did. She came to earn her bread, and, while doing so, was anything but

popular. Nothing but her brilliant musical abilities, and the fact that she had been educated at Leipsic, saved her from utter failure. People did not fancy this self-possessed, unpretending young person, who could sometimes show such a haughty front to the presuming, and who was, moreover, so frightfully dark and sallow. They did not understand her, and preferred to leave her very much to herself.

One person only found her not a puzzle. To Mr. Carpenter she was simply a refined woman among uncongenial associates; becoming discontented and unhappy there, too, before many months had passed. He did not choose that she should go away. He had become pleasantly accustomed to seeing her, had sometimes met her on her long walks out of town; and once, when he had politely offered to drive her home—an offer which any other lady in Crichton would have accepted beamingly, without the preliminary of an introduction—had been refreshed by receiving a cold refusal, and a surprised stare from a pair of large black eyes. The great man, surfeited with smiles and flatteries, was immensely pleased by this superciliousness.

But though strangely disturbed at the prospect of Miss Weston’s leaving, he hesitated to speak the word which might detain her. A bachelor of forty-five does not readily determine on making a sensible marriage; it usually needs some great folly to spur him on to a change so long deferred. He had, moreover, two other reasons for delaying: he wanted a charming wife, and was in doubt whether even his power could transform this lady into his ideal: the other reason had blue eyes, and a dimple in its chin, and was a very silly reason.

But no one who knew this gentleman would expect him to remain long in doubt on any subject. Within a month from the day he first entertained the thought of running such a risk, Crichton was electrified by the announcement that Mr. Carpenter was soon to be married to Miss Weston; and, before they had recovered from their first astonishment, the marriage had taken place, and the quiet, dark-faced music-teacher was established as mistress of an imposing mansion on North Avenue.

It was now Mr. Carpenter’s turn to be astonished, and he was enchanted as well. Never had he pictured to himself a woman so charming as this grub, now become a butterfly, proved herself; and never had he imagined that even his wife could obtain so beautiful a supremacy as she gradually established and never lost. She was born to rule, and seldom had such power been placed in any woman’s hands. Mr. Carpenter was the first of her vassals. With a refined and noble arrogance, she esteemed him as the first man in the world, because he had been the first to appreciate and exalt her. For this she gave him a faithful, if condescending, affection, and quoted his wishes and opinions so constantly that one might have thought they were her only guides. So thorough was her tact and her courtesy toward her husband he scarcely guessed his own inferiority, and never dreamed that she was aware of it.

She grew beautiful, too, as well as amiable. Now that the drudgery of toil was lifted from her, and her cramped talents had room for full and exhilarating play, the swarthy skin cleared, showing a peach-like bloom, the fine teeth lit a frequent smile, and the deep voice lost its dull cadence, and took a musical, ringing sound.

Mrs. Carpenter used her power well. Crichton was as clay in her hands, and she moulded it after a noble model. What arrogance could never have done was accomplished by tact and sweetness. Her forming touch was strong and steady, but it was smooth, and nothing escaped it. Thoroughly womanly, speaking by her husband’s mouth when she deemed it not fitting that her proper voice should be heard, she could influence in matters where women do not usually care to interfere. She thought nothing out of her province which concerned the prosperity of the town she honored with her presence, and she inspired others with her own enthusiasm. That streets should be wide and well kept, that public buildings should be architecturally symmetrical, that neat cottages for the poor, replacing their miserable huts, should start up sudden as daisies along some quiet road—these objects all interested her, though she worked for them indirectly.

But in social life she ruled openly; and there her good sense and good heart, her gentle gaiety and entire uprightness, became the mould of form. Ill-nature went out of fashion, and, in the absence of charity, self-control became a necessity. When people of opposite creeds met at her house, their feuds had to be laid aside for the time; and, once two foes have smiled in each other’s faces, the frown is not so easy to recall.

Gradually the change which had been imposed outwardly became a real one; and, when Mrs. Carpenter died, full of years and of honors, her spirit continued to animate the place, in its opinions and actions, at least, if some fairer grace of heart and principle were wanting. She died as she had lived, out of the church; though the church had ever found her a friend, bountiful and tenderly protecting. Of its doctrines and authority she seemed never to have thought; but the copy of the Sistine Madonna in her drawing-room had always a vase of fresh flowers before it.

She left no children. A niece whom she had adopted married in Crichton, and had one descendant, a grand-daughter, living there. This grand-daughter was Honora Pembroke.

Wake again, Crichton, for morning is come. Long rays of golden light are shooting out of the east; and down the hillside, in the church of S. John, Father Chevreuse is saying, _Sursum Corda_!

TO BE CONTINUED.

FONTAINEBLEAU.

CONCLUDED.

CHARLES had a dangerous enemy in the person of the Duchesse d’Estampes. She was furious at his being allowed to enter France at all, and still more at his leaving it without paying such a ransom as his host might easily have enforced; but to all her arguments and blandishments Francis was nobly inexorable; he remained true, in this instance at least, to the instincts of his better nature and the promptings of knightly honor. He could not, however, resist saying to Charles, when presenting the duchess to him: “Here is a lady who advises me to undo at Paris the work done at Madrid.” To which the emperor replied coldly: “If the advice be good, you ought to follow it.” The story goes—a most improbable one, considering the position occupied by the Duchesse d’Estampes, whose jewels were worthy of a queen of France—that at supper that same evening, when, according to the complimentary custom of the times, she presented Charles with the urn of perfumed water to rinse his hands, he dropped a diamond ring at her feet, and, on her picking it up and handing it to him, replied: “Keep it, madame; it could not be in fitter hands.” Whether Charles bribed the _belle savante_ with a diamond or any other device, it is certain that, before he left, they had become very good friends, and she had quite adopted the king’s more generous view of the case.

At the close of 1546, Francis fell ill, and was supposed to be dying. The courtiers, true to the traditions of their race, immediately fled from Fontainebleau to greet the Dauphin, who was at Amboise. Francis was conscious enough to notice their disappearance, and to divine the cause of it. It stung him to the quick, and roused him to make a desperate effort to disappoint them. He rallied, and announced his intention of following the procession of _Corpus Christi_ next day. The doctors remonstrated, but in vain; nothing could shake the king’s determination. He dressed himself in his robes of state, had his pale cheeks brightened with rouge, and thus, under a mask of returning health, appeared in the midst of his astonished court, and held the canopy during the procession. But the ceremony was no sooner over than he fell exhausted into the arms of his attendants, and was carried back to bed. He remained for some time unconscious; on recovering his senses, his first exclamation was, “Well, at any rate, I will give them one more fright!” Four months after this childish piece of bravado, he died at the Château of Rambouillet.

The forest of Fontainebleau was infested during his reign with a quantity of noxious vermin—serpents eighteen feet in length, which did great damage, and filled the inhabitants with terror. One of these snakes, by his depredations on man and beast, earned the reputation for himself of a sort of mythological dragon. Some bold men had undertaken to combat him, but all had perished in the attempt. Francis declared at last that he would fight and kill the dragon himself. He equipped himself accordingly in a suit of armor covered all over with long blades as sharp as razors, and, thus armed, sallied forth to the perilous duel. The serpent coiled itself round the glistening blades, and, in clasping his victim, cut himself to pieces. This fantastic exploit of Francis was magnified by the adulation of his courtiers into a deed of supernatural prowess.

The death of Francis was the signal for the downfall of the Duchesse d’Estampes, who retreated like a dethroned sovereign before the now transcendent star of Diana of Poitiers. Diana’s frailty was unredeemed by the intellectual gifts and native kindliness that distinguished her rival. There is no counterpart even in French history to the sway exercised by this Dalila over Henri II. Madame Du Barry’s is the nearest approach to it, but even that falls far short of the precedent. Diana not only ruled the king and the kingdom, but openly usurped the honors, prerogatives, and official state of a legitimate queen. Her cipher, interlaced with Henri’s, was carved and emblazoned on all the public monuments; not a door or gallery of Fontainebleau, aptly nicknamed by the people “the Temple of Diana,” that was not surmounted by the monogram H. D. It was to be seen in the stained glass windows of the chapel, as well as on the plate served on the royal table under the eyes of Catherine de Medicis. Diana appropriated the crown jewels, and appeared at all the public ceremonies decked in the hitherto sacred regalia of the queens of France. Catherine looked on and was silent—she could wait; her hour would come. It came sooner than either she or Diana anticipated. The king fell mortally wounded in a tournament given to celebrate the nuptials of his daughter, the Princesse Elizabeth, with the King of Spain (1559). He was carried to the nearest shelter; Catherine flew to his side, and gave orders that no one should be allowed to approach him; at this crisis, at least, the wife should be supreme. Diana soon presented herself at the door, but the guard refused her admittance; the queen had forbidden it. “And who dares to give me orders?” demanded Diana, with flashing eyes; “if the king breathes, I have no master yet.” Soon he had ceased to breathe, and Diana, without further protest, bowed to the queen’s command, which bade her “restore the crown jewels, and retire forthwith to her Château d’Anet.”

Her beauty was marvellous, and lasted in all its bloom long after the meridian of life was past. Brantôme describes her at the age of sixty-five as “still beautiful as a girl.” The death of Henri II. was the signal for Catherine de Medicis’ real queenhood. Her reign lasted over thirty years, and may be justly styled, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, a reign of terror for the nation. Her first business was to create discord in the family as a prelude to civil war in the state. She imported into France, with the enlightened love of the arts imbibed at the court of the Medicis, their crafty Italian policy; a system of cabal and intrigue which worked well enough in the narrow compass of petty states, but was fruitful of the most disastrous results in a large kingdom where government can only be carried on successfully by well-organized institutions and strong and wise laws justly administered. Catherine was born with a genius for intrigue; her love for conspiracy amounted to a mania. The faculty of dissembling, with which nature had so pre-eminently endowed her, did her good service in the first years of her residence at Fontainebleau. It required all the tact of an accomplished dissembler to steer between the rival powers of the Duchesse d’Estampes and Diana of Poitiers—a feat which the wily pupil of the Medicis achieved with singular success. To the last day of their reign and her own thraldom, she contrived to remain friendly with both. Catherine’s ambition was unbounded, and drove her to excesses of wickedness that have few parallels in modern history. She systematically labored to corrupt the minds and hearts of her children, and to sow dissensions amongst them, so as to draw the power that should have been theirs into her own hands. Jealousy of one son, Francis II., drove her to espouse the cause of the Huguenots for a time; and, when his death placed the sceptre in the hands of his brother Charles IX., she veered round, and persecuted her quondam _protégés_ with cold cynicism and ferocity. Five civil wars can be traced home to the dark intrigues of this unnatural mother—a woman who never took a straight road when she could find a crooked one, who regarded human beings as an apparatus composed of an infinite variety of tools to be used one set against another as the special nature of her work demanded. The massacre of S. Bartholomew was but another manifestation of the same spirit which had led her to stir up the Huguenots to revolt when she thought their rebellion would serve her aims. This sanguinary despot had most of the foibles of a woman, combined with the fiercer passions of a man. Her frivolity and extravagance knew no bounds; and when her ministers ventured to hint to her that the lavish prodigality of her expenditure was exasperating the people, and might lead to trouble, she shrugged her shoulders, and replied, with serene simplicity: “Good heavens! one must live.” The sweet, pathetic face of Marie Stuart appears for a moment at Fontainebleau in the earlier days of Catherine’s rule—a bright meteor flashing on a troubled sky; poor Marie, whose sky was gathering up the storm that was to break at no distant day over her young life, and beat it some twenty years with a fury that was only to be silenced by the great tranquillizer—death. Fierce and long-raging were the storms that swept over Fontainebleau through the same darkling years. Henri de Navarre bears down on it like a whirlwind, and forces the queen, with her son Charles IX., to fly before him and his Huguenots to Melun. They have not taken breath at Melun when the Duc de Guise meets them like a contrary wind, and blows them back to Paris. Soon follows the night of S. Bartholomew, that blackest of black nights, under whose pall, as it has been pithily put by a modern Frenchman, “a few scoundrels killed a few scoundrels.” Its gloom was still hanging over the city when Catherine and the king were bowling along the road to Fontainebleau—he shuddering, a Macbeth terrified at his share in the ghastly deed; she triumphant, unappalled by ghost or conscience, her sharp, elastic mind busy on the next step to be taken. How was she to undo the one awkward consequence of her triumph—the remorse and mistrust of this faint-hearted son? A hundred and fifty maids, miscalled of honor, were recruited from the beauty of France, and brought to Fontainebleau to aid in the task of soothing the king’s scruples and mending the queen’s nets. But her hold upon Charles was loosened, and not all the charms of all the houris of Mahomet’s paradise would lure it to her grasp again. Catherine, however, could accommodate herself to the decrees of fortune, and turn even her own blunders to account. Charles, obdurately sullen, refused to revoke the edict of the pacification of Amboise, thus quenching for once, instead of lighting, the smouldering flames of civil war. Catherine smiled bland approval on her blighted schemes, and was full of satisfaction, as if, instead of chaining the war-dogs, she had been allowed to let them loose. She received the ambassadors in regal state, and laid herself out to captivate all men by her smiles and honeyed courtesies; feuds and jealousies were lulled to sleep with soft music of delight; all the heads of all the factions, civil and religious, turned in the dance till they were giddy, carousing, and embracing, and pledging one another in loving cups, while their followers were cutting each other’s throats hard by; fireworks sent rockets blazing to the sky—merry rockets, red, white, and green; and Fontainebleau was once more a palace of Armida, an Arabian night’s dream, where men came and drank, and were inebriated. A dark and agitated scene is that which France presents at the close of Catherine’s reign. We turn from it with relief to see Henri de Navarre enter his “good city” of Paris. After the peace of Vervins, which put an end to religious wars in France, and allowed Europe to breathe once more, the gay Béarnais came to enjoy his well-won conquest at Fontainebleau. Sully, the true and trusty friend, goes with him, supreme, though not alone, in his influence with the soft-hearted monarch. Gabrielle d’Estrée contests the field with him; but, to Henri’s honor be it said, she is defeated. Gabrielle had, in a weak moment, extracted from the king a promise that he would make her Queen of France—a promise which, as a matter of course, he immediately confided to Sully. The minister burst out into indignant protest, and outswore the Béarnese himself in the vehemence of his indignation. They parted, as usual, in a rage, and, as usual, Henri soon calmed down, and declared that Sully was right. When Gabrielle recurred to the promise, he told her the result of his conversation with “my friend Rosny.” The lady flew into a tantrum, called Rosny hard names, and wound up by insisting that “that valet” should be dismissed from the court. The insolent appellation, coming from such a quarter, roused the king to a sense of his own disgraceful weakness. “Ventre S. Gris, madame,” he cried, “if I must needs dismiss either, it shall be you a thousand times rather than my faithful Rosny—my friend without whom I could not live!” Gabrielle saw that she had overstepped the mark; for Henri, if he had the faults of a man, was no emasculated puppet, like so many of his predecessors, to be bound hand and foot by a Dalila; he had still the spirit of a king. Gabrielle fell at his feet, and begged his pardon, and Sully’s too. Shortly after this incident, Sully’s fears on her account were put an end to by her death. Henri’s grief for a time was so violent as almost to deprive him of his reason. But his fickle heart soon found consolation in a new allegiance. Mlle. d’Entragnes was the next to captivate it. For this fair siren, Henri went so far as to draw out a written promise of marriage. Before, however, giving the document into the hands of the fair lady, he, of course, showed it to Sully, the dauntless Sully, who was the most discreet of confidants, but the most unmanageable of accomplices. This time he was too deeply moved for anger; he did not bully the king, but coolly read the paper twice over, and then, tearing it deliberately into four fragments, he flung it into the fire. “_Parbleu_, Rosny, you are mad!” cried the king. “Would to God, sire, I were the only madman in France!” replied Rosny. Henri turned on his heel, and there was no more said about that marriage. He married finally Marie de Medicis. She gave birth to the Dauphin Louis XIII. at Fontainebleau. Henri’s joy was unbounded. He made his wife a present on the occasion of the Château of Monceau with its beautiful park and grounds, which had formerly been a gift to Gabrielle d’Estrée. Marie de Medicis was blest with wonderfully robust health—a fact which her husband comments upon rather quaintly in a letter to Sully ten days after the birth of the Dauphin. “My wife,” he says, “dresses her own hair, and talks already of getting up; my friend, she has a terribly robust constitution!” Sad pity that anything should spoil the attractive beauty of Henri IV.’s portrait as it hangs before us in the long gallery of royal sitters at Fontainebleau; but, alas! there it is, the black blot on the bright disk, the treacherous breach of hospitality perpetrated in his name toward an old companion and brother-in-arms. There is abundant proof that the arrest of Maréchal de Biron and his death were repugnant and painful to the king, and that for some days he combated both by every means in his power, stooping to tears and passionate entreaty with Biron, and pleading eloquently in his behalf with his own ministers; and that it was only after all his efforts had failed to convince the latter, or to wring from Biron’s stubborn pride the confession which could have saved him, that Henri’s signature was obtained for the death-warrant. This no doubt absolves him from the odium of a cold-blooded, premeditated act of vengeance; but it is a poor apology to say that he only consented to invite his old brother-in-arms to Fontainebleau, and let him be arrested in a dark corridor at nightfall, and taken to prison, and eventually put to death, because he was overruled and circumvented by the iron will of his wife Marie with the “terribly robust constitution.”

The gardens of Fontainebleau are full of delicate and poetic memories of Henri de Navarre in which Rosny plays a prominent part. The courtiers looked on at the familiar, schoolboy friendship between the king and his minister with envious eyes, and set to work with malignant diligence to loosen the bond. They succeeded in getting up such a plausible story against Rosny that the king, who had been some time without seeing him, was staggered; he examined the deed of accusation, and admitted that the circumstances looked badly. The minister was in Paris working away for his master as hard as any galley-slave at the arsenal. Henri sent for him. When he arrived, the king was on the terrace surrounded by the court; he greeted his friend with a gracious formality foreign to the habitual free and easy manner of their intercourse. Sully was pained and mystified. But the restraint was equally intolerable to both. Henri called him aside presently, and they walked up and down an alley in sight of the terrace, but out of ear-shot. The king pulled out the deed of accusation, and handed it to his friend. Rosny cast his eye contemptuously over the paper, and in a few words scattered all its contents to the winds. Henri saw that he had been the dupe of a base, designing jealousy, and broke out into bitter self-reproach at having been led to doubt even for a moment the fidelity of his tried and faithful servant. He held out his hand; Sully, overcome with emotion, was about to fall on his knees to kiss it; but, quick as lightning, the king caught him in his arms, exclaiming: “Take care, Rosny! Those fellows yonder will fancy I am forgiving you.”

The visit of the Spanish ambassador to Fontainebleau led to the construction of the large and handsome Chapel of the Trinity. After going all over the interminable galleries and halls of the vast edifice, they came to the chapel. It was very pretty, but quite out of keeping with the space and splendor of the rest of the building. Don Pedro’s minister was scandalized at the irreverence implied in the contrast, and, with the impulse of a Spaniard, exclaimed, looking round at the narrow walls of the little sanctuary: “Your house would be perfect, sire, if God were as well lodged in it as the king.” Henri was pleased with the outspoken rebuke, and at once set about building a temple worthier of the divine worship.

His ungovernable passion for the chase was a frequent cause of altercation between himself and Sully, who shared his master’s love for the sport, but, unlike him, knew where to stop in the indulgence of it. The title of _Grand Veneur_,[127] attached to the office of master of the royal hounds, dates from Henri’s time, and takes its rise from a phantom which made its appearance in the forest in the shape of a man larger than life, dressed in black, and surrounded by a pack of hounds, and who vanished as soon as the spectator tried to approach him. Sully had long laughed at the story of this spectre, but, once coming to meet the king, he came face to face himself with the _grand veneur_; he owned to the fact, but was still sceptical, though unable in any way to explain away the mysterious apparition, which he took great pains to do.

Louis XIII. resided much at Fontainebleau, and continued the work of embellishment, which needed little now to make it perfect. Anne of Austria enriched the new chapel with many valuable paintings. For a period, Richelieu is the presiding genius of the grand old palace. Then he passes away, and makes room for Mazarin, who received here Henrietta of England with a splendor becoming her double majesty of misfortune and royalty.

The first time that Louis XIV. honored the palace with his presence was on the occasion of signing the marriage contract between Ladislas of Poland and Marie de Gonzagne (1645); the marriage itself was celebrated at the Palais Royal.

Christina of Sweden furnishes one of the most thrilling chapters in the history of Fontainebleau. This eccentric woman, whose ambition it was to entwine the laurels of Sappho with the jewels of her crown, gave up the throne of Sweden to wander about the world like an Arab. That sort of eccentricity being rarer in those days than in our own, it passed for genius, wisdom, anything the owner chose to call it. Christina gained the reputation of possessing extraordinary erudition, and a mind gifted with the powers of a man, as well as adorned with the graces of an accomplished woman. Anne of Austria was filled with admiration for the queen who cast away a crown to go in pursuit of science and philosophy; and, when Christina announced her intention of visiting France, the regent made preparations to receive her which surpassed anything that Fontainebleau had witnessed since the reception of Charles V. by Francis I. Christina made her entry on horseback, surrounded by a guard of honor composed of the highest nobles of the kingdom, all magnificently attired, and followed by a _cortége_ of noble dames, some riding on horses caparisoned in housings of cloth of gold and silver, others drawn in chariots of state. The _fêtes_ given for the royal Sappho’s entertainment were on a scale equal to the splendor of this reception. She showed her sense of Anne of Austria’s appreciation of her superior merits by making herself very agreeable to her; but she earned the dislike of the young king by ridiculing openly his boyish love for Marie Mancini, and pointing an epigram at the fair Italian. Lo, when, on her return from Italy, she intimated her intention of again coming to France, Louis sent word that he placed the Palace of Fontainebleau at her disposal, but begged she would not show herself in Paris. During this second visit, Christina committed the crime which has so irretrievably damned her memory. Monaldeschi, who had been her pampered favorite for years, rightly or wrongly incurred her displeasure. Christina determined that he should die, and did not pause to consider that it was adding a darker hue to her crime to perpetrate it under the roof of a brother king. The hour suited her vengeance—that was enough. The whole thing was planned with a business-like coolness worthy of Louis XI. in his best days. The queen ordered her victim to be taken to the _galerie des cerfs_, and herself gave the most minute instructions as to how he was to be killed, and by whom: he was not to be despatched by one or even a few successive blows, but struck a great many times and at short intervals, in hopes of extracting certain avowals from him. Christina then retired to an adjoining room, and remained in animated conversation with her _entourage_ while the horrible tragedy was going on close by. Occasionally she sent in to ask if Monaldeschi were dead; when the answer again and again came back that he was still struggling, she expressed first surprise, and then impatience, and at last, unable to brook the delay, she rose and opened the door of the gallery; Monaldeschi, on beholding her, stretched out his arms in an attitude of supplication, but the queen exclaimed sharply, “What! thou art not yet dead?” and, walking up to where he lay writhing on the ground, she slapped him on the face “with that hand,” says Voltaire, “which had loaded him with benefits.” Monaldeschi had cried out for a priest to help him to die, and this last grace had been granted. Christina stood by till her victim was dead, and then quietly paid the assassins, and went back to her conversation. The news of the abominable deed of blood travelled quickly to Paris; as soon as Mazarin heard it, he sent her a peremptory order to leave Fontainebleau and France forthwith, adding that the King of France harbored no assassins as his guests; to which Christina returned the contemptuous reply that “she was queen wherever she was, and took no orders from the King of France, and was accountable for her acts neither to him nor any one else.” It is curious to observe how little horror seems to have been produced in the public mind by this execrable murder, committed under circumstances which rendered it tenfold more revolting; the ladies and courtiers of the time make no more than a passing mention of it in their letters, and, in speaking of Christina, reserve their sharpest criticism for her style of dressing her hair and her manner of dancing, which they condemn as “fantastic and awkward.” Two years after this event, we find Christina abjectly begging for an invitation to the carnival ballet in which Louis XIV. was to dance! The fact of the invitation being granted is perhaps as significant as that of its being asked for. It was accompanied, however, with the condition that the Queen of Sweden should only remain in Paris the three days that the ballet lasted; this she agreed to, and Mazarin’s apartments at the Louvre were placed at her disposal.

Louis XIV. restored Catherine de Medicis’ pavilion at Fontainebleau, called the _Pavillon des Poêles_,[128] for Mary of Modena, and fitted it up in a style of elegance and splendor befitting rather a royal bride of France than an exiled queen. But all his graceful gallantry to the beautiful exile, and professions of brotherly love to her husband, did not prevent Louis from signing in 1698 the treaty whereby he pledged himself to recognize the Prince of Orange, and not to disturb him in the possession of his kingdom.

Louis XV. was married in the chapel at Fontainebleau to Marie Leczinska (1725). He never cared for the palace as a residence, and merely used it as a hunting-lodge. His first-born son died there. Shortly before his death, the young prince, leaning over a balcony from one of the upper rooms of the palace which looked towards Paris, was heard saying to himself with a deep-drawn sigh: “What delight the sovereign must feel who makes the happiness of so many men!” A great deal has been built on this exclamation—regrets for the blighted promise which the feeling that prompted it held out to France. But twenty years before, Louis XV. had said as much, and felt it, very likely, just as sincerely. Fontainebleau was spared the shame of the saturnalian orgies that profaned Versailles and Trianon under the reign of Du Barry. The grim towers that had sheltered Francis, and the Medicis, and Henry de Navarre had many tales to tell that were better left untold, but at their worst they showed white beside the vulgar blackness of the Pompadour and Du Barry chronicles.

Louis XVI., who seldom visited Fontainebleau, has left no mark of his passages there. Under the Revolution, it was used as the military school which has since been transferred to St. Cyr. Napoleon compensated the royal old château for the neglect of his predecessors; he preferred it, next to St. Cloud, to all the other palaces of which France had given him temporary possession, and repaired it with elaborate magnificence, adhering rigidly to the original style in every detail. He also added a stirring chapter to its history. When, by his orders, General Radet scaled the walls of the Quirinal at three o’clock in the morning, and, attended by a band of soldiers, brutally dragged Pius VII. from his bed, it was to Fontainebleau that the venerable pontiff was conveyed; here he was kept in close confinement, and fed upon the bread of insult, with which it was Napoleon’s wont to nourish his captives; but Pius VII., disarmed, isolated from friends and counsellors, surrounded by spies paid to interpret his every word and gesture according to the interests and wishes of their paymaster, broken in bodily health, his mind bending under the accumulated weight of every torture that ingenious cruelty could devise, was still a greater conqueror, in the noblest sense of the word, than Napoleon ever was on the field of battle. Moreover, a day of reckoning was at hand. Fontainebleau, which had been the theatre of so many of Napoleon’s most gorgeous pageants of the melodramatic and sentimental kind—for he could be sentimental, this great butcher of men and despoiler of crowns; he could, “with delicate forethought, and at vast expense, cause a multitude of pine-trees to be planted” amidst the elms and the oaks of the sombre Medicean forest, in order that his young Austrian bride might find some reminiscence of home when she walked out for her evening stroll—Fontainebleau was to witness the going down of his sun. Fortune, exasperated at last by the excesses of her spoilt child, plucked the brilliant meteor from the sky, and cast it out into the darkness. Once, in an interview with Pius VII. during his captivity, Napoleon, after lavishing all his art of flattery on the pope, stooping to tender caresses and the most winning attitude of supplication to wrest from his captive the coveted concession of the Concordat, presently paused to see the effect of the experiment. Pius VII. was silent awhile, then, looking up at the emperor with a smile of withering scorn, he answered: _Commediante!_[129] Like lightning the tactics were changed; curses rained where kisses had been showered; threats and gestures fierce as blows succeeded to bland entreaties; the actor struck his forehead with clenched fists, stamped, grew red and white in turn, and swore that a thunderbolt should be hurled by the Tuileries at the Vatican which should crush her defiant pride, and bury all Christendom under its ruins. Again he “paused for a reply.” Pius raised his eyes, and, looking fixedly at Napoleon, murmured, this time with no smile: _Tragediante!_[130] The whole life and character of the man are summed up in those two epithets: _commediante, tragediante_. But if Bonaparte played comedy well, tragedy was his forte, and his last appearance at Fontainebleau was a splendid farewell representation. It is a little past mid-day. A bright April sun pours down from a cloudless sky upon the courtyard of the palace; the horse-shoe staircase, bathed in the unmitigated sunshine, gleams white and majestic—a stage of the antique fashion well suited for the closing act about to be played upon it. The audience are already gathered to the place; thousands of the inhabitants have flocked in from the town and neighborhood, but the inner circle, the reserved seats, are filled by the grenadiers of the guard, the Old Guard of a hundred battles and as many victories, and by the marines of the young guard. The time seems long, for every heart is beating in sympathetic emotion with the coming crisis. At last the curtain rises. The doors opening on the horse-shoe staircase are thrown back, and Napoleon comes forward. A cry goes up to him from the depths of those many thousand hearts. But hush! He waves his hand for silence. He is going to speak. The crowd sways to and fro, a human wave ebbing at the base of an adamantine rock, whence its idol of twenty years looks down upon it.

“Officers, non-commissioned officers of the Old Guard, I bid you farewell!... For twenty years you have given me satisfaction. Be faithful to the new sovereign whom France has chosen. Grieve not for my fate; I might have died, nothing would have been easier to me—but, no; I shall to the last tread the path of honor. I will write what we have done together....” Sobs, such as break the stout hearts of warlike men, interrupt him. He waits for a moment, and then resumes: “I cannot embrace you all, but I will embrace your general. Approach, General Petit.” The general advances, and Napoleon clasps him in a long embrace. “Bring me the eagle!”

They bring it. He gathers the colors to his heart, and kisses the symbol passionately.

“Dear eagle! May these kisses find an echo in the hearts of every brave man!... My children, farewell.” The voice that had electrified them on a thousand battle-fields ceased to speak; it has stirred those brave hearts to their depths; the veterans sob like women. Napoleon descends the monumental steps of the horse-shoe, and passes through the midst of them in silence. Bertrand is waiting for him at the gate. He gets into his carriage, and drives away. Thus the unrivalled actor took his leave of the world-stage on which he had figured so long and so brilliantly. The colors which he clasped in that last touching embrace were henceforth treasured as a sacred thing; half a century later, they were laid on his tomb at the Invalides.

The gallery of Diana, which had been left unfinished by Napoleon, was completed after the restoration of the Bourbon. Louis XVIII. has commemorated the achievements on a slab bearing in golden letters the date of the completion of the gallery—“_in the 20th year of my reign!_” And on the table on which Napoleon signed his abdication he caused the following to be engraved: “The 5th of April, 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte signed his abdication on this table in the king’s cabinet, the second after the bedroom, at Fontainebleau.” With the singular mixture of obstinacy and simplicity which characterized his Bourbon mind, he systematically ignored in conversation and in all official deeds the reign of Napoleon altogether, and continued to the last to date as if that stormy meteor had never broken in upon the dull horizon of his sovereignty. Those inscriptions are the only two traces of Louis XVIII.’s passage which are to be found at Fontainebleau.

Charles X. never resided there, and seldom even visited the palace. It fell into sad neglect, but was entirely restored by Louis Philippe, not only the edifice, but the pictures and costly works of art with which a long line of sovereigns had so magnificently endowed it.

Under the Empire, Fontainebleau came in for the share of imperial favor which was so impartially divided amongst the still habitable castles of France. Every autumn it was the scene of brilliant hunting-parties and varied hospitalities.

We will close this fragmentary record of the past of Fontainebleau by an incident, which, though not yet within the range of history, may one day take its place there, and be quoted with interest as an indication of the character of one destined, for aught we know, to play his part in the annals of the coming age.

The Prince Imperial, then a mere child, was playing one day in the _galerie des cerfs_ with a little friend of his, the son of an officer of the household. Suddenly, in the midst of their game, the latter rather irrelevantly remarked: “This is where Queen Hortense killed a man.” “Queen Hortense was my grandmother,” retorted the young prince indignantly; “she never killed anybody!” “Oh! but she did, though,” persisted his companion; “she killed one somewhere hereabouts; I’ve read it in a book.”

This was too formidable an argument to be met by mere words; the descendant of the injured Hortense clenched his little fist, and laid on vigorously to the traducer of his grandmother. The noise of the battle soon drew the attention of some ladies who were at the other end of the gallery; they ran to separate the combatants, and inquire the cause of the row; but the young prince, crimson with rage, and with the big tears rolling down his cheeks, broke away from them, and rushed to his mother, who was somewhere in the neighborhood.

“He says that my grandmother killed a man,” cried the child out loud, “and I say it is a lie!” Then, throwing his arms round the empress’ neck, he whispered: “It’s not true, is it, that she ever killed anybody?”

LAUGHING DICK CRANSTONE.

IT was not that soft, white, feathery stuff that flutters to the ground pleasantly and lighter than the fall of a rose-leaf; that, dancing and darting around and about everywhere with gleaming whiteness and varied and graceful motion, makes the empty air seem a living thing smiling at its own frolic. No; the snow was not of that character at all. It was a sharp, fierce storm that made at you in a determined manner, as though it had a sort of spite against you and the whole human race generally for bringing it down out of its bed somewhere up there among the clouds; that, as it was compelled to make the journey, made up its mind to let you and everybody else have the full benefit of it. So down it came fiercely in bitter lines so regular that a William Tell might shoot an arrow through them without touching a single flake. It rushed at you, it beat you in the face, it snarled around your legs, it powdered your hair, and made for the small of your back; it peeped up your sleeves, and made acquaintance with the inside as well as outside of your boots, as though it thought of getting a pair itself, and wished to examine your shoemaker’s handiwork. It laughed at umbrellas, and made such a savage assault on your overcoat and waterproof that it was plainly as enraged as it could be at being foiled, and in revenge settled down on them, till it made you look from top to toe as though you had been just rolled in feathers, _minus_ the tar.

Ah! it was a dreary day—a day that made one shiver and think of the poor, and shiver again. It spoiled the play of the children, and little Bessy would sit “anyhow,” as her nurse termed it, in her chair, with one hand mechanically endeavoring to pull the cane at the back of it to pieces, while her big round blue eyes would look out in silent wonder at the ugly day; and little Benny would flatten his already flat nose in desperation against the window-pane, creating quite a little atmosphere of fog around him; while Harry, the big brother, ten years old last birthday, would make a false attempt to keep up his spirits by riding that imaginary horse round and round the room, making him curvet and caper, and shy at that corner, and evince a particular dislike to the nurse, and kick so furiously at the door-key, till a crack of the whip suddenly brought the restive animal to his senses, and Harry would be still a moment, and gaze silently with the rest of the world out at the cheerless snow.

Was it the snow that Cranstone of Cranstone Hall was gazing at so fixedly out of the library window? Was it the snow that made those cheeks so deadly white, save for the two little purple spots on each of them? Was it the snow that made him clench his hands till the nails almost tore the flesh? What was he looking at so fixedly out there in the Park? What did he see out in the blinding snow, driving down on his own meadow-lands, and draping the strong forms of his ancestral oaks in mystic drapery, while from the bottom where the river ran, stole up a snaky mist in curling ashy-gray folds? He saw no snow, no mist, no oaks: he looked through them, beyond them, straight out at a tall form striding along, its back to Cranstone Hall, and its face to the wide, wide, bitter, cold world—striding on, and on, and on, and never looking back to the home where he fell one day like one of these little snowflakes out of heaven, and grew up straight, and tall, and honest, and true, and manly, with a head, and a handsome head too, on his shoulders, and such a heart in his bosom!—the pride of all the country-side, and the heir of Cranstone Hall. It was Dick Cranstone whose figure his father was gazing at so fixedly, though that figure had been gone three hours, and was far out of sight—Dick Cranstone, his father’s only son, the only relic of his dead mother, the boy on whom all the father’s strong heart was now set, who was striding along through the snow and the mist out into the bleak world on that winter morning, cast out from his father’s hearth and heart, driven away with a bitter curse.

What had Dick Cranstone done to bring down this curse and chastisement on his handsome young head? Dick and his father had been companions as well as father and son, for Ralph Cranstone was still a youngish man, and bore such years as he had well. His heart and his hopes were centred in this boy, whose mother had been snatched away so early; and when he saw the bright-eyed, laughing lad ripen into a great, handsome, clever young fellow, who rode with him, and played cricket with him, and scoured over the country neck and neck with him—for there was a dare-devil drop in the Cranstones—it would be hard to find a happier man in this world than Ralph, or a more loving son than Dick; in fact, “Oh! they’re as fond of each other as the Cranstones” had grown into a proverb in all the country-side. What, then, was Dick’s great crime that left him in a day fatherless, and his father childless, and rent asunder with a fierce wrench two hearts which all their lives had run together?

The Cranstones were an old family, older than Elizabeth, though it was at her time that Cranstone Hall first came into their possession. That was a good reign for people blessed with an elastic conscience. The Elizabethan Cranstone was a Catholic. He had the choice of running his neck in a noose and dying a martyr for his faith, or renouncing the religion he believed in, and taking instead the goodly Abbey of Cranstone, with its river, meads, and all its appurtenances. He did not hesitate long. Like most of his countrymen, he threw up his religion, and took to the abbey, turned out the monks, became a bitter persecutor of the church, changed the name of the place to Cranstone Hall, lived to a good old age, and the rich man died and was buried—in Cranstone churchyard. The old country folk round about tell you that this particular old Cranstone, whom they look upon as the first of the race, “died a-yellin’ for holy water like hell-foire”; but then, such people are always foolish. However, to come back to the story, the Cranstones remained from that day out a flourishing, wealthy family, strongly devoted to church and state, fierce persecutors of the Catholics whilst persecution was the fashion; when not so, what Catholics call bigoted Protestants.

Ralph was no exception to the rule. He honored the queen, and hated the pope and Papistry as genuinely as the old Elizabethan Cranstone had professed to do. He thought the country was going to ruin when he found Papists throwing up their heads, and walking about on English ground, just as though they had as much right there as anybody else. And when his old friend and neighbor Harry Clifford, who had been at Eton and Oxford with him, and whom Ralph had pronounced over and over again “the best fellow going,” turned Catholic one fine day, as soon as Ralph heard of it, and met Harry by chance at a friend’s, he turned on his heel, and walked out of the house, leaving the latter standing there with the old friendly hand outstretched towards him. From that day out, all intercourse ceased between the Cliffords and Cranstones, and the old friends were as dead to each other as though they had never met.

In good time, Dick went off to Oxford, with an Eton fame as a good bat and all-round cricketer, a handy man at the oar, the best runner and jumper in the school, added to the lesser reputation of being able to knock off the best Latin poem in the college, and running Old Barnacles hard for the head of the class—Old Barnacles, who did nothing but grub at his books night and day, and who sucked at Greek roots as little chaps would at lollipops. He made one of “the eleven” that year against Cambridge at Lord’s, and saved the game from becoming a disastrous defeat to his university by his plucky and cool play against that terrible left-hand bowler. How proud his father was of him that day! He could almost have gone up and shaken hands with Harry Clifford, whom he saw there with his wife and a beautiful young lady in the carriage, so divided in looks between Harry and his sweet wife that she could have belonged to no one else but to them. “A Clifford to the tip of her nose!” he kept repeating to himself, as he stole a sly glance at them now and then, and yearned for a grasp of his old friend’s hand; but the stubborn Cranstone blood was too strong within him, and he turned away slowly to watch the game.

It was going badly for Oxford in the second innings; the Cambridge men had a hard hitter in, who hit so hard and so furiously, and had so completely “mastered the bowling,” that the score mounted rapidly, and every new hit elicited shouts of applause for Cambridge. All over the field flew the ball, sometimes in among the rows of carriages which lined the ground. “They’ll never get him out,” said the spectators one to another, as the Cantab struck away right and left as freely as though he were playing with the bowlers. “There she goes! Bravo! Well hit!” they shouted, as the ball flew from the bat right across the field, straight and furious, full at the carriage where were seated the Cliffords. “Look out there! Look out—look out!” they shout, as the carriage party, conversing together, are utterly unconscious of the danger approaching them. It takes a long time to tell this here, though it was all over in half a minute. The cricket-ball was flying at lightning speed straight at the head of the young lady, who at the moment was looking in another direction, inattentive to the warning cries that rose from all parts of the field. The shouts were hushed into that deadly silence that will settle so awfully over a vast assembly when every eye is bent in one direction, and every heart beats as one great one with the expectation of immediate disaster. All saw the danger of the young girl, but no one could prevent it, when suddenly there is a rush of something white, a leap in the air, a bare arm flashes in the sun, and the ball is clasped in the hand of one who never missed a catch yet, as he falls back over the side of the carriage, right in among the party, holding the ball all the while, and the great Cantab is out.

“Bravo, Cranstone! Bravo, Cranstone!” What a shout from the Oxonians! What a shout and a rush from all sides of the field to applaud the young fellow whose Eton fame had not belied him for speed, and whose swiftness and agility, and that high leap in the air and splendid catch, had perhaps saved a young girl’s life, while it rid his side of a terrible foe, and revived the hopes of Cambridge! But Cranstone never heeded the shouts; he lay back there in the carriage, lifeless, his head on Harry Clifford’s knee, his eyes closed, and his face white, while the frightened ladies, who scarcely yet knew from what a danger they had escaped, bent over him in terror. He had fallen heavily on the side of the carriage, and the shock caused him to faint.

The crowd is parted by a strong man, who rushes wildly to the spot. “Dick, my boy, Dick, are you hurt? Good God! Harry, it’s my son. Water, some of you—water. Clear away there, and let him have air!” The water is brought, and in a few moments he revives, to open his eyes on a pair of the tenderest blue eyes looking pityingly and frightened into his. A shake or two, like a strong mastiff, and he is all right again; the game goes on, and, though Oxford was beaten, that catch lives in men’s memories; while Ralph Cranstone and Harry Clifford were old friends again, and Mr. Dick Cranstone was reintroduced to his old playmate, Miss Ada Clifford.

Dick went back to Oxford that year with another feeling creeping into his heart side by side with the great love for his father which had hitherto possessed it. He was not over head and ears in love with Ada Clifford, nor, since it must be confessed, she with him; but his father and himself rode over often that vacation, and Dick found the family one of the most agreeable in every way that he had ever met, while Ralph atoned for his former rudeness in a thousand ways that come with such an indescribable charm from a strong nature. Dick took back this memory with him to the university, and perhaps it saved him from getting among the “fast men”—a society only too fascinating for young fellows blessed with health, strength, good nature, good looks, and money.

Without actually giving up his practices of muscular Christianity, association with more intellectual minds brought him soon to perceive that there was a higher ambition in this life for a young man than being the captain of a cricket eleven, the “stroke” of a university eight, the best pigeon shot, or the proprietor of the most startling “turn-out” on the road. Association with intellectual men brought with it intellectual thoughts, inquiries, pursuits; while under all happily ran the boy’s innate love of honor, of what was fair and truthful, supporting him somewhat, and keeping him, on the whole, straight in the midst of the dangerous speculations and vexed problems which were being agitated around him, and discussed with all the boldness natural to undisciplined minds.

His Oxford course was drawing to a close, and he began to think of adopting some career, though the wealth and property to which he was heir necessitated no pursuit at all other than that of a quiet country gentleman living on his estates. During his last year particularly he had read and studied much, and the result of his studies and inquiries always came home to him in the form of the old question of Pilate, What is truth? He was, like his father, a loyal Englishman, a supporter of the state, rather because he found it there established, and could see no better, than for any divine right which, in his father’s mind, and in the minds of so many Englishmen, the glorious British Constitution possesses. But the church was another affair. That question puzzled him sorely. That it might be a very fine institution, that it had given birth to many splendid minds, that it still possessed many very amiable and worthy followers, he did not deny; but that an institution which was at best a very mixed affair, which was not believed in by the majority of his countrymen, which had been patched, and stretched, and mended, and cobbled to meet the exigencies of every changing hour, which was not believed in even by so many of its professed members and teachers, was in any sense a divine institution, he could not concede. To his truthful mind, it dated from Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, not from Jesus Christ; it was simply in its present form an amiable machine of state, not a divine organization which should command the approving consent of all were it what men who believed in salvation ought to follow. As for the rest of the wrangling sects, he looked upon them as so many ecclesiastical tinkerings, better calculated to bore holes in the edifice of faith than to build up a system strong, enduring, and right.

Filled with thoughts of this description, he came home restless, dissatisfied, questioning; too true and too earnest to throw quite overboard all belief as a sham, and take the world as he found it—a mixture of good and bad, inexplicable save as a result of chance and conventionality. He visited the Cliffords, and they found laughing Dick Cranstone an altered man, somewhat graver, and evidently unsettled. One day, when his father was not present, he unbosomed himself to Mr. Clifford, who was a very intellectual man. The latter listened kindly to the boy, though he knew the story well; he had gone through it all himself. He did not try to explain matters there and then; he merely told him that what he was then experiencing was the exact counterpart of what he himself had experienced. “If you like to come over in a few days, I expect to have F. Leslie here, a Jesuit, and a convert like myself. He will explain matters to you much better than I can, if you are not afraid of meeting a Jesuit, Richard.”

Dick winced a little at this proposal; he had never in his life met with a Jesuit, and his opinion of the society was formed on what he had read of them as the most deceitful, crafty, and cunning set of men ever organized to blind men’s eyes and lead them astray from freedom and light; though, when he came to think the matter over, he could not bring to mind a single case of any of his friends who had come across them and been converted to Catholicity, as some of them had, turning out fiends or blind enthusiasts. So he resolved to meet F. Leslie.

It was the old story. After due inquiry and preparation, he was converted, and immediately after went straight to his father, and told him all.

To describe Ralph Cranstone’s wrath at the news would be impossible. He only saw one terrible fact—his family disgraced for ever in the person of their last descendant his son, from whom he had hoped so much. The line of the Cranstones was poisoned, defiled in the person of one who could thus turn traitor to his queen and country. A Cranstone a Papist! And that Cranstone his son Dick! He did not ask him to retract—he rose up and cursed the boy, and turned him out of the house.

Protestant friends, this part of the story, though inwoven with fiction, is a very hard fact. It is not of unfrequent occurrence; the writer to-day has friends who in their own persons can corroborate it.

Ralph Cranstone could have borne anything rather than this—that his son should turn Papist. He might become an infidel, and believe in no God at all; he might join any one he chose of the sects, however low; he might even turn Mussulman or Jew—but a Cranstone a Papist! Good God! it were better that he had never been born.

And so Ralph sat there looking out into the storm, where the form of his brave, handsome boy had vanished. He was conscious only of the storm raging in his own breast, of the terrible curse he had uttered out of his heart on the head of the one he had loved more, infinitely more, than himself. That curse was ringing around the room still, and seemed to mock him like a fiend. He rose at last, and staggered to his room, not noticing the tearful old housekeeper, who knew that something dreadful had happened, and who came timidly asking him to take something to eat, for the day had gone. His day had gone out with his boy, and the light of his life went out with Dick into the winter storm, to be swallowed up and buried away in it for ever.

* * * * *

Dick had a hard time of it. He refused all offers of assistance tendered him by Mr. Clifford. He would not even go down to visit them; he would not appear in the neighborhood; for he could not meet his father again. He wrote to him many times, but his letters were always returned unopened. He soon received news from Mr. Clifford that his father had broken up his home, left the neighborhood, and gone no one knew whither. He could only pray for him to the God to whom, for the first time in his life, he found he could pray with a strong faith and earnest belief. He still would not go to the Cliffords’, though he corresponded with them from London, and saw them now and then when they came up. He had friends on the press, and with their assistance managed to eke out enough to live upon by means of his pen. He worked away, sustained, in his loss of father, fortune, and place, by the religion of Jesus Christ, discovering each day new wonders in an exhaustless region. His father he never heard from, nor gained any intelligence of his whereabouts, nor whether he was living or dead. The trial was a sore one, but he felt that perhaps he was in some small degree atoning for all the evils which had followed that first defection of his family from the religion to which they belonged. And so he worked away, and rose; for he had talent, and soon attained a position which relieved him from all fears of absolute want, though still poor enough.

The Cliffords were a great comfort to him, and the thought of Ada often inspired the weary pen to fresh exertion when it flagged from sheer fatigue. The more he found the love of her growing upon him, the more he avoided the presence of the family; for his poverty set a boundless sea, in his imagination, between himself and her. He excused himself for not calling on them by a thousand reasons—press of business, and the usual excuses; till at last their intercourse almost ceased, and poor Dick, laughing Dick, became wretchedly miserable, and began to look upon the world as a poor sort of place after all, while Cranstone Hall would force itself upon his mind, dreary and deserted, the garden weedy, and the oaks lonely, with that terrible, heartless curse hanging over all.

One night, while seated in his room thinking such thoughts as these, a hasty knock came to the door, and, opening it, the old housekeeper fell forward almost fainting in his arms, with the exclamation:

“O Master Richard! Master Richard, dear! he’s come back at last.”

Dick staggered as though the old woman’s trembling voice had been a giant’s arm which smote him.

“Yes, yes,” he murmured.

“For God’s sake and your dear mother’s, Master Richard, fly! He’s ill—he’s dying—he’s raving of you!... At the Hall.... Yes. Go, go, or you’ll be too late.”

He rushed into the street, she following him. The snow was falling again as bitterly as on the day when he last saw his father. The train, though it flew along, seemed to him to travel at a snail’s pace. The snow blocked the roads leading to the Hall: the chaise could not advance. He leaped out, unyoked one of the horses, bade the driver follow as best he could with the housekeeper, mounted the animal, and, by what means he never knew, found himself at the Hall. He was about to dash up to his father’s rooms, when a light in the library window attracted his attention. Mother of God! can that be his father?

The brown curls bleached to snow, the face white, and thin, and bloodless, the eyes staring wildly straight out of the window, the form shrunk, the mouth mumbling some incoherent words. The light of a candle shone full on his father’s face, altered to that of a ghost.

Dick entered trembling, uncertain whether it was a spirit or his father himself whom he saw before him.

“I want my boy, my Dick, my brave, handsome son. Bring him back to me. You stole him away. Where is he?”

“Father, he is here. Look at me, father. Here I am, Dick—your own son Dick, come back to you. Do you not know me?”

“You? You’re not my son. I’ve got no son. He went away from me. He hates his father—his poor father. I—I—cursed him, when I could have blessed him, and he believed me; and Dick’s gone—gone—gone.” And the poor creature moaned, and covered his crazed head with his hands, while the sharpest pang that ever rent his boy’s heart rent it at that moment with the thought that, perhaps, it was all his fault, and that, had he only forced himself upon him, his father might have forgiven him, all might have gone well, and he would not now have been summoned to the side of the lost wreck before him.

They bore him back to the bed whence he had stolen while those who should have watched him had dozed a little. The next day the Cliffords came over, and took up their abode in the old Hall, where Ada and her mother watched and tended the sufferer as only women can do. Dick was around them and about them, and in and out, and happy and miserable, and all contraries in a breath. Ada alone could set him right, and prevent him from going as mad as his father.

Ralph lay long between the two worlds. His strong reason; once forced out, seemed sullen to return. But it did come at last, and his weak eyes opened on his son, while the heart of the father, with all the pent-up feelings of these years, gushed out over his boy. He had gone away and wandered everywhere. He drank till his brain gave way, and only enough reason was left to lead him home to die.

But death seems a long way off from Ralph Cranstone yet. The saying is oftener than ever on people’s lips, “They’re as fond of each other as the two Cranstones.” Old Cranstone’s face—the Elizabethan—has taken a new scowl, for underneath his picture rises up an ivory crucifix which Ralph himself set there. The snow falls merrily and cheerily; the old oaks smile in their winter garb; no mist rises up from where the river runs. Yes; that’s young Ralph there dashing out of the hall door to meet his uncle and papa; there he goes climbing up uncle’s legs, and shaking him as though he were a telegraph post set up there for him to shake; and, if ever there was a happy couple, that couple is Ada and laughing Dick; and the old Cranstone frowns down on it all out of his dim canvas, for the Cranstone line has gone back to its old faith.

SONNET

TO A BOOK OF IMAGINATION; OR, THE LITERATURE OF THE FUTURE.

Go forth, fair book! Go, countenanced like that man Upon whose brow all Eden’s light was stayed; Beauteous as truth, go forth to cheer and aid, Breathing of greatness ours ere sin began; With angel-wing from eyes earth-wearied fan Convention’s mist; revive great hopes that fade; Bid nature rule where reigned but masquerade; Bear witness to the joy divine that ran Down to Creation’s heart, while, bending o’er it, The great Creator saw that all was good— The mightier joy, when, dying to restore it, He rose who washed it in his conquering blood. Go forth, a seer in minstrel raiment clad; Say to the meek, “Be strong”; the poor, “Be glad!”

—_Aubrey de Vere._

THE PRESENT GREATNESS OF THE PAPACY.

FROM THE CIVILTA CATTOLICA.

I.

WE do not know that history, ancient or modern, offers a spectacle similar to the one presented to the world by the Vatican to-day. Upon the brow of that hill sits an august Pontiff and king, an octogenarian, unarmed, dethroned, a prisoner. He is strong only in the power infused into him from God; rich only in heavenly wisdom and the love of nations; great in his merits towards Christendom; great, above all, in the treasure of rights divine and human which he represents. The powers of earth have attacked or forsaken him; the base world concentrates against him all its rancor for the extermination of everything that Christian civilization holds sacred. Standing alone, with serene brow and heart unshaken, he lifts his head before this concourse. He humbles, confounds, sears them; the more furious the attack, the more does he show himself invincible to assault and terrible to assailants.

The enemy has hitherto triumphed over all and conquered all; subduing empires, destroying kingdoms, subjugating nations. He holds in his hand all the instruments of brutal force, and in his service all the passions of brute nature. He is to-day almost master of the civilized globe; yet he cannot rule that venerable man of eighty years, who stands as high in glory and authority as the opponent lies low in vile infamy.

Such is the spectacle, historically unique in all its accessories, which we have witnessed for several years, and have never seen so grand and august in aspect as to-day—the contrast between Pope Pius IX. and the Revolution. Unique, we say, for in no age of Christianity do we find its equal for the universality of war, and arms, and desolation, or for the duration and variety of outrages. Therefore, the contrasts between Gregory VII., Innocent III., Boniface VIII., and Pius VII., with the impious sovereigns who dared to oppress them, do not in several points present a parallel.

There are feeble spirits, unmindful of the past, and weak of faith in the unfailing promises of Christ, who cannot read the lucid words graven by his finger on the tiara of Pius IX.: I am the strength of God; let no man touch me!

Through the shower of hostile darts raining around the Vatican they do not discern the glory of moral grandeur radiating from it. Therefore they are discouraged and scandalized. For the comfort of such as these, it seems well to speak of this grandeur, which, in our opinion, is clearly shown in the glorious cause defended by the Pontiff, in the mode and circumstances of his defence, in the quality of the enemies who attack him, as well as of the friends who support him.

II.

The cause for which Pius IX. wages so stern a war is the cause of God and man; the cause of liberty, individual, domestic, and social; in short, a cause embracing all those ordinances without which no public or private right, no property, or virtue, or justice, or peace, could be maintained. In the Sovereign Pontiff temporarily imprisoned in the Vatican, the Revolution attacks not only the liberty of the supreme Catholic apostolate and the legitimacy of the most inviolable of thrones, but also all rational liberty of conscience, and the source of all social authority. In the Sovereign Pontiff, it attacks God, whose vicegerent on earth he is, and with God all rights and duties of nature and of grace, which proceed originally from him.

The Revolution, essentially satanic, full of hate towards God and man, _extollitur supra omne quod dicitur Deus_.[131] It tries to supplant God, whose every image in creation it would gladly see cancelled. From the beginning, it has always attacked the Papacy as the most vivid and universal representation of God among men; of God under the double aspect of Creator and Saviour, author of reason and faith, eternal founder of natural society and of the church; in one word, of Christ the God-man. As it cannot dethrone Christ in heaven, it would dethrone him on earth: and, to accomplish this hellish work of madness under the guidance of Satan, it directs all its efforts against the Roman Pontificate, truly the true vicariate of Christ, the king of the world.

All moral grandeur, human and divine, is therefore included in the cause defended by Pius IX. against the ministers and satellites of the enemy of human nature and of God’s Word. The accursed phalanx make use of innumerable frivolous and false pretexts to reach their aim; but in truth they thirst to destroy the Papacy because the Papacy embraces all morality of reason and faith emanating from the Word, the unchangeable and eternal wisdom. In vain the Revolution masks its batteries behind the dazzling names of liberty, civilization, and progress, pretending to seek the destruction of the Papacy as their implacable adversary. Indeed, after eighty years of experience, it is evident, palpably certain, that under its false liberty lies hidden the most ruinous tyranny that ever oppressed the world. It usurps the dominion of conscience and of family life, and confiscates at its wanton and fickle will the blood and gold of nations which it has trampled underfoot, giving them in return only the liberty of corruption and blasphemy. Its treacherous civilization covers a refined barbarism fully shown by the carnage and ruin of France in 1793, and of Spain in 1834, and by the massacres and conflagrations of the Commune in 1871. Its baleful progress tends to change the partnership of Christian nations into a horrible hell of disorder, where, as in the kingdom of Satan, _nullus ordo sed sempiternus horror inhabitat_.[132]

Therefore, strictly speaking, Pope Pius IX., with his indomitable resistance, defends all the wealth of humanity against the monster that would destroy it as the communists destroyed it before our eyes in Paris lately. The religious, civil, and material ruin of the human race is the final end for which, directly or indirectly, with or without deliberate purpose, all the partisans of the Revolution exert themselves, from the most hypocritical or dull of moderates to the grossest socialist.

The immeasurable grandeur of this cause defended by the Roman Pontiff is generally seen and felt by all, even more by the enemies than by the friends of the Papacy. Upon their war against the Vatican they have concentrated their best strength, sagacity, and industry. They care for nothing so much as for the least trifle connected with the Pope; they talk, and write, and vociferate of nothing so much as of the Pope’s sayings and doings; of the hopes and fears which agitate them in this war. Hence the first position in the political world and in what we call public opinion is held by the Pontiff. It is preserved to him and nourished by that very Revolution which would gladly annihilate for ever his name and memory. It cries a thousand times a day that he is dead and buried, and a thousand times a day it is forced to bewail his vitality and energy; neither more nor less than do the demons and the damned in the abyss, forced to glorify God for ever, in that they will eternally blaspheme him.

This is one of the marvellous sports of Providence in our day: to make use of the wild beasts of the Revolution to strengthen the Papacy. When they think to devour it, they find themselves drawing its triumphal car. So it was with Nero and Domitian in their persecutions against Christianity; so with Henry IV. and Barbarossa in the middle ages; so with the Directory and Bonaparte in modern times. What doubt can there be that the same will come to pass with the Lanzas, the Bismarcks, and their compeers in our own day?

III.

But the glories of the cause for which Pius IX. is fighting receive also wonderful lustre from the strange modes and conditions of his warfare. He has neither arms nor soldiers; he is poor in gold; neither diplomacy, nor journalism, nor the telegraph is subject to his orders; he is morally deprived of the liberty of leaving the precincts of the Vatican, whose outer gates are guarded by the cut-throats of the Revolution. Arms, money, diplomacy, newspapers, and the telegraphic wires are in the hands of the enemy who besieges him before the tomb of S. Peter, and who uses them as far as possible to his injury. The artifices, conspiracies, calumnies, outrages, and insults of the Revolution succeed each other like waves on a tempestuous sea. And to make them more exquisitely atrocious, the greater number are hurled at him with the absurd protest that his inviolability is guaranteed by the majesty of the laws.[133]

Literally speaking, no other arms are left to the Holy Father than his constancy and his word; but it is a constancy that makes the enemy despair, and a word that confounds him. That apostolic breast is inaccessible to seduction, those august lips are inexhaustible of truth. He boldly defines theft to be theft, injustice to be injustice, tyranny to be tyranny; his language does not change with the times, nor to suit any one whomsoever. In condemning crimes and reproving villany, he has no respect for persons. He fears the powerful no more than the faint-hearted. He does not suffer himself to be deluded by the promises or dismayed by the threats of those who boast innumerable armies and glory in formidable artillery. The heart of Pius IX. is undaunted by the flash of swords and the thunder of cannon. The Revolution, unable to shake the firmness or chain the tongue of Piux IX., regards him with a shuddering admiration, and exalts with demoniac yells his superhuman power.

In very truth, a strange case! We see a victim and an assassin. The victim has only the moral strength of dignity and right: the assassin is opulent in brute force; yet the victim does not tremble before the assassin, but the assassin before the victim. The Revolution does not make Pius IX. turn pale: Pius IX. intimidates the Revolution. A rebuke from the victim strikes sharper terror into the assassin than the whole arsenal of the assassin can infuse into the victim.

This fact alone, in our opinion, is a striking proof that the Papacy is divine in origin, in its prerogatives, its life, its activity, its manifestation. The mysterious power which, with the simple virtue of a _non possumus_ and a _non licet_, it exercises on earth, proves that God speaks in it, and its word proceeds from the Word of truth. What other mere mortal could by his own power produce effects so great with arguments so slight? A motto of Napoleon I. intimidated whole nations, because at his beck armed men stood forth and always victorious: his power was founded on iron and in blood. But on what soldiery rests the word of the Vicar of Christ, imprisoned in the Vatican? What invasion, what battle, can be dreaded as the result of a _non possumus_ and a _non licet_ of Pius IX.? Yet these words, uttered by his lips, strike perplexity into the leaders of all Revolutionary armies. How explain this wonder without admitting that the strength of Pius IX. is God’s strength? And after that, how deny that the stupendous greatness of the Roman Pontificate never shone more gloriously than now, whilst Pope Pius, in the name of the King of kings, and of the Lord of lords, _pugnat gladio oris sui_,[134] strikes with the sword of the Word, and conquers the satanic hydra of the insolent Revolution?

IV

The assailants of the Papacy are wont to say, in their own praise, that the Vatican has for its adversaries the most enlightened, cultivated, and virtuous men of our time. We, on the contrary, see the very opposite. With certain exceptions, including the blind, the dull, and the deluded, in the throng of declared enemies of the Roman Pontificate, we find only the moral dregs of society. There are great and small, of course, but, when put to a moral test, they are all equal, one as good as another, unless, indeed, the great are worth less than the small. In the throng, there are heretics without a creed, Jews without a Testament, atheists without a God, and Catholics without laws. We find deserters from every flag—those who betray their masters, and bite the hands of benefactors; doubled-faced deceivers—men who have instigated horrible massacres, and flattered every social crime; men guilty of infamous sacrilege, awful rapine, nefarious murders. We see corruptors of the people—burglars, brawlers, bombarders of harmless cities, mercenary writers, vendors of honor, protectors of evil haunts, worshippers of luxury. We notice all the apostates from the church and the priesthood: renegade Christians, silenced priests, unfrocked friars. We see men who insult God, disturb civil order, tear down thrones, cheat and defraud their neighbor—in short, men who blaspheme against the faith, and trample on the Ten Commandments. There is no kind of sectarian, from the most stupid of Freemasons to the most brutal of communists, that does not make part of this crowd of enlightened, cultivated, virtuous men of the present age.

The Prophet Daniel contemplated, in four shadowy, mysterious creatures, not only the four great monarchies of the earth, but the four great persecutions to which Christ’s church would be subjected in the course of ages. The interpreters of this acceptation of the vision agree in saying that the first, symbolized by the lioness, meant the persecution of Gentiles so cruelly prosecuted by the Roman Cæsars; the second, denoted by the bear, that of heretics; the third, represented by the leopard, that of false Christians; and the last, figured by a nameless creature awfully hideous, that of Antichrist, and so designated because, _in ea erit omnium perversitatum concursus_, it shall contain in itself the wickedness of the three preceding ones.[135]

It is, indeed, difficult to decide whether the terrible and universal persecution which the Catholic Church is now sustaining, especially in the person of the Sovereign Pontiff, should be referred to the third as its completion, or to the fourth as its preparation. When we consider the quality of the persecutors, they are undoubtedly false Christians, and worthy to be compared in ferocious malice to the leopard. But when we see in them the union of all perversity united to slay the church in its head, we suspect that the present is, indeed, a preparation for that final persecution which must forerun the consummation of the human race.

However that may be, it is beyond controversy that the persecution of to-day bears all the marks of Antichristianity, and that its promoters, followers, and accomplices accord with the description given by the apostle S. Paul to his disciple and Timothy. We give the text, let him deny it who can:

“Know also this, that, in the last days, shall come dangerous times.

“Men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, haughty, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked,

“Without affection, without peace, slanderers, incontinent, unmerciful, without kindness,

“Traitors, stubborn, puffed up, and lovers of pleasures more than of God;” and the following verses.[136]

Now, if, according to the proverb, the vituperations of the wicked are praise, is it not glory for the Papacy to see unchained against it to-day all the malice of the world, and to be lashed by all that Christendom holds in its bosom most odious, despotic, base, and abominable? Is not this the highest summit of grandeur? Is it not an unexampled participation in the glories of Christ?

V.

The more startling the contrast of opposite qualities in those who love and are faithful to the Papacy, the more must we admire them. To the moral dregs of society we see opposed the very flower of good men of every condition and in every country; not only among Catholic Christians, but among Protestants and schismatics, and even among Turks, Jews, and the barbarians of Asia. In vain does the Revolution try to vilify with terms of reproach those who are devoted to the Pope and to his sacred rights. It cannot prevent them from being what they are—an honor to the world, and the support of justice. It is impossible to be sincere, to understand clearly the significance of the cause defended by the Papacy, and not feel for it love and veneration. For this end it is not necessary to have supernatural faith, and to belong to the fold of the church: the light of reason, human understanding, are sufficient. Reason and sense make it clear to the least astute minds that the Pontiff is now defending all order, every right, every social law, against an enemy who hates God in humanity, and every good of God in the good of mankind.

The ardor of Catholics all over the world for Pius IX., and the close union of the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy with his see, constitute a plain and lasting fact which will surely be the greatest glory of this age in the annals of Christianity. It is a glory due chiefly to the Revolution, which has been providentially permitted and ordained by God, chiefly for the end of better strengthening and confirming unity in the hierarchy of his church. The result has been an exaltation of Papal authority among Christian nations so new and striking that it now forms a large part of the strength with which the Papacy repels the attacks of the Revolution, and promises to surpass before long the effective power which it possessed in the middle ages of our era. The complication of events leads nations to recognize in the Roman Pontificate the sole anchor of safety left to them in these tempests raised by the Revolution. We may say that an irresistible power is little by little bringing them to seek refuge in this asylum. Not only has the Pontiff’s voice found a wonderful echo in the soul of peoples, but his sacred person is oppressed, so to speak, with demonstrations of faith and love more solemnly magnificent than could be imagined. The voluntary tribute of blood has been and is offered to him by thousands of valiant men; that of gold is constantly given to him by millions of the faithful. He is truly the most beloved, praised, and honored among men. In our time, there is no name of magnate or of king which ranks so high as the name of Pius IX.

It is true that governments occupied almost everywhere by the Revolution strongly oppose, with a thousand corrupting and despotic artifices, this movement of nations towards the Papacy; but all in vain. The wind blows from that quarter, and it is a wind that crushes, sweeps, and grinds to powder all impediments. See how rapidly the deeds and men of the Revolution succeed each other in the nations oppressed by it; the instability of its kingdoms, the fragility of its empires, the fickleness of its victories, the inanity of its statistics, the weakness of its institutions; all about it is variable, changeable, inconstant: the buildings of yesterday crumble to-day.

This is because its satanic power is that of a meteor, not of a star; it appears, falls to ruin, and disappears. The power of the Papacy, on the contrary, is a sun which does not pass away, but lives; and the vivid flashes which it sends through the clouds gathering around the Revolution already show that the meteor is about to break and melt away.

VI.

Yes, the present greatness of the Roman Pontificate, impersonated in Pius IX., the visible pole of all social order in this world, the terror of bad hearts, and joy of upright souls—this glory is only the first gleam of that which his heroic and lingering passion is preparing for an approaching future.

For the comfort, meanwhile, of the weak and timid, we repeat, with the more sagacious minds of our own day, that the future is for the Papacy, not for the Revolution; that the Papacy has already conquered the Revolution. We will conclude by making our own those noble words upon the immortal youth of the Church, spoken by our Holy Father to the representatives of the Catholic youth of Italy, on Epiphany of this year, in the Vatican. We accommodate them with perfect propriety to the supreme office of the Vicariate of Christ, with which he is divinely invested, and which he so gloriously sustains in the presence of God, of angels, of men, and of the infernal Revolution itself:

“My sons, let us give battle, and fear nothing. Remember that the enemies of God are vanishing, and the Papacy remains. The Child Jesus fled into Egypt, but in the night-time he was told to return, ‘for they are dead who sought the life of the child.’ How many persecutors of the Papacy are dead! After giving vent to their fury, and decimating the faithful who served God, they are dead: and the Papacy is left. Yes; _ipsi peribunt_, but thou, beloved Peter, living in thy successors—thou, constituted by God his vicar on earth—thou remainest, and thou shalt always remain: _ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanebis_. Thou shalt remain, young, vigorous, constant, in contrast to the persecutions which purify the church, whose head thou art, wash away its every spot, and make it stronger. _Ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanebis._ Thou art still with us in the teaching of truth and morals, in many ways, under many appearances. _Ipsi peribunt, sed tu permanebis._

“Let this be our consolation, our comfort, our faith. Let us feel assured that _ipsi peribunt, Petrus autem permanebit usque in finem sæculorum_.”[137]

And you, great Pontiff, in uttering these sublime words, little thought that, three days later, he would perish suddenly who for many years had been the treacherous tormentor of the Papacy in your august person.

Napoleon III. perished uncrowned, humbled, in exile; that Napoleon who, in the intoxication of his empty triumphs, thought to hold in his hand, after your death, the victory over the Roman See, _periit_. He died, let us hope, repentant; and you, Holy Father, survive him to pray for his peace after death, with the same generous soul that, like your divine Model on Golgotha, always pardoned him in life. He has vanished like a shadow, first from the greatest throne in Europe, then from the sight of men, _periit_; and the Papacy _permanet_ in you more than ever invincible. You, Pope Pius, for the time a prisoner, continue, from the Vatican, with Christ and in Christ, to reign beloved, blessed, applauded, over all who have a believing heart, an upright soul. Napoleon III. has gone down to that city of the dead which shall form the pedestal of your greatness in all ages: _scabellum pedum tuorum_; peopled by beings like Cavour, Palmerston, Mazzini, and by a throng of many others, who girded their loins for the mad enterprise of crushing out in his Vicar Christ our God, King of Heaven and Earth.

A MAY CAROL.

BY AUBREY DE VERE.

Is this, indeed, our ancient earth? Or have we died in sleep, and risen? Has earth, like man, her second birth? Rises the palace from the prison?

Hills beyond hills ascend the skies; In winding valleys, heaven-suspended, Huge forests, rich as sunset’s dyes, With rainbow-braided clouds are blended.

From melting snows through coverts dank White torrents rush to yon blue mere, Flooding its glazed and grassy bank, The mirror of the milk-white steer.

What means it? Glory, sweetness, might? Not these, but something holier far— Shadows of him, that Light of Light, Whose priestly vestment all things are.

The veil of sense transparent grows: God’s face shines out, that veil behind, Like yonder sea-reflected snows— Here man must worship, or be blind.

“FOR BETTER—FOR WORSE.”

CONCLUDED.

“PRAY take an easier chair, Mrs. Vanderlyn,” says the invalid; “I thank you for your sympathy, and trust my cough has not disturbed you.”

“Oh! not at all,” says Agnes; “it only made me want to come to see you, and I hope you will not regard it as an intrusion on my part.”

“By no means. You are very kind. I see it in your eyes. You do not shun the sick. It is a good heart that leads you to me. I thank you.”

These words are interrupted by painful coughing, but, after the paroxysm has passed, she becomes more quiet, and Agnes has a better opportunity of studying her face while they converse.

In spite of her wasting disease, it is a beautiful and _saintly_ face still, and evidently has been much more beautiful in health and youth. Refinement and purity are stamped on every feature, and in every gesture and every fold of her raiment. The small, thin hands, folded over the book in her lap, are those of a delicately bred lady. A heavy plain gold ring, on the third finger of her left hand, is so loose that it is guarded by another and smaller one. These are all the ornaments she wears. A soft, warm wrapper of brown merino, a little white cap of thin muslin which does not altogether hide her abundant dark hair, are all of feminine costume to tell of the wearer’s character.

The room is very neat and comfortable, and shows no sign of poverty. On the walls are a few wood engravings, mostly of religious subjects, and a few photograph portraits finished in oils. A crucifix stands on the mantel, and a smaller one, attached to a rosary of Roman pearls, on the table by her side, where also is an exquisite Parian statuette of the Blessed Virgin and Child. Agnes sits on the other side of this table, and, while she converses with her hostess, her attention is drawn to a small book lying near her. Apparently only to read the title, she takes up this book, and opens at the fly-leaf. It is a prayer-book, and, in a lady’s writing, she reads:

“Martin Vanderlyn, from his wife.” Although prepared to know the truth, almost knowing it before she came into the room, Agnes feels her cheeks and lips grow pale; but she has always great command of herself, and now has not been taken quite by surprise.

“My husband is not a Catholic, although that book bears his name,” says Mrs. Vanderlyn. “Perhaps he is a relative of yours,” she adds, looking inquiringly at her guest.

“I never heard my husband speak of any relative of that name,” Agnes says. “The name is not a very common one, either. It seems strange that two of us should meet here. Is your husband absent?” She has remarked that Mrs. Vanderlyn had said, “My husband is not a Catholic,” and the avoidance of the use of the past tense gives her the chance to put her question, which she does to cover her own confusion, and mislead the lady as to herself. An expression of pain passes over Mrs. Vanderlyn’s face, as she quietly replies:

“Yes; he is absent, travelling.” It is not the first time that the poor lady has been obliged to answer a similar question, so she is not much disturbed; but Agnes feels sorry she has asked it. Mrs. Vanderlyn goes on speaking of her increased indisposition: “Mr. Vanderlyn does not know how very rapid has been the progress of the disease. I am much worse now than when he left home.”

Agnes cannot find it in her heart to ask how long it is since he left her. She thinks she knows, and she thinks she understands that Mrs. Vanderlyn does not wish her to know that she is a divorced woman. She respects this as a delicacy of feeling which her own position fully teaches her to appreciate. With her present knowledge of Martin Vanderlyn as a husband, her sympathies are all with his wife. She believes now that it was his fault and not hers which made the trouble between them. Her strong good sense tells her that Mrs. Vanderlyn being a Catholic was no sufficient reason for his separating from her; and she cannot believe that this lady has been a disagreeable companion to live with.

Overwhelmed with all the thoughts surging in her mind, she soon takes her leave, all the sooner that she hears her boy calling to her.

“You have a little son,” Mrs. Vanderlyn remarks. “Will you not bring him in to see me? I am very fond of children, and the only one I had is dead; I shall soon meet her, I hope. But to-morrow you will bring your boy to see me, will you not?” And she holds her hand out to Agnes, and looks wistfully in her face. Agnes is touched almost to tears as she promises.

The next day, with her “curled darling” clinging to her skirts, she goes to see this _sister_, as she somehow feels Mrs. Vanderlyn to be to her. Are they not both the deserted wives of the same man? And she feels that this one is more truly the wife than herself, in spite of all the law can do for her. And it has not escaped her notice that Mrs. Vanderlyn spoke of Martin as her husband still.

As she approaches Mrs. Vanderlyn, little George is hiding his face in her skirts, only allowing himself to look out, from time to time, between his fingers, at the lady. No urging from his mother seems likely to get him out of his intrenchment.

“Let him alone,” Mrs. Vanderlyn says; “that is the way with many children. When we stop urging him, he will show himself of his own accord.”

And so he does. After the attention of the two is, as he supposes, removed from himself, the chubby fingers come down, and the bright eyes gaze steadily at Mrs. Vanderlyn. She, becoming aware of this, turns, saying, “What is your name, darling?”

“Martin Van’lyn,” proudly speaks out little George, using the name by which his father had nearly always called him, and which he now seems to choose in a spirit of sheer mischief, for Agnes has rarely called him by that name. She had opposed it because it confused the address she used for his father. The child speaks out the “Martin” with unusual distinctness too, although he has oftener called himself “Marty” than Martin. Agnes has never thought of the boy thus betraying her, and she has said truly that his name is George. She is confused, and looks distressed, feeling that Mrs. Vanderlyn will naturally suspect her of falsifying, if not much more.

That lady seems equally disturbed, but in a different way from that which the child’s blunder might be supposed to create. She pauses, stammers, and, in great agitation, looking at Agnes, exclaims:

“_Whose_ child is this? I could almost think I had my own again! Holy Mother, help me!” Then reaching for a little velvet miniature case, she opens it with trembling fingers, saying, “Look at that!”

Agnes looks, and sees the face of a child nearly the age of her own, which is so good a likeness of George that it might be taken for him. What wonder? It is the picture of his half-sister. These children of the same father had inherited a resemblance to his family rather than to himself, and here is little George looking at Mrs. Vanderlyn with the eyes and smile of her own child. Who has not observed how wonderfully lineage will proclaim itself in this way? The poor lady is more overcome by this sight than by any question as to George’s name; but that has not escaped her notice. She lays her wasted hand on the arm of Agnes, and says appealingly:

“Tell me the name of this child’s father! Pardon me! See, I will tell you first why I ask, that you may know why I take this liberty with you. I am Martin Vanderlyn’s deserted wife. This is his child’s face, and that is your child. He says his name is Martin. Pardon me, dear lady, again, for asking. I do not wish to pain you as I am pained; but what that man did to one woman he may have done to another—deserted her. I have heard that he did deceive another, and married her. I had not believed it, because he came to me for money within the past year, and spoke of returning to me after he had done travelling. I could not believe he had pretended to marry another woman; but with this” (pointing to the picture and to the boy), “you see I cannot help believing it. Are you that unfortunate woman?”

She speaks with tender commiseration for Agnes rather than with any animosity toward her. Agnes has stood during all this time, with her hands nervously clutching her dress, and vainly trying to be composed. Of what need, after all, is concealment from this woman, evidently not long for this life, and so full of pity and forgiveness? So she answers:

“You have rightly guessed. This is Martin Vanderlyn’s son, and I am what you truly call that unfortunate woman whom he has deserted. But I knew you immediately to be his divorced wife.”

“Divorced! who says so? No; I am not _that_. He would have made me so, but I am a Catholic, and I would not consent to it. I _could_ not. He is my husband still, and, while I live, no law can make another woman his wife. But, oh! this is too cruel to you!” she says, seeing Agnes droop at once. “Did you really believe, dear, that you had the law on your side? You thought he was divorced from me. Ah! no; not even that doubtful right had he to marry you. He has not even the Protestant permission, for he is not divorced from me. Even if the law had so parted us, he ought not to have married another, and I, as a Catholic, _could not_ do so; for you remember our Lord’s words that “he who shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.” I pain you, madam, very much, I know, but I must not deceive you more than you have been deceived already. I have not much longer to live, and I must speak truth. If he ever returns to you, as I once hoped he would return to me, I may be in my grave then. Beg him, in that case, to marry you, else you will never be his wife. I say this for your good. I am sure you cannot think it is in malice. Look at me. I have nearly done with this life—above all, with Martin Vanderlyn. You have shown me kindness. I say to you what I do now, that you may see to it that no more wrong in the sight of Heaven is done. I cannot look into your face, and think that you will live with him again while I live.”

“Oh! no, no! God forbid!” cried Agnes. “I am not _that_, I could not be!”

“Then see to it when I am dead,” says Mrs. Vanderlyn, and she sinks back exhausted in her chair. Agnes kneels before her, and does everything in her power to restore her; but, in the meantime, her own condition is almost as pitiable. Little George has got hold of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s rosary, and is quietly playing with it during all this time. When Mrs. Vanderlyn is more composed, Agnes gives way herself. Drawing her boy to her heart, she cries:

“Oh! what am I, and what is he? What is our name, and what can we call ourselves? Can a few words more or less from judge or jury thus disgrace us? If I am not his wife, what am I? God knows I insisted on marriage with him, and entered upon it in good faith.”

“I do not doubt you,” Mrs. Vanderlyn says gently. “But, my dear, call yourself by your own name again. Try to put yourself, as far as possible, back into your old life, until you can get him to make it right.”

Alas! she little knows how these words pierce Agnes, and enlighten her as to the great wrong that has been done. Her own name again? Why, what is it? Not Thorndyke now. Her old life! She shall

“Hear the ‘Never, never,’ whispered by the phantom years.”

Another woman fills her place, closed now for ever to her, even if she could wish to take it. No honored wife can she be now; only a dishonored woman, deceived, betrayed, deserted. Her child without a father’s name to call his own—in the eyes of the law, “nobody’s child.” Where shall she go? What shall she do? To earn their bread she expected, but she had not thought to do it in disgrace. The two women weep together, Mrs. Vanderlyn trying to comfort Agnes, who now tells all her former history to this new and strange friend. Strange, indeed, that to Martin Vanderlyn’s true wife this shameful story should be confessed by his victim; but Agnes feels that she has not a wiser, kinder friend.

“Oh! where shall I go? What shall I do!” she sobs, with her head in Mrs. Vanderlyn’s lap.

“My dear, if you were a Catholic, I should answer: ‘Go to your confessor.’ As it is, could you not seek advice of your pastor? What kind of Protestant are you, dear?”

“Alas! I have no pastor. I _was_ a Presbyterian. I am nothing now. _He_ destroyed all my faith.”

“Yes, yes; I can well believe it; only a faith rooted deep as mine is, and as invulnerable, could withstand his assaults,” Mrs. Vanderlyn says sadly. “But, my poor child, you need some counsel wiser than I can give you, and a strength greater than your own or mine to lean upon in this sore trial. Are you too prejudiced to let me bespeak for you the aid of my own pastor, F. Francis? Our fates seem so to meet in this great trouble of our lives (though I know yours is the greater burthen) that I feel sure F. Francis will give you the advice and consolation you need.”

Agnes is startled at the proposition, but it does not repel her as it once would have done. This much, at least, unbelief will do for its victims, if they have been Protestant—it destroys that intense prejudice against the Catholic clergy which is the very life of Protestantism. Indeed, it often ploughs up the soil of the mind, and roots out the weeds of prejudice and bigotry, leaving a fair chance for the seeds of the true faith to find root. Agnes has been a very thoughtful woman, and has often suspected that there must be some divine influence in the Catholic religion to bind its believers to it, and to sustain them as she has seen no others held and sustained. In Mrs. Vanderlyn, she has perceived, through all her own perplexity and grief, a marked example of this divine assistance. Now that the way is open, she feels a yearning to lay hold of the same support. It is the desperate groping of a despairing soul for something beyond itself. Moreover, she has seen the gentle face of F. Francis, and heard the kind tones of his voice. So she answers humbly:

“If he will let me, Protestant as I am, trouble him with my affairs, I would be indeed glad to have his advice. He must be often called to comfort distressed Catholics, who keep nothing back from their priests.”

“Indeed he is—none oftener. Then I will tell your part of this sad story to him first. He, of course, knows mine already. What shall I call you to him, dear? You will be Mrs. Thorndyke still to him and to me, but you may not like to hear the name from us, and we must designate you.”

“Call me Agnes Rodney—my father’s name may yet be mine. This is the second time I have taken it back. I gave my boy that name. Poor child! He has no other now.”

The boy has been sleeping on the pillows of a sofa for some time, happily hidden from Mrs. Vanderlyn’s sight by the back of his mother’s chair. As he turns now in his sleep, Agnes rouses him, and leads him from the room.

On the following day, Agnes is asked by a servant to come to Mrs. Vanderlyn’s room. She suspects that it is to meet F. Francis, and she is not mistaken. It is not so great a trial to her as she has feared, for Mrs. Vanderlyn has told the story first to him.

From this interview she goes with a chastened spirit, and yet with more of comfort than she has thought it possible for her to feel. He has not spared her in the matter of how much she has been blamable all through her trials in not bearing with her husband more patiently and dutifully, and, above all, in tampering with divorce. He has shown her how the church regards marriage: not as a civil contract, but as a sacrament; and that, in his eyes, she is still John Thorndyke’s wife. So the wish of Mrs. Vanderlyn that Martin might be persuaded to legally marry Agnes after her own death, could not be granted while Agnes had yet a husband. True, the _law_ has freed her from that tie, but no Catholic could bid her take any such advantage. Moreover, it is very doubtful if she will ever see Vanderlyn again. No thought of pursuit or of punishment ever enters her mind. To work for herself and her boy is now all that is left for her, and F. Francis promises to try to find that work for her to do. In the meantime, it is arranged that she shall stay for the present with Mrs. Vanderlyn, making no difference in her name to the landlady, to whom she says that they have discovered that they are remotely connected.

“I guessed it would turn out so,” says the landlady, “and I am right glad the poor soul has found a friend. I think she grows worse very fast. She won’t last long.”

The landlady is not wrong in her conclusions. From this time, Agnes devotes herself to the care of Mrs. Vanderlyn in her fast-failing strength. Indeed, did Agnes not fill the place of nurse, a hired one would be necessary, for the invalid has no relatives in the country upon whom to call. She was an only child, and her father the only one left of his family. From him she has inherited a small competence which has placed her above want and above the need of trying to wring from her husband any support. It was this which tempted him to come so meanly to her, even while living with Agnes, for pecuniary aid, well knowing, as he did, her generous nature.

It is a loving, but short task for Agnes to perform. In little more than three months, Margaret Vanderlyn is dead. But what a missionary even on her dying bed she has proved herself! Agnes sees now what it was that gave the angelic patience, and lent such a glory to the last days of her friend. Day by day, she has been necessarily thrown within the influence and teaching of F. Francis. The soil has indeed been ready, and, after Mrs. Vanderlyn’s burial, she feels, in her desolate condition, that only in the bosom of kind Mother Church is there any consolation for her. Perhaps, too, the desire to get as far as possible from all the infidel tendencies and teachings which Vanderlyn had brought to bear upon her mind makes her turn to the church as the surest and safest refuge. So Agnes Rodney becomes a Catholic, and a sincere one. As she kisses the crucifix, which was Mrs. Vanderlyn’s, she feels that she is a Magdalen, and longs to pour some precious ointment over her Saviour’s feet.

Mrs. Vanderlyn has left nearly all of her property to Agnes, not only as an acknowledgment of untiring devotion in her last days, but as some amends for the wrong done to her by Martin Vanderlyn. No finer proof of Margaret’s noble heart could have been given than in this generosity to the woman who had supplanted her.

But Agnes cannot rest content in the ease thus afforded her. She feels that she does not deserve it. She longs to make some greater expiation than any she has yet offered for the error of her life. A Magdalen she seems always to herself. It is this feeling which culminates at last in a desire to make the devotion of all her energies, and the sacrifice of all ease the precious ointment to pour at his feet. With this thought, she goes to F. Francis, and proposes to place her boy in a Catholic asylum, and that she may become a religious in some severe order.

“My daughter, it must not be,” replies the good priest sadly.

“Why not, father? I will strive so hard; I think I can be steadfast, with God’s help, after all I have endured. It would be such a blessed refuge, too, from my name and from my sad place in life—perhaps too great a privilege for me,” she adds, watching the unconsenting look in F. Francis’ eyes.

“You have said it, my child,” he replies. “Those who wear that garb have never been in your doubtful position. Besides, your husband lives.”

Agnes’ face falls. She never thinks of herself now as a married woman.

“But if I should become a real widow ever?” she pleads; for the purpose is dear to her, and she has hoped that her boy can be made a priest.

“Even then,” says F. Francis, “that which was your relation to Mr. Vanderlyn would be in the way of your reception into any of these orders, and your boy’s birth would be an impediment to his entering the priesthood.”

Never before has Agnes felt how great has been her degradation as now, when she finds that the all-pitying, loving, and gentle church which has washed her sins and granted her comfort and hope has yet its reservations for such as she and her boy.

It may be taken as a proof of the thoroughness of her conversion that she so meekly acquiesces.

“But, my daughter, I will tell you what you may do, if you feel like devoting yourself. We will put George in an asylum, and educate him, and by-and-by we will find his place for him; and you can go into a hospital as nurse.”

Her face brightens.

“You may not be a real sister; but a good hospital nurse, braving all contagion, and discomfort, and fatigue, is the next thing to one; and you may fashion your garb plainly, and shun the world’s comforts and pleasures very effectually in such a calling.”

“I will, father! Oh, I will!” she says with warmth, for this is her true vocation. “And then I may not have to part from George entirely, which, after all, would wound me _here_.” She lays her hand upon her heart as she speaks. “He is the only tie that is left me now.”

So Agnes Rodney watches beside the sick and dying in a hospital. Dressed in a plain brown gown, with her hair drawn under a simple white cap, she looks almost a real “sister,” and many of her Protestant patients think her such. She is happier now than ever since her girlhood. She is doing her Saviour’s work and that which she has always loved—ministering to the sick. No other nurse throws into her work such tender, loving care, such sympathy for the homeless and friendless. The doctors rely upon her skill; the patients love her for her gentle ministrations.

“And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss Her shadow, as it falls Upon the darkening walls.”

It is some five years from the time when Agnes Rodney commenced this life, that a young man, indeed scarcely more than a youth, for he cannot be more than nineteen, is hurt by a fall from a scaffold, and brought into the hospital. He is a carpenter, and has been at work on an adjoining building. To care for him, Mrs. Rodney is sent. The youth is unconscious at first, and under the surgeon’s hands. She does not learn his name at once, and it seems as if no one knows it. His fellow-workmen have withdrawn for the time, but will return to-morrow.

While Mrs. Rodney is disposing of this youth, washing and removing superfluous clothing, a pocket-book falls from his pockets, opening, and scattering its contents. She gathers these up, and is returning them, when her eye falls on a little picture which makes her start and gaze curiously at the youth on the bed before her. This picture is of a woman much younger than herself, and fairer, but it is her own likeness, nevertheless, taken many years ago. The face has a sweet girlish look, and soft, dark ringlets hang about the white throat. Her own hair is now more gray than dark, and stern lines are traced about the eyes and mouth; yet something of the same expression characterizes the face of the picture and the face of the hospital nurse. How many changes have come in her life since the sun portrayed that girlish face! How well she remembers sitting for it years ago! She gazes at it now, and criticises it, as if it were that of another person—never of herself. So completely changed does she seem to herself that no feeling has she now in common with the girl in the picture. And yet she knows it so well. Who is this youth who carries it about him? Is it for a chance admiration of it? She knows this may be, for it is the picture of a very pretty girl of about his own age. She almost fears to allow herself to believe who he may be as she scans his face closely. He moans and opens his eyes, turning to her, saying:

“Please give me some water.”

She gives it, and asks, with a quiet voice, but with eyes and ears expectant of the answer:

“What is your name?”

“George Thorndyke, ma’am.” And Agnes knows that her own son lies before her. How anxiously, for many days and nights after this, does she devote herself to this patient! No wonder the boy grows to be very fond of her? To him she is only Mrs. Rodney, and he has connected no idea of his mother with that name, although it has been his middle name also. His father struck it out, and he does not even know his mother’s maiden name. During his illness, she, by little and little, gleans this from him—that his father is dead; that he has three sisters (she sighs to herself as she remembers the other two); that he is working with a carpenter, of whom he is learning his trade; that his “_stepmother_” has been always good to him, but that she is gone, since his father’s death, to live far away. This explains one thing which has puzzled her—that only his employer and fellow-workmen have come to see him in the hospital. She has feared every day that some of his family might come. One thing yet she yearns to know—does he know any thing of herself, or does he think her dead? She longs and yet dreads to know this. At last, when it is evident that he will soon be well enough to leave the hospital, she asks him if he remembers his own mother, or if he was too young when he “_lost her_.”

“Yes, ma’am; I remember her a very little; but I have got her picture in my pocket-book.” And he shows it to her.

“This was taken when she was very young, I should think,” says the nurse.

“Oh! yes; mother said, the day she found it, that she guessed it was a keepsake of father’s once, but that she thought I had the best right to it. She told me never to let him see it, or know I had it, and that’s the reason I got to carrying it around with me. Why, nurse, I think she had eyes like yours.”

The nurse smiles, and busies herself in such a way that her head is turned away for some moments.

“Don’t you think she was pretty, nurse? _I_ do?” continued Thorndyke.

Thus challenged, Agnes looks critically at the little picture.

“Yes; she _was_ pretty, I think,” she answers slowly; “but, if she had lived, she might have been no better-looking than I am now.”

“And that would be nice enough for me; but, nurse, stoop down. I want to tell you something. She isn’t dead, or wasn’t when my father married my stepmother. They think that I think so, but a boy told me that she went away, and was divorced. I didn’t believe it at first, but I found out that it was true, and I would so much like to find her.”

“Why?”

“Because I believe it was father’s own fault that she went away. It may be wrong in me to say it, but I know he could be hateful sometimes, and I think he never liked me so well as he liked my sisters; and I always thought my stepmother was kinder to me than he was.”

“God bless her for that!”

Thorndyke looks at the nurse, surprised at the earnestness of the words.

“Why, yes,” he says, encouraged in his confidences by her sympathy. “She was always good to me, but I guess my own mother was superior to her, and father knew it; but they got along very well together, and she was good to him when he was sick at last.”

“Did he prosper?”

“Yes, quite well; but what he left wasn’t much, divided among four of us, and mother’s share out. I’ll have a little to start me with, though, and I got good schooling.”

“I am glad of that,” says the nurse.

“Why, nurse, what an interest you take in me; I think it very good of you, indeed. Is it so with all the poor fellows who get shut up here?”

“George Thorndyke, let me tell you something which I _must_ before you go away and I lose all trace of you. I knew that picture as soon as I saw it, for I saw it before you were born.”

“Then you knew my mother! Where is she? Say! Is she living?”

“She is here. Can you forgive her and love her?”

They are not alone, so this revelation has to be made with hushed voices and guarded manner; but George Thorndyke says, grasping her hands:

“I would rather you were my mother than any woman I have ever met; and I will work for you all the days of my life.”

“No, George; this is my place, and this is my work.”

“But you must come out of it; you’ll get your death here. Gracious goodness! I can’t take it all in! Why, what a good thing it was for me to get that tumble, as it led me to you!”

And then he questions her very much, and many of his questions are hard to answer. At last he says suddenly:

“But you’re a Catholic, are you not?”

“Yes,” she answers.

“Did that make the trouble, mother?” And he looks as if he thinks he has guessed it all.

“No, my son; if I had been a Catholic then, it would never have happened, and I should never have been here, and perhaps not you, either.”

He refrains from any further questions, but goes on declaring that he will take her from there, and work for her. It is pleasant to this lonely woman to feel that here is a manly heart and strength to lean on which she may honestly claim, but she answers:

“No, George; I cannot allow it; you must work, and take a wife, by-and-by, to yourself. I have my place and my work here, and there is another for whom I work too. But I have some money besides. There is no need for you to work for me, although I am here. Why, I am almost rich.”

“Another?” he says curiously, and scarcely noticing her last words.

“Yes,” she says, and has the pain of blushing before her own son, as she tells him he has a brother. “There is another George who is as near to you as those sisters of whom you have told me. I named him George to fill your place, after the law gave you to your father and not to me. O my son! I never meant to leave _you_. God knows I did not.”

“I do believe that,” he said; “but keep quiet, or they’ll notice. Where is—my—brother?” There is a slight hesitation over the last word—ever so slight—and he puts it bravely, but she feels it. That nice sense of motherhood has always been so quick with her. In all her vicissitudes, it has never been blunted. She tells him where George Rodney is, and asks if he wishes to see him.

“Yes; I do, for your sake; and, besides, he is my namesake, and did almost crowd me out, which I can’t allow, you know. But—is—is—Mr. Rodney living?”

Ah! what a keen although unconscious thrust is that!

“Rodney is my maiden name, George, and I have dropped the other. The Catholic Church does not recognize me as the wife of any other than your father.”

“Ah! I see,” he says, in evident relief.

She goes bravely on to have it over:

“But little George’s father is gone from us, I do not know where; I never expect to see him again. Rodney was in your name too, George.”

“I never knew that,” he says.

“Well, let it pass; perhaps your father did well to leave it out, and your brother keeps it now.”

They are interrupted here, and the nurse leaves her son, to attend to other duties. He finds enough to think about, and wants no other company but his own thoughts.

It is not many days after this that George Thorndyke leaves the hospital; but he never lets a day pass without going to see his mother, and he meets his brother kindly, if not affectionately. But to all his entreaties, and for a long time, Agnes refuses to leave her hard life. She means to “die in the harness” which she has voluntarily assumed. But at last her health begins to fail with the long strain upon her endurance, and the doctors say she must rest. F. Francis also counsels it. Now, and not till now, does she allow her son to make a home for her. It is a very comfortable one, for, with the money left her by Mrs. Vanderlyn, added to her long-saved pay as a hospital nurse, and George Thorndyke’s wages in his trade, they live in quiet refinement, if not luxury. And Agnes Rodney is a happy mother of two good sons.

A year has passed, and Agnes sits on a ferry-boat, in company with George Rodney, who is spending a short vacation with her. They sit near a man who is closely watching them, but whom they do not observe. This man has a sallow, unhealthy, and dissipated face, but withal a rather handsome one. The hair is dark, the eyes are gray, but sunken, and restless in their expression. A very heavy beard covers all the lower part of his face. A broad-brimmed felt hat shades his forehead and eyes. He seems very curious about Agnes, and shifts his seat, and leans nearer to hear her voice every time she answers George’s frequent questions. As they pass from the boat, he hastens to walk close behind her. He hears her say to the boy, “Wait, _George_, not so fast,” and his eye lights up at something in these few words. The mother and son get into a street-car. The man follows them, but seats himself on the same side, and at the other end of the seat. He keeps his head turned the other way whenever Agnes appears likely to look in his direction. He is at the end of the car where she will not pass him in leaving it.

When Agnes and George get off, he follows quickly, still without their noticing him. He sees the house they enter, surveys the neighborhood, repeats the number to himself, and then walks up the street and around the block, apparently in deep thought. When he comes around to the house again, he goes slowly up the steps, and reads “Thorndyke” upon the door. This seems to puzzle him. He looks around the neighborhood again.

“No; I am right,” he says; “that is the church opposite, and this is the number, but what does _this_ name mean! John Thorndyke is dead, but she seems to prefer his name! Well, I’ll just see.” And he rings the bell.

“Is Mrs. Thorndyke in?” he says to the maid who opens the door.

“There hain’t no Mrs. Thorndyke,” says the girl, taking it as a personal grievance that he is not aware of this fact.

“Oh! well, the lady of the house—Mrs. Vanderlyn,” he says, not wishing to appear too ignorant before this austere damsel. Now she is exasperated.

“There hain’t nobody of _that_ name, neither; but isn’t it Mrs. Rodney you want?”

The moment he hears this name, he appears satisfied, and, without noticing the girl’s rudeness, he says:

“That is the lady I mean.”

“Well, she’s in.” And the girl waves her hand to the open parlor door, as if she disdains further words with him. She suspects he hasn’t known the name of Rodney at all before she mentioned it. All his offence is in asking a question which she has been obliged to answer several times before to pedlars and others of that kind, but she visits upon him the accumulated vexation caused by his predecessors.

“_What name_ shall _I_ take to her?” she asks, with an unpleasant emphasis, as if she doubts whether he knows his own name, or has any.

“What name? Ah! yes. Say Mr. _Martin_ would like to see her.”

The girl goes up-stairs, and tells Mrs. Rodney that Mr. _Morton_ is waiting in the parlor.

After he is left alone, the man looks about the comfortable appointments of the room with a quick business eye. He seems satisfied, but has not much time for scrutiny, as he hears a step coming down the stairs. He rises, and stands ready to meet Agnes as she enters. When her eye falls on him, she stops at once, and stands looking steadily at him without speaking, but growing very pale. He comes toward her, saying, “Agnes!” and holding out both his hands. She does not take them, nor offer any welcome, but says, in a cold, quiet voice, “What do you want of me?”

“Are you, then, so unforgiving to me, Agnes? After all my long search for you, is this all the greeting you can give me?”

“I do not know how long your search may have been, but I am sorry that you have succeeded in finding me. What is it you want of me?” she says, in the same cold tone.

“To live with you, as I would have done all these years if you had not so unaccountably hidden yourself away.” He says this with an air of boldness, and of assertion of some right which he supposes she must recognize.

She smiles disdainfully. She divines the selfishness of this move, and she sees that he is ignorant of the extent of her knowledge concerning him.

“Where have you been all these years?” he asks, as she continues silent.

“I am not bound to account for myself to you,” she replies.

“Come, now, Agnes, this is foolish. Why not be friendly? It is best for you to be so. I have seen you with the boy. He is mine, and I can claim him, you know.”

“No, sir! you cannot do that.”

“You think I cannot? Pray, why? You are my wife, and he is my son.”

“He is your son, but I am not your wife,” she says, in a firm tone.

“Not my wife! But you were married to me. Oh! shame, Agnes! I did not expect that _you_, who insisted on the tying of that knot, would be the one to untie it. In what position does it place you and the boy if you are not my wife? I suppose you have considered _that_, and you must have advanced somewhat in your ideas to be so independent now of public opinion.”

Her face is very pale, and her lips have been firmly set. There is a cold, stern light in her eyes as she answers: “I was never your wife. You were not free to marry me, even if I had been free to marry you. You were never divorced from your wife, so you can have no claim on me.”

He looks astonished, and for a moment cringes just a little as she says this. But he rallies, and says, “That will not matter now, my wife is dead; do you know that?”

“Yes.”

“You do? Why, how do _you_ know so much, when I only know that bare fact? Pray, can you tell me anything more?”

His tone is half satirical, half beseeching. He really wishes to know more than the meagre information which he has gleaned from the neighbors of the house where Margaret died—that a Mrs. Vanderlyn was buried from that house. The landlady has gone they know not where. They remember the funeral, that is all. He is anxious to know what has become of Margaret’s money. He thinks the priests have it; but he is not sure of this, however, for one person has told him that a relative who was nurse for the Catholic lady at the last inherited all her money. It has puzzled him very much to guess who this person could have been. He has not succeeded in finding any record of Margaret’s will. F. Francis and Mrs. Vanderlyn had thought it wiser not to have it recorded, considering Agnes’ peculiar relation to Vanderlyn, who might yet return to dispute the possession of the money with her, or to trouble her. Now that Agnes seems to know something of his wife, it occurs to him that she may possibly be that _relative_ who inherited the money. Knowing the disposition of each of these women as he does—the one for nursing the sick, the other generous and forgiving—he sees that, if they met at all, this might have been the consequence. Remarkable quickness of deduction and conclusion he has always possessed, and it serves him now, and makes him more determined in his designs upon Agnes; but he is desirous of playing his game adroitly. She, on her part, wishes to shorten the interview, and be rid of him.

“I can tell you,” she says, “that your wife died as she lived, a saintly woman; that she was the kindest, truest friend to me I ever had. I knew from her the falsehood you told me when you said you were divorced from her, and the base deception you practised on me in pretending to make me your wife.”

“For love of you, Agnes! There was no other way for me. Let my love be my excuse.”

She disdains any notice of this interruption, and continues:

“It was an infamous falsehood and treachery to me; but let that pass. I was almost equally to blame, for I had no real right to marry you.”

“How so? You, at least, were free,” he says.

“No; my husband lived. I was still John Thorndyke’s wife in the eyes of the church.”

“Church!” he repeats scornfully.

“Martin Vanderlyn, I am a Catholic. It may modify your tone and remarks to be aware of that. I am proud and thankful to be of Margaret’s faith.”

He frowns, but thinks quickly that he may turn this to his advantage.

“Why are you called Rodney, then, and Thorndyke on your door, if you are Mrs. Thorndyke still?”

“My son’s name is Rodney. He has no other, and I will bear his. I decline to account to you for the name on my door.”

“You are very proud, Agnes, but I think it is best for you to be friendly with me, considering all things. I certainly am free to marry you now, and give the boy and you your right name and place. I should think you were the very woman to wish that. I happen to know of John Thorndyke’s death, too, so I think you are as free as I am now, even on your own ground. Agnes, I never meant to leave you so long. I wrote to you, and got no answer. I have searched for you in every direction, and only now I find you. Why are you so unwilling to live as my wife with me, when you see that it would place you and your son in a more respectable condition?”

Agnes remembers Margaret’s words: “See to it that he marries you when I am gone!” Then it had seemed doubtful if he could be persuaded to do so. And here he is suing for her consent. She remembers his son’s position, “nobody’s child,” but she remembers also her first-born son. She remembers the bold, false, bad heart and life of Martin Vanderlyn; she sees the possible effect of his evil influence on both her sons, as it formerly blighted her own life, and she shrinks in horror and disgust at the bare thought of such a stepfather introduced into their home. She answers his question without hesitation:

“I do not love you. I cannot respect you. You were false to your wife and false to me. I have been able to live happily without you all these years, and I shall live apart from you still.”

He keeps down his pride, and appears yet to hope to change her resolution, thinking it may be only the result of a woman’s pique. Moreover, he feels almost sure now that the comfortable home around her is purchased with the money left by Margaret. At all events, he is determined on getting a home if possible at her expense, and he does not scruple at any misrepresentation regarding his own means of support. To her last scornful words, he replies, with an air of kind consideration:

“But, Agnes, you will not always be able to support yourself as well as I can support you. I know not how you do it, but I can place you above the need of any effort on your part. Why can you not be frank with me, and tell me how you have managed to live? You did not receive all the money I sent, for some of it came back to me. Tell me, Agnes.”

“Martin Vanderlyn, I will not accept anything for either of us from you. We can do without you, and we _will_. My decision is final.”

“Do you know the harm I can do you?” he says, in an angry voice, and with flashing eyes. “I can brand you to the world and to the boy. Would you rather that than have a husband, and a father for your son?”

She seems to shrivel and whiten at his threat, but she stands firm, and answers him:

“You committed bigamy when you married me. What will the law do about _that_? I can prove it, sir! Now, had you not better leave me?”

“No! I swear I will not leave you until you promise to marry me!”

At this moment, a man’s step is heard in the hall. He has entered the house, quietly opening the door with a key of his own, and, while taking off his overcoat, has heard the last words of both the speakers. He steps within the room, and comes to Agnes’ side, passing his arm around her trembling form. He is a powerful young man, in full and vigorous health, which contrasts strongly with Vanderlyn’s sallow face and wasted figure. He looks at Vanderlyn with piercing eyes as he says:

“What do you mean, sir, by speaking to this lady in this manner? Mother, has he any right here that you acknowledge?”

“None, my son; I wish only to be rid of him.”

“Then, go,” says Thorndyke, “or I will see that you do. And if you trouble her again, I will see that the law lays its hand on you more heavily than I will lay mine if you do not leave us at once.”

Vanderlyn has gazed in great astonishment at this unexpected champion for Agnes. When he hears him call her “mother,” it flashes upon his quick perception why “Thorndyke” is on the door. He does not forget that there was a boy left in Agnes’ old home, whom he once promised to care for as if he were his own. Not much more has he cared for his own; but this is an opponent he does not like. This is a different kind of quarrel from the one he supposed he had with a defenceless woman. His game is lost; he knows it, but he tries to be very brave in his defeat. He says scornfully:

“Mr. Thorndyke, I do not ask _your_ hospitality. I remember the quality of the article I had from your father some years ago. Yours seems to be of the same sort. I will not disturb the _honorable_ repose of your family, or try to become further acquainted with my son, _your brother_.”

George raises his clenched hand to fell him to the floor, but Agnes interposes, and Vanderlyn leaves the house untouched—leaves it, but reels as he goes down the steps—staggers—falls upon the pavement only a few paces from the door. A few moments later, George Rodney, coming in the house, cries:

“A man has fallen dead in the street, just by the corner! I was coming around the other side, and I almost met him!”

George Thorndyke rushes out, and sees the men carrying Martin Vanderlyn’s senseless body away.

The next day, Agnes and her sons read in the papers that the man died of heart disease, which the doctors thought had been aggravated by some recent excitement. The mother and son are thankful that George’s hand did not fall upon him; but George Rodney never knows that the man he “almost met,” and who dropped down before his eyes, was his own father.

THE INDIANS OF YSLETA.

THE rich and thriving Pueblo of the Ysléta Indians is situated on the western bank of the Rio Grande del Norte, about nine miles below the little town of Albuquerque in New Mexico.

We strike southward from Albuquerque along the east bank of the river. Three miles below the town we enter on flat and uninteresting bottomland. The eye is not relieved by a dwelling, not even by a tree, for a distance of five miles. We thus come to a rancho, deserted when we last passed there, but which still gave evidence of former comfort. The owner had joined the Texan Confederates, and quitted the territory.

Now we begin to cross the Sand Hills—a not unexciting performance. The road is a narrow and shifting one, growing daily narrower and of steeper slope, as the winds blow the sand upon it and fill it up. The wagon moves along slowly at an angle of 45°. The road winds tortuously along the face of the Sand Hills for about two miles, sometimes making short and abrupt turns. It is from two to three hundred feet above the river which washes the base of the hills. I feel an unpleasant tingling sensation at my elbows, and a great and almost uncontrollable desire to walk—“to lighten the load,” of course. Once on the road, there is no going back, and one is entirely at the mercy of one’s mules. You must let them go their own way. If they should grow restive or become frightened, a broken neck, a general and irretrievable “smash up,” an unpleasant and unrecorded grave in the quicksands of the Rio Grande, would be the result. A six-mule wagon went off at one of the sharp turns some years ago. Its fate was discovered by persons who travelled some hours behind it, and who noticed the tracks. The wagon and team had been engulfed, and had entirely disappeared before they arrived.

From the Sand Hills, we have a beautiful view of the Pueblo of Ysléta on the opposite side of the river. The spectacle of the Indians fording the river in certain spots, and driving their _burros_ up the steep sides of the Sand Hill on which their Pueblo is built, enhances the picturesqueness of the scene.

We have passed the Sand Hills, and now we cross the river to visit the Pueblo. We have struck a little above the ford, however; the water is in the bed of our wagon. We have to stand on the seats in order to keep dry, and we perceive, not without alarm, that the mules are swimming. By striking down-stream a little, however, the mules find bottom again, and pull us out all safe on the western bank.

A steep and narrow path leads up to the summit of the Sand Hill on which the Pueblo is perched. The Pueblos always have built and still build their dwellings on the hill-tops: for defensive reasons in the olden times, for security against inundations in the present. The houses are built of the customary adobe. They are washed outside with a whitish wash which resists the action of the weather; the mode of its preparation is said to be known only to the Pueblos. I have seen nothing like it in any of the Mexican towns. The houses are generally two stories high, the lower story projecting considerably beyond the upper. The entrance is through the roof, to which you climb by a ladder placed against the outside. This mode of entrance is also a relic of defensive precaution in past times of hostilities with other tribes of Indians and with the Spanish invaders. The internal arrangement of the houses is the reverse of ours. The kitchen is in the upper story, and the sitting or sleeping room in the lower. You descend into the latter from the former by an opening in the floor so small that not even the lightest weight of the Fat Man’s Club could hope to squeeze through. The Pueblos have no monstrous developments of adipose tissue; the opening is large enough for them. The lower room is thoroughly secured even against ventilation. The only window consists of one piece of glass, without frame, imbedded in the wall.

The earthen vessels for family use are manufactured by the Pueblos themselves, and are ornamented with fantastic designs of most primitive execution. Chief among these vessels is the _tinaja_, globular in shape, with an orifice at the top large enough to permit taking out the liquid contents with a small dipper. The _tinaja_ is porous, to permit evaporation through its sides. In hot weather, the _tinajas_ are filled from the river or spring before sunrise, carefully covered, and set in the shade. With these precautions, they keep the water almost ice-cold. They are used in all Mexican _ménages_, as well as in the households of the Pueblos.

The costume of the Pueblo men is not lacking in picturesqueness, more particularly when distance lends its proverbial effect. They wear a short loose sack of white cotton, or manta, ordinarily made of carefully washed flour-sacks; for your Pueblo Indian is economical, and, when he has sustained the inward man with the contents of the flour-sack, he covers the outer man with the sack itself. The pantaloons are of the same material, loose but short, not usually reaching below the knee. The enchantment of distance dispelled, however, traces of the former uses of the material may be discovered in such inscriptions on the shoulders or the seat as the following: “Superfine Family,” or “Choice Family Extra.” The Pueblo wears his hair long, tied behind in a cue, around which is wound a piece of red cloth or ribbon, according to the financial standing of the wearer, or mayhap the greatness or solemnity of the occasion. The head gear is generally a broad-brimmed straw hat. The foot covering is a deer-skin moccasin.

The costume of the gentler sex is eminently ungraceful. The women wind long strips of buckskin tightly around the leg, in successive layers, resulting in an enormous bandage from three to four inches thick reaching from the ankle to above the knee. The _chaussure_ is a moccasin. The effect produced by this arrangement is that of a feminine _torso_ set on two huge bolsters. All symmetry of form or grace of gait is destroyed. The walk is a sort of shuffle. The upper covering of the figure is a dark woollen stuff, coarse in texture, and of Pueblo woof. This reaches to the knee, and is composed of two rectangular pieces joined at the upper edges, which form the shoulders, and leaving a space for the passage of the head and neck. The pieces hang down before and behind, and are held together at the waist by a belt or cincture. The women cut their hair squarely across the forehead, leaving the side locks and back hair to hang down loosely. Many of the men, too, besides wearing a cue, cut the hair straight across the forehead, and wear the pendent side-locks. The women wear their arms bare, save the ornamentation of from one to a dozen bracelets of thick wire, which glitters, but is not gold. They wear necklaces of coral, moss-agates, or common glass beads, according to the wealth or importance of the wearer. The men also frequently wear similar necklaces.

The portion of the feminine toilet which requires most elaboration is evidently the leg-bandage. It is taken off to cross the ford on foot, and its removal seems to be as slow a process as unrolling a mummy. The object of such a covering for the nether limbs I am unable to imagine.

The Pueblo is a handsome Indian. I have seen very finely cut features among the men. Many of them have beautifully fresh complexions, on which a bright apple-rosy tint is gradually shaded into a deep rich brown. They are generally of medium stature, however. Their feet and hands are correspondingly small. Their faces have not that animal, that _wolfish_, expression of the wild Indians of the mountains or the plains; on the contrary, they beam with good nature, simplicity, and single-heartedness. They are thrifty and industrious. The men do the out-door work; the women attend to the household affairs, or, in the season, peddle the grapes, apricots, peaches, melons, etc., raised in their Pueblo. Should you meet a Pueblo and his squaw travelling with the universal _burro_, you will always find the lady mounted on the animal, while her cavalier, urging on John Burro with his stick, trots along gaily behind, and smilingly gives you a cheery “_Come te va?_” as he passes.

The Pueblos do not intermarry with the Mexicans. The women are chaste in their lives, and domestic in their habits. Vice is almost unknown among them. I have lived some years in the vicinity of two or three Indian Pueblos, and have neither known of nor heard of an abandoned woman among them. I wish I could say the same of other races in the territory. In this regard, the Pueblos also differ greatly from the wild Indians whose lives are continued scenes of bestiality.

During my residence in their vicinity, the Pueblos had daily access to my dwelling. They were our fruit and vegetable purveyors. I have not known an instance of their stealing a pin’s worth, though they had ample opportunities to pilfer had they been so inclined. In this regard, their example might be imitated with profit by people with greater pretensions to civilization, and in this also they differ widely from the savage Indians who are, to a man, thieves both by nature and habit. In fine, the Pueblos are among the most moral, peaceful, simple, and honest citizens of New Mexico.

The Pueblos are Catholics. Their Catholicity, in its out-door festivals, has just sufficient tinge of the antique observances of the Montezumas to throw a romantic glamour around it. They have churches in all their Pueblos. Some of these—Ysléta among the number—have a priest regularly stationed in them, and many of the churches are served by the priests of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction in which they are situated. The churches are adobe structures, not always cruciform, with a belfry, and adorned inside with grotesque figures, the product of their own primitive art.

The weapon of the Pueblos is still the bow and arrow. A few have old-fashioned muzzle-loading rifles. The Pueblos do not lack the combative instinct, and are more than a match for the Apaches and Navajoes, man to man. They have frequently acted in conjunction with our troops against these tribes; but their co-operation is often rendered valueless by their custom, most strictly adhered to, of returning to their village as soon as they have taken a scalp, for the purpose of having the customary scalp-dance. I regret to say that they give no quarter, and spare neither age nor sex, except when it suits them to make _peóns_, or slaves, of the women and children. They say, in self-justification, that little Indians soon become big Indians if allowed to grow. The measure they mete is meted again to them by the hostile tribes.

As in courtesy bound, we direct our steps to the dwelling of the “governor,” who is known as “Don Ambrosio.” His house is of more modern construction than the customary Pueblo dwelling. We were admitted through a _corral_ and a door—not in the roof, but in the side of the house, after the fashion of “the whites.” The room we were received in was a long apartment _à la Mexicaine_, with benches around the walls. Some of the finest Navajo blankets I ever saw were displayed upon the benches. The walls were hung around with French colored lithographs of a religious character.

Governor Ambrosio was a dapper little Indian, with long snow-white hair falling loosely to his shoulders. His complexion was clear and peach-bloomy. Though full of years and honors, he was full of life and health. His son, who acted as his lieutenant, was a man about thirty-odd years, the image of his father, in stature, size, complexion, and everything except the white hair, the junior’s being jet-black. The women of the family were pleasingly featured, but their inartistic dress destroyed the effect of their good looks.

Ambrosio is said to be quite wealthy, with fifty or sixty thousand dollars in _oro_ and in _plata_; for your Pueblo does not consider greenbacks good hoarding. Ambrosio, Jr., showed us the fruithouse, where the senses of sight and smell were regaled with the pleasant spectacles and odors of heaps of rich, fragrant quinces and apples, the latter small but rosy as young Ambrosio’s pleasant face.

Ambrosio’s style of farming is more in accordance with modern progressive ideas than that of some of his neighbors. His mules were fat, round, and sleek, and in the _corral_ lay an American plough of modern construction. Many among the middle and lower classes in New Mexico still plough “with a sharp stick.” The irrigating dikes, or _acequias_, of the Pueblos are well and carefully attended to; they are not permitted to overflow in the wrong places and at the wrong times—a neglect which so frequently causes the traveller from the valley of the Rio Grande to soar from prosaic observation to the sublimity of anathema. In their fields, I saw men, only, engaged in agricultural labors.

S. Augustine is the patron saint of Ysléta. Its great _fiesta_ is the “San Augustin.” The feast is held about the time when all the grapes are gathered and some of the new wine already made. It is essentially a grape and wine feast. But to his other virtues, the Pueblo adds the great one of temperance. Mass is celebrated in the morning, and the whole Pueblo is out in its showiest attire. The dance known as “the Montezuma” is performed by young men selected for the occasion. Americans and Mexicans are kindly received and hospitably entreated in the Pueblo on these festival occasions. I have heard of but one instance in which this kindness and hospitality was abused. It was by a miserable gambler—a “white man,” and, I regret to say, an American—who, at the San Augustin of 186-, without the slightest provocation, shot dead a Pueblo boy. The territory got rid of the desperado, who had to fly, for his worthless life, from the wrath of the outraged Indians of Ysléta.

TO A CHILD.

You little madonna, so very demure! You draw me, yet awe me: As warning, half scorning, That kissing a face so religiously pure Is almost a sacrilege, I may be sure.

Yet, awed as I am, I but love you the more. You meet me and greet me Serenely and queenly; And image so sweetly the one I adore When She was a child in the ages of yore.

Her name it is Mary Regina—your own. You share it and wear it As flower its dower Of fragrance—predestined hereafter, full-blown, To reign with the lilies that circle Her throne.

Be fragrant for me, then, O lily! and pray— Each hour, little flower, Exhaling availing Petitions—to Mary the Queen of your May, To breathe on my Autumn your pureness to-day.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

ELEMENTS OF PHILOSOPHY, COMPRISING LOGIC AND ONTOLOGY, OR GENERAL METAPHYSICS. By Rev. W. H. Hill, S.J., Professor of Philosophy in the St. Louis University. Baltimore: J. Murphy & Co. London: R. Washburne.

We are glad to see this anxiously expected volume. The author proves himself quite competent to the most important task he has undertaken, and writes with the ease and precision of a thorough student and practised teacher of the highest and most necessary but most neglected and abused of all the rational sciences, philosophy. In his doctrine, he follows S. Thomas and Suarez, and is therefore necessarily sound in his principles and method. The most subtile, abstruse, and controverted points in respect to which there is the most difference among the votaries of scholastic philosophy, and those topics also where there is the best opportunity for the author to display special ability in his explication of doctrines in which all scholastic philosophers are substantially agreed, are found in the special metaphysics. The present volume, proceeding no further than general metaphysics, does not enable us to judge of the way in which the author will treat these questions. So far as he goes, we are satisfied with his explication of the grand fundamental principles and truths of philosophy, and wait with favorable anticipations his second volume. The style is admirably precise and clear, and as neat and elegant as our imperfect language will admit in such a treatise. An able correspondent, whose letter will appear in our next number, has laid down certain rules in regard to this point, and made some pertinent observations in which we concur, and we refer our readers to that forthcoming letter. We think he will find that F. Hill has generally adopted the style which he recommends. We find, so far as we have had time to examine, only one word which appears to us open to criticism, “cognoscive,” used in place of the term cognoscitive, employed by Cudworth and found in Webster’s _Dictionary_. The term _Idea_ also seems to us to need a more full and precise explanation, in connection with the terms _species sensibilis_, _species intelligibilis_, _species impressa_ and _expressa_, and _verbum mentis_, as used by S. Thomas, which we presume we may expect to be given in the treatise on psychology. A teacher who has been thoroughly taught philosophy will find this treatise, we think, well suited to the purposes of a text-book. The question, how far teachers who read only English, and are obliged to learn themselves a sound system before they can teach it to others, or intelligent pupils in their own private studies, will find the exposition of philosophy in this volume intelligible and satisfactory, can better be answered after a fair trial. The logic has been much shortened and simplified, yet includes, we think, all that is essential for training the class of pupils who will use the book in the rules of correct reasoning. If something more is needed for exercise in syllogisms, any of the books of logical praxis in common use will answer the purpose. We recommend the adoption of F. Hill’s philosophy as a text-book to all teachers in Catholic schools, both male and female, where English text-books are used. It is the only English text-book fit for use in teaching philosophy. Our impression is—that it will be found on trial to be an excellent text-book for the higher classes of pupils, and we thank the author for the great service he has rendered in preparing it, hoping that he will not delay to finish his work.

IERNE OF ARMORICA. By J. C. Bateman. (Fifth volume of F. Coleridge’s Quarterly Series.) London: Burns, Oates & Co. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This is an historical novel after the fashion of _Fabiola_ and _Callista_. The scene is laid in the time of Chlovis, about the period of his marriage to Chlotildis. The author has brought extensive and accurate learning into play in this story, which is thus a picture of the times it describes. It is also a well-written and interesting romance. We think he has made Chlotildis, who is exquisite as an ideal character, somewhat too perfect for the strict historical truth. Although a saint, she had a little of the barbarian left in her, before she achieved the full measure of the perfection of Christian meekness, gentleness, and charity. All readers will be pleased with the perusal of this book. Our young friends in college and convent, who are always keen for a new book for wet days, of which we have had so many of late, will be delighted with this one, and, while they are reading it, will forget the disappointment they are apt to feel when their favorite prayer, _Donnez nous un beau jour_, is not granted.

SERMONS FOR ALL SUNDAYS AND FESTIVALS OF THE YEAR. By J. N. Sweeney, D.D., O.S.B. In two volumes. Vol. I. London: Burns, Oates & Co. 1873. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

MARY MAGNIFYING GOD—MAY SERMONS. By William Humphrey, of the Cong. of the Oblates of S. Charles. Same Publishers.

These two volumes of sermons are excellent in regard to matter and style. F. Humphrey’s little volume is specially marked by a dogmatic character. Both will be found serviceable to priests in preparing sermons, and to the faithful for their private reading.

SUEMA; or, The Little African Slave who was Buried Alive. By Mgr. Gaume, Prothonotary Apostolic. Translated, and with a Preface, by Lady Herbert. London: Burns, Oates & Co. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)

The recent mission of Sir Bartle Frere, by the British Government, to the Sultan of Zanzibar, with a view to the suppression of the slave-trade in East Africa, has attracted American notice. Now, although government intervention will be able to put a stop to the shipping of slaves across the seas, it cannot interfere with slave-labor in Zanzibar itself and the adjoining towns, or prevent the atrocities of Portuguese and Arab agents who act as traders on their own account. Catholic charity, then, has found a way of reaching where government influence has no bearing. There is a community in Brittany which devotes itself exclusively to the education of little negresses, purchased from the slavers in the African marts. And, jointly with this community, the Fathers of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost and of the Sacred Heart of Mary, who have founded a mission in Zanzibar, buy up as many slave children as they can, and educate them in the Catholic faith. These devoted religious would, of course, be able to do much more in this way had they the pecuniary means at their command. The thrilling story of Suema is put forth in order to excite an ardent zeal in the hearts of Catholic readers for the purchase of slave-children in East Africa, whereby the curse that has befallen them is turned into a blessing. The story is perfectly authentic, the substance of it having been taken down from Suéma’s own lips, translated into French, and sent home by the superior of the Zanzibar mission.

We are very sure the narrative itself, as also the admirable preface and introduction which accompany it, cannot fail to awaken the sympathy of our Catholic readers. When, then, they learn that the sum of fifty francs, or about ten dollars in currency, will purchase a boy or girl of seven or eight in the slave-marts, they will not be slow, we believe, to contribute towards so glorious a work. And the price of a single slave-child “will be received with the greatest gratitude by the R. P. Procurator-General of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost and of the Sacred Heart of Mary (who have charge of the Zanzibar Mission), 30 Rue Thomond, Paris, or by Monseigneur Gaume, 16 Rue de Sèvres, Paris.”

A CATECHISM OF THE HOLY ROSARY. By the Rev. Henry Formby. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1873.

This is a neat little book in catechism form containing about 60 pages of the most necessary and useful instruction on the fifteen mysteries of the Holy Rosary. F. Formby is doing a great work. He is the right man just at the right time, and seems to anticipate the wants of priest and people. His other books are admirably well calculated to interest not only the youth for whom they were especially intended, but also those of riper years. The little book before us ought to be in the hands of every Catholic, young and old. It is also well calculated to instruct those who think that our devotion to the Blessed Virgin excludes God and the Saviour from our prayers. All we have to say is let any such person read this catechism, and they will be forced to admit that the Rosary is nothing more or less than an epitome of the New Testament history of our Lord, and that he is mentioned on nearly every one of the pages of this beautiful little book, for the appearance of which we thank the Rev. author most heartily.

THE SIGN OF THE CROSS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. By Mgr. Gaume, Prothonotary Apostolic. Translated from the last French edition by A Daughter of S. Joseph. Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham. 1873.

This work, which might, to a passing glance, appear fanciful and unimportant, is truly philosophical and of rare interest. It comes to us not only with the Imprimatur of the Bishop of Philadelphia, but also with a Brief of His Holiness Pius IX., granting an indulgence of fifty days to the sign of the cross, in response to the illustrious author’s petition.

The author is able to say, in his preface to the second edition, that the book has had a wonderful success: “The first French edition was sold in a few months. Three translations of it have been made into different European languages—one in Rome, one in Turin, and one in Germany. Catholic papers have vied with one another in recommending its perusal, and many letters have been sent to us bearing the congratulations of the most respectable men of France and of foreign countries.” He then, after quoting the Neapolitan review, _Scienza e Fede_, appends a portion of a letter from the Dean of the Catholic Chair at Rome, and also a circular from the commission charged with the care of the regionary schools, to the effect that the book should be read by the pupils, and distributed as a premium.

The preface to the first edition explains the origin of the treatise—how a young German of distinction, having come to study at the College of France, found his companions there laugh at him for making the sign of the cross before and after meals, and so by requesting the author’s opinion of the practice, and of the sign in general, occasioned the twenty letters which form the volume.

These letters exhaust the subject in a masterly way truly French. Besides proving over again what has been proved so many times before, the antiquity of the holy sign among Christians, and how the noblest intellects of primitive times both taught and practised the use of it, Mgr. Gaume shows that it was made in some way before Christianity, and from the beginning of the world. “The sign of the cross is so natural to man that at no epoch, among no nation, and in no form of worship, did man ever put himself in communication with God by prayer without making the sign of the cross.” Then he gives the “seven ways of making it”:

“(1) With the arms extended: man then becomes an entire sign of the cross. (2) With hands clasped, the fingers interlaced: thus forming five signs of the cross. (3) The hands joined one against the other, the thumbs placed one over the other: again the sign of the cross. (4) The hands crossed on the breast: another form of the sign of the cross. (5) The arms equally crossed on the breast: fifth way of making it. (6) The thumb of the right hand passing under the index finger, and resting on the middle one: a sign of the cross much in use, as we shall see. (7) And, finally, the right hand passing from the forehead to the breast, and from the breast to the shoulders: a more explicit form, which you know.”

“Under one or other of these forms,” he adds, “the sign of the cross has been practised everywhere and always in solemn circumstances, with a knowledge more or less clear of its efficacy.”

Accordingly, he proceeds to show, first, how the Jews made it, instancing Jacob, Moses, Samson, David, Solomon, and others. And here he only echoes what the Fathers have observed before him. Next, he tells us how the pagans made it, attaching to it some mysterious value. Three of the ways of making it were known to them; and these ways, being universal, were not arbitrary.

Some curious facts of undoubted authenticity are related of the power of the holy sign when made even by strangers to Christianity. And this sets off its efficacy as it is made in the church. Now, our author laments, and, we fear, with good reason, that the sign of the cross is fast becoming obsolete among a large number of Catholics. Those who make it at all, too often make it very imperfectly and carelessly. The object, therefore, of the present work is to revive the ancient practice of making the sign frequently and making it thoroughly. And it is with the same intention that the Pope has granted fifty days’ indulgence to it when made reverently and with invocation of the august Trinity.

THE ILLUSTRATED CATHOLIC SUNDAY-SCHOOL LIBRARY. 6 vols. 18mo, in box. Containing: The Apprentice, and Other Sketches. Mary Benedicta, and Other Stories. Faith and Loyalty, and The Chip Gatherers. Agnes, and Other Sketches. Lame Millie. The Chapel of the Angels. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1873.

Sensible stories with good illustrations are always welcome to children. This set of books is well calculated to please the eye and satisfy the tastes of both reader and purchaser. They are excellently printed, handsomely bound in bright colors, and present a variety of healthful reading seldom found within the compass of six small volumes. The cuts, from neat and chaste designs by a skilful artist, will attract the attention of every child, and lend additional interest to the tales. In the selection and arrangement of the stories, good judgment is shown, many of them being now published for the first time. As premiums, no series of volumes could be more desirable for the little folk.

THE KING AND THE CLOISTER; OR, LEGENDS OF THE DISSOLUTION. By the author of Cloister Legends, etc. London: Stewart.

These legends are well suited to readers of a romantic turn of mind and fond of the marvellous and tragical. Being purely Catholic stories, and perfectly innocent, our young readers will, we hope, have a good time over them.

THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS DURING THE WAR OF 1870-71. From the French. With thirty-two Illustrations. Westchester: Printed at the Catholic Protectory. 1873.

This book exhibits Christianity in action. Plato said, “If virtue could be seen embodied”—he meant in living form—“all men would love and adore it.” Plato’s dream was realized when Love became incarnate, and walked about doing good to the bodies and souls of men; but all men did not adore it. Virtue, to be adored, must be known. The book before us makes known the cardinal virtue of Christianity, charity, by exhibiting her in human form, and telling us, not what she can do or should do, but what she _did_ do by the hands of the Christian Brothers during the late memorable war between France and Prussia. Of the success of this glorious order in doing the work for which it was started by its venerable founder, it is not our purpose to speak, but of the book which lies before us, and which tells so graphically the deeds of charity and heroism of these Brothers during the terrible war of 1870-71. It is translated from the French of J. D’Arsac.

The mechanical execution of the volume is creditable to the boys at the Protectory where it has been brought out.

HAWTHORNDEAN; or, Philip Burton’s Family. By Mrs. Clara M. Thompson. Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham. 1873.

This is a book written by a lady, and it bears in every chapter and page the impress of a delicate, sensitive, and refined mind. It cannot be called artistic in the truest sense, for the plot is simple, and the characters are so natural that we feel in reading it that we are only renewing our acquaintance with old friends. The scene is laid in this country, and the actors are Americans, some by birth, others by adoption, and in this respect it has the advantage over most of the works of fiction which have issued from the press of late, which, while treating us, or pretending to treat us, to a view of the inside lives of Europeans, utterly ignore the fact that at our very door there are abundant materials for a hundred novels and romances, still unused and neglected.

ISABELLE DE VERNEUIL; OR, THE CONVENT OF S. MARY’S. By Mrs. Charles Snell. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co.

This is a story about life in a convent school, written in an interesting and ladylike style, and with a sufficient number of exciting incidents to gratify the well-known taste of young ladies of about the age of Mlle. Isabelle de Verneuil.

LARS: A PASTORAL OF NORWAY. By Bayard Taylor. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. (late Ticknor & Fields). 1873.

This poem is dedicated to John Greenleaf Whittier. It is fully worthy his acceptance. Besides a delicious freshness which pervades the story, like the air of its rural scene—the leading characters are strikingly delineated. One sees their very faces; while never was contrast more perfect than between Per and Lars, Brita and Ruth. The last, the angel of the piece, is a Quakeress, and the tale seems written in the interests of that persuasion, yet contains nothing designedly offensive to a Catholic. The verse, smooth and strong, is very scholarlike, and wisely modelled on Tennyson.

ESSAYS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS. By Cardinal Wiseman. In six volumes. Volumes I. and II. New York: P. O’Shea. 1873.

This is, in one respect, the most desirable of Mr. O’Shea’s reprints of the great Cardinal’s works, inasmuch as it is the only one, of the _Essays_, that has yet appeared in this country, and the original edition is out of print. It is needless to say aught in commendation of these incomparable writings.

MEMORIALS OF A QUIET LIFE. By A. J. C. Hare, author of _Walks in Rome_, etc. New York: G. Routledge & Sons. 1873.

The life which this book relates was sufficiently quiet, so far as its immediate subject was concerned, to suggest to other than personal friends the sense of tame and insipid, were it not for its association with characters more or less historical. And this reminds us of the difference between Catholic and Protestant biography: whereas the latter is restricted in its range to one country or language, the former embraces within the scope of its interest all nations and races. The record of the obscurest priest, if true to his vocation, may excite sympathy in those widely separated from him in time and space: for his spiritual life is quickened by the same blood which courses through kindred veins in the highest social walks, and among the rudest tribes of distant islands; the works of mercy and charity in which he is engaged also occupy the thoughts and energies of his brethren in every part of the globe; and the same seal which attests his ministry may be recognized in theirs also.

The subject of this volume, the widow of Augustus W. Hare, was the daughter of a clergyman, and in her maiden years was an intimate friend of Bishop Heber, then rector of Hodnet, England. Her husband, himself a clergyman, was joint author with his brother Julius W., also a clergyman, of _Guesses at Truth_. The family trace their descent from Francis Hare, one of the bishops of George II.’s reign, and boast of other prelatical and noble connections with the church “as by law established.”

It might naturally be inferred, therefore, that the author, a nephew of the subject, would be thoroughly penetrated with Anglican “principles,” and find all his ideals in the communion to which we are inclined to attribute the discovery of the “happy medium” between truth and error. But, alas for the perversity of human nature! he cannot see the schemes of Victor Emmanuel through a rose-colored lens. He has the temerity to express sympathy for the august prisoner of the Vatican; his regret for the dismemberment and spoliation of convents and monasteries—the dispersion of their libraries, the interruption of the charitable works in which they were engaged, and the appropriation by the government of the dowers which these religious brought with them to their respective houses; the wiping out of many beautiful religious associations, along with the destruction of the monuments with which they were connected. He even has the hardihood to doubt whether there is a moral gain in the freedom now vouchsafed to the vendors of Protestant Bibles and the flood of _popular_ literature, which has signalized the advent of the Sardinian usurper, as we glean from an article by the author in a recent number of _Good Words_.

THE POODLE PRINCE. By Edouard Laboulaye, Member of the Institute. Translated by W. H. Bishop. Milwaukee: Office of the _Journal of Commerce_. Pamphlet.

This is a most clever _brochure_, full of wit and humor, which is, however, only the sparkle of serious thought, for the object of the author is a serious one. M. Laboulaye is a Protestant and a Liberal, but he is, we believe, one of the most respectable and moderate writers of that school, and is certainly one of those who are disposed to be respectful toward the Catholic Church. Writers of this class, though they are deficient in respect to their positive political doctrines, are yet often the most effective and powerful opponents of that Cæsarism which Catholics have so much reason to detest and oppose. The present _brochure_, which we regret not to have the pleasure of reading in its original French, is a satire on Napoleonic Cæsarism, together with a brilliant fancy sketch of what the author dreams of as a happy political condition for France. The Poodle Prince is king of the Fly-catchers, and receives his funny appellation from the circumstance that his godmother, a fairy, occasionally turns him into a poodle. She does this whenever he is about to be befooled by his ministers, or to make a fool of himself. In his character as poodle, he meets with mishaps and acquires a knowledge of the actual state of things among his subjects, which are very serviceable to him, and he finishes by becoming a model of what a wise and patriotic prince ought to be, and doing what such a prince ought to do, according to the idea of M. Laboulaye. This idea is simply that the institutions of the Republic of the United States are those which France ought to copy, with, as we suppose the author intends, a nominal monarch and a responsible ministry, in place of an elective chief-magistrate.

We agree with him in respect to the end which he wishes to attain, viz., the just liberty and prosperity of the mass of the people, by means of a government which is properly restrained by laws and other efficacious checks from tyrannizing over the nation. We do not believe, however, in transplanting our institutions to French soil. They are the best and the only ones for ourselves, because they have grown here naturally. But we are convinced that France can only prosper under a monarchy, and that a real one in which the king rules as well as reigns. This does not hinder the formation of a constitution and a mixed government in which the people have a share as voting citizens, and by which the monarchical power is limited, though not destroyed. The Napoleon Dynasty is the creation of the Revolution, and therefore will not do. The Orléans family has compromised with the Revolution, and therefore will not do, unless it will renounce the maxims of 1789, and return to its proper place under the headship of the Count de Chambord. The latter, in his avowed principles, gives the best guarantee France can have for liberty as well as order. The restoration of her ancient monarchy, with Henry V. for king, and the _fleur de lis_ for her symbol, with the church re-instated in her complete rights and privileges, and with the modifications of political and social relations suited to the present time, is, in our view, the only way of realizing that which F. Ramière, in his able paper published in our present number, points out as the way of salvation for _la belle France_ “_Le Drapeau blanc c’est un beau drapeau_,” and we hope to see it supplant the tricolor, and wave in triumph over regenerated France.

To return to M. Laboulaye. His exquisite satire has been well rendered into good English by his translator. Whoever reads it, and is able to appreciate the finest intellectual sword-play, will enjoy a rich and rare pleasure. Moreover, there is so much truth, and good sense, and genuine philanthropic sentiment contained under the envelope of fancy and satire, that we can sincerely and conscientiously commend its general scope and spirit, and pronounce it a work as well worth reading for a serious purpose, as it is for amusement.

CONSTANCE AND MARION: OR, THE COUSINS. By M. A. B. Baltimore: Kelly & Piet. 1873.

The scene of this little story is laid in Ireland. It is one of the best of the many nice books of the kind which have been recently published, and may be read with pleasure by adults as well as young people. The writers of these unpretending, modest little books are doing more good than they can imagine, and we trust they will keep on writing.

_The Irish Race in the Past and in the Present._ By the Rev. A. J. Thebaud, S.J., is announced to be published this month by the Messrs. Appleton. F. Thebaud’s book has been anxiously expected, as it is understood to take up a phase of Irish history hitherto neglected—the _race_ itself rather than the repetition of the sad events which, in the main, constitute its history, and are only too well known. A book of this kind is required for Irish history—one that may serve as a light whereby to see the facts in their true colors, and which must prove doubly interesting by reason of those facts having been brought so recently before us.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XVII., No. 100.—JULY, 1873.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by Rev. I. T. HECKER, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

JEROME SAVONAROLA.

PART SECOND.

“Ye fathers! let your children learn grammar, and keep able men as teachers who are accomplished, and not players, pay them well, and see that the schools are no holes and corners. All should practise grammar in some degree, for it wakens the mind, and helps much. But the poets should not thereby destroy everything else. There should be a law made that no bad poet should be read in the schools, such as Ovid, _De Arte Amandi_, Tibullus and Catullus, of the same sort, Terentius in many places. Virgil and Cicero I would suffer, Homer in the Greek, and also some passages from S. Augustine’s work, _De Civitate Dei_, or from S. Jerome, or something out of the Holy Scriptures. And where your teachers find in these books Jupiter, Pluto, and the like named, say then, Children, these are fables, and show them that God alone rules the world. So would the children be brought up in wisdom and in truth, and God would be with them.”—_Sermon of Savonarola._

IT was but natural that the striking events of the life of Savonarola, and the tragic scenes of the close of his career, should have absorbed the attention of his early biographers to the exclusion of the less attractive and more difficult duty of appreciating and presenting the moral and intellectual side of his character. He is constantly described by those friendly to his memory as a grand pulpit orator and Heaven-inspired reformer; by others, as the sensational preacher and extravagant innovator; while little or nothing is said by either of his literary and philosophical acquirements. By turns, and according to their several views, they exhibit him to us as fanatic and impostor, as prophet and martyr, while the figure of the scholar, the philosopher, and the theologian remains invisible. It is, nevertheless, but fair to say that this arises partially from the fact that a very important portion of Savonarola’s literary productions was unknown to his contemporaries and their immediate successors. Modern research has brought to light a large number of which they never heard. Another circumstance has contributed to confirm the mistaken impression concerning him as a man wanting in literary capacity, namely, the effort to make of him the enemy of literature by classing him among the opponents of the so-called revival of letters in Europe.

What is styled the revival of letters in the XVth century really began in Italy long before, and was prepared, says Hallam, by several circumstances that lie further back in Italian history. The classic revelation of the XVth century was indeed a revelation to Germany, France, and England, but not to Italy. The true restorer of classical antiquity in Italy, and consequently in Europe, had already appeared in the XIVth century, and his name was Petrarch (1304-1374). It was he who first inspired his countrymen with his own admiration of the classic beauties of Virgil and Cicero. The larger portion of his works is written in Latin, and he died under the delusion that his _Africa_, a Latin poem, was his greatest work. A taste for the cultivation of the Roman classics grew steadily from this period, gaining strength and ardor every day, until it became the absorbing passion of all ranks of scholars. Even Poggio Bracciolini, usually assigned exclusively to the XVth, belongs partially to the XIVth century. So also does Guarino Guarini, the greatest of the early Hellenists.

PAGANISM IN LITERATURE.

The tide of classical enthusiasm was now swollen by the introduction of the Greek classics and the emigration to Italy of numerous distinguished Greek scholars. Historians vie with each other in describing the enthusiastic ardor of the Italians in the cultivation of these two great ancient literatures. It amounted to an intoxication that seized upon young and old, laity and clergy, women as well as men. The purely literary advantages to be obtained by so general a devotion to classic lore were of course enormous. But in this world, says a distinguished English Catholic divine[138] in referring to the period in question, “evil follows good as its shadow, human nature perverting and corrupting what is intrinsically innocent or praiseworthy. It was not Virgil, nor Cicero, nor Tacitus, nor Homer, nor Demosthenes that was most read and imitated, but Propertius, and Tibullus, and Apuleius. Pagan ideas colored men’s thoughts; pagan ethics supplanted Christian morals; pagan theogony was better understood than the Christian catechism; and their influences spread not only through the schools, but to the cloister. Men sought in those classics, not poetry, but pruriency; not finished style, but abandoned vice; not accountability in a hereafter, but nothingness in the future. The Fathers, many of whom wrote for the express purpose of denouncing the heathen immorality of these productions, must not be studied, because, forsooth, of the uncouthness of their style. Paganism impressed itself on everything, and men sought to ignore the road to Calvary that they might enter the flowery path of Olympus.”

Unfortunately, the period was most propitious for the introduction and spread of this moral poison. For long years, Italy had been demoralized by violent factions and bloody wars. Society was disorganized. The removal of the head of the church to Avignon had been fatal to ecclesiastical discipline. The effects of this laxity produced that most frightful of scourges—a corrupt clergy; and although scores of volumes have been written describing with great minuteness all the details of the rapid march and wide extent of this fatal influence, it would be difficult to present in any shorter space at this day any adequate idea of its depth or intensity. Alone and unaided, Savonarola dared to attack paganism in literature in its stronghold; for Florence was at that time the centre of the Hellenic and Roman revival, and filled with its most passionate devotees. He thus arrayed himself against Italy and the spirit of the age. He denounced pagan literature, and scouted as absurd the fanaticism for its study. Not the laity alone, but the clergy and the hierarchy, came in for a share of his strictures. “In the houses of the great prelates and great doctors,” he cries out, “nothing is thought of but poetry and rhetoric. Go and see for yourselves: you will find them with books of polite literature in their hands—pernicious writings—with Virgil, Horace, and Cicero, to prepare themselves for the cure of souls withal. Astrologers have the governance of the church. There is not a prelate, there is not a great doctor, but is intimate with some astrologer who predicts for him the hour and the moment for riding out or for whatever else he does. Our preachers have already given up Holy Scripture, and are given to philosophy, which they preach from the pulpit, and make it their queen. As to Holy Scripture, they treat it as the handmaid, because to preach philosophy looks learned, whereas it should simply be an aid in the interpretation of the divine Word.”

In another sermon, he says: “They tickle the ears with Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, and Petrarch, and take no concern in the salvation of souls. Why do they not, instead of books like these, teach that alone in which are the law and the spirit of life? The Gospel, my Christian brethren, must be your constant companion. I speak not of the book, but its spirit. If ye have not the spirit of grace, although you carry the whole volume about with you, it will be of no avail. And how much more foolish are those who go about loaded with briefs and tracts, and look as if they kept a stall at a fair? Charity does not consist of sheets of paper. The true books of Christ are the apostles and saints: the true reading of them is to imitate their lives.”

Because Savonarola thus denounced ancient classic literature, it must not be supposed that he was either ignorant of it or unable to recognize what was really valuable in it. On the contrary, he was as familiar with Greece and Rome as his adversaries, and denounced only such pagan authors as were dangerous to morality. He might as consistently have been charged with ignorance of Aristotle, the whole of whose philosophy and writings he had, as it were, at his fingers’ ends, because, after denouncing from the pulpit the blindness with which that philosopher was followed, he would ask: “Has your Aristotle succeeded in proving the immortality of the soul?”

Savonarola’s denunciation of the evil effects of pagan literature is too often represented as sweeping and indiscriminate, while in point of fact he falls short in both these respects of a writer of the XIXth century who counts a certain number of respectable adherents. We refer to the Abbé Gaume, who, in a remarkable work published in France in 18—, _Le Ver Rongeur des Sociétés Modernes_, maintains that very many of the evils of society that have their origin in the education of youth may be traced to the pagan ideas imbibed in the early study of the Greek and Roman classics.[139] Savonarola’s position on this subject, in fact, appears to have been substantially the same with that of Tertullian, S. Basil, and S. Jerome.

Partial justice has been done to Savonarola as a powerful logician and a learned theologian. His intimate knowledge of the Scriptures was something exceptional—not a mere rote knowledge, for it is said he knew them by heart, but a searching and thorough familiarity which showed a wonderful intellectual and spiritual grasp of their body and spirit.

HIS PHILOSOPHY.

As a philosopher, he has been credited by all writers with a familiarity with the systems of Plato and Aristotle, then dominant; but his latest Italian biographer, Villari, shows satisfactorily that, in his theological writings, he reasons with so much freedom and independence that he had practically freed himself from the dominion of Aristotle.[140] His early biographers made neither attempt nor pretence to do more than relate the material facts of his career. Later writers, with more attention to his published works, saw more clearly his intellectual power, although his philosophical productions were almost entirely neglected. M. Perrens does indeed direct attention to them, but merely as “_des catéchismes sans prétention_.” Rudelbach[141] is so engrossed with his sharp search for Protestant ideas that he takes no notice of his philosophical writings. Meier[142] perceives that in philosophy “he shows a judgment and critical power of his own”; while Poli, in his additions to Tennemann, remarks his order and clearness. “Not to acknowledge Savonarola as a powerful logician,” says Rio, in his remarkable work on Christian art, “an accomplished orator, a profound theologian, a genius comprehensive and bold, a universal philosopher, or rather, the competent judge of all philosophy, would be an injustice which history and his contemporaries would not tolerate.” The same author goes on to give him credit for the possession of faculties rarely found united with those which make the logician and the theologian. He says: “One might imagine without doubt that it would be more just to deny him the possession of that rare gift of an exquisitely acute and intuitive perception of the beautiful in the arts of imagination, which is not always the privilege of the greatest genius, and which supposes a sensibility of soul and a delicacy of organs too difficult to meet with, either the one or the other, in a monastic person devoted to the mortifications of the cloister; and yet it is no exaggeration to say that both are found united in a very high degree in Savonarola.” The historian Guicciardini, who had made special study of Savonarola’s works, says: “In philosophy, he was the most powerful man in Italy, and reasoned on it in so masterly a manner that it seemed as if he had himself created it.”

Although the mass of published works of Savonarola may be truly called enormous, very many of his productions never appeared, most of his manuscripts having been destroyed, or, in a few instances, but lately brought to light. Among these latter, Villari mentions a compendium of all the works of Plato and Aristotle, regularly catalogued as in the library of S. Mark. Some of his smaller treatises also survive, and the same author recognizes the writer’s originality and the bold hand (_la mano ardita_) of Savonarola in such passages as these:

“We must, in all cases, proceed from the known to the unknown; for thus only can we arrive at truth with any degree of facility. Sensations are nearest and best known to us; they are gathered up in the memory, where the mind transforms individual sensations into one general rule or experience; nor does it stop here, but it proceeds further, and from many united experiences arrives at universal truths. Therefore, true experience resolves itself into first principles—primary causations; it is speculative, free, and of the highest nature.”[143]

Savonarola’s definition of _veracity_, strikingly acute and clear, is one not likely to have been made by a man at all weak either in philosophy or moral principle. It is well worth attention: “By veracity we understand a certain habit by which a man, both in his actions and in his words, shows himself to be that which he really is, neither more nor less.” This, though not a legal, is a moral, duty, for it is a debt which every man in honesty owes to his neighbor, _and the manifestation of truth is an essential part of justice_. Savonarola was, in fact, the first to shake off the yoke of ancient authority in philosophy. He alone, if we except Lorenzo Valla, who spoke more as a grammarian than a philosopher, dared to declare against it. “Some,” he says, “are so bigoted, and have so entirely submitted their understandings to the fetters of the ancients, that not only dare they not say anything in opposition to them, but abstain from saying anything not already said by them. What kind of reasoning is this? What additional strength of argument? The ancients did not reason thus; why, then, should we? If the ancients failed to perform a praiseworthy action, why should we also fail?” And this sentiment he constantly presents in various forms; not in theory alone, moreover, but in practice; not only in the special discussion of philosophy, but in its practical application. His _Triumph of the Cross_[144] which is generally accepted as his greatest work, is an exposition of the whole Christian doctrine by reason alone. He thus states it in his preface: “As it is our purpose to discuss the subject of this book solely by the light of reason, we shall not pay regard to any authority, but will proceed as if there had not existed in the whole world any man, however wise, on whom to rest our belief, taking natural reason as our sole guide.” And he adds: “To comprehend things that are visible, it is not necessary to seek the acquaintance of things invisible, for all our knowledge of the extrinsic attributes of corporeal objects is derived from the senses; but our intellect, by its subtlety, penetrates the substance of natural things, by the consideration of which we finally arrive at a knowledge of things invisible.”

We have spoken of the large number of Savonarola’s published works. There would not be space in an article like this even for a list of his popular treatises on practical religious duties, of which four were published in one year alone (1492). These were _On Humility_, _On Prayer_, _On the Love of Christ_, and _On a Widow’s Life_. With all their pious fervor, they are marked by strong practical judgment, and it is but little wonder that the people of Florence should have been enthusiastic in their admiration of a priest who, in all the various lines of his duty as teacher, as confessor, and as preacher, was always equal to his high calling. His harshest critics have said of him that, so violent was the asceticism he taught and preached, he opposed matrimony, and would have turned Florence into a convent. They are more than answered by the following passage from _A Widow’s Life_—_Libro della Vita Viduale_:

“Widows are like children—under the special protection of the Lord. The true life for them to lead is to give up all worldly thoughts, and devote themselves to the service of God; to become like the turtle-dove, which is a chaste creature; and thus, when it has lost its companion, no longer takes up with another, but spends the rest of its life in solitude and lamentation. Nevertheless, if for the education of her children, or through poverty, or for other good and sufficient motive, the widow desire to marry again, let her do so by all means. This would be preferable to being surrounded by admirers, and so expose herself to the risk of calumnies and to a thousand dangers. Let the widow who is not inclined to maintain the strict decorum, the somewhat difficult reserve, becoming her position, rather return to the dignified life of a married woman; but let those who feel that they possess strength and temper of mind equal to the demands of their state become a model to other women. A widow ought to dress in sober attire, to live retired, to avoid the society of men, to be gravity itself, and to maintain such severity of demeanor that none may dare utter by word or show by a smile the least want of respect. By such a life, she will be a continual lesson to other women, and will render it unnecessary for a widow to use words of counsel by which to acquire influence over others. It is unbecoming a widow to be prying into the lives and failings of other persons; it is unbecoming for her to be or even appear to be vain, nor ought she, for the sake of others, to forget what is due to herself.”

SCHOLAR AND POET.

Mention has already been made of Savonarola’s devotion to the task of teaching the novices of the order, not only by his famous “damask rose-bush” lectures which all learned Florence crowded to hear, but his classes of the humanities and physical sciences. Not content with this, and desiring that the monks of his convent should live by the fruit of their own labors, he established schools in which they might learn painting, sculpture, architecture, and the art of copying and illuminating manuscripts. He also opened a department of oriental languages, where Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, and Chaldean were taught. In urging their cultivation, he said he hoped that he and his brethren would be sent by the Lord to spread the Gospel among the Turks.

When, after the expulsion of the Medici, the Florentine signiory, on account of the financial embarrassments of the republic, resolved to sell the Medicean library, there was great danger that this magnificent accumulation, then the most valuable collection of Greek and Latin authors known in Europe, and specially rich in the most precious MSS., would be either scattered or fall into the hands of strangers. There was no private citizen in Florence wealthy enough to purchase it. Savonarola, who fully appreciated its value, and who had already brought up the library of his own convent to a high standard, making it accessible to all, and the first free library in all Italy, resolved that these treasures should not leave the city. His first act of authority as prior had been to enforce the original rule of S. Dominic as to the poverty of the order. The saint’s last words were: “Be charitable, preserve humility, practise poverty with cheerfulness: may my curse and that of God fall upon him who shall bring possessions into this order!” Nevertheless, under certain so-called reformed rules, the convent at Florence had adopted the power of holding property, and its wealth in landed possessions had greatly accumulated. Savonarola’s first reform was to enforce the practice of poverty in the order, while the absence of landed income was to be supplied by the labors of the monks and a yet more rigid economy. It so happened that the sale of the convent property, in pursuance of this reform, had just been made, and Savonarola had at his command a sum of two thousand florins—a large amount for that period. His convent bought the library for three thousand florins, paying two thousand on account, and binding themselves to liquidate the balance, which was a claim held by a French creditor, in eighteen months. This transaction occurred precisely during the period of the celebrated bonfire of vanities, at which Savonarola is unjustly charged with having destroyed innumerable classical manuscripts.

Space fails us to speak of Savonarola as a poet. Like many other boys, he scribbled verses in his early youth, and wrote a poem, _De Ruina Mundi_, at the age of twenty. There is something anticipatory of Byron in the sadness and gloom of its tone:

“Vedendo sotto sopra tutto il mondo, Ed esser spenta al fondo Ogni virtute, ed ogni bel costume, Non trovo un vivo lume, Né pur chi de’ suoi vizi si vergogni.”[145]

We find in his youthful productions, says Villari, “both vigor and poetic talent, but united with negligence of form.” Later in life, he wrote numerous spiritual lauds, composed for the purpose of counteracting and taking the place of the degrading carnival songs in vogue under the Medici. As poetry, they possess no special merit. Villari mentions several of his canzoni, written when he was a young man, and cites one in praise of S. Catherine of Negri, in three long stanzas of fifteen lines each, in which he finds great delicacy and exquisite tenderness of feeling. He also refers to some of his Latin compositions modelled on the Psalms, which are eminently poetical. In one of them, he celebrates the praises of God, saying: “I sought thee everywhere, but found thee not. I asked the earth, Art thou my God? and I was answered, Thou deceivest thyself: I am not thy God. I asked the air, and was answered, Ascend still higher. I asked the sky, the sun, the stars, and they all answered me, He who made me out of nothing, he is God; he fills the heavens and the earth; he is in thy heart. I then, O Lord, sought thee far off, and thou wast near. I asked my eyes if thou hadst entered by them, and they answered, We know colors only. I asked the ear, and was answered that it knew sound only. The senses, then, O Lord, knew thee not; thou hast entered into my soul, thou art in my heart, and thou makest manifest thyself to me when I am performing works of charity.”

Owing to his terribly earnest denunciation of pagan excesses in poetry and painting, and his indignation at their imitation by Christians, Savonarola has been held up as the enemy of both poets and poetry, and this even in his own day. To this charge he replied in his work on _The Division and Utility of all the Sciences_, one part of which treats of poetry. We select a few of its points. He begins:

“It never entered my mind to say a word in condemnation of the art of poetry. I condemned solely the abuse which many had made of it, although I have been calumniated on that account by many persons, both in speaking and writing.... The essence of poetry is to be found in philosophy. If any one believe that the art of poetry teaches us only dactyls and spondees, long and short syllables, and the ornaments of speech, he has certainly fallen into a great mistake.... The object of poetry is to persuade by means of that syllogism called an example, expressed with elegance of language, so as to convince and, at the same time, to delight us. And as our soul has supreme delight in song and harmony, the ancients contrived the measures of versification, that, by such means, men might be more readily excited to virtue. But measure is mere form; and the poet may produce a poem without metre and without verse. This, in fact, is the case in the Holy Scriptures, in which our Lord makes true poetry consist in wisdom; true eloquence in the spirit of truth; hence, our minds are not occupied with the outward letter, but are filled with the spirit.” ... He then goes on to denounce “a fallacious race of pretended poets, who know no better than to tread in the footsteps of the Greeks and Romans; keep to the same form, the same metre; invoke the same gods, nor venture to use any other names or words than those they find in the ancients.... This is not only a false poetry, but one most pernicious to youth. We find the heathens themselves condemning such poets. Did not Plato himself declare that a law ought to be passed to expel those poets from the city who, by the allurements of the most corrupting verses, contaminate everything with vile lusts and moral degradation? What, then, are our Christian princes about? Why do they not issue a law to expel from their cities not only these false poets, but their works also, and all the works of ancient authors who have written on libidinous subjects and praise false gods? It would be well if all such works were destroyed, and none were allowed to remain except such as excite to virtuous conduct.”

It is on such passages as these that Savonarola’s enemies base their charges of enmity to poetry, etc. The charges are unfounded. His æsthetic opinions were in harmony with the purest principles of art, and his sense of the true and the beautiful was always acute. “In what does beauty consist?” he asks, in one of his sermons. “In colors? No. In figures? No. Beauty results from harmony in all the parts and colors. This applies to composite subjects; in simple subjects, beauty is in light. Look at the sun and the stars—their beauty is in light; behold the spirits of the blessed—light constitutes their beauty; raise your thoughts to the Almighty—he is light and is beauty itself. The beauty of man and woman is greater and more perfect the nearer it approaches to the primary Beauty. But what, then, is this beauty? It is a quality resulting from a due proportion and harmony between the several members and parts of the body. You would never say that a woman was handsome because she had a fine nose and pretty hands; but when her features harmonize. Whence comes this beauty? Inquire, and you will find it is from the soul.”

Addressing himself to women, he said: “Ye women who glory in your ornaments, in your head-dresses, in your hands, I tell you that you are all ugly! Would you see true beauty? Observe a devout person, man or woman, in whom the Spirit dwells—observe such an one, I say, while in the act of prayer, when the countenance is suffused with divine beauty, and the prayer is over. You will then see the beauty of God reflected in that face, and a countenance almost angelic.”

We have thus endeavored, in referring to Savonarola’s acquirements, and by presenting him to our readers in a variety of mental aspects, to convey some idea of the moral, intellectual, and æsthetic sides of his character, in order that, as the story of his life and the account of the exciting incidents with which it is filled progress in our pages, they may be the better able to appreciate his action by at least a partial knowledge of his spiritual constitution and mental resources. We resume, then, the thread of our narrative.

THE SERMON AT BOLOGNA.

Savonarola preached his usual course of Lenten sermons in 1493, not at Florence, but at Bologna. His correspondence with his brother friars at S. Mark’s during his absence shows that he had gone there unwillingly, and it is hence supposed that Piero de’ Medici had brought about his absence through orders from his superiors at Milan and at Rome. The friar confined his preaching to subjects of doctrine and morals, and at the outset attracted but little public attention. The _beaux esprits_ set him down as “a poor simpleton, a preacher for women”—_uomo semplice e predicatore da donne_. But his animation and sincerity were contagious, and hearers soon came in crowds. The tyrant Giovanni Bentivoglio then ruled Bologna, and his wife, an Orsini, appeared at all the sermons, entering late, and followed by a large retinue of gentlemen, pages, and ladies—_gentildonne e damizelle_. The silent rebuke of stopping short in his sermon until the disturbance thus caused had subsided was tried by the preacher several times in vain. He then referred to the disedification given by such interruptions, and mildly requested that ladies who came to hear the sermon should endeavor to be present at its beginning. In response, the haughty woman made a point of continuing the annoyance with offensive and increased ostentation, until one morning, when thus breaking in upon the friar while in all the fervor of his discourse, his patience gave way, and he cried out: _Ecco, ecco il demonio che viene ad interrompere il verbo di Dio_—“Behold the demon who comes to interrupt the word of God!” All the blood of all the Orsinis boiled over at this public insult. A reigning princess to be thus treated by a mere _frate_! As the story runs, she ordered two of her attendants to slay him in the pulpit; but whether their courage failed them, or the crowd would not permit them to reach the friar, they did not carry out their order. Still enraged, she sent two other satellites to his cell, where Savonarola received them with such dignity and impressive calmness that their resolution oozed away, and they said with great respect: “Our lady has sent us to your reverence to know if you had need of anything.” To which suitable and courteous reply being made, they were dismissed. In his closing sermon at Bologna, the preacher announced: “This evening I shall depart for Florence with my slender staff and wooden flask, and I shall sleep at Pianoro. If any person want aught of me, let him come before I set out. _My death is not to be celebrated at Bologna, but elsewhere._”

The legend runs that it was on this journey, when near to Florence, that Savonarola, unable to take any food and broken with fatigue, sank by the roadside, powerless to go further. Quickly there came to him the vision of an unknown man, who, giving him strength, accompanied him to the city gate, and disappeared, saying: “Remember that thou doest that for which thou hast been sent by God.” Each reader will decide for himself as to the degree of credibility to be attached to such a legend. Certain it is, nevertheless, that Savonarola himself and many men of the strongest minds of that day fully believed in it.[146]

INDEPENDENCE OF S. MARK’S.

On his return to Florence in the spring of 1493, Savonarola found a worse state of things than he had left on his departure. The rule of Piero de’ Medici was rapidly becoming every day less tolerable, and the discontent of the people more marked and bitter. One thing, however, the people knew well. It was that Savonarola was their friend. Piero de’ Medici was also perfectly aware of it, and, as he had the power, might at any moment through his influence have the Dominican prior ordered away to Milan by his superiors in Lombardy or Rome, as the Tuscan convents formed one province with those of Lombardy. This union had been brought about some fifty years before by reason of the depopulation of the Tuscan convents from the plague. As this state of things had long ceased to exist, and the convents were again full, it occurred to Savonarola to seek the restoration of the Tuscan convents to their original condition of an independent province. In his management of this important and difficult piece of practical business, there was nothing whatever of the visionary monk, and he set to work with all his energy to carry out a measure in which he felt that the purity and elevation of his order and the liberties of the Florentine people were at stake. The authorization for the measure he desired must of course come from Rome, and, in order to obtain it, he sent thither two of his friars, Alessandro Rinuccini, a member of one of the most illustrious families of Florence, and Domenico da Pescia. The latter in particular was unreservedly devoted to his prior, ardent in his admiration of him, and fully persuaded that he was a prophet sent by God. On arriving at their destination, they encountered a formidable opposition. Not only the Lombards, but the King of Naples, the republic of Genoa, the Dukes of Milan and Ferrara, and Bentivoglio of Bologna, all joined in striving for the defeat of the petition. Strangely enough—and it is mentioned by historians as an evidence of his frivolous mind and inattention to serious matters—Piero de’ Medici had been persuaded to favor a measure of which the main object was to free S. Mark’s and its prior from his authority. In fact, Savonarola could not have advanced a step without obtaining his approbation, inasmuch as the application of the convent as made could not be allowed to be presented without the approbation of the Florentine government. In bringing about this important success, Savonarola had the assistance of Philip Valori, and John, Cardinal de’ Medici, a brother of Piero, who afterwards became Pope Leo X. While at Rome, the general of the Dominicans and Cardinal Caraffa of Naples warmly supported him. Nevertheless, the two friars of S. Mark’s who had been sent to Rome were dispirited by the formidable aspect of the opposition they there encountered, and wrote to their prior that success was impossible, and he must give up all hope of carrying his point. Savonarola’s reply was: “Away with doubts! Stand firm, and you will be victorious; the Lord scatters the councils of the nations, and casts the designs of princes to the ground.” In a consistory of the 22d of May, the Tuscan question came up, but the pope refused to approve the brief, and dismissed the consistory until the following day. All the cardinals departed with the exception of Caraffa, who took the liveliest interest in the success of the measure, and had a strong personal influence with Alexander VI. They entered into a friendly conversation, during which the cardinal produced the brief, and asked the pope to sign it. With a smile, he declined; when, presuming on his personal familiarity, and in a half-jesting manner, Caraffa took the pontifical ring from the pope’s finger, and sealed the brief. Just then, in hot haste, came in fresh and stronger remonstrances from Lombardy, but the pope replied that it was too late—“What is done is done”; and he would hear no more of it.

Savonarola’s first care was to reform and strengthen the discipline of his convent, and it was at this juncture that he brought it back to the original rule of poverty established by the founder of the order, as we have already stated. Then followed the enforcement of the strictest personal economy, the acquisition and practice of useful arts by the monks whereby to earn their livelihood, and the study of the oriental languages. In all his conventual reforms, the new prior taught by example as much as by precept. His monks saw that he inculcated no principle of which he was not a living model. Sober in his diet, ascetic in all his habits, of an application to study that seemed to know no fatigue, he inspired all by his labor and self-denial. In all the whole convent, the humblest monk was not more poorly clad than his prior. No cell so naked, no pallet so hard, as his. Rigid with others, he was severe with himself. Numerous candidates presented themselves for admission to the Convent of S. Mark, which was now the admiration of all Tuscany. The sons of the most distinguished families in Florence sought to become inmates of S. Mark’s, and the Rucellai, the Salviati, the Albizzi, the Strozzi, and even the Medici, pressed into the narrow limits of the crowded convent, in order to receive at the hands of Savonarola the robe of S. Dominic. Additional buildings were absolutely necessary, and those of the Sapienza were obtained—the same that were a few years since used for the stables of the grand duke.

Under the brief lately obtained from Rome, the Dominican convents of Fiesole, Prato, and Bibbiena, and the two hospices of the Maddalena, asked for reception into the Tuscan congregation under Savonarola’s authority, and were admitted. Even the friars of another order, the Camaldoli, were desirous of uniting themselves with S. Mark’s, in order to be under the rule of Savonarola; but he could not accede to their request, for want of authority. All this success and honor did not in the slightest degree affect his character. If, during his career, he manifested pride and daring, it was towards the great and powerful. In private life, and in the interior of his convent, he was to the end the same gentle and humble brother the monks had known as Fra Girolamo.

ADVENT, 1493.

It was natural, under the circumstances, that the Superior of the Tuscan Congregation of Dominicans, the preacher whose predictions had been so wonderfully verified, the exemplary monk who had been called to the bedside of the dying Lorenzo the Magnificent, should enter upon the delivery of his course of Advent sermons for 1493 with increased confidence and far greater freedom of speech than the comparatively unknown Fra Girolamo had ever manifested. His audiences grew daily more numerous, and crowds awaited for hours his coming. The twenty-five sermons of this course were on the Seventy-third Psalm (_Quam Bonus_). His principal topics were the unhappy and ruinous condition of the church, the immoral lives of the Italian princes and many of the higher clergy, approaching punishments, and the desire of all good men to stem the rising tide of depravity. We have already cited the passages (“They tickle the ears with Aristotle, etc.,” and “In the houses of the great prelates”) in which he denounces the clergy and hierarchy; and he thus describes the princes of Italy: “These wicked princes are sent as a punishment for the sins of their subjects; they are truly a great snare for souls; their palaces and halls are the refuge of all the beasts and monsters of the earth, and are a shelter for caitiffs and for every kind of wickedness. Such men resort to their courts because there they find the means and the excitements to give vent to all their evil passions. There we find the wicked counsellors who devise new burdens and new imposts for sucking the blood of the people; there we find the flattering philosophers and poets who, by a thousand stories and lies, trace the genealogy of those wicked princes from the gods; and, what is still worse, there we find priests who adopt the same language. That, my brethren, is the city of Babylon, the city of the foolish and the impious, the city which the Lord will destroy.”

And then, after speaking sharply of a superfluity of golden mitres and golden chalices, he adds: “But dost thou know what I would say? In the primitive church, there were wooden chalices and golden prelates; but now the church has golden chalices and wooden prelates....”

“What doest thou, O Lord? Why slumberest thou? Arise and take the church out of the hands of the devil, out of the hands of tyrants, out of the hands of wicked prelates. Hast thou forgotten thy church? Dost thou not love her? Hast thou no care for her? We are become, O Lord, the opprobrium of the nations. Turks are masters of Constantinople. We are become tributaries of infidels. O Lord God! thou hast dealt with us as an angry father; thou hast banished us from thee; hasten the punishment and the scourge, that there may be a speedy return to thee. _Effunde iras tuas in gentes_—’Pour out thy wrath upon the nations.’ Be not scandalized, my brethren, by these words; rather consider that, when the good wish for punishment, it is because they wish to see evil driven away, and the blessed reign of Jesus Christ triumphant throughout the world. We have now no other hope left us, unless the sword of the Lord threatens the earth.”

THE DELUGE.

In Lent, 1494, Savonarola resumed his preaching in a course of sermons which, as published, have been entitled _Sermons on Noe’s Ark_ (_Prediche sopra l’Arca di Noé_). It was, in fact, a continuation of the expounding of Genesis begun in 1490. The impression produced by them upon his auditors was very great. All the biographers unite in describing how the people were carried away, the wonder he excited, and how marvellously all that was foretold came to pass. His Advent sermons had dwelt on the near approach of punishments—a coming deluge of calamities—and he now constructs a mystical ark in which all may take refuge. He prophesied the approach of a new Cyrus who should conquer Italy without resistance. At length, on Easter morning, his ark being completed, he invited all to hasten to enter it with the virtues which distinguish Christians: “The time will come when the ark will be closed, and many will repent that they had not entered therein.” Thus the short chapter of Genesis relating to the ark occupied the whole of Lent, and he resumed the subject in the month of September following. On the twenty-first day of that month, he was to expound the seventeenth verse, relating to the Deluge.

The Dome of Florence was crowded. All waited for the sermon in anxiety and excitement, but attentive and motionless. Mounting the pulpit, and surveying the multitude in impressive silence for a few moments, he thundered out: “And behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth.” A thrill of terror convulsed the vast assemblage. Pico di Mirandola relates that a cold shiver ran through all his bones, and that the hairs of his head stood on end; and Savonarola has recorded that he was profoundly moved. That very day the news had arrived that a horde of foreign troops were descending the Alps to conquer Italy, and popular credulity made their numbers countless, invincible in arms, gigantic, cruel, and ferocious. “Having, before the arrival of the King of France, just closed the ark, these sermons caused such terror, alarm, sobbing, and tears, that every one passed through the streets without speaking, more dead than alive.” (_MS. history in Magliabecchian library._) Terror there was indeed. Italy was helpless. There was neither nation nor national army. The princes were defenceless, and the whole country must fall an easy prey to the invader. Men saw rivers of blood before them. What could save them? All rushed to Savonarola, imploring counsel and help. He alone could succor them. All his words had been verified. All those whose deaths he foretold had gone to their graves. Punishment threatened had begun. The sword of the Lord had indeed descended upon the earth. Not only the people flocked about him, but the graver men and magistrates of Florence asked his counsel, and his admirers and adherents became in a moment, as if by magic, the rulers of the city.

Here may be said to terminate the monastic life of Savonarola, and, in order to follow his career, we must with him quit the cloister, and accompany him among the people of Florence down in the public places.

MADAME AGNES.

FROM THE FRENCH OF CHARLES DUBOIS.