The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877 (part 4 of 5)

The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877 (part 4 of 5)

A woman, remarkable for nothing except her curiously total lack of anything noticeable, opened the door, but into that dull face an actual sunny gleam of pleasure came as soon as she saw the blithe young face before her. The descendant of all the Vans doffed his cap courteously again, with an answering gleam in his very brilliant eyes. He had been used all his life to know that people admired him, but it is to be acknowledged that this oft-repeated fact had never lost its charm.

“Is this Mrs. Escott?” he asked.

“I be,” was the succinct reply.

No faintest shadow of a smile betrayed her hearer’s amusement. He knew himself master already of the field. “If you please, Mrs. Escott,” he said audaciously, in his most captivating tone and with his most pleading, obstinate look, “I’m come to board with you.”

Mrs. Escott stared as one taken by storm and unable to collect her scattered forces. “But—but,” she stammered, “we never take boarders, we don’t.”

“This exception will prove the rule, then,” quoth Van. “Oh! for shame, Mrs. Escott. You never would have the heart to turn me away from such a view as this. I want to sketch it, and I will give you a sketch of it, and pay you the highest board into the bargain.”

“But we an’t got nothing fit to board ye on.”

“Ah? No eggs, then, I suppose,” suggested Van mildly, pointing at the hens cackling in the yard. “No milk, either,” he added as the lowing of a cow sounded near by. “No berries to be had for love or money, eh? And of course there are no fish to be found in the sea.”

The woman actually laughed. “I’ll speak to Jake,” she said, then disappeared, and Van seated himself on the doorstep and waited her return without fear of disappointment.

“Jane and I can pick berries,” he said to himself; and then he trilled forth gaily, in a voice that was the envy and admiration of city circles:

“In the days when we went gipsying, Long time ago.”

The melody pleased him; it chimed in well with the birds’ blithe song in the trees and the faint dash of the waves along the shore. He began the song and went through it all as blithely and carelessly as they.

“That’s handsome, now,” an uncouth voice behind him said when he stopped at last with a sense of buoyant delight in his own power. “That’s handsome, stranger. Sing like that, and you’re welcome here, and no mistake.”

This was “Jake,” then, shuffling, untidy, uncouth as his voice. A misgiving arose in Van’s mind. Would the house, the table, his room, be like Jake and Marm Escott? But he need stay no longer than he chose—no longer than one night; and it was now nearly six o’clock in the afternoon. So, all necessary arrangements being concluded, Jake trundled a dilapidated wheel-barrow, in some vague, slipshod fashion, to the road to “fetch the stranger’s traps,” and Mrs. Escott, going to the gate, called loudly, “Jane! Jane! I want ye, child.”

Van, waiting in the parlor for her coming, looked attentively about him. There was almost nothing in the room to show that any one ever came there who cared a whit more for beauty than Jacob Escott himself did. Rag mats of discordant hues covered squares and ovals and rectangular parallelograms of the pine floor; the walls were decorated with coarse prints of General Washington and of the prize ox of twenty years ago; on the table was a big family Bible and a Farmer’s Almanac illuminating the sombre cover with its sickly yellow, and on this was a half-knitted blue yarn stocking.

There was a cheap piano in one corner, but it looked as though it was never opened. The windows were not uncurtained, but, of all other things there, they set Van’s teeth on edge with their execrable attempts at some sort of a painted landscape; he seized the tassels vindictively, and pulled the curtains out of sight, thus letting in the superb view beyond.

Some one, he discovered then, had had taste enough to put flowers in the room. A great handful of daisies and clovers and delicate grasses stood on the sill of the window that looked out to where the narrow gulf separated the promontory from the mainland.

“Jane’s work,” said Van to himself; and as he thought it, he heard a slow, calm step coming through the entry, and Jane herself stood in the doorway.

Involuntarily he bent his head with such a reverence as he had never paid to woman before. He was the cynosure at home among all ladies, but none yet had won from him the reverent greeting of an utter self-forgetful absorption in another’s presence. The girl who stood there was not beautiful, though there was nothing in her features to displease the artist’s eye; indeed, the absence of mere material beauty made more marked the impression conveyed in movement and feature and face. Of all colors in the world—and Van was passionately fond of color—he loved best the gold that is sometimes seen in the western sky near where the sun is setting: a clear, fair hue that does not dazzle but rests the eyes that gaze upon it. Van thought of that color when he saw Jane’s face with its look of unclouded peace.

She lifted her eyes and glanced at him, at first with a tranquil, unmoved expression, as though it was quite indifferent to her who it was that she was meeting; then she gave a quicker, keener glance that thrilled Van with an uneasy sense that she was reading him through and through. What was it that she read? he wondered.

He tried to talk with her as she moved about the room, engaged in the very ordinary task of setting the supper-table. Her language showed some culture and refinement. He hazarded the question, “Are there good schools about here?”

“I do not know,” she said meditatively. “There is the district school.”

“Why does she not say, 'I went there’?” thought Van. “That would tell me something about herself.”

But more and more he found, as his talk went on, that Jane ignored herself. It did not appear to enter her mind that she was anybody to be thought of or talked about. He had at first to make conversation at the supper-table—the farm, the fisheries, the crops—but presently Jacob Escott made bold to ask: “What may be your occupation, sir?”

And, nothing loath, Van launched upon one of his pet topics—art and artists. Even the plain farmer and his wife enjoyed it. How could they resist the fascination of the merry stories, the musical voice, the face that spoke as clearly as the words? But Jane hardly listened, and suddenly a thought struck Van: “This is mere surface-talk after all. Can it be that this farmer’s girl cares for anything deeper, or is it only that she has not depth enough to care?”

They rose from the table, and Van followed Jane to the door. She did not see or heed him. The tide was at the full; wave upon wave came heaving gently onward toward the land as a child, tired out with play, comes home to its mother’s arms to rest; through the twilight the dark, restless mass of water and its ceaseless murmuring alike woke a sense of mystery and awe; above, in the darkening skies, a pale half-moon was shining and a few great throbbing stars. And in the dim light Van saw Jane’s face, and it seemed to him as beautiful and as full of mystery as sea and sky. Such a look of hunger marked it! He thought of Niobe, and of Cassandra, and of Mariana in the moated grange, but she differed in some inexplicable fashion from them all, and then he heard her say below her breath: “My God! My God! My God!”

Over and over again—not what Van had ever fancied a prayer could be, and yet to his ear more full of intense personal pleading than any prayer he had ever heard. Faith, hope, love, expectation, keen desire, and suffering were all summed up in two words; and though he knew nothing of her trouble, yet when the aunt’s call for her came from the room within, Van started as if he had been struck. He could not bear to have her harried back into the dull life of her home.

“Just mend this, Janey, will you?” Mrs. Escott said, exhibiting a coarse blue shirt. “Your uncle wants it for to-morrow.”

The girl’s face was tranquil and happy again by some sudden transformation. She took the rough work—it was not clean work, either; it had evidently been worn once or twice, Van saw with mingled disgust and pity—and, sitting down contentedly in the dingy room, she began her mending. She puzzled Van greatly, she interested him intensely. As he talked to her uncle he watched with his artistically-trained eye each expression of her face. It varied now and then, though the strange, yearning look did not return to it. The peace was there, and an exquisite happiness.

“She is like a dove,” thought Van. “She is like an innocent baby. Oh! if one could take her away from this.”

But one clue to her character he was certain that he had found. He rose up before she finished her work, and he flung open the old piano and sat down before it. It was not so unfit for use as he had feared it would be, and he knew how to glide skilfully over the worst notes. And then he began to try Jane. First he sang ballads, “Robin Adair,” “John Anderson my jo, John,” “Oh! wert thou in the cauld blast.”

“That’s fine, Phœbe,” said Jacob, and Phœbe said “Yes” with an unwonted enthusiasm. But Jane worked steadily on, and if she heard or cared Van could not tell, though he fancied the sweet, dove-like look deepened upon her face.

“The brightest jewel in my crown Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.”

The last tender notes of the song lingered under Van’s fingers, as a knock was heard at the kitchen door, and Jacob went to answer it, followed soon by Phœbe, who evidently recognized the voice of the new-comer. There was a scraping of chairs on the kitchen floor—the plain indication that somebody had come to stay awhile. Van leaned his head forward against the music-rack, and once again before his eyes was the scene he had witnessed in the twilight one hour before. Could the same person who sat quietly at her rough work now be she whom he had seen and heard then in that passion of prayer? And while he mused there rang through his brain echoes that always thrilled his music-loving, art-loving nature with an especial power, and that seemed now like fit mates for the darkly-heaving sea, the star-lit sky, the girl’s yearning face; and from the old ivory keys, that grew strangely full of power and sweetness beneath his magical touch, rang out Chopin’s grand funeral march.

The work dropped from Jane’s hands. He could not watch her face, for she turned it straight toward that eastern flower-decked window that looked out to gulf and sea; but he saw her fingers lock tightly into one another and her form become rigidly still. When he ended she rose quietly and went away, and he did not see her again that night.

But long that night he studied her, while an unwonted shame of himself and a keen admiration for her grew steadily in him, and what he inferred of her then was confirmed each day more and more.

“She does not know one-half the things that I know,” he said, “but she has it in her to care for the highest art and beauty. And she is so noble by nature that she couldn’t spend her thoughts on a thousand trifling things that I waste mine upon. Such a glorious creature imprisoned here! I’ll do my best for her.”

Never used to early rising, he came down stairs the next day to find his breakfast waiting for him and the morning of the family half over.

“Yes, we be early risers,” said Mrs. Escott. “Leastways, Jake and Jane be. I’m a poor hand at it myself. Why, Jane here, she’s across the gulf and home again afore six every day.”

“Across the gulf! Before six!” exclaimed Van.

“Certain sure, Mr. Van. These Catholics are queer creatures. Jane’s a Catholic, you know.”

Habitual courtesy quelled the words of surprise and of pain that rose to Van’s lips—surprise at finding a Catholic in this notedly Protestant fishing settlement, pain at hearing Jane’s deepest feelings thus lightly exposed to view. But Jane showed not the slightest shade of annoyance.

Now he thought he understood her better. One of the many marvellous spells of Catholicism had been woven about her—some vision of beauty had thus come into her hitherto blank life; he would strive the more now to teach her of what he blandly deemed the freer, nobler lights of art and science, but never should word or look from him throw scorn or jest or trifling speech of any kind on that which was dear to her.

Love at first sight—Van had always maintained that he believed in it; he was always falling in love with any pretty face that struck his fancy, and then just as easily falling out of love with an unwounded heart. But here love and pity and real reverence all awoke together and made of him their willing slave. “I’ll go with her to Mass to-morrow,” he said, and on the morrow he stood in the early sunrise on the beach.

So early was it that Jane herself was not yet there. He watched her coming towards her boat, her eyes cast down, and that hungry, longing look stamped plainly on her.

“May I go too?” he said, the gay, trifling manner gone, and that peculiarly distinct imprint of a clean heart shining in his eyes. Lifting her own sweet eyes, once again he felt that she read him through; then, saying nothing, she bowed assent and stepped into the boat. And still without a word she let him take the oars from her, and, drawing her rosary from her pocket, she began to tell her beads. Van thought she never would stop, and she did not till they reached the town. Still silent, she led the way from the shore through some dull, shell-paved paths to a small chapel, and, entering, forgot Van altogether and went with eager footsteps up the aisle. Van stationed himself where he could see her; she sank on her knees before the altar, and crossed herself, and lifted up her face. The lips were parted in a smile of ecstasy, the eyes were shining bright as though they saw unearthly loveliness.

What Van saw was this: a square, low-studded, dingy room, poor prints of religious subjects, mean tallow dips for candles, tawdry gilding and hangings, artificial tawdry flowers, a plain, small altar, a few squalid worshippers; presently an aged priest, who said Mass in a cracked and feeble voice.

“What spell is over her?” thought Van, marvelling. “Oh! if I could once take her out of it all, home to wealth and beauty and tenderness, and to our churches. No need to tell her that Catholics have beautiful ones somewhere.”

But on their way back to the farm she did not speak, and he could not venture to break the intense calm in which she was wrapped. Every evening he read or sang and played, or talked his best, in the parlor where the household gathered, but she never again was there alone with him, and in the daytime she was always busy just when he wanted her society most. Often he was conscious that what he said or read or did failed to make any impression at all upon her; often while he tried to interest her he found her gazing toward that eastern window, and knew that she did not heed him. He longed to say: “I cannot see what you find in that dull church to give your eyes and thoughts to,” but he could not say it.

Sometimes when he read, far oftener when he played grand music—often, too, when they watched the sky and sea and listened to the waves, the noble nature woke responsive to his call. But it stung him to the quick to feel his general powerlessness to move her except when he roused his best and highest powers; it stung him to see how little she cared for the comforts and luxuries and prettinesses, for knowledge even and the art, that were part of his daily existence, and which he deemed necessary to him; it stung him to find that the meanest occupation never made her discontented, but glad and bright instead; while what he considered suited to her condition or her needs was as nothing to her, and the yearning which he could not fathom seldom came into her face when at her daily labor, but often when he told himself she ought to be content and glad with him.

She talked very little to him; she never seemed to care whether he came or went, and he—all his thoughts became engrossed in her.

One afternoon, near the close of a sultry day, as the first mutterings of thunder and the first far-off flashes of lightning shone and sounded from the dark depths of low-lying clouds above the sea—when the winds were rising, and the poplars showed their leaves’ white faces, and the white-crested waves broke in ominously upon the shore; when Jane’s sensitive nature was awake and quivering in sympathy with the gathering storm—Jacob Escott came hurrying his cattle home to shelter, bringing with him a letter which the stage-driver had flung down to him as he raced his horses by to town. “For you, Mr. Van,” he said.

Van opened it carelessly, read it carefully, then came straight to where Jane stood, watching with keen delight the seething sea and storm-tossed sky.

“Jane,” he said, “listen to me. They have sent for me to go home at once. My father is very ill. Jane, I love you. Will you be my wife?”

She turned with great displeasure in her eyes. “You jest, sir,” she said. “Such jesting pains me much. Even my uncle understands that now.”

“I am not jesting,” he cried vehemently. “I speak the truth. I love you. None but you can ever be my wife. Give me your promise, Jane. I love you so.”

At first her look of rebuke waxed sterner; then for a moment her eyes met the pleading bright eyes fastened on her with the look peculiar to them, that bespoke a singularly clean heart. She smiled as one smiles at a child.

“It is impossible,” she said.

Tumultuously he hurried on: “No, no, not impossible. If I will promise to read, to study, to be a Catholic if I can—will you think of it then? Will you try me?”

“It is impossible,” she repeated. “You pain me.” And then, with an effort, as though she spoke of things too sacred for the common ear, “By the grace of God,” she said slowly, “when he makes the way plain before me, I am to be a nun.”

“No, no!” Van cried again. “No, no! Think—listen. Think it all over again. You do not understand. Your life has been cramped here in this poor, mean place. That is why you want to be a nun. Come away with me to a life that suits a soul like yours. I have seen your craving for higher things.”

The sudden, jagged lightning cleft the skies. By its glare he saw her face distinctly, and a noble scorn was on it, and a righteous indignation.

“Come away with you—from God!” she said, and in the pause that followed Van felt himself more mean than the dust from whence he came.

“Forgive me,” she said gently. “I forget. It is you who do not understand. I do not mind that this house is poor and mean; my Lord was born in a stable, and he died upon a cross. And if I suffer here and crave for higher things, it is a suffering which even the cloister can never cure—far less, then, you—for I crave to see the face of God! To love my God, to cease from sin, to come to my God and be for ever one with him in his high heaven—I hunger for it by night and by day.”

“And if this life suits you so well, and you must suffer anyhow,” Van said curiously, “why not stay here always? or why not come with me?”

“Mr. Van,” Jane answered, “to be a nun is my vocation. God himself calls me. I must do his will. Forgive me again, but I cannot talk any more to you about it. If you did not seem so young to me—so like a little innocent child, in spite of all your knowledge—I could not have said so much.” And the next minute she was gone, leaving Van abashed and utterly ignorant of the high meed of true praise which she had bestowed upon him.

He went home to watch for two long days and nights beside a couch of foolish delirium and lingering death; to see a mind of uncommon intellect and far-famed, exquisite taste reduced to folly; to see the eyes stare vacantly at picture and statue and familiar face alike; and then to follow the lifeless body to the grave, and hide it there, clay to its kindred clay. The young heir of enormous wealth and princely possessions paced alone in his father’s halls that night, and found no pleasure in the beauty that once had satisfied him. Even the memory of Jane’s face was a burden to him.

“She would have to die too,” Van muttered. “And, after all, one could as soon love a St. Catherine borne by angels as love her. I do not believe I ever did. And yet if I did not, I never really loved any woman.”

Wherein he spoke the truth.

Yet one look of hers haunted him—that look of settled, tranquil peace, like the undazzling gold of the western sky; and while it shone before him the steady, tranquil voice echoed through his memory, “To be a nun is my vocation. God himself calls me. I must do his will.”

“I wonder,” queried Van wistfully—“I wonder what my vocation is. I’m sure it has never made any difference to me. I have sketched, and played, and read, just as I fancied.”

And, with that great grace vouchsafed him, of which he was so ignorant, he said like a child: “O God! what shall I do?”

The answer did not come at once. He fretted and puzzled; by and by he began to wonder whether Jane’s religion had anything to do with her choice. Besides, if it was worth a man’s while to think of changing his religion because he fancied himself in love with a creature that some time must die, had he not reason to think seriously about it anyhow? What did she mean when she said she craved to see God’s face? What caused that woman of so few words to speak with such power when she spoke of that?

Van read and thought, but it was not the books that enlightened him. He went one evening where he seldom went by day, when curious eyes could watch him—to his father’s grave. It was a warm evening late in September. As he passed the rectory adjoining the church, which his father, and his father’s father, and all the Van Doorms of the region had religiously attended, gay voices and snatches of music caught his ear, and he looked up involuntarily.

It was a pretty sight. The gas had just been lighted, the curtains were still up. Lonely, sorrowful Van, forgetful of his wonted courtesy, stood still where he was and took in the whole picture with an added heartache.

In the pleasant parlor, not luxurious, but a home-room, the mother sat with her baby on her knee. Van remembered her when she came a bride to the parish, and he was only a child of five years old. It was one of his earliest memories—that being taken to church with the promise of seeing the new young minister’s new young wife, if he would be very good. That was twenty years ago, and there were lines of gray in Mrs. Charles’ hair, but her face wore the same kindly smile that had marked it then in the freshness of her nineteen years, and at the piano a girl of nineteen might have been taken for the bride brought back again in her youthful bloom. She was playing some familiar melody; five or six brothers and sisters clustered about her, sang blithely with her; a toddling child at the mother’s knee beat time with its chubby fingers on the younger baby’s chubby hand. Presently an inner door opened, and the pastor entered. There was a cry of “Father! father!” a general rush to meet him, frantic, merry embraces from the children, while the mother smiled contented, and the father stood tender and strong in the midst of his happy flock.

The picture lasted for a brief space only; with a pretty gesture of horror the eldest daughter sprang toward the window and drew down the shades, lest somebody should see, and Van stood alone outside in the gathering night.

He plodded on dreamily to the church-yard, and sat down near the new grave among many, many older graves where the men and women of his race lay buried.

“Wife and child,” said Van, with a long, hard, envious sigh, “father and mother, and happy home. And I—”

“Wife and child—father and mother.” The words repeated themselves in that curious, echo-like fashion which words have when they come to the mind as a part of a familiar saying, whose whole cannot be at once recalled, and which for a time we vainly strive to place.

“Wife and child—father and mother.” Ah! something else comes: “Houses and lands.” What is it? What is Van striving to get?

“Houses and lands.”

He has it.

“No man who hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or children, or lands for my sake and for the Gospel, who shall not receive an hundred times as much, now in this time: and in the world to come life everlasting.”

He does not see with his bodily eyes at all now, but the eyes of his soul are wide awake, and they see clear and true.

In which church—Catholic or Protestant—were the men who, not by tens or by hundreds, but by thousands upon thousands, and through centuries upon centuries, had carried out to the very letter the words of Christ, the Bible words? Which, except through some exceptions that only served to prove the rule, had by loud-voiced declamation, and an action that spoke more loudly still, set at naught the teaching of the Master—set at naught the example of Him who left all for them?

Van seemed to hear it once again—the missionary letters read from the pulpit and published in Protestant magazines; the pleadings for clothes for the missionary’s wife and children; the appeals for money, or a missionary must leave his important field because his family could not be supported there; the vaunted heroism of missionaries who endured to see their children suffer rather than desert their post. Where were the men whose heroism was such that they had no home, no family, no earthly tie, but stood ready like the angels—true messengers—to go or to stay, undeterred by any human consideration, where God and his church asked or needed them?

And so it came to pass that Van understood the mystery of Jane’s vocation; comprehended that men and women, young and old, rich and poor, ignorant and lettered, heard, as the wedded Peter and the unwedded John heard once the voice of Christ call to them, and literally, like them, left all and followed him. It came to pass also that he understood Jane’s suffering; knew that that call of God and the accompanying love of God were a hundred-fold more in this life than the earthly joys renounced, and yet that the promise of the everlasting life spoke of such ineffable bliss that the longing awakened for it could only be appeased in heaven.

Van found his vocation too. He threw himself, heart and soul, into true Christian art. His pictures were seldom seen on the walls of rich men’s houses, but churches and convents owned them free of price. That part of his work, however, was the smallest part. Money and time and strength were lavished nobly with and in aid of those who are successfully laboring in our day to show, by research in catacombs and ruined sacred buildings and among old missals and breviaries and parchments, that the Catholic Church of to-day is the church of the early Christians and martyrs.

In Italy he met and married some one very different from Jane—a very lovely and good and noble woman—and Jane to him became more and more a St. Catherine borne by angels, and more and more he wondered that he ever had presumed to think of offering her an earthly love.

“Had I been a Catholic then, I never could have done it,” he told his wife. “God had called her for himself, and set his seal upon her.”

And the happy wife said humbly: “Hers was the higher calling, dear.”

So when, one day, their only daughter came to them—a strong, high-spirited, brilliant girl, the sunshine of their home—and told them that God’s call had come to her to leave her home for Christ’s poverty, and all human love for his love alone, she found no weak resistance.

“Thank God,” they said, “for the honor he has done us! For him we gladly bid thee forget thine own people and thy father’s house.”

But of Jane they never heard, except that, when God’s time came, she left the farm beside the sea. What need to know more of her, who was where she longed to be—one of the great number who lose all to find All, and, having Him whom their soul loveth, need nothing more?

COUNT FREDERICK LEOPOLD STOLBERG[88]

Footnote 88:

Frederick Leopold, Count Stolberg, since his return to the Catholic Church, 1800-1819. From hitherto unpublished family documents. By John Janssen. Freiburg in Breisgau: Herder & Co.

Count Stolberg, a well-known statesman and writer, a minister of the Duke of Oldenburg, the friend of Goethe, Schlegel, Klopstock, Lavater, Stein, John and Adam Müller, La Motte Fouqué, Körner, and others as distinguished, the correspondent of most of the German historians, philosophers, and savants of his day, became a Catholic, after seven years’ anxious seeking for truth, on the 1st of June, 1800, at Münster, in Westphalia, in the fifty-first year of his age. He immediately retired from public life, although circumstances afterwards brought him before Germany as a representative man; and his writings spread through all classes of his countrymen as a worthy and dignified exposition of a religion at that time much reviled, misunderstood, and in some cases persecuted. His example in home-life was as powerful in a smaller circle as his writings were in a wider one; and his relations with his wife and children (he had eighteen children by his two marriages) were such as to make it true of him that he was a model for all Christian heads of families. His own tastes were simple and domestic; he was fond of the country, and was a childlike companion even to his youngest children, while to all, as they grew up, he was a wise friend and teacher. All his children, except Mariagnes, his eldest daughter by his first marriage, became Catholics with him; those born after his conversion were of course brought up in the church. His second wife, Sophie, Countess von Redern, had shared his doubts and his experiences during those seven years of eager search after religious certainty, and became a Catholic also; but while he remained in intimate and sympathetic relations with his brothers and sisters, he never influenced any of them far enough to make them follow his footsteps. His brother Christian and his wife Luise were his most constant and intimate correspondents; with the former religion seemed to make no difference, as his admiration for, and sympathy with, Stolberg was proof against anything—indeed, Stolberg often called him his “other self”; and the latter, to judge by her letters, was a woman of more than common understanding, a student of science, an observer of the times, whose mind was open to receive any new impression that had the semblance of truth or real progress in it; an investigating and impartial searcher, better versed than most women in classic learning, and eager for knowledge in any shape. To give up constant intercourse with his own family and remove to a Catholic city was the hardest sacrifice Stolberg had to make on leaving the Lutheran communion; but he considered the change imperative for the proper education of his children. In a letter to Luise announcing this resolve he says: “There is no dilemma, but, even if there were, you will agree with me that a tender conscience, in a doubtful case, must always choose against its wishes—I mean its natural wishes, which are always suspicious to upright morals, let alone to Christianity.” To his friend Princess Gallitzin, the mother of the zealous missionary in America, Demetrius Gallitzin, he says: “It is an unspeakable joy to me that my brother and sister-in-law remain bound to me in the fullest and most unreserved love, and that not even the shadow of a misunderstanding has come between them and me, however painful to them is the separation from me, from Sophie, and from the children.”

He took a house in Münster and made it his home for thirteen years, living there through the winter and spending his summers at a country-house a few miles out of the city, at Lütjenbeck. His children’s studies were his first care. Greek being his favorite study, he made each of his sons a good Greek scholar, and kept up his own studies by a repeated round of all the great authors, read successively with each of his many boys. Ernest and Andrew, the sons of his first marriage, were his first pupils, and his own teaching was supplemented in languages and history by a French emigré, the Abbé Pierrard, and in philosophy by some professors resident in Münster. Stolberg did not neglect the physical education of his boys, and would no more dispense with the daily walk, ride, or swim than he would with the studies. His sons were good shots, too, and in the summer he and they spent most of their time in the open air. Their mother writes of them that they are “truthful, generous, and good-hearted,” and “that their tender respect for their great father increases day by day.” She was herself a patient and judicious teacher, and fully recognized how much harm is done to children, and the “quiet workings of God’s influence disturbed in them, by the expectation of hurried development and individuality.” Stolberg was already beginning his literary work in the interests of religion and education, and in 1801 was translating St. Augustine’s De Vera Religione. The early Fathers were his favorite spiritual reading; also the Greek Testament and the Hebrew version of the Old Testament. He wisely resolved to lead a retired life, and not enter into what is called society; but he gathered round him a circle of real friends, in intercourse with whom he spent many hours, especially in the evenings. Among these were Princess Gallitzin, to whom we owe the suggestion that produced Stolberg’s great work, The History of the Religion of Jesus Christ; Prince Fürstenberg, an old man of very exemplary life; Kellermann, his friend and pupil, and the tutor of his younger sons for sixteen years—a priest who was the model of his order; some of the cathedral chapter, learned and enlightened men; and many young people, friends of his children, among whom the latter afterwards found wives and husbands, in all cases happily acceptable to their parents. Whoever has read the real-life idyl of A Sister’s Story will see some likeness between the home of the La Ferronays and Stolberg’s happy home. Indeed, his friends were part of his family, and admission to his intimacy became the ambition of all such in Münster as had minds beyond the common run, and aspirations beyond those of fashion, politics, and frivolity. Stolberg’s dislike to the loss of time involved in ordinary visits and the inanities of society is thus described by himself in 1810:

“I am growing more unfit from year to year for large gatherings. Intercourse with friends, like the leaves of the Sibylline books, is more precious the less time it occupies and the less often it recurs. To hear social chatter for more than an hour affects me so that I feel much like a dead donkey.... How true are Lavater’s words: 'Even the circle of good souls seldom gives me a new impulse, and a thousand trivial pleasures rob me of true enjoyment. Only solitude can shadow and cool my spirit, thirsty and weary from the company even of loved ones; only solitude can give what no friend can offer—a new consciousness and new life, and a feeling that God loves me.’”

This country life which was such a relief and yearly joy to the whole family is charmingly described in Stolberg’s letters. His garden, his hay-field, his children’s play; his walks in the beech, oak, and maple woods; the squirrels in the trees, the favorite kid of his little girls, the nightingales, the blossoming fruit-trees that suggested to him the saying that the “apple-tree did not eat of the apple”; the grottos, rocks, valleys, castles, torrents of the neighborhood of Stolberg; the old family house which he had not seen for twenty-eight years, and upon which he prided himself as a possession that had been in the family for a thousand years; the beauties of the Erzgebirg, and the Bohemian hills that lean against it; the Scotch or Norwegian-like scenery, wild and grand, of these mountains with their narrow, fruitful valleys and green meadows, fringed with dark pine woods—are all described with that heartiness and enthusiasm which real lovers of the country know, but which, as Stolberg says, so many others pretend to, while in reality they see in nature nothing but a cold show, a theatre decoration. “They look complacently as into a peep-show at the sunrise and the heavens, but their heart does not swell within them nor their eyes grow dim.” He was as fond of childish games, especially of blowing soap-bubbles, as he was of beautiful scenery, and counted it a sign of soul-health when he was in the frame of mind to enjoy such games. And now that we have before us the picture of the man in his domestic life, who in his public, political, literary, and social life was of so much importance and had so wide an influence, we will keep mostly to his own letters, which give full vent to his opinions on the important events of the time, and show him forth as emphatically of the old school, a model Christian, a thorough gentleman, but a man of his own generation; impatient of novelty, a great admirer of the English constitution, but a scornful contemner of the mushroom constitutions of the Continent; a hot Légitimiste, but a patriotic German; an uncompromising and somewhat irrational foe of Napoleon, over and above his mere national antagonism against the great and successful warrior—for instance, he believed that “Napoleon’s greatness was kneaded out of the abjectness of Europe,” forgetting that a man’s greatness may lie precisely in the art of taking advantage of a weakness inherent in an adversary, and seizing the right moment to overwhelm small minds with his stronger one; a firm believer in the necessity of his own order, but an “aristocrat” with lofty and beautiful theories of what aristocracy consists in; in a word, a great Christian and a thorough man.

Besides his Greek and Hebrew studies, he was fond of English history and literature, and knew French and Italian well; Milton and Young were his favorite English poets, though he often quotes Shakspere too, and one of his works, second only to the History of Religion, was the Life of Alfred—a man whom he looked upon as a heroic model, and whose example he wished to dwell upon as a guide to his sons through life. He also translated the whole of Ossian. His letters relating to his home-life, his losses and those of his relations, the death of his sons and son-in-law, and of many dear friends, full as they are of Christian manliness and resignation, and of moral axioms that might be taken as mottoes, we will pass by, as they have less of individuality than his letters containing opinions on religion, politics, and literature, as well as expositions of theories of his own, all strongly and conscientiously held. He firmly contradicted a current misconception in his time—and, indeed, a not unfrequent one now—of the intolerance of the Catholic Church.

“Only for those who confess Catholic truth,” he writes, “and yet consciously keep aloof from the Catholic communion, is there no hope of salvation. Of others who err in all good faith, my church teaches me to believe that they are her members, though unknowingly. God allows many honest Protestants to remain in error, and to fancy that the Catholic Church, that truly merciful mother, is intolerant against those outside her pale. It is not the true spirit of that church to persecute, curse, or burn the erring. Infallible in her doctrine, as were also the teachers who sat in Moses’ seat, she still cannot preserve all her members free from imperfections in their acts—not even the pope, nor, in the old dispensation, the high-priest.”

In another letter he says:

“Far be it from me, as it is from every Catholic who knows the spirit of his church, to doubt that among Protestants also there are and have been holy souls—holy in the sense in which all true children of God are holy; ... but my church teaches me to look upon these as unconscious members of the true, though to them unknown, church.”

“Overberg, of whose rarely beautiful catechism thirty thousand copies have been sold, especially for schools and children, expresses himself very pleasingly on this subject. No well-instructed Catholic has any objection to make to this, but even no half-taught Catholic can, on the other hand, mistake other altars for that altar of sacrifice which Malachi prophesied of, and will hold all other altars only for such as they really are.... Among unlearned Protestants (and, as I said before, among a few learned ones) there are very many whom the spirit of Protestantism as such has not touched, who have never been disturbed, because they have found in Holy Scripture a full rest and contentment, and lean with heartfelt love on Jesus Christ, doing for love of him all they do, in fullest confidence, and what flesh and blood would never teach them to do. Plants that bear such fruit as this I can only hold to come from roots watered by the Heavenly Father himself. You believe [he is addressing Sulzer, of Constance] that the number of such souls is small; and such a belief grieves me, for I think that it drives many away and discourages them. And, indeed, such hard suppositions as you make and insist upon having categorically answered lead to embittering results. I speak from experience. For seven years did I seek for truth with an upright heart, after God first put it into my heart to seek. After seven years’ search was I led, through circumstances that God overruled, to know and confess the truth. Others have sought longer and more anxiously, and have not found what I did, but they serve God in the simplicity of their hearts better than I do, and will assuredly find the truth in the kingdom of light and truth....”

“You see,” he says to his brother, “that I am not intolerant. But I hope to God that I shall never be tolerant in the newest sense of the word—that is, indifferent, lukewarm, fit to be spat out of the mouth of Jesus Christ.”... “Do not let,” he says to his son Caius at Göttingen University, “yourself be led away from the rock-founded church by the many good and worthy Protestants you meet. Among all in error are many who are individually children of God, but they have no church, no sacrifice, no priesthood, no Eucharist. The helter-skelter union of both Protestant bodies (the Lutheran and the Calvinist) must give serious scandal to the earnest souls in both, and will, I hope, lead many into our church.”

Of the difference between feeling and truth he says:

“Certain sensations may be real to one person and unreal to another. Not so with facts and doctrine. It is the peculiar character of the true religion that as it must be the same in all ages, so must every man be equally able to understand and embrace it.... I could not believe in a true religion which it would not be possible for every human being to believe in.... He leads some through rough paths, others through smooth ones; some towards truth, some through error. The way of error, as such, is not His way, although he is always ready to unfold the truth, to be beforehand with, and to meet half way, the upright soul who in all simplicity holds an erring belief.”

Indeed, in Stolberg’s experience, the difference between lukewarm and conscientious Protestants was fully shown; for the former reviled him for his change of religion, while the latter approved of his following what he looked upon as truth. Other misconceptions of Catholic doctrine he also combated, and greatly enlightened many of his friends on the Catholic belief in the justifying merits of Christ. Holy Scripture was a source from which he considered spiritual light to come, but, as he observed, “the learned have not yet been able to see that the healthy eye, like the concave mirror, gathers into one point all the scattered rays, while they split and split until the last particle of light is lost in shadow.” Elsewhere he says:

“He who is careless of Holy Writ is careless of the life of the soul, and he is happy if he becomes conscious, were it only now and then, of the fact that the world, whether with its pleasures or its wisdom, offers him nothing but what is poisonous to the immortal spirit.”

His advice to his son Ernest, who left home in 1803 to join the Austrian army, is full of the true Christian spirit. He recommends him to practise every virtue that would make a man perfect, and goes into many details which, of course, we cannot follow here, but this sentence is almost a compendium of the whole:

“A true Christian cannot find true freedom nor true unsolicitude but in the possession of a good conscience. Where the conscience is tender and watchful it watches alike over every act; and the more we pay attention to it, so much the more does it become, notwithstanding the violence it at first does to nature, a principle of our life which puts us in harmony with ourselves, and therefore makes us truly free.”

Elsewhere he says, speaking to another youth, a friend of his sons:

“Lassitude and a want of courage increase the strength of the enemy; and discontent concerning the post to which God has appointed us is unseemly in any brave man, much more in a foremost fighter. Not the wish that 'everything were otherwise,’ but the resolve always to act well and bravely—or, as Holy Writ says, 'to walk before God and be perfect’—can make men of us. That wish unnerves us; this resolve strengthens us and gives us a might which remains with the weapons of the fighter even on the other side of the grave. He who has done and suffered much does not dream of soiling his crown with tears, while he who has as yet found no opportunity of doing or suffering has still less a right to weep.”

The melancholy which the French have aptly called “la maladie du siècle”[89] was abhorrent to Stolberg—that unmanliness and cowardice of mind which became fashionable through the writings of atheists, and which in many phases has spread itself into our present literature as well as our practice. He also writes concerning the same thing:

Footnote 89:

The disease of the age.

“Every human being has his own history to work out, and that this should be thoroughly done does not depend upon the amount of talent he has, but upon the will which few bring to it unconditionally and in a cheerful spirit.”

Stolberg was of a healthier school and generation; he did not see the beauty and sentiment and romance of passion running riot, misunderstood natures, morbid hearts, vain strivings, and all the paraphernalia of a moral sick-bed. For instance, the baneful and unreal excitements of the theatre were very dangerous in his eyes, and the evil custom which even good and well-meaning people fell into of countenancing private theatricals, and letting even their young children take part in them, was a great sorrow to him. One of the evils he deprecated was the rousing of a false sympathy with imaginary woes, which ended by undermining true sympathy with our neighbor’s actual troubles; another, the vanity which play-acting fostered in young people, and the excitement which rendered them unfit for serious study and work. It also destroys the simplicity of the soul and that modesty which is the chief adornment of young souls, especially of a girl’s soul.

“Young girls,” he says, “when they have once overcome their shyness, long after the same excitement, and are always wishing to be playing a part. The truthfulness of their nature is soon lost; seeming overcomes being, every acted feeling destroys real feeling; the heart becomes cold for reality, and is only to be aroused by supposed passion.”

Public theatricals he looked upon as equally dangerous, and even wrote against them, praising Geneva for having, until it became French, refused to allow the erection of a theatre within the limits of its territory. “The special charm of the stage,” he says, “lies in its flattery of our lusts, our vanity, and our laziness.” We have often heard fine theories advanced as to the mission and morality of the drama, but as long as practice belies these theories it is impossible to look upon them otherwise than as a well-meaning Utopia. Stolberg saw the real harm done, and not the imaginary good which some high-minded and exceptional artists would fain do.

The atheistical and deist philosophy of the eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth were naturally repugnant to such an upright mind as Stolberg. He hated the wilful groping in the dark after a truth which the “philosophers” might have found in the Gospels, had they had the fairness to admit these on an equality, at least, with other so-called “proofs.” He called Steffen and Schleiermacher at Halle the “new Gnostics,” and compared their systems to the vain effort of the fabled Danaides to pour the ocean through a sieve.

“The name of Gnostics sounds ominous,” he says, “and brings to mind the Gnostics of the first centuries, with many of whose beliefs, indeed, the wisdom of our newest sages astonishingly coincides. Under their treatment even realities dissolve themselves in shadow, while they give to shadows the form and appearance of realities.”

Jacobi was at that time a very prominent leader of philosophy in Germany, and Stolberg mentions him many times in his correspondence with various persons, evidently as a representative man. At one time this teacher, the friend of Goethe, a sort of Medici among his disciples near Düsseldorf, where he had a beautiful house, and still more beautiful garden—now the property of the town and the appropriate scene of artists’ banquets and popular fêtes—confessed himself, in the midst of his philosophy, “a very beggar” in the true learning of the Spirit. Stolberg often alluded to this, and, when the master’s pride had long distanced the frame of mind in which this acknowledgment had been made, wrote of him: “Poor Jacobi! he was richer indeed when he called himself poor as 'a beggar.’” In 1812 he writes:

“I have just read Jacobi’s last pamphlet. The one before the last On a Wise Saying of Lichtenberg, seems to me in the highest degree satisfactory. That on The Recension (Jacobi cannot help putting odd and often trivial titles to his works) has also excellent points, but the whole seems to me loose, and a windy toying with views which he borrows from Christianity, the whole system of which, however, he, as far as in him, the puny mortal, lies, seeks to weaken and annihilate. While he praises the god-like Plato, he seems to forget that this philosopher, or rather Socrates in his platonic Phædrus, evidently longs, as a hart after the fountains of waters, for a god-given revelation whose very possibility itself Jacobi, on the contrary, strives to reason away.”

Schelling’s answer to Jacobi, however, equally displeased Stolberg, and he accuses him of making Jacobi appear, “through certain wiles of speech, now an atheist, now a fanatical dreamer,” and of taking credit to himself for

“Having been the first clearly to prove the existence of God. His God has been from all eternity the greatest Force, which contained within itself, in potentia, but not in actu, that goodness and wisdom which it developed in later ages. He falls thus into Count Schmettau’s error, of a god who has raised himself from a lower state to the highest, which theory one might compare with the career of a field-marshal who has risen by degrees from the ranks.... Evidently Schelling is a man of much mind, but of overweening vanity. He speaks of Christianity with respect, and probably believes in the divine mission of Christ, whose system, however, it was reserved for him—Schelling—fully to explain. He sent this paper of his to Perthes (Stolberg’s publisher), and told him he wished me to read it, and that I should then have quite another idea of what his philosophy was, and discover that he did not hold the views I attributed to him.”

At another time he writes:

“The deplorable frivolity of these times is one of their worst signs. I find it the saddest of all. Would that one could hope,

“When the hurly-burly’s done, When the night is past and gone,”

that things would come right again. But moral nights are not as physical ones. The latter bring us dreams which the dawn of day dispels. The moral nights are full of the feverish dreams of mankind, and they have no certain limit as to time. They go crescendo from error to folly, until the awakening at the end of a completed, comet-like course of misery.”

We have mentioned Stolberg’s warm love of his country. Prince Francis Fürstenberg said of him during the time of the humbling of Germany under the yoke of Napoleon: “I know, and have known in my long life, many of the noblest men in the nation, but I saw none surpass Stolberg in genuine love for the Fatherland. His German and imperial heart is pure as gold and shines like a diamond.” The epithet imperial sounds odd to our ears; it is an allusion to his belief that the Empire of Germany, such as it existed just before the Congress of Vienna, was the proper representative and bulwark of the nation. He blamed the Emperor Francis very strongly for laying down his time-honored dignity later on, and contenting himself with a local title which severed his interests materially from those of Germany at large. He also saw in this withdrawal of imperial authority and protection over non-Austrian countries a danger to the Catholic faith, and a possible interference of Protestant powers in the communications between Catholic German states and the Holy See. But concerning the ever-vexed question of the Rhine frontier his patriotism was quick and hot; he wished that in the new partition at the Congress Alsace and Lorraine should be given back to Germany, and lamented the injudicious behavior by which some of the German troops had spoilt the evidently favorable state of mind of the Alsatians during part of the disturbances on the frontier.

“Eighteen months ago,” he writes in 1815, “the Alsatians were very well disposed, came to meet our troops with flags and received them with ringing of joy-bells; then came the Bavarians, the Badeners, and so on, and behaved so as to make them hate us. We all talk of our wish to reunite our once torn-away brethren with Germany, but we have angered them instead and are burning their towns and villages. My hair stands on end and I could weep tears of blood at the thought.”

Early in the century, a few weeks after his conversion, Stolberg wrote thus to Princess Gallitzin:

“True patriotism embraces the highest good of the people in all things: the blessings of faith, those of law, of freedom, and of morals. It can never follow the path of forcible overthrows and of revolution, nor covenant with an outside enemy, nor lend itself to the service of injustice, even when a seeming and momentary advantage is to be gained by such service. What a disgrace for us Germans is the Franco-mania that reigns among us—the cap-in-hand alliance with the Corsican adventurer, who is spreading horror and desolation among us and knows no right but that of the sword. What undermines all our strength, and will sink us even lower and lower, is not only the jealousy and spirit of aggrandizement current among the German states against the empire and the emperor, the fawning on the French with the hope of getting their help to win new slices of territory, but far more the weakened character of the whole people, and their want of moral energy and good feeling—the result of the unbelieving philosophy and immoral literature that have unnerved the nation.”

Just as impartially he condemned in after-years, when German patriotism had spread with a sudden rush from the field into literature, the “coarse Teutonism” which rejected every refinement of foreign origin, maligned every foreign custom, and made patriotism ridiculous by enjoining upon it to be no less than rabid. He then defended all that was reasonable and applicable to German life, all the praise-worthy customs, books, and improvements that fashion had turned suddenly against. He had earned a good right to be independent; for four of his sons fought in the different German armies that overwhelmed Napoleon after the retreat from Moscow, and one, his son Christian, a brave boy of eighteen, died at the battle of Ligny. His two sons-in-law also, fathers of large families of young children, were in the national army, and the greatest enthusiasm was felt by all the members of the family, old and young, for the cause which Stolberg called “ours, God’s, Europe’s, mankind’s, and the right’s.”

In 1815 he wrote: “True German feeling it is to welcome all that is noble and good, out of all ages and nations, as our own. Every one now, with narrow minds, is Nibelungen-mad, barbaric-mad”; and concerning his Life of Alfred he says:

“Alfred belongs to us, and therefore do I wish to hold him up to the veneration and imitation, and for the teaching, of my children. But not only do Alfred and his people belong to us; we should also make our own all that is great and noble in the life of all nations, yet without losing thereby our own individuality.”

In 1805 the decree freeing the serfs in the Duchy of Holstein went into effect, and Stolberg congratulates his brother Christian on this happy event; naturally, the greater event of the abolition of negro slavery in the British West Indies was a great joy to him, and he rejoiced the more that the Illuminati, his special aversion, lost thereby their best weapon against England, and that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man could be unfavorably compared with the English constitution, on account of a contradictory law, at that time still in force, forbidding the liberation of the negroes in French colonies to be even mentioned before the legislature. The alliances, dictated by fear or by interest, of German sovereigns with Napoleon were a subject of great grief and indignation to him, and he looked upon England with almost exaggerated admiration because she withstood the conqueror. He said “Pitt would save England against Europe’s will,” and his confidence in the general policy of the English statesman was unbounded. He had, too, a kind of historical admiration, if we may so call it, for the English form of government, which alone he thought proper for freedom, but which he did not believe fit for the wants of every nation, indiscriminately, on the Continent. It strikes us, however, that the fact of the English constitution, in its then state, being nearly a hundred and fifty years old had somewhat blinded his mind to the facts—according to his theory, rather suspicious, to say the least—of the change of dynasty in 1688; for the Stuarts in England were surely as legitimate sovereigns, from his point of view, as the Bourbons in France, whose least advances, in the person of Louis XVIII., towards the modern spirit so incensed and disgusted Stolberg; and when he said that “England alone stood in the breach” against Napoleon, he forgot that she considered it her interest to withstand him, and that a deeply-rooted prejudice egged on the nation against him. If he had seen anything of the unreasoning panic which the threatened invasion caused among the English, he would have been less ready to jest at the falling through of the scheme, which he called “an expedition to gather mussels along the British shores.” It has often been so, we think, among Continental statesmen and thinkers: they look upon England with exceptionally favorable eyes and weigh her doings in special balances, forgetting the lawless and riotous disturbances that she experienced earlier than other countries, after which she settled into the solid, steady, conservative, law-abiding, slow-to-be-moved nation which she had been for over a hundred years when the French Revolution suddenly broke out. Stolberg, much as he praised England, almost refused to see any good in the chaos of new ideas that were seething pell-mell together; he saw nothing but the evident godlessness, selfishness, pride, and cruelty which marked that era; and, indeed, he, the man of another age, the lover of a lofty ideal which we shall mention presently—the man who said that “all politics hinged on the Fourth Commandment”—could hardly be expected to allow that out of such confusion God could glean anything worthy of being offered to himself.

Stolberg often called Germany the “heart of Europe,” and wrote an ode with that title; but he would not allow with the innovators that the “philosophy” of the age was the true source of the influence his country should have on the Continent. Allied to this false idea of many Germans was the affected custom, in the early part of the century, of using the French language instead of the mother-tongue, even in the nearest domestic intercourse—a fault which the Russians also fell into, but which at present they have seen the folly of and have nearly successfully remedied. Stolberg heartily hated and despised this foreign intrusion into German home-life.

“Even in my younger days,” he says with scorn, “I can remember hearing of a gifted German girl being reproached by German women with being 'affected’ enough to write 'German’ letters.... Germans now write to each other, brother to brother, husband to wife, in French.... Is that not to estrange one’s self from one’s nearest and dearest? nay, even from one’s self?”

His relations and correspondence with well-known people of his day furnish us with his opinions on many of the writers, savants, statesmen, and philosophers, the reigning and rising public men. Of the historian Johann Müller he says:

“No one ever seized the true spirit of history so early in life as he did.... His life is very interesting; it is true he showed a good deal of vanity, but also so much cheerful good-humor that one does not feel inclined to be hard upon him for the former. His plan of study, as he arranged it for himself, and the scrupulous way in which he followed it out, seem to me truly noteworthy.... What a comprehensive spirit, what feeling and sympathy for the true, the good, and the beautiful! How early, too, he broke loose from the unwisdom of the philosophy of the times, and how deep a religious spirit remained firm in him in the midst of many disturbances, since he so clearly understood the history of the world by the light of that Providence whose finger he was always tracing in it! He once said very beautifully that Christ was the key to the world s history.”

In 1807 he gives the following opinion of Alexander von Humboldt:

“I know Humboldt personally. He has much understanding, much liveliness, much industry. But is he not inclined to be too much enslaved by the German à priori tendency and by a love of the scientific form? Is he strong enough not to let himself be carried away by the method of modern criticism, which tends to violent disruption from all that has gone before, instead of tracing out the great analogies on the path of simple observation? Is he quite free from a delicate and imperceptible charlatanism? Years may have matured him, but such maturing seldom takes place when the quick strides of science make it difficult for wisdom to keep up with her.”

Of Frederick Schlegel’s poetry, and that of others in the Dichtergarten (or “Poet’s Garden,” a collection of fugitive songs by various poets), he writes:

“The rarer and the more beautiful is the noble, religious spirit that breathes through the Poet’s Garden, the more do I wish that its authors might put forth all their strength. And so it would be, if it were not for a particular theory which lies at the bottom of the poetry—a theory whose foundation I do not know, but whose evident peculiarity strikes the eye, bewilders the reader, forces the Muse, and in its purposed negligence of language goes so far as even to disfigure it. The Muse craves freedom above all things, if she is to express what comes from the innermost of our heart or our mind. Every trace of art lames poetry, and theory often misleads, because it is born of human philosophy, while poetry is something divine. Therefore poets always succeed best in rhythm where the inspiration is great and noble, and the quickly-passing images, thoughts, sensations only group themselves well and naturally when they are conjured up by an infallible, all-subduing inspiration, without the poet knowing how it happens.”

Of Niebuhr’s Roman history he writes, in 1812—not, perhaps, in the sense that most of the readers of that work will endorse:

“I marvel at the deep learning, and often at the penetration, of our friend; but who will read him? What a bulwark of tedious researches, the result of which is often nothing more than a learned outwork! It is strange that, with this fault of historical pedantry, he could not avoid the contrary one of reasoning à priori, so common to the German professors. There is much understanding in the book, and in a few places one is pleasantly surprised at its spirit; but this spirit is neither a joyful nor a certain one. He fails in simplicity. From this springs his heavy style, despite his choice use of words. He is too forward in making hypotheses and foregone conclusions; for instance, his open partisanship with the plebeians leads him to make false and hasty judgments. His pragmatical tendency makes him unjust even to Livy, and he has no appreciation of the noble amiability of Plutarch. Yet, with all these faults, he must ever remain a valuable historian—not a star of the first magnitude, but still too good to be a mere famulus,[90] to gather material for great historians. Among other things, he lacks the art of managing his style so as to appear to be led by it and yet to make it convey exactly what the writer pleases. But concerning his principles, some of which, however, I do not endorse, his conscience always appears as it is, noble and tender, while his love of truth follows him even on his hobby—hypothesis.”

Footnote 90:

Servant; meaning here a second-rate chronicler.

It may be interesting to give the opinion of some of the same men on Stolberg himself as a historian and writer. The History of Religion, which was his great work, and which he mainly attributed to the suggestion, encouragement, and interest of Princess Gallitzin, became a topic of discussion and interest all through Germany. Many were brought by it to the Catholic Church, and of these most wrote to him first, asking advice and making confidences, before they read further or asked instructions from a priest. It was a source of deep thankfulness to him that he had thus been the means of making others share in the same blessings and peace which he had won through the grace and leading of God. But his History was no controversial work; it was very comprehensive, and embraced the whole subject of true religion from the beginning of the world, tracing the connection between Judaism and Christianity; the fulfilment of the prophecies in Christ; the spirit of aloofness from the world, first symbolized in the national exclusiveness of the Hebrews, and then proved in the persecutions under the Roman emperors in the struggle between Christianity and heathendom; and, lastly, the gradual, onward sway which the truth at last won over error, and which, speaking in a certain sense, culminated in the conversion of Constantine. Here Stolberg ended his history, feeling that his life would not be spared much longer, and that he had done his work, so far as he felt called upon by God to witness to the truth that was in him. The unhappy struggles, rents, and abuses of later church history he left untouched; surely there were counterparts to them in earlier days, but no such embittering could come from a relation of the old heresies and divisions as would have sprung from even the most impartial discussion of recent and more local ones. Schlegel took the greatest interest in this work, and of the least important part he spoke thus admiringly:

“I am especially delighted at the strength and simple beauty of your style; whoso compares it with what is called nowadays the art of representing things will easily discover where is to be found the true source of even this beauty.”

Again, of the second part of the history (it was divided into fifteen parts) he says:

“I found myself much steadied and strengthened by the whole, and particularly enlightened by the exposition on the Hebrew belief in the immortality of the soul and on the Mosaic code. May you in the future of your work, as often as opportunity allows, return to and dwell upon the immortality of the soul. It seems to me the path by which mankind at present can best be led towards truth, better than by any other teaching regarding the Godhead.”

He then says that pantheism and a vague sentimentality had perverted everything distinctly Christian into an empty shadow-form, but that few were so absolutely dead to all higher feeling as not to distinguish between the “real personal immortality, and the mere metaphysical image of it, without a hereafter, and without a continuance of the memory.”

“Bring vividly before them the true personal immortality, and you will often find those whom you had thought most spiritually dead and careless to be palpably roused. To me the doctrine of the Trinity is the central point of Christianity, and therefore the foundation and source of all my convictions, views, and aspirations.... The unfolding and representation of this secret of love (the Trinity) I have found to permeate every doctrine, principle, and even custom or rubric of the Catholic Church; although even in her pale many good individuals are less impressed with the divine spirit of the whole than with some one or other literal regulation.”

Johann von Müller wrote thus of Stolberg’s work:

“It is not a lukewarm, sham impartial church history, in which one is uncertain what relation it bears to Jesus of Nazareth, but the work of a man who knows what he believes, and would fain move all men to believe as he does. Not a church history critically weighing the Messiahship of Jesus from the Old Testament against his Godhead from the New, but the work of a man who sees everywhere and at all times Him who was and is, and is to come, and to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth. Lastly, it is not a worldly representation of the deceits and time-serving devices through which Christianity crept into the world, and is still able to maintain herself, the humble handmaid of statecraft, in these our enlightened times, but the confession and outpouring of soul of a man to whom the whole world is nothing in comparison with the Saviour of the world. Of the latter he speaks so that whoever loves him must love this book, and he who knows nothing of him will learn from this book what Christians possess in him. Therefore, reader, if thou art a reed, driven before the learned wind of our modern writings, look to this rock, and see if it has not a foundation in the needs of mankind and the love of the Godhead; and thou who knowest not Christianity, come and see what it is, as thy forefathers felt it, as it is yet, mighty in every childlike heart; and thou who believest, come hear, and enjoy, and rejoice thy heart with the word of life.”

Claudius spoke of the book being read by thousands, and of its “undoubted influence in strengthening the Christian faith among the German people.” A person in comparatively private life, Major Bülow, a stanch Bible man, said that Stolberg’s History of Religion had been a “welcome surprise to him, although the style was not always clear to his understanding, and he was only fearful lest the author should not live long enough to finish it.”

Joseph de Maistre spoke thus of the work in his Recueil de Lettres, p. 23:

“New researches and discoveries, and the progress of the art of tracing all up to the first sources, may correct or supplement much in his history, may bring a new light to bear on many of his opinions—for the work, in spite of its foundation on, and buttressing by, much study of a high order, is not meant to be an exhaustive scientific work; but I doubt if any, in our century at least, will surpass the author of this history in pure love of God and mankind, love to Christ and his church, and in pure and truly creative spirit. How striking also are his observations on the circumstances of our time, his opinion on the persecution of the church by the spirit of this world, on false teachers, on the marriage tie, and the sanctity of oaths, and many like things!”

Stolberg was rejoiced by these commendations, but more encouraged than rejoiced. Mere vanity was far from him; he thanked God that he had been able to supply “what these oft-repeated praises of good and single-minded men proved to him to have been really a want.”

The ideal which we have alluded to, and which was a great characteristic of Stolberg’s mind, was that of the mission and duties of an aristocracy. He believed that, in the abstract, the existence and allowed influence of such a class was an instinct inborn in man, and that it was only when the aristocracy was false to its own principles that the people could grow antagonistic to it. His theories on the subject were beautiful, noble, poetic, but in his time there had been so much evil practice that such theories were nearly swamped under it. It was natural to his character, however, to lean more on the theory than the practice, and to consider the latter an excrescence and abuse which might be done away with, and the ideal thereby reinstated in its first dignity. At first sight his theory seems simply a feudal, mediæval, romantic one, the dream of a man proud of his own order, and nursed in prejudices such as no change in political relations de facto could uproot but if we look closer into it, it becomes a very different and far more worthy thing—namely, a belief in the essence of chivalry, a standard of conduct such as King Arthur’s, a translation into altered forms and circumstances of the Gospel rules of charity, courtesy, and patience. Here are some of his own sayings on the subject, on which he reasoned in a way so far removed from either fanaticism or vanity that we place his explanations here as something wholly special to himself, and quite different from the ordinary rhapsodies about the necessity of various grades of classes:

“The ideal of the aristocracy[91] is not weakened through the unworthiness of many who are of noble birth. On the contrary, the just scorn which follows these men redounds to the honor of their class, of which one cannot become unworthy without being despised by all. Nature gives the aristocracy neither more understanding nor more physical strength than she does to other classes; it takes its worth wholly from an ideal, but not a mistaken ideal. This, like all that is great in mankind, is founded upon the sacrifice of all that is lower for the sake of attaining the highest.

Footnote 91:

Adel, nobility, from edel, noble, our Saxon Ethel and Atheling. The word is here translated by aristocracy rather than nobility—the former being a word of wider signification, and embracing the class of untitled gentlemen (which of course Stolberg included), as well as that of strictly so-called noblemen.

“The aristocracy must give up every mercantile and lower traffic. Three things were entrusted to its keeping—agriculture, of which kings have not been ashamed, statesmanship, and the defence of the Fatherland.

“As an ennobled countryman the aristocrat can pursue the most necessary, the oldest, and the most innocent work with better results than the peasant, because he has more means, more insight, and can better afford the danger of an occasional failure. His experience and example teach and encourage the common countryman, whom it is the beautiful and holy duty of the nobleman to enlighten and to protect, and whose well-being, morals, and temporal and eternal good it is his duty to further by every means in his power. This business is one which, if he wishes to be respected as a nobleman, he has no right to evade or neglect; except temporarily, if he is chosen as a representative of his province—a business to which he has also a special call as a citizen of the state. He must and ought, however, to take part in the government, even if he be not chosen by his province; and either as a magistrate or only as a land-owner he can take a prominent part in it. The defence of his country devolves upon no one so strongly as upon the nobleman. This is a worthy and beautiful duty of knighthood. It is well for that state where the aristocracy, as such, is called to the defence of the Fatherland as leaders of their own country people, whose patrons they are in times of peace, whose heads, judges, mediators, example, and benefactors they should be at all times. The old, fair relations have been rent by false representations, but they are not effaced.... The aristocracy has an inner worth, no matter how unworthy are many of its members. Neither royal nor priestly anointing can preserve from moral corruption! Of how much less avail are mere human, outward means to preserve the spiritual existence! Indeed, they often soil it. Let every one who is of knightly standing strive to prove by his actions that the ideal of knighthood lives in him, in noble simplicity, in courteous behavior, in quick willingness to give blood and lands for the Fatherland. His example will not remain without fruit. He will be far from looking upon certain virtues as virtues of his condition, and neglecting to practise others or superciliously leave them to other classes. If we hold fast to our knightly calling, the essence of knighthood will remain to us. The shell of the thing renews itself from time to time.... Whatever is worthy of respect in knighthood has come from self-sacrifice.... In order to keep pace with the century, the nobleman must be the equal of the citizen in knowledge, whenever the two meet in the same field. If he neglects this, he will see the burgher reigning as a cabinet minister and himself reduced to the honor of waiting in the king’s ante-chamber by virtue of his birth. And even in war, the knight’s proper field, how can the nobleman boast of his superiority to one who knows more than he does of the science of war? If the knight covets intellectual superiority, he must not seek it in emulation so much as in brave and silent self-sacrifice. The life of his fathers must teach his heart this lesson: Be worthy of thy fathers, whether the world acknowledge thy worth or no.[92] A thirst after approbation does not behove a knight, but steady reliance on his strength and his intentions.... The present hatred of the aristocracy is a fever which will soon be spent.... It remains for us, each in his own circle, to maintain a lofty ideal and to spread it abroad—that is, a true spirit of religion and that spirit of brave self-denial, of earnest courage, and discreet worth which should mark the aristocracy—and at the same time to encourage among ourselves a desire not to be behindhand in such knowledge and in such strivings as elevate the heart, adorn the mind, and make us fitter for the callings that specially beseem us.”

Footnote 92:

The italics are ours.

It will be readily understood from the foregoing quotations that Stolberg had not much sympathy with a scheme which some German noblemen had started—that of a new knight-union or society. He deprecated the publicity such a step would necessarily bring upon them, and saw in it only a hollow, childish plan of defiance, a foolish revival of old customs as powerless in practice as a return to the weapons of the ancient knights, a protest against firearms and the altered arts of warfare. His enthusiasm was always dignified and reasonable; it had no touch of sentimentality and “playing at” things. To the last his character remained the same. Forgiving and temperate as regarded any wrong done personally to him, he could not brook the distortion of truth, and was in the act of replying to a libellous pamphlet of Voss, of Heidelberg, destined to spread among the public distrust of Stolberg’s sincerity in his conversion, when his last sickness overtook him. He had just finished the Life of St. Vincent of Paul, which he had written instead of the autobiography that his friends strongly urged him to write. He had objected that he felt no call from God to do so, and that, unless one wrote with the view of God’s call, vanity and self were too apt to become the leading motive in the work. He commended St. Augustine’s Confessions because they were evidently inspired by love of God’s honor only, and a monument of thankfulness to the One who called such a sinner to repentance. In St. Vincent he saw a man of modern times whom one could hold up as a model not too exalted and extraordinary, yet thoroughly humble, perfect, and holy, to men of his and future generations.

Stolberg died December 5, 1819, at the age of seventy, at Sondermühlen, a country-house for which he had, four years before, exchanged his favorite Lütjenbeck, when French domination was in the ascendant and he had become an object of suspicion to the French spies in Münster.

What his death was to his family can be easily imagined; it was hardly less to a large circle of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers who knew him only by name and by his works, but whose reliance on his advice, example, and opinion had long been their best and surest standard of duty.

FROM THE HECUBA OF EURIPIDES. A free translation. BY AUBREY DE VERE.

[The Chorus of Trojan Women lament their Captivity.]

STROPHE I.

Breeze of the ocean, fresh and free! Whither, O whither wilt thou bear The Exile, and her great despair? Thou speed’st, and I must speed with thee! Say, must some Dorian haven be The home of Troy’s unhappy daughters? O unbelovèd home!—or where The father of most lovely waters, Apidanus, goes winding by The fruitful meads of Thessaly?

ANTISTROPHE I.

Or 'mid those isles of old renown, Haply bright Delos’ sea-born glades, Where deathless palms and laurels spread Above their own Latona’s head Green boughs (commemoration holy Of that twin-birth that lit their gloom):— There must I weep a captive’s doom? There sing, with gladsome native maids, Extorted song and melancholy To Dian’s silver bow and crown?

STROPHE II.

Perchance, a slave in Athens pining, On tap’stried walls these hands must trace Minerva’s awful steeds and car Still radiant from the Ten Years’ war; Or blazon there the Titan race Beneath the Thunderer’s wrath oppressed, And every godlike head declining Upon the thunder-blasted breast.

ANTISTROPHE II.

Alas my people, and alas My fathers, and my country’s shore! And thou, O Troy—’tis Fate’s decree— Farewell! I see thy face no more! Alas for thee, alas for me! Above thy head the plough shall pass:— Worse fate is mine, o’er ocean’s wave, The conqueror’s plaything, and his slave.

THE TRUE IRISH REVOLUTION.

The Irish people, albeit much given to intermittent spasms of insurrection, are at present as peaceable, and apparently as contented, as the contending passions of local politicians and the intrigues of imperial statesmen will allow them to be. The constabulary, in their rifle-green and burnished accoutrements, continue to be the envy and terror of the unsophisticated peasant; the queen’s writ runs unobstructed in the remotest parts of the island; “the castle still stands, though the senate’s no more”; and, save the sharp crack of a rifle at Dolly-mount or the more death-dealing fowling-piece of the sportsman, no warlike sound disturbs the quiet slumbers of the weary sentinel or the superserviceable stipendiary magistrate.

And yet a revolution has been in progress in Ireland and in Irish affairs elsewhere for the last three-quarters of a century as beneficent in its effects and as tangible in its benefits as if blood had flowed in torrents and the pure atmosphere from shore to centre of the land had been polluted by fumes of villainous saltpetre. We mean that within the memory of men now living a radical though gradual change has taken place in the manners, habits, and tastes of the Irish people, but more particularly in their literature, which after all is the best evidence of a nation’s ability to think correctly and express accurately what their minds are capable of conceiving.

Looking back to the condition of Ireland at the beginning of the century—her domestic legislature annihilated and seven-eighths of her people unrepresented in the imperial Parliament—beyond broken relics and dim memories of a glorious past, it can be said truthfully that she had no literature whatever, or rather no literature save what was alien and hostile in tone and spirit. There were no native authors except those who had earned pelf and unenviable notoriety by decrying Ireland’s nationality, maligning her faith, and holding up to the contempt and ridicule of the world the faults and foibles of her unlettered peasantry. But, even had there been men of a different character, they could not have found either encouragement or patronage; for the mass of the population, thanks to the Penal Laws, could not read English, and one-half at least could not even speak it.

The consequence, therefore, was that every young Irishman who felt the spirit of literary ambition stir within him, as soon as he had attained manhood, hastened to pack up his scanty wardrobe and turn his face toward London—then as now the great intellectual focus of the United Kingdom. The pioneers of this movement were generally men little fitted to represent their country. They were merely adventurers, without principle or honor, facile and versatile, and in some instances even educated, but, from previous training and association, just such tools as Grubb Street publishers loved to handle and the lowest class of Britons delighted to patronize. They were the originators of the “Denis Bulgruddery” and “Paddiana” school of so-called comic literature, and were useless if they did not caricature in the grossest manner, on the stage and in the newspapers and periodicals, their Catholic fellow-countrymen. With them a priest was an ignorant and low-bred tyrant; the peasant his abject, superstitious slave. This worthless class, while it did much to destroy the moral effect produced by men of a preceding generation, like Goldsmith, Coleman, O’Keefe, Sheridan, Burke, Barry, and other distinguished Irishmen, did more to instil into the popular mind of England that utter misconception of Irish character and insensate hostility to the Catholic religion of which we find at the present day such marked traces even among fairly intelligent men.

Those mercenaries were followed by others of a higher order of intellect and of greater pretensions, of whom Crofton Croker and Sheridan Knowles may be considered to have been the representatives. The drama, poetry, and prose fiction of every description employed their attention alternately, and in each they proved true to the baser instincts of their nature and the traditions of the faction whence they had sprung. They were stanch no-popery men of the Orange stripe, and, having a Protestant, English audience to gratify, they were consistently and virulently anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. When they wished to delineate their co-patriots, whether before the foot-lights or in the pages of cheap novels, they invariably divided them into two classes: the high-spirited, accomplished Protestant gentleman, and the low, grovelling, ignorant papist. Thus for many years did they thrive on bigotry and fatten upon treason to the land that was unfortunate enough to have given them birth. It was only natural that England should have viewed with complacency the caricatures of a faith she had so long and so strenuously proscribed, and a people whom she had robbed of the last vestige of independence; but it is humiliating to reflect that the works of such libellers were up to a recent period popular in Ireland, and that their comedies and farces “have kept the stage” even to our own day.

There were yet other candidates for fame, who, tired of the provincialism of Irish towns, or impatient of the restraints which their peculiar calling in life had placed upon them, sought an English market for their intellectual wares—spoiled children of genius, men like Maginn and Mahony, of much learning and fascinating accomplishments, fitted to have conferred lasting honor on their country, but who, lacking the true spirit of national dignity and personal respect, easily fell a prey to one or other of the contending English parties, and sank to the level of those who disgrace the noble profession of letters by making it subservient to the base purposes of political factions. This class contributed much of what is still to be found brilliant and entertaining in English literature, but little that reflects credit on their character as Irishmen.

Following or contemporaneous with them came another and a different school of Irish writers, such as Lever, Lover, Maxwell, and even Carleton; for, though the latter in many of his later works showed a just appreciation of the vast improvement taking place in public taste, his earlier and more popular productions, apart from their occasional touches of true pathos and flashes of genuine wit, were devoted mostly to caricature and exaggeration. Charles Lever, who has written so many books, and who is yet the most read of all the Irish novelists of this century, has been called the best recruiting sergeant the British government ever employed; while Lover may be styled a gifted and versatile buffoon in all save his lyrics. The first’s highest conception of an Irish gentleman was one who broke his arm over a Galway fence, was commissioned in the British army, blundered into all sorts of scrapes and out of them, hated Napoleon, worshipped “Sir Arthur,” charged wildly at Ciudad Rodrigo or Waterloo, and finally—married an heiress. His best Irish peasant does not rise above the grade of Mickey Free or Darby the Blast, while he seemed utterly unconscious of the existence of a very important social element in all agricultural countries—the farming or middle class, always remarkable for their sturdy common sense and practical views of life. It was from this portion of his countrymen and from the hardy mechanics of the towns that Scott drew his best and most enduring portraits of Scotch manliness, shrewdness, and humor.

Lover, though tender and natural in verse, was singularly unfortunate in his choice of subjects and altogether false in his attempts to develop them. He also ignored the “middle classes,” and substituted for gentlemen sentimental non-entities, and for the free-spoken, light-hearted, and withal poetical plebeian, blundering boobies full of chicane and deception. We can scarcely believe that the man who wrote Treasure Trove and Handy Andy could have conceived such pathetic songs as “The Angels’ Whisper” and “The Fairy Boy.”

Still, the works of these authors, though exhibiting many glaring defects, were a great improvement on those of their predecessors, and consequently they have not yet been consigned to the oblivion which has enshrouded the productions of the bigots of the previous era.

But the revolution in Irish literature had commenced long before their advent, and the credit of initiating it belongs to one who was not only universally admired and applauded during his life, but whose fame continues to augment as time rolls along, and the memory of his extraordinary efforts in behalf of his faith and country becomes brighter and more enduring. That man was Thomas Moore, the son of humble Catholic parents, who, on account of his religious belief, was refused a fellowship in the only university of which his native country could then boast. Naturally disgusted at such ostracism, Moore, at the age of twenty-three, went to London, and entered upon that brilliant career in poetry and prose which has indelibly stamped his name on the history of the literature of the nineteenth century. Never was the force of genius better exemplified than in the life of Moore. A plebeian, a Catholic, and an Irishman in the strongest sense of those terms; without condescending to apologize for, or attempting to palliate, the facts of his station and belief; with scarcely a friend or acquaintance in the great metropolis, and no recognition in the world of letters, the poet rose amid an aristocratic, Protestant, and anti-Irish community to a position equal to the most gifted of Scotland’s and England’s men of genius, and in his Melodies far surpassed any lyrics that have been written in our language since or before his time. In 1808 the first part of that unequalled collection of songs appeared, and each successive instalment but added to the popularity of the preceding. From the first they became fashionable, and consequently popular. They were sung in the drawing-rooms of princes and in the cottage parlors of the shop-keeper and tradesman. Persons of every rank in life who knew little of Ireland, and that little not to her credit, listened entranced to “Remember the Glories of Brian the Brave” or “Oh! blame not the Bard,” and began to think that a country that could produce such airs and so sweet a poet could not after all be considered very barbarous. It was but a poor concession, yet under the circumstances a most valuable one. It was the first blow struck against the solid wall of prejudice with which English society had surrounded itself.

Next to Moore we place John Banim, the principal author of the Tales of the O’Hara Family. Banim, like Moore, sprang from the ranks of the humbler classes and sought in London a field for his rare genius which was denied him at home. Though a dramatist of no mean order, his reputation rests principally on his novels, many of which, like the Boyne Water, Crohoore of the Bill-Hook, The Priest-Hunter, and The Fetches, are works of real power, interspersed here and there with pleasantry and humor, but always moral, dignified, and true to nature. The sale of Banim’s tales and shorter stories from their intrinsic merit, and perhaps somewhat on account of their novelty, was very extensive in England, and helped to increase the good feeling towards the Irish people which the lyre of Moore had first called into being.

In Gerald Griffin, afterward the humble Christian Brother, Banim found not only a friend but a powerful auxiliary. Griffin, of all the writers of fiction in the English language, was the purest and most actively moral. If we search all his works—and they fill nine or ten volumes—we will not find an expression or an innuendo to offend the most sensitive. The writings of the great English novelists of this century, like those of Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, cannot be said to be positively immoral, though the author of the justly-celebrated Waverley Novels often exhibited marked prejudice, and sometimes downright bigotry; while his later rivals, when not satirical or trifling, can at best claim but a negative morality for their teachings and tendencies. But the genius of Griffin sprang from a pure Catholic heart filled with love for all his kind, and consequently he wrote with a sense of religious responsibility, and in a spirit of justice and rectitude rarely to be found so thoroughly developed in a writer of fiction in our days. His works have had a great influence on the popular mind of both countries. But, though he first wrote in England, his sole and absorbing object was to benefit his countrymen. When satisfied that the germ of his laurels had begun to fructify in a foreign soil, he returned to his home, where, amid domestic pleasures, and in daily communion with the characters he so admirably portrayed and the scenes of natural beauty he so loved to describe, he composed his more important and finished works.

Meanwhile, another and not less important impetus had been given to the rapid change taking place in popular sentiment regarding Irish character and literature, and this was in Ireland itself. The letters of “J. K. L.”—the learned Dr. Doyle—on Catholic Emancipation and the Tithe Question, and those of the present venerable Archbishop of Tuam on similar topics, had thrilled the Irish heart and evoked in it a feeling of national dignity and self-reliance that had long lain dormant; and even the great O’Connell, amid all his professional and political labors, found time to contribute his aid to the new movement. But it was not till after 1840 that the various rivulets combined and assumed the proportions of a mighty flood, which, bursting through the barriers of ignorance and prejudice, overspread the entire land. Then began to appear the theologians and ecclesiastical historians of Maynooth and the antiquarian writers of old Trinity; the fiery ballads of the Nation and the graceful and learned essays of the Dublin Review and University Magazine. Archæological and Celtic societies were formed, the hitherto neglected Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy were brought into public notice, and the musty tomes that were crumbling to dust and decay on the shelves of Trinity College library, after their sleep of centuries, were explored, collated, and vivified. The names of Murray, O’Reilly, Petrie, Todd, O’Donovan, O’Curry, Graves, Wilde, Meehan, McCarthy, Mangan, and a host of other lesser lights, became familiar to the intellectual world by their profound, subtle, or brilliant contributions to the literature of the age. One thing alone was wanting to complete this grand national revival: a Catholic university—and even that soon came, not as a subordinate worker in the common cause, but as the leader of the movement.

Yet, though general education and popular instruction, in their own sphere, kept pace with the mental awakening in the higher departments of learning, strange to say, the stage, generally considered the first to yield to popular impulse, was the slowest and last to acknowledge the improved spirit of the times, and even to this day clings to many of the antiquated and bigoted so-called Irish dramas and comedies with insensate tenacity. Theatrical managers still persist in presenting for the amusement of patrons, a large portion of whom are Irish, the farces and low interludes which fifty years ago were written to gratify the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feelings of the lowest class of London society. A partially successful effort has been made recently to redeem this gross and fatal error; better, or rather less bad, Irish dramas have of late made their appearance, and let us hope the reformation, once set on foot, will be carried out. There is no reason why we should not have Irish dramas as good as Irish poems, tales, and other works of fiction. If people will go to theatres, they ought not be compelled to become interested spectators of outrages on faith and morals, and patrons and supporters of those who commit the outrages.

Still, casting our memory back over the history of Irish intellectual life for more than half a century, it would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that since the Renaissance epoch no country has given such evidence, in so short a time, of mental fertility and activity as that island which was once almost as famous throughout Europe for her learning as for the piety of her children. Ireland has at last a literature which is not only rich in ideas and information, but which is both national and Catholic. Her history, once so obscure and misunderstood, can now be studied with as much ease and satisfaction as any in Christendom; her antiquities, formerly the spoil of the ignorant or the jest of the sceptic, have been collected, arranged, and scientifically explained in a hundred ways; while the lives and actions of her great and holy men, from the earliest ages, have received full, critical, and impartial justice. And as yet we have only seen the beginning! If that be so fair and full of promise, what may not be hoped for from the intellectual future of a keen yet imaginative, brilliant yet conscientious, witty yet harmless in their wit, passionate in the wider sense, yet profoundly religious, people?

THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.

IV. ST. CATHERINE.

“Whom I shall wed,” said Alexandria’s princess, “rare Of beauty must be, past imagining; So great I shall not think I have made him king; More rich, sweet-hearted more, than summer air!” In dreams she came where courts such state declare Of Mother and Son enthroned, that worshipping She knelt, though royal: the Child placed a ring Upon her finger, and she woke—’twas there!

So Catherine became Christ’s. Again she kneels: With rose and lily, in white and purple clothed, No shining host now hails the heaven-betrothed, But God’s bolt shatters the sharp torture-wheels. Then Night and angels her pall-bearers are— The Bridegroom waits on Sinai lone and far.

V. ST. MARGARET.

Of all the virgins pure that bear the palm, There is not any one more meek and mild Than sweet maid Margaret. Tending while a child The flocks, she drew near, in the mountain’s calm, To the Good Shepherd, like a trustful lamb; She felt that God with man was reconciled; She saw diurnal victory undefiled Of light o’er darkness hoist the oriflamme.

Of Morning. So flashed she, in dungeon drear, The Cross uplifted, till the Dragon foul Crouched at her feet, in fear of that white soul. O Pearl of Antioch, so soft and clear! O Daisy, with the chaste dew on thy lips! Thou touchest Christ with stainless finger-tips.

VI. ST. BARBARA.

Dioscorus of Heliopolis Shut his wise daughter in a lofty tower, Jealous of lovers; therein, for her bower, She caused three windows to be made, in this Her father disobeying, but said: “It is Through three clear windows that the Almighty Power, The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, shower Light on the soul—with light immortal bliss!”

Scourged, by the gold hair dragged, slain by thy sire— A turbaned heathen!—soft as rosy May, Yet resolute, and avenged by instant fire, Christian Bellona! sweet-browed Barbara! With the Red Mantle of thy fortitude, Thy Tower and Cannon, be my soul endued!

MARSHAL MacMAHON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS.

The inconveniences resulting from the present system of transmitting political intelligence from Europe to this country for the use of our daily journals are serious. An event of importance occurs to-day in London, Paris, Constantinople, or Rome; the same afternoon we read what purports to be an account of the event in our evening journals, and the next morning we are furnished with a few more details, accompanied often by a leading article hurriedly written and based, as a rule, upon no other information than that contained in the despatches. In twenty-four hours afterwards the event is almost forgotten; and by the time that the letters of correspondents on the spot, or the journals of the locality, can reach us, the incident has become an old story and the interest excited by it in the first place has faded away. This manner of dealing with matters of great importance would be lamentable, even if the information contained in the cable despatches were always correct, full, and uncolored by prejudice; but too often the despatches are models of what they should not be—that is, they are incorrect in matters of fact; marked by omissions of the truth and by suggestions of falsehood; and disfigured, in the majority of cases when the events reported have, or are supposed to have, some relation to the interests of the Papal See, by an ingenious perversion of the real and natural meaning of the incidents which they purport to describe. A heavy responsibility rests upon the conductors of our daily journals in this matter—a responsibility to which we should be glad to see them more sensitive than they now appear to be. They know well enough how it happens that the bulk of their cable despatches from the Continent of Europe is continually affected by an evident animus against the Holy See whenever there is an opportunity to display this feeling; they know well enough why it is that, whenever possible, a coloring hostile to the church, and calculated to excite Protestant or non-Catholic prejudice against her, is given to events.

The greater part of the European despatches of the New York journals is transmitted from London, being made up there chiefly from the despatches of the Reuter Agency, supplemented by the special despatches received by the leading London journals. The Reuter News Agency, which has its ramifications throughout all Europe, and is conducted with admirable skill and good management as a business enterprise, is in the hands of Jews; its agents have peculiar relations with the governments which stand in need of their services, and a system of mutual benefit is kept up between them; in return for the monopoly of official news and other similar favors on the part of the governments, the agents of the Reuter company transmit only such intelligence as is agreeable to the governments, and with such coloring as the governments wish. The relations existing between the Italian government and the Reuter Agency are understood to be especially intimate; and certain it is that from no capital in the world has more false and distorted news been sent forth than that which all the world has received from Rome since the Italian occupation of that city. As for the Continental despatches taken from the London journals and sent to New York, it should be remembered that not one of the London daily papers is in the Catholic interest, and that those whose despatches are most frequently sent to us—namely, the Times, the Daily News, and the Pall Mall Gazette—are inspired by a very lively hatred and fear of the church. We believe that the conductors of our own daily journals are for the most part actuated by honest motives. Their heads are sometimes deplorably at fault, but their hearts are generally right; and, with rare exceptions, they are free from the guilt of wilfully misrepresenting facts and designedly deceiving their readers. But too frequently they do permit themselves to be deceived or misled, in the manner we have explained, with respect to the true meaning and co-relation of political events on the continent of Europe.

The facts mentioned are, or should be, perfectly well known in the editorial rooms of all our journals; and it is certainly to be desired that our editors should cease to take their opinions at second-hand, and should begin to exercise their own good and honest judgment upon events as they occur abroad. If they were in the habit of doing this, and if they were furnished with cable information of a correct and uncolored character, they would not, we are certain, have fallen into the error of regarding the recent change of government in France as a wicked, base, and unprovoked conspiracy to destroy the republican institutions of that country, but would have recognized in Marshal MacMahon’s action the wise, absolutely necessary, and not too rapid determination of that ruler to save the republic, if possible, while it is still worth saving, and at all events to save France and society generally throughout Europe from the convulsion, anarchy, and destruction into which the revolutionists were so rapidly and surely dragging them. It is by no means certain that Marshal MacMahon will now succeed in the task before him; he may have waited too long. Nor are we concerned to prove that the motives of the Marshal-President in his dismissal of M. Jules Simon, and in his selection of his present advisers, were unmixed; but we are anxious to show to our readers that his action was necessary, and that the good wishes of Americans who reverence law and order, who detest red-republicanism and communism, who cherish religious liberty, and who dread and abhor tyranny, whether exercised in the name of many or of one, should be on his side. “I am conscious,” said Marshal MacMahon nine days after the dismissal of M. Simon—“I am conscious of having fulfilled a great duty. I have remained, and shall remain, absolutely within the bounds of legality. It is because I am the guardian of the constitution that I acted as I have acted. To attribute to me an intention of assailing the constitution is a misconstruction of my character. The country will soon comprehend that my sole aim is the salvation of France and of the government which she has given herself.”

We believe that these are sincere and honest words; and we shall have no difficulty at least in showing that Marshal MacMahon could not have acted otherwise than he did, unless he had been prepared to surrender the virtual government of the republic into the hands of men who are leagued together to destroy the rights of property; to degrade marriage; to enslave, if not wholly to overturn, the church; to cut her off from her connection with her earthly head; to reduce her prelates, if they were permitted to exist at all, to the condition of servants of the civil power; to exile her contemplative and teaching orders; to take from her the right of educating her children; and to drag France, ere long, into an alliance with the revolutionary associations in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Russia, which dream of establishing on the ruins of religion and of society a new confederation from which God shall be banished, and over which Satan shall rule supreme. Comparatively few of the constituents of the Gambetta party in the French Assembly are aware of the designs of the leaders of this faction; but enough light has within the past few weeks been thrown upon their machinations fully to justify the President in making a firm stand against their further progress.

M. Jules Simon refused to aid the President in executing this determination; and M. Simon was removed to give place to a minister who would co-operate with his chief. So powerful had the Gambetta faction become in the Assembly that the whole of the cabinet followed M. Simon in his enforced retirement from office, and the President was for the moment left alone. The men whom he called to his aid, however, and who, indeed, had encouraged him to dismiss M. Simon, were prompt in taking up the fallen reins of office, and the government, without a day’s delay, began its work of preserving France from her worst foes. The task before them is a most arduous one, and it has been begun none too soon. Let us show how it became necessary that it should be undertaken at all.

The French Assembly was re-convened at Versailles on the 1st of May after the usual Easter recess. During the vacation events had occurred which made it probable that the long-threatened rupture between the Gambetta faction, or Extreme Left of the Chamber, and the conservative elements in the executive department of the government, could not be delayed much longer. The administration had indeed gone to the very furthest point of concession in endeavoring to satisfy the demands of the Left. The consent of Marshal MacMahon had been given to these concessions, but it was known that this assent had been extorted from him with difficulty, and that he was personally of the opinion that the more was given to the Gambettists the more would they ask, and that the true and safe course was that of steady and uncompromising resistance to their unconstitutional and revolutionary demands. The Left, by skilful management of the press in its interest; by the manipulations of the local public functionaries who had from time to time been appointed at its request, or whom it had been able to purchase; by adroit misrepresentations and exaggerations of the policy of the conservative members of the Assembly; and by the not infrequent maladroit utterances and acts of certain of the imperialist and monarchical members, had contrived to make an imposing show of their strength in the country as well as in the Assembly. It is no doubt true that, all other things being equal, a large majority of the French people would prefer a republic to any other form of government. But the republic which would satisfy them is not at all the republic which would satisfy M. Gambetta and his friends. The republic which the majority of the French people desire is a republic in which property would be safe; in which law and order would reign; in which God would be respected; and in which the church would be free. The republic of Gambetta would possess none of these characteristics; but Gambetta and his lieutenants had been allowed to assume the attitude of the especial friends and defenders of republican institutions, and many of their members in the Assembly owed their election to the votes of good Catholics and sober citizens. They now felt themselves strong enough to advance further, and to wrest from the administration a still greater share of power.

Marshal MacMahon was himself irremovable for three years longer, only four years of his Septennate having expired. But it might be possible, in the opinion of the Gambettists, to force him to accept a cabinet which should be dictated by themselves, and which would hand over to them the virtual control of the government. One of the members of the then cabinet, they believed, would be useful to them, and their plans involved his retention. What was the nature of the communications which are said to have taken place in secret between MM. Gambetta and Simon cannot at present be known. Nor can we unveil the mysteries of the correspondence which has been kept up during the last few years between the controlling members of the French Extreme Left and the revolutionary leaders in England and throughout the Continent of Europe. The operations of the secret societies are seldom brought to light until after their work has been accomplished—and not always even then. The once famous “International Society of Working-men” has ceased to exist for all practical purposes; but it, at the best, was only an engine invented and put in motion by men who still are laboring in the secrecy of Masonic lodge-rooms and in the caucus-chambers of hidden political organizations to accomplish the destruction of Christian society and Christian government. It cannot be doubted that a certain solidarity unites the socialists of France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Portugal, and that they have the means of acting together. The Gambetta faction in France by no means stood alone in their recent attempt to gain the upper hand in the administration of the republic; they had the active sympathy and the moral support of their confrères throughout Europe.

Now, the great bulwark of the conservative republic in France is the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic faith, the Roman Catholic people. So long as the church is free and undisturbed in France—free to pursue her work of educating her children, preserving morality, and saving souls—the French people, of whom all but a small fraction belong to her, will remain tranquil and happy, and they would make short work of men who proposed to set up in France a communistic and atheistic republic. They are quite well contented with the republic as it at present exists, and are hopeful of its future; under it the church for the first time has been allowed full right of teaching; and the avidity with which Catholics availed themselves of the privileges conferred by the new university law sufficiently attests at once their intelligence and their zeal. Still, the Catholics in France, like the Catholics throughout the rest of the world, have a sorrow and a grievance; and French Catholics, like all other Catholics, claim the right to express this sorrow and to do what is in their power to redress this grievance. The earthly head of their church is a prisoner in his own city; he has been despoiled of his patrimony and plundered of his crown; his jailers threaten from time to time to deprive him of the little that is left to him; there is positive danger that the freedom of the election of his successor will be assailed, and that the church throughout the world may be subjected, through the malice of her foes at Rome, to the gravest perils. The French Catholics conceive that it is their right and their duty to protest unceasingly against this state of things, and to inspire their government to speak in their name—and, if occasion arises, to act in their name—for the purpose of protecting the Holy Father from further insults and oppression, and of seeking to bring about the peaceable restoration of his independence. In all this they are strictly within the limits of their constitutional rights as citizens of the French Republic.

Let us bring the matter home to ourselves. Suppose that a petition should be drawn up praying President Hayes to instruct our minister at Rome to represent to the government of Italy that nine millions of American Roman Catholics felt themselves deeply aggrieved and injured by certain acts of the Italian government towards the Pope, and that they considered these acts all the more unjustifiable because they were one and all in open and undisguised violation of the promises made by the Italian government to the whole Catholic world; suppose that this petition should be signed by every Catholic man and woman in the United States and sent to the President; would it be said, then, that we were exceeding our rights as citizens, and that we should be punished for our temerity? The President might do as he pleased with the petition; he might act upon it or cast it aside—that would be for him to decide; but could we, as citizens, be blamed and punished for exercising the right of petition in order to make known our feelings upon a matter which touches us so closely? Yet this is all that the French Catholics have done; and it is because of the solidarity of interests and of purpose, of hope and of fear, which exists between the revolutionists and socialists of Italy and of the other Continental nations that the Gambettists in France were spurred up to make this perfectly legitimate action of the French Catholics the pretext for a new and desperate assault upon the liberties of the church in France—an assault under cover of which, and aided by what seems to us very much like treachery on the part of M. Jules Simon, they hoped to compel Marshal MacMahon to capitulate to them.

The allocution of the Pope issued on the 12th of last March had moved to the very depths the hearts of Catholics in France, as it had moved the hearts of the Catholics of every other land. They felt that it was impossible for them to remain silent after hearing that most pathetic and powerful appeal; they wished that their reply should be as emphatic as possible, and that it should consist of acts as well as of words. They resolved to draw up addresses to the Holy Father; to organize pilgrimages to convey these addresses, with their gifts, to Rome; and to devise means whereby they could express to their own government their anxious wish that it would use its influence with the government of Italy in behalf of the restoration of the independence and freedom of the Pope. Each of these projects was entered into with commendable zeal; and early in April the Bishop of Nevers addressed a letter to Marshal MacMahon, asking him, in the name of his flock, to use the influence of France at the court of King Victor Emanuel and at other courts for the protection of the Pope and for the restoration of his rights. The marshal’s cabinet at this moment were greatly under the influence of M. Jules Simon, the President of the Council; they were imbued with the idea that it would not be safe for them to exasperate the Gambetta faction; and they persuaded the marshal to approve a letter addressed by the Minister of Public Worship to the bishop, in which entire disapproval of his appeal was expressed, with the remark that “the marshal, as a sincere friend of religion, saw with pain the clergy intervening in internal, and still more in foreign, politics.” The Gambettists were encouraged by this mark of weakness on the part of the government, and prepared to push their advantage. But the Catholics did not choose to take their views of duty from the dictates of a Council whereof M. Simon was the chief; and they continued to organize their pilgrimages and to draw up and circulate their addresses to the Pope. On the 19th of April the Bishop of Nevers, not at all disconcerted by the rebuke which he had received from the Cabinet, addressed a letter to the Mayor of the Nièvre, in which he explained to that official what, in his opinion, was the duty of all good Catholics occupying influential positions.

“The Pope being no longer free in Rome,” wrote the bishop to the mayor, “the result is that we ourselves are no longer free in our consciences, and we consequently should use all our influence to obtain a change in such an abnormal state of things, and the restoration to the sovereign of our souls of the independence which he absolutely requires in order to guide us. We must first instil these views in the minds of the population whose interests are confided to us. We must then concert together to cause similar convictions to prevail in the various councils of the country.”

On the 20th, at a cabinet council, the general petitions of the Catholics addressed to the government were taken into consideration, and it was proposed that, in order to silence the complaints of the Gambettists, who were declaiming violently that the circulation and presentation of such memorials would embroil France in a difficulty with Italy, the bishops should be ordered to forbid the further exposure of these petitions in their churches for signature. But the marshal on this occasion displayed a little more firmness and the matter was passed over without action. A few days before this an event had occurred in Italy that served to increase the distrust with which Marshal MacMahon already regarded the secret intentions of the leaders of the Left. In Benevento, near Letino, and again near Rome, the government had arrested a number of socialists who, it appears, were engaged in a conspiracy for the establishment of a Red Republic. The papers found on the persons of the arrested men were of the usual inflammatory character, and set forth, among other things, that “man ought not to be subjected to any tyranny, human or divine; that the principle of private property is the climax of infamy, because it creates inequality between men; that the union between men and women ought to be free; and that the state is the denial of the most sacred principles.” The chief leader of the band, who was arrested with about fifty of his adherents, was a young Milanese named Caffiero, a man of wealth and position; and an examination of his papers disclosed the fact that his association was only one of a large number of others spread throughout Europe, and that the names of some of the leading radical republicans of France appeared upon a list which was believed to enumerate the advisers and real leaders of the conspirators. On the 28th of April, however, the cabinet again induced the marshal to make another effort to conciliate the Gambettists, who had redoubled their agitation against the Catholic movement, which had by this time become very general throughout the whole country. On that day the Minister of the Interior issued a circular to all prefects, directing them to discourage the signature of the Catholic protests and petitions by not allowing them to be publicly circulated within their respective jurisdictions. The circular—to which Marshal MacMahon assented after much pressure—instructed the prefects to regard these petitions and protests as “an unjustifiable and illegal interference in the legislative and domestic affairs of a friendly foreign state,” and to do all in their power to suppress them. Gambetta himself could scarcely have said more; but the marshal was quite correct in his opinion that Gambetta would still ask for more. Meanwhile, the mot d’ordre to the Gambettists had gone forth to strike terror into the hearts of their opponents by public manifestations. The students of the Sorbonne were instigated into making violent assaults upon the Catholic universities; on the 1st of May five hundred students assembled in front of the Catholic university in the Rue de Vaugirard, where they insulted the Catholic students and professors by indecent harangues and by singing blasphemous parodies of a hymn to the Sacred Heart; dispersed by the police, they separated only to assemble again before the Jesuit school in the Rue de Shomond, where the same disorderly and disgraceful scenes were repeated until the police arrived and arrested the ringleaders of the mob. In all the cities where the Gambettists were sufficiently numerous manifestations against the church and her liberties were organized; and in some cases the zeal of the disciples so far outran the directions of the leaders that it was with difficulty the latter prevented the former from outrages which would have alarmed and disgusted the whole country.

Affairs were in this condition when the Chambers reassembled on the 1st of May. The Left lost no time in bringing forward their guns and forcing the fighting. M. Leblond was put up by them in the Chamber of Deputies to give notice of a question addressed to the government “as to the measures which it proposed to take to repress Ultramontane intrigues.” M. Jules Simon, hastening to comply with the demands of the men with whom, as it now appears, he was secretly in accord, at once replied that the debate on the proposed question could take place on the next day. The Catholic members of the Chamber seem to have already distrusted the sincerity of M. Simon. One of them—the eloquent and fearless Count de Mun—announced that he and those who acted with him insisted upon a clear understanding of the position of the government.

“We shall insist upon knowing,” said he, “whether the government accept the responsibility for the campaign that is being waged by means of impure calumnies against the Catholics of France. The patriotism of French Catholics cannot be called in question; it is above suspicion. In what we are doing—in what we wish to do—we are claiming but our rights. We demand, however, that the government, to which we give our support, should free itself from the responsibility for the attacks made upon us, which render our position intolerable.”

M. Simon seems to have perceived that matters were growing serious, and that he could not much longer continue to pretend to serve two masters; but he resolved to struggle still to maintain his position. On the following day, after M. Leblond had put his question and supported it by a harangue in which he urged that the government should at once proceed to repress by the most stringent means “the Ultramontane intrigues,” M. Simon addressed the Chamber in a speech highly disingenuous and full of double meanings. It was virtually an appeal to the Gambetta faction to permit him to remain in power in order that he might do their work; while at the same time it was an attempt to throw dust in the eyes of the Catholics by hypocritical professions of respect for religion and its rights. The government had been blamed, he said, for permitting Catholic newspapers to assail Italy; but the government could not prevent this; the law would punish the writers, if what they wrote was punishable under the law. On the other hand, the government would not tolerate any attack upon the Catholic religion—“which it sincerely respected”—and would protect the rights and liberties of Catholics. In fact, the church in France enjoyed to-day more freedom than at any previous time. But it was necessary to limit this freedom. For instance, the government “tolerates” the existence of Catholic societies so long as they are used only for the purposes set forth in their statutes, but it had interdicted the Catholic committees which were employed in political undertakings and which had “formidable ramifications.” Having gone thus far, M. Simon thought he might as well go a little further, and he proceeded to make a statement which was a direct insult to the intelligence of the whole Catholic world. “The Catholic petitions and the demonstration made by the Bishop of Nevers,” said he, “were based upon a fiction—namely, that the Pope is a prisoner in the Vatican”; “the law of guarantees has taken every care of the spiritual independence of the Holy Father”! And he then went on to condemn the petitions as “an interference in the internal affairs of a neighboring country,” and to remind the Chamber that the government had done all in its power to suppress these lawful manifestations of Catholic feeling. The government, he added, would continue to protect the clergy as long as they confined themselves to their spiritual duties, but would in the future punish them severely “if they encroached upon the civil power”—that is, if they continued to exercise their freedom and to discharge their duty by protesting against the acts of the Sardinian robbers, and by seeking to enlighten the public mind and conscience as to the real condition of the head of the universal church.

This speech of the President of the Council was a virtual surrender to the Extreme Left; but M. Gambetta was determined to force a more formal and complete capitulation. On the following day, May 4, he resumed the debate in a speech which he had carefully prepared, and which he delivered with great eloquence and animation. Its spirit is expressed in the sentence which was received with the loudest applause by the Extreme Left: “It is time that lay society should drive back the church to that subordinate rank which belongs to her in the state.” M. Gambetta, our readers will perceive, is very far in advance of M. Cavour. The Italian statesman dreamed of “a free church in a free state”; the French revolutionist demands an enslaved church in an atheistic and communistic state. Listen to him:

“The church has set citizens by the ears, alarmed France, and troubled Europe. It is always thus: the monarchy was often compelled to resist the encroachments of the church, but the republic must do more, for now the state is assaulted on all sides in the name of religion and her very existence is threatened. The Catholic leaders—ex-ministers, senators, and members of this Chamber—have exalted the Pope as the supreme ruler of France and of the world; when the Pope has issued an order they exclaim: 'Rome has spoken and must be obeyed.’ The Pope on the 12th of March commanded that an agitation in his favor should be everywhere set on foot; immediately we behold deputations of Catholic royalists calling upon the Minister of Foreign Affairs, convocations being held, and petitions circulated in spite of the feeble pretences of the government to suppress them. It will not do to say that the church in France must have the liberty which she enjoys elsewhere; she shall not have it, for the reason, among others, that here the church is bound to the state, and the state is responsible for the language and the acts of the bishops. No longer must it be permitted that the Pope may address himself directly to France, without having first obtained the sanction of the civil power, and without first submitting to it his bulls, briefs, and allocutions. No longer must the bishops be allowed to address themselves to mayors and prefects, conveying to the civil functionaries of the republic orders received from Rome. It is useless to say that only a few of the bishops have done these things; for these bishops represent the whole hierarchy, the church is unanimous, and its submission to Rome is complete. There is no such thing as resistance or opposition in the church; the old Gallican liberties have been swept away by the Syllabus and by the Vatican Council. The Pope must not be permitted again to usurp the rights of the state, as he has recently done in appointing one of his bishops chancellor of a French university and giving him the right of conferring degrees. I cannot understand how it happened that the papal instrument making this appointment was ever permitted to enter France! We must no longer endure these things; we must drive back the church to the place where she belongs. We need not fear that the people will not be on our side; if there is one thing more than another that is repugnant to France, it is the yoke of clericalism; and it cannot be too strongly said that clericalism is the enemy of the country.”

To this bitter harangue M. Jules Simon had no reply; he contented himself with declaring that he and the cabinet were not subject to the dictation of any power behind the throne, and that perfect harmony existed between the marshal and himself. He hastened to add that he would accept, in the name of the government, the order of the day proposed by M. Leblond, which was in these words:

“The Chamber of Deputies, considering that the recrudescence of Ultramontane manifestations constitutes a danger to the domestic and foreign peace of the country, calls upon the government to make use of the lawful means which it has at its disposal.”

This was adopted by a vote of 361 against 121; thus M. Gambetta won his victory, and, so far as M. Simon could pledge it, the government was pledged to carry out the demands of the foes of the church. This was on the 4th of May. Marshal MacMahon, it appears, hesitated as to his future course; but it appears also that he was conscious he had been betrayed into an intolerable position. He seems to have determined, from that moment, to dismiss M. Simon, and to appeal to the country to sustain him in his refusal to comply with the unconstitutional and tyrannical demands of the revolutionists; but, with what may seem to some an unwise timidity, he resolved to wait for some other act on the part of M. Simon which might be made the immediate ground for his dismissal.

He had not long to wait. During the next few days the sittings of the Chamber were characterized by great excitement and tumult. M. Simon was made the target of continual attacks; he was accused of having formerly belonged to the International Society, and of having been morally in league with the Communists who assassinated the Archbishop of Paris. He defended himself with vehemence, but his affiliation with the Gambetta faction became daily more apparent. He promised to draw up and send to the bishops a stringent circular, warning them that they would be held to a strict responsibility for all their future acts. The Committee of the Budget, on the 12th of May, reported in favor of according the sum annually paid for the support of the church, $10,626,199; but it accompanied this recommendation with the remark that it was now the duty of the government to revive and enforce a number of obsolete and almost forgotten laws which had been enacted, from time to time, by various governments which had desired to enslave the church. If these obsolete enactments should now be enforced, no French bishop could visit Rome without the consent of the government; no subscriptions for the Pope could be raised in France; no papal brief or bull could enter France, and no council or diocesan synod could assemble, without the consent of the government; and the ecclesiastical seminaries would be compelled to teach that the civil government is supreme in all things. M. Simon, it was understood, was about to enforce these unjust and virtually abrogated restrictions, and the Gambettists were in high feather. But their exultation was soon to be changed into disappointment and rage.

The Chamber of Deputies had before it a bill modifying the organization of municipalities, and another measure for the repeal of the law on the restrictions of the press which had been passed two years ago to secure social order. The cabinet had consulted upon these measures and had agreed upon the line which the ministers should take in opposing them. To this agreement M. Simon was a consenting party; it was well understood between him and the marshal that when these measures came up for decision M. Simon should explain that the government could not consent to them. But the new masters of M. Simon held him to the engagement he had made with them; and when these measures were brought forward M. Simon found it convenient to be absent from the Chamber, and the government was again betrayed. The patience of Marshal MacMahon was now exhausted; he was perhaps glad that M. Simon had so soon furnished him with a sufficient reason for his dismissal. Early on the morning of May 16 the marshal, having, it is said, passed a sleepless night, addressed the following note to M. Simon, and sent it to him without consulting with any of the other members of the government:

“I have read in the Journal Officiel the report of last night’s proceedings in the Chamber of Deputies. I observed with surprise that neither you nor the Keeper of the Seals put forward from the tribune the reasons which might have prevented the repeal of a press law, passed less than two years ago on the motion of M. Dufaure, and which you yourself quite recently wished to see applied in the courts of law. And yet it had been decided in several meetings of the cabinet, and indeed in the council held yesterday morning, that you and the Keeper of the Seals should undertake to oppose the motion for the repeal of the law.... In view of such an attitude on the part of the chief of the cabinet, the question naturally arises whether he retains sufficient influence to assert his views successfully, An explanation on this point is indispensable; for I myself, although not, like you, answerable to Parliament, have a responsibility towards France which to-day more than ever must engross my attention.”

M. Simon, upon receiving this note, saw that between his two stools he had fallen to the ground; but he made one more effort to again deceive the marshal. He repaired to the Elysée with a letter of resignation in his pocket; but before presenting it he asked the marshal if it were not possible that they should continue to act together. “No,” was the reply. “I have gone as far as I can possibly go in the wake of you and your allies; I shall go no further.” M. Simon then presented his letter of resignation, which was composed mainly of rather lame excuses for his absence from the Chamber on the two occasions complained of by the marshal. Immediately afterwards the other members of the cabinet resigned, in order to leave the marshal full liberty of action; and by the time the Gambettists had eaten their breakfasts they learned that they had overshot the mark, and that, instead of forcing Marshal MacMahon to accept their revolutionary programme, they had driven him to dismiss from his councils the man on whom they most relied, and in all probability to surround himself with men whom they could neither frighten nor purchase.

The excitement among all the members of the Assembly was great as the news spread; and a meeting of the Gambettists was called for the same evening, at which a line of action was laid down. One of the first things to be done, it was agreed, was to use the machinery at their disposal “in order properly to inspire foreign public opinion,” so that it might react upon France; and during the night “the republican leaders sent to foreign journals instructions to insert opinions upon the crisis” which would have the effect of alarming the marshal by holding up before him the threat of the displeasure of Germany and Italy. The London journals were especially inspired in this sense; and it was thus that our own journals, re-echoing this echo of the Gambetta caucus, gave their readers the idea that Marshal MacMahon had dismissed his cabinet in order to destroy the republic and to engage at once in a war against Italy for the restoration of the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. The session of the Chamber of Deputies on the 17th was excited; and M. Gambetta once more demonstrated the foolishness of those who, deceived by his affected moderation and calmness during the last two years, had believed that this fou furieux had become a decent and practical statesman. He moved the resolution which had been adopted at the caucus the preceding night, and supported it in a speech full of fire and venom. The resolution, which the Chamber accepted by a vote of 355 against 154, simply declared that “the confidence of the majority can only be enjoyed by a cabinet which is free in its action and resolved to govern in accordance with republican principles, which can alone secure order and prosperity at home and abroad”—words with which no one can find fault. But M. Gambetta, giving full vent to his rage at finding himself foiled at the very moment when he was dreaming of victory, declared that the dismissal of M. Simon had been brought about by the intrigues of “a secret influence with which no ministry could cope.”

“It is not true,” he cried, “that the President of the republic bears a responsibility over and above that of the ministry. We must recall him to an exact observance of the constitution, and deliver him from perfidious counsels. The country wishes to be rid of the nightmare of those men of reaction who show their livid faces at all moments of uncertainty. If the Chambers are dissolved we have no fear of the result, but the country may see in it a prelude to war. Criminals are those who would provoke it.”

No one thinks of provoking war save M. Gambetta and his friends, and they are the only criminals. Marshal MacMahon was not at all dismayed by this loud talk; on the same evening the new cabinet was announced. The Duke Decazes and General Berthaut, Ministers of Foreign Affairs and of War in the former cabinet, retained their portfolios; the Duke de Broglie was made President of the Council and Minister of Justice; M. de Fourtou, Minister of the Interior; M. Caillaux, Minister of Finance; M. Paris, Minister of Public Works; M. de Meaux, Minister of Agriculture; and M. Brunet, Minister of Public Instruction. The cabinet is a homogeneous and a respectable one; as long as it remains in office the country may be certain, at least, that order will be maintained and that the plots of the Reds will be frustrated. During the morning of the 18th the Gambettists were very busy in preparing to give battle to the new cabinet. But they found themselves again disconcerted by the firmness of the President, who, exercising his constitutional right, sent a message to both houses, adjourning their session until the 16th of June. In this message Marshal MacMahon explains that he has scrupulously conformed to the constitution. He appointed the cabinets of M. Dufaure and of M. Simon with the object of placing himself in accord with the majority in the Chamber; but neither of these cabinets were able to unite in the Chamber a majority capable of causing constitutional and proper ideas to prevail.

“I could not,” the marshal went on to say, “take a further step on the same path without making an appeal to the republican fraction which desires a radical modification of all our institutions. My conscience and my patriotism do not permit me to associate myself even distantly with the triumph of these ideas, which can only engender disorder and the humiliation of France; and so long as I hold power I shall use it within legal limits to prevent that consummation, for it would be the ruin of the country. But I am convinced the country thinks as I do. It was not the triumph of these theories which the country desired at the last elections, when all the candidates availed themselves of my name. If it were to be again interrogated it would repudiate such a confusion of ideas. I am firmly resolved to respect and maintain the existing institutions of the country. Until 1880 I can propose no modification, and contemplate nothing of the kind. In order to allow the excitement to calm down, I invite you to suspend your sittings for one month. You will then be able to discuss the Budget. In the meantime we will watch over the maintenance of public peace. We will suffer nothing at home tending to compromise it; and it will be maintained abroad, I am confident, notwithstanding the agitations which disturb a portion of Europe, thanks to our good relations with all the powers and our policy of neutrality and abstention. On this point all parties are agreed, and the new cabinet holds the same views as the old. If any imprudence in the language of the press compromises the concord which we all desire, I shall repress it by legal means. To prevent this I appeal to that patriotism which is wanting in no class in France.”

Violent were the scenes in both Chambers when this message was read, but they were cut short by the firmness of the new ministers. M. Gambetta attempted to speak; his voice was drowned by shouts of “Down with the Dictator!” In the Senate M. Simon essayed to deliver an oration, but the Duke de Broglie announced that no one could speak, as the President had adjourned the session. The houses separated in confusion, and the Gambettists occupied themselves during the next few days in issuing inflammatory appeals to the country. The new government began without delay the task of strengthening itself by the removal of disaffected prefects, sub-prefects, and other department officials, and this work has been carried out with the same thoroughness that is displayed in our own country after a radical administrative change.

All this is the prelude to an appeal to the country in the shape of a general election for a new Assembly. The people will be summoned to decide, not whether they wish a republic or a monarchy, but whether the republic shall be entrusted to the extreme radical party or to those who can and will save France from the ruin into which Gambetta and his crew would engulf it. The decision will be waited for with anxiety, but without fear on our part. The French people, we believe, are sound at heart, and have no wish to resign themselves into the hands of men who fear not God nor regard man save as a convenient tool for their own ends. Meanwhile, however, the utmost circumspection should be exercised by the new government. Prince Bismarck is enraged when he sees France strengthening herself; he is delighted when he beholds her weakening herself by internal dissensions. Thus growls of displeasure at the check given to the Gambetta party have already been heard from Berlin, and the German press has been instructed to represent that the new French administration intends “to restore the Papacy through the humiliation of Germany.” The Italian government, troubled with a bad conscience, indulges in similar anticipations; and the first duty of the Duke Decazes has been to reassure these cabinets and to point out that the French government wishes simply to devote itself to the domestic interests and safety of France. We believe that this is the plain truth. If Marshal MacMahon and his present advisers are sustained, France will be saved from domestic ruin, and her salvation will go far towards checking the revolution in other countries.

The time will come, no doubt, when France will again assert herself in European affairs, but with a wisdom gathered from her terrible reverses and humiliation. For those reverses she had no one but herself to blame. They were the bitter fruit of an overweening pride, and of the desertion of those eternal principles of justice and right, and of the faith that embodies them, close adherence to which alone makes nations truly great. France is coming back to her faith, and with her faith will return her greatness, her nationality, her life. Before, however, she can make her voice heard in Europe she must speak in clear, calm, and not discordant tones. She must be united in herself, one nation, one people, with one heart and one soul. It is this that Germany dreads of all things, and consequently the threats and intrigues of Germany and Italy will be exerted to the utmost in aid of Gambetta and his faction, who, indeed, have much strength of their own. While we are far from thinking that the contest will be an easy one, we have little doubt as to the final issue. The republic of order in France is the Catholic republic. The French nation is Catholic. All the real glories of France are indissolubly linked with the Catholic name. Her greatest disasters are as fatally linked with the party of which Gambetta is to-day the ostensible leader. It is time for Catholic France to gather herself together and arise in a strength that she never before had the opportunity of possessing. The way is open. She stands now quite untrammelled from alliances with any dynasty or name. Her fate lies in her own hands, and the honest soldier who has guarded so well her truest interests will not betray the trust placed in him by his countrymen.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

LIFE OF THE VEN. CLEMENT MARY HOFBAUER, C.SS.R. By the Author of the Life of Catharine McAuley, etc. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1877.

Father Hofbauer was a second St. Alphonsus in the Congregation of the Redemptorist fathers, and the founder of the institute as existing outside of Italy. He will probably be canonized; and it would not be a matter of surprise if the veneration for his memory in Austria and the neighboring countries, in case this solemn recognition is accorded to his sanctity by the Holy See, should equal that for St. Vincent de Paul in France. He was a plain, simple man, of humble origin, moderate parts and learning, but truly angelic purity and miraculous sanctity. The influence he obtained and the good he accomplished are simply wonderful. The history of his life is graphically portrayed by the religious lady who has written his biography. We could wish that every priest and every ecclesiastical student in the United States might read it. The scandal and mischief wrought by perverse men of brilliant intellectual gifts, like Gioberti and Döllinger, by apostate princes, faithless prelates, and unworthy or careless priests, are best repaired by such worthy successors of the apostles as the Venerable Father Hofbauer. The study of their characters and actions is better than the most thorough course of polemics, as an antidote to every kind of pseudo-Catholic liberalism.

THE LIFE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. By Arthur George Knight, of the Society of Jesus. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1877.

Christopher Columbus is, and always will remain, one of the greatest figures in history and one of the grandest of Catholic heroes. He may be said to have passed through all human experience. He was born in poverty and schooled in poverty. His days were cast in one of those eventful periods in the world’s history when “the old order changeth, yielding to the new.” With ideas in his mind just beyond his time, and convinced himself of their truth and power, he had to struggle hopelessly for years under the most adverse circumstances before he could imbue other minds with the ideas that possessed him. He could only think and talk and plan. He was powerless to act, for lack of means. He had the satisfaction of being regarded as a dreamer by the enlightened men of his time. At last his ideas prevailed, and resulted in the discovery of a new world.

Then came his hour of triumph—a triumph unparalleled in history; and after it, more bitter than his early struggles upwards, ingratitude, contempt, chains, and misery. There is nothing more romantic than this story, nothing fraught with more solemn lessons. Through all, through triumph as through adversity, through poverty as through greatness, stands out the true Catholic, who cherished his faith above all things, who in all things looked first to the greater glory of God, and who from first to last lived the life of a practical Catholic. Indeed he was truly a holy man, and strong efforts are now being made for his canonization.

It seems strange that this great Catholic figure should have fallen so completely into Protestant hands. There are admirable histories of him in English, works that have won deserved fame for their authors, but they are all written by Protestants, who, however well disposed they may be, must in the nature of things make mistakes when treating of Catholic subjects. Grave mistakes have been made, not by Protestants alone, but by Catholics also, in the story of Columbus’ life. It is with a view to rectify these mistakes, and to present to the Catholic reader the true story of a most important, edifying, and interesting life that Father Knight has written the present volume. He has done his work thoroughly well, and we have no doubt that the book will become a favorite with all classes of Catholic readers.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF DISTINGUISHED MARYLANDERS. By Esmeralda Boyle, author of Thistledown, Felice, etc. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1877.

This little volume is replete with interest. It recalls in graceful language the memory of men who have honored by their upright lives and heroic actions the gallant State that gave them birth. It is no small boast for Maryland that no State in the Union has produced more men distinguished for their ability, patriotism, and, above all, a high-toned chivalry which could never stoop to aught having the flavor of dishonor about it. These were the men who first won for our country the recognition of European scholars and statesmen. Their lofty principles, their graceful accomplishments, their scholarly attainments, and their dauntless courage drew on them the eyes of the world, and earned for their mother State the proud reputation she now enjoys. From the time that Lord Baltimore landed on her shores to the present day no public man has disgraced the fair record or blurred a page of the history of Maryland. And, indeed, the beginning of her civilized days was an eminently fit prelude to her whole subsequent career. From out of the first colony established on the banks of the Chesapeake flowed the doctrines of religious toleration and equal religious rights to all men irrespective of clime and color, at a moment when witch-burning fires lighted up the settlements of Massachusetts. The Indians of those times for once felt that Christianity and civilization were blessings and not a cloak to avarice and tyranny. “From the records left to us,” says Miss Boyle, “it is evident that these teachers endeavored by all mild and lawful means to elevate the hearts of the Indians to a knowledge of the true God. The Indian of the present day, dwelling on the border-lands of civilization, deems the white man a traitor to his word, an enemy to the Indian race, and a breaker of compacts, whose perfidy must be retaliated upon the innocent by fire and tomahawks. This is rather a sad commentary upon the savage or the Christian of our times. Which is it?”

Miss Boyle appropriately begins her series of biographical sketches with a notice of that truly grand historic figure, Daniel Dulany, the Nestor of the Maryland bar. The unflinching advocate of probity and truth, and a strong friend of freedom, he distinguished himself fitly for the first time by counselling opposition to the famous Stamp Act. His eloquence and fearlessness greatly helped the cause of the Revolution; for although he opposed immediate separation from England, his burning words kindled the fires of opposition to British rule. The name parce detortum is the same as Delany and indicates the Irish stock whence he sprang.

The paper on Charles Carroll of Carrollton is extremely interesting. It presents a very life-like picture of that great patriot, statesman, and devout Catholic. We behold the courtly and polished gentleman, tinged with the airs and manners of an education acquired in the gay capital of France. And though fashionable Paris was at that time the hotbed of infidelity, and Voltaire ruled supreme, young Carroll never became so imbued with the madness of the hour as to abandon the strong Catholic principles and spirit pious parents and teachers had early implanted in his heart. His name will ever remain an honor to his native State, and his virtues and loftiness of character an incentive to her children to cling to the highest standard of a true gentleman’s life.

It is evident that Miss Boyle had abundant materials at hand, for she is constrained at times to sacrifice method to condensation; and this, perhaps, is the worst that can be said of her interesting volume. The sketch of the Most Reverend John Carroll, first Archbishop of Baltimore, is illustrative of this defect. The writer labored under an embarras de richesses, and passes too brusquely from one incident to another.

It is not generally known, nor does Miss Boyle make mention of the fact, which has been already announced in this magazine, that at the time when John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was supplicating George III. to send more troops to America for the purpose of suppressing the unholy rebellion against his majesty’s benign sway, Father John Carroll, the Jesuit priest, was on a mission to Canada, seeking the non-intervention of that colony in the efforts of the States to free themselves from the yoke of British tyranny. And yet it is almost a Methodist article of faith that the Jesuits have ever been the enemies of the republic, and the sons of John Wesley its warmest friends.

William Pinkney, one of Maryland’s most gifted sons, whose eloquence ranks him with Pitt, Fox, and Burke, receives a most fitting tribute from the pen of Miss Boyle. The history of this wonderful man should be known and closely studied by the young men of our time; for few lives exhibit a more perfect pattern of true manliness. His struggles against early poverty and the numerous difficulties attending the efforts to acquire knowledge in those times gave earnest of his future success in life. The late venerable Chief-Justice Taney spoke of him in these words: “I have heard almost all the great advocates of the United States, both of the past and present generation, but I have seen none equal to Pinkney.” Rufus King, having once listened to him exclaimed in a burst of enthusiasm “that the speech of Pinkney had enlarged his admiration of the capacity of the human mind.” Of such men is Maryland justly proud, and Miss Boyle has performed a timely and praiseworthy task in having brought us face to face with the heroes of a past generation, whose memory their native State should ever delight to honor.

SIDONIE. (Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné.) From the French of Alphonse Daudet. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1877.

We understand that this story has had an enormous circulation in France. This circulation we are inclined to attribute rather to the author’s name than to any special excellence in the book itself. Alphonse Daudet is one of the pet French novelists of the day, and it takes much to destroy a well-earned reputation. Sidonie is a repulsive story, told with great skill, and embellished throughout by those thousand and one delicate artistic touches, lights and shades, of which French writers alone seem to possess the secret. M. Daudet is actuated by the very laudable design of punishing vice, and showing in a very strong and real light the awful, the tragic misery it brings upon the vicious and the good alike. All very well. Novelists, however, who take up this kind of theme—and many are very fond of it—have an unpleasant and untrue habit of making their good people fools or simpletons. It seems to us that, as a rule, good people, particularly good women, are remarkably keen in detecting falsehood and scenting rascality. In Sidonie it is all the other way. One detestable little wretch of a woman, who has not half an ounce of good in her whole system, sets all the good people by the ears, destroys the peace of happy families, ruins a great business-house, causes the suicide of several excellent and very charming characters, and ends by retiring to that kingdom from which she should never have been called—Bohemia.

It seems to us a pity that an author of such real power and skill in delineation of character and plot as M. Daudet should waste himself on the unutterably mean. We are not of the opinion that this world is given over to the dominion of the devil and his servants. It is not heaven to any of us; yet as between the good and the bad, all things considered, we believe that the good have the best of the battle even in this life. Of course novel-readers must have their villain, male or female; and the female villain must, of course, be very, very bad. Their viciousness, however, could be shown sufficiently, and the lesson it entails inculcated, without making them the pivots on which the world turns. It is the noble, not the ignoble, who really move the world; and until the race of the noble is exhausted, novelists may as well draw their heroes and heroines from that class. At least we object to their being for ever depicted as fools.

The translation of Sidonie is admirable. It is from the graceful and cultivated pen of Mrs. Mary Neale Sherwood.

LEGENDS OF THE BLESSED SACRAMENT. Gathered from the History of the Church and the Lives of the Saints. By Emily Mary Shapcote. London: Burns & Oates. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This is in every sense a most beautiful and attractive volume. The author has collected a large number of legends connected with the Blessed Sacrament. These are abundantly and very handsomely illustrated, and the letter-press itself is admirable. There is much more, however, than legends in the volume. The devotion of the church to the Blessed Sacrament is traced down to the very days of the apostles, verified by ample quotations, and illustrated by pictures taken from the Catacombs and the earlier monuments of Christian art. This is indeed an excellent and most valuable feature of the work. The whole is in keeping. The devotion is brought up to our own days, and its wonderful growth and development brought out in a clear and most interesting manner. The author has done her work skilfully, gracefully, and reverently. The admirable preface shows how much she is inspired by real love for and devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. The last picture in the volume is a large and admirably-executed portrait of our Holy Father Pope Pius IX.

THE DISCIPLINE OF DRINK: An Historical Inquiry into the principles and practice of the Catholic Church regarding the use, abuse, and disuse of alcoholic liquors, especially in England, Ireland, and Scotland, from the sixth to the sixteenth century. By the Rev. T. E. Bridgett, of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. With an introductory letter to the author by His Eminence Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster. London: Burns & Oates. 1877.

The best notice we can give of this valuable work will be to make a few extracts from Cardinal Manning’s letter. His Eminence says it is “the first attempt to collect the counsels and judgments of Catholic pastors and writers on the use of wine and on the sin of drunkenness.” He believes the book will be “of signal use in clearing away a multitude of prejudices, and perhaps some more reasonable censures, which have impeded the efforts we are making to check the spread of intoxication.” These “more reasonable censures” have been called forth by the words and acts of associations not in the unity of the Catholic Church, and particularly by Catholics having joined such societies and adopted their “wild talk, worthy of the Manichees.” Father Bridgett’s book, then, “will show how broadly the Catholic Church has always taught the lawfulness of using all things that God has made, in all their manifold combinations, so long as we use them in conformity to the law of God. Drunkenness is not the sin of drink, but of the drunkard.” On the other hand, “in every utterance of the church, and in every page of Holy Scripture, wine is surrounded with warnings,” says his Eminence, and adds that our author has “done well to point out that a new and more formidable agent of intoxication even than wine has in the last three centuries confirmed its grasp, chiefly upon the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon races.” So that “no exact precedents can be found in the past action of the church as to the way of dealing with an evil new in its kind, and so far more formidable both in its spread and in its intensity”; while at the same time “the principles of the church are always the same, and, in bringing forth things new and old, forms may vary, but the mind and action are immutable.” The cardinal then proceeds to give his own views of what should be done. He is in favor of “a widely-extended organization,” and advocates total abstinence as the only hope for multitudes, and a specially meritorious act of self-denial in those who do not need it themselves, but embrace it for the sake of others. But—and to this we would call particular attention—the “widely-extended organization” should comprise, in his opinion, those who are not total abstainers. He expresses satisfaction at Father Bridgett having quoted in the appendix some words of his own. We quote them, too, because we most heartily agree with them: “Now, my dear friends, listen! I will go to my grave without tasting intoxicating liquors; but I repeat distinctly that any man who should say that the use of wine or any other like thing is sinful when it does not lead to drunkenness, that man is a heretic condemned by the Catholic Church. With that man I will never work. Now, I desire to promote total abstinence in every way that I can. I will encourage all societies of total abstainers. But the moment I see men not charitable attempting to trample down those who do not belong to the total abstainers, from that moment I will not work with those men. I would have two kinds of pledge: one for the mortified who never taste drink, and the other for the temperate who never abuse it. If I can make these two classes work together, I will work in the midst of them. If I cannot get them to work together, I will work with both of them separately.”

Father Bridgett has given in his appendix “a summary of the principal Catholic organizations which have lately been set on foot in these countries” (England, Ireland, and Scotland). Some of these organizations include partial abstinence in their rules. Another society is mentioned as existing in some parts of Germany, and approved by His Holiness Pius IX. and enriched with indulgences. The members of this last promise total abstinence from distilled liquors, and sobriety in the use of fermented drinks.

We hope this labor of love from the pen of Father Bridgett will have the circulation it deserves.

SPIRIT INVOCATIONS; or, Prayers and Praises publicly offered at the Banner of Light circle-room free meetings by more than one hundred different spirits, of various nationalities and religions, through the vocal organs of the late Mrs. J. H. Conant. Compiled by Allen Putnam, A.M., author of Bible Marvel-Workers, Natty: a Spirit, etc. Boston: Colby & Rich. 1876.

Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat would be an appropriate motto for this hodge-podge of nonsense and lunacy. Imagine a sane man being called on to believe that he is listening to prayers offered by the spirits of Tom Paine and Cardinal Cheverus through the same set of “vocal organs”! It is evident that the “prayers” were all ground from one mill, as there is the utmost sameness pervading them. Tom Paine condescending to come down from the pedestal of his celestial greatness, and praying with unctuous fervor to the God he blasphemed on earth, is a spectacle highly refreshing; but more astonishing still is it to find him surpass Father de Smet and Cardinal Cheverus in the ecstatic intensity of a mystical devotion. “We pray not for more blessings,” exclaims the pious Thomas; “we only pray that we may appreciate those already received; and when we lift up our souls in prayer, asking that thy kingdom may come on the earth, we do but ask that thy children in mortal may know themselves and their relations to thee.”

It is evident that the author of the Age of Reason has materially changed his “spirit” since he exuviated his mortal coil, or perhaps he has deftly substituted that of Mr. Putnam, A.M., for his own. This, we rather suspect, is the case. Theodore Parker, too, has been to camp-meeting up above; for a great change has come over the “spirit” of the frigid founder of New England transcendentalism. He prays with a vim that no leader of a revival at Sea Cliff or Sing Sing could ever hope to emulate, and appears shamefully unlike the Rev. O. B. Frothingham’s ideal of a hero. Some of the prayers are quite touching, and sound as if they had been pilfered from Catholic books of devotion.

KNOWN TOO LATE. By the author of Tyborne, Irish Homes and Irish Hearts, etc., etc. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1877.

This little volume bears the impress of patient and painstaking care. The author is the happy possessor of a pure and pleasant style, and yet throws off nothing carelessly, as too many with facile pens are disposed to do. The narrative is done in subdued colors, and nowhere is good taste shocked by the utterance of extravagant or whimsical sentiments.

The plot of the story unfolds itself quite naturally, and, though the dénoûment is a hard one to bring about, it is done so ingeniously as not to appear at all violent. We can conscientiously say of this little book that it is a shade in advance of Catholic stories generally and is well deserving a perusal.

THE PARADISE OF THE CHRISTIAN SOUL. By James Merlo Herstius, of the Church of the B. Virgin Mary in Pasculo Pastoris, at Cologne. A new and complete translation. By lawful authority. London: Burns & Oates. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

A most complete manual of prayer for ordinary use. One cannot tire of it. The present edition is illustrated; but the illustrations might easily have been improved.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXV., No. 149.—AUGUST, 1877.

THE POLITICAL CRISIS IN FRANCE AND ITS BEARINGS.

I.—QUESTION STATED.

The attention of the world at large is at present fastened on two important movements—the war between Russia and Turkey and the recent political changes in France. Both of these have the same origin, but the aspect of each is different. No one will dispute that both are fraught with most momentous interests, that their development will be watched with great concern, and that it is not impossible that their final issue may change the religious features no less than the territorial limits of Europe.

Our purpose in this article is to confine the attention of our readers to the affairs of France; not with the design of narrating the successive events which brought about the present crisis,[93] but with a view to the principles involved in the struggle and their bearing on the great interests of Europe, actual and prospective.

Footnote 93:

See THE CATHOLIC WORLD, July, 1877: “Marshal MacMahon and the French Revolutionists.”

What agitates France at this moment is not an “ultramontane” and “clerical intrigue” to restore “the temporal princedom of the Pope,” or an “anti-republican” plot of legitimists to place Henry V. on the throne of his ancestors, as our daily newspapers of all political parties and the weekly Protestant journals of every sect would have the public believe. The real political leaders in France today are representative of none of these parties, nor are they champions of their distinctive principles or advocates of their cherished measures. They have other fish to fry. Some of the newspaper writers and correspondents would persuade their readers that the change of front in France by the government is owing to the influence exerted by Madame MacMahon over the President of the Republic, her husband. Drowning men catch at straws, and men who lack common sense clutch at any flimsy pretext to bolster up a foolish project.

The day of the supremacy of such influence in great state affairs is gone by; and, even were it not, the character of the men engaged in this weighty piece of political strategy is not made of stuff that would incline them to be led by the nose by a woman, whatever may be her reputation for piety or her supposed or declared inclinations for legitimacy. We venture the opinion that the most estimable Christian wife of the Marshal-President of the Republic of France is not wasting her time in fruitless political intrigues, but employs it better in telling her beads, in taking care of her children, and in works of charity to her neighbor. All these are random shots.

The raising of such false issues, however, serves the purpose of their inventors in throwing the public attention off the true scent, and thereby prolonging the opportunity for them to invent new schemes against public order and society under the restored leadership of the octogenarian, M. Thiers. This was their manœuvre in 1871, and “Prince Bismarck regretted the fall of M. Thiers, because he would have infallibly thrown France into the arms of M. Gambetta and anarchy.”[94] They also afford them additional chances of escape from the due and certain punishment which is impending over them.

Footnote 94:

See Count von Arnim’s pamphlet, Pro Nihilo.

These pretexts show also the craft of those who make them and the simplicity of their dupes. For they are well aware that there is a large class of persons, especially in Protestant communities, whose prepossessions are stronger than their attachment to Christianity, and there are no absurdities too great for them to swallow, provided only you bait them with the cry of “Popery!” “Vaticanism!” “Clericalism!” As for those who are caught by the cry of “anti-republicanism,” they appear not to understand that a king without the popular instincts of a people in his favor is a mere cipher, and that the age is past and never again to return, at least in Europe, when, as an Eastern despot, the king dare say: “L’Etat, c’est moi.”

The transformation that has taken place in the nations of Europe, the expansion of their narrow lines of policy into broader political principles, has been so rapid and powerful that its force in our day has passed beyond all possible human control. These principles have become profound convictions, and for not heeding them the people of France dethroned Charles X. and Louis Philippe; and were Henry V. placed to-day upon the throne of France with the intention of attempting to restore the ancient régime, it would be as vain, even though he should have Marshal MacMahon and the army at his command to back him, as an effort to stem and throw back the mighty torrents that pour their waters over the precipice of Niagara.

The tendency of modern society to a political equality, without distinction of the privileges of birth or rank, has its root in the spirit of Christianity. The Catholic Church, in this sense, is the most democratic institution that has ever existed upon this earth. There is no barrier in the path for its humblest member to become its chief in power and dignity. It is not seldom, too, that those who have risen from the lowest walk in life have been elected to this high position. The spirit of an age, rightly interpreted, is the breath of the Almighty stirring within men’s souls, which finds its utterance in their voices, even in spite of themselves. Nowhere has the Catholic Church been given such fair play, though this is yet imperfect, as in the democratic republic of the United States. This fact has been recognized by the supreme pastor of the faithful, Pius IX., and again and again he has called the attention of the world to it.

France has the opportunity under the presidency of Marshal MacMahon, if she only knew how to profit by it, of forming a political government adapted to the genius and character of her people and in harmony with her present wants and future greatness; to govern herself, if she wishes it, independently of an emperor or a hereditary monarch; and this task will be accomplished, unless hindered by that enemy of all rational liberty—a destructive radicalism. If the young Napoleon, or the Count of Paris, or Henry V. ascends the throne of France, it will be due to the Thierses, the Simons, and the Gambettas and their abettors.

II.—TWO MOVEMENTS IN THE WORLD.

There have been from the beginning only two fundamental movements in this world, and these are becoming in Europe more and more distinct, powerful, and antagonistic. The one has its source in the Catholic Church, which is the concrete form of the direct action of God on society in view of man’s true destination. The other consists in rebellion against this divine action, and finds on earth its headquarters and expression in heresies, in despotisms, and, more particularly in recent days, in organized secret societies.

III.—FIRST MOVEMENT.

The order and stability of modern society and civilization are based upon the truths which find their root and support in the doctrines unswervingly taught and uncompromisingly upheld by the Catholic Church. Among these great truths are the divinity of Christ and the divine establishment and perpetuity of his church upon earth; the unquestionable responsibility of both kings and peoples to the law of God; the indissolubility of the marriage tie and the sacredness of the family; the reign of the law of justice between man and man, and, when violated, the strict obligation of restitution; the sacredness of oaths and the equality of all men, without distinction of rank, color, or race, before God. By the undeviating application of these and other great first truths of divine revelation and of human reason, at the cost of the lives of millions of her children; by withstanding the fierce attacks of the barbarians of the northern forests of Europe; by her contest with Mahomet and his followers; and by her resistance to the errors and vices of her inconsistent and disobedient children, the Catholic Church formed the conscience of modern society, founded the nations of Europe, united them in a universal commonwealth called Christendom, in view and as the means of establishing the reign of God in men’s souls and upon earth, as preliminary to the kingdom of heaven hereafter, issuing finally into the Christian cosmos.

Such has been the work of the first movement.

IV.—SECOND MOVEMENT.

All heresies, all despotisms, all secret societies have this postulate in common: that the overthrow of the Catholic Church is a sine qua non to their attaining ultimate success. Hence there is an instinctive and unanimous sympathy among their adherents whenever there is an attack aimed against the Catholic Church—an unmistakable sign of their common origin and an unquestionable proof of their parentage. Peoples of countries distinguished for their profession of universal toleration and championship of the right of every individual to the enjoyment of his own religious convictions will applaud to the skies the violation of these principles, provided the persecuted be only Catholics! Every right guaranteed by constitutional law, every principle of divine and human justice, may be trampled under foot—yea, with sympathy and applause—provided those who do so are animated with hatred for the Catholic Church! Witness the public sympathy, both in England and the United States, with the war of imprisonments, fines, and banishments waged against Catholics, with murderous intent against their church, by the “iron and blood” chancellor of the Hohenzollern Empire; witness the confiscations and sacrilegious spoliations by the crew of infidels of Italy, led by a Mancini, against the church; witness the banishment of all the Catholic priests without exception from its district, in violation of the federal constitution, by the canton of Berne, and the robbery of the churches built by the sacrifices of loyal Catholics, which are given over to the use of a rebellious and insignificant faction by the authorities of the Swiss so-called republic; witness, to come nearer home, the assassination, by the agents of secret societies, of the President of Equador, and, within a few weeks, the poisoning of the Archbishop of Quito at the altar! There are none to raise a voice, not to say a cry of horror or indignation, among these sticklers for liberty and justice, in condemnation of this wholesale tyranny, these cruel persecutions, and this secret and deadly violence. This is well known by the atheists, who aim at the ruin of all Christian institutions: that to delude a large class in these so-called liberty-loving countries, and gain their sympathy, material aid, and the use and support of their press, all that is required to make them run like an enraged bull at a red rag is to shout lustily, “Ultramontanism!” “Vaticanism!” “Popery!”

Herein lies also the interpretation of the assertion of the governments actuated by an anti-Christian spirit and under the influence of members of secret societies, to whom they are bound to trim, that the present attitude of France is dangerous to the peace of Europe. That is, the secret designs of radicalism are detected, and their plots are in danger of being checkmated. “Let the galled jades wince.” At the same time it gives the explanation of the motives of Marshal MacMahon, which is nothing else than to head off the efforts of these anti-Christian conspirators, and prevent France from falling into their hands and the civilized world from witnessing the repetition of the atrocities of the Commune of the petroleuse notoriety of 1871. A large portion of the people, and with them the press, of England and the United States, is duped by cunning and designing men; and probably, if all were known, a portion of Bismarck’s Reptile Fund has found its way to their shores and done some service.

The present crisis in France is fraught with her deliverance as well as that of Europe from the most desperate and wide-spread organized conspiracy that has ever existed in the world. They fail to interpret rightly public events and to discern the signs of the times who take it to mean anything less than the saving of Christianity and modern civilization in Europe.

“Let order die!

* * * * *

Let one spirit of the first-born Cain Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set On bloody courses, the rude scene may end And darkness be the burier of the dead.”

Such is their aim, and it is also their undisguised and outspoken word; for these men “know not how to blush.”[95]

Footnote 95:

If any of our readers wish authentic information on this point, they will find it abundantly in a book entitled Les Libéraux Peints par Eux-Mêmes. Par G. Lebrocquez. Paris: Victor Palmé, 1876.

And these are the chief characteristics of the second movement.

V.—THE LINES OF BATTLE.

The explosion of the first mine laid by secret societies has been heard in the outbreak of the war between Russia and Turkey, if we are to credit Disraeli, than whom no man is in a position to be better informed of the decisions gone forth from their secret revolutionary headquarters. Unless thwarted by a counter movement, prompted by the instincts of self-preservation on the part of all the Christian and conservative elements of European society, we may expect to hear, as in 1848, the successive explosions of revolution in Paris, Vienna, Rome, Madrid, and Berlin; and being more skilfully planned, and more extensively spread, and more powerful, a revolutionary upheaving of the populations in St. Petersburg and London as well as in the lesser centres of Europe, is not improbable.

Men who read in consequences their causes will not fail to see the significance of the position taken by the President of the Republic of France; for, whatever may be his reputation as a politician, his military sagacity and strategical genius are unquestioned. President MacMahon’s change of cabinet is the first declared, earnest, and decided step taken to avert from France and all Europe this great and threatening catastrophe. For Jules Simon surreptitiously attempted to insert the edge of the radical wedge, whose butt end is made up of socialism, communism, and anarchy, into the Republic of France, which M. Gambetta, his aspiring and designated successor, would have energetically and logically driven home and riven her asunder, to the delight of her enemies and to the advantage of her foes. Let us hope that the President of France has taken time by the forelock.

The die is cast; there can no longer be any neutrality or secondary motives to divide one’s allegiance between these two distinctly-drawn camps. He is a traitor to Christ and a renegade Christian who stands aloof or hesitates which side to take when a battle is fairly drawn between Christianity and atheism. Every Christian, whatever may be his peculiar tenets, will make common cause when the primary truths of divine revelation and the first principles of morality are at stake. All political party designations will be sunk into oblivion by men who intelligently and disinterestedly love their country and their race, when both society and civilization are endangered.

The present crisis in France is a call to both religion and patriotism, in their best and widest sense, to unite in a common defence of their truest and highest interests.

There is no alternative, and he who does not see this battle imminent in Europe is like an officer on board of a ship, lulled in a dream of false peace or disputing about the rigging of his vessel when the enemy is fastening a torpedo to its bow that will in a few seconds blow them all into atoms and send their vessel to the bottom of the ocean.

The conservative elements, if not from higher motives, will be forced to unite from the instinct of self-preservation to save their property from the petroleurs and their necks from the guillotine.

VI.—THE ISSUE OF THE BATTLE.

This movement in its weak beginnings in France, regarding only impending dangers to the state, will not exhaust itself until it has restored the Catholic Church to her normal position in Europe. This final result is no more intended by the leaders of the movement than it was the design of the Allied Powers to restore the Papacy at the downfall of the first Napoleon. It is a divine law that man acts, but God directs.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.”

There is, then, this increasing purpose running through the history of God’s dealings with the human race: to bring into clearer light the divine character of his church, his spouse, rendering it less and less possible for men to recognize his existence and not be Christians, and, being Christians, not to be Catholics. This is the key of universal history.

There is not an “ultramontane,” a “clerical,” or a “papist,” in the sense in which these words are used by those hostile to the actual movement in France; and if its final outcome be favorable to the Catholic Church, it is because this is the nature of things.

VII.—ERRORS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.

Europe for the past century has been in the state of transition to a new epoch—a renewal of Catholicity. This statement is in flat contradiction with the assertions of some modern thinkers who claim the title of philosophers. They would have us believe that religious motives—or, as they term it, “theological motives,” which is the same thing; for theology is nothing else than the scientific statement of religion—are exhausted. This is equivalent to saying that human nature is exhausted; for religion is what lies deepest in human nature, and consequently all other motives will be exhausted before those of religion.

Religion is the very essence of man’s nature; for it springs from the intellectual sense of his entire dependence for existence on an absolute cause. Religion is, in its last analysis, reason’s recognition of God and man’s fulfilment of his relations to God. Religion and reason are, therefore, correlative.

Men who pretend that religious motives have ceased to have a strong hold upon human nature labor under a complete hallucination. First they fancy that those faculties through which God acts on the soul, and which bring the soul in contact with God, have by some strange freak suddenly become defunct. That religious motives to an almost incredible extent have become extinct in some men’s souls we, with pain and pity, admit; that this is the case with the bulk of mankind is an egregious mistake. There has seldom been an age when religious questions occupied so large a share of intellectual attention as our own; and religious motives still influence the bulk of mankind in their conduct.

It is too true, however, that a class of men have fatally succeeded, by a false education and an erroneous philosophy, in paralyzing the action of the noblest faculties of the soul; but this disease is confined to a small class. Deluded men! they would have the rest of mankind to esteem their descent as a privilege and count their defect an honor.

The second form in which the symptoms of this malady manifest themselves is the eschewing of the first principles of sound logic. As “God is a provisionary idea,” or “man’s intuition of himself projected into space,” or “the creation of a wish”—so runs their premise; and the religious faculties of the soul having become extinct, they jump to the most absurd of all conclusions: “God is extinct,” “the soul’s immortality is a fable,” and “religion is a worn-out superstition”! The inspired Psalmist wrote in his day that none but “the fool said in his heart, There is no God.” Were he now to come upon earth, he would be surprised to see the fools of his time dressed in the garb of philosophers and proclaiming from the house-tops as the highest wisdom, “God is extinct!” These delirious minds are like the ostrich, which, when on the point of being captured, blinds its eyes by thrusting its head under the sand, and foolishly fancies, because of its incapacity to see, it has destroyed its pursuers and escaped all danger.

“Le nid n’a pas créé l’oiseau.”

“I tell thee, friend, a speculating churl Is like a beast some evil spirit chases Along a barren heath in one perpetual whirl, While round about lie fair, green pasturing places.”

The eternal God is, and in him is all that lives, moves, and exists, and his providence directs all things to the end for which he called them into existence.

The world is not out of joint, nor is the responsibility of setting it right placed upon the unsteady and feeble shoulders of inventors of absurd religions, the cogitators of false philosophies, or the dreamers of sterile Utopias.

God is not ousted from his creation as easily as these ambitious philosophers, who are so ready to occupy his place in the universe, would have the world believe.

VIII.—MISTAKE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHERS.

The mistake of a class of speculative thinkers consists in regarding the state of transition of society from one epoch to another—in interpreting a phase of religion—as the change and vanishing of the indestructible elements of all religion.

A certain class of truths suits one age, awakens the greatest enthusiasm and profoundest devotion, and in another epoch falls dead almost upon the ears of men and hardly calls forth an audible response. Epochs differ from epochs in their aspirations and instincts, like those of individuals; and this is a law of the providential education and growth of the human race. One race of men differs from another in its capacity to seize hold of, appreciate, and give the proper expression to certain truths, and in turn is brought to the front ranks in the providential march of humanity. And this is the intention of the Author of the human family. Men of the same race differ also greatly from each other; for in the wide universe there are no two things in all respects precisely alike, and in this is seen displayed God’s creative power.

These separate epochs, this variety of races, and these differences among men afford to Christianity the opportunities and means of giving expression to the great truths contained in all religions of which she is the adequate representation. For Christianity is the synthesis of all the scattered truths of every form of religion which has existed from the beginning of the world, and the Catholic Church is its complete organic, living form. Christianity is the abstract expression of the Catholic Church, which, in the successive centuries of her existence, has come in contact with every race of men, and has known how to Christianize and retain them in her fold in harmony with their natural instincts. She has met humanity in every stage of its development, from the intellectual and refined Greek to the man-eating savage, and, by working on the foundations of nature, she has captivated them to the easy yoke of Christ. The Catholic Church alone has known how to supply the defects of human nature and correct its vices while giving free play to its instincts and retaining the charm of its native originality—not by a superior human sagacity or a preternatural craft, as sophists would make the world believe, but because in her dwells that divine Spirit which breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life, and made him a living, rational, immortal soul, and in whom he lives, moves, and has his being.

God is not extinct nor are religious motives effete. The mistake of these theorizers consists in supposing that the present is the finality of Christianity, whereas the hand of God is opening the way by purifying his church, by directing the movements of nations and the issues of the world, in order that she may shape the coming future beyond all past experience in her progressive approach to the perfect realization of her divine Ideal.

“An age comes on, which came three times of old, When the enfeebled nations shall stand still To be by Christian science shaped at will.”

IX.—NEW UNITED CHRISTENDOM.

Are the intelligent Christians of our day sufficiently aware of the serious character and the extent of the dangers which are now impending? Do they appreciate the import of the questions which engage and agitate the active intellect of their contemporaries? Are they sensible of the weight of their responsibilities, and ready to lift their minds and hearts to the grandeur of the mission of the age in which their lot is cast?

He who can see things as they are throughout the world where the Christian faith has spread, and appreciate them rightly, cannot help seeing that a fresh unfolding of the great design of Christianity in all its simplicity, vastness, and splendor, and a stricter application of its principles in the several spheres of life, alone are adequate to meet all the genuine aspirations and satisfy the honest demands of this age.

The attack is against the primary truths of reason no less than the essential truths of divine revelation, and the defence, to be adequate and victorious, must at least be equal to the attack. Thus the law of reaction is forcing upon the leading Christian minds a reaffirmation of natural and revealed truths with a completeness and a force which the world has not up to this time witnessed. There can be no compromise with the false principles of atheists in religion, revolutionists in the state, and anarchists in society. Their errors must be refuted and their movements counteracted. The positive side of truth must be brought out and clothed in all its beauty. The true picture must be presented and contrasted with the false, so as to captivate the intelligence and enlist the enthusiasm of the active minds of the youth of the age. This is the great work that, in the economy of God, is mainly left to the initiative of individual minds of the members of his church. It is the work of Catholic genius illuminated by the light and the interior inspirations of the working of the Holy Spirit. The Church, in every critical or important epoch in her history, has always given birth to providential men; these are her Gregories, Augustines, Benedicts, Bernards, Francises, Neris, Ignatiuses, Vincents of Paul.

As in the past, so in the present, a new phase of the church will be presented to the world—one that will reveal more clearly and completely her divine character. “It is the divine action of the Holy Spirit in and through the church which gives to her organization the reason for its existence. And it is the fuller explanation of the divine side of the church, and its relations with the human side, giving always to the former its due accentuation, that will contribute to the increase of the interior life of the faithful, and aid powerfully to remove the blindness of those—whose number is much larger than is commonly supposed—who only see the church on her human side.”[96]

Footnote 96:

An Exposition of the Church, in view of recent Difficulties and Controversies and the present Need of the Age. London: Pickering. 1875. THE CATHOLIC WORLD, April, 1875, p. 128.

The reintegration into general principles of the scattered truths contained in the religious, social, and political sects and parties of our day would reveal to all upright souls their own ideal more clearly and completely, and at the same time present to them the practical measures and force necessary to its realization. By this process sects and parties and antagonisms would become as far as possible extinct—not by way of antagonism, but by the power of assimilation and attraction. Just as the lesser magnet is drawn to the greater by cords of attraction identical with its own, only more intense, more powerful, and all-embracing, so the fragmentary truths contained in error, when reintegrated in their general principles, will be drawn to them and their division disappear. Christianity once more will be perfect in one, and, uniting its forces for the conversion of the world, will direct humanity as one man to its divine destination.

X.—THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH.

Is not such a consummation the answer to the devout aspiration of all sincere Christian souls? Is it not also the promise of Christianity, and was it not the object of the most earnest prayer of its Founder when upon earth? The Son of God did not pray in vain.

Underneath all the errors and evils found among men of all times is the prime desire for the knowledge of the truth and the native hunger for the good. Now, the absolute truth which contains all truth, and the absolute good which contains the supreme good, is God. God is therefore the ideal of the rational soul, the term of all its seeking, and the end of all its wishes. The perfect union of the soul with God is bliss.

Again, Christianity does not confine itself to the reign of God in the soul; it seeks to establish the reign of God upon earth. “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” was the petition of Christ to his heavenly Father. His life was not confined to contemplation and preaching; he “went about doing good.”

Genuine contemplation and action are inseparable. He who sees truth loves truth, and he who loves truth seeks to spread the knowledge and the practice of truth. Divine love is infinitely active, and, when it has entered the human heart and has set it on fire, it pushes man to all outward perfection and visible justice. No men have labored so zealously and so efficiently for their fellow-men, for the establishment of God’s kingdom upon earth, as the saints of God.

The love of God and the love of man are one. God promises his reward not to the ignorant, or to the indolent, or to the indifferent, but to those who visit the prisoner, feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, to the doing of good works as the evidence of the true faith.

The Catholic Church teaches to men their true relations to God and to their fellow-men, and by the practical application of the principles which govern these relations are removed the errors and vices which hinder the establishment of the reign of God in men’s souls and everywhere upon earth. The history of civilization since the moment of the church’s institution on the day of Pentecost is nothing else than a record of the several steps of progress of society, under the guidance of the Catholic Church, in reaching this goal. Whatever elements the nineteenth century possesses superior to Judaism, paganism, barbarism, and Islamism are due to the uninterrupted action of Christ upon the world through the Catholic Church. Modern civilization may be defined as the result of nineteen centuries of action of the Holy Spirit dwelling in the Catholic Church in establishing the reign of God in men’s souls and the kingdom of heaven upon earth. “God is now taking the dross out of the crucible, so as to render his people free from all alloy, and once more to clothe the church for which our Lord delivered himself up with beauty resplendent with glory. And when God shall have accomplished this, he will remove the rod of his justice from the church, and, that his divine name may no longer be blasphemed, he will give her victory, a victory far more brilliant than her sufferings have been terrible. May this triumph not be delayed!”[97]

Footnote 97:

Letter of Pope Pius IX. to Mgr. Lachat, April 27, 1876.

XI.—THE CATHOLIC IDEA OF HEAVEN.

The Catholic Church teaches that the road to a blessed hereafter is by striving to establish the kingdom of heaven upon earth; it is after a life spent in practical good works that the soul merits to hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.” But then do all the soul’s interests cease the moment it has left this world and entered upon its future life? Is it true that the only thought of a true Christian is to get well out of this world and all that belongs to it, and give it no further concern? Is this the Catholic idea?

Not at all. The Catholic idea is that as our transformation in God is perfected, so do all the faculties of the soul increase. The soul knows more, loves more, and does more infinitely in the blessed land than when upon this earth. The lives of most of us while here are only a little better than a sleep. The soul’s vision of the divine Essence, and its participation in the divine Nature, render it, like the angels, “God’s coadjutor” in the realization of his ideal in the vast universe. So far from the knowledge of this globe, and the affection towards its inhabitants or interests in its concerns, being lessened or lost by the citizens of heaven, the knowledge acquired and the affections formed during their life upon earth are essentially retained, and are enlarged and intensified; and on this truth is based the Catholic doctrine of the communion and invocation of saints. Hence to this knowledge and affection and constant interest taken by the souls in heaven in the welfare of this world, and of those from whom they are corporally but not really separated, and to their power to aid them, is owing the adoption of angels and saints as patrons by Catholic nations, cities, villages, towns, and by every individual Catholic. He who is ignorant of the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints, and who is not within the Catholic fold, can have no conception of the intimate and intense, uninterrupted spiritual intercourse between the soul of a truly devout Catholic and the angelical and saintly inhabitants of heaven. The church militant and the church triumphant are substantially one, form one communion, and their action is inseparable. The Catholic idea, then, is this: that the power of the soul, on entering into heaven, to aid man upon earth in the realization of his true destiny is redoubled; and that this power is most efficaciously employed in our favor by the souls of the eternally blessed. The retrospective action of the inhabitants of the other world on the welfare of this world greatly accelerates its progress, and, compared with their direct action while upon earth, it is immeasurably greater and free from all alloy.

XII.—FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF MODERN INFIDELS.

The Catholic Church places no gulf between God and humanity, or divorce between heaven and earth, or antagonism between revelation and reason, or religion and science; and she repudiates the doctrine which emphasizes faith at the expense of good works. Hence the accusation of modern infidels against Christianity, as confining itself exclusively to man’s happiness hereafter—“a post-mortem happiness”—while ignoring his actual, present good—“ante-mortem happiness”—may have some show of reason as against Protestant sects, especially of the Calvinistic sect; but it is altogether false, and must be set down to defective knowledge, when made against the Catholic Church.

It is through the faithful reception of the divine action of the Catholic Church by individuals and society that the highest good possible for man here and hereafter can be surely attained; and this needs only clearly to be seen to restore to her true and visible fold all the descendants of the members separated from the Catholic Church by the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, who are in good faith.

And it is the bringing out into a clearer light the divine side of the church, and to the front those truths which eliminate the errors rife in our day and their stricter application to present evils, that, by the instinct of the Holy Spirit, now preoccupies the active intelligent mind of Catholics throughout the world, especially in countries where the dangers are most imminent, such as France, Germany, and Italy.

XIII.—PROMISES, FALSE AND TRUE.

There are two controlling forces, explain their origin as we may, visible in the conflicting movements of human affairs in this world. The one places man in possession of the Supreme Good, and makes him a co-worker with his Creator in the realization of the ideal for which God called this great universe into existence. The other is instigated by the enemy of God and the human race, seeking by false promises to lead man astray.

“You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,” was Satan’s promise to our first parents. This promise contained what was desirable for man; God had implanted in the human soul the aspiration for its fulfilment. But what the enemy promised he had not the power to perform, and the road that he pointed out as leading to the fulfilment of the promise led in a wrong direction.

The right answer of our first parents to Satan would have been: “We know that God has made our souls in his own image and likeness, and that we shall be made participators of his divine Nature, and thereby deified; and as our Creator has endowed us with the gift of intelligence, we shall also gain the knowledge of good and evil—for this is its proper object. And we know also with certitude that we shall gain these great rewards by following the paths which God has pointed out to us.” Had they thus spoken, they would have, in the strength of their innocence and conscious rectitude, added: “Begone, tempter! Thou art a liar; for what thou dost promise it is not thine to give; and instead of wishing our elevation, thou seekest to accomplish our fall and utter ruin!”

As in the beginning, so now, Satan seizes hold of the noblest aspirations of the soul, and, by deceiving men under the guise of a real good, leads them quite astray. For what underlies the promises of Protestantism and its innumerable sects; and rationalism, so-called, and its different phases; and the secularists, positivists, scientists, atheists, radicals, materialists, spiritists, revolutionists, evolutionists, socialists, pessimists, free-religionists, communists, internationalists, optimists, theists, nihilists, kulturkämpfer, agnostics, intuitionists, transcendentalists, and other sects and parties too numerous to mention—for their name is legion, and their confusion of tongues is as great as that of Babel—what underlies their promises is in one aspect true and in a sense desirable. The right answer to all their fine promises is this: “You affirm undoubted truths and you hold out a desirable good; but the way that you point out for realizing the one and attaining the other is subversive of all truth and the supreme good, and it will not reach even what you aim at, but end in entire disappointment and anarchy. Put together the fragmentary truths affirmed by each of your different religious sects, and you will find them all contained in Catholicity. Make a list of all the honest demands for ameliorations and reforms in man’s social, industrial, and political condition—it will not be a short one—and you will discover that they have their truth in the spirit, and are justified by the teachings and the practice, of the Catholic Church.” O sincere seeker after truth! did you but know it, the path lies open before you to a perennial fountain of truth, where you can slake to the full that thirst which has so long tormented your soul. O sincere lover of your fellow-men! there is a living body which you may see and co-operate with, whose divine action is realizing a heavenly vision for the whole human race, brighter and more beautiful than the ideal which so often haunts your lonely dreams!

The divine ideal is a God-given aspiration to your soul, but the way to realize it is not by building up a tower of Babel.

XIV.—CONCLUSION.

The evolution of Catholicity which is now coming slowly to the light will gather up all the rich treasures of the past, march in response to every honest demand of the interests of the actual present, and guide the genuine aspirations of the race in the sure way to the more perfect future of its hopes.

This sublime mission is not the self-imposed work of any man or party of men, but the divinely-imposed task of religion, of the present, visible, living body of Christ, the church of God. None other has the power to renew the world, unite together in one band the whole human race, and direct its energies to enterprises worthy of man’s great destiny. Marshal MacMahon, Duke de Broglie, or any one else, legitimists, imperialists, Orleanists, republicans, anti-republicans, these men and these parties in France may contribute more or less as instruments to the initiation of the new order of things in Europe, but that is all. They will betray the cause of God and the interests of humanity, if they should attempt to turn it to any individual account or to any partisan triumph, whether called religious or political. The enemies of the church may place hindrances in her way, but they cannot stop her in reaching her goal. God alone rules and reigns.

God has spoken his “thus far shalt thou go, and no further” to his enemies and to all the persecutors of the church of Christ. When God arises, his enemies will flee and be scattered. Their strength, compared with that of his children, is as the strength of a rope of sand. Their power is gained by secrecy, and their influence by threats and deeds of violence; for their real numbers constitute but a small fraction of the French, German, Italian, and Spanish or any other people. The present struggle will render this fact evident to all the world.

Strange destiny that of France, to be the leader of Europe both for good and for evil! France was the first nation converted to Christianity in western Europe, and the first to proclaim herself, as a nation, infidel. France will be the first to recover from her errors and give the initial blow that will end in the overthrow of the enemies of modern civilization and Christianity.

The Marshal-President of the Republic of France, the brave soldier, the man without fear or reproach, is not the man to betray his high trusts through any personal ambition, or to any party, legitimist, Orleanist, imperialist, Gambettist, or whatever may be the name which it bears on its banner.

The mission of the President of France is to keep ambitious men and partisans at bay, and afford the best elements and the truest interests of all France a fair expression and the opportunity of forming a stable and suitable political government. The Catholic Church has been made to suffer too much and too long from crowned emperors, royal dynasties, and political factions in France and elsewhere to identify her great cause with theirs.

France, under the providence of God, is slowly being taught to stand on her own feet, to assert her true manhood, and to practise self-government. The political virtues the French people have practised, and the self-control they have displayed, since the formation of the republic, have discomfited their enemies, increased the admiration of their friends, and won the applause of the civilized world. France never was so really great as she is at this moment.

The purity of the motives of the President of the Republic, the disinterested love of his country, and his undaunted valor have never been impeached, nor has his escutcheon ever borne the slightest stain. His sagacity and prudence have never been at fault. That he has a will Jules Simon has learned to his cost. Patrick MacMahon, the marshal of the armies of France and the first President of her Republic, possesses evidently all the distinguishing qualities of the first commander-in-chief of the American army and the first President of the Republic of the United States—George Washington. The French people can safely trust for one term, and not unlikely for a second, their liberties, their interests, and their honor to the keeping of such a man.

France will find in her president a providential man, and his name will go down to posterity with the title of our own great patriot, the noblest of all titles—“MacMahon, the Father of his Country.”

The turning point of a new era for Europe and of the renewal of Catholicity is entrusted by divine Providence to the hands of the eldest daughter of his church—France! In the answer of France to the present issue lies the secret of the weal or the woe of the future of Europe.

PHIL REDMOND OF BALLYMACREEDY.

“Whisht!” exclaimed the blind hostler attached to the Derralossory Arms. “There’s a car rowlin’ along the Bray Road, an’, from the sperrit that’s in the baste, it’s Luke Finnigan that’s dhrivin’ him. Ay, faix,” he added with a self-satisfied chuckle, “an’ that’s Luke Finnigan’s note. I’d know it from this t’ Arklow.”

A wild whoop and a sound of wheels in the direction indicated announced the approaching vehicle, and, ere the sightless hostler could grope his way from the snug corner in which he had been ensconced by the roaring kitchen fire—it was the middle of July—an outside car dashed up to the principal door of the hotel, stopped with a jerk as if on the edge of a precipice, and the driver, throwing the reins upon the neck of the panting horse, cried out as he gaily entered the hostelry:

“Now, thin, Misther Murphy, be nimble wud the liquor. There’s a rale gintleman goin’ for to stand, an’ I’m as dhry as a cuckoo.”

Upon the vehicle sat a young man whose exquisitely-fitting frock-coat, faultless linen, diamond studs, soft hat, and square-toed boots bespoke the American. He was fair, with soft and expressive eyes, and wore a Henri Quatre beard which admirably became his long and pensive face.

“Yer welkim to the County Wicklow, sir,” cried the hostler, who had approached the car and was engaged in giving a drink to the jaded animal. “It’s an illigant place for rocks an’ rivers an’ threes an’ scenery. Sorra a forriner that cums into it but is loath for to lave it. It takes a hoult av thim.”

“It is a very, very beautiful place,” exclaimed the new-comer enthusiastically, as he sprang to terra firma. “So green, so fresh, so—but you cannot enjoy it, my poor fellow!” suddenly perceiving the sightless orbs which were turned toward him.

“It’s many a day sence I seen it, sir,” responded the man, with a weary moan in his utterance—“many an’ many a day.”

“Thrue for him,” added the driver, emerging from the hotel and swabbing his mouth with the back of a bronzed and blistered hand, while bright beads twinkled like fallen stars in his merry eyes. “He’s dark sence he was a gossoon! An’ it’s a sight for to see him along wud the horses in the stable; he’ll go into stalls, an’ the bastes kickin’ thim to smithereens, but sorra a word they’ll say to him, though they’d be afther knockin’ sawdust out av any other tin min. He thravels the roads day an’ night. To be sure it’s all wan to him in regard to his bein’ dark, but he’ll work his way down to Lake Dan below—ay, an’ to the Sivin Churches, begor.”

“God is good to me, sir,” said the hostler; “an’ whin it plazed him for to take me eyesight, he gev me sight in me ears an’ hands.”

“Here, my poor fellow.” And the stranger placed a coin in the other’s horny palm.

“A five-shilling bit! Och, thin, may the saints light ye to glory, an’ may ye never die till they sind for ye! It’s lonely they’ll be till ye go to thim.”

By this time the car was surrounded by a motley group of tatterdemalions of all ages, sizes, and sexes, in every stage of decrepitude and every variety of raggedness.

“Throw a few coppers to an ould widdy, an’ the Lord reward ye!” exclaimed one.

“Ye’ll never miss a fourpenny bit,” added another.

“A sixpince to an orfin will take a bag o’ coals from undher ye in purgathory,” chimed in a third.

“Give us the price av an ounce av tay,” droned a fourth.

“More power to the stars an’ sthripes! Three cheers for Ameriky, boys!” roared a leathern-lunged dwarf, throwing a rabbit-skin cap into the air. This appeal was responded to with an enthusiasm that brought the fire into the stranger’s eye. Turning round upon the steps of the hotel—along, thatched, whitewashed, two-storied building—he made a sign as if desirous of addressing the assemblage.

“Be jabers! he’s going for to spake.”

“I riz him wud the stars an’ sthripes,” joyously chuckled the dwarf.

“Faix, it’s more nor a speech we want,” wheezed a little old fellow on crutches.

“The Home-Rulers has stuffed us like turkeys.”

“Ordher! Ordher in the coort!” yelled the dwarf. “Be aisy, Billy McKeon. Lave off scroogin’ me, Mary Nayle, an’ let the cripples in front.”

A few additional facetiæ, and the silence became complete.

The new-comer had removed his hat, and his massive white forehead stood out from beneath his soft brown, curly hair.

“I thank you for the cheer which you have given for the country of my birth.” (“That’s half a crown to me, anyhow,” muttered the dwarf.) “I hope that cheer was an honest one. It was not my intention to bestow ten cents among you, as I do not encourage mendicants; and once a beggar, always a beggar.”

This was received with very audible manifestations of dissatisfaction.

“Musha, but ye’ve come far enough for to tell us that,” growled the old man with the crutches.

“I have come a long way to tell it to you,” retorted the stranger, “and I’ll tell you more. It is positively sickening to travel through this beautiful country, on account of you and the like of you. From Cork to Killarney, from Killarney to Dublin, from Dublin to—”

“Boys, let’s make up a subscription for him,” interrupted a little fellow whose rags depended for support upon a straw rope—technically termed a “suggawn”—fastened around his waist.

“Th’ hostler 'll hed it wud five shillin’s,” observed a bystander with a droll, malicious grin.

“Begorra, we’ll tell the landlord for to put it in the bill.”

“Are ye goin’ for to give us anything?” demanded the dwarf. This query was backed up by a unanimous murmur of approval.

“I am.”

“Well, that’s raysonible, anyhow.”

“I’m going to give you some sound, wholesome advice,” said the stranger.

A yell of anger, disappointment, dissent, and derision followed this announcement. Crutches were brandished, sticks flourished, fists shaken, and general denunciations upon this “nagurly” conduct were indulged in, in terms as pungent as they were personal.

“You won’t hear me?” he resumed during a lull in the storm.

“Sorra a hear.”

“Well, good-afternoon.” And making them a low bow, he turned into the house, whither execrations loud, prolonged, and deep rapidly followed him.

The accommodations at the “Derralossory Arms”—for so the hostelry was named—were somewhat pretentious. Opening a door with the word “coffee-room” imprinted thereon in brazen letters, the new-comer found himself in a long, low-ceilinged apartment. A cracked mirror, the surface of which was scratched from frame to frame, like an ice rink, by amorous owners of diamond rings, stood over the mantel-piece, and above it a smoke-dried card containing the announcement of the meets of the Wicklow Harriers of the preceding season. Upon a mahogany sideboard shone a brave array of glassware interspersed with pickle-jars and some mysterious specimens of the ceramic art. Facing the sideboard was a huge antiquated sofa whose springs revealed themselves like the ribs of a half-starved horse, and opposite the sofa an ancient but uncompromisingly upright pianoforte. But not upon the mirror, sideboard, sofa, or piano did the eyes of the stranger continue to rest. The window had been lowered, and a young girl was leaning her arms upon the sash, gazing out upon the tatterdemalion crowd beneath. Her figure was petite, but of that faultless outline which no amount of drapery can conceal. A long plait of lustrous brown hair hung down her back. She was attired in black, and a huge Puritan cambric collar and cuffs adorned her wrists and neck.

“If her face is as her figure, she must be enchanting,” thought the new-comer.

“He should have given them something,” she murmured half aloud. “Poor creatures! hoping and fearing is weary, weary work.” And she slowly faced him.

He gazed at features as regular as the classic model, and whose paleness almost imparted to them the calm, impassive beauty of marble. She flushed and was about to withdraw when he blurted forth:

“I—I beg your pardon, but I overheard what you said. I am not so mean as you think.” And striding to the window and attracting the attention of the mob, who received him with a yell of derisive defiance, he flung a handful of silver among them.

A scarlet flush mantled over her face and throat. “I was but speaking to myself, thinking aloud—and—but nevertheless on the part of those poor miserable people, I beg to thank you, sir. I am sorely to blame, and your generosity only rivets the fetters that bind them to beggary.” And with a low courtesy, old-fashioned but witching grace itself, she swept from the apartment, leaving the stranger lost in admiration.

“What is that young lady’s name who was here just now?” he asked.

“Her name is Miss O’Byrne—wan av th’ ould anshint O’Byrnes that fought hard agin’ the Danes an’ Crummle—bad cess to thim, body an’ bones!” replied the waiter.

“Does she live near this place?”

“Beyant four mile, over be the side o’ Lake Dan. It’s an illigant place, wid no ind av ruins, an’ a darlin’ ghost that walks whinever sorra is comin’ to the race; an’ be me song, they’ve supped lashins av it.”

“Is Mr. O’Byrne wealthy?”

“Well, now”—here the waiter scratched a very shock head—“he’s not rowlin’ in goold, but he’s warm and”—brightening up—“as proud as a paycock. But there, I’m forgettin’ me message to ye.”

“To me? exclaimed the stranger with a start, half hoping it might be from Miss O’Byrne.

“Yes, sir. There’s two gintlemin cum here in regard o’ the fishin’, though sorra a haporth they ketch; an’ they cum regular wud rods an’ hooks an’ nets, an’ all soarts av cumbusticles. Wan av them is an attorney, a gay man, an’ th’ other houlds a situation in the Four Coorts beyant in Dublin, an’ he’s as nice a mannered man as there’s in the four walls o’ Wicklow this blessed minit.”

“But the message?” interrupted the stranger.

“That’s it. Yer to dine wud thim—no less. Misther Minchin tould me to prisint his respects an’ to hope ye’d favor him wud yer company; an’ don’t be hesitatin’, mind ye”—here the waiter winked an indescribable wink, such as an augur might have indulged in consequent upon a successful omen; “there’s lovely chickens, an’ the elegantest bacon, wud a filly av cabbage, an’ a dancing leg o’ lamb.”

“But I don’t know these gentlemen, and—”

“Permit me to introduce myself, sir,” exclaimed a small, elderly man with a merry eye, a bulbous nose, a very stiff, old-fashioned stock, and a stiffer rim of shirt-collar which kept his head as erect as though he was hung up by the chin, entering and bowing very courteously. “Minchin—Dominick Minchin. Hearing from this shock-headed retainer that you were a stranger, and having experienced on more occasions than one, especially during piscatorial excursions, the thrice-accursed loneliness of an inn, I beg, sir, that you will favor us by coming where glory waits you and—a bit of dinner.”

This was uttered with a quaint cheeriness that bore everything before it.

“Really, sir, I am quite impressed by your consideration, and accept your invitation most gratefully. My name is Philip Redmond.” And he handed the other his card.

“Redmond is not an American name, sir?”

“No, sir; my father was Irish.”

“Anything to the Redmonds of Ballymacreedy?”

“I am Redmond of Ballymacreedy.”

Mr. Minchin seized him warmly by both hands and shook them repeatedly. “By Jupiter, sir! this is positively glorious—sublime, sir! I knew your father well; and when he thought fit to part with his property—”

“His property parted from him, Mr. Minchin. It is gone, and I am now here to try and repurchase it at any cost. However, we’ll talk of that by and by. I feel that dinner is not very far off, and that you are only half as anxious about it as I am.”

Mr. O’Hara, Mr. Minchin’s companion, was a tall, handsome, florid-faced man of about five-and-thirty, with a profusion of sandy hair which stood out from his head like quills upon the fretful porcupine, and a smile like sunlight. In five minutes Redmond was as much at home with the two anglers as if he had known them all his life, and had planned two excursions with them.

“I’m afraid you’ll have some trouble about getting back this property,” observed O’Hara. “It’s now in the possession of a man who doesn’t want money, and who would call you out if you proposed to purchase it.”

“Every man has his price, has he not, Mr. O’Hara?” asked Redmond.

“True; but there are exceptional circumstances connected with this case which hedge it round with an impenetrable chevaux de frise.”

“Of what nature?”

“Family pride, which will never consent to confiscate the old acres.”

“But the lands of Kilnagadd and Derralossory belonged to our family.”

“That may be, Mr. Redmond, but they were part and parcel of other territory before the Redmonds came north of Vinegar Hill. I know all about them, as I rented a fishing lodge from one of the tenants, and, being anxious to purchase it, inquired into the title.”

“I made my dying father a solemn promise that I would get back the old place. Money is no object, Mr. O’Hara. My father operated both in real estate and in gold, and died wealthy, so that a few thousands will not balk me.”

“You can try it,” was the rejoinder, accompanied by a shake of the head.

It was late when they separated, Minchin warbling “The young May moon,” and insisting upon shaking hands with the “young boss,” as he designated him, over and over again.

The summer’s morning was bright and balmy, and Redmond, after a yeoman’s breakfast—consisting of trout fried with bacon, fresh eggs, and tea in which the cream was pre-eminent—started out into the glorious sunlight which was irradiating hill and dale, mountain and valley. The forget-me-nots told their tale to the crystal pools, the graceful ferns languidly embraced the lichen-covered stones, an occasional cur basking in the heat and glow opened a lazy eye as Phil passed along the road, and compromised a bark with a prolonged yawn. The hawthorns threw their shadows across the path, and the “blossoming furze unprofitably gay” sent forth that fresh, quaint, and delicious perfume that tells us with speechless eloquence that we are out in the bright green country and away from the heat and turmoil and loathsomeness of the over-crowded human hive. Having promised to join his newly-found friends at Lough Dan, Phil took the steep and romantic road that leads to the lake direct from the village of Roundwood. Far away to the left in the summer haze lay the picturesque village of Annamoe, and farther still the sweet, sad valley of Glendalough, guarded by the giant Lug na Culliagh, while the deep-tinted groves of Castle Kevin lent a delicious contrast to the purple heights of the heather-covered Derrybawn; on his right the grim gray crags of Luggelaw, and, as he gained the crest of the hill, the blue waters of Lough Dan lay mirrored beneath him, reflecting the giant shadows of Carrig-na-Leena. The exquisite loveliness of the scene fell upon the young American like a dream or a perfume. It was refreshing, yet almost intoxicating. He thought of the color glories of the Hudson in the fall, of the blood-reds and orange-yellows and wine hues of the autumn foliage, and they seared his mental vision when he came to contemplate the soft, cloudy green, the odor-laden atmosphere, pure yet filmy as a bridal veil, and the delicious completeness of the coup d’œil, so satisfying, so soothing, and so enravishing. Somehow or other he associated all this perfection with the fair young girl whose pale face and mantling blush still haunted his imagination like a sweet strain of music. These scenes were a suitable setting for her beauty. She would comprehend them, she would commune with nature in this wild, secluded spot, so lonely and yet so lovely. As his ideas glided in this rosy channel, his revery was suddenly disturbed by the sound of wheels, and close upon him came a basket-phaeton attached to a very diminutive pony. His heart gave one violent bound—the object of his immediate and gushing thoughts was the occupant of the vehicle. Would she pass without noticing him? There had been no introduction. He could expect no recognition, and yet—

Chance fills up many a gap in life, solves many riddles, and hastens many dénoûments.

The pony, evidently a wilful, over-petted, hand-fed little brute, took it into its stubborn head that a rest at this particular spot in the road would admirably suit his inclinations; and as he feared no whip, and, save a gentle chuck upon the reins and a solemn admonishment from his fair mistress, his whim could be indulged in with comparative impunity, he proceeded forthwith to carry his idea into execution, and stopped with a jerk right opposite where Philip Redmond stood.

“Do go on, Doaty!” exclaimed Miss O’Byrne, shaking the reins. “Do go on, there’s a pet. You shall have a lump of sugar when we get to stable.”

Doaty shook his head and stolidly gazed at the lake beneath him.

“Permit me to try and persuade him,” said Phil, stepping forward and lifting his hat, which, by the way, doubled up in his hand, clumsily concealing his face and utterly destroying his bow.

“Oh! thanks; I seem destined to give you trouble, sir.”

This was a delicate recognition.

“I have to thank you for making me the most popular man in Roundwood,” retorted Redmond. “I feel like the lord lieutenant. I held quite a levée this morning.”

“And your courtiers, instead of looking for place, were seeking for pence.”

“A distinction without much difference.”

“Except in the viceroy,” she laughed.

Doaty was as good as gold—at least so thought one of the party—and manifested no intention of budging an inch.

“What a tiresome pony!” exclaimed Miss O’Byrne. “I shall have to beat him.”

“Let me try and get him along.” And Phil, taking hold of the shaggy mane, lugged the unwilling Doaty along in the direction of the lake.

“This is really too bad, sir,” remonstrated Miss O’Byrne. “I cannot tax you in this way.”

“It is no tax, I assure you. I have nothing on earth to do but to revel in the especial sunshine of this moment.”

This was said with ever so slight an emphasis; nevertheless it bore a scarlet blossom in the rich blush which came whispering all over the young girl’s charming pallor.

“You—you are a stranger here?”

“I am, and yet I ought not to be.”

“This savors of a riddle.”

“Very easily solved. My fore-fathers hunted these hills and fished that lake. My father was reckless, extravagant, and new men came into possession of the old acres. My father emigrated, and made a great deal of money in New York, and—”

“I have been in New York,” interposed the young lady.

Here was a bridge for thought-travel. Here was a market for the disposal of mutual mental wares.

“Did you like it?” he asked.

“Like it!” she exclaimed enthusiastically. “Who could dislike it? It is the most charming city, perhaps excepting Paris, that I have ever lived in. And how are Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and the ash-boxes?” she added with a ringing laugh.

Doaty made another stop, and no earthly inducement would stir him until he so willed it himself. His fair mistress relinquished the idea and the reins, and, stepping from the vehicle, clambered, with the assistance of Redmond, to a moss-grown bank, from which she pointed out some objects of special interest in the scenery.

“That is Billy Doyle’s cottage at Shinnagh, down far in the valley by the edge of the lake. See the amber thatch glowing in the sunlight, and the red flag. That flag shows that poor Mr. Fenler is on the lake fishing.”

“Who is poor Mr. Fenler?” asked Phil.

“He is a man who was a great merchant in Dublin, but who lost all his property, and his wife and all his children. He saved as much from the wreck as enabled him to purchase one-half of that cottage—the slated half—and to support himself. He came here seven years ago, having made a vow never to leave the valley again.”

“And has he kept it?”

“Religiously. He goes nowhere, and spends his whole time in fishing. Do you see that golden strand at the head of the lake?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there is a legend about that which you should hear. Any old crone in the valley will do it ample justice.”

“I should prefer to hear it from a fairy on the hill,” said Redmond gallantly.

“Pas des compliments, although yours was nearly French.”

“You beat me at my own weapons,” laughed Redmond. “But whose palatial residence is that right over in the cleft between those two hills?”

The fire lighted up in the young girl’s eye, the delicate nostril expanded, the rich, ripe lips quivered, as she proudly replied: “That is my home.”

Her home—the nest in which she had been nurtured. What a precious flower in that gloomy valley! What a world of love and joy and beauty in that lone and sequestered spot!

“I envy you,” murmured Phil. “The tranquil loveliness of your home is—” he was going to send the words from his heart to his lips, but luckily they encountered Prudence upon the road, and altered themselves to suit that cold, passionless, interfering busybody—“is—just as it ought to be. You have made no vow to leave this valley?” he added.

“No, but I have often thought it.”

“Such a determination would be a calamity, Miss O’Byrne.”

“How do you know my name?” she quickly demanded.

“I asked the waiter after you had left.”

“Now for an exchange,” she laughed. “Let us trade. What is your name?”

“Philip Redmond, son of Redmond of Ballymacreedy.”

“Why, that is Ballymacreedy,” exclaimed the young girl, pointing to a fir-covered mountain, upon the side of which, as though perched on a shelf, stood a gaunt, uncompromising-looking, square-built mansion, all roof and windows.

Phil Redmond’s feelings, as he gazed on the home which he had never known save by hearsay, were of a very varied and conflicting nature. He had pictured it a feudal stronghold towering over an extensive lake such as America boasts of—a diminutive ocean—a battlemented castle, with keep and moat and drawbridge, ivy-grown in the interests of the picturesque, and plate-glassed in the interests of modern sunlight.

“Good heaven!” he exclaimed involuntarily, “how unlike what I conceived it to be. What a cruel disappointment!”

So rudely were his ideas shattered, and so bitterly the pride of baronial halls mortified, that the poor fellow’s heart felt quite crushed. Whether Miss O’Byrne saw this or whether Doaty saw it is not the question here; but certes, that admirable little brute gave a loud neigh as a trumpet-call to Redmond’s scattered senses, and evinced for the first moment during the preceding half-hour a desire to proceed upon his homeward journey.

“Papa does not visit, Mr. Redmond,” said Miss O’Byrne as she grasped the reins upon resuming her seat in the basket upon wheels, “but I shall ask him to call upon you, when I may hope for something like a formal introduction. How half an hour flies upon the wings of sans cérémonie!” And with a delicious inclination of the head, half-saucy, half-dignified, and wholly piquante, she disappeared at a turn of the road leading into the valley.

“Heigh-ho!” sighed Philip Redmond of Ballymacreedy.

While all this—shall we say nonsense?—was going on upon the hill, Mr. Minchin and his fidus Achates, O’Hara, were busily occupied upon the lake; and although not a single rise greeted their longing vision, like true sportsmen they lived in hope.

“That’s a very good style of man,” observed O’Hara.

“Redmond?”

“Yes.”

“The son of an Irish king, sir. By Jupiter! a fine fellow. A noble fellow!” exclaimed Minchin, whacking the lake with his line in emphasis.

“He’ll go back to New York without as much of his father’s property as would sod a lark.”

“You are still of opinion that the O’Byrne will not sell?”

“He’d burn the land first,” was the sententious rejoinder.

“Well, sir, the next best thing that Redmond can do is to purchase Glenasluagh. It adjoins Ballymacreedy, and he will enjoy the right of fishing the Clohogue—an enjoyment fit for the gods. Yes, by George! fit for the gods.”

“I never thought of that. Are you sure it’s for sale?”

“A scoundrelly attorney, one of those pitiful miscreants with whom it is my bane to be officially associated, knowing that I loved the gentle sport, endeavored to curry favor with me by mentioning this. I listened to the scoundrel and made inquiries elsewhere—in fact, I own I felt my way towards the Clohogue myself, but the figure was too high, sir.”

“We must put Redmond on to it at once.”

“There’s our man crossing the bridge. George! how I envy him his sensations upon beholding this cherished spot, 'where all save the spirit of man is divine.’” And Minchin glowed again in the summer light.

Redmond instinctively paused upon the quaint old lichen-covered bridge, in the worn interstices of which dainty little ferns of emerald green toyed with the pale blue loveliness of the forget-me-not, and gazed across the sheening waters of the tranquil lake. All was sleeping in sunlight, even the deep, clear shadows of the purple-covered mountains, while the melodious hum of glowing insect-life lent its peculiar charm to the peaceful surroundings.

The boat, by direction of Mr. Minchin, was turned for the bridge, and a few lazy strokes from the oar of the ragged urchin who acted as waterman brought it bump against a projecting bowlder which served as a landing-place.

“The top of the morning to you, Mr. Redmond!” cried Minchin. “You are just in the nick of time. Nature abhors a vacuum, and we were about to pass the rosy. This, sir, is a very dry country.” And the cheerful old biped laughed until the crags of Shinnagh re-echoed his jovial hilarity. At this moment a cart attached to a donkey appeared upon the bridge, and two formidable-looking hampers jostled each other for supremacy.

“Jump in, Mr. Redmond. We shall take our pick on that lovely little neck of land just under the stronghold of the O’Byrnes yonder.”

“Have you room for two friends of mine?” asked Phil.

“Any friend of yours is my friend, sir,” exclaimed Minchin with the pompous mannerism of the old school.

“Then lend a hand,” to the boat-boy, “to get these hampers on board.”

“What does all this mean?” asked Minchin as the baskets were safely stowed away.

“A liberty I have taken,” said Philip. “I want you and Mr. O’Hara to lunch with me to-day, as I dined with you yesterday.”

“O’Hara,” exclaimed Minchin, “what shall we do with this dog? Pitch him into the lake, hampers and all?”

“I should say not,” laughed the other.

“'My foot is on my native heath,’” cried Redmond; and, taking an oar, a pull of twenty minutes keel-grated them upon a silvery strand beneath the shady foliage of a gigantic horse-chestnut tree.

“A lobster-salad, George!” cried Minchin, unloading the basket. “A chicken-pie, Jupiter! A magmain of salmon! Why, hang it, man! this never was raised at the Derralossory Arms.”

“How was it done?” asked O’Hara.

“I sent a man into Dublin for it.”

“Ah!” with a long-drawn breath of admiration. “You Americans do things in the right way.”

“By the nine gods! champagne,” ejaculated Minchin as he extracted the golden-necked bottles from their wicker cradles. “Heidsieck extra dry. I am extra dry too. Per Bacco, Redmond! you are the son of an Irish king.”

Where is the mortal who does not enjoy a picnic?—that picnic where the food is laid upon the grass, and with the green leaves or the sky for a canopy; where fingers do service for forks, and the wild flowers for napkins; where the food is ambrosia and the drink nectar. Ay de mí, we have changed all that, and now we must have silver and cutlery and napery, and servants to wait upon us, and hot dishes ad nauseam. We must don our best and encase our sweltering hands in delicate-hued gloves, and icy etiquette now reigns where nature’s happy freedom heretofore presided.

They were busily engaged with the chicken-bones, and Redmond, as host, was uncorking the second bottle of champagne, when Minchin exclaimed: “Jupiter Olympus! here’s the O’Byrne and his daughter.”

Now, to be caught, under ordinary circumstances, in a stooping posture, wrestling with an infrangible wire, almost black in the face, and with the drumstick of a chicken stuck saltier-wise in your mouth, your hat anywhere, and your hair in the wildest and most elfin disorder, is embarrassing enough in all conscience; but, in the condition of feeling under which our romantic hero labored, to be thus detected was simply horrible. As Redmond beheld the tall and stately form of a man of about fifty, with a pair of fierce black eyes beneath still fiercer brows, advancing towards him, and by his side, gliding with that graceful undulation which is almost exclusively confined to the women of Spain, the young girl for whom the portals of his heart had been cast wide open, his desire to sink beneath the daisies was about the only sensation left to him.

“We have invaded the land of the O’Byrnes,” said Minchin, rising and bowing to the châtelaine.

“You seem tolerably well armed,” observed the O’Byrne, casting a comical glance at the champagne bottles.

“Permit me the honor of crossing swords,” cried Minchin.

At this moment Miss O’Byrne interposed by exclaiming: “That gentleman is Mr. Redmond of Ballymacreedy.”

The O’Byrne took a short, sharp survey of Philip from beneath his shaggy brows, and, advancing with outstretched hand:

“Mr. Redmond, I am glad to meet one of the old stock. You resemble your father very strongly.”

“You knew my father, sir?” asked Redmond eagerly.

“Yes.” The monosyllable spoke for itself. It shut down on the subject like an iron door.

“The old stock are thinning out, like my brown hairs,” laughed Minchin.

“Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto,” was the rejoinder.

“Per Bacco! you must taste the Falernian. I am Dominick—”

“Minchin,” interposed the O’Byrne, “the best angler in Wicklow. We disciples of the rod and reel scarcely need a formal introduction.”

Somehow or other, while the O’Byrne and Dominick Minchin were bandying quaint and courtly compliments, Philip managed to pull himself together and to engage in conversation with the daughter of the house.

“You perceive, Mr. Redmond, how fate is against our being introduced—so dead against as to compel me to make you and my father acquainted as if you and I were old friends.”

“I do feel as if I had known you for ever so long, and that a void—”

“Do look at the trout jumping. What perfect circles they make in the still water!”

She had interrupted with a woman’s tact. Redmond was unversed in the subtle distinctions which form the rungs of the ladder of love. Most of the girls whom he met in society were as so many agreeable nothings—exquisitely-attired statuettes, whose ideas were bounded by silk, satin, feathers, and lace. With them he had nothing in common save the weather and ice-cream; and being imbued with a feeling of aversive contempt for the whole sex, the revelation of light and love which now burst upon him revolutionized his whole being and begat an enthusiasm that forgot impossibilities. A child of nature sounds very well in poesy, but the article attired in broadcloth is very rapidly put down as a bore, if not a nuisance.

“I drink with you on one condition,” said the O’Byrne to Minchin, who presented a bottle at his head.

“Condition me no conditions, chieftain!”

“I shall; and the condition is this: that you, with Mr. Redmond and Mr. O’Hara”—to whom he had been introduced by Minchin—“will help me to punish a cooper of claret after a seven o’clock dinner.” O’Hara excused himself on the plea of being compelled to reach Dublin by the night mail from Rathdrum. Minchin called a number of the Olympian deities to witness that so superb an offer should not be lightly considered, and Redmond thought of his dress and hesitated to say yes, when his whole soul was in that solitary word.

“I want to have a gossip about New York, and surely you will not refuse me that boon?” urged Miss O’Byrne, and this decided the question.

“Are you of the true faith, Mr. Redmond?” she asked, as some hours later, in acting as cicerone through the old castle, she took him to the private chapel.

“I should be a recreant Redmond if I were not,” was his proud reply.

Coolgreny, the stronghold of the Clan O’Byrne, was as picturesque as a round tower, an ivied keep, a battlemented outer wall, a dry moat, a veritable carpet of bright flowers, solemn old yew-trees whose branches had supplied many a sturdy bow wherewithal to resist the incursions of the O’Tooles, and a rookery, could make it. As he crossed the drawbridge and gazed at the oaken door with its rusty iron rivets, at the massive archway telling an imperishable tale, at the inner quadrangle, its gray stone lighted up by blood-red geraniums and deeply, darkly, desperately blue forget-me-nots, and from thence to the high-bred-looking girl by his side, Philip Redmond felt the old blood in his veins as the old, old story began to whisper itself to his heart.

They passed into the old banqueting-hall, rich in oaken tracery and wainscoted up to the ebon-colored ceiling. Portraits of doughty warriors in the grim panoply of battle-axe and shield, suits of Milan steel, and buff jerkins of the later periods adorned the walls—formidable O’Brinns who stood in many a gap, and fought the rocky defiles of Auchavana inch by inch; who displayed their prowess on many a tented field; who followed the fortunes of the luckless house of Stuart even after the unhappy disaster at the Boyne; and who, nobly fighting, fell against the hated usurpation of the Orange William. Here, too, were soft, silken-bearded representatives of the house who attached themselves to the Irish Brigade and covered themselves with glory at Lannes and Fontenoy.

“Now for the ladies, monsieur!” exclaimed Miss O’Byrne. “I see that you are lost in admiration of my male ancestors. Prepare now to be enchanted by the beauty of their wives and daughters.”

“I need no preparation,” said Phil with a low bow. “I see all their perfections concentrated in their charming descendant.”

“Admirably done!” cried the young lady, with heightened color; “but 'bide a wee.’ Look at that little dame. There is fire for you. She was Countess of Ovoca in her own right—a Geraldine. She defended this castle against two attacks of Cromwell’s crop-eared curs, and when it was intimated to her that the defence jeopardized her husband’s life, she naïvely replied: 'I could replace my husband, but I could not replace Coolgreny.’ 'Wasn’t that complimentary to that ill-looking fellow opposite leaning upon his sword? I do believe that he steps out of that frame occasionally for the purpose of upbraiding her, poor dear!”

Redmond laughed heartily as he replied that he thought the cavalier was likely to get the worst of it.

“Here is a Lely—my great, great, great, ever-so-great grandmamma. Isn’t she lovely? Look at her cool blue pastoral drapery, her bright brown hair, her matchless eye, and her ivory complexion.”

“I am looking at her,” said Redmond, gazing earnestly at Miss O’Byrne, “and she is lovely.”

It was as if the portrait had been painted for herself.

“Mr. Redmond, you are incorrigible. I absolutely refuse to act as cicerone. Tyrconnel was madly in love with her.”

“Of course he was; and if he wasn’t he ought to have been,” laughed Philip. “Pray who is that sparkling brunette, with the color glowing beneath her swarthy skin, and with the head and hair of Cleopatra?”

“That is Mistress Lettice O’Byrne, who received King James in this very hall, as, blood-stained and travel-sore, he honored our poor house by resting here after the disaster of the Boyne. He heard Mass in our little chapel before he started at daybreak.”

They wandered from portrait to portrait, she chatting gaily, brilliantly, until they came directly opposite that of a very young man attired in a gorgeous hussar uniform.

“This is a picture of today,” said Redmond. “Who is he?”

A bright diamond-drop welled into her eyes as she replied:

“It is my only brother. He took service with our kinsman, Field-Marshal Nugent, in Austria, and fell at Magenta. God be merciful to him!”

“Amen!” And the response was a prayer, so fervently and reverentially was it uttered.

“Let us go to the chapel and say an Ave Maria for the repose of his soul.” And, leading through a long, dark passage, and thrusting aside a scarlet velvet curtain which hung over the entrance, she ushered Redmond into the church. Pure Gothic, the oaken traceries of its pulpit and chancel rails were worthy of the hand of Verbruggen, while the altar, of white marble, was decorated with constellations of the rarest hot-house flowers and plants.

As they emerged from the chapel the hideous clamor of a gong announced that dinner would be served in a quarter of an hour, and Redmond was ushered by his host to an apartment to prepare as best he might for the all-important ceremony. For after all “the dine” is a very serious piece of business, and it is only such foolish young fellows as Redmond—who spoiled his appetite at luncheon—or such delicately-nurtured young ladies as Miss Eileen O’Byrne, who can afford to turn up their noses at the mention of the word, and wish with a sigh that the noble institution yclept eating had never been invented.

When Redmond descended to the drawing-room he was formally presented to the Rev. Father O’Doherty, the parish priest “of as wild a district as lies between this and New York,” gaily added his reverence. “I am proud to meet you, sir; and let me tell you that the Redmonds of Ballymacreedy have left a name behind them respected, loved, and honored. Have you come to stop with us?”

“Not—that is, I’m—I’m so enchanted with all that I have seen of Ireland, and with all whom I have met here”—he sought the eye of his hostess (it should be mentioned that her mother had died in giving birth to Eileen)—“that if I do not return to it, it will not be my own fault.”

This was doing pretty well—much better than he could have hoped. It was very prononcé, but Phil liked to be understood. He was straight in everything, and was perfectly prepared to step into the O’Byrne’s library and explain himself right away. But he was not to get the chance. Father O’Doherty took the châtelaine into dinner and presided at the foot of the table. The dinner was not à la Russe, and, although served with extreme elegance, the guests were allowed the privilege of seeing what they were about to partake of, and to make a judicious selection according to palate. The wine was, as Minchin subsequently remarked, “of the rarest and choicest vintage.” To hear her speak, to listen to the music of her laugh, to gaze upon her when her looks were turned in another direction, was rapture to poor Philip, who drank his wine, eating nothing, being wholly and solely absorbed in the radiance of her presence. It was rack and torture to him when she arose to leave the room, and, as he opened the door to permit her egress, the words, “Do not remain too long over your wine,” rang into his senses like a peal of sweet bells.

“Push the claret, Mr. Redmond,” exclaimed his host; “you may get richer but you won’t get softer wine across the Atlantic.”

“Per Bacco! this is bottled velvet,” said Minchin, smacking his lips—“the odor of the violet, and the gentle tartness of the raspberry. By the nine gods! a bottle of this makes a man look for his wings to fly, sir—to fly like a bird.”

After some considerable time, during which Minchin and the O’Byrne had indulged in a very serious potation of the Château Lafitte, “Are you here on a pleasure trip, Mr. Redmond?” asked Father O’Doherty.

“Well, my good fortune has made it one of pleasure, but I came originally on business. I came to endeavor to rescue some of my poor father’s property,” replied downright Phil.

“What do you mean by rescue, Mr. Redmond?” asked the O’Byrne, flushing darkly red.

“I mean, to purchase it from the man who now holds it.”

“Oh!” And his host tossed off a bumper of the wine. “Do you refer to Ballymacreedy?”

“I do, and to the lands of Kilnagadd and Derralossory.”

The beetling brows of the Irish chieftain met in a black scowl.

“And suppose this man who holds these lands were unwilling to sell?”

“Oh! every man has his price,” said the unconscious Philip.

The O’Byrne rose, and, stretching himself to his full height, haughtily exclaimed:

“When I sell one rood of Ballymacreedy, Kilnagadd, and Derralossory, may I be shattered into fragments like that wine-glass,” casting, as he spoke, the crystal goblet upon the oaken floor, where it shivered into ten thousand pieces.

Had a thunderbolt fallen upon the épergne, and, splitting roof and ceiling, descended into their midst, the luckless hero of this narrative could scarcely have been less scared and astonished. The admonitory winkings of Minchin, the ankle-rubs of the good priest, had been lost upon him. He had rushed upon his fate and had impaled himself. Fool that he was, never to have conjectured that the haughty possessor of the land of his ancestors was the fiery, fierce old chieftain who now sat scowling at the ceiling and quaffing goblet after goblet of the rich red wine! Everything pointed to the fact—the conversation of the previous evening, the exclamation of Eileen upon the hill overlooking Lough Dan, the references of Father O’Doherty. He was a senseless idiot, and had planted the thorn of offence where he would have sown the bright seed of friendship. Could he apologize? How? Could he explain? He must.

“The fact is—” he commenced, when his host pulled him up:

“A word of advice to you, Mr. Redmond. When you enter a man’s house do not turn appraiser and play the amateur auctioneer.”

“But-” burst in Phil.

“Pardon me. If you consider that because you have scraped a few greenbacks together—Heaven knows how; I don’t want to inquire—that you can come over here to dictate insulting terms to a man with reference to his own goods and chattels, upon his own hearth, let me tell you, sir, that—”

“Hear me,” exclaimed Father O’Doherty. “I am certain that our young friend had no intention of giving annoyance when he made those observations.”

“On the honor of a man,” roared Redmond, who was in a white heat of mortification, “I meant no offence, and furthermore—”

“Let us drop the subject, sir, and go to the drawing-room for coffee,” said the O’Byrne, rising.

“But I will not drop the subject until I explain myself.”

“Mr. Redmond, do not press my endurance in my own house.” And the haughty host motioned to the door.

“Not a word,” whispered Father O’Doherty. “You can make it all right by and by, and if you fail I will succeed.”

Still, Philip was not satisfied. He was the outraged party. He demanded redress for a cruel wrong. Was he to remain in the pillory and be pelted with the mistrust and dislike of the man whom of all others he was most desirous of conciliating. What would she think of him when her father came to tell her his version of the affair? Would he not suffer and stand convicted, however innocent he might be? It was maddening, and Redmond, following his host, brusquely demanded a few minutes’ conversation.

“'Forbid it, Heaven, the hermit cried!’” exclaimed Minchin, playfully seizing our hero by the shoulders and twisting him teetotum-fashion, while the priest engaged the attention of the O’Byrne in another direction.

“Are you mad, Redmond?” said Minchin in a low tone. “On this subject he has a craze. Why, in the name of Jupiter Olympus, did you introduce it?”

“Am I to lie under the imputation of being a peddler, an auctioneer, a blackguard?” asked the other excitedly.

“The thing will be as dead as Queen Anne in five minutes, if you will only let it cross the Styx.”

“But I did not know that Mr. O’Byrne was the present proprietor of Ballymacreedy.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?”

“I would not be listened to.”

“It’s easily explained.”

When Redmond entered the drawing-room the host was speaking to his daughter, and that it was about him he had little doubt from the expression of surprise, pain, and anger which flitted across her face.

Determined not to be baffled in his purpose this time, he strode across the apartment, and, confronting the O’Byrne, said:

“If you will kindly permit me a word of explanation—”

“Do take a cup of coffee, Mr. Redmond,” interrupted Miss O’Byrne; “and—and you will excuse me if I—I wish you good-night.” And courtesying very low, she turned from him and swept out of the room.

A choking sensation seized our hero. A something in his throat—anger, mortification, bitter mortification—clutched him and held him fast.

“I’ll be hanged if I’ll stop here any longer!” he said; and so earnest was his rage that, without waiting to bid his host farewell or to hint his intention to Minchin, he strode out into the quadrangle, through the arched entrance, across the drawbridge, and onwards he knew not in what direction, reckless, hopeless, and hatless.

Why had he met her? His path had been calm and peace. Why had she treated him in this way? What had he done to her? He knew how her father would vamp up his version of the story. Was ever innocent man so deeply wronged? He would leave Ireland next day, and place the broad Atlantic between him and this—ay, this lovely, bewitching girl. Why was she so captivating? Where did the charm lie?

Thoughts all-conflicting, all-contradictory surged through his brain as he marched onward. The summer dew failed to soothe his fevered mind; the soft night-wind sighing across the Shaughnamore mountain did not cool his burning brow. The gray dawn of glorious day still found him plodding onwards, and the sun was high above the horizon when he entered the picturesque little village of Enniskerry. He had left Coolgreny fifteen Irish miles behind him across the mountains.

When he had succeeded in arousing the inmates of the Powerscourt Arms, he demanded writing materials and a messenger.

“Is it pin an’ ink at this time o’ day, sir?” demanded the sleepy handmaiden.

“Yes; here’s half a crown for you. Open your eyes and hurry up.”

He wrote the following note to the O’Byrne, and despatched it by a ragged gossoon, who started on his errand, up the hill that leads by the Dargle, like a mountain deer. He also forwarded an order for his luggage to the landlord of the Derralossory Arms.

SIR: As you would permit me no explanation last night, I insist upon making it now. I did not know that you were the possessor of the lands of my forefathers until you yourself announced it. In thanking you for your hospitality I cannot refrain from saying that I wish I had never enjoyed it, as it has been a source of intense pleasure and likewise of bitter pain.

I am, sir,

Your obedient servant,

PHILIP REDMOND.

The messenger returned in a few hours with his luggage.

“Did you deliver my letter at Coolgreny?”

“I gev it to wan av the boys, sir.”

“Did you see any of the—family?”

“None o’ them, barrin’ Miss Eileen’s pony that does be dhruv be her in a sthraw shay, yer honner.”

Happy pony! thought Redmond, as he gazed into the past and beheld Doaty coming to a standstill despite the musical remonstrances of his mistress.

“They axed me if your honner’s name was Ridmond, an’ I sed I didn’t know; an’ I was axed if ye cum wudout a hat, an’ I sed yis. 'That’s him,’ sez Luke Byrne, the boy. 'A low-sized man,’ sez he. 'No,’ sez I, 'he’s a cupple o’ yards high anyhow’; an’ Luke tould me they wor draggin’ the lake beyant at Shinnagh for ye, an’ that Miss Eileen was roarin’ an’ bawlin’ the whole mornin’.”

A thrill went through every fibre in Redmond’s body as this last announcement fell upon his ear; and although the idea was coarsely expressed, that the tender girl might be sorrowing for him caused an unutterable sensation of joy. She could not believe him capable of insulting her father beneath the same roof which shut the stars from her; and yet—pshaw! he would shake the whole thing off as a disagreeable yet delightful dream.

His immediate resolve was to proceed to Dublin, and from thence to Queenstown and back to his native shores; but second thoughts, always so sober, so full of judicious counsel, whispered that the long, lonely days and nights upon the Atlantic would but serve to increase his fever, and that his best chance lay in the distracting influence of European travel. Seven o’clock that evening found him on board the mail steamer for Holyhead; and as he gazed at the soft outlines of the Wicklow hills receding from his wistful glance, and thought of her in that secluded, peaceful valley, he would willingly have parted with a moiety of his existence to be once again in the sunlight of her presence.

* * * * *

While our hero was on the road to Enniskerry Father O’Doherty found an opportunity for comparing notes with Minchin, and, fully convinced of the truthfulness of the young American’s statement, proceeded at once to disabuse the diseased mind of the O’Byrne. This he ultimately succeeded in doing, but not without a deal of powerful and full-flavored argument. “I do believe, Father, I took too much wine. Where is Mr. Redmond, until I make the amende honorable?”

“Strolling about the grounds, I believe.”

“Let us go in search of him.”

“You can go, O’Byrne; I want to have a chat with my fair young child,” said the clergyman, who had witnessed Eileen’s stately courtesy and exit.

Minchin and O’Byrne strolled out into the summer night, making sure of finding Redmond on the terrace overlooking the moat.

“We have bail for his appearance,” said Minchin, “as his hat is decorating the antlers of a lordly stag in the entrance hall.”

The two gentlemen smoked their cigars as they leisurely went in quest of the missing one, and from terrace they proceeded to garden, from garden to pleasaunce, and from pleasaunce to gate-house, but no trace of him could be found. “He is in the stables,” suggested the O’Byrne; and they returned to the enormous quadrangle in which the houses were quartered, but none of the helpers had seen him, and the stables were all locked for the night.

“He is a romantic, hot-headed young dog, and is just taking a cooler. He will turn up by and by, I warrant me; or mayhap he has hied him to my lady’s bower.” And Minchin laughed at the conceit.

“Where is Redmond?” asked Father O’Doherty, as they regained the drawing-room.

“We were going to ask you,” said the O’Byrne. “Where is Eileen?”

“The poor child has a bad headache and has gone to lie down.”

“Come along, Mr. Minchin, and we’ll take our cruiskeen lawn. In the meantime I shall send some of the men to scour the wood in pursuit of this invisible guest. I needn’t ask you to join us, father?”

“No, sir; a little wine at dinner is my quantum.”

As the night rolled over considerable uneasiness was felt about Philip’s non-appearance; but Minchin’s theory, that he had, in his agitation, returned to the Derralossory Arms minus his hat, was gladly accepted, and the O’Byrne insisted upon driving with Minchin into Roundwood in order to set matters right.

It is scarcely necessary to say that the worthy proprietor of the hostelry had nothing of Redmond’s but a small nickel-mounted valise, which he described as set in solid silver.

This increased the anxiety, and as a portion of the lands of Coolgreny abutted upon the lake in sheer precipices of two and three hundred feet, fears began to be entertained that poor Philip in his ignorance of the country might have taken this unfortunate path. There was nothing for it but to await the advent of daylight, and then to scour the country, and, if necessary, to drag the lake at this particular place.

The morning brought no Redmond, and as traces of recent footsteps were very distinct in the neighborhood of the precipice, and the heather rudely torn away at the edge of the cliff, as though by a despairing clutch, the idea that he had fallen into the lake grew into a certainty. A grapnel was got ready, and the melancholy process of dragging rapidly commenced.

The relief which Redmond’s letter brought produced immediate reaction. Father O’Doherty at once started with his car to Enniskerry, with a very courteous note from the O’Byrne and a message from Eileen, but arrived about an hour after our hero had quitted the village. Later on, when the good priest had returned with this intelligence, the O’Byrne telegraphed to the Shelborne Hotel, Dublin, on chance, writing also to that address. Philip was on board the steamer when the telegram arrived, and in London when the missive reached Ireland’s capital. Had he received either, he would have flown back to Coolgreny; but it was not to be.

* * * * *

It was Sunday forenoon, and a great human wave surged out of the Madeleine Church, Paris. Instinctively one pauses beneath that noble portico and gazes across the Place de la Concorde, taking in the glittering Boulevard and the whole brilliancy of the coup d’œil. Philip Redmond had been amongst the worshippers, and was now on his way to the Hôtel du Louvre, so different in every respect to the white-washed, thatch-covered hostelry in the heart of the County Wicklow, and at the door of which he was introduced to the reader. He had indulged in a lazy tour, commencing with the quaint old cities of Belgium, whence he proceeded to Cologne and up the Rhine to Mayence, and after a wandering of two months found himself in the gay and fascinating capital of the world. Philip’s wound had been healed; his heart ceased to throb at the recollection of the “tender light of a day that was dead”; and if the image of Eileen O’Byrne did come back to him, he felt inclined to place himself in the pillory of his own thoughts and pelt himself with ridicule. It was a delightful thing to be heart-whole. He had played with fire and had passed through the red-hot furnace, badly burnt, no doubt, but cured at once and for ever. He used to amuse himself by imagining what the effect of his letter upon the haughty chieftain might be, and would not her vanity be ruffled by the utter absence of the mention of her name? He had done his devoir in stating that the day was one of intense enjoyment; this she could easily translate by the aid of her own dictionary. Heigh-ho! it was a pity the dream did not last a little longer, he thought, as he prepared to descend the steps of the church upon that lovely August forenoon. As he descended, his foot became entangled in the skirt of a young girl right in front of him. He turned to apologize—his heart gave one fearful bound and his brain reeled till he became dizzy. He felt himself grow pale and cold, but, lifting his hat with a cold salutation, he passed down and onwards. It was Eileen O’Byrne!

When he reached the hotel—and he felt as if treading on air—he repaired to his apartment and flung himself into a chair in a whirl of conflicting emotion. The old wound which he had imagined healed had broken out afresh beneath the sad, reproachful glance of those lovely gray Irish eyes. There was but one chance left, and that was to fly. To be in the same city, country, hemisphere with her would be torture. He felt as if some great sea should divide them, and then that the joyous serenity of the last few weeks would be restored to him. He had very little packing to do, as he had not unpacked, and he at once proceeded to the bureau to settle his bill. As he was passing along a corridor in order to reach the vestiaire, he became almost rooted to the ground. A turn in the passage brought him face to face with her whom he was doing his uttermost to avoid. She was deadly pale, and she passed him with a scarcely perceptible inclination of the head, cold, glacial, haughty. There was a cry of anguish in Phil Redmond’s heart, and, acting upon an unconquerable impulse, he turned after her and almost fiercely demanded: “What have I done to deserve this?”

The same bright rush of crimson which flashed across her face like a rosy sunset when first he met her covered her now as she panted forth:

“You seemed to wish it so.”

“I!” And Phil Redmond blurted out something with reference to explanation and unfair treatment in his usual brusque way.

* * * * *

It was chill October, and a huge log burned in the cavernous fire-place in the banquet-hall at Coolgreny. The claret was upon the ebon-colored oak table, and round it sat no less a party than that which was assembled upon the memorable night when Phil Redmond so innocently brought the wrath of his host upon his devoted head.

“To think,” said Minchin in a state of ecstatic glow, “that we should meet here under such remarkable circumstances. Ye gods!”

“Yes,” said the O’Byrne, rising, “I wanted the same party exactly, and I have been fortunate. You all heard me swear that I would never sell a rood of Ballymacreedy, Kilnagadd, or Derralossory; but”—with a smile—“that oath does not prevent my giving them away, and, please God, when you, Father O’Doherty, unite my honest young friend Philip Redmond to my only child, he shall be restored to the lands of his fathers through his wife.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE POPE’S TEMPORAL PRINCIPALITY.

The Vicar of Jesus Christ is by virtue of his office, and by divine right, of necessity in his own person a sovereign. He is exempt from all subjection to any temporal power, and perfectly free in respect to his own person and the full exercise of his spiritual supremacy, to which kings are as much subject as other baptized persons, and nations as individuals. The right of acquiring property and domain, in a manner which does not violate any other human right, is inherent in this personal sovereignty, and carries with it all the rights of eminent domain, so that whatever is acquired in this way becomes inalienable except by a voluntary cession. The possession of actual sovereign dominion over a sufficient territory is evidently the logical and natural complement of this personal sovereignty, yet is not acquired except by some legal, human act, similar to that which subjects any given domain in particular to any other given individual or corporation. The possession of spiritual sovereignty united with the temporal dignity and power of a civil monarch is, manifestly, the most dangerous and liable to abuse of all the attributions which any individual ruler or dynasty of supreme rulers can be supposed to have received as a stable and permanent right. The danger is increased in proportion to the magnitude and duration of the spiritual empire and the political monarchy united with it. We are obliged, therefore, to believe that Jesus Christ, as the Sovereign Lord of the world, when he founded such an institution, provided efficaciously for the protection of Christian society against this danger and liability to abuse. This he could not do without exercising a special and supernatural providence over his earthly vicariate, the Papacy. Yet, according to the analogy of all other departments of the divine government, this special providence ought to be reduced to a minimum and made as little miraculous as possible, by a wise ordering of natural and secondary causes in reference to the desired effect. In point of fact, we see, from the history of the Papacy, that God has permitted it to exhibit as much of the weakness and imperfection of all human things as was consistent with the fulfilment of the end of its institution. His supernatural overruling of the natural course of events has been limited to this result. And the preservation of the Holy See from perversion by human passions into a merely earthly power, an empire of this world, has been accomplished in great part by the difficulties and struggles which have always environed the possession of the greatest of human dignities and powers—the papal sovereignty.

From Nero to Constantine the Popes were obliged to struggle with the heathen emperors in order to conquer their liberty at the cost of martyrdom. From Sylvester to Gregory the Great they were obliged to struggle with civil and ecclesiastical princes for the recognition and maintenance of their spiritual supremacy. The temporal and civil domain necessary for the stable possession and exercise of the personal, sovereign independence of the Pope as Supreme Pastor of the church was not given until its necessity became manifest. It came in the natural course of events, without violence or miracle. Its tenure was precarious and constantly disputed, and has so remained until the present day. Our present purpose is to sketch the history of the struggles by which the first Popes who were kings of Rome secured the dominion of the patrimony of St. Peter as an inalienable right recognized by the international law of Christendom.

The temporal domain of the Popes began with the natural and gradual acquisition of landed property, which in those times carried with it princely authority over the tenants and inhabitants of estates. Not only the Popes but the principal bishops in Italy and other countries became in this way dukes and counts. The sovereign rights of the emperors lapsed through a long-continued neglect to fulfil the essential duties of sovereignty, and there was no other royal power in Italy which succeeded to them in a legitimate manner. The ruling power devolved naturally upon the local princes. The Roman people turned toward the Pope as their immediate bishop; just as the people of Ravenna, Milan, Treves, Cologne, and many other cities did to their own bishop, because he was the chief of their aristocracy, and also the protector of the people, and was the only one who was both willing and able to take the place vacated by their former rulers. The Western Roman Empire ceased to exist when the Heruli under Odoacer took and sacked Rome, making themselves masters of Italy. Odoacer was in turn conquered and killed by the Ostrogoth Theodoric, who was nominally the lieutenant of the Greek emperor, but in reality conquered Italy for himself. When the empire revived under the able administration of Justinian, the kingdom of the Ostrogoths was subdued and overthrown by the great general Belisarius. A new invasion of Lombards, or Long-beards, from Germany put an end once more to the imperial dominion in Italy, with the exception of a certain part called the exarchate, which had its capital at Ravenna. The authority of the Lombard kings was very limited and precarious, and under their sway the duchies and marquisates and independent municipalities of Italy assumed that character of autonomy which made Italy ever after incapable of anything except a federative unity. The Lombards were at first Arians, but the conversion of their beautiful and accomplished queen, Theodolinda, by St. Gregory the Great was the beginning of a general reconciliation of the whole people to the Catholic Church, and of the complete extinction of the Arian heresy in Italy. The Popes never acknowledged the sovereignty of the Lombard kings over the city and duchy of Rome. The Greek exarch at Ravenna, as the representative of the emperor, was recognized as having lawful jurisdiction, and a magistrate delegated by him, called a duke, resided in Rome. The actual authority of these representatives of the ancient imperial power and of their master at Constantinople became, however, continually more and more a restricted and almost nominal formality, until it was altogether extinguished by the fall of the Greek exarchate. A few passages from the Italian historian Cantù will show in a clear and brief manner how the temporal sovereignty of the Popes in Rome resulted naturally and necessarily out of the new order of things which issued from the universal disorder and confusion that prevailed:

“At the time of the descent of the Lombards upon Italy the country lacked a head possessing general authority, and the Roman people, as well that portion of them who had been subjugated as those who were still free, had no other eminent personage to whom they could look except the Pope. He possessed immense domains in Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, the Campagna, the Sabine territory, Dalmatia, Illyria, Sardinia, in the Cottian Alps, and even in the Gauls. These domains being cultivated by farmers, he exercised over them a legal jurisdiction, appointed officers and gave orders; and, besides, his revenue enabled him to distribute succors in times of dearth, to furnish asylum to refugees, and to pay troops. After the conquest had interrupted the communications between Rome and the exarch of Ravenna, the Pope remained the de facto head of the city where he resided; he corresponded directly with the Byzantine court; made war and peace with the Lombard kings; and, moreover, by putting himself in an attitude of resistance to their conquests, he became the representative of the national party. The chair of St. Peter awaited only a pontiff who should feel all the importance and display all the dignity of his high position. Such a man was Gregory the Great” (580-603).

“Italy, at this time, had no more stability in its civil institutions than France. The Lombards had occupied a large part of it in the first burst of invasion; but the partition which they made among several dukes, though it served to consolidate their possession, prevented them from completing their conquest. As the king was elected from among these different nobles, without any hereditary right, there was a revolution at every vacancy; moreover, the dukes obtained continually more considerable privileges by favoring one or another among the competitors—so much so that those of Benevento and Spoleto acquired complete independence. The only thing they all desired was to remain in tranquil enjoyment of absolute authority in their particular domains, or to make war for their own personal aggrandizement in power and wealth, and not in obedience to the king’s command; so that the king could with difficulty induce them to follow him in any military enterprise against the Greeks for the purpose of expelling these from Italy, or against the Franks, who molested them unremittingly, either for the sake of pillage or at the instigation of the Eastern emperors.... The Greek exarch’s administration extended over the Romagna, the marshy valleys of Ferrara and Comacchio, over five maritime towns from Rimini to Ancona, and five other towns between the shore of the Adriatic and the Apennine slope, over Rome, Venice, and almost all the cities on the sea-coast. Some cities, for instance Venice, made themselves independent, while others were constantly menaced and often invaded by the Lombards. When these latter were involved in foreign or civil wars, the exarchs would avail themselves of the chance to repossess the places they had lost, but were always speedily driven back into narrow limits, without ever enjoying peace, and subject to the necessity of making every year short truces, for which they frequently had to pay a tribute of three hundred livres in gold. When the means failed for paying tribute and the wages of the soldiers, they ran down to Rome and plundered the treasury of the church, or pillaged the sanctuary of St. Michael at Monte Gargano, which was an object of great veneration to the Lombards....

“Another power remained in Italy, as yet imperceptibly growing up, but destined to be developed during the course of the century and to cast lasting roots amid the ruins of the others. The Popes had always shown themselves hostile to the Lombard domination and desirous of preserving the invaded provinces to the empire. Gregory the Great had employed for this effect his authority, his eloquence, his treasure, and his skill in the arts of diplomacy; his successors followed his example, and whenever they were menaced by the Lombards they implored without delay the aid of Constantinople. Preserving toward the emperor the submission which they had constantly exhibited while Rome was the capital of the world, they asked his confirmation of their election, paid him a fixed tribute, and kept at his court an apocrisiarius, who treated with him respecting their affairs; but their dependence on distant sovereigns and feeble exarchs, upon whom the people looked with an evil eye, kept on continually diminishing. Thus the authority of the Popes, who were at the head of the municipal institutions which had been preserved in the city, rendered that of the Duke of Rome almost a nullity, and approached to a species of sovereignty.”[98]

Footnote 98:

Cesar Cantù’s Univ. Hist., French translation, vol. vii. p. 418, vol. viii. p. 214.

Alboin, the first Lombard king, was murdered soon after his conquest by his own wife, in revenge for the death of her father, Cunimond, chief of the Gepidæ. He was succeeded by Clefis, who was assassinated after reigning eighteen months. The Lombard dukes were disposed to do without a king, and elected no successor to Clefis, until the necessity of uniting in war against their enemies compelled them to elect Autharis, the son of Clefis, the prince whose wife was the celebrated Queen Theodolinda. Autharis died one year after his marriage, and Theodolinda was requested by the dukes to choose a new spouse and king from among their number. The choice fell upon Agilulph, Duke of Turin. His son and successor, Adoloald, was deposed and Ariovald, Duke of Turin, elected in his place, to whom succeeded Rotharis, Duke of Turin, the second husband of Gundeberga, widow of Ariovald, and who was followed by his son Rodoald, the last of the descendants of Theodolinda. The nobles and people were so much attached to the memory of this pious queen that they sought for a new king in her family, although it was not Lombard, and elected her nephew, Aribert of Asti, of the Agilolphingian tribe settled in Bavaria. At his death the kingdom was divided between his two sons, from whom it was wrested by Grimoald, Duke of Benevento. His son Garibald was dispossessed by Perthurit, one of the sons of Aribert. Cunibert, Luitpert, Ragimpert, and Aribert II. completed the list of the Agilolphingian kings. Ansprand, a partisan of Luitpert, who had been dethroned by his rival Ragimpert and imprisoned by Aribert, conquered Aribert, and after a short reign of three months was succeeded by his son Luitprand, who reigned thirty-two years (712 to 744) and was the greatest of the Lombard kings.

With the reign of Luitprand begins the epoch of the decisive events which resulted in the final severance of all the bonds of political dependence which united Rome with the Greek Empire, in the establishment of the formal and legal monarchy of the Popes, and the overthrow of the Lombard dominion in Italy by Charlemagne.

Luitprand was a sovereign in the strict sense of the word, through his ability and energy of character even more than by the recognized title to the royal dignity which was vested in his person. He undertook and carried out a thorough reformation in the political administration of his kingdom, re-established order, extirpated the germs of disunion and civil war, secured the obedience of his subordinate dukes, and preserved a good intelligence with the Popes and the church. His ultimate aim was the union of all Italy in one kingdom under his own laws, including all the remaining Greek possessions and the city and principality of Rome. The first great step toward the fulfilment of this design must obviously be the conquest of the Greek exarchate. In this undertaking he had the sympathy of the Roman aristocracy and people, though not that of the Popes. The remnant of the old Roman nation existed at this time almost entirely in the ancient capital and its adjacent territory. The Roman Empire really perished from no other cause than the general extinction of the Roman race. As the barbarians swarmed into Italy the best part of the old Italians took refuge in Rome, where the old spirit, the old manners and institutions—so to speak, the Roman essence—was concentrated and preserved to effect a new and peaceful conquest of the world. This Roman nation desired to have its own autonomy and to be subject neither to the Roumanians of the east nor the barbarians of the west. They had no thought of accepting Lombard sovereignty over themselves, yet they were eager to see the Greek domination in Italy terminated, and therefore desired Luitprand’s success in the enterprise of overthrowing the exarchate. For Rome they desired independence. The Popes, however, would not take any measures for making Rome a sovereign state, until divine Providence directed the course of events to this end as a natural and necessary result, without any positive act on their part renouncing civil allegiance to the empire.

The course of events actually favored most opportunely and remarkably the designs of Luitprand and the wishes of the Roman people. The unutterable folly of the Emperor Leo the Isaurian drove him to an attack on the religion of the Romans and the sacred person of the pontiff. He ordered the exarch Paul to enforce submission to the heresy of the Iconoclasts by military power. Pope Gregory II. excommunicated Leo and exhorted all the Catholic princes and people of Italy to stand firm in defence of the faith and discipline of the church. They obeyed his voice so readily and with so much zeal that the absolute and final extinction of the Greek dominion in Italy was only averted by the mediation of the Pope himself. As Luitprand and the Lombards, profiting by the general uprising against the imperial authority, became stronger and advanced toward a more entire subjugation of Italy, they became more dangerous to the independence of the Holy See than were the feeble dukes and exarchs who represented the distant emperor. The king even allied himself with the exarch for the subjugation of the proud republic which disdained to be subject to either Greek or Lombard, and besieged the city of Rome. Pope Gregory II. went to Luitprand’s camp, and the majesty of his presence, together with the force of the arguments which he addressed to the noble and Catholic mind of the king, produced such an effect upon him that he cast himself at the feet of the pontiff, imploring his benediction and promising peace. In company with the Pope, Luitprand went to St. Peter’s Church, where he laid upon the tomb of the apostle his royal mantle, bracelets, coat of mail, dagger, gilded sword, golden crown, and silver cross as a gift to St. Peter and the church. Nevertheless, he renewed his attempt to make himself master of Rome ten years later during the pontificate of Gregory III., and continued during the pontificate of Zacharias his occasional irruptions into the exarchate of Ravenna and the duchy of Rome, although in every instance he yielded to the voice of his conscience and of the Vicar of Christ, desisting from his purpose as often as he renewed it, and making restitution of the towns which he had conquered. His successor, Rachis, undertook anew the enterprise of subjugating the exarchate, but was so much affected by the remonstrances of the Pope that he abdicated his dignity and withdrew with his wife and children into a monastery. His brother and successor, Astolpho, actually achieved the conquest of the exarchate,[99] and put an end to the Greek dominion in that part of Italy. Henceforth the Byzantine emperors had no authority in Italy except in Calabria and Sicily. Astolpho next turned his attention toward Rome and made a formal demand of allegiance on the senate and people, supported by a large army. The city was strongly fortified, and all its people were determined to make a stubborn defence of their independence. Astolpho would not lend his ear to any negotiation, help was demanded in vain from the Greek emperor, and in these sore straits Pope Stephen III. betook himself for aid and succor to Pepin, the King of the Franks.

Footnote 99:

The term exarchate is here used in its restricted sense.

Gregory III. had once before invoked the help of Charles Martel without any result. Since that time the Frankish nobles had referred to Pope Zacharias the question of their right to set aside the effete dynasty of the Merovingians and to substitute in its place the family of Charles Martel. The Pope had answered that the royal title ought to be given to the one who actually possessed and exercised the royal authority and functions. The new Carlovingian dynasty was thus formally established in France with the sanction and benediction of the Pope. And the time was now come for these powerful kings, Pepin and Charlemagne, to step forward as the eldest sons of the church, to secure the temporal sovereignty of the Pope, and to inaugurate that close relationship which has ever since existed between the kingdom of France and the Holy See.

Pope Stephen, although old and in extremely feeble health, went to France, where he was received with a spontaneous and splendid ovation by all ranks of the people, from the highest to the lowest. The Pope performed the solemn ceremony of the anointing of the king, the queen, and the royal princes, and conferred upon Pepin the dignity of patrician of Rome. A solemn assembly of the magnates of the kingdom was held at Quiercey, at which the king and nobles bound themselves to place the Pope in possession of the sovereign dominion of Rome and the exarchate. Pepin first attempted peaceful negotiations with Astolpho, and, these being absolutely refused, crossed the Alps with an army, and compelled him to make a treaty of peace with the Pope, by which he renounced all claim upon the Roman principality and the exarchate. Astolpho, however, disavowed and violated his engagements as soon as Pepin had withdrawn his army. Again (755) Pepin crossed the Alps and suddenly appeared with an overwhelming force before Pavia. Severer conditions of peace were this time imposed upon Astolpho—a mulct of one-third of his treasure, a yearly tribute of 12,000 gold solidi, and hostages for the fulfilment of his promises. French and Lombard commissaries were appointed to visit the whole territory assigned to the Pope and receive the keys of all the cities. Pepin made a solemn and festal entry into Rome amidst universal jubilation, and laid a formal document of investiture of the pontifical domain, together with the keys of the towns, upon the tomb of St. Peter.

Astolpho died suddenly from an injury received by a fall from his horse, very soon after these events (756). Rachis came out of his cloister with the design of regaining the crown which he had resigned. The majority of the princes favored the election of Didier, Duke of Brescia, who secured the influence of the Pope and of the envoys of Pepin in his favor by a solemn promise under oath to execute the treaty made by Astolpho and to cede some additional territory to the Holy See. He was accordingly elected King of Lombardy, but failed to fulfil his engagements and passed the seventeen years of his reign in perpetual efforts to secure an undivided sovereignty over all Italy. At last, taking advantage of the death of Pepin and of Pope Stephen III., and of cabals and factions among the Romans in reference to a new election, he made an open and violent effort to seize the dominion of Rome and the entire principality. He was deterred from actually consummating his intention by an armed entry into the city, where there was no force which could have prevented it, simply by the threat of excommunication, and withdrew to Pavia. The end of the Lombard kingdom was now near at hand. Pope Adrian, the Italian people, Charlemagne, and all except a few adherents of Didier were in accord on this subject. Charles crossed the Alps with a large army, evading the troops which guarded the passes by means of a secret defile, and easily took possession of the whole territory, Pavia only excepted, which held out for a year under Didier and his gallant son, Adelchis. Pavia at length surrendered, the Lombard kingdom was abolished, Didier was confined in a French monastery, where he became a monk in earnest for the rest of his life, the donation of Pepin to the Holy See was confirmed, and Charles returned home to prosecute that brilliant career which made him before the end of the century the monarch of almost the whole of Europe.

The temporal kingdom of the Pope was now established in a definite and stable manner, with the universal recognition of Catholic Christendom. Nevertheless, as a civil institution it was still exposed to the inward and outward vicissitudes and dangers to which all states are liable from the very nature of things. It was necessary that some great political power, distinct from the papal sovereignty, should hold over the See of St. Peter the ægis of protection. The providence of God, therefore, soon raised up that power which was consecrated by the name of

“THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.”

During the last year of the eighth century Adrian’s successor, Pope Leo III., was obliged to implore the aid of Charlemagne to repress the turbulence of Roman factions. Leo was received by Charlemagne at Paderborn, in the midst of a brilliant assemblage of nobles and a vast army, with all possible veneration and honor, and returned to Rome escorted by princes and prelates and a guard of honor, to await the promised visit of the king. In December, 799, Charlemagne came to Rome, a great council was assembled, and all the measures which were necessary for restoring and confirming order in the pontifical state were adopted. The Christmas festivities were celebrated with the greatest possible pomp and splendor, and while Charlemagne was kneeling before the tomb of the apostles Leo suddenly and unexpectedly approached him and placed on his head a golden diadem. The people burst forth into the acclamation: “Life and victory to Charles, the great and pacific Roman emperor!” In the bull which Leo published on the same day he says: Quem Carolum auctore Deo, in defensionem et provectum sanctæ universalis ecclesiæ Augustum hodie sacravimus.

In a former article[100] we have sketched an outline of the destinies and vicissitudes of Rome during the period of the decline of the Carlovingian dynasty and the rise of the German Empire. We have, therefore, now presented in a general view the history of the rise and consolidation of the temporal sovereignty of the Popes between the two great eras of St. Gregory I. and St. Gregory VII. From that time forward the political history of the Papacy relates chiefly to the rise and subsequent decline of the temporal power of the Pope over all Christendom, until at last, in the disruption of political unity among European states, the Holy See is once more subject to the same struggle for independence in its immediate patrimony which preceded the period of its mediæval power. The confederate union of the European nations under the moral presidency of the pope and the political primacy of the emperor was gradually transformed, by the waning of the imperial power which became restricted to Germany and at last subsided into a mere royal dominion over Austria, and the diminution of the spiritual power of the Holy See by the schism in Christendom, into a weaker sort of alliance, held together by common interests and mutual treaties. So long as this continued the Pope retained his place among the other sovereigns as one of the Italian princes, with a personal pre-eminence and a moral influence derived from his spiritual supremacy over the Catholic nations, and over the Catholic population in those nations which were not Catholic. Sound policy and the necessity of preserving an equilibrium in Europe caused the powerful monarchs of the great states to protect the independence of the Pope against one another, and to restore it when it was invaded. The disruption of the last bonds of European alliance in our own day has left the Holy See and the church once more a prey to secular tyranny exercised by a new German emperor, and a new Lombard king, without protection or defence from any political power. As Rome and Christendom went up together, so they have gone down together. And if a regeneration or restoration in the actual present or the future is destined for Europe and the rest of the world, it must be accomplished in both together; for they are inseparable parts of one whole. The history of the past is therefore a guide for judging the present and forecasting the future. The question of the temporal sovereignty of the Pope in the Roman state is essential and pre-eminent in the discussion of the principles of a reconstitution of the family of civilized and Christian nations. The complete independence and liberty of the Pope as supreme head of the church, and of the church itself, are intrinsically the most important of all rights and interests; and with these the temporal sovereignty of the Pope is necessarily connected so intimately that it becomes indirectly and extrinsically of equal importance, being, in fact, practically identified with them. We have, therefore, in our preceding historical sketches prepared the way for showing how this sovereignty of the Pope over Rome and the whole territory which he claims as subject to his crown is an indubitable and inalienable right, which must be restored and secured to him as the indispensable condition of religious and political order and well-being.

Footnote 100:

“The Iron Age of Christendom,” THE CATHOLIC WORLD, July, 1877.

We shall not attempt to reconcile this proposition with the doctrine of a divine or natural right of sovereignty inhering in the multitude of every nation or a majority of them. At the present time this doctrine is not maintained by sensible and moderate advocates of a constitutional form of government and of popular franchises. The sovereignty may lawfully reside in the multitude politically organized, as it does in our republic, but it is not by virtue of divine or natural right coalescing from the separate, individual rights of the units who make up the mass. The right of Mr. Tilden to the Presidential chair was not asserted on the ground that he received a majority of the popular vote, which he did receive without question, but on the ground that he received a majority of the votes of the electors who were really competent to vote for the appointment of a President, according to the Constitution. We might make a plausible argument to show that the Roman people have always consented to the papal sovereignty, except during intervals of political madness, and actually at the present time would re-establish it, if they were free to do so. But the right of the Pope cannot be maintained on a theory, which would reduce it to a popular concession revocable at any time by the will of his subjects. Some good Catholics may hold the doctrine of popular sovereignty as above defined, but they do so inconsistently; for, although it is not directly contrary to the Catholic faith, it is incompatible with the principles and practice of the Holy See and the church, and the doctrine of every authority respected by sound and loyal Catholics who are instructed in the science of political ethics. In certain circumstances the will of the people suffices, alone or in concurrence with other causes, to convey or transfer lawful dominion. We have shown how, in the case of the papal sovereignty, the Roman people did, voluntarily, withdraw or refuse allegiance to all other princes and eagerly give it to the Pope. We have shown, also, how other causes concurred in establishing his right as a fact, and placing him in actual possession of the sovereignty, without prejudice to any other really existing legitimate right. The Pope possessed all the rights belonging to his position as the chief land-owner and prince among the Roman princes. He possessed the right, as head of the church, to have no temporal prince placed over him who could control or hinder the exercise of his spiritual supremacy. Moreover, he possessed a great many imperfect rights or claims upon the allegiance of the Roman people arising from the services he had rendered to the state in preserving, defending, and succoring it in circumstances when it was near extinction, from his superior ability to govern the state, and the fitness of things making it expedient, and even necessary, for the public good that sovereignty should be vested in his person. The action of Pepin was that of one who defended the Roman people in the right of their independence against tyrants and aggressors, and defended the general right of his own and other nations to the independence and tranquillity of the Roman Church as the centre of Christendom. The action of Charlemagne was similar, and his overthrow of the Lombard kingdom was justifiable by the right of conquest, the consent of the greater part of the people of Italy, and the necessity of providing for the welfare not only of Italy but of all Europe. His final act of settlement in the beginning of the year 800 had still greater force and legitimacy as the act of the king of Europe, in which all the great estates of his realm concurred, the whole people of Western Christendom applauding, and the Eastern empire tacitly consenting. The possession of a temporal principality by the Pope became thus a fact, which was so connected with natural and divine rights of various kinds that it became a perpetual and inviolable right. This is the only way in which sovereign rights can become vested in any kind of lawful possessor or political person. There is no such thing as a right to civil sovereignty immediately delegated by God or springing out of the constitution of nature directly. Scarcely any one can be found, even among legitimists, who maintains any such origin for sovereign rights. There is a natural and divine right to good government inherent in the social and political order. There is a divine right, having a natural basis, in the Catholic Church to good government, which is specifically secured by the divine appointment of the form of government, as a hierarchy subordinated to a supreme head. This right takes precedence of all others. As those rights which are more particular cede to the more general, all rights whatever must give way to the universal right of all Christians and all mankind, that the Vicar of Christ shall be left free and independent in the possession and exercise of his spiritual supremacy, and that all men shall have liberty of obeying him as the vicegerent of God on earth. The Roman people have a right to good government, the Italian people have a right to national well-being, all Europe has a right to the advantage of a due political equilibrium and alliance among nations. All these advantages were secured by the establishment of the sovereignty of the Pope in Rome. It grew up and became strengthened, and sustained itself for ages, as an essential part of the political constitution of Europe. Whatever pretence to right, legitimacy, stability, or sanction of any kind can be made by any European institution, the same is applicable to the temporal principality of the Pope. But, beyond all this, it is necessary to the spiritual independence of the Holy See, and therefore protected by the sanction of a higher right and a higher law. It has been given to God and accepted by his vicegerent, and has thus become sacred, inviolable, irrevocable. It is like a cathedral, an altar, the sepulchre of a saint. It is the property of the universal church, of Christendom, and of God. As such it is under the protection of ecclesiastical, international, and divine law; it is within the domain of right and of morality, and therefore appertains to the Catholic religion; is included in the order which is subject to the spiritual supremacy of the Pope. In this order he is the supreme judge and lawgiver, infallible in defining and declaring the law, sovereign in the judgments and decrees by which he applies it to particular questions and concrete matters. The Pope is therefore the supreme judge, the Catholic episcopate being associated with him in the same tribunal, by whom alone the right and the necessity of the temporal sovereignty of the Holy See can be determined. The consent of the Catholic people adds moral weight to this determination, and the political action of states gives it the necessary physical force for its execution. But there is no appeal from the judgment of the Pope himself on his own rights as sovereign in the Roman principality, either to bishops, sovereigns, or people. His own judgment has settled the right of the Roman question, and it is the duty of all Catholics to adhere to that judgment. The Pope will not cede his sovereignty, and the Catholic people will not consent to its cession or to its violent occupation by any usurper.

The history of the destinies of Rome in the past shows that the recent calamities of the Holy See do not warrant the expectation that its temporal sovereignty has passed away to return no more. It has proved itself to be indestructible amid all the vicissitudes of Europe. When Rome is shaken and disturbed, the civilized world is thrown into commotion. As we are writing, the Russian army is crossing the Pruth, and it cannot be doubted that we have reached one of the most momentous epochs of history. When our readers are perusing what has been written, another fold of the scroll of time will have been unrolled, perhaps thickly written over with records of great events. We have read this morning the significant utterance of Von Moltke on the necessity of arming more German troops for the defence of the empire. Some may take Châteaubriand’s gloomy view of things and think that Europe is hastening on a funeral march to the tomb. If this be so, then there is no refuge for the Pope but the catacombs. If atheism, despotism, revolution, and anarchy are going to hold a wild revel amid the ruins and monuments of a Christendom which was but is no more, then Rome will be involved in the common ruin. But “when Rome falls, the world.” However, we do not feel obliged, as yet, to despair of Europe, Christianity, or civilization. If there is a resurging movement after a temporary convulsion, Rome will be the centre of it, and the successor of Pius IX. will reap the advantage of his long watch by the tomb of St. Peter. We believe in the triumph of the Catholic Church over infidelity, heresy, schism, revolution, and despotism; over Judaism, Mohammedanism, and heathenism. The restoration of the Pope’s temporal kingdom is necessary to this triumph, and therefore we believe it will be restored. We hope for a pacification of Europe after the war which has now begun is terminated. Civilized mankind is tired of war, and the almost bankruptcy which is universally produced by the enormous military establishments of the nations of Europe, it would seem, must enforce at length disarmament and bring about a period of amicable alliance and devotion to the arts of peace, the study of the welfare of the people as the end of government, the moral sway of principles which are not only patriotic but Christian and Catholic. In such a state of things the moral influence of the Holy See would naturally rise to a higher point than it attained even under the mediæval system.

As for Rome and Italy, their temporal prosperity, so far from being sacrificed, would be promoted, by the re-establishment of the pontifical state and the overthrow of the visionary fabric of Cavour and Mazzini. We certainly desire to see all just national aspirations of the Italians satisfied. We are glad that Austrian domination in Italy has ceased. But all history seems to show that a confederate unity of distinct states is the only order suited to Italy, and that a monarchical unification is foreign and hostile to the genius and conditions of the Italian people. But, whatever may be done by the Italians and the European princes who will be left masters of the situation and arbiters of national interests after the conflict now impending, in respect to the rest of Italy, the domain of the Pope must be restored to him in its integrity and placed under the protection of the law of nations. This is the indispensable condition of the restoration of Europe from the condition of decadence into which it has fallen, and no doubt the providence of God will force upon the rulers of the world the recognition of this truth in due time and by the course of events wholly beyond their foresight or control.

ALBA’S DREAM. BY THE AUTHOR OF “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” ETC. PART II.

When it was known in the country that M. le Marquis had joined the army as a common soldier, the consternation was great; but when it was known why he had done so, surprise gave way to bitter indignation and regret. The Marquis de Gondriac gone to risk his life for the son of a low plebeian, generally supposed to have been a pirate! The marvel was how the world stood still while such a scandal was enacted in its face. As to the widow, nobody thought of congratulating her. If Marcel had gone out and been shot, they would have pitied her, within reasonable bounds; but now every man’s hand was against her and her son—even the women felt the sweet font of pity dried up within them when they thought of what might come of this. But the people, despite their wrath, were loath to take so gloomy a view of the future.

“The bullets have a sense of their own,” said Peltran; “they know who to hit first and who last, and who never to hit. Look at M. le Comte, how they respect him! He has seen more fighting than ever the Caboffs did, and yet the bullets have never touched a hair of his head. It’s my belief the things are alive and know what they are about.”

No one contradicted this sapient remark; for Peltran was not a pleasant person to contradict.

Marcel Caboff had never been popular, but from this time forth he was branded as a sort of potential malefactor; if M. le Marquis died, Marcel would be his murderer, and Marcel’s life would not be worth an old song in Gondriac. The only people who did the young man justice and had the courage to take his part were Virginie and Alba. Since the night of the storm a friendship had sprung up between Marcel and Alba which had grown to more than friendship on his side. Alba was a lovely maiden now; impulsive, untutored as the waves that her nature seemed attuned to, wild as the sea-birds whose lot she sometimes envied when they beat their wings, rose up from the rocks, and took flight across the sea.

“I wonder you can stay here and live this idle, humdrum life when you might be away seeing the great world,” Alba said to him one day, as they met upon the cliff and walked on together.

“You wish I were away, do you?”

“Oh! no; only I wonder you don’t go. I should, if I were a man.”

“It is harder on me than you think,” said Marcel bitterly. “I did my best to get away; but mother went on her knees and said I would kill her if I went. It was hard to resist that; but it makes me feel angry with her when I think of what has come of it. I know the people hate me and call me a coward. Alba,” he said, turning suddenly round, “you don’t think me a coward, do you?”

“No, Marcel; if you had not been braver than any man in Gondriac, except your father, you would not have come out in the boat that night. How dare they call you a coward when they remember it!”

“They don’t remember it. Everybody has forgotten it but you.”

“M. le Marquis has not forgotten it.”

“I wish he had. That is what has brought all this misery about. If he had not remembered, I should be away with the grande armée now, and should either die a glorious death like my brothers, or come home by and by with the cross, and perhaps a wound or two. Then everybody would know I was a brave man, and mother would have had something to be proud of.”

“Yes,” said Alba dreamily; she was watching a ship that flecked the horizon far away like a great swan, its white sails flapping against the sky, the sea-gulls following in its wake, as it cleaved the wave.

“Would you have been proud of me?” asked Marcel.

“Yes,... perhaps.”

“You would not have cared a straw, I believe,” he said, angry and hurt at her indifferent tone.

“If you had been killed? Indeed I should, Marcel. I should have been very sorry; but what is the good of being sorry now, when it is never going to happen? Look at that ship out there! With what a dip she shears the water! How fast she goes! Her sails are like wings. I wish I had wings!”

“You are always wishing for impossible things,” said Marcel, huffed at this summary dismissal; “you were wishing you were a man a little while ago, and now you want to be a bird. Why don’t you wish for something I could give you?”

“You give me! You could not give me any one of the things I wish for!” Alba flung back the waves of swart hair from her low, broad brow and laughed derisively.

“How do you know that? I have plenty of money, and money can buy everything—everything reasonable, that is. Suppose a fairy were to come and say she would give you whatever you wished; what would you ask for?”

“I would ask her first to make me perfectly beautiful, perfectly good, and perfectly happy,” began Alba.

“Why, you are all that already, you foolish girl!”

“You think so; but you know nothing about it. I would ask her to make me as rich and powerful as a queen, and to make everybody pay me homage—not because I was rich and powerful, but because they loved me! Oh! I should like to be loved more than anybody ever was in this world before. And I should like to live in a beautiful castle, like the castle yonder, and I should fill it with beautiful things, and make it a real fairy palace to live in.”

“And who would you like to live in it with you? You would not care to live in it all alone?” inquired Marcel, bewildered by these ambitious aspirations that left himself and his money-bags altogether out of the reckoning.

“Well, first, I should like to have petite mère, of course; then ... then I should ask the fairy for a brave and handsome prince, who would come and woo me as they do in the story-books; he should be handsome and clever and good, or I should not care for him; but if he was all that, I should love him with all my heart and soul, and we should be as happy as the days are long!”

Marcel heard her to the end, and then began to consider if there was not some one item in the capacious list that came within his possibilities.

“If another castle would do instead of this one—you know you never could have this one—I would go and buy it for you, Alba, and you might have as many pretty gauds to fill it as you liked. We have lots of gold and silver things and pictures up there”—nodding towards the Fortress—“and if I asked mother she would give them to us—to you, I mean.” Alba’s laugh rang like a silver echo all along the cliff.

“And the prince—where would you get him?”

“Must he be a prince? Would not a brave man who loved you and was ready to do your bidding in everything, who would spend his whole life in trying to make you happy—would not that do instead? Must he be a prince, Alba?”

He took her hand and held it, and she did not struggle to release it. They were standing at the foot of a rock that cast a long, black shadow far out upon the sea; the west wind blew into their faces; Alba’s scarlet hood had fallen back, and her hair drifted in a heavy stream behind her, as Marcel bent over her, waiting to hear his fate. He might have read it in her blank, scared looks, in her startled, reluctant attitude. If there had been hope for him, would she have shrunk away and drawn closer to the rock, as if asking it to protect her?

“I have been too hasty,” said the young man penitently; “I should have spoken to Mère Virginie first. Forgive me, Alba, and say only if I may go to her now and ask you for my wife?” He still held her hand, and, mistaking her silence, made an effort to slip his arm around her. The movement acted on Alba like the sting of a snake; she escaped from him with a cry, and sped along the cliff like a deer flying from the hunters.

“My child, you have been foolish, and so has Marcel; but there is no need to cry or be unhappy about it,” said Mère Virginie when Alba had sobbed out the terrible story on her breast. But Alba was not to be comforted. She had been living in dreamland, and now awoke to find the hard ground under her feet instead of golden clouds. Of course she had dreamt of love and lovers, and her heart, or that vague yearning which as yet took its place, had become enamored of the dreams, visions that lay safe beyond the disenchanting present, wrapped in the golden haze of distance; and now this rude awakening had dispelled them, and brought home to the dreamer that she had reached that border-land that lies between the mystery of morning and the revelation of noon; the pearly mists had rolled away in an instant, and the blaze of the mid-day sun was upon her, chasing the fairy phantoms and making sober realities pitilessly clear. She had been dreaming of a lover in some remote time and place, and, lo! he was at her side; he had been close to her all along—an ugly, common man, who seemed made on purpose to mock the visions of her fancy. And yet this incident, which threw Alba into such despair, had been for many a day the fond anticipation of her mother’s heart.

“Why need it frighten you to find that Marcel loves you and wants to have you for his little wife, my child?” said Virginie. “Don’t shudder and cling to me as if he were going to drag you away this very moment! You shall never leave me, unless you do it of your own free will. But remember, darling, that I may have to leave you; and then what will become of you?”

“You leave me, petite mère?” And Alba looked up at her in dismay.

“It must come to that some day. I am old and you are young. I have a trouble here that reminds me of this often, and then I lie awake of nights, thinking of my little one, and praying God to give her a friend, the best and truest friend a woman can have in this world, to take care of her before I am called away.”

“Mother, if you go I will go too. I could never live without you! What should I do here if you were gone? Nobody wants me, nobody loves me in the whole world but you.”

“Marcel loves you, my child, and he will be that good friend, if you will let him.”

“Marcel! Marcel! As if he could replace you! I don’t love him; I don’t care if he went to the wars and never came back again.”

“If you married him you would soon learn to love him; his goodness would soon win your love. And then remember, Alba, how happy he could make you. You often long to have beautiful things—pearls and jewels and splendid dresses—and you sigh to go away in the ships that we see setting sail for distant lands, and to see fair cities, and the great mountains, and the countries where it is always summer and the flowers never die. Marcel would give you all these wishes; and then he would let you be so good and generous to the poor!”

“I should not care for pearls and pretty things, if I had to marry Marcel,” said Alba. “I should not like to go to distant cities with him; and if he loved me like a real lover, he would let me be good to the poor without making me his wife.”

How was the anxious woman to argue with this sweet, foolish innocence? If she could but teach the child to believe in the happiness that was at her feet, and persuade her to become Marcel’s wife, how easy it would be to die! How terrible it was to have to leave her unprotected and alone! Virginie’s heart overflowed in tears as she thought of it, and the hot drops trickled down her face and fell on Alba’s.

Alba looked up quickly. “Petite mère!” she said.

Throwing her arms round Virginie and kissing the wet cheeks again and again, “I will marry him! I will do anything, only don’t be unhappy, don’t cry! O mother, mother! what is it?” she cried, starting up in terror; for Virginie had fallen back and was gasping for breath. She pressed the child’s arm, and with her eyes bade her be still. The spasm of pain passed away after a while; but when she tried to speak the words came faintly in broken sentences.

“Petite mère! what is it?” entreated Alba, scarcely reassured. “May I call Jeanne? Shall we send for the doctor?”

“No, my darling, it is nothing; I am well now,” said Virginie, with a sickly smile that belied her words. The sharp pang had, it is true, subsided, but she was still ashy pale and could only speak under her breath. Alba watched her intently for some minutes, and then, twining her arms round Virginie’s neck, she laid her head upon her breast, nestling to her like a bird.

“Mother,” she whispered, “would it really make you happy if I were to marry Marcel?”

“My darling, it would make me happier than anything else in this world.”

“Then I will marry him, petite mère.”

“My child!” Virginie’s face lighted up with a beaming joy.

“I will marry him to please you. There, now, promise me not to be unhappy, not to lie awake at night fretting, and never to have any more pains at your heart!”

“But, my darling, I would not have you do it to make me happy. It is your happiness I am thinking of, not my own. Don’t you think you could learn to love Marcel after a while?”

“Petite mère! how can you ask me? Foolish, ugly Marcel, whom everybody laughs at and calls a coward! But never mind. I will marry him, since he wants me and you wish it; I promise you I will.”

“You are a foolish child to speak of Marcel so,” said Virginie; “those who laugh at him are the fools, and you know he is not a coward. As to his ugliness, what does that matter, if he is faithful, and fond, and good?”

Alba pondered this philosophy for some minutes; then she said: “When will he want to marry me, petite mère?”

“Not for a long while yet, my darling. You are both very young; there’s time to wait.”

“How old am I?”

“You were sixteen in September.”

“And how long will you let me wait?”

“Till your seventeenth birthday is passed, at least.”

“Nearly a whole year! Then I have all that time to be free and happy!”

“And if at the end of that time you have not learned to care for Marcel, I shall not ask you to marry him at all,” said Virginie. The ecstasy which the reprieve had called forth sent a pang through her heart, and made her ask herself whether, after all, she was doing wisely and well in forcing upon the child a lot from which her sympathies recoiled so violently.

“Not marry him at all!” repeated Alba in amazement; but she added quickly, with one of those sudden changes of manner that were familiar to her sensitive and mobile nature: “I think, petite mère, I had better not wait for the year. Instead of growing easier, it might grow harder by thinking over it all that time. You know you always tell me that when one has a disagreeable thing to do, it is better to do it at once and be done with it; one only makes it worse by looking at it. I think it would be better if I were to marry Marcel at once and get it over.”

Virginie was aghast at the combination of strength and utter childish ignorance of the true nature and bearings of the sacrifice in contemplation which Alba’s reasoning revealed. In the bottom of her heart the mother believed this repugnance would pass away, and there was no cruelty in coercing the child’s will at the outset, in order to bend it to her real happiness; but unless it could be so bent, Virginie would rather die trusting her treasure to God’s guardianship than force it into any man’s keeping.

“We will say no more about it for the present, my child,” she said; “we will leave it in the hands of God for another year.”

“And you will be happy now, petite mère?”

“Yes. I feel more tranquil about my darling’s future.”

“And Marcel—must I tell him?”

“No, you must not mention to him or to any one what we have been saying. I will speak to him myself.”

So there was no engagement, no promise exchanged; not a word of thanks or of rejoicing passed between him and Alba; but Marcel knew how docile she was to the power of love, and she loved her mother with a strength and depth of feeling that knew no limits and measured no sacrifices. He did not mean to be accepted as a sacrifice. He had faith enough in his love to believe that before the year was out it would have conquered the coy heart of his lady-love and brought her a willing captive to his side. Meantime, he would leave none of the stratagems and tactics of honorable warfare untried.

Alba was fond of books; he sent for all those he could hear of that were likely to interest her, and she and Virginie read them together in the long evenings, and talked over them, until their days were brightened by the scenes of travel and story which the books described. He knew she loved jewels and shining silks, and he went to Paris himself and selected pretty trinkets of every kind—a necklace of pearls, and rings of emeralds and rubies, and silks of soft and brilliant colors—and he would carry them to the cottage, and shyly lay them down without saying a word. Alba seldom noticed them till he was gone, when she would open the parcel and examine its contents; but Mère Virginie seemed to take more pleasure in the gauds than she did. This went on for three months. Then, one morning, Alba, who had been out since sunrise, sitting on the rocks and watching the tide come in and the creamy surf break upon the shore, entered the cottage and said abruptly:

“Mother, I won’t take any more presents from Marcel, and I want to give him back all those we have. I can’t keep them; I can’t indeed.”

“You have made up your mind never to marry him?”

“I will marry him whenever you wish it. It is not that, only I can’t take his gifts; they make me miserable. I hate them!”

“My darling, I will send them back to him, if you wish; but it will hurt him very much, poor fellow!—he took so much trouble to get them for you, and you used to love pretty things. How often have I not heard you long for the rings and flowers and shining silks we have seen in the fine shops at X——? Many a time you have wished a fairy or a lover would come and give them to you! Do you forget?”

“Ah! that is just it,” said Alba, with a light laugh that was full of pain; “if a lover gave them to me, I dare say I should like them well enough.”

“But Marcel is your lover?”

“Poor Marcel! It is so funny trying to think of him like that. He is so awkward and stupid and ugly; a real lover would be quite different. But I don’t want one now; I don’t indeed, petite mère. Only please send Marcel back his gifts. They make me feel as if he were bribing me to be fond of him, and I should not care a bit more for him if he gave me the loveliest jewels in France. I don’t care any more for jewels. I used to long to be happy myself, but now I only care to make you happy. You promised me to be very happy when I married Marcel?”

This was dreadful. This was not what the mother meant when she prayed for the marriage that Alba contemplated with such pathetic resignation, as if it were a sacrifice or a torture that every day brought nearer to her. There were still eight months between her and the dreaded fate, and Virginie was strongly moved to tell her at once that she was released. It seemed cruel to poison the child’s life all that time on the chance, which apparently grew less as the months went on, of her getting to love Marcel at the end of the year. But, again, this marriage was the one prospect of security and happiness which the future opened out—quiet, substantial happiness such as the mother longed to see her in possession of. If Alba flung it away, there was nothing before her but a lonely, loveless life of unprotected poverty. It was best to be patient, to keep silence a little longer. Virginie, meantime, had faith in the power of her own love, and she would never cease imploring heaven to take the destiny of her darling into its safe-keeping.

* * * * *

Hermann de Gondriac had now been five years absent, and those years had been an uninterrupted series of triumphs for him; he had borne a charmed life on every battle-field, and come off unharmed where all around him were stricken. But the chances of war prevailed at last, and the news came to Gondriac that M. le Comte had been seriously wounded and was coming home. His left arm had been shattered, and, though the skill of the emperor’s surgeon had saved him from amputation, he was in great suffering and condemned to the severest precautions. A few bonfires were lighted on the cliffs to bid the home-comer welcome, but this was all the people ventured on. M. le Marquis, it was said, had been in the same engagement with his son, but had come out of it unhurt.

That winter was a fierce one all through France, and Gondriac suffered terribly; the bleak gray sea in a perpetual roar, and the winds beating on its wild, open coast. Food and fuel were scanty, and but for the presence of the young lord at the castle many amongst the fishermen’s families must have perished and starved. No one had yet seen him; the great physician, who came from Paris at intervals, forbade his going beyond the southern side of the park until spring came with sunshine and blossoms. But Hermann could not have been more actively present amongst his people had he been walking daily in the midst of them. He seemed to know by inspiration what they wanted, and food and clothing were dealt out from the castle in unlimited supplies. There were toys for the children, and medicine and strengthening wine for the sick, and books for those who could enjoy them, until the people came to think that the bird of the fairy-tale must be true, and that their young master had the tell-tale messenger at his orders.

Alba busied her poetic fancy in making pictures of what Hermann was like. She had not seen him since she was a child and he a tall, slim lad. Now that he was a man and a hero, she longed to behold him again. Even to look at a hero from a distance would be something—life was so tame, and all the people she knew were so commonplace. Was he proud and stern and abrupt in speech, as they said the emperor was? Or was he gentle and honey-tongued like the knights of old?

One morning a man rode in from X—— to the castle bearing important news to M. le Comte. Important news indeed: the emperor was coming the next day to inspect the fortifications of a neighboring seaport. It was settled at once in Gondriac that M. le Comte would go to meet his majesty. No physician could hinder him in that, come what might of it.

Alba had heard nothing of this great event which was stirring the country for fifty miles round. She and Virginie lived a life apart up in their sea-nest, and old Jeanne was not given to gossip, but did her marketing without waste of words, and brought home little news in her basket.

It was a lovely morning; the sun shone brightly on the sea; the breakers were scampering in, not loud and angry, but tossing over one another in masses of creamy foam. Alba loved these laughing seas, and would sit for hours on the rocks, watching the tide ride in on the silver horses. To-day the salt breath of the ocean and the mellow west wind excited her like wine, and carried her off to the old dreamland where she seldom ventured now. She was away on the dancing billows, sailing to the land of the sun with a noble knight by her side. Virginie sat there with maidens serving her; there was music on shore, and crowds waving glad farewells. Alba began to sing as she walked briskly along the cliff, building her castle in fairy-land. But the Fortress standing out like a spectral prison, with the ivy blown inside out on its grimy walls, sent a sudden chill through her and put out the sunlight. There was a figure at the window watching her. She turned hastily back, walking quickly until she got down the slope, when she almost flew across the moor, on and on till she was safe in the shelter of the park. O that figure, how it pursued her! How the Fortress threatened her! If she could but fly from them for ever, and never hear of Marcel Caboff any more! She had fancied latterly that the prospect of being his wife and living with old Mme. Caboff in the gloomy, rat-haunted place was less odious to her than it used to be; but to-day the thought nearly drove her mad. She had sped along as if some evil fate were behind her, and she was tired; there was a moss-grown oak close by, and she sat down on the trunk to rest. The wind rustled the dead leaves at her feet and swept the topmost branches of the pines; then the anthem died softly away and all was silent. The place was very still; nothing stirred but the insects in the grass, and the zephyr high up above her head, as it rose and fell in swift, Æolian breathings. In the distance, with a forest of trees between, lay the castle, its battlements and towers and flying buttresses rising majestically against the sky—a high romance of chivalry and war chronicled in stone; to Alba the door of an enchanted realm whose portals she might never pass. No wonder men were heroes who lived in homes like this; how easy it must be to lead grand lives where the very walls are heralds and witnesses urging to noble and knightly deeds! The present owner of this splendid house was worthy in all this of his proud ancestors. What a royal act of heroism it was of the old Marquis to enlist as a common soldier out of gratitude to a dead man and pity for his widow! Then Alba thought of Marcel, of the poor, tame creature he showed beside this race of knightly nobles, and she despised him, and fell to wondering how it would be when she was his wife. Gradually the castle melted away, and in its place rose the Fortress, dark and frowning, and it lowered on her like a doom, and Marcel and his grim old mother stood at the window beckoning her to advance. Alba flung herself down upon the trunk and buried her face in the moss, and began to cry passionately. She cried a long time, being full of pity for herself, and there was no one within reach that she need check her sobs.

“What has happened? What is the matter with you, child?” said a voice close to her.

She started up in terror. Yet the speaker was not at all terrible to look at—a gentleman in the brilliant uniform of the Imperial Guard, young and handsome, with a most commanding air, and carrying his left arm in a sling. When Alba rose it was his turn to start. Lying there in an attitude of child-like abandon, shaken with sobs, her scarlet hood thrown back and her masses of black hair falling in loose coils over her neck and face, he had taken her for a little girl; he had called her child, and, lo! she was a full-grown maiden, and lovely beyond words, despite her tears and her dishevelled mien. He bowed to her as he might have done to a queen.

“You are M. le Comte!” said Alba, pretty much as she might have said to a celestial apparition, “You are the Archangel Gabriel!”

“Hermann de Gondriac, your humble servant, mademoiselle.”

She stared at him through the big tears that hung like dew-drops from her lashes, her soft, large glance modest, yet unabashed as if it were gazing on a picture. The knighthood in Hermann recognized the maidenhood of that fearless gaze and did it reverence, but he could not quench the glowing admiration of his own. How liquid and pure they were, those black stars with which she stared at him, those soul-lit eyes that met his without dismay, too innocent to quail beneath their burning light! Why should they quail? Were they not looking at a vision, a dream transmuted into substance? This was the young chief whom she had pictured to herself so often, whose lineage and prowess were the pride of all the people. Only how much grander the reality was than anything she had fancied! What a martial air he wore in his gold-embroidered uniform, with his spurs and clanging sword and plumed helmet, the stars upon his breast—every inch a warrior and a knight!

“You have hurt yourself, mademoiselle; you are in pain,” said Hermann. “Can I send to the castle for assistance for you?”

“Thank you, monseigneur; I have not hurt myself.”

“Yet you were crying?”

“It was not with pain.” This time Alba dropped her lids and blushed.

“Forgive me; I did not mean to intrude upon you.” Alba stood looking down like a guilty child, her cheeks aflame, her lips quivering with the sudden conflict between fear and shame, and a strange emotion that thrilled her like sweet music. “Who is she?” thought Hermann. He remembered, years ago, a child whom his father raved about, wondering how a plebeian stem could have put forth so fair a flower. Could this be she? The curé had told him of the girl’s rare beauty as a sad and anxious burden on his mind, and of the mother’s being ill and in need of generous wine, and he had ordered the best in his cellar to be sent to her. Half unconsciously, as when we try to catch some forgotten air by humming it under our breath, he murmured, “Alba....”

She looked up with a start, and then they both smiled.

“How did you guess I was Alba?” she said, her shyness gone in an instant.

“I did not guess, I remembered.”

“How wonderful! I should never have remembered you, monseigneur.”

“That is not surprising. I am changed since you saw me.”

“And so am I, am I not?”

“Yes, more changed than I could have believed.”

“Ah?” Did he mean for the better or the worse? The man read the question in her eyes and answered it:

“You are far more beautiful than I expected.”

“Beautiful!” she repeated, and her face lighted up.

“I was frightened when I saw you; I took you for a fairy princess,” said Hermann, yielding to the irresistible temptation of pleasing her.

Alba’s face clouded over. “Now I know you are laughing at me, monseigneur; you don’t believe in fairies, and you know very well I’m not a bit like a princess.”

“I have seen many a one who would have given a great deal to be like you,” said Hermann.

“Like me! I thought princesses were all so happy!”

Hermann smiled. “Sometimes they have hearts,” he said.

“Sometimes! And does that make them unhappy?”

He turned to walk under the trees, tacitly inviting her to do the same.

“It endows them with the power of loving,” he answered absently.

“But I thought....” She hesitated; it was difficult to put the thought into the right words.

“You thought that love always led to happiness?” said Hermann, finishing the sentence for her, while he looked at her with a curious glance. Why had she come to cry in this lonely place?

“I don’t know what it leads to. I shall never know,” said Alba very gravely.

M. le Comte smiled. “Tell me, Alba, why were you crying so bitterly just now?”

She turned away her head and made no answer.

“Tell me, sweet Alba,” persisted the young man; “perhaps I can help you if you are in trouble. Trust me with your secret. As I am a soldier and a gentleman, I will defend you if I can. Tell me, is there some one you care for who does not know it?”

She shook her head. “It is not I who care.... I wish I could, but I have tried my best and I cannot love him!” The tears welled up again and were flowing freely.

“Who is forcing you to love him? Tell me his name and I will protect you from him. I swear to you I will!” And Hermann, with a soldier’s instinctive gesture, put his hand to his sword, while his eye kindled with chivalrous anger. Alba thought him the ideal of a noble knight, as she looked at him, terrified and enchanted.

“He is not forcing me, monseigneur,” she said, “and you can do nothing to help me. I have promised to marry, and I must keep my word.”

“You shall not, by heaven, if it makes you wretched! He is a cowardly dog who would hold you to your word against your will,” protested the count hotly.

“He is not forcing me; but I have promised,” repeated Alba.

“And you cannot love him?”

“No! and I have tried so hard.... But mother says that when I am his wife it will be different....”

“Yes, it will be worse, a thousand times worse! Alba, tell me this man’s name; trust me with your secret,” said Hermann, changing his angry tone to one of soft persuasion.

“I dare not,” said Alba in a frightened whisper; “you would go and kill him.” The great, swart eyes were looking up at him, full of trust and admiration.

“Kill him, child! Do you think me so terribly wicked? Do I look like a murderer?”

“It would not be murder in you. You are a warrior; you don’t think it wrong to kill men. That is what warriors are for; but I should not like you to kill poor Marcel.”

“Marcel!... Marcel! I seem to know that name,” said the count, musing. “Has he no other?”

“Yes, Marcel Caboff,” replied Alba in a confidential tone; “but you must not hurt him, monseigneur. Oh! I wish I had not told you.”

Hermann started and muttered something between his teeth which she did not hear, but his look frightened her.

“Marcel Caboff! the fellow whom my father ransomed at the risk of his own life!” said the count. “And he would force you into marrying him! By heaven! he shan’t. I will foil him there.”

“O monseigneur, monseigneur! you will not kill him,” pleaded Alba, clasping her hands and appealing to the murderer with a scared face. “It is not his fault—it is not indeed, monseigneur!”

“I don’t mean to kill him; I would not touch a hair of his head,” said Hermann. “But why do you say it is not his fault? Does he not love you? Does he not want you to marry him?”

“He does, oh! so dreadfully. But I should not mind that. It is mother whom I have promised. It is to please her that I must marry him,” said Alba, and her breast heaved with big sobs, and all the floods were let loose again.

Hermann longed to draw her to his breast and kiss away the tears—she was such a child in spite of her sixteen summers and their full-blossomed beauty! But he checked the impulse. There is no majesty so imposing as the majesty of childhood. “Alba,” he said, “I will save you from Marcel Caboff without hurting him or any one. You shall not marry him, unless you come to wish it yourself. Are you sure that if he gave you up you would not change your mind and wish him back again?” This was Hermann’s estimate of woman’s nature; true, his experience had been gathered among types as different from the one before him as the flowers of a hot-house are from the primrose of the woods.

“I should never wish him to come back; I could never love him,” said Alba—“never, never, never.”

“Then I swear to you on my sword you shall not marry him!” said the count impetuously. “Now tell me, Alba,” he resumed, seeing that she did not speak, “is there not some one you would like to marry better than this fellow Caboff? Tell me the truth. If you had a brother, you would not mind telling him. Try and fancy I am your brother.”

Fancy him her brother! Alba’s fancy had taken many an aerial flight, but never such a one as this.

“Who is he? What is his name?” said Hermann in a whisper, bending closer to her.

But she shook her head. “There is no one, monseigneur.”

“Oh! I don’t believe that; you are afraid to trust me. There is surely some one else who wants to marry you?”

“No one, monseigneur, but Marcel.”

“Alba, look at me!” She turned and looked at him like a docile child. “Have you never seen any one whom you could love or whose heart you would care to win?” He was gazing deep down into the two dark pools of light, as if he thought to see into her soul through them. She did not shrink from the searching glance, but dwelt in it for one long moment; then, as if the flame in Hermann’s eyes leaped out and flashed upon her with too intense a radiance, revealing the spring of some sweet mystery in her heart and his, the white lids quivered and dropped, and a deep blush rose to Alba’s face. They were alone. The voices of the wood were hushed; the dead leaves ceased to rustle at their feet; the zephyrs paused in the branches overhead; the silence grew and deepened, filling the solitude with an overpowering presence, till each seemed to hear the beating of the other’s heart. Suddenly the sound of a horn, followed by a noise of wheels crushing the gravel in the distance, broke the spell and admonished Hermann that he must be gone. He lifted Alba’s hand to his lips, and without a word of farewell turned from her and struck across the park towards the castle.

Alba watched him out of sight, and then turned and wended homewards. Her heart beat with wild throbs of joy; the spirit that had been dead within her all these miserable months woke up, quickened to a new birth, and overflowed in song. The flute-like voice trilled out over the lonesome moor like the carol of a bird let loose; but as she drew near the confines of the heath the Fortress came in sight and checked her song. Was it so certain that Hermann could set her free? and how? What would her mother think of it? how of this wonderful meeting and monseigneur’s promise? Alba slackened her steps and took to pondering. A moment ago she was impatient to pour into Virginie’s ear the story of the interview, to repeat every word Hermann had said, to convey, as far as it was possible, the impression he had made upon her, to describe his manly beauty, his warlike aspect, his gentle courtesy, the incomparable sweetness of his voice, the chivalrous kindness of his manner, never doubting but that Virginie would sympathize in this new delight, as she had done in every little joy that had gladdened her child’s young life. But suddenly a change came over Alba—something vague, and undefined; a sense of doubt, of warning, of intangible fear. She had done nothing wrong, and yet the still, small voice was whispering inaudible reproach as if she had. Could Virginie be angry with her for speaking to monseigneur? How could she have avoided it, how refuse to answer his persistent questions, so kindly and so courteously put? He had entreated her to trust him! Alba stood amidst the breezy waves of heather, and recalled him as he bent near her and lowered his voice and bade her look at him. How he had seemed to read her through and through! “Have you never seen any one whose heart you would care to win?” She murmured the words softly to herself, and the sound of them was like the echo of his voice, and called up the hot blush to her cheeks again. There was nothing wrong in monseigneur’s asking her the question. Why, then, did she feel afraid to tell her mother of it? Musing for a moment on this mystery, Alba remembered how he had said: “Try and fancy I am your brother.” Virginie could not be angry at that, surely. “I will tell her that, and say nothing about the other,” muttered Alba to herself; and, satisfied that this was a safe way out of the difficulty, she walked on briskly till she was close upon the confines of the moor. Then the sound of a carriage coming down the road made her stop till it should pass. It was an open calêche preceded by outriders. Alba recognized the occupant at once, even before his hand was raised in courtly salutation as he flashed by. Her heart beat fast, and sent the blood to her cheeks and brow, dying them crimson.

“Perhaps I had better say nothing at all to petite mère,” was her reflection as she crossed the road and began to climb the cliff. “He told me to trust him; perhaps he would be angry if I spoke until he bade me.” And so it was decreed. The tyrant had stepped in, and at his first whispered prompting the discipline of a life gave way.

It was not many days after this wonderful morning when an event occurred which threw all the sweet romance of life into the shade, and made Alba forget her own cares and hopes in concern for the great sorrow of another. M. le Marquis was dead. He had died, not actually on the field, but of a wound received in battle. The young lord’s grief was like a madness, they said. Those about him said that in the first frenzy of despair he had called on Marcel Caboff and cursed him as the murderer of his father. Whether this was true or not, Gondriac believed it, and bitter words were spoken against the widow’s son in all the country round. Bitter words are like the wind; they fly, and have a faculty for reaching those whose aching nerves most dread their sting. The widow heard what was said of her son and felt it keenly; it was cruel, yet it was just; it was a hard price to pay for Marcel’s safety, but she could not reckon it too high. If only she might pay it alone! They are all alike, these mothers. Mme. Caboff was a vain, hard woman, but the mother in her was all soft and generous and beautiful. She came to Virginie for sympathy—not for herself, but for Marcel. It was her doing, M. le Marquis’ death, not his. Why would not people visit her sin upon herself, and not upon her boy? But Virginie and Alba would be kind; they had always said that Marcel was no coward. Virginie gave the poor woman what comfort she could; but Alba was not there. She could not bear the sight of Marcel’s mother; for the thought of Marcel was now unendurable to her. It might be unjust, and yet it was true to say that he was the murderer of M. le Marquis, of Hermann’s father. The news had thrown her into such a paroxysm of distress that Virginie was terrified, not holding the key to it. It was right that she should be sorry, and natural that she should be shocked, but this agony of grief was unaccountable. Virginie took her in her arms, and soothed her with caresses and endearing words, and then bade her go and rest awhile. But Alba, as if instinct warned her of the coming visit, hastened out of the house, and fled across the moor until she was safe in the shelter of the park, and then she flung herself down on the moss-grown trunk that had a memory of its own, and buried her face in the primroses and cried her heart out in pity for Hermann.

After this it was impossible to mention Marcel Caboff’s name in her presence. “I loathe the very thought of him, mother! I would rather die than marry him!” she said; and Virginie felt that Providence was against her, and surrendered. Marcel took back his gifts, and quarrelled with his mother, and went away from Gondriac. People said it was shame and remorse that drove him forth; but Alba knew this was not true, and, now that he had set her free, she pitied him.

* * * * *

M. le Marquis was borne to the grave amidst such honors as the proudest Crusader of his name might have envied. It was with the jubilant pomp of a coronation rather than the mournful pageant of a burial that they laid him to rest. For his people would have it that he was a martyr; he had gone out to die of his own free will, sacrificing himself out of gratitude to the dead and charity to the living. The population flocked in from thirty miles round to attend the funeral. Five hundred men followed the crimson-draped car with palms and laurel branches; children clad in white bore crimson banners that fluttered in the breeze, while their voices rose in hymns of victory, giving glory to God and the Christian soldier; the voices of the multitude made response in chorus, and the waves, breaking in low thunder against the rocks, sounded their everlasting amens as the procession wound its way by the sea-shore to the cemetery.

And now Hermann de Gondriac was alone, the head of an ancient house, wealthy and young, but as poor in that which makes life rich as the poorest of his peasantry. If he could but have girded on his sword, and, escaping from solitude, have drowned his grief in the excitement of the camp! Spring came, and the fields were carpeted with wild flowers, and the woods were full of music. But Hermann was seldom seen abroad; he lived indoors, amidst his books, the people said; but, in truth, the young lord’s chief companions were his thoughts, angry, rebellious thoughts, that made him chafe most bitterly against his forced inaction. The park was vast as a forest, and he never went beyond it. Often, in his moody walks, he strayed to that spot close upon the moor where he had first seen Alba lying upon the mossy trunk. The charm of her beauty and her daisy-like simplicity had wrought upon his heart more deeply than he was aware. For days after that meeting she had been ever in his thoughts. He said that he was thinking only of how he might rescue her from a cruel fate; no doubt it was to help him to this issue that he returned to the spot where she had stood, and conjured up her image, till the nymph-like figure with the dark eyes and witching smile seemed to float visibly before him, and listened for her voice until he thought he heard it in the sighing of the wind.

Then came the thunderbolt of his father’s death, and Alba and all the world were forgotten. But grief cannot hold its sway in human souls beyond a given time. As the days go by they bear away its sting upon their wings, that touch the bleeding places with a balm. Hermann was young, and as the weeks passed youth vindicated itself, and rebelled against the stagnant, lonely life, and longed for action and for the sweet companionship of kindred youth. If he could not fight, he could at least love; but who was there at Gondriac to love? The merry comrades of the bivouac were out of call, and when he returned to the midst of them he would find his place filled up; others would have come and gone again, and risen in command and won place and distinction, while he was out of sight, a prisoner to a stiff arm, as good as a dead man. He hated himself with bitter vexation. One morning he betook himself in one of these savage moods to wander in the park, and, not heeding which way he went, strayed to that lonely walk under the shadow of the old trees near the moor. Some one, meanwhile, was watching him, crouched timidly behind a furze-bush, admiring his quick, military stride, thinking how grand and lion-like was that angry toss of the head which every now and then relieved his bitter thoughts.

The air was fresh, and yet warm with that delicious warmth of some spring days that come like heralds of the summer, gathering up all the sweets of earth into one fragrant breath, wooing us with soft, furry zephyrs, and the scent of opening blossoms, and the melody of young birds learning to sing. Alba had been tempted across the heath to the park, where the trees had put out their bright green foliage that looked so lovely sparkling in the sunlight. Perhaps, too, though she did not own it, there was a lurking hope in her heart that she might catch a glimpse of Hermann in the distance. If so, she was not disappointed. There he was, walking under the pine-trees, but, happily, with his back to the heath, so that he did not see her! She dipped quickly behind a furze-bush, and disappeared from view just as he turned, and, coming through the trees at an angle, stepped out on the pathway. A nightingale began to sing in the distant copse; but Alba, as she cowered behind her bush, thought the crystal trills and the loud call-note less musical than the sound of Hermann’s foot-fall crushing the gravel close to her hiding-place—so close she almost feared he would note the shadow of her pink skirt upon the grass, or mayhap overhear the palpitation of her heart. But presently the foot-falls died away, and the nightingale and the zephyrs had it all to themselves again. She waited some minutes—an hour it seemed to her—before she ventured to look up; but at last she did, and there, within a few paces, straight before her, stood Hermann. He had left the pathway and taken to the noiseless grass under the trees.

“Alba!”

There was a ring of joy in the greeting, as the young lord came forward, holding out his hand.

“Why have you never come? I have been here again and again in hopes of seeing you!”

He was a true knight and meant no harm; but in his joy at seeing the sunbeam on his path he forgot that he had no right to be so glad or to let Alba see it.

“I did not forget my promise,” he said, leading her into the park and turning to walk by her side; “but I learned soon after that there was no need for me to interfere. Caboff left the place, they told me.”

“Yes, monseigneur, people said” ... she hesitated. “They were all so sorry for you, and Marcel could not bear it, because they hated him—poor Marcel! It was not his fault; he never was a coward.”

“You are sorry now that he is gone! Perhaps he will come back? No doubt he will, if you ask him.”

“I will never ask him; but I am sorry for him,” she replied, and then, looking up at Hermann with those soul-lit eyes that had a language of their own like music, she added timidly: “But I was more sorry for you, monseigneur.”

“Alba!” He took her hand and kissed it. It was very sweet to be so near him, Alba thought. They walked on together, hand in hand, without speaking for a while. The grass was soft beneath their feet, and the trembling sunbeams stole through the trees and touched their faces with golden shadows, thrilling and pure and full of gladness, as the touch of nature is when it stirs the chords of young vibrating hearts. “If I could but comfort him!” she was thinking, till the thought grew so loud within her she feared he would overhear it. But we are deaf to those voices that lie “upon the other side of silence.” Hermann, as he held the warm, soft hand within his own, was wondering how it came to pass that yonder on the barren cliffs a flower so rare and delicate had grown, and been trained to so much grace and ease by a woman who was called Mère Virginie. Then he remembered his father’s words about the royal flower on the plebeian stem, and, thinking of him, he sighed. Alba looked up quickly, offering all her soul’s wealth of sympathy through her eyes, and Hermann bethought to himself how delightful it would be to have this sympathetic creature always at his side. But he thought also of the emperor and the world, and wondered what these potentates would say were he to pick up the jewel from the dust and set it in his coronet. Bonaparte had a way of choosing mates for his officers as he chose sites for his battles, and ordering them to marry as he ordered them to charge; but Hermann felt he was not one to be cowed by the imperial match-maker, and there was something rather inspiriting in the idea of defying the despot if he attempted to meddle with his life outside the camp. Why should he not gather this wild flower, if he chose? Had his father lived, it would have been different; but now he was free, there was no one to whom he need sacrifice the promptings of his heart, be they wise or foolish. The world and the court might laugh; it was not from amongst them he cared to take a wife; he wanted to be loved, to be wed for his own sake, and not for the good things he had to offer. But did Alba love him?

“Alba,” he said, “now that Marcel is gone, who is to be the favored suitor?”

“No one, monseigneur; I told you so before.”

“But I did not believe you. I don’t believe you now.”

“Why should I tell you a lie? I never told one in my life.”

She spoke without anger or offended pride; but Hermann saw that he had pained her, and there was a purity of truth about her that rebuked his denial, though it was spoken in jest.

“Forgive me, dearest! I wanted to hear you say it again. I wanted to be certain there was no one else you cared for.”

He bent toward her caressingly, and, looking under her hood, saw two big tears slowly trickling down her cheeks.

“Alba....”

What an idle boast seems this about the freedom of the human will! Our most pregnant words, our weightiest actions, spring far oftener from impulse than from deliberate resolve; a touch, light as the feather floating on the summer breeze, will stir the fountain and make its waters overflow; a word spoken when we had meant to be silent will change the current of our life, and push us to a step that can never be retraced. An hour ago Hermann de Gondriac no more dreamed of offering his hand to Alba than he did of burying himself in the Grande Chartreuse; but those two tears were the drops that made the fountain overflow, and, in the sudden flood of tenderness, pride, prudence, everything but love was swept away.

“Alba,” he whispered, clasping her in his arms and gathering her to his breast—“Alba, I love you. Will you come to me and be my wife?”

Was she awake, with the solid earth under her feet, or were those whispered words the music that our fancy makes in dreams? But the music did not die away, nor did the clasping arm melt from her, as do the embraces of those loved ones who visit us in sleep.

“You love me!” she said, looking up into his face with her large, warm glance, pure and trusting as a child’s—“you love me!” And the sunbeams went on singing it in shadow music on the grass, and the cuckoo called it through the woods, and the trees in their murmurous song repeated it, and the clouds, as they sailed over the zenith, traced it in silver lines upon the sky—“You love me!”

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.

MAGDALEN AT THE TOMB.

Deep sombre clouds roll up to shroud the night, For in the silence of a guarded tomb Rests the rich promise of a Virgin’s womb; And hearts that hoped are shrunk as buds by blight, Till, like a soul which gains from Heaven delight, The radiant morn dispels the woeful gloom, And casts o’er hungry Earth a new perfume. A white-robed Angel, pinion-fring’d with light, Beside the empty grave bade one rejoice, Who, coming from the cross, outran the morn, In loving haste the body to adorn; But found it gone—and wept. Oh! hasty choice Of tears, for one who was the first to turn Her eyes upon her Lord, and hear his voice.

FROM THE MEDEA OF EURIPIDES. 'A free translation. BY AUBREY DE VERE.

[The Chorus dissuades Medea from slaying her children.]

STROPHE I.

O race renowned in ancient story, Race from the blest Immortals sprung, Athenians, ye who all day long, Feeding on wisdom and on glory, Walk lightly through that climate fine, Where, as the fabling poets say, The yellow-tressed Harmonia Brought forth the Muses nine; That sage and virgin choir whose shell You hear so often, love so well:—

ANTISTROPHE I.

To you white Aphrodite sends Her Loves, to make you wise and kind; For they are Wisdom’s choicest friends; And here they say the goddess wreathed Her fragrant locks with rosy twine; And here they sing that, passion-fraught And o’er Cephisus’ stream reclined, Along the flowery vale she breathed Sweet airs from that cold current caught Upon her balmy lips divine.

STROPHE II.

Medea, dream not that the city Of sacred founts and streams can e’er Give harbor to a wretch like thee: Pity them, ruthless mother, pity! See but thy guilt as others see; By all things great and good, forbear! We clasp thy knees, and bid thee spare The babes that laughed upon thy knee!

ANTISTROPHE II.

They are thy children! They will call Aloud, aloud upon their mother! How can’st thou hear that pleading cry? In vain thou striv’st:—thou can’st not smother A mother’s love. Thy hand will shake; Thy heart will bend; thy heart will break, Thy frenzy melt away and die, When twining round thy feet they fall In that despairing agony.

THE STORY OF THE GOTHIC REVIVAL.

When, centuries hence, historians endeavor to delineate the characteristics of the present century, it is more than probable that the features that will most strike them will be those of innovation and change. Progress in every science, rapid advance in material prosperity, sweeping reforms in laws and governments, political and social changes not a few, will appear to have pretty well filled up the records of the busy century that is fast drawing to its close. To those, however, who look more closely into the minor though oftentimes important details that contribute in a great measure to influence the character of an age, it will be evident that, if change and revolution have to a large extent reigned paramount in this century, neither has it been altogether wanting in a just recognition of the past, and in a serious revival of some of the best features of that past.

These thoughts have been suggested by the perusal of Sir Charles Eastlake’s History of the Gothic Revival in England—a work in which is displayed a thorough knowledge of the subject combined with an agreeable style and a high artistic taste, which cannot fail to interest even those whose predilections are for other styles of architecture.

The revival which it describes has not been confined to England; in both France and Germany progress in Gothic art has made rapid strides during the last thirty years. In the production, indeed, on the history and theory of the pointed style France is perhaps in advance of England; but nowhere else has the revival been so universal and so practical as in the latter country, nowhere else has it reached a point which could justify an author in attempting its history. So many Catholic associations are linked with Gothic architecture, so many fond recollections of a glorious past are called up by the mere name, that it is only natural that Catholics should take a special interest in its revival, should feel justly proud of the large part that some of their co-religionists have had in that revival, and should refer with feelings of pleasure to the influence brought to bear upon it by the adoption of many Catholic doctrines and practices by their Protestant brethren.

American readers cannot be indifferent to the history and fortunes of edifices where their ancestors prayed in those happy days when unity of faith prevailed; nor can they fail to take an interest in the history, which we propose to sketch, of those years during which a handful of earnest men struggled, and struggled successfully, to revive the glories of a style that had been rendered for ever illustrious by such names as Cologne and Chartres, Amiens and Salisbury, Notre Dame and York Minster.

Many were the fair buildings that graced the broad lands of merry England at the commencement of the reign of Henry VIII.; stately churches and splendid monasteries adorned her towns and nestled among her wooded hills and valleys; the one same principle of art had presided over their structure—happy symbol of the one faith to whose service they ministered. Before the end of that reign what a transformation had come over the face of the land! One of the first acts of the Reformation had been the suppression of the monasteries and confiscation of their property. Cromwell and his band of impious followers but too faithfully carried out the orders of their royal master; the venerable and beauteous piles on which the pious munificence of ages had lavished their skill and their treasures were soon reduced to bare and crumbling ruins. Nor did the spoliation end here; the zealous reformers of God’s church were not slow in condemning as idolatrous the rich and brilliant decorations and ornaments that filled the cathedrals and churches, and thus these sacred edifices were shorn of all the costly treasures that devotion had accumulated to honor the abiding presence of a heavenly King, in order to fill the coffers of a licentious monarch.

It was not, however, the material ruin and desecration of its finest buildings that struck the severest blow at Gothic art; it was rather the loss of that faith which had witnessed its earliest efforts and had inspired its grandest works. When the cold blast of Protestantism swept away one after another each Catholic dogma and each Christian belief, the sources of Gothic inspiration were dried up, its very raison d’être ceased to exist. Not that the Catholic Church has in any way adopted one style of architecture as the only fitting one for her use; she has equally sanctified by her solemn ritual and her sacred ceremonies the colonnades of the Greek temple, the dome of the Italian basilica, and the pointed arch of the Gothic cathedral. But this last, if we may use a comparison, seems somehow more especially her own child; the others are but children of adoption—wayward children that she has rescued from pagan parents. She has not watched over them from their birth, nor seen them grow up under her fostering care to the vigor and strength of manhood.

It naturally took some time before the spirit of a form of art which was then the only form could completely disappear from the country; for we must recollect that in England at the time of the Reformation not only ecclesiastical but civil and domestic architecture was entirely Gothic. As there were for several centuries no new churches built—for the usurped edifices of Catholic days more than sufficed for the needs of Protestant piety—it was in domestic structures that the spirit of the style lingered longest in a practical form.

“Even down to the reign of James I. the domestic architecture of England, as exemplified in the country-houses of the nobility, was Gothic in spirit, and frequently contained more real elements of a mediæval character than many which have been built in modern times by the light of archæological orthodoxy. Inigo Jones himself required a second visit to Italy before he could thoroughly abandon the use of the pointed arch. But its days were numbered when in 1633 the first stone was laid for a Roman portico to one of the finest cathedrals of the middle ages, and Gothic architecture as a practical art received what was then no doubt supposed to be its death-blow.”[101]

Footnote 101:

Eastlake, p. 5.

From this period the practice of Gothic art gradually died out. Classic and Italian architecture, which had received a fresh impulse from the French Renaissance, rapidly came into fashion. Architects studied no other style, for the very good reason that the public admired no other. It was henceforth considered the criterion of good taste to abuse as barbarous all the productions of mediæval art, and the test of good Protestantism to look upon them as superstitious and popish. It is indeed surprising that so many of the wonderful productions of a period no longer understood or appreciated should have been allowed to come down to us unaltered by “classical” remodelling. What saved them and at the same time preserved the spirit of the old art from total extinction is thus told by Sir C. Eastlake:

“By a strange and fortunate coincidence of events, however, it happened at this very time, when architects of the period had learned to despise the buildings of their ancestors, a spirit of veneration for the past was springing up among a class of men who may be said to have founded our modern school of antiquaries. Sometimes, indeed, their researches were not those of a character from which much advantage can be expected.... But, luckily for posterity, the attention of others was drawn in a more serviceable direction. Up to this time no work of any importance had been published on the architectural antiquities of England. A period had arrived when it was thought necessary, if only on historical grounds, that some record of ecclesiastical establishments should be compiled. The promoters of the scheme were probably little influenced by the love of Gothic as a style. But an old building was necessarily a Gothic building, and thus it happened that, in spite of the prejudices of the age, and probably their own æsthetic predilections, the antiquaries of the day became the means of keeping alive some interest in a school of architecture which had ceased to be practically employed.”[102]

Footnote 102:

History of the Gothic Revival, p. 6.

Amongst the earliest names that attained to a certain celebrity by their researches and writings may be mentioned those of Mr. R. Dodsworth and Mr. W. Dugdale, joint authors of the Monasticon Anglicanum, a work first published in 1655, and which still retains much interest for the modern student, as it includes many records and views of buildings which have long since perished. Another writer whose name deserves mention was Antony à Wood, born 1611, whose History of the Antiquities of Oxford was a book of considerable importance, connected as it was with a university where Gothic architecture was so nobly illustrated and where the traditions of the style lingered long after its true principles were forgotten.

During the next two hundred years the annals of Gothic art are indeed meagre; from time to time we have the record of some antiquarian research, and at rare intervals we hear of some uncouth attempts at Gothic building remarkable only for the egregious mistakes they display.

Early in the eighteenth century we find the name of a remarkable man connected with one of these crude attempts at mediæval art—that of the celebrated Horace Walpole, Earl of Oxford, the author of the first work of modern fiction whose scene is laid in the middle ages. His labors in the fields of literature and art were not profound. Eccentricity seemed the most marked feature of his taste; and, as may be well imagined, his famous Gothic house, Strawberry Hill, which has remained almost unaltered to the present day, is a strange monument of what debased art can achieve. The fact, however, that a man of his position, and enjoying the reputation he did, could patronize a form of architecture which had fallen into almost universal contempt could not have been without a powerful effect on the public mind—an effect which may be traced in the erection during the next fifty years of a certain number of mansions throughout the country in that style which Pugin loved so much to call “Brummagem Gothic.”

Towards the end of the century some useful books on architectural archæology appeared, such as Carter’s Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Painting, Hearne’s Antiquities of Great Britain, Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments, Halfpenny’s Gothic Ornaments of the Cathedral of York, B. Willis’ History of Gothic Architecture in England.

“It was something at least to draw attention to the noble works of our ancestors, which had long been neglected and despised; to record with the pencil or with the pen some testimony, however inadequate, of their goodly form and worthy purpose; to invest with artistic and historical interest the perishing monuments of an age when art was pure and genuine.”[103]

Footnote 103:

History of the Gothic Revival, p. 71.

When the nineteenth century opens, we find these works already producing practical fruits; for we see several architects of note, such as Wyat, Nash, and Smirke, attempting, and not without some success, the erection of edifices of Gothic design. Nearly always, however, their efforts were confined to domestic structures for private individuals—a proof how completely the taste was confined to the upper classes and was still unappreciated by the general public. If they did not often attempt to build new churches, unfortunately they did not hesitate to restore and improve the venerable cathedrals and churches of the past. Wyat in particular has a heavy burden of responsibility to bear on this score; for many were the noble buildings that long bore the traces of acts of vandalism and ignorance associated with his name.

How, indeed, could we expect better things in ecclesiastical architecture at a time when religion was at so low an ebb in England? As each generation had passed away the lingering memories of the old faith and the old ritual had vanished one by one; the last remnants of Catholic feelings and practices had disappeared under the influence of the cold formalism of the Puritans and the colder indifferentism of those who succeeded them. When we read the following description, given by Sir C. Eastlake, of a Protestant church and Protestant worship as he recollected them during the early years of the present century, we cannot feel surprised that there was a lack of inspiration among church architects:

“Who does not remember the air of grim respectability which pervaded, and in some cases even still pervades, the modern town church of a certain type, with its big bleak portico and muffin-capped charity-boys? Enter and notice the tall, neatly-grained witness-boxes in which the faithful are empanelled; the 'three-decker’ pulpit placed in the centre of the building; the lumbering gallery which is carried round the three sides of the interior on iron columns; the wizen-faced pew-opener eager for stray shillings; the earnest penitent who is inspecting the inside of his hat; the hassock which no one kneels on; the poor-box which is always empty. Hear how the clerk drones out the responses for a congregation too genteel to respond for themselves. Listen to the complicated discord in which the words of the Psalmist strike the ear after copious revision by Tate and Brady. Mark the prompt, if misdirected, zeal with which old ladies insist on testing the accuracy of the preacher’s memory by turning out the text. Observe the length and unimpeachable propriety, the overwhelming dulness, of his sermon.”

Alas! as far as exterior worship was concerned, the Catholic chapels of this period were in an equally sad condition; but from how different a cause! Centuries of persecution had not been able to stamp out the Catholic faith, but penal laws still in force, though not rigorously carried out, forced it to hide away in back streets and lanes, always avoiding whatever might attract public notice, lest it might awaken again the dormant flames of bigotry. Add to this the state of poverty to which, in many places, the Catholic body was reduced, and we need not wonder at the desolate aspect of the chapels, if the miserable structures that oftentimes were used for divine service deserved the name. They possessed, however, the presence of that God who had not disdained the poverty of a stable nor the humble offerings of poor shepherds; in like manner he looked with indulgence on the mean and scanty ornaments that in these sad times decorated his altars, and on the cold and desolate walls within which persecution had forced him to make his dwelling. He was pleased to await the time when happier days and gentler laws should once again permit his worship to be freely celebrated with all the glory and pomp of by-gone years. Such days were rapidly advancing, and Catholics were not slow in availing themselves of each relaxation of penal statutes, each favorable turn of Protestant bigotry, to improve their churches and to carry out more fully their sacred ceremonies—a task of no small difficulty on the part of a community so ill supplied with the riches of this world, and so long, from cruel necessity, forced to content themselves with a simplicity almost akin to that of the early Christians.

The dawn of the revival, which was now at hand, was marked by some writers of eminence whose theoretical works contributed much to prepare the way for it. Their writings were distinguished from those of the earlier antiquarians by a more practical knowledge of building and a more exact delineation of the details of the edifices they describe. Mr. J. Britton may be looked upon as a link between the two schools, as he had some of the characteristics of both. He was the author of numerous works on the English cathedral and other Gothic edifices, all illustrated with really artistic drawings. They were, however, more designed to create a taste for ancient art among the reading public than to assist the professional architect.

“While Britton was thus enlisting the sympathy of the amateur world two architects were engaged in preparing a practical and valuable work for the use of professional students.

“The examples of Gothic architecture which had hitherto been selected for publication were chiefly those which either served to illustrate a principle in the history of the style, or possessed some picturesque attraction in the way of general effect. But neither of these were of real service to the practical architect, who required geometrical and carefully-measured drawings of ancient roofs, doors, and windows to guide him in his designs and to help him in reviving a style the details of which had been as yet most imperfectly studied. Pugin’s (father to the celebrated Welby Pugin) and Wilson’s specimens of Gothic architecture supplied this want. It was a happy accident which brought these men together, the one eminently qualified as a draughtsman for the task, the other equally fitted to undertake its literary labor.”[104]

Footnote 104:

Eastlake, page 88.

The writer whose name next appears on the roll of champions of Gothic art is one whose memory is enshrined in the hearts of all English Catholics—Dr. Milner, Vicar-Apostolic of the Midland district, better known to most people for his holy life, his ardent zeal, and his controversial power than as a writer on architecture. In this latter capacity, however, he deserves a foremost place among those who prepared the way for the great revival which unfortunately he did not live to see accomplished.

His Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester revealed much erudition and a thorough appreciation of ancient art; but by far the most important part of it was the short but now famous essay it contained, “On the Rise and Progress of the Pointed Arch.” In it the author uses for the first time the appellation now become so general as applied to the architecture of the middle ages—viz., the pointed style. His next work was an important Treatise on the Ecclesiastical Architecture of England during the Middle Ages. In this work the author not only proves himself an antiquary but a man of taste. A work more important still, and one productive of the most serious results, was a short pamphlet entitled A Dissertation on the Modern Style of Altering Ancient Cathedrals, as Exemplified in the Cathedral of Salisbury. In it he protests in vigorous language against the miserable degradation of the old churches accomplished under the name of restoration; nor does he spare Wyat, the leading spirit in these unfortunate improvements. No one before the days of Welby Pugin had so enthusiastically entered into the spirit of the old art, so thoroughly appreciated its beauties, and so ably defended its principles, not only against its avowed enemies, but against the ignorance of many of its would-be admirers. So outspoken, indeed, was Dr. Milner’s language in this pamphlet that it shocked the staid members of the Society of Antiquaries, before whom it was to have been read, and was in consequence withdrawn—not, however, to lie mouldering in its author’s desk, but soon to appear in print, and to work even more important effects on the future than its author ever contemplated.

Dr. Milner died in 1826, the very year that W. Pugin, then a youth of fourteen, was displaying one of the earliest proofs of his taste for mediæval art in devoting long hours to the studying and sketching of the old castle of Rochester.

How little did the gray-haired bishop dream of the wonderful revolution this youth, as yet unknown to fame, was to accomplish within a few years. Little did he think, when he saw arising the humble walls of his Gothic chapel at Winchester, that the day was not far distant when a Catholic architect would revive throughout the land the glories of that style which Dr. Milner had so well defended in days when it was neglected and abused.

One more name of importance must be mentioned before we attempt to trace the outline of Pugin’s career; we again quote from Sir C. Eastlake:

“Midway in point of time between Milner and Pugin, and possessing, though in a minor degree, the talents of both, Thomas Rickman, as an architect and author, plays no unimportant part in the history of the revival. His churches are perhaps the first of that period in which the details of old work were reproduced with accuracy of form. Up to this time antiquaries had studied the principles of mediæval architecture, and to some extent classified the phases through which it had passed, while architects had indirectly profited by their labors when endeavoring to imitate in practice the work of the middle ages. Rickman united both functions in one man.... In the science of his art he will not, of course, bear comparison with Willis. In the analyzing of its general principles he must yield to Whewell. In capability of invention he ranks, even for his time, far below Pugin; but it may be fairly questioned whether, if we consider him in the twofold capacity of a theorist and a practitioner, he did not do greater service than either his learned contemporaries or his enthusiastic disciple.”[105]

Footnote 105:

Page 122.

Had Rickman done no more than write his Attempt to discriminate the Styles of English Architecture, he would have been worthy of a high place among those who contributed to revive Gothic art. He supplied by this book a want long felt by architects and by those interested in architecture. Of learned, or rather unlearned, dissertations on the origin of the pointed style there were plenty, but of those short and useful volumes to which have been aptly given the name of hand-books there was a complete absence. Rickman’s book gave in a small compass a very complete history of the various phases of Gothic architecture in England; the main divisions into periods which he adopted being so good that they have remained unaltered to the present day. The work was illustrated with very fair engravings, and no architect who had perused it could any longer plead ignorance as an excuse for the monstrosities that were so often produced in those days under the name of Gothic.

His work on French Gothic, the fruits of a journey through the North of France with his friend Whewell, afterwards the famous Master of Trinity, is full of interest and contains an elaborate and carefully-drawn comparison between the mediæval remains in France and England.

With Rickman ends that gloomy night which had so long, with faint flashes of light now and again, enveloped the science and art of Gothic architecture; a dawn as sudden as it is bright foretells a day of more than ordinary brilliancy.

Ignorance and prejudice, which had so long reigned supreme in England in all matters concerning true religion and true art, were fast giving way before the researches of conscientious science, and as a result we see two great movements marking the first quarter of the present century—the Tractarian movement and the Gothic revival; the one religious, the other artistic. Of the first it does not enter into our plan to speak here, though it would no doubt afford a highly interesting study to trace out the mutual influence these two movements have exercised on one another; for it is impossible not to perceive that, on the one hand, the inquiry into the principles and form of ancient art led naturally on to an inquiry into the ancient formularies and practices of the faith which had inspired that art; and that, on the other hand, the revival of the long-forgotten ritual of the old faith led directly to the restoration and refurnishing of those temples that were so intimately connected with it. Before entering on the life of Pugin, which constitutes the culminating point in the great artistic revival we are attempting to sketch, we cannot do better than quote the opening words of the chapter in which Sir C. Eastlake traces his career, as it clearly proves the importance he attaches to the labors of this great man:

“However much we may be indebted to those ancient supporters of pointed architecture who, faithfully adhering to its traditions at a period when the style fell into general disuse, strove earnestly, in some instances ably, to preserve its character; whatever value in the cause we may attach to the crude and isolated examples of Gothic work which belong to the eighteenth century, or to the efforts of such men as Nash and Wyat, there can be but little doubt that the revival of mediæval design received its chief impulse from the energy and talents of one architect whose name marks an epoch in the history of British art, which while art exists at all can never be forgotten.”[106]

Footnote 106:

P. 145.

Augustus Welby Pugin, the architect to whom these words apply, was born in London on March 1, 1812. We have already spoken of his father, and of the important place his illustrated works occupy in the history we are tracing; he was a French refugee and a Protestant, and his son was brought up a Protestant. Although the elder Pugin had little professional practice, he seems to have attained to a position of ease by the sale of his works and the instruction of pupils. His son was educated at Christ’s Hospital, on leaving which he entered his father’s office, having from his earliest years shown a great taste for drawing. He soon mastered the first elements of his profession and became of much use to his father, already showing that earnestness in all he undertook that was so characteristic of him in later years. His taste for mediæval art received a fresh impulse from a professional tour he made in 1827 with his father through Normandy, which gave him the opportunity of studying the beauty of Gothic ornament in some of its most splendid productions.

While still a mere youth his cleverness in designing attracted attention, and he received a commission from the royal upholsterers to prepare designs for the new furniture for Windsor Castle, which it was determined should partake of the character of the building. The drawings he gave were probably better than what most architects of the day could have produced, yet in the writings of his after-years he always frankly pointed out their faults.

A love of variety and a strong taste for roving interrupted for a short period his architectural studies. He devoted for a time his energies to scene-painting, and with much success when the subjects were of a mediæval character. Next we find him carried away by an extraordinary passion for the sea, and he actually for a certain period commanded a merchant schooner trading between England and Holland. Having been wrecked, however, on the Scotch coast, his seafaring ardor was somewhat cooled, and he returned to the labors of his original profession.

His talents were soon rewarded by increasing practice, many architects being glad to avail themselves of his wonderful, one might almost say innate, knowledge of Gothic ornament.

A most serious and important event in Pugin’s life, and one having much influence on his future career, occurred about this time—his conversion to the Catholic religion. There can be no doubt that his intense love of the past and his enthusiastic admiration of the glorious monuments of the ages of faith strongly biassed his mind towards this determination, though of course it was not these considerations alone that led him to take so important a step. His after-life proved how thorough was his faith and how sincere his piety.

This change of religion affected, in more ways than one, the professional career of Welby Pugin. From a pecuniary point of view it probably made little difference to him—as his talents were such as to insure for him constant work, and he already possessed independent means. But by this step he sacrificed what was far dearer to him, his future fame as an architect.

Never was there a more splendid opening for architectural talent than that very time when Pugin, in the first dawn of his genius, embraced the Catholic faith. Everything had combined to prepare a revival of Gothic art. The materials were already collected and awaited but the hand of a man of genius to make a practical use of them. The ritualistic movement had awakened the desire to restore the old and to build new churches. Rich men were ready to give unbounded wealth to further the enterprise. Had Pugin remained a Protestant, had he preferred fame to conscience, he might have found an easy road to it by availing himself of an opportunity so worthy the gifts of one eminently fitted to be a leader in a movement that combined religion and art. He preferred to return to the faith that had inspired those mediæval times he so fondly loved, and to risk his future reputation by offending that feeling which is so strong in Protestant England against converts. The Catholic who for centuries has kept his faith they can tolerate, nay, admire; but one who was their own and deserts them they find it hard to forgive.

Not only did Pugin, in thus affronting public opinion, bias the judgment of his contemporaries and of future critics, but he actually, by attaching himself to the poorest religious body in England, deprived himself of the means of adequately displaying his power.

During the next years that composed the short career of Pugin we find him working with an activity and enthusiasm that showed how all labor connected with his art was to him a labor of love. His pen and his pencil were alike devoted to its service. In 1836 he published his celebrated Contrasts—a work in which he compares with keen irony and scathing satire the buildings and institutions of the past with those of the present; in the sketches which illustrate it he delineates with wonderful humor all the weak points of modern architecture. His style of writing was flowing and easy, always highly picturesque and enthusiastic, but sometimes slightly inclined to exaggeration and eccentricity. It was this that made it so difficult for him to write without giving offence sometimes even to his own friends and co-religionists.

His next work was his True Principles of Pointed Architecture. It is but a short volume, consisting of two lectures delivered at St. Mary’s College, Oscott, but it forms a most complete elementary treatise on Gothic art, founded on the two great principles enunciated in its first page: “1. That there should be no features about a building that are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety; 2. That all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building.”

It is clearly shown that in these principles lies the true secret of all correct pointed construction and ornament, and that any analysis of Gothic work undertaken without taking them into consideration must inevitably lead to erroneous conclusions.

The truth of these principles is now universally admitted in works that treat of pointed architecture, but to Pugin belongs the honor of having first laid them down and having shown how important they were to the right understanding of the lessons handed down to us in the wondrous structures of the past.

His next work was An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England. It is a brilliant defence of Gothic art, intended specially to prove that it is still “the only correct expression of the faith, the wants, and climate of our country.”

As a specimen of Pugin’s amusing style when describing the incongruous productions of modern architecture, we cannot do better than quote the description of a nineteenth-century cemetery contained in this book; we only wish we could reproduce the delightful picture that accompanies the text:

“There are a superabundance of inverted torches, cinerary urns, and pagan emblems, tastefully disposed by the side of neat gravel walks, among cypress-trees and weeping willows.

“The central chapel is generally built on such a comprehensive plan as to be adapted (in the modern sense) for each sect and denomination in turn as they may require its temporary use; but the entrance gate-way is usually selected for the grand display of the company’s enterprise and taste, as being well calculated from its position to induce persons to patronize the undertaking by the purchase of shares or graves. This is generally Egyptian, probably from some associations between the word catacombs, which occurs in the prospectus of the company, and the discoveries of Belzoni on the banks of the Nile; and nearly opposite the Green Man and Dog public-house, in the centre of a dead-wall (which serves as a cheap medium of advertisement for blacking and shaving-strop manufacturers), a cement caricature of the entrance to an Egyptian temple, two and a half inches to the foot, is erected, with convenient lodges for the policeman and his wife, and a neat pair of cast-iron hieroglyphical gates which would puzzle the most learned to decipher; while, to prevent any mistake, some such words as 'New Economical Compressed Grave Company’s Cemetery’ are inscribed in Grecian capitals along the frieze, interspersed with hawk-headed divinities, and surmounted by a huge representation of the winged Osiris bearing a gas-lamp.”[107]

Footnote 107:

An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture, p. 12.

In 1844 he published his next important work, The Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume. It is a thoroughly practical book, designed to supply correct descriptions and patterns for the use of those who manufacture the various ornaments employed in the ritual of the church, which were at that time of the most incorrect forms and in the worst taste.

His other literary productions were numerous but of less importance, being for the most part of a controversial character, and we pass on to examine, as far as our limited space permits, Pugin’s career and influence as a practical architect. Catholic emancipation, in freeing the church from the galling restraints to which she had been so long subjected in England and Ireland, opened for her a new era of liberty and prosperity in those countries. True, she did not regain that wealth which had been sacrilegiously torn from her at the Reformation; still, she was enabled, through the generosity of her children, to expend large sums in the construction of churches somewhat more worthy of the august mysteries she celebrates than those poor edifices she had been so long forced to use.

As a Catholic of undoubted talents, Pugin soon found that his architectural capacity was appreciated by his co-religionists, who entrusted to him the construction of all their principal churches. Few among them, indeed, were, by their size or importance, calculated to give full scope to Pugin’s genius; nevertheless, to the smallest building he always devoted long study and attention and a scrupulous fidelity to the principles he had laid down in his writings, although in many cases it was extremely difficult to do so, owing to the small amount of money that could be expended on the work. Among the many churches he designed we may mention, as the best specimens of his skill, the cathedrals of Birmingham, Southwark, Nottingham, Killarney, and Enniscorthy; the churches of St. Wilfrid’s, Manchester; St. Marie’s, Liverpool; St. Giles’, Cheadle; St. Bernard’s Abbey, Leicestershire; St. Augustine’s, Ramsgate.

In all these churches the exterior beauty has been more or less sacrificed to interior ornament and decoration, Pugin preferring to devote all the money possible to beautifying those parts which were most closely connected with the presence of his God, when the funds did not permit him to adorn fully both exterior and interior. This has often led his critics to misjudge his capacity as an architect; even Sir C. Eastlake falls into this error, and, though a sincere admirer of Pugin, does not hesitate to assert that “of constructive science he probably knew but little.” That his greatest power lay in ornament and detail may no doubt be true; still, we are fully convinced that had he found the same opportunities of displaying his knowledge as a scientific architect, and had he not been trammelled by the constant necessity to keep down expense, he would have amply proved to the world how unfounded were these accusations.

In comparing Pugin with the architects who have succeeded him people often forget the difficulties he had to contend against. He had to revive and educate the whole series of artisans whose combined labors are required to construct the smallest Gothic edifice—sculptors, carvers, iron-workers, painters, and decorators. When he began his career as a practical architect he had to design every smallest item required for his buildings, and, what is more, often personally to superintend their manufacture; a lock, a screw, a nail of correct pointed design were then things that had no existence.

If we take up now a book of that period, we can scarcely believe that ignorance and absurdity could go so far as to call Gothic the designs we see there depicted under that appellation. It is solely to Pugin’s untiring energy, to his conscientious love of his art, and to his wonderful fertility of invention—gifts which even his adversaries cannot deny him—that we owe the change that has been wrought in a few years.

The important progress in metal work, which now places at the disposal of the architect and builder material and designs almost equalling the best products of the middle ages, is completely due to him; in this, as in another long-lost branch of art—glass-staining—he found in Mr. J. Hardman, of Birmingham, one thoroughly competent by his practical knowledge and refined taste to assist him in carrying out his reforms.

How many other branches of industry, connected directly or indirectly with mediæval art, could be mentioned in which the influence of Pugin’s labors can be traced!—the production of encaustic tiles, silk embroidery, wood-carving, the manufacture of church plate and furniture of all kinds, even household articles and jewelry. Sir C. Eastlake truly remarks: “Those establishments which are known in London as ecclesiastical warehouses owe their existence and their source of profit to Pugin’s exertions in the cause of rubrical propriety.”[108] He might have added with equal truth that the many beautiful objects we admire in them owe their existence to the principles he established by his writings and to the endless models which his unrivalled facility of invention placed at the disposal of the public.

Footnote 108:

History of the Gothic Revival, p. 153.

If a proof were wanting of the hold that the revival of which Pugin was the leading spirit was taking on public opinion, it is the fact that a Parliamentary committee, in drawing up the terms of the competition for the plans of the new Houses of Parliament, stipulated that the designs should be Gothic or Elizabethan. It has often been regretted that Pugin did not take part in this competition, and his reasons for not doing so have never been quite satisfactorily explained.

Barry, the architect selected for the new buildings, showed his appreciation of Pugin’s capabilities and his esteem for his talents by applying to him for designs for all the important interior decorations and furniture. The beauty of these parts shows how well suited he was for the task; many consider them the most perfect parts of the edifice, the exterior, notwithstanding its real merits, having numerous faults—some of them, it is true, inherent to the style adopted—Tudor or perpendicular.

Besides the many churches and other religious edifices which Pugin designed, he devoted considerable attention to domestic architecture; and among the best specimens he left may be mentioned Bilton Grange, Adare Manor, and Scarisbrick Hall, Chirk Castle and Alton Towers; the last two he only restored and altered. But perhaps his happiest effort in this style was his own house at Ramsgate, which is, in every detail, a perfect specimen of a mediæval residence, strongly illustrating how deeply imbued Pugin was with the spirit and traditions of the past. So thoroughly Gothic were all his feelings and tastes that we firmly believe it would have been impossible for him to design a building in any other style.

With Pugin’s death, which occurred in 1854, we shall terminate this short sketch of one of the most wonderful revivals of the present age. We have told how Gothic architecture became extinct as a practical art, how its theory was forgotten and misunderstood for centuries, its very name kept in remembrance only by a few rare lovers of antiquity. We have traced the first dawn of a change in public taste, originated by the serious works of men versed in the history of ancient art, and inspired by a love of its grand productions.

In what a different position we leave it now! The master spirit that had breathed a new life into its almost inanimate form has passed away; his mortal remains are sleeping in the hallowed transept of that beautiful church at Ramsgate, the designing and decorating of which had been to him such a labor of love; but, unlike many reformers, he had lived to see his cherished dreams realized; he had lived to see the mystic steeple and the high pitched roof once more ascend to heaven from the crowded cities and the wooded fields of his country; he had lived to see a long array of distinguished names consecrate their gifts to that one style he had loved and for which he had labored.

ALONG THE FOOT OF THE PYRENEES.

We followed the old Roman way along the foot of the Pyrenees—a delightful route, picturesque on one side and fair on the other, and everywhere abounding in historic and legendary memories. Every age has left its impress here, as every geological period has left its strata in the mountains. Many of the cultivated hills are crowned with the ruins of feudal times. The plains are blooming with a thousand traditions and marvellous events that have sprung up from the contests with the Moors in the eighth century. Numerous remains of ancient art are constantly coming to light from the soil to prove that, during the Roman occupancy of the land, many wealthy patricians established themselves in this region, at once attractive to the eye and favorable to health. The Visigoths also, who once held possession of the country, have left behind them memorials of their barbarity in the martyrs who are still honored; and the Huguenots and Revolutionists ruined churches and cloisters that are still deplored.

At length we came to Martres-Tolosanes—the ancient Callagorris—an industrious place on the left bank of the Garonne containing about two thousand inhabitants. Clouds of smoke hover over it by day, and flames and sparks stream up at night, from the numerous potteries which supply all the neighboring region with dishes and tiles, and pave all the by-roads with broken crockery. The streets are narrow, and the begrimed houses seem inclined to stray off on the road to Spain, as if to breathe the pure mountain air. There is an interesting old church here that was consecrated in the year 1309. The baptismal font is an ancient sarcophagus, set up on four pillars, its sides divided by colonnettes, between which are holy emblems and other carvings. In one chapel there is a sculptured retable over the altar, with the shrine of St. Vidian supported by chained Moors—not covered with precious stones, or a work of art, like so many of the shrines of Italy, but a mere urn of gilded wood. On great festivals this is taken down and placed before the grating of the sanctuary, surrounded by lights and flowers. The bust of the saint is placed above it, the head shaded by nodding white plumes to give it a martial character, in view of St. Vidian’s achievements, the face painted more or less after nature, the shoulders covered with a gilded mantle of imperial fashion, and the neck adorned with a collar, or necklace, of blue and white crystal—probably the offering of some devout peasant. In another chapel, on such days likewise full of flowers and tapers, is St. Vidian’s ivory comb exposed in a kind of monstrance, as if the object of particular veneration. It is rudely carved, and the teeth which used to disentangle the long blond locks of the warrior after battle are of portentous size and length, and jagged from the conflict. But those were not days of gentle measures. This comb is of considerable celebrity in the country, not merely on account of its original use, but also because of the curious tale that hangs around it.

In the golden ages, when kind Heaven directly intervened in human affairs more frequently than is thought to be the case now, and did not suffer sacrilegious deeds to go unpunished, a peasant woman of the neighboring canton of Cazères, who had come to Martres to attend St. Vidian’s fair, went into the church to pay her devotions at the shrine, and, finding it empty, was induced by some diabolical inspiration to steal the wondrous comb, which was not then kept under glass as now. She hid it under her scarlet capulet, and, rejoining her husband at the market-place, set out for home. The afternoon was drawing to a close. Some rays of the declining sun still brightened the gray tower of Mauran among the mountain oaks, but the evening shadows had begun to gather in the valley below. Accordingly, they hurried along the road that bordered the river, the irons on their shoes clattering over the stones and giving out an occasional spark. The woman’s feet, however, often faltered, and, contrary to custom, her tongue was mute. But this was no affliction to her husband, and he pretended not to observe it. At length, on crossing the boundary that separates Martres from Cazères, he suddenly found himself alone, and, hearing a cry, looked around. His wife remained fastened on the line, as if by some invisible influence, with one foot in the parish of Martres and the other in that of Cazères, without the power of moving. He hurried back to her assistance, but, in spite of herculean efforts, he could not move her an inch, more than if she had been Lot’s wife. Night was now coming on fast. Not a ray of the sun was left on St. Michael’s tower, and they were only half way home. A cart from the mountains came by, drawn by three cows, and he begged the driver’s assistance. The woman seized hold of the cart. The driver goaded the cows. They were usually gentle and tractable, as becomes the female nature, but they now set off as if suddenly gone mad, leaving the poor woman behind, her arms nearly dislocated with her efforts, but her feet still glued to the ground. Then came along some Spaniards with their mules covered with gay tassels and bells. New efforts were made to remove her. She clung desperately to bridle and harness, but the mules so reared and kicked that she was obliged to give up the attempt. “Certainly the devil must have a hand in this,” said the husband. The woman rent the mountains with her cries, and at length was forced to confess the deed she had done. It was evidently a case in which the spiritual powers alone could be of any avail, and, as she could no more go back than forward, her husband sent to Martres to make known the case and ask the benefit of the clergy. As St. Vidian would have it, they were all keeping solemn vigil at his shrine, and, taking the torches that stood around it, they came hastening out with cross and banner, and as soon as they took possession of the relic the woman had stolen, her feet recovered their liberty. After this the comb was kept under lock and key, and, at a later day, was placed in the reliquary where it now is. Of course so stupendous an event caused a great sensation in the valley, which had not been so stirred up since the Norman invasion, and made the comb not only an object of universal curiosity but of increased veneration. The legend is related to this day. It is pretended that the women of Cazères are a little spiteful about it, and dress their shining black hair with much more care than their neighbors at Martres, probably to show they have no need of the comb of St. Vidian.

St. Vidian figures everywhere in this region. Charming legends, handed down from father to son for ages, have thrown quite a veil of poetry over numberless places. They are not very clear as to the precise place of the saint’s birth, but they are quite positive that he was one of the preux who served under Charlemagne, and had even a dash of imperial blood in his veins. In his youth he became a hostage for his father, who had been taken prisoner by the Basques of Luceria, then idolaters. They sold the young Frank as a slave. An Englishman bought and adopted him, and as soon as Vidian was sufficiently inured to the use of arms he organized a crusade against Luceria, which he pillaged and completely destroyed. Of course such a feat recommended him to his imperial kinsman. Charlemagne invited him to his court and created him duke. About this time the Saracens crossed the Pyrenees and began to ravage the plain of Toulouse. Vidian joined the imperial hosts who came to the rescue of the land, and entrenched himself with his followers at Martres, then called Angonia. He defended the place so bravely against the enemy that for a while it was supposed saved, but, surprised by an ambuscade near a fountain where he had gone to stanch his wounds, he was slain after a stout resistance, and the town taken and devastated. When it rose from its ruins it took the name of Martres in memory of those who were martyred in trying to defend it.

It is certain that all this part of France was once overrun by the Moors. They, and the Normans after them, probably destroyed not only most of the ancient Christian churches, but the monuments left by the Romans. History has not recorded all the efforts made to repel them, but a confused memory of the struggle has been left in the minds of the people, and, colored by time and the warm southern imagination, these memories have become a genuine cycle of poetic traditions, not the less founded on fact because only written with the sword and blood of their ancestors.

The country around Martres is full of character and beauty. The Garonne, fresh from its mountain sources, winds through the verdant plain. To the south are broad terraces and wooded hills, and behind is the grand barrier of mountains, their summits all crystal in the morning light, and at evening all rose and amethyst. No wonder the Romans thought it rivalled Italy, and established themselves here. On one of the neighboring plateaus have been found the remains of a magnificent Roman villa that must have belonged to some wealthy person of luxurious and cultivated tastes, to judge by the objects brought to light from time to time. In 1826 a vault was found by a laborer, and excavations were systematically made which led to the discovery of sumptuous apartments paved with mosaics and marble, with remains of columns, statues, and bas-reliefs, and fine bathing-rooms with furnaces and earthen pipes, and all the accessories of Roman luxury. Among the works of art that have been found here are about forty busts and medallions of Roman emperors and empresses from Augustus down; a white marble statue of a reclining naiad; the beautiful head of another statue called the Venus de Martres; medallions of Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Cybele, and Atys; large bas-reliefs of Serapis, the labors of Hercules, etc., and several bronzes. These form quite a gallery of ancient art in the museum at Toulouse, where we saw them in the old cloister of Augustinian friars.

Beneath one of the plateaus is a pretty fountain with a cross near it, in the midst of gentle undulations of verdure, shaded by a grove. Here St. Vidian had his encounter with the Moors and was slain. The pebbles in the spring are said to be still stained with his blood. Every year his exploits are celebrated here by a mimic battle between the Moors and Christians, in which nearly all the male population take part. It is said the brilliant costume of the Saracens is so attractive to the younger portion that they show a lamentable disposition to enter the service of the infidel. However, by dint of cautious measures, both armies are kept about equal. They consist of nearly one hundred and twenty-five men each, of whom fifty are horsemen. The Moorish cavaliers wear red and white turbans with silver trimmings; green stomachers adorned with a yellow crescent; orange coats turned out with red facings; girdles of scarlet silk; and blue pantaloons of Oriental amplitude. It will at once be perceived that nothing could be more gorgeous. The infantry are less pretentious. They content themselves with the white pantaloons of the French hussar, but make up for this with bright orange vests a Mameluke might envy. The Christian knights wear a black pasteboard helmet with a silver cross on the front, a blue tunic, and a tin cuirass that is quite dazzling in the sun. The foot-soldiers are dressed in gray, with blue caps, and a silver cross on their breasts. Both armies are furnished with tall lances, and each has its standard. That of the Moors is green and orange. On it gleams the ominous silver crescent. The Christians’ is blue and bears the redoubtable figure of St. Vidian.

The battle takes place on St. Vidian’s day. The relics of the saint are exposed in the church. High Mass is celebrated with the utmost pomp. Even the followers of Islam are so unfaithful to their traditional intolerance as to attend and present arms at the Elevation of the Host, in utter disregard of the Prophet. Mass over, the clergy and people go in procession to the miraculous fount, bearing the shrine and chanting the hymn of St. Vidian. There they bathe the bust of the saint in memory of his wounds. These traditional services concluded, the military ardor of the soldiers begins to assert itself. The two armies draw up on the neighboring field. Prodigious acoustic performances are made on the drum of the commune. Military evolutions begin. The banners fly. Red, yellow, and blue uniforms flash across the green field. The cavaliers show themselves true paladins. Such curveting and prancing have not been seen since the days of Charlemagne and Haroun al Raschid; at least, on such steeds—mostly farm horses the worse for wear. Sometimes the contest becomes too warm and real. However, their ardor never lasts longer than is warranted by tradition. The Moorish flag is invariably captured by the Christians, and the battle-field deserted till the next anniversary of St. Vidian’s martyrdom.

Vigilantius, the first heresiarch that troubled the peace of Christian Gaul, was a native of Callagorris. He was of a roving turn and a lover of novelty. In early life he crossed over into Spain and there became an inn-keeper. Then we hear of him as a priest at Barcelona. He made the acquaintance of St. Paulinus (afterwards of Nola) in Spain, who was induced to give him a letter of recommendation to St. Jerome. Furnished with this, he went to the Holy Land, but there he took sides with the enemies of St. Jerome and attacked the monastic life, celibacy of the clergy, the veneration of relics, the use of candles in the daytime, etc. St. Jerome, sarcastically referring to his original calling, told him the faculty of testing wine and that of expounding the Scriptures were not quite the same, and advised him to acquire the elements of grammar and the other sciences, and then learn to be silent. His countrymen do not seem to have been influenced by his example, however, but have always been remarkable for their confidence in the saints and veneration for relics.

Five or six miles beyond Martres we came to St. Martory, so named from a holy monk of the East whose beautiful legend is related by St. Gregory. One evening this saint, on his way to a neighboring monastery, overtook a poor leper forced by fatigue and disease to rest by the wayside. Filled with intense compassion, St. Martyri, as he is otherwise called, spread his cloak on the ground, placed the leper thereon, and, carefully wrapping him up, took him on his shoulder and proceeded on his way. The abbot of the monastery, seeing him coming, cried: “Hasten, my brethren, to open the gates. Behold Brother Martyri coming, bearing the Lord.” While they were gone to execute his command the leper descended from the good monk’s shoulders, and, taking the form under which the Redeemer is usually represented, he addressed him in these words: “Martyri, thou hast had pity on me on earth; I will glorify thee in heaven.” And, while the monk was gazing at him in speechless amazement, he ascended to heaven. When St. Martyri entered, the abbot asked what he had done with the person he was carrying. The saint replied: “Oh! had I known who he was, I would have held him by the feet!” And he related how light he had seemed on the way. The body of St. Martory is still revered in the church.

Not long after leaving St. Martory we came in sight of the towers of St. Gaudens at one end of a broad plateau, once the place of a Roman encampment. Behind it are the mountains that enclose the beautiful valleys of Aure and Campan, the Pic du Midi, and the whole of the mighty chain that binds sea to sea. Below is a vast plain, fertile and smiling, supposed to be the bed of a lake in which the waters of the Neste once mingled with those of the Garonne. On the other side are to be seen the ancient thermal place of Labarthe, overlooked by a feudal tower and a village that dates from the fourth century, called Valentine, in honor, it is said, of Valentinian II., who was assassinated in Gaul Narbonnaise in 392. Here and there in the fields are found remains that attest the importance of the place under the Romans—fragments of tombs, bas-reliefs, and antique vases. At one corner of the church of Valentine is the head of a Roman soldier with his helmet on, and near it a white marble urn. Inserted in the wall of the church is a marble slab with a Latin inscription, thought to be of the fourth century, which may be thus rudely rendered:

“Nymphius, whose limbs are cold and stiff in eternal sleep, reposes here. His soul is in heaven. It contemplates the stars, while his body is left to the repose of the tomb. His faith dispelled the darkness that seemed to envelop it. O Nymphius! the renown of thy virtues raised thee to the very stars and placed thee in the zenith. Thou art immortal, and thy glory will be perpetuated in ages to come. The province honors thee as its father. The entire population made vows for the preservation of thy life. At the celebration of the games due to thy munificence the spectators on the gradations of the arena testified their joy by acclamations. Once thy beloved country, at thy command, assembled its magistrates and spoke worthily by thy lips. Now our cities, deprived of thee, are plunged in mourning, and the senators, in consternation, are incapable of action. They are like the human body that, deprived of its head, falls lifeless and inert, or a flock without its shepherd that knows not which way to direct its steps. Serena, thy spouse, abandoned to grief, erects this monument to thee, and finds in this pious duty a slight solace for her pain. Thy companion for eight lustres, she only thought and acted by thee. At thy side life seemed sweet. Now, abandoned to her sorrow, she sighs for the eternal life, hoping that which she now possesses may be brief.”

What a tale might be woven out of the epitaph of this old Roman, who died fourteen hundred years ago in this remote valley—made up of domestic bliss, political honors, the happiness that virtue alone can bestow, and an untimely death mourned by the public and, above all, by the gentle-hearted Serena!

The Romans knew how to choose their sites. Nothing can exceed the charm of this region, especially in the month of May, when we visited it for the first time. The fresh valleys, the clear streams, the unexpected views at every turn, the harmonious outlines of the landscape, are a perpetual delight to the eye. The fertile plain of Valentine especially is so lovely that all the mountain-tops seem crowding together to gaze at and admire it, and they send down their purest streams to preserve its freshness and beauty.

On the sides of the plateau that overlooks Valentine a young shepherd, named Gaudentius, led his flocks to pasture in the latter part of the fifth century. His mother, a holy woman of the name of Quitterie, had brought him up in the practice of the most fervent piety. The country at that time was in possession of the Visigoths. Euric had succeeded to the throne by slaying his brother, Theodoric II. He was a man of great military genius, who extended his conquests in Gaul from the Loire beyond the Rhone, and carried war beyond the Pyrenees with so much success that he conquered most of the Peninsula. Toulouse was thus made the capital of an immense empire that extended from Provence to Andalusia. Euric was a fanatical Arian, and, attributing his success to his fidelity to his principles, he began a violent persecution of the Catholics, though they constituted a large part of his subjects. Executioners were frequently his missionaries, and one of these summarily opened heaven to the young shepherd Gaudentius, who, refusing to apostatize, gave a last look at his mother, who encouraged him, and submitted to martyrdom. His remains were carefully transported to the place of his residence, and, after the downfall of the Visigoths, an oratory was erected over his grave.

Such miracles were now wrought through the instrumentality of St. Gaudens that his fame extended all through the country, people came to live around his tomb, and a village soon sprang up that took his name. More than a thousand years passed away without diminishing the affluence at St. Gaudens’ tomb, but in the sixteenth century the town was taken by Montgomery the Huguenot, the church stripped of its ornaments and greatly injured, the statues broken, the tombs desecrated, and most of St. Gaudens’ relics thrown into the flames. But that was a way of reforming the Huguenots had.

“N’est ce pas réformer, quand on trouve une église Trop riche, lui ravir ses trésors anciens?”

says the old Plainte de la Guienne of 1577 with a bitterness that is quite natural. The bullet-holes made in the church are still pointed out. This is a noteworthy building of the Romanesque style, with round arches, clustered columns, and carved capitals. Each aisle ends in a chapel, and a choir is at the apsis. Over the altar is a statue of the Virgin that, before the Revolution, belonged to the neighboring abbey of Bonnefont, now completely destroyed. This statue is the production of Pierre Lucas, the founder of the academy of art at Toulouse. A priory was formerly attached to the church of St. Gaudens, dependent on the abbey of St. Sernin at Toulouse, but it has been totally destroyed. The old cloister of Pyrenean marble, built by Bernard I., Bishop of Comminges, and of the race of its counts, has also been destroyed. Of the tombs that once lined the arcades, only one here and there is left, with its touching mediæval inscription, and perchance some consoling emblem of religion, such as a cluster of grapes on a vine branch, recalling the Saviour’s words, “I am the vine and ye are the branches”; the monogram of Christ; the Alpha and Omega, etc.—symbols of hope graven on the cold marble tomb. And there is an ancient portal over which used to hang the horseshoes of Abderahman’s steed, which, according to tradition, plunged and reared when his master attempted to pillage the shrine of St. Gaudens, and thus lost its shoes. The horse of Montgomery seems to have been of a coarser nature, and as insensible as his ferocious owner to the spiritual influences around the tombs of the saints.

There is a kind of mournful pleasure in sitting down among the ruins of such old cloisters, listening to the echoes of past times, and trying to decipher the pious inscriptions on the tombstones among the rank grass, and to divine the history of those who lie beneath—once centres of fond affection, but now forgotten and unknown. Through the rifts in the wall is seen the peaceful rural valley, with the Pyrenees in the distance, resplendent in the light; and the contrast between all that is graceful and sublime in nature, and the desolation of this spot once beautified by art and hallowed by religion, is exceedingly touching. How peaceful, how religious, this cloister must have been, where paced the silent, prayerful monk among the tombs! And there is a sacredness in its present desolation that appeals to the heart; if the solemnity of the ancient arches is wanting, there is no lack of beauty in the lovely vistas among the picturesque mountains and delicious valleys.

St. Gaudens is a place of four or five thousand inhabitants, with old blackened houses full of industry. The country around is densely populated, and at certain seasons many go into the neighboring districts to add to their slender earnings. The young men have a commercial taste, and all through the Pyrenees you meet peddlers and colporteurs from St. Gaudens, hawking their small wares with amusing pertinacity. The girls, too, in harvest-time descend to the neighboring valleys to offer their services, and there are many popular rondeaux that allude to them.

“Las fillos de Sen Gaoudens nou n’an d’argent, Las qui nou n’an qu’en bouléren: Faridoundaino, qu’en bouléren.”

—The girls of St. Gaudens are penniless, and those without money desire it. Tum-te-tum, yes, desire it.

“Aou pays bach, anem! anem! Coillé d’argent! En sega blat et dailla hen, Faridoundaino, n’en gagnaren.”

—Down to the valleys let us go, go! Money to seek, by reaping grain and raking hay. Tum-te-tum, we shall gain some.

On the outskirts of St. Gaudens is shown the house where St. Raymond was born—the celebrated founder of the order of Calatrava, which rendered such glorious services to Spain, and thereby to all Christendom, in the struggle with the Moors. It is a humble birthplace for one who gathered under his banner the haughtiest grandees of Spain. His companion, Durand, was also a native of St. Gaudens. They both became monks at the noted abbey of Escale-Dieu, where they inured themselves by austerities for the mission Providence had in reserve for them. There would seem to be but little in common with the peaceful pursuits of the Cistercians and the valiant exploits of the knights of Calatrava, to those who know nothing of the bracing discipline of monastic life.

Not far from St. Gaudens is the chapel of Notre Dame du Bout-du-Puy—a place of pilgrimage, enriched with indulgences by Pope Innocent XI. It is under the continual guardianship of a hermit. This Madonna is particularly invoked by people in danger of death. Among the ex votos on the wall is the picture of a child carried away by a neighboring torrent, the mother kneeling on the bank with eyes and arms raised towards heaven, where Mary appears, commanding the waves to bring back her child.

We have mentioned the tower of Labarthe. The viscounts of this name were the lords of the Four Valleys for several centuries, and played an important rôle in the history of Bigorre. The fifth Vicomte de Labarthe married the grand-daughter of Eudoxia, the daughter of Emmanuel Comnenus, Emperor of Constantinople, who died at Rome in the odor of sanctity, and was buried at the church of the Vatican. Geraud de Labarthe, Archbishop of Auch, put on the cross and accompanied Richard the Lion-hearted to the Holy Land as the prefect of his army. One of the glories of this race is Marshal Paul de Labarthe, Lord of Thermes, who lived in the sixteenth century and saw six kings succeed each other on the throne of France. He took part in the siege of Naples, and, made prisoner by the corsairs, endured a severe captivity for two years. He afterwards distinguished himself in the Piedmont war and fighting in Scotland against the English, and was finally created Marshal of France. He was so noted for his humanity that the Huguenots said he could not hold his place as governor of Paris because he was “too little inclined to slaughter.” Some of his descendants still live in Bigorre.

On our way to Bagnères de Bigorre we stopped to visit the abbey of Escale-Dieu, at the bottom of a deep valley enclosed among the hills. The name is derived from Scala Dei—the ladder of God—a ladder to aid man in his ascent to heaven! No name could be more appropriate for a monastery where, as Wordsworth says, paraphrasing the words of St. Bernard:

“Man more purely lives; less oft doth fall; More promptly rises; walks with nicer tread; More safely rests; dies happier; is freed Earlier from cleansing fires; and gains withal A brighter crown.”

This abbey is on the banks of the Arros, a river noted for its impetuous character and sudden overflows. It has its source in the valley of Oueil, the ancient Vallis Oculi—so called from its shape, where it is said three barons once could breakfast together without leaving their own domains. Near by is a little hamlet called Mayleu, on the edge of a torrent, where on stormy nights pale lights are said to wave to and fro on the current, which the mountaineers say are caused by the soul of an old miser that agitates the waters—emblem of his restless life, spent in grasping the goods of others with insatiable avidity. His influence surely extends all along the Arros.

The valley of Escale-Dieu was given to a community of Cistercian monks in the twelfth century by Beatrix, Countess of Bigorre, in order, as she says in her charter, that she “might be accounted as a sister in Christ by the brethren of Escale-Dieu in their watchings, and fastings, and prayers, and obtain the redemption of her soul, her husband’s, her father, Centulle’s, her mother, Amable’s, and other relatives’.” The Cistercians were famous as agriculturists, and in bestowing on them large tracts of land the old lords of the middle ages ensured the best means of bringing the country under cultivation and humanizing the inhabitants. The monks built a church here under the invocation of SS. Peter and Paul, which was consecrated October 23, 1142, by the Archbishop of Auch, in the presence of the Countess Beatrix and her husband, many abbots and neighboring lords, and an immense crowd of people. This church became the St. Denis of the counts of Bigorre, who doubtless thought to rest here in peace till the end of the world; for the abbey was at that time so remote from the highways of travel that its solitude was almost unbroken. The Countess Beatrix was one of the first to be buried here, but her tomb was broken open at the Revolution, and the remains, spared by centuries, fell into dust at contact with the air.

The first abbot of Escale-Dieu was a son of the Vicomte de Labarthe, and his successors, over forty in number, were mostly from the great families of the country. The house was immediately dependent on the Holy See, and the Sovereign Pontiff forbade any one to rob, burn, make any arrest, commit murder, or do any violence on its domains.

One peculiarity about its history is that, contrary to most great monasteries, no town or village ever sprang up around it. It remained solitary in its valley, studying “the secret lore of rural things” and pruning the wings of Contemplation, unconscious that Providence was to give it a mission in the world seemingly incompatible with the spirit of the order. The monks became so numerous, however, that two colonies were sent across the Pyrenees under the charge of St. Raymond and Durand, to found the abbeys of Yergo and Fitero. In 1147 the town of Calatrava, the bulwark of Andalusia, was taken by Alfonso, King of Castile, and entrusted to the care of the Knights Templars, who held it for ten years. Then the success of the Moors made them fear they would not be able to defend it any longer, and they resigned the place to the king. The latter, embarrassed at having it thrown on his hands, offered it to any one who would undertake its defence. St. Raymond, indignant to see knights, vowed to the defence of religion, thus abandon the post of danger, asked the honor of taking their place. The king willingly consented. St. Raymond went through the provinces preaching a kind of crusade, and twenty thousand soldiers ranged themselves under the Cistercian banner. Their success made him conceive the idea of cementing the union of the knights with his order. The abbot of Escale-Dieu did not at first approve of the design. “What an idea,” said he, “for solitaries by profession to convert a monastery into a school of war, and flatter themselves tumultuous exercises can be combined with the silence of prayer and the chanting of Psalms!” A chapter of the Cistercian order was held, but the Kings of France and Castile, and the Duke of Burgundy, overcame the scruples of the abbot, and the pope issued a bull authorizing the affiliation of the Knights of Calatrava with the Cistercian Order as lay brothers. All the houses in Spain were subjected to the rule of the abbot of Escale-Dieu, who had the right of visiting and inspecting them till the secularization of the knights.

The most brilliant era in the history of Escale-Dieu is the thirteenth century. Two saints had sprung from the house (for we must not forget St. Bertrand of Comminges, one of the most popular saints of the Pyrenees, whose tomb is still honored in the town called by his name); it held rule over ten monasteries in Spain; and it was greatly enriched by the neighboring lords, particularly by the counts of Bigorre, who made it their burial-place. The Countess Petronilla, so famous for her five husbands, was a great benefactress of the house. Besides endowing it during her life, she bequeathed it, at her death, all her gold and silver vessels and reliquaries, her jewels, rings, and precious stones, her dresses (probably for vestments), sheets, and blankets. Her first husband was Gaston, Viscount of Bearn, who took sides with Count Raymond of Toulouse, but was reconciled to the church before his death. The second was Nuñez Sancho of Aragon, whom she repudiated under pretext of consanguinity. The third was Guy de Montfort, son of the great opponent of the Albigenses, who was killed at the siege of Castelnaudary. The fourth, Aymar de Rançon, who died about the same time as her second husband. And finally, Boson de Matas, Lord of Cognac. After these five chapters she died at the Abbey of Escale-Dieu in great need, it is thought, of expiatory prayers and good works. Henry III. of England was captivated by the beauty of her daughter Amate, and three other princes sought to obtain her hand in marriage; but she married Gaston VII. of Bearn, and two of her daughters, by the intermediation of Abbot Bernard of the house of Castelbajac, married princes of Aragon.

One of the viscounts of Lavedan also became a benefactor to the abbey, and in his deed of conveyance declares he gives it the soil, the rocks, the vegetation, the fruit, leaves, all that rises from the land towards heaven, and all it contains in its depths.

Rising over the valley of Escale-Dieu are the ruins of the old feudal castle of Mauvezin, like a vulture’s nest on the cliff, overlooking the whole country. It was once considered impregnable, and was, after that of Lourdes, the most important fortress in Bigorre. From this castle went many a valiant knight to the Crusades. One of them, in making his preparations to go beyond the seas with St. Louis, gave to “God and Madame St. Mary of Escale-Dieu” fifty sols of Morlaas money[109] from the rents of the thermal springs of Capvern.

Footnote 109:

A sol Morlaas was worth about 2.4 francs.

In early times the abbey found a kind protector in the castle; but when, at a later period, it became the stronghold of freebooters, who only issued forth to pillage the lowlands and fat abbeys, the good monks of Escale-Dieu had reason to call it a Mauvais Voisin—a bad neighbor—a name that has ever since clung to it.

When the English took possession of the country after the treaty of Brétigny, the Black Prince established a garrison of soldiers here, who rendered themselves as famous for their brigandage as for their heroic exploits. When the Duke of Anjou and Duguesclin went to the Pyrenees in 1374 to root the English out of the land, the castles of Lourdes and Mauvezin long resisted their stoutest efforts. The latter was besieged by eight thousand men, but the castle was so strong that it would have held out a long time, had not the supply of water been cut off by the capture of the outer cistern. The garrison now suffered all the horrors of thirst under a burning sun. Froissart says the weather was excessively warm, and not a drop of rain had fallen for six weeks. There was no choice but to surrender. Captain Raimounet de l’Epée, the commander of the fortress, like the true Gascon he was, made the best of his fate, and offered to yield up the castle on conditions that were the most advantageous to himself and his soldiers. Unwilling to lose any of his plunder, he stipulated that they should be allowed to depart in freedom, taking with them all they and their sumpter-horses could carry. The duke consented, saying: “Go about your business, every man to his own country, without entering any fort that holds out against us; for, if you do, and I get hold of you, I will deliver you up to Josselin [the executioner], who will shave you without a razor.”

Raimounet had fought well for the English, but he had an eye to the main chance, and he now showed the nature of his bravery by entering the service of the Duke of Anjou and continuing, under the fleurs-de-lis of France, the pillaging he had so long practised under the leopards of England. What he had not seized in the name of St. George he now took in honor of St. Denis, and thus filled both pockets at once. He died fighting by the side of the Duke of Anjou under the walls of Naples.

The sixteenth century, so fatal to innumerable churches and monasteries in France, did not spare the abbey of Escale-Dieu. The Huguenots now invaded the peaceful valley and proved far worse than the old troopers of Raimounet de l’Epée. The first band came in 1518 and burned the stables and the abbot’s residence. In 1567 a more formidable company appeared that put the monks to flight and took possession of the abbey, which they made the centre of their operations, issuing suddenly forth from time to time, like birds of prey, to plunder some church, or monastery, or well-garnished priest’s house. Blasphemies now resounded beneath the arches only accustomed to the voice of prayer and psalmody. All religious emblems were destroyed. The sanctuary angels feared to tread witnessed their orgies. At length, by the combined efforts of some of the lords of Bigorre, they were routed from the abbey, but before leaving they set fire to it and nearly destroyed it. In this destruction was included the fine old Romanesque church of the twelfth century, where St. Raymond and St. Bertrand had so often prayed, and the cloister they had so often paced in silent meditation. It is a poor comfort to know that the leaders of this sacrilegious deed were taken and executed at Toulouse. The monks returned to Escale-Dieu, but only to find it in ruins. In the course of time, however, it was rebuilt, but in an inferior style, as suited their diminished means, and the house led a precarious existence till the French Revolution, when it was once more ravaged, the very tombs violated, and the monks for ever dispersed.

The abbey is now owned by a layman who is more interested in agriculture than archæology. It contains, however, but little that is ancient. At the end of a long file of poplars you see the dome and white walls of the church, a building of the seventeenth century, now a grange. There is a flower-garden on the site of the ancient cloister, and in the walls are encrusted a few of the old columns with palm-leaves sculptured on the capitals, emblem of spiritual victory. And the hallowed name of Escale-Dieu, which once gave laws to Spanish knights, is now degraded to a mere post station.

Mauvezin itself became the hold of the Huguenots under Captain de Sus in 1584, and they made the castle more than ever worthy of its name. They extended their ravages as far as St. Bertrand of Comminges, and the name of their leader became a terror in the land. Now the castle is in ruins, which are as melancholy as its history. The square, massive tower that withstood so many attacks is roofless, windowless, and dismantled. Beneath is the vaulted dungeon where the prisoner once groaned in vain—dark and hopeless as the tomb. Over one of the doors of the tower is an escutcheon on which the arms of Foix are quartered with those of Bearn, with the inscription Fébus mé fé—Phœbus made me; for here lived for a time the famous Gaston Phœbus of Bearn. The kite and the osprey inhabit it now. The hoarse notes of birds of prey well suit the place where once resounded the war-cries of Raimounet de l’Epée and Captain de Sus.

Two leagues from Mauvezin is Bagnères de Bigorre, one of the most popular watering-places in the Pyrenees. Here “Esculapius est sans barbe et sans rides” says the poet Lemierre. Long before you arrive you see the tower of the Jacobins rising into the air light and slender as a column. It is a clean, attractive town in a circular valley surrounded by hills cultivated to the very top, or covered with woods whose shady paths are full of mystery. The valley is watered by several streams, and cooled by mountain breezes that are delicious in summer. Numerous canals convey the waters of the Adour through most of the streets of the town, giving a certain freshness to the air, and a supply of water for domestic purposes. An old author attributes the foundation of the place to Venus and Hebe, and says it was here the god Mars came to be healed when wounded at the siege of Troy. It was, at least, frequented by the Romans, who gave it the name of Vicus Aquensis. Their homages to the nymphs who guard the springs are still to be seen graven on marble, such as: Nymphis pro salute sud, Sever. Seranus V. S. L. M.

Like most of the towns of this region, Bagnères was formerly held by the Visigoths, Saracens, Normans, and English one after the other, but seems to have been spared by the Huguenots, who perhaps were more afraid of offending the water-nymphs than the saints. The people, it is said, propitiated their leaders by sending them occasionally a tribute of butter and maize. The town, notwithstanding its antiquity, has but few ancient remains. There is a feudal tower or two that formed part of the old fortifications, necessary when, as Froissart says, it was so often worried and beset by the garrison at Mauvezin. The old church of the Templars is standing, but used for profane purposes.

There are many agreeable promenades around Bagnères. One of these is to a green hollow among abrupt cliffs, called the Elysée-Cottin, from Madame Cottin, who was very fond of this quiet nook. It was here she is said to have conceived the noble character of Malek Adhel, which so delighted us in our youth, and wrote not only Mathilde but some of her other works. It is a charming retreat with a fountain in the bottom of the valley, in her time shaded by fine beeches and ash-trees, which have since been cut down.

The Allée Maintenon is so called in honor of Mme. de Maintenon, who accompanied the Duc du Maine here for his health. This Allée begins at the end of the town, and, climbing a steep hill, proceeds along the plateau of Pouey till it comes to a spot where you can see the whole plain of Bigorre, and the waters of the Adour dashing down the steep sides of the mountains. Here, taking the road to Campan, you soon come to the place where once stood the Capuchin convent of Médoux, founded in the sixteenth century by Susanne de Grammont, Marchioness of Monpezat. It was particularly renowned for a miraculous statue of the Virgin, honored under the name of Sancta Maria in Melle dulci, corrupted into Notre Dame de Médoux. The convent was destroyed during the Revolutionary period, but the Madonna, so dear to popular piety, was saved and now adorns the high altar of the church of Asté. The people say it was miraculously transported through the air and thus saved. It is of white marble, and a genuine work of art, by an Italian sculptor. It was the gift of one of the viscounts of Asté, who were generous patrons of the monastery. The expression and pure outline of the face, the dignity of the attitude, and the graceful flow of the drapery excite the admiration of every visitor.

A modern villa now occupies the place of the convent. It is in the midst of a fine park watered by a stream that comes pouring out of a cool grotto. Nothing could be more delightfully rural. Not far off is an old feudal tower, and beyond is Baudeau, the birthplace of Larrey, the favorite surgeon of Napoleon. The Vicomte de Castelbajac has sung the beauties of this spot where once stood

“Une chapelle hospitalière Toujours ouverte au pélerin, Jamais il n’y frappait en vain; Et le malheur et la misère, La pauvre veuve et l’orphelin, Y trouvaient toujours la prière Et l’aumône du Capucin.”

“CATHEDRAL WOODS,” MANCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.

Hushed grow our voices as our footsteps fall These darksome woods’ high fretted roof beneath, Whose living arches, sprung from living sheath, Are organ-pipes for winds to play withal. We leave, without, the meadow’s autumn glare— Its Tyrian wealth of asters prodigal, Its pomp of scarlet-robed cardinal, Its gentian that doth heaven’s livery wear. So leave we, too, the sparkle of the sea, And land-locked beach where waves break lazily.

Herein we seem among the hills at rest; Their balm by breath of salt wind undefiled; Freshness of streams, and strength of great rocks piled, Seem by our souls in this calm shade possessed, Where hemlocks stretch their dusky branches o’er The scattered rocks, whereto the green moss clings, Catching the prisoned sunbeam as it flings A miser’s portion of its golden store, As if it feared to break the shadow deep, To mar some vigil these grave giants keep.

Here only mountain incense seeming fills The lofty arches, by sea-wind unbent, That rise as if with height still nobler blent: Some peak, cloud-piercing, 'mid the sunlit hills Whose glamour holds us fast, whose blossoms lie The darkness of the broken rocks amid, Whose written speech in these lithe ferns is hid, Whose forests whisper in the winds’ low sigh. Should any bird this inland silence break, Sure in his song the mountains’ soul would wake.

Hearken! breaks through the silence soft a sound Faint as the thought of half-forgotten dream. Not speech so sad is that of mountain stream That from all loftiest heights doth reckless bound, Scattering its broken life in shining drift Of constant dew that mocketh at the sun. Nor breathes the wind in such low, measured tone When doth it lightly leafy branches lift— This wakes and dies in mournful monotone: The sea’s vast life dashed out against a stone!

Some law this chant seems ever to obey— Advancing, swells, now sinketh in retreat, Sad-voiced like life that knoweth but defeat, Yet still with patient purpose keeps its way. Joy-burdened silence of the hills, farewell! And salt sea-wind, thy carven choir reclaim! Brave sun, set all these dusky trunks aflame! Lost are our mountains in yon ceaseless swell That, shoreward rolling, lapsing quietly, Holds all the strength of the untiring sea.

The land grows little, and we crave the blue No earthly shade e’er shutteth from the sun, The barren sands whereon the light waves run But rest not, bidding evermore adieu, And evermore returning, bringing gifts They give and take, and still give o’er again. We crave the vastness of the salty plain! As sea-bird on unbreaking billow drifts Our hearts with that soft plashing throb in time— Longing, we list our dim cathedral chime.

One well might paint the hemlock solitude, The quiet shadow that the sunshine breaks; Even in color give the song that wakes At windy touch amid the peaceful wood. Limned all might be, indeed, so cunningly That one should hear the babble of glad stream, E’en catch the climbing mountains’ happy gleam; But—who could paint the murmur of the sea? Who dream, amid these dark boughs closing o’er, The song eternal of the broken shore?

JULIETTE: A NORMAN STORY.

I.

Marriage is in one respect not unlike greatness: some are born to it, some achieve it, some have it thrust upon them. And the last-named some are apt to find it as unprofitable an acquisition as to Napoleon the Little it proved to be the nephew of his uncle.

Now, M. de Boisrobert was a born bachelor, and, left to himself, a bachelor he would have died. But who shall gainsay fate? Upon him gayly baccalaureating Fate fixed her eagle eye and made up her mind that he should marry. Not without reason has Fate been made a female. When a person of that charming but inflexible sex makes up her mind that any bachelor of her acquaintance shall marry, we know what happens. Married M. de Boisrobert accordingly was, with what direful consequences to the poor gentleman the reader shall see.

Up to his forty-fifth year Messire Guillaume Georges de Boisrobert, Sieur de Boisrobert and Saintange, had lived the happy life of a country gentleman upon his estates in Normandy, near Evreux, satisfied with himself and with the world. Indeed, he had every reason to be satisfied, possessing as he did a fine château, a princely income, an honorable name, an easy conscience, and the respect of all who knew him. From the summit of his towers, look which way he would (and his sight was keen, as so good a sportsman’s should be), he could scarce fix the boundary of his domains. Farms, meadow-land, and woodland, his broad acres stretched for many a mile along the blue waters of the Eure; upon his pastures fed sheep and cattle by the hundred; in his stables neighed scores of gallant steeds. Yet, strange to say, with all his wealth, envy had no word for him, nor was he even decried more than it was fitting a rich and handsome bachelor should be. Certain maiden ladies of uncertain age, to whose charms he had, perhaps, been ungallantly cold, sometimes, indeed, made light among themselves of his pretensions to noble birth. That, truly, was the simple gentleman’s weakness, and he loved to style himself after the stately fashion written above.

“He De Boisrobert, forsooth!” Mlle. Reiné might say over her tatting (or is it tattling the ladies call it?). “He was never aught but plain” (“plain indeed!” Mlle. Gudule would giggle, pointing the mot with her crochet-needle. Ah! thou thoughtest otherwise, fair Gudule, of his beauty when the embroidered slippers, and watch-pockets, and what-nots worked by thy own fair fingers—or thy maid’s—deluged the château and made largesse for its kitchen!)—“plain Guillaume Robert till his father, the notary, got an army contract and left him money enough to buy the wood in which his dismal old château is buried—the stingy old hunks!”

Now, this was not entirely true; and these fair Ariadnes were, to say the least, uncharitable. But it must be remembered, for the credit of the sex, that these events took place very long ago—so long ago, indeed, as the time of that great and glorious monarch, Louis XIV.—“le doyen des Rois,” as he called himself—whose majesty was like the sun (which orb, indeed, depicted in the act of illuminating the world, he modestly took for his device), and whose grandeur was indisputably shown in the fact that he could eat more for dinner than any man in his kingdom.[110] In point of fact, no small number of his loving subjects, owing to their sovereign’s majestic and princely appetite, had rarely anything to eat at all. But to return to our sheep.

Footnote 110:

Read the monarch’s usual menu in the memoirs of the Princess Palatine, who seems to look with a certain naïve admiration on the trencher prowess of her august kinsman: “The king devours with ease at a single meal four basins of different kinds of soup, a pheasant whole, a partridge, a dish of salad, two slices of ham, some mutton with gravy, a plate of pastry, and for dessert (O dura messorum ilia!) a quantity of hard-boiled eggs and fruits of every sort, the whole washed down with abundance of wines.” Here, at least, he might justly claim to be nec pluribus impar.

M. de Boisrobert was not stingy. On the contrary, his open-handed, and even profuse, hospitality endeared him to all the men about him, who had, no doubt, their own private reasons for liking him, as some of the women had theirs for looking upon him with a different feeling. The manner of his living was almost lordly; and when he was at home, it was nothing but junketing and merriment from month’s end to month’s end. An enthusiastic sportsman himself, his stables and his kennels contained the best that money could buy; while his huntsmen, his gamekeepers, and his beaters were a small army in themselves. Being so rich and so generous, he was naturally looked upon with great respect, and even liking, through all the country round; and many a man who had little reverence for aught besides would doff his hat most humbly to the well-furnished larder of that excellent M. de Boisrobert.

It must be said, however, that in his case—what is unhappily not always true—this respect was rightly his, for better reasons. Amiable, simple, and sincere, a scrupulous observer of his word, his charity was greater than his hospitality, and his piety was as unbounded as his wealth. Every morning he was first at Mass in the little village church of Boisrobert, whose excellent curé was his favorite and, it may be said, his only intimate associate. His best friends, indeed, he counted among that admirable class, whose sterling and unobtrusive virtues he thoroughly appreciated. It was strange that so worthy a penchant was destined to lead him into the great danger of his life. Of the great folks our friend was a little shy; and as for the small farmers and hobereaux, or “squireens” (to borrow from the familiar speech of Ireland a word which alone fitly translates it), who made the bulk of the neighboring landed proprietors, their tastes and habits were little congenial to his own. So good Father Bernard and he were much together; and a pleasant sight it was to see the two friends placidly angling, side by side, for the fish which somehow a French angler seems quite as well satisfied never to catch; or, in the bright summer evenings, playing bowls with all the zest of school-boys on the village green. No more welcome guest than Father Bernard entered the gates of the Château de Boisrobert; and when the November nights grew chilly, and the logs were piled high and glowing in the wide Norman hearth (its owner always quoted Horace at such times, and old Mère Chicon, the housekeeper, knew as well as any one that dissolve frigus was the Latin for “stir up the fire and fetch a bottle of Burgundy,” and had had, indeed, many bouts thereanent with the village schoolmaster, in which that worthy was not always triumphant), our hero liked nothing better than to engage his friend in a contest at chess, or trictrac, or piquet, or, over a jug of Norman cider or the aforesaid Burgundy, to discuss the movements of the court, with which he professed to be in constant communication.

That was, as we have said, the honest gentleman’s foible—almost his sole one; he secretly worshipped rank, and often sighed to think that he, who might—and, he sometimes added to himself, should—have been a De Rohan was only a De Boisrobert, barely a gentleman, by virtue of the lands his money had bought. Yet, if not the rose, he had at least lived near the rose. The son of a notary himself, he was yet distantly connected with one of the noblest names in France, as he was by no means slow in making folks aware.

“My good cousin, De Beaumanoir,” he would say in an off-hand way, pronouncing the name tout sec, like the provincial ladies in the Roman Comique, though to his face he never ventured to address him otherwise than as M. le Comte—“my good cousin De Beaumanoir writes me that he is to visit Saint-Aignan at his country-seat, and will have me to be of the party.”

Or, mysteriously: “The army—but this, you conceive, my friend, is between ourselves—a secret, mind you, of state—the army moves on Flanders this week. I have it direct from Beaumanoir.”

It was then, as you may read in Scarron’s sprightly pages, a common ambition of provincial gentlemen to be thought on familiar terms with the great folks of the court. Truly, an extraordinary time!

At these naïve confidences the curé, who knew his friend’s failing, but respected his virtues, smiled, if at all, to himself.

But M. de Boisrobert’s reverence for his noble kinsman went further than talking of him in season and out of season. He gave a more substantial proof of his regard in making him his sole heir. “The money should go with the title,” he said; “the family must be kept up.” It seemed to him a little price to pay for the privilege of being admitted for a month or two in the year to the rather frigid hospitality of the Hôtel Beaumanoir, of being nightly snubbed by the bluest blood in France, and of having down a great man or two for a day in the shooting season, to convert the Château Boisrobert to his enamored fancy into a new Versailles. His noble cousin he would gladly have had stay longer; but the count, after yawning through forty-eight hours of ennui, invariably left. The lands of Boisrobert he wanted; its simple and placid life he could not stomach. His palate was seasoned to higher flavors.

Not to put too fine a point on it, M. the Count de Beaumanoir was as insolent, imperious, and ungrateful a scoundrel as was to be found in a court where gentry of his pattern were rather a drug. Had it not been that he enjoyed the confidence and familiarity of a still greater rogue than himself—no less a one, to wit, than Monsieur, the brother of the Most Christian King—he would long since have come to grief. He was more than suspected of a share in the mysterious poisoning of the hapless Henrietta of Orleans, and it was only the credit of his patron and his own well-known courage and skill as a swordsman that kept these doubts from taking form.

Such was the heir whom our worthy M. de Boisrobert had selected for the reversion of his vast estates; and his promise once given, the count determined that it should be kept.

II.

Daybreak of a pleasant morning in October, 1681. In the court-yard and stables of the Château de Boisrobert, and in the great farm-yard near by, all is bustle and confusion. Grooms and footmen, herdsmen and farm-servants, are scurrying to and fro, with lanterns and lighted torches, through the gray dawn, tumbling over one another in their haste, shrieking out contradictory orders at the top of their lungs, clamoring and making all the noise possible, as though they had taken a contract for the purpose and felt they had but a limited time to fulfil it. In the farm-yard the heavy Norman horses are being harnessed, with collars that would be in themselves a load for a horse of our degenerate days, to the unwieldy Norman carts, already loaded with huge sacks of wheat and barley; further on, in the barns, a prodigious lowing and bleating and bellowing tell where Pierrot and Hugues are marshalling their herds; in the court-yard, saddled and bridled, are stamping and snorting the steeds which shall bear M. de Boisrobert and his bodyguard of two armed domestics to the great fair of Moulin-la-Forêt. Himself booted and spurred for the journey, that gentleman stands upon the terrace of the château, overlooking these preparations; chiding here, encouraging there, animating all by word and gesture. M. de Boisrobert has not been a nobleman long enough to forget that he is a farmer, and prefers to be his own steward. He finds it saves time and temper as well as money.

By dint of much exhortation and shrill volubility of expletives in the curious Norman patois all is at last in readiness, and they are off, with many tender partings and tearful embraces between Blaise and Madelon, and much scolding from Mère Chicon the housekeeper, and fervent adjurations to the Bon Dieu to bring them a good market and a safe return. The latter prayer may seem superfluous, as the distance is but thirty miles and they are a stout party. But it is the day of the famous Mandrin, most redoubtable of robbers, and of the terrible chauffeurs who extort the farmer’s hidden hoard by roasting his feet at his own fire; so there is some room for trepidation in the bosoms of the simple peasant-girls whom this animated company soon leave behind.

We have not space to follow the great cavalcade as it goes bellowing and baaing and shrieking and sacrréing over the white roads between the hedges and the apple-orchards to the great fair. We cannot even stop with M. de Boisrobert at the tidy little auberge of the Pomme d’Or for the welcome déjeuner of soupe aux croûtes, to be followed by ham, and perhaps a poulet with the freshest of eggs and salad, and the most delicious of cheeses, and a most refreshing draught of cool cider from the great stone jug. Nor can we do more than glance at the humors of the fair—much like other fairs, for the matter of that—with its inevitable jugglers and tumblers and charlatans, swallowing flames as if they were sausages, and pulling endless yards of ribbon from their mouths, to the delight of gaping rustics; its gipsies and gingerbread hawkers; its shrill-voiced peasant women, in high Norman caps, selling eggs and poultry; its shriller-voiced ballad-singers piping out:

“Si le roi m’avait donné Paris sa grand’ ville,”

or some other favorite chanson of the time. These joys we must pass lightly by, to say that, before the afternoon was well over, M. de Boisrobert had already sold his entire venture at an excellent profit, and it was rumored about the fair that he would go home richer by 20,000 francs (equal to 80,000 now) than when he came. The interest in the lucky capitalist increased; it extended even to his horses, and one or two simple rustics went so far as to push their way, during the temporary absence of the grooms, into the stables, there to gaze in open-mouthed admiration upon the steeds that had the honor of bearing—so history renews itself—M. Cæsar de Boisrobert and his fortune.

The hour for departure drew nigh. As the days were getting short and the homeward ride was long and lonely, and, as already hinted, far from safe—few roads in France were safe in those days after nightfall—M. de Boisrobert commanded an early start. He himself was to ride on ahead, attended only by his two mounted valets, leaving the wagoners and herdsmen to follow more leisurely with the carts. The horses were accordingly brought forth and saddled, and the worthy squire was just setting foot in stirrup when he was accosted by a curé, who, calling him by name, politely craved leave to ride with him, as their road lay in the same direction. M. de Boisrobert assented more than gladly, for not only was company desirable, but a curé the company he most desired, and which could be accepted, as would not have been the case with every comer, without suspicion. So they set forth together.

The curé turned out a most agreeable travelling companion, and M. de Boisrobert secretly felicitated himself on the chance which had thrown them together. So charmed was he with his new-found friend that, when the latter pressed upon him the offer of a supper and a bed at the vicarage, he wavered, until reminded by the sum he had about him of the wisdom of pushing on. But even while he doubted came a most distressing mishap. The horse ridden by one of the servants stumbled, fell, and, before his rider had fairly scrambled to his feet, rolled over stone dead. There was nothing for it but to mount Blaise behind Constant, and so get on as best they might. But, lo and behold! scarcely had Constant drawn rein for the purpose than, with what seemed to the startled hearers almost a shriek, the beast he bestrode set off at a furious gallop, which soon left his luckless rider on the ground with a broken leg. And, strange to say, the poor animal had run but a few yards further when he too stopped, staggered, and—pouf! before one could say Jack Robinson, or its equivalent in Norman French, he is as dead as the very deadest of door-nails or herrings.

Whatever M. de Boisrobert may have thought of this odd coincidence, he had little leisure to dwell upon it; for the next instant his own steed was in convulsions, and, barely giving him time to spring from the saddle, like the others rolled over dead. How account for so singular a fatality? Had some poisonous weed got into their fodder? had some venomous reptile stung them in their stalls? or—uneasy doubts crept into the good gentleman’s mind—had they been foully dealt with by reptiles in human form who meant to waylay and rob, if not murder, the travellers? If the latter, it would be indeed most prudent to accept the good curé’s hospitality. His house was luckily not far off, and the disabled servant being first made comfortable in a wayside cabin, and the sound one despatched to the nearest town for a surgeon, M. de Boisrobert and the curé took their way to the home of the latter.

Night had fallen when they reached it, but enough light still remained to show that it was a partly-ruined château, dating probably from the time of the Crusades. One wing had been so far reconstructed as to be habitable, and the ancient chapel, the curé explained, had also been put in order to serve as the village church. “My parish,” he added with a sigh, “is too poor to build a better.” A moat, still filled with green and stagnant water, surrounded the walls; a few planks served for a pathway across it, where once had hung the feudal drawbridge; a dark and snake-like ivy crawled up the crumbling walls; dense woods cast about it a funereal gloom. Altogether its outward aspect was sombre and forbidding in the extreme, and M. de Boisrobert could not repress a shudder or stifle a sinister presentiment as he looked upon his quarters for the night. Had his host been anybody but a curé, he would have felt like drawing back even then.

A little old man, who filled in the modest household by turns the comprehensive functions of butler, valet, groom, gardener, waiter, cook, and general factotum, took their horses in silence, but with a curious glance at the visitor the latter could not help remarking, and the curé led the way to the drawing-room. This was a lofty, vaulted apartment almost bare of furniture, on the walls of which flapped dismally a few tattered pieces of tapestry, the relics of old-time grandeur. A faggot or two crackled and sputtered feebly on the gloomy hearth. Near it, busied apparently over woman’s work of some kind, were seated an old woman of repulsive aspect and a young girl, the latter of whom the curé introduced as Juliette, his niece, and, briefly requesting her to entertain their guest, excused himself to see to the latter’s entertainment for the night.

And now, as the heroine of this exciting history has at last arrived—a little tardiness, as you know, messieurs, must be forgiven to her sex—it seems only becoming that she should have a chapter to herself.

III.

Lovely? Of course she is lovely. What a ridiculous question! Who ever heard of a heroine who wasn’t lovely, still less a heroine who was also the niece of a rob—Peste! The cat was almost out of the bag that time—so nearly out, in fact, that we may as well slip the noose and let her go at once. Scat! And now, the author’s mind being freed of an enormous load, he breathes more freely and announces that our luckless M. de Boisrobert has literally fallen into a den of thieves. For what purpose otherwise that artful hint about the rustics prying into the stables, the horses falling dead upon the way, the elaborate setting forth of the gloom and desolation hanging like a pall over the ruined château—to what end, do you suppose, was all this expenditure of literary artifice, except to prepare the reader’s mind for some blood-curdling and harrowing event? But the curé? the curé? Why, simply no curé at all: a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as there were then but too many in France.[111]

Footnote 111:

It should be said here that the main incident on which this tale is founded is true, and that this sacrilegious disguise was in those days frequently assumed by French robbers the better to disarm suspicion. The fact is in itself a striking testimony to the implicit confidence which the clergy of France have always inspired, and deserved.

Of this, however, as yet M. de Boisrobert knew nothing. Filled with vague forebodings of evil he could neither define nor reason down, he felt but little in the humor for talk, and still less—being, as you remember, in his tenth lustrum—for flirtation. So, after one or two wise remarks upon the weather, or the state of the crops, or the latest opera, or whatever other topics gentlemen-farmers then chose to break the ice of conversation with a pretty girl, had been answered more virgineo with shy blushes, or faltering monosyllables, or embarrassed and embarrassing silence, M. de Boisrobert betook himself to the window to look out upon the surrounding country. A full moon threw upon every object a lustre like that of day, and—ha! what is this he sees in the court-yard? Can that be his host, the curé, talking so confidentially to those exceedingly sinister-looking chaps (one of whom he now remembers to have had pointed out to him at the fair as a coiner of base money, the other as a more than suspected thief), and handling those three exceedingly long and ugly-looking poniards!—ugh! how their keen edges glitter in the moonlight as the rascals run their dirty thumbs along to try their temper.

M. de Boisrobert turned from the window with a gesture of affright and despair, and beheld Juliette standing before him, no longer a timid child but a lovely and courageous woman, one finger upon her lip, the other pointing to the ill-featured duenna, who had had the good manners to go to sleep. In a few rapid whispers, and still more eloquent gestures, she explained the danger and her unalterable resolve to save him or perish in the attempt. Whether it was her words or her beauty, M. de Boisrobert felt instantly reassured. Indeed, had he known anything of the course of such adventures, he must have felt so from the moment he laid eyes on her. For what other purpose except to save him could he suppose so lovely a creature was to be found in so vile a den? And let it here be said for the benefit of scoffers that the present writer is well aware how often this incident has been used for purposes of fiction—at least ten thousand times in the English language alone. Yes; but does not the very frequency of its use prove it to be founded on fact, that some time or other it was true? Very well; this is the time it was true. Besides, who has said that Juliette is to succeed in her noble but rash endeavor? Suppose—now just suppose—she were to fail; in which of your fictions do you find a stroke of originality like that? If the historian were revengeful; if he had a mind to distort facts, as historians in very remote ages are said sometimes to have done—well, well, we shall see.

In her hurried warning Juliette had made shift to tell M. de Boisrobert that it was meant to put a sleeping potion in his wine, and afterwards to enter his chamber and kill him while still under the influence of the drug.

“Do not for your life refuse to drink,” she added, “but be careful to eat the apple I shall offer you after it, and which will contain the antidote to the drug.”

Scarcely had she ended when the pretended curé came in with his precious comrades, whom he introduced as parishioners. (“A fit flock for such a shepherd!” thought poor M. de Boisrobert.) Supper was served at once, and all went as the young girl had foretold. The wine was drunk and the apple duly presented and eaten with a confidence that must seem truly sublime under the circumstances, remembering, too, that one of M. de Boisrobert’s remote ancestors had lost his entire patrimony through accepting a similar gift from a near female relation. Feigning weariness and sleep, the traveller begged to be excused and was shown to his room.

No sooner was he alone than he began to examine his means of defence and offence. The flints, of course, were taken from his pistols and the bolts removed from the door—they would be poor robbers, totally unworthy the attention of an enlightened reader, who would neglect such obvious precautions as these. Somewhat disconsolately M. de Boisrobert looked under the bed and into the wardrobe, but found no comfort there. Then he piled all the furniture against the door, drew his sword, said his prayers, set his teeth, thought of Juliette (O middle-aged and most forlorn of Romeos!), and awaited the conspirators.

He had not long to wait. Scarcely had he taken position when a stealthy tread outside, a fumbling at the latch, and probably a strong odor of garlic penetrating through the keyhole, announced their arrival. The door was first softly, then strongly, pushed, and then, as the unlooked-for resistance showed their plot was discovered, a furious volley of oaths was followed by an onset that made the barricade tremble. Now should we dearly love to entertain the reader with the description of a terrific combat à l’outrance—also à la Dumas—wherein M. de Boisrobert, calmly awaiting his foes’ approach, falls upon them with such ferocity that in a twinkling he has one spitted like a lark, another cloven to the chine, and the third in headlong flight and bawling lustily for mercy, but pricked sorely in tender places by the relentless sword. But, alas!—such is the fatal limitation of your true story—nothing of the sort took place. On the contrary, our hero was in all probability horribly frightened and thoroughly glad to see a secret panel suddenly slide back, and a white hand thrust through the opening, while the sweetest voice he had ever heard begged him to make haste. To seize that hand—and who shall blame him if he pressed it to his lips?—to dart through the opening—quick! quick! good Jean!—to close the panel, is the work of an instant. Scarcely is it shut when cr-rack! crash! bang! go door and barricade, and the foiled assassins are heard stamping and swearing furiously about the deserted room. If you could but have seen their faces and heard—no, it would not have been edifying to hear their language. But the fugitives are safe. Need it be said that the foresight of the faithful Jean (who, of course, follows his young mistress, having, indeed, waited this long time in the robber’s den only for a chance to be on hand in this emergency) had provided horses, on which they soon reached Evreux, where they lodged an information, which, there being no police there to speak of, led to the prompt arrest of the ruffians.

Placing the lovely Juliette in a convent, M. de Boisrobert returned home. But it was observed that he hunted less than formerly, that he was often closeted with Father Bernard and his notary, and that he spent much time in settling his affairs. Need the result be told? What in the world is a middle-aged bachelor to do whose life is saved by a lovely maiden of spotless virtue? For, be it known, the fair Juliette, left an orphan only a week before, had, by her dying father, a rich farmer of Brézolles, been consigned to the guardianship of this wicked brother, whose evil courses he was far from suspecting. All that is as plain as a pikestaff; as it is that in less than six months after, just long enough to get the trousseau ready (from the Worth of the day, of course) and to see the wicked uncle comfortably hanged, the bells of Friar Lawrence’s—we should say of Father Bernard’s—little church at Boisrobert rang out a merry answer to the problem last propounded.

When the distant echoes of these wedding chimes reached the ears of M. le Comte de Beaumanoir at Paris, he was not at all angry, as people thought he would be. Oh! dear, no. On the contrary, he only smiled, showing a remarkably fine set of teeth. So that people said he was a brave man, this poor M. le Comte, and not by any means as black as he was painted. And, indeed, a great many folks began to commiserate him and to abuse M. de Boisrobert.

IV.

Well?

Well what?

Why, what came of M. de Beaumanoir showing his teeth?

Oh! that? Nothing—just nothing at all. That’s the trouble, you see, of telling a true story: one’s imagination is hampered at every step. It would have been most delightful and exciting to have invented a frightful tale of the count’s vengeance; how he slew his recalcitrant kinsman, immured his weeping bride in a dungeon for life, and laid waste the lands of Boisrobert with fire and sword, etc., etc. But the truth is, he did nothing of the kind. Indeed, his teeth were speedily drawn, and he was glad to get away with his worthless life. The false curé confessed before his death that the count had suborned him to kill his kinsman as he returned from the fair, promising him a sum equal to that which he would be sure to find on M. de Boisrobert’s person, and even suggesting the disguise. He little thought that the very scheme he fondly imagined was to secure him his coveted inheritance was destined really to lose it to him for ever. So ever come to grief the machinations of the wicked! This last escapade was a little too much even for courtly morals, and Monsieur was quietly advised to hint to his murderous favorite that his health would probably be the better for a change of air.

And the fatal consequences resulting from this marriage?

Yes, yes, of course; how stupid to forget it! Well, a cynic might say that for a bachelor to marry at all, especially at forty-five—but never mind the cynic. Their married life was surely not unhappy? Let us hope not. Do Romeo and Juliet ever throw teacups at each other over the breakfast-table because that duck of a spring bonnet is not forthcoming? In romances certainly not; but in true stories—hem! Let us trust, however, that peace reigned eternal over the domestic hearthstone at the Château de Boisrobert. But his marriage had cost its owner an illusion—a life-long illusion; and that is a painful thing at forty-five. Disenchantment seems to come harder as one gets older and has anything left to be disenchanted of. He ceased to believe that rank and birth are the same as goodness, or even greatness, and it cost him many a pang, and no doubt a great deal of real though whimsical unhappiness, to be forced thus suddenly and radically to readjust his scheme of life. But, in spite of the adventure which gave him a wife, perhaps because of it, he never lost his faith in curés or in Juliette; and the games of bowls and of trictrac were all the pleasanter for the sweet face that thenceforth lit them up, and the romping curly-pates that disturbed them and in time effaced from their fond father’s memory his lingering regret for the loss of a noble heir.

TO AUBREY DE VERE. AFTER READING “POEMS OF PLACES—ITALY,” EDITED BY H. W. LONGFELLOW.

I stood in ancient church, ruined and vast, Whose crumbling altar of its Lord was bare, Whose shattered windows let in all the glare Of noonday heat, and noise of crowds that passed With careless jest, of malice not assoiled. Within, fast-fading angels still lent grace Of art, believing, to the holy place That cruel hands of its best gift despoiled. With weary feet I trod the broken floor, With tearless eyes the maimèd aisles gazed down, When, lo! afar a waxen taper shone, Burning a hidden altar clear before: Here hastened I, here knelt—O poet true! Thine was the light that shone my sorrow through.

COLONIZATION AND FUTURE EMIGRATION.

God has apparently chosen the United States as the theatre for the demonstration of the truth that the Catholic Church is the church of the people. She has always been the church of the people; many of her most severe persecutions have been caused by the stand she has taken in behalf of popular rights and individual freedom against the tyranny of kings and the exactions of nobles. But never before has she been furnished with so large a field for the manifestation and development of her popular and democratic character as has been prepared for her here. It is her destiny, we believe, to save the republic from the ruin to which the sects and their offspring, the atheists, would lead her. Even those of our Catholic readers who may not fully share this belief will admit that, to all seeming, the Catholic Church is destined to play an important part in the future history of our country—at least that she has grown in numbers, material wealth, and social influence during the last thirty years to an almost marvellous degree.

A better or more certain method of accomplishing the work of the church in the United States could scarcely have been devised than the congregation of a large share of the Catholic emigration in our great cities. The Catholic Church in the United States is not “a foreign church” in any other sense than the Bible, or Shakspere’s plays, or Homer’s poems are “foreign” books; she is, as they are, and far more than they are, the common inheritance of all, and she is as much at home here, and as rightfully at home, as she is or ever was in any other land. Indeed, the church of God is not and cannot be foreign to any of God’s creatures. But a large proportion of her children in the United States at present are either of foreign birth or are the descendants of foreign-born persons in the first or second generation. These people did not bring the Catholic Church with them to America: they found her here; she had always had an existence here since Christopher Columbus planted the cross upon San Salvador, and since the Jesuit priests sailed up the St. Lawrence and down the Mississippi rivers. If, however, the emigration which has poured into this country since 1840 had not arrived, or had it come from non-Catholic countries, and had the growth of the church here been dependent wholly, or even chiefly, upon the natural increase of American Catholic families and upon converts from Protestantism or heathenism, the church in America to-day would have been numerically insignificant; which is only the same as to say that, if emigration had ceased after the first European exodus, the population of the United States to-day would be equally insignificant.

We may form some idea of what the progress of the church under these conditions would have been here by remembering what it has been in England since the cessation of the active persecutions which followed the Reformation. There are about 1,800,000 Catholics in England to-day. Of these not less than 800,000 are Irish, French, German, Spanish, and Italian emigrants or their children; the remaining 1,000,000 represent all the converts of English birth, as well as the descendants of the old Catholic families who always retained the faith. Half a century has elapsed since the English Catholics were emancipated from the last remnant of the persecuting and restrictive legislation which had oppressed them since the days of Elizabeth. During this half-century the church in England has been free—free in its own government, free in its work of propagating the faith and of bringing back the English people to the religion which their fathers had cherished for a thousand years.

Yet, with some advantages that Catholics in the United States did not and do not yet possess, the growth of the church in England during the last fifty years has been vastly less than the progress she has made in this country during the same period. In 1830 there were more Catholics in England than in the United States; since then the church in both countries has been equally free, with the advantages at the start on the side of England. But now the Catholics in the United States outnumber those in England more than fourfold.

In 1830, according to the most trustworthy estimates, there were 600,000 Catholics in England and 475,000 in the United States; now they number two millions there and from six to seven millions here. In England to-day the church has a cardinal, twelve suffragan bishops, and 2,064 priests; in the United States she has a cardinal, 66 archbishops and bishops, and 5,297 priests. In England, according to the English Catholic Directory for last year, there were 997 Catholic churches, 7 theological seminaries, 312 ecclesiastical students, 15 colleges, 38 asylums, and 5 hospitals. In the United States, according to the American Catholic Directory for the same year, there were 5,292 Catholic churches, 34 theological seminaries, 1,217 ecclesiastical students, 62 colleges, 219 asylums, and 95 hospitals.[112]

Footnote 112:

These figures, as far as they relate to the institutions of the church in England, are probably not entirely correct. The Register from which we have quoted contains no tabular statement of these institutions, and we have been compelled to arrive at the totals by an enumeration of our own, the accuracy of which has been rendered doubtful by the confused manner in which the statistics of each diocese were given. However, our figures cannot be very greatly at fault.

We have drawn out this comparison for the purpose of accentuating our former remark that the marvellous growth of the church in the United States during the last half-century has been mainly due to emigration from Catholic countries. Had it not been for these accessions, it is doubtful, in our opinion, whether the church in the United States would to-day equal in numbers the church in England. But would its growth have been so great, so pronounced, so commanding to the attention of all beholders, had this emigration been directed away from the cities and dispersed throughout the rural and agricultural sections of the country? A little reflection will, we think, show that this question must be answered in the negative. It would have availed the church nothing had these emigrants been placed in their new homes under conditions where the preservation of their faith in any practical form would have been almost impossible; where they would have been deprived of the care and counsel of their spiritual guides and of the sacraments necessary for salvation; where their children would have remained unbaptized, their marriages have been degraded to civil contracts, and their souls starved and enfeebled by the absence of the Bread of Life. Yet that this would have been the fate of the great majority of them, had they not congregated in the cities, cannot be doubted, unless, indeed, God had chosen to work another miracle in their behalf and to create for them a miraculous supply of priests—a supply so large that every little hamlet in the far-off wilds of the West and North should have been furnished with a spiritual director.

Some boast of having even nine millions of Catholics in the republic; but it can be shown that there are perhaps half as many more Americans now living who are the children of Catholic parents in the first or second generation, but who have lost their faith and grown up as Protestants or without any religion at all, chiefly because their parents had gone into districts where there were no priests, and where the exercise of their religion, save as a spiritual meditation, was impossible.[113] It was only when the Catholic emigrants began to arrive here in large numbers, and to dwell together by hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands in the great cities, that it became possible, humanly, to provide for their religious wants and for their Catholic education. How nobly they have themselves furnished the material means for this work the statistics given above show. They have mainly done it for themselves. In England the Irish Catholics, in their works of charity and in the erection of their churches, have often been aided by the contributions of their wealthy English fellow-Catholics; but in America the foreign-born and the descendants of the foreign-born Catholics have for the most part built their own churches, their own convents, seminaries, and schools, and have received but little aid from their co-religionists of native ancestry. Indeed, in some instances within our own knowledge it is the latter who have been the beneficiaries of the former; and many an American Catholic to-day is indebted to the charity and self-denial of German, French, and Irish Catholics for the services of the priest who was the means of his conversion, and for the erection of the church in which he hears Mass. We repeat that all this was made possible by the congregation of our Catholic emigrants in the cities, and that the most deplorable consequences would have followed had not this congregation taken place.

Footnote 113:

A very ingenious statement was published some time ago in one of our journals, setting forth what was believed to be “the constituent elements of the population of the United States in 1870.” This statement may be thus summarized: In 1784 the entire white population of the United States was 3,172,000 persons; of these 1,141,920 were of Irish birth, 751,280 were of other Celtic races, 841,800 were of Anglo-Saxon extraction, and 427,000 were of Dutch and Scandinavian birth. The total immigration to the United States from 1790 to 1870 was 8,199,000 persons, of whom 3,248,000 came from Ireland, 796,000 from Anglo-Saxon races; and 4,155,000 from all other sources. The total population in 1870 was 38,500,000; and this vast number was thus analyzed:

Joint product in 1870 of Irish colonial 14,325,000 elements and subsequent Irish immigration, including that from Canada

Joint product in 1870 of Anglo-Saxon 4,522,000 colonial elements and subsequent Anglo-Saxon immigration

Joint product in 1870 of all other 19,653,000 colonial elements and all subsequent immigration, including the negroes

—————

38,500,000

From these figures was drawn the somewhat startling deduction that the population of the United States in 1870 was composed of 24,000,000 of Celtic birth or origin (Irish, Scotch, French, Spanish, and Italian), and that of these 14,325,000 were of Irish birth or origin, 4,522,000 of Anglo-Saxon birth or origin, and that the remaining 9,978,000 were of neither Celtic nor Anglo-Saxon extraction. We are not in any way responsible for the accuracy of these figures; but that they express at least an approximation to the truth we do not doubt.

It is not, moreover, in spiritual matters only that our emigrants have been wise in congregating in the cities. One must remember the condition in which the great majority of them landed here during the years when emigration was at the flood-tide, and then compare with that their present state and the future which is before them and their children. They were desperately, or apostolically, poor, because they came from lands where it was impossible for them to acquire anything beyond the means of bare subsistence. They were uneducated, because they had been the subjects of governments whose studied policy it was to keep them in ignorance. They had neither the capital nor the knowledge necessary to render them successful as independent agriculturists. Labor was most abundant in the cities, and in the cities they remained. What have they done there? If you seek their monument, look around you! Behold not only the 57 Catholic churches (12 of them built almost or quite exclusively by Germans, 1 by Poles, 1 by Italians, 1 by Bohemians, 1 by Frenchmen, and 30 by Irishmen), the 17 monasteries, the 22 convents, the magnificent Protectory, the theological seminary, the 3 colleges, the 22 select schools, the 19 asylums, the 4 homes for aged men and women, the 4 hospitals, and the 85 parochial schools of which the city and diocese of New York alone boast; but the great business houses, the large manufactories, the numberless smaller though important factories, stores, and shops belonging to the foreign-born and foreign-descended population of this metropolis; make a similar examination of what this class of our citizens have done in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Boston, Hartford, Portland, Springfield, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Albany, Buffalo, Newark, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and twoscore more of our large cities; and then compare these truly magnificent religious, moral, charitable, commercial, and industrial results with all that the same people could have accomplished had they been scattered as sheep without shepherds throughout our Western and Northern wilds, destined to lose their faith, deprived of the support and strength which common association and common interest afford, and doomed, most probably, to lives of hopeless poverty and unremunerative struggle. God has been too good to them, and to the country in which they have become so important a factor, to permit this, and what the arrogance of man has so often stigmatized as folly has proved to be the highest and best wisdom both for eternal and for temporal ends. The whole number of foreign emigrants who have landed in the United States during the first 75 years of this century was 9,526,966. We showed in a former article[114] what proportion of these has remained in the cities; and we have now pointed out some of the results of this congregation.

Footnote 114:

“The European Exodus,” THE CATHOLIC WORLD, July, 1877.

We must not be understood, however, to convey the idea that a very considerable proportion of our foreign-born Catholic citizens have not made homes for themselves in the rural districts of the country, under conditions which rendered it possible for them to continue the active exercise of their religion, and that the happiest results have not followed. In the New England States, in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, in Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota, the number of Irish and German Catholic farmers—well-to-do, prosperous, and faithful—is very large. In the New England States the increase of this class has of late been marked. The farms throughout this section are generally small; their native owners, especially when they are young men, find it difficult to extract from them incomes large enough to supply their desire for the luxuries of life; they are often anxious to try their fortunes in the cities or in the West; whenever one of them offers his little estate for sale the purchaser is most likely a German or Irishman, whose wants are more modest, and who finds it quite possible to derive from a farm of twenty or thirty acres a comfortable subsistence for his family. This change in the proprietorship of the soil in New England has gone on to an extent much larger than is generally known; and one would labor under a serious mistake who supposed that the foreign-born and foreign-descended population of New England was altogether, or even unduly, congregated in the cities. There are in New England, according to the last Catholic Directory, 539 Catholic priests, 508 churches, 167 chapels and stations, with a Catholic population of about 890,000 souls; and it is evident from an examination of the list of the churches that a large proportion of them are in the small towns and rural districts of these States. It may be unwelcome news to our Protestant readers, but it is true, that nearly 25 per cent. of the present population of New England is composed of Roman Catholics. It may be still more unpleasant for them to learn that nearly 70 per cent. of the births in that region are those in Roman Catholic families. New England, indeed, promises to be the first portion of the country which is likely to become distinctively Roman Catholic. The immigration into New England is small, but it is mostly composed of Catholics; the increase of population is very largely Catholic; the emigration is almost entirely non-Catholic. From this digression from our main subject we return with the remark that the rural Catholic population in the Middle and Western States—a population largely composed of foreign-born citizens and their descendants—constitutes a most important factor in the material strength of the Catholic body, and that, as we shall show, the future course of foreign emigration should, and most probably will, tend mainly to increase this class.

The late decline in emigration to the United States, and the present lull, amounting almost to stagnation, which has taken place in it, together with the fact that there is abundant reason to suppose that this lull is but temporary and that emigration will again ere very long pour in upon us, suggest some reflections respecting the changed character which that emigration will probably assume, the changed conditions under which it will be carried on, and the changed duty of the Catholic body in the United States towards it. What was so essentially necessary in the past will be necessary, under these new conditions, no longer; what was so often impossible in the past will now become generally easy of accomplishment. The Catholic Church in the United States has passed through the stage of its infancy and feebleness, and has entered upon the period of its manhood and strength. Firmly planted throughout the land, it fears nothing and can watch over and abundantly protect the faith and the education of its children. In every State and Territory, save Alaska, at least one bishop; in seven States two bishops; in five States three bishops; in one State six, in another State eight bishops, and with more than 5,000 priests—surely with this army of shepherds the sheep and the lambs of the flock can be fed and guarded from the wolves of infidelity, sectarianism, and bigotry. God has built up his church in the republic in the manner, and chiefly through the agencies, which we have pointed out, and has thus fitted her, armed her, and made her strong for the great work which still lies before her. That work is the conversion of the non-Catholic portion of our fellow-citizens; the nurture of Catholic children; and the care, the protection, and, if need be, the conversion of the emigrants who, in the future, are to come to us from the Old World. It is only with this latter branch of her duty that we now deal. Emigrants to the United States have hitherto arrived here chiefly as isolated individuals, or at best as isolated families. There have been some attempts at colonization—that is, in bringing in one company a large number of individuals and of families, destined to migrate together to a spot already selected for them, and which they are to occupy as a community. Most frequently these attempts at colonization have been successful. Where they have failed the failure has been due to some incapacity or dishonesty on the part of the agents who had the matter in charge, and not to any vice in the system itself. There is evidence to show that emigration in future will be to a great extent, and may be almost wholly, conducted on the colonization principle. We have already said that emigration from Ireland in the future would most probably be confined within small limits; but if anything could stimulate it, it would be the development in Ireland of wise plans for colonization, carried out by men of probity, experience, and practical wisdom. Our chief sources of emigration, however, for some years to come, are likely to be England, Scotland, Germany, France, Austria, Bohemia, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Poland, and Russia. There are causes at work which even now are stimulating emigration from each of these countries, and these causes may attain great strength. As an instance of the curious manner in which apparently insignificant causes, originating at a distance, produce large effects, we may mention the fact that the shipping of fresh meat from this country to Great Britain—an enterprise only in its infancy—has already so seriously unsettled the relations existing between landlords and farmers in England and Scotland that the latter are declaring their inability to make both ends meet, and are turning their thoughts towards emigration. So general and so serious is this feeling that the leading journal of Scotland has sent to this country a trusted member of its permanent staff (the editor of its agricultural department for many years), with instructions “to make the fullest possible inquiry into everything connected with the stock-raising department of agriculture” in the United States, extending his researches to Texas, “where he proposes to examine thoroughly the system of cattle and sheep breeding and raising carried on in that State on so immense a scale, and to obtain all the information that is to be had with respect to the breeds of cattle, the methods taken to improve the quality of the stock, and Texan agricultural methods and circumstances generally.” He is then to visit other States for the same purpose, and “all along his route he will take note of all the phases and conditions of agriculture, and of the suitability of the States for advanced farming.” The results of his investigations, published in Scotland and England, will enable the farmers there “to determine the full significance of the competition of American cattle-growers in the British dead-meat market,” and in all probability determine many of them to emigrate to this country, with their capital and their skill, to engage in this competition on the American side.

Farming in England and Scotland—especially in Scotland—has long been a precarious and hazardous business; and now the reduction of four or six cents a pound in the price of beef which has been caused by the importation of about 1,000 tons of American beef and mutton every week at Glasgow and Liverpool, threatens to be the last straw to break the back of at least the Scotch farmer. Irish agriculturists likewise depend to a great extent for their profits upon the money received for their cattle, and they, too, will feel as severely as their Scottish friends the ruinous consequences, to them, of a reduction of twenty-five per cent. in the market value of their principal commodity. Thus the emigration of the well-to-do farmers of the United Kingdom is likely to be stimulated, and these agriculturists, most probably, would need but little persuasion to induce them to emigrate, if they emigrated at all, in colonies, and not as isolated families or individuals. So, also, as respects the future emigration from the Continent of Europe. Different causes are at work in each of the countries above named, but they all tend to the same result.

We have already hinted that the emigration of the future will be of a different class from the emigration of the past. At the present moment, and probably for some time to come, it would be dishonest, cruel, and unwise to encourage the emigration to this country of people without capital—those who must earn daily wages in order to live. Hitherto the great majority of our emigrants have been people of this class, and most fortunate is it that they came in such vast numbers. The time will again arrive, no doubt, when this class will be once more necessary and welcome among us, and when they will come, as they have come before, in thousands and tens of thousands. But at present they are not needed here; to bring them hither would be cruel to us as well as to themselves. The emigrants whom we need, and who are for some time most likely to come, are those who possess considerable worldly wealth at home, but who, like the English, Scotch, and Irish farmers of whom we have spoken, find it difficult to provide sufficiently for their increasing families, or wish to secure for them, in the New World, better fortunes than they can hope for in the Old. On the European Continent, and especially in Germany, other causes are at work which are morally certain to promote emigration. The war in the East may be localized—although all the probabilities point to a different conclusion—but even now it has increased the burdens which oppress the German people, and rendered the “blood-tax” that they are compelled to pay heavier and harder to bear. There is probably no intelligent man in Germany who does not look forward to a not distant day when that country will be again engaged in a desperate conflict; and meanwhile the military service exacted from every German citizen, and the cost of maintaining the army, press with a crushing weight upon the country. A thoughtful and experienced writer in one of our daily journals—a writer who, if we mistake not, has himself had extensive experience in the organization of emigration enterprises—thus treats of this subject:

“But it is in Germany that the fears awakened throughout Continental Europe will contribute most powerfully to a renewal of interest in the subject of emigration among classes to whom this country even now presents all requisite advantages. The stern methods employed by Bismarck to repress emigration movements—his interference with the freedom of American citizens who dared to speak of the attractions held out by the fertile West, and his suppression of whatever seemed likely to facilitate emigration to the United States—were all called forth by the anxious desire of people to escape the liability to military service. The military glories of the empire had charms for the cities, which acquired delusive appearances of prosperity. Among the population of rural districts the situation was different. The burdens and penalties of war, and of a system which exacts incessant preparation for war as a condition of national safety, have among these people stimulated the feeling in favor of emigration to a degree which the action of the Imperial Government has imperfectly controlled. The dread, vague before, will now be a reality. What, as a mere contingency, has sufficed to foster the wish to leave the Fatherland is now so near a certainty that the movement in favor of emigration needs but a guiding hand to assume large proportions. And the emigration available is of the description which, discreetly operated upon, should be attracted rather than repelled by the considerations which have driven wage-earners back to Europe. Those who would gladly get out of Germany to save their sons from service in the army look to the land for a livelihood, and would form valuable accessions to the Western States. As far as Germany is concerned, the difficulty is in reaching this class. Agencies that might be freely used in England or Holland are in Germany unavailable. All that seems possible there is to provide authentic information through channels which would not conflict with local law or incur the suspicion which, in view of recent experience, interested representations are likely to excite. Might not our consular agencies be utilized, not as emigration bureaux, but as means of supplying to those who seek it information in reference to lands and farms in the West and South, and to other matters connected with the opening or purchase of farms, and stocking and working them? The laborious head of the Statistical Bureau some years ago compiled a volume of statistics which to the working-men of the Old World was invaluable. The manual at present needed would deal with the phases of the emigration question, and would be much more than an accumulation of figures. It would be more legitimate than half the matter which emanates from the department and is printed at the public cost; and it would contribute to a revival and increase of the only immigration which can be honestly encouraged in the face of hard times.”

The French have never shown much anxiety for emigration; but the arrivals of emigrants from that country have increased during late years, and were slightly larger last year than in 1875. In France the burdens which are felt in Germany are also a cause of suffering, if not of complaint; and emigration from France, if the proper means for stimulating and directing it were employed, might reach large proportions. In Holland causes like those to which we have alluded as potent in Great Britain exist. The emigration from Russia has hitherto been of a peculiar character; it has consisted mainly of the Mennonites, whose anti-war principles impelled them to escape from the military service exacted from all Russian subjects, and from which only the temporary and partial concessions of the czar exempted some of them. The mission now undertaken by Russia is of a character which will compel her ruler, ere he has finished his task, to press every one of his subjects into the military service, directly or indirectly. The desire for emigration from Russia may be expected to increase, although some time will probably elapse before large results can be hoped for from it. The emigration from Austria has thus far been small. The total arrivals of emigrants from that country at the port of New York during the last 30 years have been only 21,677, of whom 1,210 came last year and 1,088 in 1875. But Austria is a country especially fit to emigrate from, and the incentives which are powerful in Germany will ere long be felt in Austria also. From Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, and Poland emigration of the better class may with reason be anticipated; and even from Italy, which has sent us 42,769 emigrants since 1847, considerable accessions may be expected.[115]

Footnote 115:

During the year ended December 31, 1876, 157,440 immigrants arrived in the United States, of whom 102,960 were males and 54,480 females. Their ages were: under fifteen years, 26,608; fifteen and under forty, 111,764; forty years and upward, 19,068. The countries of last permanent residence or citizenship of the immigrants were: England, 21,051; Ireland, 16,506; Scotland, 4,383; Wales, 294; Isle of Man, 8; Guernsey, 1; Germany, 31,323; Austria, 6,047; Hungary, 475; Sweden, 5,204; Norway, 6,031; Denmark, 1,624; Netherlands, 709; Belgium, 454; Switzerland, 1,572; France, 6,723; Italy, 2,980; Malta, 2; Greece, 24; Spain, 597; Portugal, 816; Gibraltar, 16; Russia, 6,787; Poland, 854; Finland, 22; Turkey, 59; Arabia, 13; India, 22; Burmah, 9; China, 16,879; Asiatic Russia, 83; Japan, 6; Asia, not specified, 14; Egypt, 3; Liberia, 14; Algeria, 9; Africa, not specified, 17; Quebec, 15,545; Nova Scotia, 3,200; New Brunswick, 1,494; Prince Edward Island, 437; Newfoundland, 58; British Columbia, 484; Mexico, 532; Central America, 14; U. S. of Colombia, 20; Venezuela, 37; Guiana, 3; Brazil, 28; Argentine Republic, 6; Chili, 20; Peru, 11; South America, 10; Cuba, 880; Porto Rico, 17; Jamaica, 23; Bahamas, 559; Barbados, 32; other West India Islands, 43; Curaçoa, 14; Azores, etc., 960; Bermudas, 29; Iceland, 30; Mauritius, 3; Sandwich Islands, 20; Australasia, 1,261; East Indies, 16; and born at sea, 23.

During the month ended April 30, 1877, there arrived at the port of New York 7,353 immigrants, of whom 4,553 were males and 2,800 females.

The countries or islands of last permanent residence or citizenship of the immigrants were as follows:

England, 1,500; Scotland, 191; Wales, 46; Ireland, 1,364; Germany, 2,184; Austria, 286; Sweden, 415; Norway, 67; Denmark, 171; France, 241; Switzerland, 183; Spain, 58; Italy, 350; Holland, 60; Belgium, 26; Russia, 35; Poland, 34; Hungary, 37; Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, 25; Cuba, 19; Sicily, 18; India, 14; Mexico, 8; U. S. of Colombia, 4; Venezuela, Bermuda, and born at sea, 3 each; Greece, China, and Peru, 2 each; Turkey and Iceland, 1 each.

We have before us a collection of documents relating to colonization in the West and Northwest. One of them describes the admirable plan of the Coadjutor-Bishop of St. Paul for Catholic colonization in Minnesota. In a powerful letter addressed, on the 16th of September last, to the President of the Board of Colonization of the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union, the bishop dwells upon the evils which have followed the settlement of our Irish emigrants in the large cities—evils which we have no wish to belittle; but he also confesses that the misfortunes of those who went into the rural districts were equally deplorable. He remarks:

“Those who—exceptions to the rule—did move forward into the country, in search of homes on the land, suffered in many instances from the absence of proper and systematic direction no less than their companions in cities. They lost their faith. They strayed away from church and priest, from Catholic associations, and in certain States to-day there are whole districts where you hear the purest of Celtic names, and where, nevertheless, not one man proclaims himself a Catholic or smiles at the mention of the old land.”

And then, after a charming picture of a certain little Irish Catholic colony in the West, of which he says that, beginning in poverty and hardship twenty years ago,

“To-day those families are prosperous—rich; their children are as innocent and as true as if they had always breathed the atmosphere of the most Catholic of lands; the number of families has doubled, through mere natural increase; their district of country is for ever secured to the church,”

Bishop Ireland goes on to say that the results of his own colonization labors in Minnesota may be thus described:

“We began last February. Our first step was to secure the control of 117,000 acres of land, situated in Swift County, belonging to the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. There was at the time in the county about as much more vacant government land open for settlement under the pre-emption and homestead acts. The price of the railroad land was fixed, so that during the time it was to remain under our control the company could not advance its figures. We at once placed a priest in the colony, whose duty it was to direct and advise the immigrant as well as to minister to his spiritual wants. An office was opened in St. Paul, where the immigrant would be received on his arrival from the East, and where all letters of inquiry would be answered. Two weeks after publication of our plans had been made in the Catholic press, immigrants commenced to arrive, and up to the date at which I am writing over eight hundred entries have been made by our people on government land, and about 60,000 acres of railroad land have been occupied. We permit no speculation, so that each quarter section generally represents a family, persons, as a rule, being allowed to take more land only when they have grown sons, who soon will themselves need a home.”

He then gives a letter from the register of the Land Office, showing that the number of land entries made in Swift County from January 1 to June 1, 1876, was 1,317, and saying that over 800 of these were made by “your people.” The register adds:

“In this connection allow me to bear testimony to the intelligence, integrity, and good order always manifested by your colonists in all their business relations with this office. I can now call to mind no instance in which one under the influence of liquor has been in this office. Cases of profanity are extremely rare; in no instance have we had trouble or contention with any one. They are model colonists. I know this opinion to be shared by all who come in contact with them.”

The bishop adds:

“We have already in the colony two churches; one more will be built in spring. Two promising towns have sprung up—De Graff and Randall. In De Graff there are some forty houses, stores or residences, a large brick-yard, a grist-mill; a grain elevator and a convent school are to be put up during the winter. The settlers, whom I had the pleasure of visiting a month ago, are full of hope and delighted with their prospects. Last spring Swift County was a wild, untenanted prairie; to-day on every side new houses and freshly-broken ground meet the eye. Our expenses in organizing and directing the colony were large; still, we were able to meet them by direct revenue from the colony itself. Each settler paid a small entrance fee, and we sold town lots. We have also reserved from sale some choice sections of land, which can at any time, if there is need, be disposed of at a high advance over the original price; so that we are safe against all losses in our enterprise. As soon as a settlement is formed the land advances at once in value; one farm bought in Swift County last spring at two dollars per acre has been sold since at nine dollars per acre, and a settlement that embraces three or four hundred families always affords room for a valuable town-site. The two excellences which I deem our Minnesota plan possesses are the following: We had control of the land; this is necessary to ward off speculation and preserve the land for our own colonists. No sooner would twenty families be settled in a district than the surrounding land would be bought up by speculators or strangers, if you had not complete control over it in some manner. Next, we began the colony with a priest on the spot; the presence of a priest does more than any other agency to attract immigrants and to encourage them in their difficulties. We have been so well satisfied with our work in Swift County that our programme for next year includes the opening of two new colonies.”

Our space does not permit us to summarize even the accounts of the other Catholic colonization movements which have come under our notice. These movements are serious and important, and those engaged in them should take every possible precaution to prevent them from falling into the hands of careless, incompetent, or dishonest persons. The work, it appears, will have two chief departments—the home and foreign agencies. The former will undertake and supervise the task of selecting and securing proper localities for colonies, and of procuring as settlers families and individuals already resident here, but whose interests would be promoted by their translation to these new homes; the foreign agencies would be employed in diffusing the necessary information among the classes in Europe who would be most likely to emigrate, and who would be the most desirable emigrants, and in inducing them to join new colonies already established or to form others of their own. The Catholic Advocate, of Louisville, Ky., in some well-considered remarks on the subject, says:

“Now, it is our opinion that a great impetus could be given to this good work if the directors of the colonization project could so manage as to awaken the Irish people at home to the value of the movement; if they could have their plans placed in all their development before that class in Ireland from which emigration recruits its numbers. This could be best and most efficiently done by inducing the formation of corresponding organizations in the old country. There are very many thousands of people in Ireland, with farming-stock worth two and three and four hundred pounds sterling, holding their lands by an insecure tenure and at a rack-rent, who would come out to this country to-morrow, with all their valuables converted into gold, if they knew or understood the advantages of the colonization scheme. As it is now, they only hear about it. It comes to them by newspapers, as a kind of far-off echo. It is not brought forcibly to their notice. Its benefits are not urged upon them personally. There is no persuasion about it, and it is as a dead interest to the great majority of the people, who, if they only knew and understood it thoroughly, would grasp at it. The British government was very earnest in its efforts to colonize Australia and New Zealand some years ago, and the advantages it had to offer were far and far away from those offered by the Catholic colonization movement amongst us. But how did the British government act? It sent agents amongst the Irish and English and Scotch, prepared with maps and pamphlets and lectures, to impress the value of their project upon the people at home and put it immediately before their eyes. What was the consequence? Numbers of emigrants came forward, and of a class which had the means to colonize, and they settled in Brisbane, Queensland, and New Zealand, where they are to-day prosperous and promising. We do not say that paid agents should be sent to Ireland for the purpose we indicate, but it would be very easy to communicate with influential persons there to put before them the value of forming organizations in connection with Bishop Ireland’s scheme, with the St. Louis scheme, and any others that may be started. What is required is emigrants with some capital, and this is the way to get them.”

Bishop Ireland, in the letter from which we have already quoted, sets forth at some length what such a body as the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union could do in this work. It could constantly agitate the subject of colonization, and it could establish a national bureau of information, which would collect information, publish pamphlets, secure the co-operation of bishops and priests, and open colonies of their own. But the “crowning stone in the work of colonization,” in the bishop’s opinion, would be “the formation of joint-stock colonization societies.” He says:

“By no other means can the poor among our people—those most in need of homes—be colonized. However successful our Minnesota plan may seem to have been, it does not reach the poor. We have received hundreds of letters from most deserving persons, to whom we were obliged to answer that we had no place for them in our colony. How many there are who have simply means to bring them West, but who can neither pay for land nor maintain themselves while waiting for the first crop! A joint-stock company would give them land on long time, at reasonable rates of interest, and would also advance them small sums to assist them in opening their farms. The plan might be somewhat as follows: The executive power of the company should be in the hands of most reliable business men. Stockholders would be promised that their money would be paid back in five years, with interest at six per cent. per annum, and, in order that men of all classes might take part in the work, shares would be put at low figures. The inducement to take shares is that good is done to our fellow-countrymen without any loss to ourselves. The company purchases a tract of land; cash in hand, the land would cost but little. Immigrants, in purchasing it from the company, would give back a mortgage, promising to pay the full price in four or five years, with interest at eight per cent. per annum. An industrious settler could not fail to meet such obligations. If he failed to do so, the land reverts to the company, worth much more than it was when first purchased. The company derives its expenses from the two per cent., which it charges the settlers over what it pays its shareholders; but to protect itself the better it could sell the land at a slightly increased figure, especially a few choice pieces; it could also lay out for its profit a town-site, and sell the lots.

“There should be colonies in every State where cheap lands are to be found. The movement should be made general, our entire Irish Catholic people entering into it: one class coming forward with advice and money, the other profiting, for their own good and that of their religion, of the assistance offered to them. What is to be done must be done quickly. The time is fast passing when cheap lands can be had in America. Already the tide of immigration—bearing, alas! but a small number of our people—has crossed the Missouri, leaving in its wake but inconsiderable portions of unoccupied land, and reaching even now the limits of the arable lands of the continent. Patriotism and religious zeal are two great incentives to action for Irish Catholics. Colonization is a work upon which both can be most easily brought to bear.”

Already one such joint-stock company has been formed—on the 10th of April last—in St. Paul, in which the bishop and the coadjutor-bishop of that see have taken shares.

It will henceforth be the duty of the church in America to see that no Catholic family landing on our shores and seeking a new home in our Western States and Territories shall be permitted to stray beyond her control, but shall be conducted to localities where her priests are already prepared to receive them, and where their fellow-citizens will be bound to them by the ties of faith. Catholics in this land are already about as one in six. We receive accessions every day from the ranks of the Protestant sects; few, if any, of our own number fall away from us; the emigration of the future, to a great extent, will be in our hands. Thus will the church in America—where to-day, to use his own words, our Holy Father “is more truly Pope than in any other land”—grow in strength and beauty, and thus will she be prepared, when the hour comes, to save the republic for which her sons, from the hour of her birth until now, have shed their blood, and given their toil and their prayers, in unstinted measure.

A THRUSH’S SONG.

Underneath a leafy cover, Green with morning-wealth of June, Wanting still, like gift of lover Craving even greater boon, Deeper chords of light to perfect summer’s fulness, love’s high noon;

Just apart from all the glitter Of a busy crystal world Where, amid quick human twitter, Pond’rous engine huge arms hurled, Leaping shuttle wrought bright fancies, girded wheels obedient whirled;

Just a little from the glimmer, From the footfalls’ tuneless tread— With the distance ever dimmer— Rose, so calm o’ershadowèd, Sound of lusty drum and hautboy, with clear flute voice interlaid,

Notes exultant loud outpouring Chant of nations, lightly bound With frail melody, up soaring O’er the people gathered round, Resting from the glare a little, from the wearing sight and sound.

Ears of loyal Briton tingling Hark’ning there, “God save the Queen”; Erin’s children’s tears commingling At “The Wearing of the Green,” Thinking of a loveless bondage, truer trust that might have been.

Sounds of wrathful people seeming Storming through the “Marseillaise,” Stirred a land, nigh dead in dreaming, Through Hortense’s song of praise, Through its wailing sadness tolling bells of old chivalric days.

Through sad France’s slumber breaking Germany’s triumphant hymn, Armed peoples, eager waking, Watching Rhine-lights growing dim, Hearing clear a weary nation struggling sore with spectres grim.

In the nations’ anthems swelling Ever twanged some chord of wrong: Broken notes in anguish welling Even in our starlit song— Shadowy notes from swamp and prairie mingling with the suffering throng.

Stilled at last the music’s clamor, Drum and hautboy laid to rest, Softly through the silence’ glamour Stole the light wind of the west, Gently parted the green branches, tenderly each leaf caressed.

And a sudden thrill of sweetness, Mellow, careless, glad, and clear, Love’s noon-song in its completeness, Poured in peaceful nature’s ear From a thrush’s throat of silver—happy song without one tear—

Fell like precious, heav’n-dropped token 'Mid the elements of strife, 'Mid the melodies, grief-broken, Blare of trumpet, shriek of fife— Only with undarkened blessing was the thrush’s singing rife.

Where the ways were broad and ordered England’s Indian blossoms flamed; Here, where guarding thickets bordered, Bloom of May June’s sunshine claimed, Lifting, 'mid the throngs of people, glance, half-fearing, half-ashamed;

Trembling at the cymbals’ crashing Through the ancient solitude, Till the thrush’s sweetness flashing, With its wild-wood joy imbued, Seemed a covenant from heaven, arc of promise, rainbow-hued.

In the upper silence singing, Hidden minstrel, unafraid, In the sunlit branches, swinging, By the west wind, whispering, swayed, All the lower tumult silenced in the clear, blue depths o’erhead;

Whence the peace of heav’n, descending, Filled the bird’s song, true and clear, Lightsome duty sweetness lending, Joy o’erbrimming in its cheer, Freedom on his pinions resting, sunshine soft, and heaven near.

Careless strength and free heart blending In each note’s melodious mirth, Calm within a pure soul bending Praising for its heavenly birth, For its gift of soaring pinions, lightening so the bonds of earth.

With that clear and sudden sweetness Sober fancies swept along, And its wild-wood, perfect meetness Seemed our country’s truer song— Sunshine soft, and heaven near it, and no undertone of wrong.

So, methought, her clear voice, ringing, Should in strength of freedom rise, With the sweetness of its singing Every evil exorcise; Blessing for her children winning through her nearness to the skies.

PHILADELPHIA, June, 1876.

THE CONGREGATION OF CLUNY. TRANSLATED FROM SCHOEPPNER’S “CHARACTER-BILDER DER GESCHICHTE DES MITTELALTERS.”

At the close of the ninth century the great wealth of the Benedictine Order in France had produced a relaxation of discipline and a departure from regular observance in many of its monasteries which brought it into a state of decadence. One principal source of this degeneracy lay in the want of all organic union binding together the distinct monasteries, each one of which was exclusively subject to its own abbot. It is true that in earlier times the bishops exercised a certain jurisdiction over them; but this was seriously impeded by the fact that the abbot was frequently equal to the bishop in power and in external consideration. The pope was too distant; disorder could strike deep root before any information would reach him, and even then he was ordinarily able to employ only indirect methods of remedying the evil. This seems to have been felt by all those who, from the tenth century onwards, endeavored, by various additional statutes, explanations, and stricter applications of the Rule of St. Benedict, to bring back those who were subject to it to a more conscientious fulfilment of the obligations of their religious profession. At the time when the Carlovingian dynasty, represented in the person of Charles the Simple, was verging toward extinction, William the Pious, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Auvergne, in concert with his duchess, Ingeburga, formed the plan of founding a new monastery. He took counsel respecting the carrying out of his design with Hugh, Abbot of St. Martin’s at Autun.

In company with the duke and duchess Hugh made an exploration of their domains in search of a suitable location, and selected a meadow on the banks of the little river Grosne, near an agreeable cascade, where a chapel in honor of the Blessed Virgin and St. Peter had been already erected. The duke objected that this was his favorite hunting-ground, and that the noise and tumult of deer-chasing would frequently disturb the quiet of the monastery. “Well, then,” replied the abbot, “drive away the hounds and bring in the monks; you well know which of the two will bring you the most favor with God.” The duke cheerfully assented to this proposition, and took measures for the erection of a monastery in honor of the apostles SS. Peter and Paul upon this territory, of which he had but recently acquired the possession.

At the recommendation of Hugh, Berno was invited from a neighboring monastery to become the first abbot. He was succeeded by Odo, the son of a Frankish knight, who had been brought up at the court of Duke William, had afterwards devoted himself to the religious state, and was at the time of his election in the maturity of his manhood. Odo saw that in many monasteries the end of the religious vocation had been entirely forgotten, and, in order that he might restore the primitive discipline of St. Benedict, he determined to reform the monastic state in accordance with its original spirit and intention, and to induce the monasteries in his own vicinity to adopt his reformation. He was a man well fitted to undertake such a task, by his personal austerity, his self-devotion to the good of others, and his extraordinary charity, which was so great that he was ready at any time to bestow all he had upon the poor, without any thought of reserving on one day what might be necessary for the next. The influence of his personal character, and the effect of his active efforts during a prolonged life, were so great that a number of monasteries became affiliated to the one over which he immediately presided. He is, therefore, properly speaking, the founder of the Cluniac Order.

His meek and humble successor, Aymard, won for himself by his amiable virtues the confidence of all the brethren of the order, and the favor of the great and powerful, who were profuse in conferring upon it liberal gifts, charters of protection and privilege. His successors in office, Majolus, Odilo, and Hugh I., were all equally eminent by their able administration, their great influence in all the most important ecclesiastical and political movements of their time, and their high favor with emperors, kings, and princes. Emperors, kings, popes, and bishops maintained intimate relations with the abbots of Cluny, and all the great and powerful nobles of the country sought their advice in matters of importance. Three Sovereign Pontiffs were taken from Cluny to fill the chair of St. Peter. When the son of a king was obliged to become a fugitive, he sought for a refuge at Cluny, and princes who were weary of life and disturbed by remorse of conscience came there to do penance among the brethren. The rulers of foreign countries were lavish of their donations to the order, the popes were equally munificent in conferring marks of their high favor, and bishops were eager for the affiliation of the most important monasteries in their dioceses with Cluny. The immense revenues which flowed into its coffers from all countries in the world became at last proverbial.

The internal discipline and external splendor of Cluny were maintained in an undisturbed permanence and stability for a period of two centuries. At the end of that time both were grievously shattered by the disastrous administration of the unworthy Abbot Pons, a man of worldly levity in character and manners, haughty and ambitious in his disposition, whose whole course of official conduct was such as to threaten the complete downfall of the order. After a length of time he was formally impeached and tried at the tribunal of Rome, by which he was deposed from his office as abbot. Disregarding this sentence, he seized anew on the possession of the monastery of Cluny by force of arms, but was soon after overpowered and cast into a prison, where he was carried off by a sudden attack of fever.

After a short period of only three months, during which the abbatial chair was occupied by Hugh II., Peter the Venerable was placed over the Cluniac Order, which he ruled for thirty-nine years, precisely during the period of St. Bernard, who was his intimate friend, and whom he survived about three years. His activity, prudence, and universal reputation, the intellectual power, deep learning, and exalted virtue which merited for him the appellation of Venerable by which he is designated in history, sufficed not only to heal Cluny from the wounds inflicted on it by the Abbot Pons, but to raise the whole order to its highest summit of importance, and to make the monastery which was its centre flourish in a state of unexampled spiritual and temporal prosperity. If we consider the many journeys which this great abbot undertook on affairs of the utmost importance connected with the public interests of the day, it would seem that he was exclusively a statesman; his vast correspondence seems sufficient to have employed the time of one whose whole attention was given to counselling all sorts of persons seeking his advice by letters; his theological works are like the productions of one actively occupied in study; the strictness with which he observed and enforced upon his subjects in the cloister the monastic rule indicates a contemplative ascetic; his administration of the temporalities of his monastery presents him in the light of an able financier and man of business. The world was filled with his fame, and his order attained the highest zenith of its glory during his administration, which ended at his death, during the Christmas-tide of the year 1156.

All the special rules of the Cluniac Order were based upon the Rule of St. Benedict. The ecclesiastical chant and the service of the choir employed much more time and attention, according to the customs of Cluny, than in other Benedictine monasteries. As far as possible, uniformity was enforced in the different houses after the model of the mother-house. Besides the special prayers which each one said according to his own devotion, one hundred and thirty-eight psalms were prescribed to be recited daily, which was usually done while engaged in performing the various tasks; and even in the great heats of summer, on the days when talking was permitted, there was only time for a recreation of half an hour. Every negligence or mistake in the choir-service received instantly a reproof. This was regarded as a spiritual military service, in which no individual caprice or negligence could be tolerated. Special care was exacted on the greater festivals of the church, and their high importance was recognized by the greater length of the choral song, the reading of longer lessons, and a more fervent devotion. During High Mass no Low Masses were allowed to be said, so that no one could in that way consult his own convenience and escape from the public and solemn celebration. The moment of the departure of one of the brethren from this world was treated as a specially solemn occasion. As soon as he had received Extreme Unction a wooden cross was put under his head in place of a pillow. All who could possibly attend were obliged to assist at the last agony of the dying man, and, although at other times running through the corridors was strictly forbidden, it was specially ordered whenever the passing-bell announced that one of the brethren was about to depart this life. Special revenues were devoted to all charitable purposes, and their conscientious expenditure strictly enjoined. There was a particular endowment for eighteen poor men who were perpetually supported by the mother-house. Six brothers were appointed for the service of the poor, one of whom waited on them, another acted as porter of their hospital, two others furnished the wood out of the forest for their fires, and two had charge of ovens for baking bread, to be given away in alms to the poor. Everything remaining on the tables of the refectory after the meals was taken by the almoner for distribution among the poor. A cover was laid for each one of the most distinguished benefactors at every meal, even though they were living at a great distance or had been long dead, and all their portions were taken for the poor. Twelve loaves, each weighing three pounds, were prepared each day for widows, orphans, feeble and aged persons. On Holy Thursday the ceremony of foot-washing was performed for as many poor men as there were brothers in the community, all of whom were afterwards served at dinner. On certain special occasions, and on all the festivals when the table of the brethren was better served than usual, more abundant alms were distributed. The almoner was bound to make a weekly visitation of the houses in the village near the monastery, that he might find out every poor person who was sick, and furnish him with food, wine, and medicines. The number of poor persons who regularly received aid was estimated at seventeen thousand. The Abbot Odilo sold the ornaments of the church and a crown presented by the German emperor Henry II. in order to relieve the wants of the people during a famine. The subordinate monasteries were required to imitate in this generous alms-giving the example of Cluny, and a similar observance of hospitality was also exacted. Precise rules were laid down for the reception of visitors of different ranks and conditions, who were continually arriving at the monastery on foot or on horseback. If they were ecclesiastics, they were not only invited to partake of the hospitality of the monastery, but also to participate in its religious exercises. Every one who travelled on foot received a certain amount of bread and wine on his arrival and at his departure. If the poverty of the house did not permit anything more than a temporary shelter and a friendly reception, this, at least, was to be cheerfully given to every one. The prior was not to consider what was within his means, but to go beyond them in providing for the wants of strangers. Frequently, when they had consumed all the provisions of the larder, the monks had to endure hunger until new supplies, which often came unexpectedly, were furnished by royal and noble benefactors.

The life of the monastic brethren was austere. Besides the regular and very long choir-service, which no one was dispensed from attending, the fasts were frequent. The flesh of quadrupeds was never allowed, and on the ferial days and the entire period from Septuagesima to Easter, not even fat could be used in preparing the food. The principal article of their daily diet was beans, with an occasional allowance of eggs and cheese, and more rarely of fish. After night prayers no one could taste food or drink anything without special necessity and permission. The violation of these rules and of the law of strict poverty was considered as a grievous transgression, exposing the offender to excommunication and privation of Christian burial.

Obedience, the pivot of all the virtues of an ecclesiastic, was regarded as having a higher and more extended obligation for religious. Its disregard was esteemed worthy of the severest punishment, and the incorrigible were subject to expulsion. Priors and other officials were twice admonished, and afterwards deposed without any hope of restitution. The observance of a strict rule of silence was regarded as a specially efficacious help to the acquisition of perfect spiritual virtues, and, in the opinion of the Abbot Odo, monastic life was utterly worthless without it. Absolute silence was invariably observed during meal-times, and during all times of the day throughout Lent and several other penitential seasons. The Cluniac monks became so expert in the use of the sign-language through their disuse of speech that they might have dispensed with talking altogether without the least inconvenience. The most perfect silence and stillness, undisturbed even by hasty and noisy walking through the cloisters, reigned throughout the monastery.

Every fault must be expiated by penance, or at least an acknowledgment before the abbot. Those who were late must remain standing or prostrate until a sign was given to them to repair to their places. The tardy at table received also a penance. Public offences received public penances, in order that every one might have sensible evidence that the community was vigilant in observing the behavior of each individual member. Smaller offences were punished by solitary confinement, making a station at the church-door, or exclusion from the common exercises. Those which were more serious were punished by flagellation, and, if the offence had been public, the penance was administered at the door of the church while the people were assembling for Mass, and the cause of it announced to them by an official of the monastery. For the gravest faults the culprit was put in irons or imprisoned in a dark, underground dungeon. St. Hugh’s maxim was that a monastery is not dishonored by the faults of its members, but by their impunity. Several brothers were appointed to make the rounds of the monastery at intervals, and to declare in chapter every disorder which they observed, whereupon due penance was inflicted on the delinquents. This duty devolved on the prior for the first hour of the night, and at intervals during its progress, with a special charge of watching that all the doors were properly closed and fastened.

Such a special care was observed in regard to cleanliness that the most particular housekeeper could not be more thorough or exact in a well-regulated private family than were these monks of Cluny in their domestic arrangements. This care for cleanliness showed a deep psychological insight into the close connection between this exterior virtue and interior purity, which is often endangered and damaged by a slovenly disregard of outward propriety. Articles of clothing and all the bed and table furniture were regularly changed according to an invariable rule. Careful supervision was observed towards the novices in respect to their personal neatness in such minute particulars as washing, combing their hair, etc., and conveniences for these purposes were provided in abundance for all, that they might easily make use of them when they came in from work to go to the choir or the refectory.

The clothing was very plain, in contrast to the worldly elegance and vanity in dress which prevailed in many other religious communities, but all the different articles of dress were provided in abundance, with two complete outfits for each one. The winter clothing was made to suit the season and the climate, warm and comfortable; for the men who made the regulations of Cluny were not so narrow-minded as to adhere scrupulously to purely exterior customs which were suitable to Italy but utterly unfit for the ruder climate of the North.

The sick were cared for with the most tender solicitude, six brothers were deputed to the service of the infirmary, and the best ass in the stables was set apart to haul wood for the fire. The infirmarian was always provided with spices and wholesome herbs to make the food of the sick more appetizing and wholesome. Meat was provided for them every day, and even on fasting-days. A certain part of the presents made to the monastery was assigned to the purchase of comforts and delicacies for the sick and weakly. They were dispensed from the rule of silence, and only required to refrain from abusing the privilege of talking. The abbot and grand-prior were required to make frequent visits to the sick, and the cellarer was bound to see each one, in company with the infirmarian, every day, and inquire what kind of food he wished for and in what way it should be prepared. As soon as one was released from the infirmary he came to the chapter, and, standing up, said to the prior: “I have been in the infirmary and have not kept the rules of the order according to our obligation.” The prior answered: “May God pardon you!” whereupon the convalescent brother went to the place of the penitents and recited the seven penitential psalms or seven Pater Nosters.

As for the interior legislation and administration of the order, a general chapter was held at Cluny once a year, where all the abbots, priors, and deans of the entire congregation were bound to appear under pain of deposition, those only who lived in distant countries being exempted from attendance oftener than once every two years. Every question which related to the rules was submitted to this chapter, and to the votes of all the brethren of the monastery of Cluny. Each one was obliged to make known in the chapter, without any regard to personal considerations, whatever he had noticed in any of the houses or in any individual member of the order which was worthy of censure, and was protected from any unpleasant consequences which might possibly ensue afterwards to himself from his disclosures. All priors whose administration or personal conduct was censurable were deposed by the chapter; and, finally, they made an examination of all the novices of the congregation.

As soon as the chapter was dissolved the supreme power reverted to the abbot of Cluny. He appointed all the priors and confirmed all the abbots-elect, being strictly forbidden to receive any presents or perquisites in connection with any such official act. He could make such regulations as he saw fit in all the houses; all his sentences upon individual delinquents which were in conformity with the canons were binding; and in the interval between the capitular assemblies he could depose from all offices without appeal. He was bound to share as much as possible in the common life of the other monks, to be with them in the common dormitory and at the common table, and to use the same food, the only mark of distinction being that he was served with wine of a better quality and with two loaves at dinner.

Next in rank and authority came the grand-prior, appointed by the abbot with the counsel of the elders of the monastery and the assent of the chapter. Under the abbot’s supreme direction he presided over all the spiritual and temporal offices of the monastery, with a special oversight of those brothers who were charged with out-door employments on the cloistral domains. Every year, after the vintage, he made an inspection of all the farm-lands, examined the stores laid up in the barns and cellars, and directed the division of the fruits of the harvest for the use of those who resided in the outlying farm-houses, and for the general use within the monastery.

The interior order of the house was under the oversight of the prior of the community, who had several assistants, and in case of absence a deputy. The rule prescribed that no account should be taken of birth or other personal considerations of human respect in the choice of prelates and officers, but only of moral virtue, experience, and prudence. No abbot or prior, not even the abbot-general of the congregation, was allowed to travel without some of the brethren in his company, as witnesses of his conduct and associates in fulfilling the devotions prescribed by the rule.

We can form some estimate of the extent of the monastic buildings of Cluny from the circumstance related in history, that in the year 1245 Pope Innocent IV., with twelve cardinals and his entire suite; also two patriarchs, three archbishops, eleven bishops, with their respective suites; farther, the king of France, with his mother, wife, brother, and sister, and the whole of their retinue; the emperor of Constantinople, the crown-princes of Aragon and Castile, several dukes and counts, and a crowd of knights, ecclesiastics, and monks, were accommodated within the precincts of the monastery without encroaching on any part of it which was ordinarily occupied by the community or incommoding any of the brethren.

The fine arts were made to contribute to that which is their highest end—the service of religion—in the Cluniac Order more than in any other contemporary institute. They were all employed in harmony and unity with each other to enhance the splendor of the divine service. The candles and lamps by which the church was lighted were placed in costly hoops beset with precious stones. Instead of candelabra, trees artistically wrought in bronze stood near the altar, having the lighted candles prescribed for the solemn ceremonies blazing among their branches. Paintings covered the walls; the windows were richly ornamental and filled with colored glass. Costly tapestry and hangings, beautifully-carved stalls, a decorated pavement, chimes of bells of unusual size, reliquaries of gold whose beauty of workmanship even surpassed their costliness, chalices, ciboriums, and monstrances of gold, sparkling with jewels, vestments heavy and stiff with cloth of gold, and all else that was magnificent in sacred art and decoration, made the church of Cluny a theme of praise and admiration throughout all France. It was probably at the date of its erection the largest in the world, and rested upon sixty-eight columns, each eight and one half feet in diameter. Thirty-two of these pillars supported the vast dome, and the whole edifice, which was built in the peculiar form of an archiepiscopal cross, was regarded as one of the most splendid monuments of the Roman style of architecture in France. Sculpture, carving, and painting rivalled each other in the decoration of this magnificent church, and there still remained at the beginning of the present century a representation of the Eternal Father on a gold ground in the vaulting of the apse, ten feet in height, which retained all its original brilliancy of color. The choir-stalls, which were of a comparatively late period, were two hundred and twenty-five in number at the time of the suppression—showing how numerous the community had become—and the towers were filled with a great many bells, the largest of which were melted down to cast cannon during the religious wars. At present but little remains of this grand structure in a state of ruin. During the French Revolution the whole was sold for building material for the sum of twenty thousand dollars, and thus rude force destroyed this grand work of the spirit of Christianity.

The cultivation of science was fostered in the Cluniac Order with much greater care and zeal than in some of the other monastic bodies. Its founders were more solicitous for the promotion of intellectual labor than for material industry. The Abbot Peter wrote: “In virtue of a special privilege, the abbots of Cluny from ancient times promoted literary occupations with zeal and energy. It is not the desire of winning a high reputation which stimulates them to write books, but the feeling that it would be shameful to neglect the imitation of their predecessors, the holy Fathers of the church, and thus to prove themselves degenerate sons.” Under such superiors the brethren were not deterred by any ill-grounded scruple from applying themselves to the study of the heathen classics, and in fact considered this study as a valuable auxiliary to the investigation of the Sacred Scriptures. The works of the great ecclesiastical writers were fully appreciated and diligently perused, and the valuable manuscripts collected in the library of Cluny were not considered as a mere assortment of curiosities for the sake of show, but as useful implements for the cultivation of science, and in a generous spirit of liberality were freely lent to other monasteries for the sake of making copies or recensions. The books used for the church service were written out in a beautiful, ornamental text, richly adorned with initial letters executed in the most elaborate style of art; and those who were engaged in this kind of work, if it would not admit of interruption, were excused from choir for the time being. The ability and industry of the Cluniac monks in collecting manuscripts and preserving precious monuments of ancient history have been recognized even in later times, and abundant documents of that zeal for the promotion of science which was not damped by the earnestness with which religious discipline was enforced have come down to our own day.

The confraternity of Cluny, which had speedily risen to a high consideration throughout France, attained to a higher and more solidly-established reputation during the period extending through nearly forty years of the administration of Peter the Venerable. The renovation of the Benedictine Order in its original spirit which had been effected by the Cluniac reform became renowned in other countries as well as in France, and awoke the desire of attempting to accomplish the same happy results elsewhere by the use of similar methods. Every founder of a new monastery in France desired to introduce the rule and submit to the supremacy of Cluny. Kings, princes, and bishops urged upon the already existing monastic communities, especially when they had fallen into disorder, incorporation with the Cluniac congregation. During the rule of Peter the Venerable it was increased by the addition of three hundred and fourteen monasteries, collegiate foundations, and churches, and at its most flourishing period it embraced within its limits more than two thousand distinct houses. At the time of the Crusades it extended itself even beyond the sea. Cluniac houses were founded in the valley of Josaphat and on Mt. Tabor, and in the time of Abbot Peter a monastery in a suburb of Constantinople was united to the mother-house, over which he presided.

Men of all conditions who desired to do penance for their sins, to seek a refuge from the dangers of the world, or to find spiritual direction and come under a holy influence for their own sanctification, sought to make reparation and deserve the grace of God by rich gifts to Cluny, to consecrate themselves to God in some house of the order by the religious vows, or to secure for themselves by becoming affiliated to it a share in the sacrifices and prayers perpetually offered within its sacred enclosures. It is related that Count Guy of Macon, who had been a bitter persecutor of the order, one day presented himself at the gates of Cluny in company with his son, several grandsons, thirty knights, and the wives of each one of the noble group respectively, all of whom demanded permission to take the vows of religion. Under the sixth abbot, Hugh I., three thousand monks were present at one general chapter. The crowd of applicants for admission became so great that Hugh VI. was once compelled to issue an edict forbidding the reception of any new candidates during a term of three years. Under Peter the Venerable the number of monks resident at Cluny increased from two hundred to four hundred and sixty, some of whom, however, led a solitary life as hermits in the neighboring forests.

The popes were lavish in their grants of privileges to Cluny and the monasteries connected with it. Alexander II. decreed that no bishop or prelate should have the right of excommunication in respect to the Cluniac congregation. Urban II. allowed the use of episcopal insignia to the abbot, and Calixtus II. conceded to him the special privileges of a cardinal. The brethren of the order were even permitted to have the celebration of Mass continued for their own benefit during an interdict.

There is nothing which shows more clearly the high esteem in which Cluny was held than the decree of Pope Innocent IV. in the third session of the Council of Lyons: that accredited copies of all the official documents relating to the diplomatic intercourse of emperors, kings, and other princes with the Roman Church should be deposited in its archives. This important and precious collection was still in existence at the outbreak of the Revolution.

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