Part I.

It stood in one of the wildest spots in New England, surrounded by woods, a “frame house” in a region of log‐houses, and, as such, in spite of defects, a touch beyond the most complete edifice that could be shaped of logs.

The defects were not few. The walls were slightly out of the perpendicular, there were strips of board instead of clapboards and shingles, the immense stone chimney in the centre gave the house the appearance of being an afterthought, and the two windows that looked down toward the road squinted.

Yes, a most absurd little house, with all sorts of blunders in the making of it, but, for all that, a house with a worth of its own. For Jack Maynard had put the frame together with his own unassisted hands, had raised it with but two men to help him, and had finished it off alone. And round about the work, and through and over it, while his hands built visibly, his fancy also built airy habitations, fair and plumb, and changed all the landscape. Before this fairy wand, the forest sank, broad roads unwound, there was a sprinkle of white houses through the green country, like a sprinkle of snow in June; and in place of this rustic nest rose a fair mansion‐house, with a comely matron standing in the door, and rosy children playing about.

At this climax of his castle‐building Jack Maynard caught breath, and, coming back to the present, found himself halfway up a ladder, with a hammer suspended in his hand, the wild forest swarming with game all about him, and the matron of his vision still Miss Bessie Ware, spinster.

Jack laughed. “So much the better!” he exclaimed, and brought his hammer down with such force, laughing as he struck, that the nail under it bent up double and broke in two, the head half falling to the ground, the point half flattened lengthwise into the board, making a fragment of rustic buhl‐work.

“There’s a nail driven into the future,” said the builder, and selected another, and struck with better aim this time, so that the little spike went straight through the board, and pierced an oaken timber, and held the two firmly together, and thus did its work in the present.

“Well done!” said Jack; “you have gone through fifty summers in less than a minute.”

The startled woods rang to every blow, the fox and the deer fled at that tocsin of civilization, and the snake _slid_ away, and set the green grass _crawling_ with its hidden windings. Only one living creature, besides the builder, seemed happy and unafraid, and that was a brown‐and‐white spaniel that dozed in the shadow of the rising walls, stirring only when his master whistled or spoke to him.

“Wake up, Bruno, and tell me how this suits your eyes,” Jack would call out. Whereat Bruno would lift his lids lazily, show a narrow line of his bright brown eyes, give his tail a slow, laborious wag, and subside to his dreams again, and Jack would go on with his work. It seemed to be his heart, rather than the hammer, that drove the nails in; and every timber, board, latch, and hinge caught a momentary life from his hands, and learned his story from some telegraphing pulse. The very stones of the chimney knew that John Maynard and Bessie Ware were to be married as soon as the house should be ready for them.

There was not a dwelling in sight; but half a mile further down the road toward the nearest town, there was an odd, double log‐house, wherein lived Dennis Moran and his Norah, three little girls, and Bessie Ware, Dennis Moran’s sister’s child.

Jack paused in his work, took off his straw hat to wipe away the perspiration from his face and toss his hair back, first hanging on a round of the ladder just above him the hammer that had driven a nail through fifty summers. As he put his hat on again, he glanced downward, and there, at the foot of the ladder, stood twenty summers, looking up at him out of a face as fair as summers ever formed. The apple‐blooms had given it their pink and white, the June heavens were not bluer than those eyes, so oddly full of laughter and languor. The deepest nook under a low‐ growing spruce, nor shadow in vine‐draped cave, nor hollow in a thunder‐ cloud, ever held richer darkness than that hidden in the loose curls and waves of hair that fell about Bessie Ware’s shoulders. No part of the charm of her presence was due to her dress, save an air of fresh neatness. A large apron, gathered up by the corners, was full of fragrant arbor‐vitæ boughs, gathered to make a broom of. The large parasol, tilted back that she might look upward, allowed a sunbeam to fall on her forehead.

“Oh! what a tall pink has grown up since I came here!” exclaimed the builder, as he saw her.

“And what a great bear has climbed on to my ladder,” retorted the girl.

He came down from the ladder and began to tell her his plans.

“Bessie, I mean this shall be yet one of the best farms in the state. On that hill I will have corn and clover; there shall be an orchard in the hollow next to it, with peach‐trees on the south side of the little rise; and I will plant cranberries in the swamp beyond. In ten years from now, if a man should leave here to‐day, he wouldn’t know the place.”

Bessie smiled at the magician who was to work such wonders—never doubting but he would—then glanced about at the scene of his exploits. Sombre, blue‐green pines brooded over the hill that was one day to be pink with clover, or rustling with corn; oaks, elms, maples, birches, and a great tangle of undergrowth, with rocks and moss, cumbered the ground where peaches were to ripen their dusky cheeks, when Jack should bid them grow, and large, green, and red‐streaked and yellow apples were to drop through the still, bright, autumn air; and she knew that the future cranberry‐ swamp now stood thick and dark with beautiful arborvitæ trees, whose high‐ piled, flaky boughs, tapering to a point far up in the sunshine, kept cool and dim the little pools of water below, and the black mould in which their strong roots stretched out and interwove. But Jack could do anything when he set out, and her faith in him was so great that she could shut her eyes now and see the open swamp matted over with cranberry‐vines, and hear the corn‐stalks clash their green swords in the fretting breeze, and the muffled bump of the ripe apple as it fell on the grass.

After a while, Bessie started to go, but came back again.

“I forgot,” she said, and gave her lover a book that had been hidden under the boughs in her apron. “A book‐pedlar stopped at our house last night, and he left this. Uncle Dennis doesn’t want it, and I do not. Perhaps you can make some sense out of it.”

It was a second‐hand copy of Comstock’s _Natural Philosophy_, for schools, and was scribbled through and through by the student who had used it, years before.

Jack took the book.

“And that reminds me of your white‐faced boarder,” he said, with a slight laugh. “Is he up yet?”

“Oh! he gets up earlier than any of us,” she answered lightly. “He doesn’t act cityfied at all. And you know, Jack, the reason why he is white is because he has been sick. Good‐bye! Aunt Norah will want her broom before she gets it.”

Bessie struck into the woods instead of going down to the road, and was soon lost to view. Standing beside her little house, she had looked a tall, fairly‐formed lassie; but with the great trunks of primeval forest‐ trees standing about her, and lifting their green pyramids and cones far into the air, she appeared slim and small enough for a fairy. Even the birds, chippering about full of business, seemed to flout her, as if she were of small consequence—not worth flying from.

She laughed at them, and whispered what she did not dare to say aloud: “Other people besides you can build nests!” then looked quickly around to see if any listener were in sight.

There was a slight, rustling sound, and an eavesdropping squirrel scampered up a tree and peered down with twinkling eyes from a safe height. She was just throwing one of the green twigs in her apron at him, when she heard her name spoken, and turned quickly to meet a pleasant‐ faced young man, who approached from an opposite direction. This was the white‐faced boarder who had left the city to find health in this wild place.

The two walked on together, Bessie as shy as any creature of the woods, and her companion both pleased and amused at her shyness, and trying to draw her out. To his questioning, she told her little story. Her mother was Dennis Moran’s youngest sister, her father had been a color‐sergeant in the English army. There had been other children, all younger than she, but all had died, some in one country, some in another. For Sergeant Ware’s family had followed the army, and seen many lands.

“I am an East Indian,” Bessie said naïvely. “I was born at Calcutta. The others were born in Malta, in England, and in Ireland. It didn’t agree with them travelling about from hot to cold. My father died at Gibraltar, and my mother died while she was bringing me to Uncle Dennis Moran’s. May God be merciful to them all!”

Mr. James Keene had heard this pious ejaculation many a time before from the lips of humble Catholics, and had found nothing in it to admire. But now, the thought struck him that this constant prayer for mercy on the dead, whenever their names were mentioned, was a beautiful superstition. Of course he thought it a superstition, for he was a New England Protestant of the most liberal sort—that is, he protested against being obliged to believe anything.

They reached the house, near which Dennis Moran and his wife stood watching complacently a brood of new chickens taking their first airing. The young gentleman joined them, and listened with interest to the farm talk of his host.

What had set Dennis Moran, one of the most rigid of Catholics, in a solitude where he saw none of his own country nor faith, and where no priest ever came, he professed himself unable to explain.

“I’m like a fly caught in a spider’s web, sir,” he said. “When Norah and I came over, and I didn’t just know what to do, except that I wanted to have a farm of my own some day, I hired out to do haying for John Smith’s wife—John had died the very week he began to cut his grass, and Norah she helped Mrs. Smith make butter. Then they wanted me to get in the crops, and after that I had a chance to go into the woods logging. When I came out of the woods, Mrs. Smith wanted me to plough and plant for her. And one thing led to another, and there was always something to keep me. Norah had a young one, and Bessie came—a young witch, ten years old,” said Dennis, pulling his niece’s hair, as she stood beside him. “So I had to take a house. And the long and short of the matter is, that I’ve been here going on ten years, when I didn’t mean to stay ten weeks. But I shall pull up stakes pretty soon, sir,” says Dennis, straightening up. “I don’t mean to stay where I have to go twenty miles to attend to my Easter duties, and where my children are growing up little better than Protestants (he called it Prodestant). I’m pretty sure to move next fall, sir.”

At this announcement, Mrs. Norah tossed up her head and uttered an unspellable, guttural “Oh!” brought from the old land, and preserved unadulterated among the nasal‐speaking Yankees. “We hear ducks!”

Whatever might be the meaning and derivation of this remark, the drift of it was evidently depreciatory, and it had the effect of putting an end to her husband’s eloquence. Doubtless, Mrs. Moran had heard such announcements made before.

Bessie stole a little hand under her uncle’s arm, and smiled into his face, and told him that she had given Jack the book, and soon made him forget his mortification. She knew that he was sometimes boastful, and that the great things he was constantly prophesying of himself never came to pass; but she knew also that he had a kind heart, and it hurt her to see him hurt.

That same book, which the girl mentioned merely to divert attention, was to be a matter of more consequence to her than she dreamed. It was more important than the wedding‐dress and the wedding‐cake, which occupied so much of her thoughts—more important than the jealous interference of Jack’s mother, who did not like Bessie’s foreign blood and religion, though she did like Bessie—more important than even her Uncle Dennis’ actual flitting, when fall came—all which we pass by. Only one thing in her life then was of more consequence than that old school‐book, which the pedler left because no one would buy it, and that was the earnest and sorrowing advice of good old Father Conners when, against his will, he united her to a Protestant.

John Maynard said later, that before he read that book he was like a beet before it is pulled out of the ground, when it doesn’t know but it is a turnip, and firmly believes that it is growing upward instead of downward, and that those waving leaves of its own, which it feels, but sees not, exist in some outer void where nothing is, and that angle‐worms are the largest of locomotive creatures.

It is doubtful if the artistic faculty is any more a special gift in the fine than in the useful arts, or if he who creates ideal forms, in order to breathe into them the breath of such life as is in him, is more enthusiastic in his work, or more fascinated by it, than he who, taking captive the powers of nature, binds them to do his will.

This enthusiastic recognition of the work to which nature had appointed him, John Maynard felt from the moment when he first knew that a crowbar is a lever. He read that book that Bessie gave him with interest, then with avidity, and, having read, all the power latent in that wide brow of his waked up, and demanded knowledge. He got other and more complete works on mechanics and studied them in his leisure hours, he made experiments, he examined every piece of mechanism that came in his way.

Coming home one Sunday from a meeting which she had walked six miles to attend, Mrs. Maynard, senior, was horrified to find that her son had paid her a visit during her absence for the sole purpose of picking in pieces her precious Connecticut clock. There lay its speechless fragments spread out on the table, while the yawning frame leaned against the wall. Bessie sat near, looking rather frightened, and Jack, in his shirt‐sleeves, sat before the table, an open book at his elbow. He was studying the page intently, his earnest, sunburnt face showing an utter unconsciousness of guilt.

“Land sakes, Jack!” screamed his mother. “You’ve been and ruined my clock!”

A clock was of value in that region, where half the inhabitants told the hour by sun‐marks, by the stars, or by instinct.

He put his hand out to keep her back, but did not look up. “Don’t worry, mother,” he said, “and don’t touch anything. I’ll put the machine together in a few minutes.”

Mrs. Maynard sank into a chair, and gazed distressfully at the ruins. That the pendulum, now lying prone and dismembered, would ever tick again, that those two little hands would ever again tell the time of day, that the weights would run down and have to be wound up every Saturday night, or that she should ever again on any June day hear the faithful little gong strike four o’clock in the morning—her signal for jumping out of bed with the unvarying ejaculation: “Land sakes! it’s four o’clock!”—seemed to her impossible.

“And to think that you should do such work on the Sabbath‐day!” she groaned out, casting an accusing glance on her daughter‐in‐law. “You seem to have lost all the religion you ever had since you got married.”

Bessie’s blue eyes lighted up: “I think it just as pious for Jack to study, and find out how useful things are made, as to wear out a pair of shoes going to hear Parson Bates talk through his nose, or sit at home and spoil his eyes reading over and over about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

“Come, come!” interposed Jack; “if you two women quarrel, and bother me, I shall spoil the clock.”

This procured silence.

Had he been a little more thoughtful and tender, he would have told his mother that Bessie had tried to dissuade him from touching the clock, and had urged the impropriety of his doing such work on Sunday; but he did not think. She shielded him, and he allowed her to, scarcely aware that she had, indeed.

The young man’s prediction was fulfilled. Before sunset, the clock was ticking soberly on the mantelpiece, the minute‐hand hitching round its circle, and showing the reluctant hour‐hand the way, and Jack was marching homeward through the woods, with his rifle on one arm and his wife on the other.

They were both so silent—that dark‐browed man and bright faced woman—that they might almost be taken as kindred of the long shadows and sunstreaks over which they walked. He was building up a visionary entanglement of pulleys in the air, through which power should run with ever‐increasing force, and studying how he should dispense with an idle‐wheel that belonged in that maze; and she was thinking of him. He was thinking that this forest, that once had bounded his hopes and aspirations, now pressed on his very breathing, and hemmed his steps in, and wishing that he had wings, like that bird flitting before him; and she was watching his eyes till she, too, saw the bird.

Jack stopped, raised his rifle, took a hasty aim, and fired. Bessie ran to pick up the robin:

“How could you, Jack!” she exclaimed reproachfully, as she felt the fluttering heart stop in her hand.

He looked at it without the slightest compunction. “I wanted to see, as it stood on that twig, which way the centre of gravity would fall,” he said. “Don’t fret, Bessie! There are birds enough in the world.”

The young wife looked earnestly into her husband’s face, as they walked on together. “Jack,” she said, “you might kill me, and then say that there are women enough in the world.”

He laughed, but looked at her kindly, as he made answer: “What would all the women in the world be to me, Bessie, if my woman were out of it?”

Could she ask more?

“Jack, where do you suppose the song has gone to?” she asked, presently.

“Bessie, where does a candle go when it goes out?” was the counter‐ question.

There had been a season in this man’s life, during the brief bud and blossom of his love for Bessie Ware, when his mind had been as full of fancies as a spring maple of blossoms. But he was not by nature fanciful, and, that brief season past, he settled down to facts. Questions which could not be answered he cared not to ask nor ponder on and all speculations, save those which built toward an assured though unseen result, he scouted. The sole impression the bird had made on him was that it was a nice little flying‐machine, which he would like to improve on some day. Meantime, he had much to learn.

The extent of his ignorance did not discourage John Maynard, perhaps because it opened out gradually before him, over a new, unknown path starting from the known one. He was strong, fresh, and healthy, and the very novelty of his work, and his coming to it so late, was an assistance to him. “I have a head for all I want to get into it,” he said to his wife. “When my brain gets hold of an idea, it doesn’t let go.”

It seemed so, indeed; and sometimes when he sat studying, or thinking, utterly unconscious of all about him, his eyes fixed, yet glimmering, his mouth close shut, his breathing half lost, his whole frame, while the brain worked, so still that his hands and feet grew cold, Bessie became almost afraid of him, and was ready to fancy that some strange and perhaps malign spirit had entered into and taken possession of her husband’s soul.

And thus it happened that, after two years, the house that Jack built was abandoned to one of his relatives, and the young couple, with their baby boy, left the forest for the city.

Of course, no one is to suppose that John Maynard failed.

It was summer again, and lavish rains had kept to July the fresh luxuriance of June. The frame house stood nearly as it was when its builder finished it. The walls had changed their bright yellow tint for gray, and a few stones had fallen from the top of the chimney—that was all. The forest still gathered close about, and only a few patches of cultivated land had displaced the stumps and stones. A hop‐vine draped the porch at the back of the house, and a group of tall sunflowers grew near one of the open curtainless windows.

Civilization had passed by on the other side, and, though not really so remote, was still invisible. Twice a day, with a low rumble, as of distant thunder, a train of cars passed by through the valley beyond the woods.

There was no sound of childish voices, no glimpse of a child anywhere about. The air bore no more intelligent burden than the low colloquial dropping of a brook over its pebbly bed, the buzzing of bees about a hive, and a rustling of leaves in the faint stir of air that was more a respiration than a breath. The only sign of human life to be seen without was a frail thread of blue smoke that rose from the chimney, and disappeared in the sky.

Inside, on the white floor of the kitchen, the shadows of the sunflowers lay as if painted there, only now and then stirring slightly, as the air breathed on the wide, golden‐rayed shields outside. In the chimney‐corner, almost as silent as a shadow, an old woman sat in a rocking‐chair, knitting, and thinking. The two small windows, with crossing light, made one corner of the room bright; but where this woman sat, her face could be seen plainly only by firelight.

It was a rudely‐featured face—one seldom sees finely moulded features in the backwoods—but it showed fortitude, good sense, and that unconscious integrity which is so far nobler than the conscious. The gray hair was drawn tightly back, and fastened high on the head with a yellow horn comb; the tall, spare figure was clad in a gown of dark‐blue calico covered with little white dots, and a checked blue‐and‐white apron tied on with white tape strings, and the hands that held the knitting were bony, large‐ jointed, and large‐veined.

The stick of wood that had been smouldering on the andirons bent in the middle, where a little flickering flame had been gnawing industriously for some time. The flame brightened, and made a dive into this break, where it found a splinter. The stick bent yet more, then suddenly snapped in two, one end dropping into the coals, the other end standing upright in the corner.

“Bless me!” muttered the old woman, dropping her work with a start. “There’s a stranger! I wonder who it is.”

She sat gazing dreamily at the brand a moment, and, as her face half settled again, it became evident that the expression was one of profound melancholy as well as thoughtfulness. The lifted eyelids, and the start that roused without brightening, showed that.

After a moment’s reverie, she drew a long sigh, and, before resuming her work, took the long iron tongs that leaned in the corner, and most inhospitably tossed the figurative stranger into the coals.

“I wonder why my thoughts run so on Jack and Bessie to‐day,” she soliloquized, fixing the end of the knitting‐needle into the leather sheath at her side. “I wish I knew how they are. It’s my opinion they’d have done as well to stay here. I don’t think much of that machinery business.”

The coming event which had thus cast its shadow before, was already at the gate, or, more literally, at the bars. Bessie Maynard had walked alone up the road she had not trodden for years, and now stood leaning there, and looking about with eyes that were at once eager and shrinking. Her face was pale, her mouth tightly closed; she had grown taller, and her appearance disclosed in some indefinable way a capacity for sternness which would scarcely have been suspected, or even credited, in the girl of twenty we left her. A glance would show that she had suffered deeply.

Presently, as she gazed, tears began to dim her eyes. She brushed them away, let down the slim cedar pole that barred her passage, stepped through, replaced the bar, and walked up the path to the house.

The knitter in the chimney‐corner heard the sound of advancing steps, and sat still, with her face turned over her shoulder, to watch the door. The steps reached the threshold and paused there, and for a moment the two women gazed at each other—the one silent from astonishment, the other struggling to repress some emotion that rose again to the surface.

The visitor was the first to recover her self‐possession. She came in smiling, and held out her hands.

“Haven’t you a word of welcome for me, Aunt Nancy?” she asked.

Her voice broke the spell, and the old woman started up with a true country welcome, hearty, and rather rough. It was many a year since Bessie Maynard’s hands had felt such a grasp, or her arms such a shake.

“But where is Jack?” asked his aunt, looking toward the door over Bessie’s shoulder.

“Oh! he’s at home,” was the reply, rather negligently given. “But how are you, Aunt Nancy? Have you room for me to stay awhile? I took a fancy to be quiet a little while this summer. The city is so hot and noisy.”

The old lady repeated her welcomes, mingled with many apologies for the kind of accommodations she had to offer, all the while helping to remove her visitor’s bonnet and shawl, drawing up the rocking‐chair for her, and pressing her into it.

“Do sit down and rest,” she said. “But where is the baby? Why on earth didn’t you bring her?”

Bessie clasped her hands tightly in her lap, and looked steadily at the questioner before answering. “The baby is at home!” she said then, in a low voice.

Aunt Nancy was just turning away for some hospitable purpose, but the look and tone arrested her.

“You don’t mean—” she began, but went no further.

“Yes,” replied Bessie quietly; “there is only James left.”

James was the eldest child.

Mrs. Nancy Maynard was not much given to expressions of tenderness—New England people of the old sort seldom were—but she laid her hand softly on her niece’s shoulder, and said unsteadily:

“You poor dear, how tried you have been!”

“We have all our trials,” responded the other, with a sort of coldness.

The old woman knew not what to say. She turned away, mending the fire. If Bessie had wept, she would have known how to comfort her; but this strange calmness was embarrassing. Scarcely less embarrassing was the light, indifferent talk that followed, the questions concerning crops, and weather, and little household affairs, evidently put to set aside more serious topics.

This baby was the fourth child that Bessie Maynard had lost. After the first, no child of hers had lived to reach its third year. Each one had been carried away by a sudden distemper. The first death had been announced to John Maynard’s aunt in a long letter from Bessie, full of a healthy sorrow, every line stained with tears. John had written the next time, his wife being too much worn out with watching and grief to write. At the third death, there came a line from Bessie: “My little boy is gone, Aunt Nancy. What do you suppose God means?”

Aunt Nancy had wondered somewhat over this strange missive, but had decided that, whatever God meant, Bessie meant resignation.

But now, as she marked her niece’s changed face and manner, and recollected that laconic note, she was forced to give up the comforting thought. There might be endurance, but there was no resignation in that face.

The sense of distance and strangeness grew on her, though Bessie began to help her get supper ready, drawing out and laying the table as though she had done it every day of her life, and even remembering the cup that had been hers, and the little iron rack on which she used to set the teapot. “Jack found the brass‐headed nail this hangs on miles back in the woods,” she said. “It’s a wonder how it got there.”

“Why didn’t Jack come with you?” asked Aunt Nancy, catching at the opportunity to say something personal.

A deep blush ran up Bessie’s face at being so caught, but her hesitation was only momentary.

“He is too busy,” she answered briefly.

“But I should think he might take a rest now and then,” persisted her aunt.

Bessie gave a short laugh that was not without bitterness.

“What rest can a man take when he has a steam‐engine spouting carbonic acid in one side of his brain, a flying‐machine in the other side, and a wheel in perpetual motion between them? John is given over to metals and motions. I might as well have a locomotive for a husband. Shall I take up the applesauce in this bowl?”

“Yes. I should think that James might have come.” Aunt Nancy held desperately to the thread she had caught.

“James is a little John,” replied Bessie, pouring the hot, green applesauce into a straight, white bowl with a band of narrow blue stripes around the middle of it. “Never mind my coming alone, Aunt Nancy. I got along very well, and they will do very well without me.”

They sat down to the table, and Bessie made a great pretence of eating, but ate nothing. Then they went out and looked at the garden, talking all the while about nothing, and soon, to the relief of both, it was bed‐time.

To Be Continued.

Where Are You Going?

We happened, the other day, to notice in the columns of a ribald infidel newspaper an advertisement in which a young lady gave notice of her desire to find “board in an infidel or atheist family.” There are many persons nowadays who are looking for a lodging‐place and for food which will give rest and refreshment to their minds and hearts, in the bosom of the infidel and atheistic family circle. They may not, in most cases, distinctly perceive and expressly avow that they are going over to dwell in the tents of atheism, but they have turned their faces and steps in that direction, and into the path leading thitherward, and those who keep on their way must arrive, sooner or later, at that destination. It is to these that we address the question: Where are you going? We would like to have them reflect a little on the kind of entertainment which they may reasonably expect to find in the private family of the household, and in the larger family of human society, when these are constituted on atheistic principles.

Before going any further, we will designate more precisely what class of persons we intend by the above description. In general, all who do not believe in a law made known to the mind and conscience by Almighty God, and, in particular, those who, having been brought up in the Catholic faith, no longer believe in that law as made known by the authority of the church. We class these last individuals, for whose benefit chiefly though not exclusively we are writing, with those first mentioned advisedly and for a reason; and warn them that they are included in the number of those whose faces are set toward atheism. Nevertheless, we do not say this on the ground that every one who is not a Catholic is either incapable of knowing God and his law, or logically bound to deny their existence. A Theist, a Jew, or a Protestant has a rational ground for holding against the atheist or infidel all that portion of Catholic truth which his religion includes. Therefore, we have not included any of these in the number of the atheistical.

Those only who do not believe in any law of God over the conscience we have charged with this tendency to positive atheism. Against such, the justice of the charge is manifest. For they are practically atheists already, and by denying an essential attribute of the Creator, and a relation which the creature must have toward him on account of this attribute, the way is opened to a denial of his existence. As for those who have been instructed in the Catholic faith and have thrown off its authority over their conscience, we say that they have turned towards atheism, because we are convinced that, as a matter of fact, the motives and reasonings which have induced them to this fatal apostasy are practically and theoretically atheistical, even if they themselves are not distinctly aware of their ultimate tendency. We do not deny that a Catholic may lapse into some imperfect form of Christianity or natural religion. The first Protestants had been originally Catholics, and so have been some of the so‐called philosophers professing natural religion. But the present tendency of unbelief is toward atheism, and those believers in positive, revealed religion, whether Catholics, Protestants, or Jews, who are swept by this current, are carried toward the abyss whither it is rushing. Those who reject the law of God which is proclaimed and enjoined by the authority of the church, do so because its moral or intellectual restraints are irksome, and they wish to be at liberty. In plain words, they wish to be free to sin, to follow the proclivity of our fallen nature to indulge in pride and concupiscence, without any fear of God before their eyes to disturb their peace. Therefore, they deny the authority of the church to bind their conscience to believe the doctrines and obey the moral precepts which she promulgates in the name of God. Their revolt is against the law itself and the sovereign authority of God. They sin against faith and against reason also; against the natural as well as the revealed law. They sin with the understanding as well as with the will, and their sin is one which goes to the root of all moral obligation and responsibility in the creature toward the Creator. It is an assertion of perfect individual liberty of thought and action, of independence and self‐sovereignty; and as such an independence is completely incompatible with the existence of God, it is but a step to deny that he exists, or at least that we have any knowledge of his existence. Moreover, modern unbelief proceeds by the way of objections, difficulties, and doubts. It is sceptical in its principle; and one who rejects the authority of the church and of divine revelation on the principle of scepticism, easily rejects all philosophy and natural religion on the same principle, and runs down into pure materialism and atheism.

There are many persons in Europe, and some in this country, who have sunk into a state of avowed impiety and violent hostility to all religion which places them beyond the reach of every appeal to reason, conscience, or right feeling. We do not attempt to argue with such as these; but we suppose in those whom we address a condition of the mind and heart much less degenerate and hopeless. We suppose them to recognize the excellence and necessity of the private and social virtues, and to retain some intellectual and moral ideal in their minds which they cherish and venerate. They believe in truthfulness, honor, fidelity, honesty, true love, friendship, in the cultivation of knowledge and the fine arts, in all that can give decorum, refinement, and charm to domestic and social life, power, dignity, and splendor to political society. But all this is looked on as a spontaneous, natural growth, which finds its perfection and its end from and on this earth, and in this life, without any direct relation to God and an immortal life in another sphere of existence. Now, that such persons are intellectually and morally on a height which elevates them far above those who are wholly degraded in mind and character, we readily admit. But they are on the verge of a precipice. It is the black and awful abyss of atheism which yawns beneath them. And we invite them to look over the brink, and down into those dark depths, that they may consider deliberately whither their steps are leading them, before it is too late to retreat to a safer position.

In what consists the reality of truth, let us ask of one who professes to love truth, or the obligation of respecting it, if Christianity is a falsehood, and its Founder a deceiver of mankind? One who knows the evidence on which Christianity rests, and rejects it as a delusion, has adopted a principle of scepticism which destroys all the evidence on which any truth can rest. The principles of reason are denied or called in question, unbelief or doubt extends to everything. The existence of God is doubted, the distinct and immortal existence of the soul is questioned, nothing remains but the senses and the phenomena which are called sensible facts. Take away God, the Essential Truth, who can neither be deceived nor deceive us, and who has manifested to us the truth by the lights of reason and revelation, and there is no such thing as truth. The descendants of apes, whose whole existence is merely one of sensation, who have sprung from material forces and are resolved into them by dissolution, can have no more obligation of speaking the truth than their cousins the monkeys. If lying, calumny, or perjury will increase the means of your sensible enjoyment, why not employ them against your brother‐apes, as well as entrap a monkey and cage him for your amusement? Whence comes the excellence and obligation of honor, that principle which impels a man rather to die than to betray a trust or abandon the post of duty? On what is based honesty? Why should one choose to pass his life, and to make his family pass their lives, in poverty and privation, rather than take the gold of another, when he can steal it with impunity? Where lies the detestable baseness of bribery and swindling? Why does the heart revolt against the conduct of the man or woman who is faithless to conjugal, parental, or filial love, who is a false friend, ungrateful for kindness, a traitor to his country? It is all very well to say that our natural instincts impel us to love certain qualities and detest others, as we spontaneously admire beauty and are displeased with ugliness. This is certainly true. And it is very well to say that happiness and well‐being are, on the whole, promoted by virtuous sentiments and actions, and hindered by those which are vicious. But if mere selfish, sensitive enjoyment of the good of this life be the end of life itself, all virtue is resolved at last into the quest of this enjoyment by the most sure and suitable means. When virtue requires the sacrifice of this enjoyment, it is no longer virtue. Why should a wife sacrifice her happiness to a cruel, sickly, or disagreeable husband, a husband preserve fidelity to a wife who is hopelessly deranged or who has violated her marriage vows? Why should a soldier expose his life in obedience to the order of a stupid or reckless commander, or shed his blood in an unnecessary war brought on by the folly or ambition of incompetent or unscrupulous rulers? Why should a seaman die for the sake of saving passengers who are nothing to him, and many of whom are perhaps worthless persons, leaving his widow and children without a protector? Why trouble ourselves about taking care of the poor, ruined wrecks of humanity, who can never more be capable of enjoying life or contributing to the enjoyment of others? If we are not the offspring of God, but of the earth, mere sensitive and mortal animals, existing for the pleasure of a day, all the virtues which demand self‐sacrifice are absurd; and the sentiments which we feel about these virtues are illusions. It is very well to appeal to these sentiments; but those who do so must admit that these sentiments must be capable of being justified by reason. An atheist or a sceptic cannot do this. If a man is essentially the same with a pig, there cannot be any reason for treating him otherwise than as a pig. Our natural sentiments, which revolt against the practical consequences of the degrading doctrine of atheism, prove that it is contrary to nature, and therefore false. It is because our nature is rational and immortal that we owe to ourselves and our fellows those obligations and charities which are not due to the brutes; that life, chastity, property, honor, love and friendship, promises and engagements, political, social, and personal rights of all kinds, are to be respected and held sacred. Our rational and immortal nature cannot exist except by participation from God, and its constitutive principle is the capacity to know God and recognize his law as our supreme rule. The obligation of doing that which is just and honorable is derived from that law. Our own rights and the rights of our neighbor are inviolable, because God has given them. They are the rights of God, as that great philosopher Dr. Brownson has so frequently and conclusively proved. God, as our lawgiver, must necessarily give us a law which is plain and certain. It can be no other than the Christian law. And every one who has been instructed in the Catholic faith must see that Christianity and the Christian law are guaranteed, defined, proclaimed, and enforced on the conscience by the authority of the church.

Let him reject that authority, and he has disowned God; and by so doing has taken away the basis of virtue. Self‐interest, sentiment, and human instincts are no sufficient support for it. For, although our temporal interests coincide in great part with the claims of virtue, and natural sentiments and instincts are radically good, we are subject to inordinate and even violent passions. Take away the fear of God, and the passions will sweep away all slighter barriers. Pride and concupiscence will assert their sway, make a wreck of virtue, and eventually destroy even our earthly and temporal happiness.

Even with all the power and influence which religion can exercise over men under the most favorable circumstances, there is enough of sin and misery in the world; but what are we to expect if atheism should prevail? The practical atheism, or, to speak Saxon, the ungodliness of the age, has produced enough of bitter and deadly fruit to give us a taste of the entertainment which is awaiting us if the time ever comes when the power which religion still retains is altogether taken away. We do not need to refer to the pages of professed moralists, or to quote sermons on this topic. It is enough to take what we find in the works of those masterly novelists who describe and satirize the crimes and follies of modern society and depict its tragic miseries, and what we read every day in the newspapers. The intrigues, villanies, swindlings, divorces, murders, and suicides which blacken the record of each passing month, and the hidden, untold tragedies going on perpetually in private life, give us proof enough of the ravages which the passions of fallen, weak human nature will make when all fear of God is removed, and they are left uncontrolled by anything stronger than self‐interest, and physical coercion in the hands of the civil power. No one who casts off all faith in God, allegiance to his authority, and fear of his just retribution, can foresee what he himself may become, or what he may do before his life is ended. The natural virtues, the intellectual gifts, the education, refinement, elevated sentiments, and pure affections which such a person may possess in youth, whether it be a young man or a young woman, are no sure guarantee or safeguard, even in a religious and moral community. Much less are they in one which is wholly irreligious. No one knows, therefore, how wicked he may become, or how miserable he may make himself. Still less can any one foresee what treachery, cruelty, and ingratitude, what bitter sufferings, and what ruin, may await him at the hands of others, if he is to be a member of a great infidel or atheist family which he has helped to form. He will be like the unhappy Alpine tourist who fell down from the Matterhorn, dragging with him and dragged by his companions from his dangerous foothold, and all dashed in pieces in the abyss beneath.

Let any one who has been brought up in the enjoyment of those advantages which give decorum, charm, and refined pleasure to life—and who wishes and expects to possess the same in the future which he looks forward to in this world, with a zest and freedom increased by the riddance of all fear of God—think for a moment about one very important question. To what is he indebted for the blessings he has already enjoyed, and to what can he look for those he is expecting? In order that he should have a happy home, his parents must fulfil all the obligations of the conjugal and parental relations. If he is born to wealth, his father has had to work for him, or at least to take care of his property. If he has had a good mother, it is needless to expatiate on all that a woman must be, must do, and must suffer, to give a child such a blessing as that which is expressed by the tender and holy name of mother. For his education, how many noble and disinterested men have toiled, how many generous sacrifices of time, and labor, and money have been required! To create the nation which gives him the advantages of political order, the civilization which gives him a society to live in, the arts which minister to his higher tastes and personal comforts, how many causes have concurred together, what a multitude of the most noble, self‐sacrificing, heroic exertions of genius, philanthropy, patriotism, fructified by a plentiful besprinkling of the blood of just and faithful men, have been necessary through long ages of time! In his ideal of a happy life, which he hopes for in this world, what a multitude of things he requires which presuppose the fidelity of thousands of persons to those obligations and relations of life on which he is dependent as an individual. His bride must bring to the nuptial feast her virgin purity, and keep her wedding‐ring unbroken and undimmed. His children must be such as a father’s heart can regard with pride and joy. Those with whom he has relations of business must act with honesty and integrity. He must have good servants to work for him, and hundreds of skilful and industrious hands must minister to his wants or caprices. Society must be kept in order, the machinery of the world must be kept going, the law must protect his life and property, and the majority of his fellow‐men must remain content with a lot of hard work and poverty, that he may enjoy his dignity, leisure, splendor, and comfort in peace and security.

Now it is a simple fact, that the principles and laws which have wrought out whatever is high and excellent in modern civilization, have been derived from the Christian religion. The public, social, and private virtues which alone preserve society from corruption and extinction, are the fruit either of religious conscientiousness, or of the influence of religion on the natural conscience of those who live in the atmosphere which it has purified and irradiated. There has never been such a thing as human society founded on atheism; and when atheism, practical or theoretical, has begun to prevail in any community, it has begun to perish. Whoever tampers with that poison is preparing suicide for himself, and death for all around him that is living. A large dose will kill at once all that is capable of death in a soul which is, in spite of itself, immortal. The slow sipping of small doses will gradually produce the same effect. The general distribution of the poison will destroy more or less rapidly the vital principle of the family, of society, of the state, of human civilization. Human beings cannot live together in peace and order, in love and friendship, in mutual truth and fidelity, in happiness and prosperity, if they believe that they are mere animals, whose only good is the brief pleasure which can be snatched from the present life. Even the imperfect amity and good‐fellowship, the lower grade of society, the inferior well‐being and enjoyment, the faint dim similitude of the rational order which exists among the irrational animals, cannot be attained by the human race when it strives to degenerate itself to the level of the brute creation. The irrepressible, inextinguishable, violent appetite for a satisfying good, when it is defrauded of its true object and turned away from its legitimate end, becomes a devastating tornado of passion. There is too much suffering, and too small a supply of sensible enjoyment in human life, to allow mankind to be quiet, and to agree together amicably in the relations of civilized society, in the common pursuit of temporal happiness. Pride and concupiscence are as insatiable as the grave and as cruel as death. The fear of God can alone restrain them. Take that away from the individual, and he will be faithless to the duties of life, friendship, honesty, patriotism, philanthropy, to his nobler instincts, his higher sentiments, his ideal standard of good, in proportion as his passions gain power over him. Take it away from the family and the social order, and mutual faithlessness, breeding mutual hatred and warfare, will be the result. Take it away from the masses of men, and the commune will come, the maddened rabble will rush for the coveted possessions of the smaller number who appear to have exclusive possession of the real good, and at last all will be resolved into a state of barbarism in which the race will become extinct.

This will never take place; for the church and religion of Jesus Christ are imperishable, and God will bring the world to a sudden end before the human race has had time to destroy itself. But such is the tendency of the infidelity and atheism of the age. Whoever turns his back on Christianity is a partaker in this tendency, and a companion of that band of conspirators against religion and society whose end is more infernal and whose means are more cruel than those of the Thugs of India.

Number Thirteen. An Episode Of The Commune. Concluded.

There was music enough chiming at No. 13 to keep a choir of angels busy. Mme. de Chanoir, with the petulance of weakness, grumbled unceasingly, lamenting the miseries of her own position, altogether ignoring the fact that it was no worse, but in some ways better, than that of those around her, whinging and whining from morning till night, pouring out futile invectives against the Prussians, the Emperor, the Republic, General Trochu, and everybody and everything remotely conducive to her sufferings. She threatened to let herself die of hunger rather than touch horse‐flesh, and for some days she so perseveringly held to her determination that Aline was terrified, and believed she would hold it to the end. The only thing that remained to the younger sister of any value was her mother’s watch, a costly little gem, with the cipher set in brilliants; it had been her grandfather’s wedding present to his daughter‐in‐law. Aline took it to the jeweller who had made it, and sold it for one hundred and fifty francs. With this she bought a ham and a few other delicacies that tempted Mme. de Chanoir out of her suicidal abstinence; she ate heartily, neither asking nor guessing at what price the dainties had been bought; and Aline, only too glad to have had the sacrifice to make, said nothing of what it had cost her. Gradually everything went that could be sold or exchanged for food. Aline would have lived on the siege bread, and never repined, had she been alone, but it went to her heart to hear the never‐ending complaints of Mme. de Chanoir, to see her childish indignation at the great public disasters which her egotism contracted into direct personal grievances. Fortunately for herself, Mlle. de Lemaque was not a constant witness of the irritating scene. From nine in the morning till late in the evening she was away at the Ambulance, active and helpful, and cheering many a heavy heart and aching head by her bright and gentle ministry, and forgetting her own sufferings in the effort to alleviate greater ones.

“If you only could come with me, Félicité, and see something of the miseries our poor soldiers are enduring, it would make your own seem light,” she often said to Mme. de Chanoir, when, on coming home from her labor of love, she was met by the unreasonable grumbling of the invalid; “it is such a delight to feel one’s self a comfort and a help to them. I don’t know how I am ever to settle down to the make‐believe work of teaching after this long spell of real work.”

She enjoyed the work so much, in fact, that, if it had not been for the sufferings, real and imaginary, of her sister, this would have been the happiest time she had known since her school days. The make‐believe work, as Aline called it, which had hitherto filled her time had never filled her heart. It was a means of living that kept her brains and her hands at work, nothing more; and it had often been a source of wonder to her in her busiest days to feel herself sometimes seized with _ennui_. That trivial, hackneyed word hardly, perhaps, expresses the void, the sort of hunger‐ pang, that more and more frequently of late years had made her soul ache and yearn, but now the light seemed to break upon her, and she understood why it had been so. The work itself was too superficial, too external. It had overrun her life without satisfying it; it had not penetrated the surface, and brought out the best and deepest resources of her mind and heart—it had only broken the crust, and left the soil below untilled. She had flitted like a butterfly from one study to another; history, and literature, and music had attracted her by turns; she had gone into them enthusiastically, mastered their difficulties, and appropriated their beauties; but after a time the spell waned, and she glided imperceptibly into the dry mechanism of the thing, and went on giving her lesson because it brought her so much a _cachet_. But this work of a Sister of Mercy was a different sort of life altogether. The enthusiasm, instead of waning, grew as she went on. At first, the prosaic details, the foul air, the physical fatigue and moral strain of the sick‐nurse’s life were unspeakably repugnant to her; her natural fastidiousness turned from them in disgust, and she would have thrown it all up after the first week but for sheer human respect; she persevered, however, and at the end of a fortnight she had grown interested in her patients; by degrees she got reconciled to the obnoxious duties their state demanded of her; and before a month had passed it had become a ministry of love, and her whole soul had thrown itself into the perfect performance of her duties. She was often tired and faint on leaving the Ambulance, but she always left it with regret, and the evident zest and gladness of heart with which she set out each morning became at last a grievance in the eyes of her sister. Mme. de Chanoir vented her discontent by harping all the time of breakfast on the hard‐heartedness of some people who could look at wounds and all sorts of horrors without flinching; whereas the very sight of a drop of blood made her almost faint; but then she was so constituted as to feel other people’s wounds as if they were her own; it was a great misfortune; she envied people who had hard hearts; it certainly enabled them to do more, while she could only weep and pity. Aline bore the querulous reproaches as cheerfully as if she had been blessed with one of those hearts of stone that Mme. de Chanoir so envied. She had the indulgence of a happy heart, and she had found the secret of making her life a poem. But the nurse’s courage was greater than her strength. After the first three months, material privations, added to arduous attendance on the sick and wounded, began to tell; her health showed signs of rebellion.

M. Dalibouze was the first to notice it. He came regularly on the Saturday evenings as of old; his age exempted him from the terrible outpost work on the ramparts; and he profited by the circumstance to keep up, as far as possible, his ordinary habits and enjoyments, “_afin de soutenir le morale_,” as he said. When he noticed this change in Aline, he immediately used his privilege of friend of the family to interfere; he begged her to modify her zeal for the poor sufferers at the Ambulance, and to consider how precious her life was to her sister and her friends.

Aline took the advice very kindly, but assured him that, far from wearing out her strength as he supposed, her work was the only thing that sustained it. The tone in which she said this convinced him it was the truth. It then occurred to him that her pallor and languid step must be caused by the unhealthy diet of the siege. Everybody suffered in a more or less degree; but, as it always happens, those who suffered most said least about it. The _gros rentier_, who fared sumptuously on kangaroo, and Chinese puppies, and elephant at a hundred francs a pound, talked loud about the miseries of starvation which he underwent for the sake of his country; but the _petit rentier_, whose modest meal had long since been replaced by a scanty ration of horse‐flesh, and that only to be had by “making tail,” as they call it, for hours at the butchers shop—the _petit rentier_ said very little. He was perishing slowly off the face of the earth; but, with the pride of poverty strong in death, he gathered his rags around him, and made ready to die in silence.

It was on such people as Mme. de Chanoir and her sister that the siege pressed hardest; their _concierge_ was far better off than they; she could claim her _bons_, and fight for her rations; and she had fifteen sous a day as the wife of a National Guard.

As to Mme. Cléry, she proved herself equal to the occasion. She had no National Guard to fall back upon, but she was sustained by the thought that she was suffering for her country; she, too, was a good patriot. Patriotism, however, has its limits of endurance, and hay bread was the border line that Mme. Cléry’s patriotism refused to pass. When the good bread was rationed, she showed signs of mutiny; but when it degenerated into that hideous compound, of which we have all seen specimens, her indignation declared itself in open rage. “What is this?” she cried, when the first loaf was handed to her after three hours’ waiting. “Are we cattle, to eat hay?” And, breaking the tawny, spongy lumps in two, she pulled out a long bit of the offensive weed, and held it up to the scorn of the _queue_.

As to Mme. de Chanoir, when she saw it she went into hysterics for the rest of the day. But Providence was mindful of No. 13. Just at this crisis, when Aline’s altered looks aroused her sister from the selfish contemplation of her own ailments and wants, M. Dalibouze arrived early one morning soon after Mme. de Lemaque had started for the Ambulance, and announced that he had received the opportune present of a number of hams, tins of preserved meat, condensed milk, and an indefinite number of pots of jam. It was three times as much as he could consume before the siege was raised—for raised it infallibly would be, and, if he were not greatly mistaken, within forty‐eight hours—so he begged Mme. la Générale to do him the favor of accepting the surplus.

Mme. de Chanoir, with infantine simplicity, believed this credible story, and did M. Dalibouze the favor he requested. So, thanks to his generous friend, the professor in turn became the benefactor of the two sisters, and had the delight of seeing Aline revive on the substantial fare that arrived so apropos. Well, it came at last, the end of the _blocus_; not, indeed, as M. Dalibouze had prognosticated. But that was not his fault. He had not reckoned with treachery. He could not suspect what a brood of traitors the glorious capital of civilization was nourishing in her patriotic bosom. But wait a little! It would be made square yet. Europe would see France rise by‐and‐by, like the Phœnix from her ashes, and spread her wings, and take a flight that would astonish the world. As to the Prussians, those vile vandals, whose greasy moustaches were not fit to brush the boots of Paris, let them bide a while, and they shall see what they should see!

Thus did M. Dalibouze _resumer la situation_, while Paris on her knees waited humbly the terms that Prussia might dictate as the price of a loaf of bread for her starving patriots.

But the worst was to come yet. Hardly had the little _ménage_ at No. 13 drawn a long breath of relief after the prolonged miseries and terrors of the siege, than that saturnalia, the like of which assuredly the world never saw before, and let us hope never will again, the Commune, began. Like a fiery flood it rose in Paris, and rose and rose till the red wave swept from end to end of the city, spreading desolation and terror everywhere, and making the respectable party of order long to call back the Prussians, and help them out of the mess. How it began, and grew, and ended we have heard till we know the miserable story by heart. I am not going to tell it here. The Commune is only the last episode in the history of No. 13.

There was work to do and plenty in binding the wounds and smoothing the pillows of dying men, and words to be spoken that dying ears are open to when spoken in Christian love. Aline de Lemaque’s courage did not fail her in this last and fearful ordeal. She resumed her duties as Sister of Mercy, asked no questions as to the politics of the wounded men, but did the best she could for them. Mme. de Chanoir could not understand how her sister spent her time and service on Red Republicans; the sooner the race died out, the better, and it was not the work of a Christian to preserve the lives of such snakes and fiends.

“There are dupes and victims as well as fiends among them,” Aline assured her; “and those who are guilty are the most to be pitied.” After a time, however, the dangers attendant on going into the streets became so great that Aline was forced to remain indoors. Barricades were thrown up in every direction, and made the circulation a dangerous and almost impracticable feat to members of the party of order. The Rue Royale, which had been safe during the first siege, was now a threatened centre of accumulated danger. It was armed to the teeth. The Faubourg end of it was barred by a stone barricade that might have passed for a fortress—a wall of heavy masonry weighted with cannon, two black giants that lay couched like monster slugs peeping through a hedge. But after those terrible weeks there came at last the final tug, the troops came in, and Greek met Greek. Shell and shot rained on the city like hailstones. The great black slugs gave tongue, bellowing with unintermitting fury; all round them came responsive roars from barricades and batteries; it was the discord of hell broke upward through the earth, and echoing through the streets of Paris.

Aline de Lemaque and her sister sat in the little saloon at No. 13, listening to the war‐dogs without, and straining their ears to catch every sound that shot up with any significant distinctness from the chaos of noise. Mme. Cléry was with them; she stayed altogether at No. 13 now, sleeping on the sofa at night. It would have been impossible for her to come and go twice a day while the city was in this state of commotion. To‐ day the old woman could not keep quiet; she was constantly up and down to the _concierge’s_ lodge to pick up any stray report that came through the chinks of the _porte‐cochère_. Once she went down and remained so long that the sisters were uneasy. An explosion had reverberated through the street, shaking the house from cellar to garret, and, like an electric shock, flinging both the sisters on their knees simultaneously. Mme. de Chanoir’s spine had recovered itself within the last week as if by magic. She had abandoned her usual recumbent position, and came and went about the house like the rest of them. If the Commune did nothing else, it did this. We must give the devil his due.

“Félicité, I must go and see what it is. I hear groans close under the window; perhaps a shell has fallen in the court and killed her,” said Aline. And, rising, she turned to go.

“Don’t leave me! For the love of heaven, don’t leave me alone, Aline!” implored her sister. “I’ll die with terror if that comes again while I’m here by myself.”

“Come with me, then,” said Aline. And, taking her sister’s hand, they went down together.

Mme. Cléry was not killed. This fact was made clear to them at once by the spectacle of the old woman standing in the _porte‐cochère_, and shaking her fist vehemently at somebody or something at the further end of it.

“Stay here,” said Aline to Mme. de Chanoir, motioning her back into the house. “I will see what it is; and if you can do anything I’ll call you.”

It was the _concierge_ that Mme. Cléry was apostrophizing. And this was why: a shell had burst, not in the yard, as the sisters fancied, but in the street just outside, and the explosion was followed by a shriek and a loud blow at the door, while something like a body fell heavily against it.

“_Cordon!_” cried Mme. Cléry; “it is some unfortunate hit by the shell.”

“More likely a communist coming to pillage and burn. I’ll _cordon_ to none of ’em!” declared the _concierge_. “The door is locked; if they want to get in, they may blow it open.” But Mme. Cléry flew at her throat, and swore, if she didn’t give up the key, she, Mme. Cléry, would know the reason why. The _concierge_ groaned, and felt, in bitterness of spirit, what a difficult task the _cordon_ was. But she opened the door; under it lay two wounded men, both of them young; one was evidently dying; he had been mortally struck by a fragment of the shell that had burst over the thick oaken door and dealt death around and in front of it. The other was wounded, too, but much less seriously; he had been flung down by his companion, and the shock of the fall, more than his wound, had stunned him. Mme. Cléry dragged them in under the shelter of the _porte‐cochère_, and proposed laying them on the floor of the lodge. But the _concierge_ had no mind to take in a dead and a dying man, and vowed she would not have her lodge turned into a coffin. The dispute was waxing warm, Mme. Cléry threatening muscular argument, when Aline made her appearance. Her training in the Ambulance stood her in good stead now.

“Poor fellow! He will give no more trouble to any one,” she said, after feeling the pulse of the first, and laying her hand for a moment on his heart; “bring a cloth, and cover his face; he must lie here till he can be removed.”

The _concierge_ obeyed her. They composed the features, and laid the body under cover of the gateway.

Aline then examined the other. His arm was badly wounded. While she was still probing the wound, the man opened his eyes, stared round him for a moment with a speculative gaze of returning consciousness, made a spasmodic effort to rise, but fell back at once. “You are wounded—not severely, I hope,” said Aline; “but you must not attempt to move till we have dressed your arm.”

She despatched Mme. Cléry for the box containing her ambulance appliances, lint, bandages, etc., and then, with an expertness that would have done credit to a medical student, she washed and dressed the shattered limb, while Mme. de Chanoir watched the operation in shuddering excitement through the glass door at the foot of the stairs. What to do next was the puzzle. The _concierge_ resolutely refused to let him into her lodge; there was no knowing who or what he was, and she was a lone woman, and had no mind to compromise herself by taking in bad characters. The poor fellow was so much exhausted from loss of blood that he certainly could not help himself, and it would have been cruel to leave him down in the courtyard, where his unfortunate comrade was lying dead within sight of him. Aline saw there was nothing for it but to take him up to their own apartment. How to get him there was the difficulty. He looked about six feet long, and might have weighed any number of stone. She and Mme. Cléry could never succeed in carrying him. He had not spoken while she was dressing his arm, but lay so still with his eyes closed that they thought he had fainted.

“We must carry him,” said Aline in a determined voice, and beckoned the _concierge_ to come and help.

But before proceeding to the gigantic enterprise, Mme. Cléry poured out a tumbler of wine, which she had had the wit to bring down with the lint‐ box, and held it to the sufferer’s lips, while Aline supported his head against her knee. He drank it with avidity, and the draught seemed to revive him instantaneously; he sat up leaning on his right arm.

“We are going to carry you up‐stairs, _mon petit_,” said Mme. Cléry, patting him on the shoulder with the patronizing manner an amazon might have assumed towards a dwarf.

“_You_ carry me!” said the young man, measuring the short, trim figure of the charwoman with a sceptical twinkle in his eyes: they were dark‐gray eyes, particularly clear, and piercing.

“Me and Mlle. Aline,” said Mme. Cléry, in a tone that testified against the supercilious way in which her measure was being taken.

Aline was behind him. He turned to look at her with a jest on his lips, but, changing his mind apparently, he bowed; then, with a resolute effort, he bent forward, and, before either she or Mme. Cléry could interfere, he was on his feet. It was well, however, they were both within reach of him, for he staggered, and must have fallen but for their prompt assistance.

“La!” said Mme. Cléry, “what it is to be proud! Lean on Mlle. Aline and me, and try and get up‐stairs without breaking your neck.”

“It is the fortune of war,” said the gentleman laughing, and accepting the shoulder that Aline turned towards him.

They accomplished the ascent in safety, and then, in spite of his assertion that he was all right now, Mme. de Chanoir insisted on their guest lying down on her sofa while the charwoman prepared some food for him. But safety, in truth, was nowhere. The fighting grew brisker from minute to minute. The troops were in possession of the neighboring streets; they had taken the Federals in the rear, and were mowing them down like corn. The struggle could not last much longer, but it was desperate, and the loss of life, already appalling, must be still greater before it ended. The stranger who had introduced himself so unexpectedly to No. 13 had formed one of the party of order, he told his good Samaritans, who had gone unarmed, with a flag of truce, to the Federals in the Rue de la Paix; he had seen the ghastly butchery that followed, and only escaped as if by miracle himself; he had fought as a _mobile_ against the Prussians, and received a sabre‐cut in the head, which had kept him in the hospital for weeks; he had, of course, refused to join the Federals, and it was at the risk of his life that he showed himself abroad in Paris; just now he had been making an attempt to join the troops, when that shell burst, and stopped him in his venturesome career. All day and all night the four inmates of the little _entresol_ waited and watched in breathless anxiety for the close of the battle that was raging around them. It never flagged for an instant, and as it went on the noise grew louder and more bewildering, the tocsin rang from every belfry in the city, the drum beat to arms in every direction, the chassepots hissed, the cannon boomed, and yells and shrieks of fratricidal murder filled the air, mingling with the smell and smoke of blood and powder. It was a night that drove hundreds mad who lived through it. Yet the worst was still to come. Late the next afternoon, Aline, who was constantly at the window, peeping from behind the mattress stuffed into it to protect them from the shells, thought she discovered something in the atmosphere indicative of a change of some sort. She said nothing, but slipped out of the room, and ran up to a bull’s‐eye at the top of the house that served as a sort of observatory to those who had the courage of their curiosity, as the French put it, and ventured their heads for a moment to the mercy of the missiles flying amongst the chimney‐pots. It was an awful sight that met her. A fire was raging close to the house. Where it began and ended it was impossible to say, but clearly it was of immense magnitude, and blazed with a fury that threatened to spread the flames far and wide. She stood rooted to the spot, literally paralyzed with horror. Were they to be burnt to death, after living through such miseries, and escaping death in so many shapes? Yet how could they escape it? There were barricades on every side of them; if they were not shot down like dogs, which was the most likely event, they would never be allowed to pass. All this rushed through her mind as she gazed in blank despair out of the little bull’s‐eye, that embraced the whole area of the Rue Royale and the adjacent streets. As yet, there was a space between the fire and No. 13. Mercifully, there was no wind, and she saw by the swaying of the flames that they drew rather towards the Madeleine than in the direction of the Rue de Rivoli. Flight was a forlorn hope, but still they must try it. She turned abruptly from the window, and was crossing the room, when a loud crash made her heart leap. She looked back. The roof of another house, one nearer to No. 13, had fallen in, and the flames, leaping through like rattlesnakes out of a bag, sprang at the sky, writhing and hissing as they licked it with their long red tongues.

“O God, have pity on us!”

Aline fell on her knees for one moment, and then hurried down to the _salon_.

“We must leave this at once,” she said, speaking calmly, but with white lips; “the street is on fire.”

M. Varlay, _citoyen_ Varlay, as he gave his name, started to his feet, and, pulling the mattress from the window, looked out. He saw the flames above the house‐top.

“Let us go, with the help of God!” he exclaimed. “We must make for the Rue de Rivoli!”

Mme. de Chanoir and the charwoman, as soon as they caught sight of the fire, shrieked in chorus, and made a headlong rush at the stairs.

“You must be quiet, madame!” cried M. Varlay in a tone that arrested both the women; “if we lose our presence of mind, we had better stay where we are. Have you any valuables, papers or money, that you can take in your pocket?” he said, turning to Aline. She alone had not lost her head.

Yes; there were a few letters of her parents, and some trinkets, valuable only as souvenirs, which she had had the forethought to put together. She took them quickly, and the four went down the stairs. There was no one in the lodge. The _concierge_ had taken refuge in her cellar, and her husband was supposed to be saving France somewhere else. Mme. Cléry pulled the string, and the little band sallied forth into the street. The air was so thick they could hardly see their way, except for the fiery forks of flame that shot up successively through the fog, illuminating dark spots with a momentary lurid brightness, while now and then the crash of a roof or a heavy beam was followed by a pillar of sparks that went rattling up into the sky like a fountain of rockets. The Babel of drums, and bells, and artillery added to the confusion of the scene as the fugitives hurried on singly under the shadow of the houses. They fared safely out of the Rue Royale and turned to the left. The Tuileries was enveloped in smoke, but the flames were nearly spent, only here and there a tongue of fire crept out of a crevice, licked the wall, twisted and twirled, and drew in again. A crowd was gathered under the portico of the Rue de Rivoli, watching the last throes of the conflagration, and discussing many questions in excited tones. Our travellers pushed on, and came unmolested to the corner of the Rue St. Florentine, where a sentry levelled his bayonet before them, and cried “Halt!” Mme. de Chanoir, who walked first, answered by a scream. _Citoyen_ Varlay, laying his hand on her shoulder, drew her quickly behind him. “Stand here while I speak to him,” he said, and he advanced to parley with the Federal, at the same time putting his hand into his pocket. They had not exchanged half a dozen words when the sentinel shouldered his chassepot, and said:

“Quick, then, pass along!”

Varlay stood for the women to pass first. Mme. de Chanoir and the charwoman rushed on, but no sooner had they stepped into the street than, clasping their hands, they fell upon their knees with a cry of agonized terror. The sight that met them was indeed enough to make a brave heart quail. To the left, extending right across the street, rose a barricade, a fortress rather, surmounted at either end by two warriors of the Commune, bending over a cannon as if in the very act of firing; in the centre two amazon _pétroleuses_ stood with chassepots slung _en baudelière_ and red rags in their hands that they waved aloft proudly like women who felt that the eyes of Europe were upon them; the intermediate space on either side of them was filled up with soldiers planted singly or in groups, and _poséd_ in the attitudes of men whom forty centuries look down upon. Just as Mme. de Chanoir and her _bonne_ came in front of the terrible _mise‐en‐ scêne_, and before they could go backward or forward, the word _Fire!_ rang out from the fortress, two matches flashed in the hands of the gunners, and the women dropped to the ground with a shriek that would have waked the dead.

“What’s the matter now?” cried the sentinel.

“They are going to fire!”

“Imbeciles! No, they are going to be photographed!”(112)

And so they were. A photographic battery was set up against the railings opposite. Aline and _citoyen_ Varlay seized the two half‐fainting women by the arm, and dragged them across and out of the range of the formidable _tableau vivant_. Meanwhile, the fire was gaining on No. 13. The house three doors down from it was _flambée_. It had been deserted the day before by all its occupants, save one family composed of a husband and wife, who had obstinately refused to believe in the danger till it was too late to evade it. They were friends of M. Dalibouze’s and the professor turned in to see them this morning on his way to No. 13. “The situation was a difficult one,” he said; “it were foolhardy to defy it, and the time was come when good citizens should save themselves.” He convinced M. and Mme. X—— that this was the only reasonable thing to do. So casting a last look at their belongings, they sallied forth from their home accompanied by their servant, an _ex‐sapeur_, too old for military service, but as hale and hearty as a youth of twenty. The professor had got in by a backway from the Faubourg St. Honoré, and thither he led his friends now; but, though less than fifteen minutes had elapsed since he had entered, the passage was already blocked: part of the wall had fallen and stopped it up. There was nothing for it but to go boldly out by the front door, and trust to Providence. But they reckoned without the _pétroleuses_. Those zealous daughters of the Commune, braving the shot, and the shell, and the vengeful flames of their own creation, sped from door to door, pouring the terrible fluid into holes and corners, through the gratings of cellars, under the doors, through the chinks of the windows, everywhere, dancing, and singing, and laughing all the time like tigers in human shape—tigers gone mad with fire and blood. When the _sapeur_ opened the door, he beheld a group of them on the _trottoir_; one was rolling a barrel of petroleum on to the next house, another was steeping rags in a barrel already half empty, and handing them as fast as she could to others, who stuffed them into appropriate places, and set a light to them; every flame that rose was hailed by a shout of demoniacal exultation. The _sapeur_ banged the door in their faces.

“We must set to work, and cut a hole through the wall,” he said; “it’s the last chance left us.”

No sooner said than done. He knew where to lay his hands on a couple of crowbars and a pickaxe; the professor fired the contents of his chassepot at the wall, and then the three men went at it, and worked as men do when death is behind them and life before. It was an old house, built chiefly of stone and mortar, very little iron, and it yielded quickly to the hammering blows of the workmen. A breach was made—a small one, but big enough to let a man crawl through. M. X—— passed out first, and then helped out his wife. M. Dalibouze and the _sapeur_ followed. They hurried through the next apartment. M. Dalibouze reloaded his gun; whiz! whiz! went the bullets; bang! bang! went the crowbars; down rattled the stones; another breach was made, and again they were saved. Three times they fought their way through the walls, while the fire like a lava torrent rolled after them, and then they found themselves at No. 13. M. Dalibouze’s first thought was for the little apartment on the _entresol_ at the other side. They made for it; but as they were crossing the court a blow, or rather a succession of blows, struck the great oak door; it opened like a nut, and fell in with a crash like thunder. The burglars beheld M. Dalibouze in his National Guard costume scudding across the yard, and greeted him with howls like a troop of jackals. Whiz! went the grape‐shot. M. Dalibouze fell.

Mme. X—— and her husband had fallen back before the door gave way, and thus escaped observation. No one was left but the old _sapeur_.

“What sort of work is this?” he said, walking defiantly up to the men—there were five of them—“what do you mean by breaking into the houses of honest citizens?”

“You had better break out of this one if you don’t want to grill,” answered one of the ruffians; “we are going to fire it, _par ordre de le Commune_.”

The women had disappeared, and left their implements in the hands of the men.

“Oh! _par ordre de le Commune!_” echoed the _sapeur_; “then I’ve nothing to say; I hope they pay you well for the work?”

“Not over and above for such work as it is,” said one of the incendiaries, rolling a barrel into the concierge’s lodge.

“How much?”

“Ten francs apiece.”

“Ten francs for burning a house down! Pshaw! you’re fools for your pains!”

The _sapeur_ shrugged his shoulders, and, turning on his heels, walked off. Suddenly, as if a bright thought struck him, he turned back, and faced them with his hands in his pockets.

“Suppose you got twenty for leaving it alone?”

“Twenty apiece?”

“Twenty apiece, every man of you!”

They stopped their work, and looked from one to another.

“_Ma foi_, I’d take it, and leave it alone!” said one.

“_Pardie!_ we’ve had enough of it, and, as the _citoyen_ says, it’s beggarly pay for the work,” said another.

“Done!” said the _sapeur_.(113)

He pulled out a leathern purse from his breast‐pocket, and counted out one hundred francs in five gold pieces to the five communists.

“_Une poignée de main, citoyen!_” said the first spokesmen. The others followed suit, and the _sapeur_, after heartily wringing the five rascally hands, sent them on their way rejoicing to the cabaret round the corner. This is how No. 13 was saved. No. 11 was burnt to the ground, and then the fire stopped.

But to return to Aline and her friends. They got on well till they came to the Rue d’Alger, where they were caught in a panic, men, and women, and children struggling to get out of reach of the flames, and threatening to crush each other to death in their terror. Our friends got clear of it, but, on coming out of the _mélée_ at separate points, the sisters found they had lost each other. Mme. de Chanoir had held fast by Mme. Cléry, and was satisfied that Aline was safe under the wing of _citoyen_ Varlay. But she was mistaken. He had indeed lifted her off the ground, holding her like a child above the heads of the crowd, and so saved her from being trampled under foot, most likely; but when he set her down, and Aline turned to speak to him, he was gone. It would have been madness to attempt to look for him in the _mélée_, so she determined to wait at the nearest point of shelter, and then when the crowd dispersed they would be sure to meet. She made for the door‐way of a mourning house at the corner of the Rue St. Honoré. But she had not been many minutes there when she heard a hue and cry from the Tuileries end of the street, and a troop of men and women came flying along, driving some people before them, and firing at random as they went. The sensible thing for Aline to do was, of course, to flatten herself against the wall, and stay where she was, and of course she did not do it. She saw a flock of people running, and she started from her hiding‐place, and turned and ran with them. They tore along the Rue St. Honoré till they came to the Rue Rohan; here the band broke up, and many disappeared at opposite points; but one little group unluckily kept together, and, though diminished to a third its size at the starting point, it still held in view, and gave chase to the pursuers. Mlle. de Lemaque kept with this. On they flew like hares before the hounds, till, turning the corner of the Place du Palais Royal, they were stopped by two Federals, who levelled their chassepots and bade them stand. The fugitives turned, not like hares at bay to face the hunters and die, but to rush into an open shop, and fall on their knees, and cry, “Mercy!”

The Federals were after them in a second. Instead of shooting them right off, however, they set to discussing the propriety of taking them out and standing them in regulation order, with their backs to the wall, and doing the thing in a proper business‐like manner. While this parley was going on, Aline de Lemaque cast a glance round her, and saw that her fellow‐ victims were two young lads and half a dozen women, all of them of the lower class apparently; most of them wore caps. The men who were making ready to shoot them without rhyme or reason, as if they were so many rats, were evidently of the very dregs of the Commune, and looked half‐drunk with blood or wine, or both—it was hard to say—but there was no trace of manhood left upon the faces that gave a hope that mercy had still a lurking‐place in their hearts. One of the women suddenly started to her feet. “What!” she cried, “you call yourselves men, and you are going in cold blood to shoot unarmed women and boys? Shame on you for cowards! There is not a man amongst you!”

She snapped her fingers right into their faces with an impudence that was positively sublime. The cowards were taken aback. They looked at each other, and burst out laughing.

“_Sapristi!_ She’s right,” exclaimed one of them; “they’re not worth wasting our powder on!”

Like lightning, the women were on their feet, fraternizing with the men, embracing, shaking hands, and swearing fraternity in true communistic fashion. Mlle. de Lemaque alone stood aloof, a silent, terror‐stricken spectator of the scene.

“What have we here? _Une canaille d’aristocrate_, I’ll be bound! It’s written on her face,” said one of the ruffians, seizing her by the arm; “let us make away with her, comrades! It will be a good job for the Republic to rid it of one more of the lazy aristos that live by the _ouvrier’s_ meat.” There was a lull in the kissing and hand‐shaking, and they turned to stare at Aline. Her life hung by a thread. A timid word, a guilty look, and she was lost. But the soldier’s blood rose up in her; she bethought her of her _abus_, and _lancéd_ it.

“Lazy!” she cried; “I am a soldier’s daughter; my father fought for France, and left his children nothing but his sword; I work for my bread as hard as any of you!”

The effect was galvanic; they gathered around her, shouting, “Bravo! Give us your hand, citoyenne!”

And Aline gave it, and, like the statesman who thanked God he had a country to sell, she blessed him that she had a hand to give.

—Blood ran like water in the sewers of Paris for a few days, and then the troops were masters of the field, and order was restored—restored so far as to enable honest men to sleep in their beds at night.

Mme. de Chanoir was back again in the little saloon at No. 13, and diligently reading the newspaper aloud to a gentleman who was lying on the sofa near her; the _générale’s_ spine complaint had been radically cured by the Commune, and she sat erect in a chair now like other people. The invalid’s face and head were so elaborately bandaged that it was impossible to see what either were like, while his bodily proportions disappeared altogether under a voluminous travelling‐rug. He listened for some time without comment to the political tirade which Mme. de Chanoir was reading to him, an invective against France, and her soldiers, and her generals, and the nation at large—a sweeping anathema, in fact, of everything and everybody, till he could bear it no longer, and, sitting bolt upright, he exclaimed:

“Madame, the man who wrote that article is a traitor. France is greater to‐day in her unmerited misfortunes than she was in the apotheosis of her glory; she is more sublime in her widowed grief than her ignoble foe in his barbarous successes! She is, in fact, still France. The situation is compromised for a moment, but—”

“_Lâ, lâ, voyons!_” broke in Mme. Cléry, putting her head in at the door, and shaking the lid of a sauce‐pan at the invalid. “How is the _tisane_ to take effect if you will talk politics and put yourself into a rage about _la situation_! Mme. _la Générale_, make ’um keep still!”

The _générale_ thus adjured laid down the newspaper, and gently insisted on M. Dalibouze’s resuming his horizontal position on the couch. Aline was not there; she was off at her old work at the Ambulance again. The hospitals had been replenished to overflowing by the street‐fighting of the last week of the Commune, _la dénouement de la situation_, as M. Dalibouze called it, and nurses were in great demand. _Citoyen_ Varlay had not turned up since the night they had lost him in the crowd. The excitement and confusion which had reigned in the city ever since had made it difficult to set effective inquiries on foot, even if the sisters had been accurately informed regarding their quondam guest’s identity and circumstances, which they were not. All they knew of him was his appearance, his name, and his wound. This was too vague to assist much in the search. Mme. de Chanoir was sincerely sorry for it; she had been attracted at once by the frank bearing and courteous manners of the young _citoyen_; but his cool courage, his forgetfulness of himself for others, and the stoical contempt for bodily pain which he had displayed on the occasion of their flight, had kindled sympathy into admiration, and she spoke of him now as a hero. She spoke of him constantly at first, loudly lamenting his loss; for lost she believed him. He had, no doubt, been overpowered by the crowd; his disabled arm deprived him of half his strength, and, exhausted as he was by previous pain, and the violent effort to protect Aline in the struggle, he had probably fainted and been suffocated or crushed to death. This was the conclusion Mme. de Chanoir arrived at; but when she mentioned it to Aline, the deadly paleness that suddenly overspread the young girl’s features made her wish to recall her words, and from that out the name of the young soldier was never pronounced between the sisters.

Mme. Cléry had formed on her side an enthusiastic affection for him, and sincerely regretted his fate, but with a woman’s instinct she guessed that the one who regretted it most said least about it. She never mentioned _citoyen_ Varlay to Aline, but made up for the self‐denial by pouring out his praises and her own grief into the sympathizing ear of the _générale_.

“What a pretty couple they would have made!” said the old woman one morning, wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron; “he was such a fine fellow, and so merry; he only wanted the _particule_ to make him perfect; but, after all, who knows? He may not have been as good as he looked. One can never trust those _parvenus_.”

A month passed. Mme. de Chanoir was alone one afternoon, when Mme. Cléry rushed into the room in a state of breathless excitement, her eyes literally dancing out of her head.

“Madame! madame! I guessed it! I was sure of it! I’m not that woman not to know a gentleman when I see him. I told madame he was! Let madame never say but I did!”

And having explained herself thus coherently between laughing and crying, she held out a card to her mistress.

Mme. de Chanoir read aloud:

LE BARON DE VARLAY, _Avocat à la Cour de Cassation_.

Another month elapsed, and the great door of the Madeleine was opened for a double marriage. The first bridegroom was a tall, slight man, on whose face and figure the word _distingué_ was unmistakably stamped. The second was a plump, dapper little man, who, as he walked up the carpeted aisle of the church, seemed hardly to touch the ground, so elastic was his step; his countenance beamed, he was radiant, and it is hardly a figure of speech to say that he was buoyant with satisfaction. If he could have given utterance to his feelings, he would have said that “the situation was perfect, and absolutely nothing more could be desired.”

Mme. Cléry was present in her monumental cap, trimmed with Valenciennes lace brand‐new for the occasion, and a chintz gown with a peacock pattern on a pea‐green ground that would have lighted up a room without candles. She, too, looked the very personification of content. The first couple was all her heart could wish, and more than her wildest ambition had ever dreamed of for her favorite Aline. The second she had grown philosophically reconciled to. The marriage had one drawback, a grievous one, but the charwoman consoled herself with the reflection that Mme. de Chanoir might condone the _bourgeoisie_ of her new name, by signing herself:

FELICITE DALIBOUZE, _Née_ de Lemaque.

Use And Abuse Of The Novel.

If the question were put to us—What class of books, viewed merely as reading, without tutelage or commentary of any kind, had the greatest influence in moulding and training the thoughts, aspirations, mode of life, of the mass of readers in these days?—we should, notwithstanding the slur and sneer which it is fashionable for clever writers to cast upon them, answer unhesitatingly—Novels.

This answer, we have no doubt, might shock the sensibilities of some of our readers, as it might very cordially agree with those of a not insignificant body of others. Without going into a dry analytical discussion of the _pros_ and _cons_ of the question, we will adopt the easier course of taking at the outset everything we want for granted, and allowing the truth of it to emanate from the body of our article; merely premising that, if it be true, Catholics have too much neglected, are far too weak in, this very important collateral branch of modern education.

Every age, every cycle, every period in the history of the world has its distinctive features, its proper individualities, its representative men, systems, or facts, strongly and clearly marked. Ours is the iron age. Our province is matter. Our tastes are material. The world seems, strangely enough, to be working backwards. We began with intellect: we finish with matter. The signs of the past are stamped with intellect or the intellectual. The development of the present is steam and electricity. If we ask the ages, What have you given us? the answer comes rolling down out of the dim mountain of the past: Homer, Phidias, Apelles; the alphabet, the geometrical figure, the science of numbers; Plato and Aristotle; Virgil and the historians; the practical greatness of Rome; the great faith of the new‐born middle ages; the Crusades, the Gothic order, the great masters, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. We have our distinctive mark; the one indicated: the mastery over the material world. In the intellectual order, if we look for one, we must set it in the daily newspaper and the novel. These are the peculiar intellectual development of the XIXth century. Against the names of Homer, Plato, Æschylus, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, we pit those of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Eugene Sue, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Bulwer, Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, and her kin.

Surely this is rank heresy. Is not this the age of the rationalists, the free‐thinkers, “the swallowers of formula,” of Hegel, Cousin, Comte, Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Thomas Carlyle? All these are nothing to the purpose. Thinkers, dreamers, idealists, doubters, belong to all ages. The novelists belong to ours alone, as surely as do the steamboat, the railway, the electric telegraph, the daily press, the penny post.

In saying this, we are not blind to the fact that novels and romances were written long before our century dawned. Cervantes and Le Sage are old enough; the Romaunts are older still. De Foe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Richardson, are names of a bygone century. But novelism, to use the word in a new sense, considered as a science—for such it has practically become—as the most popular branch of literature known in these days, with men and women of genius devoted to its pursuit, with an ever‐increasing progeny spreading and growing, and stifling each other out of life, is an intellectual phase proper of to‐day.

Philosophic historians trace the decline of peoples and periods in the decline of their literature; in its tone, its style, its subjects, and manner of treatment. If this test be applied to us, what a show should we make! But happily the test, though in the main a true one, is not an infallible one. The facility opened up by the invention of printing for writers of every shade of opinion to express their thoughts upon any given subject at any length and in any quantity, provided only they pay the printer, must weaken to some extent the theory that writers are the exact reflex of the times and peoples for and among whom they write. Still there rests the significant fact that to‐day the novel, and particularly the worst form of it, is the _book of the period_; the most popular, widely read, best paid class of literature that we possess—a fact which tells its own tale of our intellectual and moral advance.

The ancients seem not to have conceived such a thing. And, despite the danger of such an admission in the face of what the novel has come to be among ourselves, we can only regret its loss among them. Had the Greeks and Romans caught the idea, and turned their brilliant, clear‐sighted, manly, and truth‐loving intellects to the portrayal of everyday life; to the picture of how the world wagged behind the scenes long ago, what a flood of light would have been let in on their history, its meaning, its philosophy, so as to render almost superfluous the works of such men as Niebuhr, Gibbon, Grote. We should have had plenty of evil undoubtedly, plenty to sicken us; but, after all, would the foulness of the pagans have been much worse than the spicy dishes cooked and served up to us every day by our own novelists; by gray‐haired men; by ladies, at whose age we will not venture to guess; by smart young girls who have just bounced out of their teens? The glimpse we have had of Socrates’ spouse makes us wish for a closer acquaintance with that dame. We are anxious to know how she received the news of his draught of hemlock, for she evidently entertained the utmost contempt for all his doctrine and philosophy, and must have been rather surprised at the state bothering itself so much about _her_ husband. What an irreparable loss we have sustained in Diogenes, his sayings and doings, his snarls and life in that tub of his! What living pictures would have been left us of the life in the groves, the disputations, the clash of intellect with intellect where all was intellect; the great games, who betted, who lost, who won, who contended; of the mysteries and the sacrifices; of Greece at the invasions; of the party strifes; how Alcibiades pranked and ruled in turn; how Balbus built that famous wall of his that he is always building in the _Delectus_; how Agricola ploughed his field; how the _Symposia_ passed off with Cicero and his friends; how Cæsar spent his youth, and how the conspiracy worked that destroyed him; what sort of companions brought Catiline’s conspiracy about; the effect of the _quousque tandem_ speech related by an eye‐ witness; the coming of the great Apostles; the dawn of Christianity; how the gay Greeks listened to that first strange sermon given from the altar to the Unknown God.

These things have been told us in a way. We can pick and sort them out of the brilliant works of the writers of the time. But had they been told us by a Greek or Roman novelist, a Thackeray, Dickens, or Bulwer, with the actors set living and real and palpable on the scenes, speaking the language, using all the little peculiarities, of everyday life, with all their natural surroundings and coincidents, what a lost world would have been opened up to us!

Abandoning, however, such vain and useless regrets, let us turn to the immediate subject of our own article. The title, Novel, we here use in the popular signification of the word, as comprising all works of fiction, distinct from those that are purely satirical, and history as written by such men as Mr. James Anthony Froude and Mr. John S. C. Abbott. Novelists, we know, are apt to be nice on the question of titles. No lady of third‐ rate society, who with time on her hands to do good devoted it to the study of the court balls and the pages of Debrett, was ever more so. Here is your romance, which looks down upon your mere story; your novelette which shrinks with awe from your psychological romance; your story of real life, a republican sort of fellow often, who hustles and bustles and shoulders them all and stands on his own legs; and a variety of others as numerous as they are, to the public at large—which is, as it should be, a poor respecter of titles—unnecessary. We purpose, in the name of the public, dealing very summarily with these titled folk, throwing them, high and low, in the same category, and designating one and all as novels pure and simple, with the single distinction, which shall appear in due time, of the sensational novel.

As we have arrived at this point, it may not be amiss to ask, What purpose do novels serve; with what object are they written?

A hard question truly. We reply to the second part of the query first. It may not be unnatural, nor dealing unfairly with their authors, to suppose that novels are written, in the first place, with the very laudable desire of earning one’s bread: so that “the root of all evil” lies at the bottom of the “psychological romance,” as of far humbler things in this world. As to what purpose, earthly or unearthly, they serve, the answer to that depends, first of all, on the author’s secondary motive in writing them; secondly, on the effect they produce on the reader—which are two very different things. We have not the slightest doubt that the French novelists, as popularly known, entertained the very loftiest ideas with regard to morality, Christianity, the laws of God and man, the conventional relations between husband and wife, and so on, before ushering into the world the representatives of their—to put it mildly—somewhat peculiar views on these questions. Well, if the world read them wrongly, mistook faith for infidelity, a deep lesson in purity for adultery, loyalty and obedience to the sovereign for rank outspoken disturbance and rebellion, who was to blame? The world was simply stupid. M. Dumas _fils_, for instance, has lately been good enough to enlighten us with his ideas on the vexed questions of matrimony and women in general. M. Dumas _fils_ is undoubtedly an excellent guide on such subjects. He is an advanced man, a man of the age, of society, of the world. His testimonies on such subjects ought, therefore, to be of value. He has disposed of the whole question in, for a Dumas, a few words—a single volume. The moral of his doctrine comes to this: if your wife is faithless, kill her. We have not yet heard of any practical results arising from this new gospel, as preached by M. Dumas _fils_; from which, we have no doubt, he will draw the very agreeable inference that his remedy for the regeneration of society, and the nice adjustment of the marriage‐knot once for all, was altogether unnecessary. If his doctrine should spread to any alarming extent, no doubt M. Dumas _fils_ will be satisfied that at last the world is beginning a new era of advancement, that there is still hope for it; and he will hold himself answerable for all the consequences. By the bye, we believe he has omitted one little thing: the course to be adopted by the wife in the event of the husband’s infidelity. But probably such a high‐minded, virtuous man as M. Dumas never contemplated the possibility of such a contingency arising.

Mr. Collins, Mr. Reade, Miss Braddon, and the rest hold, doubtless, the same ideas with regard to the relative value of their productions. Whether their praiseworthy efforts have been duly appreciated; whether they have ever made man, woman, or child a whit better or sounder by the perusal of any of their works, we do not know. We are inclined to think not. If any reader would kindly come forward and show that we are wrong in this from his or her own experience, we shall only be too happy to stand corrected. At all events, the advantage derived must be in very small proportion to the quantity of literary medicine and advice administered by those social physicians to the craving multitude.

Laying aside, then, the invariably pure and lofty motives of the authors; laying aside the cloak which novels serve for at times, as in the hands of a Disraeli, to attack a policy or a system; and taking them as they affect ourselves, the readers, one may safely say that they serve mainly to amuse; to fill up those spare moments that nothing else can fill up. They constitute the play‐ground of literature—a recreation and relief for the mind. We gulp them down as we are whirled along in the railway train. We take them with us on long voyages, as the Scotch patient took his weekly sermon at the kirk, as an opiate—thus fulfilling to the letter the traditional notion of the “Sabbath” being a day of rest. When the brain is heavy and the body worn, when to talk is labor and to think is pain, then we can seize the novel, loll on the sofa, or recline under the leafy shade by the brink of the musical river, and float away, half asleep, half awake, into dreamland. In a moment a new world, as real and living to the mind’s eye as that in which we move, is conjured up before us. We are on intimate terms with a villain whose dagger is as air‐drawn as Macbeth’s. We can commit cold‐blooded murders that will never bring us to the dock; or shocking improprieties that even the far‐reaching nose of Mrs. Grundy will fail to catch scent of. Or we go over “the old, old story,” and are bumped, jerked, and jolted along the delicious course that never _will_ run smooth; mapping it out if we have not yet had the fortune (or misfortune) to traverse it; filling it in with many a well‐known form, if we have. And if the never‐running‐smooth theory be true of love, this much we ungrudgingly grant the novelists—they certainly hold to their tether. The labyrinth of Dædalus was nothing to it; the twistings, the windings, the sudden and unexpected meetings, the separations, the jiltings, the halts by the way, the joy, the sorrow, the ecstasy, the despair, the losings, the seekings, the findings, the torturing uncertainty, the wanderings through hopeless mazes, to end, as we knew at the outset it would and must end, according to “the eternal fitness of things,” in some man marrying some woman—the most extraordinary phenomenon that the world ever witnessed!

The novel invites us, as the noonday devil is supposed to do, at dangerous moments—those moments that come to all of us when matter holds the mastery over mind. Place in the hands of the reader at such a time a book which, while it interests, while it soothes, lulls, and gently enwraps in its kindly meshes the abstracted brain, never palls; containing at least what is harmless; and good, not very great certainly, but at least of a kind, is effected.

But let the novel be like the favorites of its class, a thing to fire the imagination with impure thoughts clothed in the thinnest veil of mock morality, at the very moment when the imagination of the reader is ready to run riot; and evil, great, sometimes irreparable, is produced.

“All the wrong that I have ever done or sung has come from that confounded book of yours,” writes Byron to Moore in a moment of bitterness. If the accusation be well founded, what an intellectual wreck has Moore to answer for; what a multitude of lesser disasters following in the train of a great genius, so early led astray!

The novelist beats every other writer from the field. We all read him, from the crop‐haired schoolboy to the octogenarian who has quite grown through his hair; from the nearest approach to Mr. Darwin’s ideal man to the philosopher “who would circumvent God”; from the artless maiden who fondly dotes over those wicked but excessively handsome villains, those athletic but ridiculously stupid lovers, those consumptive heroines with the luminous eyes and rippling glories of golden hair; those lady poisoners with the floating locks and sea‐green orbs—to the dyspeptic lady who makes novel‐reading a science, who dawdles out her languid existence in elegant nothingness, who looks to the production of a new story as men look to a change in the constitution, or as astronomers lately looked to the comet that would not come; who is, in a word, utterly useless for all the purposes of life, of wifehood, of womanhood—novel‐struck, novel‐bred, only fit to “resolve and thaw into a dew” of weak sentimentality and essence of inanity. From this category of readers we must not omit the typical old maid, who is continually telling us that she renounced such things as love and other rubbish long ago; yet daily treats herself to her spruce, strong, highly flavored dish of the purest, spiciest scandal, and takes her diurnal dose of immorality as regularly as her “drops” or her tea.

All the world lies open to the novelist. From no place is he excluded, save from a few high and dry quarterlies; and even they are stirred from their abstract regions into sledgehammer activity or solemn admiration by him from time to time. Of monthlies, fortnightlies, weeklies, dailies, he forms the chief ingredient. Even editors of metaphysical fortnightlies find they must flavor their own romance with a spice, of the more regular and orthodox in order to make it “go down with the public.”

What a field, then, is the novelist’s!—what ground for a high, pureminded man or woman to sow seeds in that may sprout, and spread, and fill the world with truth, with purity, with noble aspirations, with right teachings set in the goodliest garb! The youth of the generations is their own.

Who has forgotten those earlier days when we stood, fair‐haired, open‐ hearted children, on the threshold of life, steeped in the morning sun of a future that looked all golden? A warm mist hung about us, shrouding all in beautiful, mystical dimness. There was no storm, no darkness, no night. Whisperings of soft voices stole out of the magic mist, and called us on to do great things; to rift the mist and open up the glorious world of God, as we saw it in our imaginings. The morning of life, like the morning of the world, is all Eden. We walk with God, for we are innocent. But the doom is on us; we must pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The moment we taste of it, the golden dream is no more; the mist is reft asunder; and slowly the world opens on our saddened eyes in all its hard reality, to be subjected by the labor of our hands and the sweat of our brow. As we merge from that innocence, so we go on. Some great event may change us; may make this one a saint, that a fiend. But, as a rule, the sapling grows into the tree, weakly or strong, straight and tall and looking heavenwards, or stunted, useless, and unsightly as it grew from the grafting.

The grafting is the mother’s voice, the father’s example, the companions around us, the guidance of our thoughts. And the great mass of our thoughts, at a time when we are all imagination, springs from the books we read. Here steps in the crying need of a series of story‐books for Catholic children; for all children up to the age when study becomes a more serious work.

One other glance back at the days of our childhood, and the manner in which they were spent; for it is not the least important part of our subject. What a round of acquaintance we had, necessitating a corresponding round of visits! One day we dropped in on our best of friends, _Robinson Crusoe_, on that lonely island of his, wishing that all the world were islands and we were all Crusoes. All we wanted to live happily was a boat, six or seven guns and pistols, a goat‐skin cap, a parrot, a Man Friday, an umbrella, and an occasional savage to kill. After taking a sail with him in his boat, helping him to build his castle, tending the goats, running down to see if we could find that second footprint on the sand, giving Friday a lesson in English, we bade him good‐bye with the promise of calling again soon, and hurried off on that expedition to the other end of the world with our old acquaintance Captain Marryat, to search for our father, play our practical jokes, and fight our triangular duels. Then we had to hunt up that Indian trail for Cooper, and no redskin ever followed the track half so keenly as we, marking the way, notching the giant trunks with our six‐bladed penknife, shooting the buffalo with our pop‐guns, sleeping round the campfires in those limitless prairies and thickest jungles of our imagination. Ha! by’r Lady! Here we are at the gentle trial of spears at Ashby de la Zouch. How brave it was! The glinting of the lances, and the clash of steel on helm and hauberk; the gay plumes shorn and floating on the wind like thistledown. And out we rushed, and called the friend of our bosom a caitiff knight and a false knave, and plighted our troth to that imprisoned maiden—no matter who, and no matter where—to do her right, and do our devoir as leal and belted knight. That caitiff deals in leather now, and does a thriving business; his knightly limbs are cased in the best of cloth, cut by the cleverest of artists; his knightly stomach is naught the worse for wear, but quite beyond the girth of steel armor; and he has a son who, at this moment, is assisting at the joust as we did, spurring into the _mêlée_ and bearing all down before us, to spur out again victor, and meet Charlie O’Malley waiting for us outside; to ride with him for dear life into to‐day. What a race it is; how the world spins past us; how our heart throbs, and our eyes grow dim, and our hopes sink as we fall and dislocate our shoulder at that last fence. By heaven! up again—on, and in a winner! And we sink to the ground with the shouts of thousands ringing in our ears, to wake in a darkened chamber with low voices breaking on us—the voices of our dear Irish girls, who make “smithereens” of our hearts only to heal them the next minute, and sit there wooing us back into life and love.

Such was the favorite mental food of our earlier days, our literary candy. If the reading of youth were restricted to authors such as these, on the whole we might consider them in safe hands. But books multiply and cheapen day by day, and as usual “the cheap and nasty” carries everything before it. The favorite stories of the mass of boys that we see consist of what is known as the _Dime Novel_ and those blood‐and‐thunder weeklies with the terrific titles and startling pictures. By some strange freak of nature, boys are fond of blood; the warlike element prevails; the peaceful is nowhere. We feel certain that, if Mr. Barnum possessed a real live murderer among his collection of curiosities—though we fear he could scarcely ticket such an animal “a curiosity” in these days—and caged him up among the other wild beasts, he would prove a greater attraction to the juvenile visitor than anything else in the famous exhibition. It were easy enough to satisfy this morbid craving for muscular Christianity in a safe and sound manner, if our writers of fiction took up systematically the incidents of history; the great wars; the crusades, the parts played by great Christian heroes, by the saints of God; the scenes of martyrdom, the labors of the missionaries, and a thousand other subjects as entertaining as they are instructive and strictly true. We know that there are many such; but we want to be overloaded with them, as we are with those others to which we referred. We can scarcely at the moment call to mind one Catholic story to compete at all with a crowd of children’s books written by Protestants. The production of children’s stories has grown into a science among them. We frequently see pages of stately reviews and the columns of the London _Times_ devoted to as critical an examination of this class of books as to the works of the greatest writers. They recognize the necessity and the advantage of giving their children something to save them from the evil effects that must ensue from a continual history of daring and impossible feats by young burglars, detectives, spies, and the like. The best writers of this kind are, as they should be, women, who know best how to interest children, who watch them with an eye to their every want, that a man cannot attain. Here, then, is a field for Catholic ladies—a field wide open, which cries to be filled up.

But our article deals not alone with children and children’s books. We purpose looking higher and looking deeper, at the mental recreation of the day, of the age; at the literature that loads our tables, our shelves, our public libraries, our bookstalls: the book “of the period”—the sensational novel.

What is a sensational novel? Who has defined it? Who dare define it? It is a pity the author of _Rasselas_ had not some faint conception of it. The idea of calling _Rasselas_ a novel in these days! We might imagine him to have dealt with it somewhat in the following style:

Sensational Novel: A complexity of improbabilities woven around a crowd of nonentities, interspersed with fashionable filth, and relieved by sleek‐ coated beastliness; meaning nothing, and good for less.

What is this word that possesses us! Sensation!—as though we had not enough of it. The age is so dreadfully prosaic, so workaday, so dull. We must run off the track, out of the common groove, or we are ill at ease. Where is the sensation in steam and electricity? We are whirled through a continent in a week: but that is a thing done every day. It almost equals the mantle of the genii in the _Arabian Nights_; we had only to step upon it, and find ourselves at whatever point of the compass we wished. We cross thousands of miles of ocean in a similar period, mastering the elements with a clockwork regularity, fair weather or foul. We knit sea to sea. We rise from foe‐encircled cities, and sail safe away into the air. The whisper of what has been done in one quarter of the world has not had time to pass abroad before it is discussed in the others. We have linked the disjointed world by an electric flame that flashes knowledge throughout its circle instantaneously. We build up vast empires and topple down thrones every day, as though they were ninepins, and yet we want sensation! We sigh for the cap and bells; the jousts and games and junketings of old. Even the feast of horrors, crimes, and incidents, the births, deaths, and marriages, and the scandals of the “fashionable world,” served up to us at breakfast daily, with all the inventive genius of the newspaper correspondent, pall upon our surfeited appetites. “We have supped full of horrors. Time was when our fell of hair would have uplifted to hear a night‐shriek. But now, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to us all the uses of this world of ours. Life is as dreary as a twice‐told tale.” We are not satisfied; we feel a craving after something. Our want, our craving, springs not from the desire for a higher spirit in it all, not from an absence of faith and noble purpose, of something greater than utility, not from a horror of a daily widening infidelity and impurity that mocks the pagan; but simply and purely from a lack of sensation! In the face of the dull routine of this age of marvels that old Friar Bacon dimly saw in his dreams, and was deemed a madman for his foresight; in the face of wars like our own rebellion and the devastation of France; in the midst of fallen thrones and falling peoples—we ask for sensation! as the philosopher, though perhaps with more reason, took a lantern to look for a man. We find it not in these things; we pass them by, and bury ourselves in the pages of Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, and their kind. They are the wonder‐workers of the age.

Here we find what we are seeking; here is a response to our ravenous craving, in those delicious, torturing plots that take our breath away. Here we sit hob and nob with what the fourth‐rate newspaper is fond of calling “the scions of nobility.” We get an animated description and category of their articles of clothing, from their boots and who made them, to their linen and where it was bought. What a pleasure it is to know a count and a lord, and a lady and a duchess; to know how they eat and drink, and the chronicle of all the fearful scandal that goes on in what the newspaper man again knows as “certain circles”! What peeps we have into the green‐room! Pages are devoted to the eyes of an opera‐ singer, the ankles of a _danseuse_, the charming slang of an actress. The scene is varied by dips into the purlieus of society; into the bagnio and the gin‐mill; the prize‐ring and the barracks; the dancing saloon and the gaming‐table; the betting ring; into every place, every person, everything the lowest, the meanest, the worst.

Is this exaggeration? Is it a false, outrageous libel on this age, so full of great things, and still greater capabilities? Is it particularly false of ourselves, the simple‐hearted, simple‐mannered republicans, who have set our faces as sternly against the ungodly and the ways of sin as our old crop‐haired, steeple‐crowned Puritans professed to do? We shall only be too happy if somebody convinces us that such is the fact. In the meanwhile; incidentally to our purpose appeared a few statistics the other day from public libraries, bearing on this very question, showing that in libraries, which, as a rule, a class of intelligent and sensible readers are supposed to frequent, the books most in demand were of the style we deplore, and complaints were laid at their doors because they failed adequately to supply this demand.

There must be something very delicious in vice. Nothing else will satisfy us. The novelists have sounded the depths of depravity; and in their efforts to find a lower depth still, are driven to walking the hospitals, diving into blue‐books, frequenting the asylums for the diseased, the depraved, the insane. The repertory of evil seems almost used up. They have so beaten the drawing‐room carpet, so sifted and shaken out for the public gaze the smallest speck of fashionable filth that the most delicately organized imagination of the refined lady could discern, that there is nothing left on it. Titles even are growing common, and we want some new type of a coroneted brow to bind our scandal on. Dickens and Collins and Yates have overrun us with burglars and detectives. They did good service in their day; but even they are growing unromantic. The Krupp, the mitrailleuse, the needle‐gun, have killed off the slashing cavalry heroes, who rode at everything, neck or nothing, in perfect safety, and were as irresistible in love as in war. We must abandon these higher regions with a sigh, and go down to the dirtiest columns of the dirtiest newspapers in our efforts to find “something rich and strange.” And to this men and women of “genius,” as it is called, bend their every effort. The gifts that God has given them to ennoble man they devote to stirring the puddle of filth which they take as the mirror of human nature, and, holding before the admiring gaze of humanity whatever they have fished up, say—Behold yourselves!

Are these the lessons society must look for in its gifted children? Is the great book of nature narrowed down to these limits? Is there nothing in human life, human thought, human activity, more worthy our attention, more deeply interesting to man, than the chronicle of his vices? Is the attractive in human nature confined to third or fourth hand glimpses of “the scions of nobility,” the bywords of the barracks, the slang of the gutter, the echoes of the footlights? Is vice alone captivating, and morality such an everyday, humdrum affair that we are sick of excess of it? Is love the thing they present to us?—love, the great passion, the pure divine flame that God has set in our hearts to link together and perpetuate the generations, and finally lead us up to him? Is this maudlin rubbish that the writers of the day surfeit us with, love?—this weak, puny, consumptive thing; inane, jejune, sickly, fleshly, sensual, impure, inhuman? Love is a divine‐inspired passion of the soul, planted there by God, to grow and flourish in its great, pure, single strength. They have cut it, and hacked and torn it to shreds, and left nothing of divinity in it. They set it in the flesh, and convert a heaven‐born gift into the lowest of animal passions.

It requires no very powerful stretch of the imagination to draw from the foul pens of these writers the germ of the question which to‐day threaten to turn the world topsy‐turvy—the so‐called theory of _Woman’s Rights_—which has for champions philosophers of the stamp of Stuart Mill and Professor Fawcett, and for first‐born, _Free Love_.

We will suppose Mr. Stanley, of the _New York Herald_, to have brought back with him a native of the countries he visited in his marvellously successful search for Dr. Livingstone. The native has learned the English language on his journey. He is suddenly thrown among a people whom he can only look upon as gods, as the Indians first looked upon the Spaniards. He is surrounded by the results of all the ages. He wishes to learn something about these gods: how they live and move and have their being. A novel “of the period”—any one by any of the thousand authors of the species—is put into his hands as the faithful reflex of this society. What can we imagine would be his feelings at the end of its perusal? A comparison rather in favor of his own countrymen would be the most natural inference.

But it may be objected that we are pessimists. We attack a class whom no decent person would defend. There are more schools of novelists than the sensational school. There are Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer. Are these all that we would wish, or do they also fall under our sweeping condemnation?

As for Scott, we are still proud to acknowledge him by his old title—“The Wizard of the North.” He was a man who, taking into account the times in which he lived, the prejudices still rife, the people for whom he wrote, the purpose of his writings, turned every faculty of his marvellously gifted, richly stored mind to its best account. Even Livy’s “pictured page” almost dims in our eyes before the range and variety of his. His works are the illumination of history; his characters almost as true, as rounded, as full as Shakespeare’s, and partaking of the great master’s “infinite variety.” His plots are deeply interesting, his fidelity to nature in character and scene sustained and equal, whether the subject be Queen Bess or Queen Mary of Scotland, Louis XI. or King Jamie, a moss‐ trooper or a crusader, a free‐lance or a pirate, a bailie or a Poundtext; whether the scene lie in Palestine or in the Trosachs, in mediæval France or mediæval England, in the camp or the court, the prisons of Edinburgh or the purlieus of Alsatia. He has laughed at us Catholics good‐naturedly sometimes, but despite that, his novels did us a vast service at a time when our road was very dark, and we were looked upon at best as something utterly inhuman—something, in fact, like what the sailor conceived who, when stranded somewhere with his mess‐mate in the neighborhood of the North Pole, beheld for the first time a white bear squatted on its haunches before them, and taking a contented survey.

“What’s that ’ere beggar, Jack?”

“Oh!” said the other, taking a solemn glance at the animal, between the whiffs of his pipe, “I can’t say exactly, but I expect it’s one o’ them there what they call Roman Cawtholics too.”

Scott first made us known to the mass of English readers in a fair way. The barriers of anti‐Catholic prejudice, centuries old, which had resisted stoutly and stubbornly every effort which reason, right, and common humanity made against it, crumbled at once beneath the fairy wand of the magician, and English Protestants came to know something of us and recognize us, though still in a cautious manner, as fellow‐men.

From Scott all readers may undoubtedly derive much good. And now we turn to the others, the leaders of modern fiction: the standard, though, as we showed, not the most widely read authors of the day.

They are Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer; and though the men themselves, so far as their lives are known to us, had little or no faith in any particular church or any particular creed, and must therefore be wanting in a firm, steadfast groundwork, absolutely necessary to impart a pure, high‐minded spirit to their writings, we lay this aside, and look at them only through their works. In Thackeray and Bulwer we have two eminently clever, highly cultivated men—writers who cannot fail to grace everything that they touch, who cannot fail to interest deeply and always. They were men of much learning, of great insight into character, whose mode of life and circle of acquaintances threw them into the heart of the world, their world, and gave them every facility of knowing it thoroughly. They came and saw. And what is the result of their investigation? They found it all a great sham. The genius of both consists in thoroughly exposing this great sham, in tearing off the gilded mask, and showing the hollow, empty, grim death’s‐head beneath it; in leaving not a rag to cover its nakedness. After reading Thackeray, there springs up in us an utter contempt for ourselves and for the world in general. All human nature is false, rotten, and utterly worthless. There is no religion in it, no faith, and as a consequence no honesty and no law save the law of expediency. If there are any characters to admire at all, they are certainly not his good men; for they, and those of Dickens also—Tom Pinch, for instance—are the most insipid numskulls that ever crossed our vision; the most wretched caricatures of goodness that could possibly be conceived. Very truly might he say that, “when he started a story, he was very dubious as to the morality of his characters.” We respect his good men infinitely less than his rogues. Among them he is at home: in his Lord Steynes, his Becky Sharpes, his drunken parsons, his wicked gray‐hairs, his asses or black‐ legs among the young, his solemn humbugs, his tuft‐hunters, his silly, useless, vain, untruthful women, his worldly mammas who hold up their charming daughters at auction; those charming daughters who submit to it with such good grace, who simper so chittishly under their pink bonnets and look for soft places on the sofa to faint; his designing and unprincipled adventuresses, to whom the world is as a market, a betting ring, or a faro‐table, and the thing to be sold, the stake to be played for, is the virtue they never possessed. Such is Thackeray’s world; and he has done well to show it up so openly and unsparingly in all its nakedness. But is it altogether a true portrait; could he do no more than this? Is this the true world, after all—so utterly depraved and given over to evil? Are there no such things as truth, honesty, morality, religion, among us? Are there no men and women, no bodies, endowed with sense enough, power enough, and wit enough to give the lie to this, and bring this false world with shame to their feet? If there be, it is not to be found in the pages of Thackeray.

In Bulwer, it is the same story told in Bulwer’s way, with less of heart and more of licentiousness. Thackeray was, we believe, a virtuous man, as the phrase goes; that is, he was contented with one wife, paid his bills, kept his word, and very rarely woke with a headache. But Bulwer rather glories, or was wont to do, in the opposite character. He used to be fond of telling us that he knew the world; had mixed in, shared, felt its vices and its follies. He comes out of this world of his, sits down, and tells us all about it; what sort of men and women he found in it; what motives actuate them; what they live for, what code of morality they follow. Taken as a whole, their code of morality is fashion; their temple is the world; their religion, worldliness; their god, themselves. Crime is only crime in the humble; in the wealthy it is elevated into vice. Such is the doctrine of the Bulwer world; the doctrine that our children imbibe unconsciously, while only diverted momentarily by the interest of the story. So far, then, notwithstanding grace of style, elegance of diction, happiness of conception—all which may be found in a hundred writers infinitely superior, essayists and historians—we have nothing but a very doubtful negative gain.

And Dickens—who has made us weep over fireside virtues, the hardness and quiet nobleness of humble struggle, and the greatness of spirit that beats as strong in the cottage as on the throne—must we cast him into the same category? Hard as it is to say, we find him wanting, though in a less degree than the two above‐mentioned. He has fought sham, and fought it, as few others have done, successfully. He did not take up the whole world and fight it as one gigantic falsehood. This is useless. The world is large enough and strong enough to withstand the mightiest single‐handed and hold its own. It will not be put down in this way, and it only laughs at the tooting tin whistles that are continually blowing such shrill but tiny blasts of regeneration at it, till they crack and are silenced for ever. Dickens fought it as the first Napoleon fought the combinations arrayed against him; he cut them off in detachments. So with the world; you must take it by pieces. Show it one sham, and all the other shams will cry shame. The silks, and the satins, and the perfumed licentiousness of the drawing‐room, Dickens left to other hands. But he opened up to the eyes of these fine folk, who sinned so elegantly in their carriages and palaces, a black, yawning, startling gulf right under their feet; with its hot elements seething in corruption and danger beneath them, because they would not look at it; because they would not recognize this other nation, as Disraeli called it in _Sybil_; because that world was to them as far off and unknown as Timbuctoo. He showed them the thieves’ and harlots’ dens, and how they were fed; by the innocent and pure, brutalized by the system of the jail, school, and workhouse, presided over by such men as have lately stood unabashed in the broad light of day before us, and openly confessed to cruelties that Squeers would have blushed at; who passed unharmed and triumphant from the court of justice, and found lawyers and excellent “ministers of God’s Word” to uphold them, and proclaimed in the press and elsewhere that they were honest, humane men and maligned saints. Dickens showed us what these Squeerses and Stigginses were made of. He showed us what the jails were made of, the asylums, the workhouses, the schools; and undoubtedly aided in effecting many a reform. He warmed our hearts towards each other, and towards the unfortunates to whom all life was a bitter trial from birth to the grave. He undoubtedly did great good; and many a book of his is a never‐ending, never‐wearying sermon, preached to a broad humanity. As Catholics we owe him a deep debt for never having systematically or seriously abused his talents by abusing us, where abuse is ever welcome and well rewarded. But he has given us so much that we look for more from him; for some great, broad, sound principles to guide us through the hard battle of life; since his problem was life, human nature, its difficulties and its dangers. While confessing our debt to him for what he has done, we find a good deal in Dickens that we do not like. His code of ethics is a very easy one, and a very dangerous one, running into that indifferentism so prevalent and demoralizing to‐day. We find, after reading him, that there is a great amount of evil in the world counterbalanced by a tolerably fair amount of good, and that it is useless to hope for anything more. That, so far as religion goes, mankind may be divided into two classes—the humbugs and the humbugged: the humbugs—the Chadbands, the Stigginses—getting decidedly the better of the bargain. That, provided a man is not intolerably bad, he is as good as the generality of his neighbors, and has a fair chance of arriving safe at the end of life’s journey, wherever or whatever that end may be, without being extraordinarily particular about it. That drunkenness is not a vice unworthy of man, it is rather an amiable weakness, a good joke, something funny, something to be laughed at; something that you and ourselves might fall into now and again without doing much harm. Nowhere in Dickens, as far as we recollect, does drunkenness appear as what it is, a vice lower than the appetite of the brute. As for our quarrel with him as Americans, though a grievous and a just one, we will let that pass now. He endeavored to atone for it at the end, so let it rest with him in his grave. In considering his works as a whole, his almost unrivalled power of moving us to laughter or to tears, we cannot help contrasting what he has done, great as it is, with what he might have done had he been endowed with a clear religious belief, and not a heart open only to mere human goodness.

To conclude, then: the point of our article is this. The novel is a power among us to‐day: a new weapon thrown into the midst of the strife of good and evil, to be taken up by either party. Those who would uproot all morality, all law, all faith, the basis of humanity, have been quick to see its efficacy, seize upon it, and turn it to a terrible account. It is not so much the open direct teachings of heathen, pagan, rationalistic—call it what you will, it means the same in the long run—philosophy that we are to fear. The intellects that breathe in that atmosphere are few and far between. But when this heathenism comes filtered down to us through sources that meet us at every turn, and impregnates and poisons the innocent streams that ought to beautify and fertilize the intellect of the mass—when it comes to us half disguised in the literature that we place in the hands of our sons and daughters, it is time for us to purge this poison out.

Stop novels we cannot. Let preachers thunder as they may, they will be written, and they will be read. It is for us to seize upon that weapon, and turn it to our own purpose. We have already done so to a degree. Our great thinkers, Wiseman, Newman, have recognized the necessity of this, and themselves set us the example. But not to such men as these are we to look for a Catholic school of novelists: their duties are higher, their work more laborious, though not, and we may say it advisedly, from the necessities of the day more important. We want a crowd of such writers as Gerald Griffin, Bernard McCabe, Lady Fullerton, the authoress of _The House of Yorke_. In France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we have been more successful. The Countess of Hahn Hahn, Bolanden, Mrs. Craven, Conscience, Manzoni, Fernan Caballero, show us that Catholic writers who give themselves to this necessary and noble work can make the novel their own, and compete successfully even in the matter of sale with the Dumases, the Eugene Sues, George Sands, Wilkie Collinses, Charles Reades, Miss Braddons. Their works are received with heartfelt approval by the critics of the Protestant press. And we cannot refrain from thanking these gentlemen for the very fair, honest and manly, and conscientious use they make of their pens in this particular at least. Critics are heartily weary of the mass of rubbish they are compelled to wade through week after week, month after month. If anything, they are too mild. We lack something of that hearty knock‐down criticism which prevailed in the palmy days of the quarterlies; which killed or cured; which lashed Byron into savagery and brought out his true genius; which crushed the weakly and the worthless.

Catholic novelists, and Protestant also, have a noble field before them wherein to sow and reap. It is for them to show that vice and unchastity are not the only subjects which can interest us; that godliness and _true_ love are not such dull, insipid, everyday things; that suffering and self‐ denial and sacrifice for a noble purpose, the soul‐conflict of human passion against the eternal decrees, and its mastery after much struggle and weary strife, are full of the profoundest interest for man; that history is but the chronicle of this conflict, and when rightly read shows it forth in every page; that our souls can be fired, our flagging senses stimulated, our admiration aroused, by the well‐told story of the struggle of right when we see a God moving and acting in it all, far more than by the adoration of indecency deified.

Review Of Vaughan’s Life Of S. Thomas: Concluded.(114)

In our last number, we endeavored to give our readers some idea of Prior Vaughan’s _Life of S. Thomas of Aquin_. We purposely omitted, however, to say anything of his treatment of the personal history of the saint himself. The name of Thomas of Aquin belongs to church history, to theology and philosophy; but it also belongs to what is known by the somewhat uncouth name of hagiography; and the story of the _saint_ is more engaging to the greater number of readers, than the history of the theologian or the philosopher. We have already hinted that some of Prior Vaughan’s best pages are to be found in the narrative of the saint’s personal story.

Biography is as old as the days of Confucius, or at least as the times of his early disciples; and whilst its object has been, on the whole, the same in all ages, its forms have undergone infinite variety. Men have written Lives in order to cheat Death of his victims. They have tried to keep heroes alive by embalming them in incorruptible and imperishable speech, that all time might know them, and their influence might reach from age to age. Biography has always had a moral purpose: to make men patriotic, or brave, or virtuous—to make them better in heart, rather than more subtle in intellect. Example being the great motive power in the world, the images of men in books have done much to shape the world’s course. But the books that have preserved the memory of heroic men have been of many different sorts. In old times, they used to be books of anecdote—books which were a threaded series of pithy sayings and generous deeds, each with a point of its own, and altogether tending to form the citizen, the soldier, or the virtuous man. And the style of Plutarch and of Diogenes Laertius was continued by Ven. Bede, by William of Malmesbury, by Froissart, and by the innumerable chroniclers of the middle ages. The biographer speaks in his own person now and then, but his words are very brief, and are often not so much an assistance to the tale, as a break in it or a sort of private _aside_ with the reader. The personal features of the hero, his mind or his body, are not made much of by the old biographers. You hear about his height, his complexion, the color of his hair, or the length of his chin; but you are never told when his eye flashes or his lip curls. Dates are not matters of importance. You have his birth and his death, but there is none of that curious comparative chronology which modern readers know of. And as for any sense of the picturesque, any idea of scene‐painting or putting in backgrounds, it need not be said that the old biographies are as plain as the background of a Greek theatre. They now and then give particulars of time, place, and circumstance which their modern transcribers seize upon as a miner seizes on the rare and welcome nugget; but these are entirely beyond their own intention. The historical and the moral are the only two elements to be found in lives from Xenophon down to Dr. Johnson. The latter biographer suggests that, in his days, the _moralizing_ element had developed out of the merely moral. But the life of Prior and the life of Alcibiades are not very distantly related. The time was coming when lives began to be picturesque. The growth of the propensity to the picturesque is a curious problem. Why is it that Homer never describes Troy, that Herodotus never gives us a picture of Marathon, that Cæsar has no eye for the Rhine, and that Froissart does not paint St. Denis on the day of the Oriflamme, whilst, on the other hand, Montalembert stops his story to describe the Western Isles, De Broglie lets us see the Council of Nicea as it sat, Stanley consecrates pages to paint Judæa and Carmel, and every writer of a saint’s life at the present hour provides for a picture or two in every chapter? Who began this? We do not mean who began the picturesque in literature, for that question, though a curious one is not so difficult to answer; but who began the picturesque in biography? It is Chateaubriand who usually gets the credit of having initiated all the romance and sentimentality that has crept into serious literature during the last half‐century. Chateaubriand has only left, if we remember rightly, one attempt at biography, and the _Vie de Rancé_ contains certainly sentiment and romance enough, but it is not graphic in the way that modern biographies are. The author dashes off brilliant sketches of society, he recites imaginary scenes, or rather episodes, in which nature plays her part, he makes incisive remarks, and utters beautiful poetry; but when he comes face to face with De Rancé, the penitent and the monk, his hand seems to falter, and he grows feeble and disappointing, just where a modern writer would have seized the opportunity of powerful painting and strong situation. For ourselves, whatever influence Chateaubriand had—and he had much—in directing men’s thoughts to analogies that lie beneath the surface of nature, of history, and of the human heart, we are inclined to attribute the modern craving for the picturesque to the development of a quality in which Chateaubriand did not especially excel; we mean, earnestness and reality. Many causes, and most of all, perhaps, that series of political and religious phenomena which is summed up in the word _revolution_, have combined, during the present century, to take literature out of the hands of merely professional writers, or to make those only choose it as a profession who have something earnest to say. Style and thought have come to be considered one thing. As De Quincey observes, style is not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, but rather its very incarnation.

It is easy to see how earnestness leads to the picturesque in biography. In proportion as the writer is able to fix his mind upon his hero, in the same proportion he comes to realize him, as the phrase is. Not only are all the facts and circumstances collected with the care of a lawyer getting up a brief, but words and names that look dead and speechless are analyzed as with magnifying power, till they take significance and life. Every name, as Aristotle saw, is itself a picture; but it is a picture that only requires a more powerful imaginative lens to grow greater, fuller, and more living. And therefore the earnest writer, because he looks more intently at his subject, sees more in it to put upon his canvas; and the reader, struck by the significance that he cannot gainsay, and moved by the pictures, as pictures always move the human fancy, is held in bonds by the writer, and remembers long and vividly what impressed his thought so strongly at the first. He is like one who has seen the site of a great battle, and has once for all fixed for himself, as he gazed, the relative positions and movements of the fight; he will not easily forget it. Something must, no doubt, be added to this; something must be allowed to modern culture, to modern appreciation of art as art, to modern love of landscape, and to the general _romanesque_ tendency begun by Chateaubriand. But so far from the tendency to picturesque biography being wholly attributable to sentiment, we hold that it is precisely our modern earnestness that makes us demand to see things nearer and more real. Doubtless the picturesque biographer is exposed to many dangers, and his readers to many trials. He may “realize” what does not exist; he may “analyze” out of his inner consciousness alone; he may usurp what is the privilege of the poet and the romancer, and give names and habitations not only to airy nothings, but, what is much more serious, to unsubstantial mistakes. And therefore we do not wonder that many well‐meaning people, with the results of romantic biography or history before their eyes, and youthful remembrances of Lingard and Butler, have come to distrust every account of a personage or of a fact which contains the smallest mixture of imagination.

The length of these prefatory remarks may lead the reader to suppose that Prior Vaughan has written picturesquely and sensationally about S. Thomas of Aquin. Yet this, stated absolutely, would by no means be true. We shall presently give one or two passages, in which a fine imaginative and descriptive power, we think, is displayed. But the book bears no sign of a straining after pictorial effect. Yet its whole idea is pre‐eminently picturesque. Prior Vaughan has written with the idea of not merely giving the history of his chosen saint, but of localizing it in time and in space. It is with this view that he enters into descriptions of Aquino, of Monte Cassino, of Paris and its University; it is for this that he brings S. Dominic and S. Francis on the canvas, and sketches the figures of Frederick II., of Abelard, of S. Bernard, of William of Paris. Each of these names has some connection with Thomas of Aquin, and each throws fresh light on the central object, when it is analyzed with care.

Here is the description, taken from the opening pages of the first volume, of the town of Aquino, which was, if not the birthplace of the saint, at least the principal seat of his family:

“The little town of Aquino occupies the centre of a vast and fertile plain, commonly called Campagna Felice, in the ancient Terra di Lavoro. This plain is nearly surrounded by bare and rugged mountains, one of which pushes further than the rest into the plain; and on its spur, which juts boldly out, and which was called significantly Rocca Sicca, was situated the ancient stronghold of the Aquinos. The remnants of this fortress, as seen at this day, seem so bound up with the living rock, that they appear more like the abrupt finish of the mountain than the ruins of a mediæval fortress. Yet they are sufficient to attest the ancient splendor and importance of the place; and the torrent of Melfi, which, tumbling out of the gorges of the Alps, runs round the castellated rock, marks it out as a fit habitation for the chivalrous and adventurous lords of Aquino, Loreto, and Belcastro.”—i. 3, 4.

Prior Vaughan, as a Benedictine, is naturally drawn to dwell upon the fact of S. Thomas having lived as a boy for five or six years in the Abbey of Monte Cassino. It certainly seems true that the child was placed by his parents in the abbey with a view to his continuing there after he came to years of discretion; just as so many children had been from the days of S. Benedict downwards. “To all intents and purposes,” says the author, “S. Thomas of Aquin was a Benedictine monk. Had he continued in the habit till his death—without any further solemnity beyond the offering of his parents—he would have been reckoned as much a Benedictine as S. Gregory, S. Augustine, S. Anselm, or S. Bede” (i. 20). We do not think that this can be denied. It was affirmed on oath, in the process of canonization, by an exceedingly trustworthy witness, that the saint’s father “made him a monk” at Monte Cassino. And a monk he was, no doubt, as much as a boy of twelve can be a monk—and the Council of Trent, be it remembered, had not then fixed the age of religious vows at sixteen. But the frightful confusion of the times brought his Benedictine days to a premature close. Monte Cassino was pillaged and nearly destroyed, the community was scattered, and Thomas of Aquin went to Naples to study—and to find the habit of S. Dominic.

The personal character which is drawn in this work is that of a large‐ minded, serene man, of powerful natural genius and winning character, who steps forth from the ranks of mediæval nobility, and, turning his back on sword and lance, and giving no heed to the tumult of war and rapine, deliberately consecrated himself wholly to God, and, grace being added to natural gifts, illuminates the world as a doctor and as a saint. It would be interesting to dwell, if we had space, upon the circumstances of S. Thomas joining the Order of S. Dominic. The opposition of his family, the utter unscrupulousness with which they carried out their opposition, the quiet yet fervent persistence of the saint—feudal violence, maternal desperation, and ecclesiastical interference—all this makes up a scene of wonderful reality and deep suggestiveness. But we must pass it over. S. Thomas became a Dominican, and we follow him from Naples to Cologne, from Cologne to Paris. We follow the course of his academical life, his writings, his teaching, his promotion to the grade of bachelor, of licentiate, of doctor. The first chapter of the second volume is entitled “S. Thomas made doctor.” It contains a lively picture of the great University of Paris and its life from day to day; and with it, moreover, the author gives an eloquent summary of the character of his hero, part of which we extract, because it is in some sort a key to the whole story of his life.

“A man with the power possessed by the Angelical could afford to be serene and tranquil. He lived, as it were, behind the veil; he saw through, and valued at its intrinsic worth, this earth’s stage, and took the measure of all the actors on it. Like Moses, he came down from the mountain, into the turmoil of the chafing world below, and, enlarged by the greatness of the vision in which he habitually lived, it shrank into insignificance before his eye; and those events or influences which excited the minds of others, and disturbed their peace, were looked upon by him somewhat in the same way as we may imagine some majestic, solitary eagle surveys from his high crag, with half‐unconscious eye, the world of woods below him. The Angelical himself had drawn his first lessons from a mountain eyrie. His elastic mind, even as a boy, had expanded, as he looked down from the mighty abbey, on teeming plain and rugged mountain, with the far‐distant ranges of the snowy Apennines standing up delicate and crisp against the sky. God, who made all this, had drawn him to himself, and the fingers of a heavenly hand, striking on his large, solitary heart, had sealed him imperially, for all his life to come, as the great master of the heavenly science, and as the gentle prince of peace.... Immense weight of character, surpassing grasp of mind, and keenness of logical discernment, added to a sovereign benignity and patience, and to a gentleness and grace which spoke from his eyes and thrilled in the accents of his voice, made men conscious, when in contact with him, that they were in presence of a man of untold gifts, and yet of one so exquisitely noble as never to display them, save for the benefit of others. Men knew that he had the power to crush them; but since he was so great, they knew also that he never would misuse it; they found him ever self‐forgetting and self‐restrained. A character with such a capability of asserting itself, and yet ever manifesting such gentle self‐ repression, must have acted with a singular fascination on any generous mind that came into relation with it.... He was a vast system in himself, and appears to have been specially created for achieving such an end. He was one single, simple man—doubtless. But he was a ‘system,’ or the representation of a system—the highest type of what heroism can do in human heart and mind. Christ, in choosing him, had chosen the most majestic of human creations, converting it into a powerful exponent of the light, peace, and splendor which strike out from the cross. He, if any man, had rested on the bosom of his Lord. He, the great Angelical, with the golden sun flashing from his breast, and the fire of heaven scintillating round his massive brow—he, if any man, had broken the bread of the strong, and had refreshed his lips with the blood of the grape, and had been transfigured by the draught. There is a largeness about him which, whilst it expands the heart, seems almost to take away the breath. We look up at him, and say: ‘How great art thou! how gently courteous, and how tenderly true! Sweet was the power of God, and the grace of Christ, which made thee all thou art. O gentle mighty sun, shine on in thy sweet radiance, spread thy pure invigorating rays amidst the deep sad shadows of the earth!’... Such was his character. And, prescinding from his natural gifts, how did he become so mighty? The cause has been touched on and partially developed already. The reader, adequately to realize it, would do well to study and master, with his heart as well as with his head, the monastic theology of S. Victor’s—the Benedictine science of the saints. Grasp the spirit of S. Anselm, S. Bernard, and the Victorines, weigh it as a whole, follow its drift, mark its salient points, learn to recognize the aroma of that sweet mystic life of tough yet tender service and self‐forgetfulness, and you will have discovered that spring of living waters which ran into the heart and mind of the great Angelical, and lent to all his faculties—aye, and even to his very person and expression—a warmth and glow which seemed to have come direct from heaven. From the rock, which was Christ, flowed straight and swift into the paradise of his soul four crystal waters: Love—fixing the entire being on the sovereign good, and doing all for him alone; Reverence—that is, self‐distrust and self‐forgetfulness, produced by the vision of God’s high majesty awfully gazed on with the eye of faith; Purity—treading all created things, and self first, under the feet, and, with entire freedom of spirit, basking and feeding in the unseen world; Adoration—love, reverence, and purity, combined in one act of supreme worship, as the creature, with all he has and all he is, bends prone to the earth, and with a feeling of dust and ashes whispers to his soul: ‘The Lord he is God, he made us, and not we ourselves!’ ” (ii. 31‐48.)

The mind and heart are both fond of dwelling on the heroic; and the heroic is met with at every step in the life of S. Thomas. We are reminded, as we read, of that Achilles on whose prowess hangs the fate of Troy and of the Greeks,

“Full in the midst, high‐towering o’er the rest,”

his limbs encased in an armor that is more divine than that which the father of fire forged for the son of Peleus, the gold upon his breast, the sword of the Spirit by his side, the “broad refulgent shield” of heavenly faith upon his arm, and in his hand the great paternal spear that none but he can wield—not a “whole ash” felled upon Pelion by old Chiron; but the seven gifts of the Christian doctorate wielded by the force of seraphic love. His appearance in the lists of argument, in the contest of the schools, in the field of intellectual strife, has all the _quelling_ power that is ascribed to the greatest heroes of the battle‐field; and his place in the records of mental and theological history is that of a discoverer, a conqueror, and a king. Here is a scene which is perhaps more or less familiar, but it is a type of many scenes in this wonderful life. It occurred whilst Thomas was under Albertus Magnus, at Cologne:

“Master Albert had selected a very difficult question from the writings of Denis the Areopagite, and had given it to some of his scholars for solution. Whether in joke or in earnest, they passed on the difficulty to Thomas, and begged him to write his opinion upon it. Thomas took the paper to his cell, and, taking his pen, first stated, with great lucidity, all the objections that could be brought against the question; and then gave their solutions. As he was going out of his cell, this paper accidentally fell near the door. One of the brothers passing picked it up, and carried it at once to Master Albert. Albert was excessively astonished at the splendid talent which now, for the first time, by mere accident, he discovered in that big, silent student. He determined to bring out, in the most public manner, abilities which had been for so long a time so modestly concealed. He desired Thomas to defend a thesis before the assembled school, on the following day. The hour arrived. The hall was filled. There sat Master Albert. Doubtless the majority of those who were to witness the display imagined that they were about to assist at an egregious failure. How could that heavy, silent lad—who could not speak a word in private—defend in public school, against the keenest of opponents, the difficult niceties of theology? But they were soon undeceived, for Thomas spoke with such clearness, established his thesis with such remarkable dialectical skill, saw so far into the coming difficulties of the case, and handled the whole subject in so masterly a manner, that Albert himself was constrained to cry aloud, ‘_Tu non videris tenere locum respondentis sed determinantis_!’ ‘Master,’ replied Thomas with humility, ‘I know not how to treat the question otherwise.’ Albert then thought to puzzle him, and show him that he was still a disciple. So, one after another, he started objections, created a hundred labyrinths, weaving and interweaving all manner of subtle arguments, but in vain. Thomas, with his calm spirit and keen vision, saw through every complication, had the key to every fallacy, the solution for every enigma, and the art to unravel the most tangled skein—till, finally, Albert, no longer able to withhold the expression of his admiration, cried out to his disciples, who were almost stupefied with astonishment: ‘We call this young man a dumb ox, but so loud will be his bellowing in doctrine that it will resound throughout the whole world’ ” (i. 321, 322).

How exactly this prophecy was fulfilled need not be said. S. Thomas was soon employed in speaking to the world what God had given him to say. He spoke in the class‐hall and in the church; he wrote for young and for old; and wherever his voice was heard men wondered as at a portent. The students of Paris, the professors of France and of Italy, his fellow‐ religious, the intimate friend of his privacy, the rough people round his pulpit, the pope himself as he sat and heard him preach, every one said over again the wondering words that Albert the Great had used in the hall at Cologne. And if we had no record of what men thought, we should still be secure in saying that they were astonished; for we are astonished ourselves. Many men who have made a great noise in their lifetime have left posterity to wonder, not at themselves, but at their reputation. But the writer of the _Summa_ _must_ have been great even in his lifetime. That breadth of view, that keenness of analysis, that comprehensive reach of thought, that enormous memory—we can see it for ourselves, and every story of his prowess we can readily credit from what the imperishable record of his written works attests to our own eye. Prior Vaughan relates interesting anecdotes of his power of discussion, and of his influence over the irreverent world of his scholastic compeers, filling up the outlines of the annalist with no greater exercise of imagination than is fairly permitted to the serious biographer.

But the heroic in the life of the Angel of the Schools would not be perfect unless the giant strength had been joined to the gentleness of the servant of Christ. There is nothing, perhaps, that will so strike a reader of this Life as his mild, equal, and gentle spirit. It does not seem that S. Thomas was naturally of a quick and impetuous nature, like S. Ignatius or S. Francis of Sales. From his youth he had been a contemplative in the cloisters of Monte Cassino; when but a child he had charmed his teachers by asking with childish meditative face, “_What was God?_” His quiet determination had conquered his mother when she opposed him being a Dominican; his calm courage had converted his sisters and shamed his brothers. And in the schools, his silence and his humility, virtues never more difficult to be practised than in the field of intellectual combat, had soon become the marvel of all who knew him. A great natural gift—the gift of a changeless serenity of heart and temper—was perfected in him by grace, until it became heroic. The contest he once had in the Paris schools with Brother John of Pisa, a Franciscan friar who afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury, is typical of what always happened when the Angelical discussed:

“John of Pisa, though a keen and a learned man, had no chance with the Angelical. It would have been folly for any one, however skilled—yes, for Bonaventure, or Rochelle, or even Albert the Great himself—to attempt to cross rapiers with Br. Thomas. He was to the manner born. Br. John did all that was in him, used his utmost skill—but it was useless: the Angelical simply upset him time after time. The Minorite grew warm; the Angelical, bent simply on the truth, went on completing, with unmoved serenity, the full discomfiture of the poor Franciscan. John of Pisa at length could stand it no longer. In his heat he forgot his middle term and forgot himself, and turned upon the saint with sarcasm and invective. The Angelical in his own gentle, overpowering way, giving not the slightest heed to these impertinences, went on replying to him with inimitable tenderness and patience; and whilst teaching a lesson which, after so many hundred years, men can still learn, drew on himself, unconsciously, the surprise and admiration of that vast assembly. Such was the way in which the Angelical brought the influence of Benedictine _quies_ and _benignitas_ into the boisterous litigations of the Paris schools. And what is more, Frigerio tells us that the saint taught the great lesson of self‐control, not only by the undeviating practice of his life, but also by his writings; that he looked upon it as an ‘ignominy’ (ignominia) to soil the mouth with angry words; and contended that ‘quarrels,’ immoderate contentions, vain ostentation of knowledge, and the trick of puzzling an adversary with sophistical arguments—such as is often the practice of dialecticians—should be banished from the schools” (ii. 57‐59).

The appearance of such a man as S. Thomas, in the midst of the scholastic agitation of the XIIIth century, partakes of that providential character which the eye of faith sees in the lives of all the great saints. We have already, in a former notice, touched upon the marvellous way in which he turned the current of thought against rationalism, heresy, and impiety. But his personal influence was no less than what we may term his official. At the moment when theology was beginning, with philosophy as her handmaid, to enter on that course of development in which system, on the one hand, advanced in equal steps with discovery on the other, it was the will of God that a saint should show the world in his own person a perfect model of the Catholic scholastic theologian. His powers were undeniable, his genius imperial, his rights undoubted; and he used his privileges and his grand position to enforce upon the noisy spirits of the time, and upon all generations of students yet to be, that the true type of theological discussion was “_humilis collatio, pacifica disputatio_.”

The theologian was to be no proud dogmatist, laying down the law as if he had discovered all truth, but one who, taking the faith for his standing‐ point, humbly put forth and peacefully discussed the views that he thought to be true. This was his great lesson; he taught it in the tone of his own lectures and discussions, in the turn of his phrase when he wrote, in the meekness of his answers, and in the moderation of his conclusions. And we may thank the Providence that sent S. Thomas for that calm and judicial serenity which has ever been the prevailing character of Catholic theology. The great Dominican school that he founded carried on the traditions of their master; and (to take an example not far from our own days) the weighty and admirably clear pages of a Billuart are not unworthy, in their broad, searching, yet tranquil argument, of the master whom they follow. A troubled reach of time separates Paris in the XIIIth century from Douay in the XVIIth; yet the spirit of S. Thomas had been living over it all. Not only in his own religious family was his influence strong. The Franciscan Order has its own tradition; but it is a tradition that sprung up side by side with the Dominican. It was the seraphic Bonaventure that sat beside Thomas of Aquin in the hall of the University of Paris on the day when each of them received the insignia of the doctorate. They were friends—more than friends, for each knew the other to be a saint. Each heard the other speak, and the spirit of one was the spirit of both. And in spite of divergences and varieties, such as our Lord permits in order to draw unity from diversity or good from evil, the two Orders have taught in harmonious spirit during all the long centuries they have been before the world. S. Thomas, who reverenced S. Bonaventure, has had the reverence of all S. Bonaventure’s children; and we have before us as we write the _Cursus Theologiæ_ of a venerable bearded Capuchin, considerably esteemed in the theological classes of the present day, who stops in his enumeration of fathers and of doctors to add his emphatic tribute of veneration to the Angelic Doctor, who, he reminds us, is, with S. Augustine, “_præcipuus theologorum omnium temporum magister_”—the great master of theologians of all ages. And what we say of the Franciscan Order we may say of that great school which dates its traditions from that Cardinal Toletus who was the pupil of the Dominican Soto. It is not that the Jesuit theologians, even the many‐sided Suarez, have looked up to S. Thomas as to their prince and teacher: this they have done; but even if they had left his teaching, or where they have left his teaching, they have followed his spirit. That spirit we might name the spirit of _conciliation_. We do not mean the spirit of compromise, or of going only half‐way in matters of truth. S. Thomas was as downright as Euclid. But what we refer to is that readiness to admit all the good or the true in an opposite view, the shrinking from forcing a vague word upon an adversary, the impartial dissection of words and phrases which issues from the scholastic and Thomistic method of _distinction_. The _distinguo_ of the tyro or the sophist is a trick that is easily learned and easily laughed at; but we claim for the scholastic method that its _distinguo_ is the touchstone of truth and of falsehood; it requires acuteness and stored‐up learning to make it and sustain it; but it requires, above all, that perfect fairness of mind, that judicial impartiality of view, which calms the promptings of ambitious originality; it requires that patience which seeks only the truth and cares nothing for the victory, and that honesty which is afraid of declamation, and sets its matter out in unadorned and colorless simplicity. This is the true scholastic spirit, and it is pre‐ eminently the spirit of S. Thomas. If we might personify that grand science which has been so high in this world, and seems now to have sunk so low (yet, with the signs around us, we dare hardly say so now), it would be under the figure of him who is its prince and lawgiver.

“See him, then, our great Angelical, as with calm and princely bearing he advances, a mighty‐looking man, built on a larger scale than those who stand around him, and takes the seat just vacated by Bonaventure. His portrait as a boy has been sketched already. Now he has grown into the maturity of a man, and his grand physique has expanded into its perfect symmetry and manly strength, manifesting, even in his frame, as Tocco says, that exquisite combination of force with true proportion which gave so majestic a balance to his mind. His countenance is pale with suffering, and his head is bald from intense and sustained mental application. Still, the placid serenity of his broad, lofty brow, the deep gray light in his meditative eyes, his firm, well‐ chiselled lips, and fully defined jaw, the whole pose of that large, splendid head—combining the manliness of the Roman with the refinement and delicacy of the Greek—impress the imagination with an indescribable sense of giant energy of intellect, of royal gentleness of heart, and untold tenacity of purpose. That sweet face reflects so exquisite a purity, that noble bust is cast in so imperial a mould, that the sculptor or the painter would be struck and arrested by it in a moment; the one would yearn to throw so classical a type into imperishable marble, and the other to transfer so much grandeur of contour, and such delicacy of expression, so harmonious a fusion of spotlessness with majesty, of southern loveliness with intellectual strength, to the enduring canvas” (ii. 108, 109).

The angelic quality of the Angel of the Schools—his calmness and his power over men—was not bought without a price. Like all the saints, he too had to bear the cross, and like all the saints he was not content with suffering the cross, but he sought it and courted it. We cannot quote much more of Prior Vaughan’s narrative, or else we would fain draw attention to the account he gives from authentic sources of Thomas’ holy distress of mind, and his midnight prayer the night before he received the doctorate. But the following paragraph must be transcribed:

“Let the carnal man, after looking on the sweet Angelical fascinating the crowded schools, take the trouble to follow him, as silently, after the day’s work, he retires to his cell, seemingly to rest; let him watch him bent in prayer; see him take from its hiding‐place, when all have gone to sleep, that hard iron chain; see him—as he looks up to heaven and humbles himself to earth—without mercy to his flesh, scourge himself with it, striking blow upon blow, lacerating his body through the greater portion of the sleepless night: let the carnal man look upon this touching sight; let him shrink back in horror if he will—still let him look on it, and he will learn how the saints labored to secure a chaste and spotless life, and how a man can so far annihilate self‐seeking as to be gentle with all the world, severe with himself alone. If in human life there is anything mysteriously adorable, it is a man of heroic mould and surpassing gifts showing himself great enough to smite his own body, and to humble his entire being in pretence of his Judge” (ii. 60, 61).

S. Thomas died in the prime of life—when scarcely forty‐eight years old. He was called away a little before his great work, the _Summa_, was completed, as if his Master wished to show the lamenting world that his own claims were paramount to every other thing. But it was that divine Master himself who had rendered it necessary to take away his servant when he did; for S. Thomas could write no more. After that vision and ecstasy which rapt his soul in the chapel of S. Nicholas at Naples, he ceased to write, he ceased to dictate; his pen lay idle, and the _Summa_ stood still in the middle of the questions on penance. It was, as he said to his companion Reginald, _Non possum!_ “I cannot! Everything that I have written appears to me as simply rubbish.” From that day of S. Nicholas he lived in a continual trance: he wrote no more. As the new year (1274) came in, he set out, at the pope’s call, to attend the general council at Lyons: but he was never to get so far. He had not journeyed beyond Campania—he was still travelling along the shores of that sunny region which had given him birth, when mortal illness arrested him, and he was taken to the Abbey of Fossa Nuova to die.

“The abbot conducts him through the church into the silent cloister. Then the whole past seems to break in upon him like a burst of overflowing sunlight; the calm and quiet abbey, the meditative corridor, the gentle Benedictine monks; he seems as if he were at Cassino once again, amidst the glorious visions of his boyish days—amidst the tender friendships of his early youth, close on the bones of ancient kings, near the solemn tomb of Blessed Benedict, in the hallowed home of great traditions, and at the very shrine of all that is fair and noble in monastic life. He seemed completely overcome by the memories of the past, and, turning to the monks who surrounded him, exclaimed ‘_This_ is the place where I shall find repose!’ and then ecstatically to Reginald in presence of them all: ‘_Hæc est requies mea in sæculum sæculi, hic habitabo quoniam elegi eam_—This is my rest for ever and ever; here will I dwell, for I have chosen it’ ” (ii. 921).

The whole of this last scene of the great saint’s pilgrimage is admirably and most touchingly brought out by the author, and our readers must go to it themselves. As we conclude the story, we are forced to agree with Prior Vaughan when he exclaims, “It is but natural, it is but beautiful, that he who in early boyhood had been stamped with the signet of S. Benedict, should return to S. Benedict to die!”

We are sure that this life of S. Thomas of Aquin will do good. It is a large book, but it deals with a large and a grand life. It is the work of one who evidently has an interest in his subject far beyond that of the mere compiler. The earnestness, the warmth, the very redundancy and fulness of the author’s style, leave the impression of one whose heart is strongly impressed by the glorious career which he has been following so minutely, and there is little doubt that his readers will sympathize with him. And there can be just as little doubt of the benefits which a practical study of the life of the great doctor will confer upon students, upon priests, and upon all serious men at the present day. Sanctity taught by example is always an important lesson; but the saintliness of learning and genius is still more important and still more rare. We live in an age when there are numbers of men who are profoundly scientific and splendidly accomplished in the different branches of knowledge which they profess; and there is no one who is more sure of the world’s attention and reverence than the man who can show that he knows something which other men do not. The present time, therefore, is one at which we are to look for and to hope for men who in theology and Catholic philosophy shall be as able and as learned as are the leaders of profane science. Hard work and unwearying devotedness are essential to this; and the example of S. Thomas shows us what these things mean. But there is something which is more necessary still; something which is especially necessary in sacred science. “_In malevolam animam non intrabit Sapientia, nec habitabit in corpore subdito peccatis._” There is no such thing as the highest wisdom without the highest purity of heart. The perfection of the Christian doctorate is the consequence of the perfect possession and exercise of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. And the holy fathers who have written on Christian wisdom tell us repeatedly, using almost identical words, that a man might as well try to study the sun with purblind eyes as to be perfect in theology with a heart defiled. There has been no greater example in the range of sanctity of what S. Augustine calls the “_mens purgatissima_” than that of him who on account of his purity has been called the Angelical. Leaving the world as a child, his heart hardly knew what earthly concupiscence was. With his loins girded by angels’ hands, with his body subdued by hard living, with his thought always ranging among high and elevating things, the soul of S. Thomas lived in a region that did not belong to the world. He learnt his wisdom of the crucifix, he found his inspirations at the foot of the altar; and the same lips that dictated the _Commentaries on Aristotle_ were ready to break forth with the _Lauda Sion_ and the _Pange Lingua_. If he taught in the daytime, he chastised his body during the watches of the night. Born to a gentle life, with powerful friends, with the world and its attractions within his reach, he lived in his narrow cell, cleaving to his desk and to his breviary, walking the streets with a quick step and downcast eye, letting the world go on its way. He wanted only one thing—not as a reward for his labor, because his labor was only a means to a great end—he wanted only that one object which he asked for when the figure spoke to him from the Cross, “Thee, O Lord! and thee alone!”

Prior Vaughan has accomplished a task for which he will receive the thanks of all English‐speaking Catholics. His book will be read, and will be treasured; for it is a book with a large purpose, carried out with unwearying labor, presenting the results of wide reading, and offering the student and the general reader a large variety of solid information and of suggestive thought. If the book were less honestly wrought out than it is, we could excuse the author, in consideration of the heart and soul he has thrown into it. S. Thomas of Aquin is evidently a very real, living being with him. His hero is no abstraction of the past, no quintessence of a scholastic that must be looked at as one looks at an Egyptian papyrus in a museum. He is a man to _know_, not merely to know about; a man who taught in Paris and who reigns in heaven; a man who led an angel’s life here below, and who can help us to lead a life more or less angelic from his place above. To have worked with such a spirit is to have worked in the true spirit of the Catholic faith. The saints are our teachers and masters; and, what is more, they are the trumpets that rouse us to battle, the living voices that make our hearts burn to follow them. And therefore a true life of a saint will live, and will do its work. Our wish is that Prior Vaughan’s _S. Thomas_ may make its way into the hearts of earnest men, and it is our conviction that it _will_ make its way, and that men will be the better for it.

To S. Mary Magdalen.

’Mid the white spouses of the Sacred Heart, After its Queen, the nearest, dearest, thou. Yet the auréola around thy brow Is not the virgins’. Thine a throne apart. Nor yet, my Saint, does faith‐illumined art Thy hand with palm of martyrdom endow: And when thy hair is all it will allow Of glory to thy head, we do not start. O more than virgin in thy penitent love! And more than martyr in thy passionate woe! How should thy sisters equal thee above, Who knelt not with thee on the gory sod? Or where the crown our worship could bestow Like that long gold which wiped the feet of God?

God’s Acre.

In all countries and in all creeds, the dead have claimed the affectionate notice of the living. The idea of housing them, deifying them, propitiating them, of remembering them in _some_ way, however diverse, has always been a prominent one. The belief in the soul’s immortality seems to have been even more clear to the ordinary mind of the natural man than that of a Supreme and Almighty Being. When Christianity appeared, the departed had a place assigned them among the members of the church, and were commemorated as absent brethren gone before their fellows one stage further on the last great journey; when the Reformation disfranchised human nature in the XVIth century, and levelled all its hallowed aspirations with the brute instincts of the animal kingdom, the dead, though divorced from communion with the living, were yet remembered, and placed in two categories—the elect, or the precondemned. Another life was even then believed in, and later branches of the reforming sects all condescended at least to theorize on the future state of disembodied spirits. It remained for our times to foster the cruel _un_belief that dooms our loved ones, not even to everlasting perdition, but to absolute annihilation. It was hard enough in Puritan days for a pious though mistaken mind to bring itself to the belief that possibly the loved companion of childhood, the chosen mate of youth, the venerable parent, the upright teacher, was one of those predestined to eternal torments, one of the holocausts to the greater glory of God; but how far harder now for a fond heart, a clinging nature, to see in those it loves so many perishable puppets, without future and without hope! But happily there is a haven to which these storm‐tossed souls may come with the precious freight of their love and their unerring Catholic instincts. Their companions and brethren are not gone into trackless chaos, they are not absorbed into that monstrous “nothing” of which a false philosophy has made a bewildering bugbear. Every year the church protests against such revolting doctrines on the day which she publicly consecrates to prayers for and remembrance of the departed. This festival is like a spiritual harvest‐home; coming as it does just at the close of the ecclesiastical year, it marks an epoch in the life of the church suffering; and various “revelations” made to saints, as well as the collective belief of the faithful, agree in considering it a day of liberation and rejoicing among the souls in Purgatory. “God’s Acre” (according to the touching and suggestive German idiom) is reaped on that auspicious day, though, like Boaz, the Divine Reaper leaves yet a few ears of corn to be gleaned into heavenly rest by the prayers of the faithful on earth.

Before we go further into our own beautiful view of the future life, let us stop to see how other races and religions have treated the dead.

Of the Egyptians, it is difficult to speak except at too great a length, and, not having at hand sufficient authority, we can only set down what our recollection will supply. The readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD will no doubt remember some interesting articles published a few months since regarding the ancient civilization of Egypt, in which copious reference was made to the esteem and respect paid to the dead in that country. The singular custom of pledging the embalmed body of a father or ancestor, on the receipt of a loan, was noticed; also the dishonor attaching to the non‐redemption of such a pledge. A learned English author, speaking incidentally of Egyptian embalming, mentions that the word mummy is derived from “mum,” which, he says, is Egyptian for _wax_. Representations of the embalming process have been found on tombs and sarcophagi, in which the men engaged in it are seen wearing masks with eagles’ beaks, probably iron masks, thereby denoting of what a poisonous and dangerous nature this absolutely incorruptible embalmment must have been. The Pyramids are perhaps the most imposing funeral monuments ever raised to the memory of mortals, and even the famous Mausoleum of Artemisia can have had no more massive or _eternal_ an aspect.

To pass from the cradle of older civilization to the land whose original peopling has sometimes been attributed, though we believe inaccurately, to Egyptian enterprise, the America of the Aztec and the Red Indian, we find in Parkman’s _Jesuits in America_ some lengthy details on the funereal customs of the Huron tribe, now extinct. He says that “the primitive Indian believed in the immortality of the soul, but not always in a state of future punishment or reward. Nor was the good or evil to be rewarded or punished (when such a belief _did_ exist) of a moral nature. Skilful hunters, brave warriors, men of influence, went to the happy hunting‐ grounds, while the slothful, the weak, the cowardly, were doomed to eat serpents and ashes in dreary regions of mist and darkness.... The spirits, in form and feature, as they had been in life, wended their way through dark forests to the villages of the dead, subsisting on bark and rotten wood. On arriving, they sat all day in the crouching posture of the sick, and when night came hunted the shades of animals, with the shades of bows and arrows, among the shades of trees and rocks; for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike immortal, and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead.” The public ceremony of exhuming the dead, of which some interesting details are given further on, was supposed to be the occasion of the beginning of the other life. The souls “took wing, as some affirmed, in the shape of pigeons; while the greater number believed that they journeyed on foot ... to the land of shades, ... but, as the spirits of the old and of children are too feeble for the march, they are forced to stay behind, lingering near their earthly homes, where the living often hear the shutting of their invisible cabin doors, and the weak voices of the disembodied children driving birds from their corn‐fields.... The Indian land of souls is not always a region of shadows and gloom. The Hurons sometimes represented the souls of their dead as dancing joyously.... According to some Algonquin traditions, heaven was a scene of endless festivity, ghosts dancing to the sound of the rattle and the drum.... Most of the traditions agree, however, that the spirits were beset with difficulties and perils. There was a swift river which must be crossed on a log that shook beneath their feet, while a ferocious dog opposed their passage, and drove many into the abyss. This river was full of sturgeon and other fish, which the ghosts speared for their subsistence. Beyond was a narrow path between moving rocks which each instant crashed together, grinding to atoms the less nimble of the pilgrims who endeavored to pass. The Hurons believed that a personage named Oscotarach, or the Head‐Piercer, dwelt in a bark house beside the path, and that it was his office to remove the brains from the heads of all who went by, as a necessary preparation for immortality. This singular idea is found also in some Algonquin traditions, according to which, however, the brain is afterwards restored to its owner.”

Le Clerc, in his _Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie_, tells a curious story, which is mentioned in a foot‐note by Parkman. It was current in his (Le Clerc’s) time among the Algonquins of Gaspé and Northern New Brunswick, and bears a remarkable likeness to the old myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. “The favorite son of an old Indian died, whereupon the father, with a party of friends, set out for the land of souls to recover him. It was only necessary to wade through a shallow lake, several days’ journey in extent. This they did, sleeping at night on platforms of poles which supported them above the water. At length, they arrived and were met by Papkootparout, the Indian Pluto, who rushed on them in a rage, with his war‐club upraised, but, presently relenting, changed his mind and challenged them to a game of ball. They proved the victors, and won the stakes, consisting of corn, tobacco, and certain fruits, which thus became known to mankind. The bereaved father now begged hard for his son’s soul, and Papkootparout at last gave it to him in the form and size of a nut, which, by pressing it hard between his hands, he forced into a small leather bag. The delighted parent carried it back to earth, with instructions to insert it into the body of his son, who would thereupon return to life. When the adventurers reached home, and reported the happy issue, of their journey, there was a dance of rejoicing; and the father, wishing to take part in it, gave his son’s soul to the keeping of a squaw who stood by. Being curious to see it, she opened the bag, upon which it escaped at once, and took flight for the realms of Papkootparout, preferring them to the abodes of the living.”

These superstitions, although they may make us smile, yet attest, through their rude simplicity, the _natural_ and deep‐rooted existence in all races of a belief not only in the immortality of the soul, but in the possibility of communication with the departed. The Buddhist doctrine of transmigration is but a distorted version of the truth we call purgatory, that is, a state of temporary expiation and gradual cleansing. The Egyptian practice of embalming the dead and often of preserving the bodies of several generations of one’s forefathers in the family house, is another consequence of the primeval belief in the soul’s immortality. Everywhere reverence for the dead implied this belief and symbolized it, and even the custom of placing in the mouth of the Roman dead the piece of money, _denarius_, with which to pay their passage over the Styx, is referable to the true doctrine of good works being laid up in heaven and helping those who have performed them to gain the desired entrance into eternal repose.

The following minute description of the Indian feast of the dead, of which mention has already been made, is interesting, and is condensed from the account given by Father Brebœuf: “The corpses were lowered from their scaffolds and lifted from their graves. Each family claimed its own, and forthwith addressed itself to the task of removing what remained of flesh from the bones. These, after being tenderly caressed with tears and lamentations, were wrapped in skins and pendent robes of beaver. These relics, as also the recent corpses, which remained entire, but were likewise carefully wrapped in furs, were carried to one of the largest houses, and hung to the numerous cross poles which, rafterlike, supported the roof. The concourse of mourners seated themselves at a funeral feast, the squaws of the household distributed the food, and a chief harangued the assembly, lamenting the loss of the deceased and praising their virtues. This over, the mourners began their march for Ossonané, the scene of the final rite. The bodies remaining entire were borne on litters, while the bundles of bones were slung at the shoulders of the relatives, like fagots. The procession thus defiled slowly through the forest pathways, and as they passed beneath the shadow of the pines, the mourners uttered at intervals and in unison a wailing cry, meant to imitate the voices of disembodied souls, ... and believed to have a peculiarly soothing effect on the conscious relics that each man carried. The place prepared for the last rite was a cleared area in the forest, many acres in extent. Around it was a high and strong scaffolding of upright poles, with cross‐poles extended between, for hanging the funeral gifts and the remains of the dead. The fathers lodged in a house where over a hundred of these bundles of mortality hung from the rafters. Some were mere shapeless rolls, others were made up into clumsy effigies, adorned with feathers, beads, etc. In the morning (the procession having arrived over night at Ossonané) the relics were taken down, opened again, and the bones fondled anew by the women, amid paroxysms of grief. When the procession bearing the dead reached the ground prepared for the last solemnity, the bundles were laid on the ground, and the funeral gifts outspread for the admiration of the beholders. Among them were many robes of beaver and other rich furs, collected and preserved for years with a view to this festival. Fires were lighted and kettles slung, and the scene became like a fair or _caravanserai_. This continued till three o’clock in the afternoon, when the gifts were repacked, and the bones shouldered afresh. Suddenly, at a signal from the chiefs, the crowd ran forward from every side towards the scaffolding, like soldiers to the assault of a town, scaled it by the rude ladders with which it was furnished, and hung their relics and their gifts to the forest of poles which surmounted it. The chiefs then again harangued the people in praise of the departed, while other functionaries lined the grave throughout with rich robes of beaver skin. Three large copper kettles were next placed in the middle, and then ensued a scene of hideous confusion. The bodies which had been left entire were brought to the edge of the grave, flung in, and arranged in order at the bottom by ten or twelve Indians, stationed there for the purpose, amid the wildest excitement and the uproar of many hundred mingled voices. Night was now fast closing in, and the concourse bivouacked around the clearing.... One of the bundles of bones, tied to a pole on the scaffold, chanced to fall into the grave. This accident precipitated the closing act, and perhaps increased its frenzy. All around blazed countless fires, and the air resounded with discordant cries. The naked multitude, on, under, and around the scaffolding, were flinging the remains of their dead, relieved from their wrappings of skins, pell‐mell into the pit, where were discovered men who, as the ghastly shower fell around them, arranged the bones in their places with long poles. All was soon over; earth, logs, and stones were cast upon the grave, and the clamor subsided into a funereal chant, so dreary and lugubrious that it seemed like the wail of despairing souls from the abyss of perdition.”

These processions and ceremonies relating to the bones of the dead remind us of the singular custom observed at the Capuchin Convent of the Piazza Barberini in Rome. The skeletons of the dead monks are robed in the habit of the order and seated in choir‐stalls round the crypt, until they fall to pieces, or are displaced by a silent new‐comer to their ghostly brotherhood. The bones which are thus yearly accumulating are formed into patterns of stars and crosses on the walls of the crypt and surrounding corridors, while the skulls are often heaped up in small mounds against the partitions. The convent is strictly enclosed, and is only accessible to men during the rest of the year, but on All Souls’ day and during the octave, the public, men and women alike, are allowed to visit this strange place of entombment. Crowds flock to see it, especially foreigners. Hawthorne, in his _Marble Faun_, has described it in terms that make one feel as if _his_ impression were vivid enough to supply the place of a personal one on the part of each of his readers.

The ancient Roman customs and beliefs concerning the dead are well worth noticing, as embodying the essence of the utmost civilization a heathen land could boast. It is said that the Romans chose the cypress as emblematic of death because that tree, when once cut, never grows again. The facts of natural history are sometimes disregarded by the ancient poets, but it is not with that that we now have to deal, but with the false idea symbolized by this choice. The Romans, nevertheless, fully believed in an after‐life, though one modelled much on the same principle as their life on earth. The unburied and those whose bodies could not be found were supposed to wander about, unable to cross the river Styx, and their friends therefore generally built them an empty tomb, which they believed served as a retreat to their restless spirits. Pliny ascribes the Roman custom of burning the dead to the belief that was current amongst the people, that their enemies dug up and insulted the bodies of their soldiers killed in distant wars. During the earlier part of the Republic, the dead were mostly buried in the natural way, in graves or vaults. Some very strange ceremonies are recorded in Adams’ _Roman Antiquities_ concerning the funeral processions, which usually took place at night by torch‐light. (This was chiefly done to avoid any chance of meeting a priest or magistrate, who was supposed to be polluted by the sight of a corpse, as in the Jewish dispensation.) After the musicians, who sang the praises of the deceased to the accompaniment of flutes, came “players and buffoons, one of whom, called _archimimus_ (the chief mimic), sustained the character of the deceased, imitating his words or actions while alive. These players sometimes introduced apt sayings from dramatic writers.” Actors were also employed to personate the individual ancestors, and Adams’ commentator adds in a foot‐note: “A Roman funeral must therefore have presented a singular appearance, with a long line of ancestors stalking gravely through the streets of the capital.” Pliny, Plautus, Polybius, Suetonius, and others are the authorities quoted on this curious point. It is said by some authors that, in very ancient times, the dead were buried in their own houses; hence the origin of idolatry, the worship of household gods, the fear of goblins, etc. Relations also consecrated temples to the dead, which Pliny calls a very ancient custom, which had its share in contributing to the establishment of idol‐worship. In the Book of Wisdom(115) we find a reference to this in these words: “For a father, being afflicted with bitter grief, made to himself the image of his son, who was quickly taken away, and him who then had died as a man, he began now to worship as a god, and appointed him rites and sacrifices among his servants. Then in process of time, wicked custom prevailing, this error was kept as a law.” Adams tells us that “the private places of burial of the Romans were in fields or gardens, usually near the highway (such as the Via Appia near Rome, the Via Campana near Pozzuoli, the Street of Tombs at Pompeii), to be conspicuous and remind those who passed of mortality. Hence the frequent inscriptions—_Siste, viator_,(116) _Aspice, viator_.”(117) Games of gladiators were frequently held both on the day and the anniversaries of great funerals; and on the pyre slaves and clients were sometimes burnt with the body of their deceased master, as also all manner of clothes and ornaments, and, “in short, whatever was supposed to have been agreeable to him when alive.” As the funeral cortége left the place where the body had been burnt, they “used to take a last farewell, repeating several times _Vale_, or _Salve æternum_,”(118) also wishing that the earth might lie light on the person buried, as Juvenal relates, and which was found marked on several ancient monuments in these letters, S.T.T.L.(119) “This is a very remarkable instance of the dead being considered, in one sense, as conscious, sentient beings, and evidently has an origin which can hardly be disconnected from some remote or indistinct recollection of the true religion.”

Adams goes on to say that “oblations or sacrifices to the dead were afterwards made at various times, both occasionally and at stated periods, consisting of liquors, victims, and garlands, as Virgil, Tacitus, and Suetonius tell us, and sometimes to appease their _manes_, or atone for some injury offered them in life. The sepulchre was bespread with flowers, and covered with crowns and fillets. Before it there was a little altar, on which libations were made and incense burnt. A keeper was appointed to watch the tomb, which was frequently illuminated with lamps. A feast was generally added, both for the dead and the living. Certain things were laid on the tomb, commonly beans, lettuce, bread, and eggs, or the like, which it was supposed the ghosts would come and eat. What remained was burnt. After the funeral of great men,... a distribution of raw meat was made to the people.”

“Immoderate grief was thought to be offensive to the manes, according to Tibullus, but during the shortened mourning that was customary, the relations of the deceased abstained from entertainments or feasts of any sort, wore no badge of rank or nobility, were not shaved, and dressed in black, a custom borrowed (as was supposed) from the Egyptians. ‘No fire was ever lighted, as it was considered an ornament to the house.’ ”

The common places of burial were called _columbaria_, from the likeness of their arrangement to that of a pigeon‐house, each little niche scooped out in the walls holding the small urn in which the ashes of the dead were deposited. These _columbaria_, Adams tells us, were often below ground, like a vault, but private tombs belonging to wealthy citizens were in groves and gardens; as, for instance, that of Augustus, mentioned by Strabo, who calls it a hanging garden supported on marble arches, with shrubs planted round the base, and the Egyptian obelisks at the entrance. The tomb of Adrian, now the Castel S. Angelo, was a perfect palace of wealth and art, and supplied many a later building with ready‐made adornment before it became what it now is, a fortress. The tomb of Cecilia Metella, on the Via Appia, was also used as a mediæval stronghold, and looks more fit for such a use than for its former funereal distinction.

From ancient and imperial, we now pass to modern and Christian Rome, so undistinguishable in the chronology of their first blending, so widely apart in the moral order of their succession.

The subject of the catacombs and the early inscriptions on Christian graves is one so widely known and so copiously illustrated by many learned works, both English and foreign, that it would be superfluous to say much about it. Yet Cardinal Wiseman is so popular an author, and _Fabiola_ so standard a novel, that we may be forgiven for drawing a little on treasures so temptingly ready to our hand. There is in the first chapter of the second part of _Fabiola_ an interesting reference to the old established craft of the _fossores_, or excavators of the Christian cemeteries. Cardinal Wiseman says that some modern antiquarians have based upon the assertion of an anonymous writer, contemporary with S. Jerome, an erroneous theory of the _fossores_ having formed a lesser ecclesiastical order in the primitive church, like a _lector_ or reader. “But,” he adds, “although this opinion is untenable, it is extremely probable that the duties of this office were in the hands of persons appointed and recognized by ecclesiastical authority.... It was not a cemetery or necropolis company which made a speculation of burying the dead, but rather a pious and recognized confraternity, which was associated for the purpose.” Father Marchi, the great Jesuit authority on ancient subterranean Rome, says that a series of interesting inscriptions, found in the cemetery of S. Agnes, proves that this occupation was continued in particular families, grandfather, father, and sons having carried it on in the same place. The _fossores_ also transacted such rare bargains as were known in those days of simplicity and brotherly love, when wealthy Christians willingly made compensation for the privilege of being buried near a martyr’s tomb. Such an arrangement is commemorated in an early Christian inscription preserved in the Capitol. The translation runs thus: “This is the grave for two bodies, bought by Artemisius, and the price was given to the _fossor_ Hilarus—that is ... (the number, being in cipher, is unintelligible.) In the presence of Severus the _fossor_, and Laurentius.”

Cardinal Wiseman, jealous of Christian traditions, particularly notes that the theory of the subterranean crypts, now called catacombs, ever having been heathen excavations for the extraction of sand, has been disproved by Marchi’s careful and scientific examination. He then describes the manner of entombment used in these underground cemeteries: “Their walls as well as the sides of the staircases are honeycombed with graves, that is, rows of excavations, large and small, of sufficient length to admit a human body, from a child to a full‐grown man.... They are evidently made to measure, and it is probable that the body was lying by the side of the grave while this was being dug. When the corpse was laid in its narrow cell, the front was hermetically closed either by a marble‐slab, or more frequently by several broad tiles put edgeways in a groove or mortise, cut for them in the rock, and cemented all round. The inscription was cut upon the marble, or scratched in the wet mortar.... Two principles, as old as Christianity, regulate this mode of burial. The first is the manner of Christ’s entombment; he was laid in a grave in a cavern, wrapped up in linen, embalmed with spices, and a stone, sealed up, closed his sepulchre. As S. Paul so often proposes him for the model of our resurrection, and speaks of our being buried with him in baptism, it was natural for his disciples to wish to be buried after his example, so as to be ready to rise with him. This lying in wait for the resurrection was the second thought that regulated the formation of these cemeteries. Every expression connected with them alluded to the rising again. The word to _bury_ is unknown in Christian inscriptions: ‘_deposited_ in peace,’ ‘the _deposition_ of ...’ are the expressions used; that is, the dead are left there for a time, till called for again, as a pledge or precious thing, entrusted to faithful but temporary keeping. The very name of cemetery suggests that it is only a place where many lie, as in a dormitory, slumbering for a while, till dawn come and the trumpet’s sound awake them. Hence the grave is only called the ‘place,’ or more technically ‘the small home,’(120) of the dead in Christ.”

The old Teutonic _Gottes‐Acker_, the acre or field of God, denotes the same eminently Christian idea; the dead are thus likened to the seed hidden in the ground for a while, to ripen into a glorious spiritual harvest when the last call shall be heard. We have read somewhere, in an English novel whose name has escaped our memory, the same beautiful idea most poetically expressed. It was something to this effect: “We put up a stone at the head of a grave, just as we write labels in the spring‐time for the seeds we put into the earth, that we may remember what glorious flower is to spring from the little gray, hidden handful that seems so insignificant just now”—a Catholic thought found astray in a book that had nothing Catholic about it save its beauty and poetry; for beauty is a ray of truth, and truth is one and Catholic. One other remark is worth remembering about the early Christian inscriptions on the tombs of the departed. There is generally some anxiety to preserve a record of the exact date of a person’s death, and, in modern days, if it happened that there was no room for both the day and the year, no doubt the _day_, would be left unnoticed, and the year carefully chronicled. “Yet,” says Cardinal Wiseman, “while so few ancient Christian inscriptions supply the year of people’s deaths, thousands give us the very day of it on which they died, whether in the hopefulness of believers or in the assurance of martyrs. Of both classes annual commemoration had to be made on the very day of their departure, and accurate knowledge of this was necessary. Therefore it alone was recorded.”

O ages of faith! when it was the ambition of Christians to be inscribed in the Book of Life, instead of leaving names blazoned in gold in the annals of an earthly empire!

Prayers for the dead were in use among the primitive Christians, and in one of the inscriptions mentioned by Cardinal Wiseman the following reference to these prayers is found: “Christ God Almighty refresh thy spirit in Christ.” That this hallowed custom is akin to the natural feelings of a loving heart is self‐evident; the coldness of an “age of philosophy” alone could doubt it. Well might it be called the age of disorganization and not of philosophy (which is “love of wisdom”), for the wisdom that seeks to pull down instead of building up is but questionable. The disorganization of political society which we see at work through the International and the Commune; the disorganization of moral society which we behold every day increasing through the ease with which the marriage‐ tie is dissolved, and the hold the state is claiming on children and even infants; the disorganization of religious society which we find in the ever‐multiplying feuds of sects, like gangrene gradually eating away an unsound body; these are all fitting companions to that most ruthless severing of this world from the next which pretends to isolate the dead from the spiritual help and sympathy of the living, and to dwarf in the souls of men what even human laws commanded, or at least protected, concerning their bodies. The want of our age is a want of heart; heartlessness and callousness to the most sacred, the most _natural_ feelings, is shown to a fearful extent among our modern mind‐emancipators and reformers. On the one hand, nature is held up as a god to which all moral laws are to be subject, or, rather, before whose _fiat_ they are to cease to exist, while, on the other, nature (in everything lawful, touching, noble, generous) is told that she is a fool, and must learn to subdue “childish” aspirations and outgrow “childish” beliefs!

But the belief of a communication between the living and the departed is not only a _natural_ one; it is also Biblical. S. Matthew speaks of the middle state of souls when he mentions the strict account that will have to be rendered of “every idle word.”(121) S. Paul says that “every man’s work ... shall be tried in _fire_: and the fire shall try every man’s work _of what sort it is_. If any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.”(122) S. Peter makes mention of “the spirits in prison,”(123) and S. John, in the Apocalypse, implies a state of probation when he says that “there shall not enter into it [the New Jerusalem] anything defiled or that worketh abomination, or maketh a lie.”(124) In the Second Book of Machabees, one of the most national of the Jewish records, and the most favorite and consolatory of the religious books held by the Jews as infallible oracles, the whole doctrine of purgatory and prayers for the departed is most plainly adverted to.

After a great battle and victory, Judas Machabeus searches the bodies of his slain warriors, and finds that some of them had appropriated heathen votive offerings made to the idols whose temples they had burnt at Jamnia a short time before. Upon this discovery, according to the sacred text, which is here too precious a testimony to be condensed, he, “making a gathering, sent twelve thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection. (For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead.) And because he considered that they who had fallen asleep with godliness, had great grace laid up for them. It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.”(125)

It may not perhaps be generally known that, among the Jews, the custom of praying for the dead exists, and has always existed uninterruptedly. Some of the supplications are very beautiful, and we do not hesitate to give them here, as an interesting corroboration of the assertions we have made throughout.

The chief prayers for the dead are contained in the “Kaddisch” for mourners, which forms part of the evening as well as the morning service for the Jewish Sabbath. Although the dead are not mentioned by name, it is to them alone that the prayers apply, as we understand from persons of that persuasion. The text is the following:

“May our prayers be accepted with mercy and kindness; may the prayers and supplications of the whole house of Israel be accepted in the presence of their Father who is in heaven, and say ye Amen. [The congregation here answer Amen.] May the fulness of peace from heaven with life be granted unto us and to all Israel, and say ye Amen.” “My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. May he who maketh peace in his high heavens bestow peace on us and on all Israel. And say ye Amen.”

During these prayers, the mourners stand up and answer. Other invocations mention “the soul of my father” or “mother,” etc., as the case may be. In the service for the dead read over the corpse, these words occur: “O Lord our God, cause us to lie down in peace, and raise us up, O our King, to a happy life. I laid me down fearless and slept; I awoke, for the Lord sustained me.” All through the Old Testament we constantly find “sleep” used as a synonym for death. Scattered through the morning and evening services of the Hebrew liturgy there are invocations, frequently repeated, referring to the dead, such as these: “Thou, O Lord, art for ever powerful; thou restorest life to the dead, and art mighty to save. Thou art also faithful to revive the dead: blessed art thou, O Lord, who revivest the dead.” God is also said “to hold in his hands the souls of the living and the dead,” thus giving at least equal prominence to the departed and those they have left in their place. The Jews believe and hope that their prayers on earth benefit and refresh their lost brethren, and pray daily for them. The bodies of the departed are plainly dressed in a linen shroud without superfluous ornamentation, but many of the old ceremonies and purifications enjoined in the old law are now dispensed with. The old manner of burial was in a cave or spacious sepulchre in a field or garden, and the body was wrapped in spices, which were often burnt around it. The double cave of Mambre, bought for Sarah by Abraham, stood at the end of a field, and the sepulchres of the kings were also in a field. The garden where Our Lord was laid is another instance of the universality of this custom. In the Second Book of Chronicles(126) we read of King Asa that “they buried him in his own sepulchre which he had made for himself in the city of David: and they laid him on his bed full of spices and odoriferous ointments, which were made by the art of the perfumers, and they burnt them over him with great pomp.” This burning (of spices) is often mentioned throughout Holy Writ. Rachel, says the Book of Genesis,(127) was buried “in the highway” that led to Bethlehem, and Jacob erected a pillar over her sepulchre; Samuel, “in his own house at Ramatha”; and Saul, beneath an oak near the city of Jabes Galaad, the inhabitants of which place provided for his burial, and fasted seven days in sign of mourning for their sovereign. Joram, king of Juda, was punished for his misdeeds by exclusion from the sepulchre of his fathers, “and the people did not make a funeral for him according to the manner of burning [spices], as they had done for his ancestors.”(128) Ozias, being a leper, a disease which came upon him in punishment for having usurped sacerdotal functions, was buried “in the field” only “of the royal sepulchre.” Thus we see the immense importance attached to the place of burial under the old Jewish dispensation, and how it was an eternal disgrace to be expelled in death from the neighborhood of one’s family and their hereditary place of entombment. This feeling has continued very strong in most civilized and in all savage races; the graves of their forefathers are even more symbolical of home and fatherland to the wandering desert tribes of different nations, than what we should call their hearths and firesides. In later times, how often have we not seen gorgeous and imposing buildings, especially cathedrals and abbeys, built over the shrine of a dead king or bishop, canonized by that popular veneration whose last expression was the public honor decreed them by the Roman Pontiff? In places where these monuments are not dedicated to the sainted dead whose shrines they guard, we often find them burdened with the condition of Masses being perpetually offered within their walls for the soul of the dead founder; others are memorial churches to friends or relations of the founder. Public charities, doles of bread and money, annual distributions of clothing, hospitals, schools, or municipal institutions, etc., spring chiefly from the desire of the survivors to have their loved ones remembered to all future ages, while sometimes a generous testator himself will take this simple and practical means of recommending himself to the prayers of unborn generations. Family names are perpetuated in remembrance of the departed; family records are valuable only in proportion as they embody a proof of longer or shorter descent from the distinguished dead. There is no test of success or popularity so sure as that of death, and no one can tell which of our living friends will be known to and loved by future nations, and which other will be passed by in obscurity and silence, until long after our exit and their own from this present life‐ scene. _Real_ life is centred in the dead, it revolves around them, it depends on them. They are the root of which we are the leaves and flowers. The life of fame is theirs, while only the life of struggle is ours; they are victors calmly bearing their palms, umpires gently encouraging their successors, but we are only striving competitors, who know not and never will know our fate till we have gone with them beyond the veil.

Germany is, above all, the home of these beautiful traditions of an unbroken communion between the souls who have left earth and those who remain behind. _There_ are the churchyards most loved, and the anniversaries of deaths most remembered, even among Protestants. It is a custom in Germany to wear black and to keep the day holy every recurring anniversary, were it twenty, forty, fifty years after the death of a relative or beloved friend. The cemeteries are always blooming with every flower of the season, the crosses or headstones always hung with wreaths of immortelles. In Catholic German countries, such as Bavaria, the festival of All Souls’ is one of the most interesting, because the most individual of the ecclesiastical year. We happened to be in Munich on one of these occasions, and had been there for a week previous, visiting the galleries and inspecting the art‐manufactures for which that city is world‐famous. But rich as it is in such treasures, the hand of its old King Louis—the grandfather of the present sovereign, and whom in his retirement we have met at Nice some few years before his death—has effaced much of its mediæval stamp, and attempted to varnish it over with a Renaissance coating very uncongenial to the northern character of its people and the northern mistiness of its atmosphere. Here we have again the wretched imitation in plaster of the marble Parthenon and Acropolis; the cold stuccoed pillars looming like huge bleached skeletons through a November fog, and yet supposed to represent the sun‐tinted columns of exquisite workmanship that rear themselves against the purple sky of Greece; the vast desert‐looking streets which, bordered by “Haussmann” palaces, seem intended for _future_ rather than present habitation, and each of which, if cut into a dozen equal parts, would furnish any capital with twelve good‐sized public squares; above all, a stuccoed church, dazzlingly, painfully white, the _Theatiner‐Kirche_, a sort of S. Paul’s (London) without the smoky coat thrown over it by the chimneys of the busy city. Then, turning with relief to the little that is left of the old town, we find a few quaint streets leading to the cathedral, a plain but grand building, very fairly “restored” and adorned with the distinctive Munich statues of angels and saints, which are now sold all over the world, as the worthy substitutes of plaster‐of‐Paris images of the Bernini type of sculpture. A very interesting old triptych stands over the altar, with its strange medley of figures forming a striking and novel reredos. A procession was slowing winding its way down the aisles as we entered the cathedral one afternoon, and though the congregation was not numerous it was very devout. A few comfortable‐looking old houses and quiet streets surround the cathedral, and form quite an oasis in the midst of the modernized city. Indeed, the monotonous stretch of apparently uninhabited mansions was really wearying to look at, and we began to think that King Louis had built his town as if he expected its population to increase at a _Chicagoan_ rate! It is true the season of fêtes had not come, and, according to the recognized phrase, “all the world” had left Munich for the country villas and hunting‐boxes in its neighborhood, but on the day of All Saints, the vigil of All Souls, how magically the scene changed! After Mass in the Royal Chapel, which, by the way, is beautifully decorated with frescoes of mediæval saints on a gilt background, we started for the great “Gottes‐Acker” (churchyard.) We had been told that this was worth seeing, and so it proved. The desert seemed to have blossomed like the rose. The road leading to the cemetery was crowded with carriages, carts, horsemen, and foot passengers. Every one, especially those on foot, carried wreaths of immortelles and small lanterns. The carriages were mostly laden with wreaths. Every one looked cheerful, but great quiet prevailed throughout the crowd. It seemed to us that until the dead called for a visit, the living in Munich must have been well hidden, so great were now the numbers that incumbered the hitherto lonely road. All were going in the same direction, and once there the scene was almost festive. Military bands (the best, we believe, next to the Austrian) were stationed near the cemetery gates. The “Gottes‐Acker” itself is an immense square, the length being about twice the breadth of the inclosure. Round the four sides runs a covered cloister, under which are all the graves, monuments, and vaults of the more wealthy part of the Munich population. Each of these was a perfect forest of evergreens and hot‐house plants, artistically heaped up around a vessel of holy water, from which any pious passer‐by was free to sprinkle the grave while repeating a prayer for its occupant. The large square in the centre was crossed and recrossed by narrow paths between the serried files of graves. Nearly all were distinguished by a cross, of stone, marble, wood, or metal. To these the wreaths and lamps were hung, and here and there a kneeling figure might be seen. Within the covered cloister a dense crowd promenaded slowly, while the bands played unceasingly, not always, however, appropriately. It was a striking scene, the like of which we do not remember to have ever witnessed elsewhere. At Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, the cemetery is similar to this in construction and arrangement, though it is, of course, smaller in size. Night fell gradually as we were admiring this peculiar expression of national idiosyncrasy, but the crowd did not seem to grow less dense. It was a remembrance worth carrying away from that old Munich whose spirit, though outwardly imprisoned in a pseudo‐classic shape, lives yet in the simple Christian instincts of its laboring classes. At this time, when it threatens to become another Wittenberg, have we not also seen the unconscious and magnificent protest of its inveterately Catholic feelings in the unique Passion Play, that worthily kept relic of the heroic ages of faith and chivalry? Kings and philosophers cannot change the world as long as peasants like those of Ammergau, and artisans such as work in the Munich manufactories—that should not be degraded to comparison with the materialistic establishments of Manchester or Sheffield—are yet to be found bearing through the present times the banner of their forefathers’ undying traditions. There is more simple faith among the German people, including also the Slavic and Hungarian races, than among some other modern Christian nations, and no doubt there must be a hidden law of gracious compensation in this fact, since the same country has been the cradle and the teacher of almost every modern heresy and philosophical (_sic_) aberration. No doubt the faith of the masses is intimately connected with their wonderful love of home and fatherland, their domestic instincts, their love of quiet family gatherings. All this easily leads to great love and tenderness for the departed, and it reads almost more like a German than a French saying, that “the dead are not the forgotten, but only the absent.”(129) Love for the dead and a reverent, prayerful remembrance of them are as much bulwarks to the morality of the living, as they are spiritual boons to the departed themselves. We would not speak ill of an absent friend, or break our word with one who had gone on a long journey; even a short earthly distance seems to make a pledge more sacred. How much more when the distance is the immeasurable breadth of the valley of the shadow of death! We all of us remember promises once made to those who have fallen asleep in Christ: those promises will be guardian angels to us, if we keep them; they will be so many drops of refreshing dew to those who are perhaps suffering at this moment for the unfulfilled promises once made by them in life. Shall we whose faith includes the communion of saints as a vital dogma, and whose humble hope it must ever be to become one of the church suffering after having done our weak share in the cause of the church militant—shall we be no better for this belief than are those who have it not? Let the dead be guides to us, while we are helps to them; let us each remember that besides the angel we have at our side, there is another spirit who rejoices or grieves for and with us—a company of spirits perhaps, but seldom less than one.

Mother or father, sister, brother, husband, wife, or child, that spirit from its prison looks sadly and lovingly earthward, marking our every step from its own patient haven of suffering sinlessness. No longer racked by the personal fear of falling away, no longer haunted by the possibility of temptation, it concentrates its loving anxiety on the soul whom it will perchance precede to heaven, but on whom it is yet dependent; let us not grieve it, let us not willingly or knowingly wound it, but rather let us take heed that we fit ourselves to go and bear it company in the new and glorious God’s‐Acre to which we hope to be called when that “which was sown in mortality shall be raised in immortality, and that which was sown in dishonor and weakness shall be raised in glory and in power.”

Personal Recollections Of The Late President Juarez Of Mexico.

I. The President In The Reception‐Room.

We saw President Juarez for the first time in the fall of 1865. He was then temporarily established with his government in the town of El Paso, on the northern frontier of Chihuahua, and within almost a stone’s throw of American soil. Fort Bliss, Texas, then recently reoccupied by the Union troops, was not more than ten minutes’ distance from the Plaza of El Paso.

The prospects of the Mexican Republic were not then very bright; the treasury was almost exhausted, the government was barely on Mexican soil, and on the American side of the Rio Grande it was generally looked upon as a question of time when President Juarez would have to seek safety on our own side of the boundary. It is needless to say that he would have been received by the Americans of that region with right royal hospitality.

American sympathy and material aid were looked for, and Americans were very popular with all the followers of the Mexican president.

Shortly after the arrival of President Juarez and his cabinet in El Paso, we joined a party of American gentlemen who paid him a visit. The party comprised, we think, nearly all the Americans of any standing about El Paso. There were the American consul, the collector of customs, three or four army officers from Fort Bliss, some local civil officials, and one or two leading business men.

President Juarez and his cabinet occupied a house on the Plaza—a large building constructed in the usual Mexican fashion. On announcing ourselves as a party of American citizens desirous of paying their respects to the chief of a sister republic, we were immediately ushered into a room where we found President Juarez with most of the members of his cabinet—notably his successor Señor Lerdo de Tejada, then Secretary of State, and Señor Yglésias, Secretary of the Treasury—now also named for the presidency—rather a sinecure office at the time.

We were presented in turn to the president by Señor Yglésias, the only person present attached to the president who spoke English. President Juarez spoke neither English nor French. He shook hands cordially with each of us, and expressed through Señor Yglésias the very great pleasure it gave him to receive our visit. We were sufficiently familiar with the Pueblo type to recognize Juarez immediately on entering.

President Juarez was low in stature, rather stout, but dignified, and at the same time easy in his manners. The Pueblo Indian was marked in every lineament of his face—the aquiline nose, the small bright black eyes, the straight cut mouth showing no trace of redness in the lips, the coal‐black hair, the swarthy complexion. Yet he was, as it were, an Indian idealized; his forehead was high, capacious, and the light of intellectual cultivation illuminated his face. He was dressed in plain black.

The secretary of state, Señor Lerdo de Tejada, is evidently, judged merely from externals, a man of great intellectual ability. His skin is as white as that of the fairest daughter of the Anglo‐Saxon. A forehead, so high as to seem almost a monstrosity, and of a marble whiteness, towered above a face that gleamed with the glance of the eagle.

Señor Yglésias was of a darker complexion than his colleague in the cabinet. He seemed to be in rather indifferent health. The expression of his face was remarkably gentle and pleasing. We have already said that he acted as interpreter. He spoke English with a very marked accent, but with great care and correctness. We happened to be seated next him on a sofa, President Juarez being on his right. He told us that he learned to speak English in the city of Chihuahua, and that he had never been a day in an English‐speaking country.

Notwithstanding that President Juarez did not speak English, and the necessity of an interpreter naturally causes some embarrassment, yet his manners were so pleasant and affable that he placed us at our ease at once. He spoke about our war, and asked with much interest about our great military leaders, Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan. He seemed to feel some sympathy with Gen. McClellan. A very pleasant half‐hour was spent in conversation on these and kindred subjects. It was at length interrupted by the entrance of a _péon_ bearing a tray with quite a generous number of bottles of champagne on it.

We were invited to partake of the Green Seal. We stood around the table, President Juarez standing at the head. Toasts were drunk to the lasting friendship of the two North American republics, to the independence of Mexico, etc. The péon, who was not a very bright specimen of his tribe, exerted himself to his utmost to open the bottles sufficiently fast. In his tremulous hurry he got within point‐blank range of the president, and a peculiarly excited bottle going off prematurely, discharged about half its contents into the president’s shirt‐bosom. Juarez looked at the poor _péon_—whose swarthy face grew sickly pale, and who seemed about to sink to the ground with terror and confusion—neither in sorrow nor in anger. He took no notice whatever of the incident, but went on talking cheerfully as before. Such an accident happening to most men would have been laughable in the extreme. It did not seem to us to place Juarez in a ludicrous position at all, his self‐command was so perfect, his dignity so thoroughly preserved.

After all the patriotic toasts proper to the occasion had been drunk, we took our leave. The president again shook hands with us, again expressed, through Señor Yglésias, his gratification at meeting American citizens and officers, and hoped that he should receive further visits from us.

We departed very greatly prepossessed in favor of the Mexican president. We agreed in thinking that there was a simplicity and honesty of purpose about him which made him the best man for the difficult position of chief magistrate of the struggling republic in her great hour of trial.

II. The President In The Ball‐Room.

Some time after the visit just described, President Juarez gave a ball in honor of the anniversary of Mexican independence. We had the honor, in common with some other Americans, of receiving an invitation to the ball, which, of course, we accepted.

There were four American ladies in our party—two the wives of infantry officers stationed at Fort Bliss, the post surgeon’s wife, and the wife of one of the leading citizens of Franklin. We were all invited to pass the night—or such portion of it as would remain after the close of the ball—at the mansion of a lady, a native of El Paso, of American descent.

We were bestowed in three or four vehicles, and forded the Rio Grande successfully a little before dark. We found El Paso in festal array. The cathedral was covered with shining lamps from foundation to steeple. The Plaza was brilliantly illuminated, and crowds of both sexes were already assembling for the grand open‐air _baile_ of the _profanum vulgus_. Class lines of demarcation are very sharply drawn in El Paso, and the _gente fina_ alone were admissible to the president’s ball.

We dined at the Señora L——’s, where we had the pleasure of meeting several Mexican officers of high rank. Among them were General Ruiz, the Postmaster‐General (another sinecurist just then), and other staff officers, whose names we have forgotten. A little son of one of the officers at Fort Bliss—a child of five or six, who spoke Spanish very well, having passed nearly all his little life in New Mexico, only remaining sufficiently long in New York to set all doubts at rest as to his being born in the Empire State—became a very great favorite with the Mexican officers.

Between ten and eleven P.M. our vehicles were again in requisition, and away we went to the ball. It was given in the spacious house of a wealthy citizen, the front of which was brilliantly illuminated. A guard of Mexican soldiers was posted in front of the house, and lined the long hall leading to the ball‐room. Their pieces were at order, and they saluted the chief officers by striking the butt of their muskets against the ground. They were dressed in gray jackets, like the undress of the New York National Guard, white cross belts, white trousers, and a leather cap, somewhat Hussar shape.

We had the honor of giving an arm to one of the four American ladies on entering. Arrived at the door of the ball‐room, four white‐vested and kid‐ gloved Mexican gentlemen offered an arm each to the four American ladies, bowing at and smiling most sweetly on us the while. At first, we were disposed to resist “the deep damnation of this taking off.” The ladies hesitated and drew back. The situation would have become remarkably comic; but Don Juan Z——, well‐known to all Americans who visit El Paso, seeing the critical state of affairs, came to us and whispered that it was the _costumbre del pais_—the custom of the country. We submitted, but, we fear, not with a good grace. By the way, we only saw our American ladies at a distance for the rest of the evening. The Mexican gentlemen took entire charge of them. Don Juan informed us that we were expected to take our revenge among the señoras and señoritas.

The ball‐room was very tastefully arranged. The _placeta_, or open square in the centre of all Mexican houses, on which all the rooms in the building open, was roofed and floored for the ball‐room. The window‐ curtains were hung outside the window of the house; mirrors, paintings, etc., were hung on the outer walls, making the illusion that you were inside the house instead of outside of it, complete. American and Mexican flags were festooned around the walls. The music, softly and sweetly played, was placed in a side room, entirely out of sight. No braying cornet flayed your ears, and no howling fiddler, calling out the figures from a position dominating everything and everybody, gave you an _attaque de nerfs_. The fiddlers would be heard, not seen. The waltz, the national dance of Mexico, was, of course, the terpsichorean _pièce de résistance_; but a fair number of quadrilles were sprinkled through the programme, in compliment to the Americans.

We have seen many balls in the Empire City—some given under “most fashionable auspices”—but we must in justice declare that we have seen none which surpassed the Mexican President’s ball. There may have been more glare, more glitter, more diamonds, if you will, but there certainly was not more good taste, more elegance and refinement, more genuine good‐ breeding and gentlemanly and ladylike good‐humor. There was no rushing, steam‐engine fashion, the length of the ball‐room; knocking couples to the right and left, and tearing dresses, without even an apology. The ladies were richly but not gaudily dressed, and made no barbaric display of golden ornaments, as their New Mexican sisters are wont to do on _bailé_ occasions. The gentlemen—except the army officers—wore the traditional black dress‐coat and pantaloons, with white vest and gloves, clothes and gloves fitting admirably, for the _gente fina_ of El Paso got both from Paris. The army officers were, of course, in full uniform, the American uniform looking rather sombre compared with the red‐leg top trousers, with broad gold or silver stripes, and the magnificent gold‐embroidered sashes of the Mexican general and field officers. By the way, the lowest officer in rank of the Mexicans in the ball‐room was a colonel. The only captains and lieutenants admitted were the Americans. Juarez’ son—“the image of his father”—though somewhat shorter in stature, in the undress uniform of a second lieutenant of artillery was in the vestibule with the guard.

The president, with his cabinet and staff, was already in the ball‐room when we arrived. After being dispossessed of our fair companions, we were ushered to the portion of the room in which the president sat. We paid our respects in turn, and were kindly and cordially welcomed. Juarez was dressed in plain black, except his gloves, which, of course, were white.

The male portion of the American party then broke ranks, and spread themselves through the ball‐room, enjoying themselves each after his fashion; some in the fascinating “see‐saw” of the Spanish dance, others in the apartments off the ball‐room where exhilaration of a different kind was provided.

We passed a very agreeable hour with Signor Prieto, a Mexican poet and orator of distinction. Signor Prieto was then known as the “Henry Clay” of Mexico. He spoke French very well. He told us with just pride that he considered the highest recognition his efforts had received was the translation of one of his poetical pieces by our American patriarch‐poet, William Cullen Bryant.

Just before supper‐time, an official came with President Juarez’ compliments, to say that President Juarez and the members of his cabinet would take the American ladies in to supper, and requesting the American gentlemen to take in Mexican ladies. We immediately sought our friend Don Juan T——, and begged him to find us some Mexican lady who could talk either English or French. He found compliance with our request impossible, but gave into our charge the Señora S——, a magnificent beauty of the Spanish type, with coal‐black hair and large lustrous black Juno‐like eyes—_fendus en amande_. The other gentlemen of the American party were soon provided with supper partners, and we began our march for the supper‐ table, President Juarez taking in Mrs. Capt. O——; the secretary of state, Señor Lerdo de Tejada, Mrs. Capt. B——; the secretary of the treasury, Mrs. Dr. S——; and the secretary of war, Mrs. W——, of Texas. The first table was for the president and cabinet, with the American party. The supper was rather a solemn affair. It consisted of nine courses, though the courses seemed as like each other as railway stations on the plains. All seemed to be desiccated, and reminded us somewhat of what we had read about Chinese feasts. When a course was served to every guest, the President looked down the table to his right and bowed; he then looked to his left and bowed. Then, and not before, knives and forks were observed, and the guests attacked the viands. This repeated nine times was not calculated to impart gaiety to the repast. It was slow, but ended at last, and we retired in the same order in which we entered, making way for the ladies and gentlemen of the second table.

After the supper, President Juarez sat for over an hour with the American ladies, chatting pleasantly with them in the simplest Spanish phrases he could devise. Seeing him chatting away and laughing gaily, no one could have imagined that he had the cares of a tottering government with an empty treasury upon his shoulders.

Capt. O—— asked us to go out with him and have a look at the great _bronco_, the public fandango, on the Plaza. As we passed out through the hall, the Mexican guard—now lying on their arms—jumped up and brought their muskets to the ground with a crash to salute our companion, much to his discomposure, as he wished to go out without attracting attention.

The great fandango was a sight worth seeing. A leviathan Spanish dance wound its way around and through the Plaza, filling to overflowing the market‐place, the sidewalks, and the arcades. Swarthy Mexicans with immense sombreros, with cigarettes of corn‐husks in their mouths, abandoned themselves to the swaying movements of the slow waltz, their dark‐eyed partners—often partners in the cigarette as well as the dance—now moving with a graceful languor, now dashing out with wild and unrepressed vigor to the clattering of a thousand castanets.

Unusual gambling facilities were to be found everywhere, of course. Cake merchants, fried hot cakes in the open air, lemonade, _vino del pais_, fresh _queso_, fruits, _puros_, were to be had for the paying.

Having seen sufficient of the great unwashed fandango, we returned to the ball‐room. Our companion was again the object of another demonstration of respect on the part of the guard. “I wish,” said he, “those fellows would go to sleep; this begins to be unpleasant.”

A waltz was in full gyration when we returned to the ball‐room. We took chairs and sat near the door chatting. Suddenly we became aware that some one stood behind us, placing a hand on either chair. Looking round, we saw that it was President Juarez. We immediately arose, but he insisted on our being seated, and resumed his former attitude. He talked with us for half an hour, in Spanish well adapted to our limited knowledge of the language, and which we had no difficulty in understanding.

During the evening, from time to time, we had received invitations from the president to drink wine with him—invitations which, of course, we did not refuse. Many patriotic toasts and sentiments were offered on both sides. It must have been in one of those festive moments that an enthusiastic gentleman of our party slapped the president on the back, called him “Ben” (Juarez’ Christian name was Benito), said he was “a brick,” and bade him “never say die” till he was dead! We were not a witness to this scene. It was described to us by members of our party.

Between two and three P.M. the president’s party left the ball‐room. Shortly after, the American clans were gathered, we got our fair ones back again, and set out for the hospitable dwelling of the Señora L——.

There was plenty of bustle and activity there. It seemed to us that half the people at the ball must have been guests of this house. All the rooms opening on the large _placeta_ were turned into lodging‐rooms. There was hurrying to and fro with lights in hand, putting every one in his place. Some people put themselves in other people’s places. Notably our enthusiastic friend, who had taken up his quarters in a room intended for F—— and his new Spanish bride. He was found by the happy pair, just as happy as they were, sleeping the sleep of the just. In the meantime, the partner of his joys and sorrows sat solitary and alone in the room intended for her and her spouse, on the other side of the _placeta_, wondering at his absence and anxiously awaiting his return. This complication, however, was settled by transferring the lady to the room in which lay her sleeping lord, and bestowing the F——s in the room she had occupied.

After a good breakfast, we set out on our return to the Land of the Free, forded the Rio Grande at about noon, under a September sun—no contemptible luminary about latitude 32°, let us assure the reader. We sought our _casas_, darkened up our respective rooms, and shut the venetian blinds to keep out the flies, and having turned night into day, proceeded to turn day into night.

New Publications.

ELEMENTS OF LOGIC. Designed as a Manual of Instruction. By Henry Coppée, LL.D., President of the Lehigh University. Revised edition. Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co. 1872.

President Coppée has carefully excluded from this edition of his Logic everything which could give offence to a Catholic. The main part of the work, treating of formal logic, is of course substantially the same with other treatises of this kind, and is written in a clear, simple style, well adapted to an elementary text‐book. But here our approbation must cease. The history of logic is altogether defective. The author advocates the doctrine derived by Hamilton from Kant, that our rational knowledge is merely “conditioned,” which is pure scepticism, and confounds Christian philosophy with theology, which is effectually to subvert both sciences. Teachers may find some useful assistance from this book in explaining the laws of thought; but it is altogether unfit to be placed in the hands of Catholic pupils. We reiterate the desire we have so often expressed, that some competent person would translate one of our standard Latin text‐books of logic, for the use of pupils and teachers who cannot read them in the original language.

THE POCKET PRAYER‐BOOK. Compiled from approved sources. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.

This is certainly the most complete little manual we have seen, and, although it contains 650 pages, is small enough for the pocket; and gives, among other things, the three indulgenced litanies, the entire Mass in Latin and English, Vespers, and the Epistles and Gospels for the Sundays throughout the year. The type, moreover, is singularly large and good. Thus the book supplies a long‐felt want; and ought to become very popular amongst Catholic men, for whose especial benefit it was compiled. There is another edition without the Epistles and Gospels, which fits the vest pocket, and can therefore be made emphatically a daily companion.

ENGLAND AND ROME. By the Rev. W. Waterworth, S.J. London: Burns & Lambert. 1854. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

A COMMENTARY BY WRITERS OF THE FIRST FIVE CENTURIES ON THE PLACE OF S. PETER IN THE NEW TESTAMENT, AND THAT OF S. PETER’S SUCCESSORS IN THE CHURCH. By the Very Rev. J. Waterworth, D.D., Provost of Nottingham. London: Richardson. 1871. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

The reader will perceive, if he takes notice of the titles of these two books, that they are by two different authors, both bearing the name of Waterworth. They are brothers, and one of the two is a Jesuit, the other being a dignitary of the Catholic Church in England. The work whose title stands first in order at the head of this notice, is not a recent publication, having been issued as long ago as 1854. We think it, however, not unsuitable to recall attention to it as a work specially useful at the present time. About one‐third of the volume is taken up with a very solid and scholarly disquisition on the general topic of the Papal supremacy. Its principal and special topic is, however, the relation of the church in England to the Holy See from the year 179 to the epoch of the schism of Henry VIII. It is handled with great learning and ability, and the sophisms and perversions of those disingenuous or ill‐informed controversialists who pretend to establish the original independence of the British Church are scattered to the winds.

The work of Dr. Waterworth, the Provost of Nottingham, was published last year. This learned divine is the author of the celebrated treatise entitled _The Faith of Catholics_, and is well known as a most profound and accurate patristic scholar. The present volume was prepared by him for the press before the publication of the Decrees of the Vatican Council; but its issue having been delayed by an accident, the author took the opportunity of making a re‐examination of its contents, with special reference to the objections raised by Dr. Döllinger, and of adding some new prefatory remarks. The result of his revision did not suggest to him the necessity of any alteration whatever, or show anything in the cavils of the petulant old gentleman, who has so completely stultified himself by retracting the deliberate convictions of his better days, worthy of any special refutation.

As for Dr. Waterworth’s work itself, it is quite unique in English Catholic literature, and different from the other works on the Papal supremacy, able and learned as these are, which we have hitherto possessed. It is literally an exhaustive collection of all the sayings of fathers and councils on the two topics discussed, during the first five centuries of the Christian era, by one who has mastered the whole of this vast body of literature. One hundred and seven fathers and councils are quoted, and copious tables at the end of the volume place the whole array of authorities in a convenient order for reference under the eye of the reader. It is needless for us to expatiate on the value of such a work, or to say anything more to recommend it to the attention of all who wish to study this great subject of the Papal supremacy.

THE TROUBLES OF OUR CATHOLIC FOREFATHERS, RELATED BY THEMSELVES. First Series. Edited by John Morris, Priest of the Society of Jesus. London: Burns & Oates. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

One of the outward and by no means the least significant signs of the revival of religion in England is the appearance in rapid succession of a most useful class of books, having for their main object the vindication of the character and constancy of the Catholics of that country during and subsequent to the so‐called Reformation. We have had occasion elsewhere to refer to Father Morris’ work on the _Condition of Catholics under James I._ The book before us may be considered a continuation of that exceedingly interesting contribution to history, and, as it is the first of a series, we may expect at an early day others equally valuable from the same painstaking and indefatigable student.

Until lately, with very few exceptions, historical works relating to Great Britain have been the composition of prejudiced, anti‐Catholic writers, each in his turn guilty of the same omissions while servilely copying the misrepresentations of his predecessors; so that the public mind has at length become impressed with the conviction that, when the tocsin of rebellion against God’s law was sounded by Henry Tudor, the people of the whole of his dominions arose in hostile opposition to the authority of the church. None but a critical few, familiar with foreign contemporary authorities, were aware that, while the nobles who hungered for the spoils of convents and monasteries, and the suppliant courtiers, lay and ecclesiastical, whose fortunes depended upon the smiles of the sovereign, basely bowed down before the brutal passions of Henry and Elizabeth, the mass of the people, particularly the educated and moral middle class, held firmly to the faith, braving persecution, poverty, imprisonment, and even death, in defence of Catholicity. England, in fact, can count her thousands of uncanonized martyrs, priests and laity, men and women, who, in common with their co‐religionists of the Continent, fell victims to the lust, cupidity, and inhumanity of the “Reformers.” Some of their most glorious achievements will probably never be recorded in this world, but there is every hope that, through the exertions of such conscientious searchers as this learned Jesuit, a flood of light will be thrown ere long on the darkest, but not least edifying, days of the Christian Church in England. Heretofore this noble work has been delayed for various reasons. Contemporary documents were either in the hands of the Government, or were scattered among many convents and private libraries, and from long neglect had become almost forgotten; and it required so much industry as well as knowledge to search for and utilize them, that until lately no one was found equal to the task. Besides, the English Catholics of the last generation were so few and so lukewarm that it was difficult to find a publisher willing to risk his money and his reputation in bringing out books that were considered neither profitable nor politic. A change has come over the spirit of their dream, as the appearance of late of so many Catholic works, well printed and handsomely bound, from some of the first publishing houses in Europe, amply testifies; and the ancient faith is fast regaining its power in what, for three centuries, has been considered the stronghold of dissent. While of primary interest to English readers, works of this character will also have peculiar attractions for Americans, many of whom by blood and affinity are as much heirs to the virtues and courage of the British Catholics of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries as those born on that soil. No historical library in our language would be complete without such works as those of F. Morris, containing as they do original, authentic documents which hitherto have never appeared in print, in whole or in part. Such documents, carefully annotated, and modernized only as regards their obsolete orthography, are the true materials of history, worth an infinity of commentaries and second and third hand statements filtrated through the minds of ignorant or partial writers.

The present volume contains the memoirs of Mother Margaret Clement; a sketch of the history of the Monasteries of SS. Ursula and Monica at Louvain; an account of the dissolution of the Carthusian Monastery of the Charter House, London, and the execution of several of its monks, in the reign of Henry VIII.; a detailed narrative of the imprisonment of Francis Tregian for sixteen years; some additional particulars relating to the missions of Fathers Tesimond and Blount; the trial of the Rev. Cuthbert Clapton, chaplain to the Venetian ambassador, as related by himself, and the correspondence of that official with his government from A.D. 1638 to 1643; with several interesting details of the sufferings and persecution of some noble Catholic families. These documents were procured in various places—in the Public Record Office; S. Mary’s College, Ascott; Stonyhurst; the Archives de l’Etat, Brussels; S. Augustine’s Priory, Abbotsleigh; Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster, and in numerous private MS. collections; each original being preceded by a short but comprehensive introduction from the pen of the learned editor.

PETERS’ CATHOLIC CLASS BOOK: A Collection of copyright Songs, Duets, Trios, and Choruses, etc., etc. Compiled and arranged by William Dressler. New York: J. L. Peters.

The first half of this work is a reproduction of ballads of sentiment of no special merit, issued, as the foot‐notes ingeniously advertise to the purchaser, “in sheet‐music form, with lithograph title‐page,” by the publisher. The latter half is chiefly a reprint of so‐called religious songs which persistently return to us under one or another guise in publications of this class, like poor relations, and with as hearty a welcome as such visitors proverbially receive.

THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY has fixed upon the 5th of November as the publication day of _The Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac_ for 1873: over 35,000 copies have already been ordered by the different booksellers. The Society has just published an edition of _The Little Manual of Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and Spiritual Bouquet_, formerly published by John P. Walsh, of Cincinnati; and will soon issue in book‐ form _Fleurange_, by Mrs. Craven; Col. Meline’s translation of _Hubner’s Life of Sixtus V.; Myrrha Lake, or Into the Light of Catholicity. All‐ Hallow Eve and Unconvicted_ will appear early in November. Canon Oakeley’s work on _Catholic Worship_ is in press, and will be published uniform with his excellent treatise on _The Mass_.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XVI., NO. 93.—DECEMBER, 1872.

The Spirit Of Protestantism.

Recent events in Europe, particularly in Prussia and Italy, have done much to awaken the attention of thinking men in this country to the true spirit of what is known as Protestantism. While they have once more presented to our view humiliating spectacles of human weakness, injustice and downright tyranny under the guise and in the sacred names of religion and liberty, they have confirmed with remarkable force all that has been alleged against the spirit that actuates and has always governed the enemies of the Catholic Church.

When the revolt against Catholic doctrine and the spiritual authority of the See of Rome was first inaugurated in the XVIth century under the banner of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, it was asserted by those who then upheld the ancient faith that these were specious pretexts invented to cover ulterior designs, which, by giving full scope to the worst passions of our nature, would inevitably fix in the minds and in the hearts of mankind a moral slavery more debasing, and a servitude more irradicable, than even the most astute pagans of ancient times ever dreamed of; that dissent from the dogmas and discipline of the universal church did not in itself constitute a creed, but simply the negation of all Christian truth, and that the right of private judgment in matters of faith meant in reality the right, when seconded by the power, to pull down and destroy, to persecute and proscribe, to desecrate and desolate the Christian temples and charitable institutions which pious hands had reared and richly endowed throughout Europe. How sadly prophetic were the sagacious champions of true liberty and divine authority, the history of the last three centuries fully attests.

Whoever has studied the career of modern civilization, either in the detached records of nations and dynasties, or by following the course of the church herself from her foundation to the present day, cannot fail to discover that the advance of Europe from the epoch of the disruption of the Roman Empire until the commencement of the XVIth century was a steady, constant, and rapid march towards true civil polity and enlightenment; frequently checked, it is true, by wars and local schisms, but ever flowing onward in an irresistible and majestic flood.

From the barbarism and chaos incident to the disappearance of the central authority of the empire, Europe emerged into the preparatory condition of feudalism, at that time another name for order; and, through this state of order, the first necessity of freedom, she was fast acquiring that second essential element of political excellence—liberty. Already the humble peasants of Helvetia were as free as the air of their romantic mountains; Italy was dotted with republics; the Spanish peninsula was ruled more by its cortes than by its sovereigns; France had her several “estates”; Poland her elective monarchy; and Germany and the North were fast becoming imbued with liberal and constitutional ideas; England, the last to adopt the feudal system, had by degrees abrogated its slavish restraints and commercial restrictions, and, with justice, boasted of her great charters and independent parliaments; while over all a species of international law was established, the chief executive of which sat in the chair of S. Peter, before whose moral power warriors sheathed their swords and crowned kings bowed their heads in submission. Municipalities, the germs of which had first clustered around the monasteries, had become numerous and powerful enough to defy and, on occasion, to curb the power of the feudal nobles, and, under the protection of the guilds, the mechanical arts had acquired a degree of perfection fully equal if not superior to that of our own time. Those workers in wool, cotton, and silk, stone, metal, and wood, have left us lasting monuments of their skill not only in the productions of the looms of Flanders and Italy, and the forges of Spain and England, but, better still, in the multiplicity of magnificent cathedrals and basilicas, in the contemplation of which the artisan of this generation, with all his supposed advantages, is lost in silent admiration. Poetry, painting, architecture, and sculpture, the four highest developments of creative genius, may be said to have reached, at the period immediately anterior to the Reformation, the acme of glory and greatness, never before nor since excelled or even equalled by man; while the discovery of the art of printing had given a new impetus to literature, and commerce spread her white wings in the Indian Ocean and along the shores of the New World.

Now, all these beneficent results were directly and indirectly the work of the Catholic Church. From the details of ordinary life to the more profound schemes of state policy, her animating presence was felt, and her influence cheerfully recognized and obeyed, for it was always exercised for the benefit of humanity and the greater glory of God. From the forging of the Toledo blade that flashed in the dazzled eyes of the Saracen, to the rearing aloft of that wonder of the Christian and pagan world, S. Peter’s; from the humble Mechlin girl meshing a robe for a statue of the Virgin, to Columbus exploring unknown seas in search of treasure to ransom the holy shrines; from the poor friar teaching the child of the degraded _villein_, to Archbishop Langdon framing _Magna Charta_; from the enfranchisement of a serf, to the organization of the crusades, there was no step in human progress that was not inspired and directed by the church for the wisest and most exalted purposes. Guided by the spirit of religion, the amount of solid happiness, simple virtue, and rational liberty enjoyed by the people of Europe at the opening of the XVIth century was greater, far greater, than their descendants possess at the present time, after nearly four hundred years’ experience, and countless attempts at religious, social, and political revolutions.

Yet, under the name of Reformation and greater liberty, this grand march towards human perfection and eternal bliss was to be stayed, and even for a time turned backwards, so that morally and politically Christendom has not yet, nor is it likely for a long time, to recover from the shock which it experienced at the hands of the Protestant reformers, their aiders and abettors. The motives which actuated these reactionists were neither new nor doubtful. Under various names and pretences, bodies of fanatics or knaves swayed by the same inducements had appeared from time to time in different parts of the world, generally causing much local disturbance, but always suppressed by the authority of the church or the strong arm of the state. They were simply detached efforts on the part of the worst portion of the population to throw off all spiritual restraint as well as temporal authority, and, by being thus freed both from moral and civil law, to give full scope to their passions, undeterred by either religious or social considerations. The history of fanaticism, of the Albigenses, the Fratricelli, and the Lollards, proves that the leaders in such movements were invariably the enemies of existing civil authority, and that profligacy and plunder were the lures by which they drew around them their deluded followers. The “Reformation,” as the last and greatest rebellion is called, forms no exception to the rule.

In the early part of the XVIth century it broke out in Germany under the auspices of three or four Saxon ecclesiastics, principal among whom were Luther and Melanchthon. The former schismatic, who was a preacher of some eminence, commenced by inveighing against the abuse of indulgences, and by rapid transitions ended by totally denying the authority of the church in every point of doctrine and discipline. He bases man’s salvation on faith alone regardless of works, proclaimed the right of every individual to make his own religion according as it seemed best to himself, and boldly advocated the massacre of priests and bishops and the pillage of churches and religious homes—the existence of all of which he declared to be contrary to Holy Writ. “Now is the time,” he wrote, at the commencement of his crusade, “to destroy convents, abbeys, priories, and monasteries”; to which advice he added a little later, “These priests, these Mass‐mumblers, deserve death as truly as a blasphemer who should curse God and his saints in the public streets.” A system of belief at once so convenient and so conformable with the greatest license, so free from all moral responsibility and so suggestive of rapine and spoliation, could not but attract followers, and Luther became so popular with the more debased of his countrymen and with the rapacious among the nobles, that rivals soon sprang up, who, accepting his premises, quickly outstripped him in the race of fanaticism. The Anabaptists under Münzer, thinking that they also had a right to private judgment, declared against infant baptism, demanded a reorganization of society on what would now be called a socialistic basis, and proceeded to put the heresiarch’s theory into practice by overrunning the fairest provinces of Germany with fire and sword, destroying alike feudal castles and Catholic churches, and slaughtering with unheard‐of barbarity every one who opposed them, whether layman or cleric.

This practical commentary on the new doctrine affrighted even its founder, so he hastened to implore the interposition of his friends among the German nobility. Accordingly, Philip of Hesse, in 1625, marched an army against them, and, meeting their main body under Münzer, a quondam friend and pupil of Luther, at Mülhausen, cut them to pieces and subsequently hanged their leader. About thirty thousand peasants are stated to have been slaughtered on this occasion, when the new Reformation may be said to have been baptized, and the right of private judgment according to Luther fully vindicated. Nearly at the same time another scene of even greater barbarity was enacted at the other extremity of the Continent. Attracted by reports of rich spoil to be obtained in Italy during the wars of the emperor and the French king for the possession of that lovely but unfortunate country, sixteen thousand German Lutheran mercenaries crossed the Alps and joined the forces of Constable de Bourbon, himself a traitor in arms against his country. Under the command of that gifted apostate, they marched on Rome, and, though their leader fell in the attack, the city was captured. Had he survived, the fate of the Eternal City might have been sad enough, but, unrestrained by superior authority, the conduct of the victors was simply diabolical. For weeks and months the city was given over to plunder, and the inhabitants to every species of outrage by those wretches, who, true to their master and his teachings, even went to the extent, in mockery of the church, to formally suspend Clement VII., and elect in his stead their new apostle. How Luther must have chuckled at the news!

“Never perhaps, in the history of the world,” says a distinguished historian, “had a greater capital been given up to a more atrocious abuse of victory; never had a powerful army been made up of more barbarous elements; never had the restraints of discipline been more fearfully cast aside. It was not enough for these rapacious plunderers to seize upon the rich stores of sacred and profane wealth which the piety or industry of the people had gathered into the capital of the Christian world; the wretched inhabitants themselves became the victims of the fierce and brutal soldiery; those who were suspected of having hidden their wealth were put to the torture. Some were forced by these tortures to sign promissory notes, and to drain the purses of their friends in other countries. A great number of prelates fell under these sufferings. Many others, having paid their ransom, and while rejoicing to think themselves free from further attacks, were obliged to redeem themselves again and died from grief or terror caused by these acts of violence. The German troops were seen, drunk at once with wine and blood, leading about bishops in full pontifical attire, seated upon mules, or dragging cardinals through the streets, loading them with blows and outrages. In their eagerness for plunder, they broke in the doors of the tabernacles and destroyed masterpieces of art. The Vatican library was sacked; the public squares and churches of Rome were converted into market‐places, where the conquerors sold, as promiscuous booty, the Roman ladies and horses; and these brutal excesses were committed even in the basilicas of S. Peter and S. Paul, held by Alaric as sacred asylums; the pillage which, under Genseric, had lasted fourteen days, lasted now two months without interruption.”(130)

Having disposed of his rivals the Anabaptists and set afloat his anathemas against the church, Luther proceeded systematically to disorganize society and obstruct the efforts of the sovereign pontiff and the Catholic princes to save Europe from the horrors of a Mahometan invasion, at that time most imminent. He formed a league among the semi‐independent German princes favorable to his views, particularly on the matter of confiscation, and the power he had denied to the pope and bishops of the church he assumed to himself by forthwith creating a number of evangelical ministers to preach the new gospel. In 1529, the members of this league, with other nobles of the empire, were summoned by the Emperor Charles V. to a diet at Spires to concert means for the general defence of Christendom against the Turks, then threatening it by the way of Hungary. The Lutherans, taking advantage of the critical condition of affairs, and not being particularly adverse to the success of any movement that would destroy Christianity, demanded the most unreasonable terms as the price of their active co‐ operation. On the part of the emperor, it was proposed that all questions of a religious nature should remain _in statu quo_ pending the struggle against the infidels, and be submitted as soon as practicable thereafter to a general or œcumenical council of the church, at which all parties were to be represented. “The edict of Worms,” they proposed, “shall be observed in the states in which it has already been received. The others shall be free to continue in the new doctrines until the meeting of the next general council. However, to prevent all domestic troubles, no one shall preach against the sacrament of the altar; the Mass shall not be abolished; and no one shall be hindered from celebrating or hearing it.” But these concessions to heresy for the general good, this weak recognition of an unlawful assumption of ecclesiastical and political authority, were not what the reformers desired. Not even toleration or equality would satisfy them. They wanted the right to persecute, to eradicate by forcible means and as far as their power extended, every vestige of Catholicity. They declared that in their opinion “the Mass is an act of idolatry, condemned by a thousand passages of Sacred Scripture. It is our duty and our right to overthrow the altars of Baal.” Thus _protesting_ their duty and right to persecute, they retired from the diet, left the Mahometans, as far as they were concerned, free scope to destroy Christianity wherever they pleased, and Lutheranism, or rebellion, was henceforth known by the generic title of Protestantism.

So far from Protestantism being, as popularly represented, the assertion of liberty of conscience in religion, it originated in the denial of that liberty, by asserting the right to persecute those who differed from them in religion.

From this time the Reformation under its new and more comprehensive name made vast strides on the Continent, its path being everywhere marked by the same spirit of fanaticism, sacrilege, and destruction of property devoted to religion, learning, and charity; the insane dissensions of the Catholic rulers granting it immunity, if not positive encouragement. Geneva and part of Switzerland first embraced the gloomy doctrines of Calvin, and made active war on the church; spreading into France, the Netherlands, and the northern countries, their adoption by the ignorant and venal was invariably followed by the greatest atrocities and the wildest anarchy. Europe was shaken to its centre, and wars, the worst of wars, because waged in the name of religion, desolated the entire Continent for over a century with but pause enough to enable the combatants to rest and recruit their strength. The destruction of life during this period must have been immense, morals degenerated, industry languished, and the principles of rational freedom, which had been steadily gaining ground, were lost sight of in the clash of arms and the angry conflict of contending systems. From this epoch we may date the rise of modern Cæsarism and revolutionary ferocity which at the present moment are contending for supremacy in the Old World.

But it was not continental nations alone that suffered from the blight of this stupendous curse. Great Britain and Ireland soon experienced its baleful influence. Henry VIII., in order to be able to divorce his lawful wife and marry a mistress, cut himself loose from the See of Rome, and became, by act of parliament, head of the church in his own dominions. Henry was no mean reformer, as the record of his life testifies. He married in succession six wives, two of whom he repudiated, two beheaded, and his sudden demise alone prevented the execution of his surviving consort, whose death‐warrant had been signed by his royal and loving hand. “For the glory of Almighty God and the honor of the realm,” he seized upon all the churches in England, as well as nearly four hundred religious houses, and confiscated their property “for the benefit of the crown”—that is, for his own use and that of his facile courtiers and parliament. With the same pious purpose, we suppose, he ordered for execution, at different times, besides his wives, a cardinal, two archbishops, eighteen bishops, thirteen abbots, five hundred priors and monks, thirty‐eight doctors, twelve dukes and counts, one hundred and sixty‐four noblemen of various ranks, one hundred and twenty‐four private citizens, and one hundred and ten females. If all of those did not suffer the fate of the Charter‐house monks, Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and the Countess of Salisbury, it was not his fault, but theirs who were ungrateful enough to fly their country and perish in poverty and exile, thus robbing the Reformation in England of half its glory.

Under his daughter Elizabeth, nearly two hundred ecclesiastics are known to have suffered for their faith on the scaffold, besides laymen, and the multitude who died in prison: and if her successor, James I., does not present as striking a record of his zeal, it was because there were very few priests left to be hunted down, and very little Catholic property to be confiscated. To do that light of the Reformation justice, wherever he could catch a priest he hanged him, and, with a keenness eminently national, wherever a penny could be squeezed out of a recusant Papist he or his friends were sure to have it. Still he was only a gleaner in the field so cleanly reaped by his predecessors; for even in unhappy Ireland Elizabeth’s captains had done their work so thoroughly that he had nothing to seize upon or give away but the uninhabited and desolated lands.

However, lest the traditions of the early fathers of his church—Luther, Calvin, and the royal Henry—should be forgotten, and having no longer any Catholics to persecute, he turned his attention to the Presbyterians, Covenanters, and Puritans with some effect. The humanizing custom of cropping the ears and slitting the noses of those dissenters became greatly the fashion in this reign; for, though James acknowledged the right of private judgment in the abstract, the exercise of the right was found by his subjects to be a very dangerous pastime. The Puritans, who also based their religion on the same right, improved on the lessons thus taught; for, when in the next reign it became their turn to persecute and punish, instead of cutting off the ears or the nose of his son and successor, they took off the entire head, and gave to the English Church its first and only martyr. Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parliament interpreted “King James’ Version” too literally, and of course, believing in freedom of conscience, swept away episcopacy, kings, bishops, and all. After the Restoration, the English Church was again in the ascendant. Then they dug up the bones of the Puritan regicides, scattered them to the winds, and ever since the followers of John Knox and the believers in the _Westminster Catechism_ have held a very subordinate place under the feet of “the church as by law established.”

If the fell spirit of Protestantism, which, as we have seen, was bloody and cruel in its inception and growth, had been confined to the eastern hemisphere, we, as Americans, feeling grateful to Providence for the exemption, might have less cause of complaint against it. But unfortunately it was not so. The virgin soil of the New World, from the first consecrated to freedom, we are often told, was destined to be polluted by the evil genius evoked by the apostate monk of Wittenberg. Every breeze from the east that wafted hither an immigrant‐ship bore on its wings the deadly moral pestilence of intolerance and persecution. It accompanied the Huguenots to the Carolinas, landed at Jamestown with the royalists, went up the Delaware with the Swedes and Quakers, up the Hudson with the Hollanders, and pervaded the hold of the _Mayflower_ from stem to stern. Whatever physical, mental, and moral qualities those early adventurers, of many lands and divers creeds, may have possessed, Christian charity was certainly not of the number, and though they each and all proclaimed the right of every one to be his own judge in matters of religion—and most of them claimed to have suffered for conscience’s sake—not one had the consistency or the courage to tolerate, much less protect, the expression of an opinion or the observance of a form of worship differing from his own. So completely had the rancor of the founders of Protestantism eaten up whatever of Christianity it retained of the church’s teaching, that each of the sects, having no common enemy to prey upon, turned round, and, like hungry wolves, were ready to tear and rend each other. With the exception of one small settlement, there were no Catholics in the early colonies; but still, the Puritan found it as unsafe to live in Virginia as the Episcopalian did in New England, while the non‐ combatant Friend dared not risk his life in either locality. There was one little bright spot in the darkened firmament that hung over the infant settlements, and that was near the mouth of the St. Mary’s, on the Potomac. Here Lord Baltimore had planted a colony of Catholics which soon showed signs of life and vigor, worshipping according to the old faith, and proclaiming the doctrine of charity and religious toleration to all Christians. But it was not long allowed to enjoy its honors in peace. Its very existence was a reproach to its bigoted neighbors. Taking advantage of its humane and equitable laws, Protestants of the various denominations, persecuted in the other colonies, flocked to it as to a city of refuge, abused its hospitality, when strong enough in numbers changed its statutes, and actually commenced to persecute the very people who had sheltered them.

As the colonies grew in population and extent, we do not find that they increased in equity or liberality. Many of them were even at the pains of passing laws prohibiting the settlement of Catholics within their limits; and now and then we hear of some solitary priest being executed or a group of humble Catholics driven into further exile. The dawn of our Revolution created some change in religious sentiment, but it was more on the surface than in the heart. England, the oppressor, was the champion of Protestantism; France, the ally, was as essentially Catholic; so it was not considered politic to manifest too openly that bigotry of soul which pervaded all classes of society in those days, though even in the continental congress there were found some candid enough to object to asking the assistance of Catholic Frenchmen to help them to wrest their liberties from their Protestant enemy. These patriots preferred the Hessians and their Lutheranism to Lafayette and Rochambaud.

Our independence once gained by the efficient aid of the troops of the eldest son of the church, a pause appears to have occurred in the persecuting progress of the sects. Common decency required as much, but commercial interest demanded it. Our finances were in a ruinous condition, and it was only among the Catholic nations of Europe that we could look for sympathy and support. Then the new states very generally repealed the colonial penal laws, and finally the amended constitution prohibited the interference of the general government in matters of religion. Still, though we owe much to French sympathy and influence in placing us, as Catholics, free and equal before the law, we owe more to those of our own countrymen who actually had no religion at all. We would rather, for the honor of human nature, that the benefits thus received had been derived from another source; but it is an historical fact that the minds of many of the leaders of the Revolution, before and during that struggle, had become deeply imbued with the false philosophy then prevalent among the intellectual classes in Europe, and, believing in no particular revelation, dogma, or religion, they could see no reason why one party calling itself Christian should ostracise another claiming the same distinction. To their credit, be it said, our countrymen never carried their theories to the same extent as their fellow‐philosophers across the Atlantic, and their impartiality, which we would fain hope to have been sincere, took a direction in accord with the spirit of justice and impartial legislation.

If, then, our young Republic has not been disgraced by such penal enactments against Catholics as have long disfigured the statute‐books of England, and which are yet in force in Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the Protestant sects, as such, deserve neither credit nor gratitude. The active Protestants of that day—the ministers, deacons, and politicians—were just as narrow‐minded and as bigoted as were their ancestors, and as would be their descendants if it were not for certain good reasons best known to themselves. Witness the periodical outbursts of Nativism or Know‐Nothingism which have from time to time disgraced our national character. These have been directed invariably against Catholics—not against foreigners as such, for with a Protestant or even infidel foreigner their promoters have never professed to find fault. The occasional destruction of a convent, the burning of a church—and we have had many so dealt with—or the mobbing of a priest may only show that depravity exists in certain sections of the country, but the news of such atrocities has been received with such ill‐concealed satisfaction—certainly with nothing like hearty condemnation—by the clerical demagogues and the so‐called religious press, that we are forced into the conviction that to the absence of opportunity and power on their part we alone owe our exemption from such villanies on a larger and better organized system.

We are told, in a tone of patronage, if not menace, that we ought to be content as long as the Catholics of America are free and enjoy equality under the law. We grant the freedom and equality, but only so far as the letter, not the spirit, of the law is concerned. Let any one look at the way our Catholic missions in the far West have been defrauded for the benefit of Methodist and Baptist preachers of the Word and cheaters of the Indians, and tell us are they free and equal? How many Catholic chaplains are there in the army and navy, the bone and sinew of which are mainly Catholics? For how many foreign consuls are we paying merely to act as agents for the Board of Foreign Missions, Bible Societies, and Book Concerns? How are our numerous state institutions—penitentiary, reformatory, and eleemosynary—attended to in the interests of their Catholic inmates? When these questions are satisfactorily answered, we will be able to estimate the extent of the legal equality we possess. For so much of freedom and equality as we actually enjoy, we are thankful. Grateful not, however, to the Protestant sects, but to a benevolent Providence who has vouchsafed it to us; and, under him, to our Catholic predecessors who helped to found, and our co‐religionists who have bravely defended, our institutions, and who now stand ready to oppose with might and main any attempt to infringe upon our liberties.

But even as to the letter of the law we are not without just cause of complaint. For instance, we object most emphatically to the present school law of this state as unjust and inequitable in its provisions and method of administration. The state has no right to prescribe how or what our children shall be taught, and then make us pay for its so doing. We Catholics are unanimously in favor of educating our own offspring according to our conception of the demands of religion and morality, and, as the artificial body called the state is a judge of neither, it is manifestly incompetent to direct the training of our children. We are also willing to pay, and are actually expending, large sums of money in this good work; and while we are doing so, we hold it not just to tax us for the support of schools we do not require. Our duty to the state and society is performed when we teach our children to obey the laws of one and respect the usages of the other, and, if parents and the ministers of religion are unable to do this, mere officials and strangers certainly cannot. However, if the state will insist on levying a school‐tax, let it in justice give us a pro rata share of the money, and let the Evangelical Alliance of the sects take theirs and bring up their children in their own way. We ask nothing for ourselves that we would not willingly see granted to others, but, until one or other of these measures be adopted, we maintain that a large class of the citizens of the United States is deprived of one of its most vital and dearest religious rights.

Then, again, look at the treatment meted out by the legislative authorities to Catholic institutions, to our hospitals, foundling‐asylums, reformatories, and orphanages, which save annually to the state hundreds of thousands of dollars, and are daily conferring on society incalculable advantages. What begging, petitioning, and beseeching must we not resort to, to get the least legislative favor for them, even to a bare act of incorporation! For a quarter of a century or more, irresponsible bodies under the names of the sects, or even in no names but their own, have been fattening on the public money, our money, and no word of remonstrance has been uttered; but, as soon as anything is asked for our institutions, the cry of “sectarian appropriations” and “Romish designs” is immediately raised and repeated along the line. Every petty bigot who misuses a pen gets up a howl about the “Papists,” and “Romanism the Rock Ahead,” etc.; the pigeon‐holes of the _religious_ newspaper offices, and of newspapers the contrary of religious, are ransacked for stale calumnies against the church, and slanders over and over refuted are launched at the most gifted and reputable of our citizens. This must all be changed before we can consider that, as Catholics, we stand on an equality with non‐Catholic Americans, and before we are prepared to admit that Protestantism, mollified by time and distance, has lost any of its pristine love of persecution and proscription. We would prefer to live at peace with every shade of Christians, but, if they will not let us, they must take the responsibility.

In stating our grievance in this manner, we do not address ourselves specially to the sense of justice or fair play of the leaders of Protestant opinion, but rather to the manhood and intelligence of our co‐ religionists who, by a more determined effort, might easily remove the evils of which we complain. We are more confirmed in this view by a recent event which happened at the national capital. The force of well‐regulated public opinion will always be very powerful in this Republic, and we are satisfied that the opposition very generally expressed by the Catholics of the country to the scheme of compulsory education by the general government, some time ago introduced into Congress by some distinguished members, had a powerful effect in defeating, for a time at least, a measure fraught with the greatest danger to our rights, and to the general liberties of all the states.(131)

We expect little from the Protestant press or pulpits. The manner in which the revival of religious persecutions in Europe has been looked upon by them precludes the faintest hope that they will listen to the appeals of humanity or justice where their passions, prejudices, or interests are concerned. Not very long since, the schismatic king of Sardinia wantonly levied war on the most defenceless and venerable sovereign in the world, and despoiled him of the larger half of his small dominions; yet there was not a single Protestant voice heard among us in reprobation of the foul act. Two years ago the same royal _filibustero_, with, if possible, less pretence, and without any warning, stealthily advanced his army on the Eternal City, took possession of its churches and their sacred furniture; its convents, and turned them into barracks and stables; its treasures of art and literature, and sold them to the highest bidder; its colleges and schools, and drove out the students and poor children to wander on the face of the earth. Then the Protestant churches and meeting‐houses rang with acclamations; and public assemblies were held by freedom‐loving American citizens to congratulate the modern vandal on his “victory” over—justice, religion, and civilization.

Rome has again been sacked, this time not by the rude Lutheran _Landsknechte_, but by a more ruthless and more insidious foe, the Garibaldini, the enemies of all forms of revealed religion, the men who swear on the dagger and the bowl because they have no God to swear by. The sovereign pontiff is virtually a prisoner in his Vatican; monks and priests, passing along the streets to comfort the afflicted or administer the sacraments to the dying, are set upon and slain at noon‐day; weak and delicately nurtured ladies are turned out of their peaceful retreats into the highways, to be insulted and derided by a crowd of vagabonds gathered from every quarter of Europe; the libraries, statuary, paintings, castings, and all the treasures which made Rome the centre of Christian art, and the depository of the world’s store of classic literature, lie at the mercy of a horde of ruffians, the very offscourings of Italian society, called together to that devoted city by the hope of plunder and the certainty of immunity for their crimes. All this and more is matter of public notoriety, yet no word of execration, no wail of sorrow, at this worse than vandalism rises up from a country that boasts its love of civilization, its chivalry to women, its respect for sacred things, and its patronage of the arts and letters. Why? They are only priests that are assassinated, only helpless nuns that are jeered at, only Catholic treasures that are stolen, shattered, or destroyed; right, justice, liberty, and even ordinary humanity, can afford to suffer and be forgotten, so that Catholicity be thereby weakened and checked in its onward course. The force of bigotry can go no further.

Late European mails bring us an account of a general election throughout “United Italy” on the universal suffrage plan—that supposed panacea for all political ills. The Catholics in certain portions of the country, it seems, who had hitherto abstained from voting, resolved this time to take part in the contest. As soon as this became known to the ministry, a circular was sent to even the local government officials, mayors of cities, magistrates, police captains, poll‐clerks, returning officers, etc., warning them of the danger, and threatening the severest penalties if steps were not immediately taken to prevent the Catholics from electing their candidates. The result was what might have been expected. The officials have done their duty to the government, and now feel secure in their places. The Catholics of one city, and that the largest, Naples, did, however, despite of all official precautions to the contrary, carry their election by an overwhelming majority; but, being only Catholic voters, the election has been set aside without even the mockery of an investigation or the least show of reason. Now, if such a thing had occurred in France, or any other country governed under Catholic auspices, we would be treated by nine‐tenths of the press of this country to a dissertation on the inability of the Latin nations to understand free institutions, and the folly of expecting an ignorant and slavish multitude to be able to appreciate the right of suffrage; but, as this gigantic fraud was perpetrated by a government in direct hostility to the head of the church, it is passed over in dignified silence. Not a syllable of remonstrance is uttered by our freedom‐shrieking friends—our Beechers, Fultons, and Bellowses—who are so fond of interlarding their sermons with political appeals against ballot‐stuffing and intimidation at the polls.

Let us turn for a moment to the present sad condition of Germany, the cradle and the victim of religious dissent and doubt. Prussia emerged from the late war not only the victor of France, but the conqueror of the several independent states and cities of the late Germanic Confederation. Her capacious maw has engulfed them all. Prince Bismarck, whose absolutist tendencies have long been recognized, not content with his success in creating an empire one and indivisible, desires to found a German church, to be conducted on strictly military and autocratic principles. Having disposed of a good many of the bodies, and taken possession of a large share of the property of the subjects of the new empire, he is now anxious to take care of their souls, and, whether they will or not, guide them in the way of salvation and the Gospel—according to Bismarck. Obedience to the central civil head in Berlin is to be the leading feature in his new religious system, and the emperor, like his brother of Russia and the Grand Lama, is to unite in himself absolute political and spiritual power, tempered by Bismarck.

A large portion of the Germans, having great doubts as to whether or not they have such things as souls to be saved, feel philosophically indifferent; the sects, being weak and without popular support, can make little resistance to the encroachments of the state; but the Catholic body, powerful not less from its intelligence and independence than from its numbers, utterly refuses to recognize the right or the authority of the chancellor to interfere in their spiritual affairs. That astute statesman first tried to frighten them by abolishing the denominational schools, then by patronizing a few dissatisfied professors who call themselves “Old Catholics,” but without avail; and now, like a genuine follower of the teachings of Luther, he is resorting to expatriation and persecution. He has already attacked the religious orders, and, as is generally known, has procured a law to be passed expelling the Jesuits and all religious in affiliation with them from the empire. It is not pretended that the members of that illustrious body, individually or collectively, have committed any offence against the state, nor is it even proposed that a semblance of a trial should be granted them before condemnation; but they have been guilty of opposing the designs of a confirmed despot, and their removal from home, country, and the sphere of their duties is forthwith decreed, and effected with all that mean malignity which subordinates who hope for future favor so well know how to exercise towards the victims of official oppression. The summary expulsion of so many learned and studious men from their schools and colleges has filled Europe with disgust and amazement; and even the more enlightened class of German non‐Catholics, who at least know the value of their acquirements and wonderful skill in training youth, have denounced, in the most forcible terms, an act so detrimental to the true interests of their country.

In England, a meeting of prominent Catholics was lately held, to protest, in the name of religion and learning, against this exhibition of high‐ handed authority; but Protestantism, true to its instincts, took the alarm, and, lest the Prussian Government might in the slightest degree be influenced, hastened to send an address to Berlin to assure Bismarck of English sympathy and support. This precious document was signed by fifty‐ seven persons, including the Marquis of Cholmondeley, the Bishops of Worcester and Ripon, Lord Lawrence, Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Arthur Kinnaird, the Archbishop of Armagh, the Moderators of the Established Church of Scotland, of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, of the English and Irish Presbyterian Churches, and the President and Secretary of the Wesleyan Conference. The reply of Bismarck, who is not remarkable for his “religiosity,” is full of sanctimonious cant and what, under the circumstances, seems to us very like grim irony:

“Most warmly do I thank you and the gentlemen who were co‐ signatories of the address you were good enough to present to me for this encouraging mark of approval. Your communication, sir, possesses a greater value, coming as it does from a _country which Europe has learnt for centuries to regard as the bulwark of civil and religious liberty_. Rightly does the address estimate the difficulties of the struggle which has been forced upon us contrary both to the desire and expectation of the German governments. It would be no light task for the state to preserve religious peace and freedom of conscience, even were it not made more difficult by the misuse of legitimate authority and by the artificial disturbance of the minds of believers. I rejoice that I agree with you on the fundamental principle that in a well‐ordered community every person and every creed should enjoy that measure of liberty which is compatible both with the freedom of the remainder, and also with the independence and safety of the country. God will protect the German Empire in the struggle for this principle, even against those enemies who falsely use his holy name as a pretext for their hostility against our internal peace; but it will be a source of rejoicing to every one of my countrymen that in this contest Germany has met with the approval of so numerous and influential a body of Englishmen.”

Now, all this simply means that the man who controls the affairs of Germany for the present is determined to destroy or to subject the spiritual order to the state; to enforce compulsory education, and prescribe forms of faith according to his ideas of what the “independence and safety of the country” demand; the penalty of resistance, as in the case of the Jesuits, being banishment, persecution, and perhaps worse, should the necessities of the case, in his individual judgment, require it. In this as in every other respect his word is all‐powerful in the empire. Still, we have yet to learn that one advocate of the higher law in America, one enemy of the union of church and state, one stickler for the rights of conscience, one believer in private judgment and religious freedom, has raised his voice against this violation of every right said to be so dear to the Protestants of the United States. Not one Protestant has _protested_ against this assumption of absolute power over the minds and consciences of forty millions of people. Why? The answer is simple: the blow, in this instance, is aimed at Catholicity. Yes, the Republic is silent when even monarchical England feels herself constrained to speak. In a late number of the _Manchester Examiner_, a paper, we believe, anything but favorable to Catholics on general grounds, we noticed a very pertinent article on the address alluded to, of which the following is an extract, and we recommend it to the serious consideration of the conductors of the sectarian newspapers:

“We cannot understand why bishops and deans of the English Church should go into ecstasies over a united Germany, or why it should furnish a theme for the pious applause of Wesleyan presidents and Presbyterian moderators. Political changes concern politicians and political societies. When the kingdoms of this world adopt a different principle of grouping, all who take an interest in the political concerns of mankind may find in the altered arrangements abundant reason for gratulation or for dismay, but theological creeds and spiritual interests have no direct concern in the matter. If the unity of Germany were likely to give a great impetus to Roman Catholic doctrine, and aid the extension of Papal authority, Mr. Kinnaird would hardly have found in it a subject of thanksgiving, though, as a political change, it might have been equally desirable. Is it Prince Bismarck’s assumed hostility to the dogma of papal infallibility, and the trenchant steps he has taken with the Jesuits, that constitute the real merit of his policy in Protestant eyes? Well, then, to begin with, it is not at all clear that Prince Bismarck has any absolute aversion either to papal infallibility or to the Jesuits. If the pope had only thrown his influence into the scale of German unity, and employed it to further the new political policy in Fatherland, he might have made himself as infallible as he pleased without provoking any hostility from Prince Bismarck. If the Jesuits, instead of fighting against him, had fought for him, he would have made them welcome to as much power as they liked to grasp. At present, he finds them in his way, and he sends them off about their business; but our Protestant friends must not make too sure of him. He has fourteen millions of Catholics to govern, and he has no wish whatever to be at variance with the Pope. Besides, the necessity for getting rid of the Jesuits by depriving them of their civil rights is a thing to be deplored; since, so far as it does not spring from political considerations, the acts to which it leads are acts of persecution, and entitled to our regret, if not to our reprehension. We like the Jesuits just as little as the Germans do, but we allow them to settle amongst us, feeling sure that the law is strong enough to keep them in order. The thing really to be deplored is that Germany cannot afford to do the same, and it is a proper subject for commiseration rather than for eulogy.”

We have said more than enough to convince the most supine Catholic that Protestantism in this country has lost little if any of its anti‐Christian renown, and, if it cannot persecute here, it is in full sympathy with those in Europe who can; that, while it has lost much of its capacity, it has given up none of its desire for proscription. Split, as it is, into so many antagonistic sects, and constantly losing large numbers who are following out its teachings logically and gliding into indifferentism and infidelity, it is comparatively powerless to work us new injuries; but it is for us, by continued harmony, labor, and self‐sacrifice, to put beyond peradventure the question of our right to full and unqualified religious liberty and perfect impartiality in the administration of the laws.

Fleurange.

By Mrs. Craven, Author Of “A Sister’s Story.”

Translated From The French, With Permission.

Part Third. The Banks Of The Neckar.

XLV.

Fleurange, as we have said, generally returned to Rosenheim in the evening, but that day she left the princess several hours earlier than usual, and it was not yet night when Clement, who was alone in a room on the ground floor, absorbed in a large volume open before him, saw her suddenly appear at an hour when he expected her the least. Perhaps, instead of reading, he had really been dreaming over his cousin’s gayety which made him so sad the night before. At all events, when she appeared so suddenly before him at this unusual hour, the same sensation contracted his heart. There was, however, nothing in her appearance to justify his presentiment. He feared in seeing Fleurange again he might behold traces of the tears on her face which had probably succeeded her feverish and causeless gayety. But now, if not smiling and gay as the evening before, if, on the contrary, she looked serious and grave, her brow nevertheless was radiant, and in her brilliant eyes it was easy to read an expression of almost triumphant joy. All this by no means resembled the dejection that usually follows a fit of factitious gayety.

“You are alone!” said she immediately. “So much the better, Clement. I have something to tell you—you first, before any one else. You will see,” she continued, throwing off her cloak, “that I am faithful to my promise. I come to you now as to my brother and my best friend.”

As Clement looked at her and listened to this preamble, his heart instinctively warned him more and more strongly a great trial was at hand and he must prepare to suffer. But when, without much circumlocution, she came to the point; when she clearly laid before him her design; when, with a simplicity fearful from the strength of affection and devotedness it revealed, she unfolded the plan of her projected immolation—an immolation longed for, embraced, and decided upon—Clement literally felt his hair stand on end and it seemed to him as if his reason was deserting him.

What! lose one so dear, so precious, so adored!—lose her forever!—and in what way?—To see her voluntarily embrace a destiny too horrible for the imagination to contemplate. And wherefore?—wherefore?—Ah! the cry of Othello now resounded in Clement’s soul: “The cause—the cause!” Yes, the cause of this sacrifice was what added so much bitterness to his pain—and stung him so sharply, so cruelly, so intolerably, that, overpowered by the unexpected disclosure, overcome by an emotion impossible to master, Clement for a moment lost all control over himself. A smothered cry escaped him, and, leaning his head on his clasped hands, the tears he could not repress fell on the floor at his feet.

Clement’s firmness was so habitual that Fleurange was surprised at its failing him now, and perhaps at the moment the hidden cause of this fit of despair came over her like a momentary flash! But it was no time to dwell on such a thought, and, besides, Clement did not give her the opportunity. He rose and walked around the room in silence. His manly and courageous heart sought to regain self‐control, by an interior appeal to Him who alone could save it from bursting and renew its failing strength. He soon approached her, having triumphed over his emotion, and his first words gave an explanation quiet natural.

“Pardon me, Gabrielle,” said he, “I beg you, for my inconceivable weakness. But I could not indeed have any—any friendship whatever for you, to consider calmly the frightful perspective you so abruptly unfolded to me! You understand that, I imagine?”

“Yes, I expected to see all the rest greatly terrified. But you, Clement—I thought you capable of listening coolly to anything?”

“Well, my dear cousin, you had, you see, too high an opinion of my courage. However, I will endeavor to behave better in the future. Do not deprive me of your confidence, that is all I ask.”

“Oh! no, far from that, for it is on you I rely to inform the rest of the family of my resolution, and especially, and before any one else, your mother. You may imagine, Clement, that I must have her consent, and her blessing likewise. And you will plead my cause with her.”

Clement was silent for some moments. He was trying to command his voice, but it still trembled as he said: “And when do you think of starting?”

“In a week, if I can.”

“In a week!—That will be before the end of January! And have you thought of the means of making such a journey at this season?”

Fleurange hesitated. “I am quite well aware,” said she, “that it will be difficult for me to go alone.”

Clement hastily interrupted her in a terrified tone: “Alone!—I declare, Gabrielle, it is impossible to listen to you coolly, though I know your rash words must be taken seriously.”

“You must, however, take them so,” said she, in the same tone of energetic tenderness which had struck the Princess Catherine. “You must resign yourself to see me set out alone, if there is no other means of joining him.”

Oh! how willingly Clement would that moment have changed places with the prisoner! He was looking at Fleurange with sorrowful admiration when she resumed: “I thought it would not be difficult to find some one travelling to Russia with whom I could make the journey.”

“Go with strangers on so long and tedious a journey! That is impossible, Gabrielle, more impossible than the rest.”

“Ah!” cried Fleurange then, “with what confidence I would have had recourse to the kind friend Heaven once sent me. I feel his loss more now than ever.”

“You mean Doctor Leblanc?—Yes, I render justice to his memory. I am sure his devotedness would not have failed you under these circumstances. But you try my patience indeed, Gabrielle; you are too cruel.”

“Clement!—”

“What! you need a friend who has the unpretending merit of being faithful, devoted, capable of protecting you in so difficult a journey, and ready to remain with you till—till he can follow you no longer! And at such a time you do not deign even to remember you have a brother! And do you not see that, in thinking of others, you overlook what is at once his privilege and his duty?”

“Clement! my dear Clement!” said Fleurange, with tearful surprise, “what do you say? and what answer can I make? Assuredly I relied, and do rely, on you as a brother, and yet I confess I should not have ventured to ask you to make such a journey with me.”

Clement smiled bitterly. He could not help comparing what she was ready to do for another with what she thought him incapable of doing for her.

“Well, my cousin,” said he coldly, “you were wrong; it seems to me it was the very time to remember the promise you made me. As to me, I am merely faithful to the engagement I made the same day, that is all.”

“God bless you, Clement!—bless and reward you!” said she, much affected. “Yes, I acknowledge I was wrong. I should have known there was no kindness on earth equal to yours.”

She held out her hand. He pressed it in his without saying a word, and without looking at her; then they separated. Fleurange longed to be alone. Clement went to fulfil her commission to his mother.

XLVI.

It was the professor’s regular hour of repose in the latter part of the morning. Everything was quiet around him. His wife was seated at her wheel in the next room ready to answer the slightest call; for Madame Dornthal knew how to handle the spindle, and, in accordance with a custom kept up longer in Germany than anywhere else, had spun with her own hands the two finest pieces of linen for her daughter’s trousseau. She looked up as her son entered, and saw by his face that something agitated him. She gave him an inquiring look.

“I wish to speak to you, mother,” said he, in a low tone. “Let us go where we can talk freely.”

Madame Dornthal stopped spinning, immediately rose, and, ordering a young servant to take her place and call her if needed, she followed her son, softly closing the door behind her.

The opposite door, on the same corridor, opened into Clement’s chamber. They went there. Clement began to relate the conversation he had just had. His first words were met by an exclamation of surprise, after which Madame Dornthal listened without interrupting him. Her face by turns expressed interest, pity, and admiration, as he spoke; and it was with tearful eyes and a faltering voice she finally replied:

“My consent and blessing, do you say? You ask them for her? Poor child! how can I refuse my blessing to such devotedness! But my consent,” she continued gravely—“I cannot give that unconditionally.”

“What! mother,” said Clement earnestly, “can you think of refusing to let her go?”

“No, dear Clement; but I can refuse to let you accompany her.”

Clement started. “Mother!” cried he with surprise.

Madame Dornthal brushed back Clement’s hair with her hand, and looked him in the face, as we know she loved to do when moved to unusual tenderness towards him, then slowly said:

“Alone to St. Petersburg with Gabrielle! Have you reflected on this, Clement?”

Clement’s face slightly flushed, but his eyes met his mother’s with a beautiful expression of candor and purity. “Mother,” said he, “Gabrielle looks upon me as a brother. As for me”—he hesitated a moment and turned pale, but continued in a firm tone—“as for me, I regard her now as the wife of another. I hope you do not think it possible I can ever forget it!”

Madame Dornthal’s eyes filled with tears, and for a moment she looked at her son silently. Never had she loved him so much! Never had she so fully comprehended how worthy of affection he was! But the hour had come—perhaps the only period in life when the most passionate maternal love is powerless, and can do nothing, absolutely nothing, to comfort her suffering child!

She realized this; she felt she must respect her son’s secret sorrow, and repress the impulse of her own affection. Neither compassion nor sympathy could be of any avail at such a time. She therefore refrained with the sure instinct of a responsive heart, and Clement’s agitation soon subsided. He resumed in a calm tone:

“If you think it indispensable on her account, or on account of others, that a third person should go with us, then, mother, we will try to find some one.”

“Ah!” said Madame Dornthal, “if a cherished and paramount obligation did not retain me here, you would not have far to go for some one.”

Clement took his mother’s hand and kissed it. “I thought so,” said he, smiling. Then he continued: “We shall find some one, you may be sure, if necessary. For the moment we will leave it; we have something else to do.” And so to one after another the astonishing news was announced by him and his mother: first to the professor, and then to all the other members of the family. We will not describe their feelings individually, we will not tell how many tears were shed, what a succession of emotions poor Fleurange had to pass through that day. We will only say that, on the whole, they were all much more affected than surprised. So pure an atmosphere pervaded this unpretending household that everything beautiful and noble was at once perceived and comprehended without difficulty. To lose this charming sister, who had grown dearer and dearer, was too painful to be concealed, but Madame Dornthal’s daughters, like her, were ready for any sacrifice. Therefore the young girl felt that they entered into her feelings, and would regret, without blaming her. This sympathy not only increased her affection for those she was to leave, but gave great support to her courage.

The only person who did not at first participate in this general heroism was Mademoiselle Josephine. The knowledge of Fleurange’s resolution threw her into a state of stupefaction that would have been comical under any other circumstances. Her eyes wandered from one to another with a perplexed expression of consternation, as if imploring an explanation which would enable her to comprehend so extraordinary a fact. When, at her usual time, she joined the family circle in the evening, she was still speechless. She took her place among them, knitting‐work in hand, without saying a word or looking at any one.

The professor, cautiously informed of this new separation, heard it with resignation—a feeling that had grown upon him with respect to everything, in consequence of the increasing conviction that he had a long time to suffer and should never be well. Fleurange was now sitting near him. Madame Dornthal and her daughters were at work beside the table where sat the silent Josephine. Clement alone sat apart, talking in a low tone with his little sister on his knee. She was in her turn asking an explanation which no one had thought of giving her. While he was replying in a whisper, Frida’s large eyes opened to their utmost extent, her little mouth contracted, and a flood of tears inundated her face; then she threw both her arms around her brother’s neck, and said in broken accents:

“O Clement! how can I do without her?—I love her so much!—I love her so much!—”

Clement hid his face in the child’s long curls, pressed her in his arms, and kissed her affectionately, but he could not succeed in calming her till he promised that Gabrielle should return, and that he would bring her back. At this assurance, the child’s tears ceased to flow, she became quiet, and remained serious and thoughtful in her brother’s arms.

All at once Mademoiselle Josephine broke her long silence: “Siberia is a great way off, is it not?” said she.

A general smile accompanied the reply to this question, which was the first‐fruit of the elderly maiden’s prolonged deliberations.

“And is Clement going to Siberia, also?”

“No; he is going to St. Petersburg.”

“And how far is to St. Petersburg?”

They replied by giving her a full account of the way Fleurange would take to reach the end of her first journey. Being enlightened on this point, mademoiselle relapsed into her former silence, but not for a long time. A new idea suddenly occurred to her. She snatched off her glasses hastily.

“But those two children cannot travel all alone!” she exclaimed.

Madame Dornthal and Fleurange looked up, and Clement gave a start which disturbed the sleep into which Frida had fallen: every one became attentive.

“No, certainly not,” said the old lady earnestly. “How would that look, I beg to know?—Excuse me, Clement, you know how I esteem and love you; but then, my good friend, how old are you, pray? And as to Gabrielle, besides her age (which is equally objectionable), she has, as I have told her a thousand times, a dangerous face—a face which will not allow her to do a great many things permissible to others not older than she—I tell you the truth, and defy any one to deny it.”

No one attempted it, for the thought just expressed so characteristically was the opinion of all.

“Therefore,” continued mademoiselle, “Gabrielle must be accompanied by some respectable person. Once more pardon, Clement; this does not imply you can be dispensed with (you are a protector not to be easily replaced); but, my dear friend, _les convenances_ require she should have at the same time an elderly and reliable companion. Now, I propose that this reliable and elderly person be—myself!—”

There was a general exclamation at these unexpected words. Every one spoke at once, and for some moments no one could be heard. The good Mademoiselle Josephine, however, comprehended at once that her proposition was generally approved. But before any one uttered a word, before Clement even had time to go and grasp her hand, Fleurange sprang forward, and, throwing her arms around her old friend’s neck, exclaimed: “Oh! how shall I thank you?—May God reward you for all it is his will I should owe you!”

This signified that she accepted her generous offer without any formality. A few hours previous, her aunt, we know, had attached a condition to her consent, and this was preoccupying Fleurange when her excellent old friend suddenly decided the matter in so unexpected a way.

From this moment, everything was plain to Mademoiselle Josephine. The opportunity she so greatly desired had not been long delayed. In this extraordinary phase of Gabrielle’s life she found an opportunity of manifesting the greatest devotedness, and of retarding still longer the hour of separation from her beloved _protégée_. She felt comforted, and was at once restored to her usual placid good humor. There remained, however, more than one misconception about the whole arrangement which she could not seem to clear up.

“Why,” said she an hour after, when, following her servant, who had come for her with a lantern, she took Clement’s arm to go home—“why cannot we also go to Siberia with her, if not disagreeable to this M. le Comte, whose name I can never pronounce?”

Clement could not repress a smile at this, but there was too much bitterness in it for him to wish to reply. She did not perceive it. She was only thinking aloud without regard to him, and, following the course of her reflections, she soon made another, which, far from exciting the least temptation to smile, made Clement shudder from head to foot.

“If,” she said, after a few moments’ silence—“if this Monsieur George is only worthy of the sacrifice she is going to make for him!—If after leaving us all—us who love her so much—she does not hereafter discover he does not love her as much as we!”

XLVII.

Clement left Mademoiselle Josephine at her door, and hastened back, struggling against the new tempest excited in his breast by the words he had just heard. Hitherto, in consequence of the impressions left by his meeting with Count George, and the prestige he had acquired in his eyes from the very attachment of his cousin, Clement had always regarded him as a superior being, to whom it merely seemed right, in the unpretending simplicity of his heart, that his humble affection should be sacrificed. To doubt him worthy of her—to fear that, beloved by her, he could cease to love in return, had never occurred to him, and mademoiselle had quite unwittingly thrust a warm blade into his bleeding heart. To admit such a thought would absolutely shake the foundations of his devotion and add despair to abnegation. He therefore repelled the thought with a kind of terror, and by way of reassuring himself he began to recall all the remembrances that once were so torturing. He took pleasure in dreaming of the devotion of which his rival was the object, the better to persuade himself it was absolutely contrary to the nature of things he could ever be ungrateful.

Fleurange’s reflections at the same hour were of a different nature. Somewhat recovered from the successive emotions of the day, she could now freely indulge in the secret joy with which her heart overflowed. She was at last free!—free to think of George—at liberty to love him and to confess it! The feeling so long repressed, fought against, and concealed, could now be indulged in without restraint! A few weeks more, and she would be with him!—She would be his!—All horror of the fate she was going to participate in was lost in the thought of bestowing on him, in the hour of abandonment and misfortune, all the treasures of her devotion and love, and this appeared a sweeter realization of her dreams than if united to him in the midst of all the _éclat_ that rank and fortune surrounded him with!—

Ah! Madre Maddalena was right in thinking hers was not a heart called to the supreme honor of loving God alone, of bestowing on him that ineffable love which does not suffer the contact of any other affection, that unique love which, if it has not always been supreme, blots out, as soon as it springs up, all other love, as the sun causes the darkness to flee away and return no more to its presence!... “Whosoever loveth, knoweth the cry of this voice.”(132)

It was this voice which spoke directly to Madre Maddalena’s heart. Fleurange did not hear it so distinctly, even while silently listening to it apart from the noise of the world, though by no means deaf to the divine inspirations. She was pure: she was pious and steadfast: she had a fervent and courageous heart—a heart shut against evil, which preferred nothing to God, but which was ardently susceptible to affection when she could yield to it without remorse. This is doubtless the appointed way for nearly all, even among the best, and it is the ordinary path of virtue. But we would observe here that it is not the path of exquisite and inexpressible happiness already referred to, and we moreover add that, when a soul is inclined to make an idol of the object of its love, and place it on too frail a foundation, it is not rare that suffering—suffering whose severity is in proportion to the beauty and purity of the soul—leads it back sooner or later to that point where it sees the true centre to which, even unknown to ourselves, we all aspire, and which all human passion, even the most noble and most legitimate in the world, makes us lose sight of.

Fleurange perhaps had a confused intuition of this, and it made her look upon the frightful conditions on which happiness was vouchsafed her as a kind of expiation, which she accepted with joy, hoping thereby to assure the permanence of the love that overruled all other sentiments.

After Gabrielle’s conversation with Princess Catherine, the state of the latter underwent a salutary change. Her physical sufferings, and her grief itself, seemed suspended. A fresh activity was aroused as soon as she perceived a way of exerting herself for her son, and entering into almost direct communication with him. Let us add to these motives the princess’ natural taste for the extraordinary, and we shall comprehend that Fleurange’s heroic resolution afforded her an interesting distraction, and, at the same time, a source of activity which was useful and beneficial.

She made every arrangement herself. They were forced to allow her to direct all the preparations for the long journey the young girl was going to undertake. She and her elderly companion were to go as far as St. Petersburg in one of the princess’ best carriages, and everything that would enable Fleurange to bear the severe cold on the way was anxiously prepared. At St. Petersburg, it was decided she should take up her residence in the princess’ house until the day—the terrible day of the departure that must follow.

All this was transmitted by the princess to the Marquis Adelardi, whom she charged to receive and protect Gabrielle. Moreover, he must find means of announcing to George the unexpected alleviation Heaven granted to his misfortunes.

As to the steps to be taken in order to obtain the necessary permission for the accomplishment of this strange lugubrious marriage, and for the newly‐made wife to accompany her condemned husband, the princess thought the most successful course would be to obtain for Gabrielle an audience of the empress.

“Either I am very much deceived,” wrote the princess, “or her heart will be touched by such heroic devotion, by Gabrielle’s appearance, and the charm there is about her, and perhaps even by a remnant of pity for my poor George. Something tells me this pity still survives the favor he showed himself unworthy of, and that the day will perchance come when I can appeal to her with success. Obtain my son’s pardon!—behold him again!—Yes, in spite of everything, I hope, I believe, I may say I feel sure, that sooner or later this happiness will be granted me, unless so much sorrow shortens my life. Nevertheless, the effect of this terrible sentence, should he incur its penalty only for a day, will never be effaced. I feel it. My hopes for him have all vanished, never to return. How, then, could I hesitate to accept Gabrielle’s generous sacrifice—to accept it at first with a transport of enthusiasm which, I confess, I was seized with when, with indescribable words and accents, she so unexpectedly begged my consent on her knees, but afterwards deliberately, and, in consideration of the strange and painful circumstances in which we are situated, with sincere gratitude?”

“No doubt,” she added, with an instinctive and natural feeling, never wholly or for a long time dormant—“no doubt, when the time comes which I look forward to with hope—the time when he will be restored to me, other regrets will revive. But then, his condemnation, only too certain, puts an end to all hope in that direction. The conspirator acquitted, or even pardoned, might win a heart in which love perhaps still pleads his cause; but the haughty Vera will never bestow a thought on the returned exile from Siberia. I resign myself, therefore—and, after all, Gabrielle is charming, and, as far as I know, he never loved any one else as well. You will perhaps say that a quick fire is soon extinguished in George’s heart. I know that well, but it is very certain that this young girl’s devotion is calculated to foster the love she has inspired, and even to revive it if deadened by the revolutionary tempest he has passed through. As for me, I know, if anything can make me endure this fearful separation, it is the thought that this beautiful and noble creature, who is better fitted than any one else to preserve him from despair, will be with him in his exile.”

In the princess’ eyes, Gabrielle was, in spite of the pure generosity of her love, only a _pis‐aller_, or rather she was only something relatively to herself. She overwhelmed her to‐day with attentions and caresses as before she abruptly dismissed her, and as she would be quite ready to do again if a sudden turn of fortune brought about chances more favorable to her wishes. But, even if all these sentiments were evident, they could not change Gabrielle’s determination or diminish her courage. Her fate was already united in heart to George’s. Everything but this thought, and the anticipated joys and sacrifices connected with it, became indifferent to her. Calm and serene, she made all the preparations for her departure without haste or anxiety, and was equally mindful of her dear old friend, for whom she reserved the rich furs and all the other things which the princess had been careful to provide for herself as a protection against the cold.

The days, however, passed rapidly away, and as the time of separation approached, more courage was required for those she was to leave behind than for herself.

And when the farewell hour at length arrived, and she knelt in church with Clement, to utter a last prayer, the All‐Seeing Eye saw to which of the two belonged at that moment the palm of devotedness and sacrifice.

Part Fourth. The Immolation.

L’amour vrai, c’est l’oubli de soi.

XLVIII.

Our travellers were already far away, having pursued their journey for more than twelve days without stopping. In spite of the increasing severity of the weather, Fleurange and her companion went as far as Berlin, and even beyond, without suffering from the cold—thanks to the numerous precautions taken by the princess to protect them from it. But at Königsberg they were obliged to leave the comfortable carriage in which they had travelled thus far, for they wished, above all things, to travel fast, and they had the Strand to cross (the only way to St. Petersburgh at that season), that is to say, the narrow tongue of sandy soil that extends along the Baltic as far as the arm of the sea which separates Prussia from Courland like a wide canal, and then forms the basin or inland lake of Kurishe Haff. This bounds the Strand at the right, whereas at the left its dreary coast is shut in between the sea and the high dunes of sand which ward off the winds from the scattered habitations of this desolate region, all situated so as to face the lake and turn their backs on the sea.

The princess’ carriage remained, therefore, at Königsberg, to await the return of Fleurange’s travelling companions. She took with her, however, the rich furs, so warm and light, with which she had been provided, to wrap around Mademoiselle Josephine, in spite of her resistance. As for herself, she reserved a cloak of sufficiently thick material to protect her from the cold, not wishing to accustom herself to comforts she must afterwards be deprived of.

The change from one carriage to another was promptly effected, and the small calèche in which they were closely seated was soon on its way over the Strand towards Memel, which they hoped to reach the same evening. Clement, in front, gazed with secret horror on the desolate aspect of nature. Everything around him seemed a fitting prelude to that Inferno of ice towards which he was escorting her whom he would gladly have sheltered from too rude a summer breeze.

The weather was not as cold as on the previous day. The gray clouds charged with rain seemed to indicate a sudden thaw, and through them the sun, veiled as before a coming storm, cast a pale light over the dark waves and the sandy shore. The postilion, to favor his horses, rode so close to the water that the waves broke over their pathway. To the right rose the dismal sand‐hills, and on that side, as well as before them, nothing was to be seen but sand as far as the eye could reach; to the left, nothing but the tumultuous and threatening waves. Not a house far or near, not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a living creature, save now and then some sea‐birds skimming wildly over the waves, adding another melancholy feature to the dreariness of the scene, which with the storm was a sufficiently exact image of the mental condition of him who was regarding it.

As to Fleurange, instead of looking around, she closed her eyes, the better to wander in imagination among the cherished scenes of the past and those she looked forward to. She beheld again the blue waters of the Mediterranean, and the radiant sky whose azure they reflect, and the graceful undulations of the mountains veiled in a pearly mist; then Florence, sparkling and poetical in the golden rays of departing light, and beside her she heard a voice murmuring words once dangerous to hear, but now delicious to recall and repeat to herself. How much she then suffered in struggling against her own impulses! Recalling those sufferings, how could she fear those she was about to brave?—sufferings repaid by the immense happiness of loving!—of loving without fear!—loving without remorse!—Besides, they were both young.—His mother’s hopes might be realized.—Yes, perhaps some day they would again behold, and together, that charming region, and then in the restored brilliancy of his former position, with her beside him, he would be convinced, convinced beyond doubt, that that was not the attraction which had won her, but really himself, and only him, whom she loved!

Yes, she was now happy; no fears troubled her; she was full of hope; and, as it is said of the only great and true love that it “believes it may and can do all things,”(133) so earthly love which is its pale but faithful reflection, made every earthly happiness appear possible and certain to Fleurange, inasmuch as the greatest of all was in store for her.

Clement was still absorbed in silent contemplation, and Fleurange in her sweet dreams, when Mademoiselle Josephine awoke from the drowsiness favored by the ample furs in which she was wrapped, which not only excluded the air but the sight of outward objects. She looked up and around for the first time that morning, and gave a sudden start of surprise.

“Ah! mon Dieu! mon Dieu!—” she cried with alarm. “Gabrielle, what is that?”

Fleurange, suddenly recalled from the land of dreams to what was passing around her, replied: “It is the sea. Did you not notice it before?”

“The sea!—the sea!—” repeated Mademoiselle Josephine, as if stupefied. “No, I had not seen it, and never imagined we should go on the sea in a carriage.—What a country! What a journey!” murmured she to herself, endeavoring to conceal the terror she had not ceased to feel as they proceeded on their way and found everything so different from France, and consequently the more alarming. But in her way she made an act of heroism in trying to overcome the surprise and fear caused by so many strange sights. She was especially desirous of not being troublesome to her companions. “Besides,” thought she, “if these two children are not afraid, I must at least appear as brave as they.” Nevertheless, she could not help repeating with astonishment: “Going on the sea in a carriage—it is really very singular!”

Fleurange laughed. “Here, dear mademoiselle, look on this side, and you will see we are not on the sea, but only on the shore.”

“Very near it, however, for we are riding through the water.”

“It is only the waves that break on the shore and then recede. There, you see the land, now.”

Mademoiselle felt somewhat reassured. She looked to the right, she looked to the left, she looked before her, then turned her eyes towards the gloomy immensity of the sea beside which they were riding.

“Oh! how dismal, how repulsive it is,” she exclaimed, at last.

Fleurange now gazed around. Her thoughts were no longer wandering. “The scene is indeed singularly gloomy,” said she. “The leaden sky—that mock sun—the dark waters of that melancholy sea, and the interminable sand. Yes, the whole region is frightful!” And she slightly shuddered.

“I have always been told,” said mademoiselle, “that the sea was glorious; but it seems it was a traveller’s tale for the benefit of those who never go from home.”

“No, no,” cried Fleurange, “do not say so. The sea is really beautiful where it is as blue as the heavens above, and where its shores are luxuriant with trees, plants, and flowers; but not here, I acknowledge.”

And, in spite of herself, the sweet impression of her recent dreams, caused by the contrast, entirely vanished. Her heart sank. She became silent, and for a long time none of the three travellers spoke.

The Strand, about twelve or fourteen leagues in length, was divided into several stages by post‐stations on the other side of the sand‐hills, whence were brought fresh horses. A carriage could not approach the stations on account of the deep sand, and when they paused a few moments to exchange horses, the travellers were only made aware of a neighboring habitation by a peal of the horn which responded afar off to that of the postilion as he announced his approach. While they were thus halting at the last stage, Fleurange noticed Clement’s anxious look towards the sea and the threatening sky. The wind grew stronger and stronger, and the waves mounted higher. A violent storm was evidently at hand. She beckoned to him, and said in a tone inaudible to her companion: “We are going to have bad weather, are we not?”

“Yes,” replied he, in the same tone. “It will be dark in about an hour, and I fear we may find the crossing rough and difficult. I do not say this on your account,” added he, with a somewhat forced smile. “I know well I am not allowed to tremble for you, however great the danger, but I fear you may find it difficult by‐and‐by to reassure your poor friend.”

He mounted to his seat again, ordered the postilion to hurry, and the little calèche set off as speedily as possible to avoid the enormous waves which threatened to upset them. In spite of their haste, night came on, and the storm set in before they arrived at the ferry across the arm of the sea which connects the Kurische Haff with the Baltic. The passage was short but dangerous. They could not stop an instant, for, though well sheltered here, the sea rose higher and higher, and the large boat that was to take the carriage across was difficult to manage in bad weather. They therefore rapidly descended the bank to the boat, and Mademoiselle Josephine was roused from the drowsiness produced by the motion of the carriage, by a sudden and violent shock, accompanied by cries and vociferations mingled with the roar of the sea and the frightful howling of the wind.

“O Jesus, my Saviour!” prayed the poor demoiselle, clasping her hands with terror: “the time, then, has come for us to die!”

The rain fell in torrents. The waves broke over the boat. Darkness added its horrors to the danger, which, to her inexperienced eyes, appeared to be extreme. The sweet voice of her young companion vainly sought to encourage her. By the light of the lanterns carried from side to side to light the boatman, she soon distinguished Clement standing beside the carriage, holding up a sail with a firm hand to screen them on the side most exposed to the waves.

“Poor Clement,” she exclaimed, “it is all over with us, then.”

“No, not quite, unfortunately,” replied Clement. “It will be at least half an hour before we reach the shore.”

“The shore!—the shore!—He imagines, then, we shall reach it alive?” said mademoiselle, hiding her face on Fleurange’s shoulder.

“Yes, yes,” replied the latter, pressing her in her arms. “Dear friend, there is no danger, I assure you. Believe me, I am only alarmed to see you so terrified.”

“Pardon me, child,” said the other, raising her head. “I resolved you should know nothing about it. But this time, Gabrielle, you cannot say we are not crossing the sea in a carriage,” continued she, with renewed alarm as she felt the increased motion of the waves.

Fleurange embraced her, repeating the same reassuring words. The poor old lady made no reply, she was trying to overcome her terror by a genuine act of heroism. “Danger or not, it is like what I have always imagined a terrible tempest, destructive of human life. But then,” murmured she still lower, “God overrules all, and nothing happens without his consent.”

Her physical nature was weak, but her soul was strong, and piety, a support in every trial, served now to calm her. She began to pray mentally, and did not utter another word till they reached the shore.

XLIX.

But a far greater danger awaited our travellers beyond Memel, whence they continued their journey the following day in sledges. The first, containing their baggage, preceded them several hours in advance to announce their arrival at the post‐stations; the second somewhat resembled a clumsy boat on runners, surmounted by a hood, and protected by a boot of thick fur. It was in this sledge Fleurange and her companion were stowed away. They were obliged to lie nearly down to avoid the piercing wind. The third vehicle, entirely uncovered, was very light, and so small that it barely contained Clement, in front of whom sat a young fellow wrapped in a caftan, strong and vigorous, but with a slender form quite adapted to the seat he occupied and the sledge he drove. With this light equipage Clement went like the wind, sometimes preceding the other sledge as a guide, and then returning to accompany it and watch over its safety.

The cold had become as intense as ever within a few hours. The pouring rain of the previous night after several days of thawing weather, alarming at that season, caused great gullies in the road, and endangered the passage over the rivers, at that time of the year, on the ice. Though scarcely four o’clock, the short day was nearly ended, and daylight was declining when our travellers came to the river they were obliged to cross in order to reach the small town of Y——. It was a deep, rapid stream, which at the beginning of every winter was encumbered with thick cakes of floating ice before the surface of its waters was congealed, and which, at the approach of spring, was also the first to resume its course and break the icy fetters that confined its current. This river was therefore almost always difficult to pass over, and very often dangerous, and, when the travellers came to the only place where it could be crossed, they felt they had reason to be anxious about the thaw. As soon as Clement cast his eyes on the river, he thought there were really some alarming indications. He at once saw there was no time to be lost, and drove directly on to the ice. Then he stopped, and hurriedly said to the young guide: “I think we should let the heaviest sledge go first: we will follow, if we can.”

“Yes, if we can,” said the other.

The order was instantly given, and the sledge that contained Fleurange and her companion passed rapidly on. But it had scarcely gone ten or twelve feet from the shore before an ominous cracking was heard. The frightened driver stopped. Clement imperiously ordered him to proceed without a second’s delay. But, instead of obeying, the driver, seized with fear, jumped out on the ice and sprang back to the shore he had just left. This jar increased the breaking of the ice which had already commenced. That next the shore gave way and began to move with the current, leaving an open gulf between the land and the still solid ice where our travellers remained. Great promptness of decision was necessary at a moment of such sudden and extreme danger, and orders as prompt as the judgment.

“Descend, Gabrielle,” said Clement, with authority.

The young girl instantly sprang from the sledge. Clement took Mademoiselle Josephine in his arms and placed her beside Fleurange.

“Get into my sledge, Gabrielle,” said he calmly, but very quickly. “As soon as you are safe, the sledge shall return for your friend. There is time, but you must not hesitate.”

“I do not hesitate,” said Fleurange. “I shall remain myself: she shall be saved first.”

Clement shuddered. But there was not time to contest the point. Besides, he knew from the tone of Fleurange’s voice that her decision was irrevocable, and he yielded without another word. He placed poor mademoiselle, who was incapable of comprehending what was transpiring, in the light sledge, gave the order—obeyed at once—and it darted off. The sound of the bells on the horses’ necks was heard for a few moments, and then died away.

Fleurange and Clement were left alone. Night was gathering around them. Not far off could be heard the slow cracking of the ice beneath the heavy weight of the sledge at the edge of the first opening. The noise increased, and the ice broke away the second time. The huge mass, thus detached, quivered, then, like the first, slowly descended the river, carrying the sledge with it. The opening became frightfully large. Clement looked before him to see if he could venture, by taking Fleurange in his arms, to cross on foot the long interval that separated them from the opposite shore. But it was too dark to distinguish the path, and, if they left that, death was inevitable. They might lose the only chance of being saved—by awaiting the return of the sledge. And yet they could not remain long where they were. The ice was already loosening around them. In a few moments there was another cracking, and it gave way before them. The fragment on which they stood became a kind of floating island. Clement saw at a glance the only course to be taken. He did not hesitate. He seized Fleurange in his arms, and, by the uncertain light of the snow, sprang boldly across the opening before them. They were once more on the solid ice, but who could tell how long it would be so? Who knew whether the sledge would succeed in reaching them again? Perhaps it was swallowed up in the impenetrable darkness, or left on the ice broken up around it. Otherwise it should have returned.

These thoughts crowded into Clement’s mind faster than they can be written. Fleurange, silent but courageous, was equally sensible of their danger. She bent down her head and silently prayed. Leaning thus against Clement, her hair brushing his very face, she might have heard the rapid pulsations of his heart and felt the trembling of the arm that supported her, and the hand that pressed her own. But he did not utter a word. His sensations were strange. A desire to save her doubled his strength and courage, and quickened all his faculties. At the same time, he was conscious of a transport he could not control—that she was there alone with him, that they were to die together, and she would never be able to fulfil the odious design of her journey!

But this moment of selfish love and despair was short. His thoughts returned to her—her alone. He must save her—save her at whatever cost. But how? It seemed as if an hour had passed away. It was useless to hope for the return of the sledge.—He thought he felt the ice quiver anew beneath his feet.—He looked at the dark current behind. Should he jump into the water, and endeavor to regain the shore they had left, but now no longer visible?—He hesitated a moment—no, that would expose her to certain death, and a more speedy one than now threatened them. It would be better to remain where they were, and endure the fearful suspense to the end.

They therefore remained motionless for some minutes more of silent agony. Notwithstanding her courage, the young girl’s strength began to fail. Her sight grew dim. There was a strange hum in her ears. Then her head fell on her cousin’s shoulder.

“Oh! I am dying,” murmured she. “May God restore you to your mother, Clement!”

At this moment of supreme anguish, Clement raised his eyes to heaven, and the cry of love and despair that rose from his heart was a prayer as ardent and pure as was ever uttered by childlike faith. He felt he was heard. Yes, almost at the same instant.—Was he mistaken? Afar off, so far he could hardly catch the sound, he thought he heard the jingle of bells. He listened without breathing.—O Divine Goodness! is it true?—Yes, yes, there is no longer any doubt. The sound becomes more distinct. It approaches.—It is really the sledge.—It is coming rapidly; it reaches them; it stops; it is really there!

“Blessed be God! she is saved!” was Clement’s cry. But Fleurange, overcome by weakness and terror, was already senseless in his arms.

He bore her to the sledge, and as he placed her within, but half conscious of what was occurring, he pressed her once more to his heart with unrestrained tenderness, and said: “Adieu, dear Gabrielle. Regret not that I die here. God is good. He spares me the sorrow of living without you.” And he added, in a lower tone: “Gabrielle, I have loved you more than anything else in the world. I can acknowledge it now, for death is at hand.” Then he stepped back, and ordered the young guide to hurry away.

His first words had only been indistinctly heard by Fleurange, as in a dream; but she clearly understood this precise order. It brought her at once to herself.

“Away!” she exclaimed. “Away without you! What do you mean?”

“It must be so,” said Clement. “The sledge can only hold you and the guide. Any additional weight would be dangerous. Go, without an instant’s delay.”

“Never!” said Fleurange resolutely. “Clement, we will all three die here, rather than leave you!”

“You must go!” repeated Clement energetically. “Go, I tell you! The sledge will return for me.”

“It will be impossible to cross a third time,” said the young conductor.

Clement knew it. He only replied by imperiously ordering him to start.

Fleurange, no less firm than Clement, rose and checked the hand that held the reins. The driver at once jumped down from his seat. “Do you know how to drive?” said he.

“Yes.”

“Well, I know how to swim. Here, get in quick.—Keep that for me,” continued he, hastily taking off his caftan and throwing it into the sledge. “Do not be uneasy. I shall get it again to‐morrow. I know the way and am familiar with the river.”

And without hesitating he plunged into the dark current, while Clement sprang to his seat in the sledge.

With a boldness that is the only chance of safety in such a case, he forced the horses into a gallop. They thus traversed with giddy rapidity the considerable distance that separated them from the other shore. The ice, jarred by the two former trips, cracked beneath the horse’s feet. To slacken their course an instant would have submerged them in the river, but the sledge flew rather than ran on the ice, and the hand that guided it was firm. They arrived at the goal in less than half an hour, and Fleurange, pale, exhausted, and chilled, fell into the arms of her dear old friend.

The latter was quietly awaiting them in a warm, well‐lighted room at the post‐station, and supper had been ordered, but Fleurange was neither able to talk nor eat. Mademoiselle saw that instant repose was absolutely necessary. She only persuaded her to take some hot mulled wine before going to sleep, and then went to join Clement in another room, where she learned, for the first time, all the danger she, as well as the rest, had escaped.

After the experience of the past day, Mademoiselle Josephine resolved never to manifest any astonishment at whatever might occur in this strange journey. She would go in a balloon without wincing, as readily as in a sledge, at Clement’s slightest injunction, for he seemed more and more to merit boundless confidence.

Perhaps, at the end of this terrible day, Clement did not give himself so much credit. He recalled what he had dared say to Fleurange in the height of their danger, and anxiously wondered if she heard and understood the words that rose from his heart at the moment death seemed so inevitable. Was she conscious when he uttered that last farewell? He did not know, and it was natural he should await the following day with anxiety.

But he was then reassured by finding his cousin as calm and frank as ever. She evidently had not understood, and probably not heard his words, or thought them sufficiently explained by the intensity of emotion naturally irrepressible at such a moment of extreme danger. The young girl was forced to rest a whole day to recover from her exhaustion. But it was their last halting‐place, and, when they resumed their journey, it was not to stop again till they arrived at its end.

To Be Continued.

Sayings Of John Climacus.

If any one has conceived a real hatred of the world, he is emancipated by this very hatred from all sadness. But if he shall cherish an attachment to things that are visible, he carries about with him a source of sadness and melancholy.

It is impossible that they who apply their whole mind to the science of salvation, should not make advancement. Some are permitted to perceive their progress, whilst from others, by a particular dispensation of Providence, it is altogether concealed.

He who strenuously labors to conquer his passions, and to draw nearer and nearer to God, believes that every day in which he has to suffer no humiliation is to him a grievous loss.

Repentance is the daughter of hope, and the enemy of despair.

Before the commission of sin, the devil represents God as infinitely merciful; but after its perpetration, as inexorable and without pity.

A mother will sometimes hide herself from her child, to watch its eagerness in seeking her, and she is exceedingly pleased to observe it seeking for her with sorrow and anxiety. By this means she wins its love, and binds it inseparably to her heart, that it may never be alienated from her in affection. “He that hath ears to hear,” saith our Lord, “let him hear.”

Meekness is an immutability of soul, which ever continues the same, whether amidst the injuries or the applaudits of men.

Dante’s Purgatorio. Canto Fifth.

[NOTE.—In this Canto, Dante introduces three other spirits, who relate the manner of their departure from the body, and recommend themselves to his prayers, that their penal sufferings may be alleviated.

The first of these penitents is Jacopo del Cassero, a townsman of Fano in Romagna, who, flying towards Padua from the vengeance of one of the tyrannous Este family, was waylaid and murdered in the marshes near Oriago.

The second is Buonconte, son of Guido di Montefeltro. He was a fellow‐soldier with Dante in the battle of Campaldino, and there slain; but what became of his body was never known until this imaginary narration.

The third is the noble lady of Sienna, Pia de’ Tolommei, whose story, told by Dante in three lines, has formed the subject of a five‐act tragedy, recently illustrated in this country by the genius of Ristori.—TRANS.]

Already parted from those shades, I went Following the footsteps of my Guide, when one Behind me towards my form his finger bent, Exclaiming—“See! no ray falls from the sun To the left hand of him that walks below! And sure! he moveth like a living man.” Mine eyes I turned, at hearing him say so, And saw them with a gaze all wonder scan Now me, still me, and now the broken light My body caused. The Master then to me: “Why let thy wonder keep thee from the height To drag so slowly? what concerns it thee What here is whispered? only follow thou After my steps, and let the crowd talk on: Stand like a tower, firm‐based, that will not bow Its head to breath of winds that soon are gone. The man o’er whose thought second thought hath sway, Wide of his mark, is ever sure to miss, Because one force the other wears away.” What could I answer but—“I come”—to this? I said it something sprinkled with the hue Which, in less faults, excuseth one from blame; Meanwhile across the mountain‐side there drew, Just in our front, a train that as they came Sang _Miserere_, verse by verse. When they Observed my form, and noticed that I gave No passage through me to the solar ray, Into a long, hoarse “O!” they changed their stave. And two, as envoys, ran up with demand, “In what condition is it that ye go?”

And my Lord said—“Return ye to the band Who sent you towards us, and give them to know This body is true flesh. If they delayed At sight,—I deem so, of the shadow here Thereby sufficient answer shall be made: Him let them reverence,—it may prove dear.”

I never saw a meteor dart so quick Through the serene at midnight, or a gleam Of lightning flash at sunset, through a thick Piled August cloud, but these would faster seem As they retreated; having joined the rest, Back like an unreined troop towards us they sped. “This throng is large by whom we thus are pressed, And come to implore of thee,” the Poet said— “Therefore keep on, and as thou mov’st attend.”

“O soul who travellest, with the very frame Which thou wert born with, to thy blessed end, Stay thy step somewhat!”—crying thus they came. “Look if among us any thou dost know, That thou of him to earth mayst tidings bear. Stay—wilt thou not? ah! wherefore must thou go? We to our dying hour were sinners there: And all were slain: but at the murderous blow, Warned us an instant light that flashed from heaven, And all from life did peacefully depart, Contrite, forgiving, and by Him forgiven To look on Whom such longing yearns our heart.” “None do I recognize,” I answered, “even Scanning your faces with mine utmost art; But whatsoe’er, ye blessed souls! I may To give you comfort, speak, and I will do; Yea, by that peace which leads me on my way From world to world such guidance to pursue.”

JACOPO DI FANO.

“Without such protestation,” one replied, “Unless thy will a want of power defeat, In thy kind offices we all confide; Whence I, sole speaking before these, entreat If thou mayst e’er the territory see That lies betwixt Romagna and the seat(134) Where Charles hath sway, that thou so courteous be As to implore the men in Fano’s town To put up prayers there earnestly for me That I may purge the sins that weigh me down. There I was born; but those deep wounds of mine Through which my life‐blood issued, I received Among the children of Antenor’s line,(135) Where most secure my person I believed: ’Twas through that lord of Este I was sped Who past all justice had me in his hate. O’ertook at Oriaco, had I fled Towards Mira, still where breath is I might wait. But to the marsh I made my way instead, And there, entangled in the cany brake And mire, I fell, and on the ground saw spread, From mine own veins outpoured, a living lake.”

BUONCONTE DI MONTEFELTRO.

Here spake another: “O may that desire So be fulfilled which to the lofty Mount Conducts thy feet as thou shalt bring me nigher To mine by thy good prayers. I am the Count Buonconte: Montefeltro’s lord was I. Giovanna cares not, no one cares for me; Therefore with these I go dejectedly.” And I to him: “What violence took thee, Or chance of war, from Campaldino then So far that none e’er knew thy burial‐place?” “O,” answered he, “above the hermit’s glen(136) A stream whose course is Casentino’s base, Springs in the Apennine, Archiano called. There, where that name is lost in Arno’s flood, Exhausted I arrived, footsore and galled, Pierced in my throat, painting the plain with blood. Here my sight failed me and I fell: the last Word that I spake was Mary’s name, and then From my deserted flesh the spirit passed. The truth I tell now, tell to living men; God’s Angel took me, but that fiend of Hell Screamed out: ’Ha! thou from heaven, why robb’st thou me? His soul thou get’st for one small tear that fell, But of this offal other work I’ll see.’ Thou know’st how vapors gathering in the air Mount to the cold and there condensed distil Back into water. That Bad Will which ne’er Seeks aught but evil joined his evil will, With intellect, and, from the great force given By his fell nature, moved the mist and wind And o’er the valley drew the darkened heaven, Covering it with clouds as day declined From Pratomagno far as the great chain,(137) So that the o’erburdened air to water turned: Then the floods fell, and every rivulet’s vein Swelled with the superflux the soaked earth spurned. When to large streams the mingling torrents grew Down to the royal river with such force They rushed that no restraint their fury knew. Here fierce Archiano found my frozen corse Stretched at its mouth, and into Arno’s wave Dashed it and loosened from my breast the sign, Which when mine anguish mastered me I gave, Of holy cross with my crossed arms: in fine, O’er bed and bank my form the streamlet drave Whirling, and with its own clay covered mine.”

PIA DE’ TOLOMEI.

“O stay! when thou shalt walk the world once more, And have repose from that long way of thine,”— Said the third spirit, following those before, “Remember Pia! for that name was mine: Sienna gave me birth: Maremma’s fen Was my undoing: he knows that full well Who ringed my finger with his gem and then, After espousal,—_took me there to dwell_.”

Sanskrit And The Vedas.(138)

“But in justice, I am bound to say that Rome has the merit of having first seriously attended to the study of Indian literature.”—CARDINAL WISEMAN: _Connection between Science and Revealed Religion_.

“The first missionaries who succeeded in rousing the attention of European scholars to the extraordinary discovery (Sanskrit literature) that had been made were the French Jesuit missionaries.”—MAX MÜLLER: _Lectures on the Science of Language_.

What manner of language is the Sanskrit?

By what people or nation was it spoken?

When? and where?

What are its literary monuments?

Whence comes it—granting it to be as ancient a tongue as is represented—that neither in Greek, Roman, nor, indeed, in any ancient literature, is it ever mentioned, and that we only read of it in modern works, scarce a century old?

Such questions as these are frequently asked, even at the present day. Forty years ago, it is doubtful if there were ten persons in this country able to reply to them satisfactorily, and more than doubtful if a single scholar could have been found capable of translating the simplest Sanskrit sentence. Within that period, however, philological science in general, and Sanskrit in particular, have made long and rapid strides among us, and we now have scores of scholars fully awake to the importance of cultivating the resources of this wonderful tongue, as the origin or common source of the European family of languages, in which our own English is included.

At the head of these scholars stands, without dispute, Prof. William Dwight Whitney, whose, linguistic acquirements and philosophical treatment of difficult philological problems have earned for him a very high and well‐merited reputation. Nor is this opinion a merely patriotic and partial estimate. Prof. Whitney’s merits as a Sanskrit scholar and comparative philologist are fully acknowledged, not only in this country, but by the eminent Orientalists of Europe. The first periodical of Germany and of the world for the comparative study of languages (_Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete des Deutschen, Griechischen und Lateinischen_, Berlin, 1872), in a late number recognizes, in the most flattering manner, Prof. Whitney’s high rank in the philological republic of letters, and refers in complimentary terms to the fact that he is well known in Germany as the editor of the Sanskrit text of the _Atharva Veda_.

We may here incidentally note, in the same number of the _Zeitschrift_, another gratifying recognition of advanced American scholarship. We refer to a review of Prof. March’s _Comparative Grammar of the Anglo‐Saxon_, from the pen of Moritz Heyne, the well‐known author of the _Brief Comparative Grammar of the Old German Dialects_, and editor of the celebrated editions of the Mœso‐Gothic Bible of Ulphilas, and of the Anglo‐Saxon poem of Beowulf. The German reviewer credits Prof. March’s work with extensive and original investigation, great erudition in the Anglo‐Saxon texts, and valuable contributions to the grammar of the language. He adds, that the study of Anglo‐Saxon is pursued with more zeal and success in the United States than in England. Solid commendation like this, from such a source, speaks well for American progress in the field of philological science.

During the past twenty years, Prof. Whitney has published numerous essays on Sanskrit literature which, limited to the special circulation of scientific or literary periodicals, have not fallen under the notice of the general reading public. Many of these articles he has now collected and published in a volume,(139) edited by himself. Four of the essays are on the Vedas and Vedic literature, one on the Avesta (commonly called the Zend‐Avesta), and seven upon various philological topics, including two reviews of Max Müller’s _Lectures on Language_, which are admirable specimens of temperate and careful criticism, guided by sound scholarship.

Prof. Whitney’s first paper on the Vedas (originally published in the _Journal of the American Oriental Society_, vol. iii., 1853) opens thus:

“It is a truth now well established, that the Vedas furnish the only sure foundation on which a knowledge of ancient and modern India can be built up. They are therefore at present engrossing the larger share of the attention of those who pursue this branch of Oriental study. Only recently, however, has their paramount importance been fully recognized: it was by slow degrees that they made their way up to the consideration in which they are now held. Once it was questioned whether any such books as the Vedas really existed, or whether, if they did exist, the jealous care of the Brahmans would ever allow them to be laid open to European eyes. This doubt dispelled, they were first introduced to the near acquaintance of scholars in the West by Colebrooke.”

Not stopping to raise a question as to just reclamation in favor of Sir William Jones for a portion at least of the credit of the introduction of the Vedas to the “acquaintance of scholars in the West,” which, perhaps Professor Whitney means to solve in advance by a distinction between acquaintance and “near acquaintance,” we would observe that this comprehensive statement as to the introduction of the Vedas to European scholars takes for granted the previous interesting history of the modern discovery of the existence of the Sanskrit and of Vedic literature. We use the expression “takes for granted” in no invidious sense.

The author was writing for scholars who, he had a right to assume, were already acquainted with the objective history of his subject‐matter, and were probably informed as to the details of the gradual steps by which the certainty of the existence of a great language and a rich literature long buried in darkness was at length brought to light. His concern was with the internal, not the external, history of Sanskrit. Now, it is upon this external history that we propose to say something, returning to Prof. Whitney’s work when we reach the subject of the Vedas.

It is not necessary that our readers should, to any extent, be linguists or philologists in order to become deeply interested in the relation of the modern discovery of a language so old that it had ceased to be spoken and was a dead language hundreds of years before the Christian era—a language to which cannot with any certainty be assigned the name of the nation or people who spoke it, and which is at once the most ancient of all known tongues, living or dead, and, despite all modern research, still prehistoric.

To our Catholic readers, the narration of this discovery is full of interest; for in it they will recognize an additional version of the familiar story of the enlightened intelligence, piety, and self‐sacrifice of our devoted missionaries who, combining active zeal for knowledge with apostolic zeal for souls, amid privation and suffering, even in distant and savage lands, with one hand built up the walls of Zion, while with the other they erected temples to science.

In order fully to appreciate the bearing and importance of the revelation of Sanskrit to Europe, it is essential that we should first look a moment upon the condition of European comparative philology at the end of the XVIth and commencement of the XVIIth centuries. A short digression will suffice for this.

The Hebrew language was, from the earliest period of Christianity, settled upon by almost common consent of the learned as the primitive tongue. It was generally admitted by scholars that the sole great and essential linguistic problem to be solved was this:

“As Hebrew is undoubtedly the mother of all languages, how are we to explain the process by which Hebrew became split into so many dialects, and how can these numerous dialects, such as Greek and Latin, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, be traced back to their common source, the Hebrew?”

Upon this hopelessly insoluble problem an amazing amount of remarkable ingenuity and solid erudition were, for hundreds of years, hopelessly wasted, for, at this day, instead of Hebrew, Sanskrit is recognized as being the oldest of all known languages. How came this about? Reply to this inquiry will at the same time answer the questions proposed at the outset of this article.

The result of labor on the problem, “How could all languages be traced back to the Hebrew?” was of course unsatisfactory. No solution could be obtained. None indeed was possible.

At last it was suggested, why _should_ all languages be derived from the Hebrew? and with investigation thus taken off its false route, the question was in a fair way to be successfully treated. Leibnitz vigorously denied the claims set up for Hebrew, and said: “There is as much reason for supposing Hebrew to have been the primitive language of mankind, as there is for adopting the view of Goropius, who published a work at Antwerp in 1580 to prove that Dutch was the language spoken in Paradise.” More than this, he indicated the necessity of applying to language as well as to any other science the principle of a sound inductive process, and in this he was greatly aided by the Jesuit missionaries in China.

“It stands to reason,” he said, “that we ought to begin with studying the modern languages which are within our reach, in order to compare them with one another, to discover their differences and affinities, and then to proceed to those which have preceded them in former ages, in order to show their filiation and their origin, and then to ascend step by step to the most ancient tongues, the analysis of which must lead to the only trustworthy conclusions.”

But Leibnitz, while properly disputing the justice of the claims of Hebrew as the mother‐tongue, knew of none other for which a similar claim might be advanced. It is doubtful if he ever heard of Sanskrit, although he lived until 1716, a full century after one, at least, of our missionaries had mastered Sanskrit and all the Vedas.

Sanskrit

is the ancient language of the Hindus, and had ceased to be a spoken language three centuries before the Christian era. The sacred Vedas, the oldest literary productions of the Hindus, and even the laws of Manu and the Purânas, later works, are written in a dialect still older than the Sanskrit, of which it is the parent, and are assigned by different scholars to periods varying from twelve hundred to two thousand years B.C. Thus, the dialects of Sanskrit spoken by the people of India three hundred years B.C. may be said to have been to the Vedic Sanskrit what Italian now is to the Latin. These dialects, modified by admixture with the languages of the various conquerors of India, the Arabic, Persian, Mongolic, and Turkish, and changed also by grammatical corruption, yet survive in the modern Hindí, Hindustání, Mahratta, and Bengálée.

Specimens of the dialects spoken by the people of the northern, eastern, and southwestern regions of India have come down to us in the inscriptions of the Buddhist King Piyadasi (third century B.C.), and in the account of the victory over Antiochus which King Asoka (206 B.C.) had graven on the rocks of Dhauli, Girnar, and Kapurdigiri. These inscriptions have been deciphered by Burnouf, Norris, Wilson, and others, and are found to be in the Prakrit (common), not the Sanskrit (perfect) or exclusive dialect. From these facts the best Oriental scholars draw the conclusion that, at the periods of Piyadasi and Asoka, the Sanskrit, if spoken at all, was then already confined to the educated caste of Brahmans, having been a living language at some remote previous period (most probably between the VIIIth and IVth centuries B.C.), spoken by all classes of that race which emigrated from Central India into Asia, and the language so spoken is that to which modern Orientalists give the name of Aryan. For it will be borne in mind that the term Sanskrit is no indication of the people or race who originally spoke the language so called: it merely indicates the estimation in which it is held by their successors, and signifies “the perfect language.”

Meantime, during all these centuries, Sanskrit continued to be preserved as the classic tongue and literary vehicle of Brahmanic thought and study, and we are told on good authority that, “even at the present day, an educated Brahman would write with greater fluency in Sanskrit than in Bengálée.” It is now well established that Sanskrit is certainly not the parent, but the eldest brother or _chef de famille_ of the large groups of Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, Teutonic, and Scandinavian families from which all the modern European tongues (Basque excepted) are derived (we omit mention of the Oriental branches). When we write the Sanskrit words _mader_, _pader_, _dokhter_, _sunu_, _bruder_, _mand_, _lib_, _nasa_, _vidhuva_, _stara_, we very nearly write the corresponding English terms, and see in them their English descendants through Mœso‐Gothic and German. The Sanskrit and Greek equivalents of _I am_, _thou art_, _he is_, are almost identical:

_Sanskrit_: asmi, asi, asti. _Greek_: esmi, eis, esti.

We find the Sanskrit _dinâra_ in the Latin _denarius_; _ayas_ in Sanskrit—passing through the Gothic _ais_ to English _iron_; and _plava_, in Sanskrit, a ship appearing in the Greek _ploion_ (ship), Slavonic _ploug_, and English _plough_; for the Aryans said the ship ploughed the sea, and the plough sailed across the field. In like manner, similar illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely to the extent of volumes, showing not hazardous and doubtful etymological similarities, but clear, distinct, and sharp‐cut affinities by clearly traceable descent.

“Who was the first European that knew of Sanskrit, or that acquired a knowledge of Sanskrit, is difficult to say,” remarks Prof. Max Müller. Very true. But it is not at all difficult to reach the certainty that that European, whatever might have been his name, was a Catholic missionary.

Soon after S. Francis Xavier began to preach the Gospel in India (1542), we hear of our missionaries acquiring not only the current dialects of the country, but also the classical Sanskrit language; of their successfully studying the theological and philosophical literature of the exclusive priestly class; and of their challenging the Brahmans to public disputations. If the example of their labors, humility, sufferings, and piety were not sufficient to win souls, they always, where it was needed, had science at their command, and were at once scholars, linguists, mathematicians, and astronomers as well as lowly messengers of the glad tidings of salvation.

Prominent among the most remarkable of these men stands

Robert De’ Nobili.

A nephew of Cardinal de’ Nobili and a relative of Pope Julius the Third and of the great Bellarmine, he was nobly born and tenderly reared. He went a missionary to the Indies in 1603, and began his public labors at Madura in 1606. Being a man of superior education, cultivation, and refinement, he soon perceived the reasons which kept all the natives of high caste—especially the Brahmans—from joining the communities of Christian converts formed by the common people of the country. He saw that the Brahmans could be successfully met and argued with only by a Brahman, and he at once resolved on the heroic project of fitting himself by long study and almost incredible labor to become a Brahman in outward appearance, language, and accomplishments, and thus obtain access to the noblest, most learned, and most accomplished men in India. The task was full of difficulty. For years he devoted himself to his silent work, acquiring in secret the dialects of Tamil and Telugu, and the language and literature of Sanskrit and the Vedas. When in time he felt himself strong enough in Brahmanic learning and accomplishments to meet them in argument and debate, he publicly appeared arrayed in their costume, wearing the cord, bearing the exclusive frontal mark, and submitting to the rigid observance of their diet (eating nothing but rice and vegetables) and their complicated requirements of caste. So exhaustive had been his studies, so thorough was his preparation, and so admirable his talent, that his success was perfect. The Brahmans whom he met found in him their master even in their own exclusive field of literature, philosophy, and religion. Müllbauer (_Geschichte der katholischen Missionen Ostindiens_) says they were afraid of him. As a devoted and successful missionary, his life is full of interest; but we have to do with him here only as the first known European Sanskrit scholar. After forty‐two years of missionary labor in that exhausting climate, worn out, infirm, and blind, Robert de’ Nobili died, aged eighty years, at Melapour, on the coast of Coromandel. The distinguished Professor of Sanskrit at the English university of Oxford, Max Müller, pays the following earnest tribute to the acquirements of this admirable missionary and scholar:

“A man who could quote from Manu, from the Purânas, and even from such works as the Apastamba‐sûtras, which are known even at present to only those few Sanskrit scholars who can read Sanskrit MSS., must have been far advanced in a knowledge of the sacred language and literature of the Brahmans; and the very idea that he came, as he said, to preach a new or a fourth Veda, which had been lost, shows how well he knew the strong and weak points of the theological system which he came to conquer.”

Religious bigotry has sought to fix upon de’ Nobili the forgery of the Ezour‐Veda; but the examination of the charge by distinguished English (Protestant) Orientalists has only resulted in bringing out into brighter relief that devoted missionary’s remarkable acquirements and admirable virtues. Francis Ellis, Esq., a distinguished Orientalist, discovered the Sanskrit original of the Ezour at Pondicherry, and made an elaborate report upon it, which was published at the time, in the _Asiatick_ (_sic_) _Researches_ (vol. xiv., Calcutta, 1822), from which we cite the following short extract:

“Robertus de Nobilibus is well known both to Hindus and Christians, under the Sanskrit title of Tatwa‐Bodha Swami, as the author of many excellent works in Tamil, on polemical theology. In one of these, the _Atma‐Nirnaya‐vivecam_, he contrasts the opinions of the various Indian sects on the nature of the soul, and exposes the fables with which the Purânas abound relative to the state of future existence, and in another, _Punergeuma Acshepa_, he confutes the doctrine of the metempsychosis. Both these works, in style and substance, greatly resemble the controversial part of the Pseudo Vedas; but these are open attacks on what the author considered false doctrines and superstitions, and no attempt is made to veil their manifest tendency, or to insinuate the tenets they maintain under a borrowed name or in an ambiguous form. The style adopted by Robertus de Nobilibus is remarkable for a profuse admixture of Sanskrit terms; those to express doctrinal notions and abstract ideas he compounds and recompounds with a facility of invention that indicates an intimate knowledge of the language whence they are derived; and there can be no doubt, therefore, that he was fully qualified to be the author of those writings. If this should be the fact, considering the high character he bears among all acquainted with his name and the nature of his known works, I am inclined to attribute to him the composition only, not the forgery, of the Pseudo Vedas.”

But the result of further examination has decided that the Ezour‐Veda was not even written by de’ Nobili, but by one of his native converts. It is plain, from the testimony of Mr. Ellis, that he was not a man to seek the cover of the anonymous or the ambiguous, in order to attack the superstitions of Buddhism. This he did openly and boldly. Max Müller decides that “there is no evidence for ascribing the work to Robert.”

The example of Robert de’ Nobili was sedulously followed up by other members of his Order.

Roth, another Jesuit, appeared in 1664, master of Sanskrit, and successfully disputed with the Brahmans. Yet another, Hanxleder, who went to India in 1669, labored for more than thirty years in the Malabar mission, composed works of instruction, compiled dictionaries, and wrote works in prose and verse. Many of his writings are preserved at Rome. Among the most prominent of the Jesuit missionaries in the field of modern Oriental and Sanskrit literature was Father Constant Beschi, who went out to India in 1700. He made himself master of Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, and wrote moral works in Sanskrit which are still preserved and highly prized by the Brahmans. The natives called him the great Viramamouni. Scores of other missionaries might be named, equally devoted, equally learned. But they acquired science, Sanskrit, and Oriental erudition as a means, not an end. They sought no worldly distinction, no literary reputation. They had but one engrossing object and thought here below—their mission of charity and of love.

Nevertheless, the day of

Sanskrit For Europe,

long delayed, was now fast approaching. Its revelation to the West is generally ascribed to Sir William Jones. This assumption may be stated to be incorrect without in the slightest degree detracting from the merits of that distinguished English scholar. For more than a century before Sir William Jones went to India, the published letters of the Jesuit missionaries had established the existence and general characteristics of that remarkable tongue, the Sanskrit; and in 1740 (November 23), Father Pons, then at Karikal [Madura], addressed a letter to Father Duhalde, giving what Professor Max Müller describes as “a most interesting and, in general, a very accurate description of the various branches of Sanskrit literature; of the four Vedas, the grammatical treatises, the six systems of philosophy, and the astronomy of the Hindus. _He anticipated, on several points, the researches of Sir William Jones._”

The letter in question was, in fact, an essay; and Father Pons so speaks of it. It fills sixteen closely printed octavo pages, and refers to the fact, not mentioned by Prof. Müller, that it is one of a succession of communications upon the same subject, inasmuch as he mentions a treatise written by himself on Sanskrit versification, transmitted to Europe the previous year, and specifies a Sanskrit grammar (_Kramadisvar_) which he sent two years before. Although Adelung, in his _Mithridates_, mildly censures both Father Pons and Sir W. Jones for exaggerating the value of Sanskrit, the exposition made by the former of the wealth of the Sanskrit language and literature is, to this day, held by distinguished scholars to be “very accurate.”

The Pons‐Duhalde letter is often referred to, but seldom quoted. We will therefore here cite a few short passages from it, which may give the reader some idea of the nature of the communication and an early estimate of the value of Sanskrit. We translate: “The Brahmans have always been, and still are, the only class who devote themselves to the cultivation of the sciences as a matter of hereditary descent. They originally descend from seven illustrious penitents, whose progeny, in course of time, was multiplied infinitely, etc. They are exclusively consecrated to learning, and a Brahman who strictly adheres to the rule of his order should devote himself solely to religion and study; but, in course of time, many have fallen into a very lax life.

“These sciences are inaccessible to all the other castes of people, to whom it is permitted to communicate certain compositions, grammar, poetry, and moral sayings.”

“The grammar of the Brahmans may fairly be classed in the rank of works of science. Never were analysis and synthesis more happily employed than in their grammatical works on the Sanskrit language. I am satisfied that this language, so admirable in its harmony, its wealth, and its energy, was at some remote period the spoken tongue of the country inhabited by the first Brahmans.”

Parenthetically, and also by way of comparison, let us look for a moment at the impression made by Sanskrit upon two other distinguished scholars from among those who were earliest in the field—Sir William Jones and Frederick von Schlegel.

At the outset of his researches, the first declared that, whatever its antiquity, it was a language of most wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a strong affinity. “No philologer,” he adds, “could examine the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family.” And Frederick von Schlegel (_Essay on the Language and Philosophy of the Indians_) says: “The similarity between Sanskrit, on the one hand, and Latin and Greek, Teutonic and Persian, on the other, is found not only in a great number of roots possessed by them in common, but it also extends to the inner structure and grammar. The remarkable coincidence is not merely such an accidental one as may be explained by an admixture of language, but an essential one which points distinctly to a common descent. Comparison further shows that the Indian (Sanskrit) tongue is the more ancient, the others younger and derived from it.”

But to return to our missionaries. The interest excited in Europe by the remarkable letter of Father Pons was purely one of surprise and speculation, inasmuch as Western scholars were without the means of testing the value of the great linguistic discovery. Sanskrit grammars, dictionaries, and even vocabularies were then unknown in any European tongue. This want, however, was soon supplied by another missionary, John Philip Wesdin, more widely known as Father Paulinus a Santo‐Bartolomeo. He spent thirteen years in India, and subsequently published (1790) at Rome, under the auspices of the Propaganda, several works on Sanskrit grammar and upon the history, theology, and religion of the Hindus.

Referring to his numerous publications (_vielen Schriften_), no less an authority than Adelung qualifies them as indispensable to a knowledge of Sanskrit as also to the other languages of India (welche zur Kentniss sowohl dieser Sprache als auch Indiens überhaupt unentbehrlich sind); and he adds (writing in 1806): “Peradventure has no European up to this time so deeply penetrated into this language as he.”(140) Of his first Sanskrit grammar, published at Rome in 1790,(141) Prof. Max Müller says: “Although this grammar has been severely criticised, and is now hardly ever consulted, it is but fair to bear in mind that the first grammar of any language is a work of infinitely greater difficulty than any later grammar.”

In this connection we must not omit some mention of that prodigy of linguistic industry and erudition, the Spanish Jesuit, Don Lorenzo Hervas y Pandura, who, in the midst of his missionary labors, collected specimens of more than three hundred languages.(142) This of itself was a gigantic work, and its rich results furnished to Adelung an important portion of the material of his _Mithridates_. Hervas, moreover, prepared grammars for more than forty languages, and is the founder of the true method of ascertaining lingual affinity by grammatical analysis, rather than by etymology, always more or less deceptive. Klaproth’s enunciation of this principle established by Hervas is so felicitous that we cannot refrain from citing it here: “Words are the stuff or matter of language, and grammar its fashioning or form.”

Concerning Hervas we need say no more than to add the noble tribute to his memory and his merits to be found in the pages of Max Müller’s _Lectures on the Science of Language_, p. 140:

“He proved by a comparative list of declensions and conjugations that Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Amharic are all but dialects of one original language, and constitute one family of speech, the Semitic. He scouted the idea of deriving all the languages of mankind from Hebrew. He had perceived clear traces of affinity in Hungarian, Lapponian, and Finnish—three dialects now classed as members of the Turanian family. He had proved that Basque was not, as was commonly supposed, a Celtic dialect, but an independent language, spoken by the earliest inhabitants of Spain, as proved by the names of the Spanish mountains and rivers. Nay, one of the most brilliant discoveries in the history of the science of language, the establishment of the Malay and Polynesian family of speech, extending from the Island of Madagascar east of Africa, over 208° of longitude, to the Easter Islands west of America, _was made __ by Hervas long before it was announced to the world by Humboldt_.”

English literature has made us familiar with the name of Sir William Jones as the European originator of the cultivation of Sanskrit. The merits of Sir William Jones are not a subject of doubt or contest. Full justice has been done them. But when we come to settle the question of priority of successful and distinguished labor in the field of Sanskrit, the names and transcendent services of the humble and self‐sacrificing missionaries, Robert de’ Nobili, Roth, Hanxleder, Beschi, Pons, Paulinus a Santo‐ Bartolomeo, Hervas, and scores of others, their predecessors and companions, must ever be gratefully remembered.

The Triumph Of Sanskrit.

Through the publications of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, European scholars were now furnished with facilities for the study of Sanskrit, and it would be difficult to say which of the two, the language or the literature, excited the deeper or more lasting interest.

The absolute identity of grammatical forms of Greek and Latin with Sanskrit was at once recognized, and it was evident that these three languages sprang from one common source. The revelation created one of the greatest literary sensations ever known in Europe. The theory that upheld Hebrew as the mother tongue—already seriously damaged—now received its death‐blow. Classical scholars shook their heads sceptically. Theologians were troubled. Ethnographers were all at sea. Etymologists and lexicographers were dumfounded. The philosophers of the day, each one of whom had his own little system of the universe to take care of, saw their theories ruthlessly upset; and Lord Monboddo, who had just finished his great work in which he derives mankind from a couple of apes, and all the dialects of the world from the language of the Egyptian gods, was petrified with astonishment. His Egyptian theory, his men with tails, and his monkeys without tails, were all equally doomed to destruction. To his credit, though, it must be said that he soon afterward accepted the situation with commendable intelligence and alacrity.

Other pet theories and other deeply ingrained prejudices of many scholars of the best education were shocked and scandalized at the claims set up for Sanskrit. The idea that the classical languages of Greece and Rome could be intimately related to a jargon of mere savages—as they supposed the natives of India to be—was to the last degree repugnant to these gentlemen, and they went great lengths in assertion, absurd argument, irony, and ridicule, to escape the, alas! too inevitable and horribly unpleasant conclusion that Greek and Latin were of the same linguistic kith and kin as the language of the black inhabitants of India. The distinguished Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart, by way of protest against the claims set up for Sanskrit, even went so far as to deny that any such language existed or ever had existed, and wrote his famous essay to prove that those arch forgers and liars, the Brahmans, had manufactured the dialect on the model of the Greek and the Latin, and that the whole thing, language, literature, and all, was a piece of daring invention and bold imposture.

How deeply rooted were the prejudices, and how stubborn the ignorance, even among scholars and men of literary pursuits, in favor of the Hebrew and against the reception of Sanskrit in its place, may be judged from the representative fact, that so late as the ninth day of August, 1832, we find no less a man than Coleridge making this entry in his note‐book: “The claims of the Sanskrit for priority to the Hebrew as a language are ridiculous.”

The first European scholar of distinction who dared boldly accept the facts and conclusions of Sanskrit scholarship was Frederick von Schlegel. He began his study of the language with verbal tuition from Sir Alexander Hamilton, continued it at Paris with the aid of M. Langles, custodian of Oriental MSS. in the Imperial Library at Paris, and subsequently had the advantage of the rich collection in the British Museum. The result was his _Language and Wisdom of the Indians_, published in 1808. It embraced in one glance the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany, riveted them together by the name of Indo‐Germanic (by common consent of scholars since changed to Indo‐European), and became the foundation of the science of language. Appearing only two years after the publication of the first volume of Adelung’s _Mithridates_, “it is separated from that work,” says Prof. Müller, “by the same distance which separates the Copernican from the Ptolemæan system,” and this work of Schlegel, he adds, “has truly been called the discovery of a new world.”

Omitting mention of the labors of many distinguished French and German laborers in the same field, we may close our record of the services rendered by Catholic scholars to the cause of Sanskrit literature by reference to the remarkable course of lectures on “Science and Revealed Religion,” delivered by the Reverend (afterwards Cardinal) Wiseman, at Rome, in 1835,(143) only two years and six months after the memorable entry of Coleridge in his note‐book.

Sanskrit Literature And The Vedas.

It was perfectly natural that the fresh enthusiasm of the earliest Sanskrit scholars should have carried them into what is now looked upon as an undue estimate and hyperbolic praise of their new discovery and acquisition. And this early enthusiasm was neither short in duration nor limited in extent.

A tidal wave of admiration swept over European scholarship with the appearance of _Sacontala, or The Fatal Ring_ (Calcutta, 1789), certainly a beautiful specimen of dramatic art and admirable poetry by Kalidasa, the Indian Shakespeare, who is assigned to the period of Vikrama the Great (B.C. 56). Sir William Jones very judiciously selected this masterpiece of Indian literature for translation as a first specimen, and, although in prose, it so delighted a French scholar, Chézy, that it induced him first to learn Sanskrit and then to publish a French version of it. This was followed by no less than four German translations, prose and verse, a Danish translation, and an additional English translation (the best) in a mingling of verse and prose (following the original) by Monier Williams. Goethe was enraptured with the _Sacontala_, and it drew from him the celebrated verse:

“Willt Du die Blüthe des Frühen, die Früchte des Späteren Jahres, Willt Du, was reizt und entzückt, willt Du was sättigt und nährt, Willt Du den Himmel, die Erde mit einem Namen begreifen, Nenn ich, Sacontala, Dich, und so ist Alles gesagt.”(144)

A. W. von Schlegel finds in it so striking a resemblance to our romantic drama that we might, he says, be inclined to suspect we owe this resemblance to the predilection for Shakespeare entertained by Sir William Jones, if the fidelity of his translation were not confirmed by other learned Orientalists. And Alex. von Humboldt says of Kalidasa that “tenderness in the expression of feeling, and richness of creative fancy, have assigned to him his lofty place amongst the poets of all nations.”

Voltaire went into ecstasies over a French translation of the Ezour‐Veda, a Sanskrit poem in the style of the Purânas, quite an inferior production, written in the XVIIth century by a native convert of Robert de’ Nobili. This French translation was published by Voltaire under the title, “L’Ezour‐Vedam, traduit du Sanscritam par un Brame,” and he stated his belief that the original was four centuries older than Alexander, and that it was the most precious gift for which the West had been indebted to the East.

Adelung, as we have seen, found fault with Sir William Jones and Father Pons for overrating the claims of Sanskrit, and subsequent critics have gone so far as to assert that its literary and scientific value is very slight. Among the latest of these are M. Jules Oppert(145) and Prof. Key of University College, London. Their objections and arguments are met and discussed by Prof. Whitney in the seventh essay of his volume, in a tone so moderate and a treatment so thorough as to present a more than satisfactory vindication of the claims of Indo‐European philology and ethnology to the serious attention and close study of every scholar. We are not aware that either Prof. Key or M. Oppert has cited the fact that, when the Indian rajah Rammohun Roy found the distinguished Sanskrit scholar Rosen at work in the British Museum upon an edition of the hymns of the Veda, he expressed his surprise at so useless an undertaking. It was not that the Indian philosopher looked upon all Vedic literature as worthless. On the contrary, he was of the opinion that the Upanishads were worthy of becoming the foundation of a new religion. The rajah most probably did not also consider the fact that, whatever might be the intrinsic literary merit of the Vedic hymns, they were none the less valuable to the comparative grammarian and philologist. For the purposes of grammatical construction, it is perfectly immaterial whether or not a text has the fire of genius or the inspiration of poetry.

And here it may be mentioned that Rammohun Roy, the descendant on both the paternal and maternal side of the highest caste Brahmans, and familiar with the whole body of Vedic and Sanskrit literature, indirectly bears high testimony to one of the grandest results obtained by European study of Sanskrit literature. _That result is the exposure of Brahmanism as a gross imposture._ Against any attack on its social and religious errors, the Brahmans formerly entrenched themselves in the pretended warrant of high antiquity and the authority of the sacred works. “Thus say the Vedas” was a sufficient justification for any claim, and “That is not in the Vedas” an unanswerable argument against any objection. Although they threw every possible obstacle in the way of Europeans who strove to obtain a knowledge of Sanskrit and access to the Vedas, by refusing to teach them and by withholding the sacred books, these difficulties were finally overcome, and when the Vedas were read and understood it became apparent that fully one‐half of the social and religious institutions of Brahmanism, as it existed down to the commencement of the present century, were not only without a shadow of authority in the Vedas, but absolutely opposed to the spirit and letter of its law. Thus, it is certain that nothing of the great characteristic feature of Brahmanism—the system of castes—can be found in the Vedas. The belief in the transmigration of souls and in the doctrines flowing from it has no existence there. And the Suttee, or system of widow immolation, the singular mingling of pantheistic philosophy with gross superstition, and the worship of the triad Brahma, Vishnu, and Civa, are all equally without Vedic foundation.

Robert de’ Nobili discovered all this at an early period, and it was only when he first fought the Brahmans with their own weapons—the Vedas—that they were, for the first time, silenced. Rammohun Roy had his eyes opened at an early age to the idolatrous system of the Hindus, came out from among them, and openly attacked its pretensions. “I endeavored to show,” he says, “that the idolatry of the Brahmans was contrary to the practice of their ancestors, and to the principles of the ancient works and authorities which they profess to revere and obey.”

Prof. Whitney, referring to the same subject, says: “Each new phase of belief has sought in them (the sacred texts) its authority, has claimed to found itself upon them, and to be consistent with their teachings; and the result is that the sum of doctrine accepted and regarded as orthodox in modern India is incongruous beyond measure, a mass of inconsistencies”: a summing up that might, we regret to say, be truthfully made of a Christian country of far higher civilization than that of India.

Not stopping to discuss what has been called the “standing reproach” against Indian literature, that it is barren of historical and geographical results, nor to point out much that is of high value and interest to every scholar, we will close by an inquiring comment as to the following statement made by Prof. Whitney at p. 22. He is speaking of the Vedic texts, and says: “So thorough and religious was the care bestowed upon their preservation that, notwithstanding their mass and the thousands of years which have elapsed since their collection, _hardly a single various reading, so far as yet known, has been suffered to make its way into them after their definite and final settlement_.”

We have italicized the passage which we wish to make the subject of our inquiry, for, unless we are mistaken, two instances may be pointed out in which the texts in question have been garbled or seriously tampered with.

We find the first instance in the developments growing out of the discussion as to whether there are three Vedas or four Vedas (Goverdhan Caul on the “Literature of the Hindus,” _Asiatic Researches_, Calcutta, 1788, vol. i., p. 340, and Sir William Jones’ _Works_, vol. iv. p. 93 (edition of 1807)). Even down to the present day, Indian scholars sometimes speak of three Vedas, sometimes of four. According to Indian tradition, Brahma has four mouths, each of which uttered a Veda. Yet most ancient writers speak of but three Vedas, Rig, Yajush, and Sama, from which it is inferred that the Atharva was written after the three first. The Atharva is spoken of and called the Veda of Vedas in the eleventh book of Manu, and the designation affirms the assertion of Dara Shecuh, in the preface to his Upanishad, that the first three Vedas are named separately, because the Atharvan is a corollary from them all, and contains the quintessence of them all. But this verse of Manu, which occurs in a modern copy of the work brought from Benares, is entirely omitted in the best copies, so that, as Manu himself in other places names only three Vedas, _we must believe this line to be an interpolation_ by some admirer of the Atharva.

The second instance to be specified is furnished by Prof. Whitney himself, at pages 53, 54, and 55, where he gives a translation of a hymn from the concluding book of the Rig‐Veda (x. 18), describing the early Vedic funeral services. When the attendants leave the bier, the men go first, while the director of the ceremony says:

“Ascend to life, old age your portion making, each after each, advancing in due order; May Twashtar, skilful fashioner, propitious, cause that you here enjoy a long existence.”

The women next follow, the wives at their head:

“These women here, not widows, blessed with husbands, May deck themselves with ointment and perfume; Unstained by tears, adorned, untouched with sorrow, The wives may first ascend unto the altar.”

The wife of the deceased is then summoned away the last:

“Go up unto the world of life, O woman! Thou liest by one whose soul is fled; come hither! To him who grasps thy hand, a second husband, Thou art as wife to spouse become related.”

In commenting upon this hymn, Prof. Whitney notes its “discordance with the modern Hindu practice of immolating the widow at the grave of her husband,” and adds: “Nothing could be more explicit than the testimony of this hymn against the antiquity of the practice. It finds, indeed, no support anywhere in the Vedic scriptures.” And now we come to the “various reading,” for Prof. Whitney concludes the passage with this statement: “Authority has been sought, however, for the practice, in a fragment of this very hymn, rent from its natural connection, and a little altered; by the change of a single letter, the line which is translated above, ‘The wives may first ascend unto the altar,’ has been made to read, ‘The wives shall go up into the place of the fire.’ ”

We heartily welcome this work of Prof. Whitney, and thank him for it as a solid contribution to literature and to philological science, honorable to himself, and reflecting credit on American scholarship.

The House That Jack Built.

By The Author Of “The House Of Yorke.”

In Two Parts.