledge of the Creator, whose invisible essence and attributes are understood by the things that are made. That is, God is known by a mediate and not an immediate apprehension, resulting in an intellectual judgment that he is. The mind terminates at a representative and inadequate image of God, and not at God himself or that which is God, real, concrete, necessary, infinite being, which is the remote and reflected object of the intellect.

We are now prepared to answer the question, What is the harm and danger of ontologism on account of which it has been condemned? It has not been condemned as heretical, for it does not formally, directly, and explicitly contradict any doctrine of faith. The Holy See has simply decided that it cannot be safely taught—that is, that it cannot be taught with a safe conscience, without danger to the faith, and consequently without grievous sin. It must therefore contain in it an error which cannot be extensively held and taught in Catholic schools without a serious danger of indirectly subverting Catholic faith and doctrine, especially in the minds of the young and inconsiderate. While this danger was only remote or not yet apparent, the error might be tolerated, and left to be opposed and refuted by argument. Moreover, it might be held and advocated in good faith and without sin by intelligent and pious men, who are liable to error when left to their own reasonings about abstruse matters in theology and philosophy. But when the danger was apparent and proximate, it was necessary to appeal to the supreme authority of the Roman Church, that the whole matter might be thoroughly examined and adjudicated; and, the judgment being once rendered, the cause is finished for all good Catholics. Thenceforth all that remains to be done is to study the import of the decision, and to search into the reasons by which the condemned errors may be proved false by philosophical and theological arguments, and the opposite truths brought out into a clearer light for the advancement of sound and solid science and the protection of the faith.

That part of Catholic doctrine which was endangered and indirectly subverted by ontologism is the one which relates to the distinction between nature and grace, the rational knowledge of God attainable by man in this life, and the immediate intuition of God enjoyed by the blessed in heaven. Ontologism destroys the real distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders, between the abstractive vision of God by reason and faith, and the intuitive vision of God without any medium, and face to face. It is true that ontologists have never taught that man has, or can have, a clear vision of the divine essence, like that of the blessed, by his unaided natural powers. This is a heresy condemned by the General Council of Vienne. Moreover, it would be too absurd for any sane person to maintain that such a vision is congenital and possessed by all men from the first instant of creation. Nor would any one who maintains that the idea of God is impressed on the soul at its creation be so extravagant as to assert that the clear and distinct conception of God which can be obtained by reason and faith is present to the minds of all men from their birth. Ontologists are careful to state that there is a difference between the immediate cognition of God in this life and that of the life to come. And all who maintain any kind of ideal cognition which is congenital or innate, understand by this something which exists unconsciously in the soul until its powers are developed. The object is there, facing the intellect, but the intellect has its eyes closed, and cannot perceive it. When it perceives it, it is first obscurely, then clearly, then more or less distinctly. Its congenital cognition is an unconscious, undeveloped act. But all the principles of conscious, developed cognition are in that act, and are only evolved by the operation of the senses and the intellectual faculties. The error condemned is the assertion that this cognition has God in his intelligibility as real and necessary being as its immediate object. And though it is not formally a heresy, since it does not assert that the immediate cognition of God is identical with the beatific vision, or deny the necessity of the light of glory to make the soul capable of the beatific vision, it is erroneous, inasmuch as it removes that which really makes the essential difference of the vision of the blessed, as distinct from the natural cognition of any created intelligence. This difference is defined by Benedict XIV., in the Const. Benedictus Deus, to be that the blessed see God “without the mediation of anything created which presents itself as the object seen”—nulla mediante creaturâ in ratione objecti visi se habente. Every other cognition of God must therefore have some created object of intellectual vision as an intermediary between the intellect and God—that is, must be mediate and not immediate cognition. An immediate cognition, however obscure and imperfect, must therefore be essentially the same with the clear, beatific intuition of the essence of God, and capable of being expanded, extended, developed, increased, made more penetrating or powerful, without being essentially changed, until it equals or surpasses the intuition of the highest angel in heaven. The light of faith or the light of glory can be therefore only aids to the improvement of the human intellect in its own natural capacity and activity—as if one should see the stars more plainly by a telescope, and afterwards receive a more perfect body with a visual organ superior to any telescope that was ever made.

A more elaborate similitude will make the difference of immediate and mediate cognition of God more plain. Let us suppose a barbarian lying asleep on the shore of his lonely island in the Pacific, while a large ship, the first which has ever approached it, has just come within the most distant range of vision. There is an object, then on his horizon, which he has the power to see, but does not perceive until he awakes. He perceives it at first as a very small and dimly‐seen object—as something, he knows not what. It may be a cloud, a bird, a wave sparkling in the sun, a canoe. It is a large man‐of‐war which is the real object perceived, but he does not know that it is a ship, or know its contents, or even know what a ship is. This is an obscure perception. By‐ and‐by he can see that it is not a cloud, or bird, or canoe, but a large, moving structure, whose principal parts are visible to him. This is a clear perception. When it has anchored, he has been taken on board, has seen its crew and armament, its cabins and hold, and has learned what is its purpose and the utility of its principal parts, he has a distinct conception. After he has learned the language of the sailors, and has been instructed to a greater or less extent, he acquires a more adequate and perfect knowledge, like that which the sailors themselves possess; he joins the crew, and becomes an expert seaman, and finds himself to have become much superior in knowledge and happiness to what he was before the ship came to his island.

Let us also suppose that a bottle is washed ashore at another island, and picked up by a native. When he opens it, he finds in it a drawing representing a large ship, and a paper containing particular information about the ship and its crew. This bottle had been thrown overboard after the ship had sprung a leak in mid‐ocean, and was about to founder. After the bottle has been found by the native, Europeans arrive at the island, by whom the papers are examined, and their contents explained to the native, who learns also from the explanation of the drawing to understand what the ship is, its use, construction, parts, etc. He thus gains substantially the same knowledge of that ship and its crew with that which the other native gained about the other ship, though in a different way, without ever seeing the ship itself, but only an image of it. One has immediate, the other mediate cognition. One sees the object in itself, the other sees it in something else. In the first case the native saw something which was a ship, but while it was distant it was not visible as a ship, only as an object. Afterwards it was visible in its outward shape and appearance as a ship, in clear, unmistakable contrast with every different object, but not distinctly understood or closely inspected, or made the principal object of the occupation, the attachment, the enjoyment, of the native—in a word, the home and centre of his chief earthly good. When he first saw something in the distance, he really saw the ship, and in that vision was virtually contained all that he afterwards discovered in respect to it; whereas, the other native never saw the other ship, and never could see it by means of drawings or verbal descriptions, although he could learn that it was a ship, and what ship it was, where it sailed from, who sailed it, and when and where it foundered.

The above comparison is not perfect, since every comparison must limp at least a little; but we think it is sufficient as an illustration of the process by which the human intellect attains to the knowledge of God and the beatific vision of God, according to ontologism as differing from the doctrine of sound Catholic theology. According to ontologism, God presents himself to the intellect, when he creates it, as its immediate Object, objective Idea, or intelligible Term. So soon as it is capable of apprehending eternal verities, it apprehends that which is God, although not yet knowing explicitly that what it apprehends is God—that is, the one, living, most perfect Being who is the creator and sovereign lord of all things. By another step it acquires a clear conception of God, and makes the judgment that God is, and that he is eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent. This judgment is an evolution from that cognition which existed at the beginning as a habit into an explicit act, as the explicit act of faith is deduced from the habit of faith given to the infant by baptism. That God is, is known by what he is—that is, by his essence, which is seen in the eternal verities or divine ideas as they are in reality, not distinguishable from the divine substance. Faith gives an obscure perception of the interior mysteries of the divine substance which are beyond the ken of the intellect unaided by revelation, or, in other words, are superintelligible verities; and the light of glory increases the power of intellectual vision so that it sees clearly and distinctly the interior essence of God, which completes the beatification of the soul.

In this place we may cite the third of the seven condemned propositions, which expresses the afore‐mentioned theory, as taken in connection with the fifth. This third proposition is: “Universals, objectively considered, a parte rei, are not really distinguishable from God”; and the fifth: “All other ideas are only modifications of the idea in which God is intellectively perceived as simply being—tamquam ens simpliciter intelligitur.” Universals are general ideas, each one of which is capable of being predicated of a multitude of subjects. The logical universals are five—genus, species, differentia, attribute, accident. The ten categories of Aristotle include all the supreme genera, though some maintain that a better division may be made. The transcendental ideas are those which transcend all generic classification, because they may be predicated of every genus and all its inferiors. They are the ideas of being, unity, the good, the true, the beautiful. They belong, therefore, to the universals, although predicated in analogous and not identical senses of the diverse genera and their inferior subjects. Take the supreme genus substance, as an instance, and follow it down to man—substance, corporeal substance, organized substance, animal, rational animal, i.e., man. His proximate genus is animal, his differentia rationality, which constitute the species man. The concrete reality of the universals, substance, etc., terminating in the species which is rational animal is found only in individual men. The direct universals, genus, species, differentia, exist, a parte rei, in each individual of the human species. Each man is a substance, corporeal, organized, animal, rational, and these universals can be predicated of him as their subject. The transcendental predicates, also, are connected with individual men as their subject. Individual men have being, unity, verity, goodness, beauty. But these may be predicated in senses which are only analogous to each other of the composite essence, of its distinct parts, soul and body, of the attributes or essential qualities of man, and of the accidents of individual men. For instance, the human essence is essentially good; the soul and body are good each in its own order; rationality is good; learning, valor, amiability, moral virtue, sanctity, are good; but there is analogy only, not identity, in these various kinds of good. The same is true of being. It is absurd, therefore, to speak, as Plato does, of a universal good, true, beautiful, or to speak of any universal idea, such as being, or a modification of being, as having any objective reality as a universal, except as a concept of the mind with a foundation in that which is or may be an actually existing thing. They are metaphysical essences, with their generic, specific, qualifying, and transcendental predicates. All the categories or supreme genera together make up what is called the nature of things, considered metaphysically; considered in their physical being in the sum of all concrete existences, they make up universal nature. The metaphysical essences are necessary, immutable, eternal, and potentially infinite. They are the eternal verities, the necessary truths, which copy the divine ideas upon nature or the universe, where God has impressed them, and are abstracted from the works of the Creator by the intellect of man. They are distinguishable from God, therefore they are not in the essence of God, or the divine ideas subsisting in the divine substance, and are not there seen by the intellect. This was long ago proved by philosophers and theologians. It is now declared by authority that it is unsafe thus to identify them with God, and thereby make him the immediate object of the intellect. The reason why it is unsafe is that it destroys the differentia which makes our rational cognition of God specifically distinct from the intuitive cognition of the blessed. There are also other dangers to faith and sound theology involved in the doctrines or tendencies of ontologism, which we have not space to notice.

Neither the absurdity nor the heterodoxy of ontologism is avoided by the system of Gioberti. The objection of Giobertians to pure ontologism, that it furnishes no dialectic principle uniting natural theology with other branches of special metaphysics and with ontology, is, indeed, well taken. But this only shows that pure ontologism is absurd and incoherent. It does not remove the absurdity of that which is common to pure ontologism and the ontologism of Gioberti. Neither does it remove its heterodoxy. Saying that we have immediate cognition of something which is not God does not make it more orthodox to say that we have immediate cognition of God. Moreover, Gioberti’s doctrine, as taught by himself, and understood by his European disciples and admirers, as well as by his acutest and most orthodox opponents, is far more heterodox than that of any other ontologist who is also a Catholic. Evidence has been furnished which has never been rebutted that Gioberti was a pantheist even before he published his Introduction to Philosophy. In a letter to Mazzini, written before that date, but only afterwards published from a motive of pique against him, he says explicitly that he is a pantheist after the manner of Giordano Bruno, though a Christian pantheist. What does this mean, unless it means that he had conceived a plan of combining pantheistic philosophy with the Catholic dogmas, as a part of his grand scheme of reconciling paganism with Christianity, and the European revolution with the Papacy? On this supposition he must either have acted the part of a deliberate liar and hypocrite—a baseness of which we believe him to have been incapable—or he must have intended, and in a subtile manner insinuated pantheism in the guise of his famous ideal formula, Ens creat existentias. In this case whatever may bear a pantheistic interpretation or seem to point to a pantheistic conclusion must be pantheistically interpreted, so far as the sense of the author is concerned. It is not strange, however, that many have understood him in a sense not directly heretical, or even, perhaps, quite compatible with Catholic faith. For his works are filled with passages which, taken in a Catholic sense, are gems of the purest and most precious sort. If the formula Being creates existences be taken in the orthodox sense, as equivalent to God creates the world, it is obviously a directly contrary proposition to any one expressing pantheism. To make it bear a pantheistic sense, definitions of being, create, and existences must be sub‐introduced which vitiate its orthodox meaning. But, leaving aside this question, we have already proved that a Catholic must hold that the human intellect cannot have an immediate cognition of the first extreme of the formula, viz., that real and necessary Being which is God. Without this he cannot have an immediate cognition of the creative act, as the act of God, or of created things in their ideas, considered as the divine ideas themselves in the divine mind, and really identical with the divine essence. It is certain that the Holy See did not intend to condemn pantheism in the decree respecting the seven propositions, for it would never have affixed such a mild censure if it had so intended. Ontologism, whether couched in Gioberti’s formula or not, is condemned in that sense which is not pantheistic, and under every formula which includes an affirmation of the immediate cognition of God by the human intellect, as defined by M. Fabre in the passage quoted at the beginning of this article.

Before concluding we are obliged reluctantly to add a few words about a personal controversy with Dr. Brownson, with whom we always regret to have a difference respecting any matter which belongs to Catholic doctrine. We desire to explain, therefore, that we made no statement to the effect that the ontologism condemned by the Holy See had ever been formally and explicitly taught in philosophical articles, whether written by himself or any one else, in this magazine. Moreover, in the passage where his name is mentioned there is no direct statement that “his own ontologism” falls under ecclesiastical censure. The utmost implied or asserted is that some educated men might think that some of his statements are “unsound,” philosophically or theologically, and demand a certain benignity of interpretation in order to escape the censure which a professed theologian would justly incur if he made such statements in a book written for school‐boys or young pupils. Dr. Brownson’s own defence of his doctrine, as based on his definition of intuition: “Intuition is the act of the object, not of the subject,” was cited as the precise distinction between his own doctrine and the one condemned, upon which the question of the theological soundness of his peculiar ontologism turns. We called it “a newly‐invented distinction between ideal intuition and perception or cognition,” and qualified the definition above quoted as an “assumption,” which we think is quite correct. It is new in Catholic philosophy, and has not been proved. We think, therefore, that the phraseology of Dr. Brownson makes his doctrine liable to an interpretation, even by educated men, which makes it similar to that of the condemned ontologism. That it is sound and safe we are not prepared to say. Neither do we say positively that it is not. If it is, we think Dr. Brownson can place it in a clearer light than he has yet done, and we shall heartily rejoice to see him distinctly enunciate and vindicate his fundamental doctrine, whether it does or does not accord with that which is held by the disciples of S. Thomas. Of his loyal intention to conform his doctrine to the decisions of the supreme authority in the church there can be no doubt. That he has so far succeeded in doing so, at least by an exact and explicit expression of it, we cannot help doubting. We cannot see that the distinction between ideal intuition and cognition, so far as we apprehend it, suffices.

We understand him to define ideal intuition as an act of God presenting himself to the intellect as its object, and to call the act of the intellect apprehending this ideal object empirical intuition. We understand him also to identify the immediate object on which the active intellect exercises its discursive operations with real, necessary being—i.e. God—although it does not make the judgment that eternal verities are real being, and that real being is God, immediately, but by means of reflection and reasoning. Now, we cannot see any essential difference between this doctrine and that of M. Branchereau and other ontologists. We do not think it possible to escape the ecclesiastical censure on the doctrine of the immediate cognition of God, unless something is placed, ratione objecti visi, between God and the intellect, making the cognition mediate. Moreover, we consider that the term cognition in the Roman decree covers intuition and simple apprehension, even in their confused state, as well as distinct conceptions and judgments. Dr. Brownson’s peculiar terminology and informal method of arguing make it, however, more difficult to understand his real doctrine and compare it with that of standard authors than if it were expressed in the usual style and method.

Dr. Brownson has also further charged the author of Problems of the Age with having actually taught in the opening chapters of that essay, as first published in this magazine, the very ontologism condemned in the seven propositions. That there are ambiguous expressions and passages which taken apart from the whole tenor of the argument are liable to such an interpretation, we do not deny. But in reality, it was the doctrine of Gerdil which was intended, and expressed with sufficient distinctness for a careful and critical reader. This doctrine is expressed by the illustrious cardinal in these words: “God, who contains eminently the ideas of all things, impresses their intellectual similitudes in us by his action, which constitute the immediate object of our perceptions.” Upon which Liberatore remarks: “In these words Gerdil did not modify the ontologism which he professed in his youth, but retracted it. And indeed, how can even the shadow of ontologism be said to remain, when the immediate object of our perceptions is no longer said to be God, or ideas existing in God, but only their similitudes, which are impressed by the divine action upon our minds.”(99) A few quotations from the Problems of the Age will prove the truth of our assertion that it proposed a theory similar to the theory of Gerdil.

“It is evident that we have no direct intellectual vision or beholding of God. The soul is separated from him by an infinite and impassable abyss.”(100) “God affirms himself originally to the reason by the creative act, which is first apprehended by the reason(101)through the medium of the sensible.... Thus we know God by creation, and creation comes into the most immediate contact with us on its sensible side.”(102) “The knowledge of God is limited to that which he expresses by the similitude of himself exhibited in the creation.”(103) “It is of the essence of a created spirit that its active intuition or intellective vision is limited to finite objects as its immediate terminus, commensurate to its finite, visual power. It sees God only mediately, as his being and attributes are reflected and imaged in finite things, and therefore its highest contemplation of God is merely abstractive.”(104)

More passages might be quoted, but these may suffice. The form of expression is frequently Giobertian, especially in the early chapters. But the author understood Gioberti in an orthodox sense. In our opinion Dr. Brownson, as well as ourselves, failed to a very great extent to understand his artfully‐expressed meaning. We used language similar to that of ontologism, but the sense in which we asserted the intuition of God was that of an infused idea of necessary and eternal truths; having their foundation and eminent, but not entitative existence in God, as Father Kleutgen teaches; by virtue of which the mind can rise by discursive reasoning through the creation to an explicit conception of what God is, and make the judgment that he is. All that introductory part of his work which treats of ontology was, however, suppressed by the author when the Problems of the Age was published in book‐form, precisely on account of the tincture of ideas and phraselogy, which too nearly resembled those of ontologists, and were too obscure and ambiguous.

We do not suppose that the ideology of those Catholic philosophers whom we may call Platonisers, for want of a more specific term, has been condemned; or the Peripatetic ideology enjoined as the only one which can safely be taught in the schools; by any positive precept of the Holy See. Nevertheless, we think the former ideology, in all its various shapes, has received a back‐handed blow, by the condemnation of ontologism, which must prove fatal to it. We see no logical alternative for those who reject psychologism, except between ontologism and the ideology of S. Thomas. The objective term of intellective conceptions must be, if it has real existence, either in God, in created things outside the mind, or in the mind itself. If it is the latter, a vague idealism which carries philosophy into an abstract world, separated by a chasm from the real, seems unavoidable. There is no real, concrete being, except in God and that which God has created. Unless the universals are mere conceptions or ideas, and unless ideas are, not that by which the intellect perceives, but that which it perceives—and this is psychologism—they must have their entitative existence in the essence of God, and be indistinguishable from it; or they must have it in created objects. The former cannot be safely held and taught. Therefore we must take the latter side of the alternative, or fall into psychologism. There is no solid rational basis, except that of scholastic philosophy, on which we can stand. The master in this school is the Angelic Doctor. Our interpretation, or that of any greater disciple of S. Thomas, has no authority, except that which is intrinsic to the evidence it furnishes that it is really his doctrine. The evidence is clear enough, however, to any competent person who examines it, that we have stated his doctrine correctly, and that all the criticisms upon the ideology we vindicate fall upon S. Thomas, and not upon us. Any one who will read the great works of Kleutgen and Liberatore can see this proved in the amplest manner from the writings of S. Thomas and in his own distinct statements. And any person of ordinary common sense will conclude that a man of the acute intelligence, conscientiousness, and patient application which characterize Father Liberatore, in a lifelong study of the clearest and most lucid author who ever wrote, cannot have failed to understand his philosophical system. Liberatore avowedly confines himself to an exposition of the philosophy of S. Thomas pure and simple. And in his great work, Della Conoscenza Intellettuale, he has given the most ample and lucid exposition of that particular part of it, with a solid refutation of the other principal theories. Kleutgen is more original, and not less erudite, though perhaps not equal to Liberatore in the thorough mastery of the writings of the Angelic Doctor; and he has given a most extensive and complete exposition of scholastic philosophy, accompanied by an exhaustive appreciation of modern systems, in his Philosophie der Vorzeit. It is very well for those who can do so to study S. Thomas for themselves, though even they cannot neglect his commentators. But it is idle to recommend this study to the generality of students in philosophy and theology, as a substitute for the study of the minor approved authors. Dogmatic and moral theology and philosophy are real sciences, as they are taught in the Catholic schools, and they can be and must be learned from text‐books and the oral instruction of professors. The presumption is in favor of the books and teachers approved by ecclesiastical authority, that they teach sound doctrine. There cannot be anything more injurious to the interests of ecclesiastical or secular education than to depreciate and undermine their legitimate authority, and thus awaken distrust in the minds of those who must receive their instruction from them, or else undertake the task of instructing themselves. Such an undertaking usually results in a failure which may have disastrous consequences. The greater number follow self‐ chosen and dangerous guides. The few of superior intelligence and activity of mind; who throw off respect for all authority except that which they recognize as absolutely infallible, or submit to through the worship which they pay to genius and to ideas which have captivated their intellect and imagination; are apt to indulge the futile and dangerous dream of remodelling philosophy and theology. Such have been the leaders of dissension, of heresy, and of apostasy. De Lamennais, St. Cyran, Gioberti, and Döllinger are examples. They began to deviate by breaking away from the common and present sense of the great body of authors in actual use and living teachers of theology. Every one knows where they ended. Similar tendencies and proclivities can be effectually suppressed only by a sound theology and a sound philosophy, together with that spirit called the piety of faith, which goes much beyond a mere submission to absolute and categorical decrees in regard to faith and morals. In conclusion, we venture very earnestly to advise all converts who have finished a liberal education before entering the church, not to study theology without also going through a careful course of philosophy, beginning with text‐books such as those of Father Hill and Liberatore.

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Reminiscences Of A Tile‐Field

Once upon a time there lived a king and a queen in a grand old group of Gothic towers that was called the Louvre. Nowadays we should call their house a palace, but in those good old times kings built houses to fight in as well as to live in, and their abodes had to do duty at once as palace, fortress, and prison. At the time we speak of this mass of straggling roofs and gables resembled a citadel mounting guard over Paris from the western side, as the Bastile did from the east; but when Francis I. came on the scene, he denounced the barbaric‐looking stronghold as a place too like a dungeon for a king to live in, though it did well enough for a hunting‐lodge. It was too venerable to be thrown down, and too stern in its original character to bend to any architectural modifications, so he decided to leave it as it was, and build a palace after his own fancy by the side it. He began, accordingly, the florid Italian edifice which now forms the western side of the old Louvre. He did not live to see the work completed; but it was continued by his son, who died soon after it was finished, and left his widow, Catherine de Médicis, in enjoyment of it. But the wily queen, looking to the future, saw that her son would one of these days be reigning in the Louvre, and that it might not suit her to remain his guest; so she set about building a palace for herself, where in due time she might plot and scheme, distil poisons, and light civil wars unmolested by the king’s presence or the prying eyes of his court. West of the Louvre, and in the then open country, was a tile‐field, which, from the fact of tuiles being manufactured there, was called Les Tuileries. The Médicean sorceress touched the tiles with her wand, and up rose under that magic stroke the stately palace which was to be the centre of so many high and wonderful destinies, and which continued to bear through all changes and vicissitudes its first homely title of Les Tuileries. One life could not suffice for the completion of such a monument, however, and Catherine left it to her three king sons, successively to finish. But already in her own time the tile‐field was baptized in blood. From one of its Gothic windows the mother pulled the trigger in the trembling hand of the son which gave the signal for the massacre of S. Bartholomew. Thus in its very cradle did the Tuileries sign itself Haceldama, a field where blood should flow, where princes should sell and be sold, where a king should wrestle with the powers of darkness, and be dragged forth in ignominy to death. The two palaces, hitherto distinct and separate, were united by Charles IX., who erected the long gallery by the river’s side. It was not entirely finished when he died, leaving his brothers to make it ready for Henry IV., who is represented as traversing the gallery, leaning on De Guise, the day before Ravaillac’s dagger cut short the Béarnais’ career.

The idea of turning it into a museum was first suggested by Louis XVI., who reverted to the plan frequently, but was compelled by financial difficulties to leave the glory of its execution to Bonaparte. Those who have seen the beautiful old palace recently, before its partial destruction, would hardly recognize it as the same which fifteen years ago was choked up to its very windows by the rubbish of the encroaching town; the space now cleared away between the two palaces, the Louvre proper and the Tuileries, was filled with mean houses, for the most part shops. Even the façade of the Tuileries was cumbered and disfigured by a variety of shabby buildings, barracks, stables, and domestic offices, these latter being necessary for the convenience of its inmates—since royalty must dine—the original plan of the palace having made no provision for those vulgar essentials for the carrying on of daily life. It was an unsafe abode for royalty when safety needed to be thought of and the hearts of the people had ceased to be the king’s best stronghold; but when the Médicis reared the noble, picturesque old pile, they were troubled with no such considerations. The ghosts of constitutionalism and sans‐culottism were slumbering quietly unsuspected in the womb of the future, and no provision was made for slaying or defying them. For nearly a century the Tuileries had been uninhabited, when, on the wrathful day of the 6th of October, the mob surged from Paris to Versailles, and dragged Louis Seize and Marie Antoinette from their beds, and installed them within its empty, neglected walls.

“Buildings, like builders, have their destiny.” Ever since the memorable morning when insurrection reared its hydra‐head under the windows of the Queen of France, and battered in the chamber door with clubs and tricolor‐ bedizened pikes, and sent her flying in terrified déshabillé through secret corridors and trap‐tapestries into the king’s room for safety; ever since “rascality looked in the king’s face, and did not die,” but seized royalty by the beard, and led it, amidst hootings of triumph, to lodge where the people willed, the grand château of Versailles has stood vacant of kings and queens, its polished floors reflecting the dead monarchs on the walls, a great hush filling its broad galleries, grass growing in its courts, the silence of the past brooding everywhere. Noisy demagogues may scream and howl in the theatre where the Grand Monarch applauded the verses of Corneille and Racine, and their nimble heels may tread down some of the grass between the paving‐stones of the Cour du Roi, but they are but jackdaws chattering in the deserted temple. Versailles has lived its day, and outlived its generation.

Neglected and uncomfortable as the Tuileries was, the royal family had no choice but to go there. The Louvre was partly dilapidated and quite unfurnished, while the sister palace, though so long uninhabited, was still furnished, and needed comparatively little to make it, even in this sudden emergency, a suitable domestic residence. The discomforts of the first few days were great, but the royal captives were absorbed in graver cares, and bestowed no idle regrets on such small matters as personal accommodation. Louis was satisfied with his truckle‐bed, hurriedly provided by the nation in the tapestried room. “Where will your majesty please to sleep?” inquired an obsequious municipal, entering the presence; and majesty, with head bowed over his knees, answers, without deigning to look around and choose, “I am well enough here; let each lodge as he may.” So the truckle‐bed is got ready. Strange days followed this strange beginning. Paris for a week was drunk with joy. The mob had got the king in their possession. Loyal subjects looked on, not knowing whether to weep or to rejoice. The Orleanist faction chuckled boldly over the degradation of the crown, and over the fact that the persons of the king and, above all, of the queen were safe in a gilded prison.

The queen was far too wise and keen‐eyed to be deceived by the pale glimmer of popularity which, during the early days of their abode in Paris, shone upon them. Louis took pleasure in the scanty vivats that greeted him when he sauntered out for a walk on the terrace—his only place of exercise now—and within doors amused himself with carpentry and lock‐ making. The Dauphin played at soldiering, dressed in military uniform, and gave the word of command to his men, a regiment of warriors from five to eight years old. Marie Antoinette had her library brought from Versailles, and sought refuge from thought in reading. Mme. Elizabeth, meanwhile, watches the signs of the coming storm, prays, loves, and hopes.

The Assembly had followed the king to Paris, and installed itself in the Salle de Manège, formerly the riding‐school of the Tuileries, and situated within sight of the palace on the north terrace. This proximity, whether accidental or designed, was a source of danger and humiliation to the king. The members could see the royal prison‐house from the windows of the Manège, and the prospect served to point many an insolent period in the tribune. Mirabeau used it with fine effect. “I see,” he cried, “the window whence a king of France, under the influence of execrable advisers, fired the shot which gave the signal of the massacre of S. Bartholomew!”

But the Assembly did not content itself with pointing the arrows of its rhetoric at the doomed Louis; it sought to give him more practical proofs of disrespect. The riding‐school being situated on the Terrace des Feuillants, the members declared that this terrace belonged to them, and not to the king; it was therefore thrown open as a public thoroughfare, the palace being thus exposed to the coming and going of the populace, who availed themselves of the opportunity of flaunting their disloyalty under the very windows of the sovereign. There was no longer any barrier on the north side, and, the external posts being all sentinelled by National Guards, the royal family had no control over either the courts or the gardens. This scandalous violation of his privacy roused even Louis to utter a mild protest to the Assembly, but it was met by one of the Girondists retorting that “the people lodged Louis in the Tuileries, but it nowise followed that they gave up to him the exclusive use of the gardens.” The unhappy king had no resource henceforth but in dignified patience, fed by the hope of escaping to the freedom and seclusion of St. Cloud at Easter. We know how, just as he had entered his carriage to start for that suburban castle, it was surrounded by the mob, and he himself only rescued from personal violence by Lafayette and his troop, who were, however, unable to effect his release. Louis re‐entered the Tuileries crushed and humbled, but inwardly resolved on some desperate attempt to escape from the insupportable bondage of his position. The abortive attempt to leave the Tuileries, even for his usual summer residence, roused a bitter feeling of suspicion against him, and more especially against the queen, which was soon manifested by the increasing insolence of the mob. They dared no longer show themselves in public, and even their afternoon walk on the terrace by the river’s side became impossible. They tried to avoid the humiliation and annoyance it provoked by rising at daybreak, and taking an hour’s exercise in the early dawn; but this soon became known, and had also to be abandoned. At last the queen complained that she “could not even open her windows on these hot summer evenings without being subjected to the grossest invectives and threats.”

When things came to this point, the king was forced to lend an ear to the proposals which had up to this time met with a dogged and somewhat contemptuous refusal. There was but one way of remedying the miseries of their position, and that was by flight. It was no longer a question of flying from humiliation, but from absolute and imminent danger. The most sanguine or the most obtuse observer could not but see that things were hastening to a fearful crisis, which, terminate how it may, must work ruin to the royal family.

Many schemes were arranged, but for one reason or another they fell through. Finally, it was settled that the sovereign should escape with his wife and children and sister to Montmédy. This was the utmost that could be wrung from Louis, even in this extremity. No arguments could induce him to consent to leave France, or even to cross the frontier with the purpose of re‐entering France the next day, though by so doing he would have shortened the journey and lessened its dangers. If even then he had consented to fly speedily, separately, instead of losing the precious days and weeks in preparations that only awoke suspicion and proved hindrances instead of helps! But in the race of destiny, who wins? Not he who flies, but he who waits. Louis waited too long, or not long enough; fled too late, if he should have fled at all.

The story of the flight to Varennes has been written by historians of all shades and camps, but it is generally tainted with such vehement partisanship that the simple, underlying facts become obscured, almost obliterated, by hysterical reproaches of this one and that; whereas the cause of the failure of that memorable expedition is to be sought rather in the attitude of the entire population, the atmosphere of the times, or, let us say at once, the mysterious leadings of the First Great Cause which overrules human events, even while it leaves the human instruments free to decide the issue. It is easy for one historian(105) to lay the blame on Marie Antoinette, who “could not travel without new clothes,” showing us how “Dame Campan whisks assiduous to this mantua‐maker and to that; and there is clipping of frocks and gowns, upper clothes and under, great and small—such clipping and sewing as might be dispensed with. Moreover, majesty cannot go a step anywhere without her nécessaire, dear nécessaire, of inlaid ivory and rosewood, cunningly devised, which holds perfumes, toilet implements, infinite small, queenlike furniture necessary to terrestrial life.” Poor Marie Antoinette! her grand, queenlike soul was lifted far above such silly “terrestrial life” by this time, and it is not likely that, when such tremendous stakes were impending, her care dwelt with new clothes or perfume bottles—so misleading does prejudice make the clearest mind, the most intentionally sincere witness. The plain truth is that the difficulty of the new clothes existed, but from a very different motive from that suggested by Mr. Carlyle. It was necessary that the queen and the royal children should be disguised, and for this purpose new clothes were essential, and it required all the ingenuity of Mme. De Tourzel, and Mme. Campan, and every one connected with the affair to get them made so as to fit the royal fugitives, and then conveyed into the palace without exciting the keen lynx‐eyes that were fixed on every incomer and outgoer passing through the queen’s apartments. As to the nécessaire over which the Scotch philosopher breaks the vials of his scorn so loftily, it was wanted. Some box was wanted to hold the money, jewels, and certain indispensable papers that were to be taken on the journey, and the queen suggested that her dressing‐case should be used, adding at the same time that she was loath to leave it behind her, as it was almost the first present she had received from her husband—no great subject for philosophical sneers, as far as we can see. Nor did either nécessaire or new clothes—though the obtaining and smuggling in of the latter caused much delay—give rise to any of the accidents which worked the failure of the scheme.

Then there was the new berlin to be provided—a lamentable mistake, but not one that deserves Mr. Carlyle’s withering sarcasms any more than the nécessaire. “Miserable new berlin!” he cries. “Why could not royalty go in an old berlin similar to that of other men? Flying for life, one does not stickle about one’s vehicle.” It was not for the newness or dignity of the vehicle that the queen stickled, but for its capability of carrying “all her treasures with her.” She positively refused to fly at all, unless it could be so contrived that she was not separated for an hour of the way from her husband, her children, and her beloved sister‐in‐law, the Princess Elizabeth. She insisted, moreover, that the few faithful friends who were to share her flight should be with them also, and not exposed to solitary risks in a separate conveyance. This was characteristic enough of the queen’s loyal heart towards those she loved, but it was unlike her practical sense and intelligence. M. de Fersen, who was taken into confidence from the first, declared that no travelling‐coach was to be found large enough to answer these requirements, and that one must be built on purpose. It so happened that the previous year he had ordered a berlin, of just such form and dimensions as was now wanted, for a friend of his in Russia; he therefore went to the coach‐maker, and desired him with all possible speed to build another on the same model for a certain Baronne de Korff, a cousin of his, who was about to return to St. Petersburg with her family and suite. The berlin was built, and, to baffle suspicion more effectually, was driven through some of the most public streets in Paris, in order to try it. The result was most satisfactory, and M. de Fersen talked aloud to his friends of the perfect coach he had ordered and partly designed for his cousin, Mme. de Korff.

The journey was fixed for the 19th of June. Everything was ready, every precaution had been taken, every possible obstacle anticipated. The Marquis de Bouillé, almost the only general whose devotion the king could trust to the death, was in command of the army of the Meuse, and Montmédy, a small but well‐fortified town, was situated in the midst of it. Here the royal family were sure of a safe and loyal asylum. The minor military arrangements were entrusted to M. de Goguelat, an officer of engineers, who was on Bouillé’s staff, and personally devoted to the king and queen. The Duc de Choiseul, under De Goguelat’s orders, was to furnish local detachments from his regiment of Royal Dragoons along the road, and to precede the royal departure by a few hours, so as to ensure all being in order at the various stations. M. de Goguelat made two experimental journeys to Montmédy himself, to ascertain the exact hour of arrival at each place. Unluckily, he forgot to calculate the difference between a light post‐chaise and a heavily‐built, heavily‐laden “new berlin.” Relays of horses were provided at each stage, and a detachment of cavalry from De Bouillé’s army was to be there also, and, after a short interval, to follow the new berlin, picking up each detachment successively, and thus swelling the force at every stage. The utmost secrecy was observed with all except the leaders of the expedition; the pretext alleged to the troops for all this marching being that a treasure was on its way to the north for payment of the army. All was waiting, when, at the last moment, owing to some difficulty about getting Mme. de Tourzel into the berlin, the king sent a counter‐order for the departure, saying it must take place, not on the 19th, but on the 20th. It was a woful delay. But at last, on the night of the 20th, behold the travellers under way. Mme. Royale’s Mémoires give us the most authentic account of the mode of starting: “At half‐past ten, on the 20th of June, 1791, my brother was wakened up by my mother. Mme. de Tourzel brought him down to my mother’s apartment, where I also came. There we found one of the gardes‐du‐corps, M. de Malden, who was to assist our departure. My mother came in and out several times to see us. They dressed my brother as a little girl. He looked beautiful, but he was so sleepy that he could not stand, and did not know what we were all about. I asked him what he thought we were going to do. He answered: ‘I suppose to act a play, since we have all got these odd dresses.’ At half‐past ten we were ready. My mother herself conducted us to the carriage in the middle of the court, which was exposing herself to great risk.”

The rôles were distributed as follows: Mme. de Tourzel, governess of the children of France, was Baronne de Korff; Mme. Royale and the Dauphin, her daughters. The queen was their governess, Mme. Rocher. The Princess Elizabeth was dame‐de‐compagnie, under the name of Rosalie. The king was Durand, the valet‐de‐chambre. The officers of the disbanded gardes‐du‐ corps went as couriers and servants. This was a grievous mistake amidst so many others. These gentlemen were totally inexperienced in their assumed characters, and, by their personal appearance and ignorance of the duties they undertook, proved a fatal addition to the party. The preparations were altogether too cumbrous and elaborate, but it is difficult to accuse any special portion of them as superfluous in a time when the public spirit was strained to such a pitch of suspicion and hatred; though prudence might have hinted that this heavy paraphernalia was far more calculated to awake the jealous mistrust of the people than to baffle or allay it.

All being now ready, the fugitives furtively left the Tuileries, and proceeded to enter the hackney‐coach that stood in wait for them outside the palace. “Mme. de Tourzel, my brother, and I got into the coach first,” says Mme. Royale. “M. de Fersen was coachman. To deceive any one who might follow us we drove about several streets. At last we returned to the Petit Carrousel, which is close to the Tuileries. My brother was fast asleep in the bottom of the carriage.”

And now another traveller steals softly out of the palace, her face shrouded by a gypsy‐hat. As she steps on the pavement a carriage, escorted by torch‐bearers, dashes past. An unaccountable impulse moves her to touch the wheel with the end of her parasol. The occupant of the carriage is Lafayette, on his way to the king’s couchée. He is late, having been delayed by urgent matters. They tell him the king has already retired for the night. Meantime the lady in the gypsy‐hat, leaning on M. de Malden, one of the amateur couriers, loses her way in the dark street, and keeps the occupants and driver of the hackney‐coach half an hour waiting in an agony of suspense. At last, after crossing and recrossing the river, they make their way to the coach, and start. Another presently follows them. So they jog on through the dark night to the spot where the new berlin is waiting; but, lo! they arrive, and no berlin is there. The king himself alights, and prowls about in search of it. M. de Fersen at last finds it, overturns the hackney‐coach into a ditch, mounts the berlin, and drives on to Bondy. There the travellers find a relay waiting in a wood. The chivalrous Swede stands bareheaded in the dewy dawn‐light, and bows his loyal farewell to the king and Marie Antoinette. They press hands in silent thanks, and the chevalier goes his way—to Stockholm, where that same day, nineteen years hence, he will meet a more brutal end than that which awaits the royal pair he has befriended—beaten to death with sticks by a savage mob, who, on the impulse of the moment, accuse him of having been accessory to the death of Prince Charles Augustus. But now he breathes with a glad sense of victory and security, and stands with bright, moistened eye watching the huge berlin lurching on its way, the only thing that broke the stillness of the wood, sleeping yet under the fading stars.

All went smoothly as far as Châlons‐sur‐Marne, about a hundred miles beyond Bondy, and here the programme as arranged by the queen and De Fersen ceased, to be taken up by the Duc de Choiseul and M. de Bouillé’s detachments. The berlin rumbled on through Châlons at four in the afternoon, and reached the next stage, Pont de Somme‐Velle at six, where M. de Goguelat’s escort was to meet it. But no escort was to be seen. M. de Choiseul had been there at the appointed time, but owing to the slow pace of the berlin and the time lost in the early stages—one accident to a wheel causing two hours’ delay—they were four hours behind time, and M. de Choiseul, taking for granted something had occurred to change the plan altogether, drew off his dragoons, without leaving even a vedette to say where he was going. Everywhere these unlucky troops turned out a hindrance and a danger. The soldiers accepted without arrière pensée the plausible story of their being on duty to protect the transport of pay for the army of the Meuse; but the municipal authorities looked on them with suspicion, and, long before the idea of the real cause of their presence got wind, the soldiers were eyed askance in the towns they passed through. At this very place, Somme‐Velle, one detachment caused a panic. It so fell out, by one of those disastrous coincidences which pursued the berlin on its adventurous way, that some few days before there had been an affray amongst the peasants of a neighboring estate, they having refused to pay certain rates, in consequence of which the tax‐gatherers had threatened to enforce payment by bringing down the troops. When therefore the population beheld De Choiseul and his cavalry they fancied they had been summoned for the above purpose, and a spirit of angry defiance was roused against them. The municipality sent the gendarmerie to parley with the troops and compel them to withdraw; but they failed in this overture, and words began to run dangerously high on all sides. Meanwhile De Choiseul was straining eyes and ears for the approach of the berlin, in mortal dread of seeing it arrive in the midst of the popular excitement. When, however, four hours passed, and there was no sign of it, he said to an officer, loud enough to be heard by those near, “I will draw off my men; the treasure I expected must have already passed.”

The accounts of this particular hitch in the itinerary of the flight are so conflicting—some envenomed by bitter reproach, others equally hot with recrimination from the accused—that it is difficult to see who really was in fault. The time lost in the first instance appears to be the main cause of all the mishaps. Goguelat is blamed for not having taken better measures for ensuring the relays being found at once at every stage; but he throws the blame on De Choiseul, under whose orders he was, and who was at any rate guilty of strange thoughtlessness in drawing off from the point of rendezvous without leaving word where he could be found.

Little time, however, was lost at Somme‐Velle when the berlin at last arrived there. It changed horses at once, and away to Sainte‐Ménéhould, which it reached at half‐past seven. But here the incapacity of the soi‐ disant couriers caused fresh delay and danger. M. de Valory, one of them, not knowing where the post‐house was, went about inquiring for it, exciting curiosity and some suspicion by his manner and uncourier‐like appearance. He was still looking for it when a special escort of troops rode up—a circumstance which was very unfortunate, as the angry feeling excited in the neighboring village by De Choiseul’s huzzars the day before had not yet subsided. The captain of the detachment, the Marquis d’Andoins, sees the berlin, and tries to telegraph by glances to Goguelat which way lies the post‐house; but Goguelat cannot read the signals, and goes up to him and asks in words, keeping up the sham of his yellow livery by touching his hat respectfully to the aristocrat officer. The king, impatient and nervous, puts his head out of the carriage‐window, and calls to Valory for explanations; the marquis advances and tenders them respectfully, but with seeming indifference, as to ordinary travellers asking information on their way. Unlucky Louis! Imprudent M. d’Andoins! Patriots’ eyes are sharp, and there are hundreds of them fixed on your two faces now. These sharp eyes are suggesting some vague memory, a likeness to some forgotten and yet dimly‐remembered features. Whose can they be? And the lady with the gypsy‐hat who bends forward to thank the gracious gentleman, bowing in silence, but with a grace of majesty unmistakable, a something in her air and carriage that startles even these heavy‐souled provincials into wondering “who can she be?” The lady falls back in an instant, and is hidden from further gaze; but that fat valet‐de‐chambre keeps his head protruded for several minutes. The post‐house is found at last, and the horses are coming. The postmaster and his son are busy at their service. The son has lately been to Paris, and has seen that head somewhere. He whispers suspicion to his father, old Drouet, one of Condé’s dragoons in by‐gone days, and the two come closer, and steal a long, sharp, look. Yes, it is the same as the head on the coins and the assignats; there is no mistaking it. What is Drouet to do? He is a staunch patriot; is he to connive at the king’s treachery to the nation, and let him fly to the foreigner unimpeded? Never was the ready wit of patriotism more severely tested. No need now to wonder at all this marching and countermarching, this flying of pickets to and fro, this moving of troops along the road to the frontier. Treasure to be transported! Ay, truly, a greater treasure than gold or silver. But what was to be done? How was it to be stopped? There were the soldiers and chivalrous aristocrat officers, ready to cut all the patriot postmasters in France to pieces, and then be cut to pieces themselves, rather than let a hair of one of those royal heads be touched. A word, and the village would be in a blaze; but only so long as it would take those glittering swords to quench the flame in patriot blood. Drouet is a prudent man. He holds his tongue until the new berlin is fairly on its way, with the village gaping after it, the military escort lounging about yet a little longer in careless indifference. M. de Damas was in command of the troops. Presently, after the appointed interval, he orders them to move on in the wake of the berlin. But short as the time was, it had sufficed to stir up the town to terrified and resolute opposition. The people had flocked into the streets in angry excitement, and would not suffer the cavalry to advance. M. de Damas at first took a high tone of command, but it was of no use; his weapon broke in his hand. The troops turned round on him and joined the mob, and after a desperate struggle he was obliged to escape for his life, unconscious, even at this crisis, of the danger that threatened his master. Drouet, meanwhile, was flying after his prey to Clermont, the next stage to St. Ménéhould, and which by a fatal chance he never reached; if he had, the final catastrophe would, in human probability, have been averted. On the road there he met his own postilions coming back, and they informed him that the berlin had not gone on to Verdon—the next stage beyond Clermont; that they had overheard the courier on the seat say to the fresh postilions, “A Varennes!” Drouet, who knew every stone of the roads, saw at once what a chance this gave him. He turned off the main road, and started by a short cut across the country to Varennes. Varennes was a small town, a village rather, where there was no post‐house, but where M. de Bouillé had a relay waiting for the travellers, who, having arrived before Drouet, and without any suspicion that he was pursuing them, might have congratulated themselves on being at last safe over the Rubicon. Yet it was here that danger was to overtake and overwhelm them. In this secluded little dell, near midnight, when every one was asleep, hushed by the lullaby of the river hurrying on its way beneath the silent stars, no prying eyes to peer at them, no patriots to take offence or fright, with fresh horses waiting in the quiet wood, and young De Bouillé, the general’s loyal son, to superintend the relays, with a guard of sixty staunch huzzars lodged in an old convent of the upper town, at hand in case of now seemingly impossible accident—it was here that the thunderbolt fell, and, as the king expressed it, “the earth opened to swallow him.” Valory, the clumsy courier in the gaudy gold livery, has been blamed for it all; but let us remember at least that a man who has ridden one hundred and fifty miles without breathing‐space in twenty‐three hours is entitled to mercy if, at the end of the ride, his mind wanders and his thoughts become confused. It was past eleven when he reached Varennes, and went looking about for the relays, where he had been told he should find them, at the entrance of the faubourg; but no relays were to be seen. He pushed on through the faubourg to the town, which had gone to bed, and could find no sign of the missing horses. After wandering about for nearly an hour, he hears a sound of rumbling of wheels coming along the Paris road. Can it be the berlin? And where, oh! where are the fresh horses? He hurries back in the direction of the sound, and finds the fugitives at the entrance of the suburb, looking about for the relays. There was nothing for it but to wake up the village and make enquiries. The king and queen themselves got out, and went, with the couriers, knocking at doors, and calling to the inhabitants to know if they had seen horses waiting in the neighborhood. Drouet, meantime, was not asleep; he was up with his game now, and flashed past the berlin, like a man riding, not for life, but against life for death, just as the king alighted. He shouted something as he passed, but Louis did not hear it. It was an order to the postilions not to stir from the spot. The relays all this time were ready waiting not at the entrance of the suburb on the Paris side, as had been specified to the king in M. de Goguelat’s programme, but at the entrance of the faubourg beyond the town—a safer and to all appearances more advantageous position, as the change of horses would be sure to attract less notice out of the town than within it. The grievous mistake on De Goguelat’s part was in not having told the courier the exact place where the relays were to be found. But where were the officers commanding the sixty huzzars all this time? Fast asleep, it is said, though it is almost impossible to believe it. Certain it is that they and their huzzars, as well as the detachment of dragoons which, under command of M. Rohrig, was told off to keep watch over “the treasure,” kept out of the way while all this commotion was going on, and never appeared until the entire village was on foot, lights gleaming in every window, and the streets filled with the inhabitants, lately snoring in their beds. Drouet had managed his mission with a coolness and cleverness worthy of a nobler cause. He made no row, but went quietly to the houses of some half‐dozen good patriots, told them what was abroad, and directed them how to act. Their first move was to hurry off to the bridge, and throw up a loose barricade which would prevent the berlin passing; they then flew to the other end of the town, and overturned some carts that happened to be close by, and thus barricaded the exit by the road. They were but “eight patriots of good‐will,” Drouet proudly asserts, in these momentous preliminaries, so sagaciously and quickly executed.

The mob were by this time thoroughly roused. They surrounded the carriage, and forced the travellers to alight. Mme. Royale thus describes the scene: “After a great deal of trouble the postilions were persuaded that the horses were waiting at the castle (at the other side of the town and river), and they proceeded that way, but slowly. When we got into the village, we heard alarming shouts of Stop! stop! The postilions were seized, and in a moment the carriage was surrounded by a great crowd, some with arms and some with lights. They asked who we were; we answered, ‘Mme. de Korff and her family.’ They thrust lights into the carriage, close to my father’s face, and insisted upon our alighting. We answered that we would not; that we were common travellers, and had a right to go on. They repeated their orders to alight on pain of being put to death, and at that moment all their guns were levelled. We then alighted, and, in crossing the street, six mounted dragoons passed us, but unfortunately they had no officer with them; if there had been, six resolute men would have intimidated them all, and might have saved the king. There were sixty close at hand, but the two officers who commanded them were asleep; and when at last the noise of the riot awoke them, they coolly rode away to tell the Marquis de Bouillé that the king had been stopped, and all was over; while M. Rohrig, who commanded the treasure escort, rode off likewise, leaving his men under a disaffected non‐commissioned officer.” M. de Raigecourt, in his account of this eventful “Night of Spurs,” tells us how he and his brother officer, De Bouillé, “at half‐past eleven returned to their bed‐rooms,” after strolling about the town, in hopes of seeing the travellers arrive. “We extinguished our lights,” he says, “but opened our windows and kept a profound silence. About twelve we heard many persons passing and repassing, but without tumult; some even stopped under our windows, but we could not distinguish what they were saying.” They remained quietly in their rooms, “wondering what was the matter,” until about half‐past twelve, when they were enlightened by signals which even their unsuspicious minds could not mistake. The tocsin was rung, the drum beat to arms, the tumult became very great. Terror seemed to prevail. I believe that at that moment ten, or even fewer, determined men would have routed that scared populace. A general cry informed us that the king was in Varennes, betrayed and a prisoner. Instead of now, at least, hastening to call out their men (who, we said, were lodged above the town in an old abbey), the two officers “took for granted that the huzzars had laid down their arms, as otherwise they would have come to the rescue and liberated the king,” and so they simply rode away to report the lamentable issue to De Bouillé. It was about a quarter to one when they left Varennes.

At this juncture M. de Damas, who had escaped with a few faithful men from the fray at Clermont, reached Varennes—not with the idea of succoring the travellers, but of rejoining them. He believed that the uproar which so suddenly exploded at Clermont had been merely against the troops, and that the royal fugitives were now in security, past all further dangers or hindrances. His consternation was therefore great when, on approaching the village of Varennes, he beheld a barricade across the high‐road, held by a band of peasants, who made an attempt to stop him. M. de Damas, however, leaped the barricade, and dashed past them into the town. But the chivalrous soldier was no war‐god descending on fire‐wings to save the royal prisoners. He saw the huzzars walking about the streets, and in answer to his question, “What were they doing?” they replied, “Nothing; we have no orders.” Those who should have given the orders had fled. M. de Choiseul was there with his drawn sword at the head of forty men; and there was a detachment just arrived from another direction under M. Deslons. There was therefore, even at this point of the disaster, no lack of armed force to clear the way, if there had been but one vigorous will to use it. But everybody seemed too bewildered to act. No one had the courage or the presence of mind to take the initiative. As to Louis himself, he was like one paralyzed; not with personal cowardice—that odious charge his subsequent conduct amply disproved—but with a sort of dazed, mental stupor. When Deslons went the length of asking him for orders, he replied, “I am a prisoner, and have no orders to give!” Deslons might have taken the hint, and acted without orders; but the two officers present were his superiors, and he lacked the genius or the desperation to seize the opportunity at the cost of a breach of military discipline. Even the queen’s imperial spirit seems to have abandoned her in this critical extremity, and she sat passive and dumb in Sausse the grocer’s bed‐room, clasping her children to her heart, and taking with silent, humble thanks the sympathy of Mme. Sausse, who forgets the queen in her pity for the mother, and stands over the group weeping womanly, unavailing tears. Tears even of “warlike men” cannot help now, for the soldiers have fraternized with the mob, as their wont is in France; and even if Louis could be electrified by the shock of despair to arise and assert himself, remembering that he is a king, it is too late.

The journey so wisely planned, so deeply thought over, dreaded, and at last attempted, had come to an end, and stopped at the first stage along the road whose goal was the scaffold. The return to Paris resembled the capture of a runaway malefactor. Every species of insult was poured out on the unhappy victims of the popular fury. The brave men who stood by them in their hour of humiliation, MM. de Choiseul, de Damas, and de Goguelat, were disarmed and sent to prison; the three gardes‐du‐corps, who faithfully but clumsily played their part as servants to the last, were bound with ropes on the front seat of the berlin, and hooted at in their glaring yellow liveries by the mob; the National Guard of Varennes claimed the glory of escorting the fugitives back to the capital, and the National Guard of all the towns the berlin had passed through on its ill‐starred journey fell in with the cortége one after another, swelling it to ten thousand strong as it advanced. As these men were on foot, the journey homewards lasted four days. When the king arrived at Sainte‐Ménéhould, M. de Dampierre came out to salute him, and paid for the loyal act by being massacred on the spot. A little further on the prisoners were met by Barnave, Petion, and Latour‐Maubourg, members of the Assembly sent by Lafayette to conduct them back to Paris. Barnave and Petion entered the berlin, Mme. de Tourzel leaving to make room for them, and following in another carriage. From this strange meeting grew the quasi‐friendship of Barnave and the queen, which led to his honorable though futile efforts to save her and all of them. At first the proud Austrian lady sat in sullen silence, turned to stone, deaf to Petion’s coarse sneers, as he sat opposite in ill‐suppressed jocularity of triumph; but Barnave’s interference to save a priest from being butchered, like loyal Dampierre, for saluting the king, moved her to speech, and soon to confidence in the young representative of the nation. Barnave was surprised beyond measure to discover in Marie Antoinette’s conversation such clear and strong intelligence, and so thorough a comprehension of the existing state of things. He was captivated by her grace, as well as impressed by the serenity and courage that stamped her whole demeanor throughout that terrible journey; while his prejudices received nearly an equal blow in the person of the king. There was no approaching Louis XVI. without being convinced of his single‐minded honesty and good sense.

In this sorry guise did the new berlin re‐enter Paris. It had departed on Monday night, and behold it returning on Saturday towards sundown, a huge, jolting, captured whale whom no miracle will compel to disgorge its prey. In order to prolong the people’s jubilee and the king’s shame, it was brought a league out of its direct way, so as to make an entry down the Champs Elysées, and bear its occupants back to their gilded prison with due pomp and emphasis by the front gate of the Tuileries gardens. So with serried ranks of bayonets pointed at it on every side, it reappears in Paris, and jogs on to deposit its burden on the old Médicean tile‐field, an ignominious procession, royalty degraded and fettered, a spectacle of joy to the king‐hating citizens. The royal family enter the Tuileries, now a prison in the most cruel and literal sense. The queen and Mme. Elizabeth are henceforth watched, even in their chambers—so watched that, as it is recorded, the queen being one night unable to sleep, the National Guard on duty at her open door offered to come in and converse with her majesty awhile, conversation being sometimes conducive to sleep.

Even at this distance, when we read the history of the flight to Varennes, it has the exciting effect of a fresh tale. We hold our breath, and fancy that still at the last some deliverer will arrive just as all is lost; some accident will prevent Drouet from reaching the scene in time; the fugitives will clear the bridge, and the mob be prevented by the soldiers from pursuing them. Never, even in the history of those most unfortunate of princes, the Stuarts, was there a series of mishaps, blunders, and accidents such as make up the chapter of the flight to Varennes. It is idle to conjecture what would have happened if it had ended differently. If, when the berlin was first surrounded and the travellers ordered to alight, Louis had proudly defied the insolent command, and bade the soldiers fire, how quickly the “pale paralysis” of baffled rage would have seized Drouet and his eight patriots of good‐will; how the froth of ruffianism they had evoked would have melted away before that imperial word, and slunk out of sight, while the monarch fared on his way along the high‐road, the troops sweeping back all possible pursuers, and landing the destinies of France safe beyond the reach of regicidal hands! All this was so much more likely to be than that which was! The reason why it was not is so mysterious! Enough that it was not; that the bloody deed of January the 20th was to consummate the outrages and sufferings of the Night of Spurs; and that the fate of France was not shaped to a different issue, as we, in our short‐sighted philosophy, fancy might so easily have been done.

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The Ingenious Device

“Doth no man condemn thee? And she answered, No man, Lord.”

“Woman! thou’rt over‐confident and sure To answer thus the Infinitely Pure! How knowest thou that He does not condemn, And will not cast at thee th’ avenging stone?” “The pure are merciful. His stratagem Has left me to be judged by such alone.”

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