Chapter VII.

A secret fault, drawing with it its terrible consequences, interlaced one with another, like a nest of venomous serpents, had already cost the one who committed it her happiness and life, and the one who conceived it her reason; for Nora, shocked into insanity by the fearful curse and death of her mistress, was the inmate of a madhouse. But its hideous trail continued still, entangling and envenoming the hitherto tranquil life of the General Count of Alcira. The good old man never ceased to reproach himself for the cruel epithet indignation had forced from his lips; the only expression he had ever uttered that could wound the poor worn heart that implored but one pious word to permit it to cease its beating in peace. Instead of that word, he had cast the cruel taunt under which it had burst in despair. He wept burning tears for not having conceded the pardon which could have been but one instant wanting to his generous soul. And that instant had been her last. His forgiveness might have soothed her anguish, prolonged her life, and sweetened her death; and he had refused it. This remembrance became in its turn a remorse, and poisoned his existence.

The reaction he experienced, with his natural goodness of heart, had the effect to render almost excusable in his eyes a fault counterbalanced by so many shining qualities, and blotted out by such unparalleled remorse and by mortal sufferings; for death, when it takes its prey, has the sweet prerogative of carrying with it under the earth the evil it has done, leaving the good behind for an epitaph.

The general atoned for that one moment in which he had forgotten to be a Christian by multiplied works of charity, offered in sacrifice to obtain from heaven the pardon earth had denied the penitent, and by incessant offerings for the repose of her soul. Offerings which the Eternal would receive; for the Creator has not left man a foundling. He has acknowledged him as a son, has given him precepts, and promised him, from the cross, a glorious inheritance.

Every morning a mass was offered for the rest of her whose image dwelt in the heart of the old man who knelt at the foot of the altar, uniting his fervent petitions with those of the priest that was sacrificing.

The general's life was still more embittered by the painful secret which oppressed and involved him and his sons with him, as the serpent in the group of the Laocoon makes both father and sons his prey. He could not break the arcanum without sacrificing the one to whom his kind heart clung with tender affection, without defaming the sacred ashes of the mother of his children. He, therefore, respecting the youth and innocence of his boys, kept the fatal secret, which, in truth, he had not the courage to reveal. The time, he argued within himself, when the veil must be withdrawn from such a sad and cruel reality will come soon enough. Sometimes he resolved to let it be buried with him. But what right had he, a man of such strict principles, to deprive his heirs of their inheritance in favor of a stranger? Could he make an alien the head of his noble house? {252} Allow a foundling to usurp the rights of its lawful representatives? Worldly fathers would rather listen to the opinion of the world than to the voice of conscience, placing social considerations above its decisions, persuading it that they are compelled thereto by circumstances. But let no one compound with conscience, lest she cease to be conscience; lest she become a conniver instead of a sentinel, a weather-cock instead of a foundation; lest she lose the respect and confidence she is bound to inspire. For she should give her decisions as the sun sends forth his rays, with nothing to hinder them or turn them from their direction.

The years sped onward. The count grew infirm and saw his end approaching. Wishing to pass the last days of his life in the society of his children, and feeling that he ought to reveal the secret he had kept so long, he sent for them to join him in Chiclana, where he wished to die, in order to be buried beside his wife, thereby giving her, even after he was dead, a last public testimony of affection and respect.

The word enlightenment had not then been brought into use, nor had the colleges been modernized. Yet this did not prevent the three brothers from being such finished and accomplished gentlemen that the sight of them filled their father's heart with pleasure and pride.

Ramon, the eldest, came from the school of artillery, where he had been the companion of Daoiz and Velarde. The second came from the academy of marine guards, the academy which produced the heroes of Trafalgar, those Titans who contended with a powerful adversary, with the treachery of an ally, and with the unchained fury of the elements, and who were crushed, not vanquished, by the three united. The youngest arrived from the university of Seville, in which, at that time, or a little before, the Listas, Reinosas, Blaneos, Carvajales, Arjonos, Roldanes, and the worthy, wise, and exemplary Maestre, were students. For though Spain has lacked railroads, hotels, and refined and sensual means of entertainment, she has never, in any epoch, lacked wise men and heroes.

The general looked at the three in turn with an indefinable expression of tenderness; but when his glance fell upon Ramon, he lowered his eyes to hide the tears that filled them.

His vivid pleasure at the sight of his children, mingled with the anguish of knowing that over the head of the unconscious Ramon the sword of Damocles was suspended, agitated the old man so much that he passed the night in feverish wakefulness, and his state on the following morning was such that his doctors advised him to make his last preparations. The grief of his children, by whom he was adored, was heart-rending. But the general was so well prepared to leave the world and appear before the bar of God, that his last dispositions, though solemn, were short and serene.

Toward night, feeling himself grow weaker every moment, he made arrangements to be left alone with his sons, who drew near his bed, repressing their tears in order not to afflict him.

He looked long at them, and then said: "My children, I am about to tell you a cruel secret, which will make one of you wretched. It has lain for many years buried deep in my soul; but I am dying, and can be its repository no longer. O my God! my heart gives the lie to my lips; and, nevertheless, one of you is not my son, and the mother at whose grave you go to pray never bore you."

The grieved astonishment which manifested itself in the countenances of the three youths, left them pale, speechless, and overwhelmed.

"You know well," continued the father, after a pause, "that my interest and tenderness, in and toward you all have been the same, and that it cannot be known, even to yourselves, which of you has no right to bear my name. And you, my children, which one of you is it that does not feel for me the affection of a son?"

The simultaneous and eloquent reply of the three was to throw themselves, suffocated by their sobs, into the arms of the good old man.

{253}

"Alas! then," he proceeded, "if your own hearts do not tell you, it is my cruel duty to declare it."

The youths regarded each other for a moment, and then, with one impulse embracing each other, exclaimed with one voice:

"Father, we will not know it!"

The father raised his hands and eyes to heaven. "My God," he cried, "I thank thee! I die contented. My sons, my sons! may the satisfaction of having hidden for ever an unhappy secret, may the remembrance of having covered with a mantle of holy fraternal love the misfortune of one of yourselves, make your lives as happy and tranquil as you have made my death."

And laying his hands upon the heads of the three brothers, who had knelt at his bedside, he said: "Let my last words be your recompense. My sons, I leave you my blessing!"

Mercersburg Philosophy.

By A. Protestant.

[As allusion having been made in the article on Dr. Bacon, which appeared in our April number, "to the German Reformed Presbyterians and Dr. Nevin," has called forth the following communication. We publish it as interesting to our readers who will bear in mind in its perusal that it is from a Protestant source, and while making, therefore, an allowance for some of its statements, will at the same time be not a little surprised that one who sees so much Catholic truth should fail to identify what he sees with the Catholic Church.--Ed. C. W.]

From the mountain village of Mercersburg in Pennsylvania emanated a philosophy--theology we, who are its prophets and adherents, call it--which has done much, and is destined to do more, to unprotestantize Protestantism. Nor do we, who are Protestants, regret this. The longer we ponder our work the more are we convinced of its utility, and confirmed in our resolution to pursue it. Well aware, as we are, that the Reformation has proved a failure, except it be as a preparation for a higher form of Christianity to follow nearer the old landmarks, and free from the democratic tendencies that have crept into the Protestant Church from the institutions of the state, or which, perhaps, more properly have moulded the institutions of the state themselves as the natural outgrowth of the system taught by Luther and Calvin, we cannot but rejoice that this is so. Our people have a natural desire to worship, instead of being compelled to give an intellectual assent to arguments on points of doctrine, and the teachers of the Mercersburg philosophy are determined to gratify them.

We see clearly, what many others have failed to see, that New England Unitarianism, and after it infidelity, to which it leads, are not only the logical but the actual consequences of Protestantism. But we believe in historical development; and as this is development in the wrong direction, we see nothing before us but to profit by the lesson and retrace our steps. We know that a cult which rejects the Christ and elevates the Jesus will soon degrade the Jesus too, and that, following an attempt to attain to merely human excellence, will be a society distorted by the vices of vanity, avarice, and selfishness, and then a gradual obliteration of all the virtues. Men are beginning to see, dimly enough, that this age is a transition period in the world's history, when all our conceptions of truth, that is, Protestant conceptions of truth, are unsettled and passing through crucible, as it were, to come out in new and untried forms. {254} But they do not understand the law of transition periods, and, while they acknowledge that the last great transition was the Reformation, they fail to perceive that the theories embraced at that time have failed. A certain feeling of disappointment at the work sectarianism has wrought sometimes oppresses them, but, instead of attempting to bridge over the chasm, they endeavor to tear away the broken arches which remain.

Everybody can see that Protestantism had a grand start during the first thirty years of its existence. That Rome would soon give its last convulsive gasp seemed patent to the eyes of all reformers; but now, after three hundred years of Protestant endeavor, a leading Protestant clergyman of New York is constrained to say that "Protestant Christendom betrays signs of weakness in every part," and to declare, and rejoice in the declaration, that "Modern life is not 'Christian' in any intelligible sense. The industrial interest is openly averse to it both at home and abroad. Political life is, if possible, still more unchristian." But continues the same authority: "If industry, politics, literature, art, have abandoned Christ, they have as fully and unreservedly embraced Jesus." Now this is either sheer nonsense or it is downright infidelity. About the premises there can be no doubt. It is but a small part of the so-called Christian church that looks to Christ as the central fact of the system--the super-natural agency working through the church for the salvation of men. But the broad churchmen, when they have as fully and unreservedly embraced what they understand by Jesus as they now believe they have, will discover that the "touching devotion to the cause of humanity," about which they talk so eloquently, will develop itself into pure selfishness, and the rapacity of Wall street and the heartlessness of Madison square will extend their ramifications through every order of society.

Seeing that ostentatious wealth is about to be at a premium, and unobtrusive piety at a discount, we, who believe in the Mercersburg philosophy, are endeavoring to interpose our hands to stay the sweeping tide.

I hope I have now laid the grounds with the readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD for an enunciation of what we believe and teach.

The cardinal principle of the system we inculcate is the incarnation, viewed not as a mere speculative fact, but as a real transaction of God in the world. Thus, our belief is peculiarly christological in its character, all things being looked at through the person of the crucified and risen Saviour. The church which he founded is an object of faith--a new creation in the natural world working through the body of Christ and mediating super-naturally between him and his people. Its ministers hold a divine commission from him by apostolical succession. Its sacraments are not mere signs, but seals of the grace they represent. Baptism is for the remission of sins. The Eucharist includes the mystical presence of Christ by the power of the Holy Ghost; that is, the real presence in a mystery. With these dogmas we started, contending that we had all the attributes that were ascribed to the church in the beginning--unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity.

It is now many years since the work was started--as many, indeed, as were required for the Reformation in Europe to reach the acme of its success. Since then a growing culture and enlarged views of doctrine and of worship have seemed to require an enlargement of the range within which the movement was originally intended to be confined, and beyond which we did not conceive of its expansion. The time has been spent in educating the backward up to the starting-point, and in preparing a better form of worship for them when they are sufficiently advanced to receive it. {255} The movement commenced at Marshall College. "Old Marshall," which started as a high school for boys and was soon after endowed, though sparingly, as a college, has since been merged with another with more money, but without the prestige, and, alas! without the true spirit of the philosophy of the mountain college. In the same village with this institution is the theological seminary of a church, respectable for numbers and influence, though without fashionable appointments or pretensions to popular favor, which still retains the true ring of the old metal. Some time after its foundation, it came to be presided over by a man of rare genius as a theological writer and thinker, who was also president of the college. Profound in his conceptions of truth and logical in his reasoning, be possessed an unbounded influence over those who came under his instructions, and but few young men have sat at the feet of this Gamaliel without going away fully indoctrinated with his peculiar opinions, and zealous standard-bearers in carrying forward the work which he had begun.

Many prejudices had to be encountered and overcome in carrying forward this work. Bigotry and prejudice are barriers against which reason and religion strike in vain. Many who placed their hands to the plough turned back in the furrow. Opposition made the seed strike deeper root, and in the very slowness of the work is an earnest of its ultimate triumph. It may take us us nearer to Rome than we contemplate just now; it may bring Rome nearer to us than she at present desires. Come what will of it, it is plain sailing to us, although we cannot see land on either horizon. Nor do we see such cause for terror in the "horrors and superstitions of popery" which many men believe constantly lurks there. It seems to us that what men call Romanism may not be such a bad thing after all. We know it has done much good. A church that was a power in the days of the old Roman empire, and could not be overwhelmed by the tide of barbarism that overturned the power of the Caesars, but could finally roll back that tide of darkness, preserving Christianity through ages which have not left a vestige of the universal wreck behind, has certainly claims upon our profoundest gratitude and most reverential awe. To us, it would seem strange, indeed, that the vehicle for the preservation of Christianity through ages when civilization was blotted out, and which did preserve not only its essence but its form, should be the mystical Babylon and the man of sin.

Were this, indeed, so, we know in what desperate straits we would be placed. The form of the primitive church is generally flippantly declared by Protestants to have been nearer the system of New England than old England; and the Roman hierarchy is regarded as a long distance from either, which it certainly is. It is easy to assume that in the earlier ages of the church there was no papacy, no priesthood, no liturgy, no belief in a supernatural virtue in baptism, nor of the real presence in the sacrament, and that everything was quite in accordance with modern ideas of private judgment, popular freedom, and common sense; but it is not so easy to prove it, nor indeed is it desirable even for Protestants that it should be proved. The Reformation has always been understood to have been the historical product of the church itself; but if these assumptions were well founded, the church out of whose bosom the Reformation sprang would be no church at all, and the Reformation no reformation, but only a revolution. Thus, indeed, Christianity would be the theory of a philosopher, but not the life of a Christian.

The work we have been doing is different from Puseyism even in its spirit. The simplicity of Keble and the earnestness and power of Newman, in the days of their early zeal when these two wrought together, is nearer to what we intend if different from what we have accomplished or may yet accomplish. We thank the Roman Catholic Church for its Christian year, its symbols of faith, its traditions of battle and of conquest, its early martyrology, and its unceasing and undying purpose. {256} Nor do we conceal that there are some things in the Roman Catholic Church to which we object. These are rather historical defects than present imperfections, and we see as much in our own history to regret and to condemn.

I well remember the unpretending little church in which it was my privilege to worship in a country town of Pennsylvania. The Episcopalians had no foothold there, and the Presbyterians consequently, combining together at once the imperiousness and the exclusiveness for which they have ever been distinguished, pretended to monopolize the fashion and the piety, the society and the religion, of the village. They, of course, contemned us, and opened wide their doors for our disorganizers, who were crying out against innovation when we were seeking to make our church a place of worship, instead of a bazaar for the display of fine clothing and false curls. The Methodists, living only the false life of a sickly sentimentality, and the Lutherans degraded even from the doctrines and practices Luther taught in his fiery zeal, were absorbed in their childish schemes of marrying and giving in marriage, engaged in special efforts at reform by revivals and meetings of religious inquiry, and busied in raising subscriptions for objects like Mrs. Jellaby's mission at Borrioboola-Gha or Sunday-school libraries which would not be sectarian, had little time to think of us after they received their quietus in the "anxious bench" controversy of 1843. There were, indeed, many solemn conclaves over our affairs by gossips who neither understood nor wished to understand the work we were doing, and half in fear that we should be lost for too much reverence for mother church, and half in joy at the prospect of a few proselytes, everybody affected to commiserate us. But these, though often working mischief among our "weaker vessels," were not seriously opposed by us. Our purpose was steadily kept in view, notwithstanding.

It was by preaching principally that we hoped to accomplish our task, and, after the stubborn fallow of an unworked field had been broken, to recur gradually to the forms of the church. But the furrows, we felt, would be an empty mockery without the teachings that give them force. To inculcate truth was then our first duty. This was often done by the more earnest and intelligent of our clergy, by following up the seasons of the Christian calendar and deriving lessons from each. Incidentally was urged, with more or less boldness according to the courage and temper of the man whose duty it was to enforce them, doctrines which for many years sounded strangely to Protestant ears. Among these, besides those already noticed in this paper, I may instance, as an example least expected by Catholics to be urged anywhere outside of mother church itself, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Starting with the proposition that that which is holy cannot be born of that which is unclean and sinful, I have time and again heard this theme urged upon his people with force and fervor by an earnest and fervent pastor. Not with equal boldness, perhaps, but with no less sincerity and fervor have I heard him urge the ministrations of the Virgin. Often in declaring these doctrines he would enforce a proposition by putting it in the form of a question, and one of these, I believe, I shall continue to hear ringing in my ears while the words of men remain intelligible to me: Why should we not reverence the mother of our Lord?

These things may be news to Catholics, and may be news even to many in whose ears they have been thundered for a quarter of a century. The latter hear without understanding, but the words will be re-echoed in their hearing until they are not terms without meaning. {257} The Mercersburg philosophy is the antagonism in thought and in its social aspects of New England transcendentalism and Plymouth Rock conventionalisms, and receives no favor, and merits none, from a people among whom Dr. Holmes's Elsie Venner is an exponent of the life and practice of the present, as Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World was of past generations. And Pennsylvania, where this philosophy has its stronghold, being unlike New England, of which Dr. Mather said, "Being a country whose interests are remarkably inwrapped in ecclesiastical circumstances, ministers ought to concern themselves in politics," the body of the people who compose the German Reformed Church, and who look back to the Heidelberg Catechism as their earliest enunciation of faith, and the Mercersberg theology as their latest development of truth, have never felt the need of political preaching. A simple motto includes all their aspirations, their hopes, and their fears, their preaching, their practice, and their eternal reward--CHRIST CRUCIFIED.

Original.

A Family Motto.

A well proportioned ancient shield, And on the azure-tinted field The red crusader's cross: Words scarce could tell at what a loss The well-read scholar stood-- In what an earnest, startled mood, Beneath the ancient, comely shield, And red cross on the azure field, This motto's thread He whispering read, "_Fortiter gerit crucem_."

A true crusader, staunch and bold, Was he, my good ancestor old, Who thus could boast his cross He bore unmindful of the loss: "Strong, strong his cross to bear," Comes down in characters most fair; Comes down a glory unto me Through many a bloody century; The good seed kept Though old faith slept, "_Fortiter gerit crucem_."

{258}

Though old faith slept! a deep blush came Across his cheek, a blush of shame: That bold crusader's cross, Borne in the very teeth of loss, No longer worn with pride; His conscience told him, laid aside Like some base superstitions's sign: That cross which from high heaven will shine. When men shall hear, With joy or fear, "_Fortiter gerit crucem_."

Years passed; his quickened eye had scanned The archives rich of many a land. Yet still a purpose, named Not to himself, each spoil had claimed; And day by day to hail On truth's horizon some new sail, Strange sweetness sent through all his veins, Till to his contrite breast he strains That cross severe, While angels hear, "_Fortiter gerit crucem_."

From The Month.

"He Went About Doing Good."

The memory of the French _émigrés_ in England must be almost extinct. A few survivors may remain among us, who can just remember the marquis with faded decorations who taught them French or drawing, or the venerable abbé who patted them on the head and whispered his blessing. But the horrors that led to the sudden appearance on our shores of several thousand French exiles, the burst of compassion and friendliness with which they were welcomed, the sustained respect which they continued to excite, the noble efforts successfully made, under the crushing pressure of a fearfully expensive war, to provide for their wants, and the recompense that came in the shape of prejudices cleared away and preparation for the reception of truth--these things are now matters of history, and we have few traditions of them to supply the place of recollection. They do not even enter much into our current literature. In our own younger days the courteous and dignified, although threadbare, French nobleman, and even the snuff-box and shoe-buckles and silver hairs of the kind-hearted French priests, not unfrequently figured in the moderate supply--very different from the present inundation--of tales and works of fiction which sufficed for the wants of that remote epoch. We know of no work of note of the present day in which use is made of the character of an _émigré_, except the Tale of Two Cities; and that is hardly an exception, since the exiles there introduced are little more than pegs to the story. We would gladly know more of the intercourse of our grandfathers with these confessors for the faith, of the homage which their courage and cheerfulness extorted, and especially of the working of that influence for good, which, indirectly, must have had vast effects, and have tended greatly both to accelerate the removal of the penal laws, and to bring about that reaction toward the church of which we are now reaping the harvest; and which, even directly, was probably the cause of very numerous conversions. {259} A memorandum found among the papers of Abbé Carron, with the title, "A little memorandum most precious to my heart and to my faith," contained a list of fifty-five Protestants received by him into the church before the year 1803; and many more, whose names did not appear in that list, were known to have been converted by his ministry. The simple fact that, within twelve years after the public burning of Catholic chapels and the houses of Catholics in London, our parliament was voting money by acclamation to support several thousands of foreign priests who were in exile purely for their loyalty to the Catholic Church, is at first sight almost startling. The British lion must surely have worn rather a puzzled expression of countenance when he found himself bringing bread to popish priests of the most thoroughly popish kind, and respectfully licking their hands. While great admiration is really due to the generosity of the noble animal on this occasion, it is perhaps only fair, as well as obvious, to remark, that he probably somewhat confounded the cause of the clergy, who suffered only for their faith, with that of the exiles in general, and was somewhat influenced by his hatred first of the _sans-culottes_, and afterward of Bonaparte. The clergy, however, although for the most part very strongly attached to the French throne, were quite ready to work on under any government, and in whatever privations, and were driven into exile or threatened with death solely for the same sort of offence as that of St. Thomas of Canterbury, of Fisher and More; that is, for their repudiation of the wry principle which is the essential basis of the so-called Church of England.

An exceedingly interesting life,[Footnote 54] notwithstanding its somewhat superfluous diffuseness, has lately been published at Paris of the venerable Abbé Carron, to whom the Catholics of London are indebted for the chapel and schools of the Somers-town Mission, and indirectly, through his successor Abbé Nerinckx, for the establishment among us of the "Faithful Companions of Jesus."

[Footnote 54: Vie de l'Abbé Carron, par un Bénédictin de la Congrégation de France. Paris, 1866.]

We can hardly help envying the good religious who has sent forth this huge volume of nearly 700 pages, the thorough roominess in which he carries on his labor of love; omitting no detail that in any way furthers his purpose, describing not only the holy priest himself, but most of his relations and intimate friends, and freely inserting letters and documents at full length. Some of these, such as letters of commendation from royal personages, and other notabilities, and the official answers, which show that the "Circumlocution Office" was a French quite as much as an English institution, we could perhaps forego. But the letters of the abbé himself, numerous as they are, do not contain a line too many for our taste; for every line exhales the fragrance of a love the strength of which, as a natural affection, could seldom have been surpassed, and which, at the same time, although not so thoroughly predominated over by the supernatural as in the highest order of saints, is yet always under its influence, and ready to pass into it. Few men have ever lived less in or for themselves. He lived for his mother, brother, and sisters, for his nephews and nieces and adopted children, for his king and country, for his fellow-exiles, and, above all, for the poor, to whose special service he bound himself by repeated vows, which were gloriously fulfilled. We cannot see in his most confidential letters or in his most private memoranda a trace of indulgence in a single natural pleasure, except that of being loved. Although a very voluminous writer, he seems to have been absolutely free from literary vanity. He allowed the Abbé Gérard, the author of Valmont--to whom he submitted most of his productions--to go on criticising and correcting without mercy, and was ready to suppress anything at a word from him. {260} As he had no vulnerable point, so to speak, but in his affections, it was here, as is usual with those whom God would train for great things, that the sharpest wounds were inflicted. The early death of a younger sister born soon after himself, who had been his confidante and associate in piety and in all his schemes of devotion and devotedness as a child; the death of his mother, whom he would have idolized if he could have idolized anything, but from whose death-bed he went back calmly to sit all the evening in the confessional; the deaths of several others of those nearest and dearest to him, and the defection of a few; the overthrow of his gigantic and successful undertakings in behalf of the poor of his native town; two deportations and nearly half a life spent in banishment from his beloved France; banishment from Normandy and from home even after his return to France; frequent contact with distress greater than even _his_ wonderful ability to relieve; and, perhaps worst of all, his own share, however innocently, in the ruin of an intimate friend whom he had encouraged to invest all his property in his favorite undertaking of workshops at Rennes, and who died broken-hearted, leaving a widow and seven children destitute: these were the things that made his _way of the cross_, and moulded his loving and bleeding heart to a greater likeness of the Crucified.

It was on the 16th of September, 1792, that Abbé Carron, then in the thirty-third year of his age, and the tenth of his priesthood, landed in Jersey with 250 other priests, after a tempestuous passage of forty-eight hours from St. Malo, in which they had narrowly escaped the fate to which those who forced them to put to sea in a storm had apparently destined them. These were nearly the last of the exiles. The September massacres gave the crown of martyrdom to most of the clergy faithful to their vows, who had not either been alarmed into flight or forcibly banished. The Abbé Carron, and those who accompanied him, were not, properly speaking, _émigrés_ but _déportés_. Of the _émigrés_ or fugitives, again, there were two classes: those who, like most of the nobility, had fled when their property was seized and their privileges taken away; and those who, as was the case with most of the clergy, had remained at their posts till they were exposed to indignities and outrages, and their lives endangered. But nothing would induce the Abbé Carron and those who were influenced by his example to fly. The civil character of the clergy had been decreed by the National Assembly on the 12th of July, 1790, and unfortunately accepted by Louis XVI on the 24th of August. On the 4th of January, 1791, the oath which was the test of confessorship had been demanded of the bishops, and almost unanimously refused; and soon afterward began the persecution of the priests and the religious who followed their noble example. On the 11th of May the municipality of Rennes endeavored to install the schismatical clergy in the chief parishes of the town, and threatened summary proceedings against all who had refused the oath for any attempt to discharge their ministry any more. The Abbé Carron, the chief curate of the large parish of St. Germain, in which he had labored from the time of his ordination, was one of those specially interdicted. At the same time, the violent republicans of the town, who, although comparatively few--for the mass of the inhabitants continued Catholic and loyal--were prevailing, as elsewhere, over the more moderate, had begun to threaten his life. He preached the last course of Lent sermons that were heard for many years to come in his native town, although parties of armed men were known to be in wait for him; but after Easter, by order of the vicar-general, he retired to the house of a brother a few leagues out of the town. {261} On his way, early in the morning, he was met by forty armed men who had been searching for him at the very house to which he was going, with the intention of murdering him, and whose violence had so agitated his brother, who was in weak health, that he died not long after; but although they spoke to the abbé, they did not touch him. His life had been still more wonderfully preserved several years before, when three men--one of whom was enraged at the conversion by the abbé's preaching of a woman whom he had seduced--had laid a plot for his assassination, and had entrapped him, under pretence of his services being required for a wounded man, into a solitary house on the bank of the river. When he approached the bed in which his pretended penitent had laid himself ready to strike the murderous blow, he exclaimed, "You have sent for me too late: the unfortunate man is no more;" and his companions found that the wretch had suddenly expired. Carron had not yet finished his work; and, although in a less signally supernatural manner, the divine hand that had then fallen on his would-be murderer interposed again and again to protect him. From his retirement, where he had composed and published a vigorous and pathetic remonstrance to those religious who were yielding to the storm and breaking their vows, he returned to his perish, and did not intermit his work till he was seized and carried to prison, and into forced exile in the August of the next year. He continued to carry on and even to extend, in addition to his sacerdotal labors, the weaving, rope and sail-making, and other manufactures that he had established for the benefit of the poor, and was actually giving employment and subsistence to 1500 artisans when he was arrested. At the same time he had expended 100,000 francs on the buildings where the works were carried on; and when they were taken possession of by the republicans, the stock in hand was valued at more than 94,000 francs, and 90,000 more were due to him for sails supplied to the navy from his establishment. His success in this undertaking was probably the reason for which, although he was unflinching in his zeal, and resolutely refused to allow any constitutional priest to officiate in his church, his arrest was so long delayed. While inflexibly firm in matters of conscience, he was ready enough to accommodate himself in everything else to the new state of things, in order to carry on his work. He was willing to be known as _citoyen Carron_, and to be _tutoyed_ to any extent. He obeyed the law which ordered all the _imermentés_ to present themselves every day to the municipal authorities. He implored that, if they thought fit to imprison him, he might still be permitted to carry on his works of charity, and offered to visit them accompanied by an officer, and to live contentedly in confinement. "Although breathing infected air," he said, "I may still manage to live a few years, and discharge the sacred obligation of reimbursing the friends who lent me money to do good with. Then I will make a present of my establishment to my country, and I shall die satisfied with having undeceived those who think that I had in view to enrich myself or my family."

But the fatal blow, though delayed, was not very long in coming. On the 10th of August a party of the national guard took him to the _hôtel de ville_, and thence to the Abbey of St. Melaine, which had been turned into a prison; and on the 8th of September he and his fellow-prisoners were escorted to St. Malo to be shipped for Jersey. His bishop, his rector, and many of his clerical friends had fled months before; but he had kept to his resolution, more expressively, his biographer says, than grammatically worded, "_Jamais je n'ai voulu consentir à m'émigrer._" He was in bad health, and suffering besides from a violent toothache; but neither of this, nor of his being made to share the single mattress of a prisoner in a high fever, nor of any of the brutal insults which he received in prison and on the journey to the coast, does he say a word in the letters which he managed to send to his sister and nephews. {262} He addresses them all by name, longs to fold them to his breast, hopes one day to see them again, consoles and advises them, and sends the little ones the few sous that he happened to have in his possession. But his thoughts of his own sufferings are only such as these:

"Believe me, I do not suffer the hundredth part of what I have deserved. An unfortunate sinner, a base and too frequent transgressor, such as I know myself to be, ought not to think anything of such slight drops of bitterness. My God, when we love you, how sweet, how consoling, how delicious it is to suffer for you; and how magnificently does the love which we bear you recompense us for all the miseries of life! Do not, my dear child, think of your friend's imprisonment, without remembering at the same time that I deserve to be at the bottom of the most loathsome dungeon, and under a thousand chains, to bewail the sins of my youth."

His last message, when on the point of embarking, was to M. Paris, whom be had commissioned to watch over his factories.

"I hope that this letter, in which I enclose my heart, will find you in good health. Mine has had some variations, but it is at present quite sound; and I desire, if my God preserves me in it, to consecrate it again one day entirely to the service of my dear fellow-citizens; for I shall always love them, and shall always sigh for the moment when, recovering from their unfounded prejudices, they cease to close their heart to me. Speak of me now and then to the members of that dear colony whose prosperity formed the sweetest enjoyment of my youth. Tell them that I shall always be their father and their friend, and that I shall seek all my life for the means of making them happy. If I can gain any practical knowledge of manufactures in England, I shall make haste to apply it to the improvement of La Piletière,"

He was never permitted to revisit his work at Rennes; but his indefatigable activity and burning zeal found a still wider field, and achieved still greater wonders in exile.

It was no slight task that awaited him. The two hundred and fifty penniless outcasts--of whom he was one--came to swell a crowd of more than three thousand priests and religious, living in discomfort and distress in the midst of a population far more bitterly opposed to the Catholic religion than the people of England, and in danger, from the want of occupation, and from the cessation of all outward practices of piety, of falling into disorder. Only the year before, a Catholic lady had tried to get permission to have mass celebrated in private, and the good people of Jersey had threatened to throw any priest who ventured to celebrate mass into a caldron of boiling oil; and when after some time she got a brave Irish priest to run the risk, her husband, who served his mass, held a naked sword to be ready for an attack. The Abbé Carron had not been long in the island before nine masses were said every morning in her parlor. After a short visit to London, whither he went to consult with the Bishop of Léon and the rector of his old parish at Rennes--not forgetting at the same time his promise to obtain information that would be useful at La Piletière--he settled himself to his work on the 8th of October. He opened an oratory at once, in which he said mass every day, and preached on Sunday, with some secrecy at first, but very soon, as the dispositions of the people changed, without the necessity of any precautions. He gave several courses of spiritual exercises to the clergy, by which their fervor was rekindled. He set on foot a large dispensary, in which a priest, who had been a surgeon before his ordination, made up and administered remedies, and in which another priest dispensed soup, wine, linen, and other necessaries. Then he collected a great quantity of books, and opened a library and reading-room, where the clergy could come from their over-crowded barrack-rooms to study or pray in silence and in comfort. He provided another collection of books to form a circulating library for the emigrant laity, many of whom had been hurried into exile without being able to bring anything with them; and Catholic books were, of course, unattainable at that time in Jersey. {263} By the June after his arrival he had two schools at work for their sons and daughters, and constituted himself master of the upper division of the boys' school, but taught the catechism and explained the epistles and gospels to all the classes in each institution. These were the only Catholic places of instruction in the whole island. He was, besides, the common refuge for all the wants, spiritual and temporal, of the whole colony; he was hard at work at the composition of some of the numerous volumes which he published to increase his resources of charity; and he continued, till war broke off the communication between England and France, to direct, as far as was possible, the factories of La Piletière. Yet, with all these undertakings on hand, he was living himself in a state of almost destitution. One room served him for a second chapel, for confessional, class-room, reception-room, and bedchamber; and having no servant, he had to move and replace the tables and benches, and sweep and dust several times a day. And, with all this multifarious work, he made it a rule to read two chapters of Holy Scripture on his knees every day, to make a visit every afternoon to the blessed sacrament, to make at least half an hour's mental prayer, and to read a chapter in the Imitation, another in the Spiritual Combat, and at least fifteen pages of a manual of theology, however pressing his occupations might be. He prescribed to himself in a rule of life, drawn up in Jersey, and found after his death, to rise at four, however late he might have retired to rest; to say office after his meditation, and then to celebrate; to fast every day, never taking anything before dinner, and only milk for his collation, and on Fridays only bread; never to touch wine, and to confine himself to bread and vegetables when be dined alone; and in various other ways to deprive himself of comfort, and to bring his standard of what was necessary far below that which is usual even with the pious and charitable. The only expensive article that he retained was a watch, the alarum of which he found needful to wake him; but be promised, as soon as be had thoroughly acquired the habit of waking before four o'clock, to give this also away to his "dear friends the poor; who," he said, "shall have everything that I can deny myself." His rule of life, which contains also devout aspirations for every different act of the day, and for times of wakefulness at night, ends with this fervent petition:

"O incomprehensible and eternal treasure of my soul, the one adorable object of all the feelings, affections, and emotions of my heart, Jesus, my Jesus, my love and my all, oh! that I may love you, that I may live only to love you, and to cause you to be loved upon earth! Grant me, O Lord! days well filled, a pure life, and a happy death, that may conduct me to your bosom!"

That such a man should exercise great influence for good, and work wonders, we cease to be surprised. When his undertakings assumed soon afterward a still more extended range of responsibility in London, Bishop Douglas expressed to the Bishop of Léon his amazement and alarm, and was answered: "Reassure yourself, my lord; I have known Abbé Carron a long time, and I am accustomed to see him work miracles." Yet we should hardly, perhaps, be prepared for what he actually effected. When the republican forces under General Hoche were massed on the coast, apparently for an invasion of our territories, the English government resolved to fortify Jersey, and deemed it expedient to transfer the exiles to London. A curious proposal had just been made by the military commander, that the clergy should take up arms; which was, however, courteously refused, and the refusal courteously accepted. In August, 1796, the abbé came to London, charged with the task of finding accommodation and providing for the wants of the French colony from Jersey. {264} Besides the herculean task of finding lodgings for most of them, he at once hired two houses in Tottenham-court road and reopened his two schools, and soon after opened two rooms for public chapels, and established again his libraries. In less than three years he had also under his care a hospital for forty aged and infirm ecclesiastics, and another for twenty-five female patients, an ecclesiastical seminary containing twenty-five students in training for the priesthood, and a Maison de Providence, on the plan of the houses of the Sisters of Charity, provided with all necessary supplies for visiting and relieving the poor. In 1799, to his two day-schools were added _pensionnats_--the one for eighty boys, and the other for sixty girls--all the expenses of which, in excess of the twelve or eighteen guineas per head granted by the British government, fell on the abbé. His way of returning thanks was to promise some additional work of charity. Thus, in an effusion of gratitude for the opening of the hospice for old priests, he bound himself to give a dinner to six poor old men every 28th of October; when the seminary was opened, he promised to give a dinner every 1st of December to twelve poor children, to wait on them himself, and to send them home with new clothes and bread in their hands; and when the female hospital was opened, to give a marriage portion every 25th of October to three virtuous young women.

When in peculiarly great difficulties, his plan, like that of many saints, was to give in alms any little money that remained, in order, as he said, "to draw down dew from heaven;" and this never failed. Rich Protestants called and left bank-notes, without giving him time to discover who they were, or sent anonymous donations. Two gentlemen in drab-colored attire astonished the pupils, trained to the most exquisite politeness, by coming in one day without removing their hats; and one of them, who turned out to be that torment of our infancy, Lindsey Murray, after seeing the whole establishment, deposited £10 in the abbé's hands. The leading Catholics were, of course, profuse in their offerings, and all ready to place themselves at his disposal. The hoarded jewels of the richer exiles melted into alms for the poor. Actors read plays for his benefit, and the great Catalani gave a concert for him. He had been encouraged at the outset by even more striking dispositions of Divine Providence. A rich Englishman, living at St. Aubin in Jersey, had entreated him to accept his house and estate and become his heir; but, as the offer involved the condition of being naturalized and abandoning France, his love for his country, that had used him so cruelly, prevented his listening to it. Soon after his settlement in London he found himself without resources, and heavily in debt. Mr. Desprez, his former rector, met him coming out of his oratory in a state of great depression, and proposed a walk in the park. It was early, and no one was to be seen. A man passed them at a rapid pace, and, when a little in advance of them, drew some packages out of his pocket, one of which fell to the ground. The abbé picked it up, and found a bundle of notes. He ran after the man, shouting to him, but in vain, to stop, and at last overtook him. The other refused to stop, and declared that the notes did not belong to him, and that he was in a great hurry. "Where do they come from, then?" was the natural question. "From there, sir," said the stranger, pointing upward. They amounted, Mr. Desprez recorded, to the value of some scores of thousands of francs. The abbé used to say that, while in England, more than a million guineas had passed through his hands. Yet he was inexorable in his rule of never receiving anything of value for himself. He refused whatever was clogged with the condition of keeping it himself.

In 1797, an amnesty for the exiles was voted, and for a week he was hoping to return to France, and had even closed his schools; but the government, who were better acquainted with the state of things, refused him a passport, and the _coup d'état_ of the 4th of September revoked the amnesty. {265} In November, 1799, he settled with all his establishments, except the seminary for priests, which was now not so much required, at Somers-town. They occupied ten large houses, the rent of three being paid by the government, and that of the others by himself. A French journal describes them as situated outside of London, in good air, and _quite in the country_.

In 1801, he might have returned to France. The famous concordat was signed on the 15th of July, and made public on the following Easter, the 12th of April, 1802. The Bishop of Rennes, who yielded, although with rather too much of protest, to the invitation from the Holy See addressed to all the old bishops to resign their sees, in order to facilitate the working of the concordat, earnestly entreated that Abbé Carron might be his successor; and the First Consul desired himself to secure him. But the articles fraudulently added by Napoleon, and against which the pope, when he became aware of them, vehemently protested, made the abbé feel it to be impossible to work satisfactorily in France while they were in force.

The schism of the _Petite Eglise_, or Blanchardism as it was called in England, was a terrible blow to him. More than half the bishops still in exile and many of the clergy--and among them his dearest friends--held out against the Holy See. But his fidelity never wavered, not even while the vicar-apostolic of the London district was acting timidly, and weakening the effect of Dr. Milner's more energetic measures. The _organic articles_ were a sore puzzle and distress to him; but he would never countenance a word of disrespect to the Holy See. In a synod of bishops he was chosen by Dr. Milner for his theologian, but rejected on the ground of his being a foreigner. This firmness of his drew upon him ultimately a fierce persecution, and great attempts were made, but with only partial success, to alienate from him Louis XVIII. and the other members of the exiled dynasty, who had themselves remonstrated with the Holy See on the concordat. But no ecclesiastical dignity was ever offered him after the restoration. A storm of abusive pamphlets, anonymous letters, and slanderous reports of the worst kind fell for some time keenly upon him. Yet in his correspondence with his dear relations in Normandy, which was now resumed and carried on till war broke out again, there is no allusion to any of his trials, except that of his continual separation from them. He longs to see them; he interests himself in all the details of their families, and gives them advice and encouragement; but he has no space for his own afflictions. The only thing that disputes with them for his love --for his love of God is supreme over all--is his love of the poor. "I love you," he cries; "yes, certainly, I love you with all my heart, and all the dear ones by whom you are surrounded; but I love my poor still more; they are my numerous and best-beloved family."

In 1807, the popularity of the French clergy was so great, and had so increased the favorable feeling toward Catholics generally, that he thought it time to build a regular church. Hitherto he had officiated in the largest room of one of the schools. The impossibility of raising 4000_l_. for the purpose was soon surmounted by one to whom nothing was impossible that the glory of God seemed to require. So the church in the Polygon soon rose, and was crowded at once on its being opened; and he added to his other labors the task of giving sermons in English, which it cost him immense pains to elaborate and learn by heart. As his little flock of exiles, who were now making their way back to France diminished, his ministry both among the French settled in London and among the English increased. He made it a rule to visit all his sick--of whom he had a large number--at least once a week, and those seriously ill every day. {266} He visited one daily, and often twice a day, for six months together. His poor schools were enlarged and admitted English as well as French Catholics. His records of conversions became more and more numerous; and each cost him weeks, and generally months, of careful preliminary instruction. He was constantly engaged in writing, and published twelve or thirteen different works in London. He was carrying on also a correspondence with many Protestants and sceptics; to whose difficulties he was never weary of replying. Part of his correspondence with one alone extended to twenty-seven letters, mostly of eight or ten pages each. How he could multiply himself sufficiently for all that he was doing is one of those mysteries which we find in the lives of saints alone. When the demands of the _émigrés_ on his purse were less heavy, he began to distribute soup and coals to the poor Catholics of London; an express prohibition from government preventing him from extending this charity to Protestants, _for fear of conversion_. As the war went on, immense donations both of money and of all kinds of necessaries were made by him to the increasing crowds of French prisoners.

In April, 1814, Louis XVIII., who had been nearly seven years in England, and under whose patronage the abbé's _pensionnats_ for the children of the _émigrés_ had acquired a sort of title to be deemed royal institutions, returned to the throne, vacant by the banishment of Napoleon to Elba; and the abbé only waited for the royal commands respecting the young French nobility under his care to terminate his twenty-two years of exile. On the 14th of July he said mass for the last time at Somers-town, and set off at five in the morning, to escape any attempts of his flock to prevent his departure. He left England, after all the hundreds of thousands of pounds that had passed through his hands, as poor as he had come to it, and was beholden to his friends the Jerninghams for part of the expense of the journey. A solidly built chapel and two poor schools, containing a hundred children, with all necessary appliances, were his legacy to the Catholics of England. What were his feelings toward those whom he was leaving, and those whom he was expecting to see again, how the sight of France affected him, and what were his intentions for the future, we must leave him to express, by extracting some portion of one of several letters which be wrote on landing:

Calais, Sunday, July 17, 1814. "Ursula, my dearly loved sister, daughter, and friend--I arrived here last night, after a difficult passage. Here I am, then, on the precious soil that gave me birth. .... Ah! my dear ones, if I could clasp you all in my arms, my heart would be less bruised, less in anguish than it is! Alas! I have lost Somers-town, for me a land of benediction; and in my own country, I look for France in vain. In twenty-four hours, what have I not seen already! This holy day of rest made a working day; not a shop that is not open; not a street-vender that is not crying his wares. What a sight! How it pierces any heart that retains the faith! ... All the difference between the twenty-two last years and those that it may please the Lord to add to me will only be in the outward utterance of my feelings. I was silent, and I loved; I shall speak, but I cannot love more. Oh! what a pure and innocent enjoyment it will be to bless your children and your grandchildren, and to chat together about the days of our youth! I so need some distraction, some nourishment to my poor heart. But do you know the way to procure it the most delicious nourishment? It is to assure me that you wish to live and breathe only for God and for his love; for this is the true life of man--to have a sinner's awe and a child's love for the most tender and compassionate of fathers. If it were granted me to gain him some hearts before dying, this would be a balm that would heal all my wounds. Ah, my child, if you knew what angelic souls I have left on the soil of my second country! Excellent Christians, you are not heard of on earth; but what a festival is in preparation for you in heaven! The love of God for ever! Let us talk of this love; let us act in everything for the sake of it; let us act only through it. To live without loving is to languish; to live without loving is to die. Ah! let us live to love, and let us desire death in order to love still more. Let us live to get love for what is alone supremely lovable, our dear Master, our best of fathers. {267} By his side, and in his bosom, all pains lose their bitterness; and how much of it do they not lose! He forgets nothing that can embellish our crown; and to suffer for so good a Master has its own special charm; suffering love is the best love. Adieu, my beloved child; your father will always love you, as the old curate of St. Germain loved you, and--to end with that sweet title--as _the Missioner of Somers-town_ loved you."

In November he was installed with the orphans, whom he had left in England until he was ready for them, and the ladies who instructed them, in what was to be his home henceforth, with the exception of his second brief exile, until death, a house in the _Impasse des Feuillantines_ in the Faubourg St. Jacques. Thirty of his pupils were paid for by the king, and others received at his own risk. On the 1st of the following March Napoleon landed from Elba, and at Lyons, on his way to Paris, ordered all returned exiles who had come back without his leave to quit France within a fortnight, under pain of death. On the 4th, all unconscious of what had happened, the merry old lady who was at the head of the establishment, and styled herself _Religieuse indigne du Monastère des Feuillantines_, was writing a letter, sparkling with fun, to invite the abbé's nephew to come in June and keep with them the _triplex-majus_ feast of St. Guy. Before the end of the month she and the abbé and most of the orphans were again in banishment in London, and a crowd of fugitives were looking to him again for help. An appeal to his "generous friends, the citizens of Great Britain," brought in £500.

At Kensington, whither he retired to avoid any appearance of interference at Somers-town, he gave shelter to a young man, who was afterward too well known as the Abbé de la Mennais. A great friendship sprang up between them; and when the battle of Waterloo allowed of his return, Féli, as he was familiarly called, clung to the Abbé de Carron, whom uncertainties about his orphans detained in London, and accompanied him back to the Feuillantines in December. "What a man!" he wrote to a common friend of the abbé, whom he always called his good father, "or rather what a saint! I hope, by the help of his advice, to settle at last to something. It is high time. Thirty-three years lost, and worse than lost!" Happy would it have been for him if be had been guided by his venerable friend's counsels. The instincts of faith in the abbé made him suspect even the first volume of the Essai sur l'Indifférence. When the second came out, he wrote a most affectionate and touching letter, appealing from his head to his heart, and imploring him not to go on writing. But it was too late.

We regret that we cannot linger longer over the last days of the abbé. The difficulties about his establishment at Rennes, which were not settled till just before his death, prevented the return to his native place for which he had hoped, and he remained at Paris. We intended to confine ourselves mainly to his labors in England; and we have not space to dwell, as we could wish, on that wonderful institution of the Feuillantines, where the pupils never met a mistress without an embrace; where the great treat, after some months of study, was a week of what our foolish would-be governesses often call "menial drudgery," and the greatest treat of all was to wait at table on parties of poor people and play with their children; where Mr. (afterward Cardinal) Weld, whose daughter was married to Lord Clifford in the chapel of the institution, and all the most pious priests in Paris, came for edification and recreation; and whence relief flowed to all the destitute in the city. The good old abbé died worn out with toil and austerities, the chief of which, such as the wearing of spiked belts and haircloths, were not known till after his death, on the 15th of March, 1821. {268} His memory was fresh at Somers-town; and at the requiem sung for him there the chapel was crowded with rich and poor, all in mourning attire; and the voice of the bishop preaching was interrupted by sobs and cries of grief. The simple motto on his grave is _Pertransiit benifaciendo;_ and to few could the words be more truly applied. "Needy, yet enriching many," might be added as equally appropriate. The Catholics of England, as well as of France, have good reason to thank God for the life and labors of Abbé Carron.

Translated From the French.

The Birds' Friend.

For some years past, in the garden of the Tuileries, is seen, daily, a man of middle height, with a respectable and roundness of figure, thick mustaches, and beard slightly gray and bushy, who, as soon as he appears in one of the walks bordering the terrace of the water, is surrounded by a numerous brood of pigeons. He throws them a morsel of bread or cake which he brings with him, and the birds are so familiar with him that, far from flying away, they surround him, and dispute for his favors and liberality. Some of them, even, his favorites, flying around his head, perch on his shoulders, his arm or hand, and dip their bills in his mouth for their accustomed nourishment. He is the subject of admiration for young mothers, babies great and small, truant apprentices, and child nurses, generally. As soon as the bird man arrives, they precipitate themselves in his train. He advances majestically, and with quite an imposing air, followed by his impromptu court, which holds back slightly, from respect, no doubt, and fear of frightening the birds. Idle people who come every day to lounge in the garden of the Tuileries take their daily walk or read the papers, join the crowd of courtiers, and even Guignol himself, in presence of this redoubtable concourse, sees his representations deserted, and the Petite Provençe forsaken by the rheumatisms who come to seek a ray of sun on his benches. The friend of the birds walks with a sense of his own importance, and enjoys greatly the astonishment and homage of the crowd. With his cane under his arm, his hat on his head, and as immovable as the dervish on his minaret, or the little joist of the fable, he gravely accomplishes his daily office. The young mothers are astonished, the children open their large eyes, and I saw one of the smallest ones, Master Guguste, so terribly frightened, because the birds were not afraid of him, that he hid himself behind his big brother Aymer, and took in the whole scene by stealth, in bo-peep style. Master Guguste will certainly ask his father, whom he has led by the hand toward the place where the friend of the birds dines his pets, how is it the pigeons fly around this man's head, and when he, Master Guguste, runs toward them, they always fly away? The good little fellow forgets to add that he throws stones at them--his age has no mercy--and that the pigeons have the bad taste to prefer cake.

{269}

The birds' friend has become one of the sights of the Tuileries, and one of the pleasures of the Parisians. They come from the marshes to see him; and the provincial who arranges his programme for his visit to Paris never forgets to write in his note-book: "To go and see the wild beasts breakfast in the Garden of Plants; to go and see the hippopotamus bathe; to go and see the pigeons eat in the garden of the Tuileries." Innocent people ask by what talisman this man of the Tuileries has succeeded in taming the pigeons.

I think his method is a simple one, and that he has nothing in common with the charmers of India, nor even with Madame Vandermersch, who has astonished the saloons of Paris by the singular empire she exercises over the feathered tribe.

Then, the pigeons of the Tuileries, like all animals not tormented and accustomed to a crowd, are not easily frightened. If you have ever been to Venice, you have certainly seen the pigeons of the square of St. Mark. These pigeons, whose history is very curious, date their origin from the ancient republic of Venice. At that time, it was the custom on Palm Sunday to let fly from the top of the principal door of the church of St. Mark a large number of birds, with little rolls of paper so attached to their claws as to force them to fall into the hands of the crowd who filled the court, and disputed among themselves for this living prey. Some of these birds, having succeeded in ridding themselves of their fetters, and training the thread like the pigeon of La Fontaine, sought an asylum on the roof of the church of St. Mark, and on that of the ducal palace, not far from the celebrated leads that Silvio Pellico has described in "My Prisons," and Lord Byron has cursed in his immortal verses. They multiplied rapidly, and became the favorites of the population to such a degree that, to respect popular opinion, the senate of Venice issued a decree, stating that the pigeons of the square of St. Mark had become the guests of the republic, and as such should be respected and nourished at the cost of the state. While the republic of Venice existed, a man employed by the corn administration of the city came every morning to distribute the rations of the pigeons on the place of St. Mark and the Piazza. Since the establishment of Austrian rule, the Venetians support their favorite birds by voluntary contributions. Accustomed to live in peace with man, the pigeons of the place of St. Mark have become exceedingly familiar. They never fly away at the approach of the promenaders, and I have seen them perched on the edge of the buckets of the water-carriers, to quench their thirst, and not even take flight when these women took their buckets by the handle. In truth, the whole secret of taming animals consists in not frightening them by movements too sudden or by noise, never injuring them, and always treating them well.

If you have never seen the pigeons of the place of St. Mark at Venice, you have certainly seen the fishes of the large pond at Fontainebleau come in bands to dispute the bread thrown to them; the swans of the basins of the Tuileries swim toward the children who throw them crumbs of their cakes; the small elephants of the Garden of Plants put forth their trunks gently to seize a piece of rye bread; and more than one young girl has amused herself during the winter in spreading the crumbs from her table on her balcony, to see flocks of sparrows tumble down and help themselves at the well-set table, doing honor to the banquet, without considering in the least the pretty blonde head and the laughing mouth assisting their repast.

You see, it is always the same process. What frightens animals is noise, sudden movements, and especially bad treatment.

When man makes friends of them, it is rarely they do not respond to his advances. You know the history of Androcles and his lion, of Pellisson and his spider, and a hundred others of the same kind. I do not speak of domestic animals, the dog especially, our faithful companion. {270} The Bible itself, the book of books, in relating the return of the young Tobias conducted by the angel to his father, has in honor of this faithful animal these charming lines: "Then the dog, who had followed them all the way, ran before them, and, like a courier who might have preceded them, he testified his joy by the wagging of his tail." The grand poet of paganism, Homer, in his turn, has described in the most touching and heartfelt verses, Ulysses, on his return to Ithaca, unknown to Penelope, Telemachus, and his retainers, but recognized by the dog, who died of joy at his feet. But passing by the dog who is our friend, savage animals show themselves no less sensible to man's goodness, and as we read the legends of monks of the Merovingian time, who lived hid in the depths of forests, it seems that virtue can give man the same empire over animals which he had in his first days of innocence. M. de Montalembert, in his Moines d'Occident, has recounted many legends of this nature. A huge boar, pursued by hunters, fled for asylum to the cell of St. Basil, which he had constructed in the thickest part of the mountain forest of Rheims. Again, St. Laumer, wandering in the forest of Perche, and chanting psalms, met a hind flying before several wolves. To him, she was the symbol and image of the Christian soul pursued by demons; he wept for pity, and cried to the wolves: "Enraged executioners, return to your dens, and leave this poor little beast; the Lord arrest this prey from your bloodthirsty mouths." The wolves stopped at his voice, and retraced their steps. "Behold," said the saint to his companion, "how the devil, of all wolves the most ferocious, seeks ever some one to strangle and devour in the church of Christ." Meanwhile the hind followed him, and he passed nearly two hours in caressing her before returning to his home.

Recitals of this nature are numerous. It was the lion of the Abbé Gérasime, whose monastery was on the borders of the Jordan, who, having loved the monk during his life, came to die on his tomb. The wolf of another solitary waited at his door for the remains of his humble repast, and never retired without licking his hand. Irish legends tell us of stags of the forests coming to present their heads to the yoke to draw the plough. Everywhere we find man's power over animals established by sanctity. "Can we be astonished," said Bède on this subject, "if he who faithfully and loyally obeys his Creator sees in his turn inferior creatures subject to his command?"

Among the legendary recitals we find none more touching than those written of St. François d'Assise, whose heart overflowed with tenderness to animals. We read in a legend that this great saint, who had a beautiful and harmonious voice, hearing one evening the song of a nightingale, was tempted to respond, so that he passed the night in chanting, alternately with the bird, the praises of God. The legend adds that François was exhausted the first, and praised the bird that had so completely vanquished him.

Who has not read in the Franciscan Poets the miracle of the saint who converted the ferocious wolf of Gubbio, and how he tamed the wild turtle-doves, a present from a pious young man, while saying to them: "O my simple and innocent doves! how will you ever be tamed? But I must save you from death, and make you nests, that you may obey the command of our Creator." And the turtle-doves, by degrees less wild, commenced to deposit their eggs, like hens, covering them before the brothers, and nourished by their hands. In conclusion, let us recall the exordium of a delightful sermon related in the Franciscan Poets, and addressed by the saint to a multitude of birds, attentive to his voice, a sermon related to Brother Jacques de Massa by Brother Massio, one of St. Francis's favorite disciples: "My birds, you are extremely obliged to God, our Creator, and always and in every place you ought to praise him, because he has given you liberty to fly everywhere, has clothed you with double and triple vestments, and has preserved your species in the ark of Noah. {271} Besides, you neither sow nor reap, and God cares for you; gives you streams and fountains to quench your thirst, mountains and valleys for your refuge, and large trees in which to make your nests." But we have rambled from the commencement of our story. We began in the garden of the Tuileries, and end in another garden, a mystical one, where we gather flowers from St. Francis.

From Chambers's Journal

Time-Measurers.

There is, perhaps, no subject more interesting to human nature than that of time. Like eternity, it concerns us all; and, unlike it, exacts as well as demands our attention. True, as Sir Walter Scott writes, "it is but a shadowy name, a succession of breathings measured forth by night with the clank of a bell, by day with a shadow crossing along a dial stone;" but we cannot shut our eyes for very long to the fact of its passage. If in our youth we strive to kill it, so all the more in our age do we strive to lengthen its too brief hours out. Even the means by which to note its course have naturally engaged the minds of men in all ages; they have been very diverse and ingenious, and a due record of them cannot fail to contain many curious particulars. Such a work has been recently published in Mr. Wood's Curiosities of Clocks and Watches. Even the diligence of our author, however, does not seem to have discovered at what period the present method of beginning the day at midnight came into use; but it is supposed to have been an ecclesiastical invention. Among the early Romans, the day was divided into twelve hours, from sunrise to sunset, the length of which, therefore, varied with the seasons. The Egyptians, Mexicans, and Persians reckoned the day to begin from sunrise, and divided it into four intervals, determined by the rising and setting of the sun, and its two passages over the meridian. Our own uniform hours of sixty minutes each could scarcely have come into use until something like the wheel-clock was invented: the ancient sun-dial represented hours of a length varying with the seasons, and the clepsydra (or water-clock) was adjusted to furnish hours of fifty to seventy minutes each, to suit the changing lengths of day and night. Clocks, even so late as the reign of James I., were often called horologes; and, up to the fourteenth century, the word clock was applied only to the bell which rang out the hours, or certain periods determined by the sun-dial or sand-glass. To this day, the bell of Wells cathedral is still called the horologe.

The clepsydra is said to have been invented by the censor Scipio Nasica, 595 B.C. The principle of these early time-measurers was a very simple one. "In those of the common kind, the water issued drop by drop through a small hole in the vessel that contained it, and fell into a receiver, in which some light floating body marked the height of the water as it rose, and by these means the time that had elapsed. In a bas-relief of the date of the lower empire, figuring the Hippodrome in Constantinople, a clepsydra, in the shape of an oviform vase, appears. It is very simply mounted, being traversed by an axis, and turned with a crooked handle. {272} By this contrivance, the instantaneous inversion of the vase was secured, and the contents, escaping in a certain definite time, showed the number of minutes which were taken up by each _missus_, or course. Vitruvius tells us of the construction of a clepsydra which, besides the hours, told the moon's age, the zodiacal sign for the month, and several other things; in fact, it was a regular astronomical clock. His details now read somewhat obscure and complicated; but the principle was that a float, as it moved upward by means of a vertical column fixed in it, drove different sets of cog-wheels, which impelled in their turn other sets, by means of which figures were made to move, obelisks to twirl round, pebbles to be discharged, trumpets to sound, and many other tricks to be put into action. The admission-pipe for the water was made either of gold or a perforated gem, in order that it might not wear away, or be liable to get foul." The floats sometimes communicated with wheels which worked hands on dials, or supported human figures which pointed with hands to certain numbers as the water rose; and in some ingenious water-clocks the fluid flowed as tears from eyes of automata; but all these _clepsydrae_ had two great defects: the one being that the flow varied with the density of the atmosphere; the other, that the water flowed quicker at last than at first. They were, however, put to one excellent use, which has, unhappily, fallen into decay: they were set up in the law-courts to time counsel; "to prevent babbling, that such as spoke ought to be brief in their speeches." For this custom, the world was indebted to the Romans (especially Pompey), and from it Martial is supplied with a pleasant sarcasm: perceiving a dull declaimer moistening his lips with a glass of water, he suggests that it would be a relief to the audience as well as to himself if he would take his liquor from the clepsydra.

With some mechanical additions, the ancient clepsydras were made to do wonderful things besides stopping lawyers' tongues. Haroun-al-Raschid sent (in 807), by two monks of Jerusalem, to the Emperor Charlemagne a brass water-clock, the dial of which was composed of twelve small doors representing the divisions of the hours; each door opened at the hour it was intended to represent, and out of it came the same number of little balls, which fell one by one, at equal distances of time, on a brass drum. It might be told by the eye what hour it was by the number of doors that were open, and by the ear by the number of balls that fell. When it was twelve o'clock, twelve horsemen in miniature issued forth at the same time, and, marching round the dial, shut all the doors.

Hour-glasses, called clepsammia, in which sand took the place of water, were modifications of the clepsydrae. Candle-clocks were used as time-measurers by some, and especially by our own Alfred the Great. "To rightly divide his time, be adopted the following simple expedient: he procured as much wax as weighed seventy-two pennyweights, which he commanded to be made into six candles, each twelve inches in length, with the divisions of inches distinctly marked upon it. These being lighted one after another regularly, burned four hours each, at the rate of an inch for every twenty minutes. Thus the six candles lasted twenty-four hours. The tending of these candle-clocks he confided to one of his domestic chaplains, who constantly from time to time gave him notice of their wasting. But when the winds blew, the air, rushing in through the doors, windows, and crevices of his rude habitation, caused his candles to gutter, and, by fanning the flame, to burn faster. The ingenious king, in order to remedy this serious inconvenience, caused some fine white horn to be scraped so thin as to be transparent, which he let into close frames of wood; and in these primitive lanthorns his wax-clocks burned steadily in all weathers."

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The invention of wheel-clocks is attributed by some to Archimedes so early as 200 B.C.; by others to Wallingford so late as the beginning of the fourteenth century; but in the Book of Landaff, describing the life of St. Teilavus, who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem at the end of the fifth century, it is stated that he returned to Britain with three precious gifts, and among them "a bell greater in fame than in size, and in value than in beauty. It convicts the perjured, and cures the infirm; and what seems still more wonderful is, that _it did sound every hour without being touched_, until it was prevented by the sin of men, who rashly handled it with polluted hands, and it ceased from so delightful an office." They looked their gift-clock in the mouth, and probably disturbed the works.

St. Paul's had a clock of some sort at a very early period; in the year 1286, allowances to "Bartholomo Orologiario" (the clock-keeper) being entered, in its accounts, of so much bread and beer. Iron and steel were used for the wheels and frames until the end of the sixteenth century, and blacksmiths were the chief clock-makers. Chaucer, who died in 1400, remarks of a punctual cock of his acquaintance:

"Full sikerer was his crowing and his loge Then his a clock or any abbey orologe;"

or:

"As certain was is crowing in his roost As any clock or abbey orologe;"

which might probably have been truthfully said of many a less punctual bird; for, to judge by the old parish account-books, these blacksmiths' clocks were not good goers, and were for ever being rectified. That of St. Alban's abbey, however, was an exception. It was constructed at a great cost by Richard de Wallingford, son of a blacksmith in the town in question, but afterward made abbot for his learning (1330), and his clock was "going" in Henry VIII.'s reign. It noted the course of the sun and moon, the rising and setting of the planets and fixed stars, and the ebb and flow of the tide. When the good abbot felt his end drawing nigh, his thoughts being fixed on time as well as eternity, he left a book of directions for keeping this piece of mechanism in order.

For ingenuity and complication, however, all ancient clocks must hide their dials in the presence of that of Strasburg cathedral. "Before this clock stands a globe on the ground, showing the motions of the heavens, stars, and planets. The heavens are carried about by the first mover in twenty-four hours. Saturn, by it proper motion, is carried about in thirty years; Jupiter, in twelve; Mars, in two; the Sun, Mercury, and Venus, in one year; and the moon in one month. In the clock itself are two tables on the right and left hand, showing the eclipses of the sun and moon for the year 1573 to 1624. The third table in the middle is divided into two parts. In the first part, the statues of Apollo and Diana show the course of the year and the day thereof, being carried about one year. The second part shows the year of our Lord, and the equinoctial days, the hours of each day, and the minutes of each hour, Easter-day, and all the other feasts, and the dominical letter; and the third part hath the geographical description of all Germany, and particularly of Strasburg, and the names of the inventor and the workmen. In the middle frame of the clock is an astrolabe, showing the sign in which each planet is every day; and there are statues of the seven planets upon a circular plate of iron; so that every day the planet that rules the day comes forth, the rest being hid within the frames, till they come out, of course, at their day, as the sun upon Sunday, and so for all the week. There is a terrestrial globe, which shows the quarter, the half hour, and the minutes. There is a figure of a human skull, and statues of two boys, whereof one turns the hour-glass when the clock has struck, and the other puts forth the rod in his hand at each stroke of the clock. Moreover, there are statues of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and many observation of the moon. {274} In the upper part of the clock are four old men's statues, which strike the quarters of the hour. The statue of death comes out at each quarter to strike, but is driven back by the statue of Christ, with a spear in his hand, for three quarters; but in the fourth quarter death strikes the hour with the bone in his hand, and then the chimes sound. On the top of the clock is the image of a cock, which twice in a day crows aloud and claps his wings. Besides, this clock is decked with many rare pictures, and, being on the inside of the church, carries another frame to the outside of the walls, whereon the hours of the sun, the courses of the moon, the length of the day, and such other things are set out with much art." But perhaps the most striking part of the history of this famous Strasburg clock was that it was made, or, at all events, perfected, by a blind man. The artisan who contrived it lost his sight, and was superseded; but since nobody else would carry out his ideas, and he refused to communicate them, he was reinstated in his work, and actually carried out the affair, in all its intricate delicacy, to the end. There are several other examples of blind clockmakers, and even watchmakers. "The Illustrated London News of August 23, 1851, tells us that there was then living at Holbeach, Lincolnshire, a watchmaker named Rippin, who was completely blind. He was a first-rate hand at his business, and it was truly surprising to observe with what ease he could take to pieces and place together again watches of the most delicate mechanism. Some years previously, Rippin was robbed, and the property taken from him consisted of watch-wheels, hair springs, and other tiny things belonging to the trade. The thief was traced, and convicted at Spalding sessions, the blind man having sworn to his property by feeling."

Those who are accustomed only to eight-day clocks will be astonished to learn that some time-pieces have been made to go for a hundred years! The Marquis of Bute had one at Luton Park; and "in Sir John Moore's account of his 'large sphere-going clock-work' (Mathem. Compend.) we read that it made a revolution of once in seventeen thousand one hundred years, by means of six wheels and five pinions, for the sun's apogeum." Instead of "it made," one should surely here read "it was made to make," since the oldest inhabitant could scarcely certify to the fact having been performed. In 1859, after years of labor, James White, of Wickham Market, completed a self-winding clock, which determined the time with unfailing accuracy, continuing a constant motion by itself, never requiring to be wound up, and being capable of perpetuating its movements so long as its component parts should exist.

Italy boasts of some curious native clockwork. Early in the last century, at the Palazzo di Colonna at Rome, was a portable clock, which was wound up only once a year, and showed the hour of the day, the month, and the year; and the popes possessed for two centuries a horological marvel, which, passing through the hands of King William I. of the Netherlands, was exhibited to our Royal Society so late as 1848. This was produced solely by manual labor, without any other help than the bench of the turner and the file; yet it shows the date of the month and all the Catholic feasts and holidays throughout the year. Seven heathen gods make their appearance, each on his proper week-day, exactly in front, and is relieved, after twenty-four hours' duty, by the next. "In the centre of the second division (the clock being a tower of three stories) is an image of the Virgin, holding her son Jesus in her arms; two angels are seen placing crowns and garlands on her head; and during the performance of the bells, several angels appear making their obeisance before the image of Mary and the Saviour. Within the centre of the third division is a metal bell hanging on a gilt plate of copper, on which is represented the judgment-day. {275} Round this metal plate move four silver figures, set in motion by mechanism, representing the four states of social life. These images point out the quarters of the hour by striking the bell; the first quarter is represented by a youth, the second by a grave citizen, the third by a Roman soldier, and the fourth by a priest. In the fourth division is likewise a metal bell, on the sides of which are chambers; on the left side is the representation of death, proclaiming the hours of day and night by striking the bell; above it is seen a Latin inscription, from Romans, chapter vii. verse 23. At the right side is the image of the Saviour, stepping forward, with the globe in his hand, and above it the cross. This figure proceeds every two minutes in a slow manner, and then, for a moment, hides itself from view; above it is a Latin verse from the prophet Hosea, chapter xiii. These two figures are of massive silver. Behind the bell is inscribed the name of the artist, and the date 1589." Many ancient clocks upon the continent exhibit processions of saints and various other religious automata; but the most singular of all, perhaps, is one in the cathedral of St. John at Lyon. On the top of it stands a cock, that every three hours claps his wings and crows thrice. In a gallery underneath, a door opens on one side, and out comes the Virgin Mary; and from a door on the other side the angel Gabriel, who meets and salutes her. At the same time a door opens in the alcove part, out of which the form of a dove, representing the Holy Ghost, descends upon the Virgin's head. After this, these figures retire, and from a door in the middle comes forth the figure of a reverend father, lifting up his hand and giving his benediction to the spectators. The days of the week are represented by seven figures, each of which takes its place in a niche on the morning of the day that it represents, and continues there until midnight. The greatest curiosity is an oval plate marked with the minutes of an hour, which are exactly pointed out by a hand reaching the circumference, that insensibly dilates and contracts itself during the revolution. This curious machine, although not so perfect now in all its movements as when it was originally constructed, has suffered but little injury during a long course of years, owing to the care and skill of those who were appointed to look after it. It appears from an inscription on the clock itself that it was repaired and improved by one Morrison in 1661; but it was contrived long before that time by Nicholas Lipp, a native of Basle, who finished it in 1598, when he was about thirty years of age. The oval minute motion was invented by M. Servier, and is of later date. There is a tradition that the ingenious artist, Lipp, had his eyes put out by order of the magistrates of Lyon, that he might not be able to make another clock like this; but so far from this being true, the justices of Lyon engaged him to take care of his own machine, at a handsome salary.

Ingenious, however, as are the quasi-religious automata above mentioned, how inferior are they in human interest when compared with the time-piece possessed by Mrs. Forester at Great Brickhill, Bucks, "the identical clock which was at Whitehall at the time of the execution of Charles I., and by which the fatal moment was regulated." At that period (the seventeenth century), there was a great taste for striking-clocks. "Several of them, made by Thomas Tompion, who invented many useful things in clock-work, not only struck the quarters on eight bells, but also the hour after each quarter. At twelve o'clock, forty-four blows were struck, and one hundred and thirteen between twelve and one o'clock. Failures in the striking mechanism of these clocks were attended with much annoyance to the owners of them, for they would go on striking without cessation until the weight or spring had gone down, and they were frequently contrived to go for a month.

{276}

In 1696, a very remarkable clock was made for "Le Grand Monarque," whom science as well as literature, it seems, delighted to flatter. Louis was therein represented upon his throne, surrounded by the electors of the German states and the princes of Italy, who advanced toward him doing homage, and retired chiming the quarters of the hours with their canes. The kings of Europe did the same, except that they struck the hours instead of the quarters. The maker, Burdeau, advertised his intention of exhibiting this work of art in public, and knowing the stubborn resistance offered to his sovereign by William III., be determined to make the English monarch's effigy particularly pliant, so that when its turn came he should show an especial humility. "William, thus compelled, bowed very low indeed; but, at the same moment, some part of the machinery snapped asunder, and threw 'Le Grand Monarque' prostrate from his chair at the feet of the British king. The news of the accident spread in every direction as an omen; the king was informed of it, and poor Burdeau was confined in the Bastille."

Clock-omens, it seems, have not been confined to the work of this unfortunate Frenchman, "A correspondent of Notes and Queries" for March 28, 1861, relates the following account of a curious omen or coincidence: 'On Wednesday night, or rather Thursday morning, at three o'clock, the inhabitants of the metropolis were roused by repeated strokes of the new great bell at Westminster, and most persons supposed it was for a death in the royal family. There might have been about twenty slow strokes when it ceased. It proved, however, to be due to some derangement of the clock, for at four and five o'clock, ten or twelve strokes were struck instead of the proper number. On mentioning this in the morning to a friend who is deep in London antiquities, he observed that there is an opinion in the city that anything the matter with St. Paul's great bell is an omen of ill to the royal family; and he added: "I hope the opinion will not extend to the Westminster bell." This was at eleven on Friday morning. I see by the Times this morning, that it was not till 1 A.M. the lamented Duchess of Kent was considered in the least danger, and, as you are aware, she expired in less than twenty-four hours. ... I am told the same notion obtains at Windsor.'"

A century after Burdeau's masterpiece, a much more useful work, and one perhaps equally characteristic of the nationality of its maker, was executed for George III. by Alexander Cumming, of Edinburgh, which registered the height of the barometer. "This was effected by a circular card, of about two feet in diameter, being made to turn once in a year, the card was divided by radii lines into three hundred and sixty-five divisions, the months and days being marked round the edge, while the usual range of the barometer was indicated in inches and tenths by circular lines described from the centre. A pencil, with a fine point pressed on the card by a spring, and held by an upright rod floating on the mercury, accurately marked the state of the barometer; the card, being carried forward by the clock, brought each day to the pencil. It was not even necessary to change the card at the year's end, as a pencil with a different-colored lead would make a distinction between two years. This barometer-clock cost nearly two thousand pounds, and the maker was allowed a salary of two hundred pounds per annum to keep it in repair."

{277}

Taking leave of these ingenious complications, we may say indeed that in nothing has "man sought out many inventions," or exhibited his diligence and patience, more than in the science of clockmaking. Earth, air, fire, and water have been pressed into his service for his purpose; the sand or earth clock being worked like the water-clock; the air-clock consisting in the pumping of a bellows, like those of an organ, the gradual escape of the air regulating the descent of a weight, which carried round the wheels; and the fire-clock being formed upon the principle of the smoke-jack, the "wheels being moved by means of a lamp, which also gave light to the dial; this clock was made to announce the several hours by placing at each a corresponding number of crackers, which were exploded at proper times." This very alarming time-piece was outdone by a cannon-clock placed in 1832 in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. "A burning-glass was fixed over the vent of a cannon, so that the sun's rays at the moment of its passing the meridian were contracted by the glass on the priming, and the piece was fired; the burning-glass being regulated for this purpose every month." At Greenwich Observatory there is a most ingenious wind-clock, which, however, is not a time-measurer, but registers for itself, with pencil and paper, the wayward action of the wind. "Each minute and each hour has its written record, without human help or inspection. Once a day only, an assistant comes to put a new blank sheet in the place of that which has been covered by the moving pencils, and the latter is taken away to be bound up in a volume. This book might with truth be lettered, The History of the Wind; written by Itself: an AEolian Autobiography."

The well-known and simple piece of mechanism called a cuckoo-clock has been the cause of some spiritual mischief. An assortment of them was taken by certain missionaries to the Friendly Islands, the inhabitants of which resolutely refused to attribute them to science; they believed that each contained a spirit, which would detect a thief if anything were stolen from their English visitors. When a native was sick, a cuckoo-clock was always sent for, as being "great medicine." Unfortunately, however, one of the clocks got out of order, and since the missionaries did not understand how to set it right, they fell into contempt, and lost their usefulness.

The two most curious examples of clock-work--apart from intricacy--to which Mr. Wood has introduced us are the clock-lock and the clock-bed. The former, made by a locksmith of Frankfort in 1859, consisted of a strong box without any keyhole at all, and which even its owner could not open. Inside was a clock-work, the hand of which, when the box was open, the owner placed at the hour and minute when he again wanted to have access to the interior of the box. The works began to move as soon as the lid was shut, and time alone was the key. The clock-bed was the invention of a Bohemian in 1858, and was so constructed that a pressure upon it caused a soft and gentle air of Auber's to be played, which continued long enough to lull to sleep the most wakeful. At the head was a clock, the hand of which being placed at the hour that the sleeper wished to rise, when the time arrived the bed played a march of Spontoni's (spontaneously) with drums and cymbals, enough to rouse the Seven Sleepers.

The great time-piece of Westminster, which receives Greenwich time by electricity, exhibits no sensible error in less than a month. Mr. Airy's last report upon its rate was that the first blow of the hour may be relied on within less than one second a week; which is a seven times greater accuracy than was required in the original conditions under which the clock was built.

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A proportionate part of Mr. Wood's interesting volume is devoted to the smaller subject of watches. The invention of the coiled spring as a motive power instead of the weight used in clocks seems to have taken place in 1477, at Nuremberg, where watches were first made, and called, from their oval shape, Nuremberg eggs. In 1530. we find Charles V., in his retirement at the monastery of St. Yuste, amusing himself with "portable clocks;" reflecting: "How foolish I was to have squandered so much blood and treasure to make men think alike, when I can't even make a few watches keep uniform time;" and good naturedly observing, when a monk overthrew them all: "I have been laboring for some time to make these watches go together, and now you have effected it in one instant." This emperor possessed one watch that was made "in the jewel or collet of his ring," so that diminutiveness of construction must have been rapidly attained. George III., however, had a repeating watch presented to him (by Arnold of Devereux Court, in the Strand) whose size did not exceed that of a silver twopenny-piece. "It contained one hundred and twenty different parts, but altogether weighed not more than five pennyweights, seven grains and three-fourths. ... For this delicate and exquisite specimen of his art, Arnold had to make nearly all the tools used in its manufacture. This tiny watch contained the first ruby cylinder ever made, The king presented Arnold with five hundred guineas; and when the Emperor of Russia offered a thousand guineas for a similar one, the watchmaker refused to make it lest he should depreciate the value of his gift."

Sir John Dick Lauder possesses a skull-watch that belonged to Mary Queen of Scots; this is of silver gilt, and ornamented with representations of death between the palace and the cottage; the garden of Eden, and the crucifixion; the holy family at Bethlehem, etc. The works are as brains in the skull, the hollow of which is filled by a silver bell; the dial-plate being on a flat upon the roof of the mouth. With reference to this ghastly subject, Mr. Wood relates that, in a French engraving of 1830, death enters a watchmaker's shop, and shows his hour-glass to the master, saying: "_Vais-je bien?_" to which the latter answers: "_Vous avancez horriblement._" Many persons addicted to the science of watchmaking seem, indeed, to have been on unusually familiar terms with the king of terrors; and some have left epitaphs behind them of a very characteristic nature. In the churchyard of Lydford, in Devonshire, is to be read the following:

"Here lies in a _horizontal_ position, the outside _case_ of George Rautleigh, watchmaker, whose abilities in that line were an honor to his profession. Integrity was the _mainspring_, and prudence the _regulator_ of all the _actions_ of his life; Humane, generous, and liberal, his _hand_ never _stopped_ till he had relieved distress; So nicely _regulated_ was his _movements_, that he never _went wrong_, except when _set-agoing_ by people who did not know his _key_; Even then he was easily _set right_ again. He had the art of disposing of his _time_ so well, That his _hours_ glided away in one continual _round_ of pleasure and delight, Till an unlucky _moment_ put a _period_ to his existence. He departed this life November 14, 1802, Aged 57, _wound up_. In hopes of being taken in hand by his Maker; And of being thoroughly _cleaned, repaired_, and _set-agoing_ for the world to come."

Of course, watches could not be made to imitate the feats of the Strasburg clock; but in the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg there is a watch which was made by a Russian peasant, named Kulubin, in the reign of Catharine II., which is sufficiently wonderful. It is about the size of an egg, and contains a representation of the tomb of Christ, with the Roman sentinels. On pressing a spring, the stone is rolled from the tomb, the sentinels fall down, the angels appear, the holy women enter the sepulchre, and the same chant which is sung in the Greek Church on Easter eve is accurately performed.

The most costly and elaborate watch ever produced by British workmen, up to 1844, was made in that year by Hart & Son of Cornhill, for the Sultan Abdul Medschid; the brilliancy of its colors and exquisiteness of its pencilling seem to have surpassed anything of the kind of foreign manufacture. It struck the hours and quarters by itself, and repeated them with the minutes upon pressing a small gold slide; and the sound, produced by wires instead of a bell, resembled that of a powerful and harmonious cathedral clock. Its price was one thousand two hundred guineas.

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The most accurately exact watch is probably Mr. Benson's Chronograph, used for timing the Derby. "It consists of an ordinary quick train lever movement, on a scale sufficiently large to carry the hands for an eight-inch dial, and with the addition of a long seconds-hand, which traverses the dial, instead of being, as usual, just above the figure VI. The peculiarity of the chronograph consists in this seconds-hand and the mechanism connected with it. The hand itself is double, or formed of two distinct hands, one lying over the other. The lower one, at its extreme end, is furnished with a small cup or reservoir, with a minute orifice at the bottom. The corresponding extremity of the upper hand is bent over so as to rest exactly over this puncture, and the reservoir having been filled with ink of a thickness between ordinary writing fluid and printer's ink, the chronograph is ready for action. The operator, who holds tightly grasped in his hand a stout string connected with the mechanism peculiar to this instrument, keeps a steady lookout for the fall of the starter's flag. Simultaneously, therefore, with the start of the race, the string he holds is pulled by him, and at the same moment the upper hand dips down through the reservoir in the lower, and leaves a little dot or speck of ink upon the dial. This is repeated as the horses pass the winning-post, so that a lasting and indisputable record is afforded by the dots on the dial of the time--exact to the tenth of a second--which is occupied in running the race. As an example of the results of this instrument's operations, we may add that it timed the start and arrival of the Derby race in 1866 as follows: Start, 3 hours 34 min, 0 sec,; arrival, 3 hours 36 min. 49 sec.; duration of race, 2 min. 49 sec."

To give an idea of the extraordinary division of labor in this delicate science, it was stated in evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, that there are one hundred and two distinct branches of the art of watchmaking, and that the watch finisher, whose duty it is to put together the scattered parts, is the only one of the hundred and two persons who can work in any other department than his own. The hair-spring gives a very curious proof of the value that can be given to a small piece of steel by manual labor. Four thousand hair-springs scarcely weigh more than a single ounce, but often cost more than a thousand pounds. "The pendulum-spring of a watch, which governs the vibrations of the balance, costs, at the retail price, two-pence, and weighs three-twentieths of a grain; while the retail price of a pound of the best iron, the raw material out of which fifty thousand such springs are made, is the same sum of two-pence." Mr. Bennett--whose advocacy of female labor in the watch-trade has rendered him obnoxious to some persons--states that he found at Neufchâtel, where the Swiss watches are chiefly made, twenty thousand women employed upon the more delicate parts of the watch-movement.

The last part of this very interesting volume is devoted to that perfection of timekeepers, the chronometer, by which is found the longitude of a ship at sea. Twenty thousand pounds was offered by the British government for the invention of this instrument, which was awarded to John Harrison in 1765. His chronometer, in the first instance, was discredited on a voyage to Jamaica, since it differed with the chart by a degree and a half, but it was eventually discovered that it was the chart that was wrong. Of how accurately chronometers are made, there are numberless instances; here is one with which we must conclude. "After several months spent at sea," writes Dr. Arnott, "in a long passage from South America to Asia, my pocket-chronometer, and others on board, announced one morning that a certain point of land was then bearing north from the ship, at a distance of fifty miles. {280} In an hour afterward, when a mist had cleared away, the looker-out on the mast gave the joyous call of 'Land ahead!' verifying the reports of the chronometers almost to one mile, after a voyage of thousands of miles. It is allowable at such a moment, with the dangers and uncertainties of ancient navigation before the mind, to exult in contemplating what man has now achieved. Had the rate of the wonderful little instrument in an that time quickened or slackened ever so slightly, its announcement would have been useless, or even worse; but in the night and in the day, in storm and in calm, in heat and in cold, its steady beat went on, keeping exact account of the rolling of the earth and stars; and in the midst of the trackless waves, which retain no mark, it was always ready to tell its magic tale, indicating the very spot on the globe over which it had arrived."

Among the relics of the Franklin expedition brought home from the arctic regions by M'Clintock was a pocket-chronometer in excellent preservation; it had stopped at four o'clock. The owner probably had done with time ere that.

Translated from Revue Génétale, Brussels.

Catholic Doctrine and Natural Science.

M. D'Omalius D'Halloy, in a discourse recently delivered at a general annual meeting of the class of sciences of the Royal Academy of Belgium (December 16th, 1866), treated the question which has frequently and seriously occupied learned minds. Director of an order which has for the past fifty years been signalized by assiduous labors and patient researches, he has once again attested, with that superior authority which none can deny, that "the pretence is shameful, that our religious teachings are in opposition to the progress of natural science." We receive, with respect and attention, this frank declaration as the testimony of a noble mind surrounded with the double glory of science and faith. After the exordium, the speaker thus pursued his demonstration:

If we commence with that which related to the creation, we shall see, on the one side, those men who, not wishing to forsake the ideas which were formed in their early years, have profited by their influence in religious matters to condemn others who do not desire to follow their conclusions in regard to the phenomena of the natural development of the world; meanwhile, on the other side, those men who, inflated by their pride, or prompted by their desire to divest themselves of the restraint that religion imposes upon their passions, have profited all they could in whatever they found obscure or contradictory in the explanations of their adversaries to deny divine inspiration to the sacred books, and consequently to the fundamental principles of our religious belief.

I am, on the contrary, led to believe that we can see nothing in the cosmogony of the book of Genesis but the consecration of several grand principles; namely, the existence of an all-powerful God anterior to matter, and its creation by him. I acknowledge that our minds conceive with difficulty these two principles, but it is more difficult to conceive the existence of the universe and its admirable arrangement without the pre-existence of [an] omnipotent being; one against whom neither science nor reason could raise an objection, or refuse to admit the existence of its two component principles. {281} When we say that God inspired our sacred books, we mean to convey that he has caused certain men to understand the great truths which they contain; we do not wish to assert that he has endowed these men with a complete scientific knowledge. Besides, to comprehend all that study has revealed to modern _savans_, they should speak or understand the rude language of the age in question; even at this period, though civilization and the art of printing have greatly increased the instruction of the masses, we find astronomers speaking of the _rising_ and the _setting_ of the sun.

We should not take the sacred writings for other than what they really are; namely, as the medium through which we are to understand the great principles which form the basis of our religious belief; and not as treatises upon natural science.

The long periods, the existence of which has been revealed by the study of the terrestrial globe, have also been placed in opposition to the recent period which we find named in the Bible as the epoch of the creation. But it is to be remarked, in the first place, that the term translated _day_ has been erroneously rendered; the seven successive periods indicated in the Bible as the limits of events were not confined to twenty-four hours; and, in the second place, that the calculations derived from the age and genealogy of the patriarchs should not be regarded as imperative; first, because we do not possess the positive value of the expression translated as _year_, and, further, because it appears that a portion of the terms of the genealogical series has been lost in the lapse of time.

The question of the deluge has also given rise to numerous contradictions; but it seems to me that we can say, on the one side, that these contradictions support themselves upon the susceptible hypotheses of discussion, and, on the other, upon the interpretations of modified nature which they will eventually acknowledge. It is thus that, while there exist in geology schools which deny the great cataclysms, there are others which admit them; and we cannot deny that the theory which attributes the origin of our high mountains to swellings of the crust of the earth relatively recent, destroys the objections raised against the return of the waters upon the materials forming the summits of our most elevated plateaux. Notwithstanding the objections which anthropologists make against the opinion that all mankind are descended from Noah, which agrees with pure hypothesis, can we not say that the contrary opinion is founded upon but one interpretation of Genesis, which cannot be very exact? Indeed, it appears to me that the book, after the account of the creation, which should be applied to the entire universe, does, while it always teaches the power of God and the origin of things, assume: an especial character; namely, it becomes a history of a people whom God had chosen to serve him in a particular manner. Thus the history of the Bible does not relate to any other people than the Hebrews, although these people had relations with the most powerful races on the earth; the races that are willing to admit that the deluge of which they speak submerged all the countries known to the Hebrews, but not all the terrestrial globe. They object in this manner to see that the book of Genesis gives to the deluge the title of universal; but is not this one of those expressions often employed to designate something understood? Do we not often say, All the world was united, all Europe is afraid, all the world listens? Expressions of this kind are very common in the florid style of the orientals; and, without leaving the sacred books, do we not read of the Pentecost, that there were in the assembly who listened to the apostles "Jews of all the nations under heaven;" and in the enumeration of the countries from which they came, "Rome was the most distant?"

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If I here recall the hypotheses of the anthropology of all men who did not actually descend from Noah, I am far from saying that they were not descended from one couple. I have had, on the contrary, occasion to declare that, according to my views, science, in its present state, is powerless to resolve the question whether the human race is descended from one or from several sources. However, I am convinced that the differences which actually present themselves in the diverse human races have not manifested themselves since the deluge of Noah. I have said, long since, that paleontology has led me to admit that hereditary transformations are much more important than the differences which exist in the human race. At all times admitting that man has hardly suffered the transformations analogous to those described in the paleontological order, I am far from concluding that he descends from a beast. Existing observations do not disprove the distinct creation attributed by the Bible to man. The opinion of some authors, that all living beings derive their origin from a monad, is a gratuitous hypothesis, which cannot be supported by facts. Quite to the contrary, we learn, by paleontology, that all the great organic types existed in the silurian period; and, if the vertebral type had not yet been observed in the anterior deposits, this negative circumstance is considered of small importance. For it is only a short time since that the existence of organic remains in these deposits has been revealed; that these remains are very rare, and that even they differ but slightly from those of the silurian soil. Now, if the present state of observation leads us to admit that the Creator originally and distinctly formed the great types of organization, nothing authorizes us to deny that he created in a distinct manner the only being endowed with the faculty of knowing and adoring him.

On the other side, we do not see why the special origin of man is denied, even if he should have changed his form with time, as I suppose other living creatures may have done. Genesis tells us truly that God created man in his own image; but we cannot understand this phrase to signify that he himself actuated a material form. God has taken the human form under certain circumstances to communicate with man, but no one maintains that this is the normal form of an essentially spiritual being. The Bible, in speaking of the image of the Deity, scarcely alludes to the material and decomposable part of man, but always to the spiritual part; which, to be the _image of God_, should be endowed with immortality. But this spiritual part, which we call the soul, may have been placed in a being who had a different form to that worn by man at the present time; one more appropriate to the sphere in which he lived. Because God now permits the existence of men, who, by their brutishness, assimilate to the beasts, we see no reason for supposing that the first men had forms unsuited to the development of the faculties which characterize the civilized world of to-day.

They have also denied particular immortality to human souls in assimilating them to vital force, but this is one of those hypotheses unfounded upon any observation.

I am convinced that the life, that is to say, the vital force, or the union of forces which gives to matter the attributes characteristic of organized bodies, can be assimilated, to a certain degree, to the forces which determine physical phenomena; because the condition of its effects are more restrained, and only develop by continuation with the body with which it was originally endowed, and is not a sufficient reason for concluding that it belongs to an entirely different order of things. We see, in effect, that the order of forces presents phenomena which becomes successively less general; it is thus that attraction constantly acts upon all bodies, while there exist circumstances where affinity acts upon certain bodies; and the manifestation of electricity is due to conditions again less general. {283} On the other side, we cannot conceive the movement of the stars without the first cause of impulsion, any more than we can conceive the birth of a living being without the intervention of a pre-existing cause; we cannot give to these connections any consequence contrary to the dogma of the immortality of the soul. Nor can science decide whether physical phenomena are owing to diverse forces, or to a single force that manifests itself in various ways; neither resolve the question whether life is composed of an individual force or the union of many. It is certain that _vegetable life_, a term which we consider applicable to all living things, is something different from _animal life_, a term applied to all sensible beings. It is contended no longer that man has attributes not possessed by beasts. Now we see nothing in physiology which opposes itself to these aptitudes being determined by a particular force named the soul, and that this force be endowed with immortality; that is to say, the power of preserving eternally its individuality after separation from the matter which it once animated.

Although I am unfamiliar with physiological studies, I will add that these considerations compel me to say that I have no right to apply the name of soul to that force which animates beasts; not that I wish to rob certain animals of the faculties which they enjoy, but whatever may be the intelligence or social capacity with which these animals are endowed, they cannot pretend to perform the _rôle_ that man maintains upon earth. And neither physiology nor the sacred writings lead us to believe that the force which animates beasts should be endowed with immortality. I can only avow that the birth, the existence, and the death of an animal are but the manifestation of a vital force determined by particular circumstances, as lightning and thunder are but the manifestations of electricity.

Again, according to my views, a religious sense has hardly been given to the admission or the rejection of a human kingdom, a question frequently agitated in these modern times. In fact, the division of natural bodies into three kingdoms, with their inferior subdivisions, has only been made to facilitate the knowledge of these beings, and to designate by name the different groups of which we would speak. We cannot deny that by the mineral, the animal, and the vegetable kingdoms we understand three divisions, which include all bodies on the terrestrial globe; and that each one has common attributes which are not found in the two others; it follows that, when we admit a human kingdom, we have no term to designate the class of beings possessing the attributes which distinguish man and the beasts from the two other kingdoms. This consideration causes me to reject the human kingdom, without always classing man in the animal; the enlargement of the vertebrae and the mammiferous class appear to me to oppose themselves in another order of ideas; we must, therefore, believe that man is endowed with a soul enjoying attributes different from the force which animates beasts.

In conclusion, I do not hesitate to say that there exists in my mind no real opposition between our religious belief and the demonstrations afforded by the present state of the natural sciences.

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Miscellany.

_Meteoric Stones_.--M. Daubrée records his observations on a great shower of meteoric stones which fell on the 30th of May, in the territory of Saint Mesmin, in the Department of the Aube. Mr. Daubrée gives the following account of the phenomenon: The weather being fine and dry, and only a few clouds in the sky, at about 4,45 in the morning a luminous mass was seen to cross the sky with great rapidity, and shedding a great light between Mesgrigny and Payns. A few seconds after this appearance, three loud explosions, like the report of cannon, were heard at intervals of one or two seconds. Several minor explosions, like those of muskets, followed the first, and succeeded one another like the discharge of skirmishers. After the detonations a tongue of fire darted toward the earth, and at the same time a hissing noise was heard like that of a squib, but much louder. This again was followed by a dull, heavy sound, which a person compared to that of a shell striking the earth near him. After a long search he perceived, at the distance of about two hundred feet from the place where he was when he heard the noise, a spot where the earth had been newly disturbed; he examined the place, and saw a black stone at the bottom of a hole nine inches deep, which it seemed to have formed. This stone weighs nearly ten pounds. On the following day a gendarme named Framonnot picked up another meteoric stone of the same nature, weighing nearly seven pounds, at about two thousand feet distant from where it first fell. A third stone was found on the first of June by a man named Prosat, five to six thousand feet from the two spots above referred to. This last meteorite weighed nearly four pounds and a half.-_Science Review._

_Father Secchi_.--A new spectroscope has been constructed by Father Secchi, S.J., and seems to be a very excellent instrument. It absorbs a very small quantity of light, and is therefore admirably adapted for stellar observations. The inventor has analyzed with it the spectrum of the light emitted by the star Antarés. It is of a red color; the luminous bands have been resolved into bright lines, and the dark ones are checkered with light and dark lines, so there is no black foundation.--_The Reader._

_The Heat-conductibility of Mercury_.--M. Gripon, who has been making experiments after Peclet's method, thinks he has demonstrated that if the conducting power of silver be regarded as 100, that of mercury is equal to 3.54. He places mercury, therefore, the lowest in the scale of metals, as far as the conductibility of heat is concerned. It is strange that electric conductivity is quite different, being represented by the figures 1.80.--_Science Review_.

_Penetration of Platinum and Iron by Hydrogen_.--From time to time we have reported the discoveries of Troost and Deville in this field of research. These conclusions have recently been collected by the master of the mint, Mr. Thomas Graham, in an admirable paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. He thinks that this wonderful penetration is connected with a power resident in the above-mentioned and certain other metals to liquefy and absorb hydrogen, which latter is possibly in the condition of a metallic vapor. Platinum in the form of wire or plate at a low, red heat may take up and hold 3.8 volumes of hydrogen, measured cold; but it is by palladium that the property in question appears to be possessed in the highest degree. Palladium foil from the hammered metal, condensed so much as 643 times its volume of hydrogen, at a temperature under 100° C. The same metal had not the slightest absorbent power for either oxygen or nitrogen. The capacity of fused palladium (as also of fused platinum) is considerably reduced, but foil or fused palladium, a specimen of which Mr. Graham obtained from Mr. G. Matthey, absorbed 68 volumes of the gas. Mr. Graham thinks that a certain degree of porosity may be admitted to exist in all these metals.--_Science Review_.

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_Improvements in the Barometer_.--Some important improvements have recently been effected in the Aneroid barometer by Messrs. Cook &; Sons, the opticians. Although the Aneroid, under ordinary circumstances, has been shown by Mr. Glaisher and others to be very much more effective and satisfactory in its results than could have been hoped, still, under conditions which bring rapid changes of pressure into play, the instrument when it returns to the nominal pressure does not always indicate correctly. This results from the motion being communicated to the index axle by a chain, and this chain, from other considerations, is the weakest part of the instrument, and is the first acted upon by climactic influences, rust, etc. Mr. Cook has abolished this chain altogether, substituting for it an almost invisible driving-band of gold or platinum, and the result of this great improvement is that the Aneroid may now be looked upon as an almost perfect instrument for scientific research. Several such Aneroids, placed under the receiver an air-pump, not only match absolutely together, but all return unfailingly to one and the same indication--_The Reader_

Original.

New Publications.

1. Frederick The Great And His Court. An Historical Romance. By L. Mühlbach. Translated from the German by Mrs. Chapman Coleman and her daughters. New York: Appleton & Co. 1867. 12mo, pp. 434.

2. Berlin And Sans-Souci; or, Frederick The Great and His Friends. An Historical Romance. Author, translators, and publishers the same. New York. 1867. 12mo, pp. 391.

3. Joseph II. and His Court. An Historical Romance. By the same. Translated from the German by Adelaide de V. Chaudbron; complete in one volume. New York: Appleton & Co. 1867. 8vo, double columns, pp. 343.

We know nothing of the writer of these works, save the works themselves, and even them we know only in the translations before us. The last-named volume reads more like an original work in English than the others. Mrs. Chapman Coleman and her daughters appear not to have learned the proper use of _shall_ and _will_, and make now and then the same sort of blunder the Frenchman did when he fell into the river and exclaimed: "I _will_ be drowned, and nobody _shall_ help me out." The use of _shall_ and _will_ is a little arbitrary in English. _Shall_ in the first person simply foretells, in the second and third persons it commands; _will_ in the first person promises or expresses a determination or resolution, in the second and third persons it simply foretells. The same rule applies to _should_ and _would_. The Scotch, Irish, and most foreigners are very apt to reverse the rule, as do some New-Yorkers and most western writers and speakers.

These works themselves are too historical for romances, and too romantic for histories. Unless one is exceedingly familiar with the real history of the times, one never knows whether he is reading history or only romance. The historical predominates in them, and most people will read them as histories rather than romances, and thus imbibe many erroneous views of real persons and events. The Empress Maria Theresa is praised enough and more than enough, so far as words go, both as a woman and as a sovereign, but she is, after all, represented very untruthfully as weak, sentimental, permitting her ministers to persuade her to adopt measures to which she is conscientiously opposed, and really ruinous to the empire. She is arbitrary, despotic, and the slave of her confessor. The author even repeats the silly story that Kaunitz persuaded her, in order to further his policy, to write an autograph letter to Madame Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV., and to praise her for her virtue and modesty, a story invented, it is said, by Frederick the Great. The _béte noir_ of the writer is the clergy, and alike whether Catholic or Protestant. {286} The author sympathizes from first to last with Joseph II.; thinks the Josephine reforms or pretended reforms very just, very wise in themselves, but that the people were too ignorant and superstitious to appreciate them. From first to last humanity takes precedence of God and the state of the church. The great divinity the author worships is the mutual love of man and woman, and the greatest evil that afflicts humanity, or at least princes and princesses, is that they cannot follow the inclinations of their own heart, but must sacrifice their affections to the demands of state policy.

Joseph II. is a great favorite with the author, but Frederick the Great is her hero. He is always great, noble, wise, just, with a most loving heart, which he sacrifices to the necessities of state. No censure is breathed against his infamous conduct in invading and taking possession of Silesia, without even a color of right, and without even the formality of declaring war against Austria, and while Austria, unsuspicious of any invasion, is wholly unprepared to resist it, and embarrassed by a disputed succession. He was successful, and in our times success is proof of right. Frederick was utterly without principle, without faith of any sort, a _philosophe_, corresponded with Voltaire, invited him to his court, and even paid him a salary, and detested the clergy, and therefore was a fitting idol of our modern liberals and humanitarians, and worshippers of FORCE like Carlyle.

Joseph the Second, we are inclined to believe, was sincere, and really wished to benefit the nation committed to his charge, and he gave proof of it in revoking most of the changes he attempted, and dying as a Christian. He was vain and ambitious, and was led astray by the philosophy of his times, and his unprincipled minister, Prince Kaunitz, a legacy from his mother. He, like all the philosophers of the eighteenth century, understood nothing of the laws of continuity, and supposed anything he decided to be for the good of his people, however contrary to all their most deeply cherished convictions and their most inveterate habits, could be forced upon them by power, and should be received with grateful hearts. Two things he appears to never have known, that despotism cannot found liberty, and that power must, if it would make people happy, suffer them to be happy in their own. There was, in the eighteenth century, with the European rulers and the upper classes much sincere and active benevolence--a real and earnest desire to lighten the burdens of government and ameliorate the condition of the people; and no one can read these volumes, with sufficient knowledge to distinguish what in them is history from what is mere romance, without being persuaded that real reforms would have gone much further, and European society would have been far in advance of what it now is, if the revolution of 1789 had never been attempted. All that was true in the so-called principles of 1789 was favorably accepted by nearly all European statesmen and sovereigns who were laboring peaceably and earnestly to develop and apply it. The statesmen and sovereigns, unhappily, had utterly false and mischievous views of the relation of the church to the state, and imagined that the only way to reform society was to begin by subjecting the spiritual to the temporal; but they went in this direction not so far as went the old French revolution. Indeed, the great lesson of history is that the attempt to effect real social reforms by raising the people against legitimate authority, whether civil or ecclesiastical, always turns out a failure. Some good may be gained on one side, but is sure to be more than overbalanced by the evils effected on another side.

As purely literary works, these historical romances possess a high degree of merit, and prove that the writer has rare powers of description and analysis. They read like the genuine histories, and from them alone it is impossible to say where the real history ends and the romance begins, so completely is the verisimilitude maintained throughout. If, as we are told, they are the production of a female pen, as they bear indubitable evidence of being, they are truly remarkable productions. The characters introduced are all, or nearly all, historical, and if not all or always faithfully reproduced, they are presented without any violence to the generally received history of the two courts described. There is a little too much German sentimentality in them, if faithfully translated, to suit our taste, and more than we believe is usually to be found in imperial or royal courts; and the _liaisons_ of princes are treated with too much lenity, if not downright approbation, to have a good moral effect; but they indicate a rare mastery of the subjects they treat, and intellectual powers of a very high order. {287} They are by no means faultless, and their spirit and tone are pagan rather than Christian; but they who are familiar with the history of the two courts described, and are accustomed to master the works they read instead of being mastered by them, may read them even with profit.

Lectures On Christian Unity, delivered in St. Ann's Church, Eighth Street, during the season of Advent, 1866, with an appendix on the condition of the Anglican Communion, and of the Eastern Churches. By the Rev. Thomas S. Preston, Pastor of St. Ann's Church and Chancellor of the diocese. 12mo, pp. 264. New-York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co.

Father Preston's style is natural, earnest, and direct. He is too anxious to impress truth on the minds of his readers to load his pages with rhetorical ornaments; too resolute in his opinions to hesitate at the most downright and unmistakable expression of them. His ideas are clear, and therefore his style has the two chief requisites of all good writing, clearness and simplicity. It has also the beauty which invariably radiates from a devout heart. Love of God, love of the Blessed Virgin and the saints, love of the holy church and all her teachings and her ways, illuminate every chapter with the light of an unaffected piety. And like the majority of really devout controversialists, he writes without rancor or bitterness. "No true Catholic," he says, "can be intemperate in speech, much less in heart. .... When we speak of the claims of our religion or announce our doctrines and urge them upon men, it is not to advance our own opinions so much as to benefit mankind, and promote their best happiness, temporal and spiritual. We feel that the church answers the very questions which are agitating their souls; that it responds to the wants of their spiritual being, now unsatisfied; that it is the only and the divine barrier to infidelity so fast increasing among us. ... It is in this spirit that these lectures are begun, with the earnest desire for truth, and a comprehensive charity for all who differ from us."

The first of the four lectures comprised in this volume proves from reason, Scripture, and the writings of the primitive fathers the necessity of unity among all who profess the Christian faith. The second shows how impossible it is of attainment under the theory of Protestantism, which holds that everything concerning faith and salvation must be left to the private judgment of each individual, and that no external authority has power to bind the conscience or compel the obedience of believing men. There can be no unity of belief unless there be an admitted standard of truth; and under the Protestant theory such a standard cannot be found. There is no church which can be such an authority, for, according to the doctrines of all the reformed bodies, a church has no authority except that given to it by the members. As then the members are not infallible, the church cannot be. The Bible cannot be the authority; for history shows that the Scriptures, subjected to private interpretation, have never been able to effect any agreement whatever; and, moreover, it is practically impossible to prove either the authenticity or inspiration of the sacred books without falling back upon the authority of the church. The objections to setting up the consent of the majority or the opinions of antiquity as a standard of doctrine are likewise exposed with clearness, though very briefly. The third lecture is devoted to an examination of the claims of Protestantism to represent the Church of Christ, and a survey of the present condition and history of the principal reformed bodies. In lecture the fourth the claims of the Catholic Church upon the obedience of mankind are summarized with beautiful lucidity and eloquence.

An appendix of 100 pages contains an interesting and valuable note on the position of the Anglican churches, and some welcome information respecting the church union movement, from which it is hardly necessary to say that Father Preston expects no good. Neither is he so sanguine of happy results from the ritualistic movement as a writer in a recent number of this magazine; but of these, as of all other matters, he speaks with his accustomed charity. A second part of the appendix gives an account of the present position of the Eastern churches.

We regard this as the best work Father Preston has written, and we earnestly join in the hope he expresses in his modest preface, that it "may reach some minds who are seeking the truth, and lead them to the haven of rest."

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Lectures on doctrines of the Catholic Church are a powerful means of conversion to the faith. Never were the public better disposed to inquire, and more ready to listen to the claims of the church, than at present, and, wherever lectures of this character have been given, their fruits have been found more abundant than was anticipated.

The Life Of St. Dominic And A Sketch Of The Dominican Order. With an introduction by the most Rev. J. S. Alemany, D.D., Archbishop of San Francisco. P. O'Shea, 27 Barclay street.

This is not a reprint of F. Lacordaire's Life, but an original biography, accompanied by a history of the Dominican order brought down to the present day. It is from the pen of an anonymous English author, and resembles the best works of the modern school of English Catholic writers in the care and elegance with which it has been prepared. No one could have introduced it more suitably to the American public than the illustrious Archbishop of San Francisco, who is himself one of the brightest ornaments of the Dominican order in modern times. It is the history of a great man and of a great order, given in a moderate compass and an attractive style, and, of course, well worth the perusal of every intelligent reader, whether Catholic or Protestant.

The Journal Of Maurice De Guérin. With an Essay by Matthew Arnold, and a Memoir by Saint-Beuve. Edited by G. S. Trebutien. Translated by Edward Thornton Fisher. 12mo. pp. 153. New York, Leypoldt & Hoyt. 1867.

Our readers, already so familiar with the character and writings of Eugénie de Guérin from the frequent notices they have received, especially of her Journal and Letters, will be glad to know that this journal of her so much loved brother Maurice has been brought before the public.

In perusing the charming journal and mournful letters of Eugénie our curiosity must needs be awakened to know more of her gifted brother, of whom these pages of love speak so constantly. We have only to say that in this volume that curiosity may be satisfied. Our readers will see depicted the efforts of a soul vainly striving to find God outside of God in the worship of nature, and at last returning, wearied and disappointed, like the prodigal son to his father's home and embrace. Maurice de Guérin, who had fallen away into heartless and godless pantheism, died kissing the crucifix.

"The Catholic Publication Society" announces an American edition of a book just published in London: "The Clergy and the Pulpit, in their relations to the People," M. l'Abbé Mallois, chaplain to Napoleon III.

Books Received.

From Hon. W. H. Seward, Secretary of State. Washington, D. C, Diplomatic Correspondence, relating to Foreign Affairs for 1865. Parts I., II., and III.; also Part IV., being an appendix to the other three parts, containing letters and documents with reference to the assassination of President Lincoln, and the attempted assassination of Secretary Seward, with extracts from the press of Europe, and letters from public communities, of condolence and sympathy, inspired by inspired by these events. 8vo.

From Kelly & Piet. Baltimore, Md, Devotion to the Holy Guardian Angels, in the form of Considerations, Prayers, etc. Translated from the Italian of Rev. P. de Mattel. S. J. 32mo. pp. 229. Price 50 cts.

From P. O'Shea, New York. The Life of St. Dominic and a Sketch of the Dominican Order, with an introduction by Most Rev. J. S. Alemany, D.D. 1 vol. 12mo. pp. 370. Price $1.50.--The Gentle Skeptics; or, Essays and Conversations of a Country Justice on the Authenticity in Truthfulness of the Old Testament Records. By Rev. C. Walworth. New edition, revised. 1 vol. 12mo. Price $1.50.

From Ruttenberg & Co., Newberg, New York. An Address in behalf of Universal Education with Religious Toleration. By the Hon. J. Monell. Pamphlet.

From Lawrence Kehoe, New York. Three Phases of Christian Love. By Lady Herbert, of Lea. 1 vol. 12mo. pp. 315. Price $1.50

From Dayton Ohio, we have received two pamphlets namely: the Divinity of Christ, a sermon preached in the Holy Trinity Church, Dayton, Ohio, at the conclusion of the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ; St. Antony: Alban Butler and Local Gossip of the Dayton Journal. By X.

From D. & J. Sadlier & Co., New. York, Lectures on Christian unity, delivered in St. Ann's Church, New York, during the season of Advent, 1866, with an Appendix on the condition of the Anglican Communion, etc. By Thomas S. Preston, Pastor of St. Ann's Church. 1 vol. 12mo. pp. 264. Price $1.50--The Christian armed against the Seductions of the World, etc. Translated from the Italian by Father Ignatius Spencer. 1 vol. 18mo. pp. 320, 50 cts.--Devotion to St. Joseph By Rev. Father Joseph Anthony Patrignani, S. J. Translated from the French. 1 vol. 12mo. pp. 360. Price the 63 cts.--Fourth Annual Report of the Society for the Protection of the Destitute.

From the author. Reconstruction of the Union., in a letter to Hon. E. D. Morgan. U. S. Senator from New York, from Judge Edmonds. New York American News Co. 8vo. Pamphlet, pp. 89.

From John Murphy & Co., Baltimore. Manual of the Lives of the Popes, from St. Peter to Pius IX. By John Charles Earle, B.A. 1 vol. 12mo. pp. 332. Price $1.25.

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The Catholic World.

Vol. NO. 27, June 1867

Translated from Le Correspondant

Lectures and Public Conferences Among the Ancients.

I.

_Nil sub sole novum;_ there is nothing absolutely new under the sun. Apart from the sciences and their application, our age differs less than we suppose from the ages that preceded it. Fancying ourselves pure Frenchmen of the nineteenth century, we discern upon a nearer view numerous traits of resemblance to the contemporaries of Pliny and Plutarch.

"Who will deliver us from Greek and Roman shackles?" cried the author of Gastronomie, in a fit of witty ill-humor. It is to be feared that for many a long year we are condemned to imitate the Latins and Athenians whom we love to slander even while copying them. What matter how unconsciously we borrow from them? Many things besides the game that made the amusement of our infancy may be considered renovations of Greek originals. Fashions, customs, pleasures even, are ours, not by right of invention, but of inheritance; and what we take for new is sometimes merely the old refurbished.

If there be a novelty, for the mass of the people who do not pride themselves on erudition, it is to be found in the lectures or conferences, to which the public is bidden every winter. Tested first successfully in Paris, through the enterprise of a few private individuals, they afterward, favored by the influence of higher powers, reached the provinces--invaded them, I should have said, if the word had not an offensive signification, far from my thoughts. It is surprising to watch the rapid development of this custom, exhibited as it is in the fact that since the second year a thousand _chaires_ have sprung up in various parts of France. Modest townships, no less than great cities, have their course of lectures, and one peruses with interest the list of lecturers, [Footnote 55] some of whom are accustomed by profession to communicating their ideas to an audience, while others essay for the first time the public expression of their opinions.

[Footnote 55: The _chaires_ have been lately interdicted to Prince Albert de Brogile and to MM. Saint Marc Girardin, Cochin, Laboulaye, and Jules Simon. We cannot help, while recording this ostracism, deploring its effect upon French literature.--_Note of French Editor_.]

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In the ranks of volunteer instructors (without mentioning professors, who are naturally called to assume such a position) lawyers elbow physicians, the Catholic priest finds himself next to the Protestant minister, and officers march abreast with men of letters. Nay more: women too are seen taking part in these manly exercises, anxious to prove good the equality of their sex with ours.

'Tis undeniably an odd spectacle to unaccustomed eyes, and there is no lack of discussion and outcry upon the matter. But one need only read a few pages from the pen of ancient authors to discover that what startles us to-day as a thing without precedent, had passed into a well-known custom in the earliest ages of Christianity. It is into the subject of lectures and conferences among the ancients that I propose to inquire, as a topic offering interest if not profit to those who like to compare antiquity with our own times.

II.

Nowadays, thanks to the printing-press, which multiplies thought and scatters it to the four winds of heaven, an author can enter into communication with the public without going beyond the threshold of his study. But among the ancients, when every copy of a work was painfully executed by hand, who can estimate the pains, fatigue, and expense that went to build up an incomplete publicity? What wonder then that an historian like Herodotus introduced his book to public notice by reading it aloud to the crowds assembled for the Olympic games, or that the people paused to listen to him for days together? The author entered without delay upon the enjoyment of his glory--the public into possession of a masterpiece. Later, we learn that Prodicus, the sophist of Ceos, went from city to city, reciting his allegory of Hercules between Virtue and Pleasure, and engraving it upon the memory of all Greece.

Other similar instances might be cited, but merely as exceptions to the customs anterior to the Christian era; nor was it in Greece but at Rome that public lecturing first became a popular usage.

In the reign of Augustus, when eloquence had become _pacifice_ (or narrow-minded, as the bitter spirits who pined for ancient laxity would have said), Asinius Pollio, having been transformed from a republican into a courtier without sacrificing his love of letters, bethought himself to replace the oratorical combats, for ever banished from senate and forum, by establishing a school of declamation, and assemblies whither authors should resort to read their works in public.[Footnote 56] It was erecting a stage for the exhibition of wits who longed for notoriety, and the plan could not fail to succeed. Augustus, in harmony, on this occasion, with popular desire, lent a hearty consent to the innovation. Not only did he sit among the audience without giving evidence of weariness or _ennui_, but he took an active part in the literary exercises, reading in person, or letting; Tiberius read for him, various compositions of his own.[Footnote 57]

[Footnote 56: Seneca the Rhetorician, Controv. V. Procem.]

[Footnote 57: Sustonius, Augustus, 85, 89.]

Without doubting that Augustus really enjoyed these intellectual entertainments, I believe the encouragement of a harmless literature to have been in accordance with his policy. Every pursuit that could turn aside the Romans from too importunate an interest in state affairs was favorably received. What time remained for meddling in public matters to any man occupied with polishing poetical phrases or rounding rhetorical periods? The chair replaced the tribune advantageously. While bread and circus games satisfied the lower classes, distractions and diversions of a nobler stamp were provided for more enlightened minds. In both cases the conduct of Augustus was actuated by the same motive. {291} So well did public lectures second his designs that be might perhaps have introduced the fashion if it had not already existed. Under the circumstances his countenance only was required to elevate what seemed like a modish caprice to the dignity and durability of an imperial institution. Even the most suspicious and distrustful of this prince's successors forbore to disturb an amusement so conducive to their own advantage. The least favorably inclined were contented with depriving the assemblies of their presence, and others esteemed it an honor to be counted among the most attentive listeners. Nero especially, imperial artist and metromaniac, seems to have honestly regarded these exercises as one of the glories of his reign.

Every one who fancied himself a man of talent (and illusions upon such points are common to the literary world in all ages) was glad to win renown by exhibiting the fruits of midnight toil. With few exceptions, all authors claimed the public ear: Lucan to recite his Pharsalia; Silius Italicus, his Punic War; Statius, his Thebald, Achilleïd, and Silvae; Pliny, his Panegyric of Trajan.[Footnote 58] I mention those authors only whose writings have remained to us; but many others sought to charm a Roman audience. The list would be long, of lecturers whose names, without their works, have come down to posterity; orators of whom Pliny has introduced a large number to us in enumerating his personal friends. Princes followed the contagious example of Augustus. Claudius and Nero enjoyed the display or their acquirements;[Footnote 59] Domitian recited poems which he certainly never wrote; but what matter for that? he liked to give himself the airs of a poet, and of a successful poet, we may be sure. Nero, at least, did not solicit applause in borrowed plumes. In short, no verses were too bad to seek a hearing. A mania for reading and writing raged abroad. Horace satirizes this madness, but after Horace's own sweet, graceful fashion. Juvenal exclaims with wrathful bitterness: "Am I for ever to be a listener? Shall I never retaliate, (I who have been) so often teased with the Theseïd of husky Codrus? One man recites his comedies with impunity, and another his elegies. Shall huge Telephus consume my day unpunished; or Orestes, full to the extremest margin of the book, written even on the reversed pages, and not finished then?" [Footnote 60]

[Footnote 58: Suetonius; Lucan; Pliny the Younger, Let. III. 7, 18; Juvenal, vii. 79]

[Footnote 59: Suetonius; Claudius, 41; Nero, 10.]

[Footnote 60: Juvenal, i, 1.]

The time for retaliation came at last. A desire seized him during the reign of Adrian to bring forward the satires so long kept under lock and key, and to emulate those whom he had ridiculed. He bored no one, it is true, but none the less fatal were the results to himself: Several passages, cordially received by the public, and invidiously interpreted among courtiers, seemed to contain hostile allusions to an imperial favorite; and the emperor, under pretext of appointing the poetic octogenarian to a military command, sent the satirist to the extreme recesses of Egypt to finish his days in honorable exile. [Footnote 61]

[Footnote 61: Suetonius, Juvenal]

The subjects of Roman lectures were exceedingly various; sometimes serious and long-winded poems like those we have mentioned; sometimes comedies; but oftener short poems, light and trifling, or sweet and tender, according to the poet's vein. On exceptional occasions, some eloquent voice, disdaining vulgar platitudes, aroused, with its noble accents, genuine Roman sentiments; as on that day, in the Augustan era, when Cornelius Severus deplored the death of Cicero and cursed his assassin in the glorious lines that have been preserved to us. [Footnote 62]

[Footnote 62: Pliny the Younger, Letters, iv, 27; v. 17; vi. 15, 21; viii.21.]

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We notice as a singular fact that a lecturer endowed with a fine voice, would sometimes content himself with reading passages from some ancient poet, Ennius, for example; and with success too, if he read with taste. [Footnote 63] But this was too low an aim to satisfy ambition. Men desired fame and applause for themselves, and cared little to offer any works but their own to the public.

[Footnote 63: Seneca, the Rhetor, Suasor, 7.]

No style was banished from these assemblies. One day an audience listened to dialogues, or to philosophical and moral dissertations; on the next, some lawyer, already well known to fame through important law-suits, claimed a hearing. The lawyer who had gained his client's cause before the tribunal, came to argue in behalf of his own intellect before the public, [Footnote 64] caring more, perhaps, to win in the second suit than in the first. History, too, seems to have held an important place in lectures, nor did the speaker limit himself to events long since gone by. Rome within a few years had lost several distinguished men, whose death Titinius Capito commemorated. [Footnote 65] Strictly speaking, it might be considered a funeral oration, intended to console friends and relatives without wounding any individual. But the intrepid lecturer ventured upon volcanic soil, and portrayed the history of recent years with so great liberty of speech that, at the close of the first assembly, he was surrounded and urged to silence: why wound the feelings of auditors who blushed to hear of acts they had not blushed to commit? [Footnote 66]

[Footnote 64: Pliny the Younger, Lett. ii. 19; vii. 17.]

[Footnote 65: Ibid., viii, 12.]

[Footnote 66: Ibid., Lett. ix. 27.]

Probably he had reference to those informers who were expiating under Trajan the favor and prosperity they had enjoyed under Domitian. That they deserved scorn, there can be no doubt; but is it always easy to pass just and impartial judgment upon contemporaries? Does not history run a chance of resembling one of those retrospective reviews, before which, after a change of rulers, the men of to-day lay complaints against the men of yesterday?

Occasionally the choice of subjects was even more remarkable. The orator Regulus, whom Pliny (usually so full of good will toward the subjects of his criticism) unceasingly pursued with scornful hatred, loses his only son. Not content with bestowing upon him magnificent obsequies, in which, to strike all eyes with the spectacle of pompous woe, be sacrifices, upon the funeral pile, the nightingales, parrots, dogs, and horses that the child had loved; he would perpetuate his son's memory and spread abroad the proofs of his own grief. Portraits and images wrought in wax, or copper, or marble, ivory, silver, or gold--the most varied works of painter or sculptor, suffice him not. It occurs to him that he himself is an artist--a word-artist, and now or never his powers should be utilized. His son's life and death would be an admirable text for a lecture. Quick to the work! Great griefs are mute, says Seneca, but Regulus thinks otherwise; and in a few days he gives forth to a numerous assembly an address which cannot fail to do credit to his literary talents and his paternal sentiments. The comedy (for what else can we call it?) met with success. So fine a piece was not composed to delight a single audience, and Regulus, being rich enough to pay the expenses of glory, addressed a sort of circular to the magistrates of every important town throughout Italy and the provinces, begging them to select their best declaimer and confide to him the reading of this precious work of art. The wish of Regulus was gratified. [Footnote 67]

[Footnote 67: Pliny the Younger, iv. 2, 7.]

Pliny's letter, giving these curious details, shows also that the fashion of recitations had spread beyond Rome. Testimony to the same effect abounds in ancient authors. Few cities were without public lectures. In imitation of Italy, the practice was adopted in Africa, Gaul and Spain. Of Greece I do not speak, for Greece is _par excellence_ the land of literary recreations, and we will go thither all in good time.

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III.

It would appear from various texts that Rome at least had certain seasons for lectures: the months of April and August, and sometimes of July, being especially selected, no doubt because affairs before the tribunals were then less frequent. Authors took advantage of these periods of leisure to supplant the magistrates. But that each aspirant might have his turn, meeting succeeded meeting. "Poets abound this year," writes Pliny; "we have had recitations almost every day this month." Innocent satisfaction of a mind enjoying the triumph of good taste and literature in these exhibitions, or _osentationes_, as they were termed by severe judges! Seneca advises his pupil Lucilius not to stoop to objects so paltry. One would suppose that the frequency of public lectures would have led to the erection of a public edifice--of an amphitheatre especially devoted to these exercises. We find, however, that such a thing was never thought of, and that each lecturer was expected to provide his platform as best he could. Poor poets, a never-failing race, spoke in public squares or at the baths. [Footnote 68] Petronius in his Satyricon depicts the old poet Eumolpus declaiming anywhere and everywhere, in the streets or under peristyles, spouting his verses to every comer, at the risk of being driven away by the wearied crowd or of driving them away, a circumstance not more flattering to a poet. Eumolpus is but a fictitious personage, but he is no doubt drawn from life. Petronius describes what he has often witnessed; and even if we could doubt this, Horace and Juvenal would bear witness to the fidelity of the portrait.

[Footnote 68: Horace, Sat. I. iv. 75.]

Even when the crowd was attentive, these meetings in the open air had their inconveniences. Apuleius was to speak in Carthage, and great was his reputation. The people crowded and pushed and hustled to get a front place. So far so good, for what can be pleasanter than to see one's fellow creatures suffocated in one's honor? Apuleius began in his finest tones, the lecture marched apace, the most striking point was reached, enthusiasm stood on tip-toe--when, alas for the vanity of human hopes! a pelting shower fell upon all this success, dampening eloquence, putting the excited audience to flight, and sending the orator home wet to the skin, with his triumph changed to disaster. [Footnote 69]

[Footnote 69: Apuleius, Florides.]

Accidents of this nature rarely occurred, at least to men of reputation like Apuleius, for addresses were usually delivered under cover in a hall. A suitable apartment was easily found by any one who could afford to hire one. Sometimes, too, a friend would kindly lend his house, as for instance Titinius Capito, who liked to render services of this kind. "His mansion," says Pliny, "belongs to all those who have addresses to deliver." A simple dining-room sufficed for the occasions when only a few persons were expected; but these were exceptional. [Footnote 70] The place of meeting being selected, seats and benches were placed for the audience. A stage was erected for the lecturer, raised above the public, so that none of his gestures might be lost, and that he might judge correctly of the effect produced. The audience consisted of men only, it being contrary to received customs that a woman should appear in a lecture room. But an ingenious plan was devised by which literary Roman ladies could enjoy the entertainment. One part of the hall was sometimes curtained off with draperies, and behind this shelter, a woman could listen at her ease, without wounding conventional ideas. [Footnote 71]

[Footnote 70: Tacitus, Dial. de Or. 9.]

[Footnote 71: Pliny the Younger Letters viii. 12, 21]

The lecture was announced several days in advance, and ceremonious invitations were issued to friends and personages of distinction. This precaution proved useful in securing an audience, and fulfilled at the same time a duty of politeness, the neglect of which implied indifference to the courteous usages of the time. While slaves were carrying invitations through the city, the host remained at home, and, in order to make his voice clearer and more flexible, enveloped his throat in woolen cloths, and imbibed soothing beverages.

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The great day comes at last. The benches are filled. The lecturer only is wanting. He appears, and at sight of him a murmur of satisfaction passes round the hall. He takes the chair, often surrounded by his best friends, who sit beside him to encourage him with their presence and to enjoy his success. [Footnote 72] In order to appear in full lustre, he has arrayed himself in a new white toga, dressed his hair and beard carefully, and placed upon his finger a ring adorned with a precious stone. He unrolls a manuscript; utters a few modest phrases in apology for his temerity, asking of course the indulgence of the audience, but soliciting their justice also, since he seeks before all things an exact criticism, revealing the defects in his work, that he may correct them. This preamble being well received, he enters upon the discourse. In reading he tries to give effect to the words by a varied intonation of voice, by turns of his head and movement of his eyes. Soon faint cries of "Excellent perfect!" arise in various parts of the hall to charm his ear; but he feigns not to hear them. He pauses, remarking, "I am afraid all this bores you. Perhaps I ought to suppress a few passages, lest you should be wearied." But the audience are too polite to admit that a short lecture would not displease them. "Oh! no, no, skip nothing; we do not wish to lose a word." He proceeds, only to go through the same farce a little later. "I have already abused your patience; it is time to stop and release you from the remainder." "Read on, read on! it is charming to hear you." He reads to the end; the admiration grows, rises, bubbles over! where will it end? Thunders of applause follow, and the lecturer is inwardly overjoyed, but his modesty never deserts him. "Enough friends, enough!" he murmurs, "This is too much," Of course the transports are redoubled, and our lecturer returns home, believing himself a Virgil, a Sallust, or a Cicero.

[Footnote 72: Pliny the Younger, Letters, vi. 6.]

We have described here a successful lecture; but not always, it must be confessed, did the hero of the occasion carry away with him impressions so agreeable. Sometimes an author had to renounce the pleasure of reading his own composition, because of a weak or unpleasing voice, leaving the task of delivery to a reader, near whom he sat, accompanying the recitation with glance and gesture. [Footnote 73]

[Footnote 73: Pliny the Younger, Letters, viii. 1; ix. 34.]

Then, too, there were a thousand petty mishaps, impossible to foresee or avoid, one of which sufficed to spoil the occasion. Passierus Paulus, a Roman knight, was addicted to the composition of elegiac verses; a family peculiarity, it would seem, as he counted Propertius among his ancestors. One day, among the numerous assemblage of invited guests, sat Javolenus Priscus, a friend of the poet, though a little crazy. Paulus opened the recitation of his elegies with one commencing: "Priscus, you order me--" "I! faith! I ordered nothing," cried the crack-brained Javolenus, amid explosions of laughter from the audience. Behold Passierus Paulus greatly disconcerted! The absurdity of Javolenus had thrown a cloud over the entertainment, which proves, observes Pliny, that not only should a lecturer be himself of sane mind, but he should take care that his listeners be so too.

Paulus grieved over the ill success of his lecture; not so Claudius when an accident chanced to trouble the course of his recitation. He was at the first pages of the address, when a remarkably stout auditor cracked and brought to the ground a bench with his weight. The assembly roared with laughter. The good-natured emperor was not in the least annoyed; and, when silence was at last reestablished, he broke it again and again with peals of merriment, carrying the audience along with him, at the thought of the fat man's downfall.

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But a graver difficulty presented itself occasionally in the unwillingness of the public to partake of the feast of reason prepared for their enjoyment. The frequency and length of these lectures, which would last sometimes through two or three meetings, had tired many people, who came no more, except under protest, saying with Juvenal (iii. 9), "No desert but would be more endurable than Rome in lecturing times." Pliny bemoans this falling off and sees therein a grievous sign for literature--decline and decay. "The guests," he says, "stand about public places amusing themselves with frivolous talk. From time to time they send to ask if the lecturer has arrived, or if the preface is over, or the lecture far advanced. Then they go in, but slowly and with regret. Nor do they remain to the close. One slips out adroitly; another stalks unceremoniously away with his head in the air. It is said that, in our fathers' time, Claudius, while walking through his palace one day, heard a great noise, and, on asking the cause, was told that Nonianus was reading one of his works. The prince went immediately to join the assembly; but to-day prayers and entreaties will not induce the most unoccupied man to come, or, if he does come, it is only to complain of having lost a day because he has not lost it." [Footnote 74]

[Footnote 74: Pliny the Younger, Letters, i. 13; iii. 18.]

To go away before the close was a mark of ill breeding, as Pliny demonstrates; an infringement of that code of proprieties to which auditors were expected to adapt themselves. Attention was, of course, required, but many other things were prescribed. The excellent Plutarch, who seems to have shared Pliny's weakness for this kind of exercise, was at the pains to compose a treatise for his disciples upon the art of listening. "In a listener," he says, "a supercilious air, a severe face, wandering eyes, a stooping attitude, legs carelessly crossed, nay, more, a wink or nod, a word in a neighbor's ear, an affected smile, a sad and dreamy look, indecent yawns, and all other things of that nature, are reprehensible defects to be scrupulously avoided." [Footnote 75]

[Footnote 75: How to Listen, 13.]

Elsewhere he cites with approbation the conduct of Rusticus Arulenus: "One day when I was making a public address in Rome, Arulenus sat among the audience. In the middle of the conference, a soldier brought him a letter from the emperor. A profound silence prevailed in an instant, and I myself paused to give him time to read the despatches. This he declined to do, and only opened his letter when the address was ended and the audience had dispersed; conduct which won for him the admiration of every one." _Of every one_, and especially, I imagine, of Plutarch, who must have been flattered, indeed, to see that so grand a personage would not let his attention wander even to state affairs.

Plutarch at least exacts of his audience only what may be called good breeding. In this he agrees with Epictetus, who, while advising his disciple not to attend the public readings of poets and orators (believing, in his austere philosophy, that time might be better employed), recommends him, if he must go, to preserve decency and gravity, not indulging in boisterous and disorderly demonstrations, or wounding his host by giving evidence of weariness. But Pliny is not satisfied with this. In maintaining a religious attention at the lecture, the listener had fulfilled only half his duties, the other half being applause. To leave without exhibiting lively satisfaction was simply significant of boorish ill breeding. We find Pliny in despair when one of his friends has not obtained the meed of praise he had a right to expect from the audience. "For my own part," he says, "I could not refuse my esteem and admiration to those who interest themselves in literary labors." Before the lecture, he predicts in all sincerity the most startling success; and at its close, pronounces upon it in equally good faith a pompous eulogium. [Footnote 76]

[Footnote 76: Epictetus, Manual, 51.]

Sometimes the facile admiration borders on simplicity. Sentius Angurinus reads a poem, and the benevolent critic exclaims, "In my judgment, there has been nothing better done for years;" giving a specimen of the lines, that the reader may pass his own judgment. It is a little piece in which he, Pliny, is compared to Calvus and Catullus and ranked, of course, above both, without taking into consideration that he has the wisdom of a Cato into the bargain. "What delicacy!" cries the tickled critic, "what nicety of expression what vivacity!" Of course, who would not see charms in a madrigal containing these pleasant sentiments about one's self? It would be fastidious indeed to fail in admiration of such a production.

Sentius loudly proclaims the poetic talent of Pliny; and Pliny reciprocates with the announcement that Sentius is one of those rare geniuses who do honor to their age. It was an exchange of good offices--a mutual adulation in which the lecturer of to-day received back all that he had generously lavished about him yesterday. Vanity more than the love of letters found its meed in this interchange of courtesies.

We have already seen that on one side the disdain of serious thinkers, and on the other public satiety, had ended by injuring the success of these exhibitions. Solitude reigned about the lecturer, but should he on that account desert his post? It was an extreme case not to be easily met, but necessity is ingenious. New plans were invented for filling the hall. If an audience would not come, an audience must be hunted up--recruited at any cost. Clients and freedmen were borrowed from personal friends to fill the benches. One orator gathered together a troop of famished wretches and gave them a plentiful dinner. The guests, having eaten and rejoiced, were fired with gastric gratitude, and vigorously clapped the poems of their Amphitryon. This trade was carried on every day, and those who said their admiration for a good dinner were called by the expressive name of _laudicoeni_. Others bought applause cash down; but at a low price, if they were not particular as to quality; contented, for instance, with servants, who could be had for three _denarii_ apiece. At this rate, persons of low estate could drive a lucrative business by hiring out their services. A more simple method, however, than that of paying listeners by the day, was making use of debtors if one had any; for what debtor, with any sense of duty, could help attending the lectures of his creditors?

An audience collected thus did not trouble themselves much about listening, but no matter for that if they would but applaud; and applaud they did, and all the more vigorously in proportion to their inattention, as Pliny tells us, and we may well believe. All that the orchestra needed was a leader to give the signal to his docile troop, at the fine points, and to regulate the degrees of enthusiasm. Applause was no mere trade; it had risen to the dignity of a science. A skilful manager could provide every suitable emotion, from a discreet and low-voiced approbation up to passionately tumultuous enthusiasm. First came murmurs of pleasure, starts of gratified surprise and involuntary exclamations, followed by a silence no less flattering. Gradually the excitement got beyond control, and manifested itself by stamping of feet; by cries, nay, howls; to use the words of Pliny, _ululatus large supersunt_. Togas were shaken; benches trembled beneath the blows of trampling feet. Persons who sat near the lecturer, and could take such a liberty, ran to embrace him in token of gratitude at the delight he had afforded them. If perchance the speaker was an emperor, respect did not allow them to kiss his sacred lips, but only to pour forth expressions of gratitude. {297} The joy would become so universal, as we see in the case of Nero, that the senate decreed solemn thanksgiving to be offered to the gods; and the verses of the prince, graven in golden letters on the walls of the capitol, to be dedicated to Jupiter, as the noblest offering earth could consecrate to heaven. [Footnote 77]

[Footnote 77: Pliny the Younger, Letters, ii. 10, 14; Martial, i. 77; Suetonius, Nero, 10.]

IV.

We see by Pliny's lamentations that lectures in his day were not in vogue as they had been formerly. But it must be remembered that, even when lectures were at the height of popularity, they attracted only the cultivated class, so-called; that is to say, the minority. The Roman people did not pride themselves upon a marked taste for refined intellectual pleasures, finding more fascination in spectacles and circus games. Statius, according to contemporary accounts, appears to have been the poet most eagerly sought; but numerous as was the audience that thronged to hear him, there is little doubt, that, if some famous gladiator had appeared in the arena, Statius would have stood a fair chance of addressing empty benches. While the seats of the small lecture-room filled slowly with hardly earned auditors, the amphitheatre steps were never vast enough to accommodate the struggling multitude.

Only in Greece do we find a nation truly sensitive to purely intellectual enjoyments. There the simple artisan understood and appreciated philosophers, poets, and orators. The art of eloquence never left him indifferent, and he would leave his trade to run to a discourse as to a feast. With this disposition, what seemed to the Romans a pastime for the few, was the chief interest of many members of Greek society. Public speaking was but an accident in the lives of Pliny and his friends, while to the clever men of Athens or Alexandria it became a profession. Anyone who believed himself gifted with eloquence became a sophist or rhetor, and with a little tact and assurance could count upon that kind of success which is measured by a numerous audience. Some distinction between these two classes of men, the sophist and the rhetor, should be made here. The former claimed to have succeeded the philosophers, with the right to teach the people, and to develop the commonplaces of politics, morals, and even of religion. They made themselves preachers to the populace, and sometimes to princes, as, for instance, when we find Dion Chrysostom holding forth concerning the duties of royalty in Trajan's palace. Rhetors, on the other hand, were professors of eloquence. Their avowed aim was to please, but, while less proud in pretensions than the sophists, they were in reality equally presumptuous, assuming to teach art not only by explaining its roles, but also by offering in their own compositions finished models of rhetoric, in the genuine belief that they had garnered up the heritage of Demosthenes and Eschines. As all pretensions belong together, the sophist often combined his duties with those of the rhetor; witness the Dion above mentioned.

This race of public speakers lingered about the towns of Greece, and also of Asia Minor, Egypt, and Lybia. Then, finding these limits too narrow, they burst beyond them and invaded the Latin countries.

About the time of the Antonines, that is to say, when exhausted Roman genius seemed doomed to barrenness, there came a _renaissance_ of Greek letters. Many Romans preferred Greek to Latin for writing, and not merely as a caprice or literary foppishness, loving to deck itself in public with the riches of a foreign language. Marcus Aurelius converse with himself in Greek in the memoirs where be makes his examination of conscience. Why should we wonder that an audience should most readily collect in Rome to listen to some elegant rhetorician from the East?

The reputation to be gained from public speaking was too enviable to admit of delay in its acquisition. All persons did not even wait for manhood before claiming the attention of the public. {298} Far from pleading youth as an excuse, they gloried in it. Hermogenes of Tarsus made his _début_ at fifteen, as Marcus Aurelius tells us in his travels. "In me," says Hermogenes haughtily, "you see an orator who has had no master, an orator to whom years are still wanting." A sterile precocity it proved to be, making him, according to his enemies, an old man among youths, and a youth among old men.

Emulation fired women also. Many, and among their number young girls, undertook to speak in public, and spoke effectively too, and with success. History has left us the names of several of these muses, as the Greeks sometimes called them. The muses did not reveal themselves too visibly to their worshippers. A large curtain veiled them from the audience, lest their beauty should make too dazzling an impression. No longer as at Rome did draperies shelter the woman from the public; it was the public screened from feminine attractions.

In Italy we have seen that poets were among the most eager aspirants for recognition; but among the Greeks prose held public attention almost exclusively, for a reason which we hope to make clear. The crowd rushed to hear sophists and rhetors. Of historians there is no call to speak. The name was claimed by some, but on weak pretensions. They babbled of military art without understanding its first rules, and of geography while transplanting towns and rivers from one country to another. They took dragons stamped upon the Parthian standards for veritable dragons, of monstrous dimensions, fastened to pikes and destined to be launched upon the enemy, and to strangle and devour him. To give more credibility to these accounts, they assure us that, perched upon a tree, they themselves had seen the monsters and witnessed the frightful carnage. Elsewhere we learn that a general slew twenty-seven Armenians by uttering one cry, or (a statement no less remarkable) that, in a grand battle fought in Media, the Romans had only two dead and nine wounded, while the enemy lost (observe the exactness of the calculation) 70,236 men. [Footnote 78] And many more such tales indulged in by Greek historians,

"Quidquid Graecia mendax Audet in historia," (_Juvenal_,)

and detailed to credulous hearers. It is true that these authors of rare imagination laid great stress upon fine language, if not upon veracity, striving to gain distinction as polished writers. Lucian, however, who had heard them, believed as little in their eloquence as in their truthfulness, and laughed unmercifully at rhetors disguised as historians.

[Footnote 78: Lucian, "Of the Way to write History."]

On another point the Greeks differed from the Romans. With the exception of these written recitations, they did not read their orations. While in Rome we find public lectures, in Greece we have conferences or oral exercises. The theme was no doubt contemplated in private, and ideas were brought forward which habit had made familiar to the orator, but he spoke without manuscript gaining in vivacity of delivery and gesture by this liberty of action. Pliny complains of the inconvenience of reading an address: "Since neither hand nor eye is free, on which a declaimer should especially rely, what wonder that the attention wanders?" The Greek threw off all fetters, and spoke at once to eye and ear; unlike the lecturer who read his address, seated, in a voice whose inflections were monotonous in comparison to the modulations we are now about to describe. Our actor, for the platform was in fact a stage to him, was wont to call violent gesticulation to the aid of speech. He paced up and down in agitation, smiting his thighs, perspiring and panting. Again, if the subject demanded calmness and tranquillity, his actions grew melodious as a song to charm the audience, throwing into the sweet, harmonious language of Greece new suavity and unknown grace. {299} When Adrian of Tyre spoke, it was like the warbling of a nightingale, and even those who were ignorant of Greek came to listen. Herodias Atticus had more variety of tone than flutes and lyres; and, supreme above all, Varus possessed a voice so flexible that one could have danced to it, as to the sound of musical instruments. [Footnote 79]

[Footnote 79: Lucian, Master of Rhetoric, 19, 20; Plutarch, How to Listen, 7; Philostratus, Life of the Soph. II. v. 8; x, 8, xxviii.]

One can fancy with what facility the fervid Greek imagination lent itself to this enthusiasm. The state of religious belief contributed to bring spirits under the dominion of eloquence. The ancient faith was singularly weakened among pagan nations; and the priests who offered sacrifice to the deities of Olympus never dreamed of giving instruction to the people whom they gathered together in the temples. Men feel the need of moral teaching, however faulty may be their practice. They thirst for it, and seek it, though perhaps not at its true source. If pure waters are denied them, they draw from troubled streams. Preaching, which had been neglected by the ministers of paganism, was taken up by sophists. One had but to show himself abroad, manifesting a desire to speak, and straightway a circle gathered about him. To a renowned orator who wished to be silent, the privilege of silence was denied; speech was not his to refuse. As, for example, when Dion Chrysostom came as a spectator to the Olympic games, hardly was he recognized before they forced him to address them; when, taking for his theme the god they celebrated, he discoursed upon the attributes of Jupiter.

Another peculiarity of the time was that an emperor even did not disdain to inculcate virtue in public, guided, we may boldly assert, by no impulse of vanity, but by a more generous motive than that of exhibiting his eloquence. Marcus Aurelius, for it is of him we are speaking, was going to war with the Marcomanni. It was feared, and with too good cause, that he might die on this expedition, and he was implored earnestly, and without flattery, to address the people, and leave to them, by way of farewell, the moral precept that had guided his own career. He consented, and for three days in succession his people learned, from the imperial philosopher, duty as he himself understood and practised it. A curious and touching spectacle it must have been to see a sovereign regarding the instruction of his subjects as one of the functions of royalty. In unveiling his great soul, Marcus Aurelius revealed to his people the secret of an administration judged previously only by its beneficial effects; and left to his successors a model that was to find, alas! few imitators.[Footnote 80]

[Footnote 80: Vulcatius Gallicanus, Life of Aridius Cassius, 3.]

V.

In all ages, even the most degraded, a few souls have found a source of happy inspiration in moral truth. Whether among such self-appointed guides in spiritual matters there were many really worthy of their mission, we may be permitted to doubt. The instance, Lucian (I do not speak of Christians, whose veracity might be doubted), shows the conduct of these teachers of virtue to have been little in accordance with their language. Morality was in danger of being stricken with sterility under such tillage, but the field remained fertile though ill cultivated.

What can eloquence accomplish if the matter itself of eloquence be wanting? All cannot be orators for the choosing, nor even all who are endowed by heaven with those precious gifts that make an orator. There must be great interests to defend and great questions to debate. Place Demosthenes or Mirabeau in a chair of rhetoric, and what would they do with their genius? {300} A time came when there was no call but for school harangues; when professors trained their pupils in reading and speaking upon hackneyed themes familiar to every classroom. That such exercises may be useful for children of fifteen years of age, I will not deny; but here we have masters of eloquence descanting upon these venerable subjects, and impersonating Alexander or Themistocles, Miltiades, Menelaus, or Priam. They were scholars whose schooling was never ended. Gray heads betokened no emancipation from childish leading-strings, and death found them far removed from the maturity of manly oratory.

Would you know the subjects that attracted a delighted audience? A Lacedaemonian urging the Greeks to destroy trophies raised during the Peloponnesian war; or a Scythian conjuring his countrymen to abandon the life of cities for a wandering existence. One while we have Athenians wounded in Sicily praying for death at the hands of their companions; again, Demosthenes justifying himself against Demades for receiving Persian gold; with a hundred such trite themes, preserved to us by the complaisant biographers of the rhetors. It is unlucky that they have not transmitted for our edification any of these marvellous harangues entire, but we know enough of them to be sure that the style then in vogue was that sonorous Asiatic eloquence, pompous and commonplace in tone, compared by Dionysius of Halicarnassus to a courtesan entering an honest household to drive thence the mother of the family. Demosthenes is not to be recognized in the flowery declamation put into his mouth in common with other great personages. There were usages of style and rhetorical receipts, adapted to all circumstances, serviceable for none.

The glory of ancient Greece was another text on which rhetors loved to exercise their skill. They consoled themselves for achieving no exploits by celebrating those of their ancestors; boasting of victories only when the day of victory was long gone by. One orator was pleasantly nicknamed Marathon from his inability to pronounce any discourse without referring to the warriors killed at Marathon. Platea, Salamis, and Mycale had become rhetorical commonplaces. "Why," asks Plutarch sadly, "why recall triumphs that serve only to inspire us with useless pride? We should propose only imitable examples. Are we not like children walking about in their fathers' shoes?"

The eulogium of a city, a god, or some grand personage afforded matter for ample development. Socrates tells us that speech makes trifles important and great things trifling. This false definition of eloquence was received as a precept, as an axiom. Panegyrists no longer confined their commendation to heroes and great men, but pleaded the cause of the tyrant Phalaris or the cowardly Thersites. One vaunted the merits of long hair, another of bald heads. The praises were sung of parasites, parrots, gnats, and fleas. "_In tenui labor_," said Virgil, when about to sing of bees; but he could add, "_at tenuis, non gloria;_" for who can help admiring the labors of these intelligent republicans? The rhetor promised himself no less glory in celebrating the almost invisible wonders of the flea. This kind of discourse received a name which may be translated "paradoxical or unsustainable causes." Yet, strange to say, clever men did not disapprove of such topics. Aulus Gellius considers them suited to awaken talent, to sharpen wit, and inure it to difficulties. [Footnote 81]

[Footnote 81: Lucian, Phalaris, The Gnat; Dion Chrysostom, _passim_; Plutarch, Art of Listening, 13; Synesius, Praise of Baldness; Aulus Geilius, xvii. 12.]

To bring something out of nothing is a success of which one may justly be proud. But rhetors, like conquerors, possessed an insatiable ambition. They wished to astonish the world with new feats of prowess, and possibility has no limits for adventurous and valiant spirits. {301} To speak without preparation, sagely, long-windedly, without error or hesitation, being the noblest triumph attainable by man, improvisation became the exercise _par excellence_. [Footnote 82] There stood the orator, erect and tranquil, sure of himself and of his powers, waiting until the audience should throw him the text selected for his dissertation. The word given, he plunged into the discourse; words flowed in a self-supplying stream, pure and abundant; and periods unrolled themselves with admirable facility. No obstacle was insuperable; the stream flowed on and on, straying perchance into side channels here and there; but the listener followed its wanderings contentedly, for the paths were flowery and came quickly to a termination. Phrases ready for all times, and served up on all occasions, with a facility that knew neither pause nor obstruction--such was the supreme merit or the age. But if we may believe certain cavillers, it often sufficed to bring to the work audacity, to push on boldly, careless of ideas, prompt in the creation of new and odd expressions, regardless of solecisms, and anxious to avoid but one thing--silence. [Footnote 83] To acquire this noble art, one needed little study. Ignorance was no longer an obstacle, for it gave greater intrepidity and audacity. "Would you have your son a good orator," says an epigram of the Anthology, "do not let him learn his letters." [Footnote 84]

[Footnote 82: Pliny peaks admiringly of one Isaeus, and improvisatore. But it was an exception in Rome. Lett. ii. 8.]

[Footnote 83: Lucian, Master of Rhetoric, 18.]

[Footnote 84: Anthology, vi. 152.]

We feel far removed from the time when Demosthenes thought it no blot on his glory that his orations smelt of the oil! Greece has ever loved words. Take away her eloquence, and she remains gossiping and loquacious. If I may be allowed the comparison, she is like the princess in the fairy story, dropping pearls from her lips. The true pearls being exhausted, only waxen pearls remained.

And now, having proved an absence of apparent labor to be a condition of success in these exhibitions, we can understand why poets did not resort thither for the recitation of their works. Improvisations in verse had not then been invented, but the enthusiasm they would have excited one may easily fancy.

Spoiled by public favor, these fluent geniuses could not fail to hold their own merits in high estimation. We will not take literally Lucian's assertion that they set themselves above Demosthenes: "Who was your orator of Paeania compared to me? Must I conquer all the ancients one by one?" [Footnote 85] But they frequently speak in magnificent terms of their own talents, elated at the tricks of the tongue so thoroughly mastered. Praise them as one would, their self-praise was louder still. The sophists hid their vanity more skillfully perhaps, affecting sober vestments and an air of austerity, but it was merely a stage trick suited to the character to be sustained. Sometimes, in order to produce a better effect on their hearers, they appeared clad in the skins of wild beasts, with hair and beard dishevelled, or wearing simply an old tunic and carrying a wallet and staff. [Footnote 86] The rhetor was more dainty in his toilette; his garments were of a white stuff woven with flowers, brought from the looms of Tarentum, and so fine in texture as to show the outlines of the form through its gauzy tissue. He wore Attic sandals like those of women, covered here and there, or a Sicyonian buskin decorated with white fringe. He did not disdain those external signs of luxury that betoken rank; and went from town to town followed by numerous servants leading horses and packs of hounds. One in particular drove a chariot with silvered reins, and, passing lingeringly along the ranks of spectators on his way to the chair, allowed them to contemplate his gorgeous robe covered with diamonds. [Footnote 87]

[Footnote 85: Lucian, Master of Rhetoric, 21.]

[Footnote 86: Lucian, Peregrinus, Eunapius, Prohaeresius.]

[Footnote 87: Philostratus, Life of the Sophists, I. xxv. 4; II. x. 4.]

{302}

Philostratus, the biographer and fervent admirer of the sophists, remarks concerning one among them (the only one to whom he accords the praise) that he was always modest, and never spoke boastingly of himself. The vanity of many of them was simply ludicrous. Philagrius, newly arrived in Athens, was indignant because a young man had ventured to ask his name, and shuddered at the idea of meeting an individual unacquainted with Philagrius. In an assembly he let fall an expression that shocked the ear of a purist. "Who authorizes the use of that word?" asked the critic. "Philagrius," was the haughty answer. Words sufficed that day to express his sentiments, but it was not always so. One day an auditor presumed to fall asleep, an act of irreverence soon detected by the orator. He paused, stupefied to perceive that the audience were not all ears to hear him. Then, eager to avenge the wound inflicted on literature in his person, he descended from the stage, approached the unhappy sleeper, and roused him with a vigorous cuff. This severe but merited reproof was not without a certain eloquence; and we imagine that never again was anyone caught napping during the discourses of the irascible Philagrius. [Footnote 88]

[Footnote 88: Philostratus, Life of Soph. II. viii. 1; xxvii. 3.]

A Phoenician rhetorician arrived in Attica. "With me," he explained to his audience, "literature comes to you a second time from Phoenicia." Polemon, the Carian, speaking for the first time in Athens, opened his address thus: "Athenians, you are said to be good judges. I shall ascertain the truth of the report by your manner of receiving my discourse." Forewarned is forearmed. The audience were to applaud Polemon under pain of appearing dull in Polemon's eyes. His genius, according to his own estimate, placed him above the rank of kingdoms, on a level with kings and even with gods. And as a great man must die after a fashion of his own, he had himself buried alive, in his old age, lest years should impair his success. Hie weeping friends delayed to seal the stone over the cavern. "Close the tomb," he called out from below--"Close the tomb. Let it not be said that the sun beheld Polemon silent." [Footnote 89]

[Footnote 89: Philostratus, Life of the Sophists, I. xxv, 9, 27; II. x. 4.]

VI.

Did worshippers so convinced of their own merit recognize and honor the gifts of others? We shall see that they could mutually esteem and praise each other. Herodius Atticus had been declaiming at the Olympic games: "You are a second Demosthenes," he was told. "I would rather be a second Polemon," was the reply. An odd desire, and one that showed the bad taste of that day; but it expressed homage to a rival. Herodius in his turn saw his superiority recognized in the exclamation of another rhetor: "We are small change (_menue monnaie_) beside you." [Footnote 90] But these instances of modesty are rare. They were usually indisposed to yield the palm of eloquence so generously. Jealous one of another, they regarded all praise not personal to themselves as so much stolen from them. Their self-esteem was equalled only by their disdain of all rivals. Lucian gives a recipe of a method often employed to injure a rival. "Ridicule every other orator. Has he talent? Affect to believe that the sentiments are not his own; that he decks himself in borrowed spoils. Is he commonplace? Think him odious. Come late to his exhibitions. It will make you conspicuous. Choose a moment of silence to utter a eulogium in singular language, calculated to distract and startle the audience. Your exaggerated praises will disgust them with the object of your praise and make them stop their ears. Almost invariably smile scornfully, and never appear pleased with what is said." [Footnote 91]

[Footnote 90: Ibid. I. xxv. 17; II. v.8.]

[Footnote 91: Lucian, Master of Rhetoric, 22.]

Meantime the orator, seeing his success threatened, was wont to meet the skilful attack with a defence no less skilful. He managed his resources prudently, gathering about him devoted friends to assist in the manoeuvres. {303} Under all circumstances he must count upon these faithful satellites. Marcus Aurelius was to attend the exercises of Aristides. "Will you let me bring my disciples?" asked the prudent rhetor. "Certainly," said the emperor, "if it is customary." "And will you allow them to shout and applaud with all their might?" added Aristides ingenuously. "Oh! certainly," replied Marcus Aurelius, laughing, "that depends entirely upon yourself." When the master spoke, the scholars must stamp enthusiastically. If he were about to fail, they must reach out a helping hand, and give him by applause the time to recover his self-possession.

Happy he who could count among his admirers some high and puissant celebrity; for who can fail to discern the grandeur of an oration stamped with the approbation of an imposing authority? When Heliodorus declaimed, the emperor, holding him in great affection (who was that emperor, by the way? The historian does not tell us, but no matter!), regarded with an air of irritation anyone disinclined to applaud the speaker. And the laggards took the hint, we may be sure, and adapted their impressions thenceforth to the emotions of royalty. [Footnote 92]

[Footnote 92: Philostratus, Life of Soph. II. xxxii. 3]

But when an orator had reached the highest rank in the city, it is not to be supposed that his reign was free from rivalry. Combatants came from a distance to compete with him. Many lecturers, and by no means the least brilliant, have a taste for travelling, and would extend their reputation in any direction where there are ears to listen to them. Knights errant of the rhetorical art wandered from province to province, seeking adversaries and flinging challenges as they went. If victories heralded their approach, the crowd ran to greet them, and the most illustrious citizens met them at the city gates.

Conceive the uneasiness and agitation of the unlucky sophist or rhetor thus disturbed in the possession of his glory. He had labored long to attain the position of eminence, now threatened by the approaching aspirant. O nothingness of glory! A single day might suffice to destroy the edifice of many years. What was to be done? To refuse the challenge was to declare himself vanquished. Rather death than such humiliation!

Death might follow a similar struggle. Niger, the famous declaimer, had swallowed a fishbone which stuck in his throat. There came a stranger to pronounce a public harangue, and Niger, fearing that his silence might be construed into a desire to fly from the lists, declaimed in his turn, with the fishbone still in his throat. The effort caused an inflammation so violent as to result in his death.[Footnote 93]

[Footnote 93: Plutarch, Precepts of Health, 16.]

The time having arrived for the new speaker to be heard, he opened his address with a eulogium of the audience, as the exordium best calculated to ensure success. "In this place one should bend the knee," [Footnote 94] cried one of these orators, as if struck with a religious awe of the city where he was to speak. We have two declamations of Lucian's that give a good idea of the precautions peculiar to the trade. "The chosen of every city are before me, the flower of Macedonia. This assemblage consists not of an ignorant rabble, but of orators, historians, and sophists of the highest distinction." This satirical Lucian was not sparing of compliments to his Macedonian public; what was left for the Athenians? "I have long desired an audience such as this. What approbation could I look for after passing through your city without obtaining a hearing?" Then follows the panegyric of the city, endowed not only with especial magnificence, but with more men of power and talent than fell to the lot of any other city. He exalts their benevolence and affability, and likens himself to the Scythian Anacharsis, so fascinated with the charms of Athens as to be unable to tear himself away.[Footnote 95]

[Footnote 94: Philostratus, Life of Soph. II. v. 3.]

[Footnote 95: Herodotus, 8, The Scyth, 10, 11,]

{304}

I spoke just now of knights errant. Do you remember in accounts of the tournament the disguised cavalier who enters the lists and is recognized by the weight of his blows? The champions of rhetoric were sometimes the heroes of similar adventures.

Hippodromus of Larissa landed at Smyrna, and, following the crowd, entered a hall where one Megistias had drawn together an audience. Hippodromus was in travelling gear. Approaching Megistias, he said: "Change clothes with me. Lend me your mantle for a moment." The other looked at him to see if he might be a maniac; but the exchange was made. "And now give me a subject of declamation," continued Hippodromus. They gave him one, which he treated so skilfully that Megistias exclaimed with surprise: "But who are you?" "I am Hippodromus the Thessalian." In a few moments the report of the illustrious rhetor's arrival had spread through the town, and the whole population rushed to see and hear him. [Footnote 96]

[Footnote 96: Philostratus, Life of the Sophists, I. xxiv.4.]

Again the challenger would be some great celebrity. Anatolius, prefect of the praetorium, and gifted with remarkable eloquence, announced his speedy arrival at Athens, challenging all speech-makers to an encounter, and proposing one of the most difficult questions capable of discussion by trained intelligences. Great agitation ensued. Anatolius was a formidable judge, both by his science and by his exalted position in the state. Eunapus tells us that Greece trembled more on that occasion than at the approach of the Persians. He was Prohaeresius, the great Prohaeresius, victor in every battle, to whom Rome was to erect a statue bearing the inscription: _Rome, queen of the world, to Prohaeresius, king of eloquence._ The Greeks decreed even a grander title to him. He was no mere mortal; he was Mercury disguised in human form. One day when he had finished speaking, the people gathered round him and kissed his hands and feet, nay, licked his breast, as if he had been in very deed a god. And would you know by what manifestation of power he had deserved this idolatry? After improvising a long discourse, he had forthwith repeated it word for word, without missing a single syllable. The prodigy could not be denied, for reporters had been provided for the occasion, who had noted down every expression. [Footnote 97]

[Footnote 97: Eunapus, Prohaeresius.]

These transports on the part of the public, these passionate demonstrations, bordering sometimes on delirium, are so foreign to our habits that we should be inclined to suspect exaggeration in the recital of Eunapus, if many other authorities did not testify also to the ecstasies excited in the populace by eloquence. Habits of mind are, perhaps, harder to eradicate than those of the soul, and Christianity succeeded in introducing austere ideas in the spiritual life without immediately curing this excessive love of eloquence. Applause was heard sometimes in churches, and St. John Chrysostom had to impose silence more than once upon his hearers, who clapped him, forgetful of the sanctity of the place in their enthusiasm for the orator.

We have seen the bright side of the subject, but every medal has two sides. Without speaking of the jealousies and enmities inherent to the profession, can one be sure of being equal to one's self every day and all day? You appear before an imposing assembly; all eyes are fixed upon you. Let emotion seize you, a little lapse of memory, a slight absence of mind, and you are lost. The thought is enough to intimidate the most intrepid rhetor. And it was a misfortune not without example. Herodius Atticus, on one occasion, stopped short in the presence of the emperor, and thought for an instant of drowning himself in the Ister. {305} A similar accident happened to Heraclides, who took the accident more philosophically, and sought consolation for his disgrace in abusing improvisation, and composing a work in praise of labor. [Footnote 98]

[Footnote 98: Philostratus, Life of Soph. II. i. 36; xxvi. 3, 5. Here belongs an anecdote showing the pleasure taken by rhetors in insulting each other. Heraclides sent his Panegyric of Labor (Greek text) to one Ptolemaeus, and adept in improvisation. Ptolemaeus returned it to him, after erasing the first letter, so that the title stood, "Panegyric of an Ass." The biographer does not mention that Heraclides found the epigram to his taste.]

And who can count on the good nature of his audience? Listeners have a certain malice of their own at times, as Philagrius once discovered to his cost. He had composed a discourse in Asia, and learned it by heart. On arriving in Athens, he presented himself before the amateurs and burst forth into improvisation. By a wonderful coincidence, they had given him precisely the subject which he had so carefully treated. Philagrius, sure of his ground, began boldly, and wandered on like one led by the moment's inspiration. He grew diffusive and pathetic; but, strange to relate, as the discourse proceeded, the audience gave evidence of merriment, first by subdued tittering, finally by uproarious bursts of laughter. Philagrius paused in wrath and amazement. To calm this excitement, his hearers produced a copy of the address which he had repeated without altering a single word. Philagrius had been caught in a trap.[Footnote 99]

[Footnote 99: Philostratus, Life of Soph. II. viii. 3.]

The abuse of this false eloquence could not fail in the end to produce disgust. Serious men began to ask themselves if these brilliant exercises were true oratorical art or merely a vain tissue of words. A few even of those who had yielded to the fascination began to look pityingly on declaimers. Lucian lavished satire upon them, but the trade was still prosperous in his day. Synesius, coming later, spared them as little. From him we learn their misery as well as their presumption. We see that the palmy days of the profession had passed away.

"I will not wander from door to door, attracting the townspeople with the promise of a charming speech. O sad profession! Speaking for the crowd; attempting the impossible in trying to please so many different minds! The stage orator, no longer belonging to himself, is in truth a slave to the public, subject to the caprice of every individual. If an auditor begins to laugh, the sophist is lost. He dreads a morose visage; too close attention seems to him to imply criticism, a restless turning of the head to signify weariness. And yet he surely merits indulgent masters who sacrifices sleep at night, spends his days in toil, consuming himself, as it were, with hunger and fatigue, in order to compose a fine address. He comes before the disdainful crowd to charm their ears, concealing his indisposition with an affectation of health. Having bathed the day before, he presents himself to the public at the appointed time, blooming, dimpling, displaying every grace. He turns to the audience, wreathed in smiles, joyous in appearance, but torn with secret pangs. He chews gum to make his voice clear and strong, for even the most serious sophist lays great stress upon a fine voice, and lavishes upon it much ill-concealed care. In the middle of the oration, he pauses to ask for a beverage, previously prepared. A servant offers it, and he drinks, moistening his throat, the better to pronounce his melodious sentences. But the poor wretch cannot with all this gain the good will of his hearers. The audience await the final clause impatiently, that they may laugh in liberty. They would gladly see him with out-stretched arm and parted lips, preserving the attitude and silence of a statue: then, when worn out with weariness, they could escape." [Footnote 100]

[Footnote 100: Synesius, Dion]

But of all the perils that menaced their very existence, sophists and rhetoricians had most cause to dread the growing strength of Christianity. The new religion proposed to its disciples, as the aim of life, an object far more elevated than the pleasures of eloquence. It was no longer a question of noble words, but of noble actions. {306} What were intellectual satisfactions in comparison to the joys of conscience? The Christian sought the eloquence that should teach him his duties, and the sophist with uncertain and contradictory answers was no longer an authority. He must appeal to the priest for precepts of unfailing, unchanging wisdom. Let some solitary, in repute for sanctity and for familiarity with the things of God, leave his desert for a moment to mingle among men, and the crowd rushed to greet him. St. John Chrysostom proudly contrasts the entrance of a monk with that of a sophist. A few days more, and the revolution was consummated. Sophists saw no one following them, while the troop of the faithful, that is to say, the entire nation, pressed upon the steps of the humble monk. A preacher of the gospel, even if recommended only by soundness of doctrine and morality, was sure of seeing listeners seated at the foot of the pulpit. But preachers who think only of the triumph of the faith attain the true glory of oratory, that of arousing emotion. Not only may a great thought come from the heart, but the expression with which it is given forth. Why listen to elegant but empty amplifications in schools, when in a neighboring basilica one could enjoy a magnificent oration, whose brilliancy should remain untarnished through fifteen centuries? No rhetor, but a young priest from Antioch, received from contemporary admirers as well as from posterity the glorious name of Chrysostom--Golden Mouth. The church is fertile in orators as in martyrs. Christianity did not smother eloquence. She assigned to it new destinies; regenerating, or rather (for it existed no longer) resuscitating it.

VII.

And now we ask ourselves, what good and what evil these exercises have done? The mischief is not far to seek. It is exhibited in every page of the present article. Invented by vanity, these literary and philosophical exhibitions had seldom any better object than the satisfaction of vanity; hence their vitality and duration, but also their sterility.

But does this imply that they answered no useful end? By no means. I do not believe with Ovid, a great amateur of public lectures, as it appears (perhaps he used them himself), that they excite poetic genius. [Footnote 101] His contemporaries Horace and Virgil had no need of the stimulant of public praise in the composition of their masterpieces. Pliny saw another advantage in lectures, as giving a writer the opportunity to consult the public, and to invite criticism with the view of correcting defects. [Footnote 102] But an audience thus convoked is no severe and judicious Aristarchus, overlooking no defect, [Footnote 103] but forever crying "Correct." It is there to approve, and any lack of commendation is generally criticised by the author as a want of good manners. Pliny's friends applauded him, and Pliny, with singular simplicity, confessed himself charmed with their good taste. [Footnote 104] What is he thinking of when he speaks of the free judgment of auditors, and yet complains of those who deny him applause? In fact, he says, whether you are the inferior, equal, or superior of the lecturer, you have an interest in praising him whom you surpass or who equals or surpasses you. Your superior, because you merit no praise if he deserves none; your equal or inferior, because the glory lavished upon him tends to raise your reputation. With this convenient theory criticism loses its rights. We need not wonder that Lucan, [Footnote 105] whose brilliant defects are easily pardoned, allowed himself to be elated by the boisterous applause accorded to his Pharsalia; or that, comparing his age and _débuts_ with those of Virgil, be exclaimed! "My friends, am I so far behind the great?" [Footnote 106] Seneca wisely decided that nothing had injured literature so much as popular acclamations. [Footnote 107]

[Footnote 101: Pont. iv. 2.]

[Footnote 102: Letters, v, 3; vii. 17.]

[Footnote 103: Horace, Poetic Art, 445.]

[Footnote 104: Letters, iii. 18.]

[Footnote 105: Letters, vi. 17.]

[Footnote 106: Saetonius, Lucan.]

[Footnote 107: Letters, 102.]

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Far from thinking, as Pliny does, the system of lectures a finishing school, I believe the author to be confirmed in his defects by applause and adulation. But I agree with Pliny as to the efficiency of these assemblies in preserving and propagating a taste for intellectual things. Mental labor, even when bestowed on trivial matters, is of use in fostering intelligence. Rhetors and sophists were generally inferior orators and philosophers, but they deserve our thanks for their fidelity to study and to the preservation of literary traditions. But for them the maturity of Christian eloquence might have been long delayed. We must remember that Basil, Gregory, Chrysostom, Augustine, and Ambrose had passed through their schools before entering the church. The disciples effaced their masters, while profiting by lessons received from them.

And, turning to a different view of the subject, it is no matter of indifference to continue beyond the usual period assigned to serious labors one's devotion to literature, so softening and humanizing in its influence on the heart. This especially applies to a nation, unprovided by religion or morality with any remedy against evil instincts. To write little verses and polish periods is no great affair, I confess; but it is better than wallowing in low and sometimes cruel sensuality, like the rabble. In point of religious and moral convictions, the Greeks had fallen to a level with the Romans. But one thing elevated them: an untiring love of poetry, eloquence, and philosophy. In default of the reality, they pursued its shadow. Ixion, so say their mythologists, embraced only the phantom of Juno. True; but, while striving to win this phantom, he had not stooped to base and ignoble loves. The astute and polished Greek avoided that barbarism which engulfed the coarse, unlettered Roman.

We must not forget that Christian preaching has been served to a limited extent, but yet effectively, by habits introduced by sophists. The first comers freely explained their doctrines in public places without exciting surprise. Every system received a hearing. Stoics, epicureans, and cynics all sought to win converts to their various theories. Beneath the mantle of philosophy, the Christian could mingle with the crowd, and, while teaching a morality hitherto unknown, prepare the way for novel doctrines. When St. Paul arrived in Athens, that city where all men, strangers or citizens, were occupied only with hearing or uttering something new, [Footnote 108] the multitude at first mistook the apostle for some wandering sophist, and lent him an attentive ear so long as he did not openly shock their preconceived ideas. Peregrinus, whose life and death Lucian gives us, became a cynic after having been a Christian, and continued to address the people. Lucian does not clearly mark the change nor the distinction between the two systems of instruction, which seem to him equally strange. A similar confusion must have often arisen, not in the minds of Christians turned philosophers (there were fewer apostasies than conversions), but of philosophers who became Christians.

[Footnote 108: Acts of the Apostles, xvii. 21.]

Our study is ended. I had merely thought of writing a chapter on literary history, without seeking in the past an attack or a defence of the present. It is difficult to compare two periods justly. Our lectures and conferences differ in many respects from those in vogue among the ancients, but who can deny the various points of resemblance? If we wish, as everyone indeed must wish, to secure a durable and legitimate success to the system, we must remember it is not established merely for the recreation and diversion of the public, like the theatre or the concert-room, but also and above all for their instruction. It is a question of education. {308} I would have the lecture, whether literary or scientific, given in an attractive style, not after the severe, didactic fashion or a _cours de faculté;_ but it should be distinctly a lecture, so that the hearer may carry away with him some profitable ideas with the memory of an agreeable hour. In my humble opinion, it is only on these conditions that the system of public conferences will obtain not merely a passing popularity, but freedom of the city. If this be true, are we to encourage authors to read their unpublished works, poems, dramas, odes, romances, or what not? In these days there are other roads to publicity, and it is not by a single hearing that intellectual works are to be judged. Still less must it be allowed (for even improbabilities should be anticipated) that an author, speculating in fame, should announce his arrival on such a day and hour: "To speak about what? I have not the least idea, but no matter! I shall speak, and you will have seen and heard me." A mere matter of curiosity, making one think of the tight rope.

Another danger is, that conferences may become a sort of intellectual gymnasium, only good for the development of suppleness and agility of mind. Hitherto, in running over the lists of subjects under discussion, we have met none of the frivolous and insignificant themes that rhetors revelled in handling. The titles at least announce a serious purpose. We should be glad to attribute the merit of this to the wisdom of the choosers, but the thought suggests itself that the administrative control may deserve part of the praise. It is well known that no one can deliver lectures without especial permission, and a especial approval of the subject of his address. It is also well known that certain orators find it impossible to obtain this permission. Whether this exercise of authority has inconveniences as well as advantages is a question we will not here investigate. But there is one among the conditions imposed on public lectures that must suit every sensible person, the restrictions with regard to age. It is not difficult to find young persons who, mistaking temerity for talent, are eager for an opportunity to display their presumptuous ignorance. Can we even be quite certain that among those who have passed their twenty-fifth year there may not be some who would do well to preserve a discreet silence? "Weigh carefully the burdens your shoulders are to bear," said Horace to the Romans of his day. The precept is old, but sound even now. Remember, all you who present yourselves for public speaking, that it is not merely an honor, but a responsibility also. Consult your strength. Neither diploma nor certificate of capacity is demanded of you. Do not, however, imagine that no quality is needed to fit you for this professorship (for the post is nothing less than a professorship) except unbounded self-confidence. The least we can ask is that those who would teach us should be well informed themselves. Good sense, ever successful in the end, would do justice sooner or later to all such vain pretensions; but meantime the oft-deluded public might have learned to avoid the recreation prepared for them. We earnestly desire the long life and prosperity of the system, and therefore trust that no lecturers likely to injure it should be tolerated. Is our wish to be fulfilled? The future must answer.

{309}

Original.

Verheyden's Right Hand.

If there were no music, I think there would have been no Verheyden. He was an obligato.

The child of a violin-player and a singer, both professional, he had been born into an atmosphere of sweet sounds. His baby eyelids had drooped in slumber to a flute-voice lullaby, or some ethereal strain from his father's precious little Cremona. Every breeze that swept over the rippling Neckar or down the wooded mountain-sides, playing mournfully through the wind-harp in the window, caught the child at his play, hushing him. As soon as he could reach them, his fingers sought the keys of the piano; and from that thrilling moment when first a musical sound woke at his touch, Verheyden had found his occupation. It became his life. Every feeling found expression at the tips of his fingers, and his fiercest passions culminated in a discord.

It is said that a violin long played upon will show in the wood flutings worn by the "continual dropping" of musical sounds from the strings. So Verheyden seemed wrought upon by his art. He looked like a man who might have stepped from some wild German tale; of Walpurgis, or other. He was called tall, being slight, and appeared to be made of nerves and as little as possible besides. His dark hair rose like the hair in Sir Godfrey Kneller's portraits, and streamed back from his forehead as if blown. His thin face was alive with restless gray eyes--the eyes of a listener, not a seer--with fiery nostrils to the slightly aquiline nose, and with an unsteady mouth. He had frequent flitting motions, apparently inconsequent, really timed to some tune in his mind. He was moody, absent, abrupt; he was too much in earnest about everything. He had little perception of wit or humor, and he never laughed except with delight. He could be bold, yet he was simple and ingenuous as a child. An enthusiast, with room in his narrow, intense brain for but one idea at a time; a man who would take life by the blade rather than the handle; a man in _alto relievo_.

On the breath of some unaccountable impulse, he would have said--fulfilling his destiny, say we--Verheyden came to the New World, wandered about a little, dazed and homesick, at length engaged to take the place of Laurie, the organist, who was about going to Europe for further instruction.

He went into the church one afternoon with Laurie to try the organ. A sultry afternoon it was, the eve of the Assumption; but inside the church all was coolness and silence and shadow, most home-like to the stranger of any place he had seen this side the ocean. While the organist played, be leaned from the choir and looked down into the nave. Laurie played with great sweetness and delicacy, and chose first one of those yearning things that touch, but do not rouse; and Verheyden leaned and listened, dreaming himself at home.

Ah! the green, cool Neckar flowing downward to the Rhine; all the rafts and all the barges, all the wet and mossy rock; the overlooking mountains dense with forests to their summits; the gray outstanding castle crumbling lothly from its post; the red roofs of the houses, the churches fair and many; all the quiet and the color of that home in fatherland.

{310}

When the organist ceased playing, the dreamer felt as though he had been in motion and were suddenly stopped. He perceived that he was waving his hand, and became aware of a little maiden dressed in white who had been going about placing flowers, and who, at the first sound of music, had sunk upon the altar-steps, and sat there listening, her eyes upturned and fixed on the crucifix.

"Who, then, is she?" asked Verheyden, as Laurie trifled with the keys, holding the clew while he searched what next to play.

Laurie glanced into the mirror before him. "Oh! she belongs in a frame on the wall, but sometimes steps out and wanders about the church. She sings at service. Call her up here if you can."

Verheyden hastily took a seat at the organ, and, as the girl rose and prepared to leave the church, a smooth strain sprang like a lasso from under his fingers, and caught her. She went upstairs, and, standing by the organist, sang Lambillot's _Quam Dilecta_. Her voice was not powerful, but a pure soprano, clear and sweet, making up in earnestness what it lacked in volume. She sang with exquisite finish, having taken the kernel of science and thrown away the husk. Musical ornamentation was not with Alice Rothsay vocal gymnastics, but seemed to grow upon the melody as spontaneously as tendrils upon the vine. Verheyden laughed with delight when, at the climax of the song, she touched the silver C in alt.

What had been a little maiden in the distance was a small young woman when near by. She was blonde; her oval face had the lustrous paleness of a pearl; she looked as she sang, pure, sweet, and earnest. One knowing the signs in faces would say that sharp tools must have wrought there to make the eyelids and the mouth so steady. Strangers called her cold; but those who had once seen her pale gray eyes grow luminous thought her fervid.

Then began again Verheyden's life, growing richer everyday. Musical _cognoscenti_ grew enthusiastic about him: he was a genius, they said, no one before had so well interpreted the old masterpieces of song. Laurie was charming; but Verheyden was inspiring. The Scottish laddie was sweet and bright as one of his own dancing burns; but the German brought reminiscences of torrents and avalanches, and lightnings tangled among the mountain-tops. Laurie saw music as in a glass darkly, and strove to tell them how she looked; but Verheyden grasped the goddess with compelling fingers, and led her out before their eyes to dazzle them. His slight form below the towering organ-pipes they compared to Samson between the pillars of the temple of Gaza.

Verheyden was extremely happy in his art: pleased, too, to feel the wreath of fame settling on his brow with tingling touches; and when that August day had slipped back three years, he was thirty years old.

John Maynard, the machinist, drew into his mind various abortive notions conceived by men who had lived, or who were still in the sun--drew them in mistrustfully, and found them stray sparks of genius whose kindred dwelt with him. Uniting, they played pranks on the man; they made his brain swell and snap as they pushed open the portals of unsuspected chambers; they sailed through his dreams in the trains of vast shadows, whose shapes he panted to catch as they eluded him in the labyrinths of sleep; they grouped and they scattered, forming here and there a salient or receding angle, leaving voids to be filled; they got into his eyes till he forgot his friends and to brush his hat; they salted his coffee and sugared his beef; they took him on long rambles, where he would wake to find himself standing stock-still, staring at nothing; they burned up questions and answers before they could reach his lips, and they dislocated his sentences. They wooed, and eluded, and tormented, and enraptured him, till, darting on them unawares, he caught a shadow and copied it out on paper. Finally, fused into one shape, it sprang from his brain, like Minerva from Jove's, armed _cap-à-pie_. The machinist's invention was clad in iron, and stood shining and winking in the unaccustomed sunshine for everybody to admire.

{311}

Which finishes the story of John Maynard's only love.

Among the many visitors who flocked to see this wonderful invention came one day Verheyden, Alice Rothsay, and her cousin Rose.

They stood and watched smoothly slipping cylinders that coquetted with a hand of gold from every gazing window, large wheels that turned deliberately on their dizzy centres, and little families of cogged wheels that made them feel cross-eyed--all the deceitful gentleness and guileful glitter of the creature.

Alice Rothsay stretched a venturesome pink finger-tip toward a lazily rocking bar, then with a shiver, drew it back. "But I like to look at machinery," she said; "it is so self-possessed. Besides, it is full of curves, which are amiable as well as graceful. Parallels are unsocial, and angles are disagreeable."

"Parallels are faithful if not fond," remarked the machinist, "and straight lines have an aim and arrive at places. They are the honest lines, the working lines, the strong lines. The reasoner's thought goes like an arrow, the dreamer's like smoke on a heavy day. I would rather see a cat pounce upon a mouse than run round after her own tail."

"But the spiral," she ventured.

"Oh! that's the supernatural," said the machinist.

"For my part," said Rose, "I don't see why the cat, after having caught her mouse, should not amuse herself by running round after her own tail. It keeps her out of the cream."

Miss Rothsay turned to look at Verheyden, who was examining another part of the machine. As she looked, he stretched his right hand to point a question, and stretched it too far. The cruel teeth caught it, there was a sharp breath that was not quite a cry. John Maynard sprang to stop the machine, and in a moment Verheyden drew back, wild-eyed, but silent, holding up a crushed and bleeding hand.

"There is no pain," he said as Maynard knotted the handkerchief about his arm. But he staggered while speaking, and the next moment fell.

Miss Rothsay had news of him that evening. His hand had been amputated, and he was wild. He wanted to tear the ligatures from his arm and bleed to death, had to be restrained and drugged into quiet. Her messenger had left him in a morphia-sleep, pale as the dead, and with only the faintest breathing.

Weeks passed, and the reports were scarcely more cheering. The patient had to be watched lest be should do himself harm; and as he resented such watching with savage impatience, his attendant's place was no sinecure.

Indeed, Verheyden writhed in his circumstances as upon burning fagots. Wrapped in his art as in an atmosphere, the wrench that tore his hand away left him breathless. Music, the glory and the sweetness of his life, floated back only just out of reach, tantalizing him with remembered and almost possible bliss. Melodies brushed his lips and left a sting; chords stretched broad, golden, electric, and, reaching to grasp them, he fell into darkness. His passionate heart rose and swelled, and found no outlet, but beat and broke against an impossibility, like the sea on its rocks. Verheyden's occupation was gone.

True, he could study phenomena. He was haunted by the ghost of a hand that he could clench but could not see, that sometimes itched at the finger-tips. It would seem that the nerves, confounded at being cut short from their usual station, had not yet learned to send new messages, even sent the old ones blunderingly, overdoing in their anxiety to do the best they could. He had sometimes to recollect that this troublesome hand was preserved in spirits in a glass jar set in Dr. Herne's laboratory, on a shelf just behind his pet skeleton.

{312}

Verheyden read treatises on nerves till his own were no longer telegraphic lines under control, but the wires of a rack to which he was bound. He studied spiritualism till in dim night-watches the veil before the unseen seemed to glide back. He dived into mesmerism till all the powers of his mind centred in a will that glittered hard and bright in his eyes, causing the timid to shrink and the pugilistic to make fists.

But through all these noxious parasites of the tree of knowledge which he recklessly gathered about him moaned ceaselessly his unforgotten bereavement. Or, if he forgot for a moment, it was like drawing the knife from a wound to drive it back again.

Having exhausted every other distraction, he started one day for a long walk in the country. He could not walk the city streets without meeting at every step some piercing reminder of his loss. It was Scylla and Charybdis. His fancy had caught a spark from everything beautiful in nature, and there was not an outline nor motion, not a sound nor a tint, but found in him some echo. Stately, swaying trees in his path waved the grave movement of an Andante; the shrill little bird that slid down on a sunbeam through the branches mimicked a twittering strain of Rossini's; a sigh of air that rose, and swelled, and sank again, echoed a phrase of Beethoven; and an unseen rivulet played one of Chopin's murmuring soliloquies.

Verheyden trod savagely on yielding moss, and crackling twigs, and dry leaves of last year, and on the bluest of blue violets that bloomed bathed in the noon sunshine. He plunged into a by-path, and came to a brook that fled as though pursued. It stumbled dizzily over shining pebbles, glided with suspended breath around grassy curves; it was all a-tremble with inextricably tangled sunshine and shadow; it gushed here and there into sweet complaining; it leaped with white feet down the rocks. Verheyden threw himself upon the bank beside it. He had played such dances, measures that made the dancers giddy, and sent the ladies dazed and laughing to their seats.

"Does he think we are dervishes? Do take me into the air."

Verheyden laughed; and the fingers in Dr. Herne's glass jar behind the skeleton played a caprice as saucy as Puck plunging with headlong somersaults and alighting on tiptoe. Then, with a groan, he recollected.

As he crouched there, half wishing the water were deep enough to drown him, be heard a low-voiced singing near by, and, taking a step presently, he saw a picture among the pine shadows. Alice Rothsay, with a red rose in her bosom, sat in the moss, and the green, thready grasses, looking fair as Titania, her small figure showing smaller by the boles and branches of the trees. She was hushing herself silent and smiling, her lucent eyes intent on a humming-bird that wandered in the flickering shade and shine of the woods. It foraged for a moment among the shrinking blossoms, the bold little robber! it snapped at a round bright drop dashed up by the fretted waters, and got a sip, half spray, half sunshine, that turned it clean tipsy; then it made a dart at the red rose in Alice Rothsay's bosom, and hung there, a little blue buzz with a long bill. The rose trembled over the girl's suppressed laughter, and the winged mite flung itself petulantly breast deep in the fragrant petals. Then it reeled away, scared at the bound her heart gave; for, looking up, she saw Verheyden. It was the first time they had met since his accident.

"I dare not pity you," she said; "the hand of God shows too plainly." But the moistened eyes, and the unsteadiness of her soft, loitering voice, contradicted the words she spoke.

He looked at her in a dazed, lost way, wondering who then might be deserving of pity.

"We miss you at church," she went on. "We have a different organist every Sunday, and I am not used to their accompaniments. I broke down last Sunday. {313} Mrs. Wilder played, and at the _sucipe_ that you always played _legato_, she threw in half a dozen bars of explosives. The 'deprecationem' was fired off, every syllable of it, as from a mortar. I jumped as if I'd been blown up. So few know how to accompany. It will be better when Laurie comes. But we want to see you at church, Verheyden."

His face lost its momentary gentleness. "I don't go to church now," he said; "that is, to what we call church. I've been invoking 'black spirits and white, blue spirits and gray'--all but the white. I've been calling back the soul of Mesmer. I could tell stories that would frighten you."

"Oh! no, you couldn't," she said. "'If armies in camp should stand together against me, my heart shall not fear.' I might fear for you, though. I have reason to fear for you when you give thought to such delusions."

Verheyden began defending himself with the impatience of one who knows his position to be weak, going over that hackneyed talk about progress and freedom of thought. "Ah!" she sighed, "there are heights and heights; and Babel is not Pisgah."

The fragment of woods in which they had been walking belonged to the estate of Monsieur Leon, at whose house Alice was visiting; and, as she saw the two approaching, madame herself came out to meet them. An amiable, worldly woman, a patroness of the arts, graceful, cordial, and full of charming little enthusiasms. Not least among her aesthetic devotions was that to the toilette, by the help of which she managed to appear forty instead or sixty.

She stepped to meet Verheyden with both her hands extended, tears swimming in her fine dusky eyes. "My dear friend!" she said. "At last you remember us. You are welcome. Where have you been all summer?"

"Summer?" repeated Verheyden. "I haven't seen any summer."

And truly the three months had for him been beautiful in vain. He had not seen their glad, pelting showers, their dim, soft rains, nor the glory of their sunshine, and their moonlights had been to him as spilt wine.

He could not help being soothed by these friends. There was no obtrusive sympathy, no condolence hard to answer to, no affected reserve concerning his affliction. He was free to speak of it or not, as he should choose. They went on with some trifling employment while they talked to him; or, if silent, he felt their kindly, homelike presence. Then the large, cool house was refreshing after the dust and heat of the city.

Silence was sweetest in that sultry noon; and, presently perceiving it, they did not speak. But the oaks outside rustled like oaks of Dodona, and what had seemed silence grew to be fullest sound. There was a stir of plants uneasy with growing, multitudinous tiny voices of insects in the grasses, bee and bird and the murmur of waters, the wings of doves that half flew, half dropped, in purple flocks from the eaves, the fall of an over-ripe peach, the shrill cicala, the fond sighing of the brooding air in whose bosom all these sounds nestled.

Alice rose to lower the crimson curtain over an intrusive sunbeam, (madame kept her crimson draperies up all summer, knowing that her complexion needed deep, warm lights,) and out of revenge the brightness poured through the tissue, its gold changed to a rosy fire. Pausing in that light to listen, she stood aglow, her pale-brown hair, her clear eyes, her white dress.

"It is a Guido!" whispered Verheyden, with a flash of light across his face.

"No," said madame; "it is the Charity for which Ruskin longed, floating all pink and beautiful down to earth, the clouds blushing as she passes."

The sun went lingeringly down the west, a breeze fluttered up from the south, and they roused themselves to open the windows.

{314}

A piano drew Verheyden by all his aching heart-strings. He seated himself before it and played the base of Rossini's Cujus Animam. As he played, a fair hand stole to the keys at his right and played the Aria.

"It kills me! Alice, it kills me!" he moaned out, turning his haggard face toward her.

"Verheyden," she said, "do something heroic: submit!"

"To writhe on the rack is not to resist," he said bitterly.

"But how sublime," she urged, "if, instead of writhing, one could, in the midst of pain, wear a serene face, and rejoice in a serene heart."

"It is easy for you to talk of serenity," he said impatiently. "You have all you want. You live in music as I lived in it. And what an enchanted life we lived together! Do you remember the first time I saw you? Three years ago, it was, on the eve of the Assumption. You sat on the steps of the altar and listened while Laurie played. I told him you looked like a soprano, and he said you were one, that you had a voice like a violin. Do you remember how I called you up?"

"Yes," she said, smiling at the remembrance. "No one ever accompanied like you. The voice went floating on your music like a shallop on the water. Your interludes were nothing more than spray or little wavelets, or like a half-hushed bubbling laughter underneath the bows."

"And you," he said, "you never learned: you sing of nature, and 'tis art that tries to reach you. Laurie always said your _roulades_ were as if you couldn't help them; that he had to look at the score to be sure you didn't make them up as you went along. Come, now, let us try."

In the act of turning eagerly to the piano, he recollected and stopped.

She touched his arm with an earnest hand. "Delight is dear," she said; "but never so dear as when we find it in dark places. Let me speak to you of myself, Verheyden, as I have never spoken to anyone else. You think my life has been a tranquil one, but you mistake. None, or but few, knowing, I have gone through tragedies that would delight a romance writer. What I read is dull to what I have experienced. If I am calm, it is because I have nothing left to suffer. At twenty-five--you didn't think me so old because I am small and blonde--at twenty five I have exhausted the pains of life. And, Verheyden, believe me, contradictory as it may sound, the highest rapture that earth can give is distilled from its sharpest pains. It is true, even here, that those who weep are blessed. When the strong man, Jesus, rends this ravenous nature of ours, after some days we find sweetness. O Verheyden! go to the Lord with your burden, and he will give you rest. Do not fill your soul with discord because your hand can no more awaken harmony. That loftier harmony nothing can disturb without your consent. Is it not beautiful to think of--the security of the soul? Remember, Verheyden, the lightnings may strike us, but our souls shall not be smitten; and they shall not be drowned though the waters cover us; the earth may burn, but our souls shall not be consumed; and they shall not be crushed though the heavens fall on us. When I think of these things, I laugh at fear of anything save sin; I am lifted; my body seems dissolving like frost in fire. I cannot comprehend the sadness of your face. I am glad! I am glad!"

He looked at her as she stood there pale and shining, then stretched his hand, and, at a venture, touched the scarf she wore. It didn't scorch him.

Monsieur Léon came home at sunset, and with him Auguste, the son of the house. Monsieur was one of his wife's enthusiasms. "He is a misanthrope," she would say delightedly. "What a listless air! he cares for nothing. How mournful and hopeless his eyes! And though his hair is white, he is but little over fifty. He is full of poetry and sublimity and learning; but it is frozen in. His early days were unfortunate--a poor gentleman, you know--and all his life till he was forty was a struggle for bread. {315} At forty be inherited his property. Then he thought to live, my poor Auguste! We went to Paris, which we had left as children. Ah! well. But he had aspirations, and pressed on toward Italy. There was the Medean chaldron, he said. He was ill when we reached there, and saw nothing till one evening he was convalescent, and I took him by the hand and led him out on to our balcony. It was a May-moonlight in Venice. The earth can do nothing more. He stood and looked till I thought he had lost his breath, then clasped his hands over his heart as though he had a great pang, and cried out, 'O my lost youth!' He would look no more. He went in and sat with his face hidden in his hands. It was too late. The next day we started and came back. He looked at nothing as we passed, but sat in the gondola or carriage with his face hidden. He said it was like setting a feast before the corpse of a man who had died of starvation. So romantic!" sighs madame, smoothing the lace ruffles from her little hands.

Presently, when evening deepened, Auguste put his head in at the window and called them out to see an eclipse of Venus.

They stood in the dewy dusk and fragrance of the garden, and watched the star hover, moth-like, near and nearer to the moon, seeming to grow larger and more brilliant as it approached extinction, shining in audacious beauty. Then it touched, trembled, and disappeared.

"Served her right!" cried Auguste, fresh from the classics.

"But, Alice, where is Verheyden?" asked madame.

"He recollected Laurie's concert, and would go. I tried to detain him, but could not."

Verheyden hurried into town to the concert-hall, though by no means certain he might not be tempted to fling himself over the balcony. Avoiding acquaintances, he took a seat high up and apart, and looked down upon the audience. Such crowds had flocked to hear him in that lost life of his. Was it indeed lost, or did he dream?

Presently there was music. There came his fugues rolling in like overlapping billows. How he had played them when his mood had been to plunge in such a surge, he solitary, everything else washed away like sea-weed! He would never breast that tide again! Symphonies sailed over his head; but he could no more reach to touch their pinions. There was one he had named St. Michael's, from a sharp brightness that swung through it, sword-like. How he had wrestled with those angels!

Then Laurie, being loudly called, stood out, blushing before their praises.

Bless the boy! Only that day, bursting into tears, he had clasped Verheyden around the neck, saying: "Dear friend, my success hurts me like failure when I think of you."

To an encore he played "Comin' through the Rye," improvising variations in which the lovely melody hovered like Undine in the fountain, half veiled in that spray of music: an arch, enchanting thing.

As Laurie stood up again, his friend leaned over the balcony and looked down on the young, lifted brow. For one instant their eyes met; then Verheyden started up and fled out into the night.

Father Vinton sat alone in his room meditating on a text which was gradually expanding, budding, and blossoming into a sermon. He tried not to be vexed when some one knocked at his door at that late hour, and was just controlling his voice to give a charitable summons when the door opened, and Verheyden, or his ghost, came in, and, without a word of greeting, fell on his knees beside the priest, dropping his face to the arm of the chair.

"My poor friend," said the father, "have you not yet forgiven God for loving you better than you can understand?"

{316}

Verheyden shivered, but said nothing.

"Remember whose hands were pierced, not one, but both, and his feet, and his side. He never shrank."

Verheyden's shaking hand held out a little vial "I shall take this unless you prevent me," he said. "Help me if there is any help. I dare not be alone."

Father Vinton unstopped the vial, and, taking deliberate aim, flung it through the open window into the street. Then he laid his hand tenderly upon the bowed head. "You shall not be alone," he said. "Stay here to-night."

Blessed are all peace-makers; but thrice blessed are those who make peace between the soul and God. Blessed are they in whose care we breathe the tales else unspoken, whose hands lead us back from the brink of many a precipice where no one dreamed we stood, whose voices soothe the pains hidden to all besides, and inspire with hope hearts that were filled with despair. May such peace-makers be for ever blessed!

Verheyden's religion had been a recollection rather than a remembrance. He had made a point of going to confession and communion once a year; and had one looked into his mind while he was preparing for these sacraments, something like the following might have been seen: "Well, what have I been doing this year? I haven't committed any sins. I've done nothing but play tunes. To be sure, I broke Smith's fiddle over his head for playing false and spoiling a chorus. Don't suppose that was just right; though I must say I think the chorus of more consequence than Smith's head. But I must have done something. I'm not a saint yet. Guess I'll say a prayer.

"Oh! I remember!--; that was mean. I wouldn't believe I could do such a thing if I didn't know I had. I'll be hanged if I do it again. Then there's--, and--, and--. Well, confession does put a fellow out of conceit with himself. And there's--; a dishonest deed, I must own. I don't wonder the Lord gets angry with us; and how he does wait for us to come round! I'm glad I didn't drop dead to-day. I'm thankful I didn't drop dead to-day! The Lord is good. What am I lounging on a seat for? Why don't I go on my knees? Then there's ----. I'm sorry for that. I wish somebody would give me a thrashing for it. I've been sorry for the same sin dozens of times, and accused myself of it, and promised not to commit it again. My resolutions are not worth much. Suppose I can't keep myself out of sin without the Lord's help. I'll ask for it."

At the end, Verheyden, sobered and humbled, would present himself to the priest and make a clear and sincere confession.

But now religion was to be no more an incident, but the business of his life. He was fortunate in his director, for Father Vinton was not only prudent, but sympathetic. If, when he read lives of the saints, Verheyden longed for ecstasies which should thrill him as sensibly as music could, the father did not reprove his presumption, but said: "My son, such favors do not come when they are looked and asked for, they are unexpected. Strive to render yourself worthy of God's friendship, and forget the reward till he shall please to bestow it." If, kneeling before the altar, his eyes full of tears, the intensity of his gaze defeating itself, Verheyden fancied that the cross before him quivered with its burden, and that the aureoled head grew to be the head of a living, suffering man whose eyes turned pitifully on him--the father did not call his penitent crazy.

"Perhaps he grieves to find you so unreconciled," he said. "When with a loving violence he tore the idol from your grasp in order to give you a work wherein the end would not be forgotten in the means, he expected your submission. Perhaps he grieves to see that you reject all work."

{317}

Verheyden blushed painfully as he extended his mutilated arm. "What can _I_ do?"

"Take charge of your singing-class again."

For one instant he faced the priest with a sudden fierceness, the last spark of rebellion in him. Then his face faded and drooped.

"I will, sir."

"Miss Rothsay will play for you when you need her."

"Yes, father."

And Verheyden went back to the drudgery of his profession, missing its delights, and did his duty faithfully if not cheerfully. There could have been no severer test.

There was no more talk of visions and trances. But every morning a shadow of a man stole into the chapel, knelt near the door, and went out as quietly after the mass was over. Once a fortnight the same shadow came to Father Vinton's side and made a sincere but disheartening confession. The spring of the musician's spirit was broken.

"You are ill," the priest said to him one day.

"No," answered Verheyden dreamily. "My heart troubles me a little. It beats too fast. There's nothing else the matter with me."

He was told that he ought to consult a doctor.

"I thought I would," was the answer; "but I forgot it. What is in the church?"

"Laurie with the choir practising a new mass. To-morrow is the Assumption, you know."

"Oh! yes, I'll go in and listen awhile; shall I?"

"My poor boy!" said the priest. "Will it not give you more pain than pleasure?"

"No, father, it doesn't hurt me now."

Going into the choir, Verheyden took a seat apart and unseen. He leaned wearily, closed his eyes and listened, hearing the voices more than the instrument, hearing one voice through all. When Alice Rothsay uplifted her pure voice and sang the _Dona nobis pacem_, tears dropped slowly down his face; but they were not tears of bitterness.

Presently all but Alice left the church. As on that day, four years before, when he had first seen her, she had flowers for the altars.

It was a delight for her to get into the church alone, as she now believed herself to be. If she were good, she knew not. No matter: God is good. She felt as though she were among dear friends with nobody by to criticise, Her delight bubbled up almost over the verge of reverence. But perfect love casteth away fear; and she loved.

"Rosa Mystica, here are roses. Pray for me. And lilies for St. Joseph, whom I often forget. He is so near you he is lost, like the morning-star in the morning. St. Paul, I bring you fine plumes, and cardinal flowers like living coals. But you look as though you would scorch them up with a push from the point of your pen, writing epistles toward the four winds. O Unseen One! what shall I offer you? The earth is yours, and the fulness thereof. I cannot offer myself, for I am not mine to give. But if you love me, take me. O Sweetness!"

Sunset flashed through the windows, and every saint caught an aureola. Then the day went out, bright and loth. When the sanctuary lamp began to show its flame in the gathering twilight, Alice Rothsay rose with a happy heart, and went home.

Verheyden was happy, too; he scarce knew why, perhaps because the happiness of another made his own seem possible. He groped his way down to the chapel, and found Father Vinton hearing confessions.

"God is with him," thought the priest when Verheyden had left him. "He is like a child."

The same child-like sweetness shone in the face raised the next morning for communion.

{318}

Going out of the chapel after his thanksgiving, Father Vinton saw his penitent still kneeling there. "I wished I had asked him to pray for me," he said. "I must see him when he comes out."

He waited half an hour, watching, but no one appeared. The father would not for anything disturb so sacred a devotion; but he felt like looking again. Going back: to the chapel, he saw the lonely worshipper still in place, but in a slightly changed attitude. He was leaning a little wearily on the desk before him, and his shoulder and head rested against a pillar beside. His pale face was lifted, as though some one above had spoken, and he had looked up to answer.

Father Vinton hesitated, then went nearer. A morning sunbeam came in through an eastern window, stole in tender, tremulous gold over the musician's hair and brow, and looked into his eyes. So Magdalene might have looked into the sepulchre. The father bent and looked also.

Ah, Verheyden! Some One above _had_ spoken, and he had answered.

Original.

May: A Fancy.

I cannot sing to thee a song, O May! New-born of beauties never sung before. On all the tourneyed fields of poesy Bright souls have broken lance to do thee honor. And yet (so hard it is for youth and life To deem to-day not brighter than the past) I cannot think they loved thee more than I, Those silent poets in their silent graves. I cannot think their sunshine was as golden, Their meads as green, their wilding flowers as rife With the low music of the laden bee, Their clouds as soft upon the summering sky, Their gales as wooing in the wakened forests-- Their May as much of May as thou to us. Moreover, this I know: the tiny bark Of the frail nautilus may crest the wave That swelled to clasp the bosomed argosy, Or chafed the warrior-ship's embattled side. And so, beneath thy deep serenity Of sunlit blue, as, thrilled and filled with May, I lie on earth and gaze up into heaven, Sprite Fancy doth embody me a dream; And I dare utter it, for I am bold On kindly Nature's mother-breast to lay My head, and prattle of the love I bear her. As little, earnest children deck them dolls, And name them for the fair ones whom they love, I prank an image out, and call it--May.

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Thou shin'st, O May! upon my visioned hours, A maiden in the prime of maidenhood, Poised on the summer boundary of blooms, Disparting child and woman; blent of each; The child-smile pure upon the perfect lip, And girlhood in the wavy wealth of curls So lavish on the toying, amorous air, And deep'ning in the blue uplifted eyes, Like stainless heaven reflect from silent lakes, The mystic, dawning holiness of woman.

She, o'er the cycled earth imperious, Throned on the morning candor of the clouds, Sits haloed with the worship of the sun. Chosen is she of all her sister months To be the bride of the imperial sun. Disdainful suitor, he did pass unwooed The paly elder beauties of the year, Nor in the hoyden March, nor sportive April, Nor majesty of June, his pleasure found: He toyed familiar, yet scarce lovingly, With the swart, sparkling nymphs of summer tide, He schooled the autumn oreads in their tasks, And, smiling, passed, and left them all, to shower The splendid unrestraint of all his love, And choice, and tenderness on May, his own.

This is the bridal season, and the earth, Fondest of mothers, and the ardent bridegroom Have ta'en all gems of earth, all rays of heaven, Have beggared all the universe for charms To deck the bride withal. She sits in beauty, Crowned with the rarest radiance of morn, Robed in the tissued blooms of all the world, Yet loveliest for her own proud modesty; Her glorious eyes the fairest of her jewels, Her bridal blush her brightest ornament. Thus maidenly, thus queenly in the skies She waits against the coming of the bridegroom. He, o'er the orient wave now eminent, Through the concoursing rosy clouds of morn Strides like a monarch 'mid a courtier throng, Pushing soft adulation out of way; Presses in grandeur up the noon-day height, Half haste, all stateliness and majesty.

And over all the vastness of the world Goes forth the tale of bliss. The roseate clouds Blush down the tidings to the raptured sea, Till all his crested waves are musical With murmured joyfulness. The courier birds Thrill myriad melodies through all the woods, With this their joyous burden: "May is bride!" The hoary oaks, and all the ancient trees, On the high, rippling winds commune together, Saying one to another: "May is bride!"

{320}

And from her throne float forth cloud-messengers, The white-winged spirits of the unborn rain: They stoop and whisper to the dreaming flowers Bidding their choicest petals venture out; Then die to sight amid the morning shine, As sudden angels, their high missions done, Rapt from our days, resume their viewless shapes. But the fair blossoms wake and look about them, And find all May, and all things lapped in sunshine, And softly call their kindred to arise, Till every turf in all the happy fields Is garish with their bloom, and atmospheres Of perfume waft their homage to the seat Of their dear sovereign. And the loving earth, The great, dumb mother of the happy May, With all her waving continents of trees, Makes murmurous gestures full of ecstasy; And up from land, and sea, and air, and sky, Rise choral hallelujahs: "May is bride!"

Impressions of Spain.

by Lady Herbert.

Cordova and Malaga.

A comfortable little old-fashioned inn, with a "patio" full of orange-trees, leading to a public "sala," rather like a room at Damascus, with alcoves and fountains, gladdened the hearts of our wearied travellers. After a good night's rest (and one advantage in Spain is, that except mosquitoes, your beds are generally free from other inhabitants), they started down the narrow, badly paved streets to visit the cathedral. The exterior is disappointing, as all you see is a buttressed wall, with square towers sixty feet high, opposite which is the gateway and wall of the archepiscopal palace. But on passing through a beautiful oriental court, in the centre of which is a picturesque Moorish fountain, the rest of the space being filled with orange-trees and palms, and on the north side an exquisite giralda, or tower, from whence there is a beautiful view over the whole town and neighborhood. All the entrances to the mosque (now the cathedral) from this court are closed, except the centre one. Entering by that, a whole forest of pillars bursts upon you, with horseshoe arches interlacing one another and forming altogether the most wonderful building in the world. The Moors collected these pillars, of which there are upwards of a thousand, from the temples of Carthage, of Nismes, and of Rome, and adapted them to their mosque. Some are of jasper, some of verde-antique, some of porphyry--no two are alike. The pillars have no plinths, and divide the mosque into nineteen longitudinal and twenty-nine transverse aisles; hence the immense variety and beauty of the intersection of the arches. This mosque was built in the eighth century, and ranked in sanctity with the "Alaksa" of Jerusalem and the "Caaba" of Mecca.

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A pilgrimage to it was, indeed, considered equivalent to that of Mecca, and hence the Spanish proverb to express distant wanderings, "Andar de zeca en Meca." The roof is of arbor-vitae, and is in perfect preservation. Two of the moresque chapels are exquisite in carving and richness of detail, one being that of the Caliphs, and the other the "Holy of Holies," where the Koran was kept. The beauty and delicacy of the moresque work, with its gold enamel and lovely trefoiled patterns, its quaint lions and bright-colored "azulejos" (tiles), exceeds anything of the sort in Europe. The roof is in the form of a shell, and exquisitely wrought out of one single piece of marble. The mosaic border was sent to Cordova by Romanus II., from Constantinople. When the brother of the king of Morocco came there a year or two ago, he went round this "Holy of Holies" seven times on his knees, crying bitterly all the time. The inscriptions in this mosque are in Cufic, and not in Arabic. The whole carries one back to Damascus and the East in a way which makes it difficult to realize that one is still in Europe. The choir is a horrible modern "churriqueresque" innovation, stuck in the centre of the beautiful forest of Saracenic columns, many of which were destroyed to make room for it. Even Charles V. protested against the bad taste of the chapter when he saw it completed in 1526, and exclaimed: "You have built a thing which one can see anywhere; and to do so, you have destroyed what was unique in the world." The carving of the choir is certainly fine, but the incongruity of the whole jars on one's taste too keenly for any kind of admiration. The only beautiful and solemn modernized portion of the building is the chapel of the cardinal, with fine tombs and a deep recess for the Blessed Sacrament, with a magnificent silver tabernacle. From the cathedral, some of the party went to visit the bishop, who received them very kindly, and sent his secretary to show them the treasures of the cathedral. The "custodia," of the fifteenth century, is in silver-gilt, with beautiful emeralds, and exquisitely carved; it is the work of Arphe, the Benvenuto Cellini of Spain. There are also some beautiful processional crosses, reliquaries, chalices, and pax, secreted at the time of Dupont's French invasion, and so saved from the universal plunder.

Having spent the morning in the cathedral, our travellers wandered down to the fine Roman bridge, of sixteen arches, over the Guadalquiver, looking upon some picturesque Moorish mills and orange gardens. To the left is a statue of St. Raphael, the guardian angel of Cordova; and close by is the Alcazar, now a ruin, formerly the palace of Roderick, the last of the Goths, whose father was duke of Cordova. Nothing can be more melancholy than the neglected gardens, the broken fountains and statues, the empty fish-ponds, and grass-grown walks, despite the palms and orange-trees and luxuriant creeping roses, which seemed to be striving to conceal the desolation around. The first palm ever planted in Cordova was by the Moorish king Abdulrrahman, who brought it from his much-loved and always-regretted Damascus.

After luncheon, having obtained special permission from the archbishop, our party started off in two carriages for the hermitages in the Sierra Morena, stopping first at a picturesque ruined villa, called the "Arrizafa," once the favorite residence of the Moorish king. The gardens are beautiful; passion-flowers and jessamine hung in festoons over all the broken walls, and the ground was carpeted with violets, narcissus, and other spring flowers. The view from the terrace is lovely, the town, when seen from a distance, being very like Verona. Here the road became so steep that the party had to leave their carriages and walk the remainder of the way. {322} The mountain-path reminded them of Mount Carmel, with the same underwood of cistus, lilac and white, and heaps of flowering and aromatic shrubs. Beautiful wild iris grew among the rocks, and half-way up a rushing stream tumbled over the boulder-stones into a picturesque basin, covered with maiden-hair fern, which served as a resting-place for the tired travellers. After a fatiguing climb of two hours, they reached the postern gate of the hermitage, into which, after some demur as to their sex, the ladies, by special permission of the archbishop, were admitted. There are at present seventeen hermits, all gentlemen, and many of high birth and large fortune, living each in a little separate cabin, with a patch of garden round it, and entirely alone. They never see one another but at mass and in choir, or speak but once a month. In their chapel they have a beautiful oil painting of St. Paul the first hermit, whose rule they follow in all its primitive severity. One of the cabins was vacant, and the party entered. It was composed of two tiny rooms: in the inner one was a bed formed of three boards, with a sheepskin and a pillow of straw; the rest of the furniture consisted of a crucifix, a jug of water, a terrible discipline with iron points, and Rodriguez' essay on "Christian Perfection," published in 1606, at Valladolid, and evidently much read. This cell was that of Count ----, a man of great wealth and high rank, and of a still wider reputation for ability and talent. He had lost his wife some years ago, to whom he was passionately attached; and remaining in the world only till he had settled his children, then took leave of it for ever, and resolved to spend the rest of his days in penitence and prayer. Their habit is composed of a course grey stuff, with a leathern girdle, drawers, and a shirt of serge. No linen is allowed, or stockings, and they wear sandals on their feet. They are not permitted to possess anything, or to keep anything in their cells but a glazed earthenware pot, a wooden plate, a pitcher, a lamp, and instruments of penance and devotion. They keep a perpetual fast on beans and lentils, only on high days and holidays being allowed fish. They are not allowed to write or receive letters, or to go into one another's cells, or to go out of the enclosure, except once a month, when they may walk in the mountains round, which they generally do together, reciting litanies. Seven hours of each day must be given to prayer, and they take the discipline twice a week. [Footnote 109] How strange a life for one accustomed to live in the world and in society! Yet there is no lack of candidates for each vacancy; and the prior told our travellers that the number of vocations of late years had increased. There is a fine old marble seat and cross in the garden, erected by the late bishop, from whence there is a magnificent view over the whole country. The cold in winter is intense, and they are not allowed any fires, except what is absolutely necessary for the cooking of their miserable meal. Taking leave of the prior in his little "parloir," and receiving a rosary from him made of the wood of the "carouba" by the hermits themselves, the visitors retraced their steps down the hill, feeling as if they had been spending the last couple of hours in another world; and, rejoining their carriages at the villa, made the circuit of the city walls, which are partly Moorish, built of tapia, and described by Julius Caesar.

[Transcriber's note: The image of the following footnote is blurred. "Pardon my French."]

[Footnote 109: The Rev. Père Félix, the famous Paris preacher, in one of his Notre Dame conferences, speaking of asceticism of this sort, says: "Les paiens avaient épuisé la volupté: les chrétiens ont épuisé les souffrances. De ce creuset de la douleur l'homme nouveau a sorti, et c'est un homme plus grand que l'homme ancien. Ah! je le sais, la pénitence corporelle, le jeûne, l'abstinence, la discipline, la flagelation, prètent à rire à des penseurs de ce temps, qui se croieat trop sages pour pratiquer de telles folies. Ils out plus d'égurd pour la chair, plus de respect surtoui pour le corps, et ils disent en souriant à l'austérité chrétienne: 'Ascétisme! Moyen àge! Fanatisme! Démence!' La vérité est, que chátier volontairement son corps pour venger la dignité de l'homme outragés par les révoltes, est une sainte et sublime chose. La vérité est que pour accorder à son corps le plaiair, il suffit d'ètre lâche, et que pour infliger à son corps la douleur volontaire dans un but de restauration morale, il faut ètre courageux, il faut ètre veaiment grand. La vérité est enfin que cette race de mortifiés, mieux que tout autre, maintient à sa vraie hauteur le niveau de l'humanité, et tient dans sa main intrépide, avec le fouet dont elle se frappe ell-même, le drapeau du progrès. Le chemin du progrès, comme ceiul du Calvaire, est un chemin douloureax. Le drapeau de l'austérité chrétienne triomphera une fois de plus dans le monde du seusualisme paien de nos joura."]

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Then one of the party went to see the Carmelite convent of St. Theresa; not one of the saint's own foundation, but one built soon after her death. It contains twenty-four nuns, the cheeriest and merriest of women, proving how little external circumstances contribute to personal cheerfulness.

The German gentleman who had so kindly served as escort to our travellers during their stay at Cordova dined with them in the evening, and gave them several very interesting details of the place and people. The next morning mass had been promised them at five, but it was six before the priest made his appearance in the fine old Jesuit church, now bereft of its pastors and frequent services; and it was only thanks to the unpunctuality of the Spanish railways that the train which was to convey our party to Malaga was reached in time.

Passing through a very fine gorge of the Sierra Nevada, with magnificent Alpine scenery, the train suddenly stopped: the guard came to the carriages, and civilly suggested to the passengers that the government could not answer for the safety of the tunnels, and, therefore, had provided carriages and mules to take them round; or else, if they preferred it, that they might _walk_, as there would be plenty of time. This sounded ludicrous enough to English ears, but, after all, they thought it more prudent to comply than to run any risk, and accordingly bundled out with their bags and manifold packages. On the recurrence of a similar warning, however, a little later, they voted that they would remain and take their chance; and nothing disastrous occurred. At the station they were met by the kind and obliging English consul, who had ordered rooms for them at the hotel called the "Alameda," pleasantly situated on the promenade, and who had done everything in his power to insure their comfort. The first days of their arrival were spent in settling themselves in their new quarters, which required a good deal of preliminary cleaning, and in seeing the so-called "lions" of the place. These are soon visited. In truth, except for climate, Malaga is as dull and uninteresting a place as can be well imagined. There is a cathedral, originally a mosque, but now converted into an ugly Corinthian pile with two towers. Only one fine old Gothic door remains, with curious "azulejos." The rest, both inside and out, is modern, heavy, and in bad taste. The high altar, however, is by Alonso Caño; and there is some fine wood-carving of the sixteenth century in the choir and on the screen, commemorating different scenes in the life of St. Turibius, archbishop of Lima, whose apostolic labors among the Indians were crowned with such wonderful success. There are one or two good pictures and monuments, especially the recumbent figure of a bishop, in bronze, of the fifteenth century. In the sacristy is a valuable relic of St. Sebastian, and some fine silver vases for the holy oils; but everything else was plundered by the French. Afterward our travellers went, with an order from the governor, to see the castle and Moorish fortress overlooking the town, built in 1279. Passing under a fine Moorish horse-shoe arched gateway, they scrambled up to the keep, from whence there is a magnificent view over sea and land. It is now used as a military prison, and about twenty-six men were confined there. The officers were extremely civil, and showed them everything. The men's barracks seemed clean and comfortable, and their rations good; their arms and knapsacks were, however, of the most old-fashioned kind. That day a detachment of troops were starting for Morocco, whose embarkation in the steamers below was eagerly watched by the garrison.

But if Malaga be dull in the way of sights, it is very pleasant from the kind and sociable character of its inhabitants. Nowhere will the stranger find more genuine kindness, hospitality, or courtesy. {324} Their houses, their villas, their horses, their flowers, their time, all are placed, not figuratively, but really, "á vuestra disposicion." Some of the villas in the neighborhood are lovely, especially those of Madame de H----, the Marquise L----, etc. Here one finds all kinds of tropical vegetation: the date palm, the banana, the plantain and India-rubber trees, sugar, cotton, and other oriental products, all grow luxuriantly; while the beds are filled with masses of violets, tulips, roses, arums, scarlet hybiscus, and geraniums; and beautiful jessamine, _scarlet_ passion-flowers, and other creepers, trail over every wall.

But the chief interest to the winter resident at Malaga will be derived from its charitable institutions. The French sisters of charity of St. Vincent de Paul have the care of three large establishments here. One--an industrial school for the children and orphans connected with a neighboring factory--is a marvel of beauty, order, and good management. The girls are taught every kind of industrial work; a Belgian has been imported to give them instruction in making Valenciennes lace, and their needlework is the most beautiful to be seen out of Paris. Any profit arising from their work is sold, and kept for their "dot" when they marry or leave the establishment. Attached to this school is also a little home for widows, incurables, and sick, equally tended by the sisters. This admirable institution is the offspring of individual charity and of a life wrecked--according to human parlance--but which has taken heart again for the sake of the widow and the orphan, the sorrowful and the suffering. Her name is a household word in Malaga to the sad and the miserable; and in order to carry out her magnificent charities (for she has also an industrial school for boys in the country), she has given up her luxurious home, and lives in a small lodging up three pair of stairs. She reminded one of St. Jerome's description of St. Melania, who, having lost her husband and two children in one day, casting herself at the foot of the cross, exclaimed: "I see, my God! that thou requirest of me my whole heart and love, which was too much fixed on my husband and children. With joy I resign all to thee." The sight of her wonderful cheerfulness and courage, after sorrows so unparalleled, must strengthen every one to follow in her steps, and strive to learn, in self-abnegation, her secret of true happiness. The French sisters have likewise the charge of the great hospital of St. Juan de Dios, containing between 400 and 500 patients, now about to be removed to a new and more commodious building; and also of a large day and infant school near the river, with a "salle d'asile," containing upward of 500 children, who are daily fed with soup and bread. They also visit the poor and sick in their homes, and everywhere their steps are hailed with thankfulness and joy.

The "Little Sisters of the Poor" have likewise established themselves in Malaga, and have a large house, containing seventy old and incurable people, which is very well supplied by the richer inhabitants. The nuns of the "Assumption" have lately started a "pension" for the daughters of the upper classes, which was immensely wanted (education being at a very low ebb in Spain), and which has been most joyfully hailed by the Malaga ladies for their children. The superior, a charming person, is an English woman; and the frequent benediction services in their beautiful little chapel were a great boon to some of our party. They paid a visit also to the archbishop, a kind and venerable old man, with the most benevolent smile and aspect, and who is really looked upon as the father of his people. At a grand Te Deum service, given in the church of S. Pietro dei Martiri, one of the most interesting churches in Malaga, as a thanksgiving for the preservation of the city from cholera, he officiated pontifically, which his great age generally prevents, and gave the benediction with mitre and crosier to the devout and kneeling multitude.

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There is a very touching "Via Crucis" service performed every Friday in Malaga, up to a chapel on the top of a high mountain overlooking the whole town and bay. The peasants chaunt the most plaintive and beautiful hymns, the words of which they "improviser" on the way, both up and down. It begins at a very beautiful church and convent called Notre Dame des Victoires, now converted into a military hospital, nursed by the Spanish sisters of charity. The family of the Alcazars is buried in the crypt of this church, and beautiful palms grow in the convent garden. In the old refectory are some fine azulejos tiles and some good specimens of Raphael ware.

As to diversions, Malaga offers but few resources. Those who like boating may go out daily along the beautiful coast; but the rides are few, the ground hard and dusty, and the "rivière à sec," like that at Nice, must be traversed before any mountain expeditions could be reached. There is a bull-ring, as in every Spanish town, and occasionally the additional excitement of elephants being used in the fights: but the bulls will rarely face them.

After about a month, therefore, spent in this quiet little place, it was decided to start for Granada, which promised to afford greater interest and variety.

Granada.

Taking leave rather sorrowfully of their many kind friends, and of the sisters of charity who had been their constant companions during their stay in Malaga, our travellers started one stormy evening, and found themselves once more cooped up in one of those terrible diligences, and slowly ascending the mountains at the back of the town. Their intention had been to go on horseback, riding by Velez-Malaga and the baths of Alhama; but the late heavy rains had converted the mountain streams into torrents, and some of the party who attempted it were compelled to return. After ascending for about three hours, leaving on their left the picturesque cemetery, with its fine cypresses, they came to a plateau 3000 feet above the sea, from whence they had a magnificent view, the whole of Malaga and its bay being stretched out at their feet, the lights glistening in the town, and the moon, breaking through the clouds, shedding a soft light over the sea-line, which was covered with tiny fishing-vessels. Beautiful aloes and cacti starting out of the bold rocks on either side formed the foreground, while a rapid river rushed and tumbled in the gorge below. But with this fine panoramic view the enjoyment of our travellers came to an end. When night came on, and they had reached the highest and loneliest part of the bleak sierra, it began to pour with rain and blow a regular gale; the heavy mud was dashed into their faces; the icy cold wind whistled through the broken panes and under the floor of the carriage, and froze them to the bone. There was some difficulty about a relay of mules at the next stage, and so our party were left on an exposed part of the road without drivers or beasts for more than an hour. Altogether, it was impossible to conceive a more disagreeable journey; and it was therefore with intense joy that they found themselves, after sixteen hours of imprisonment, at last released, and once more able to stretch their legs in the _Alameda_ of Granada. Tired, hungry, dirty, and cold, a fresh disappointment here awaited them. All the hotels were full (their letters ordering rooms had miscarried), and only one tiny bedroom could be found in which they could take refuge, and scrape the mud off their clothes and hair. One of the party found her way to the cathedral; the rest held a council of war, and finally determined to try their fate at the new "Alhambra" hotel outside the town, where an apartment was to be had, the cold and wet of the season having deterred the usual visitors to this purely summer residence. {326} They had every reason to congratulate themselves on this decision; for though the cold was certainly great, the snow hanging still on all the hills around, and the house being unprovided with any kind of fire-places or stoves, still the cleanliness and comfort of the whole amply compensated for these drawbacks, to say nothing of the immense advantage of being close to the Alhambra, that great object of attraction to every traveller who visits Granada. The way up to it is very picturesque, but very steep. After leaving the wretched, narrow, ill-paved streets, which dislocate almost every bone in your body when attempted on wheels, and passing by the Sala de la Audiencia and other fine public buildings, you arrive at an arched gateway, which at once brings you into a kind of public garden, planted with fine English elms, and abounding in walks and fountains and seats, and in which the paths and drives, in spite of their precipitous character, are carefully and beautifully kept by convict labor, under the superintendence of a body of park-keepers dressed in full Andalusian costume. The hotel is placed on the very crest of the hill, overlooking the magnificent range of snowy mountains to the right. To the left the first thing which strikes the eye is the Torre de Justicia. Over the outer horse-shoe arch is carved an open hand, upon the meaning of which the learned are divided; some saying it is an emblem of the power of God, others a talisman against the Evil Eye. Over the inner arch is sculptured a key, which typified the power of the Prophet over the gates of heaven and hell. A double gate protects this entrance, which no donkey may pass: in the recess is a very beautiful little picture, framed and glazed, of the Virgin and Child. Passing through this arch, you come to an open "plaza," out of which rise two towers; one has been bought by an Englishman, who has converted the lower part of it into his private residence. (Where shall we not find our ubiquitous country-men?) [Footnote 110]

[Footnote 110: This unexpected rencontre reminded one of our party of a similar surprise, some years ago, in the mountains of the Tyrol. She was riding with her husband, when they came on a very picturesque old "Schloss," in an out-of-the-way gorge of a mountain pass. Stopping to look at it, and pushing open a half-open door in what appeared to be only habitable part of the ruling, they came on a group of chubby-faced English children, sitting around a table in their white pinafores, eating an undeniably English tea; and were told by the nurse, in answer to their inquiries, that the present owner of this Austrian Schloss was a London tradesman, who brought his children over every year to spend the summer--a most sensible arrangement, as the healthy bright looks of his little ones testified.]

The other is called the Torre de la Vela, because on this watch-tower hangs the bell which gives warning to the irrigators in the vega below. The view from hence is the most enchanting thing possible, commanding the whole country. Below lies Granada with its towers and sparkling rivers, the Darro and the Xenil. Beyond stretches the beautiful rich "vega" (or plain), studded with villas and villages, and encircled by snowy mountains, with the Sierra of Albama on one side, and the Gorge of Loja on the other. Descending the tower, and standing again in the "plaza" below, you see opposite to you a large ruined Doric palace, a monument of the bad taste of Charles V., who pulled down a large portion of the Moorish building to erect this hideous edifice, which, like most other things in Spain, remains unfinished. Passing through a low door to the right, our travellers were perfectly dazzled at the beauty which suddenly burst upon them. It is impossible to conceive anything more exquisite than the Alhambra, of which no drawings, no Crystal Palace models, not even Washington Irving's poetical descriptions, give one the faintest idea. "J'essaie en vain de penser: je ne peux que sentir!" exclaimed the authoress of "Les Lettres d'Espagne" on entering; but the predominant feeling is one of regret for the Moors, whose dynasty produced such marvels of beauty and of art. {327} Entering by the fish-pond "patio," and visiting first the Whispering Gallery, you pass through the Hall of the Ambassadors, and the Court of Lions, out of which lead the Hall of the Abencerrages, and that of Justice, with its two curious monuments and wonderful fretted roof, and then come to the gem of the whole, the private apartments of the Moorish kings, with the recessed bedroom of the king and queen, the boudoir and lovely latticed windows overlooking the beautiful little garden of Lindaraja (the violets and orange-blossoms of which scented the whole air), and the exquisite baths below. [Footnote 111] It is a thing to dream of, and exceeds every previous expectation. Again and again did our travellers return, and always discovered some fresh beauties. The governor resides in a modernized corner of the building, not far from the mosque, which has suffered from the bad taste of the Christian spoilers. He is not a good specimen of Spanish courtesy, as, in spite of letters of introduction from the highest quarters, it was with very great difficulty that our party were admitted to see anything beyond the portions of the building open to the general public. At last, however, he condescended to find the keys of the Tower of the Infantas, once the residence of the Moorish princesses whose tragical fate is so touchingly recorded by Washington Irving. It is a beautiful little cage, overlooking the ravine, with its fine aqueduct below, and rich in the delicate moresque carving of both ceilings and walls. Afterward, crossing a garden, they came to the gate by which Boabdil left his palace for the last time, and which was afterward, by his special request, walled up. The tower at this corner was mined and destroyed by the French. Our party then descended to a little mosque lately purchased by Colonel ----, and beautifully restored. This completed the circuit of the Alhambra, which is girdled with walls and towers of that rich red-brown hue which stands out so beautifully against the deep blue sky, but the greater portion of which was ruthlessly destroyed by Sebastiani, at the time of his occupation of Granada.

[Footnote 111: Few have described this enchanting palace as well as the French lady already quoted. She says, speaking of the feelings it calls forth: "J'aimerais autant étre broyée dans la gueule de ces jolis monstres qui ont des nez en noeud de oravate, appelés _Lions_ par la grâce de Mahomet, que de te parier de l'Alhambra, tant cette description est difficile. Les murailles ne sont que guipures délicates et compilquées: les plus hardies stalactites ne peuvent donner une idée des coupoles. Le tout est une merveille, un travail d'abeilles ou de fées. Les sculptures sont d'une délicatesse ravissante, d'un goût parfait, d'une richesse qui vous fait songer à tout ce que les contes de fées vous décrivalent jadis à l'heureux àge où l'imagination a des ailes d'or. Hélas! la mienne n'a pius d'alle, elle est de plomb. Les Arabes n'employaient que quatre couleurs: le bleu, le rouge, le noir et l'or. Cette richesse, ces teintes vives, sont visibles encore partout. Enfin, mon ami, ce n'est point un palais ceci: c'est la ville d'un enchanteur!"]

The restoration of this matchless palace has been undertaken by the present queen, who has put it in the hands of a first-rate artist named Contreras; and this confidence has been well bestowed, for it is impossible to see work executed in a more perfect manner, so that it is very difficult to tell the old portions from the new. If he be spared to complete it, future generations will see the Alhambra restored very nearly to its pristine beauty. This gentleman makes exquisite models of different parts of the building, done to a scale, which are the most perfect miniature fac-similes possible of the different portions of this beautiful palace, and a most agreeable memento of a visit to it. Our travellers purchased several, and only regretted they had not chosen some of the same size, as they would make charming panels for a cabinet or screen.

In the afternoon, the party started to see the cathedral, escorted by the kind and good-natured dean, who engaged the venerable mother of the "Little Sisters of the Poor" to act as his interpreter, his Andalusian Spanish being utterly unintelligible to most of the party. The first feeling on entering is of unmixed disappointment. It is a pagan Greco-Roman building, very much what our London churches are which were erected in the time of the Georges. But it has one redeeming point--the Capilla de los Reyes, containing the wonderful monuments of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of Philip and Joan. {328} The alabaster sepulchres of the former, wrought at Genoa by Peralta, are magnificent, both in design and execution. Isabella's statue is especially beautiful:

In questa forma Passa la bella donna, e par che dorma.

The faces are both portraits, and have a simple dignity which arrests the attention of the most unobservant. A low door and a few steep steps below the monuments lead to their last resting-place. The royal coffins are of lead, lapped over, rude and plain (only the letter F distinguishes that of the king), but they are genuine, and untouched since the day when their bodies, so justly revered by the Spaniards, were deposited in this humble vault. Among the treasures of this chapel are likewise shown the identical royal standards used at the conquest of Granada; the kings sword; the queen's own missal; their crosier and crown of silver-gilt; the picture of the Virgin and Child by St. Luke, given to Isabella by Pope Innocent VIII., and before which mass is said every 2d of January, the anniversary of the taking of the city; and the portrait of the knight who, during the siege, rode into Granada, and affixed a taper and an "Ave Maria" on the very door of the principal mosque. In the sacristy is a "Conception," exquisitely carved, by Alonso Caño; an "Adoration of the Kings," by Hemling, of Bruges; a curious ring of Sixtus II.; a chasuble embroidered by Queen Isabella; some very valuable relics and reliquaries, and a letter of St. Charles Borromeo, which the good-natured dean allowed one of the party to copy. Besides these treasures, and the Capilla de los Reyes, there is really nothing to look at in the cathedral, but one or two good painted glass windows, some clustered columns, and a curious arch in the dome, which was made to bend downward.

The following morning, after an early service at the Capuchin convent of St. Antonio, one of the party started on an expedition with the sisters of the town, and winding up a beautiful and steep ravine, in the holes and caverns of which gypsies live and congregate, they came to a picturesque wood planted on the side of the mountain. Here they left their carriages, and scrambled up a zigzag path cut in the hill, with low steps or "gradini," till they reached a plateau, on which stands both convent and church. The view from the terrace in front is the most magnificent which can be conceived. On one side are the snowy mountains of the Sierra Nevada, with a rapid river tumbling into the gorge below, the valleys being lined on both sides with stone-pine woods, amid which little convents and villages are clustered. On the other is the town of Granada, with its domes and towers; and sharply standing out on the rocks above the ruins, against the bright blue sky, are the coffee-colored towers of the beautiful Alhambra. There is a Via Crucis up to this spot, the very crosses seeming to start up out of the rocks, which are clothed with aloes and prickly pear; while in the centre of the terrace is a beautiful fountain and cross, shaded by magnificent cypresses. The church is built over some catacombs, where the bodies of St. Cecilia and eleven other martyrs were found, who suffered in the persecution under Nero. The superior of this convent, now converted into a college, is Don José Martin, a very holy man, though quite young, and revered by the whole country as a saint. He is a wonderful preacher, and by his austere and penitential life works miracles in bringing souls to God. His manner is singularly gentle, simple, and humble. He kindly came to escort the party through the catacombs, and to show them the relics. The sites of the different martyrdoms have been converted into small chapels or oratories: in one, where the victim perished by fire, his ashes still remain. Little leaden tablets mark the different spots. {329} Here also is the great wooden cross of St. John of the Cross, from the foot of which he preached a sermon on the "Love of God" during his visit to Granada, which is said to have converted upward of three thousand people. "I always come here to pray for a few minutes before preaching," said simply Don José Martin, "so that a portion of his spirit may rest upon me." After spending some time in this sanctuary, the party reluctantly retraced their steps, and returned to the town, where they had promised to visit the great hospital of San Juan de Dios. It is a magnificent establishment, entirely under the care of the Spanish sisters of charity of St. Vincent de Paul, with a "patio" or quadrangle in the centre, and double cloisters round, into which the wards open: all round the cloisters are frescoes describing different scenes in the life of the saint. The church is gorgeous in its decorations, and in a chapel above rests the body of San Juan, in a magnificent silver shrine, with his clothes, his hat, the basket in which he used daily to go and collect food for his sick and dying poor, and other like personalities.

This saint is immensely revered in Granada. He was the first founder of the order of Brothers of Charity, now spread all over Europe, beginning his great work, as all saints have done, in the humblest manner possible, by hiring a small house (now converted into a wayside oratory), in which he could place four or five poor people, nursing them himself night and day, and only going out to beg, sell, and chop wood, or do anything to obtain the necessary food and medicines for them. The archbishop, touched with his burning charity, assisted him to build a larger hospital. This house soon after took fire, when San Juan carried out the sick one by one on his back, without receiving any hurt. It is thus that he is represented in the Statue Gallery of Madrid. The people, inflamed by his loving zeal, and in admiration of his great wisdom, humility, and prudence, came forward as one man to help him to build the present hospital, which remains to this day as a monument of what may be done by one poor man of humble birth, if really moved by the love of God. His death was caused by rescuing a man in danger of drowning from the sudden rising of the river, and then remaining, wet and worn out as he was, while caring for the family. He died on his knees, repeating the "Miserere," amidst the tears of the whole city, to whom, by the special command of the archbishop, he gave his dying benediction. His favorite saying was: "Labor without intermission to do all the good works in your power while time is allowed you;" and this sentence is engraved in Spanish on the door of the hospital.

The following day happened to be the anniversary of his death, or rather of his birthday in heaven, when a touching and beautiful ceremonial is observed. The archbishop and his clergy come to the hospital to give the holy communion to the sick in each ward. A procession is formed of the ecclesiastics and the sisters of charity, each bearing lighted tapers, and little altars are arranged at the end of each ward, beautifully decorated with real flowers, while everything in and about the hospital is fresh and clean for the occasion. A touching incident occurred in the male ward on that day, where one poor man lay in the last stage of disease. The eagerness of his look when the archbishop drew near his bed will never be forgotten by those who were kneeling there; nor the way in which his face lighted up with joy when he received his Lord. The attendant sister bent forward to give him a cordial afterward: he shook his head, and turned his face away; he would have nothing after _that_. Before the last notes of the "Pange Lingua" or the curling smoke of the incense had died out of the ward, all was over; but the smile on the lips and the peace on the face spoke of the rest he had found. Afterward there was a magnificent service in the church, and a dinner to all the orphans in the sisters' schools.

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Another interesting expedition made by our travellers was to the Carthusian convent outside the town. Sebastiani desecrated and pillaged the wonderful treasures it contained; but the tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl doors and presses remain, reminding one of those in the Armenian church at Jerusalem, at the shrine of St. James. There are also two statues of St. Bruno, by Alonso Caño; wonderful for their life-like appearance and expression, but still not equal to the incomparable one at Miraflores. There are some beautiful alabaster and agate pillars still left in the chapel behind the high altar, which it is to be supposed were too heavy for the spoilers to carry off. In the cloister are some curious frescoes of the martyrdoms of the Carthusians, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, by Henry VIII. of England. The guide who accompanied our travellers said slyly to the only Catholic of the party: "We had better not explain the subject of these. Let them imagine they are some of the horrors of of the Inquisition--_that always takes with English people!_" Another picture was startling both in subject and coloring; it was that of a dead doctor, much venerated in life, who, on a funeral panegyric being pronounced over him, started from his coffin, exclaiming that "his life had been a lie, and that be was among the damned!" The friar who showed our party over the now deserted convent was like Fray Gabriel in Fernan Caballero's novel of La Gaviota. When the rest of the Carthusians were turned out by the government, he would not go. "I was brought here as a little child," he said, "and know no one in the world;" and so he sat himself down by the cross and sobbed. They let him stay and keep the garden and the church, but his life is over. "The blood does not run in his veins--it walks!" Like Fray Gabriel, he will die kneeling before the Christ to whom he daily prays for those who have so cruelly wronged and robbed him. The view from the terrace in front of the church is beautiful, overlooking the rich and cultivated plain of Soto de Roma, the property of the Duke of Wellington, with the mountain of Parapanda above, the hills of Elvira, and the pass of Moelin, which forms the bridle-road to Cordova. The gardens also are delightful: no wonder the poor monks clung to their convent home!

In the afternoon our travellers walked up to the Generalife, a villa now belonging to the Panavicini family, a branch of the great Genoa house, but formerly the palace of the Sultana. Passing through vineyards and fig-trees, they arrived at the gate of the fairy garden, with its long straight borders, fringed with myrtle, irrigated by the Darro, which is carried in a little canal between the flower-beds, and with a beautiful open colonnade overlooking the Alhambra, while a less formal garden sent up a shower of sweet scents from the orange trees and jessamine trellises below. Through this colonnade they passed into the living-rooms, exquisite in their Moorish carvings and decorations. In one of them there are a number of curious though somewhat apocryphal portraits, including one of Boabdil, and of another Moorish king of Granada, with his wife and daughter, who turned Christians, and were baptized at Santa Fé. In the outer room are portraits of an the "bluest blood" of Granada. But the gardens form the greatest charm. The ground was covered with Neapolitan violets and other spring flowers. Roses climbed over every wall, and magnificent cypresses, and aloes in full flower, shaded the beds from the burning sun. The largest of these cypresses, called the Sultana, is twelve feet in circumference, and to this tree the fatal legend of the fair Zoraya is attached. Behind these cypresses is a flight of Italian-looking steps, leading to another raised garden, full of terraces and fountains. On the steep brow of the hill is an alcove, or summer-house, from whence the views over Granada and the Alhambra are quite enchanting, every arch being, as it were, the setting or frame of a new and beautiful picture. {331} Above this again, is a Moorish fortress, and a knoll called the Moors Chair, from whence the last Moorish king is said to have sadly contemplated the defeat of his troops by the better-disciplined armies of Ferdinand and Isabella grouped in the plains below. Scrambling still higher up, our travellers came to the ruins of a chapel, and to some curious caverns, with a peep into a wild gorge to the right leading into the very heart of this mountainous and little-visited region. Boabdil's sword, and other relics and pictures of the fifteenth century belonging to the Pallavicini family, are carefully preserved by their agent in their house in the town, and had been courteously shown to our travellers when they called to obtain permission to visit the villa. Returning toward their hotel, they thought they would prolong their walk by visiting the great cemetery, or "Campo Santo," which is a little to the north of the Generalife. Long files of mourners had been perpetually passing by their windows, the bier being carried on men's shoulders, and uncovered, as in the East, so that the face of the dead was visible. Each bier was followed by the confraternity to which he or she belonged, chanting hymns and litanies as they wound up the long steep hill from the town to the burial-ground. But all appearance of reverence, or even of decency, disappears at the spot itself, where the corpse is stripped, taken out of its temporary coffin, and brutally cast into a pit, which is kept open till filled, and then, with quicklime thrown in, closed up, and a fresh one opened to be treated in a similar manner. It is a disgrace to Catholic Spain that such scenes should be of daily recurrence.

Another villa worth visiting in the neighborhood of the Alhambra is that of Madame Calderon, where the obliging French gardener took our travellers all over the gardens and terraces, the hot houses and aviaries, the artificial streams and bridges, till they came to the great attraction of the place-- a magnificent arbor-vitae, or hanging cypress, falsely called a cedar of Lebanon, which was planted by St. John of the Cross, this site being originally occupied by a convent of St. Theresa's. The house is thoroughly comfortable inside, with charming views over the "vega," and altogether more like an English house than anything else in Spain. If anyone wished to spend a delightful summer out of England, they could find no more agreeable retreat; perfect as to climate, and with the most enjoyable and beautiful expeditions to be made in every direction. It is worth remembering, as Madame Calderon, being now a widow, is anxious to let her residence, having another house in Madrid. There is a church close by, and a dairy attached to the garden, which is a rarity in Spain, and a public benefit to the visitors at the Alhambra; and the clever and notable French wife of the gardener makes delicious butter, and sells both that and the cream in her mistress's absence--luxuries utterly unknown anywhere else in the Peninsula.

Bad weather and heavy snow (for they had visited Granada too early in the year) prevented our travellers from accomplishing different expeditions which they had planned for the ascent of the Sierra Nevada, and visiting Alhama and Adea, and other interesting spots in the neighborhood. But they drove one day to the Alameda, where all Granada congregates in the evening, and from whence the view looking on the mountains is beautiful.

Returning by the Moorish gateway, called the Puerta de Monayma, they came to an open space, in the centre of which is a statue of the Virgin. Here public executions used to take place, and here, in 1881, Mariana Pineda, a lady of high birth and great beauty, was strangled. A simple cross marks the spot. Her crime was the finding in her house a flag, maliciously placed there by a man whose addresses she had rejected.

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From this "plaza" our travellers drove to the conflux of the rivers Darro and Xenil, which together form the Guadalquiver; and from thence proceeded to a mosque, where a tablet records the fact of its having been the place where the unfortunate king Boabdil gave the keys of the town to the Christian conquerors, Ferdinand and Isabella, and then himself rode slowly and sadly away from his beautiful palace by a mountain still called the "Last Sigh of the Moor," immortalized both in verse and song. The accompanying ballad, with its plaintive wailing sound, still echoes in the hearts and on the lips of the people:

Ay de mi Alhama Paseabase el Rey Moro Por la ciudad de Granada Desde la puerta de Elvira Hasta la de Bibarrambla Ay de mi Alhama!

Returning, they visited the church of Las Angustias, where there is a wonderful but tawdrily dressed image of the Blessed Virgin, who is the patroness of the town. The French sisters of charity have a large orphanage and day-school here, established originally by Madame Calderon; but the situation, in the street called Recogidas, is low and damp, and their chapel being almost underground, and into which no sun can ever enter, seriously affects the health of the sisters. Here, as everywhere, they are universally beloved and respected, and the present superior is one eminently qualified, by her loving gentleness and evenness of temper, to win the hearts of all around her. The dress of the people of Granada is singularly picturesque: the women wear crape shawls of the brightest colors, yellow, orange, or red, with flowers stuck jauntily on one side of the head just above the ear; the men have short velvet jackets, waistcoats with beautiful hanging silver buttons (which have descended from father to son, and are not to be bought except by chance), hats with large borders, turned up at the edge, red sashes round the waist, and gaiters of untanned leather, daintily embroidered, open at the knee, with hanging strips of leather and silver buttons. Over the whole, in cold weather, is thrown the "capa," or large cloak, which often conceals the threadbare garments of a beggar, but which is worn with the air of the proudest Spanish 'hidalgo.' This evening, the last which our travellers were to spend in Granada, they had a visit from the king and captain of the gypsies, a very remarkable man, between thirty and forty years of age, and a blacksmith by trade. He brought his guitar, and played in the most marvellous and beautiful way possible: first tenderly and softly; then bursting into the wildest exultation; then again plaintive and wailing, ending with a strain of triumph and rejoicing and victory which completely entranced his hearers. It was like a beautiful poem or a love-tale, told with a pathos indescribable. {333} It was a fitting last remembrance of a place so full of poetry and of the past, with a tinge in it of that sorrowful dark thread which always seems woven into the tissue of earthly lives. Sorrowfully, the next morning, our travellers paid their last visit to the matchless Alhambra, which had grown upon them at every turn. Then came the "good-by" to their good and faithful guide, _Bensaken_, that name so well known to all Granada tourists; and to the kind sisters of charity, whose white "cornettes" stood grouped round the fatal diligence which was to convey them back to Malaga. And so they bade adieu to this beautiful city, with many a hope of a return on some future day, and with a whole train of new thoughts and new pictures in their mind's eye, called forth by the wonders they had seen.

Original.

Victor Cousin And His Philosophy.

The papers some months since announced the death at Paris of M. Victor Cousin, the well-known eclectic philosopher and Orleanist statesman. The reëstablishment of the Imperial _régime_ in France had deprived him of his political career, never much distinguished; and whatever interest he may have continued to take in philosophy, he produced, as far as we are aware, no new philosophical work after the revolution of July, 1830, except prefaces to new editions of his previous writings, or to other writers whose works he edited, and some "Rapports" to the Academy, among which the most notable is that on the unpublished works of Abelard, preceded by a valuable introduction on the scholastic philosophy, which he afterward published in a separate volume under the title of La Philosophie Scholastique.

M. Cousin was born at Paris in 1792, and was, the New American Cyclopedia says, the son of a clock maker, a great admirer of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and he was, of course, brought up without any religious faith or culture, as were no small portion of the youth of France born during the Revolution. Pierre Leroux maliciously accuses Cousin, after he had quarreled with him, of having been, when they were fellow-students together, a great admirer of _L'Ami du Peuple_, the journal in which Marat gained his infamous notoriety. His early destination was literature, and he was always the littérateur rather than the philosopher; but early falling under the influence of M. Royer-Collard, a stanch disciple of the Scottish school, founded by Reid and closed by Sir William Hamilton, he directed his attention to the study of philosophy, became master of conferences in the Normal School, and, while yet very young, professor of the history of philosophy in the Faculté des Lettres at Paris. His course for 1818, and a part of is course for 1819 and 1820, have been published from notes taken by his pupils. Being too liberal to suit the government, he was suspended from his professorship in 1824, but was restored in 1828, and continued his lectures up to the Revolution of 1830. Since then he has made no important contributions to philosophical science.

The greater part of M. Cousin's philosophical works are left as fragments or as unfinished courses. {334} His course of 1829-30 ends with the sensist school, and the critical examination of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. His translation of Plato was completed indeed; but the arguments or introductions, except to a few of the Dialogues, and the Life of Plato promised, have never appeared. He seems to have exhausted his philosophical forces at an early day, and after publishing a new and revised edition of his previous writings, to have devoted himself chiefly to literature, especially to the literary history of the first half of the seventeenth century, and the biography of certain eminent ladies that played a very distinguished part in the political intrigues and insurrections of the period. It is doubtful if any man living had so thorough and minute a knowledge of the literature, the religious controversies, the philosophy, the polities, and the biography of the period from the accession of Louis XIII. to the end of the wars of the Fronde, and the triumph of Mazarin over his enemies, as he possessed. His Duchesse de Longueville, Madame de Sablé, Duchesse de Chevreuse, and Madame de Hautefort, and his history of the conclusion of the wars of the Fronde, are, as literary works, unrivalled, written with rare simplicity, purity, grace, and delicacy of expression and style, and have an easy natural eloquence and charm never surpassed by any writer even in the French language. He has resuscitated those great dames of the seventeenth century, who live, love, sin, repent, and do penance in his pages as they did in real life. He seems, as a Parisian has said, to have really fallen in love with them, and to have regarded each of them as his mistress, whose honor be must defend at the risk of his life.

The French, we believe, usually count M. Villemain as the most perfect master of their beautiful language; but to our taste he was surpassed by Cousin, if not in the delicacy of phrase, which only a Frenchman born or bred can appreciate, in all the higher qualities of style, as much as he was in depth and richness of feeling, and variety and comprehensiveness of thought. Cousin was by far the greater man, endowed with the richer genius, and, as far as we can judge, equally polished and graceful as a writer. As a philosophical writer, for beauty, grace, elegance, and eloquence he has had no equal since Plato; and he wrote on philosophical subjects with ease and grace, charmed and interested his readers in the dryest and most abstruse speculations of metaphysics. His rhetoric was captivating even if his philosophy was faulty.

M. Cousin called his philosophical system eclecticism. He starts with the assumption that each philosophical school has its special point of view, its special truth, which the others neglect or unduly depress, and that the true philosopher weds himself to no particular school, but studies them all with impartiality, accepts what each has that is positive, and rejects what each has that is exclusive or negative. He resolves all possible schools into four--1st. The Sensist; 2d, the Idealistic--subjectivistic; 3d, the Sceptical; 4th, the Mystic. Each of these four systems has its part of truth, and its part of error. Take the truth of each, and exclude the error, and you have true philosophy, and the whole of it. Truth is always something positive, affirmative; what then is the truth of scepticism, which is a system of pure negation, and not only affirms nothing, but denies that anything can be affirmed? How, moreover, can scepticism, which is universal nescience, be called a system of philosophy? Finally, if you know not the truth in its unity and integrity beforehand, how are you, in studying those several systems, to determine which is the part of truth and which the part of error?

There is no doubt that all schools, as all sects, have their part of truth, as well as their part of error; for the human mind cannot embrace pure unmixed error any more than the will can pure unmixed evil; but the eclectic method is not the method of constructing true philosophy any more than it is the method of constructing true Christian theology. {335} The Catholic acknowledges willingly the truth which the several sects hold; but he does not derived it from them, nor arrived at it by studying their systems. He holds it independently of them; and having it already in its unity and integrity, he is able, in studying them, to distinguish what they have that is true from the errors they mix up with it. It must be the same with the philosopher. M. Cousin was not unaware of this, and he finally asserted eclecticism rather as a method of historical verification, than as the real and original method of constructing philosophy. The name was therefore unhappily chosen, and is now seldom heard.

Eclecticism can never be a philosophy. All it can be is a method, and is, as Cousin held, a method of verification rather than of construction. Cousin's own method was not the eclectic, but avowedly the psychological; that is, by careful observation and profound study of the phenomena of consciousness, to attain to a real ontological science, or science of the soul, of God, and nature. This method was severely criticised by Schelling and other German philosophers, and has been objected to by ontologists generally, as giving not a real ontology, but only a generalization. Dr. Channing called the God asserted by Cousin "a splendid generalization"--a very just criticism, but perhaps not for the precise reason the eloquent Unitarian preacher assigned. Cousin does not maintain, theoretically at least, that we can, by way of induction or deduction from purely psychological facts, attain to a real ontological order. His real error was in the misapplication of his method, which led him to deny what he calls necessary and absolute ideas, and terms the idea of the true, the idea of the beautiful, and the idea of the good, are being, and therefore God, and to represent them as the word of God--the precise error which, Gioberti rightly or wrongly maintains, was committed by Rosmini. It must be admitted that Cousin is not on this point very clear, and that he often speaks of ontology as an induction from psychology, in which case the God he asserts would be, for the reason Channing supposes, only a generalization.

But we think it is possible to clear him from this charge, so far as his intention went, and to defend the psychological method as he professed to apply it. He professed to attain to ontology from the phenomena of consciousness, or the facts revealed to consciousness; but he labors long and hard, as does every psychologist who admits ontology at all, to show, by a careful analysis and classification of these phenomena or facts, that there are among them some, at least, which are not derived from the soul itself, which do not depend on it, and do actually extend beyond the region of psychology, and lead at once into the ontological order. In other words, he claims to find in his psychological observation and analysis real ontological facts. It is from these, not from purely psychological phenomenon, that he professes to rise to ontology. So understood, what is called the psychological method is strictly defensible. Every philosopher does and must begin by the analysis of thought, that is, in the language of Cousin, the fact of consciousness, and there is no other way possible. That the ideal formula enters into every one of my thoughts is not a fact that I know without thought, and it can be determined only by analyzing the thought one thinks, that is, the fact of consciousness. The quarrel here between the psychologists and the ontologists is quite unnecessary.

What is certain, and this is all the ontologist need assert, or, in fact, can assert, that ontology is neither an induction nor a deduction from psychological data. God is not, and cannot be, the generalization of our own souls. {336} But it does not follow from this that we do not think that which is God, and that it is from thought we do and must take it. We take it from thought and by thinking. What is objected to in the psychologists is the assumption that thought is a purely psychological or subjective fact, and that from this psychological or subjective fact we can by way of induction attain to ontological truth. But as we understand M. Cousin, and we studied his works with some care thirty or thirty-five years ago, and had the honor of his private correspondence, this he never pretends to do. What he claims is that in the analysis of consciousness we detect a class of facts or ideas which are not psychological or subjective, but really ontological, and do actually carry us out of the region of psychology into that of ontology. That his account of these facts or ideas is to be accepted as correct or adequate we do not pretend, but that he professes to recognize them and distinguish them from purely psychological facts is undeniable.

The defect or error of M. Cousin on this point was in failing, as we have already observed, to identify the absolute or necessary ideas he detects and asserts with God, the only _ens necessarium et reale_, and in failing to assert their objectivity to the whole subject, and in presenting them only as objective to the human personality. He never succeeded in cutting himself wholly loose from the German nonsense of a subjective-object or objective-subject, and when he had clearly proved an idea to be objective to the reflective reason and the human personality, he did dare assert it to be objective in relation to the whole subject. It was impersonal, but might be in a certain sense subjective, as Kant maintained with regard to the categories. There always seemed to remain in his mind some confusion between the subject and object, and hence his translator in Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, never ventures to translate _le moi et le non-moi_, subject and object, or the soul and the world, but introduces into the language such barbarisms as the _me_ and the _not-me_. Indeed, at the time those Specimens were published, there were few, if any, of the scholars of the modern Athens that understood or could be made to understand the real distinction between objective and subjective; and we observed the other day, in looking over the _Einleitung_ of a German professor, that he speaks of the objective-object, the objective-subject, the subjective-object, and the subjective-subject.

It is very easy to understand why Kant should assert objective-subjective, for he held that the categories are necessary, irresistible, and indestructible forms of the subject, but independent of the human will or personality, or of proper human activity, nay, the very conditions of that activity, imposed on us not by our will, but by the very constitution all of our intellectual nature. But why Cousin should have hesitated to assert the complete disjunction between subject and object in thought is what we are unable to explain. He maintains strenuously that the object is distinct from the personality of the subject, or that it is always, in his own language, _le-non-moi_, but not that it is distinct from the whole soul. He distinguishes the subject between personal activity and impersonal. The personal is subjective, the impersonal is objective, but objective in relation to what? To the personal only. There is, no doubt, the distinction he asserts, and it is recognized by all our theologians in their distinction between _actus humanus_ and _actus hominis_. The _actus humanus_ is an act of free will, the _actus hominis_ is an involuntary act; but both are acts of the subject, man. All action of man, whether personal or impersonal, voluntary or involuntary, is subjective, but for involuntary acts he is not held morally accountable.

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This same failure to mark the real distinction between subjective and objective, and making it simply the distinction between personal and impersonal, _le moi_ and _le non-moi_, has greatly deprecated the value in his philosophy of the distinction M. Cousin notes between intuition and reflection. According to him they are but two modes of the activity of one in the same reason--which reason, he asserts is our faculty of intelligence. Reason, he says, is our only faculty of knowing, by which we know all that we do know, whatever the sphere or object of our knowledge. Reason, then, is subjective, and consequently so are all its modes of activity. Intuition is as subjective as reflection, and hence the distinction between intuition and reflections, really so important when rightly understood, says nothing in favor of the objectivity of what M. Cousin calls absolute or necessary ideas. It is in his philosophy simply a distinction between personal and impersonal, between the spontaneous activity and the reflective of the same subject; yet it is on this very distinction that he bases the validity of his ontology and his whole metaphysical system. By it he explains genius, inspiration, revelation, and religious faith. These are operations of the spontaneous reason, and divine because the activity of the spontaneous reason is not personal. In this way, he legitimates all the religions of all ages and nations. He places prophetic and apostolic inspiration and the inspiration of genius in the same category, and resolves them all, in the last analysis, into what we commonly called enthusiasm. But as reason, whether personal or impersonal, is subjective, a faculty of the human soul, it is not easy to see why its spontaneous activity should be more divine or authoritative then its reflective activity. Does M. Cousin hold with the Arabs that the ravings of the maniac are divine inspirations?

Cousin seems to us never to have clearly understood the real character of the distinction between intuition and reflection, on which he rightly insists. Intuition is impersonal, divine, infallible, authoritative, he maintains, while reflection, partaking of the imperfections and pettiness of our own personality, is individual, fallible, and without authority, save as supported by intuition. All that we ever do or can know is given us primarily in intuition, and what is so given constitutes the common sense, the common faith or belief of the race. There is less, but there can never be more, in reflection than in intuition. The difference between the two is the difference between _seeing_ and _beholding_. I see what is before me, but to behold it I look. I look that I may determine what it is I see. But it is clear from this illustration that the intuition is as much the act of the subject as is the reflection. The only difference between them is that asserted by Leibnitz between simple perception and apperception. In simple perception I perceive all the objects before me, without noting or distinguishing them; in apperception I note that it is I who perceive them, and distinguish them both from myself and from one another. The intuition is _à posteriori_, and is no synthetic judgment _à priori_, as Kant terms what must precede experience in order to render experience possible.

Nor is it true to say that all our knowledge is given in the primitive intuition. What is given in the primitive intuition is simply the ideal, self-evident truths, as say some, first principles of all science, which are at the same time the first principles of all reality, and could not be the first principles of science if they were not the first principles of reality, say others. Even they who assert that the ideal formula, _Ens creat existentias_, is intuitive, never pretend that anything more than the ideal element of thought or experience is intuitive. The ideal formula is simply the scientific reduction of the categories of Aristotle and Kant to three, and their identification with reality; that is, their reduction to being, existence, and the creative act of being, which is the real nexus between them. These three categories must be given intuitively, or _à priori_, because without them the intelligence is not constituted, and no science, no experience, is possible. {338} But in them, while the principles of all science are given, no knowledge or apprehension of particular things is given. The intuition constitutes, we would say creates, the faculty of intelligence, but all science is acquired either by the exercise of that faculty or by divine revelation addressed to it.

Reduced to its proper character as asserted by M. Cousin, intuition is empirical, and stands opposed not to reflection, but to discursion, and is simply the immediate and direct perception of the object without the intervention of any process, more or less elaborate, of reasoning. This is, indeed, not an unusual sense of the word, perhaps its more common sense, but it is a sense that renders the distinction between intuition and reflection of no importance to M. Cousin, for it does not carry him out of the sphere of the subject, or afford any basis for his ontological inductions. He has still the question as to the objectivity and reality of the ideal to solve, and no recognized means of solving it. His ontological conclusions, therefore, as a writer in The Christian Examiner told him as long ago as 1836, rest simply on the credibility of reason or faith in its trustworthiness, which can never be established, because it is assumed that to the operation of reason no objective reality is necessary, since the object, if impersonal, may for aught that appears be included in the subject. Notwithstanding his struggles and efforts of all sorts, we think, therefore, that it must be conceded that Cousin remained in the sphere of psychology, and that the facts the study and analysis of consciousness gave him, have in his system no ontological value, for he fails to establish their real objectivity. His passage from psychology is a leap over a gulf by main strength, not a regular dialectic passage, which he professes to have found, or which he promises to provide, and which the true analysis of thought discloses.

M. Cousin professes to have reduced the categories of Kant and Aristotle to two, substance and cause, or substance and phenomenon. But, as he in fact identifies cause with substance, declaring substance to be substance only in so much as it is cause, and cause to be cause only in so much as it is substance, he really reduces them to the single category of substance, which you may call indifferently substance or cause. But though every substance is intrinsically and essentially a cause, yet, as it may be something more than cause, it is not necessary to insist on this, and it may be admitted that he recognizes two categories. Under the head of substance he ranges all that is substantial, or that pertains to real and necessary being, and under the head of cause the phenomenal, or the effects of the causative action of substance. He says he understands by substance the universal and absolute substance, the universal, necessary, and real being of the theologians, and by phenomena not mere modes or appearances of substance, but finite and relative substances, and calls them phenomena only in opposition to the one absolute substance. They are created or produced by the causative action of substance. If this has any real meaning, he should recognize three categories, as in the ideal formula, _Ens creat existentias_, that is, being, existence, or creature, and the creative act of being, the real nexus between substance or being and contingent existences, for it is that which places them and binds them to the creator. In the ideal formula the categories are all reduced to three, which really include them all and in their real relation. Whatever there is to be known must be arranged under one or another of the three terms of the formula, for whatever is conceivable must be being, the creative act of being, or the product of that act, that is to say, existences. The ideal formula is complete, for it asserts in their logical relation the first principles of all the knowable (_omne scibile_) and all the real (_omne reale_), and of all the knowable because of all the real, for what is not real is not knowable. M. Cousin's reduction to substance and cause, or being and phenomena, besides being not accurately expressed, is unscientific and defective.

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We do not think M. Cousin ever intended to deny the creative act of being, or the reality of existences, or what he calls phenomena, but he includes the act in his conception of substance. God is in his own intrinsic nature, he maintains, causative or creative, and cannot, therefore, not cause or create. Hence, creation is necessary. Being causative in his essence, essentially a cause, and cause being a cause only inasmuch as it causes or is actually a cause, God is, if we may so speak, forced to create, and to be continuously creating, by the intrinsic and eternal necessity of his own being. This smacks a little of Hegelianism, which teaches that God perfects or fills out his own being, or realizes the possibilities of his own nature, in creating, and arrives at self-consciousness first in man--a doctrine which our Boston transcendentalists embodied in their favorite aphorism, "In order to be you must do"--as if without being it is possible to do, as if imperfection could make itself perfection, or anything by itself alone could make itself more than it is!

But the doctrine that substance is essentially cause, and must from intrinsic necessity cause in the sense of creating, is not tenable. We are aware that Leibnitz, a great name in philosophy, defines substance to be an active force, a _vis activa_, but we do not recollect that he anywhere pretends that its activity necessarily extends beyond itself. God is _vis activa_, if you will, in a supereminent degree; he is essentially active, and would be neither being nor substance if he were not; he is, as say Aristotle and the schoolmen, most pure act; and hence the theologians discover in him a reason for the eternal generation of the Son, and the eternal procession of the Holy Ghost, or why God is necessarily indivisible Trinity; but nothing in this implies that he must necessarily act _ad extra_, or create. He acts eternally from the necessity of his own divine nature, but not necessarily out of the circle of his own infinite being, for he is complete in himself, the plenitude of being, and always and everywhere suffices for himself, and therefore for his own activity. Creation, or the production of effects exterior to himself, is not necessary to the perfection of his activity, adds and can add nothing to him, as it does and can take nothing from him. Hence, though we cannot conceive of him without conceiving him as infinitely, eternally, and essentially active, we can conceive of him as absolute substance or being without conceiving him to be necessarily acting or creating _ad extra_.

M. Cousin evidently confounds the interior act of the divine being with his exterior acts, or acts _ad extra_, or creative acts. God being most pure act, says the eclectic philosopher, he must be infinitely active, and if infinitely active he must develop himself in creation; therefore, creation is necessary, and God cannot but create. This denies while it asserts that God is in himself most pure act, and assumes that his nature has possibilities that can be realized only in external acts. It makes the creation necessary to the perfection of his being, and assumes either that he is not in himself _ens perfectissimum_, or most perfect being, or that the creation, the world, or universe, is itself God; that is, the conception of God as most perfect being includes both substance and cause, both being and phenomenon. Hence, with the contradiction of which M. Cousin gives more than one example, and which no pantheistic philosopher does or can escape, in asserting creation to be necessary, he declares it to be impossible; for the phenomena substantially considered are God himself, indistinguishable from him, and necessary to complete our conception of him as absolute substance, or most perfect being.

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In the preface to the third edition of his Philosophical Fragments, M. Cousin says the expression, "Creation is necessary," is objectionable, as irreverent, and appearing to imply that God in creating is not free, and he willingly consents to retract it. But we cannot find that he does retract it, and, if he retracts the expression, he nowhere retracts the thought. He denies that he favors a system of fatalism, and labors hard to prove that though God cannot but create, yet that in creating he is free. God, he says, must act according to his own essential nature, and cannot act contrary to his own wisdom and goodness; yet in acting he acts freely. There is a distinction between liberty and free will. Free will is liberty accompanied by deliberation and struggles between opposite motives and tendencies. In God there can be no hesitancy, no deliberation, no struggle of choice between good and evil. Yet is he none the less free for that. There are sublime moments when the soul acts spontaneously, with terrible energy, without any deliberation. Is the soul in these sublime moments deprived of liberty? The saint, when, by long struggles and severe discipline, he has overcome all his internal enemies, and henceforth acts right spontaneously, without deliberating--is he less free than he who is still in the agony of the struggle, or are his acts less meritorious? Is the liberty of God taken away by denying that he is free to act contrary to his nature?

Whether the distinction here asserted between liberty and free will is admissible or not, or whether all that is alleged be true or much of it only error, we pass over, as the discussion of the question of liberty would lead further than we can now go; but in all he says he avoids the real question at issue. Certainly, there can be no hesitancy on the part of God, no interior struggle as to choice between good and evil, no deliberation as to what he shall do or not do; nothing that implies the least possible imperfection can be in him. Certain, again, is it that God is not free to alter his own nature, to change his own attributes, or to act contrary to them, to the eternal essences of things, or to his own eternal ideas. But that is not the question. The real question is, Is be free to create or not create at his own will and pleasure? Among the infinite number of contingents possible, and all according with his own essential attributes, is he free to select such as he chooses, and at his own will and pleasure give them existence? This is the only question he had to answer, and this question he studiously avoids, and fails, therefore, to show that they are wrong who accuse him of asserting creation as the necessary and not the free act of God. The charge of asserting universal fatalism and pantheism he therefore fails to meet. He fails to vindicate the liberty of God, and therefore, though he asserts it, the liberty of man. All pantheism is fatalistic, and the doctrine of Spinoza is not more decidedly pantheistic than the system adopted and defended by Cousin.

We are far from believing that M. Cousin thought himself a pantheist, for we do not think he ever understood his own system. He was more than most men the dupe of words, and, though not destitute of philosophical genius, philosophy was never his natural vocation, any more than it was his original destination. He was always, as we have said, the littérateur rather than the philosopher. Much allowance should also, no doubt, be made for the unsettled state of philosophy in France when he became, under Royer-Collard, master of conferences in the Normal School of Paris, and the confused state of philosophical language that was then in use. Throughout his whole ontology, he is misled by taking the word substance instead of _ens_ or being. He says that he understands by substance, when he asserts, as he does, that there is only one substance, what the fathers and doctors of the church mean by the one supreme, necessary, absolute, and eternal being, the _Ego sum Qui sum_, I am that I am, of Exodus, the name under which God revealed himself to Moses. This is an improper use of the word. {341} No doubt being is substance, or substantial, but the two terms are not equivalents. Being has primary reference to that which is, as opposed to that which is not, or nothing; substance is something, and so far coincides with being, but something in opposition to attribute, mode, or accident, or something capable of supporting attributes, modes, or accidents. Being is absolute in and of itself, and therefore strictly speaking one, and it is only in a loose sense that we speak of beings in the plural number, or call creatures beings. There is and can be but one only being, God, for he only can say, _Ego sum Qui sum_, and whatever existences there may be distinguished from him have their being not in themselves, but in him, according to what St. Paul says, "in him we live, and move, and have our being: in _ipso vivimus, et movemur, et sumus._" There is in this view nothing pantheistic, for being is complete in itself and sufficient for itself. Consequently, there can be nothing distinguishable from being except placed by the free creative act of being, that is, creation or creatures. The creature is not being, but it holds from being by the creative act, and may be and is a substance, distinct from the divine substance. Being is one, substances may be manifold. Hence, in the ideal formula, the first term or category is _ens_, not _substans_ or _substantia_.

Cousin, misled by Descartes and Spinoza, and only imperfectly acquainted with the scholastic philosophy, adopts the term substance instead of being, and maintains sturdily, from first to last, that there is and can be but one substance. Whence it follows that all not in that one substance is unsubstantial and phenomenal, without attributes, modes, or activity. Creatures may have their being in God and yet be substances and capable of acting from their own centre as second causes; but, if there is only one substance, they cannot themselves be substances in any sense at all, and can be only attributes, modes, or phenomena of the one only substance, or God. God alone is in himself their substance and reality, and their activity is really his activity. By taking for his first category substance instead of _ens_ or being, M. Cousin found himself obliged virtually to deny the second. He says he calls the second category phenomena, only in opposition to the one universal substance, that he holds them to relative or finite substances. This shows his honorable intentions, but it cannot avail him, for he says over and over again that there is and can be but one substance. Either substance is one and one only, he says formally, or it is nothing. The unity of substance is vital in his system, and unity of substance is the essential principle, of pantheism. He himself defines substance as that which exists in itself and not in another.

M. Cousin say pantheism is the divinization of nature, or nature taken in its totality as God. But this is sheer atheism or naturalism, not pantheism. The essence of pantheism is in the denial of substantial creation or the creation of substances. The pantheist can, in a certain manner, even admit creation, the creation of modes or phenomena, and there are few pantheists who do not assert as much. The test is as to the creation of substance, or existences that can support attributes, modes, or accidents of their own, instead of being simply attributes, modes, or accidents of the one substance, and thus capable of acting from their own centre as proper second causes. He who denies the creation of such existences is a pantheist, and he who affirms it is a theist and no pantheist, however he may err in other matters. Had M. Cousin understood this, he would have seen that he had not escaped the error of Spinoza. With only one substance, it is impossible to assert the creation of substances. The substance of the soul and of the world, if there is only one substance, is God, and they are only phenomenal or mere appearances; the only activity in the universe is that of God; and what we call our acts are his acts. {342} Whatever is done, whether good or evil, he does it, not only as _causa eminens_ or _causa causarum_, but as direct and immediate actor. The moral consequences of such a doctrine are easy to be seen, and need not be dwelt upon.

No doubt M. Cousin, when repelling the charge of pantheism preferred against him, on the ground of his maintaining that there is only one substance, thought he had said enough in saying that he used the word phenomena in the sense of finite or relative substances; but if there is only one substance, how can there be any finite and relative substances? And he, also, should have considered that his use of the word phenomena was the worst word he could have chosen to convey the idea of substance, however finite, for it stands opposed to substance. He says _le moi_ and _le non-moi_ are in relation to substance phenomenal. Who from this could conclude them to be themselves substances? He says he could not maintain that they are modes or appearances of substance only, because he maintains that they are forces, causes. But it sometimes happens to a philosopher to be in contradiction with himself, and always to the pantheist, because pantheism is supremely sophistical and self-contradictory. It admits of no clear, consistent, logical statement. Besides, no man can always be on his guard, and when his system is false, the force of truth and his good sense and just feeling will often get the better of his system. He has, indeed, said the soul (_le moi_) and the world (_le non-moi_) are forces, causes; but he has also said, as his system requires him to say, that their substantial activity is the activity of the one only substance, which is God.

It were easy to justify these criticisms by any number of citations from M. Cousin's several works, but it is not necessary, for we are attempting neither a formal exposition nor a formal refutation of his system; we are merely pointing out some of his errors and mistakes, for the benefit of young and ingenuous students of philosophy, who need to be shown what it is necessary to shun on the points taken up. Most, if not all, of M. Cousin's mistakes and errors arose from his having considered the question of method before he had settled that of principles. He says a philosopher's whole philosophy is in his method. Tell me what is such or such a philosopher's method, and I will tell you his philosophy. But this is not true, unless by method he means both principles and method taken together. Method is the application of principles, and presupposes them, and till they are determined it is impossible to determine the method to be adopted or pursued. The human mind has a method given it in its very constitution, and we cannot treat the question of method till we have ascertained the principles of that constitution. Principles are not found or obtained by the exercise of our faculties, because without them the mind can neither operate nor even exist. Principles are and must be given by the creator of the mind itself. To treat the question of method before we have ascertained what principles are thus given, is to proceed in the dark and to lose our way.

Undoubtedly, every philosopher must begin the construction of his philosophy by the analysis of thought, either as presented him in consciousness or as represented in language, or both together. This is a mental necessity. Since philosophy deals only with thought or what is presented in thought, its first step must be to ascertain what are the elements of thought. So far as this analysis is psychological, philosophy begins in psychology; but whether what is called the psychological method is or is not to be adopted, we cannot determine till we have ascertained the elements, and ascertained whether they are all psychological or not. If on inquiry it should turn out that in every thought there is both a psychological and an ontological element given simultaneously and in an indissoluble synthesis, it is manifest that the exclusively psychological method would lead only to error. {343} It would leave out the onto logical element, and be unable to present in its true character even the psychological; for, if the psychological element in the real order and in thought exists only in relation with the ontological, it can be apprehended and treated in its true character only in that relation. Whether such be the fact or not, how are we to determine till we know what are the principles alike of all the knowable and of all the real--that is, have determined the categories?

The error of the psychological method is not that it asserts the necessity of beginning our philosophizing with the analysis of thought, or what M. Cousin calls, not very properly, the fact of consciousness, but in proceeding to study the facts of the human soul, as if man were an isolated existence, and the only thing existing; and after having observed and classified these facts, either stopping with them, as does Sir William Hamilton, or proceeding by way of induction, as most psychologists do, to the conclusion of ontological principles--an induction which both Sir William Hamilton and Schelling have proved, in their criticisms of Cousin's method, is invalid, because no induction is valid that concludes beyond the facts or particulars from which it is made. The facts being all psychological, nothing not psychological can be concluded from them. Cousin feels the force of this criticism, but, without conceding that his method is wrong or defective, seeks to avoid it by alleging that among the facts of consciousness are some which, though revealed by consciousness or contained in thought, are some which are not psychological, and hence psychology leads of itself not by way of induction, but directly, to ontology. The answer is pertinent, for if it be true that there is an ontological element in every thought, the analysis of thought discloses it. But, hampered and blinded by his method, Cousin fails, as we have seen, to disengage a really ontological element, and in his blundering explanation of it deprives it of all real ontological character. His God is anthropomorphous, when not a generalization or a pure abstraction. What deceives the exclusive psychologists, and makes them regard their inductions of ontology from psychological facts as valid, is the very important fact that there are no exclusively psychological facts; and in their psychology, though not recognized by them as such, and according to their method ought not to be such, there are real ontological elements--elements which are not psychological, and without which there could be no psychological elements. These elements place us directly in relation with the ontological reality, and the mistake is in not seeing or recognizing this fact, and in assuming that the ontological reality, instead of being given, as it is, intuitively, is obtained by induction from the psychological. Ontology as an induction or a logical conclusion is sophistical and false; as given intuitively in the first principles of thought, it is well founded and true. The mistake arises from having attempted to settle the question of method before having settled the question of principles. The simple fact is that the soul is not the only existence, nor an isolated existence. It exists and operates only in relation with its creator and upholder, with the external world, and with other men or society, so that there are and can be no purely psychological facts. The soul severed from God, or the creative act of God, cannot live, cannot exist, but drops into the nothing it was before it was created. Principles are given, not found or obtained by our own activity, for, as we have said, the mind cannot operate without principles. The principles, as most philosophers tell us, are self-evident, or evidence themselves. If real principles, they are and must be alike the principles of being and of knowing, of science and reality. They must include in their real relations both the psychological and the ontological. As the psychological does not and cannot exist without the ontological, and, indeed, not without the creative act of the ontological, science is possible only on condition that the ontological and the psychological, as to their ideal principles, are intuitively given, and given in their real synthesis, as it has been abundantly shown they are given in the ideal formula. {344} The ontological and psychological being given intuitively and simultaneously in their real relation, it follows necessarily that neither the exclusively psychological method nor the exclusively ontological method can be accepted, and that the method must be synthetic, because the principles themselves are given in their real synthesis. Clearly, then, the principles must determine the method, not the method the principles. It is not true, then, to say that all one's philosophy is in one's method, but that it is all in one's principles. If M. Cousin had begun by ascertaining what are the principles of thought, necessarily asserted in every thought and without which no thought is possible, he could never have fallen into his pantheism, which every thought repudiates, and which cannot even be asserted without self-contradiction, because in every thought there is given as essential to the very existence of thought the express contradictory of pantheism of every form.

M. Cousin professes to be able, from the method a philosopher follows in philosophizing, to foretell his philosophy; but although we would speak with the greatest respect of our former master, from whom we received no little benefit, we must say that we have never met a man, equally learned and equally able, so singularly unhappy in explaining the systems of the various schools of philosophy of which he professes to give the history. We cannot now call to mind a single instance in which he has seized and presented the kernel of the philosophical system he has undertaken to explain. He makes the Theaetetus of Plato an argument against the sensists, or the doctrine of the origin of all our ideas in sensation--when one has but to read that Dialogue to perceive that what Plato is seeking to prove is that the knowledge of the sensible, which is multiple, variable, and evanescent, is no real science at all. Plato is not discussing at all the question of how we know, but what we must know in order to have real science. Cousin's exposition of what he calls the Alexandrian theodicy, or of neoplatonism, is, notwithstanding he had edited the works of Proclus, a marvel of misapprehension alike of the Alexandrian doctrine and of Christian theology. He describes with a sneer the scholastic philosophy as being merely "a commentary on the Holy Scriptures and texts from the fathers." He edited the works of Descartes, but never understood more of that celebrated philosopher than enough to imbibe some of his worst errors. He has borrowed much, directly or indirectly, from Spinoza, but never comprehended his system of pantheism, as is evident from his judgment that Spinoza erred only in being too devout and too filled and penetrated with God!

He misapprehends entirely Leibnitz's doctrine of substance, as we have already seen. His own system is in its psychological part borrowed chiefly from Kant, and in its ontological part from Hegel, neither of whom has he ever understood. He has the errors of these two distinguished Germans without their truths or their logical firmness. And perhaps there was no system of philosophy, of which he undertook to give an account, that he less understood than his own. He seems, after having learned something of the great mediaeval philosophers in preparing his work, Philosophic Scholastique, to have had some suspicions that he had talked very foolishly, and had been the dupe of his own youthful zeal and enthusiasm; for, though he afterward published a new edition of his works without any essential alteration, as we infer from the fact that they were placed at Rome on the Index, he published, as far as we are aware, no new philosophical work, and turned his attention to other subjects. Even in his work on the Scholastics, as well as in his account of Jansenism in his work on Madame de Sablé, we recollect no re-assertion of his pantheism, nor even an unorthodox opinion.

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It was a great misfortune for M. Cousin as a philosopher that he knew so little of Catholic theology, and that what little he did know, apparently caught up at second-hand, only served to mislead him. We are far from building science on faith or founding philosophy on revelation, in the sense of the traditionalists; yet we dare affirm that no man who has not studied profoundly the Gospel of St. John, the Epistles of St. Paul, the great Greek and Latin fathers, and the mediaeval doctors of the church, is in a condition to write anything deserving of serious consideration on philosophy. The great controversies that have been called forth from time to time on the doctrine of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the two natures and the two wills in the one person of our Lord, the Real Presence of our Lord's body, soul, and divinity in the Eucharist, liberty and necessity, the relations of nature and grace, and of reason and faith, throw a brilliant light on philosophy far surpassing all the light to be derived from Gentile sources, or by the most careful analysis of the facts of our own consciousness. The effort, on the one hand, to demolish, and on the other to sustain, Catholic dogma, has enlightened the darkest and most hidden passages of both psychology and ontology, and placed the Catholic theologian, really master of the history of his science, on a vantage ground which they who know it not are incapable of conceiving. Before him your Descartes, Spinozas, Kants, Fichtes, Schellings, Hegels, Cousins, dwindle to philosophical pigmies.

The excellent M. Augustin Cochin thinks that M. Cousin rendered great service to the cause of religion by the sturdy warfare he carried in defence of spiritualism against the gross sensism and materialism of the eighteenth century, and nobody can deny very considerable merit to his Critical Examination of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. Dr. C. S. Henry translated it some years ago, in this country, and published it under the rather inappropriate title of Consin's Psychology, and it has no doubt had much influence in unseating Locke from the philosophical throne he formerly occupied. But the reaction against Locke and Condillac, as well as the philosophers of Auteuil, had commenced long before Consin became master of conferences in L'Ecole Normale; and we much doubt if the subtiler and more refined rationalism be has favored is a less dangerous enemy to religion and society than the sensism of Condillac, or the gross materialism of Cabanis, Garat, and Destutt de Tracy. Under his influence infidelity in France has modified its form, but only, as it seems to me, to render itself more difficult of detection and refutation. Pantheism is a far more dangerous enemy than materialism, for its refutation demands an order of thought and reasoning above the comprehension of the great mass of those who are not incapable of being misled by its sophistries. The refutation of the pantheism of our days requires a mental culture and a philosophical capacity by no means common. Thousands could comprehend the refutation of Locke or Condillac, where there is hardly one who can understand the refutation of Hegel or Spinoza.

Besides, we do not think Cousin can be said to have in all cases opposed the truth to sensism. His spiritualism is not more true than sensism itself. He pretends that we have immediate and direct apprehension of spiritual reality--that is, pure intellections. True, he says that we apprehend the noetic only on occasion of sensible affection, but on such occasion we do apprehend it pure and simple. This is as to the apprehension itself exaggerated spiritualism, and would almost justify the fair pupil of Margaret Fuller in her exclamation, "O Miss Fuller! I see right into the abyss of being." Man, not being a pure intelligence, but intelligence clothed with sensibility, has and can have no pure intellections. {346} M. Cousin would have been more correct if instead of saying that the affection of the sensibility is necessary as the occasion, he had said, we know the supersensible indeed, but only as sensibly represented.

In this sense we understand the peripatetics when they say: "Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu." The medium of this sensible representation of the intelligible or spiritual truth to the understanding is language of some sort, which is its sensible sign. M. Cousin would have done well to have studied more carefully on this subject the remarkable work of De Bonald, a work, though it has some errors, of an original genius of the first order, and of a really profound thinker. Had he done this, he might have seen that the reflective reason cannot operate without language, and understood something of the necessity of the infallible church to maintain the unity and integrity of language, whose corruption by philosophers invariably involves the loss of the unity and integrity of the idea. It might also have taught him that a philosophy worth anything cannot be spun by the philosopher out of his own consciousness as the spider spins her web out of her own bowels, and that without as much at least of primitive revelation or the primitive instruction given by God himself to the race, as is embodied in language, no man can successfully cultivate philosophy.

As minister of public instruction under Louis Philippe, M. Cousin labored hard and with some success, we know not how much, to extend primary schools in France; but he in part neutralized his services in this respect by his defence of the university monopoly, his opposition to the freedom of education, his efforts to force his pantheistic or at best rationalistic philosophy into the colleges of the university, and his intense hatred and unrelenting hostility to the Jesuits, who have first and last done so much for education and religion in France as well as elsewhere. Ordinarily a man of great candor, and of a most kindly disposition, his whole nature seemed to change the moment a Jesuit was in question. He was no friend to the Catholic religion, and after the writer of this became a Catholic, he forgot his French politeness, and refused to answer a single one of his letters. To him we were either dead or had become an enemy. He moreover never liked to have his views questioned. In politics he belonged to the _Doctrinaire_ school, and supported the _juste milieu_. In the Revolution of 1848, and under the Republic, he opposed earnestly socialism, and attempted to stay its progress by writing and publishing a series of philosophical tracts, as if philosophy could cure an evil which it had helped to create. When society is in disorder, old institutions are falling, and civilization is rapidly lapsing into barbarism, it is only religion, speaking from on high with the power of truth and the authority of God, that can arrest the downward tendency. "Religion," said Lamennais in the first volume of his Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion, "is found at the cradle of nations; philosophy at their tomb." Woe to the nation that exchanges faith for philosophy! its ruin is at hand, for it has lost the principle of life. After the _coup d'état_ little was heard of Cousin either in the world of politics or philosophy, and his last years appear to have flowed away in the peaceful pursuits of literature.

Rumors from time to time reached us during the last dozen years that M. Cousin had become a Catholic, and for his sake we regret that they have remained unconfirmed. It is reported, on good authority, that he regularly attended mass, and was accustomed to say his morning and evening prayers before an image of Our Lady; but it is agreed by his most intimate Catholic friends that he never made any formal profession of Catholic faith, and died without receiving or asking the sacraments of the church. {347} That in his later years his mind turned at times toward the church, that his feelings toward religion were softened, and that he felt the need of faith, is very probable; but we have seen no evidence that he ever avowed publicly or privately any essential change in his doctrine. He always held that the Catholic faith is the form under which the people do and must receive the truth; but he held that the truth thus received does not transcend the natural order, and is transformed with the _élite_ of the race into philosophy.

We have found in his works no recognition of the supernatural order, or the admission of any other revelation than the inspiration of the impersonal reason. Providence for him was fate, and God was not free to interpose in a supernatural way for the redemption and salvation of men. Creation itself was necessary, and the universe only the evolution of his substance. There is no evidence that we have seen that he ever attained to the conviction that creation is the free act of the creator, or felt even for a moment the deep joy of believing that GOD IS FREE. Yet it is not ours to judge the man. We follow him to the mouth of the grave, and there leave him to the mercy as well as the justice of him whose very justice is love.

We are not the biographer of Victor Cousin; we have only felt that we could not let one so distinguished in life, who had many of the elements of a really great man, and whom the present writer once thought a great philosopher, pass away in total silence. Genius has always the right to exact a certain homage, and Victor Consin had genius, though not, in our judgment, the true philosophical genius. We have attempted no regular exposition or refutation of his philosophy; our only aim has been to call attention to his teachings on those points where he seemed to approach nearest the truth, and on which the young and ardent philosophical student most needs to be placed on his guard, to bring out and place in a clear light certain elements of philosophic truth which he failed to grasp. We place not philosophy above faith, but we do not believe it possible to construct it without faith; we yet hold that it is necessary to every one who would understand the faith or defend it against those who impugn it. If on any point what we have said on the occasion of the departure of the founder of French eclecticism shall serve to make the truth clearer to a single ingenuous and earnest inquirer, we shall thank God that he has permitted us to live not wholly in vain.

Original.

Praises Of The Blessed Sacrament.

Imitated from Madame Swetchine.

O vault of heaven, clear and bright! All spangled o'er with stars to-night, Canst say how many worlds of light Adorn thy glorious firmament?

For here I long my voice to raise To him who hath my heart always. And fain would know how oft to praise The sweet, All Holy Sacrament.

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O shining sun! for every ray That from thee beamed since Eden's day, And shall, till this world pass away, And all thy light and heat be spent:

For each bright ray my voice I'd raise To him who hath my heart always, And sing a canticle of praise To this Most Holy Sacrament.

O trackless sea! could I but save And count each short-lived glist'ning wave; Their sum would tell how oft I crave To praise the Blessed Sacrament.

O fields! for every grassy blade Of which thy beauteous robe is made, Let offerings sweet of praise be laid Before the Blessed Sacrament.

O pleasant gardens! could I know How many flowers within you grow: So many flowers of praise I'd strew Before the Blessed Sacrament.

O wide, wide world! canst tell to me How many grains of dust in thee? So many would my praises be To this Most Holy Sacrament.

O earth! thy praises have an end; To seraphs I the task commend. Their tireless voices they must lend To praise the Blessed Sacrament.

Eternity! duration long! To thee alone it doth belong To measure when should cease the song That lauds the Blessed Sacrament!

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From Chambers's Journal.

Architecture Of Birds.

If we desire to look upon something which the first inhabitants of our planet saw exactly as it is to-day, we have only to stand before a bird's nest. Your bird is no innovator: he laid down the plan of his dwelling at the creation of the world, and, while everything around him has been changing, assuming new forms, yielding to the influence of fashion, has remained content with his primitive architecture ever since. He calculates the number, and considers the necessities of his family, and with unerring sagacity provides for them all. He imitates none of his neighbors, and his neighbors, in their turn, display no inclination to imitate him. There is in our rural districts a tradition of a farmer's daughter, who, having observed her mother winnow at a certain barn-door, stuck to the same locality through life, without the slightest reference to the quarter from whence the wind blew. So exactly is it with the bird. He cares for nothing but his own ideas of comfort, convenience, suitability--whether the original type of his mansion necessitated its being built on the summit of a rook or a tree, under the eaves of a house, or in the thick foliage of a bush, in the crevice of a cliff, or amid the rustling grass of a meadow.

To study the habitations of birds is to traverse the whole extent of man's universal habitation, through every zone from the equator to the polar circle; from the tops of the highest ranges, amid unscalable crags and snows, to the sedgy margin of the sea, and the mossy banks of streams. Whenever the air is fanned by a wing--wherever eggs are deposited-- wherever little bills are opened almost hourly for food--wherever the hen sits, and the male bird roves and toils to support her--wherever, from bough or twig, he pours music into the woods, to cheer his helpmate during her labor of love, there is poetry; whether, as on the lofty surface of Danger Island, or amid the flowery bogs of the Orinoco, the airy artisan works in solitude, or, on village roof and church spire, clings to the vicinity of man. Naturalists gravely inform us that birds are bipeds like ourselves, which in some cases may be thought to account for their fondness for our society, as with the sparrow, the swallow, the red-breast, and the martin; but, on the other hand, several members of this numerous family, though they boast of no more legs than we, make careful use of those they have to keep out of our way. Even among the swallow tribe, there is one remarkable branch which abjures the man-loving qualities of his congeners--we mean the sea-swallow of the Twelve Thousand Islands, which in breeding-time mounts high into the air, takes a scrutinizing survey of the earth beneath, and, selecting for his quarters the least frequented, descends, skims into some lofty cave, and there builds his procreant cradle. In this way he hopes to elude observation. Flattering himself that his whereabouts will remain undiscovered, he darts away with his wife to their favorite element the ocean, where it breaks upon solitary shores, and, flying along its crested surges, gathers from amid the foam and spray the materials of its dwelling, the nature of which still remains unknown. Whatever it may be, it forms a delicate bassinet in which to deposit its eggs and rear its young. Less white than alabaster, the nest of the sea-swallow is of a light color, and semi-transparent, odoriferous in smell, glutinous, and rather sweet to the taste. {350} Rows of these little bowls, which look like so many vessels of porcelain, run along the rocky walls of caverns, and are filled with a thickly bedropped with spots of celestial blue. To the people of the Flowery Land, these nests are a delicacy, which, when of the best quality, are weighed in the market against gold. What, however, renders some nests better than others is uncertain; it may be that in parts of the ocean the ingredient which imparts the most delicate flavor to the substance is not to be found; or else, on shore, the flowers that supply the perfume are too few, so that the swallow is compelled to have recourse to blossoms of inferior sweetness.

From the mouth of the swallow's cave, you may sometimes, from a long distance, discern another and very different specimen of ornithological building. This is a mound, sometimes sixty or seventy feet in length, almost as much in diameter, and about six feet high. This also is a nest, or rather a city of nests, for it is constructed so as to receive a whole republic of birds, who, as in a well-ordered state, have all their separate dwellings, with streets, highways, common chambers, breeding apartments, and so on. In some, there you find callow citizens, or fledglings, or eggs, or the grave parents of the state, discussing or meditating upon its common interests. Nothing can be more curious than a section of such a bird mound, with its various cells and compartments laid open to the view.

From this cyclopean style of architecture, the distance is prodigious to the house of the tailor-bird, which selects for its habitation the inside of a leaf, and with its bill and claws sews its house to it. It takes a filament of fine grass, and, steadying the leaf with one of its feet, uses its bill for a needle, or rather for a borer; then, having made a little hole, it introduces the grassy filament into the edge of the leaf, and afterward doing as much for the other edge, weaves between both a sort of herring-bone netting, strong enough to support its nest. Within this net it immediately begins building until it has wrought a small soft purse, sufficiently capacious to contain the female and her eggs. The habitation being completed, she enters tail foremost, leaving her little head and bill visible at the top of the purse, situated directly under the leaf's stem, and forthwith commences her maternal duties. Now begins the business of the male, which flies backward and forward in search of such delicacies as his lady loves; and, having been successful, approaches the leaf, and, with true martial tenderness, puts them gently into the female's mouth. He then seats himself upon a branch overhead, and, watching his helpmate as she swings to and fro in her airy couch, twitters or sings incessantly to keep up her spirit's.

Among us, the most accomplished bird-architect is the wren, which, in compliment to his building powers, is by our neighbors called the _roitelet_, or little king; and certainly no king has a more comfortable dwelling. The most flexible grass roots, the finest grass, the softest moss, the most delicate down from its own breast, constitute the materials of this beautiful structure, which forms a perfect sphere of dark emerald green. This edifice has two doors, one at which the little king or queen enters, the other through which it emerges when it desires to stretch its wings or plume its feathers. When at home, the point of the bill and the tip of the tail are visible at the opposite entrances, while the vaulted roof protects it from raindrops, and assists in concentrating the heat by which the regal fledglings are hatched. The builder of St. Paul's, when projecting his magnificent dome, may have taken a hint from his ancestors the wrens. But, unwilling to accumulate all her gifts on one of her children, nature has left the _roitelet_ quite without the power of charming Madame Wren by his voice, a fact to which Shakespeare alludes where he says:

"The nightingale, if she should sing by day, When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better musician then the wren."

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But this unmusical character does not belong to all the varieties of the wren, since there is one kind which may be regarded as a songster. With respect to external appearance, there are few northern birds more favored than the golden-crested wren, the feathers of whose crest, as they glance and quiver, look like sprays of burnished gold in the sunbeams. The war recently declared against these little people is as absurd as it is cruel. Supposed to be the gardener's enemies, they have been hunted down without pity or remorse; whereas, instead of destroying the fruit, they only eat the insects which do really destroy it, and should therefore be esteemed as little winged scavengers, who clear away from gardens very much that is pernicious. If we understood our own interest, we should look upon our diminutive ally, not exceeding two drachms in weight, much as the Turks do upon the stork, which they reverence for its filial piety. If contempt can dwell within breasts so small, the wren must surely feel it for the stone curlew, which, too ignorant or too lazy to build a nest at all, lays its eggs on the bare ground, where they are crushed by Hodge's foot or by the plough.

The country people in France love the song of the wren, which is most agreeable in the month of May, that being the breeding-season. In many French provinces, the rustics entertain so great a respect for the _roitelet_, that they not only abstain from injuring it, but will not so much as touch its nest, built sometimes against the sides of their houses or stables, though generally a thick bush or full-foliaged tree is preferred. Like nearly all other birds, the wren takes a fancy to some particular locality, where it will construct its habitation, in spite of dangers and difficulties. Its eggs, from ten to twelve in number, are about the size of peas, and when they are hatched it becomes so fierce and pugnacious that it will attack large birds, and put them to flight by the punctures of its sharp bill. It is the smallest of European birds, and holds, therefore, with us the place which the humming-bird occupies in Asia and America. This diminutive creature, which is as ingenious as it is affectionate, forms its tiny nest with cotton or fine, silky filaments, which it twines and arranges so as to afford the softest conceivable couch for its eggs, which never exceed two in number, and resemble small white beads, dotted with bright yellow. The young, when they first emerge from the shell, are little larger than flies, and perfectly naked, though a fine down soon appears upon the skin, which gradually ripens into feathers so brilliant and dazzling in color as not to be exceeded by the rarest gems, or even by the tints of the rainbow. So great, in fact, is the beauty of these birds, that the ladies of the countries in which they abound suspend them instead of diamonds as drops to their earings.

Tiny as the humming-bird is, neither the eagle nor the condor exceeds it in love for its young. A French missionary, during his residence in Surinam, took a humming-bird's nest in which the young were just hatched, and placed it on the sill of an open window in a cage. The parents, as he conjectured, followed their young, and brought them food, the male and female by turns, which they introduced between the bars of the cage. At length, finding that no attempt was made to harm them, they grew fond of the place, and perching upon the top of the cage, or flying about the room, rewarded the worthy priest by their music for the delicate fare he soon learned to provide for them. This was a sort of soft paste made of biscuit, Spanish wine, and sugar, and nearly transparent. Over this they passed their long tongues, and when they had satisfied their hunger, either fell asleep or burst forth into song. Familiarity, if it did not in their case breed contempt, at least banished all apprehension, for they alighted on the priest's head, or perched on his finger, where their long rainbow-like tails floated like little ribbons in the air. But all earthly pleasures have an end; a rat ate up the humming-birds, nest and all, and left the poor missionary to seek for new companions.

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Down among the coral-reefs in the Southern Pacific you meet with other bird structures, which in their way deserve equal attention. Here the sea-eagles build their nests, always, if possible, in the same islet, and, if there be such a convenience, on the same tree. On a small wild flat in the ocean, too confined to allure inhabitants, and apparently too arid for vegetation, there grew nevertheless one tree, on which a pair of fishing-eagles erected their dwelling. There these lords of the waves, contemplating their vast empire, sat aloft in their eyrie, male and female, looking at their eggs, and dreaming of the future. Our readers will remember the Raven's Oak, which the woodman, whose brow like a penthouse hung over his eyes, felled and floated down the course of the river. So it was with the tree of the fishing-eagles; some savage applied his axe to the stem, and down it came, though, it is to be presumed, not while the young eagles were in the nest, for the mother did not break her heart, neither did the father follow the timber with vindictive pertinacity. On the contrary, having consulted his helpmate, he took up his lodgings in a bush, and there provided as well as he could for the support and comfort of his heirs and successors. There might be tall trees at no great distance, there might also be islands larger and prettier; but he was born on this sandy flat; he therefore loved it, and stuck to it, and, had it not provided him with a bush, he would have built his nest on the sand. Such, over some creatures, is the power of locality. The higher the nature, the more extensive become the sympathies, so that to some it is enough if they can rest anywhere on this globe. They love the planet in general, but would like, if they could, to make a country excursion from it to Jupiter, Sirius, or Canopus, just by way of exercising their wings.

We have seen the humming-bird building in a little garden shrub, the tailor-bird in the folds of a leaf; but there is one of their family which selects a far more extraordinary situation, in order to place its young beyond the reach of vermin. Selecting the tallest tree within the range of its experience, it weaves for itself a sort of long pouch with a narrow neck, and suspends it to the point of a bare twig some sixty or seventy feet from the ground. There, in its pensile habitation, it lays its eggs, warms them into life, and when the callow brood begin to open their bills, feeds them fifty or sixty times in the day with such dainties as their constitutions require. This bird is the _Aplonis metallica_, about the size of a starling, with plumage of a dark glossy green, interfused with purple, which gives forth as it flies bright metallic reflections. The aplonis is gregarious, like man, since it loves to build its nest in the close neighborhood of other creatures of its own species, so that you may often behold fifty nests on the same tree, waving and balancing in the air. On the plain beneath, the aplonis sees from its nest the long necked emu flying like the wind before the hunter, immense flights of white pigeons, or the shy and active bower-bird constructing its palace, four feet long by almost two feet in height, where it eats berries with its harem, brings up its offspring, and, darting hither and thither before the savage, seeks to allure him away from its home. All the shrubs, and vines, and low thickets in the vicinity are haunted by perroquets no larger than sparrows, whose plumage, gorgeous as the brightest flowers, may be said to light up the woods.

The only European bird that builds a pensile nest is one of the family that we familiarly denominate toun-tits. This liliputian architect is as choice in his materials as he is skilful in the arrangement of them--his bases, his arches, his metopes, and architraves consist of cobwebs, the finest mosses, the most silky grasses, which are woven, and twisted, and matted together, so as to defy the drenching of the most pitiless storms, while within, his wife and little ones recline on beds of down as soft as the breast of a swan. {353} Scarcely less genius is displayed by the magpie, which, having constructed its dwelling with extraordinary care, covers it with a sheath of thorns, which, bristling all round like quills upon the fretful porcupine, effectually defend it from the approach of insidious enemies. The portal to this airy palace is at a little distance scarcely visible; but if you diligently observe, you will perceive the magpie dart swiftly between the thorns, and disappear beneath his formidable _chevaux de-frise_. To this stronghold he sometimes carries his strange thefts--his gold and silver coins, his spoons, his sugar-tongs, and any other bright article that strikes his fancy. Birds of the dove kind are proverbial for the slovenly style in which they provide for their families. Putting together a few sticks, which form a sort of rack to support their eggs, they think they have done enough for posterity, and forthwith lay without scruple upon this frail cradle. It may be fairly conjectured that they say to themselves: "If man will eat my eggs, my young ones, and me, upon him be the charge of seeing that I have decent accommodation." In the same spirit act all the barn-door fowls, hardly taking the trouble to find a soft place for their eggs, but laying anywhere, like the stone curlew. This reckless depravity of the maternal instinct has generally been attributed to the ostrich as well as to the domestic hen--but unjustly. She lays, it is true, her eggs in the sand, but not without knowing where she puts them, and not without visiting the same spot daily to lay a new egg, till, as the French say, she has finished her _ponte_. If the case were otherwise, how could we account for finding all her eggs together? Nature has informed her, that in those warm latitudes in which she shakes her feathers, it is quite unnecessary for her to squat upon her eggs, which the solar heat amply suffices to hatch; indeed, so scorching is the sand of the desert, that if she did not lay her family hopes tolerably deep, her eggs would be roasted instead of hatched. To the superficial observation of man, the surface of the desert looks all alike--smooth, undulating, or blown up into hillocks; but the ostrich's practised eye is able to detect the minutest elevations in the arenaceous plain, so that she can go straight to the spot where her first egg has been left, to deposit a second and a third close to it. Indeed, the Arabs, who habitually traverse the waste, sometimes rival her in keenness of perception, and take forth her treasures, while in maternal confidence she is scouring hither and thither in search of food.

To many others among the inferior animals, man deals forth his unthinking reproaches. To the cuckoo, for example, he objects to her habit of obtruding her egg or eggs into other people's premises, and leaving them there to be hatched by sparrow, wry-neck, or starling, as the case may be. But while bearing thus hard upon the cuckoo, he forgets the terrible curse, under which, like another Cain, she walks about the earth, urged forward by some resistless impulse, and condemned to the eternal repetition of two analogous notes--cuckoo, cuckoo. What do those syllables mean? The Abbé de Nemours, who devoted twenty years to the language of birds, or one of the original doctors of the Hellenic mythology, might perhaps have explained, but has not; so we must be content to regard as a mystery the secret of the cuckoo, which in some respects resembles those _ames damnées_ which fly for ever over the Black Sea, according to inconsiderate tradition, for if they never paused to build nests or lay eggs, it must have been all over with them long before this time. The cuckoo has some odd tricks which have seldom been noted; for instance, she seems to find out some small bird's nest, say, in a hole in the wall, too small by far for her to enter. In this case, she squats upon the ground, lays her egg, and then, with bill or claws, takes it up, and pokes it into the hole, after which she flies away, shrieking her awfully monotonous song. {354} In a forest in France, we used day after day to watch this smoky-blue traveller, as, in the dawn of a summer's morning, she flew across the leafy glades, or down the glens, resting her weary feet for a moment on some giant bough, and then shooting away through the soft green light, repeating her strange and ominous cry. What is the original country of the cuckoo? Has she any original country? Or is she not one of those wretched cosmopolites who know no attachment to any hallowed spot, no love or knowledge of parents, having been brought up by strangers, who regarded her from her birth as an ugly changeling, thrust by some evil spirit into their nest? Surely the cuckoo is to be pitied, since she knows no home, has never seen a hearth, or experienced the soft care of fabricating a nest or hatching an egg.

Original.

The Father of Waters.

Some one has said that rivers are the great moving highways of the world. In the earlier ages, when, from a restless and feverish impulse, whole nations became nomadic, their migrations were doubtless influenced by the rivers lying in their track. History tells of barbaric people that wandered around the Euxine and along the banks of the lower Danube found their way to central Europe.

Before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, rivers, and especially the Rhine, played a considerable part in that extensive commerce which found its way from India to the cities of the Hanseatic League. Weary caravans brought the spices, gems, and rich fabrics of the East to the shore of the Mediterranean, whence they were carried westward mainly by Venetian traders timidly skirting the coast in their frail barks, venturing up rivers or making long journeys wherever the prospect of traffic invited. The old castles on the Rhine were built by feudal robbers, who were wont to descend from their strongholds to plunder merchants travelling on this great thoroughfare of mediaeval commerce.

In time they were induced to forego the chances of occasional booty for the payment of a stipulated toll. Doubtless the princely Hohenzollern could trace back their genealogy to the feudal _high-toll_ barons of the Rhine, who furnished the original idea of the modern _Zollverein_ of Germany. _La mer, c'est l'empire_, and, after the great maritime discoveries had opened a new route to India, it, in good part, diverted that distant commerce from the rivers, which the ocean reaches like shining arms over the continents as if to grasp dominion. As the elements of modern civilization became developed, societies crystallized, and the nationalities hitherto disturbed by migrations and conquests settled down where we now find them, rivers came gradually to serve their legitimate purpose of internal and international communication--a purpose resembling that which they fulfil in the physical economy of the earth, they are the veins which bring back to the ocean, through innumerable brooks and rills, seeming to have their sources in the ground, yet having unseen springs in the air, the moisture that the sun has already drawn up from the seas in invisible buckets, and wafted away in shining clouds to be poured out in rain or dew upon the thirsty hills.

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Our own country, however, furnishes the best illustration of the importance and use of rivers. Its great physical features, of which the river system is perhaps the most striking, seem to make it a fit arena for those wonderful triumphs over the elements and the forces of nature which it is our privilege to enjoy. Their vastness would have intimidated races of men, weak and cowardly from long habits of servility, superstitious, torn with fierce passions and hatreds, and able to contend with the fatality of material things only on that diminutive scale afforded by the physical conformation of Europe.

The traveller descending the lower Danube finds the ruins of old Roman towns, Trajan's way cut for a distance of thirty miles in the steep solid rock of the Carpathians for the passage of his Roman legions, and, below the Iron Gate, the piers of Trajan's bridge, erected by him for the same purpose nearly eighteen centuries ago. Hardly less remarkable are the memorials of the bloody wars between the Christians and the Turks, the places made memorable by the campaigns of Eugene and Suwarrow and the Eastern war. But, excepting now and then a walled town, there are to be seen comparatively few habitations of men, and none of that active, sleepless life which lines the banks of our great rivers.

There are no richer plains in the world than those of the lower Danube. Why is it that the pent-up millions of Western Europe do not find their way thither, as in the time of Trajan vast multitudes emigrated from slavery impoverished Italy to that Eldorado of the Roman world? The very facility afforded by the river for hostile inroads has driven or kept the inhabitants from its banks, and to a great extent left them desolate wastes. The feverish restlessness which once made barbarous nations nomadic now seizes upon the individual; and a constant stream of immigration, oppressed by the despotisms of the Old World, bursts forth in the midst of us like a new fountain of Arethusa.

And in our own country the astonishing facilities of communication afforded by the telegraph and long lines of railroads seem to detract somewhat from the importance of rivers. We can only appreciate their value when we think of them in connection with the toil requisite for subduing the wilderness and laying under contribution the resources of our country. How earnestly and bravely our forefathers battled in this warfare, one generation taking up the task where it was left by another, so as to subdue the land and render possible such marvels as the Pacific railroad! Whatever may be the social development of the human race hereafter, and however wonderful the applications of art and science to the uses of life, will not our own age be looked back upon as perhaps the grandest in its history? To have lived in a period that saw the mysteries of Central Africa explained, the continents united with telegraphic nerves, the oceans traversed with steamships and monitors, the seas clasped together with railways, and, as we hope, the thin air made a navigable element, will be to have enjoyed the most startling triumphs of emotion of which the soul is capable.

What first strikes the attention upon comparing the rivers of the New and the Old World is the diminutive size of the latter, especially of many in the most civilized portions of Europe, or rendered famous in classical times. The Nile, with its ancient mysteries, its dim historic memorials of one of the oldest civilizations, its stupendous monuments of human wisdom and of human folly over which the centuries have brooded in solemn silence, and its wonderful physical peculiarities, is, indeed, a magnificent river. {356} Reaching from the Mediterranean to the central regions of Africa, and forming an intimate connection with its great lake and river system, it will doubtless accomplish for that portion of Africa what the Mississippi has done, and is now doing, in the material development of the United States--what the Danube may also accomplish in Eastern Europe, the Amazon in South America, and the Hoang Ho in Eastern Asia, when their expiring strata of civilizations shall have been aroused by the restless, aggressive spirit of modern times. The Jordan is only a mountain torrent. The Tiber and the Po can be swum with a single arm. The Simois and Scamander, the sacred rivers of Troy, are, like the Rubicon, the merest brooks, and would hardly drive a saw-mill. The Cephisus can be leaped across, and the Ilissus scarcely suffices for a few Athenian washerwomen, sorry representatives of its nymphs and graces of old.

The Mississippi river drains not far from a million and a quarter square miles of territory, equal to about one third of the extent of Europe. From the source of the Missouri, on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, to the Balize, is, following the windings of the river, a distance of four thousand five hundred miles. A circular line drawn through the head waters of the Mississippi and its chief tributaries would not be less than six thousand miles in length. With all of its confluents the Mississippi forms a great moving sinuous highway fully twenty-five thousand miles long, and ploughed by many thousand steamboats. They stretch out as if to embrace the beauty, to grasp the wealth, and gather, as into a lap, the products of the vast region between the two mountain chains of the continent; the coal and oil of the Alleghanies, the gold of the Rocky Mountains, the grain, lumber, and lead of the North, and the cotton, sugar, and tropical fruits of the South. Equally well will they serve for the distribution of the Asiatic commerce and travel which will be poured across the continent on the completion of the Pacific railroad. St. Louis may then become a great distributing centre, and the same causes which have made London, Paris, Vienna, and Pekin the commercial capitals of their respective countries, may, in time, give that favored and opulent city the supremacy now enjoyed by the great marts of trade on the Atlantic coast. It is hardly safe to predict what may be the social and material, much less the intellectual possibilities of that near period, when, gliding on "the pale iron edge," we may jostle Chinese mandarins _en route_ for Europe, and European money kings on their way to the Golcondas of the East.

The lotus-eating tourist of the Nile floats dreamily along the river between quaint villages and graceful palm-trees, past the pyramids, past the deserted sites of ancient cities, past the stupendous ruins of Luxor and Thebes. The monotony of the desert is broken by gloomy hills of sunburnt rock, and by the narrow strip of verdure which fringes both banks of the river. Should he push his explorations further, he will come in contact with the barbarous negro tribes of the upper Nile, and may encounter troops of giraffes and elephants.

How different the objects that attract the attention of the voyage up the Mississippi! The eye is charmed with the prospect of orange groves, of vast fields of sugar-cane of the deepest green, and of cotton plantations whose verdure and bloom at the proper season are only equalled in beauty by the snow-like whiteness of the opened balls. The forests are hung with long festoons of moss, giving them a sombre, funereal aspect. For between two and three hundred miles, both river banks, called coasts in Louisiana, are lined almost continuously with plantations, which, before the war, were in a high state of cultivation and furnished homes of luxury. The region now teeming with such active and varied life, inspired by the adjacent city of New Orleans, is made romantic by the adventures of De Soto and La Salle, and the wandering hither of the Acadians, known as _Cagians_ by the Louisianians, whose sufferings in the wilderness excited even the compassion of hostile savages. {357} Further up the river vast forests intervene, with here and there a straggling town or settlement on the banks. The monotony is broken by the sight of enormous flat-boats and rafts floating lazily down the current; and an occasional column of black smoke rising high above the trees in the distance indicates the presence of a steamboat, but, so crooked is the river, it is often impossible to say whether above or below. In consequence of the great bends, approaching boats are sometimes moving in parallel lines in the same direction, or are absolutely diverging and running from each other. Now and then the huge steamboat stops to land, perhaps, a single passenger, or, at long intervals, at a wood-yard where some settler is laying the foundation of a future fortune, the stump being usually the first product of American industry. The rude, vigorous, untamed aspect of the region seems, to a certain degree, to be reflected in the characteristics of the passengers on board. Still further north the traveller begins first to feel the pulses of that wonderful life which is throbbing throughout the great West. Here are vast prairies waving with fields of grain, and dotted with mounds built perhaps before the pyramids of Egypt. Up the Missouri one will soon reach the great plains on which roam herds of buffaloes and tribes of red men. About the head-waters of the Mississippi and its chief confluents is to be found some of the wildest mountain scenery on the continent. Where, upon the banks of a single river, are to be seen such varieties of climate, scenery, and animated life?

Very remarkable are the physical, it might almost be said paradoxical, characteristics of the Mississippi. Its average width below Natchez is not so great as from Natchez to Cairo. At Vicksburg, the river rises and falls about forty feet; at New Orleans not more than twelve feet. During the lowest stage of water, the largest ships experience but little difficulty in crossing the bar at the passes; when the great floods have filled the banks above to overflowing, deep-draught vessels can hardly be got over the bar. Below the mouth of Red river streams run out of the Mississippi instead of into it. Much of the distance below Cairo the river runs, not in an ordinary channel between the hills, but on the crest of a ridge of its own formation. The source of the Mississippi is about two and a half miles nearer the centre of the earth than the mouth, thereby causing it to run actually uphill.

The delta of the Mississippi, properly, extends from the mouth of the Red river to the gulf, a distance of about three hundred miles, following the windings of the river. It has an area of about fourteen thousand square miles, and its numerous bayous form an admirable system of natural canals. To the delta really belongs the left bank of the river below Manshac, where the bayou Manshac formed an outlet from the Mississippi to lake Pontchartrain, until it was closed by General Jackson in the war of 1812, to prevent the British getting into the river above New Orleans. The bayou could not be reopened without jeopardizing the safety of the city. A crevasse some distance above New Orleans, a few years ago, inundated the back streets. Skiffs took the place of omnibuses, and when the waters subsided some of the residents were surprised to find alligators "herbivorating" in their gardens. There is also a large partially alluvial tract west of the Atchafalaya, which covers the wonderful salt mine of Petit Aunce Island, and out through which ooze the petroleum springs of Calcasieu, where the Cagians have long been in the habit or greasing the axles of their rude carts.

Extending from the mouth of the Red river to a point above Cairo is the great alluvial plain of the Mississippi, varying from thirty to fifty miles in width, and containing a territory of about seventeen thousand square miles. {358} The bluffs retreat from the east side of the river in many places, making room for rich bottom lands, and touch the river only at one point on the west side, namely, at Helena, Arkansas. From Cairo to the Balize is by the river almost twelve hundred miles, while in a straight line it is only five hundred. The frequent changes in the bed of the Mississippi, caused by "cut-offs," where it forces a channel through a narrow neck of land around which it has hitherto flowed in a wide circuit, have left numerous semicircular lakes and _fausses rivières_, whose tranquil waters abound with alligators and wild fowl.

The soil of the delta is filled with whole trees deposited while it was in process of formation. A sudden change in the direction of the river sometimes unearths the trunks, standing erect and close together, as if they had grown where they are found. While boring an artesian well in New Orleans, they came upon a solid cypress log nearly five hundred feet below the surface. The Mississippi is said to be, geologically, one of the oldest rivers on the globe. We happened to be with Professor Hyrtl of Vienna a few years ago, when be received, as a contribution to his unequalled museum of natural history, a couple of _ganoid_ fishes, now to be found only in the "father of waters." They were clad in coats of mail, fitting them for existence in bodies of water dashed about by conflicting tempests and currents and convulsed by the upheavals of the earth. At the base of the obelisk of Heliopolis, erected by Sesostris four thousand years ago, one can see that, during that long interval of time, the valley of the Nile has been raised about nine feet around the monument. A friend of mine, engaged in sinking a shaft in the alluvium over the salt mine of Petit Aunce Island, recently exhumed the skeleton of a mastodon, and the rude implements and traces of the habitation of a people that must have passed away centuries ago. Skirting the delta on the gulf shore are vast shell-banks, consisting entirely of millions upon millions of cubic yards of small sea-shells. The popular superstition of the country ascribes their origin to the Indians, who came down to the coast for subsistence and deposited the shells where they are now found. But their existence in such vast quantities, in a purely alluvial region, is one of the curious problems of geology. In view of these facts, what ages upon ages is the mind carried back by the formation of the delta and the great alluvial plain of the Mississippi, to that far-off time when the place they now occupy was covered with a silent sea in which floundered the ichthyosauri of the pre-Adamic period!

The most remarkable feature of the lower Mississippi, and that which gives origin to very many of the peculiarities already mentioned, is the annual rise of its waters in consequence of the rain and melting of the snow above. Egypt owes its fruitfulness in great part to the sediment yearly deposited by the Nile wherever it overflows the land. We saw _fellahs_ scattering seed upon the fresh and scarcely uncovered ooze, almost in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, and treading it in with oxen, as mentioned by Herodotus. The side canals are filled when the flood is at its height, and every possible means is employed to retard the fertilizing waters for irrigation, as rain very rarely falls. Just below the head of the delta an immense _barrage_, or dam, has been built across both the Damietta and Rosetta branches of the Nile, for the purpose of keeping back the flood. When the Nilometer indicates that the river has risen to a certain height, there is rejoicing throughout Egypt, a plentiful harvest being safely predicted from a full river.

It is directly the reverse along the Mississippi. The planter depends upon the rains, not upon irrigation; upon the accumulated alluvial richness of former ages, and not upon the annual deposit of the river. He does not invite an overflow, but labors to prevent it by every means in his power. {359} A low stage of water, like that of 1864, is hailed as a providential blessing. The unprecedented floods of the present year have swept away millions of dollars worth of property, and produced extreme misery.

The lower Mississippi generally begins to rise in November or early in December, and, with rare exceptions, attains the maximum volume in April or May. The rise is at first gradual, and usually comes from the tributaries below the Ohio. As the season advances, the rains and the melting of the winter snows enlarge the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the upper Mississippi, whose freshets, often amounting to devastating floods, and sometimes becoming vast inundations, are successively poured into the lower Mississippi. Finally, and sometimes as late as June, the Missouri contributes the drainage of the great plains and of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. Descending steamboats, which have overtaken and passed the rise, announce the coming of a great tidal wave bringing possible destruction with it. The _bottures_ of the lower river are first covered, the banks are rapidly filled, and the torrent of foaming and turbid waters begins to rush down with accumulated velocity. Immense quantities of driftwood are drawn into the swiftest part of the current, in a continuous line that twists and writhes in the tortuous channel like a great black serpent, or is, day after day, whirled round in vast eddies, as at Port Hudson. Many a Federal soldier who has stood guard on the banks of the Mississippi will remember the great trees, with roots and branches high in the air, that floated down in grim processions, and in the gloom and darkness of the night seemed to glide past like spectral fleets. As the river rises, immense bodies of water escape from the natural channel and flow away into the swamps of Arkansas, Mississippi, and upper Louisiana. The low alluvial plain of the Mississippi becomes a vast reservoir. Without this, it would be impossible to control the flood below. The banks are entirely covered, and the voyager beholds an immense lake spread out before him, whose waters rush through the forest with a subdued and angry roar, the wide open space between the trees alone indicating the course of the river. And now, wherever in this vast region civilization has planted her foot, begins that conflict between man and the elements and the forces of nature, which in one form or another is as old as the human race. In Egypt it was typified in the never-ending contest of Typhon and Osiris. Osiris represented the fertile land of Egypt, the product of the Nile; Typhon, the encroaching desert, as solitary and incomprehensible as the ocean itself, the desert whose storms and waves or shifting sand, respecting only the places they cannot reach, have destroyed armies and caravans, depopulated immense regions, and turned the course of mighty rivers. The old civilization of Egypt, the giant Antaeus of mythology, who could not be vanquished so long as his foot touched the solid, fertile earth, interposed enormous obstacles to the advances and inroads of the desert. Count de Persigny wrote a book during his political imprisonment to prove that the pyramids were built as barriers to protect the alluvial land of the Nile from the encroaching sand of the desert.

To progress is, everywhere, to combat. The human race maintains a perpetual and tremendous strife with the fatality of material things, whether it be in the form of the stubborn elements, the overwhelming forces of nature, or the subtle, inexorable laws that govern the material world. Barbarism is a defeat, from cowardice of spirit; civilization, a triumph over them. And nowhere else is the conflict more terrible than where it is attempted to control the floods that sweep down the valley of the Mississippi from the very heart of the continent. The forces of the winds and of the ocean are not so irresistible. It is a hand-to-hand combat, in which to be vanquished is to be destroyed. {360} The thousands of miles of levees built on the banks of the Mississippi and its great bayous, at an expense of many million dollars, are the means employed to arrest the watery element. In some places they are between fifteen and eighteen feet high, with a base of one hundred and twenty feet. As the threatening river rises against them, they are put in the best condition, and watched with the utmost care, lest the little crawfish, or accident, a storm, or some malicious enemy should make an opening which, ever so small at first, would rapidly enlarge into a crevasse. Sometimes the river bank caves in, carrying away the levee, and permitting the water to rush in uninterruptedly. In the spring of 1863 the writer of this article rode in a carriage one evening around a point of land a few miles above Baton Rouge, which, to the extent of several acres, disappeared during the night. The following day the fields in the rear resembled a large lake. Shortly after the capture of Port Hudson, a portion of the bank slid into the river with a battery of guns. The famous citadel and many of the rebel earthworks on those historical bluffs have since shared the same fate.

Should the levee, from any cause, give way, every possible effort is made to close the breach. Planters from miles above and below hurry to the crevasse with all their available help. Piles are driven into the ground close together, and in two parallel rows a few feet apart, both above and below the opening, and in such a direction as gradually to have the lines approach each other at no great distance in the rear of the crevasse. Between these rows of piles are thrown sacks of earth, hay, or anything that will arrest the rushing flood. Presently the narrowing space between the dams can be spanned with pieces of timber, and then the torrent is soon checked and the levee replaced.

The State of Louisiana paid last year thirty thousand dollars for closing the Bouligny crevasse, a few miles below New Orleans. Crevasses above the city, owing to their greater magnitude, are, however, rarely closed. An effort was made in 1865 to rebuild the great Chim and Robinson levee, on the right bank of the river, a short distance below Port Hudson. This crevasse occurred in 1863, and was of such enormous extent that, through it, a river more than a mile wide and several feet deep rushed out of the Mississippi. A steamboat, several flatboats and rafts, and vast quantities of driftwood were swept into the irresistible torrent. It required over three hundred thousand cubic yards of earth to replace the levee, and an outlay or nearly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The tremendous flood of last April broke through the newly constructed work. The levee commissioners refused an offer to close the crevasse for eighty thousand dollars, and in a few days a great part of the new levee was swept away. Deep gulches were cut in the plantations where the disaster occurred. The ditches were filled, sandbanks formed in many places, and the sugar-cane fields covered with the _débris_ of the Mississippi. There were two or three crevasses of nearly equal magnitude between Port Hudson and the mouth of Red river, and upper Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi suffered terribly from the overflow, caused in great part by the breaking away of the newly built levees. The entire valley of Red river, whose bottoms furnish perhaps the best cotton lands in the world, was inundated below Jefferson, Texas. Many of the best buildings in Shreveport and Alexandria were undermined. The planters betook themselves to the upper rooms of their houses, and the cattle crowded together on the little knolls found here and there on the river bank. A friend who came down during the inundation stated that he saw at least twenty thousand animals thus perishing from hunger, and being gradually swept away by the rising flood. At one time thirteen parishes were said to be in great part under water. {361} Many millions' worth of property was destroyed, and the unstinted charity of the Federal government to the sufferers, through the Freedmen's Bureau, was measured only by cargoes of provisions sent to their relief.

But the overflows of the Mississippi have this year been still more disastrous. Instead of pouring out successive floods, Red river, the Arkansas, the Ohio and its great tributaries, and even the upper Mississippi have risen simultaneously and poured their mighty inundations into the lower river. The Mississippi was at one time fifty miles wide at Memphis, and the great alluvial plain or basin became an inland sea several hundred miles in length. There have for some time been but few places where landings could be made between Cairo and the mouth of Red river. Days and even weeks must elapse after the river begins to recede at Cairo before it can be affected at New Orleans or even at Vicksburg, so enormous is the body of water that must find its way to the gulf. The bottom-lands of Mississippi, especially those of the Yazoo region, and of upper Louisiana, were nearly all under water before the delta people suffered from the inundation. But as the irresistible flood swept down toward the gulf, levee after levee gave way, and at present the tracts overflowed can be estimated only by parishes and counties, the plantations only by thousands, and the loss of property only by millions of dollars. There are nearly a dozen crevasses between the mouth of Red river and New Orleans, not one of which it has been possible to stop. The crevasse at Grand Levee, Morganza, is a mile wide, and through it rushes a river twelve feet deep. To restrain the mighty flood would require immense levees through the entire delta, several feet higher than those already constructed.

The parish of Tensas, the finest cotton district of Louisiana, is almost entirely under water. The inundation extends far up the Cortableau and almost to the rich prairies of Opelousas. The sugar plantations of Terrebonne and Lafourche are invaded by the flood, and the Opelousas railroad rendered useless. The rich lands of Grosse Tête, Fordoce, and the Marangouin, for the first time in the memory of Creoles, are almost entirely inundated. Thousands of families have been driven from their homes. Certain districts, overflowed for three successive years, begin to assume the appearance of a wilderness. The garfish, the alligator, and wildfowl have, in fact, resumed possession of many of the choicest portions of the state. Should the waters not soon subside, the product of cotton on the bottom-lands of Louisiana and Mississippi will be very small. April is the month for planting, and from present appearances the floods will not begin to recede before the month of May.

So great is the interest of the Northern States in the cotton and sugar produced an the bottom-lands of the Mississippi, that evidently the general government ought to assume the responsibility of rebuilding the levees on a scale that will insure protection. This policy would be at variance with the traditions of the government as regards internal improvements. But neither the planters who have hitherto been assessed for nearly the entire outlay, nor the impoverished states, are now in a condition to do what is required.

Of the two plans proposed far leveeing the delta of the Mississippi, one consists in increasing the number of the bayous, or lateral outlets, and thereby diminishing the volume of water in the main channel; the other, in closing up all the bayous, and, with levees of sufficient strength, retaining the floods in the natural bed of the river. In some remarks made upon the subject by Mr. Banks in Congress, he expressed his preference for the former theory, and intimated his intention, should the proper occasion occur, of advocating a large appropriation by the general government to put it in practical execution. The general government has, in fact, virtually pledged itself to undertake the work as soon as the Southern States again come into the Union. {362} Mr. Banks is well acquainted with the topography of Louisiana, and can estimate the enormous outlay required for leveeing the bayous Lafourche and Plaquemine, to say nothing of the Atchafalaya, and opening new outlets, upon each of which, however small, the work would have to be done as thoroughly and upon as vast a scale as upon the Mississippi itself. This theory is based upon the false assumption that, in case of a bayou or a crevasse, the depth of the river at any point below the outlet is diminished exactly in proportion to the quantity of water taken by it from the main channel. When the great crevasse, over a mile wide, occurred last spring above Baton Rouge, I could not see that the volume of water at Baton Rouge was much diminished thereby, but the current of the river was materially lessened. When several large crevasses occur, of course, both the volume and the current of the river below must be diminished. And the slower the current, the greater the deposit of sediment on the bed of the river, the effect of which is to lift up the whole body of water and increase the tendency to overflow. The great _desideratum_ is to prevent the formation of deposit, which can be done only by maintaining a certain rapidity of current. The more effective and scientific plan would, therefore, seen to be to confine the floods to a single channel by means of levees built sufficiently far back to prevent their destruction by the caving in of the river banks, and strong enough for any emergency. The work of leveeing would thus be concentrated, vast areas of now useless swamp-land would be made available, and the bayous could be used as canals for internal communication. Nor should it be forgotten that, as the regions bordering the tributaries of the Mississippi are settled and the forests cleared up, the actual quantity of water drained from them is from year to year diminished. The floods of the upper Mississippi have already been notably affected by this general law. But disasters like those of the present year, although exceptional, can be averted only by levees constructed upon a gigantic scale, and, as the wilderness of the great alluvial plain whose swamps now receive such vast quantities of water becomes settled like the delta, the levees will have to be proportionally enlarged.

From The Dublin Review;

The Church and the Roman Empire. [Footnote 112]

[Footnote 112: _L'Eglise et l'Empire romain au l Ve Siécle._ Par M. Albert de Brogile, de l'Academie Francaise. Troisième partie--Valentinien et Théodose. Paris: Didier.]

When we opened the two last volumes of this noble work, we fancied that, after devoting a considerable degree of attention and study to the fruitful events of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, we had little to learn about its government, its institutions, manners, customs, and modes of thought. We had felt, indeed, a strange interest in watching the slow but sure development of Christianity, as it tumbled down, one by one, every landmark of ancient heathenism; here forcing back the ugly iceberg into its olden limits, there bringing forth a new and verdant vegetation to conceal the blackening ruins of the past; now enchasing, within its virgin gold, some relic of primitive wisdom, or again planting its wooden cross among the wastes and forests of Germania, as a beacon for a future world. {363} And yet, after all, in these last volumes of Prince de Broglie we have found much to admire and much to remember.

Are there many books of which we could say the same? Or, in other words, are there many that would so amply repay the trouble of perusing them?

Whoever undertakes to read any work of serious importance, whatever its nature and subject, will do well to ask himself, when he comes to the conclusion, How has the author fulfilled his promises? How far has he carried out his plan, how far justified his pretensions to impartiality, if we have to do with a historian? The reader will not therefore be astonished that we should apply the same rule to the work now before us. When Prince Albert de Broglie started upon his now completed undertaking, what was his main view and object he himself shall answer in the words he penned in 1852:

"The mild and intelligent influence of the church was never more striking than when she came forth for the first time on the stage of the world. ... In the days when Jesus Christ was born in an obscure town of Judaea, the empire was pacified, the Roman laws established on a sound basis, the Roman manners polished and refined unto corruption; the Roman empire had acquired its utmost development beyond the pale of Christianity, under the shadow of a false worship and of false gods. Everything bore the stamp of idolatry. The civil and political laws, founded first of all by those patricians who were alike priests and lawyers, and then by those Caesars whose supreme pontificate was deemed their prime dignity, were in every direction pervaded by polytheism. Arts, letters, private manners, all was heathen. Not a temple but acknowledged the protection of a divinity--not a poem but embalmed its memory--not a banquet but began with a libation--not a home but kindled a fire sacred to the Lares. Being thus totally independent of Christianity, this civilization was foredoomed to become its enemy--fate, indeed, to which it had not been found wanting. Roman society, giving up for once its usual habits of political toleration, had heaped upon Christianity contempt and insults and persecutions without end. For three long centuries, Christianity had grown up through ignominy and bloodshed. Wise men had scoffed at it, politicians chastised it, the mob hooted it fiercely and savagely. The blood of the martyrs had defiled the basis of the finest edifices in Rome, whilst the smoke of the burning stake had blackened their crowning frontispieces.

"So, when the progress of truth, supported by the revolutions of politics, had at last made the church triumphant with Constantine, what a favorable opportunity and how many excellent reasons had she for overthrowing all this profane and sacrilegious civilization! If, on the very morrow of her triumph, the church had declared open war to Roman society, if she had fired its monuments, broken to pieces its statues, burnt its libraries, overthrown its laws--all this would have been but a lawful deed of reprisal. ... Both means and motives were equally plentiful for this summary justice. Without any appeal to the ardor of new converts, the forests of Germany held within their wastes a reserve of wild auxiliaries, ever ready to undertake the task on their own account. The empire had already received its death-blow, through its own internal anarchy, and through the barbarian invasions. The church stood in no need of dealing the fatal blow--she had but to let it fall. ... This, however, the prudent and tender mother of the human race did by no means do. She looked upon Roman civilization not as the cursed gift of an evil spirit, but as the motley product of human labor. As is the case with every creation of a fallen being, there must needs be found hidden behind the mists of error certain rays of light which were not to be extinguished, but, on the contrary, brought back within the ever-burning focus of eternal truth. Peacefully settling down in the midst of the imperial society, taking up her abode in Rome itself, whilst Constantine flew from the city, as if afraid of the old genius of the republic, the church, far from destroying anything, adopted all, correcting and reforming all by her own insensible influence, raising the victorious sign of the cross above every monument, and breathing the healthy warmth of Christian inspiration into every law. The fourth century of the Christian era is not only remarkable for the men of genius by whom it was illustrated. What is a constant subject of admiration, and what I should not be astonished to see some future historian investigate hereafter more deeply, is that slow labor of purification and absorption to which the Christian religion subjected heathen civilization. It is this transformation of a whole society, not by any material conquest, but through the influence of a moral doctrine, which I shall attempt to bring forth in the following picture." [Footnote 113]

[Footnote 113: V. i., Avertissement, pp. i-v.]

{364}

Most certainly the whole work is but the grand demonstration of the above outline, but nowhere does it come forth in such glowing characters as in the two last volumes. There is hardly a page in which you do not meet with this silent yet ever-rising tide of Christian ascendency, which ends in mastery over every relic of Roman civilization. In vain does the temporal power struggle to maintain its own ground; it is itself hurried on with the stream, and forced to give up the contest in sheer despair. At the distance of sixteen centuries, we are often reminded of what took place at the dawn of our own age; and, could we but change names, we might almost imagine we have before us certain modern figures familiar to every reader. Let us take, for instance, Valentinian I., who ascended the imperial throne in 364 A.C., and chose for associate his brother Valens, as the ruler of the East. Valentinian was a sturdy soldier, an austere Christian, of no original genius, but yet endowed with such qualities as were not unequal to his difficult task.

"Of a cold disposition, inclined to enforce the laws and good order--no less severe to himself than to others--he was sober, upright, and chaste. Though a good soldier and a good speaker, he had not the slightest pretension to wit, nor even to glory. He was a plain matter-of-fact ruler, governing the empire just as he would have done a legion, with a simplicity and a roughness of character exclusively military; showing a harshness that bordered upon cruelty, when he deemed it necessary to the interests of the public service, and yet by no means prompt to avenge his own personal injuries; a man, in fact, having but few wants and no taste for pomp or display, though rigorous beyond measure to replenish the coffers of the state, and to balance the receipts with the outlays of the treasury," (pp. 8, 9.)

Valentinian was in the height of manhood when he was clothed with the imperial purple; but if he felt no exultation, he evinced a keen jealousy for the maintenance of his newly acquired power, hardly allowing a mere suggestion as to its use and exercise. That jealousy and mistrust were extended even to the high influence of the church itself. The very first year of his reign offers numerous traces of that spirit of universal toleration which has become the idol of our modern reformers, yet which was so repugnant to the ideas and feelings of the old Roman world.

Succeeding to Jovian, having witnessed the vagaries of Julian, under whom he had even suffered persecution, the new emperor indeed began by relieving his fellow-believers from their sundry disabilities, but at the same time he put every other form of religious belief on a footing of rigorous equality with Christianity. Thus, if he takes from the heathens the temples which the Apostate had bestowed upon them, these temples became state property, instead of being restored to the Christians--Valentinian so establishing, observes Prince de Broglie, a sort of neutral power between the two contending doctrines. Thus, again, the public schools are opened to all, the clerical immunities and privileges are kept within narrow bounds, the heathen sacrifices are scarcely prohibited; in fact, the most assiduous precautions were taken in order to prevent the very appearance of any subordination of the temporal government to sacerdotal influence. This was, doubtless, a new feature in the sovereign, which took every one by surprise, though many considered it to show a sound policy and practical wisdom. And yet, this very attitude of Valentinian toward the church was but a proof of his real weakness, as the general incidents of his reign were destined to show in strong colors. Valentinian's immediate object was to establish the full and total independence of the secular government. In reality, he rendered still more evident in the eyes of the world its utter helplessness to guard and defend its most important privileges. Thenceforward, to stand aloof from the church on the plea of state policy was an utter impossibility. {365} On the contrary, an alliance with the church was a matter of positive necessity, for no other power in the world could, like her, play the part of a most useful and efficient auxiliary. Valentinian was to learn this at the outset of his reign.

He had hardly arrived at Milan, the capital of the western empire, when he had to encounter the insuperable difficulties of his finely balanced system. A contest had arisen between the Arian bishop Auxentius and the great Hilary of Poitiers. The latter used his utmost endeavors to correct the evils attendant upon the persecution lately raised by the Emperor Constans; but Hilary was by no means disposed to overlook the delinquencies of courtier prelates, who changed their belief according to the whim and will of every new sovereign. Such was Auxentius, who after showing himself a zealous Arian, now displayed no less zeal in his recantations, which did not, however, at all deceive his own flock. The Milanese were steadfast in their opposition to the ever-changing prelate, and Hilary no less staunchly encouraged them in their resistance.

According to Valentinian's system, he should and would have remained neutral between the two antagonists. But such an amount of indifference was not in the habits of the Roman administration. There was nothing so contrary to public order, said many an imperial adviser, as these conventicles of the flock against their pastor, above all when backed by the influence of a foreigner. Since Auxentius consented to sign the orthodox formula, and thus to do away with every vestige of past dissensions, why should others obstinately endeavor to perpetuate them? This was a matter of police regulations, not a question of belief. When people were all of the same opinion, why should not they meet together to pray in the same church?

We can almost imagine that we are reading a memoir sent up by a French prefect to his minister, for the purpose of playing the umpire between some priest and his bishop. At any rate, Valentinian found the advice so conformable to his own ideas, that he unwittingly issued an edict prohibiting the Christians to attend at any ceremony of their worship, except in such places as were subjected to the bishop's jurisdiction. Hilary immediately applied to the emperor himself, and soon showed him his error, which was, however, followed by another step of a still graver character. He ordered that the question should be examined by a committee of ten bishops and two secular magistrates. Auxentius, on being confronted with Hilary, made every admission that was required; yet the latter had scarcely turned his back when the equivocating prelate recanted once more his recantations, and maligned the Bishop of Poitiers to the emperor. His aspersions were but too successful, for Hilary was denied a second audience, and was commanded to leave the town immediately.

The prelate obeyed as a subject, but as a bishop he had a right to speak, and he spoke with a freedom worthy of such a man. His letter, apparently addressed to the public, in reality was a bold protest against the emperor's interference in religious affairs. We doubt whether Constantine would have submitted to such language, which, however, is a landmark showing the progress of Christian ideas as to the relations of the spiritual and the temporal power. But it was the last episcopal act of the great pontiff, who died shortly after.

It is not merely in this direction that we see Christianity gradually asserting its ascendency in the Roman world. Slowly, but surely, the patriciate was yielding to its influence. Accustomed, as we are, to consider the Roman aristocracy as totally effete during the latter period previous to the fall of the empire, we can hardly fancy to ourselves that its grandees were anything else but the degenerate posterity of the Cornelii, the Anicii, and other illustrious _gentes_, of ancient Rome. There were, indeed, so many links connecting them with olden forms and idolatrous ordinances, that to couple them with the new belief seems something bordering on anachronism. {366} And yet the fact really stands thus: Partly through the effect of example, partly through ambition, and partly through an imperious conviction, whole races had embraced the doctrines and practices of Christianity, and soon found out, to their own astonishment, that they recovered at once an unexpected share of illustration and power.

"Christianity, says Prince de Broglie, renewed their influence, by throwing over it a sort of second youth. The day before their baptism, they were wont to squander away their wealth among a motley _plebs_ to gain the bauble of a useless title; on the morrow their charities, scarcely more abundant, but distributed by the discerning hand of the priest, insured them, on the part of the less degraded Christians, a prouder yet more lasting gratitude. Their slaves being gradually emancipated, and prepared for freedom by a pious education, soon formed around them a devoted army. They were no more that vile race of freed-men, a true scourge to the empire, ever ready to pass from an abject servility to the basest treachery. They were all the children of Adam, redeemed by Jesus Christ, in whom their masters revered the remembrance of a primitive equality and the stamp of a newly restored dignity. Within a short time, the authority of the Christian patricians extended far beyond Rome. Having once become members of an association the most extensive and, indeed, the only one then organized throughout the empire, they found themselves by the very fact placed at the head of a powerful party. Since Athanasius, in the days of his exile, had found an asylum in the dwellings of the Roman senators, the Christians of every country were in the habit of applying from the depths of Egypt or of distant Asia to the illustrious families in the capital, whenever they had a church to build, a convent to establish, some ruin to prevent, or some disaster to retrieve; and the alms which usually followed the application were abundantly repaid in popularity and thankfulness. One might compare them to some old trunks falling into decay through the effect of time; should their roots, whilst shooting forth, meet with a rich vein of alluvial soil, they send up a youthful sap, which adorns with a wreath of verdure their dying branches and their blackening limbs." (pp. 23, 24.)

Such was the society in which an Ambrose and a Jerome were formed and brought up--the one learning all those arts and traditions that made him hereafter such an attractive compound (if we may be allowed the term) of sanctity and statesmanship; the other of a more ardent and restless disposition, as if he had brought from his native forests of Dalmatia something of the fierce wildness of the barbarian. Jerome, though a sincere Christian, did not then conform his conduct to his belief; he rather yielded alternately to the allurements of pleasure or to the suggestions of a repentant spirit. He himself tells us that be thirsted for knowledge, being ever on the wing, passing from the Capitol to the Catacombs; almost equally impassioned for the Gospel or for Homer; reading by turns the Scriptures with the fervor of an anchoret or the disdain of an Athenian orator. But still he clung with fondness to the best Roman society, where he was an habitual guest and companion. There is hardly any part of the empire, or any one of its institutions, in which we do not find this all-pervading influence of Christianity. But nowhere, perhaps, is it more evident than in the laws. Volumes have been written upon this subject, and the most lamentable pictures have been drawn of the wretched state of the Roman population, ground down at once by heavy taxation, by the oppression of local governors, and exposed to all the horrors of repeated invasions. Their condition was so melancholy that they fled to the barbarians, among whom they enjoyed more real freedom and greater security than under the rule of their lawful sovereign. Valentinian distinguished himself among many other princes by his extreme severity in the enforcement of the fiscal laws; he hardly admitted any plea or excuse when the treasury was to be replenished; far better than anyone he felt the difficulties of his position, when he had to encounter the numberless enemies of his empire. But he had hardly secured by the most severe measures the public resources in men and money when a reaction ensued. An immense complaint and wailing, says our author, ascended to the throne from every region, and the prince was obliged to bind the very wounds he had inflicted--nay, to countermand the measures which he had adopted under the imperious claims of the public security.

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Among these laws or decrees tending to soothe the pangs of a suffering nation, we must note several that bear evident traces of a Christian inspiration. Thus, close to a law binding the tenant to the land on which he is condemned to live and die, we find another defending him against the excessive pretensions of the landowner. Elsewhere, if the authority of the judges is duly enforced, minute precautions are taken against their accidental or interested errors; they are ordered to enact their sentences in public, prohibited from holding property within the limits of their residence, and threatened with severe penalties if they should listen to the insinuations of informers. At the same time, physicians were appointed to attend the poor in large towns at the expense of the treasury, and other measures of a similar character were carried, all betraying a benevolent disposition totally unknown to the heathen world.

We must refer to the author's pages for many other instances of innovations in which we detect the increasing influence of Christianity, and draw the reader's notice to one of the most remarkable institutions of those times, out of which grew perhaps the ecclesiastical principalities of the feudal ages. As there was a constant stream of grievances and claims sent up from the provinces to the crown, Valentinian thought proper to appoint an official defender of their rights, _defensor civitatis_.

"Such was the title of a new office, which appears for the first time in 365, filling an intermediate station between the _curia_, or municipality, and the treasury. The duties of this new agent were twofold, and well adapted to the high-pressure mechanism which held the _curiae_ responsible for the total amount of taxes due to the fiscus and allowed them at the same time to fall back on the small proprietors of the city. On the defender incumbs the duty, as a representative of the curiales, of discussing with the state the amount of the whole contingent; and then, with the curiales themselves, the aliquot part of each rate-payer. Himself a stranger to the curia, he is obliged at once to protect and keep it within bounds; to speak for it and against it; to defend it, to lighten its burden, and to prevent it from throwing that burden on other people's shoulders. In fact, the defender was something like the popular tribune, whose _veto_ is now directed, not against aristocratical influence, but against the tyranny of the administration. In its decrepitude, the empire was returning, like many an old man, to the habits and ways of its childhood," (p. 51, _seq_.)

But the difficulty was to find a man of sufficient integrity, power, and influence to hold this delicate position between the crown and the nation. In the general downfall of public virtue, there was hardly a citizen or a landowner capable of fulfilling such arduous duties. His magistracy was elective; but it was soon found out that the bishop alone had both virtue and power to withstand the fitful caprices of imperial despotism, no less than the raging passions of the barbarians. Did Valentinian dream of such a result when be instituted the _defensores?_ Doubtless not: and this very fact throws a flood of light upon the real state of things at the period we have before our eyes.

It is not merely in the West that we thus meet with the irresistible ascendency of Christianity, making its way both with and against temporal power; the same spectacle awaits us in a still more striking manner in the East. Every one is more or less familiar with the great struggle between Arianism and the illustrious Athanasius. That contest, however, bore more of a purely theological than of a political character, and we shall therefore pass on to scenes of a different nature, and perhaps less known to the general reader. The famous heresy, so like Protestantism in its main features, was fast dwindling into a court intrigue, though fostered by the weak arm of a Valens. Under that degenerate prince the orthodox bishops were once more banished from their sees; but the church had already overcome two recent persecutions, whilst the state had well nigh succumbed to four successive revolutions. {368} Every man could now see with his own eyes where resided true influence and power, so that, even in a worldly view, it was no longer safe to trust solely to the sovereign's whim and pleasure. Valens himself was destined to experience, in his fatal downfall, that he would have to deal alike with a true bishop and a true statesman in the person of St. Basil, who ruled over the diocese of Caesarea.

The importance of Caesarea, as the ecclesiastical metropolis of Asia Minor, was very considerable, extending its jurisdiction over the independent exarchate of Pontus, and even beyond the limits of the empire, over Armenia and certain parts of Persia. Valens was desirous of placing at the head of this large see one of his Arian creatures; but at the very first rumor of such a scandal the whole population called for Basil, who had not yet been raised to the episcopal dignity. Shortly after, however, the old Bishop of Caesarea offered a share of his power to the popular candidate, who thus was brought forth to the foremost rank in the impending struggle between the church and the emperor.

Valens, after many delays, at last set out upon his progress through Asia Minor. He journeyed slowly, in order to make himself acquainted with the real feelings of the surrounding population. To secure a favorable reception, he sent before him his prefect Modestus, who took good care that no hostile figure should meet the eye of the sovereign. On entering any town, with a numerous retinue of courtiers, the prefect immediately sent for the bishop, and questioned him as to his dispositions in regard to the emperor's views. If the answer proved satisfactory, the prelate was loaded with honors and privileges; if, on the contrary, he adhered to the true faith, banishment or even death was awarded against him. The whole of Bithynia and Galatia was thus traversed by the imperial cortége, which met everywhere that silent attitude on the part of the people so often mistaken for a sincere feeling of satisfaction. At last Modestus entered Cappadocia, on his way to the city inhabited, one might almost say governed, by Basil. And here we must give way to our author's narrative, for no words of ours could supply the interest of the following scene:

"On his arrival in town, the prefect sent for the bishop. Basil obeyed the summons; when he entered the prefect's room, he maintained an attitude of calm superiority, which gave him, says Gregory Nyssa, far more the appearance of a physician visiting a patient than that of a delinquent before his judge. This firmness intimidated the prefect, who had recourse at first to mildness. 'The emperor is coming,' said he; 'pray beware, for he is highly irritated; and, for a mere scruple about a dogma, do not jeopardize wantonly the interests of your church: if, on the contrary, you show yourself submissive, you will feel the effects of his good-will' 'Pay attention yourself,' replied Basil, 'to the fact that you have no power over such men as seek for nothing else but the kingdom of God, and pray do not talk to me as you would to children.' 'Well, but won't you do anything for the emperor?' asked the prefect. 'Is it nothing in your eyes to see the emperor mingling with your flock and becoming one of your auditors? This is what you may gain by yielding a little, and by sacrificing one single word of the symbol.' 'Doubtless, it is a great thing to see an emperor at church, for it is a great thing to save a soul, not only the soul of an emperor, but the soul of any man, whatever it may be. And yet, far from adding to or taking from the symbol one single word, I would not even alter the disposition of the letters that make up the syllables.' 'What, will you forget so far the respect you owe to the emperor?' exclaimed Modestus in a loud voice, and giving way to impatience. 'But in what I do really offend him,' retorted Basil, 'is more than I can understand.' 'Why, you don't adopt his faith, when all around you submit to it.' 'But my own emperor wills it not; I can never worship a creature, having myself been created by God, and called to become one like unto him.' 'Well, but we who command in this place, what do you think of us! Are we nothing in your eyes? and would you not deem yourself happy to be our equal, and to be associated to our dignity?' 'You may lord it over us, and I by no means dispute your exalted rank. To be your equal is, doubtless, a fine thing; but I am already your equal, since you are, like myself, the creature of God, and since I am likewise the equal, which I deem an honor, of those whom you rule.' 'At least, don't you fear my power?' {369} 'What can you do to me?' 'What?--why, inflict upon you any degree of suffering I may command.' 'Pray speak out clearly and tell me what?' 'Confiscation, banishment, tortures--death itself.' 'None of those things can reach me; a man who has nothing leaves nothing for confiscation; a man who is attached to no place, and looks upon himself everywhere as a stranger, is beyond the reach of banishment. What tortures can you inflict upon this weak body, when the very first blow will do for it at once? Indeed, indeed,' added Basil, pointing to his chest, 'you would do me a good service were you to rid me of this miserable pair of bellows. As for death, I should deem it a favor, as leading me to that God for whom I wish to live, and for whose cause I am already half dead.' 'Nobody ever dared,' interrupted Modestus, 'to speak to me in this way.' 'Because you never met a bishop.' Bewildered and angry, yet still afraid of carrying matters to the last extremities, Modestus put an end to the interview by giving the bishop one day for reflection. 'To-morrow you will find me what I am to-day,' concluded Basil, 'and I don't wish that you should yourself change in regard to me.'

"On the morrow, and on the following days, Valens was expected every hour. The bishop was besieged with parleys and entreaties of every description. There was not one noble personage who did not undertake to argue with the prelate. The head cook, Demosthenes--an influential man, by the by--returned constantly to the attack. Modestus, on the other hand, feeling vexed at having no better result to bring before the emperor, and anxious to avoid any charge of weakness, made public preparations for an execution. Heralds, lictors, executioners--every judicial agent was summoned, ready at a signal to seize upon the factious priest. Having thus taken every precaution, the prefect, somewhat abashed, yet confident at least in his preventive measures, repaired to the prince. 'Emperor,' said he, 'I have failed in my attempt; this man is unmanageable; threats, entreaties, kindness, are all unavailing with him. This is a matter of stern severity; do but give the order, and it shall be fulfilled.' But this was exactly what Valens was not inclined to do. Though no less incensed than bewildered, still be did not dare to shed such illustrious blood on the path he was about to enter. He reprieved the execution, and penetrated into the city in a sort of wavering state of mind, just like a piece of iron, says Gregory Nyssa, already melting in the fire; but nevertheless still remaining a bit of iron.

"He continued in this mood, irresolute as to his line of conduct, and without holding any communication with the bishop's dwelling. A meeting, however, became unavoidable, for the festival of the Epiphany was approaching; and, unless he chose to put himself outside of the church, Valens could not do otherwise than attend at divine service. On the morning of the feast, he therefore came to a determination, and went to the temple with an escort of soldiers, himself doubting whether he would be received peacefully, or would have to force an entry through violence. He entered: the crowd was most numerous, and had just begun the choral psalms; the chant was both harmonious and powerful, the whole service offering that appearance of majesty and order which Basil excelled in maintaining in his church. At the bottom of the nave stood Basil himself, facing the people, but motionless like a pillar of the sanctuary, and with his eyes fixed upon the altar. There he remained standing, just as the acts of the saints represent him, his tall or rather towering stature showing off his spare and slender figure, while his aquiline features were strongly brought forth by his thin, emaciated cheeks; a latent fire flashed from under his prominent forehead and his arched eyebrows, whilst now and then a somewhat disdainful smile parted on each side of his mouth his long white beard. All around him stood his clergy in an attitude of fear and respect. At this imposing sight Valens stopped, as if suddenly seized with a sort of bewilderment. The service continued as though his presence had passed unperceived. At the offertory, he stepped forward to present the gift which he had prepared; but no hand was held out to receive it; nobody came forward to meet him. A cloud passed before his eyes; he staggered on his legs; and, had not one of the attendants supported him, he would have fallen to the ground. Basil had pity on his anguish, and waved with his hand that the offering should be accepted.

"The next day, the emperor having recovered his composure, returned to the church, and, feeling bolder, resolved to speak to his terrible antagonist. The service being over, he passed behind the velum where the officiating priest was wont to retire. Basil received him with kindness, in the presence of his faithful friend Gregory, who had hastened to his side. The interview was a long and peaceful one. Basil fully explained to the monarch his reasons for not conforming to his wishes, and even entered into many theological developments. By thus flattering his vanity, and by appearing to set some value on his opinion, he kept him for several hours spellbound by his lucid and powerful eloquence. This, by no means, satisfied many of the by-standers, who had already gone over to Arianism, and some of them endeavored to interfere. Among these was the unfortunate Demosthenes, who made an attempt at a theological argument, but in the midst of his demonstration he unwittingly coined a most ridiculous barbarism. 'Strange,' exclaimed Basil, smiling, 'here we have caught Demosthenes blundering in Greek!' The emperor departed, somewhat pacified, and bestowed upon Basil a piece of land for a hospital which he had founded," (pp. 94-103.)

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What a picture! what a lesson for every one! How it brings home to every mind the fact that a new power had arisen, which was more than a match for worldly rulers, though clothed with even imperial purple. In the present instance, the lesson became still more apparent, when Valens left Caesarea without having dared to sign a decree of banishment against Basil, and fully convinced that a supernatural agency interfered to protect him. In the West, observes Prince de Broglie, Valentinian endeavored to maintain a neutral position between the church and heathenism; but he found it impossible to keep his ground, and his own measures turned against him. In the East, Valens aimed at governing against the church, but was overcome by the sole ascendency of sanctity combined with genius. The time, in fact, was come when the temporal power proved to be utterly helpless to save a crumbling state of society from its utter downfall, and when the fundamental principles on which all society must ever rest were to be recast and remodelled by more skilful hands, though even through a dark, chaotic period, to serve again in future days as the substratum of modern Christendom. Geologists plunging into the bowels of the earth tell us of primitive periods, and primitive creations, that appear to our wondering eyes as the forerunners or foreshadows of our own world. We read something of the same kind in the facts and incidents of the fourth century: the priestly power makes itself already felt in a Basil, or in Augustin, much as it was hereafter displayed in a Gregory I., or a Lanfranc, or an Anselm, or even a Hildebrand. Doubtless, Basil and Ambrose were no Hildebrands, but they are of the same race and genus--there is a family likeness between them all, because, perhaps, the same spirit burns within them, whatever may be their outward figure or robe. To convey our meaning through another simile. You enter a gallery, containing the portraits of some eminent family, whose deeds have left their imprint for ages on the country to which they belong. You take your stand at the founder of the illustrious stock, and probably his large, open, noble figure sinks at once into your memory, as if you had before you some huge relic of the fossil world. And then you go on, following, one by one, each successive representative of the time-honored generations. The ancestral likeness becomes almost extinct, and you vainly endeavor to retrace in the effeminate lineaments of a courtier the eagle-eye and haughty traits of his forefathers. But all of a sudden you are riveted to the spot by the portrait of a youth, who seems to embody within himself every distinctive mark of the whole race. You would almost mistake him for a son of the original founder, and yet he bears so completely about him the peculiarities of his own time that to place him anywhere else would be committing an utter anachronism. Your mind is, as it were, thrown off its balance, and you hardly know how to account for the delusion. Something of the same kind occurs when you compare certain prelates of the middle age, or even of later times, with the last bishops of the Roman empire; and nowhere does this highly interesting fact come forth in stronger relief than in the work before us. It would be easy to demonstrate the assertion by other incidents belonging to the life of St. Basil; we prefer giving a still better proof in St. Ambrose, the celebrated bishop of Milan.

He was the last Roman statesman, just as Theodosius might be termed the first Christian emperor. He had been brought up in the familiarity of Probus, one of the most eminent patricians of the great city. As he himself belonged to a noble family, he had learned at an early age all the traditions and arts of the Roman government, whilst the austerity of his religious principles guarded him against the allurements of pleasure. {371} Of an open, commanding exterior, a good speaker, well versed in literature, no less proficient in the laws of his country, it seemed natural that with such eminent qualifications, backed with excellent connections, he should attract the sovereign's notice. This actually took place, and he was appointed to the consular government of Milan. But the times were dangerous, for the unbending disposition of Valentinian had now become tyrannical. Probus was by no means blind to the peril incurred by his youthful _protégé_; and on taking leave of him the veteran politician simply said, "Child, I have but one piece of advice to give you. Behave, not like a governor, but like a bishop." The advice was characteristic and pithy: Ambrose remembered it well. In the midst of the universal confusion and terror caused by the emperor's cruelty, Milan enjoyed the greatest order and tranquillity. No riots, no insurrections, no complaints; the thing was in itself a wonder, more particularly, if we recollect the dissensions existing between the Arian bishop Auxentius, and the better part of his flock. In fact, a young governor setting an example of chastity, integrity, and humanity--showing himself affable, just, or merciful according to the occasion--never sacrificing to his own ambition or private interests the time and property of others; such a man, says Prince de Broglie, was, in the eyes of the population, fit to grace the episcopal seat far better than the praetorium of the civil magistrate.

The popular election of Ambrose to the episcopacy is too well known for us to relate once more a story that has been so often and so ably told. What we wish particularly to bring forward is the secular character which is constantly enforced upon a bishop of those times, whether he wills it or not, from the very simple reason that he could do what no other could accomplish.

Ambrose had scarcely been consecrated--he had scarcely bestowed the whole of his large fortune upon the poor, he had scarcely given himself up to the absorbing duties of his new position, when be was called upon to guide the first steps of his own sovereign, young Gratian, who had just succeeded to his father Valentinian, and raised Theodosius to the throne of the East. Both these princes were sincere Christians, but Theodosius had been brought up in the camp, had tasted the bitter cup of adversity, and added to the qualities of a good soldier those of a cool judgment and a sound heart. Gratian, on the contrary, was a mere stripling, whose intentions were upright, but who had hardly any experience in public affairs. He thus was naturally disposed to lean on Ambrose, whose advice, both as a pastor and a statesman, might be so eminently useful. That advice was not wanting, and for some time the policy of the Western Empire was in reality the policy of Ambrose. We use the word advisedly, for no other could better answer to our meaning and to the real state of things. At the same time we beg the reader to remember that not for one minute does the bishop separate his strong, manly adherence to the gospel from his views as to the secular government; both are, indeed, so blended, so utterly identified, that it becomes as impossible to distinguish them one from another, as it is to mark where the influence of our bodily organs terminates, and where that of our soul begins. The evils of the times were too frequent, and too poignant, not to require the interference of Ambrose--not to make him bold, even as a bishop, a sort of civil magistracy, of which his flock would have been the very last to complain. Though he had not the slightest idea of using his sober but penetrating eloquence for anything like popular demonstrations, yet he was not the man to refuse the part or an intercessor, if a population, suffering from oppression, claimed his support; or if the sovereign asked of him to strengthen his wavering counsels, he would readily hold out a helping hand.

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And here we may find, with our author, manifest indications of that great Christian doctrine, the "_de jure_" alliance of church and state. Ambrose had been formed from childhood upward to a certain course of ideas, which led him naturally to assume a large share in the direction of public affairs.

"He could not apprehend the notion that the empire should have no official form of worship, or rather that it should have two religions together at one and the same time. He was shocked at the sight of an incoherent confusion of Christianity and heathenism to be met with at every step throughout the West, and nowhere more than at Rome itself. The churches and their rival temples, both opened on the same day, by order of the senate or emperor, for the same official ceremonies; Jupiter and Mars, two glorified demons, associated with the one jealous God, as the protectors of the commonwealth; invoked in the same language, thanked for the same favors; and then the monuments covered with profane inscriptions, the statues of idols towering over the basilicas, or defying on the public squares and at the corner of every street the cross triumphant; all this adulterous mixture of truth and error, which the Christian emperors had never dared to proscribe completely, scandalized the jealous purity of his faith quite as much as his taste for administrative regularity. As a prefect, he would have gladly put an end to such confusion, as being a public nuisance; as a a bishop, he felt indignant against so poisonous a profanation. The empire acknowledging but one master, and there being but one God in heaven, why should not these two unities be linked together by an indissoluble union? Why should the state tolerate within its limits anything beyond those two grand unities? On this central point Gratian and the bishop agreed even before they had seen each other. The alliance of the church and state, which the timorous conscience of a Gratian had looked for, Ambrose was ready not only to recommend, but enforce as a duty," (vol. ii. p. 18.)

It would hardly be possible to point out in more positive terms the doctrine which became the groundwork of Christendom in after times, a doctrine which a St. Gregory VII. and an Innocent III. were to carry to its extreme consequences. This was the germ, destined to unfold itself slowly underground, until it should rise and develop its branches in the feudal times, serving as a stay and prop for an anarchical state of society. But let us not wander beyond our subject. Gratian and Ambrose were soon closely knit together in the greatest intimacy, and ere long the influence of the master mind became apparent. Between 378 and 381 Gratian dwelt almost constantly at Milan, issuing new laws, which all bear the stamp of a priestly impulse, which all are inspired by a man who could not forget that _he_ likewise had held civil power. In everyone of these enactments, justly observes our author, we perceive certain dispositions tempering rigor by clemency. Thus it is, for instance, with those privileged corporations of the Roman empire, which were at once a resource and a source of ruin for its very existence by their extortionary tendencies; thus, again, with a more equitable distribution of the annona, which is modified according to the dictates of charity. Elsewhere measures are adopted against burglary or brigandage, but at the same time qualified by certain humane clauses, as to the mode of repression. In fact, the civil ruler shows himself less authoritative, less imperious, less harsh and arbitrary in the display of his power; and yet we meet with a greater firmness, never baulked by alternatives of weakness and helplessness.

In other directions these laws assume the form of what we might call public manifestations of the imperial conscience. Let us supply a few instructive instances.

Milan, August 3, 379.--General law against heretics, expressly modifying the edict enacted at Sirmium in the preceding year, and extending to such sects as shall debase _by their sophistry_ the notion of God, the prohibition of propagandism, which had already been laid upon those who _annulled baptism by renewing it_, (Donatist.)

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Milan, April 24, 380.--Women of low extraction, and condemned by that very fact to appear on the stage are freed from any such obligation as soon as they embrace Christianity; "because," says the law, "the better mode of living they have adopted liberated them from the bond of their natural condition: _Melior vivendi usus vinculo naturalis conditionis evaluit_."

May, 381.--The above law is restricted; "for such women as abandon the purity of a Christian life shall not enjoy the above exemption."

July 21st.--Liberation of certain criminals, in honor of Easter.

May 2, 382.--Penal measures are denounced against those apostates who shall preach apostasy. Whoever abandons the Christian law to embrace idolatry, Judaism, or Manichaeism, is declared incapable of making a will, one of the greatest penalties to which a Roman could be subjected. And all these measures were crowned by another, which made a deep impression throughout the whole empire: the statue of Victory was definitively removed from the hall where the senate assembled at Rome for its deliberations. This was perhaps the greatest proof of the influence which Ambrose had over the imperial mind, and not one heathen, of high or low degree, mistook the hand that had dealt the blow.

At any rate, Ambrose was not the man to deny it. Symmachus, one of the most illustrious patricians, who belonged to the heathen party, having sent up to the throne a petition, whose object was to obtain the restoration of the statue, Ambrose himself entered the lists in a counter petition, or rather manifesto, in which we see at once the bishop and the statesman.

"Every man [says he] who acknowledges the Roman rule bears arms for the emperors and princes; you are verily the militia of an all-powerful God, and of the most holy faith. For there is no security for man himself if he does not worship the true God--the God of the Christians, who governs all things; he alone is the true God, and demands that we should adore him from the bottom of our souls. The gods of nations, say the Scriptures, are nothing else but devils.

"Now whosoever serves that God ought to bear within him no dissimulation, no reserve, but devote his whole being to him. If he does not entertain such feelings, he ought at least to offer no external consent to idolatrous worship, or to a profane worship; for no one can deceive God, to whom the secret of our hearts lies open. ... I am really astonished that any man should hope to see you restore the altars of the Gentiles, and give money from your coffers for profane sacrifices. .... O emperor! do not allow any man to deceive your youth. ... And I likewise, I am for following the experience of the wise, but God's counsels must rule supreme over all others. If we had to do here with some military concern, you should consult and follow the opinion of the best approved generals. But in religious matters you are bound to listen to God. Is the man who gives you this piece of advice a heathen? Well, don't force him to believe what he won't believe; but then let him allow you, O emperor! the same freedom: let him not attempt to force upon the sovereign an act of violence that he would not himself endure at his hands. The very heathen does not like a man to belie his own creed; every one ought to maintain the free and sincere convictions of his own mind. Should those who hurry you on to such a decision be but nominal Christians, pray, do not allow yourself to be deluded by a name. Whoever advises you in this way sacrifices to the gods, whether he admits it or not. ..."

Ambrose wound up by requesting to obtain communication of the petition, with a view of answering it. "In a worldly suit," said he, "you would listen to both parties. This is a matter of religion. I, the bishop, I come forth to defend her. ... If you refuse me, no bishop will submit peacefully to such an iniquity; you may still apply to the church, but you will not meet any more with priests, or at least with any who will not be ready to resist you."

Thoroughly to appreciate the weight of this strong language, it must be remembered that many a lukewarm Christian within the imperial council inclined to the restoration of the famous statue. To refuse the request of Ambrose would, however, have been imprudent, and besides, Valentinian the Younger revered and loved the venerable bishop, who had shown him great kindness in trying circumstances. Once in possession of the pagan manifesto, the great prelate of the West dealt with it in a manner which scattered to the four winds both its arguments and rhetorical flourishes. {374} The whole composition is a masterpiece of sound reason and gentlemanly satire, forming a thorough defence of Christianity against idolatry. When it was read before the council, every wavering mind was struck dumb with astonishment, whilst the youthful sovereign broke forth in the following impassioned words: "It's the voice of Daniel; I will not undo what my brother did." Of course the cause of the goddess Victory was lost for ever.

But something was not and could not be lost--we mean the contest between the church and idolatry, that survived even the final crash of the empire. Yet that crash, though imminent, could not yet be foreseen by either party, still less perhaps by Ambrose himself, who was a true type of the old Roman. His constant object seems to have been to revive the pristine policy of his forefathers, by instilling new life into them, thanks to the sublime doctrines of the new faith. So things went on just in the same way, Christianity impregnating more and more the habits, institutions, and laws of ancient society, but for purposes that were still the secret of Providence. In the mean time Gratian was murdered by the usurper Maximus, and Ambrose was once more called to negotiate with the murderer, and to defend the last relics of the Valentinian family. A short time yet runs on, and Theodosius remains sole ruler of the whole civilized world--a ruler according to the heart of the holy bishop of Milan. With an Ambrose and a Theodosius to prop the tottering edifice, what might not be expected? And yet it was not to be. These two bright figures are but a transient gleam between two storms. Alaric was born--nay, more, he had been a silent spectator in the glittering crowd of courtiers who attended at the coronation of Theodosius. How many wild dreams of invasion, and burning cities, and bloody battles were teeming at that very moment in the brain of that young barbarian!

Singular enough, the first occasion on which Ambrose and Theodosius met, as it were, in public, gave rise to a contest. The emperor, irritated at the summary destruction of a Jewish synagogue by one of the Eastern prelates, had ordered it to be rebuilt at the expense of the prelate. The bishop was absent from Milan when the order was given and sent; on his return, he felt indignant that a Christian prelate should be bound to rebuild a temple dedicated to the execration of Jesus Christ. It was in his eyes a sort of prevarication far more guilty than the violation of any civil law. He immediately wrote to the emperor in the strongest language; and here again he sets forth that great Christian doctrine which was afterward so fully developed and exemplified in the middle age. The whole incident is so striking that we shall give it in the words of Prince de Broglie:

"Ambrose begins by a short insinuative exordium: 'Listen to me, O emperor! as you wish that God may listen to me when I am praying for you. If I am not worthy of being heard by you, how should I be worthy of transmitting your wishes and prayers? If it be not proper for an emperor to fear plain speaking, it is not likewise proper for a priest to disassemble his thoughts.'

"He then enters fully and unreservedly into his own doctrine: he maintains the unlawfulness of any help given by Christians for the construction of an edifice destined to error; and the faithful, but, above all, the bishops, have no more the right to do it than the emperor to impose it upon them. If the bishop yields to the imperial order, he becomes guilty, and the emperor responsible before God for the bishop's weakness. 'So you must see,' pursues Ambrose, 'whither you are going. You ought to fear quite as much the bishop's obedience as his resistance. If he is steadfast, fear to make a martyr of him; if he shows weakness, fear that you may bear the weight of his fall. And, indeed, how will your order be fulfilled? Should the Christians refuse to accomplish it, will you force them to it through violence? So you will be obliged to confide to the Count of the East your victorious standards, your labarum; nay, the very standard of Christ himself, with the mission of restoring a temple, wherein Christ will be denied. {375} Well, pray order that the labarum shall be carried into the synagogue, and then see whether anyone will obey you. ... History tells us that idolatrous temples were erected in Rome with the spoils of the Cimbrians. In our days, the Jews may engrave on the frontispiece of their synagogue: Temple built with the spoils of the Christians. Public order requires it, will you say? So the appearance of outward order must lord it over the interests of faith! No; authority must yield to piety.'

"It would be impossible to assert in language of more rigorous cogency the supremacy of the religious law over every civil law. The church, in her maternal prudence, is far from having ratified on these delicate points the tenets of Ambrose: as she never imposed upon the faithful the obligation of building temples to error, so has she not forbidden them to contribute to their material preservation whenever equity, previous engagements, or the necessity of repairing wrongs requires it of them. It is, therefore, by no means astonishing that Theodosius, arguing like a civil lawgiver, should have deemed these demands excessive, or even that he should have given way to an unusual fit of ill humor. He allowed the letter to remain unanswered. And yet it contained toward the end two lines which offered matter for consideration. 'Such is my request,' said the prelate; 'I have done all in my power to present it with that respect which is due to you: pray, do not force me to speak out in the church.'

"Indeed, as soon as he returned to Milan, Ambrose availed himself of the very first opportunity to speak out at church, and before Theodosius. He chose for his text the words of Jeremiah: 'Take up thy walnut staff, and walk forth.' He boldly asserted that the staff mentioned by the prophet was the sacerdotal rod, intended far less to be agreeable than useful to those whom it scourges. He then recalled several examples of the old law, such as Nathan and David, thus showing that in all times the ministers of God had never spared the truth to kings. The comparison was in itself clear enough, and Theodosius must have felt somewhat uncomfortable at the very first words; but still he could hardly expect that the orator should address him personally. And yet such was the case, when Ambrose said by way of conclusion: 'And now, O emperor! after speaking of you, I must speak to you; reflect that the more God has raised you up in glory, the more you ought to show deference to him who has given you all. .... It is the mercy of Christ which has made you what you are. So you must love Christ's body, or the church, you must wash her feet, kiss them, perfume them, so that the whole dwelling of Christ shall be filled with your good odor; in other words, you must honor the meanest of his disciples, and forgive them their faults, since the repentance of one single sinner gives joy in heaven to all the prophets and apostles. The eye cannot say to the hand, I do not want thee, thou art unnecessary. Every member of the body of Jesus Christ is necessary, and to every one of them you owe protection.'

"The bishop came down from the altar after uttering these words in a tone of severity, and in the midst of the general amazement, for all were aware that the emperor was accused, but no one knew the motive of the reprimand. Theodosius, of course, could not for one instant remain doubtful. Stopping the prelate as he passed by, 'So you have made me the subject of your speech,' said he in an angry tone. 'I said what I deemed of use to yourself,' replied Ambrose. 'I see very well,' resumed the emperor, more moved than ever, 'that you have been speaking of the synagogue. I admit that my orders were somewhat harsh, but I have already mitigated them; and then those monks yonder are so wrong-headed.' [Footnote 114] Here a courtier thought fit to inveigh against the monks, but he was soon stopped by Ambrose, who, once more addressing the emperor, 'I am going to offer the sacrifice!' exclaimed he; 'allow me to offer it for you fearlessly: free me from the burden which weighs down my soul.' 'Well, well,' replied Theodosius, as he sat down again, 'the orders shall be modified, I promise you.' But such a vague promise, and made as it was in a sullen mood, was not deemed sufficient. 'Cancel the whole affair,' insisted Ambrose; 'for, if you allow one tittle of it to remain, your magistrates will take advantage of it to grind down the poor Christians.' The dialogue proceeded in the midst of the whole assembly, and the situation became at last downright intolerable. The emperor gave way, and promised whatever was exacted. 'You swear to it,' said Ambrose; 'I am about to offer the sacrifice on your word. Mind, on your word,' he repeated a second time. 'Yes, on my word,' replied Theodosius, who wanted, at any cost, to put an end to such a scene. The holy sacrifice began; 'and never,' said Ambrose the next day to his sister, 'never did I feel so sensibly the real presence of God in prayer.'" (Vol. ii. pp. 247-254.)

[Footnote 114: The Emperor's expression is far stronger: _Menachi multa scelera faciunt._.]

What a scene indeed! And how it brings out at once the rapid progress which Christian feeling had made of late throughout the empire. Better than the famous penance of Theodosius in the cathedral of Milan, it shows us how strongly the slightest deviation from the general range of Christian opinion worked upon the people. For, in fact, we do not detect here the slightest mark of disapprobation, far less of indignation, among the audience. {376} Any other feeling but astonishment is not once perceptible, and even that is caused by ignorance of the case, not by any want of sympathy for Ambrose. His conduct seems to be taken for granted on the part of his flock, however extreme and out of place it may appear to modern readers. We are justified in considering such cases as signs of the times; fifty years before they could not have taken place, and we doubt whether Constantine would have allowed himself to be thus browbeaten in an open church; sixty years after--the world had fallen a prey to the barbarians, and it was all over with the Roman empire.

Another observation of no less importance is the fact that conduct like this on the part of Ambrose did not in the slightest degree deprive him of any influence with the emperor. Quite the contrary; as long as Theodosius remained in Italy, there prevailed the greatest intimacy between these two illustrious personages. Ambrose naturally resumed the station of a confidential advisor, to whom every political affair is freely communicated. No doubt that his opinions might be followed in a less servile manner than under Gratian, but the sovereign himself was a man of mature years, accustomed to all the arts of government, and thus a better appreciator of the bishop's lucid views and truly Christian politics. On both sides there sprang up a sort of mutual understanding, closely bordering on a footing of equality, as one might expect between two master minds. It is indeed probable that to Ambrose we owe the permanent establishment of an Eastern and Western Empire, a division founded upon necessity, and well calculated to avert its imminent ruin.

"Si Pergama dextra Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent."

Nor was this all, for other measures reveal the same influence. Contrary to what took place on such occasions, the revolution which placed Theodosius at the head of the whole empire cost no other blood but that spilt on the field of battle against the usurper Maximus. There were no executions, no confiscations, no acts of vengeance; for the first time, Christian mildness and charity had the day to themselves. Such policy, good in all times, was excellent at a time when hardly any monarch could reckon upon transmitting his imperial crown to his immediate descendants.

The reader may now, we trust, form a definite notion of what he may expect to find in the _church and the Roman empire during the fourth century_. It is a general review of what the church maintained, preserved, and appropriated to herself among the confused elements of which was made up ancient civilization. Among that huge mass of elements we have purposely selected the most striking, as offering the best instances of that constant though silent transformation which society itself was undergoing previous to the creation of feudal Christendom. That, in the six octavo volumes before us, there are numberless instances of the same kind, must be evident to every intelligent mind. As another inducement to study the book, we may add that the holy father has bestowed upon it the highest praise in a brief addressed to the author--the best reward, assuredly, which his truly Catholic mind could have wished.

And now, lastly, for one most important application of those historical facts which the Prince de Broglie has placed before the world. To those who are familiar with the annals of the two centuries which preceded the utter downfall of the Roman empire, there is a striking resemblance, in a moral view, with what is going on in our own times. Wherever we cast our eyes, we find a motley assemblage of high-flown philosophical doctrines blended with the most degrading superstitions of polytheism; or at Alexandria, the Neo-Platonic schools borrowing a few partial tenets of Christianity, which it mixes up with a sort of juggler's theurgy. {377} After listening to the apostles of this celebrated school, we had but to cross the street to attend at one of those instructions or lectures--how shall we call them?--in which the Christian teachers, priests, and bishops developed the sublime tenets of the redemption. And again, a little further on, we might have stepped into the Serapeum, and there witnessed the immoral mysteries of the Egyptian worship. And so was it, more or less, over all the Roman world.

Doubtless between our own times and those there are many differences, but how many no less striking points of resemblance? We meet with no immoral mysteries in the public worship, but how many cesspools of the same kind in the lower ranks of society--cesspools emitting such loathsome exhalations as would have shocked more than one heathen philosopher? There are no barbarians at our doors, ready to rush in through every gap and weak point of the body politic; but kings put forth their armies, in order to establish the supremacy of might over right; and their attempts are successful, and on the footsteps of their victorious legions an intoxicated multitude of admirers hurry on, shouting, "Hurrah, hurrah!"

And well may they shout "_Hurrah!_" for they, in their wild ovations, do but foreshadow the advent of a still wilder democracy, animated by all the insensate passions of self-worship. Such, indeed, is the form of idolatry which modern nations have assumed, in defiance of the living God, in defiance of a blessed Redeemer, in defiance of every dogma held sacred to mankind. Such are the barbarians, henceforward to be subdued, converted, baptized once more by Christianity, unless the world itself be condemned to rock and totter to and fro between anarchy and despotism. Take it as you will--consider it as you please--run over England, or France, or Germany, or Italy, or the eastern wastes of Russia,--everywhere you will descry and bear the ground-swell of the huge human tides as if awaiting but the breath of the blast to foam, and surge, and lash itself into fury. Again, the forthcoming invasion is of a far more alarming character than that of the German savages; for, born and nurtured in the bosom of Christianity itself, it has profited by all its lights, benefited by all the forces of modern science. Nay, more, our rising democracy is backed by a host of learned infidels, whose only aim and end is to annihilate revelation, so as to raise in its stead the adoration of man as God. Who will dare to deny that such a situation is fraught with imminent peril or refuse to repeat with an ancient, "_Corruptio optimi pessima_"?

And now as to our helps. An eminent French writer lately remarked in the Revue des Deux Mondes that, after all, in the present state of society there is nothing more alarming than in what has ever taken place since the very birthday of the new dispensation. Has it not ever been its fate to struggle against evil doctrines, evil practices, and evil doers? But, then, in all times it successively modified and tempered anew its weapons, according to the wants and exigencies of every age. This indeed is the very secret, in a human view of the subject; this is the secret of its ascendency over heathen corruption, feudal violence, monarchical despotism, or even revolutionary anarchy. Now, one of the most extraordinary features of the present age is that of thirsting after civil and political liberties, which seem destined to become the ground-work of every future state or government. Let us observe that this very feeling--however vitiated and disturbed it may be--is an offspring of the gospel, and, as such, worthy of our respect. So why should it be so difficult for Catholicism to bring about a conciliation between its sublime doctrines and the new cravings of civilized Europe?

{378}

"Is the notion of liberty (asks M. Vitet) alien and unknown to Christianity? Was it never enforced within its bosom? Did the church never practise it? On the contrary, did not liberty surround her cradle? Was it not in the church that arose a whole system of elections, debates, and control, which has become both the glory and rightful goal of our modern institutions? To make peace with liberty, to live cheerfully in its company, to understand and bless its favors, is that the same thing as to absolve its errors? Is that to concede one jot to misrule and anarchy? 'No,' will reply some good people; 'for God's sake, don't mix up religion with party questions. Don't drag her into such quarrels. The more she keeps aloof from the affairs of this world the more steadfast will be her empire.' Granted; and above we have insisted upon this truth; but still, however disengaged from politics, from worldly interests however absorbed in prayer and good works we may suppose religious people and the clergy, still how could they live here below in an utter state of ignorance as to what was going on? Were it but to attack the vices, the baseness, the disorders of our age, must they not know them, witness them, with their own eyes? We put the question to those pious souls who are scared at the very association of the two words--liberty and religion. Are we not delighted that eloquent voices should condemn and brand in the holy pulpit the vagaries of our modern spirit, the revolutionary frenzy, and all those impious doctrines which are a scourge to society? Well, if religion is right in waging war against false liberty, why should not she be entitled to speak of sound liberty? Why not encourage her to speak of it with kindness and sympathy, duly appreciating its generous tendencies, making it both beloved and fully understood? Otherwise, what sort of Christianity is yours, and what do you believe to be its fate? Are you not making of it a narrow, contracted doctrine--a privilege of the few--the tardy and solitary consolation of old age or grief? If of Christianity you ask nothing more, if you are satisfied with allowing it to live on just enough to show that it is not dying, like one of those ruins protected by antiquarians, and never used, though objects of general reverence--why then you must separate it from the rising generations, from an overflowing democracy; you must allow it to become isolated and to grow old--to bury itself complacently in the past, in contempt for the present, just like a scolding, querulous, morose, unpopular old gentleman. But if better apprehending its true destiny, you wish Christianity to obtain a salutary influence not only over yourself and your friends, but over all mankind, let it penetrate into the hearts of all your brethren, young and old, low and high; let it fire them with the spirit of justice and truth; let it transform them, straighten their paths, purify them, regenerate them, by speaking their own language, by taking interest in their ideas, by yielding to their wishes, without either weakness or flattery, just as a kind father draws around him all his children by making himself once more young among them, by consenting to their requests while he corrects their faults, guards them against the dangers of life, and teaches them the narrow, severe paths of wisdom and truth." [Footnote 115]

[Footnote 115: Revue des Deux Mondes, Feb. 1, 1867. The above article, written by M. Vitet, member of the French Academy, will certainly well repay the reader's perusal, and enlighten him as to the situation of Catholicism in France. It is indeed astonishing that such a paper should have been published by that truly infidel periodical; in fact, Paris readers are fully aware that the editor consented with the greatest difficulty to its insertion. But then he had of late lost so many Catholic subscribers.]

A leaning, then, toward the cause of civil and political freedom might probably become a powerful help to Catholics in the present and future crisis by which the world is now threatened. As M. Vitet very properly remarks, they would not have to sacrifice one single principle; and such an attitude on their part might pave the way for many a conversion. Yet such a help is evidently but a poor one after all--a mere matter of expediency. It is from above and in herself that the church must look for her real helps. And here we are brought round at once to a strong resemblance between the actual state of society and that of the fourth century after Christ. The result of a most extraordinary progress in physical science has bent the minds of men toward sensual enjoyment and money making. "Put money in your purse" seems now the motto of almost every living man, and in England more than in any country. But we may already see what are the effects of this ruling passion, and how it gnaws at the very vitals of our social body. The only means of counteracting this fatal craving are the same through which Christianity conquered the heathen world. Evidently Catholicism alone commands those means, for it is hardly worth while to take into account that bastard, inconsistent system, yeleped Protestantism, which has arrived at its lowest period as a spiritual doctrine, and rather promotes than checks the materialistic tendencies of the day. {379} So to set, as in olden times, bright example of asceticism, humility, charity, self-renouncement, strong faith, and a no less strong love of the poor--such are the chief weapons of the church in her warfare against her antagonists. Most fortunately, she appears at present to put forth her best approved armory in this respect; for never, whether among the clergy or laity, did there exist a more exalted ideal of Christian perfection, nor a stronger will to carry that ideal into execution. Half the work is done, and we have but to maintain our ground manfully in front of our common enemy to win the day.

And yet the day may not be ours. Another world, another form of society may reap the harvest that we have sown. When St. Ambrose and Theodosius, like two brave swimmers, breasted the wave of corruption, quickly followed by the wave of invasion, they fondly imagined, perhaps, that they were securing once more the props of Roman society, or founding a thoroughly Christian empire. Ambrose above all, a true Roman of the old stock, could apprehend no other institutions, no other government but those which had borne the test of a thousand years. Though a saint and a statesman, he could not read the signs of the times; and if he could not, who could? The future was in the hands of God; Ambrose labored and toiled for nations yet unborn, but which were already bursting the womb of their mother Europe. Yea! and so may it be with the men of our own generation.

From the Italian of Manzoni.

The Death of Napoleon. [Footnote 116]

[Footnote 116: The translation of this poem from the Italian of Alexander Manzoni was made by the late Rev. Thomas Mulledy, Provincial Superior of the Jesuits of Maryland. Manzoni is a standard writer in Italy, and the ode "Il Cinque di Maggio" is a household poem with the Italians.]

MAY 5, 1821.

He's gone: as void of motion lay, When the last breath had winged its way, His stiffened corse--of such a soul Bereft so struck from pole to pole, The astonished world astounded hung, When in its ears his death knell rung: Silent in dumb reflective power It mused upon the final hour Of that great man--that man of fate, And knows not, if with equal weight A mortal foot shall ever press Its bloody dust with such success.

{380}

Him shining on a gorgeous throne My muse beheld--nor struck one tone While fortune's wheel its circles flies. He falls, gets up--then prostrate lies; While thousand voices rend the air, Her voice amongst them none can hear. Exempt from every servile praise, For outrage base she forms no lays; But now, when such a beam had fled, She quickly rears her drooping head, And round his urn, with heaving sigh, She weaves a song that may not die.

From Alpine heights to Egypt's shrine, From Mansanares to the Rhine, His thunderbolts unerring flew Close to his vivid lightning's hue, From Scylla to the Tanais roars, From Asia's bounds to Adria's shores. Was this true glory? undefiled? Posterity, just, unbeguiled, The arduous sentence must proclaim, Whilst we before our Maker's name Must bow--who wished in him to shine An impress vast of _hands divine_.

He felt the stormy, trepid joy Of great _designs_--without alloy; The anxious heart--its feverish pains-- That eager burn--to seize the reins _That guide to power's airy height_. He grasped them, _and with hardy might_ He gained the proud reward--which seemed To all a folly e'en t' have dreamed. All things he tried: bright glory's sweet _Increased by frightful danger's heat,_ _Fair_ vict'ry's _smiles_, and _sadd'ning_ flight, The _sunny_ throne, and exile's night: Twice prostrate in the dust he lay, And twice he blazed in _glory's day_.

His name was _heard_: submissive turned Two ages--that with fury burned-- And, trembling, stood before his seat, In expectation of their fate: He bade them hush with lordly frown, And as their umpire sat him down. He disappeared: his shortened days He closed, far from the busy gaze Of men--a mark for envy's dart, For purest piety of heart, For hate, that can no act approve, And for indomitable love.

{381}

As o'er the shipwrecked sailor's head The wave rolls up, with terror dread, That wave, from whose bleak top before He searched, in vain, for distant shore; Soon that soul the sick'ning weight Of mem'ry felt, and brooding sat. How oft be undertook to paint Himself to future days--when faint Upon the eternal pages sunk His hand, and in himself he shrunk.

How oft, upon the silent close Of some dull, tedious days, he rose, And bending down his lightning eyes-- His hand thrust in his bosom lies-- He stood: and gloomy mem'ry's roll Of days gone by attacked his soul! He thought upon the tented field, The sounding plain with bayonets steeled, The splendor of his marshalled brave, The chargers rolling in a wave, The throbbing breast, the quick command, And prompt obedience of his band.

Perhaps with torturing cares opprest, His wearied spirit found no rest, And he despaired: but quick was given An aiding hand from piteous heaven, To lift him up--from this dark sphere, And place him in more genial air. And through hope's smiling, flow'ry way To guide him to the fields of day; To those rewards that far transcend The hope that vast desires lend: Where gulfed in darkness sinks each ray Of glory that has passed away.

O faith immortal! beauteous! kind! Turn'd to triumphs o'er the mind! Write this one too--rejoice! be glad! For never yet a prouder head, Or one on loftier deeds intent, To Calv'ry's infamy has bent! Off from his ashes do thou guard All malice black--each venomed word The God who overthrows--and when To pity moved--rears up again-- Who scatters terror to the poles! The God who, when he wills, consoles; That God has placed himself beside The desert couch--on which he died.

{382}

Translated from Le Mousquetaire.

Sketch of Père Hyacinthe.

The discourses of Père Hyacinthe, in the church of Notre Dame, have been numerously attended, and the sacred eloquence of the orator has furnished subjects for the strangest criticisms that have appeared in what has been called, in the nineteenth century, the profane world.

It is not my intention to give you a portrait of Père Hyacinthe. It has already been drawn by a master hand. I wish merely to sketch the features, the figure, and the personalities of this great saver of souls.

The preacher, who now attracts to Notre Dame the thinking minds of Paris, is in stature above the middle size; his head is closely shaven, like all those of the order of barefooted Carmelites. It is well known that the disciples of St. Teresa wear but a circlet of hair. It is their earthly crown. His form is too large for the size of his head; his face is monkish; his forehead recalls to mind that of St. Augustine; his eyes have rather the expression of seeking truth than of imparting it; but the mouth opens freely to let fall the word of God upon his hearers; the chin, without being aristocratic, is not wanting in a certain nobility that redeems his appearance, which at first sight is ordinary.

On the whole, Père Hyacinthe carries one's thoughts back to those monks of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, who, regardless of personal safety, fearlessly crossed the thresholds of palaces to make the dignitaries of earth listen to the teachings of charity, love, and of liberty. This preacher has been accused of voluntarily laying aside spiritual subjects to descend to the things of earth. This reproach is unjust.

It is necessary to speak of what interests people the most; meet them at their own doors, live their lives, and suffer with them. Christ spoke in parables that the ignorant might understand him better, and the poor flocked in crowds to hear these admirable teachings which transformed the old world and regenerated humanity. For different times we must take different means. In this age the man of God desires to enlighten both Scribes and Pharisees, and to warn noble ladies of the seductive temptations of Bael. What can be found objectionable in the earthly character of these teachings? In spite of philosophical reasonings, we must fall back upon the old adage, "The end justifies the means."

I do not wish to institute a comparison between Père Hyacinthe and the sacred orators who have preceded him, but I have heard two of his sermons in Notre Dame. Not being able to judge which was the best, I can only decide which pleased me the more. Père Hyacinthe possesses in the highest degree the gift of awakening man to a proper estimate of himself. Elevate the creature, and he approaches the Creator.

I have the honor of knowing a priest who exercises his holy ministry in the vicinity of our Lady of Loretto. He is the most amiable and benevolent man that I have ever had the good fortune to meet.

He speaks to the humblest sinner as St. Charles Borromeo spoke to the thoughtless Milanese. He has words of consolation and charity for all classes of unfortunates. His door is open to them at all hours of the day or night. Thus has he labored for several years, and God alone knows how many wandering sheep this minister of Christ has brought back to the fold, and how many erring hearts he has reconciled to God, to their families, and to society. {383} Certainly there do not exist two kinds of morality, but the application of morality can and ought to vary according to the situation in which they who are in need of instruction are placed.

The church of Notre Dame is to my mind one of the churches in the world which most elevates the soul and brings it nearer to God. I like the Gothic church; it seems to me that prayers ascend more easily to heaven through steeples whose spires are lost in the clouds.

The Greek Byzantine style is both rich and beautiful; but I think it wanting in majesty. My soul is more deeply impressed upon entering the portal of one of the cathedrals upon the Rhine than upon ascending the steps of the Vatican.

The other day, upon listening to the touching eloquence of Père Hyacinthe, I could not drive from my thoughts the sad remembrance of a sermon I heard several years ago in the same place from another celebrated preacher. I had then for a neighbor in the church of Notre Dame an abbé whose memoirs have formed the subject of one of my best works. The orator selected for his discourse the subject of devotion, "Thou shouldst love thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself." All is contained in these admirable words; the law and the prophets.

Such were the first words of the preacher, who from this starting-point caused his hearers to traverse ages, tracing at length the great efforts of those noble hearts who devoted themselves for the good of humanity.

The subject was beautiful, and the orator was truly convincing, every heart beat in unison.

I looked at my neighbor, he was inspired. Before me was an apostle who asked no greater happiness than to suffer martyrdom for the glory of God and the good of his fellow-creatures.

Subsequently I learned the precise details of the life of the priest, who called himself the Abbé Bernard.

His history is so interesting that I cannot deny myself the pleasure of writing it a second time. The father of the abbé had accumulated great wealth in lending money with interest. He was one of those practical men who shut up their hearts in their money chest.

Widowed in early life, he sent his only son to college, where he remained until he had attained the age of seventeen; he then removed him to finish his studies by travelling for two years in England and eighteen months in Germany.

In translating the works of Shakespeare and Goethe, the young Bernard had acquired a knowledge of the two living languages that are now the keys of the commercial world.

He then returned to Paris, with his thoughts more filled with poetry and philosophy than with a mind prepared for the sterile labors of an accountant.

His father, upon placing him in his counting-house, generously allowed him a salary of 2,000 francs. Forced into acquiescence, Bernard began the life of an accountant, in which he continued for several years. Unhappily, the young man fell in love with the daughter of his father's cashier. She was a beautiful blonde, had every desirable quality, but possessed no greater fortune than modesty. Bernard's father, who had other views, dismissed the cashier from his employment and commanded his son never to speak to him again upon the subject of that foolish union. The young man fell ill, but his father remained inflexible, "I would rather," said he, "see him laid in his coffin than give him in marriage to an inferior. I have not worked like a horse and economized for forty years for the bright eyes of Mademoiselle Marie Closet; more than that, it is the extreme of folly; the time has passed ages ago since anyone died for love."

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The father was right, nature triumphed over the malady, and the young Bernard's health was soon restored. The first day he went out during convalescence, he hastened to the father of his beloved, who declined seeing him, not wishing to give a pretext for calumny. Despairing on all sides, the young Bernard resolved to put an end to his existence; a frequent recourse for despairing lovers of twenty and twenty-five years!

His mother, a holy woman, had before her death inculcated in the spring-time of his life religious precepts, of which be retained the faithful remembrance. Strange caprice of the human heart! at the moment he determined to offend God the most, be felt unwilling to die before entering a church.

Finding himself within two steps of the church of St. Vincent de Paul, he entered the temple. Lights burned before the two altars. At his right, a marriage was being celebrated, and at the end of the chapel a funeral service was being performed. The bridal party was not numerous; but the deceased must have occupied a high position in society, judging from the numbers who followed his remains to their last resting-place. Bernard became absorbed in prayer. When he raised his eyes, he saw before him a young priest blessing the assemblage. An idea quick as lightning crossed the mind of the self-destroyer. It is noble, thought he, to console others, even when there is no hope of happiness for one's self. A week had not elapsed before Jean Léon Bernard entered a theological seminary. Two years after be received ordination; he never saw his father again, but the banker settled upon him an annuity of three thousand francs. The young Levite was sent to a small village to begin the exercise of his holy ministry. After celebrating his first mass, he found upon entering the sacristy a letter awaiting him sealed with black. His father had just died and left him an inheritance of over four millions.

Remember Christ himself has said, "The poor and those who lead sinful lives are in great need of being encouraged and consoled." Bernard returned to Paris, the great centre of glory and the abode of every misery.

When I first saw him at Notre Dame, the Abbé Bernard had been administering his admirable charities in that capital for ten years. From the time he put on the soutane he lived the life of a saint, his days and nights were at the disposal of suffering humanity. He passed his time and consecrated his life to healing the wounds of the soul and curing those of the body. He multiplied himself, as it were, to accomplish his hard task. He was soon everywhere, carrying words of peace to the dying, of hope to the occupants of prisons, and alms to the afflicted of all classes.

Indefatigable in well-doing, with charity for the faults of others, this worthy disciple of Christ exercised severity only toward himself.

Though scarcely forty years of age, he appeared more than fifty; in the vigor of life he was bent like an old man. The worn features and the cadaverous paleness of his countenance would have given him a doomed look, had not his whole aspect been illumined by the divine halo of charity.

I will relate a few more particulars, in the brief space allotted me, of the life of this priest and the manner of his death. In order to fulfil a great mission of charity this abbé set out for Rome. Arriving at Marseilles, he learned that a change consequent upon the state of the tide would compel him to wait three days for a boat leaving for Civita Vecchia.

Patience being a Christian virtue, the worthy priest submitted to the necessity without a murmur. Having nothing better to do, he set out upon a tour of investigation through this interesting city, which, thanks to the conquest of Algeria and the opening of the isthmus of Suez, should become at some future day the first maritime city of the world. Pursuing his walk, he took a cross street dividing the port from the oldest quarter of Marseilles. He had hardly advanced thirty steps, when be found himself among a crowd assembled before a house of humble appearance. A horrible sight burst upon his vision. A woman stood before the door uttering the most piercing shrieks.

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The priest asked, "What is the matter?"

"What! Monsieur le Curé!" replied the porter at the gate. "Do you not understand that here lies another victim to the terrible epidemic which is ravaging the city, and that this woman is shrieking for help for her husband who is dying?" Without waiting for the sentence to be finished, the Abbé Bernard made his way through the crowd and directed his steps toward the unhappy woman. "Take me to your husband," said he, extending his hand toward her.

The woman regarded him earnestly, but, prevented from replying by choking sobs, she showed him the way to the third floor. Upon a rough bed a naked man was prostrated. Two of his comrades were rubbing him with woollen cloths.

Finding himself in the presence of cholera the abbé reflected a second, then wrote some words upon a detached leaf of his note-book. "Here," said he to the elder of the two porters, "is an order and five francs. Run quickly to the apothecary's! I will take your place until you return." The priest took the cloths and rubbed the poor unfortunate. Under his skilfully applied friction the sick man became calm; but upon seeing the costume of the priest he could hardly contain himself with terror. "My God!" cried he, "must I die? Yes, they have brought me a confessor." The abbé assured him he would be better. The messenger returned bringing the medicines. The priest remained three hours by his bedside, and when the doctor arrived he declared him out of danger.

In the south, the people are sensational and carry their feelings to great excess. We can hardly wonder, then, that in their enthusiasm the woman and porters carried the Abbé Bernard out to the street in triumph. Unhappily, while enthusiastic, they are superstitious. The crowd immediately spread the report that the priest had power to cure the cholera. At the end of the street, a woman, upon seeing the abbé, threw herself upon her knees, exclaiming with sobs: "Father, my child is dying; I have only him on earth; in the name of the Holy Virgin save him." The indefatigable apostle of charity followed her to the poor little creature only five or six years of age, whom he found rolling in agony. God has not given to man the power of staying the angel of death when he turns from his path to strike the infant in its cradle. Prayers and science are often powerless. Notwithstanding, the child was saved.

The worthy abbé did not regain his hotel until a late hour, greatly overcome with fatigue. The next morning he did not leave his room. Toward noon, fearing he was ill, they visited him, and found him with closed eyes and a smile upon his lips. He was dead. The good pastor had given his life for his flock.

Such was the man I had for a neighbor at one of the sermons of Père Lacordaire. Such was the man whom memory recalled to my thoughts yesterday while listening to the last discourse of Père Hyacinthe.

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Original.

The Two Lovers of Flavia Domitilla.

By Clonfert.