CHAPTER II.

ART.

The Catholic reunions, both in Belgium and in Germany, have taken a special interest in Christian art; for religion is at once the source and the end of true art. "Religion," says Lasaulx, "is the soul of every useful measure, the vivifying principle in the life of nations, the permanent basis of true philanthropy. In its infancy, as well as during its most flourishing periods, at all times and among all nations, art has ever been the handmaid of religion. What is the last and highest aim of architecture? The erection of churches. How has sculpture won its noblest triumphs? In pagan antiquity, by representations of the heathen deities; since the dawn of Christianity, by presenting to the admiration of the world statues of our Saviour and his saints. In like manner the noblest subjects of painting have been furnished by religion, and by history, both sacred and profane. And do we not meet with the same phenomenon in music and religions poetry? Hence we may safely conclude that art is the barometer of a nation's civilization, and above all of its religious status. A people animated with a lively faith will not hesitate to manifest it outwardly, sparing neither trouble nor expense, and art affords the most suitable means of giving expression to its feelings. If, on the other hand, art is neglected by a nation, it is a certain sign that its mental and spiritual condition is abnormal; that it must be under the influence of some disturbing agency.

Art, in its relations to religion and the Church, is one of the subjects that have claimed the attention of the Catholic congresses; they discussed the principles of religious architecture, painting, sculpture, and of church music; they considered the subject of decorating the sanctuaries of religion in all its branches, and examined the highest and most important problems of art.

Art, as cultivated during the first {222} ages of Christianity and during the middle ages, is a subject complete in itself, for we can trace its use, its progress, and decay, as well as the development of the ideas which gave it life. Between Christian and pagan art there is no doubt a connecting link; in fact, we may safely assert that in this respect, no less than in all others, there is a great unbroken chain that unites the present age with antiquity. Still, no one can deny that there is a great and immense difference between Christian nations and those of antiquity. For, since the birth of Christianity, we may trace in history a new, active, and all-pervading principle. What the greatest minds of the pagan world scarcely suspected, has become the common property of all nations and of all men. Christianity is built on foundations very different from those on which rested the cumbrous fabric of paganism. It has impressed an original character on art, in every branch of which it has produced results of undoubted excellence, worthy of our admiration. Christian art suffers not by comparison with the masterpieces of antiquity. Narrow-minded and prejudiced persons only will maintain that the Greeks alone excelled in the arts. The independence and excellence of Christian art, compared with that of classic Greece and Rome, is by no means generally admitted; for many are unwilling to allow to the Church the credit, which it may justly claim, of promoting and patronizing the arts. During the last century art has lacked its proper basis--truth, for art is founded on truth. But since nations have been led astray by the erroneous idea that art was revived at Florence, and thence spread over all Europe, it has lost its independence, confined itself to mere imitations of the Greeks and Romans, and gradually decayed more and more. In the history of art no period appears darker than the so-called age of renaissance, and since then Christian art has been either misunderstood or entirely despised. Not long ago the masterpieces of Gothic architecture were looked upon as barbarous; paintings on wood which had for ages graced the European temples were removed, broken to pieces, and burnt, and alters of the most elaborate workmanship were treated as mere rubbish. To level to the ground the noble cathedrals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was considered a service to art. And this was done, not by the ignorant, but by the protectors of learning; nay, by artists themselves, who were foremost in the work of destruction. A French architect published an essay to prove that it would advance the interests of art to turn the cathedral of Spires into a warehouse. On the cathedrals of Cologne and Strasbourg, also, French architects, living at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had pronounced sentence of condemnation. No later than 1825, when Charles X. was crowned in the cathedral of Rheims, the heads of two hundred statues were struck off, through fear that the statues might be thrown down on occasion of the royal salute. No one seems to have thought of fastening the images; in fact, why should they trouble themselves about the workmanship of barbarians? During the revolution of 1789, the French had unfortunately acquired too much skill in smashing the statues that crowned their grandest cathedrals.

During the period of which we speak, how false was the appreciation of what is beautiful in art! To man's proud spirit it is humiliating, indeed, to know his own weakness; to know that for years he may remain in the darkness of error, without having the strength to burst the chains that fetter him.

At the beginning of the present century more correct ideas on this subject were entertained and spread by several eminent German artists, and for the last thirty years justice has been done to the claims of the middle ages. Actively co-operating with this {223} movement, the Catholic conventions of Germany and Belgium have achieved many desirable results.

At Malines, in 1864, the section for Christian art was very numerously attended; more than a hundred archaeologists and artists from every country in Europe had there met to take part in lively and interesting debates on Christian art, whilst seventy musicians, professionals, and amateurs held their sessions in another part of the building. Several years ago, I was present at the general meeting of the German architects at Frankfort, but I own that in interest their discussions fell far below those to which I listened at Malines. In 1857, at the general reunion of the Christian art associations in Germany, which met at Regensburg, several hundred commissioners were present, and on that occasion were displayed the same enthusiasm, the same freshness and interest, which distinguished the discussions at Malines. But this zeal has long died out; the Christian art associations of Germany never met again; and at Würzburg, Frankfort, and Aix-la-Chapelle, the Catholic conventions scarcely deigned to notice Christian art.

The chairman of the section for Christian art at Malines was Viscount du Bus de Ghisignies. The viscount's appearance is noble and striking; he seems to have been born to command. In the heat of the combat du Bus never loses his self-possession; his clear and steady eye watches the battle; not a word escapes his notice; fair and unprejudiced, he deals out equal justice to all. If the opinions of a speaker clash with his own, he twirls his martial moustache with more than ordinary vigor; but he allows to every one the rights he may justly claim. As chairman, his duties are not unattended with difficulty. Romans and Teutons, Frenchman and Britons, Dutchmen and Belgians, meet alternately in friendly strife; many a blow is exchanged, principle clashes with principle, and deeply-seated prejudices are uprooted. Convinced that the harmony of mind, as that of sounds, is the product of contrast, du Bus acted in accordance with his convictions and nobly fulfilled the task assigned him. The debates of his section were more animated and more instructive than those of any other.

At the right of du Bus sat the vice-president of the section. Professor Cartuyvels, of Louvain, a man well-versed in parliamentary usage, in which he was excelled by no one except, perhaps, by A. Reichensperger. A young clergyman from Brabant, Cartuyvels displays a master mind; equally skilled in aesthetics and in the philosophy and history of art, the value of these acquirements is enhanced by his knowledge of the liturgy, of canon law, and of holy writ. He is thoroughly acquainted with the works of the great masters of Germany and Italy. His words proclaim the enthusiasm with which he devotes all the faculties of his soul to the service of Christian art.

Always prepared to speak, he boldly upholds the principles which he deems correct. He defends them with ardor and confidence of success, and he seldom fails to carry his point; few are able to cope with him. It was a glorious sight to see A. Reichensperger and Cartuyvels engaged in discussion; for

"Sublimest beauty comes to light When powerful extremes unite!"

James Weale was a representative of England and English art at Malines. For many years Weale has made Bruges his home, and exerted considerable influence on Belgian art; nevertheless, he is a thorough Englishman. He is a convert and a disciple of Canon Oakley. By becoming a Catholic, as is often the case in England, Weale incurred pecuniary losses; but this sacrifice has only purified and strengthened his love for the Church. The trials he has undergone have unveiled the heroic qualities of his heart The greater number of English converts (and this no one who has had {224} the happiness of personal acquaintance with them will dispute) are men distinguished for their great learning and affable manners, and Weale is no exception to this rule. His principles of art are rigorous, I had almost said exclusive, but he is convinced of their correctness. In his views he is unique and definite; he propounds them with uncommon clearness and precision. When opposing false principles, he is not very choice in his expressions, generally preferring the strongest. Weale is the uncompromising enemy of all sham and equivocation. In the domain of art fails attainments are immense. He knows England, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Italy. His quick eye instantly discovers the merits of a painting. That the clergy may become familiar with every branch of Christian art, is his most ardent desire. At Bruges Weale publishes "_Le Beffroi_," an archaeological journal; he would have been the most suitable candidate for the newly founded chair of archaeology at Louvain.

Having spoken of Weale, we are now led to notice his friend Bethune, of Ghent. He is a painter, but confines himself chiefly to painting on glass. Brought up in the school of the celebrated English architect, Welby Pugin, who, though only forty years of age when he died, in 1852, had already built more than two hundred churches and chapels, his figures are distinguished by purity of style; he carries out in practice the theories of Weale. However, he does not by any means reject everything modern, but judiciously seeks to combine the beauties of the modern with those of the ancient style of art. Bethune is remarkable both for his piety and his learning, and this accounts for the charm and instructiveness of his conversation. He admires Germany and German art, without being blind to its defects; on the contrary, his criticisms on the best productions of modern German painting are severe, not to say harsh. His paintings on glass are in marked contrast to the productions of the Munich school. He does not delight in great historical paintings on glass, which tend to make us forget that we are looking at a window, but seeks to attain unity of design by subordinating his picture to the plan of the architect. In the debates at Malines, Bethune did not take so prominent a part as Weale. Another active member of the section of Christian art was Bethune's brother, Canon F. A. L. Bethune, professor of archaeology in the seminary at Bruges. Among the French members, Lavedan deserves to be mentioned in the first instance. He is a well-known French journalist, who seems to have a great taste for the fine arts. With untiring ardor he spoke on every question discussed, and, in spite of being somewhat prolix, his remarks were always listened to with pleasure. Although noted rather for wit and polite literature than for depth of learning, he was master of the situation, and to unhorse him was not an easy task. He pleaded eloquently for the establishment of a permanent art exhibition. Whilst Lavedan, like Weale, applies himself to the theory of art, Jaumot, like Bethune, is a practical artist. Of the few artists that France can boast of, Jaumot is one of the best; but he was not permitted to exhibit his cartoons, and has not met with the encouragement so indispensable to the artist Jaumot complainant of this at Malines, and maintained that the Belgian clergy are much better acquainted with the principles of Christian art than the clergy of France. The Abbe Carion attracted attention by his profound knowledge of archaeology; all his remarks proved that he understands thoroughly the subject he treated, though he does not present his ideas in so pleasing a manner as others. Any seminary may justly be proud of such professors as Messrs. Carion, Bethune, and Cartuyvels. No one contributed more to the merriment of the assembly than Van Schendel, of Antwerp, {225} an old painter, who delights in sketches of Dutch family life. He railed at everything, and at times he became quite sarcastic. To find fault seemed to be his sole purpose; whether justly or not, was of little consequence. He succeeded most admirably in boring the chairman. Van Schendel seems to dislike the French language, for he always preferred to speak Dutch. I might speak of many more, but I shall only mention Delbig, a German painter, residing at Liege; Alfred Geelhand, Leon de Monge, Martin, Isard, Mommaerts, of Brussels; Bordeau; de Fleury, an enthusiastic admirer of Flandrin, the great French painter; Van de Necker, the Abbé Huguet, and the Abbé Van Drival.

I cannot forbear speaking of A. Reichensperger, of Cologne. For almost a quarter of a century Reichensperger has been the champion of Christian art, not only in Germany, where he is looked upon as the foremost defender of German art during the middle ages, but also in France and England. In Cologne he had been at the head of the society for completing the cathedral. In the Prussian chambers at Berlin he has always exerted himself in favor of true art. He was president of the general meeting of the Christian art unions, held at Regensburg in 1857, and distinguished himself as an orator at the congress of artists that assembled at Antwerp some years ago. He was also present at Malines, and his presence was of great advantage to the Romanic delegates. Reichensperger is delighted to meet with opposition; nay, he calls it forth, for without it he appears dissatisfied. In fact, a debate is impossible without opposition. At Malines, it is true, opponents were not wanting, but he vanquished them all. Manfully upholding his German principles, he convinced many of their correctness. Reichensperger has often earned applause, he has been the hero of many a parliamentary triumph, during the twelve years that he has been considered one of the five best speakers in the Prussian parliament, but in the Petit Seminaire at Malines he gained his most brilliant successes. His French may not at all times be classical; but his pointed expressions charmed his French audience. His style is not florid, but his speeches sparkle with wit, humor, and sarcasm. His ready logic completely astounded his adversaries. All his remarks called forth thundering applause, which finally grew so noisy that the chairman of the first section, "_Les OEuvres Religieuses_" deemed it necessary to interfere and request a little more moderation.

But what was the subject of all these learned deliberations? Many questions were discussed, and variety constituted one of the principal charms of the proceedings, AEthetics were treated in the first place; the learned speakers philosophized concerning the ideas of truth, of goodness, and of beauty. One hundred and two years have rolled by since Baumgarten, the father of aesthetics, died. In 1750 and 1758 he published the two volumes of his celebrated work entitled "_AEsthetica_." For more than a hundred years, therefore, aesthetics have been cultivated with more or less zeal, but with very little success; the science seems to stagnate because the principles on which it is based are unsound. Hence most books on aesthetics are loathed. The best among the recent works on this subject was written by Lasaulx; but a philosophy of art, from a Catholic point of view, we do not yet possess, for Dursch's "AEsthetics" has many defects. Jacobs' "Art and the Church" might, if completed, have supplied a want long felt.

The discussions on the beautiful led to no important results. Of more practical consequence was the resolution condemning French pictures. Mommaerts made an attempt to establish in Brussels a society whose object was to be the diffusion of pictures artistically unobjectionable. At Paris Meniolle, assisted by German artists, {226} intends to do the same for France, where hitherto Schulgen, of Düsseldorf, has, so to say, held a monopoly. I hope that both projects may be successful, and escape the fate of many similar enterprises, which are nipped in the bud. In all likelihood no similar society will do so much good, and extend its influence so far, as the Düsseldorf association for the diffusion of good pictures.

Much time was spent in discussing the establishment of museums like those of Sydenham and Kensington, near London, and in listening to speeches on fresco paintings, on the stations of the cross, on exhibitions of works of art, and on the encouragement of artists. On motion of Weale, a resolution was adopted to found a Belgian national museum at Louvain, and Reichensperger prevailed on the assembly to pledge itself to further the completion of St. Rombaut's cathedral at Malines.

Let this suffice. The musicians would complain, perhaps, were we to pass them unnoticed. At the request of the general committee at Brussels, Canon Devroye and Chevalier H. Van Elewyk had prepared eight theses for discussion. These propositions treat of choral music, of the education of organists, of the influence of religious music, of the establishment of societies for the promotion of church music, and the like. It was proposed to found a musical academy, in which a special department for religious music is to be established.

Canon Devroye presided; his interesting remarks were always listened to with pleasure. Dr. Paul Alberdingk-Thijm, of Amsterdam, formerly of Louvain, was vice-president. He is well acquainted with Gregorian music and church music in general--of German music also; even of our most common popular songs he has a thorough practical knowledge; many of our German songs he renders with exquisite taste. We shall see more of him hereafter. Verooitte, of Paris, was chosen to be honorary vice-president. He is well known in France. He founded the academy for religious music in Paris, which has been in successful operation for some time, and has contributed materially to raise the character of religious music in that country. Chevalier Van Elewyk has done all in his power to establish in Louvain a society for the promotion of church music, and his exertions were not in vain. A society having the same object in view was formed at Amsterdam. At Malines there were also several organ-builders, whose practical advice was of great advantage to the musical section; the foremost among them were Cavaillé-Coll, of Paris; Mercklin, of Brussels; and Loret, of Malines.

One of the most remarkable personages at the congress was F. Hermann, prior of the Carmelites in London. F. Hermann Cohen, the pianist is a native of Hamburg, and greatly esteemed by the Catholics of Germany. The manner of his conversion was most wonderful and in many of its features resembled that of Alphonsus Ratisbonne. Whenever I saw F. Hermann, in his fine Carmelite habit, I thought of another great musician, Liszt, whom I had seen and admired at Rome, and of the Franciscan, F. Singer, who invented the wonderful instrument to the tones of which I had the pleasure of listening at the general convention held at Salzburg in 1857. True, F. Hermann is not only an eminent musician--God has gifted him with many other endowments; as an orator, especially, he is overpowering, able to move the most unfeeling. Another monk, a fine and imposing figure and a master of religious music, the Franciscan friar Egidius, of Jerusalem, offered very valuable advice. Friar Julian, of Brussels, who has supplied three nations with organists, took an active part in the debates. Beside these I shall mention, Arthur de la Croix, of Tournay, who has written several works on religious music; the Abbé Loth, of Rouen, who deserves honorable mention as one of {227} the most zealous promoters of church music; Lemmens, editor of "_L'Organiste Catholique_;" Emile Laminne, of Tongres, who most eloquently insists on the cultivation of music in seminaries, and on the appointment of a special committee for music in every diocese. F. Faa di Bruno, of St. Peter's, in London, spoke on oratorios; the Abbé Deschutter, of Antwerp, on sacred music at concerts, Edmund Duval presented a paper on the accompaniment of plain chant. L'Abbé de Mayer, Prof. Deyoght, and Hafkenscheid, of Amsterdam, also made important suggestions. On motion of Dr. Paul Alberdingk-Thijm, the most eminent authorities on sacred music were appointed corresponding members. The following were elected: Meluzzi, musical director at St. Peter's, Rome; Dandini, secretary of the academy of St. Cecilia at Rome; Don Hilarion Eslava, of Madrid; the Duke de San Clemente, of Florence; John Lambert, of London; Tornan, archaeologist at Paris; Charles Verooitte, of Paris; the Abbé Loth, of Rome; Friar Egidius, of Jerusalem; F. Hermann, of London; T. J. Alberdingk-Thijm, publisher at Amsterdam; and F. Stein, pastor of St. Ursula's, Cologne.

Hitherto very little has been done for the reformation of church music; in Germany, as elsewhere, there still exist many reasons for complaining. Nevertheless, the Gregorian chant is no more antiquated than the ceremonies of the Church, her liturgy, her liturgical language, or the vestments used at her offices. Who is there that does not admire the melody of the sacred hymns, their perfect form, their solemnity, and their dignity? Moreover, the plain chant demands no violent exertion on the part of the singer. The voice is strained neither by difficult figures nor by unnatural intervals, nor does it require the same compass as the modern music. Unlike instrumental music, choral music does not stun the hearer by its noisy effect, so unbecoming divine service.

Nor has sufficient attention been paid to several other points; to the more thorough study of the liturgy, and of the sacred hymns of the Church, and to the cultivation of popular music.

Lastly, we must briefly notice the exhibition connected with the congress of Malines. It was very interesting, and formed a pleasing feature of the first and particularly of the second congress. Those who contributed most towards its success were, James Weale, of Bruges, Bethune, of Ghent, Canon de Bleser, and Abbé Deloigne. Many weeks of patient research, under the most favorable circumstances, would not enable us to meet with so many specimens of mediaeval art; in fact, the collection was of great importance to the student of archaeology.

The works of living masters, too, were on exhibition, and many of them called forth our especial interest and admiration. They proved conclusively that the attempts recently made to restore Christian art to its pristine purity have not been altogether fruitless. In many places our artisans have again begun to study the medieval art, and many of them rival in the excellence of their productions the masters of the middle ages. How beautiful were many pieces of bronze statuary, of jewelry, and of embroidery, that we found at Malines! The bronze chandeliers, candelabra, and desks sent by Hart, of London, surpassed in purity of style and beauty the best works of the old Belgian masters. The Romanic and Gothic ciboria, chalices, remonstrances, chandeliers, reliquaries, censers, crosses, croziers, and the like, contributed by such artists as Bourdon de Bruyne, of Ghent, Martin Vogeno, of Aix-la-Chapelle, Hellner, of Kempen-on-the-Rhine, rivalled the most admired productions of the middle ages; the three artists above-mentioned fully deserved the prizes awarded them by the congress. Among the sculptors whose statuary graced the exhibition, well-merited praise was bestowed on de Broeck and Van Wint, of Antwerp, and {228} Pieckerey, of Bruges. The paintings on glass, also, exhibited by Westlake, of London, met with general approbation. The committee which awarded the premiums consisted of Voisin, of Tournay; von Bock, of Aix-la-Chapelle; Van Drival, of Arras; Felix Bethune and John Bethune, of Ghent; Cartuyvels, of Liege; Weale, of Bruges; and Helbeig, of Liege.

Lambotte, of Liege, Reinhold Aasters, of Aix-la-Chapelle, John Goyers, of Malines, and several others had sent samples of workmanship in gold. The silk embroideries of Von Lambrechts-Martin, of Louvain, attracted considerable attention, as did also the sculptures of Champigneulle, of Metz, and of Phyffers, a Belgian sculptor living in London. Many other names I have forgotten; but on the whole the English and Germans excelled the French and Belgians. J.F. Casaretto, of Crefeld, had brought to Malines a number of vestments, banners, chasubles, copes, etc, and displayed them to advantage at the Hotel Liederkercke. They attracted the notice of the Belgian bishops no less than of the foreign clergy, and their excellence was acknowledged by all, especially by Bishop Dupanloup, of Orleans. In Germany, for the last twelve years, Casaretto has enjoyed the patronage of the bishops and clergy. Though there were at Malines many excellent samples of workmanship, there was also much that did not soar above mediocrity, and much that fell beneath it. Even many experienced artisans are guilty of gross mistakes; some goldsmiths, for instance, manufacture patens entirely unfit for use. The paten should be perfectly smooth and even, without any ornament. In Malines there were many chalices whose feet were so made that it would be next to impossible to hold them firmly without injuring the hand of the celebrant. In many of the remonstrances and other sacred vessels, also, serious defects were noticeable, a proof that there is still room for improvement. To attain a proper degree of perfection, there should be a closer union of the mechanical and the fine arts and of both with science. Let our artisans be acquainted with the principles of art, let them be thoroughly instructed in the rules laid down by the Church for the guidance of the artist, let them come into closer contact with men of science; in fine, let them, thus instructed, be penetrated by the spirit of faith, purified and ennobled thereby, and they will certainly produce workmanship worthy of our admiration. On this subject many useful suggestions were made by Cardinal Wiseman in 1863, in his well-known lecture on the "Connection between Science and Art."

The results of the debates of the section on art were, as we stated above, the establishment of a professorship of ecclesiastical archaeology at Louvain and the foundation of a national museum at the same place. Considering the many reasons as eloquently urged in its favor, we doubt not that active and immediate measures will be taken for the completion of the cathedral of Malines. On the success of the German artists at the Malines exhibition we lay the more stress because, at the same time, Ittenbach, of Düsseldorf, surpassed all his competitors at the Antwerp exhibition of paintings, and the historical painter, Edward Steinle, of Frankfort-on-the-Main, by his cartoons, exhibited at Brussels, gained new triumphs for true Christian art. To the latter fact, Güffers and Swerts, the best Belgian painters, cheerfully bore witness. In the debates at Malines the superiority of German art was repeatedly acknowledged by representatives of all nations.

To return to our fatherland. At the head of the movement for the regeneration of art in Germany, which distinguished the first half of the nineteenth century was a Catholic prince, King Louis I. of Bavaria. It was he, also, who, partly by renovating the cathedrals of Regensburg, Bamberg, and Spires, and partly by erecting so {229} many beautiful temples at Munich, rescued Christian art from the disrepute into which it had fallen. Rarely has so much been done for art in so short a time as in Bavaria under Louis I.; few monarchs have been more liberal patrons of every department of art. Many are of opinion that King Louis' protection should have been confined to German art, but his great soul scorned such narrow-minded ideas, and he extended his care to ancient classical art. Foremost among those who, since 1842, strove to regenerate Christian art in its purely German form was King Louis' friend, Cardinal Geissel, of Cologne. The association for completing the cathedral of Cologne called forth great artistic activity; in that famous edifice was seen the symbol of the Catholic Church in Germany, and of the final return of all Germany to the one true faith.

To their exertions we must ascribe the advancement of Christian art previous to the meeting of the first Catholic general convention. These conventions have always upheld the claims of Christian art. At Linz, in 1850, was founded the "Christian Art Union of Germany." In a few years this society spread over every part of our country. The Rhenish art unions were the most active, and exercised considerable influence on those of southwestern Germany; the latter, however, have proved more lasting and have accomplished more important results.

When once fairly established, the Christian art union held several general meetings, the first of which took place at Cologne in September, 1856. The beginning was insignificant, for scarcely a hundred delegates assembled, and many of these hailed from the Rhenish provinces. In spite of this drawback, the transactions were far more interesting than those of many so-called "historical associations," that busied themselves with Celtic, Roman, and German antiquities. Nay, considering the merit of the speeches delivered, they compare favorably with those of the German architectural society. A still more brilliant future, however, was in store for the Christian art union. In 1857, the second general meeting was held at Regensburg, at which the number of archaeologists and artists amounted to several hundred. For three days they assembled in the splendid church of St. Ulric, discussed some most important questions, and listened to several brilliant speeches. The treasures of mediaeval art, sent from every part of the diocese of Regensburg, formed a magnificent collection, for, among all the cities of Germany, Regensburg is one of the richest in monuments of mediaeval times, whilst its cathedral is one of the finest in the world. A. Reichensperger, the chairman, enforced strict order in debate; next to him sat Dr. F. Streber, professor at Munich. As a successful student of numismatics, his fame was European; in fact he was a man of superior learning. His best work is his "History of Christian Art," which was not published previous to his death, but whose excellence no one will undervalue. If an illustrated edition were published, it would supplant all other class-books on the same subject, and be a sure guide and basis of all future researches. And no wonder, for no man had a clearer and more general knowledge of everything relating to the history of art than Streber. We hope soon to see this history grace every collection of the Catholic classics of Germany.

Another eminent member of the assembly was Dr. Zarbl, canon of the cathedral at Munich. An eloquent speaker, a writer who recounted his travels in an interesting manner, and a zealous pastor of souls, the canon was a patron of Christian art, and intimately acquainted with its literature. His residence resembled a museum of mediaeval curiosities. He was president of the Regensburg art union, and well was he fitted to fulfil his duties. When he walked up the aisles of his cathedral, his appearance was majestic {230} His words were impressive and his actions cautious and well considered. Overtopping most men, and inspiring all with respect, strangers looked up to him with a feeling akin to awe, whilst to those who knew him he was a kind and esteemed friend. Canon Zarbl departed this life long ago, to receive the reward of his virtues. A Benedictine of the abbey at Metten, on the Danube, a man whose memory is cherished by thousands of his pupils, F. Ildephonsus Lehner, was the soul of the Regensburg art union in 1857. As director of the seminary he labored successfully to imbue his students with an ardent love of Christian art, the principles of which he had mastered at an early age. This he effected not so much by aesthetic: theories as by practical instruction. At Metten he founded a museum of mediaeval art, he formed a school which was frequented by many talented young men, and assisted by several friends he founded the Regensburg diocesan art union, and encouraged artistic literature. Foremost among his disciples is George Dengler, of Regensburg, who bids fair to attain considerable eminence in architecture. At the Würzburg general convention, in 1864, F. Ildephonsus was chosen chairman of the section of Christian art, and in an eloquent address he urged the German clergy to study the Catholic liturgy and the regulations of the Church regarding Christian art.

We must not forget to mention G. Jacob. He was associated for a long time with Dr. Amberger, one of the first theologians of the present age, and Grillmaier, the most pious priest that I have ever met with, in the direction of the seminary at Regensburg, where he was professor of the history of art. At the suggestion of the Regent Dirschedl, of Regensburg, and of F. Ildephonsus, Jacob wrote his work on art in the service of the Church, which was published at the time of the Regensburg congress. It is a truly admirable work, especially as a manual for theologians and priests.

In a few weeks it spread all over Germany, and during the last seven years nothing has been written equal to it in its kind. The publication of Streber's "History of Art" and a new edition of Jacob's "Handbook" would be of great service to the German clergy, and would greatly promote the study of Christian art.

Sighart, of Freising, who had just published his "Albertus Magnus," also spoke at Regensburg. He is the most distinguished of the many writers on the history of art of whom Bavaria justly boasts; twelve years have elapsed since he began the long series of his valuable works by his history of the cathedral of Freising. His "History of Plastic Art in Bavaria," published in 1863, was the crowning effort of his genius and labors. No other German country can boast of so complete and perfect a history. He also called into existence a museum of mediaeval art, and brought to the notice of the learned all the artistic treasures of the archdiocese. His example has been imitated in several Bavarian dioceses.

Himioben, of Mayence, was the representative of the art union founded by him in that diocese. In fact Himioben was one of the firmest stays of the Catholic association in Mayence, and a prominent orator at all the general conventions. His appearance was striking, and predisposed all in his favor. His sparkling eyes, his fine flowing hair, his noble figure, his sonorous voice, and his youthful ardor and enthusiasm, made him the favorite of all who had the pleasure of listening to him. "I have seen the seed germinate, and the flowers bud; you will see them in full bloom, and reap the fruit." Such were his words to a younger friend in the fall of 1860, and well do they express his ideas concerning the regeneration of religious life in the nineteenth century. Himioben used all his influence in favor of renovating the cathedral of Mayence, though he did not live to see the repairs completed. Would that he had witnessed {231} the twentieth of November, 1864, when the Catholic cause acquired new strength by the confederation of the Rhenish cities!

Stein, of Cologne, spoke on church music; Professor Reischl, of Regensburg, on hymnology; Dr. Durch, of Rottweil, on aesthetics; whilst Wiest urged the renovation of the cathedral at Ulm. But I cannot mention all who addressed the assembly at Regensburg. But though there were many and distinguished orators at Regensburg, the palm of superior success belongs to a musician, J. Mettenleiter, who edited the "_Musica Divina_" in connection with Canon Proske, and who at Regensburg gave a practical proof of what true church music is. All were transported by the magical power of harmony. Regensburg possesses the best school of church music in Germany, and the choir of its cathedral rivals that of the Sistine chapel. Besides Mettenleiter and Proske, we must mention Schrems, Wesselack, and Witt.

The zeal displayed at Regensburg was short-lived; the German art union never met again in general convention. Since 1858 it has again become a mere section of the general conventions of the Catholic societies in Germany. At the Munich convention, in 1861, considerable interest was taken in Christian art; but at Aix-la-Chapelle, Frankfort, and Würzburg it had few any friends. At Aix-la-Chapelle, Professor Hutmacher was chairman of the section of art, at Frankfort Prof. Steinle, whilst at Würzburg the most active members were F. Ildephonsus and Dean Schwarz, of Böhmenkirch, in Wirtemberg.

But though much has been done for Christian art by the establishment of art unions and their general meetings, it has likewise been promoted in many other ways. The members of the Catholic art unions not only devoted themselves to the study of art, but also encouraged others to make researches on this subject, and it is but just to add that during the past twelve years much has been accomplished that deserves unqualified praise. To the Bozen art union we owe the "History of the Development of Religious Architecture in the Tyrol," the second part of which was published a year ago by Karl Atz. The Linz art union, after commissioning Florian Wiener to write directions for researches on religious monuments, is now preparing a history of art in the diocese of Linz. Many years ago Giefers rendered a similar service to Paderborn, Schwarz and Laib to Rottenburg, and Reichensperger to the Rhenish dioceses. Besides establishing the Diocesan museum, the richest collection of this kind in Germany, the Cologne art union founded the "Journal of Christian Art." The Regensburg union published the work of Jacob mentioned above, and distributed it among its members. Sighart made researches in the archdiocese of Munich; whilst Adalbert Grimm, of Augsburg, wrote a history of his native diocese. Great services were rendered to Eichstädt by Maitzl, to Bamberg by Kotschenreuter, to Würzburg by Wieland, to Limburg on the Lahn by Ibach, to Spires by Remling and Molitor, and to Münster by Zeke. By the advice of Prof. Alzog, the Freiburg union commenced in 1862 the publication of an art journal. To the Rottenburg art union we are indebted for an important work on altars, by Dean Schwarz and Pastor Laib. One of the most active societies is that of Luxemburg, which has published an art journal since 1861. These researches were based on those of the historical associations and on some valuable essays, some of which had been written long before. Almost every cathedral in Germany can boast of its historian. Thus Geissel wrote the history of the Imperial cathedral (1826-8); Wetter and Werner that of the cathedral at Mayence (1835); Boisserée that of the Cologne cathedral (1821-3); and Giefers that of the cathedral at Paderborn. To Perger we owe a sketch of St. Stephen's at {232} Vienna; to Himmelstein, one of the Cathedral at Würzburg; whilst Grimm and Allioli published an incomplete sketch of the cathedral at Augsburg, and the histories of the Hildesheim, Xanten, and Freising cathedrals were written by Kratz, Zehe, and Sighart. One of the most instructive works lately published is Schreegraf's history of the cathedral at Regensburg, in three volumes. Every diocese in Germany has not yet done its duty, and much can and should still be done by the German clergy. Let us not think lightly of these laborious researches; their usefulness and importance to science will one day be made evident to all. Catholics and Protestants must aid alike in gathering the voluminous materials, which must be placed at the disposition of him whom God will call to write a national history of German art. The labors of these societies have already enabled several prominent men to undertake more extensive works, among which I will mention Sighart's "History of Art in Bavaria," Lübke's "History of Art in Westphalia," Heideloff-Lorenz' "Suabian Art during the Middle Ages," Heider-Eitelberger's "Mediaeval Monuments of the Austrian Empire," Haas' "History of Styrian Art," Ernst aus dem 'Werth's "Monuments of the Lower Rhine," and Hassler's "Ancient Monuments of Wirtemberg." A year ago, Lotz published an excellent work, in two volumes, entitled, "Art-Topography of Germany," whilst Otte's "History of German Architecture" is on the point of appearing. Schnaase, too, in his "History of Art" has profited by the labors of the Catholic art unions, and the same may be said of Müller-Klunzinger and Nagler, of Munich, in their cyclopedias of art.

Let us not grow languid in our investigations concerning German art during the middle ages, until the last monument has been discovered and the last inscription deciphered. Many years must elapse before we shall arrive at this point. When, in his wanderings throughout Europe, Böhmer, the author of the great work on imperial decrees, found an undiscovered document, his joy was indescribable. Equally great was the delight of the editors of the "_Monumenta Germaniae_" when they brought to light some annals that were supposed to have perished. The same pleasure awaits any one who has the good fortune of discovering a Roman basilica, a remarkable arch, or any other important monument; who deciphers and explains an old inscription, and adds to the stock of our knowledge.

As appears from what has been said above, the religions art unions also established journals and museums. The chief of the periodicals is the "Journal of Christian Art," edited, since 1851, by Baudri. Among the contributors to this publication, which does not meet with the patronage it deserves, are A. Reichensperger, Ernst Weyden, of Cologne, the learned Dr. van Endert, Canon von Bock, of Aix-la-Chapelle, and, occasionally, Münzenberger, of Düsseldorf. Baudri's journal is to Germany what J.N. Alberdingk-Thijm's "_De dietsche Warande_" is to Holland, what James Weale's "_Le Beffroi_" is to Belgium, and what Didron's "_Annales_" are to France. The claims of church music are put forth by the "Caecilia," published in Luxemburg by Oberhoffer. Pastor Ortlieb, whose premature death we mourn, made a similar attempt, but failed. In fine, the organ of the altar societies is "Der Kirchenschmuck," a monthly publication, published in Stuttgart by Schwarz and Laib. These altar societies may now be found in every part of Germany, and their silent influence is great. Some societies, those of Vienna and Pesth, for instance, number thousands of members. The Brussels and Paris societies, beside attending to their own wants, work for foreign missions. The most recent of these societies is the one founded in November, 1864, at Frankfort-on-the-Main, as the Diocesan society of Limburg. The ladies of Germany have furnished splendid {233} pieces of embroidery in the form of sacred vestments.

I cannot speak of altar societies without mentioning Kreuser, of Cologne. Kreuser, with his hoary hair and his mighty snuff-box--a man full of sparkling wit and endless humor--is known to all of us, for up to 1861 we never missed him at the general conventions. Since the Munich convention, however, we have not seen him; he was absent at Aix-la-Chapelle, at Frankfort, and at Würzburg, and we know not the reason of his absence. To speak concisely is very difficult, and few speakers from the Rhenish provinces can boast of this virtue; still, most Germans, and especially the German ladies, listened with pleasure to old Kreuser; and no wonder, for Kreuser never failed to do justice to the ladies of Germany. When Kreuser spoke in a city, his speech was followed immediately by the establishment of an altar society. He carried everything by storm, and the impression made by his speeches was not merely transient, but produced lasting fruits. Kreuser is a poet, also, a happy improvisatore, able to cope with the most daring rhymster. He is one of the best read men in Germany, and deserves our gratitude for his exertions in the cause of Christian art. Twenty years have rolled by since he published his "Letters on the Cologne Cathedral," and during the last twelve years his work on architecture has been studied again and again. That Kreuser's style is deficient in grace and harmony we will not dispute, still much benefit may be derived from the perusal of his works.

Francis von Bock, also, deserves our notice. He is the author of a "History of the Liturgic Vestments," in two vols., illustrated with two hundred colored engravings. Boldly he demands the use of appropriate workmanship; fearlessly measures swords with every opponent, and often his impetuosity is crowned with success. To him Casaretto, of Crefeld, is indebted for valuable suggestions. He was also one of the founders of the school of art under the direction of the Sisters of the Infant Jesus, at Aix-la-Chapelle. Dr. von Bock has visited every country in Europe, Turkey excepted, which he intends shortly to visit for the purpose of continuing his researches. Where can be found an ancient vestment whose texture he did not scrutinize, and a piece of which he has not begged for still closer examination? At Gran, at Malines, in Bohemia, in Sicily, at Rome, at Paris, at Vienna--everywhere Dr. von Bock has left traces of his unwearying activity. The Rhenish goldsmiths owe him a debt of gratitude. He has written papers on the church at Kaiserswerth, on the Benedictine church at Munchen-Gladbach, on Cologne, and on the relics at Gran and Aix-la-Chapelle. His principal work is on the "Insignia of the Holy Roman Empire." It is a magnificently illustrated specimen of typography, equal in every respect to any similar work published in England or France. At Malines every one spoke loudly in its praise, and in 1864 the author received from the Emperor Francis Joseph the Cross of the Iron Crown. Von Bock's style reminds me of the chimes I have heard in Holland; it consists in a constant repetition of the same pleasing melody.

Von Bock stands in odd contrast to Dean Schwarz, of Böhmenkirch, the able editor of the "_Kirchenschmuck._" He is the personification of repose and dignity, a deep thinker, and a first-class archaeologist. For many years he has wielded great influence with the clergy.

Whilst the altar societies are displaying greater activity every day, the Christian art unions, it is said, are daily becoming less zealous. In some places, no doubt, this is true; but in many dioceses they have been changing into associations for furthering the completion of the diocesan cathedral. To mention but a few instances, this was the case in Regensburg. Since his accession to the episcopal see {234} Bishop Ignatius von Senestrey applied himself with energy to the completion of his cathedral. King Louis I. having furnished the means, we have no doubt that in a few years architect Denzinger will finish the two towers. At Mayence, likewise, everything is being done for the completion and decoration of the cathedral. The work has been intrusted to the skill of Metternich, and Director Veit, assisted by Lasinsky Settegast and Hermann, is frescoing the walls and the vaults. Since the fall of the partition between the sanctuary and the nave in the Cologne cathedral, and since the great festival of October 15th, 1868, the building has been steadily progressing, and the cathedral lottery promises to furnish the means for completing the towers within seven years. Schmidt has added a new pyramid to St. Stephen's cathedral in Vienna, which has now the highest spire in the world. After rivalling the English architect Welby Pugin by planning almost two hundred churches and chapels, Statz is now building a cathedral at Linz. Archbishop Gregory von Scheer has given a new appearance to the metropolitan Church of Our Lady at Munich, whilst the bishop of Passau, Henry von Hofstätter, has proved his devotion to the interests of art by renovating many churches in his diocese. Among all the German prelates none have built more churches than Cardinal Geissel, of Cologne, and Bishop Müller, of Münster.

Is it not an encouraging sign that we are completing the immense edifices of the middle ages? Is it not a proof of vital energy that the Catholics of all countries are building the grandest churches in the most correct style? As architectural science progresses, a like advance must take place in mechanics, and, notwithstanding many blunders, every branch of art is daily more and more perfected. Not many years hence all our temples will be completed and adorned with the splendor becoming the divine service. Let every one do his duty, fulfilling the task allotted him by divine Providence.

Let us conclude our rapid survey by calling to mind the men who have begun and directed this movement. Among the Germans, Joseph von Görres, F. von Schlegel, and Sulpitius Boisserée will head our list. France justly boasts of de Caumont, Didron, Montalembert, Viollet le Duc, Cahier, and the Abbé Martin. Oudin must not be forgotten, nor Bossi, the historian of the catacombs. The merits of Seroux d'Agincourt, Waagen, Guilhabaud, Schnaase, Kugler, Passavant, Stieglitz, Geyer, Kallenbach, Forster, Moller, Heideloff, Otte, Springer, Hefner-Alteneck, Krieg von Hochfelden, von Quast, Jacob Schmitt, and many others known to every votary of art. To us is assigned the task of reaping the fruits of their labors.

{235}

From The St. James Magazine.

PROPERZIA ROSSI.

Properzia Rossi, a female artist, celebrated for her misfortunes, though more for her proficiency in sculpture, painting, and music, died of a broken heart, just as Pope Clement VII. had invited her to Rome, to show his admiration for her masterpiece in the church of San Petronio at Bologna.

Too late--oh, far too late! Praise comes in vain To lull the fever'd agonies of pain. I am no more the artist idly proud, But the gaunt mortal waiting for a shroud. No more the songstress, whose impassioned lay O'er taste and feeling held unrivalled sway; But a weak woman, desolate and worn, Her pulses throbbing, and her heart-strings torn, Looking above--sad, humbled, and alone-- Where mercy dwells with Jesus on his throne-- Ay, fondly hoping for one smile of light From the meek Man of sorrows and of might, Who from sin's thrall is powerful to save, Died on the cross, and triumphed o'er the grave!

What though the light of genius fired mine eye, That radiant meteor leaves us when we die, And conscience whispers that the gifts of heaven Were of misused. I thirst to be forgiven. Panting I turn from streams once deeply quaff'd. And crave the Rock's sole vivifying draught! Ay, as I kneel and supplicate for grace, I veil in lowliness my tear-bathed face; Implore for pardon with intense distress, And spurn the gauds of earthly happiness! Oh, what avails it that aerial forms. And colors vivid as the bow of storms. Hang o'er my fancy with bewitching spell? Say, have I used these varied talents well? Oh, what avails it that my hands would mould Beautiful models from the marble cold? Have the rich sculptures in the hallow'd fane Brought one soil'd spirit to her God again?-- Recall'd a virtuous feeling to the heart, And by religion consecrated art? Have the fair features and bright hues I wove' In one dark breast illumed the spark of love? Or lured the soul from sin's deceptious toys To pure devotion's memorable joys? Oh, have the gifts of music and of song Soothed one sad being of the human throng?-- Angelic thoughts--submissive, hopeful, kind-- Breathed o'er a mournful or a shattered mind? And has my genius, with a potent sway, Gilded the road to heaven--that straight and narrow way?

{236}

God has been very bounteous; he has given Much to enhance the blessedness of heaven. The _threefold cords_ [Footnote 37] of talismanic power Were meant to yield employment for the hour-- Life's potent hour of labor, want, and pain-- Brief as the April drops of sunny rain; And yet by mercy recompensed above, If well improved in hope, and faith, and love. But conscience whispers, and in these dark days That voice grows louder as my strength decays,-- Of wasted talents, of forgotten crime, And of a judgment awfully sublime! Of duties unfulfill'd, of gifts misspent. Of future pangs, of fitting punishment!

[Footnote 37: Music, painting, and sculpture.]

I muse no longer on the _present_--no-- My life is with the _future_ or the _past_, And both are mingling in a magic flow, Like turbid waters in a fountain cast. The _past_---oh, whether fair, or dark, or both, Is but a picture mirror'd on the wave. The moral sicknesses--guile, anger, sloth-- Arise as spectres from a yawning grave; What boots it that misfortune paled my cheek. That penury and pain obscured my way? _Sorrow is voiceless_; 'tis remorse that speaks In awful tones of merited decay, And of the worm that dieth not--the vale Of never-ending, still-beginning death. Methinks I hear the harsh, continuous wail, The sobs and catchings of convulsive breath. Guilt unatoned for--thoughts and words of sin-- How do they rise up, burning as on glass! The evil pent the wishful heart within Asking for vengeance! O the hideous mass Of wickedness heap'd up, long, long conceal'd! But now as by a lightning flash reveal'd.

Woe! woe! the Eternal Judge's fiery dart Hath pierced the labyrinthine cells within, Where underneath the pulses of my heart Dwells the mysterious form of crouching sin. Thoughts, baneful wishes,--ay, as well as deeds, Against me in strong phalanx are array'd. In vain these tears--in vain this bosom bleeds: I look upon myself, and am dismay'd, Powerless, and weak, and agonized I cry,-- And hear the words, "Lost sinner, thou must die!"

Clouds roll around me, and from an abyss, Drear, dark, profound, behold a hideous form! Closer and closer serpents coiling hiss, And thunders boom along a sky of storm.

{237}

There is no deed to offer thee of good, Thou mocking fiend! laugh on without restraint! I seem as borne along a sulphurous flood, Too meteorically wild to paint. The couch heaves under me, my sight is gone,-- I am with the accuser, and alone!

Alone! alone! O tell me not 'tis so. That I must grapple powerless with the foe. Jesus, thou Lamb of God, arise! arise! Arrest these doubts, these daring blasphemies. It was for sinners thou didst shed thy blood, For guilty mortals, not for angels' good. Listen! attend! a sinner asks for aid,-- For _me_ that blood was spilt, for _me_ thou wast betrayed.

As when a night of storms has sped away. And robed in florid hues appears the day, Stealingly, gently lighting up the skies With gleams, as from a seraph's smiling eyes, Thus o'er my spirit breeds a gracious calm, O'er my deep wounds is poured a healing balm. Methinks the mild Redeemer stands above, And pleads _his_ righteousness, _his_ cross, _his_ love; While angels' voices wafted straight from heaven Proclaim, "Thy Savior calls! thou art forgiven!"

From The Hibernian Magazine.

THE CAPUCHIN OF BRUGES.

"Three monks sat by a bogwood fire-- Bare were their crowns, and their garments grey, Close sat they by that bogwood fire. Watching the wicket till break of day." Ballad Poetry.

Saving the color of their garments, which, instead of grey, were of a dark brown, and the omission of any allusion to their long flowing beards, the above lines convey as accurate an idea as any words could of the parties that occupied the spacious guest-chamber of the Capuchin convent of Bruges on the last night of October, 1708.

Seated round the capacious hearth, on which, without aid of grate, cheerfully blazed a pile of dark gnarled logs dug up from the fens, which, in the days of Caesar, were shaded by the dense forests of Flanders, three lay-brothers of the order kept watch for any wayfarer that might require hospitality or information on the evening in question. Their convent stood--and a portion of it still stands--at the southern extremity of the town, close beside the present railway station. But Bruges was not, a century and a half ago, what it is today. War, and the recent decline of its ancient commerce, rendered it, at {238} the period of which we write, anything but a safe or attractive locality for either tourist or commercial traveller to visit. There was no "Hotel de Flandre," or "Fleur de Blé," or even "Singe d'Or,'" for the weary itinerant to seek refreshment or lodging. Neither were there gens-d'armes in the streets, nor affable shopkeepers in their gas-lit _magasins_, as at present, to whom the benighted stranger might apply for information regarding the locality in which his friends resided. The convents and monasteries, however, with which Belgium was then, as now, studded, were ever open to the traveller, be his rank or condition what it might, and pre-eminent for their hospitality were the Capuchin fathers.

The night was a wild one; and the dying blasts of October seemed bent on a vigorous struggle ere they expired.

"What an awful storm!" exclaimed Brother Anselm, rising to secure the huge oak window shutters that seemed, as if in terror, every moment ready to start from their strong iron fastenings.

"God preserve us I but 'tis fearful," replied one of his companions. Brother Bonaventure, "and what dreadful lightning!"

Peal after peal of thunder resounded through the spacious hall and adjoining corridors; and then, again, came the wind beating the rain, in torrents, against door and casement, and completely drowning the chimes of the Carillon, though the market-place, where the belfry stood, was close beside them. Still not a word escaped their third companion, Brother Francis, a venerable old man who sat nearer than his younger brethren to the ample fireplace. He continued silently reciting "Ave" after "Ave" on the beads of the large rosary attached to his girdle, and seemed, in the excess of his devotion, utterly unconscious of the storm that howled without.

A loud knocking at the outer gate followed quickly by the ringing of the stranger's bell, at length announced the arrival of some guest. In an instant, the old man let his beads fall to their accustomed place by his side--for the rule of St. Francis gave charity toward the neighbor a first place among its spiritual observances--and hastened, as eagerly as his younger brothers, to admit the poor traveller, who must be sore distrait, on such an awful night.

Lighting a lantern, they proceeded through the court to the outer porch, and drawing back the slide that covered a small grated aperture in the wicket, demanded who the wayfarer might be. The gleam of the lamp fell upon the uniforms of two military men, who seemed engaged in supporting a third between them, while their horses stood neighing in terror, and pawing the ground beside them. In a second the gate was unbarred, and three of Vendôme's troopers entered the court-yard; two of them still supporting their comrade, who had been badly wounded in a skirmish with Marlborough's troops, near Audenarde, that morning. Leaving Anselm with the two other soldiers to look after the horses, brothers Francis and Bonaventure led the wounded man into the convent. He seemed weak and faint; but the cheerful blase of the fire, and the refreshment speedily administered by the good brothers, soon restored him somewhat, though he still suffered acutely from his wound, and was utterly unable to stand without the aid of support.

For the first time Brother Francis broke silence. From the moment he caught a distinct view of the stranger's face, as he sat in the light of the fire, his gaze seemed riveted upon him; and an observer might have noticed the old man's lip quiver and his face grow paler, might have even observed a tear steal down his cheek, as he continued for a while to gaze in silence on the pallid features of the young soldier. At length he addressed him, not in French or {239} Flemish, but in a language which to Brother Bonaventure was foreign.

The stranger's face brightened at the sound of his own tongue, and he readily made answer to the few hurried questions put him by the old monk. Their conversation was of very brief duration; but its result seemed astounding. For when Anselm returned with the soldiers, he found Bonaventure and the stranger chafing the old man's temples as he lay in a swoon on the bench before them.

To their inquiries as to the cause of this strange occurrence, Anselm could give no definite answer. All he knew was, that although he could not understand what passed between Brother Francis and their comrade, the conversation seemed to produce a wonderful effect on the former. He trembled from head to foot, and then smiled, and seemed about to grasp the stranger in his arms, when he suddenly fell back on the bench as they now saw him. The young soldier--he was almost a boy, and strikingly handsome--was equally puzzled. Brother Francis had merely asked him if he were Irish; and when he answered "Yes;"--if his name was Herbert, and if it was Gerald Herbert, and if his father and grandfather were Irish;--and when he replied that his name was Gerald Walter Herbert, and that his grandfather was not Irish, but English, the old man muttered something which he could not catch, and fainted. That was all he could tell them; but what that had to do with Brother Francis's fit still remained a mystery.

For a considerable time the aged monk lay senseless and almost motionless, the only symptoms of animation he presented being those afforded by the convulsive throbbing of his heart, and an occasional deep-drawn sigh. His brothers seemed deeply afflicted, and sought by every means in their power to restore him; for Francis, though few knew anything of his history, was, notwithstanding, the favorite of the whole community.

Toward midnight the old man revived, and his first inquiry was for the young soldier. He now embraced him, and, as he pressed him again and again to his heart, with tears and blessings called him "his son," "his dear child." Brothers Anselm and Bonaventure looked at each other in mute astonishment. They feared that their dear old friend, the patriarch of the lay-brothers, was losing his reason. They knew that, for thirty years at least, he had been an inmate of the cloister, while the party whom he thus lovingly called his son could at furthest number twenty birthdays, if indeed he could count so many. Still greater, however, was their surprise, when, on a closer scrutiny, they could not fail to observe a market family likeness between their aged brother and the individual on whom all his affections seemed now centred.

But this was no time for the indulgence of curiosity. The two troopers, drenched and travel-stained, must be attended to, and the wound of their comrade looked after. Fortunately their convent numbered among its inmates one of the best leeches in all West Flanders. He had been already summoned to the aid of Brother Francis, and now that he no longer required his services, he directed his attention to the other invalid, whose case seemed the less urgent of the two. In a short time his skilful hand extracted a spent ball from the sufferer's knee, and, by the application of a soothing poultice, restored him to comparative ease. Nor were Brothers Anselm and Bonaventure idle meanwhile. Piles of well-buttered _tartines_ made of wholemeal bread baked in the convent, with plentiful dishes of rashers and omelets, and a flagon or two of foaming Louvain beer, soon covered the table. Cold meats, too, of various kinds, were served up in abundance; and the two dragoons were soon busily engaged in satisfying appetites good at all times, but now considerably sharpened by a hard ride and a long fast. {240} It was the first peaceful meal they enjoyed since the Duke of Burgundy got command; and they blessed their stars for having been selected to escort young Herbert to the rear. Having completed the bandaging of his wound, and administered such medicine as he deemed best calculated to make up for his patient's loss of blood, the infirmarian led him to the chamber prepared for his reception; and Brother Francis begged to be allowed to take charge of him. His request was granted, but on the sole condition that no conversation of an exciting nature should take place between him and the invalid till such time as all feverish and inflammatory symptoms had subsided. Day after day, and night after night, the old man watched, in strict silence, beside the stranger's couch; and all were in amazement at such assiduity and attention on the part of one who, as long as any remembered him, seemed utterly detached from all earthly affections. They even saw him mingle tears with his prayers, as he knelt beside the pillow of the sleeper. It was whispered that the guardian knew something about the matter; for he, too, now came frequently, and looked with evident interest on the invalid. No one else ventured to speak to Brother Francis on the subject, for though generally kind and gentle, and communicative as a child, there were times when he became sad and reserved--and this seemed one of them.

Ten days passed on, and the invalid made such rapid progress that the infirmarian and his staff pronounced him quite out of danger, in no further need of medical treatment, and only requiring the aid of the cook to recover completely his wonted vigor. The interdict was now removed, and Brother Francis seemed happy. He could, henceforth, speak as he pleased to his young protégé. The latter felt equally delighted; for he felt, he knew not why, a sort of unaccountable attachment--it was certainly more than mere gratitude--toward the old man growing daily stronger and stronger within him. And then Brother Francis called him "my son"--but perhaps, as an old man, that was the name by which he addressed all youngsters. At all events, he loved the old monk as a child loves a father, and always felt sad when the duties of his rule obliged his venerable friend to leave him for a time.

"And so you tell me you have no recollection of your father?" said Brother Francis, with a sigh, as they sat together one evening--it was the eve of St. Martin--in the same apartment where we first introduced them to our readers.

"None whatever," replied his companion; "he left France as a volunteer with d'Usson's division, and was killed at Limerick when I was but three years old. So I often heard my mother say."

The speaker did not remark the shudder that ran through the old man's frame at mention of Limerick; but only paid attention to his next question, which rapidly followed.

"And your father's father?"

"Was, as I have already said, an Englishman--but he, too, died in the wars long ago. They say he fell in Spain."

The old man could no longer restrain his feelings. Bursting into tears, and clasping his young companion to his bosom, as he had done on the night of their first meeting, he said:

"No, my child--your grandfather, Walter Herbert, is not dead, but yet survives to give you that blessing which your own poor father could not bestow on you with his parting breath--he stands before you."

It was a touching scene to witness--that old Capuchin monk, with his long white beard, and coarse dark gown, and leathern cincture, and bare sandalled feet, locked in the fond embrace of the young soldier of "the Brigade," on that eve of St. Martin, in the old convent of Bruges! We do not mean to intrude on the sacred {241} privacy of domestic feeling, but leaving parent and child to commune with each other in the fulness of their hearts, will, with our readers' kind permission, assume, for the nonce, the province of the Senachie, and briefly relate as much of their history as we have ourselves learned, Outre Mer--and is still oftentimes related on long winter evenings by the brothers who have succeeded--literally stepped into the sandals of--Brother Francis and his comrades.

THE CAPUCHIN'S STORY.

Walter Herbert, or, as he was called in religion, Brother Francis, was the only child of an ancient family in Nottinghamshire. Entering the army at an early age, he found himself stationed with his regiment in Limerick, when the army of the "Confederates" sat down before that city in the summer of sixteen hundred and forty-two. He was then in his twentieth year. Forming part of Courtenay's company, when the city opened its gates to Garret Barry and Lord Muskerry, he retired with his commander to King John's castle, where, though closely besieged, they resolutely held out till St. John's eve, when Conrtenay was obliged to capitulate. In the course of the attack on the castle, a mine was sprung by the besieging party, and a turret, in which Herbert was stationed, fell to the ground with a terrific crash. For weeks he lay delirious; and when at length he awoke to consciousness, he found himself the occupant of a handsomely-fitted chamber looking out on the church of St. Nicholas. His host was a middle-aged, gentlemanly-looking person, of grave yet affable manners. He was a widower, and his household consisted of himself, an aged housekeeper, two sons, and an only daughter. The latter--Eily O'Brien--was the sick man's principal nurse, and no Sister of Mercy could have bestowed more care on a suffering invalid than she did on Walter Herbert--stranger though he was to her creed and her country. From lengthened and almost continual intercourse, a feeling of mutual affection sprang up between the young people. Gratitude on the one hand, and sympathy for the sufferings of the handsome young officer on the other, heightened this feelings till it grew into deep and lasting love. Like Desdemona, she loved him "for the dangers he had passed;" and he loved her "that she did pity them." But an insurmountable obstacle to their union lay in their difference of religion. Herbert was a Protestant; and old Connor O'Brien would never hear of any child of his being united to one of that creed which, in its struggle for ascendency, he believed to be the cause of so much suffering to his country, even though no other impediment whatever existed. A private marriage was thus their only alternative, and to this, in an evil hour, poor Eily consented.

Months rolled on--months of bliss to Walter and Eily--but their separation was at hand. Important letters called Herbert away, almost at a moment's notice. He hoped, however, that his absence would be of no lengthened duration, and that he would soon return to publicly claim his own Eily as his wife. But alas! his hopes were doomed to sad and bitter disappointment. On his arrival in England, he found the entire country in arms; and as it became impossible to remain neutral, or return to Ireland, he was forced to join the newly-formed corps just raised in his native county by Henry Ireton, his father's landlord. Once under military discipline there was no retreating; and though all his thoughts were turned to Ireland, he was doomed to maddening suspense regarding her who alone made Ireland dear to him. All communication between the two countries was now suspended. At Edgehill and Newbury he retreated before the king's troops--and at Marston Moor and Naseby had a share in defeating them. But victory or defeat was alike void of {242} interest to him. It was even with indifference he heard of his promotion for having saved his general's life at Naseby. The sole engrossing thought of his existence was how to get back to Limerick. That long-sought for opportunity at last arrived; but when it did, it scarcely brought joy to Herbert. He was ordered to join in the invading Parliamentary force; and, when he called to mind the fierce fanatics who were to be his fellow-soldiers, love made him tremble for the Irishry.

The fourteenth of June saw him on the battle-field of Naseby--the following autumn found him sailing up the Shannon--and, ere the close of the year, he was gazing on the steeple of St. Mary's and the towers of Limerick from the battlements of Bunratty, which had fallen into the hands of the Parliamentarians. He fancied he could even see the very house in which he had spent so many happy days. But beyond fancy he could not go. To reach the city was utterly impossible. All he could learn, from an Abbey fisherman whom they had taken prisoner, was that Connor O'Brien was still alive, and that his daughter was married and had a beautiful little boy. Who her husband was his informant could not say; but he thought he was an officer in Earl Glamorgan's army. Herbert, however, well knew who he was, and he would have risked worlds to have sent back his prisoner in safety, with even one line to Limerick. But Lord Inchiquin's troops were too vigilant to allow of any communication with the city. Even this intelligence, scanty though it was, afforded him some consolation. He knew his wife was safe, and unable any longer to endure the Tantalus-like position in which he was placed, he found means of returning again to England.

His next and last visit to Ireland was in the summer of sixteen hundred and fifty. He was then pretty high in command, and had hopes, as he sat down with Waller's army of investment before Limerick, in the July of that year, that should he be only able to effect an entrance into the town, his authority would be sufficient to protect whomsoever he pleased. But the year passed away, and still the city held out. And, had he but his wife and child without its walls, he would have counselled its burghers to hold out even still more manfully, for he well knew the iron heart and bloody hand of the execrable Hardress Waller.

The spring of the next year found him still before Limerick; and could he but communicate with any of its gallant defenders, his hatred of treachery would have urged him to expose to them the perfidy of one of their own whom they had raised to the rank of colonel. This wretch was named Fennell; and, for his treason in selling the passes of the Shannon at Killaloe, their commander-in-chief Cromwell had promised him and his descendants many a fair acre in Tipperary. By this pass Ireton and his myrmidons crossed the river into Clare; and with them passed Walter Herbert. Still his heart was full of hope of saving all he held dear in the leaguered city. Spring passed away, and summer again came; and still the assailing host made no progress toward the capture of the town which Ireton and his father-in-law regarded as the key of all the Munster territories. In the burning heat of July, while pestilence daily thinned the ranks of the besieged, an assault was ordered on the almost defenceless keep that guarded the northern extremity of the salmon weir, and Herbert was reluctantly obliged to form one of the storming party. His immediate senior in command was a person named Tuthill--one of those heartless hypocrites who could preach and pray while his brutal soldiery were massacring the wives and children of the brave men whom the chances of war made his victims. The fort was carried by overwhelming numbers; and Herbert was doomed to witness, with horror, the butchery of the surviving defenders, mercilessly {243} ordered by Tuthill--an order which he unhappily had no power of countermanding, but in the execution of which he took no part. Still the city held out, though the "leaguer sickness" was rapidly decimating its brave garrison. The north fortress of Thomond bridge was next carried by assault--but to no purpose. The townsmen succeeded in breaking down two of its arches, and thus cutting off all approach to the city in that quarter, and in resisting the sortie three hundred of their assailants perished. Winter was now fast approaching, and the plague extending from the city, in which fifty of its victims were now daily interred, commenced to thin the ranks of the besiegers themselves. Ireton had serious thoughts of raising the siege, and he would, beyond all question, have done so, were it not for treachery. Fennell, the traitor of Killaloe, was again at work--this time, unfortunately, within the very walls of the city itself.

A truce of some days was agreed on; and Herbert was one of those appointed to treat with the townsmen. The deputies met on neutral ground, midway between the city and camp, and within range of the rival batteries. His heart was now full of greater hopes than ever. Could he but meet with any member of Eily's family, he hoped that his love for her would induce them to listen to his counsels. But fate, it would seem, had leagued all chances against him. Had he met them, he meant to put them on their guard against Fennell's treachery, and, without absolutely breaking trust, give them such a key to Ireton's fears and readiness to make concessions as would, he hoped, lead to an honorable capitulation, and prevent the bloodshed which, from the shattered state of the town walls, and the additional element of treachery within those walls, he now judged to be inevitable, unless they came to terms with Ireton. But not one of them appeared; for the traitor had laid his plans deeply, and succeeded in diverting them and the clerical party, to which they faithfully adhered, from anything like a compromise. He wished that the sole merit and reward of surrendering the city should be his own. And he succeeded. The conference ended fruitlessly; and Herbert returned to the camp well-nigh broken-hearted.

The plague continued its ravages meanwhile; and, day after day, within the city, the dying were brought by their relatives to the tomb of Cornelius O'Dea, where many, it was believed, were restored to health through the intercession of that saintly prelate, who lay buried in the cathedral. Its effects were visibly traced in the ranks of the besieging Army. Still Ireton, relying on treason within, pressed on the siege. By a bridge of pontoons he succeeded in connecting the Thomond side of the river with the King's Island, where he now planted a formidable battery, to play on the eastern side of the city. Herbert had fortunately escaped witnessing the horrors of Drogheda and Wexford; but a sight almost as appalling now met his eyes. In the smoke of the cannonade crowds of plague-stricken victims--principally women and children--ventured outside the city walls to catch one pure breath of air from the Shannon, on "the Island" bank,--and there lie down and die. But when this was discovered, the heartless Waller forbade even this short respite from suffering. By his orders, those unhappy beings, who could have no share in protracting the siege, were mercilessly dogged back by the soldiery into the plague-reeking city-- and such as refused to return were, by the same pitiless mandate, _hanged_ [Footnote 38] within sight of their fellow-townsmen!

[Footnote 38: Historical]

The daily sight of this revolting butchery was sickening to the noble heart and refined feelings of Herbert. But suffering for him had not yet reached its climax. As he was seated in his tent, one evening toward the {244} close of October, fatigued after a long foraging excursion to the Meelick mountains, and musing sadly on the fate of her who was almost within sight of him, and yet whom, by what seemed to him an almost supernatural combination of adverse circumstances, he had not seen for years, his attention was arrested by the cries of a female who seemed struggling with her captors. His manhood was aroused by such an outrage--committed almost in his very presence--and he rose at once to rescue the victim from her assailants. But, horror of horrors! at the very door of his tent, and in the grasp of an armed ruffian, lay the fainting and all but inanimate form of his wife! To fell the wretch, and clasp the beloved object to his bosom, was but the work of a second. But, oh! how sorrow and sickness had changed that once beautiful face, and wasted that once symmetrical form. Death had already clutched her in his bony gripe, and selected her for his own. His kiss was upon her lips, for they were livid and plague-stained. And her beautiful blue eyes! how they now wandered with the wild look of a maniac. All that remained of the beautiful Eily he once knew were the long fair ringlets that now fell down in dishevelled masses on her heaving bosom. The sight almost drove him mad. In vain he clasped her to his heart, and called her by the dear fond name of wife. She knew him not, yet, when she spoke, her ravings were all about him; and he often wondered afterward how his brain stood the shock, when, without knowing him, she still called on him, "her own dear, dear Walter, to save her, to take her away from those terrible men--at least to come to her--for, to come to him, she had left her poor old father and little Gerald behind."

Wholly occupied with his wife, Herbert paid no attention to the sergeant's guard that stood at the tent door under arms. When at length he perceived them, he flew into a phrenzy of passion, asking them how they dared stand thus in his presence?--and ended by ordering "the catiffs who could thus treat a woman to get out of his sight presently."

But the orderly remained unmoved. Were his hands free at the moment, Herbert would have unquestionably run him through for presuming to disobey his orders, such was the irritated state of his feelings. But he could not leave the shrinking, still unconscious being that clung to him for support. Stamping his foot in a rage, he demanded what he wanted, or why he regained there?

"Pris'ner, sir," was the sergeant's laconic reply, as he mechanically touched his hat.

"What prisoner?"

"The woman, sir."

"Heavens and earth! do you mean to drive me mad, man?" and the soldier recoiled for an instant at the voice and look of his officer.

"Can't help it, sir--gen'ral's orders. Woman came to the camp three times, sir--supposed to be a spy, and ordered to be hanged."

"Hanged!" In a second his burthen was laid on the camp-bed, and the sergeant laid prostrate by a blow that would have almost felled an ox.

The guard now interposed; and from them he learned that the party in question had been several times seen to leave the city, in defiance of Sir Hardress Waller's orders. Twice already she had been flogged back, but she came out again, that day, at noon, and was by the general's orders sentenced to execution. The soldier added that an old rebel [Footnote 39] calling himself her father, when he heard of the sentence, offered himself in her stead; but Sir Hardress ordered him to be instantly flogged back. "She was to have been hanged," he continued, "at sunset, but she broke loose from them and ran toward his tent as he had seen."

[Footnote 39: A Fact. _Vide_ "Ferrar's History of Limerick," page 64. ]

"Touch not a hair of her head, on your peril," exclaimed Herbert as the {245} corporal concluded, and kissing the pallid lips of his wife, he rushed out of the tent to seek the general, just as returning consciousness revealed to Eily the name of her deliverer.

"Walter, my own dear husband. Oh! come back, don't leave me," were the last words he heard as he flew toward the tent of the commander-in-chief, more like a maniac than anything else.

"By the bones of St. Pancras, he's either mad, or she is," said a tall weaver from Lambeth, who wore the badge of a lance-corporal.

"Ay is he, and sore wrathful to boot," replied his rear-rank man, with a grin--he was a butcher from Newgate. "But we are the sufferers, and shall, I fear, be late for supper. The gallows, however, is ready to hand, thank God, and we shall make short work of it when the captain returns."

The name of God on the lips of such a miscreant, and on such an occasion, makes us almost shudder. But, reader, these were Cromwellian times, and such were Cromwellian customs.

Herbert found Ireton and his second in command seated at the supper table--and hell could not have unchained two such incarnate demons on that same evening. The object of his visit was soon explained. But it seemed only to supply subject of mirth to his superior officers.

"Pooh, pooh! man," said the commander-in-chief, "you are, I fear, grown quite a papist, too soft-hearted entirely. I wonder how you would act had you been at the _battue_ in Drogheda or Wexford?" and Ireton sipped his hock with a devilish leer.

"But, general, she is my wife," gasped Herbert.

"Folly, man!" rejoined Waller; "no faith to be kept with heretics, you know, and all these Irish are such. You will easily find another, I trow you, when we sack the city one of these fine days."

Herbert heeded not the coarse jest of the speaker, but, turning to the general, implored him to torn a serious ear to a matter on which the happiness of his life depended. But Ireton seemed inclined to laugh it off as an excellent joke.

Driven to desperation, the brave soldier, who never before feared or supplicated any man, sank on his knees, and with tears of agony besought him to cancel Waller's iniquitous sentence. He even asked him to do so in memory of the act by which, at the risk of his own life, he saved his at Naseby. And Ireton seemed almost inclined to relent, and hope began to brighten in the heart of the suppliant, when a whisper from Waller to the general blasted them for ever. He had himself in person given the order for execution, and his callous heart was too obdurate to feel compunction even for a bad act. Summoning an orderly, he gave him some instructions in an undertone; and Herbert was directed by his commander-in-chief to make his report of the progress of the trenches under his command in the King's Island. This was but a feint to turn his attention from the main object of his visit. His report was, however, quickly made, and as there was no other pretext for detaining him he arose to depart. There was something more then fiendish in the laugh of Hardress Waller as he wished him safe home, and a good night's rest.

That night, a heart-broken man knelt beneath the gibbet erected on the green sward in front of King John's castle. For him all earthly happiness was now over; and there, in the presence of the pale moon that looked silently on his sorrow, that cold October night, he vowed eternal fealty to his wife in heaven, eternal hatred to her murderers. There was a strange admixture of reverence and irreligion, of love and hatred, in his feelings and sentiments, no doubt; but the camp of Cromwell was but an indifferent school for the culture of Christian ethics. Beside, his brain was, for the time, astray from sorrow and outraged feeling; he followed but {246} the dictates of human passion unrestrained by either reason or religion. His heart and his hopes were already buried in the grade that was soon to close over the remains of his first and only love; and, from that night out, though his life was a long and a chequered one, he was never known to smile, till he became an inmate of the monastery where we found him at the commencement of our narrative.

The remainder of the siege was a blank chapter in his life. By nature a soldier, he got through his duties fearlessly but mechanically, without the slightest feeling of interest in any enterprise in which he had a share. To him defeat or victory was a matter of utter indifference; and it was in this mood he entered the fallen city, as the sun was sinking, on the 27th of October, 1651, and took up his quarters with Ireton, in the old Dutch-gabled house which is still standing, and adjoins the Tholsel in Mary street. It is more than probable that his reason would have altogether succumbed beneath the terrible shock it had sustained, were it not for some new incidents that now occurred to awaken it for a time to activity.

By sunrise on the 29th, the Cromwellian garrison beat to arms. It was the signal for the assemblage of the Irish troops in the old cathedral of St. Mary's, where, in accordance with the third article of capitulation, they were to lay down their arms. It was not Fennell's fault that they escaped the fate of the soldiers and women of Drogheda and Wexford. He had done his work of treachery well; and we cannot venture to say what his feelings were when he beheld his brave but ill-fated countrymen assembled round the altar to deposit at its rails the weapons they had so long and so gallantly wielded in the cause of one who was afterward to despoil their children of their lawful heritage, and sanction its appropriation by the murderers of his father. Ah! no Irishman can ever forget the ingratitude of the second Charles. But Walter Herbert thought little of the ceremony gone through that morning in the old church of the O'Briens till all was over. As the disarmed garrison marched down the long aisle of the cathedral many of them dropped dead--it might have been of the plague, or it might have been of a broken heart. Among the dead were two whose faces he had not looked on for years--Terence and Donat O'Brien, his wife's brothers. The sight awakened a new thought within him--that of his child whom he had not yet seen--and but few moments elapsed ere he was standing in front of the old corner house opposite the church of St. Nicholas. But its appearance was sadly changed since last he saw it. Gable and chimney bore evident marks of the enemy's cannon, while all around wore an air of desolation and sorrow. He looked up into one well-remembered window, but no fragrant geraniums were now there, as of old; no lark carolled the cheering song he so often listened to, with pleasure, some nine years before; balcony, and shutter, and curtain had disappeared. The whole house seemed in mourning. Even his knock rang through the house as through a sepulchre--so he thought. Twice he repeated it; and, at length, an aged head peered cautiously through a dormer window, and asked who was there. His answer quickly brought down the old domestic; but a flood of tears was her only welcome, as she opened the door and admitted him She had been the nurse of Eily and her brothers in childhood, and partly his own in sickness; and was now the survivor of all her old heart loved; of all, save one, a blue-eyed, curly-headed boy, who now hid behind her, evidently scared at the presence of a visitor in that desolate dwelling. A few words of greeting on the part of old Winny or Winifred assured him that he was known and welcome; and a few words of fondness addressed to the child soon restored his confidence. He was even, ere long, seated {247} contentedly on his father's knee, playing with sword-buckle--for that fair-headed, blue-eyed boy was the only child of Eily O'Brien and Walter Herbert. And as he gazed with pride on his beautiful boy, new hope and a new sense of duty sprang up within him. He felt that there was even yet something to live for. To protect that half-orphan child and his sorrowing grandsire would from that moment be the sole duty of his life, the sole solace of existence; and to this he pledged himself in Eily's little room, to which he ascended with his youthful companion, who, at his nurse's bidding, now called him father, and twined his little hands round his neck as he kissed him. The sudden roll of drums at length announced to him that it was time to depart, and fondly embracing his child once more, he hurried out of the house. He would never have left it did he then but know that in so doing he was bidding his boy farewell for ever.

The beating to arms announced the commencement of the mock trial of two dozen individuals, whom Ireton had already virtually sentenced to death, by excluding them from the protection guaranteed to the remaining citizens in the terms of capitulation. How readily would Herbert have saved every one of them, but his vote was only effective in one case, that of the gallant Hugh O'Neil, the city governor. The rest were condemned, by a majority, to die; and it was not without a tear he beheld that long file of brave and resolute men led forth to the scaffold. Priest and layman, soldier and citizen, were alike sacrificed, and for no crime save that of loving and defending their native land. And what Englishman, thought he, would not readily be guilty of the same offence? All passed silently from the death-chamber; all, save one, a venerable man, who, with Father Woulfe, was arrested in the lazar-house while administering the last sacraments of the Church to its plague-stricken inmates, soon to be deprived of all spiritual ministry. Herbert thought he recognized him, as he stood erect and fearless in the council-hall, and with hand pointed toward heaven, summoning Ireton to meet him, ere a month, at its judgment bar. He had certainly seen him before, but dressed in white serge, and not, as now, in purple. Nay, if he remembered rightly, he had been Eily's confessor, and, with the parish clergyman's permission, had married them privately in the church of St. Saviour, having first obtained a promise, freely granted by Herbert, that the children of that union, if such there were, should be brought up in the religion of the mother. What would he not have done to preserve the live [life?] of that venerable, heavenly-looking man! The last of Ireton's victims was one whose presence among the condemned he witnessed with astonishment. He had seen him closeted for hours with that same Ireton; and knew him to have been promised lands and money for certain services to be rendered to the general. But treachery was met with treachery; and Fennell, the traitor, ended his days on the same scaffold with Terence O'Brien, the bishop and martyr.

* * * * * *

The last guard was relieved on the day of execution--it was the eve of All-Hallows--and the clock of the town-hall was just chiming midnight as Herbert, who was the officer of the night, commenced his rounds. As he passed along, in silence and alone, by the Dean's Close, on his way to the castle barracks, he was suddenly stopped, at the head of an arched passage, over which an oil lamp feebly flickered, by an individual closely wrapped up in a large, dark frieze over-coat. To draw his sword was his first impulse; but a single glance at that wan face, whose gaze was sadly fixed upon him, changed his purpose in an instant. And, though armed to the teeth, he trembled in presence of that defenceless old man, and stood in silence before him.

{248}

"Don't you know me, Walter?" said the stranger.

"Alas! too well," was his reply. "But can I hope that you will ever forgive me?"

"My creed tells tells me to forgive even my--but I believe you never meant to be such"--and the old man extended his hand to Herbert.

They stood alone--with no eye upon them save that of the all-seeing One, and, in his presence, Walter fell on his knees, protesting his purity of intention, and asking the old man's blessing. And Conner O'Brien, for it was he, with head uncovered, blessed the stranger for the first time, and, raising him up, clasped him to his bosom as his son--the husband of his darling Eily, now sleeping with her mother in Killely.

Herbert was about to respond, with a fervent assurance of his undying love and devotion to her, when the old man stopped him short, and, drawing him into the recess of the bow way, asked him if he might now rely on his friendship and protection.

"Henceforth, as God is my witness," earnestly replied Herbert, "your interest and mine are but one."

"Good!" returned his companion. "Then, when occasion presents itself, you will procure a pass for myself and a friend in whose safety I feel the deepest interest. For my own life I care not, as I have no one save you and my grandson now remaining to care for." Then the old man, despite his resolution, sobbed aloud. "But my friend," he continued, after a few moments, "cannot yet be spared. We cannot afford to lose him, and it is solely on his account--though he knows nothing of my project--that I have waited here to meet you."

After some further brief conversation, they parted with a fond embrace --the old man to his friend, and Walter to the barracks. When his watch was ended, he lay down to enjoy, for the first time during many months, a peaceful slumber of several hours.

The 1st of November, 1651, dawned brightly on the old city of Luimneach, and its now shattered fortifications--brightly on the brown heath of the Meelick mountains--brightly on the waving woods of Cratloe--brightly on the rapids at the salmon weir, and on the snowy sails of the English transports at anchor in "the pool"--brightly on the gory head of Terence O'Brien, Bishop of Emly, impaled on the center tower of the city--brightly, too, on his murderer, Henry Ireton, as he reviewed the body of troops destined for the siege of Carrigaholt Castle; for God "maketh his sun to rise upon the good and bad." Ere the sun set the vanguard of that body had left the Cratloe hills far behind them, on their march westward; and Herbert was second in command of the first division. He was well mounted, and with him rode two peasants thoroughly acquainted with the country, and destined to serve him as guides. Of late his soldiers remarked that he had grown unusually silent and morose, and few of them cared to intrude on him uninvited. Thus it happened that, during the march, he rode considerably in advance, though always within sight of his detachment, with no other companions than the two guides.

With one of them he seemed well acquainted, and the soldiers remarked that he conversed freely with him on the road. The other seemed to speak but seldom, and then only to his brother guide. This, however, was no matter of surprise, as it was supposed he spoke in Irish, a language almost utterly unknown to the English commander. And such, in reality, was the fact. Whether he understood English or not, he spoke in his native tongue to O'Brien, who, as the reader may have guessed, was Herbert's other guide on the evening in question. As they approached Ennis the old man seemed much excited, alleging, as his reason, that he feared being recognized; but it was not difficult to perceive that his {249} anxiety was more for his companion than himself. They succeeded, however, in reaching their destination, and encamped near Kilfiehera to await the arrival of the main body from Kilrush. Under pretext of exploring the wild coast of Kilkee and Farahee, Herbert left the camp at sunrise, attended solely by the two individuals who had been his companions on the march from Limerick. He returned alone, however, in the evening, and rumor went abroad that he had been deserted by his guides amid the wild recesses of the coast. This new piece of treachery on the part of the Irishry, after being warmly denounced round the Cromwellian camp-fires that night, was forwarded next morning to Limerick, to be faithfully chronicled, with many other facts of like authenticity, in "Ludlow's Memoirs." Herbert was too much overjoyed at the escape of his father-in-law and the friend in whom he seemed so deeply interested, to give himself any concern about the camp-fire gossip, or Ludlow's version of the matter.

The next week found him again in Limerick. Sudden news of the alarming illness of the general had reached the camp, and the expedition to the west was, for the time, abandoned. Herbert found his new post a trying one--to keep watch and ward with Hardress Waller, one of his wife's murderers, beside the dying bed of another. Waller was Ireton's confidant, the ready instrument of all his infamy; and Herbert was selected by the general to attend him as the only surviving officer attached to his own regiment since it was first raised in Nottingham, the native county of both. To escape from his post was impossible. Nothing short of suicide could free him from it; and the thought of his little son, if no higher motive, prevented him from putting an end to his existence. Night after night was he doomed to sit by the bed-side of the dying man and listen to the wild ravings of remorse and blasphemy that, almost every moment escaped his plague-stained lips. He would start up betimes, and, with the frantic look of a maniac, call for his sword to ward off the fiends that seemed to mock his tortures; and then he would sink back exhausted, still wildly raving of Charles Stuart, and Terence O'Brien, the "Lord's anointed," as he now called them, whom he had murdered. Nay, he would clutch Herbert's hand, and, with tears, implore his forgiveness. But Hardress Waller stood there too, and a look from him would again rouse the murder-fiend within him. All feeling of compunction would then pass away; and grim despair again lay hold of him. Oh! it was a fearful sight--that death-bed of despairing remorse. It never left Herbert's memory, and was the commencement of that change that ultimately converted the Puritan soldier into a Christian monk.

Ireton died in his house in Mary street on the 26th of November, 1651, still "raging and raving," says the chronicler, [Footnote 40] of the unfortunate prelate, whose unjust condemnation he imagined hurried on his death. Herbert was of the party appointed to guard the remains to England, and, before setting out, hastened to his father-in-law's house to bring his child with him. But, alas! he found it empty, and not the slightest trace of Winny or the boy. Nor could any one tell him what had become of either. With a bursting heart, he set out with the funeral cortege to Cork, and thence to Bristol, resolved never more to draw sword in Cromwell's cause. Arrived in London, he delivered up his charge, and at once quitted the kingdom, without waiting for the lying in state at Somerset House, or final interment in Westminster Abbey, of Ireton's plague-stricken corpse. Though pledged never again to serve in the ranks of the monsters whose atrocities in Ireland made him so often blush for his native country, he could not yet entirely wean {250} himself away from his old profession. After a few months passed in idleness and _ennui_ on the continent, during which he vainly tried to forget the loss of his wife and child, he entered the Earl of Bristol's regiment as a volunteer, and faithfully maintained the cause of King Charles till his restoration. It was when forming part of his body-guard at Lord Tara's residence in Bruges, where the exiled monarch occasionally resided, that he first met with the Capuchin fathers, and was by them received into the Catholic Church. With the king he returned to England, but only to have all his sad recollections awakened by meeting once more with his old enemies, Waller and Ireton.

[Footnote 40: Burke, "_Hibernia Dominicana_."]

Ireton! some astonished reader will exclaim. Why, surely, we buried him years ago, and are not expected, we presume, to believe in ghosts in this enlightened nineteenth century of ours.

And yet we must repeat what we have written. On his return to London, Walter Herbert again stood face to with Waller and Ireton--the former, with a smile of hypocritical adulation, welcoming the return of him whose father he had aided in murdering--the latter, a hideous spectacle, first dangling on a gallows at Tyburn, and then grimly staring at the by-passers--if those sightless sockets could be said to stare--from the highest spike on Westminster Hall. It was a shocking sight to Herbert--that ghastly skeleton and that ghastly head--and recalled to his memory, with sadness and horror, another but far different head which, ten years before, he saw set up, pallid and blood-stained, on the castled tower of Limerick. God is very just, thought he, as he passed on, with a shudder.

On his return to England Herbert found himself friendless. All his relatives had died, or perished on the battle-field, during the civil wars, and of his child there was still no trace. All he could learn was that he had been sent to his grandfather, then resident on the continent; but where the grandfather resided, there was no means of ascertaining. Tired of England, and the cruelties and perfidies he daily saw endorsed by the sign-manual of one who, he imagined, should have learned toleration and honor in the school of affliction--in hopes also of meeting with his child--he quitted his native land for ever, and joined the ranks of the Duke of Lorraine, the old ally and friend of his former commander, the Earl of Bristol. With him and Sir George Hamilton he fought the battles of Spain for nigh fifteen years; and his last achievement in her service was one of the brightest on record. With a few resolute companions he held his ground for two entire days in the shattered citadel of Cambrai, though the battery to which they returned shot for shot was under the personal inspection of Louis XIV. and the renowned hunchback Luxemburg. The bursting of a shell laid him senseless, and when, after a long and painful illness, he was again restored to health, he resolved, in thanksgiving, to devote the remainder of his days to the exclusive service of God, in the convent where he first learned to know him.

During the recital of the foregoing narrative, which, for brevity's sake, we have given consecutively, and in our own words, Brother Francis was frequently interrupted by his youthful auditor, as new light was thrown by him on events in his family history which, till then, he had never heard satisfactorily cleared up. He had already learned from his mother that his grandfather had been an English officer, supposed to have fallen in Cromwell's wars, though a vague report reached the family that he was seen in Spain after Cromwell's death. Of his grandmother, he only heard that she died young, and that her father resided for a considerable time in Brussels, with his grandson, whom, at his death, he confided to the care of none guardian of St. Antoine's at Louvain, who was his brother-in-law, and who had brought the boy, when a mere child, from Ireland. {251} He further learned that, after the completion of his studies, and contrary to the wish of his uncle, who intended him for the ecclesiastical state, his father embraced the profession of arms, and, shortly after his marriage, embarked with the French troops sent by King Louis to Ireland. He fell at the siege of Limerick, and his widow died of a broken heart soon after the intelligence of her husband's death reached her. He was himself then but a boy, and was placed by his mother's relatives at the Benedictine college of Douai, whence he passed, in due time, like his father, to the ranks, and was then serving, as we have already seen, in the Duke of Vendôme's anny.

"But you did not say who the other person was that accompanied you on the march from Limerick to Carrigaholt, or what became of him or his companion," resumed the young soldier, when he had concluded.

"That remains to this day a mystery to me," replied his grandfather, "for I never saw either after we parted that evening. I left them on a lofty isolated rock off the coast of Clare, to which they were conveyed, as the surest place of safety, by a few poor fishermen, then dwelling in a ruined keep on the verge of the cliff's, which, if I remember rightly, they called Dunlicky. Had I much curiosity I might have possibly learned the stranger's name, but I never inquired, and probably, as I did not, my father-in-law never told me. Certain it is that he must have been a person of high distinction, as all addressed him with marked respect, I might almost say reverence, and seemed most devoted to him, though, as far as I could see, he possessed no earthly means of remunerating them--nothing, in fact, save the half-military, half-rustic garments in which he was clad. And as they left him and his companion in one of the two small huts that served as a shelter in stormy weather for the few wild-looking sheep that browsed on the island, they promised soon to return with such necessaries as he might require during his stay among them. On returning to the canoe that brought us from the mainland, I remembered that I heard something fall from the stranger as he stepped ashore on a ledge of the island. In my hurry at the moment I paid no attention to the circumstance; and it was only on our arrival at the foot of the cliff on which the old castle stood, that I found the object which he had dropped lying in the bottom of the boat. Hoping soon to be able to restore it to its owner, I took it with me, and ever since it has remained in my possession; for I need scarcely say, after all you have heard, that an opportunity of restoring it never since presented itself. I still retain it, with the father guardian's permission, in hopes of one day discovering its lawful claimant."

Here Brother Francis drew from the folds of his garment a small ebony crucifix, inlaid with pearl, and richly set in gold, and, reverently kissing it, handed it to his companion. The latter, after carefully examining it, read the following inscription, beautifully engraved in text characters round the rim--

"J. B. RINUC. LEG. AP. R.R.D.D. EDM DO. O'DWYER EP O. LUIM I. M.DCXLVI."

Still the history and after fate of the owner of the crucifix remained a mystery to them. Perhaps some reader of the foregoing pages may be able to throw some light on the subject, if not for their benefit, at least for ours.

Little more remains to be told of Brother Francis. In his ninetieth year he died peacefully in the midst of the brotherhood with whom so many years of his life had been happily spent--and his eyes were closed in death by the hands of Eily O'Brien's grandchild, young Gerald Herbert, who had likewise joined the order, and given up the camp and its turmoil, and the world and its deceit, to don the cowl of St. Francis, and spend the rest of his days with the humble, hospitable Capuchins of Bruges.

----

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From The Month.

THE DAUGHTERS OF THE DUC D'AYEN.

The stirring events, political and military, which followed on the outbreak of the great French revolution, giving a shock to every institution, secular and religious, and leaving their mark on the history of every civilized country, affected also, to an unexampled degree, the fortunes of families and individuals throughout Europe. The troubles that overwhelmed the thrones of kings, and seemed to threaten the Church herself with destruction, penetrated even to the very lowest classes of society. The great were ruined as well as their princes; the wealthy and noble were proscribed and exiled; new families arose as well as new dynasties; and if the cottage was spared persecution, it did not escape the conscription, while in many cases its inmates died on the guillotine by the side of the tenants of the neighboring palace. By this great and universal convulsion hearts and characters were tried to the utmost; and if many in every class sank under the ordeal which called for courage, patience, and prudence, and other virtues in the heroic degree, it is no less true that many others, who seemed to have been born for a life of quiet and ordinary duty, for unbroken and uneventful happiness, displayed unexpected strength of character, great qualities of heart and mind, and revealed graces of the highest order under the blows of affliction. We are in some respects fortunate in living just at the distance we do from a period like this; for it has not yet passed into the region of pure history, in which we can feel no practical concern; and yet time enough has elapsed since its close for us to reap a part at least of the rich inheritance that it has left behind it of memoirs and correspondence relating to those who played an actual part in its scenes. It was crowded with lives that deserve to be written, full of interest and instruction.

Let us confine ourselves to France alone. That country produced a number of most remarkable men, brought to the surface, as it were, by the breaking up of the great fountains of her national life, who, for bad or for good, played the chief part in the political changes which so powerfully affect Europe to the present day, or, as the soldiers of a new era of military glory, bore her flag in triumph into every capital on the continent. These men figured in events which write themselves sooner than any other on the pages of history; and every one, therefore, has heard of the names and exploits of the emperor and his marshal. More noble and heroic, more beneficial, and more truly glorious to their country, were the lives of hundreds--men and women-- who took a part in the great outburst of fresh religious activity which followed upon the restoration of freedom to Catholicism, of whose piety, charity, and devotion the present Church of France is the fruit and the monument. A great deal remains to be done as to the biography and history of this great religious restoration, in many respects already equalling, in others even outshining, the earlier glories of the French Church, for a moment submerged by the revolution. Lastly, there is another department also in which literary labor will be well repaid--the history of the sufferers in the revolution, whether ecclesiastics or secular, whether they perished on the guillotine, were transported to Cayenne, or claimed as emigrants the hospitality of England and other European countries.

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Many of these emigrants were persons who had never known what it was to have a whim ungratified; who had lived all their lives amidst the frivolous dissipation of the highest society in Paris, infected as it was with the withering influences of Voltairianism; and who had shared in the illusive enthusiasm with which the earlier steps of the revolution had been welcomed. Exile, poverty, forced inaction, obscurity, and the utter want of all that had before been the occupation of their lives, came upon them as a far more severe, because more wearing and protracted, trial than if they had had to bear the short agony of the massacres or the revolutionary tribunal. Yet, under an ordeal such as this, great and wonderful virtues often unfolded themselves, which bore witness to the sound religious training that so many of them had received, of which their patience and courage were the natural fruits. In this way their history furnishes us with many characters of wonderful interest; and the effect of it is not only to enlist our sympathies for individuals, but to give us also a higher idea of the upper classes in France than is generally derived from the annals of that dreadful period.

I have been led to these remarks by reading a little volume lately published in Paris, under the title "_Anne Paule Dominique de Noailles, Marquise de Montagu_," There may, perhaps, be many more such memoirs: this, at all events, though written without pretension or ambition, certainly gives the history of a very beautiful character, drawn out by continual misfortune, and it contains incident enough to furnish the plots of three or four romances. Although it deals chiefly with the history of Madame de Montagu, it gives us incidentally the outline both of the lives and characters of her sisters. There are also, of course, other subordinate figures in the picture; and the author has shown great skill in giving us a very graphic account of each in a few words or lines. I shall proceed, without further prologue or apology, to use the materials furnished by this volume for a short sketch of Madame de Montagu and her sisters.

These ladles were the daughters of the Duc and Duchesse d'Ayen. The duke was the eldest son of the last Maréchal de Noailles; his wife was the daughter of M. d'Aguesseau, son of the chancellor of that name. They had five daughters, called, as the custom was, Mdlle. de Noailles, Mdlle. d'Ayen, Mdlle. d'Epernon, Mdlle. de Maintenon, and Mdlle. de Monclar. The eldest married her cousin, the Viscount de Noailles; the second became Madame de la Fayette, wife of the celebrated marquis; Mdlle. d'Epernon was twice married, but died young, and we shall have no occasion to mention her name again; Mdlle. de Maintenon is the principal subject of the volume we have before us, having married the Marquis de Montagu; Mdlle. de Monclar became Madame de Grammont. The sisters probably owed more to their mother than to any one else in the world, and were formed by her; a short notice of her is, therefore, the natural introduction to their history.

Many who have been acquainted with the effects of the influence of the French emigrants who came to England at the time of the revolution have remarked that some of the most devout and religious among them must have had a certain tinge of strictness and rigor about them which betrayed the distant influence of Jansenism, even over those who were in no sort of way its disciples. This may be seen even in some of their ascetical works. The Duchesse d'Ayen seems either to have been brought up in this school, or to have taken up its teaching from something in her own character congenial to it. As was natural in a granddaughter of d'Aguesseau, she loved order and prudence with hereditary instinct, and was, moreover, acquainted with suffering; her piety was most genuine, and as wife and mother none could surpass her. The {254} due was a man of the world, a thorough gentleman, with all the dilettante learning that befitted his high station. He had passed through several brilliant campaigns, was a member of the Academy of Sciences, and shone even in Paris in the art of conversation. His time was mostly spent at court, or in gay circles away from home; but when he did return the most delicate attentions were lavished on his wife; and she, on her side, had taught their five children to greet his visits with love equal to their respect. And in truth, though their father's quick temper inspired the girls with some natural fear, his many amiable qualities could not fail to call forth their deepest affection.

Madame d'Ayen they dearly loved. The free unbroken intercourse which is natural to English homes was not in accordance with the rules of those stately Parisian families, but the first act of the day was to go and salute their mother; next, they were sure to meet her going to or returning from mass, when they were taking their morning walk; afterward, they all dined together at three, and then came the pleasant hours spent in her bedroom, while she instructed and amused them by turns in gentle maternal converse. They had other instructors I but she really formed their minds.

A bright worldly future opened before these young girls, with their good birth, high connections, and splendid fortune. Who would have dreamed of coming storms? But the pious mother did not wait for misfortune to teach them companionship with sorrow; they began when children to visit the suffering, and two poor people of the parish stood sponsors for Mdlle. de Maintenon at the baptismal font. She was born in 1766, and the parish church was St. Roch; opposite stood the family hotel, with its spacious gardens reaching up to the Tuileries.

After their marriages the sisters became brilliant stars in Parisian society, and the tenderest union ever reigned between them. The eldest, Madame de Noailles, was admired by every one for her sweetness and grace, being commonly called either "that angel," or the "heavenly viscountess." Even the family confessor, the saintly Abbé Edgworth, writing of her after her death to Madame de Montagu, says, "The fate of that angelic soul, which I knew so intimately on earth, can inspire no uneasiness. For my part, I acknowledge in all simplicity that she seems now to return me ten-fold all the good I formerly wished her. The mere remembrance of her strengthens me, and would keep me from loving earth, could it still offer any enjoyment."

The sisters vied with each other in love and veneration for their mother and Madame de Noailles especially had the happiness of being scarcely ever separated from her. The young wife, however, espoused with ardor her husband's political opinions; and he was much more liberal in his views than the Duchesse d'Ayen. Like many other nobles of the time, both about court and in the provinces, M. de Noailles hailed with enthusiasm the first dawn of the revolution, believing it would bring about a new era for France, a grand national reform. Madame d'Ayen, on the contrary, looked on events with some mistrust; her experience, her natural prudence and cautious character, made her more anxious, more inclined to circumspection.

Even after the Bastille had been taken, and when so many families began to emigrate, M. de Noailles, like his brother-in-law M. de la Fayette, continued to hope. The events of 1792, however, induced him to seek refuge in England. The Duc d'Ayen had taken refuge in Switzerland; but when he heard of the attack on the Tuileries in June, 1792, he flew to the aid of the king and the royal family, considering that though his post of captain of the royal guard had been abolished, the danger of Louis had created it anew. He was with that {255} small band of devoted adherents who would have defended the king on the fatal 10th of August--the last day of the real monarchy--when Louis' heart failed him, and he took refuge in the assembly. The Duc d'Ayen managed again to get away into Switzerland; the other members of his family, quitting their splendid hotel, hid themselves in a wretched dwelling of the nearest feubourg. Madame de Noailles was to have joined her husband in London, where they intended shortly to embark for America; but she lingered with her mother, first to assist her grandfather, the Marshal de Noailles, in his dying moments, and next to console his aged widow, now well-nigh reduced to second childhood. The result was captivity and death for all time. Madame de Noailles' virtue shone forth with lustre throughout these trying hours, and it is as a meek victim of the revolution that she especially deserves remembrance.

At first the three ladies were simply detained as "suspected" in their own hotel, during the winter of '93; but in April following they were transferred as prisoners to the Luxembourg. There they found in a room below them their relatives, the Maréchal de Mouchy and his wife, who had already suffered a detention of five months. Not far off was a cousin, the Duchesse d'Orléans, widow of Philippe Egalité, lately executed. These were sad recognitions, few or no prisoners being ever set at liberty, though many went through the mockery of a trial. Soon after Madame d'Ayen's arrival, M. and Madame de Mouchy were guillotined. From the first she and her daughter prepared for death. Both did all they could to alleviate the suffering around them. Madame d'Ayen gave up her bed to the Duchesse d'Orléans, who was very ill, and treated with even exceptional cruelty. Madame de Noailles shared her mother's attendance on this lady, and on several others. She made the beds for all their relatives, helped them to dress, and washed up the dishes; in short, waited upon the whole party as if she had been accustomed all her life to servile occupations. With true virtue, she even showed no repugnance at anything, but preserved throughout her usual sweet serenity of temper. Her consolation was to mount up twice a week to an upper story, under pretence of breathing the fresh air, but in reality to obtain a view from the window of her children in the garden beneath. She had contrived to keep up some correspondence outside, and they came at the stated hour, under the care of their tutor. Occasionally she managed to receive notes from him, or to send him one. An extract from the last she wrote, and when she _felt_ an eternal separation impending, shows the strength of her piety:

"God sustains me, and will, I am convinced, to the end. Farewell! Be assured that my gratitude toward you will accompany me above. But for you, what would have been my children's fate? Farewell, Alexis, Alfred, Euphemia! Bear God in your hearts every day of your lives; attach yourselves steadfastly to him; pray for your father, and for his true happiness; remember your mother also, and that her sole desire has been for your eternal welfare. I hope to be re-united with you in the bosom of God, and in that hope give my last blessing to you all."

These words show a soul which could not be ill prepared for death. When hastily summoned one day to leave the Luxembourg for the Conciergerie, a certain road to execution, both Madame de Noailles and her mother were quite ready. Madame d'Ayen had the "Imitation" open at that beautiful chapter on the cross. Hastily writing on a scrap of paper--"Courage, my children, and pray"--she put it in as a mark, and begged the Duchesse d'Orléans, if her life were spared, to give it to them. This commission was faithfully executed, and the little book still exists, showing {256} traces of Madame d'Ayen's last tears as she named her daughters.

The poor old maréchale scarcely knew what was going on, but followed mechanically. The Conciergerie was crowded, and afforded small accommodation for new-comers. Madame de Noailles thought it useless to sleep that night. When her mother pressed her to lie down a little, she said, "Why seek repose on the brink of eternity?" Early next morning all three were astir, and persuaded each other to break their fast, for no dinner had been provided on the previous evening. Madame de Noailles insisted on dressing both her mother and grandmother, whispering, "Have good courage, mamma; there is only one hour more!"

But nearly the whole day passed in terrible expectation. Not till five in the afternoon came the open carts that were to carry forty condemned prisoners to the Barrière du Trône for execution. Long previous to detention, Madame de Noailles had secured, in case of danger, the services of a good priest--Père Carrichon, of the Oratory. News of their coming fate reached him, and, faithful to his promise, despite the personal risk, he arrived at the prison door in time. The first cart filled and passed out. It contained eight ladies, of whom the last was the old maréchale. In the second were Madame d'Ayen and her daughter; after whom six men took their places.

The account given by Père Carrichon of this closing scene is our last view of Madame de Noailles, and tallies with what has gone before. Serene and gentle, her thoughts appeared wrapt in God. Père Carrichon tried to make himself seen as the cart came out. Evidently Madame de Noailles was looking for some one; but her glance did not rest on him. Having made a great circuit, he posted himself in a conspicuous place at the opening of a bridge. Again Madame de Noailles anxiously scanned the crowd around, and again without discerning the face she sought. Père Carrichon was tempted to give up the effort in despair. Priestly charity prevailed, however, and he hastened forward to the Rue St. Antoine. A violent storm had come on; thunder and lightning raged, the wind blew furiously. The poor victims were drenched; the ladies' hair streamed about their faces, and their hands, closely tied behind each, could give no relief. What with the jolting and wind, they could hardly keep their seats on those narrow planks. The savage curiosity of the populace yielded to the violence of the storm; the crowd dispersed; windows and doors closed. Père Carrichon ventured nearer the cart, amid the very escort of soldiers intent on guarding themselves from the storm. Suddenly Madame de Noailles' countenance lighted up with her own sweet smile; her eyes were thankfully raised to heaven, and then she leaned forward, whispering to her mother. She had seen him, Père Carrichon felt sure of it. A grateful smile stole over the duchess's face also.

Père Carrichon continued walking beside the cart; his heart raised in prayer; the mute confession was made, the silent absolution given. Solemn, touching scene!--those two heads, one so fair, reverentially bent down with looks of mingled contrition and hope; the priest fulfilling his errand of mercy; and the storm raging on.

At length the carts stopped. The executioner and his assistants came forward, one carelessly twirling a rose between his lips. The guillotine fell on the maréchale; afterward on Madame d'Ayen; and Madame de Noailles suffered next. Up to the last moment both mother and daughter employed themselves in exhorting their companions to Christian repentance. The vicomtesse devoted herself especially to a young man whom she had overheard blaspheming. One foot was already on the bloody ladder, when, turning round a last time, she {257} murmured, with imploring accents, "I conjure you, say--Forgive me!" Their own sweet countenances spoke only of heaven. So beautiful were these deaths, that, despite the horrors of the scene, Père Carrichon could but raise his full heart in praise and thanksgiving to God. Thus lived and died the eldest of these five sisters.

The second, Madame de la Fayette, is a beautiful character; so enthusiastic in spirit, so warm and generous in heart. Endowed with good natural powers, her mind had been highly cultivated, she could reason well, and possessed a ripe judgment. Prompt and decided on great occasions, she was then energetic enough in carrying out her resolutions; but by a strange contradiction of nature, doubts often assailed her in little matters, and she would hang back, uncertain what course to pursue. Ardent in her piety, she was yet tormented with scruples; and unfortunately Madame d'Ayen had so far condescended to these as to allow her daughter not to make her first communion till after marriage. Naturally enough, at that late period the great act was accomplished with much mental suffering. Madame de Montagu said with truth that this beloved sister was not sufficiently interior, and thirsted too eagerly after the consolations of human affections; but for sincerity, faith, zeal, and submission to the divine will Madame de la Fayette was most admirable. Her greatest quality was self-sacrifice, unshrinking devotion to those she loved--the virtue of a wife and a mother. M. de la Fayette attests that he owed to her unalloyed happiness during a wedded union of thirty-four years. "Gentle, tender, virtuous, and high-souled, this incomparable woman has been the charm and pride of my existence."

She too was imprisoned, but was afterward released. Her first thought was to join her husband, a captive at Olmutz. Other duties detained her for a while; but the ultimate object was kept steadily, though silently, in view. Madame de la Fayette sent her young son out of France across the Atlantic, confiding him to Washington's protection; then she hastened to look after her daughters in Auvergne, and settle money accounts there. Happily, she was able to buy back Chavaniac, the property of an old aunt who had brought up her husband. Business concluded, she sought for Madame de Grammont; the two sisters had not met since the tragic death of their relatives. Madame de Noailles' orphan children were living with their aunt. Tearing herself from them, Madame de la Fayette--who could only obtain a passport for America--then went round by sea to Altona, in Denmark, where her other sister, Madame de Montagu, and many French exiles, had fixed their residence for a while. This also was a meeting in which bitter pain was mingled with joy. "Did you see them?" were the only words Madame de Montagu could sob forth, after a long, mute caress. "Alas! I had not that happiness," replied Madame de la Fayette, whose filial heart was choking with the same remembrances.

Proper measures having been taken for obtaining an audience of the emperor, Madame de la Fayette announced her intention of proceeding to Vienna forthwith, that she might solicit permission to share her husband's captivity. The simple words in which she mentioned her generous purpose thrilled through the little circle; vain attempts were made to dissuade her from it; she gently, but firmly, persisted. Her sister could best understand the feelings that guided her, and that she did so was expressed by silent repeated pressures of her hand.

Madame de la Fayette--accompanied by her two girls, aged thirteen and fifteen--reached Vienna under an assumed name. The emperor granted her request, and she hastened joyfully to Olmutz. Such was her enthusiasm at sight of the gloomy fortress in which her husband was confined, that she began repeating Tobias' beautiful canticle (c. xiii.), and entered with it on her lips.

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It was the 15th of October, 1795. M. de la Fayette had already been a close prisoner for three years; during the last eighteen months especially he had received no tidings of what was going on in the world without. A vague rumor of excesses committed in France had indeed reached his unbroken solitude, but not the name of one victim; he knew nothing of the fate of his wife and children. Now, without one word of preparation, the door of his cell was unlocked; figures darkened the threshold. Could it be? His heroic wife and their two children! Yes; they had come to share the hardships of his prison life.

The emperor of Austria had spoken to Madame de la Fayette of her husband's place of confinement in a manner which showed her afterward that he was quite ignorant of the rigorous treatment to which the prisoner was subjected. Two little cells, with a wretched bed and a table and chair in each, formed the sole accommodation. As for eating, there was one pewter spoon, no such luxury as knife or fork being allowed. Pens, paper, and ink were only forthcoming on rare occasions, and then the open letter had to be written under the eye of an official. Madame de la Fayette endured all these annoyances for two years; and truly the abnegation of her young daughters during this long period is nearly as admirable as her own. The girls employed themselves very usefully in concocting new articles of clothing out of old materials. Madame de la Fayette, like her husband, soon began to suffer from such close confinement; but when, after eleven months' illness, she applied for leave to go and consult a physician at Vienna for a few days only, the answer was that, once outside the fortress, she would never be re-admitted. The prison doctor could only exchange conversation in Latin with her husband, and neither of them appear to have been adepts in that language; moreover, his hurried visit was obliged to take place in the presence of an officer.

Friends wearied both France and foreign powers with solicitations for the release of General de la Fayette. Fox painted the miseries endured at Olmutz in eloquent terms before a British House of Commons; but it was not until October, 1797, that the prison gates opened at length, through Bonaparte's intervention.

The name she bore often proved detrimental to her, but Madame de la Fayette gloried in it. With Robespierre's fall all prisoners in France were set at liberty. General de la Fayette, however, was accused of having betrayed the revolution because he had refused to become privy to its crimes, and his wife was therefore detained. Interrogated by Legendre, who told her how much he detested the very name of la Fayette, she boldly expressed her readiness to defend him and it against whatsoever accuser. Legendre remanded her to prison "for insolence."

This devoted love for husband and children did not suffice to fill her heart. It was burning also with other affections. To Madame de la Fayette we owe a touching life of the Duchesse d'Ayen, written while at Olmutz, on the margin of a stray volume of Buffon, with a broken toothpick for her pen and a piece of Chinese ink. When told of the tragic fate that had overtaken her relatives, she could not believe it at first; especially it seemed impossible that men could have been so barbarous to her "angelic sister." On recovering a little from this overwhelming sorrow, she wrote to her children:

"I thank God for having preserved to me life and reason, and do not regret your absence at such a moment. He kept me from revolt against him; but I could not long have borne the semblance of any human consolation. To follow in the track of such dear footsteps would have sweetened the last pangs for me."

{259}

In the prisons of the revolution her sole thought was how to relieve the wants and sufferings of those around. With her cousin, the Duchesse de Duras, at Plessis, she was constantly interceding for the sick and poor among their fellow captives, and this at a time when a chance word sufficed for death, as sixty victims chosen by caprice or at hazard were regularly dragged forth each day for execution. Her spirit never forsook her under trying circumstances, and she often showed wonderful presence of mind. Once she pleaded her own cause before the tribunal of Puy, and on several occasions harangued the people. Her language at these times was always nobly firm, and sometimes proud even to haughtiness. In a letter addressed to Brissot, after asking for liberty, or at least the favor of remaining a prisoner on parole, which the whole village of Chavaniac volunteered to guarantee, she concludes by saying, "I consent to owe you this service." Her letters to the two ministers, Roland and Servan, or to foreign princes on behalf of her husband, are no less elevated in tone. She never stoops to flatter. No wonder that she exercised a species of fascination over all those who approached her; with whatever feelings the acquaintance began, it was impossible to know and not to love her.

In all her sorrows, ardent faith sustained her. When danger again threatened at Paris, she writes to Madame de Montagu: "We mast abandon ourselves wholly to God in this critical hour. Let us live like Abraham, ready to start whenever God calls, and to go wheresoever he appoints." When she felt her end approaching, once more she repeated aloud that canticle of Tobias, singing which she had, years before, entered the fortress of Olmutz. True in death to her character through life, her heart was inflamed with celestial desires, and still overflowing with human affection. Drawing all her loved ones round her, she gave them a last blessing, and gently expired, holding her husband's hands within her own.

Of four daughters of the Duc d'Ayen, Madame de Grammont was the least attractive. Her person was small, her appearance stiff, her features marked; there was nothing soft about her look or manner. Her virtue was of a stern kind; she had schooled herself into a certain absence of feeling, neither right nor lovable; but fortunately her actions often contradicted her professions. Thus her kindness never failed, and her charity to the poor was boundless. There was a contradiction too between what she said and what she wrote--her speeches are always more or less stern, while her letters frequently betray deep affection; like a person who speaks from principle, but dares to let herself out on paper, sure of restraining emotion when necessary. Sacrifice was the prominent feature of her piety; duty dictated her every sentiment.

Eight out of her nine children she saw carried to their graves in youth, and each time she could say with composure, "The Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." Writing to Madame de Montagu about a daughter whose end was approaching, she uses these words: "As life ebbs away, her peace and self-possession are perfect. . . . . . I do not despair of helping her passage into the bosom of God after having erst borne her in my own; and it is sweet to make her repeat, 'I was cast into thy arms, O Lord, from the beginning: thou art my God, even from my mother's womb.'" It was not in her character to disclose the struggle of natural feeling that was going on in her heart at the time that she was writing words like these.

Once Madame de Grammont writes to her sister: "The expectation, experience, and long continuance of misfortune have at length made me _impassible_." "And I," adds Madame de Montagu, commenting on the word in {260} her journal, "am still a reed shaken by every breath." The two phrases aptly characterize each sister.

In 1848, Madame de Grammont, who had been an eye-witness of the two preceding revolutions, was quite surprised at the fears entertained by those around her. "But, grandmamma," said a member of her family, "if the guillotine were set up again as in the reign of terror, surely you would feel some uneasiness?" "Poor child!" replied the old lady, "that has nothing to do with the question. Must we not all die? The important thing is to be well prepared; the mode of death is a mere detail." And thus unmoved she lived on to the age of eighty-five--that is, till the year 1853--having survived all her sisters. Though her husband had been banished for some time, she never emigrated; and sixty-seven years of her life were passed in retirement at their château of Villersexel. There she was much beloved, being a true mother to all the poor.

Her sisters also were warmly attached to her. Madame de Montagu held her in such veneration, that though a little the older of the two, she always kept a journal for Madame de Grammont to read, that she might point out her faults and help her to amend. She called Madame de Grammont her _second conscience_ and the province in which she resided the kingdom of Virtue, with Peace (Villersexel) for its capital.

Madame de Grammont felt their mother's loss, in her way, as deeply as the rest. Perhaps, too, this heavy trial laid the foundation of her remarkable firmness; for there are some strong natures that cannot bend through fear of breaking. When able afterward to communicate with Madame de Montagu, she writes:

"Since the immolation of those dear victims, the cross is my sole place of refuge. With you, and all those we love in this world and the other, I cast myself into Gods's arms. There let all disquietude cease; there let our minds and hearts rest for ever; thence let us derive strength to perform our allotted task here below."

Her father had entreated Madame de Grammont to consult her personal safety in those perilous times by joining himself and Madame de Montagu in Switzerland. She declined, because her husband was only just recovering from a dangerous illness, and also through fear of compromising his family. Indeed, so much was circumspection necessary, that her letters were written on cambric handkerchiefs, which Madame de Grammont took the further precaution of sewing inside her messenger's waistcoat lining.

Madame de Montagu affords a strong contrast to Madame de Grammont. She went through life thrilling at every step; full of tears that often gushed for joy, but oftenest welled up from deep fountains of sorrow; heroic in faith, like the others, but quivering and writhing beneath each new load of anguish. She never grew accustomed to suffering, and yet God tried her well; but he could not weary her love for himself. And thus, while human affections were ever causing sharp pain, divine love gave her strength to bear it without asking her to overcome _them_. Such was her character, which grace supported without changing.

Madame de Montagu was admired in the world, but never cared for triumphs of any kind. Her sole wish was to please God and her home circle, and do good to her fellow-creatures. We may believe that the pauper sponsors who held her at St. Roch watched over their charge through life. For well and zealously, though full of natural shrinkings, did Madame de Montagu perform her part on the busy stage. Her timidity was put to its first great trial when, at sixteen, she had to undergo her first introduction to her intended husband, on whom she dared not raise her eyes, to see whether her parents' choice suited her, in appearance at least, until he fortunately turned away to look at a picture. Next {261} came the further suffering of receiving congratulatory visits from all Paris, during which the poor bride elect was seated bolt upright, pale and trembling, beside her mother, and between two goodly rows of members of either family, ranged along both sides of the apartment. At church on the wedding-day she regained her composure, because all else was forgotten in the earnest prayer breathed that she might well perform her new duties.

Almost immediately the young wife had to sacrifice her greatest pleasure, that of seeing her mother and sisters frequently. M. de Montagu was obliged to join his regiment, and she was left under the tutelage of her father-in-law, a kind and clever man, but eccentric and full of vagaries. To please him she did everything not wrong, commencing that petty series of daily yieldings, insignificant to careless eyes, but so meritorious because so difficult. This is woman's battlefield, obscure but high; and in this path Madame de Montagu always walked, perfectly ignorant that her simplicity was in any way extraordinary. The good she did by example, and without any words, was immense; only near relatives and intimate friends could perceive it. One of these, M. de Mun, used to say that she was the only _dévote_ he ever knew who made him wish to be saved. So far could she condescend even to the pleasures of others, that in exile, after all her sorrows, she danced at a rustic ball. And to a nature like hers, such griefs as she had known were undying even in their keenness. One of her characteristic traits was that she never forgot an anniversary: everything that had happened to herself and to those dear to her was treasured up, and recalled as the days came round. If it was an occasion of gladness, it was celebrated in public; but her life was more crowded with the memories of sorrow, and these she kept for the quiet of her own room.

We should occupy a larger space than that which is at our disposal were we to try to follow Madame de Montagu through the various stages of her exile from France. She first came to England, settling at Richmond; then she went with her husband to Aix-la-Chapelle, whence the success of the revolutionary armies drove them again to England. They stayed at Margate for a while; then the declaration of war between England and France brought out an order for the _émigrés_ not to live on the coast, and Richmond received them once more. Economy, however, forced them to seek a cheaper abode at Brussels. Afterward this place of refuge became unsafe, and Madame de Montagu was forced to separate from her husband, and accept the hospitality of an aunt, Madame de Tessé--a _philosophe_ old lady, who had been a friend of Voltaire's, but who, as one of her grandnieces said of her, "_tout en se croyant incrédule, ne laissait pas de faire un grand signe de croix derrière ses rideaux chaque fois qu'elle prenait une médecine._" Madame de Tessé lived at Lowemberg, in Switzerland; her character is charmingly hit off in the memoir before us; she would have delighted Mr. Thackeray. But the presence of Madame de Montagu brought persecution upon her kind relation, who took the characteristic resolution of selling her property and going elsewhere. She took her niece and family first to Erfurt, then to Altona, where many French _émigrés_ were assembled. Her plan was to find a quiet spot beyond the Elbe, where she could live in peace and carry on her farming operations; for her great delight was to manage everything herself, and to supply all the needs of her household from her own resources. They were a long time in finding a place that would suit Madame de Tessé. At length an estate named Wittmold was found, on the banks of the lake of Ploen; and here the exiles found rest for some time. The best elements of Madame de Montagu's beautiful character were developed under the hardships and {262} sufferings of this life of poverty and continued apprehension. She had, of course, never known even the idea of want before she left France. When she left Paris, she so little expected to have to manage for herself, that it was only in consequence of Madame de Grammont's imperturbable prudence that she made any provision for the future. They had to part in secret, as it was dangerous to let the servants know of the intended flight of Monsieur and Madame de Montagu. In the suppressed agitation of the moment, Madame de Grammont was characteristically thoughtful. She asked her sister whether she was sure she had her jewels. "Why take them? we are not going to a fête." "_Raison de plus; c'est parceque vous n'allez pas à une fête, qu'il faut les emporter_." The advice was afterward found to have been indeed important; but even the sale of her jewels only supported Madame de Montagu for a time. In the course of her long exile, she never made herself a very perfect manager.

She tried to study domestic economy; but she proved a greater proficient in not spending on herself than in learning how to manage household affairs on small means. Still her superintendence of the farm produced good results, from the zeal with which it inspired the workpeople. However low her funds, she always visited the sick and poor, managing to procure them some relief; she also worked unceasingly at objects for sale. Throughout life she never knew idleness, devoting fixed hours to prayer, reading, the instruction of her children, and works of charity. As years went on, she more and more begrudged the hours often forcibly given in social life to frivolous conversation. Her pleasure was to employ each moment usefully in some home duty; but this could not always be the case during exile, especially when residing with her kind but worldly aunt, Madame de Tessé.

At this period it was that she organized her _oeuvre des émigrés_; a stupendous work, if we consider that there were 40,000 persons to assist, and 16,000,000 francs the moderate sum estimated as requisite for carrying it out with success. Unfortunately the details in figures of this work have been lost; for Madame de Montagu carefully noted down every fraction received, from what quarter it came, and how expended. But we know that the correspondence alone cost annually about 500 francs during the four years it existed--that is, from 1796 to 1800. She collected money in Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, and England; and beside distributing pecuniary assistance, solicited employment for persons of all ages and sexes. She had children to get into schools, young women to place as governesses, drawings and needlework to sell, etc. All this was done without quitting her quiet home on the borders of Lake Ploen, or giving up one domestic occupation. When pressed for time she sat up at night. Winter only increased her zeal. "The colder it is," said she, "the warmer my heart grows." Indeed, she ended by selling for this work the mourning worn for her mother and sister, which she had kept as a relic; at another time she also sold her prayer-book for the same object. But she never would take from this fund for members of her own family; she preferred working for them, not from pride, but through delicacy. For another charity she once cut off her beautiful hair and sold it, receiving eighty francs.

It is curious to remark that this gentle woman nevertheless had her own firm opinions, even on politics; and though never obtruding, still constantly held them. One is surprised to find also that these opinions were not often identical with the views held by those she most respected and loved. In 1790, M. de Beaune, her father-in-law, alarmed at the turn affairs were taking, wished to emigrate with all his family. His idea was to draw Frenchmen together on neutral {263} ground, to place their families in safety, and having gained the support of foreign powers, to return with a good army for the protection of the king and the party of order in the state. Madame de Montagu fully shared these views; but her husband at this time disapproved of emigration, considering it the greatest mistake that could be committed by the king's friends. He hoped to arrive at an understanding between the liberal party and the _droite_, so as to save both the monarchy and liberty. His two elder brothers-in-law, MM. de Noailles and la Fayette, went far beyond these views. Without wishing to overturn royalty, their dream was to see it based on republican principles.

So indignant did this render M. de Beaune, that he broke with them entirely, and wished Madame de Montagu to give up seeing her two sisters, who naturally embraced their husbands' opinions. She could by no means understand that persons were to be proscribed because of their political opinions; but, not to irritate M. de Beaune farther, she would not receive Madame de la Fayette, who offered to pay her a visit at Plauzat in Auvergne, and went instead to meet her privately at a neighbouring inn.

Meanwhile M. de Montagu had yielded to his father's wishes, and at the end of 1791 resolved to emigrate; his choice, however, fell on England rather than Coblentz, where M. de Beaune then was. Madame de Montagu was to accompany her husband. Ere leaving Plauzat she had the happiness of seeing her mother again, but could not summon up courage to tell her of her own approaching departure for England. Both mother and daughter looked on public matters exactly in the same way; there was great similarity between them as to judgment; but the duchesse was not impulsive, like Madame de Montagu. They parted most tenderly, with a presentiment of coming evil; but little did either dream that the guillotine was to separate them for ever.

Then commenced for Madame de Montagu the miseries and heart-burnings of exile. Twice she visited England, spending some time at Richmond and Margate. Griefs began to accumulate; she lost a child for the third time; Marat was lording it over Paris; M. de Montagu in disgust again quitted France, and went to serve under his father's orders on the banks of the Rhine; the massacres of September took place, followed by the fatal battle of Jemappes. The _émigrés_ were henceforth banished. Then the king and queen fell victims to the revolution; Savenay destroyed the last hopes of the Vendeans. In addition to all these public sorrows, and to the pressure of poverty, Madame de Montagu lost another child, her fourth; it seemed as if all her children were born but to die.

All her life she suffered from great delicacy of constitution, and this natural tendency was further increased by her extreme sensibility. Just after losing a child for the first time, and while she was praying, bathed in tears, beside its dead body, a messenger came to tell her that Madame de Grammont had just given birth to her first infant. Madame de Montagu, drying up all traces of her own sorrow, immediately hastened off to congratulate the young mother; but she had scarcely left her sister's room when she fainted in the adjoining apartment. A severe illness followed, the precursor of many others; indeed, it may be said that her whole life was passed amid moral and physical suffering. Death was ever busy in her family.

She lost her only son Attale, a fine young man, just when he had attained his twenty-eighth year; and in this case sorrow was aggravated by the circumstance of his dying through accident--a gun went off in his hand. No fears, however, were entertained at first. Madame de Montagu herself was only recovering by slow degrees from {264} a dangerous malady; a sudden and fatal termination had occurred for her son, and she knew it not. They dared not tell her. But the next day, being Trinity Sunday, Madame de Grammont suggested that she should receive holy communion, though still in bed: the priest, in presenting the sacred host, invited her to meditate on the passion, and especially on the sentiments of the Blessed Virgin at the foot of the cross, where _her son died_.

Madame de Montagu immediately understood him. Her husband then brought to her bedside the young widow and three orphan girls. Attale's mother wept in silence, at length ejaculating: "Thy decree, O Lord, has thus ordained, and I submit. But strike no more, for I am ready to faint beneath the weight of my cross." But she reproached herself afterward for this.

Often before had she endured the mother's agony; but this was the hardest blow of all. And Madame de Montagu lived on to see many loved ones go before her; father, and husband, and several other relations preceded her to the tomb; for she lingered till 1839. Among them was M. de la Fayette, who died in 1834, having survived his wife twenty-seven years. Madame de Montagu and all the members of her family requested to be buried at Picpus.

This spot was hallowed to them by sacred memories, for there reposed above thirteen hundred victims of the revolution. Its continued existence as a cemetery was due to the pious labors of Madame d'Ayen's daughters. In the days of terror, a pit had been dug outside the Barrière du Trône, and all the persons immolated in that quarter of Paris were promiscuously thrown into it. The savage mode of proceeding has been related. As each head fell from the guillotine, it was cast, together with the body, still dressed, into a large barrel painted red. Each night after the executions were over, these barrels were taken to Picpus, and their contents indiscriminately emptied into the pit. The ground had formerly belonged to an Augustinian convent. There, it could not be doubted, lay the remains of Madame d'Ayen and her daughter. Madame de Montagu and Madame de la Fayette, on their return to France, ardently wished to raise a monument to their memory; but on discovering the immense number of victims interred together, it seemed more desirable that the undertaking should be of a less private nature. By their joint efforts, many families of other victims were attracted to the pious enterprise; souls devoted to prayer gathered round; the old convent and church of Picpus rose from their ruins. A cemetery was constructed round that gloomy pit, where not even a name had been scrawled to recall the memory of those who slept below. Madame d'Ayen's three daughters could at least enjoy the sad consolation of praying near their mother's tomb.

All the sisters had bitterly, keenly, felt the cruel stroke that deprived them of three such near relatives, and in such a painful manner; but none suffered more enduringly than Madame de Montagu. She was staying with Madame de Tessé, in Switzerland. News had reached her of the execution of her grand-aunt and uncle, M. and Madame de Monchy; but she was completely ignorant of what had become of her mother and sister. Fears, however, were rife. One day she set out to meet her father, whom she had not seen for some time; and he was so changed, that, perceiving him on the way, she only recognized him from his voice. Each alighted, and his first question was to ask whether she had heard the news; but, seeing her excessive emotion, he hastened to assure her of his own perfect ignorance. She felt a calamity impending, but dared not press for information in the presence of a third person. They drove to an inn; and when father and daughter were alone together, he, after some preparation, informed her that he had just lost his mother. {265} A deadly paleness overspread her countenance; confused and dizzy, she exclaimed with clasped hands, "And I--," "I am uneasy about your mother and sister," answered M. d'Ayen, cautiously. But she was not to be deceived. His looks belied his words. That was the hour of bitterest anguish in Madame de Montagu's life. Cries and tears gave no relief. Again and again she saw the scene re-enacted. Reason trembled, but still she strove to pray and be resigned. Remembering her mother's pious practice in times of sorrow, she also recited the magnificat; then, with beautiful feeling, in the midst of her own anguish, she knelt down and prayed, all shuddering, for those that made them suffer. But nature struggled still; and days passed ere she recovered sufficient composure to be left alone. When all the details reached her, strong religious feeling transformed the dungeon, the cart, the scaffold into so many steps by which the martyrs had ascended up to heaven. The love unceasingly manifested by the three sisters for their martyred relatives is very touching. They were first reunited at Vianen, near Utrecht, in 1799. The ostensible object was to settle the division of property rendered necessary by their mother's death; but in reality they were much more occupied in calling up sweet memories of her and of their beloved sister. Madame de la Fayette was then about forty years of age; Madame de Montagu had reached her thirty-second year; and Madame de Grammont was rather more than a twelvemonth younger. They remained a month together, their husbands and families being also on the spot. Not a little suffering was caused by cold and hunger, for their united purses could still only produce insufficient means; fuel was wanting, and they had scanty fare. The three, however, would sit up at night to enjoy each other's society, wrapping their mantles round them to keep out the cold, and sharing one wretched _chaufferette_. They spoke very low, so as not to disturbed husbands and children sleeping in the adjoining rooms. One great subject of conversation was to point out their mutual defects--a Christian habit acquired under Madame d'Ayen's training, and surprisingly brought into play again under such circumstances.

Madame de Grammont remarked that events were graven in letters of fire in Madame de Montagu's countenance, and characteristically advised her to become more calm. She also took the opportunity of teaching her how to meditate--a service which the elder sister gratefully acknowledges in her diary. Madame de Montagu observed with admiration Madame de Grammont's recollected demeanor at mass, which they attended almost daily, saying she looked like an angel, absolutely annihilated in the presence of God. "As for me, I feel overwhelmed at my poverty beside her." Indeed, the two sisters vied in humility with each other. Madame de Grammont having once said, "You excite me to virtue and attract me to prayer," Madame de Montagu quickly replied, "Then I am like the horses in this country; for one sees wretched-looking animals along the canals drawing large boats after them."

But the chief theme at night was ever their mother. Madame de Montagu was accustomed to unite herself with the dear victims in special prayer every day at the "sorrowful hour," and the other two now undertook the same practice. They also composed beautiful litanies in remembrance of them during their stay at Vianen. Madame de Grammont held the pen, writing sometimes her own inspiration, and sometimes what her sisters dictated. They called these prayers "Litany of our Mothers."

One of the most interesting episodes in the life of Madame de Montagu was her intimacy with the celebrated Count Stolberg, whose conversion to Catholicism seems to have been mainly attributable to the influence of her character. She came across him during her residence at Ploen and Wittmold. {266} He was at that time at the head of the government of the Duke of Oldenburg; and he assisted her with all his power in her charitable labors for the relief of the French emigrants. The acquaintance between them sprung up in 1796. Count Stolberg, with his wife and sister,--the only one of the three who did not afterward become Catholic,--had already begun to see something of the inconsistencies and deficiencies of Lutheranism. They were calm, thoughtful, upright souls; grave, severe, and simple, after the best type of the German character. They often conversed on and discussed religious matters among themselves; but they were very ignorant about the Catholic Church and its doctrines. Madame de Montagu taught them more about Catholicism, without speaking on the subject directly, than a whole library of controversial theology. Fragile in health, sensitive to excess, overflowing with sympathy and tenderness, tried by long and varied suffering, and strengthened, elevated, and spiritualized by the cross, without having been hardened or made impassible,--her whole character showed a force and power and greatness that was obviously not its own. Such persons have an irresistible attractiveness; and they speak with a strange silent eloquence to intelligent hearts in favor of the religion which can produce and sustain them. Madame de Montagu was not a person to introduce controversial topics; but she won upon her new friends gradually, and at last they could not help telling her so, after listening to the account they had begged her to give of her own and her sisters' sufferings. After a time their hearts strongly turned to Catholicism; but intellectual difficulties remained on the mind of Stolberg, which were not set at rest till 1800, after he had been engaged in a correspondence with M. de la Luzerne and M. Asseline, to whom Madame de Montagu and her sisters had introduced him. The French prelates did their part; but the illustrious convert must ever be considered as in truth the spiritual child of Madame de Montagu.

From All the Year Round

A FEW SATURNINE OBSERVATIONS.

Here is a gentleman at our doors, Mr. R. A. Proctor, who has written a book upon that planet Saturn, and he asks us to stroll out in his company, and have a look at the old gentleman. It is a long journey to Saturn, for his little place is nine and a half times further from the sun than ours, and his is not a little place in comparison with our own tenement, because Saturn House is seven hundred and thirty-five times bigger than Earth Lodge.

The people of Earth Lodge made Saturn's acquaintance very long ago; nobody remembers how long. Venus and Jupiter being brilliant in company, may have obtruded themselves first upon attention in the evening parties of the stars, and Mars, with his red face and his quick movement, couldn't remain long unobserved. Saturn, dull, slow, yellow-faced, might crawl over the floor of heaven like a gouty and bilious nabob, and be overlooked for a very little while, but somebody would soon ask, Who is that sad-faced fellow with the leaden complexion, who sometimes seems to be standing still or going backward?

He was the more noticeable, because {267} those evening parties in the sky differ from like parties on earth in one very remarkable respect as to the behavior of the company. We hear talk of dancing stars, and the music of the spheres, but, in fact, except a few, all keep their places, with groups as unchanging as those of the guests in the old fabled banquet, whom the sight of the head of Medusa turned to stone. Only they wink, as the stone guests probably could not. In and out among this company of fixtures move but a few privileged stars, as our sister the moon and our neighbors the planets. These alone thread the maze of the company of statues, dancing round their sun, who happens to be one of the fixed company, to the old tune of Sun in the middle and can't get out. Some of the planets run close, and some run in a wide round, some dance round briskly, and some slip slowly along. Once round is a year, and Saturn, dancing in a wide round outside ours, so that in each round he has about nine times as far to go, moves at a pace about three times slower than ours. His year, therefore, is some twenty-seven times longer; in fact, a year in the House of Saturn is as much as twenty-nine years five months and sixteen days in our part of the world. What, therefore, we should consider to be an old man of eighty-eight would pass with Saturn for a three-year-old.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Bishop Wilkins did not see why some of his posterity should not find out a conveyance to the moon, and, if there be inhabitants, have commerce with them. The first twenty miles, he said, is all the difficulty; and why, he asked, writing before balloons had been discovered, may we not get over that? No doubt there are difficulties. The journey, if made at the rate of a thousand miles a day, would take half a year; and there would be much trouble from the want of inns upon the road. Nevertheless, heaviness being a condition of closeness and gravitation to the earth, if one lose but the first twenty miles, that difficulty of our weight would soon begin to vanish, and a man--clear of the influence of gravitation--might presently stand as firmly in the open air as he now does upon the ground. If stand, why not go? With our weight gone from us, walking will be light exercise, cause little fatigue, and need little nourishment. As to nourishment, perhaps none may be needed, as none is needed by those creatures who, in a long sleep, withdraw themselves from the heavy wear and tear of life. "To this purpose," says Bishop Wilkins, "Mendoca reckons up divers strange relations. As that of Epimenides, who is storied to have slept seventy-five years. And another of a rustic in Germany, who, being accidentally covered with a hayrick, slept there for all autumn and the winter following, without any nourishment." Though, to be sure, the condition of a man free of all weight is imperfectly suggested by the man who had a hayrick laid atop of him. But what then? Why may not smells nourish us as we walk moonward upon space, after escape from all the friction and the sense of burden gravitation brings? Plutarch and Pliny, and divers other ancients, tell us of a nation in India that lived only upon pleasing odors; and Democritus was able for divers days together to feed himself with the mere smell of hot bread. Or, if our stomachs must be filled, may there not be truth in the old Platonic principle, that there is in some part of the world a place where men might be plentifully nourished by the air they breathe, which cannot be so likely to be true of any other place as of the ethereal air above this? We have heard of some creatures, and of the serpent, that they feed only upon one element, namely, earth. Albertus Magnus speaks of a man who lived seven weeks together upon the mere drinking of water. Rondoletius affirms that his wife did keep a fish in a glass of water without any food for three years, in which space it was constantly augmented, till at first it could {268} not come out of the place at which it was put in, and at length was too big for the glass itself, though that were of large capacity. So may it be with man in the ethereal air. Onions will shoot out and grow as they hang in common air. Birds of paradise, having no legs, live constantly in and upon air, laying their eggs on one another's backs, and sitting on each other while they hatch them. And, if none of these possibilities be admitted, why, we can take our provision with us. Once up the twenty miles, we could carry any quantity of it the rest of the way, for a ship-load would be lighter than a feather. Sleep, probably, with nothing to fatigue us, we should no longer require; but if we did, we cannot desire a softer bed than the air, where we may repose ourselves firmly and safely as in our chambers.

As for that difficulty of the first twenty miles, it is not impossible to make a flying chariot and give it motion through the air. If possible, it can be made large enough to carry men and stores, for size is nothing if the motive faculty be answerable thereto--the great ship swims as well as the small cork, and an eagle flies in the air as well as a little gnat. Indeed, we might have regular Great Eastern packets plying between London and No Gravitation Point, to which they might take up houses, cattle, and all stores found necessary to the gradual construction of a town upon the borders of the over-ether route to any of the planets. Stations could be established, if necessary, along the routes to the moon, Mars, Venus, Saturn, and the rest of the new places of resort; some London society could create and endow a new Bishop of Jupiter; and daring travellers would bring us home their journals of a Day in Saturn, or Ten Weeks in Mars, while sportsmen might make parties for the hippogriff shooting in Mercury, or bag chimeras on the mountains of the moon.

Well, in whatever way we may get there, we are off now for a stroll to Saturn, with Mr. R. A. Proctor for comrade and cicerone, but turning a deaf ear to him whenever, as often occurs, he is too learned for us, and asks us to "let N P' P" N' represent the northern half of Saturn's orbit (viewed in perspective), _n_ E n' E' the earth's orbit, and N p p' p" N' the projection of Saturn's orbit on the plane of the earth's orbit. Let N S N' be the line of Saturn's nodes on this plane, and let S P' be at right angles to N S, N', so that when at P' Saturn is at his greatest distance from the ecliptic on the northern side." When of such things we are asked to let them be, we let them be, and are, in the denseness of our ignorance, only too glad to be allowed, not to say asked, to do so. We attend only, like most of our neighbors, to what is easy to us. Sun is gold, and moon is silver; Mars is iron. Mercury quicksilver, which we, in fact, rather like still to call Mercury, thinking nothing at all of the imprisoned god with the winged heels when we ask how is the mercury in the thermometer. Jove is tin; yes, by Jove, tin is the chief among the gods, says little Swizzles, who, by a miracle, remembers one thing that he learnt at school--Jove's chieftainship among the heathen deities. Venus is copper, for the Cyprian is Cuprian; and as for Saturn, he is lead. A miserable old fellow they made Saturn out in the days of the star-decipherers. Mine, Chaucer makes Saturn say, is the drowning in wan waters, the dark prison, the strangling and hanging, murmur of discontent, and the rebellion of churls. I am the poisoner and the house-breaker, I topple down the high halls, and make towers fall upon their builders, earth upon its miners. I sent the temple roof down upon Samson. I give you all your treasons, and your cold diseases, and your pestilences. This is the sort of estimation in which our forefathers held the respectable old gentleman we are now going out to see.

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When Galileo's eyes went out toward Saturn through his largest telescope--which, great as were the discoveries it made, was clumsier and weaker than the sort of telescope now to be got for a few shillings at any optician's shop--he noticed a peculiarity in the appearance of Saturn which caused him to suppose that Saturn consisted of three stars in contact with one another. A year and a half later he looked again, and there was the planet round and single as the disc of Mars or Jupiter. He cleaned his glasses, looked to his telescope, and looked again to the perplexing planet. Triform it was not. "Is it possible," he asked, "that some mocking demon has deluded me?" Afterward the perplexity increased. The two lesser orbs reappeared, and grew and varied in form strangely: finally they lost their globular appearance altogether, and seemed each to have two mighty arms stretched toward and encompassing the planet. A drawing in one of his manuscripts would suggest that Galileo discovered the key to the mystery, for it shows Saturn as a globe resting upon a ring. But this drawing is thought to be a later addition to the manuscript. It was only after many perplexities of others, about half a century later, that Huygens, in the year sixteen fifty-nine, announced to his contemporaries that Saturn is girdled about by a thin, flat ring, inclined to the ecliptic, and not touching the body of the planet. He showed that all variations in the appearance of the ring are due to the varying inclinations of its plane toward us, and that, being very thin, it becomes invisible when its edge is turned to the spectator or the sun. He found the diameter of the ring to be as nine to four to the diameter of Saturn's body, and its breadth about equal to the breadth of vacant space between it and the surface of the planet.

The same observer, Huygens, four years earlier, discovered one of Saturn's satellites. Had he looked for more, he could have found them. But six was the number of known planets, five had been the number of known satellites, our moon and the four moons of Jupiter, which Galileo had discovered; one moon more made the number of the planets and of the satellites to be alike, six, and this arrangement was assumed to be exact and final. But in sixteen seventy-one another satellite of Saturn was discovered by Cassini, who observed that it disappears regularly during one-half of its seventy-nine days' journey round its principal. Whence it is inferred that this moon has one of its sides less capable than the other of reflecting light, and that it turns round on its own axis once during its seventy-nine days' journey; Saturn itself spinning once round on its axis in as short a time as ten hours and a half. Cassini afterward discovered three more satellites, and called his four the Sideria Lodoicea, Ludovickian Stars, in honor of his patron, Louis the Fourteenth. Huygens had discovered, also, belts on Saturn's disc. Various lesser observations on rings, belts, and moons of Saturn continued to be made until the time of the elder Herschel, who, at the close of the last century, discovered two more satellites, established the relation of the belts to the rotation of the planet, and developed, after ten years' careful watching, his faith in the double character of its ring. "There is not, perhaps," said this great and sound astronomer, "another object in the heavens that presents us with such a variety of extraordinary phenomena as the planet Saturn: a magnificent globe encompassed by a stupendous double ring; attended by seven satellites; ornamented with equatorial belts; compressed at the poles; turning on its axis; mutually eclipsing its rings and satellites, and eclipsed by them; the most distant of the rings also turning on its axis, and the same taking place with the furthest of the satellites; all the parts of the system of Saturn occasionally reflecting light to each other--the rings and moons {270} illuminating the nights of the Saturnian, the globe and moons enlightening the dark parts of the rings, and the planet and rings throwing back the sun's beams upon the moons when they are deprived of them at the time of their conjunctions." During the present century, other observers have detected more divisions of the ring, one separating the outer ring into two rings of equal breadth seems to be permanent. It is to be seen only by the best telescopes, under the most favorable conditions. Many other and lesser indications of division have also at different times been observed. Seventeen years ago an eighth satellite of Saturn was discovered by Mr. Bond in America, and by Mr. Lassell in England. Two years later, that is to say, in November, eighteen fifty, a third ring of singular appearance was discovered inside the two others by Mr. Bond, and, a few days later, but independently, by Mr. Dawes and by Mr. Lassell in England. It is not bright like the others, but dusky, almost purple, and it is transparent, not even distorting the outline of the body of the planet seen through it. This ring was very easily seen by good telescopes, and presently became visible through telescopes of only four-inch aperture. In Herschel's time it was so dim that it was figured as a belt upon the body of the planet. Now it is not only distinct, but it has been increasing in width since the time of its discovery.

These were not all the marvels. One of the chief of the wonders since discovered was a faint overlapping light, differing much in color from the ordinary light of the ring, which light, a year and a half ago, Mr. Wray saw distinctly stretched on either side from the dark shade on the ball overlapping the fine line of light by the edge of the ring to the extent of about one-third of its length, and so as to give the impression that it was the dusky ring, very much thicker than the bright rings, and, seen edgewise, projected on the sky. Well may we be told by our guide, Mr. Proctor, that no object in the heavens presents so beautiful an appearance as Saturn, viewed with an instrument of adequate power. The golden disc, faintly striped with silver-tinted belts; the circling rings, with their various shades of brilliancy and color; and the perfect symmetry of the system as it sweeps across the dark background of the field of view, combine to form a picture as charming as it is sublime and impressive.

But what does it all mean? What is the use of this strange furniture in the House of Saturn, which is like nothing else among the known things of the universe? Maupertuis thought that Saturn's ring was a comet's tail cut off by the attraction of the planet as it passed, and compelled to circle round it thenceforth and for ever. Buffon thought the ring was the equatorial region of the planet which had been thrown off and left revolving while the globe to which it had belonged contracted to its present size. Other theories also went upon the assumption that the rings are solid. But if they are solid, how is it that they exhibit traces of varying division and reunion, and what are we to think of certain mottled or dusky stripes concentric with the rings, which stripes, appearing, to indicate that the ring where they occur is semi-transparent, also are not permanent? Then, again, what are we to think of the growth within the last seventy years of the transparent dark ring which does not, as even air would, refract the image of that which is seen through it, and that is becoming more opaque every year? Then, again, how is it that the immense width of the rings has been steadily increasing by the approach of their inner edge to the body of the planet? The bright ring, once twenty-three thousand miles wide, was five thousand miles wider in Herschel's time, and has now a width of twenty-eight thousand three hundred on a surface of more than twelve thousand millions of {271} square miles, while the thickness is only a hundred miles or less. Eight years ago, Mr. J. Clerk Maxwell obtained the Adams prize of the University of Cambridge for an essay upon Saturn's rings, which showed that if they were solid there would be necessary to stability an appearance altogether different from that of the actual system. But if not solid, are they fluid, are they a great isolated ocean poised in the Saturnian mid air? If there were such an ocean, it is shown that it would be exposed to influences forming waves that would be broken up into fluid satellites.

But possibly the rings are formed of flights of disconnected satellites, so small and so closely packed that, at the immense distance to which Saturn is removed, they appear to form a continuous mass, while the dark inner mass may have been recently formed of satellites drawn by disturbing attractions or collisions out of the bright outer ring, and so thinly scattered that they give to us only a sense of darkness without obscuring, and of course without refracting, the surface before which they spin. This is, in our guide's opinion, the true solution of the problem, and to the bulging of Saturn's equator, which determines the line of superior attraction, he ascribes the thinness of the system of satellites, in which each is compelled to travel near the plane of the great planet's equator.

Whatever be the truth about these vast provisions for the wants of Saturn, surely there must be living inhabitants there to whose needs they are wisely adapted. Travel among the other planets would have its inconveniences to us of the earth. Light walking as it might be across the fields of ether, we should have half our weight given to us again in Mars or Mercury, while in Jupiter our weight would be doubled, and we should drag our limbs with pain. In Saturn, owing to the compression of the vast light globe and its rapid rotation, a man who weighs twelve stone at the equator weighs fourteen stone at the pole. Though vast in size, the density of the planet is small, for which reason we should not find ourselves very much heavier by change of ground from earth to Saturn. We should be cold, for Saturn gets only a ninetieth part of the earth's allowance of light and heat. But then there is no lack of blanket in the House of Saturn, for there is a thick atmosphere to keep the warmth in the old gentleman's body and to lengthen the Saturnian twilights. As for the abatement of light, we know how much light yet remains to us when less than a ninetieth part of the sun escapes eclipse. We see in its brightness, as a star, though a pale one, the reflection of the sunshine Saturn gets, which if but a ninetieth part of our share, yet leaves the sun of Saturn able to give five hundred and sixty times more light than our own brightest moonshine. And then what long summers! The day in Saturn is only ten and a half hours long, so that the nights are short, and there are twenty-four thousand six hundred and eighteen and a half of its own days to the Saturnian year. But the long winters! And the Saturnian winter has its gloom increased by eclipses of the sun's light by the rings. At Saturn's equator these eclipses occur near the equinoxes and last but a little while, but in the regions corresponding to our temperate zone they are of long duration. Apart from eclipse, the rings lighten for Saturn the short summer nights, and lie perhaps as a halo under the sun during the short winter days.

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From Chamber's Journal.

SLIPS OF THE PEN.

When Mrs. Caxton innocently made her wiser-half the father of an anachronism, that worthy scholar was much troubled in consequence. His anachronism was a living one, or he might have comforted himself by reflecting that greater authors than he had stood in the same paternal predicament. Our old English dramatists took tremendous liberties this way, never allowing considerations of time and place to stand in the way of any allusion likely to tell with their audience. Shakespeare would have been slow to appreciate a modern manager's anxiety for archaeological fidelity. His Greeks and Romans talk about cannons and pistols, and his Italian clowns are thorough cockneys, familiar with every nook and corner of London. And so it is with other caterers for the stage. Nat Lee talks about cards in his tragedy of "Hannibal;" Otway makes Spartan notables carouse and drink deep; Mrs. Cowley's Lacedaemonian king speaks of the _night's still Sabbath_; D'Urfey's ancient Britons are familiar with Puritans and packet-boats; and Rymer (though he set himself up for a critic) supplies a stage direction for the representative of his Saxon heroine to pull off her patches, when her lover desires her to lay aside her ornaments.

When Colman read "Inkle and Yarico" to Dr. Moseley, the latter exclaimed: "It won't do. Stuff! Nonsense!"--"Why?" asked the alarmed dramatist.--"Why, you say in the finale:

'Come let us dance and sing. While all Barbadoes' bells shall ring!'

It won't do; there is but one bell in the island!" This mistake was excusable enough; but when Milton described

"A green mantling vine, That crawls along the side of yon small hill,"

he must certainly have forgotten he had laid the scene of "Comus" in North Wales. Ernest Jones, describing a battle in his poem, "The Lost Army," says:

"Delay and doubt did more that hour Than bayonet-charge or carnage shower;"

and some lines further on pictures his hero

"All worn with wounds, when day was low. With severed sword and shattered shield;"

thus making his battle rather a trial of the respective powers of ancient and modern weapons than a conflict between equally-armed foes. Mr. Thackeray perpetrates a nice little anachronism in "The Newcomes," when he makes Clive, in a letter dated 183-, quoting an Academy exhibition critique, ask: "Why have we no picture of the sovereign and her august consort from Smee's brush?"--the author, in his anxiety to compliment the artist, forgetting that there was no consort till 1840.

A bull in a china-shop is scarcely more out of place than a bull in a serious poem, but accidents will happen to the most regular of writers. Thus Milton's pen slipped when he wrote:

"The sea-girt isles That like to rich and various gems _inlay_ The _unadorned_ bosom of the deep;"

a quotation reminding us that the favorite citation,

"Beauty when unadorned, adorned the most,"

is but a splendid bull, beautiful for its {273} boldness. Thomson was an adept at making pretty bulls; here is another:

"He saw her charming, but he saw not half The charms her downcast modesty concealed;"

as if it were possible to see some of them, although they were concealed. Pope, correct Pope, actually tell us:

"Young Mars in his boundless mind. A work t' _outlast immortal_ Rome designed."

The author of "The Spanish Rogue" makes "a silent noise" invade the ear of his hero. General Taylor immortalized himself by perpetrating one of the grandest bulls on record, in which he attained what a certain literary professor calls "a _perfection_ hardly to be surpassed." In his presidential address he announced to the American Congress that the United States were at peace _with all the world_, and continued to cherish relations of amity with the _rest_ of mankind. Much simpler was the blunder of an English officer, during the Indian mutiny, who informed the public, through the _Times_, that, thanks to the prompt measures of Colonel Edwardes, the Sepoys at Fort Machison "were all unarmed and taken aback, and, being called upon, laid down their arms." There was nothing very astonishing in an Irish newspaper stating that Robespierre "left no children behind him, except a brother, who was killed at the same time;" but it was startling to have an English journal assure us that her majesty Queen Victoria was "the last person to wear _another man's_ crown."

A single ill-chosen word often suffices, by the suggestion of incongruous ideas, to render what should be sublime utterly ridiculous. One can hardly believe that a poet like Dryden could write:

"My soul is packing up, and just on wing,"

Such a line would have come with better grace from the author of "The Courageous Turk," a play containing the following curious passage:

"How now, ye heavens! grow you So proud, that you must needs put on curled locks, And clothe yourself in perwigs of fire."

Nearly equalled in absurdity by this from Nat Lee's "OEdipus:"

"Each trembling ghost shall rise, And leave their grisly king without a waiter."

When the news of Captain Cook's death at Owhyhee came to England, the poetasters, of course, hastened to improve the occasion, and one of the results of their enthusiasm was a monody commencing:

"Minerva in heaven disconsolate mourned The loss of her Cook;"

an opening sufficient to upset the gravity of the great navigator's dearest friend.

Addison lays it down as a maxim, that when a nation abounds in physicians it grows thin of people. Fillibuster Henninpen seems to have agreed with the essayist, or he would hardly have informed General Walker, in one of his dispatches, that "Doctors Rice and Wolfe died of the cholera, and Dr. Lindley sickened, _after which the health of the camp visibly improved._" Intentionally or not, the stout-hearted soldier suggests that the best way of getting rid of the cholera is to make short work of the doctors. Among the obituary notices in a weekly paper, not many months ago, there appeared the name of a certain publican, with the following eulogium appended to it: "He was greatly esteemed for his strict probity and steady conduct through life, he having been a subscriber to the 'Sunday Times' from its first number." This is a worthy pendant to Miss Hawkins's story of the undertaker writing to the corporation of London, "I am desired to inform the Court of Aldermen, Mr. Alderman Gill died last night, by order of Mrs. Gill;" and not far short, in point of absurdity, is Madame Tussand's announcement of the exhibition of the effigy of the notorious Palmer, "who was executed at Stafford with two hundred other celebrities." {274} The modern fashion of naming florists' flowers must be held responsible for the very dubious paragraph we extract from a gardening paper: "Mrs. Legge will be looked after; she may not be so certain as some, but she was nevertheless very fine in the early part of the season. Lady Popham is useful, one of the old-fashioned build, not quite round in the outline, but makes up well."

Thackeray seems to have had an intense dislike to the trouble of revision, for his popular works, especially those published periodically, abound in trivial mistakes, arising from haste, forgetfulness, and want of care. The novelist mortally wounds an old lady with a candle instead of a candlestick, and afterwards attributes her death to a stone staircase. Newcome senior is colonel and major at one and the same time; Jack Belsize is Jack on one page and Charles on another; Mrs. Raymond Gray, introduced as Emily, is suddenly rechristencd Fanny; and Philip Fermor on one occasion becomes transformed into the author's old hero, Clive. With respect to the last-mentioned gentleman, author and artist seem to have differed, for while Mr. Thackeray jests about Clive's beautiful whiskers and handsome moustaches, Mr. Doyle persists to the end in denying young Newcome's possession of those tokens of manhood.

It is not often that an author is satirical upon his own productions; but Charles Dickens has contrived to be so. Describing the old inns of the Borough, in his "Pickwick Papers," he says they are queer places, with galleries, passages, and staircases wide enough and antiquated enough "to furnish materials for a hundred ghost-stories, _supposing we should ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any_." How little could Boz have anticipated certain charming Christmas books witching the world a few years later! So, also, "American Notes," Mr. Jefferson Brick, and the transatlantic Eden lay unsuspected in the future, when he made Old Wellor suggest Mr. Pickwick's absconding to America till Dodson & Fogg were hung, and then returning to his native land and writing "a book about the 'Merrikens as 'ill pay all his expenses and more, if he blows 'em up enough!"

From The Month.

SAINTS OF THE DESERT.

BY THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN, D.D.

1. Abbot Antony said: The days are coming when men will go mad; and, when they meet a man who has kept his senses, they will rise up against him, saying, "You are mad, because you are not like us."

2. While Arsenius was still employed in the imperial court, he asked of God to lead him in the way by which he might be saved.

Then a voice came to him: "Arsenius, flee the company of men, and thou art in that saving way."

3. Abbot Agatho said: Unless a man begin with the observance of the Precepts, he will not make progress in any one virtue.

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4. Abbot Ammonas said: Such be thy thought as that of malefactors in prison. For they are ever asking, "Where is the judge? and when is he coming?" and they bewail themselves at the prospect.

5. Holy Epiphanius said: To sinners who repent God remits even the principal; but from the just he exacts interest.

6. Abbot Sylvanus had an ecstacy: and, coming to himself, he wept bitterly. "What is it, my father?" said a novice to him.

He made answer: Because I was carried up to the judgment, O my son, and I saw many of our kind going off to punishment, and many a secular passing into the kingdom.

7. An old man said: If you see a youngster mounting up to heaven at his own will, catch him by the foot, and fling him to the earth; for such a flight doth not profit.

8. Abbot Antony fell on a time into weariness and gloom of spirit; and he cried out, "Lord, I wish to be saved; but my searchings of mind will not let me."

And, looking round, he saw some one like himself, sitting and working, then rising and praying, then sitting and rope-making again. And he heard the angel say: "Work and pray; pray and work; and thou shalt be saved."

9. Arsenius, when he was now in solitude, prayed as before: "Lord, lead me along, the way of salvation." And again he heard a voice, which said: "Flight, silence, quiet; these are the three sources of sinlessness."

10. "Which of all our duties," asked the brethren, "is the greatest labor?" Agatho answered: "Prayer; for as soon as we begin, the devils try to stop us, since it is their great enemy. Rest comes after every other toil, but prayer is a struggle up to the last breath."

11. Abbot Theodore said: "Other virtue there is none like this, to make naught of no one."

12. Abbot Sylvanus said: "Woe to the man whose reputation is greater than his work."

13. Holy Epiphanius said: "A great safeguard against sin is the reading of the Scriptures; and it is a precipice and deep gulf to be ignorant of the Scriptures."

14. Once a monk was told, "Thy father is dead." He answered: "Blaspheme not; my Father is immortal."

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MISCELLANY.

_The Dead Sea_.--The level of the Dead Sea is at last finally settled by the party of Royal Engineers, under Captain Wilson, who were sent by the Ordance Survey for the purpose of surveying Jerusalem and levelling the Dead Sea. The results of the survey are being prepared for publication. The levelling from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea was performed with the greatest possible accuracy. The depression of the surface of the Dead Sea on the 12th of March, 1865, was found to be 1,292 feet, but from the line of drift-wood observed along the border of the Dead Sea it was found that the level of the water at some periods of the year stands two feet six inches higher, which would make the least depression 1,289.5 feet. Captain Wilson also learnt from inquiry among the Bedouins, and from European residents in Palestine, that during the early summer the level of the Dead Sea is lower by at least six feet; this would make the greatest depression to be as near as possible 1,298 feet. Most of the previous observations for determining the relative level of the two seas gave most discordant results. The Dead Sea was found by one to be 710 feet above the level of the Mediterranean, by another to be on the same level, by another to be 710 feet lower, and by another to be 1,446 feet lower; but the most recent before that now given, by the Duc de Luynes and Lieutenant Vignes of the French navy, agrees with the present result in a very remarkable manner.

_Eozoon in Ireland_,--The fossil Rhizopod is not confined to the Canadian rocks. Mr. W. A. Sanford has discovered Eozoon in the green marble rocks of Connemara in Ireland. His assertion that it is to be found in these deposits at first excited very grave doubts as to the accuracy of his observations. Since his first announcement of the discovery, his specimens have been examined by the distinguished co-editor of the "Geological Magazine" (Mr. H. Woodward), and this gentleman fully confirms Mr. Sanford's opinion. In the specimens prepared from Connemara marble, "the various-formed chambers--the shell of varying thickness--either very thin, and traversed by fine tubuli, the silicate filling which resembles white velvet-pile, or thick, and traversed by brush-like threads, are both present. Although the specimens were not so carefully prepared as those mounted for Dr. Carpenter, still the structure was so plainly perceptible as to render the diagnosis incontrovertible."

_The Mont Cenis Tunnel_.--The following particulars of the state of the works at Mont Cenis will be read with interest. We owe them to a recent report of M. Sommeiller, the engineer in charge. The length of the tunnel from Bardonnêche to Modena is 12,220 metres, and, at the end of 1804, 2,322 metres had been pierced on the Bardonnêche side, whilst the work had advanced 1,763 metres from the Modena end, making in all 4,085 metres--nearly a third of the whole distance. From the 1st of January to the 10th of June of the present year the progress of the work has been considerably augmented, upwards of 654 metres having been accomplished. The excavation is now, however, retarded by a mass of granite, which lessens the work of the machinery by one-third. The presence of this impediment was almost exactly predicted by MM. Elie de Beaumont and Sismonda, who stated, as a result of their survey, that granitic rocks would be met with at a distance of 1,500 or 2,000 metres from the mouth of the tunnel on the Italian side.

_Lightning._--M. Boudin has recently laid before the Academy of Sciences a return of the deaths which have been caused by the action of lightning in France during the period 1835-63. During these thirty years 2,238 persons were struck dead. Among 880 victims during 1854-63, there were but 248 of the female sex; and in several instances the lightning, falling among groups of persons of both sexes, especially struck those of the male sex, and more or less spared the females. In a great number of cases flocks of more than 100 animals, {277} cattle, hogs, or sheep, have been killed, while the shepherds or herdsmen in their midst have remained uninjured. In 1853, of 34 persons killed in the fields, 15, or nearly half, were struck under trees; and of 107 killed between 1841-53, 21 had taken shelter under trees. Reckoning, then, at only 25 per cent, the proportion struck under trees, we find that of 6,714 struck in France nearly 1,700 might have escaped the accidents which occurred to them by avoiding trees during storms.

_More about the Nile_--Another source of the Nile has been discovered by the adventurous Mr. Baker, whose name has been frequently mentioned of late among geographers. But this so-called source is a lake only, the Luta Nzige, about two hundred and sixty miles long, and of proportionate breadth, which lies between the lake discovered by Captain Speke and the heretofore explored course of the Nile. The great river flows from one to the other, forming on the way the Karuma waterfall, one hundred and twenty feet in height, in which particular it represents the Niagara Fall between lakes Erie and Ontario. But it seems right to remark that the true source of the Nile has not yet been discovered, and that it must be looked for at the head of one of the streams which flow into the upper lake--the Victoria Nyanza of Speke. That the two lakes are reservoirs which keep the Nile always flowing, may be accepted as fact; but to describe them as sources is a misuse of terms. If Dr. Livingstone, in his new exploration, should get into the hill-country above the Victoria Nyanza, we might hope to hear that the real source, the fountain-head, of the Nile had been discovered. It is worthy of remark that these lakes of the Nile are laid down and described in old books on the geography of Africa. Ptolemy mentions them; and they are represented in some of the oldest Arabian and Portuguese maps. It is well known to scholars that the Emperor Nero sent two officers expressly to search for the head of the Nile. "I myself" writes Seneca, "have heard the two centurions narrate that after they had accomplished a long journey, being furnished with assistance by the king of Ethiopia, and being recommended by him to the neighboring kings, they penetrated into far distant regions, and came to immense lakes, the termination of which neither the inhabitants knew nor could any one hope to do so, because aquatic plants were so densely interwoven in the waters." This description holds good to the present day; and it is thought that certain rocks seen by the centurions mark the site of the Karuma Falls. Mr. Baker describes his voyage down the Luta Nzige as "extremely beautiful, the mountains frequently rising abruptly from the water, while numerous cataracts rush down their furrowed sides. . . . . . The water is deep, sweet, and transparent," and, except at the outlet of the river, the shores are free from reeds. "Mallegga, on the west coast of the lake, is a large and powerful country, governed by a king named Kajoro, who possesses boats sufficiently large to cross the lake." "About ten miles from the junction," he writes, "the channel contracted to about two hundred and fifty yards in width, with little perceptible stream, very deep, and banked as usual with high reeds, the country on either side undulating and wooded. At about twenty miles from Magungo, my voyage suddenly terminated; a stupendous waterfall, of about one hundred and twenty feet perpendicular height, stopped all further progress. Above the great fall, the river is suddenly confined between rocky hills, and it races through a gap, contracted from a grand stream of perhaps two hundred yards width to a channel not exceeding fifty yards. Through this gap it rushes with amazing rapidity, and plunges at one leap into a deep basin below."

_The Burning Well at Broseley_.--Mr. John Randall, F.G.S., writes to the "Geological Magazine" anent this extinct petroleum spring. The so-called burning well has ceased to exist for nearly a century. It was fed by a spring, and petroleum and naphtha also found their way from rents in the rock into the water of the well. Springs of petroleum on a much larger scale are met with in the neighborhood, and the yield of them was formerly much greater than at present. Many hogsheads from one of these were exported some years ago under the name of "Betton's British Oil," The rocks were tapped by driving a level through one of the sandstone rocks of the coal {278} measures; but these are now drained; and very little is found to flow from them.

_The Origin of the Salt in the Dead Sea_.--One of our most distinguished explorers of the Holy Land attributes the intensely saline character of the Dead Sea to the hill of Jebell Usdum. This is a huge ridge of salt, about a mile wide, and running N.E. and S.W. for a distance of three miles and a half, then due N. and S. for four miles further. It is situated near the southern extremity of the Dead Sea, and renders that portion of it much more salt than the northern portion. Further, Mr. Tristram thinks that it is the proximate cause of the saltness of the Dead Sea, the drainage to which has been dissolving away portions of salt, and carrying it to the Dead Sea, ever since the elevation of the ridge of Akabah separated the latter from the Red Sea, or since the desiccation of the ocean, which existed to the Eocene period, presuming (which seems most probable) that the fissures of the Ghor were of submarine origin, and that the valley itself was during the Tertiary period the northernmost of a series of African lakes, of which the Red Sea was the next.--Geological Magazine.

_Iron Implements in Crannogues_.--In a letter addressed to the London _Reader_, by Mr. George Henry Kinahan, some important points relative to the antiquity of iron, and the necessity for seeking for traces of this metal, have been dwelt upon. While investigating one of the largest crannogues or artificial islands in Loughrea, County Galway, Ireland, he found only stone implements, with the exception of a rude knife, which appeared to be of some sort of bronze. But he observed facts which would seem to indicate that iron implements had been in use among the inhabitants of the crannogues. These facts are as follows: 1st, All the stakes that were drawn had been pointed by a sharp cutting instrument, as were evidenced by the clean cuts. 2d, Pieces of deer's horn that were found had been divided by a very fine saw, as was proved by the absence of marks of graining on the surface of the sections. 3d, On some of the bones there were farrows, evidently made by sharpening fish-hooks or some pointed implement on them. 4th, In various places nests of peroxide of iron were observed, as if an iron instrument had once been there, but had been corroded away in course of time. Mr. Kinahan draws particular attention to the circumstances that "few metals corrode as fast as iron, and that, while stone and bronze would last for ages, iron would disappear, owing to corrosion, in a comparatively short space of time."

_The Gibraltar Cave Fossils_.--Mr. Busk in his paper on this subject says: The rock in which the caverns of Gibraltar were found is limestone, and extends for about three miles from north to south, at an elevation varying from 1,400 to 1,200 feet. It is geologically divided into three nearly equal portions by cleavages which separate the higher parts of the rock on the north and south from the central and lower part. At the southern face of the rock there is comparatively low ground, the Windmill Hill being about 400 feet above the level of the sea; but the strata there are inclined in an opposite direction to the great mass of what is termed the "Rock of Gibraltar." In the Windmill rock the caverns have been found, and in these latter a great quantity of bones was discovered. The bones, which were mingled with pottery, flint implements, and charcoal, appear to have been deposited at different periods, and were found at various depths, the lowest being fourteen feet below the floor of the cavern. Those in the lowest layer consisted of the bones of mammals, several of which were of extinct species. They were imbedded in ferruginous earth partially fossilized, and were covered with stalagmite--no human bones were with them. Above this layer were deposited the remains of about thirty human skeletons, with fragments of pottery, flint implements, particles of charcoal, and a bronze fishing-hook. Some of the pottery had been turned in a lathe, and bore evidence of classic art. In another cavern, discovered under the foundation of the military prison, the remains of two isolated skeletons were also found. Only one skull had been discovered there, and that had been sent to Mr. Busk, who remarked that the lower jaw transmitted with the cranium did not belong to it, showing that there must have been another skull {279} in the cavern, though no trace of it had been found. There was nothing in the form of the skull to distinguish it from the ordinary European type; but the bones of the leg were remarkably compressed; for which appearance it was difficult to account. Since Mr. Busk's attention had been drawn to this character, he had observed a similar compression in the leg-bones of other human skeletons which were known to be of great antiquity. Whether this conformation was to be regarded as a race-character, or was produced by special occupation or habit, Mr. Busk would not venture an opinion upon.--_Social Science Review_.

_Sun's Photosphere_.--From a strict examination of the sun-pictures obtained at Kew, near London, and from Mr. Carrington's maps, Mr. De la Rue and assistants hare arrived at the conclusion that the sun-spots are cavernous, and lie below the general level of the luminous surface, whilst, on the contrary, the faculae are elevated above the latter. The reason that the faculae appear brighter is, that on account of their height above the solar surface, they are less dimmed by passing through its atmosphere. They further conclude that the sun's luminous surface is of the nature of cloud, and that the spots are influenced by the planet Venus. They find that the faculae retain nearly the same appearance for days together, and consider them to be small particles of solid or liquid matter in suspension, and composed of the same cloudy matter as the luminous surface of the sun. They notice that in the majority of cases the faculae appear to the left of the spots, as if they had been abstracted from them, and, rising to a greater elevation where the velocity of rotation is greater, are consequently left behind. They remark that all the spots which are seen on the solar surface about the same time show a resemblance to each other; for instance, if one spot increases to the central line or past it, another will do the same; if one spot diminishes from its first appearance, another will do the same; if one spot breaks out on the right half; another will do the same. It appears from Mr. Carrington's and all the Kew pictures, that the influence of Venus is exerted in such a manner that as the spots approach the neighborhood of this planet by rotation they decrease; but as the solar surface passes away in the same manner, this influence causes it to break out into spots on the opposite side. The question is also proposed, whether the falling behind of the faculae may not be the physical reaction of the motion of the spots detected by Mr. Carrington, the current passing upward and carrying the luminous matter falling behind, whilst the current coming down from a colder region moves forward, carrying the spot with it, and accounting for its deficient luminosity.--_Social Science Review_.

_The Arctic Expedition--The Open Polar Sea again_--Last month we published an extract in which it was stated as the belief of the writer that there was an open Arctic sea. Here is another opinion which we find in the _London Reader_ of a late date: "We have received from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences a map of Spitzbergen, with explanatory remarks in illustration (by N. Duner and A. E. Nordenskiöld). This beautiful map is the result of the two last expeditions undertaken to explore that group of islands. It is based upon astronomical observations, made at about eighty different places on the shores of Spitzbergen, with prism-circles by Pistor and Martins, mercury horizons and good chronometers by Frodsham and Kessels. The observations were calculated by Professors D. G. Lindhagen and Duner. The latitude and longitude of seventy-nine different points are given--the longitude of Sabine's Observatory, determined as 11° 40' 80", being taken as the starting point of the longitudes. The value of such a map is at once apparent. All the highest mountains were ascended during the expedition, and the height of twenty-eight peaks is given; the highest being Lindström's Mount of 8,800 English feet. The permanent snow-line commences at about 1,500 feet. The whole interior country forms an even ice plateau, here and there interrupted by rocks. There are many good harbors, and on this map the places are marked where the explorers anchored. Fish, fowl, and reindeer are to be met with in great numbers. We quote from the memoir as bearing upon one of the most interesting questions of the day. 'During the last years the idea has been vindicated that the Polar {280} basin is composed of an open sea, only here and there covered with drift ice. The learned geographer, Dr. Petermann, has even asserted that it would be as easy to sail from Amsterdam Island (70° 47') to the Pole, as from Tromsö to Amsterdam Island. This view is in itself so contrary to all experience that it scarcely merits refutation, but as different prominent English Arctic navigators seem inclined to adopt the same view, in spite of the experience gained by their own numerous Arctic expeditions, we will here give some of the most important reasons against this supposition. All who for a long period have navigated the northern seas, whalers and Spitzbergen hunters, have come to the conclusion that the Polar basin is so completely filled with ice that one cannot advance with vessels, and all the attempts that have been made to proceed toward the north have been quite without success. Passing by older voyagers, Torell and Nordenskiöld ascended, during the expedition in 1861, on the 23d of July, a high top on Northeast Land, Snötoppen (80° 23' L.), without being able, from that height, to see trace of open water to the north of the Seven Islands. A few days later, when the ice between Northeast Land and the Seven Islands was separated a little, they could push forward as far as to Parry's Island, though they, even from the highest tops on these islands (1,900 feet, 80° 40' L.), could see nothing but ice northward. From the top of White mountain, at the bottom of Wijde Jans Water (3,000 feet), we could, on the 22d of August, 1864, not see anything but ice between Giles Land and Spitzbergen. Some vessels that had the same year attempted to sail round Northeast Land were shut up by ice, and had to be abandoned by their crews. Before leaving the ships, an attempt was made to sail north, in order to return this way to Amsterdam Island, but they were soon met by impenetrable fields of ice. Notwithstanding a high prize has been offered for the reaching of high degrees of latitude, none of the whalers, who else sail boldly wherever the hope of gain allures them, have considered it possible to win this prize. We have had opportunities of speaking to most of the masters of vessels sailing to Spitzbergen. All experience hitherto acquired seems thus to prove that the Polar basin, when not covered with compact, unbroken ice, is filled with closely-packed, unnavigable drift-ice, in which, during certain very favorable years, some larger apertures may be formed, which apertures, however, do not extend very far to the north. Older narratives, by Dutch whalers, who are said to have reached 86° or 87° nay, even 89-1/2° must therefore be received with the greatest diffidence, if not looked upon as pure fictions, and the prospect of being able to advance with vessels from Spitzbergen to the Pole is, no doubt, extremely slight. _It would be particularly unwise to choose the spring for such an attempt, and the passage east of Spitzbergen. At that time and by that passage it would be difficult, if not impossible, to reach even 78° of latitude._ Whereas, on the west side, one can every year depend on reaching the 80th degree of latitude, and in favorable years it might be possible, _in September or October_, to sail even a couple of degrees higher.'"

{281}

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

SIXTEEN REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE, made to a devout servant of our Lord, called Mother Juliana, an anchorite of Norwich, who lived in the days of King Edward the Third. 12mo., pp. 214. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

We Catholics of the United States have good reason to congratulate ourselves upon the appearance of this work. The selection of such a work for republication is proof of good judgment in the Boston publishers, while certainly nothing can be more elegant and tasteful than the "getting up."

Mother Juliana lived in the city of Norwich, England; and, as we are notified by the famous Father Cressy, who first published and edited her "Revelations," she wrote during the reign of Edward the Third, and about three years before his death. She was an anchoret or recluse, a religious woman who, like St. Bees and many others in England and elsewhere, lived alone, shut up by herself, in contemplation and prayer. It is to us a great mystery that these "Revelations," so excellent in themselves, and edited once by such a man, should be so little known in our day, and should owe their reproduction once more in English literature to Protestant curiosity and not to Catholic piety. We know of nothing of the same kind which can compare with them. There is an odor of supernatural sweetness about them, and a depth of contemplative thought, a freshness moreover and originality, which has never impressed us before when reading books of revelations. Critical authors have sometimes complained of works of this nature that much in them of what seems elevated or profound is evidently derived, at second hand, from the speculations of theologians, and especially of the philosophical schoolmen; while other things, supposed to have been seen in vision, are the reproduction of early histories, once popular, but proved to be apocryphal and destitute of all authority. Nothing of the kind can be said of these revelations of Mother Juliana. They sometimes touch upon questions most profound and difficult, but in the simplest and most inartificial manner, and there is not the slightest appearance of reproducing what she had read elsewhere. Every thought bears the stamp of originality and freshness. All is drawn from the same deep well of contemplation. All comes from her own mind, whether that mind be divinely illuminated or not. There is not the least semblance of searching after what is wonderful, or calculate to strike an undisciplined and curious imagination. For our own part, we cannot resist the impression that the beautiful and holy light which beams upon these pages is a divine illumination, is something supernatural. When we say _supernatural_, this does not necessarily infer anything strictly miraculous, or revelation in the highest sense of the word (supernaturally attested, as well as supernaturally given). We mean simply to say that there is apparent a certain unction and power of spiritual vision which betokens an extraordinary gift of divine love and light, to which her natural power, unaided, could never reach. In reading this book one is impressed in the same way as when reading the Holy Scriptures or Thomas à Kempis. There is a natural beauty of style and thought, but that is not all. There is inspiration, too. It is like a far-reaching landscape in a fair day, where the distant hills are not fairly distinguishable from the sky, and the beauty of earth is mingled with the beauty of heaven.

We have room to give just one example, which we select as showing, in a few lines, the general characteristics of piety, sweetness, simplicity, and beauty which everywhere pervade this little book:

"He is our clothing, that for love wrappeth us, and windeth us, halseth us, and all becloseth us, hangeth about us for tender love, that he maie never leave us. And so in this sight I saw that he is all thing that is good, as to my understanding.

"And in this he shewed a little thing, the quantitie of a hasel-nutt, lying in the palme of my hand, as me seemed; and it was as found as a ball. I looked thereon {282} with the eie of my understanding, and thought, What may this be?' and it was answered generallie thus.

"'_It is all that is made_.' I marvelled how it might last: for methought it might sodenlie have fallen to naught for litleness.

"And I was answered in my understanding, _'It lasteth and ever shall: for God loveth it, And so hath all thing being by the love of God.'_"

COMPLETE WORKS OF THE MOST REV. JOHN HUGHES, D.D., ARCHBISHOP OF NEW YORK. Comprising his Sermons, Letters, Lectures, Speeches, etc. Carefully compiled from the best sources, and edited by Lawrence Kehoe. 2 vols. 8vo., pp. 608 and 810. New York: Lawrence Kehoe, No. 7 Beekman street.

In opening these two capacious volumes, one of the first things that strikes us is the great number of excellent pieces from the pen of the late Archbishop of New York which are now entirely forgotten by the general public. There never was an author more careless of his fame than Dr. Hughes. He cast his writings upon the world, and gave no thought to them afterward He was not even at the pains of keeping single copies of his own publications. So it has happened that many of his best productions have not only been long out of print, but have never even been heard of except by a few of the writer's special friends, or some of our oldest and best read Catholic citizens. We make no doubt that the collection for which the Catholic public is so much indebted to the zeal and industry of Mr. Kehoe, will cause considerable surprise among those who supposed themselves to be well acquainted with Archbishop Hughes's literary labors. How many persons, for instance, have ever heard or remember anything of a tract of some thirty or forty pages called "An Answer to Nine Objections," which Father Hughes published when he was first a priest? Or of his controversies with Dr. Delancey, the late Protestant Episcopal bishop of western New York, and Dr. Onderdonk, P. E. bishop of Pennsylvania? Or of his letters on "Infallibility," written while he was in Philadelphia? Or his once famous series of letters on the "Importance of being in Communion with the Catholic Church?" And yet some of these deserve to rank among the most important and valuable productions of his pen. Our readers will find them all in Mr. Kehoe's volumes, and many other pieces with them which possess a more than ordinary interest. There is a long letter here to the Leopoldine Society of Vienna, in which Dr. Hughes exposes in a very graphic and masterly manner the condition of the Irish emigrants in this country: to the best of our belief it has never been published before. There is a touching and beautiful narrative, extracted from the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith for 1840 of the conversion of the Dodge Family in western New York. There is a description of a storm at sea, written during the bishop's voyage to Europe in 1839. And the second volume closes with a "Christmas Vesper Hymn," which has often been printed before, and even set to music, but will doubtless be new to many people.

We have mentioned these portions of Mr. Kehoe's collection, not only because they are less known than the archbishop's great controversies; but because every true friend of the lamented prelate's fame ought to desire them to be far better known than they are. Archbishop Hughes was one of the kindest, tenderest-hearted men that ever lived; and any one who should judge him by the severe, caustic tone of his letters to Breckinridge, for example, or his speeches on the school question, would gravely mistake his character. Most of the pieces that we have named, and some others as well, show him in his true and most amiable light.

The first volume is occupied principally by the archbishop's various letters and speeches on the School Question; his letters to David Hale, Mayor Harper, and Colonel Stone: Letters on the Importance of being in Communion with the Catholic Church; Kirwan Unmasked; and a number of miscellaneous lectures and sermons. The second contains a number of letters, sermons, etc., on the Temporal Power of the Pope; various lectures; over thirty miscellaneous sermons; the Church Property Controversy with Senator Brooks and others; and a great deal of miscellaneous matter, including the archbishop's speeches at banquets etc., during his last visit to Europe. Bishop Bayley's admirable lecture on {283} the Life and Times of Archbishop Hughes is given in full, by way of introduction to the second volume.

Mr. Kehoe's collection is the most important contribution to the history of the Church in the United States that has been made for many a year. Archbishop Hughes not only played an important part in the ecclesiastical history of his time and country, but he may be said without much exaggeration to have _made_ that history. His writings are destined to hold a permanent place in American Catholic literature by the side of those of Bishop England, while from their subjects, as well as the comparatively cheap form in which they are now presented to us, they will no doubt be more popular than those of the illustrious Bishop of Charleston.

CAPE COD. By Henry D. Thoreau. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1865. 12mo., pp. 253.

This is a readable book, notwithstanding some of its critics have put it down as "dry." The keen observations, and quaint remarks sprinkled all over its pages, keep its reader in good humor chapter after chapter until the book is read. Thoreau's books are healthy, and deserve to be read, especially by our young men.

This is true of the general tone of his writings. Occasionally, however, there is a slight vein of skepticism running through them. But he has less of this than his contemporaries. Thoreau had deep religious feeling, but he found no expression for it in the religious denominations around him. Had he lived in the fifth century he would have been a father of the desert. As it is, he gives you the natural side of life and things exclusively, but with freshness and originality.

The sturdy integrity of the man, the fixed determination of seeing life and things with his own eyes, and his resolve to have his own say about them, is what characterizes all his writings, and what makes them valuable where popular opinion sways.

As a sample of his talent for description, read the following pen-drawing of a wrecker:

"We soon met one of these wreckers,--a regular Cape Cod man, with a bleached and weather-beaten face, within whose wrinkles I distinguished no particular feature. It was like an old sail endowed with life--a hanging cliff of weather-beaten flesh--like one of the clay boulders which occurred in that sand-bank. He had on a hat which had seen salt water, and a coat of many pieces and colors, though it was mainly the color of the beach, as if it had been sanded. His variegated back--for his coat had many patches, even between the shoulders--was a rich study to us, when we had passed him and looked around. It might have been dishonorable for him to have so many scars behind, it is true, if he had not had many more, and more serious ones, in front. He looked as if he sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort; too grave to laugh, too tough to cry; as in different as a clam,--like a sea-clam with hat on, and legs, that was out walking the strand. He may have been one of the Pilgrims--Peregrine White, at least--who has kept on the back side of the Cape and let the centuries go by. He was looking for wrecks, old logs, water-logged and covered with barnacles, or bits of boards and joists--even chips, which he drew out of reach of the tides and stacked up to dry. When the log was too large to carry far, he cut it up where the last wave had left it, or, rolling it a few feet, appropriated it by sticking two sticks into the ground crosswise above it. Some rotten trunk, which in Maine encumbers the ground, and is, perchance, thrown into the water on purpose, is here thus carefully picked up, split and dried, and husbanded. Before winter the wrecker painfully carries these things up the bank on his shoulders by a long diagonal slanting path made with a hoe in the sand, if there is no hollow at hand. You may see his hooked pike-staff always lying on the bank, ready for use. He is the true monarch of the beach, whose 'right there is none to dispute,' and he is as much identified with it as a beach bird."

THE STORY OF THE GREAT MARCH. From the Diary of a Staff Officer. By Brevet Major George Ward Nichols, Aid-de-camp to General Sherman. With a Map and Illustrations. 12mo., pp. 394. New York: Harper Brothers.

The advance of General Sherman, with 70,000 men, through the heart of the seceded states, will ever be memorable in the annals of American history as the greatest achievement of modern times. From the time of his departure from Atlanta, Ga., until the purpose on which he started was accomplished in the surrender of Gen. Johnston, near Raleigh, N.C., his {284} movements attracted the attention, and called forth the criticism, of _un_military as well as military men in Europe and America. Many were the prophecies uttered of his total failure, but the able captain who conceived the plan and to whose care it was intrusted, carried the expedition successfully through. Of this march most of our readers have read more or less, in the daily papers. These statements have oftentimes been very incorrect and vague, from the excitement and hurry of the correspondents in getting them up. The handsome volume before us, however, is a clear and concise narrative of that great march, noted down from day to day by a member of General Sherman's staff. The author in this sketch gives us a true narrative of the entire march, and account of the interview between Sherman and Johnston. His style is plain and unaffected, but occasionally a little inflated. This, however, is pardonable, for he is very brief, and brevity, the poet says, "is the soul of wit." He wastes but few words in "saying his say," and has evidently taken much pains in getting his statements in as small space as possible. The book is embellished with a fine map of the march, and several appropriate wood-cuts. It also contains General Sherman's official reports of the campaign, and statement before the Congressional committee on the conduct of the war--valuable documents in themselves. We copy the following extracts from the chapter personal to General Sherman:

"Late in the summer of 1864, I was relieved from detached service in the west, and ordered to report to the general commanding the military division of the Mississippi. I found General Sherman at Atlanta, seated in the parlor of his headquarters, surrounded by several of his generals, and shall never forget the kindness with which he received me when he heard that I was a stranger in the western army; he said, "Very well; I will retain you on my staff." The expression of gentleness, sympathy, and consideration which accompanied this brief announcement, made an impression upon me which will be fully understood by any officer who has had the fortune to be suddenly ordered to a strange and distant field of duty, where anxiety and embarrassment awaited him. The incident is introduced here because it gives the key-note to a striking feature in the character of General Sherman.

"A striking evidence of his sense of justice and his unselfishness may be seen in his refusal to accept the commission of a major-general in the regular army which was offered him previous to the fall of Atlanta. In his letter declining the honor, he said: 'These positions of so much trust and honor should be held open till the close of the war. They should not be hastily given. Important campaigns are in operation. At the end, let those who prove their capacity in merit be the ones appointed for these high honors.'

"General Sherman's memory is marvellous. The simplest incidents of friendly intercourse, the details of his campaigns, citations of events, dates, names, faces, remain fresh in his mind. A soldier who may have addressed him long years ago in the swamps of Florida; some heroic deed of an officer at Shiloh; a barn or a hill-side in Georgia; a chance expression of your own which you may have forgotten; minutest description of the plan of the campaign; whatever he has seen, heard, or read, he remembers with astonishing accuracy. Napoleon had a similar trait.

"He is also remarkably observant, especially of the conduct and character of the officers of the army. He sees what many persons suppose it is impossible for his eye to reach. In an army of 70,000 men, it might be reasonably imagined that the commanding general is too far removed from the great mass to know or be known by them; but when it is remembered that Sherman has marched during this campaign alternately with one and another corps, it ceases to be a matter of surprise that he is thoroughly acquainted with the character of the different organizations. In truth, nothing escapes that vigilant and piercing eye, from the greatest to the minutest detail of the command.

"General Sherman is sociable in the best sense of the word. When the responsibilities of the hour are cast aside--and he throws them off with the utmost facility--he enters into the spirit of a merry-making with all the zest and appreciation of the jolliest of the party. He has a keen sense of wit and humor; and not unfrequently he is the centre and life of the occasion. He converses freely, yet he is reticent to the last degree, knowing how to keep his own counsel, and never betraying his purpose. He is cautious and often suspicious; yet no man ever accused him of deceit or dishonesty either in word or deed. His unmeasured scorn and contempt are visited upon pretense, new philanthropy, arrogance, self-conceit, or boasting; but he never fails to recognize and pay a hearty tribute to unpretentious merit, courage, capacity, Christian manliness and simplicity. He is not prodigal of promises, but his word once given is {285} sacred as holy writ. General Sherman is terribly in earnest in his method of conducting war, but he is neither vindictive nor implacable. He once said to a Methodist preacher in Georgia who had, by voice and example, helped to plunge the nation into war: 'You, sir, and such as you, had the power to resist this mad rebellion; but you chose to strike down the best government ever created, and for no good reason whatsoever. You are suffering the consequence, and have no great reason to complain.'

"Yet there is a depth of tenderness akin to the love of woman behind that face, which is furrowed with the lines of anxiety and care, and those eyes, which dart keen and suspicious glances. Little children cling to the general's knees and nestle in his arms with intuitive faith and affection. During our sojourn in Savannah his headquarters and private room became the play-ground of hosts of little ones, upon whom the door was never closed no matter what business was pending.

"General Sherman's integrity seemed to pervade every trait in his character. His intense dislike of the men who have been interested in the war only to make money out of it, is well known. From the first instant of the rebellion pecuniary considerations were cast aside by the general, and he has given himself wholly to the service of his country. He knows the value of money, but he can say with honorable pride that the atmosphere of integrity and honesty about him withers and destroys the lust of gain. Not even the taint of suspicion in this regard has ever been cast upon him nor upon the officers associated with him.

"In person, General Sherman is nearly six feet in height, with a wiry, muscular, and not ungraceful frame. His age is only forty-seven years, but his face is furrowed with deep lines, indicating care and profound thought. With surprising rapidity, however, these strong lines disappear when he talks with children and women. His eyes are of a dark brown color, and sharp and quick in expression. His forehead is broad and fair, sloping gently at the top of the head, which is covered with thick and light brown hair, closely trimmed. His beard and moustache, of a sandy hue, are also closely cut. His constitution is iron. Exposure to cold, rain, or burning heat seems to produce no effect upon his powers of endurance and strength. Under the most harassing conditions I have never seen him exhibit any symptoms of fatigue. In the field he retires early, but at midnight he may be found pacing in front of his tent, or sitting by the camp fire smoking a cigar. His sleep must be light and unrestful, for the gallopping of a courier's horse down the road instantly wakes him, as well as a voice or a movement in his tent. He falls asleep as easily and as quickly as a little child--by the road-aide, upon the wet ground or the hard floor, or when a battle rages near him. His mien is never clumsy or commonplace; and when mounted upon review he appears in every way the great captain that he is.

"When sounds of musketry or cannonading reach his ears, the general is extremely restless until he has been satisfied as to the origin, location, and probable results of the fight in progress. At such moments he lights a fresh cigar, and smokes while walking to and fro; stopping now and then to listen to the increasing rattle of musketry; then muttering 'Forward,' will mount old 'Sam,' a horribly fast-walking horse, which is as indifferent to shot and shell as his master, and starts off in the direction of the fire.

"One afternoon during the Atlanta campaign the general paid a visit to General Hooker, who had pitched his headquarters in a place almost as much exposed to the fire of the enemy as any that could have been found along the line. The two generals seated themselves comfortably, with their feet planted against the trees, watching the operations immediately in front and in full view of the rebels. Very soon a rebel shell passed them, shrieking overhead, clearing the crockery from the dinner-table with amazing rapidity, and frightening the cook Sambo, who afterward excused himself on the ground that his mate had been killed the night before by one of 'them things.' Another shell quickly followed, demolishing a chair which had just been vacated by an officer. Meanwhile the rifle bullets were singing and 'fiezing' about in a reckless way, chipping the bark from the trees, and cutting their leaves and branches. Still the two generals sat, discussing military questions, with the utmost indifference until the sun went down; while the staff officers, not seeing any fun in the business, carried on their own conversation as companionably as could reasonably be expected in a spot where the protecting trees were five to ten feet apart.

"The general's habits of life are simple. Primitive almost as first principles, his greatest sacrifice will be made when he resigns campaigning for a more civilized life. He has a keen sense of the beauty of nature, and never is happier than when his camp is pitched in some forest of lofty pines, where the wind sings through the tree-tops in melodious measure, and the feet are buried in the soft carpeting of spindles. He is the last one to complain when the table-fare is reduced {286} to beef and 'hard tack,' and, in truth, he rather enjoys poverty of food as one of the conditions of a soldier's life. I remember that he apologized to our guest, the secretary of war, one day at Savannah, because certain luxuries, such as canned fruits and jellies, had found their way to his table.

"'This,' he remarked, 'is the consequence of coming into houses and cities. The only place to live, Mr. Secretary, is out of doors in the woods.'

"General Sherman's patriotism is a vital force. He has given himself and all that he has to the national cause. Personal considerations, I am sure, have never influenced him. Doubtless he is ambitious, but it is impossible to discern any selfish or unworthy motive, either in his word or deeds. I do not believe it possible for a man more absolutely to subordinate himself and his personal interests to the great cause than he. His patriotism is as pure as the faith of a child; and, before it, family and social influences are powerless. His relatives are the last persons to receive from his hand preferment or promotion. In answer to the request of one nearly allied to him that he would give his son a position on his staff, the general's reply was curt and unmistakable: 'Let him enter the ranks as a soldier, and carry a musket a few years!'

"In no instance is it possible for the general to favor the advancement of soldiers upon mere political grounds; bravery and capacity are the considerations which weigh with him. When a paper is handed to him for endorsement, accompanied by questions relative to promotion, he leaves the selection of the candidate to army or corps commanders, reserving his own opinion until the proper time.

"He has had as great responsibilities to meet as any man of the age, but there has never yet been an instance when he was not equal to the occasion, even to the acceptance of a new truth. Few men have so harmoniously united common sense and genius as General Sherman."

THE OLD HOUSE BY THE BOYNE. By Mrs. J. Sadlier. 12mo., pp. 375. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1865.

Another new story by Mrs. Sadlier! "Why, it is only the other day," the reader will naturally exclaim, "I read one also from her pen." But such is the fact. "The Old House by the Boyne" is, however, her latest production, and well does it sustain her reputation as one of our best living Irish novelists at home or abroad. Mrs. Sadlier is thoroughly Irish in her stories, and her sole object in them all is the elevation and edification of her countrymen and countrywomen on this side the Atlantic. A most praise-worthy object, and one which must in the end bring forth good fruit. The low and the vulgar, which the English novelists, and we are sorry to say some Irish writers also, take particular pains to bring forward as _the_ leading characters in their works, find no place in Mrs. Sadlier's books. All that is good and generous in the Irish character is given its true value, and when necessity compels her to describe the ruffian, she does so in such a manner as to make the reader abhor his actions, and not as other writers have done--make him a sort of a hero, as if his crime was the rule and not the exception.

Her descriptions of Irish manners, customs, and characteristics can always be relied upon as correct, for she has made the Irish character her constant study, and beside, she feels for the miseries and misfortunes of that unfortunate but generous and kind-hearted people.

Mrs. Sadlier has done much for the Catholic literature of America. Her works, original and translated, put together, make a large library in themselves, and every year sees additions to them. We trust she will be spared a good longtime yet, to aid by her prolific pen the good cause in this country.

THE PEEP O' DAY; or, John Doe,|and Crohoore of the Billhook. By the O'Hara Family. A new edition, with Introduction and Notes. By Michael Banim, the survivor of "The O'Hara Family." Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4. New York: D. & J. Sadlier. 1865.

These are the first four parts of "The Works of the Brothers Banim," known as "The O'Hara Family," now publishing in numbers by the Sadliers. The Banims were, without an exception, the most powerful Irish novelists of the present century. Their style of writing was altogether different from that of Griffin, who was their superior in describing some phases of Irish life. All through Griffin's writings can be found that deep religious feeling which he never for a moment lost sight of. The Banims, although Catholics, launch {287} out more boldly into the world of passion and folly, and give us more dramatic scenes; more of reality than the "gentle Griffin" could possibly allow his pen to write. For this reason we look upon Banim's works as bolder and more vivid pictures of Irish life, as it existed forty years ago, than Griffin's. Griffin's are sounder and safer reading, for no word ever escaped his pen that could not be uttered in any society.

The present editor, Mr. Michael Banim, says in the preface to the first volume "that my brother and myself were joint producers of the stories now about to be republished. This being the case, it will, I trust, be conceded that the editorship has not been intrusted, by the publisher, to unfit hands. It is my intention, as each volume appears, in condensed shape, to state in how far I have been concerned therewith. It is my intention also, as we go on, to append notes here and there. It will be my endeavor to make these notations as little cumbrous as possible, and to throw into them whatever of anecdote or historical reference may appear to me interesting to the reader."

So far the notes are highly interesting. We only wish the publishers had given us the work in volumes, just as it appears in Dublin, instead of in numbers. We do not like to read a story by "piecemeal," hence our objection to the publication of novels in monthly or semi-monthly parts. When the whole is completed and published in bound volumes, these writings will be a valuable addition to our literature.

REMY ST. REMY; or, The Boy in Blue. By Mrs. C. H. Gildersleeve. 12mo., pp. 352. New York: James O'Kane. 1865.

Another story of the late rebellion. And we may make up our mind to be overloaded with stories of this description for at least the next ten years. "The Boy in Blue" is the latest we have seen, and is an indifferent one enough. There are plots sufficient in the book for two or three good stories, but they are badly managed, and the various parts of the story clumsily put together. "The Boy in Blue" proves to be a girl, who thus unsexed herself for the double purpose of thwarting the vengeance of a rejected lover, whom she refused to marry because he was _disloyal_, and of being near a _loyal_ lover whom she afterward married. The scene opens in Massachusetts, jumps abruptly to the army of the Potomac, and from there to that of the Cumberland, where the principal events occur. The characters are nearly all East Tennesseeans, and are made to figure in the story without any regard to time or place. The book is one we cannot recommend; for none of the characters are any better than the law allows them to be. The heroine is no model for any virtuous modest girl; for no woman of correct training or good morals could dress herself in the habiliments of the opposite sex. If the authoress cannot write a better story than this one, she had better give her time and attention to something else than novel writing. It is not her _forte_.

CATHOLIC ANECDOTES; OR, THE CATECHISM IN EXAMPLES. The Apostles' Creed, etc. Translated from the French by Mrs. J. Sadlier. 12mo., pp. 236. New York: D. & J Sadlier. 1865.

An excellent little book, and should meet with a general circulation. The present volume contains anecdotes on the different articles of the Creed, and is to be followed, we believe, by two more on the other portions of the Catechism. The translation is well made, and the book is very neatly got up. We earnestly recommend it to our readers as a book worthy of universal circulation.

THE METROPOLITES; OR, KNOW THY NEIGHBOR. A Novel, by Robert St. Clar. 12mo., pp. 575. The American News Company. 1865.

Here is a formidable volume describing fashionable society in New York. The parentage of the leading character in the story is at first unknown, but is supposed to be the son of some German emigrant who was shipwrecked and drowned off the coast. He was brought up by a German woman, and passed through all phases of New York life, from being a bootblack and newsboy, to find himself an office boy with a lawyer, who, seeing in him talent, sent him to college and paid for his education. Nathan P. Trenk is the cognomen by which this person is designated {288} in the story. The author seems to have taken every good quality possessed by different men and placed them _all_ in the person of his beloved Nathan. His hero far exceeds in perfection the gods of the ancients. He speaks French like a Frenchman; German like a German; Spanish like a Spaniard; English of course, and we are led to infer that if he chose he could converse in the language of Timbuctoo, Malay, or in the Sanscrit. In fact, he excelled in all things--was perfect in dancing, music, tragedy, yachting, _and the law_. He is made to possess nearly all these qualities before he was even sent to school!! He was also better looking than any of his comrades--a perfect Apollo. One gets tired of this hero called Nathan, and cannot help asking, with the poet,

"How one small head could hold it all."

As a story, "The Metropolites" is a failure. There are many good passages in it; but it is too inflated in style, too absurd and impossible in its scope and plot, and too pretentious, to suit the merest tyro in light literature. It ends too abruptly--in fact, the story is not finished; for only one or two of the characters are disposed of, and you are left to imagine what became of the author's _beau ideal_ of a man--Nathan. But there is no danger of such a question troubling the reader, for it is very few will have the patience to wade through its pages to the end. If there be any such, we pity them.

THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny. By O. A. Brownson, LL.D. New York: P. O'Shea.

We have seen some of the advance sheets of Dr. Brownson's forthcoming work with this title. The book will be out in the course of this month. It will make a very handsome octavo volume of nearly 500 pages, elegantly printed. It appears from what we have seen of it to have been written with great care, and to be a profoundly philosophical work on the principles of government, and especially on the constitution of the United States.

NATURAL HISTORY. A Manual of Zoology for Schools, Colleges, and the General Reader. By Sanborn Tenney, A.M. Illustrated. 8vo., pp. 540. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1865.

This is an excellent manual for schools and colleges; beautifully illustrated; well printed on fine paper, from large type; nicely bound; and is altogether a _fine_ book.

THE LIVES OP THE POPES. By Chevalier d'Artaud. Translated from the French. Edited by Rev. Dr. Nelligan. Nos. 1 and 2, pp. 96. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1865.

This is, we believe, the first attempt to give the "Lives of the Popes" in English. The French work from which this is a translation has been looked upon as a very reliable one. This work is one that was much needed in this country, and will no doubt have a decided success.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

From P. O'Shea, New York. Nos. 13 and 14 of the GENERAL HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, by M. l'Abbé J. E. Darras.

From P. Donahoe, Boston. PARRA SASTHA; or, The History of Paddy Go-Easy, by William Carleton.

From Ticknor & Fields, Boston. LYRICS OF LIFE, by Robert Browning.

From Charles Scribner, New York. Froude's History of England. Vols. III. and IV.

{289}

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL, II., NO. 9.--DECEMBER, 1865,

----

From Le Correspondant

GENERAL DE LA MORICIÈRE.

I.

It is the sad destiny of those who outlive their generation to be called upon to speak over the graves of friends, companions, and chiefs who have the happiness of being the first to depart. Forced to envy those who precede them their lot, they readily yield to the temptation of beguiling their regrets by recalling their memory; and while thus essaying to lighten their own griefs, they think, perhaps not justly, that they have something of which to remind forgetful contemporaries, or which they may teach an indifferent posterity.

The _élite_ of the men who date from the early years of the century begin already to be decimated by death, and this death which strikes them with a premature blow, while in the full possession of the gifts which God had lavished on them, has often been preceded by a disgrace or a retreat so prolonged that we naturally regard them as having long since entered into history. Their stern and melancholy fate, aggravated by the inconstancy of their country, may at least serve to lengthen the perspective from which our eye contemplates them.

What can less resemble the times in which we live than those early and splendid years of the parliamentary royalty in which Léon de la Moricière was first revealed to France and to glory? A whole powerful generation, delivered from military despotism and the imperial censorship, enfranchised, brought up, or completed by the free and loyal _régime_ of the Restoration, was then in full sap and full bloom. A constellation of rare men, men of original powers and popular renown, appeared at the head of all the great departments of the national intelligence, and fulfilled the first condition of the life of a people that are free and master of their destiny. The nation was governed or represented by its most eminent men. All its living forces, all its real wants, all its legitimate interests, were represented by men of an incontestable superiority. The names of Casimir Perier, Royer-Collard, Molé, Berryer, Guizot, Thiers, Broglie, Fitz James, Villemain, Cousin, Dufaure, gave to the contests of the tribune and to the country itself an _éclat_ never surpassed, not even in 1789. Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset stamped poetry with a character as original as ineffaceable. Ary Scheffer, {290} Delaroche, Delacroix, Meyerbeer, in the arts; Cuvier, Biot, Thénard, Arago, Cauchy, in the sciences; Augustin Thierry, Michelet, Tocqueville, in history and political philosophy, opened new paths, into which rushed the ardent and high-spirited youth of the nation. Lacordaire and Ravignan made radiate from the Christian pulpit a halo of eloquence and popularity unknown since Bossuet.

Perhaps this fertile opening of political, intellectual, and moral life did not encounter an analogous development in the military life; perhaps this purely civil glory extinguished the necessary attraction of the glory of arms. To this doubt, the army of Africa takes upon itself to reply.

In the ranks of that army new men, predestined to glory, began forthwith to appear. Each year, each day, augmented their renown. The true soldiers of free and liberal France were found. We learned to greet in that army a new line of soldiers, as chivalric, as formidable, as brave, as the bravest among their fathers, and adorned with virtues but too often wanting in our soldiers in former times --modest and austere virtues, civic virtues, which were the honor, and in the hour of danger the salvation, of their country. The illustrious Changarnier is the only one of that glorious phalanx that can receive here below the homage of our loyal gratitude. Of his noble companions, some, like Damesme, Négrier, Duvivier, Bréa, gave themselves to be killed in the streets of Paris in 1848, so that France might remain a civilized country; others, and the most illustrious, Cavaignac, Bedeau, La Moricière, have died one by one, obscurely and prematurely, rendered by implacable destiny useless to the country they had saved. This oppresses the heart, and certainly does no honor to our times.

Among all those valiant knights, the youngest, the most sympathetic, the most brilliant, and the most rapidly popular, was this same La Moricière, who has just been torn from us by death while still so full of fire, light, and life, of strength and faith, of physical and moral strength, of faith in God and in the future of France. Although few to-day know, or, having known, remember, that the future conqueror of Abd-el-Kader, a simple lieutenant of engineers at the taking of Algiers by Marshal Bourmont, faithful to the traditions of his royalist race, accompanied to the coast almost alone that disgraced and proscribed conqueror, and then returned to take his rank in the army where he was to conquer the most brilliant renown, without suspecting, assuredly, that he himself would one day experience injustice, ingratitude, proscription, exile, and forgetfulness. [Footnote 41] But all the world knows that the name of La Moricière, as that of Changarnier, is inseparably connected with the most dramatic episode of our African history--the two expeditions against Constantine. The pencil of Horace Vernet has made us all familiar with those prodigious exploits; he has made live again for us the immovable intrepidity of Changarnier, inclosed in the square battalion that saved the army on occasion of the first retreat, and then the impetuous daring of La Moricière at the head of his Zouaves, the red fez on his head, the white burnous on his shoulder, rushing the first up to the breach, where he was soon to disappear in the cloud of smoke and dust, in the midst of a fearful explosion, to be found again, his eyes almost destroyed, under a formless group of soldiers blackened with powder, their garments charred, and their flesh burnt. [Footnote 42] From that day he was married to fame. All France felt what has been so well rendered by Tocqueville in a private letter dated November, 1887: "I am even more interested in La Moricière than I can {291} explain. He carries me away in spite of myself; and when I read the account of his storming of Constantine, I seem to see him arrive first at the summit of the breach, and my soul for the moment is with him. I love him also, I believe, for France; for I cannot help believing that there is a great general in that little man." [Footnote 43]

[Footnote 41: I must be permitted to refer for all the details of the military career of General de la Moricière to the article of M. de in "Le Correspondant" for April, 1860.]

[Footnote 42: _"Les Zouaves et les Chasseurs à pied,"_by his Royal Highness the Duke d'Aumale, 1855. _"Histoire de la Conquête d'Alger,"_by Alfred Nettement.]

[Footnote 43: Tocqueville, born the 29th of July, 1805, was nearly of the same age with La Moricière, who was born the 6th of February, 1806. Before being colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies and in the ministry, they had, still young, met in 1828 at Versailles, where Tocqueville was a judge auditor, and where he received a visit from La Moricière, then hardly out of the Polytechnic School. In a letter of that date which is found in the precious collection published by M. Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville traces a portrait of the future hero which remained a striking likeness to his last days: "I must say that I have been charmed with him personally; I thought I saw in him all the features of a truly remarkable man. I who am habituated to live among men profuse in words with little meaning, was wholly surprised at the craving for clear and distinct understanding with which he seemed to be constantly tormented. The _sang-froid_ with which he stopped me to demand an account of one idea before proceeding to another, which several times a little disconcerted me, and his manner of speaking of only what he perfectly understands, have given me an opinion of him superior to almost any that I have ever formed of any man at first sight."]

Incorporated with the Zouaves from the foundation of the corps in 1830, it was he who, in gaining with them all his grades up to that of colonel, created the European reputation of that unequalled troop, at the same time that by his vigilant activity in the Arab bureaus, he preluded his remarkable faculties as an organizer and administrator. Major-general at thirty-four, lieutenant-general at thirty-seven, governor-general of Algeria _ad interim_ at thirty-nine, he never quitted Algeria till he had rendered it for ever French by forcing Abd-el-Kader to surrender his sword to the Duke d'Aumale, a young and meritorious prince, whose own rising glory was soon to set unexpectedly in the sad night of exile. He quitted Algeria in the beginning of 1848, and bore with him a reputation whose brightness was dimmed by not a shade or a breath. His courage, his rare strategic ability, the number and splendor of his victories, were enhanced by the most rigid integrity and at the same time by a humanity and a generosity all the more meritorious from the pain it must have cost his impetuous nature to exercise it in favor of barbarous enemies who massacred and mutilated our soldiers who were taken prisoners. [Footnote 44]

[Footnote 44: "In leaving the shores on which he had landed young and obscure, and which he quitted illustrious without appearing old, he bore with him a recollection more precious than the fame of his heroic deeds; his glory was without a stain, his hands, always burning for the combat, were sullied by no abuse of victory. When the irritation against an enemy that massacred our soldier prisoners was at its height. La Moricière, pursuing one day a tribe that was in insurrection notwithstanding their oaths, and having driven them to the sea, he suddenly halted his columns and suspended his vengeance. What fear had seized his intrepid soul? He himself tells us: 'In the disposition of mind in which our soldiers then were, that vengeance might have been too severe!' Beautiful and touching words, which reveal the man in the warrior, and attest a fear of excess in the bosom of a courage that paused at no obstacles."--_Le General de la Moricière_, by Viscount de Meaux, p. 11.]

He re-entered France, already invested with a sort of legendary halo, and was everywhere recognized as the true type of disinterested heroism, intelligent boldness, moral dignity, independence a little haughty, and liberal instincts, which become the armies of France, at least such as they were then. Race apart, these _Africans_, as brilliant as original in the military history of Europe, as foreign to the brutal manners of the soldier of fortune led by Gustavus Adolphus and Frederic II. as to the savage and cruel pride of the lieutenants of Napoleon, showed themselves always the citizens of a free country, the missionaries of civilization, as well as the first soldiers in the world.

But military glory did not suffice for La Moricière. Sensible to an attraction then all powerful, he aspired to enter political life, and as soon as he was initiated into it he relished it, and devoted himself to it with that passion which he carried into everything he undertook. In 1846 he solicited and obtained the suffrages of his fellow-citizens. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies, he took his place with the moderate opposition. By a privilege rarely accorded, it was given him to conquer at once, on this new and {292} difficult battle-field, a distinction and an authority almost as fully acknowledged and as legitimate as that which he had gained on the theatre of his exploits in Algeria.

La Moricière was born with the gift of eloquence--that gift which is the first condition neither of the love of liberty nor of the exercise of power, but which is seldom separated from either in countries and times which permit free discussion. He united the three qualities, very rare, which the prince of contemporary orators, M. Thiers, exacts of those who aspire to govern--knowledge of public affairs, ability to expose them lucidly and in order, and the weight of character necessary to defend them. But, against the ordinary rule, his eloquence was not at all the result of labor. With him the orator was not slowly disengaged, as with the most illustrious, step by step, in a continuous progress toward perfection; he revealed himself at once as a bold and successful improvisator, who, on a chosen ground, had nothing to fear from anybody. He jeered those who passed for eloquent without having his extemporary facility. "You Academicians," said he, "must always retire to make the toilet of your speech, and are never ready when you are wanted." As for him, he was always ready, and it was a real pleasure to hear him, and to see him spring to the tribune, to mount it as if it were his horse, stride it, so to speak, and master it at a single word, with the ease of the perfect horseman--then broach the most complicated questions, provoke the most formidable adversaries, even M. Thiers himself, overcome the tumult, regain and fix the distracted attention, instruct and charm even those whom he failed to convince. His eye sparkling, his head aloft, his voice thrown out by jerks, he seemed always in speaking to be sounding a charge. He managed figures, metaphors, arguments, with as much celerity, dash, and freedom as his Zouaves. Supple and impetuous, bounding as the panther, he turned around his adversary, as if seeking his vulnerable point, before springing upon and prostrating him. Rarely did he descend from the tribune without having moved his auditory, enlightened a question, corrected a misapprehension, repaired a defeat, prepared or justified a victory. Never was the celebrated word of Cato on the Gauls, _Rem militarem agere et argute loqui_, more exactly verified. Under this relation, as under so many others, he was the most French of the Frenchmen of our age.

This double superiority was manifested with an _éclat_ as sudden as complete in the midst of the frightful dangers of the revolution of February, 1848. Named minister by a last effort of expiring legality, he presented himself with his accustomed intrepidity before the insurgent populace. The populace mistook and outraged him: dragged from his horse, wounded with the thrusts of a bayonet, he with difficulty escaped with his glorious life from the cowardly assassins. When the Provisional Government issued from the mob, he would neither serve it nor combat it. But he promised to accept the Republic, and to be loyal to it, if it would preserve the army. That army was about to become, in the hands of the National Assembly and under the orders of the _African_ generals, the last bulwark of European civilization. When the terrible days of June came to show the depth of the abyss excavated by February, La Moricière was then by the side of his friend Cavaignac, who, become his chief, after having been his lieutenant, and retained himself from personally engaging in the struggle by his duties as head of the executive, hastened to confide to him the principal part in repressing the most terrible insurrection that ever broke out in the most revolutionary city in the world. Those who were there--those who breathed the inflamed atmosphere of those solemn and terrible days, run through those narrow streets incumbered with barricades and heaps of the {293} slain, and where flowed literally streams of blood, those deserted quays and blocked-up quarters, whose silence was broken only by _the sublime horror of the cannonade_--those who were obliged to deliberate through three days and two nights amidst the roar of that cannonade, while came alternately messages of death and bulletins of the most sad but most necessary victories--those alone can know by what means and at what cost their country could really be saved, without violating the laws of justice, honor, or humanity. Those who were not there will never form a conception either of the extent of the danger or of the yawning gulf in which he came so near being swallowed up, nor of the mixture of determined energy and invincible patience needed to vanquish those misguided but intrepid masses inured to war, and desperate, and whose blows too large a number of former military officers directed against the inexperience of the Gard Mobile or the hesitation of the troops that had just entered Paris.

La Moricière, more than any other, was the man for the occasion. His fiery temperament protected him from that patriotic sadness which overcast the countenance of General Cavaignac all through the bloody crisis which must raise him to supreme power. In exposing himself as at Constantine, for a longer time, and to still greater danger than at Constantine, in rushing himself the first against the barricades, defended by adversaries far more formidable than Arabs or Kabyles; in prolonging the struggle with a revolution madder than that of the insurgents. La Moricière finally succeeded in wresting Paris from the insurrection. The confidence with which he inspired the troops, the high spirits and gaiety, the heroic recklessness which he mingled with his indomitable resolution, triumphed over every obstacle, and decided the victory. Thanks to that victory, and to that alone, France was drawn from the abyss and saved from barbarism.

Hence, on his return from the fearful struggle, he was greeted only with a unanimous shout of enthusiasm and gratitude. Cavaignac hastened to set his seal to the general acclamation by associating him to his government as minister of war.

There was then a short period of confidence, of union, of calm, and of relative security. Those days must have been sweet to the two friends placed at the head of the country which they had just saved, and which gave them freely the gratitude which they had so richly merited. Their union, intimate and loyal, cordial and frank, contributed often to the charm and well-being of that bright interval. It received an official and touching consecration during the discussion of the constitution, on the occasion of the articles relative to the public force. It was a beautiful scene. An imprudent member, _apropos_ of the promotion, a little irregular, of the future Marshal Bosquet, accused the minister of war of acting from private friendship, and spoke of those whom chance and fortune had placed at the head of the army. La Moricière remained calm under the insult, but Cavaignac, seated by his side on the ministerial bench, was indignant, and, ascending the tribune, and addressing the aggressor, said: "There is one thing that astonishes me; it is that you, sir, who were there, on the soil of Africa, as well as me,--that you could see no other motive for the elevation of that man but chance and fortune. As for me, if I am surprised, it is to see him in the second rank, while I am in the first." A noble word, and worthy of the noblest antiquity, such as could sometimes, by the side of others by no means felicitous, fall from the lips of the proud and loyal Cavaignac, then still the idol of the fickle enthusiasm of conservative France, and which was so soon to leave him only the right to say, with not less of modest dignity, "I have not fallen from power; I have descended from it."

La Moricière was then at the {294} apogee of a fortune which nobody was disposed to regard as excessive or usurped. At the age of forty he was everywhere known, was invested with universal popularity, and was the second man of France. The superiority he had won on the battle-fields of Africa and at the much more formidable barricades in the streets of Paris, he maintained and exercised in the councils of his country and on the uncertain and perilous soil of the tribune. [Footnote 45] Even when individuals were not of his opinion, which was often the case with his friends of the evening as with those of the morrow, they regretted or were astonished not to agree with him; they ceased not to admire him, and were drawn toward him. It was known, it was felt, that however the passions of the moment might mislead him, the miserable instincts of envy, servility, selfishness, mean ambition, or thirst for wealth, could never find a place in his robust and manly heart. We loved him even when we were forced to oppose him. Beside, we knew not yet how much better and further on many essential points he saw, in his transports and gruffness, than many others more calm or more experienced, and who were, though in a different manner, as much deceived as he.

[Footnote 45: "Never has been pushed farther the intelligence, and the power of labor, with the passion or struggle under all the forms which create public life."'--_Discours du Général Trochu sur la tombe de la Moricière à Saint-Philibert de Grand-Lieu._]

Moreover, in the public life of free nations and great assemblies, if the clashing of opinions and the collision of self-loves give birth to noisy or passionate dissents, they are rarely deep or lasting. This is evident from what is seen every day and has been for a long time in England. One is not forced there to brood in silence and darkness over animosities which their very impotence renders incurable. Often, on the contrary, in that open-day life, friendships the most serious, and alliances the most sincere, succeed to misunderstandings or transports which with well-born souls cannot survive the action of time and the lights of experience, when people are agreed on the great conditions of liberty, dignity, probity, and honor, without which all is null of itself. But more than this, La Moricière, a short time before getting power, gave to what was then called the _conservative reaction_ a pledge the best fitted of all to make us forget the dissensions which had separated him from us. It was he who directed the first steps of the Roman expedition, and imprinted on it from the outset its real character, _that of defending the Pope, and assuring the liberty and the security of the visible head of the Church_.

To him is due the honor of initiating that expedition, of which twelve years later he must write the sorrowful epilogue with the blood of the young martyrs of Castelfidardo. To him and to the assemblies belongs the glorious responsibility of that grand act of French politics, which has been too often thrown at us as a crime, by the Caesarian democracy, hoping to gain the right to give to others an homage not their due.

Even afterwards, when the substitution of Prince Louis Napoleon for General Cavaignac had removed him from office, when the dismissal of his friends, Odillon-Barrot, Tocqueville, and Dufour, had involved his resignation of his embassy to Russia, which he had accepted at their request--when, in fine, the conservative party met him often among its most active opponents, before dividing and turning against itself. La Moricière preserved in the eyes of all a position apart and a marked ascendency. In the present he had no peer, and the future, whatever might happen, seemed to reserve to him a place always eminent, and always preponderant in the destinies of France and of Europe.

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II.

In one day, or, rather, in one night, all this present and all this future crumbled. La Moricière, at the age of forty-five, falling from the most enviable position a French soldier could occupy, without its being possible to reproach him with the shadow of a crime or even of a fault, saw for ever closed to him all access to either of the two careers in which he had won so much glory, and in which he walked as the peer, or the superior, of all his contemporaries. His military and public life was closed. The most brilliant of our soldiers succumbed to a military revolution. The statesman and the tribune, so in love with popular sympathies, was swept away by a movement sanctioned by a popularity none could dispute. He was broken when the law was broken with the assent of the people; he was broken for having remained faithful to an opinion which had for it constitutional right and the inviolability of oaths; broken much less by the unmerciful demands of victory than by the forgetfulness and abandonment of France; broken for not having comprehended that France had wholly changed her gait and her tendencies, and no longer held anything which she had pretended to hold and to love ever since 1814. He must then, in his turn, undergo those prodigies of inconstancy and ingratitude with which the contemporary public delights to visit princes when they are liberal, and superior men when they are honest.

No cup of bitterness was spared him: I mean bitternesses of the mind and the heart, the most poignant and the most unbearable of all; and I speak not for him alone, but also for his valiant and unfortunate companions in glory and in exile. In the first years of his exile he met, outside of his family and his wife, little sympathy in that Belgium where Catholics especially were almost all under the fascination of the conqueror. At that period of life when we have the full consciousness of our strength and our resources, when the employment of the gifts received from God is a prime necessity, he saw himself condemned to forego not only the exercise of power and the management of great affairs to which he had become accustomed, but all public life, and, indeed, all active life. In vain he repeated the device of his generous rival and friend Changarnier, _Happiness is gone, but honor remains;_ in vain he spoke and wrote with Count de Maistre after Tilsit, _Europe is Bonaparte's, but my heart is mine;_ he was forced to experience a long while the mortal tediousness of the dead calm after the salutary and quickening excitements of the storm, and to sink into a wearisome idleness, the mother, as Fouquet says to Pignerol, of despair. He had to bear the laceration of impatience, that mortal despite, that sterility of walks and books for a man of his condition, that lassitude of a life deprived of all occupation, that fatigue of doing nothing of which the bare thought made Saint-Simon shudder, and held him fast in the ante-chamber of Louis XIV.

But there was for him a more cruel trial still, a thousand times more bitter, of which neither Fouquet nor Saint-Simon had the remotest conception.

France was on the point of making war, a great war; and these valiant guards, these great war-chiefs, are not to be there! From Africa are drawn the battalions they formed, which they commanded, and so often led to victory. These battalions are now to march under other chiefs to new victories. Themselves so long first and alone, on whom the eyes of France and of Europe were so long accustomed to be fixed--themselves all glowing with military ardor, full of vigor and patriotism--having never failed their country, honor, or justice, are now condemned to inaction, to forgetfulness, to nothingness; noted subalterns rise and seize the first rank in the eyes of the world!--who can tell, who can conceive, the anguish, the torture of these men, so illustrious, so intrepid, and, be it not forgotten, so innocent, so irreproachable before the country and the army?

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The "Epoque" tells us to-day that a word, a single word, had sufficed to recall them to France, and to commands in the Crimea, the baton of the marshal, and all the augmented splendor and prosperity which victory brings in its train. Nothing is known of it. Always is it a fact that this word, whether it would have been listened to or not, was not spoken, and since it was not, it no doubt ought not to have been spoken.

What, moreover, was that marshal's baton so cruelly stolen from those who had so well earned it? Those grades, decorations, gildings, and salaries, the vulgar food of vulgar souls, were they what attracted, what inflamed, these heroic souls? No, a thousand times no. It was danger; it was devotedness, enthusiasm, action, the service of France, the love of country, the love of the noble flag which they had borne aloft for twenty years; the glorious brotherhood of arms with so many good soldiers and brave officers, their own offspring, so to speak; the burning desire, a thousand times legitimate, of adding new laurels to those already won; in a word, it was HONOR--and it was precisely honor that condemned them to silence, to inaction, to death--the real death and the only death they had ever dreaded.

Never did Calderon, the great Spanish poet, in those famous dramas of his which always turn on the imperious exigencies, the merciless refinements, the torturing delicacies of honor, imagine a situation more striking, a trial more acute, a narrower pass, or a yoke more crushing. The trial was submitted to, the pass was traversed, the yoke was borne to the end. All we cannot say, and what we do say is nothing by the side of the suffering we have seen, felt, known, and shared. Perhaps a day will come when these tortures of the soul will be comprehended and rewarded with the admiration which is their due. But who knows? To hope that, it is necessary to believe in the justice of history, and who knows if there will be again any history worthy of the name? We may well doubt it, when we mark what is passing around us in an age which for a long time boasts of having regenerated history, and when we see liberals make the panegyric of the 10th of August, Christians applaud the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and writers in high credit with their several parties undertake to rehabilitate the reign of terror, the Inquisition, and the Roman empire.

Nothing was wanting, we have said, to the evil fortune of our friend. After years of exile in Belgium, his only son fell ill in France. And while were debated with the desolate father the conditions of his return, the son, the only hope of his family, died. When at length he was permitted to return, it was too late; he received not the last sigh of his child. He was inconsolable. "They restore me my country," he said; "but who will restore me my child?" It was no longer his country, such as he had known it, that was restored to him--the country, above all, by which he had been so well known, so proudly boasted, and so admired. The real exile is not in being torn from our native country, but in remaining in it and finding no longer that which made it specially dear to us. La Moricière perceived it only too soon. But he comprehended the difference alike of time and men, and conformed with an intelligent and manly resignation, which held in nothing from his adhesion, and which took nothing from the energy of his convictions or the dignity of his attitude. For the rest, he had brought back with him from the land of his exile neither the illusions of the _emigré_, blind animosities, nor mean or noisy bitterness. And yet he was not at the end of his cross.

There remained to him a last human good, a last plank saved from shipwreck!--his old popularity among {297} his contemporaries, and the companions in that shipwreck, near his old political friends, in the bosom of the party which he had not only served and defended, but, above all, had honored and protected with his glory. That popularity he risked totally in the most abandoned, the most contested, and the most vilipended cause in the world. He risked all, and he lost! A priest whom he had known as a soldier in Africa, under the flag of France, before becoming his relation and his friend, offered him, in the name of Pius IX., an opportunity of braving new perils, with the certainty of being vanquished in the desperate struggle. He ran thither. Forthwith a long and loud howl of insult and derision rose from the bosom of the whole so-called European democracy. He was dragged to the _gemoniae_--both he and the young warriors that followed in his footsteps. A hideous clamor arose from the lowest depths of human baseness, from the Thames to the Arno, and pursued with invectives, railleries, and calumnies the devoted band and their heroic chief. The vapid calumniators of disinterested virtue spoke all at once, and spoke alone; France and Europe justified them. New Italy blushed in her turn to find herself approached by men bold enough to dare to fight and die under the colors of a pontiff and a father. She asked and obtained freedom to crush them. But she essayed to kill them with falsehood before attacking them with the sword, and by falsehoods such as the world had not heard since the imperial trap set at Bayonne in 1808. A Cialdini dares call, in an order of the day to his army, La Moricière and his companions "_mercenaries_ thirsting for gold and pillage," and King Victor Emmanuel announces to the Emperor of the French that he "is marching his troops into the Marches and Umbria to re-establish order there in relation to the temporal authority of the Pope, and, if it should be necessary, to give battle to the revolution on the Neapolitan territory." [Footnote 46] Eight days after the troops of the king pounced, ten to one, on the little army of La Moricière. The obscure burgh of Castelfidardo is immortalized by that butchery. Pimodan perished there by a death worthy of his chief, who sought refuge in Ancona, and capitulate when his last gun was dismounted. This French general--and what a general!--gave up his sword to the Piedmontese! His young companions, prisoners like himself, passed over Italy in the midst of insults and outrages. La Moricière, himself released as soon as the work of spoliation was consummated, returned to France, where he met the scoffs and jeers of those who insulted his departure.

[Footnote 46: _Circular of M. Thouvenel_, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 18th October, 1860. The "National Opinion," a worthy "Moniteur" of Piedmont, adds in its number for Sept. 14, 1860: "Victor Emmanuel proposes precisely to protect the Holy Father and his temporal authority against the enthusiasm of the volunteers."]

From that moment all was accomplished or marching toward the end foreseen and determined. The darkest forebodings, the saddest predictions, are verified. Christian France is resigned, and Europe has habituated herself to what five years ago appeared to be the _nec plus ultra_ of impossible iniquity. People have even come to regard confining the spoliation within its present limits as a benefit which, if assured, would make a _Te Deum_ break forth from the whole Catholic world, asleep or deceived.

La Moricière had seen and suffered all this, and it was only the last phase of a disgrace which lasted fifteen years without relaxation and without revenge. As his life, rent asunder, drew toward its end, by an insolent freak of fortune, by a contrast and a coincidence the strange mystery of which will astonish the future, Abd-el-Kader arrives in France to be received there as a sovereign!

The conqueror and the conquered, it is said, met in the street: La Moricière on foot, confounded with the {298} multitude; Abd-el-Kader with all the pomp of his official train, and the grand cordon of the Legion of Honor on his breast. They exchanged a single look. After which, the prisoner of 1847 is found sufficiently avenged on the prisoner of the 2d of December; pursuing his course with loud din, caressed, feasted, toasted by courtiers, functionaries, and freemasons, presented to the universitarian youth as the type of modern civilization and the religion of large souls, Abd-el-Kader quitted triumphantly the soil of France, to return with his wives, who accompanied him, to his palace in the East; La Moricière entered his house to die there, and he did die there, all alone, forgotten by the multitude, unknown by the rising generation, and buried in the silence of the flatterers and satellites of fortune. The death of this great servant of France is announced by the official journal among the "Miscellaneous Facts," after an article on conducting water into Paris! At the decline of day his coffin, in being directed toward a village cemetery, traverses obscurely the streets of that Babylon which he had saved, really saved, from barbarism--those very streets lately ploughed by the pompous _cortège_ of a marshal of France, named grand master of freemasonry by an imperial decree.

Whilst the Cialdinis, the Fantis, and so many authors and fomentors of the _guet-apens_ of Castelfidardo, so many other violators of the law of nations and of their sworn faith, survive and triumph, rolling in opulence and prosperity. La Moricière, for having been faithful to law, to honor, and to religion, is extinguished and disappears, vanquished, ignored, forgotten.

I have said that I suspect the judgments of history, because history is almost always the servant or the priestess of Success; but its recitals are always instructive, and I consent that it be questioned to ascertain if it furnish many instances of a destiny more tragic.

III.

But after having touched the bottom of the abyss, the soul rises to contemplate and adore the grandeur and glory of adversity. La Moricière, we know and confess it, triumphant and satisfied, marshal of France, conqueror at Alma or Magenta, hailed by the curiosity of the eager multitude, fat and heavy by prosperity, had not risen above the throng of successful generals, had attained no other glory than military glory, with which France in all times has been smitten, and in all times been saturated. His image, placed in its rank in the galleries of Versailles, in the midst of so many others, would have awakened in the souls of the visitors only a transient and commonplace emotion; but La Moricière, betrayed by fortune, disgraced, proscribed, insulted; La Moricière, conqueror of anarchy and victim of the dictatorship; La Moricière, condemned by his sense of honor to the punishment of an obscure idleness; La Moricière, beaten at Castelfidardo and a captive at Ancona; La Moricière, submitting to the wrongs of fate with a modesty and a gravity wholly Christian, then dying all alone, but standing with the crucifix in his hand--is a personage of another stamp, and rises at once from the ranks of the herd to the loftiest height of human admiration. This is a glory apart, which re-youths the soul, which stimulates and purifies it, and which it would not exchange for any other. This is a spectacle such as history too rarely offers, such as we Frenchmen, we Catholics, too docile worshippers of force and fortune, have special need of. Yes, this glory is enviable, and in reality the most enviable of all glories. In vain nature rebels, reason and faith unite to proclaim it. We are all moved by the recollection of Catinat, old, retired, and resigned in his retreat, and recalling there, as says Saint-Simon, "by his simplicity, his frugality, his contempt of the world, his peace of mind, and the uniformity of {299} his conduct, the memory of those great men who, after triumphs the best merited, returned tranquilly to their plough, always loving their country, and little affected by the ingratitude of Rome, which they had so well served." But Catinat, really unfortunate; Catinat, a prisoner, exiled, disgraced; Catinat, removed at the flower of his age from the command of armies, had been much greater still, and, as our La Moricière have recalled St. Louis in chains. The ancients said that the good man struggling with adversity is the most worthy, if not alone worthy, of the favor of God. Christianity adds, that it is a sight the most necessary and salutary to the heart of man.

La Moricière was chosen among us to give this high lesson in all its majesty and in all its beauty. He has shown that double character of docility under trial, and of empire over misfortune, which makes great men and great saints. It was because there was in him the stuff of a great Christian.

Trials and exile rapidly developed in his soul the germs of faith which early domestic education had planted, and which pure and noble examples near him led him to admire and cherish. By his marriage with the granddaughter of the Marchioness of Montagu, he entered a family in which calamities the most atrocious and the most unexpected, borne with superhuman energy, had left in the soul only a sublime serenity, and compassion greater still for the executioners than for the martyrs. Inflamed by the recitals of a mother-in-law who continued to the last his most devoted and enthusiastic friend, he had the first thought of a publication destined to count among the treasures of our history, and of which he himself dictated the first draft. [Footnote 47] In learning to appreciate the action of Christian virtue on the most touching victims of the Reign of Terror as on the obscure duties of domestic life, he was conducted further and higher still. A study, an active study, ardent and profound, of the doctrines and results of religion, became henceforth his principal occupation, and he continued it with unwearied perseverance to his last moments. Once a Christian in practice as well as in belief, he would be so openly, and no more recoil before human respect and the disdains of infidelity than before the Arabs or the barricades. He was seen at the foot of the Christian pulpit, following the words of the preacher with deep attention, and the lively gesticulation habitual to him, marking on his nobly chiselled features an expressive assent and sometimes an impatient contradiction, as if he felt that he must in his turn mount the tribune and reply. One day, at Brussels, a former colleague and friend, who had known him quite different from what he was now, found him bending over his maps, tracing the progress of our army in the Crimea. To hold them unrolled he took the books which he now generally, and which were the Catechism, his mass-book, the Imitation of Jesus Christ, and a volume of Père Gratry. At sight of these four witnesses of a preoccupation so novel, the visitor could not dissemble his surprise. "Yes, indeed," said the general, "I use these, I occupy myself with that. I do not wish, like you, to remain with my feet dangling in the air, between heaven and earth, between light and darkness. I wish to know whither I go, and by what I am to hold. I make no mystery of it."

[Footnote 47: _"Anne Dominique de Noailles, Marquise de Montagu."_ Rouen, 1859. It May be well to remind the American reader that the Marquise de Montagu, grandmother of General La Moricière's wife, was a sister of Madame Lafayette, who so heroically shared the prison of Olmntz with her husband, and whoso faith and purity gave a superhuman strength and energy to her noble character.--THE TRANSLATOR. ]

This public courage against the enemies of the faith availed him from God the unhoped for and incomparable gift of magnanimous patience, which he needed to enable him to accept and bear his trials, and to offer to God all the goods of his glorious life, which he had sacrificed. The progress of {300} that great soul, becoming every day more obvious, was manifested especially by his resignation in presence of the heavy cross which was inflicted on him.

"We welcome the cross at a distance," says Fénelon, "but shrink from it when close by." It was not so with La Moricière. He had seldom welcomed the cross when afar, but when it came home to him, he embraced it, raised it up, and bore it even to the tomb, with a supernatural generosity, serenity, and simplicity. The _crucifying experience_ which, according to Fénelon, is always needed to detach us from ourselves and the world, found in him no revolt, no fainting, no feebleness. He entered this new career and walked in it to the end with the vehement and obstinate resolution of a man of war determined to become a man of God.

A great genius has said it concerns the honor of the human species that souls born to suffer should know how to suffer well. La Moricière was not born to suffer; he was born to combat, to command, to conquer, and to dazzle; nevertheless, when life became to him only one long suffering, he learned how to suffer well, to suffer as a Christian, as a soldier of Christ, as the conqueror of evil--to suffer not during fifteen days or fifteen months, but through fifteen years, till death came to relieve him from his post.

All of us who have known and visited him in this second and sorrowful phase of his existence, owe to him great and valuable lessons, which his memory and the stern example of his death must render for ever sacred to us. Doubtless, the acts of the saints, the examples of the heroes of the Christian life, their trials and their triumphs, transmitted by historians or commentators to their spiritual posterity, are much; but they are nothing, or next to nothing, in the real presence, if I may so speak, of a man marked with the seal of election, of a confessor, not merely of the faith, but of virtue, patience, resignation, and Christian abnegation. What history, what preaching, could avail so much as a clasp of that valiant hand, an accent of that vibrating voice, a look of that lion's eye, coming to the support of a truth recognized, asserted, and practised by a soul of that temper?

No; the flame of that beautiful eye, so limpid and so proud, will never be forgotten by any who have once seen it, whether touched with the surprise of generous indignation or softened by sympathy and the desire to persuade; and that flame, always living in our memory, will continue to illumine for us the mysteries of life and suffering.

Besides, no exterior metamorphosis accompanied the deep and salutary change in his interior. Such as he was seen on the field of battle, or in the assemblies of which he was a member, in the most brilliant and the most agitated portion of his career, such he was in the solitude and obscurity of his new life. He was as vehement and as dazzling as ever, with all his fire and all his charm, with his exuberance of life, youth, originality, enthusiasm, which seemed always anxious to overflow on all and on everything around him. Only sourness, wrath, irritation even the most legitimate, seemed swallowed up in one master passion, the passion for good--seeking and accepting the will of God, in the love of souls.

Nothing in him was worn-out or enfeebled, but all was pacified, reduced to order, animated with a higher and purer inspiration. The touching forgetfulness of his human glory, humanly buried, rendered him only the more dear and the more sacred to his friends. These friends were still numerous; and friends, relations, old comrades, old colleagues, we were all proud of him, all under his charm as soon as he reappeared, for too brief moments, amongst us. Nothing, indeed, could be more natural, for I cannot too often repeat that he preserved in his private relations all his old fascination, and all his old {301} attractiveness. Essentially French, with all the good and generous instincts of our country; essentially modern, also, in the turn of his mind, his ideas, and his convictions, having nothing stern, morose, or superannuated in his religion, and willing to place at the service of the old law, and the old faith, all the resources of modern civilization, which none better knew or more justly appreciated; in fine, he remained a liberal in spite of so many disappointments, so many defections, and so many mad crimes committed in the name of liberty--a liberal certainly more moderate and more practical than in the days of his youth, but liberal _altogether a soldier_, as affirms to us one of those valiant knights who fought with him at Castelfidardo. He thought with the new generation, and held liberty a thing so beautiful and so good that he was willing to accept it frankly and cordially whatever the hand that offered it.

As the price of his suffering, God granted him the conversion of his soul. As the price of his conversion, it was given him to fix for a last time the eyes of Europe and of posterity on himself, by a struggle as unequal as generous, in the service of a cause as legitimate as abandoned. All has been said both before and since his death on the epic grandeur and the Christian heroism of the sacrifice he made for the Papacy, so basely betrayed. It was, as repeated over and over again, not the sacrifice of his life, which he had a hundred times exposed with joy on the field of battle, but the sacrifice of his name, his reputation, his military glory, the victories he had won. _Se et ante actos triumphos devovit,_ according to the truly Roman device of the medal offered him by the magistracy of Rome. "He marched," says General Trochu, "with weakness against force, a signal and rare honor which remains attached to his name in the judgment of all honest men of all creeds and of all countries."

Let us endeavor to define clearly what it was, aside from the justice of the sovereign and the sanctity of the right he went to defend, that marks his devotion with a character of exceptional grandeur and purity, which places him--dare I say it?--almost above Lescure and Larochejaquelein. He was not young, obscure, and inexperienced, as were those heroes so pure; he was not attracted by novelty, the irresistible charm of the unknown, the chances of the struggle, or the fortune of battle; he was vanquished in advance, and he knew it; he marched in cool blood to an inevitable defeat, and a defeat not simply material. To yield to that sublime seduction of a duty which can end only in a catastrophe, he was obliged to break with most of his political friends. He knew perfectly to what he exposed himself; he knew thoroughly the cosmopolitan power and implacable fury of the party which he was sure to stir up against him. He knew that _clerical_ unpopularity is that which is the hardest to efface, and the last that is pardoned. He knew it, and as formerly before the breach of Constantine, he threw himself, head lowered, against it. He had the noble courage to be unpopular, and so became unpopular even to heroism. Taking the man such as we have known him, with his character, his age, and his antecedents, I fear not to affirm that in no epoch has Christian chivalry ever conceived anything more difficult, more meritorious, more worthy of eternal memory.

Thus in what must be his check, God granted him here below a glory as rare as refined and imperishable. He counts in the first ranks of those who are the seconds for God in the great duel between good and evil--men predestined to be sponsors for the good, for honor and justice. [Footnote 48]

[Footnote 48: Mgr. Dupanloup _"Oraison funébre du morts de Castelfidardo."_]

A handful of young men, miserably scanty in numbers, alone responded to an appeal of so magnificent, so seductive an example; and of all the symptoms {302} of the decadence or transformation of European society, there is none more alarming, more humiliating, than that very paucity of their numbers. _Their small number honors them, but accuses us_, said, with too much truth, a brave man, who died at the very moment he was going to join them. But this small number sufficed for what La Moricière sought, and for all that he regarded as possible. It sufficed to represent the honor of Catholic France in the midst of the cowardly abandonment of Europe. Above all, it sufficed to strip the lying mask from Piedmontese usurpation, and to spot with blood the hypocritical hands about to be placed on the shoulder and the white tunic of the Vicar of Jesus Christ.

This done, nothing remained for La Moricière but to die as he has died. Death came suddenly, but it did not take him unprepared. It found him on foot, vigilant, decided, invincible, as when, in the times of his youth, he looked it every day in its face. It found him armed with a force and a faith it found not in him then. In seeing it approach he "unhooked his crucifix as he formerly unhooked his sword." The word is from a bishop and it will remain: "She was sweet toward death, as she had been sweet toward life," said Bossuet of his Henrietta of England. He would have said of our hero, that he was strong against death, as he had been strong against life. He would have greeted with his immortal accents that death of the soldier which was also, and above all, the death of a saint. What more admirable or more complete! That last night after a day divided between private and public prayer, and the study of the history of the Church in which he will have a page--a page how resplendent! [Footnote 49] That word only to call a priest--that only cry to procure the grace of absolution--those rapid moments passed while standing in solitude, the crucifix in his hand--and, in fine, the supreme moment which finds him in full adoration on his knees before his God!--can there be conceived a life more generously, more Christianly finished, a death more happy in its suddenness? Behold him saved from tasting, drop by drop, the bitterness of separation from his family--his noble wife, always so worthy of him, and whom God had given for his companion and his light, and his daughters, whom he adored with the tenderness and passionate anxiety of an old soldier. Behold him transported at once from his obscure and wearisome idleness into eternal activity, into a splendor and a glory which no one can henceforth take from him! What a triumphant exit from his exile here below! What a triumphant entry into the heavenly country, the army of the elect, of the confessors of the faith, the chevaliers of Christ! _Te martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus._

[Footnote 49: It is well known that on Sunday, the eve of his death, he assisted for the last time at the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, in the village church of Plouzel. He remained there kneeling through the whole office. On his return he read "_l'Histoire de l'Eglise_," by the Abbé Darras. It was his last reading. The volume was open, near his bed, when he rose to call a domestic to go for the parish priest, who barely arrived in time to receive his last sigh.]

How he now loves and esteems those fifteen years of human disgrace, during which divine grace invaded his soul, and led him through thorns and the cross, scoffs, jeers, disasters, bitterness, anguish, to the Christian coronation of his career!

"I will go," said the Bishop of Orleans, in speaking of the graves of the young soldiers of La Moricière, immolated under his eyes in his last battle,--"I will go there, to cast a look toward heaven and demand the triumph of justice and eternal honor on the earth; I will go there to relieve my heart from its sadness and to strengthen my soul in its faintings. I will learn from them to keep burning within me zeal for the Church and zeal for souls,--to devote myself to the struggle of truth and justice, even to the last whisper of my voice and my last sigh."

And we will go, and the great and dear bishop will come with us;--we {303} will go and ask, and learn all that we lack, near that grave opened on the barren heath in Bretagne, at the foot of an unrecognized cross, where lie the remains of the immortal chief of those victims--of him who, as Duguesclin, Duguesclin his countryman, had well deserved to sleep among the kings at Saint-Denis. So long as there shall be a Christian France, that distant and solitary tomb will appear to the soul clothed with a solemn grandeur and a touching majesty. Far from the intoxications of the battle-field, far from the theatre of his struggles and his successes, under that mound of earth which will cover to the day of judgment that brave heart and that victorious arm,--there, there with love it will go to invoke that great soul, betrayed by fortune and magnified by sacrifice. It is there that it will admire without reserve the warrior, the statesman, who preserved unstained his honor--the honor of the soldier, of the citizen, and of the Christian. It is there that it will be needful to go to learn the emptiness of human hopes, and at the same time that there is even in this world true greatness and real virtue. That grave will tell us how necessary it is to despise iniquitous victories, and to serve in the army of justice against the army of fortune; to protest against enervating indolence, against servile compliances, against the idolatry of Success; to place above the poor tinsel of a false greatness fidelity to convictions deserted, to the torn flag of liberty denied, to friends persecuted, to the proscribed, and to the vanquished. That tomb will teach us, in the confusion and instability of the present, to preserve before all things integrity of character, which makes all the power and all the value of the man here below. But from that tomb will come forth at the same time a harder and a more necessary lesson still. It will teach us how to be gentle and strong in adversity; to find calm and joy in suffering; to bear it without depression and without sourness; to consent, where need is, to be only a useless servant, and to gain thus eternal life. Yes, all this will be revealed by the grave of him who will not be forgotten, because he united in his life things too often separated; because he was not only a great captain, a great servant of his country, a faithful soldier of liberty, an honest man, a great citizen, but also a great Christian, an humble and brave Christian, who loved his soul, and has saved it.

CH. DE MONTALEMBERT.

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From The Month.

CONSTANCE SHERWOOD.

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

BY LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON.