CHAPTER VIII.

ELLEN'S HISTORY.

Ellen D'Aubrey was the daughter of an Irish officer, who her mother (Ellen Carpenter) had married against the wishes of her family. Our heroine was their only child. {191} Soon after her birth the mother, Mrs. D'Aubrey, fell into delicate health, and years of pain and suffering ensued, after which she died, leaving Ellen, then ten years old, to condole her husband for her loss. This, however, was not so easy, for Captain D'Aubrey had truly loved his refined and gentle wife, and the illness she had borne with so much sweetness and patience had the more endeared her to him; besides which, during that sickness he had learned many important lessons. Up to that time his wife, though amiable and affectionate, had thought but little on serious subjects, and he, though nominally a Catholic, had neglected his religion. But when sorrow came, and the wife and mother became aware that though she might linger on a while, she could not regain health, and must leave behind her those so dear to her, then an anxiety for future reunion took possession of her. She began to question her husband of religion, and he, recalling for her solace the lessons of his youth, became himself impressed with their importance. Catholic truth and Catholic consolation were poured into the soul of the departing wife, and having procured her every necessary aid, the captain imparted himself a great consolation by promising to watch over the education of their darling child, and endeavor to bring her up in the faithful performance of her duties as a Catholic Christian, without endangering her faith by permitting her to frequent schools or society hostile to her religion.

The noble-hearted captain had scarcely closed the eyes of the being he held so dear, than he began to consider how he might best fulfil his promise. He sold his commission, and living on a small annuity which he possessed, applied himself to develop in his child the powers that lay enfolded in her soul; but above all, he sought to cherish and to strengthen religious principle. Well did the little Ellen repay his care. At that time, in England, there were few exterior aids to religion. Catholic chapels were few and far apart. One priest attended many missions, and these but stealthily; but so much the more sedulously did the captain endeavor to infuse the spirit of religion into the soul of his child, and to animate her with patience, meekness, humility, and universal charity. Loving and beloved, she grew up beneath her father's eye like a beautiful flower, reciprocating his tenderness, and increasing daily in beauty and accomplishments. Suddenly a dark cloud lowered above that happy home. Captain D'Aubrey was seized with a fever, and in three days expired, leaving Ellen, at the age of sixteen, an orphan, almost penniless, cast upon the world's cold charity.

Strangers made out her connexions, for Ellen was stupefied by the blow. Strangers wrote to Mrs. Carpenter, her maternal grandmother, and before Ellen well knew what she was about she was travelling south with an old lady, who endeavored in vain to rouse her from her sorrow.

When the captain's affairs were arranged, but little was found remaining. His annuity ceased at his death. It had just sufficed for their maintenance; and as the sale of the furniture amounted to very little, the poor girl was utterly dependent.

Such was the account given by Mrs. Carpenter to Mrs. Barford, her married daughter, with whom, being herself a widow, she then resided. Mrs. Barford had married a man whose character was the very reverse of that of Ellen's father. He was a thorough business-like, money-making instrument, having no higher idea than to be continually extending his business, no higher ambition than to be mayor of the city in which he resided. Already he was a great man in his own estimation, and he intended that his family should become of importance also. This couple received Ellen but coldly, though she hardly knew or felt it, for she was as yet absorbed in grief. Mrs. Carpenter intended to be kind, and insisted on Ellen's grief being respected. {192} A week or two passed, then it was proposed one Sunday to Ellen to go with the family to church. She excused herself. Another week passed--and the same proposal was repeated. On this she was closely questioned as to the reason why; and when Mr. Barford came at length to understand that Ellen was a Catholic, his anger knew no bounds. A Catholic in his own house! _He_ feed popery! _He_ foster rebellion! _He_ countenance powder-plots! The thing was impossible! the girl must leave the house--she would corrupt the children, contaminate the servants, compromise his respectability, pervert the neighborhood; in short, breed every kind of disorder and endanger his position. Go she must. In vain his wife pleaded that the poor girl had nowhere to go to; she was obliged to summon Mrs. Carpenter to her aid. As the old lady had plenty of money, Mr. Barford held her habitually in respect, especially as she could will it as she pleased; therefore, when she insisted that where she was her grand-daughter should find a home, the great man yielded, and among themselves they arranged a plan which was to counteract the evil influence they dreaded. Mrs. Carpenter undertook to watch Ellen closely, and by degrees to win her from her papistry: and as there was no papist church in the locality, the neighbors need not even know what her religion was.

As for powder-plots, the good old lady argued that a girl of sixteen, without friends, money, or resources, could not effect much against the government, so she was not uneasy on that score. Silenced, but not convinced, Mr. Barford, who dared not disoblige his wife's mother, said no more on the subject to her, but he determined to keep a sharp lookout, and nip in the bud any incipient conspiracy. But under these influences, the poor girl's happiness was sadly compromised. Her grandmother undertook to enlighten her as to the character of these papists, to show her what a terrible set these unfortunate, benighted idolaters are, and so to bring her round to the Protestant establishment. Most horrible tales of conspiracies, plots, martyrdoms, inquisitorial victimizing, and every species of villanous scheming for the overthrow of pure religion, were recounted to her. These failing to make impression, the sin of idolatry was brought home to herself, and on Fridays the crime of not eating meat was by no means accounted a small one. A regular series of petty persecutions were commenced, the children of the family were taught to distrust her; she was not allowed to make acquaintances in the neighborhood, nor to stir out, save at her grandmother's side.

The old lady meant well in the part she took in this; she was not aware of the greater portion of the annoyance Ellen underwent, and she thought time only was wanted to enable her to throw off the prejudices of her education. She really liked Ellen for her refinement and gentleness, and kept her as much as she could about her. She made her read to her, and wait upon her; and though the books were not to Ellen's taste, yet this was by far the most tolerable portion of her existence. But even of this small alleviation, Mrs. Barford grew jealous; she was greatly afraid that her mother would leave too great a portion of her wealth to the poor orphan girl, and her harshness increased in proportion as Mrs. Carpenter's partiality manifested itself. She did not hesitate to impute the most unworthy motives to Ellen for paying such kind and respectful attentions to her grandmother, for Ellen's conduct contrasted too painfully with that of the unruly children of the household; and when by her reproaches Mrs. Barford drew tears from the poor girl's eyes, she would bid her "go and warm herself into her grandmother's favor, by her Jesuitical caresses and her crocodile tears." {193} Poor girl! it was no wonder that she became pale and thin and miserable; but instead of being induced to give up her religion, she clung to it the more, the more she stood in need of consolation. And thus a year, a long and dreary year, had passed away. At length a partial respite came. Mrs. Carpenter was taken sick; Ellen waited on her most assiduously; but although she could scarcely be spared as a nurse, on account of the comfort her presence seemed to afford the sick, yet Mrs. Barford's jealousy, and her husband's ill-treatment, considerably increased. Measures were often spoken of between this amiable pair, and plans devised to effect an estrangement between Ellen and her grandmother. The old lady partially recover, and then Mrs. Barford grew eloquent on the wonderful effects of a change of air. By dint of manoeuvering, she at length made the poor sick woman consent to dispense with Ellen's attendance at the watering-place to which they were bound. Mrs. Barford went herself to take care of her mother, and her children accompanied her.

* * * * * * Ellen was now virtually alone, for Mr. Barford was engaged in his business, and not wish to be troubled with her company, even at his meals. What a relief! Ellen heard the carriage drive from the door with a feeling of release from bitter thraldom. How long it might last she knew not, but certainly for some weeks. She read her own books --her father's books--so long concealed at the bottom of her chest. She opened the piano, and sang the hymns of the church. She took out her sketch-book, and reviewed the seems she had visited with her father.

At once her spirits rose, her eyes sparkled, her animation returned, and at the close of the day she retired to rest, for the first time in that house, with a light and joyous spirit. The next morning she was up with the lark. She opened her window to inhale the balmy air, and a gush of joy came over her as she felt that she was secure from annoyance at least for a time. A hasty breakfast was soon despatched, and the fragrant, breeze driving in at the window, attracted her attention to the flowery meadows. Her spirits were too keen to permit her to sit still, and as the bright sunshine poured in upon her, she asked herself why she should not enjoy it out of doors; she had been imprisoned so long, and now there was no one to rebuke or find fault with what she did. She could not withstand the temptation. "I will go and sketch the ruins of the abbey," she said, "and meditate on the times the good old monks were there." Sketch-book in hand she sallied forth. The streets of the city were soon traversed, and the avenues leading to the ruins more slowly paced. The morning was one of most glorious beauty. The birds sang in the new-leafing groves, the busy bees hummed, and the dew-drops clinging to the tips of the fresh-springing grass, presented a most dazzling appearance as, waving in the sunshine, they reflected hues of every color, and freshened with new life the whole creation. Ellen's spirits were at their height; yet with somewhat of a solemn step she approached the hallowed solitudes. None was there save herself--at least she perceived none. Long she wandered within the precincts trodden by holy feet of old, and at length sat down on a fallen tree to begin her sketch.

The ruin had formerly been surrounded by a moat; even now one side of this remained, and communicated with the river. By the side of this, our heroine took her seat on the fallen tree. How long she sat she knew not. It was a great delight to her once more to handle the pencil so long laid aside. She worked as if inspired, and the main features were at length described with taste and accuracy. In her eagerness she had untied her bonnet, (which was a close one, covering her face, after the fashion of those days,) and pushed it slightly back, {194} thus displaying her animated features, unconscious the while that a stranger was gazing at her, and that for upward of an hour he had been tracing her features in his gratified imagination.

At length she rose to depart, but as she was putting up her sketch, her bonnet fell from her head, and would have rolled into the river had not the stranger caught it, as it reached the brink, and gracefully restored it to her. He was older than herself and wore an officer's uniform. Could there be any harm in thanking him, and in unfolding, at his request, the sketch which had occasioned the accident? Ellen thought not of harm. She was unversed in the world's ways, and had experienced more of its annoyances than its dangers. Insensibly a conversation was entered into. It was prolonged until the shadows proclaimed that the sun was verging to the west. The stranger was evidently pleased and surprised at Ellen's keen sense of natural and artistic beauty, and at the simple yet poetic manner in which she clothed her ideas. The themes dilated on touched exactly his favorite hobby, and it was evidently a gratification to him to find one fresh in feeling, endowed with genius and beauty, who could appreciate his feelings and sympathize with his artistic tastes.

Reluctantly he parted with his companion, and on the morrow he seemed intuitively to know where he should find her, to renew the enjoyment of the previous day. Another day came, and another, until at length it became a matter of course that the two should meet. And still it was only poetry, or music, or painting, that occupied them. Why, then, did Ellen half surmise that the meeting was wrong? One day she did keep away, and thought she would try to do so always, but the hours hung heavily on her hands, and her resolution failed; so the walks continued.

At length the period for her aunt's return arrived, and not only must she expect to be virtually imprisoned as before, but the dread of what her aunt would say when she heard (as surely from some kind, gossiping neighbor she would hear) of her daily interviews with a strange gentleman, broke upon her. Why had she not thought of this before? Why had she yielded to the temptation? All too late those questions now, and those only who know what it is to live amid insult and neglect can appreciate her feelings or estimate the temptations to which she was exposed.

The stranger, who called himself Colonel Ellwood, had travelled much; he spoke to her of Italy, of Spain, of France; he had brought her a rosary which the Pope had blessed, and had described to her in glowing terms many of the ceremonies which he has witnessed. Why should she distrust him? With tears in her eyes she told him that in two days her aunt was expected home, and that these interviews must cease. "Indeed," she added, "I am afraid my aunt will half-kill me when she finds they have ever taken place."

"Then why not forestall her return by your own departure?"

"And to what quarter of the world should I go?' asked Ellen.

"If, sweet lady, you would trust yourself with me," said Colonel Ellwood.

Ellen started and shrank back, but the colonel followed her, saying: "Nay, do me not the injustice to suppose that I would wrong you; the impression you have made upon me is for life; your happiness, your honor, are as dear to me as my own soul. It is marriage I offer you--a _bona fide_ marriage, though a private one. My circumstances at this moment are peculiar. But fly with me, and a Catholic priest shall bless our union; I swear it on my honor."

Ellen hesitated, but her very hesitation encouraged hope. The day passed. Another came. Again Colonel Ellwood urged flight. Again the fear beset her lest her aunt should hear of these clandestine meetings. Love, too, for the stranger, who, although {195} unknown, was evidently refined, cultivated, and well versed in all human learning, grew rapidly since he had declared his love. To lose him was to lose everything; for who save he had shown kindness to the poor, friendless orphan girl? The time passed:--the day was at hand--a restless day--sleepless night--haunted by the sound of carriage wheels bringing back her tyrant to her home. Ellen's resolution gave way: two hours before her aunt's arrival she quitted that dwelling of strife for ever.

Colonel Ellwood appeared to keep his promise. One in the dress of a Catholic priest united them in marriage, and to Ellen's fancy that there was someone of informality in the ceremony, came the ready reply that it was necessitated by the anomalous position of a Catholic priest in England. [Footnote 37]

[Footnote 37: This was before the Catholic emancipation bill had passed.]

She knew little or nothing of the law, and for some time afterward she resided on the Continent with her husband. Here no doubt harassed her; love for him excluded doubt, and that love at times nearly reached the height of adoration. On the other hand, the happiness of geniality, combined with the high mental culture which her husband loved to promote, added so intellectual, nay so ethereal an expression to her naturally handsome features, that his love and reverence increased as time wore on, and he dared not tell the being who thus fondly loved him for himself alone, how foully he had deceived her. In his eyes she was an angel of light; and far from offering impediments to her fulfilling her religious duties, he delighted in her constancy; though there were times when a cloud came over him, and he felt as if he were but he demon of darkness by her side, destined to become the destroyer of her happiness. At such moments, Ellen, who was in mute amazement at the paroxysms which assailed him would strive by every endearing art to charm away his melancholy, and by so doing sometimes nearly drove him to frenzy; and alarmed her for his sanity, without decreasing her affection. But these fitful moments passed away. Continental troubles drove them back to England, and here Colonel Ellwood's difficulty in keeping his incognito increased. Sometimes he took an abode for her in the North of Scotland, sometimes in the mountains of Wales; his restlessness and anxiety distressed and puzzled her, he was not the same man in England he had seemed on the Continent. He was often absent, too, for weeks, nay for months together; but this he accounted for so plausibly on the score of army duties and the like, that Ellen tried to be satisfied, especially as he carried on a constant correspondence with her, and always sent her regular and plentiful remittances. But one circumstance puzzled her even in this--it was that she had to address all her answers to him under cover to his lawyer. This person, who knew nothing of Ellen, believed it was a sort of affair common among the nobility, young and old, and performed the business part of the transaction faithfully as regarded transmitting money and letters, while he gave himself no further trouble about the matter.

The time of discovery arrived but too soon. Ellen's child had been ill, and she had taken him to the seacoast to restore his health. It was the first time that she had ever left the residence appointed for her by her husband without his sanction and permission, and it was the urgency of the case that prompted her to deviate from this settled plan. She thought to be gone only a few days, and his last letter had bidden her not to expect him for a month or two, as pressing business was to be imperatively attended to; so there was little chance of his being displeased at the proceeding, indeed he had never been really displeased with her. She went, then, and on the beach she was recognized by a lady she did not remember, but {196} who chanced to have a better memory than Ellen. The lady appeared to be somewhat of a morose and malignant disposition, and entered into conversation apparently to gratify some ill-natured feeling. Ellen was annoyed and would have avoided her, but the other evidently had an object in view. At last she blurted out:

"So the Duke of Durimond is to be married soon, I hear."

"I do not know," said Ellen, "I have no acquaintance among the great."

"No acquaintance with the Duke of Durimond, madam? Why, surely I saw you at----Hotel in Inverness-shire with him three years ago."

"In Inverness-shire I was with my husband, but I saw no duke there."

"Your husband, ma'am! the gentleman was called Colonel Ellwood, was he not? Well, then, madam, the world believes Colonel Ellwood and the Duke of Durimond to be the same person. But, to be sure, you ought to know best. I can only say I was told so, often, in Inverness-shire, and now the duke is gone to marry Miss Godfrey of Estcourt Hall; is that a secret also to you?"

The woman evidently gloated in the pain she inflicted, and stood gazing at the victim. Ellen replied not--she was thunderstruck. Then she deemed it impossible. She turned back to the house, gave up the lodgings, and returned to her former home. There, making necessary arrangements, she left her child in the care of trustworthy servants, and ordering a post-chaise, was driven, as fast as horses could carry her, to the house of the London lawyer, travelling night and day till she reached her destination.

The lawyer, Mr. Reynolds, would not reply to her questions. He begged the lady to go home, saying that Colonel Ellwood would soon be with her, and that he would be the best person to explain all mysteries. He, Mr. Reynolds, really was not in a position to satisfy her.

What an answer to an anxious heart! mystery upon mystery! Why, since they came to England, did these long absences take place? Why did she not know his address? Why--a long list of whys that sorely oppressed her heart. What was she to do now? Being thus far, she thought at least she would go down to Estcourt Hall and try to catch a glimpse of the Duke of Durimond; she would know then if the report that identified him with her husband was based on truth.

She turned suddenly on the lawyer: "Where is the Duke of Durimond at this instant?" Her manner, so unlike her usual calm demeanor, startled Mr. Reynolds, and put him off his guard.

"I believe, madam, the duke is at the mansion of the Hon. Mr. Godfrey, at Estcourt."

"What is he doing there?"

"The world reports him as about to be married."

Ellen turned in a resolute manner to the door--the lawyer followed her. "Be persuaded, ma'am, go home in peace; all will be right in time, believe me."

Ellen got into the post-chaise, and ordered the driver to proceed to Sussex without delay. That night she was at Estcourt. The next day, as we have seen, she approached the carriage, recognized the duke to be Colonel Ellwood, followed him in his bridal tour, spoke with him, and then returned, as best she might, to her now dreary home.

The duke sent to her--she received not his messages; he wrote--she returned his letters unopened; he called on a Roman Catholic prelate to confess the transaction, and beg of him to take care that Ellen was suitably provided for; but the bishop, after seeing Ellen and becoming interested in the story, would not receive any money from the duke on Ellen's account. He said she refused it, and he could but acquiesce in her decision. The duke was utterly perplexed.

TO BE CONTINUED.

{197}

Translated from La Correspondant

THE FOUNDERS OF FRENCH UNITY. [Footnote 38]

BY THE COUNT DE CHAMPAGNY.

[Footnote 38: Historical Studies. By the Count L. de Carné.]

Our readers are certainly not ignorant of the name or the book of M. de Carné. The work which he published in 1848, on the eve of the revolution of February, attracted the interest as well as the suffrages of all serious times, and the mass of those who read may know and appreciate it.

The idea of this book is well known. M. de Carné has been struck with what constitutes the peculiar genius of the French nation, its unity. He has wished to ascertain and trace the origin of that unity; and has found it summed up in a few proper names, and has condensed in the history of a small number of statesmen that of the nation.

Nothing could be more proper. We are the republican of any nation that God has made, and we are so because the French nation is more strictly one than any other, and more than any other needs a chief. Abandoned ourselves, and obliged, willingly or unwillingly, to take each a personal part in the common action, we are worth very little; but we are admirable when we are commanded. I do not know if Shakespeare is right when he calls France the Soldier of God, but what appears to me certain is that we are much better soldiers than citizens. In France the citizen is a stupid lout who, three-fourths of the time, lets himself be led, and miserably led, either by a journal or a spouting chief of a club; he abdicates himself and consents to be led blindly by the passions of others. He cries "Harrah for Revolution!" when he thinks he is only crying "Hurrah for Reform!" and makes a revolution without intending it, and makes it to the profit of his enemies. The soldier, on the contrary, finds in obedience the element of his spontaneity, of his intelligence, I had almost said, of his liberty. He was but a peasant, very dull and lubberly when he was free; put upon him the coat of passive obedience, and he acquires abilities which seem to belong only to liberty. He is prompt, he is sagacious, he is intelligent; faithful to his commander when his commander guides him, full of activity and spontaneity, if by chance the commander fails him. Why is this? Why is the English citizen so intelligent in commercial and political life, so hampered under the red coat? Why is the French peasant so stupid when he is taken from his plough, so much at his ease when in uniform? To this I know no answer, unless it be, that God has so made us. In France, the soldier is more himself when under discipline than the citizen in his liberty. It is not, then, surprising that the history of a people, I will not say so royalist, but so monarchical in the etymological sense of the word, should be summed up in the proper names of a few men.

The Abbé Suger, St. Louis, Du Guesclin, Joan of Arc, Louis XI., Henry IV., Richelieu, Mazarin: such are the personages whom M. de Carné has selected, and who he shows have gradually effected the development of French unity. It is in the succession of these names that we can follow with him that development.

{198}

However, it is not necessary to believe, and M. de Carné does not pretend it, that these men made French unity. It has been made by itself. France was really one in fact before being made so by the government and laws. From the tenth century, when all Gaul was parcelled out, when the large provinces all belonged to masters independent in fact, save for the nominal law of vassalage, hardly acknowledged, this divided nation felt herself already one, felt herself already a nation. She has been one ever since, in reacting against the yoke of the Austrasian dynasty of the Carlovingians, she commenced to reject from her midst the Germanic race, language, and institutions. She had her language--we find it distinctly in the oath of 843; she had her capital--that little mud city which began to pass the arm of the Seine and to spread itself from the island over on the right bank, was already the centre of French life. She had her dynasty--that kinglet possessor of a narrow domain, which he disputed with great feudatories more powerful than he, was already and for all the king of France. She was already herself advancing to the time when the grandson of Robert the Strong would make himself obeyed from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, the _langue d' Oyl_ would become the common tongue of Christendom, and all the fiefs from Flanders to the Mediterranean would hold from the great tower of the Louvre.

Thus it seems to me that one of the most important facts in our history, though little remarked, is the first armed manifestation of France under Louis the Fat. At the time the Emperor Henry V. penetrated into Champagne with a German army, the king, who, according to his own expression, had grown old at the siege of Montlhéry, in a few weeks found himself at the head of three hundred thousand men, united as a thick cloud of grasshoppers, who cover the banks of the rivers, the mountains, and plains. A few weeks more, and the great vassals, the Count of Flanders, the Duke of Aquitaine, the Count of Brittany, brought him new reinforcements, and his army, raised to four hundred thousand men, was double that of the emperor, which was itself enormous for the middle ages. The political bond, however, which united those different countries which are to-day called France, was very feeble. These vassals, present at the camp of Louis the Fat, rendered him scarcely a ceremonial homage. What bond could unite so many different populations for the defence of a territory which, at that epoch, had scarcely a name, if it was not community of origin and a common aversion to the Germanic domination? The French nation was then one, even at that epoch, when the king was king of only five of our present departments at most. She made herself one by herself and her blood, before being made so by kings and laws.

In all we have been ourselves, and more ourselves than we think. We are neither Franks nor Visigoths; we are Gallo-Romans. We are Gauls civilized by Rome, and baptized by the church. The influence of the Frank domination has been more superficial than was believed in the last century; the name remains to us, but what else remains? In the language, which is the great symbol of nationality, the Germanic element, whether in words or in forms of speech, has evidently been only secondary; and it has left no traces in the national character. In institutions the Germanic element dominated for a time, for the simple reason that it possessed the political power; but it was the labor of the middle ages, and we can say their glory, to efface it.

In fact, the struggle against feudalism and feudal institutions was, to speak truly, a national struggle. There were traces of German domination during four centuries which it was necessary to efface. The day when France demanded of the house of Robert the Strong a chief, king or not, but a chief to oppose to the Rhenish sovereignty of the Carlovingians, that day she commenced, without knowing it, the struggle against the institutions which grew out of the Germanic {199} conquest. That struggle was continued under St. Louis, the epoch of the great radiation of French power, when the Mediterranean was almost our domain; when we established colonies even on the coasts of Africa; when our missionaries penetrated even to Thibet; when the sons of Genghis Khan were in diplomatic relations with us, and when even in Italy they spoke by preference our language as "the most delightful" and the most generally understood of any in the world.

In this work the church came to our aid. The great struggle of the papacy was also against the pride of the Germanic supremacy. It was against the feudalism planted in the church, against feudatory bishops who bore armor, and carried the falcon on their wrist, who held their dioceses as fiefs, and received their investiture from the German suzerain, and against the kings their patrons, that St. Gregory VII. wielded the papal power. It was against the institutions of Germanic barbarism, against the feudal aristocracy, against tests by fire and water, against private wars and judicial combats, that the church, and especially the papacy, never ceased to struggle. There was, then, during a whole century a perfect accord between the kings of France and the pontiffs of Rome, between the independence of the commons and the franchises of the religious orders, between the authority of the legists and that of the councils.

And for these institutions introduced by the Germanic conquests, and which we in accord with the church combated, what have we in accord with the church substituted? The institutions proper to our race, proper to our traditions as a civilized people, proper to our manners as Christians. For feudalism the idea of direct power such as Rome had taught, and such as Charlemagne comprehended and attempted to revive; in other words, for suzerainty sovereignty; for the jurisdiction of lords was substituted in spirituals that of ecclesiastical judges, in temporals that of royal justices; consequently, for feudal law the canon law of Christian, and the civil law of imperial Rome. For the right of private battle we substituted the possession of arms remitted to the sovereign alone, as in Rome and in all civilized countries. For duels and judicial trials by fire and water we substituted trials by witness, according to the Roman law and the law of the church and of all civilized nations. In a word, we effaced the traces of Germanic paganism and barbarism, to become in our laws once more what we were by blood, Gallo-Romans; what we were by our faith, Christians; what we still are by our reminiscences, civilized men. Such was the work of our race from Robert the Strong to St. Louis, of the popes from Gregory VII. to Gregory IX., of our commons from the first communal revolt to the enfranchisement of the serfs under Louis le Hutin, of the church from the day when she proclaimed the truce of God, and constituted to sustain it a sort of universal _Landwehr_, to that in which she canonized, in the person of St. Louis, the type, not of the feudal chief, but of the Christian king. Only from this union of all forces in reference to a single end, essentially national, legitimate, and Christian, there was one unhappy exception, that of the nobility, the heir, whether by blood or position, of the Germanic traditions, investitures, and institutions, and who became a sort of common enemy. They were found, in spite of their patriotism, standing apart from the nation, and unpopular in spite of the many ties which bound them to the people. The church, royalty, even the legists had their place in the popular affection, but the nobility had none. They were suspected by the government and abandoned by it to the suspicions of the people. Hence they were so much the further removed from the political tendency of the nation as they were nearer to its political action, and all the less disposed to co-operate in the work of national elaboration as they were more open to the seductions of foreign {200} politics. Hence they could make the war of the Annagnacs in the fourteenth century, the war of the Public Good in the fifteenth, the religious wars of the sixteenth, and of the Fronde in the seventeenth; but it was never theirs to exercise that popular, regular, pacific action, the action of patronage and defence, exercised by the aristocracy of England. They had only the choice, on the one hand, of a selfish, unpopular revolt against the king--a revolt resting on the enemies of France for its support, or on the other, of service to the crown, a service which they gloriously and courageously rendered indeed, but which was a service of perfect obedience, in which there was nothing to be gained for their order, in which indeed they could reap glory, but not power. Never has there been a real aristocracy in France--there has been only an obedient or an insubordinate feudal nobility.

Thus may be given in brief the sum of the first part of M. de Carné s book; and this first part foretells what is to follow. The position of royalty, the nobles, and the commons respectively, was during four centuries developed only on bases furnished by the middle ages. The development effected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries M. de Carné has personified in Suger, abbot of St. Denis, and St. Louis--an able and intelligent choice. Suger and St. Louis were two rare statesmen in an epoch when statesmanship hardly existed. Suger, formed by the rigid and wise discipline of the church, a full-grown man in the midst of the childish caprices and inconsequences of his age, a real statesman, although the minister of a king who was no statesman at all, was certainly one of the greatest and most intelligent agents in the national work, of which those even who were its instruments rarely had the slightest conception. St. Louis rose still further above his age. He pertained not more to the middle ages by his faith than by his statesmanship he pertains to our own times. No king ever labored harder to evolve from its feudal envelope the civil and political life of France; no king ever studied more diligently to place royalty on the footing of modern sovereignties, and to fashion it, as M. de Carné well observes, after the Biblical royalty, rather than after feudal suzerainty.

M. de Carné is very right, then, in seeking in these two rare men a serious and matured political plan; but he would have found it difficult to discover traces of such a plan in others, and perhaps even the habits of his own mind render him less fitted to judge other heroes of the middle ages. In the very pages he has written, I see, indeed, Suger; I see, indeed St. Louis; but I do not see enough of the middle age itself, of that age of youth with its contradictions and it's inconsistencies; and M. de Carné it seems to me to be too wise, too sensible, too logical, and too much of a modern statesman, to paint it in its true light.

I express here, I confess, a personal impression, not a judgment, and perhaps a profounder study of the monuments of the middle ages would give me a different impression. But I own that when I seek the the middle ages in modern writings, I receive an impression quite different from that which I receive when I attempt to study them in their own monuments. With the moderns, not only with M. de Carné, but with writers who are antiquaries rather than statesman, I find presented as characteristic of the middle ages profound political use, or at least a certain power of foresight and calculation in those who govern; but if I open the smallest chronicle, I discover nothing of the sort. These kings and these statesmen become only warriors, rude captains, capable of any devotion--capable also of any violence and even of any falsehood, rather than of any wise or consistent policy seriously and steadily pursued. Whether it is merely the result of the oldness of the language, and the simplicity, so often apparent, which a still unformed idiom gives to thought, I {201} must say this age has on me the effect of an age of infancy.

It's tongue stammers, and its diction resembles the _patois_ of our provinces and the songs of our nurses. In art it had, not without a simplicity sometimes admirable, that awkwardness and that stiffness which mark the first toddling walk of children. Its public life was mingled with puerile ceremonies, with a fantastic symbolism, sometimes even indecent. Its faith asked for no reason, as asks the mature man; but felt, saw, understood as does the adolescent; it carried into it sometimes a puerile superstition which impaired it, sometimes an admirable simplicity which excludes the wisdom of the doctors, though not the devotedness of martyrs. It instituted the Feast of Fools and of Asses. Yet it made the Crusades. It embraced Christian morality without hesitation and without an objection; it embraced it, forgot to practise it; while professing good, it practised evil with the facility of contradiction surpassing even the ordinary powers of human nature; it was a good Catholic, but scrupled not to pillage the churches. Its submission it refused in principle to nobody--to the pope, the king, or the suzerain; and yet never did the papacy receive more frequent insults, never had royalty such trouble to make itself obeyed, never were quarrels between superior and inferior so frequent, as in the middle ages--those ages of submission and of insubordination, in which the rules of the hierarchy were better established and less observed than in any other. This contradiction, this inconsistency, this easy acceptance of the law while it is asserted only in theory, and this easy forgetfulness of it when it comes to practice, this subordination of the mind, and this revolt of the heart, is it not plainly that of boyhood? Boy seldom refuses to accept the moral truth that is taught him; he does not reject in theory even the obedience which is exacted of him; but, at a given moment, it costs him nothing to contradict that truth in practice, and to fail in that obedience; he denies never the law; he unceasingly breaks it.

It is true, that when we rise to a certain general point of view, nothing appears better regulated than the mediaeval society. Regularity, far from being defective, was in excess. A manifold foresight multiplied the laws. The church and the state, feudality and the commons, sovereignty and suzerainty, had each their codes, complicated and provident as those of a society in which right and interest are complicated and run athwart each other. Decretals, bulls, decisions of councils, feudal assizes, royal charters and commercial charters, laws and regulations of all kinds, embarrass us by their number much more than they sadden us by their absence. And the definitive result of the whole is a grand and admirable effort of Christian wisdom to establish in this world the reign of justice and peace. No right is denied, no interest is sacrificed, no power is without its limit, no liberty without its defense. Relations of the king to the subject, of the suzerain to the vassal, of the master to the serf, all are regulated there on the basis, so often forgotten, of reciprocal rights and duties. Never, perhaps, have the conciliation of order and liberty, hierarchy and the equality, the powers of the chief and the rights of the inferior, been conceived in so happy a manner.

I said _conceived_, not effected; for if we come to the fact, the rule fails to be translated into reality, or, rather, is so often broken that it may be said not even to exist; all relations become violent; master and serf, suzerain and vassal, king and subject, whose mutual relations were so well settled in law, are in a continual struggle against one another. That magnificent edifice presented us in theory, with the pope and the emperor at its summit, and in which the lowest serf holds his place, is in reality as unsubstantial as the fairy castles seen in our dreams.

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When I speak thus of the middle ages, I speak only of the lay society; I do not speak of the cloister and the church. They judge very improperly the middle ages who identify society in them with the church. The church was then, as now, not of her age. She struggled against it, and was more or less sullied on the points on which she came more directly in contact with the world--that is, in the secular clergy, and even the episcopacy, and more completely herself only when the cloister, the distance of places, and the diversity of origin removed her farthest from the feudal society--that is to say, in the religious orders and the papacy. I regard as a veritable chimera that dream, sometimes entertained, of a Europe gentle and submissive, obedient to the least word of the papacy, and conducted peaceably by the staff of St. Peter--in the ways of ignorance and barbarism, say unbelieving historians--in the ways of happiness and salvation, say Catholic writers. Both delight in this dream; the former because they would ruin the church by throwing upon her the responsibility of the crimes and vices of the middle ages; the latter because they would restore those ages by identifying them with the church. But I ask them to tell me at what time, during what year, what day, or what hour only this general submission existed? I ask them to tell me if there was a single day, a single minute which did not bring to the church her combat, not merely against kings and feudal lords, but against nations, and not only on one point of Europe, but on a thousand?--if once only this temporal jurisdiction of the papacy over the world was exercised otherwise than at the point of the sword--the sword of steel, as well as the sword of speech?

This middle age, this docile child, this innocent lamb, which allows itself to be led gently and blindly by the shepherd's crook, I find nowhere; I see indeed a child, but a hard and rebellious child, who seldom bends, rarely except to threats, and who, however humbly he may and, finds it no fault to straighten himself immediately after. Alas! the infancy of a people is not the infancy of men. The infant man has his physical weakness, which permits him to be controlled, and in restraining protects him. The infant people, for its misfortune, has all the passions and all the material forces of the full-grown man, and by the side of this formidable infant, the papacy to me appears different in everything, different by its supernatural life, which lifts it above the human condition, by the maturity of its intelligence, which elevates it above this youthful world, by the traditions of the Italian civilization which raises it above this world, still sunk in barbarism. It is divine in the midst of men, adult in the midst of children, Italian in the midst of these Teutons, Roman in the midst of these barbarians, civilian in the midst of these soldiers.

And by this, it seems to me, is justified, even if not otherwise, the political part played by the papacy in the middle ages. When it is demanded by what right it pretended to the temporal government of Europe, I answer unhesitatingly, by

"The right that a spirit vast and firm in its designs Has over the gross spirits of vulgar men;"

or, at least, the right which maturity has naturally over youth, science over ignorance, reason over unreason. The mature man, whom chance has placed in the midst of indocile and imprudent children, has over them by his age and reason alone a part, at least, of the rights of a father and a teacher. Only, with the father or teacher physical force supports this right, while to the papacy it was wanting, and could be supplied only by the sanctity of its character, the authority of it's words, and the intrepidity of its government.

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This will be for ever its glory. The glory of the church is far less in having reigned than in having fought. That temporal dominion of the Holy See was never in the state of a peaceable, regular, acknowledged sovereignty. It was only a form of the unrelenting warfare which the church sustained against evil,--one of the phases of her never-ending combat, one of the arms of her ceaseless struggle. The church has fought either without auxiliaries, or with auxiliaries always ready to abandon her; she herself wields not the sword of the flesh, and is never sure that those who do handle it in her name will not turn it against her; sometimes saved by kings and menaced by the people, sometimes aided by the people and crushed by kings, she has fought her fight without having, in reality, any other human power than that of her dangers, the sufferings, the exile, the captivity, the humiliations, the death of her pontiffs. She has never completely triumphed, but she has never fainted. She has never completely teamed the lion she combated, but she has been able to soften him. She has never been a peaceful and happy mother in the midst of submissive children, a pacific queen in the midst of devoted subjects; she has been rather an unwearied combatant, according to his word who said, "I am calm to bring the world not peace, but a sword."

But the moment must come when the child becomes a man. The struggle then changes front. The man is not better than the child; properly speaking, he is not wiser or more reasonable: he has simply more order in his life, and more logical sequence in his conduct. A sort of human respect induces him to study to maintain greater harmony between his principles and his actions; when he has a good theory, he tries oftener than the child to have a good practice; and oftener when his conduct is bad, he concocts a bad theory to justify it. To use a well-known word, he practices his good maxims or he _maxims_ his bad practices, as the grace of God in him and his conscience are stronger or weaker. This accord with himself, which is the characteristic, at least the pretension, of the mature man, makes alike his greatness and his littleness. The church, when society is matured, has to combat doctrines rather than passions, ideas rather than vices. The middle ages were, then, the infancy of Christian nations; should we say the sixteenth century--the age of passion, of effervescence, of revolt, of lapses--was the age of youth? Is the present age the age of maturity or of decrepitude? This, five hundred years hence, our descendants may be able to determine.

It still remains to know whether the childhood of a people, like the childhood of individuals, ought not to be regretted rather than disdained, and whether it does not charm us more by the memory of its joys than it humiliates us by the memory of its weaknesses. If the childhood of the individual is not capable of crimes, it is not any more capable of great deeds; the childhood of a people, on the contrary, although it may have its gentle and simple side, has also its heroic and sublime side. It was so with the child-people who passed the Red Sea, or fought under the walls of Troy. They are child-men for whom the Pentateuch was written, and who inspired the Iliad. They are child-men, our ancestors, who reconquered the tomb of Christ, who carried faith even to the depths of China, and who with Joan of Arc chased the English from France. They were not souls free from all blemish, nor hands never sullied; very often the brutality of their manners repels us, and we are borne, in seeing them, like the tender souls in those iron ages, to seek refuge in the shadow of the cloister, in order to find there, at least, peace, delicacy of heart, dignity of intelligence, and serenity of soul. But they were really of those to whom much is forgiven, for they loved much. Among their contradictions they had this grand and noble contradiction--that of having committed great faults, and yet preserving the love of God; of being soiled with vice, and yet not abandoned to it; of having removed far from the Lord, {204} but having never despaired of his mercy; of being very hard and very cruel, and yet preserving a loving fibre in their hearts, and tears in their eyes. After all, if these men were children, they were the children of whom it is said, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." If the middle ages had vices, they had also faith: the world in ripening has lost the faith, and retained the vices.

Here is what, as it seems to me, may be said of the middle ages, after what M. de Carné has said, and by the side of what he has said. It may not be without some advantage to place this very different view by the side of the political view, which he has so well developed. I repeat it, that considering only the two types of Suger and St. Louis, he comprehends them, for they come within his sphere; he has, perhaps, not so well comprehended the medium in which they lived, or perhaps he partially forgets it.

We must now follow France and Europe in that more manly, or senile, epoch of their life, which M. de Carné after having given us sketches of Du Guesclin and Joan of Arc, personifies in Louis XI., Henry IV., Cardinal Richelieu, and Mazarin. These are already times which touch very closely our own. The work of Henry IV., of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV., has crumbled almost under our own eyes, and in many respects their spirit is still living in our midst. The proof is in the fact that it is still the object of attack, Richelieu especially. Louis XIV. is discussed with all the vehemence of a contemporary controversy. This indeed is not the case with M. de Carné. There is not, perhaps, in his book an appreciation more calm, more dignified, more grave than that of the policy of the great cardinal.

He has justified this policy. He shows with an evidence that seems to me incontestable, that, setting aside the severity of certain acts, setting aside the last months of a premature old age, when weariness of power began to obscure his lofty intellect, Richelieu could have done hardly otherwise than he did. The nobility, it must be said, a little in all times, and very much for a century, had yielded to a deplorable spirit of faction. Whether it dreamed, like the Calvinistic gentlemen of the sixteenth century, of a resurrection of feudalism; whether in its eyes, as in those of the Duke of Rohan, was zoning the plan of an aristocratic republic; or whether, as more frequently happens, all its ambitions were individual, and that the alliances it formed were only the coalitions of dissatisfied pretensions, always is it certain that it was in an eminent degree incapable of a serious and well-defined policy. It could not even be national, and for fourscore years there was not a chief of the party who did not seek his support in England or in Spain, and who did not treat in the beginning of his revolt with foreigners, as he counted at its close on treating with his king. The commonalty, though more national, had not a whit more case for the necessary conditions of regular political action. The parliament incontestably formed the head all the Third Estate: it was the most dignified post, the highest placed, the gravest, and the most capable of affairs; and yet the parliaments interfered in politics only with the littlenesses and caprice of children, the conceit of youngsters, or the timidity of old men; by turns submissive and rebellious, idolaters of absolute power, and rebels to every government; rash and timid, rebelling and begging pardon.

The cardinal has been almost always reproached for having established royalty without a basis; but this basis, where was he to find it? Was it ever in his power to create it? Could he found a political aristocracy, respecting the laws, and protecting the people, where there was only a turbulent, unpopular, and unstatesmanlike nobility? Could he erect on French soil a House of Commons, animated at once with the spirit of legal obedience and of constitutional resistance, {205} at a time when it did not exist even in England, and where there were only citizens ready to revolt, as was proved in the time of the League, and ready to submit, and even to worship power, as was proved under Henry IV., but wholly incapable of resisting without rebelling? At least, it will not be said that at all hazards, and without taking any account of these facts, the cardinal should have inaugurated in France something like the charter of 1814, or that of 1830, which would be very much like reproaching Hannibal for not using gunpowder, and Christopher Columbus for not using steam!

Richelieu felt that all force, that every principle of peace, grandeur, and unity, was at the time in royalty. Royalty was in the sphere of things possible, or imaginary, the only regular, and even the only popular power. Outside of it there were only resistances, or rather attacks, more or less inconsequent and factious. The liberties of the middle ages, such as they had then, could appear only as turbulent and irregular liberties, incompatible with that order and that regularity which were a necessity for the genius of the cardinal and his age. Richelieu rendered absolute that power which alone could be a protection, well the others would be only sources of danger. In doing this he abolished no liberties, for there were then no liberties in the modern sense of the word. He had little else than privileges to suppress, and absolute monarchy conferred more privileges then it destroyed. We had only insubordinations to quell, and misdeeds to punish. That, in this struggle, his untempered severity amounted even to cruelty, sometimes odius, and almost always useless, M. de Carné does not deny, and I concede it even to a greater extent, perhaps, than he would approve; but what had been the triumph of the party, or rather of the contradictory parties? What monarchy--national, constitutional, and legal--could have resulted from the victory of those great lords, leagued together, and constantly intriguing against the government ever since the death of Henry IV.; sometimes open rebels, sometimes submissive; ever uniting, or separating, allying themselves at the the exigency of the moment; enemies to their friends of yesterday, faithful to-day with the factious of the morrow, Protestants with Catholics, Catholics with Huguenots, Frenchmen with Spain! What a magnificent bill of rights the Duchess de Chevereuse would have drawn up for Louis XIII. to sign!

Richelieu did the only thing which in his time was possible, and that is the justification of the political order which he founded. But his work was not complete, and was not completed, I dare add, solely because it was sanguinary. The blood shed, as M. de Carné well says, was not so abundant as is commonly believed; twenty-six men in all perished on the scaffold. How many politicians have the reputation of great benignity, who have put to death a much larger number! But on more than one occasion Richelieu's proceedings were odious, his cruelty refined, his vengeance useless. It belonged to a man of quite another nature to finish the work which he, with less violence, might have accomplished. The cardinal, when he died, left feudal opposition humbled, but living area The blood of Montmorency had implanted still more hate than fear. All the uneasy and restless forces, which, with no purpose, or only that of personal satisfaction, agitated France for nearly a century, crushed by the hand of the cardinal, drew themselves up anew when he was no longer there, and made themselves immediately felt and feared, under the reign of a child, the regency of a Spanish woman, and the ministry of an Italian. The work, then, was not complete, and the last germ of that aristocratic faction had not been extinguished on the scaffold of Cinq-Mars.

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M. de Carné, who overrates Richelieu, greatly underrates Mazarin. Certainly, the man had less grandeur, and was more sullied; there were defects in his genius, and undeniably dark shades in his character; his morality was certainly of a low order, but his intellectual power was something marvellous. I am astonished to see that foreigner, that adventurer, that man who was never popular, that minister with greedy and grasping instincts, triumphing over enemies which the great cardinal had not been able to subdue, surviving the spirit of faction that had survived Richelieu,--to see him accomplish the work which Richelieu had not been able to accomplish by violence; and accomplishing it without having to reproach himself with erecting a single scaffold. This Italian, so furiously decried, who on re-entering Paris, after his victory, had not a word of anger to utter, nor a vengeance to inflict on any one; who re-established in their seats the magistrates of Parliament who had set a price on his head; who, vilified to satiety by the men of letters, tranquilly, and without ostentation, restored to them their pensions; who granted to the grandees of the kingdom--who were his enemies--nearly all they had asked, except their independence; this man, in all this, may indeed have been more able than generous, but I much like that kind of ability, and regard it as worth imitating. And what is curious, is that, from that minister, so many times dishonored, from that peace in which the factious were so well treated, from that struggle in which royalty was often so hard pressed, and in which it was so often forced to give way, royalty itself came forth stronger, more absolute, more venerated, more adored, than it was left by the lofty struggle maintained by Cardinal Richelieu, and in which his victories were ratified by the hangman.

It is in this way that monarchy was established in France; and, be it said in passing, without recurring to the necessity and legitimacy of this work, it has produced, in spite of its many imperfections and excesses, the most normal epoch in our history since that of St. Louis. This epoch had only brief duration, and it is sometimes, said, that what is called the ancient _régime_, was only a period of transition. I grant it. In this passing world, what century is there that is not a century of transition? When is it that the nations can stop, pitch their tents, and say, "It is good to be here?" I remember still all in my youth, the defunct Saint-Simonian school, which, perhaps, is not so defunct as is supposed, divided the history of the world into critical periods and _organic_ periods; but as for its organic periods, they could not tell where to find them. It is the same with us all. I see, indeed, in history, times of passage, but not the time of sojourn; and I know not any century in which it might not be said with as much truth has in our own, "We are in the moment of transition." But if ever there was really an organic epoch, it was that of which we speak. If any age could really pass for a normal age, not indeed for the perfection of its virtue, but for the plenitude of its principle, it would certainly be the age of Louis XIV. That was essentially, in good and in evil, in greatness and littleness, in its good deeds and in its evil deeds, in its legitimate honor and in its idolatrous apotheosis, the age of royalty.

On many sides, certainly, this age is open to attack: yet neither men nor human institutions are to be judged after an absolute type. The greatest must miserably fail, if so judged. All judgments of human things our relative. When we place a life, in age, a rule, any institution whatever, by the side of the ideal type which are imagination forms to itself, nothing is to be said; that life is stained, that period is wretched, that _régime_ is odious, that institution is detestable; but if we compare it with that which has been before, after, or contemporary with it, or even that which would have been humanly possible to put in its place {207} Our judgment is more indulgent, because less absolute. It is our glory, but also our error, to bear in ourselves a certain passion for the beautiful and the good, which can find no satisfaction in this world; to form to ourselves in everything, an ideal type superior to all human power to realize; to have in us the measure of heaven, which we very clear that Louis XIV. was only a poor knight, Bossuet only a common-place writer. Homer a street-singer, Raphael a dauber by the side of the king, the orator, the poet, the painter, of which we dream in our imagination.

That _régime_, inaugurated by Richelieu, confirmed by Mazarin, and glorified by Louis XIV., had, doubtless, its baseness as every other, but not more than others. It had its cruelties, and they were often inexcusable; it had a greater and more fundamental wrong still, that of pushing power to excess, and exaggerating its rights, as well as deifying the person of the sovereign. Human powers have all a limit, however absolute they may claim to be; and whether collected in a single hand, or dispersed among many--whether they are vested in the people, in an assembly, or in one man alone, the sphere of their action is no greater. Power has its limit in right, and this limit cannot be passed without guilt; it has its limit in fact, and against that it cannot dash its head without breaking it.

This was its fault, and it was cruelly expiated. We say, however, that the monarchy of Louis XIV. perished less by his fault than by that of his successor. Louis XV. inherited a royalty in its plenitude, surrounded by the profound respect of the nation. Louis XlV. had died unpopular, but he left the throne popular. The public calamities were charged to the man, not to the monarchy. I know not in all history a king more beloved, more venerated, more adored as king and independently of his personal qualities, than was Louis XV. A child at first, then a young man, without other personal merit than that of leaving Cardinal de Fleury to govern, Louis XV., during twenty years, gathered in peace the fruits of royalty. More humane than Louis XIV.; as selfish indeed, but selfish in another manner; not taking like him his royalty in earnest, and instead of accepting it as a dignity almost divine, regarding it as a private estate he had a right to enjoy without being under the slightest obligation to look after its management, Louis XV. took pleasure in squandering the treasures of popular respect and affection which his predecessor had bequeathed him. France persisted in respecting his royalty as long as she could. Neither the scandals of the Regency, less public than they have become for posterity, nor the succession of court influences, not yet sunk to the baseness of the later years, though beginning to approach it; nor the indolence and the corruption of that prince who hardly ever opened a letter on business, hardly ever spoke in council, and hardly ever went to the army; nor that egotism of the man crudely paraded in the place of the egotism of the king professed by Louis XIV. as a religion--nothing of all this disgusted the country, so marvellously had France been imbued with the love and worship of royalty by Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV.!

The corruption of ideas was slowly effected. The eighteenth century did not begin in 1700 nor in 1715, it was only beginning in 1750. The first irreligious book which gave much scandal was that of Toussaint in 1748. Up to that time Voltaire had restricted himself to some timid allusions against priests mingled with many flatteries of the court; the Pucelle was written but not published. Twenty-eight years after the death of Louis XIV., at the time of the illness of Metz, was still seen a thing unique perhaps--a whole country, not only the nobility and the court, but the citizens, the people, all those who were most disinterested in regard to royal favors, were seen {208} praying with a tenderness truly filial that God would leave to them a king who had reigned for twenty-eight years without having done anything, and wresting from Providence, so to speak, by the force of supplications, a life steeped in debauchery. This great and sincere testimonial of monarchical enthusiasm, which remained so deeply rooted in the memory of our fathers, was given, I say not to the worst, but certainly to the least meritorious of all our monarchs.

It is necessary, then, to render to our country this justice, that, if it came at length to despise power, it was because in spite of itself it was driven to it by power itself. It needed that this so solemn mark of filial devotion should be returned by continued indolence and corruption. It needed more than thirty years of the cynical workings of this royalty to erase from the heart in which it was so deeply rooted, the taste and the worship of royalty. They who, in seeking the semi-metaphysical, semi-political causes for the fall of the monarchy of Louis XIV., think they find the principle of its ruin in the manner of its constitution, may, in certain respects, be right, but they should tell us how it could have been constituted differently. However, they seem to me to count for too little the abuses so flagrant and so prolonged, which were made of it.

Neither am I among those who accuse the France of the old _régime_ of servility. Its love for royalty may have been excessive, but it was, at least, sincere; and if sincere it was not servile. We may be guilty of idolatry towards those we love, but we can be guilty of servility only towards those we love not. Royalty, I admit, was regarded as a demi-god, but they who really worship the false god do it in good faith. Our fathers were, perhaps, fanatics, but they were not slaves. The great English lords who, in the eighteenth century, traversed France in a post chaise, in order to attend the court at Versailles, and to pass several weeks in Parts, doubtless judged the country to be inhabited only by the cowardly slaves of an Asiatic despot;--they found no House of Commons, no speaker nor usher with the black rod. In the same way, Sterne, seeing at a play a man who annoyed his neighbors and whom the guard ordered to leave, was confounded by the arbitrary proceeding, and could not comprehend that the citizen did not maintain by his fists the right to disturb the performance. It was a country judged on the surface by the habits of mind of another country during About the same time, another Englishman, [Footnote 39] who did not journey in a post-chaise, who went on foot from village to village, playing the flute for the peasantry, holding disputations in the monasteries, and thus paying his reckoning, judged France a little differently. He came very near, God forgive him, envying it, and preferring it to his own country! He met here not miserable slaves, but happy men, satisfied with themselves, and satisfied with all the world. The current money in this country, according to him, was not silver; was not the material favors of the government; was not, or, at least, was not only, pension and place; it was a vain money, no doubt, like all human riches, but a money, at least, more delicate and more noble. "Society here finds its life in HONOR. Praise gained by merit, or obtained by an imaginary worth, is the money which passes current from hand to hand, and by a noble commerce passes from the court to the camp and the cottage." France, which for the others was the country of servitude, was for him the country of honor.

[Footnote 39: We need hardly tell our readers the person referred to here was an Irishman--Oliver Goldsmith. (Ed. C.W.)]

In reality it is hardly for us to be ashamed of the servitude of forefathers. It is true, more mature than they, we no longer either worship or respect authority; but we count it no fault to beg its favors. We crowd around the altar, though we no longer believe in the god. Every revolution has shown us the ante-chambers {209} invaded in turn by a cloud of conquerors, revolutionists, or conservatives, monarchists or republicans, all men have profound conviction, of a well-tried self-respect, a liberalism true as steel, and an independence as firm as iron, but who nevertheless came to beg their bit from the budget Since we came into the world, four times, at least, have we seeing this hideous quarry to which (we must render all justice to our equalitarians) all classes, high or low, rich or for, lettered or unlettered, have flocked with a harmony truly democratic. We now no longer conceive of a public service which is not paid for, a state function which is not an income, a position which has not its money value. Have we the right, in good faith, to be ashamed of the times when they said not _places_ but _charges_, because the public service was considered not a position but duty? Have we the right to attack even that court and that finance of aforetime, stained, I grant, with cupidity and adulation, but not otherwise than in all times, and are still the classes that approach power? Have we the right, above all, to attack the whole of that society much less greedy of the favors of power, much more independent of it than we are ourselves, that bourgeoisie who loved so much its king from whom it had nothing to expect, except the suppression of a fourth of its revenue? Those magistrates who gave their last penny for the right to rise at five o'clock in the morning, and pass the forenoon in the audience, well to-day the lowest deputy finds himself poorly paid by two thousand francs for rising at ten o'clock? That provincial nobility, poor, obscure, disdained, who had all the charges of aristocracy without its benefits, and who esteemed themselves but too happy when, after twenty years of service in order, where they left their patrimony at first, then an arm, a leg, their brothers and cousins, they obtained from the bounty of the king their discharge, and permission to retire to their homes with the cross of St. Louis, and the brevet of Brigadier-General; crippled, impoverished, but endeavoring, if possible, to "preserve a fortune sufficient to enable their children to replace them"? We, citizens and freemen, do we even for much money, what those servile beings did for a little honor?

I have passed here a little beyond the work of M. de Carné, who stops with Mazarin. He will pardon me, even thank me, for not permitting myself to go farther still, and to broach the hackneyed subject of 1789. I have elsewhere had occasion to set forth my views on that subject, by the side of M. de Carné's, happy to agree with him in many respects, though more severe, perhaps, in my judgment of that revolutionary movement than he is. The tendency of minds toward reforms might have been legitimate, but the way taken to effect them was false, and in my eyes infected with evil from the first. In fact, the groundwork of French unity, which M. de Carné represents for us with so much love, what has been its use, if, after the labor of so many centuries, it could be attained only by a national convulsion, the most violent, perhaps, which has figured in history? Civil equality, unity of territory, reform in legislation, were they not already sufficiently prepared by St. Louis, Charles VII., Louis XI., Richelieu, and Louis XIV., and was it necessary that they should be purchased by the revolt of the _jeu de paume_, by the blood of Versailles, and by the crimes of the reign of Terror? Were our countrymen not criminal, at that epoch, in repulsing a past in which they might, on the contrary, have found a firmer support for the reforms needed?

Be that as it may, I cannot but thank M. de Carné, in the name of all those who still read, for the work which he achieved in 1848, and for the return which he has just made to his former studies. Whoever we may be, and whatever may be the present, it is not necessary that it should absorb us. As the spectacle of the present age serves to explain past ages, so should a return to the past cool and calm in our minds {210} the agitation of the present. Of this freedom from contemporaneous reflection, M. de Carné has given us a noble example. On two or three points, at most, the statesman of our times is a little too perceptible. I much doubt, for instance, if in the sixteenth century, the Balafré could have founded in France a dynasty and a citizen royalty like that of Louis Philippe. Still it might have been had the Balafré been a cadet of the Capetian family, and if the dynasty of the Valois had been for forty years shaken by two revolutions. What strikes me, on the contrary, in the history of the League, and what appears to me one of the greatest proofs of the spirit of nationality and of loyalty which then reigned in the commonalty, is the repugnance which they always manifested to accepting a foreign dynasty, the timid and reluctant manner with which the proposition was made, and the unpopularity with which it was received. At the time of the League, the nation wished two things which then seemed irreconcilable--Catholic royalty and French loyalty; it wished, so to speak, an impossibility, but it willed it with decision and perseverance, and that impossibility it obtained.

But, save these slight traces of the man of the present, M. de Carné has been able, with rare facility, to identify himself with past ages; he has known how to take from erudition what was necessary to enlighten his political point of view, without suffering it absorb him. He has been perfectly able in surveying all these different subjects to identify himself by turns with each of them. Without neglecting details and without losing himself in them, without disdaining to speak to the imagination, and without suffering himself to be carried away by the fascinations of the picturesque, without abandoning himself to political theories, and without dispoiling history of them, he has in turn as fully known his Abbot Suger, his St. Louis, is Du Guesclin, and each one of his heroes, as if he had never studied else. He makes himself master of each one of these subjects in brief time, but with a sagacity worth more than time, and with a quick perception of the dominant idea which often escapes the simple erudite. He has not me what is called a philosophical history, a task become facile and commonplace, and he has not made what is still more easy, purely contemporary politics _à propos_ of the past; he has not made a history, if by history we understand the detailed recital of events; but he has known how to keep constantly at his disposition the philosophical view which illuminates history, the political sense which helps to judge it, and the knowledge of facts which is its foundation. He has not made a history, but he has made a luminous summary, and given us a necessary complement of all the theories of French history.

MY TEARS.

Ah me! how many precious tears for naught I've wept; And thus my soul did cheat. Would I, like Magdalene, had treasured them, and kept Their wealth for Jesus' feet.

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LEGEND OF COUNT JULIAN AND HIS FAMILY.

BY WASHINGTON IRVING.

Many and various are the accounts given in ancient chronicles of the fortunes of Count Julian and his family, and many are the traditions on the subject extant among the populace of Spain, and perpetuated in those countless ballads sung by peasants and muleteers, which spread a singular charm over the whole of this romantic land.

He who has travelled in Spain in the true way in which the country ought to be travelled--sojourning in its remote provinces, rambling among the rugged defiles and secluded valleys of its mountains, and making himself familiar with the people in their out-of-the-way hamlets and rarely visited neighborhoods--will remember many a group of travellers and muleteers, gathered of an evening around the door or the spacious hearth of a mountain venta, wrapped in their brown cloaks, and listening with grave and profound attention to the long historic ballad of some rustic troubadour, either recited with the true _ore rotundo_ and modulated cadences of Spanish elocution, or chanted to the tinkling of a guitar. In this way he may have heard the doleful end of Count Julian and his family recounted in traditionary rhymes, that have been handed down from generation to generation. The particulars, however, of the following wild legend are chiefly gathered from the writings of the pseudo Moor Basis; how far they may be safely taken as historic facts it is impossible now to ascertain; we must content ourselves, therefore, with their answering to the exactions of poetic justice.

As yet everything had prospered with Count Julian. He had gratified his vengeance; he had been successful in his treason, and had acquired countless riches from the ruin of his country. But it is not outward success that constitutes prosperity. The tree flourishes with fruit and foliage while blasted and withering at the heart. Wherever he went, Count Julian read hatred in every eye. The Christians cursed him as the cause of all their woe; the Moslems despised and distrusted him as a traitor. Men whispered together as he approached, and then turned away in scorn; and mothers snatched away their children with horror if he offered to caress them. He withered under the execration of his fellow-men, and last, and worst of all, he began to loathe himself. He tried in vain to persuade himself that he had but taken a justifiable vengeance; he felt that no personal wrong can justify the crime of treason to one's country.

For a time he sought in luxurious indulgence to soothe or forget the miseries of the mind. He assembled round him every pleasure and gratification that boundless wealth could purchase, but all in vain. He had no relish for the dainties of his board; music had no charm wherewith to lull his soul, and remorse drove slumber from his pillow. He sent to Ceuta for his wife Frandina, his daughter Florinda, and his youthful son Alarbot; hoping in the bosom of his family to find that sympathy and kindness which he could no longer meet with in the world. Their presence, however, brought him no alleviation. Florinda, the daughter of his heart, for whose sake he had undertaken this {212} signal vengeance, was sinking a victim to its effects. Wherever she went, she found herself a byword of shame and reproach. The outrage she had suffered was imputed to her as wantonness, and her calamity was magnified into a crime. The Christians never mentioned her name without a curse, and the Moslems, the gainers by her misfortune, spake of her only by the appellation of Cava, the vilest epithet they could apply to woman.

But the opprobrium of the world was nothing to the upbraiding of her own heart. She chained herself with all the miseries of these disastrous wars--the deaths of so many gallant cavaliers, the conquest and perdition of her country. The anguish of her mind preyed upon the beauty of her person. Her eye, once soft and tender in its expression, became wild and haggard; her cheek lost its bloom and became hollow and pallid, and at times there was desperation in her words. When her father sought to embrace her she withdrew with shuddering from his arms, for she thought of his treason and the ruin it had brought upon Spain. Her wretchedness increased after her return to her native country, until it rose to a degree of frenzy. One day when she was walking with her parents in the garden of their palace, she entered a tower, and, having barred the door, ascended to the battlements. From thence she called to them in piercing accents, expressive of her insupportable anguish and desperate determination. "Let this city," said she, "be henceforth called Malacca, in memorial of the most wretched of women, who therein put an end to her days." So saying, she threw herself headlong from the tower, and was dashed to pieces. The city, adds the ancient chronicler, received the name thus given it, though afterward softened to Malaga, which it still retains in memory of the tragical end of Florinda.

The Countess Frandina abandoned this scene of woe, and returned to Ceuta, accompanied by her infant son. She took with her the remains of her unfortunate daughter, and gave them honorable sepulture in a mausoleum of the chapel belonging to the citadel. Count Julian departed for Carthagena, where he remained plunged in horror at this doleful event.

About this time the cruel Suleiman, having destroyed the the family of Muza, had sent an Arab general, named Alahor, to succeed Abdalasis, as emir or governor of Spain. The new emir was of a cruel and suspicious nature, and commenced his sway with a stern severity that soon made those under his command look back with regret to the easy rule of Abdalasis. He regarded with an eye of distrust the renegade Christians who had aided in the conquest, and who bore arms in the service of the Moslems; but his deepest suspicions fell upon Count Julian. "He has been a traitor to his own countryman," said he; "how can we be sure that he will not prove traitor to us?"

A sudden insurrection of the Christians who had taken refuge in the Asturian mountains, quickened his suspicions, and inspired him with fears of some dangerous conspiracy against his power. In the height of his anxiety, he bethought him of an Arabian sage named Yuza, who had accompanied him from Africa. This son of science was withered in form, and looked as if he had outlived the usual term of mortal life. In the course of his studies and travels in the East, he had collected the knowledge and experience of ages; being skilled in astrology, and, it is said, in necromancy, and possessing the marvellous gift of prophecy or divination. To this expounder of mysteries Alahor applied to learn whether any secret treason menaced his safety.

The astrologer listened with deep attention and overwhelming brow to all the surmises and suspicions of the emir, then shut himself up to consult his books and commune with those supernatural intelligences subservient {213} to his wisdom. At an appointed hour the emir sought him in his cell. It was filled with the smoke of perfumes; squares and circles and various diagrams were described upon the floor, and the astrologer was boring over a scroll of parchment, covered with cabalistic characters. He received Alahor with a gloomy and sinister aspect; pretending to have discovered fearful portents in the heavens, and to have had strange dreams and mystic visions.

"O emir," said he, "be on your guard! treason is around you and in your path; your life is in peril. Beware of Count Julian and his family."

"Enough," said the emir. "They show all die! Parents and children--all shall die!"

He forthwith sent a summons to Count Julian to attend him in Cordova. The messenger found him plunged in affliction for the recent death of his daughter. The count excused himself, on account of this misfortune, from obeying the commands of the emir in person, but sent several of his adherents. His hesitation, and the circumstance of his having sent his family across the straits to Africa, were construed by the jealous mind of the emir into proofs of guilt. He no longer doubted his being concerned in the recent insurrections, and that he had sent his family away, preparatory to an attempt, by force of arms, to subvert the Moslem domination. In is fury he put to death Siseburto and Evan, the nephews of Bishop Oppas and sons of the former king, Witiza, suspecting them of taking part in the treason. Thus did they expiate their treachery to their country in the fatal Battle of Guadalete.

Alahor next hastened to Carthagena to seize upon Count Julian. So rapid were his movements that the count had barely time to escape with fifteen cavaliers, with whom he took refuge in the strong castle of Marcuello, among the mountains of Aragon. The emir, enraged to be disappointed of his prey, embarked at Carthagena and crossed the straits to Ceuta, to make captives of the Countess Frandina and her son.

The old chronicle from which we take this part of our legend, presents a gloomy picture of the countess in the stern fortress to which she had fled for refuge--a picture heightened by supernatural horrors. These latter the sagacious reader will admit or reject according to the measure of his faith and judgment; always remembering that in dark and eventful times, like those in question, involving the destinies of nations, the downfall of kingdoms, and the crimes of rulers and mighty men, the hand of fate is sometimes strangely visible, and confounds the wisdom of the worldly wise, by intimations and portents above the ordinary course of things. With this proviso, we make no scruple to follow the venerable chronicler in his narration.

Now so it happened that the Countess Frandina was seated late at night in her chamber in the citadel of Ceuta, which stands on a lofty rock, overlooking the sea. She was revolving in gloomy thought the late disasters of her family, when she heard a mournful noise like that of the sea-breeze moaning about the castle walls. Raising her eyes, she beheld her brother, the Bishop Oppas, at the entrance of the chamber. She advanced to embrace him, but he forbade her with a motion of his hand, and she observed that he was ghastly pale, and that his eyes glared as with lambent flames.

"Touch me not, sister," said he, with a mournful voice, "lest thou be consumed by the fire which rages within me. Guard well thy son, for blood-hounds are upon his track. His innocence might have secured him the protection of heaven, but our crimes have involved him in our common ruin." He ceased to speak and was no longer to be seen. His coming and going were alike without noise, and the door of the chamber remained fast bolted.

{214}

On the following morning a messenger arrived with tidings that the Bishop Oppas had been made prisoner in battle by the insurgent Christians of the Asturias, and had died in fetters in a tower of the mountains. The same messenger brought word that the Emir Alahor had put to death several of the friends of Count Julian; had obliged him to fly for his life to a castle in Aragon, and was embarking with a formidable force for Ceuta.

The Countess Frandina, as has already been shown, was of courageous heart, and danger made her desperate. There were fifty Moorish solders in the garrison; she feared that they would prove treacherous, and take part with their countrymen. Summoning her officers, therefore, she informed them of their danger, and commanded them to put those Moors to death. The guards sallied forth to obey her orders. Thirty-five of the Moors were in the great square, unsuspicious of any danger, when they were severally singled out by their executioners, and, at a concerted signal, killed on the spot. The remaining fifteen took refuge in a tower. They saw the armada of the emir at a distance, and hoped to be able to hold out until its arrival. The soldiers of the countess saw it also, and made extraordinary efforts to destroy these internal enemies before they should be attacked from without. They made repeated attempts to storm the tower, but were as often repulsed with severe loss. They then undermined it, supporting its foundations by stanchions of wood. To these they set fire and withdrew to a distance, keeping up a constant shower of missiles to prevent the Moors from sallying forth to extinguish the flames. The stanchions were rapidly consumed, and when they gave way the tower fell to the ground. Some of the Moors were crushed among the ruins; others were flung to a distance and dashed among the rocks; those who survived were instantly put to the sword.

The fleet of the emir arrived at Centa about the hour of Vespers. He landed, but found the gates closed against him. The countess herself spoke to him from a tower, and set [illegible] at defiance. The emir immediately laid siege to the city. He consulted the astrologer Yuxa, who told him that for seven days his star would have the ascendant over that of the youth Alarbot, but after that time the youth would be safe from his power, and would effect his ruin.

Alahor immediately ordered the city to be assailed on every side, and at length carried it by storm. The countess took refuge with her forces in the citadel, and made desperate defense; but the walls were sapped and mined, and she saw that all resistance would soon be unavailing. Her only thoughts now were to conceal her child. "Surely," said she, "they will not think of seeking him among the dead." She led him therefore into the dark and dismal chapel. "Thou art not afraid to be alone in this darkness, my child?" said she.

"No, mother," replied the boy; "darkness gives silence and sleep." She conducted him to the Florinda. "Fearest thou the dead. my child?" "No, mother; the dead can do no harm, and what should I fear from my sister?"

The countess opened the sepulcher. "Listen, my son," said she. "There are fierce and cruel people who have come hither to murder thee. Stay here in company with thy sister, and be quiet as thou dost value thy life!" The boy, who was of a courageous nature, did as he was bidden, and remained there all that day, and all the night, and the next day until the third hour.

In the mean time the walls of the citadel were sapped, the troops of the emir poured in at the breach, and a great part of the garrison was put to the sword. The countess was taken prisoner and brought before the emir. She appeared in his presence with a haughty demeanor, as if she had been a queen receiving homage; but when {215} he demanded her son, she faltered and turned pale, and replied, "My son is with the dead."

"Countess," said the emir, "I am not to be deceived; tell me where you have concealed the boy, or tortures shall wring from you the secret."

"Emir," replied the countess, "may the greatest torments be my portion, both here and hereafter, if what I speak be not the truth. My darling child lies buried with the dead."

The emir was confounded by the solemnity of her words; but the withered astrologer Yuza, who stood by his side regarding the countess from beneath his bushed eyebrows, perceived trouble in her countenance and equivocation in her words. "Leave this matter to me," whispered he to Alahor; "I will produce the child."

He ordered strict search to be made by the soldiery, and he obliged the countess to be always present. When they came to the chapel, her cheek turned pale and her lip quivered. "This," said the subtile astrologer, "is the place of concealment!"

The search throughout the chapel, however, was equally vain, and the soldiers were about to depart, when Yuza remarked a slight gleam of joy in the eye of the countess. "We are leaving our prey behind," thought he; "the countess is exulting."

He now called to mind the words of her asseveration, that her child was with the dead. Turning suddenly to the soldiers he ordered them to search the sepulchres, "If you find him not," said he, "drag forth the bones of that wanton Cava, that they may be burnt, and the ashes scattered to the winds."

The soldiers searched among the tombs and found that of Florinda partly open. Within lay the boy in the sound sleep of childhood, and one of the soldiers took him gently in his arms to bear him to the emir.

When the countess beheld that her child was discovered, she rushed into the presence of Alahor, and forgetting all her pride, threw herself upon her knees before him.

"Mercy! mercy!" cried she in piercing accents, "mercy on my son--my only child! O Emir! listen to a mother's prayer and my lips shall kiss thy feet. As thou art merciful to him so may the most high God have mercy upon thee, and heap blessings on thy head."

"Bear that frantic woman hence," said the emir, "but guard her well."

The countess was dragged away by the soldiery, without regard to her struggles and her cries, and confined in a dungeon of the citadel.

The child was now brought to the emir. He had been awakened by the tumult, but gazed fearlessly on the stern countenances of the soldiers. Had the heart of the emir been capable of pity, it would have been touched by the tender youth and innocent beauty of the child; but his heart was as the nether millstone, and he was bent upon the destruction of the whole family of Julian. Calling to him the astrologer, he gave the child into his charge with a secret command. The withered son of the desert took the boy by the hand and led him up the winding staircase of a tower. When they reached the summit, Yuza placed him on the battlements.

"Cling not to me, my child," said he; "there is no danger." "Father, I fear not," said the undaunted boy; "yet it is a wondrous height."

The child looked around with delighted eyes. The breeze blew his curling locks from about his face, and his cheek glowed at the boundless prospect; for the tower was reared upon that lofty promontory on which Hercules founded one of his pillars. The surges of the sea were heard far below, beating upon the rocks, the sea-gull screamed and wheeled about the foundations of the tower, and the sails of lofty caraccas were as mere specks on the bosom of the deep.

"Dost thou know yonder land beyond the blue water?" said Yuza.

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"It is Spain," replied the boy; "it is the land of my father and my mother."

"Then stretch forth thy hands and bless it, my child," said the astrologer.

The boy let go his hold of the wall; and, as he stretched forth his hands, the aged son of Ishmael, exerting all the strength of his withered limbs, suddenly pushed him over the battlements. He fell headlong from the top of that tall tower, and not a bone in his tender frame but was crushed upon the rocks beneath.

Alahor came to the foot of the winding stairs.

"Is the boy safe?" cried he.

"He is safe," replied Yuza; "come and behold the truth with thine own eyes."

The emir ascended the tower and looked over the battlements, and beheld the body of the child, a shapeless mass, on the rocks far below, and the sea-gulls hovering about it; and he gave orders that it should be thrown into the sea, which was done.

On the following morning the countess was led forth from her dungeon into the public square. She knew of the death of her child, and that her own death was at hand, but she neither wept nor supplicated. Her hair was dishevelled, her eyes were haggard with watching, and her cheek was as the monumental stone; but there were the remains of commanding beauty in her countenance, and the majesty of her presence awed even the rabble into respect.

A multitude of Christian prisoners were then brought forth, and Alahor cried out: "Behold the wife of Count Julian! behold one of that traitorous family which has brought ruin upon yourselves and upon your country!" And he ordered that they should stone her to death. But the Christians drew back with horror from the deed, and said, "In the hand of God is vengeance; let not her blood be upon our heads." Upon this the emir swore with horrid imprecations that whoever of the captives refused should himself be stoned to death. So the cruel order was executed, and the Countess Frandina perished by the hands of her countrymen. Having thus accomplished his barbarous errand, the emir embarked for Spain, and ordered the citadel of Ceuta to be set on fire, and crossed the straits at night by the light of its towering flames.

The death of Count Julian, which took place not long after, closed the tragic story of his family. How he died remains involved in doubt. Some assert that the cruel Alahor pursued him to his retreat among the mountains, and, having taken him prisoner, beheaded him; others that the Moors confined him in a dungeon, and put an end to his life with lingering torments; while others affirm that the tower of the castle of Marcuello, near Huesca, in Aragon, in which he took refuge, fell on him and crushed him to pieces. All agree that his later end was miserable in the extreme and his death violent. The curse of heaven, which had thus pursued him to the grave, was extended to the very place which had given him shelter; for we are told that the castle is no longer inhabited on account all the strange and horrible noises that are heard in it; and that visions of armed men are seen above it in the air: which are supposed to be the troubled spirits of the apostate Christians who favored the cause of the traitor.

In after-times a stone sepulcher was shown, outside of the chapel of the castle, as the tomb of Count Julian; but the traveller and the pilgrim avoided it, or bestowed upon it a malediction; and the name of Julian has remained a byword and a scorn in the land for the warning of all generations. Such ever be the lot of him who betrays his country!

Here end the legends of the conquest of Spain.

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ORIGINAL.

RECENT EUROPEAN EVENTS.

When it is said that the church is independent of time and its events, and can subsist and operate under all forms of government, and in all stages of civilization, it is not meant that she is indifferent to the revolution of states and empires, or cares not how the state is constituted, or the government administered. Subsisting and operating society, though not holding from it, she cannot be indifferent to its constitution, either for her sake or its own. It may be constituted more for less in accordance with eternal justice, or absolute and unchanging right, and therefore more or less favorable to her catholic mission, which is to introduce and sustain the reign of truth and right in the state and the administration as well as in the individual reason and will.

Far less does the independence of the church, or her non-dependence on the political order and its variations, imply that politics, as is but too often assumed, are independent of the moral law of God, and therefore that statesman, civil magistrates, and rulers are under no obligation to consult in their acts what is right, just, or conformable to the law of the Lord, but only what seems to them expedient, or for their own interest. All sound politics are based on principles derived from theology, the great catholic or universal and invariable principles which govern man's relation to his Maker and to his neighbor, and of which, while the state is indeed in the temporal order the administrator, the church is the divinely instituted guardian and teacher. No Christian, no man who believes in God, can assert political independence of the divine or spiritual order, for that would be simply political atheism; and if men sometimes do assert it without meaning to deny the existence and authority of God in the spiritual order, it is because men can be and sometimes are illogical, and inconsistent with themselves. Kings, kaisers, magistrates, are as much bound to obey God, to be just, to do right, as are private individuals, and in their official no less than in their private acts.

The first question to be asked in relation to any political measure is. Is it morally right? The second, Are the means chosen for carrying it out just? If not, it must not be adopted. But, and this is important, it is the prerogative of God to overrule the evil men do, and to make it result in good. "Ye meant it for evil, but God meant it for good." Hence when things are done and cannot be recalled, though not before, we may lawfully accept them, and labor to turn them to the best possible account, without acquitting or approving them, or the motives and conduct of the men who have been in the hands of Providence the instruments of doing them. Hence there are two points of view from which political events may be considered: the moral--the motives and conduct of those who have brought them about; and the political--or the bearing of the events themselves, regarded as facts accomplished and irrevocable, on the future welfare of society.

If we judge the recent territorial changes in Italy and Germany from the moral point of view, we cannot acquit them. The means by which the unity of Italy has been effected under the house of Savoy, and those by which {218} that of Germany has been placed in the way of being effected under the house of Hohenzollern, it seems to me are wholly indefensible. The war of France and Sardinia against Austria in 1859, the annexation to Sardinia of the Duchies, and the AEmilian provinces subject to the Holy See, the absorption by force of arms of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the still more recent war of Italy and Prussia against the same power, resulting in the mutilation and humiliation of the Austrian empire, and possibly in depriving the pope the remainder of his domain, are, I must hold in every sense unjustifiable. They have been done in violation of international law, public right, and are an outrage upon every man's innate sense of justice, excusable only on that most detestable of all maxims--the end sanctifies the means.

But regarded from the political point of view, as facts accomplished and irrevocable, perhaps they are not indefensible, nay, not unlikely under divine Providence to prove of lasting benefit to European society. I cannot defend the _coup d'état_ of Napoleon, December 2, 1851, but I believe that the elevation of Louis Napoleon to the French throne has turned out for the benefit of France and of Europe. I condemned the means adopted to effect both Italian and German unity, but I am not prepared to say that each, in view of the undeniable tendency of modern politics, was not in itself desirable and demanded by the solid and permanent interests of European society. Taken as facts accomplished, as points of departure for the future, they may have, perhaps already have had, an important bearing in putting an end to the uneasiness under which all European society has labored since the treaties of Vienna in 1815, and the socialistic and revolutionary movements which have, ever since the attempted reconstruction of Europe after the fall of Napoleon, kept it in continual turmoil, and rendered all government except by sheer force impracticable.

The tendency of European society for four or five centuries has been, on the one hand, toward civil and political equality, and on the other, toward Roman imperialism. European society has revolted against mediaeval feudalism, alike against the feudal aristocracy and the feudal monarchy, and sought to revive the political system of imperial Rome, to place all citizens on the footing of an equality before the law, with exclusive privileges for none, and to base monarchy on the sovereign will of the nation. It would be incorrect to say, as many both at home and abroad have said, that European society has been or is tending to pure and simple democracy, for such has not been, and is not by any means the fact; but it has been and is tending to the abolition of all political distinctions and privileges founded on birth or property, and to render all persons without reference to caste or class eligible to all the offices of state, and to make all offices charges or trusts, instead of private property or estates. Under feudalism all the great offices of the state and many of the charges at court were hereditary, and could be claimed, held, and exercised as rights, unless forfeited by treason or misprision of treason against the liege lord. It was so in France down to the revolution of 1789, and is still so in England in relation to several charges at court, and to the House of Peers. The feudal crown is an estate, and transmissible in principle, and usually in fact, as any other estate.

Since the fifteenth century this feudal system has been attacked, throughout the greater part of Europe, with more or less success. It received heavy blows from Louis XI. in France, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, Henry VII. in England, and Maximilian I. in Germany. The tendency in this direction was resisted by the Protestant princes in Germany, leagued against the emperor, the Huguenot nobles and the Fronde in France, and by the whig nobility in England, because while it {219} strengthened the people as against the crown, it equally strengthened the crown against the nobility. The British reformers to-day, under the lead of John Bright, are following out this European tendency, and if successful, will abolish the House of Peers, establish civil and political equality, but at the same time will increase the power of the crown, and establish Roman imperialism, which the Stuarts failed to do, because they sought to retain and strengthen the feudal monarchy while they crushed the feudal aristocracy.

But for the king or emperor to represent the nation and govern by its sovereign authority, it is necessary that the nation should become a state, or body politic, which it was not under feudalism. Europe under feudalism was divided among independent and subordinate chiefs, but not into sovereign independent nations. There were estates but no states, and the same proprietor might hold, and often did hold, estates in different nations, and in nations even remote from one another, and neither power nor obedience depended on national boundaries or national territory. There was loyalty to the chief, but none to the nation, or to the king or emperor as representing the national majesty or sovereignty. Hence the tendency to Roman imperialism became also a tendency to nationality. Both king and people conspired together to bring into national unity, and under the imperial authority of the crown, all the fiefs, whoever the suzerain or liege lord, and all the small principalities that by territorial position, tradition, language, the common origin, or institutions of the inhabitants, belonged really to one and the same nation.

The first of the continental powers to effect this national unity was France, consisting of the former Gallic provinces of the Roman empire, except a portion of the Gallia Germana now held by Belgium, Holland, and the Germanic governments on the left bank of the Rhine. The natural boundaries of France are those of the ancient Keltica of the Greeks, extending from the Alps to the Atlantic ocean, and from the Mediterranean sea to the English channel and the Rhine. France has not yet recovered and united the whole of her national territory, and probably will never be perfectly contented till she has done it. But after centuries of struggle, from Philip Augustus to Louis XIV., she effected internally national unity which gave her immense advantages over Italy and Germany, which remained divided, and which at times has given her even the hegemony of Europe.

The defeat of the first Napoleon, the restoration of the Bourbons, and the treaties of Vienna in 1815, arrested, and were designed to arrest, this tendency of modern European society under all its aspects, and hence satisfied nobody. They prevented the free development and play of the tendency to national unity and independence, re-established aristocracy, and restrained the tendency to equality, and reasserted monarchy as an estate held by the grace of God and inviolable and indefeasible, instead of the representative monarchy, which holds from the nation, and is responsible to it. Those treaties grouped people together without any regard to their territorial relations, natural affinities, traditions, or interests, without the slightest reference to the welfare of the different populations, and with sole reference to the interests of sovereigns, and the need felt of restricting or guarding against the power of France. A blinder, a less philosophical, or a more ignorant set of statesmen than those who framed these treaties, it is difficult to conceive. The poor men took no note of the changes which had been produced during four or five hundred years of social elaboration, and supposed that they were still in full mediaeval feudalism, when people and territory could be transferred from one suzerain or one liege lord to another, without offending any political principle or any sentiment of {220} nationality. Of all legislators in the world, reactionists suddenly victorious, and not yet wholly recovered from their fright, are the worst, for they act from passion, not reason or judgment.

From the moment these treaties were published a social and political agitation began in nearly all the states of Europe. Conspiracies were everywhere, and the revolutionary spirit threatened every state and empire, and no government could stand save as upheld by armed force. Bold attempts at revolution were early made in Naples and Spain, which were defeated only by foreign intervention. Hardly a state was strong enough in the affections of its people to maintain order without the repressive weight of the Holy Alliance, invented by Madame Krudener, and effected by the Emperor Alexander and Prince Metternich. Austria dominated in the Italian peninsula, France in the Spanish, and Russia in Poland and Germany; Great Britain used all her power and influence to prevent the emancipation of the Christian populations of the East, and to uphold the tottering empire of the Turks. The Holy Father was at once protected and oppressed by the allied powers, especially by Austria; the people everywhere became alienated from both church and state, and serious-minded men, not easily alarmed, trembled with fear that European society might be on the eve of a return to barbarism and oriental despotism.

Matters grew worse and worse till there came the explosions of 1830, driving out of France the elder branch of the Bourbons, detaching Belgium from Holland, and causing the final extinction of the old and once powerful kingdom of Poland, followed by revolutions more or less successful in Spain and Portugal. Force soon triumphed for the moment, but still Europe, to use the figure so hackneyed at the time, was a smouldering volcano, till the fearful eruptions of 1848 struck well-nigh aghast the whole civilized world, and conservatives thought that the day for social order and regular authority had passed away, never to return. Anarchy seemed fixed in France, the imperial family in Austria fled to Innspruck, and the Hungarians in revolt, forming a league with the rebellions citizens of Vienna and the Italian revolution, brought the empire almost to its last gasp; the king of Prussia was imprisoned in his palace by the mob, and nearly every petty German prince was obliged to compromise with the revolutionists. All Italy was in commotion; the Holy Father was forced to seek refuge at Gaeta, and the infamous Mazzinian republic, with the filibuster Garibaldi as its general and hero, was installed in the Eternal City. Such had been the result of the repressive policy of the Holy Alliance, when Louis Napoleon was elected president of the French republic.

It is true, in 1849 the revolution was suppressed, and power reinstated in its rights in Rome, Naples, Tuscany, the Austrian dominions, Prussia, and the several German states; but everybody felt that it was only for a moment, for none of the causes of uneasiness or dissatisfaction were removed. The whole of Europe was covered over with secret societies, working in the dark, beyond the reach of the most powerful and sharp-sighted governments, and there was danger every day of a new outbreak, perhaps still more violent, and equally impotent to settle European society on a solid and permanent foundation, because the revolution was, save on its destructive side, as little in accord with its tendencies and aspirations as the Holy Alliance itself.

The cause of all this uneasiness, of this universal agitation, was not in the tyranny, despotism, or opposition of the governments, or in their disregard of the welfare of the people more hostility to them; for never in the whole history of Europe were the governments of France, Italy, Germany, and {221} Austria less despotic, less arbitrary, less respectful of the rights of person and property, less oppressive, indeed more intelligent, or more disposed to consult the welfare of the people--the French, Prussian, and Austrian systems of universal popular education proves it--than during the period from 1815 to 1848; and never in so brief a period has so much been done for the relief and elevation of the poorer and more numerous classes. The only acts of government that were or could be complained of were acts of repression, preventative or punitive, rendered necessary by the chronic conspiracy, and perfectly justifiable, if the government would protect itself, or preserve its own existence, and which, in fact, were not more arbitrary or oppressive than the acts performed in this country during the late rebellion, by both the general government and the confederate government, or than those practiced for centuries by the British government in Ireland. Nor was it owing entirely or chiefly to the native perversity of the human heart, to the impatience of restraint and subordination of the people, who were said to demand unbounded license, and determined to submit to no regular authority. Individuals may love licence and hate authority, but the people love order, and are naturally disposed to obedience, and are usually far more ready to submit to even grievous wrongs then to make an effort to right them.

The cause in France was not that the Bourbons of either branch were bad or unwise rulers, but that they retained too many feudal traditions, claimant the throne as a personal estate, and, moreover, were forced upon the nation by foreign bayonets, not restored by the free, independent will of the nation itself. Their government, however able, enlightened, and even advantageous to France, was not national; and while submitting to it, the new France that had grown up since 1789 could not feel herself an independent nation. It is probable that there is less freedom for Frenchmen in thought and speech under the present régime than there was under the Restoration or even the King of the Barricades and his parliament; but it is national, accepted by the free will of the nation, and, moreover, obliterates all traces of the old feudal distinctions and privileges of caste or class, and establishes, under the emperor, democratic equality. Individuals may be disaffected, some regretting lost privileges and distinctions, and others wishing the democracy without the emperor; but upon the whole the great body of the people are contented with it, and any attempt at a new revolution would prove a miserable failure. The secret societies may still exist, but they are not sustained by popular sympathy, and are now comparatively powerless. The socialistic theories and movements, Saint Simonism, Fourierism, Cabetism, and the like, fall into disrepute, not because suppressed by the police, but because there is no longer that general dissatisfaction with the social order that exists which originated them, and because the empire is in harmony with the tendencies of modern European society.

In Italy the cause was neither hatred of authority nor hostility to the church or her supreme pontiff, but the craving of the people, or the influential and controlling part of them, for national unity and independence. In feudal times, when France was parcelled out among feudatories, many of whom were more powerful than the king, their nominal suzerain; when Spain was held in great part by the Moors, and the rest of her territory was divided into three or four mutually independent kingdoms; when England was subject to the great vassals of the crown, rather than to the crown itself; when Germany was divided into some three hundred principalities and free cities, loosely united only under an elective emperor, with little effective power, and often a cause of division rather than a bond of union between them; {222} and when the pope, the most Italian of all the Italian sovereigns, was suzerain of a large part of Italy, and of nearly all Europe, except France, Germany, and the Eastern empire, the division of the peninsula into some half a dozen or more mutually independent republics, principalities, or kingdoms, did not deprive Italy of the rank of a great power in Europe, or prevent her from exercising often even a controlling influence in European politics, and therefore was not felt to be an evil. But when France, Spain, Austria, and Great Britain became great centralized states, and when in Switzerland, Holland, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and North Germany the rise of Protestantism had weakened the political influence of the pope, these divisions reduced Italy, which had been the foster-mother of modern civilization, and the leader of the modern nations in the arts of war and peace, in commerce and industry, in national and international law, in literature, science, architecture, music, painting, and sculpture, to a mere geographical expression, or to complete political nullity, and could not but offend the just pride of the nation. The treaties of 1815 had, besides, given over the fairest portion of the territory of the peninsula to Austria, and enabled her, by her weight as a great power, to dominate over the rest. The grand duke of Tuscany was an Austrian archduke, the king of the Two Sicilies, and even the pope as temporal prince, were little less, in fact, than vassals of the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine.

Italy felt that she was not herself, and that she could be herself and belong to herself, own herself, as our slaves used to say before they were emancipated, only by expelling Austria and her agents from Italian territory, and uniting the whole peninsula in a single state, unitarian or federative, under a single supreme national government. For this Italian patriotism everywhere sighed, agitated, conspired, rebelled, struggled, was arrested, shot, hung, imprisoned, exiled, and filled the world with its complaints, the story of its wrongs and sufferings. It was not that Italy was badly governed, but that she was not governed by herself, was governed by foreigners, or at least by governors who would not, or could not, secure her national unity and independence, without which she could not become the great European power that she aspired to be, and felt herself capable of being. The Fenians do not agitate and arm against England so much because her government in Ireland is now--whenever it may have been formerly-- tyrannical and oppressive, as because it is not national, is not Irish, and offends the Irish sense of nationality, far stronger now than in the time of Strongbow or that of the confederate chieftains. Through the armed intervention of Napoleon III. in 1859, and the recent alliance with Prussia against Austria, Italy has no got what she agitated for, national unity and independence, though at the expense of great injustice to the dispossessed sovereigns, and is free to become a great European power, if she has it in her, and her chronic conspiracy is ended. She has obtained all that she was conspiring for, and is satisfied: she has gained possession of herself, and is free herself to be all that she is capable of being.

The Germans, also, were uneasy, discontented, and conspiring for the same reason. The Bund was a mockery, formed in the interest of the sovereigns, without regard to the people or the national sentiment, and in practice has tended far more to divide and weaken, than to unite and strength the German nation, both on the side of France and on that of Russia. Germany, in consequence of the changes effected in other nations, was, like Italy, reduced to a geographical expression. Austria in the south was a great power, Prussia counted for something in the north, but Germany was a political nullity. The Germans aspired to national unity, and attempted {223} to obtain it in 1848 by the reconstruction, with many wise modifications, of the old Germanic empire, suppressed by Napoleon I. in 1806, but were defeated by the mutual jealousies of Prussia and Austria, the withdrawal of the Austrian delegates from the Diet, and the refusal of the King of Prussia to accept the imperial crown offered him by the Diet, after the withdrawal of Austria. What failed to be legally and peaceably effected 1848 and 1849, has been virtually effected by Prussia in this year of grace, 1866, after a fortnight's sharp and fierce war, not because of her greatly overrated needle-gun, but because Prussia is more thoroughly German than Austria, and better represents the national sentiment.

The success of Prussia must be regards, I think, not only as breaking up the old confederation, and expelling Austria from Germany, but as really defecting German unity, or the union of all Germany in a single state. The states north of the Main, not as yet formally annexed to Prussia, and those so of that line, as yet free to form a southern confederation, will soon, perhaps, with the seven or eight millions of Germans still under Austrian rule, in all likelihood be absorbed by her, and formed into a single military state with her, and transform her from Prussia into Germany. It is most likely only a question of time, as it is only a logical sequence of what has already been effected. Austria ceases to be a German power, and must seek indemnification by developing, as Hungary rather than as Austria, eastward, and gradually absorbing Roumania, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Servia, and Bulgaria, and placing herself as an impassable barrier to the advance of Russia southward in Europe. This she may do, if wise enough to give up Germany, and to avail herself of the vast resources she still possesses; for in this she would probably be aided by Great Britain, France, and Italy--all deeply interested in preventing Russia from planting herself in Constantinople, and gaining the empire of the world. Turkey must fall, must die, and European equilibrium requires a new and powerful Eastern state, if the whole of Europe is not to become Cossack.

The independence and unity of Italy, and the union of Germany in a single state, had become political necessities, and both must be effected as the means of putting an end to what European writers call "the Revolution," and giving internal peace to European society. No doubt they have not been thus far effected without great violence to vested rights; but necessity knows no law, or is itself law, and nations never have been and never can be arrested in their purposes by vested rights, however sacred religion and morality teach us to hold them. National and popular passions can be controlled by no considerations of right or wrong. They sweep onward and away whatever would stay their progress. If the possessors of vested rights opposed to national union, independence, or development, consent to part with them at a just ransom, the nation is ready to indemnify them liberally; but if they will not consent, it will take them all the same, and without scruple.

I say not that this is right; I pretend not to justify it; I only state what all experience proves that nations do and will continue to do in spite of religion and morality. Ahab was willing to pay a round price for Naboth's vineyard, but when Naboth refused to sell it at any price, Ahab took it for nothing. But these political changes, regarded as accomplished and irrevocable facts, and setting aside the means adopted to effect them, and the vested rights violated in obtaining them, are not morally wrong, and are in no sense threatening to the future peace and progress of European society, but seem to be the only practicable means that were left of preventing it from lapsing into certain barbarism. They seem to me to have been needed to render the {224} European governments henceforth able to sustain themselves by the affections and good sense of the people, without being obliged to keep themselves armed to the teeth against them. International wars will, no doubt, continue as long as the world stands, but wars of the people against authority, or of subjects against their rulers, may now cease for a long time to come, at least in the greater part of Europe. The feudal system is everywhere either swept away, or so weakened as to be no longer able to make a serious struggle for existence; and save Ireland, Poland, and the Christian populations of the East, the European nations are formed, and are in possession of their national unity and independence. The people have reached what for ages they have been tending to, and are in possession of what, in substance, they have so long been agitating for. The new political order is fairly inaugurated, and the people have obtained their legitimate satisfaction. Whether they will be wiser or better, happier or more really prosperous, under the new order than they were under the old, we must leave to time to prove. Old men, like the writer of this, who have lived too long and seen too much to regard every change as a progress, may be permitted to retain their doubts. But changes which in themselves are not for the better, are relatively so when rendered necessary by other and previous changes.

The English and American press very generally assert that the Emperor of the French is much vexed at the turn things have taken in Germany, that he is disappointed in his expectations, and defeated in his European policy. I do not think so. The French policy since the time of Francis I. has been, indeed, to prevent the concentration and growth of any great power on the frontiers of France; as the papal policy ever since the popes were temporal sovereigns, according to Tosti in his Life and Times of Boniface VIII., has been to prevent the establishment of any great power in the immediate neighborhood of Rome. That this French policy and this papal are defeated by the turn things have taken is no doubt true, but what evidence is there that this is a defeat of Napoleon's policy, or is anything else than that he both expected and intended? When he entered on his Italian campaign against Austria in 1859, he showed clearly that he did not intend to sustain the Papal policy, for his purpose was the unity no less than the independence of Italy. He showed, also, no less clearly, that while he retained traditional French policy of humbling the house of Hapsburg, he did not intend in other respects to sustain that policy; for he must have foreseen, as the writer of this, in another place, told him at the time, that the unity of Italy would involve as its logical and necessary sequence the the unity of Germany. We can suppose him disappointed only by supposing he entertained a policy which he appears to have deliberately made up his mind to abandon, or not to adopt.

After the Italian campaign, and perhaps before, the unity of Germany was a foregone conclusion, and if effected it must be either under Austria or under Prussia. Napoleon had only to choose which it should be. And it was manifestly for the interest of France that it should be under Prussia, an almost exclusively German power, rather than under Austria, whose non-Germanic population was three times greater than her Germanic population. If the unity of Germany had been effected under Austria with her non-Germanic provinces, Germany would have constituted in central Europe a power of nearly seventy millions of people, absolutely incompatible with the European equilibrium; but if effected under Prussia, it would constitute a state of only about forty millions, not a power so large as to be dangerous to France or to the peace of Europe. France has nothing to fear from a Prussian Germany, for she is amply able to cope with her, and the first war between the two powers would restore to France her natural {225} boundaries, by giving her all the territory on the left bank of the Rhine, and thus make her commensurate with the ancient Keltica.

France is too strong in her unity, compactness, and extent, as well as in the high spirit and military genius of her people, to think of precautions against Germany. The power for her to guard against is Russia, embracing a rapidly increasing population of upward of seventy millions, and possessing one-seventh of the territory of the globe. She has no other power to fear, since Austria is separated from Germany. Prussia, capable of becoming a great maritime power, and embracing all Germany, not only rescues the smaller German states from Russian influence and intrigue, but becomes an efficient ally of France, in the west, against Russia, and far more efficient and trustworthy an ally than Great Britain, because a continental power, and more exposed to danger from the common enemy. While Prussia becomes a powerful ally in the west, Austria, by being detached from Germany, and too weak to stand without alliances, becomes a French ally in the east; and the more ready to be so, because the majority of her future population is and must be of the Slavic race.

Napoleon's policy, it seems to me, has been first, to drive Austria out of Italy and detach her from Germany, for the security of France; and then to organize pan-Germanism against pan-Slavism in the West, and an Austrian, or rather, Slavic or Hungarian Empire, embracing the Magyars and Roumans, against pan-Slavism in the East. With these two great powers, having as against Russia a common interest with France, the Emperor of the French, the ally and protector of the Latin nations, will be able to settle the terrible Eastern question without suffering Russia to receive an undue accession of territory or power, and also without the scandal of sustaining, in order to please Great Britain and save her Indian possessions, the rotten empire of the Turks, and preventing the Christian nations it holds, through the aid of the western Christian powers, in subjection, from working out their freedom and independence, rising to national dignity and influence.

Such, briefly stated, has been, I think, substantially the policy of Napoleon, since he became Emperor of the French; and the recent events in Italy and Germany so strikingly accord with it, that one cannot help believing that they have been dictated by it. It seems designed to give measurable satisfaction to the principal nationalities of Europe, as it secures undisputed preponderance to no one, and humiliates no one over much. It may, therefore, be said to be a policy of peace. It is a policy, if carried out in all its parts, that would enable France, Prussia, Italy, Austria, to isolate Russia, and at need Great Britain, from Europe; but it robs neither of any of its territory or inherent strength, and is hostile to neither, unless one or the other would encroach on the rights of others.

Will this policy be carried out and consolidated I know not. It is substantially in accordance with the tendencies of modern European society; the most difficult parts of it have already been effected, and we have seen no movement on the part of either Russia or Great Britain to assist Austria to prevent it. Napoleon had succeeded in isolating Austria from Europe, and almost from Germany, before he commenced his Italian campaign in 1859. Should Napoleon die suddenly, should Russia or Great Britain interpose to prevent Austria from expanding eastward before she has recovered from her losses in being expelled from Italy and Germany, and should France, Germany, and Italy refuse to act as her allies, or should she herself look to the recovery of what she has lost, rather than to the development of what she retains or has in prospect, the policy might fail; but these are all improbable contingencies, except the first; yet even Napoleon's death would not seriously {226} affect the unity and independence of Italy, or the unity of Germany, as much as the South Germans dislike the Prussians. This age worships strength and success.

The most doubtful part of this Napoleonic policy is the part assigned to Austria in the future; and the part the most offensive to the Catholic heart, is that which strips the Holy Father of his temporal dominions, annexes them to the kingdom of Italy, and leaves him to the tender mercy of his despoilers. The Holy Father, sustained by the general voice of the episcopacy, has said the maintenance of the temporal sovereignty is _necessary_ to the interests of religion; but he said this when there was still hope that it might be retained, and he, of course, did not mean that it is _absolutely_ necessary at all times and under all circumstances; because that would have made the principal depend on the accessory, and the spiritual on the temporal. Moreover, religion had existed and flourished several centuries before the popes were temporal sovereigns, and what has been may be again. Circumstances have changed since the Holy Father said this, and it is not certain that, as it is not a Catholic dogma, he would insist on it now.

Of course the change is to be deeply deplored, especially for those who have effected it; but is there any possibility, humanly speaking, of re-establishing the Holy Father in his temporal rights? I confess I can see none. It is a great loss, but perhaps some arrangement may be entered into with the new Italian power, which, after all, will enable the Holy Father still to reside at Rome, and exercise independently his functions as the spiritual chief of Christendom. Italy has more need of the pope then the pope has of Italy, and Victor Emmanuel, at worst, cannot be worse than were the Pagan and Arian Caesars. No Catholic can ever despair of the church. At present the temporal, to all human ken, seems to have triumphed over the spiritual, and politics to have carried it over religion. Yet the triumph cannot be lasting, and in some way the victory won will prove to have been a defeat. God will never forsake his church, his beloved, his bride, his beautiful one, and the Lord will not suffer Peter to sink when he walks upon the waters. Peter's bark may be violently tossed on the waves, but the very independence of the church prevents us from fearing that it will be submerged. In what way the future of the papacy will be provided for, it is not for us to determine or to suggest. We cheerfully confide in the wisdom of the Holy Father, assisted as he will be by the Holy Ghost.

{227}

From The Sixpenny Magazine.

THE SUMMER DAYS ARE GONE.

The flowers that made the summer air So fragrant with their rich perfume, Alas! are gone, their leaves so fair Lie faded in their autumn tomb.

The branches now are almost bare, Where summer song-birds made their homes; Where trees are green, where flowers are fair, Once more the happy birds have flown.

To distant lands o'er sunny seas The songsters bright have taken wing. To warble on that warmer breeze The notes they sang to us in spring.

Her autumn robe of red and brown Once more the gliding year puts on, And yonder sun looks colder down Since the bright summer days are gone.

The stars, the glory of the night, Look on us still with silvery eye-- Shine on us still as clear and bright. But not from out the summer sky.

The chilly breezes of the north Tell us it is no longer spring, And winter's hand is reaching forth To wither every verdant thing.

So even like the birds the flowers. When dearest things of life have flown. Then in the heart's deserted bowers The naked branches stand alone.

Oh, then, alas! no breath of spring Can breathe the living verdure on. No sun will shine, no birds will sing-- For ever is the summer gone.

But when the heart beats high and warm. And kindred hearts its throbbing share. It heeds not winter's clouds nor storm, But summer tarries always there.

{228}

From The Lamp.

UNCONVICTED; OR, OLD THORNELEY'S HEIRS.