PART II.

We said, in our last article,[41] that the Catholic reader would find this second play much more painful than the first. We are sure, too, that the non-Catholic reader will deem it inferior in point of interest. Yet we do not agree with the London _Spectator_ that there is an “artistic chasm” between the two plays. At any rate, whatever constructive defects are to be found in the present performance, there is no falling off in dramatic power.

Footnote 41:

THE CATHOLIC WORLD, March, 1877, p. 777. We regret to be informed by the publisher that this really great drama is now out of print.

The play is preluded by an “Introductory Scene,” in which Mary is discovered prostrate on the tomb of Jane Grey. This does not at all surprise us after the remorse we have witnessed in the last scene of the preceding play. Holding herself criminally responsible for the execution of her cousin, it was natural for her to perform “penances severer than the Church prescribes.” The gentle Fakenham—now Abbot of Westminster—may well express anxiety for his penitent.

“Pray God Her mind give way not: sorely is it shaken. These tearful macerations of the spirit, These fasts that chain all natural appetites, Nor mortify the sinful flesh alone, Must be restrained: or death will close the scene.”

While he is soliloquizing Gardiner enters with Elizabeth. Fakenham has requested the latter’s presence.

“Whate’er hath passed, Be sure her Grace hath ever truly loved you. Therefore we trust your coming may dispel The baleful visions that enthrall her spirit; Dispersed, as fiends before rebuking Saints.”

Elizabeth answers:

“You hope too much. Awakened jealousy Preys on her, like the Egyptian’s asp.”

But she is mistaken; for presently the queen, on recognizing the “veiled mourner,” says tenderly:

“I part The tresses on thy brow; and gaze upon thee _With the strong yearning of a blighted love_. I know thee, sister! Take me to thine arms— And let me weep.”

The weeping revives Mary’s energy, but that energy takes a shape in which we see the old despair combined with a new fanaticism.

“ELIZABETH. These mingling tears wash out All venom from past sorrow—”

QUEEN. “Not from mine! Immedicable evil hath infected The fount of life within me. I shall die In premature decay; and fall aside As withered fruit falls from a blasted branch. I, like a mother by her dying babe, Have closed the eyes of hope; and o’er my heart Torpid despair fans with his vampire wings.”

Then, suddenly apostrophizing the “Eternal Majesty,” she appeals, as one “hemmed in by dark conspiracies” and “baited by schismatics,” for “prescience to detect” and “strength to control them”; deeming herself, once more, “the Lord’s Vicegerent,” to execute his judgments.

“Fly, brood of darkness! for my prayer hath risen: And God will hear, and smite, as once he smote The sin of Korah: and the earth shall ope And swallow blasphemy; and plagues leap forth Consuming impious men: even _till the Church, Swinging her holy censer in the midst, Shall stay the pestilence_, God’s wrath appeased!”

This is a fine allusion to the destruction of the three schismatical upstarts in the wilderness; and it is surprising to see a Protestant author attribute to Catholics so much knowledge of the Bible. Nevertheless, poor sinful mortals never make a greater mistake than when they fancy themselves ministers of what they call the “justice” of Him “whose thoughts are not as our thoughts.”

Perhaps Fakenham was about to make some such reply; for this poet-created Mary Tudor—after pausing, we suppose, to take breath—continues:

“Answer me not. I rise from this cold grave, My penitential couch, with heart as frozen As the dead limbs beneath, and will unbending As this hard stone that shuts her from the world.”

Thus we are fully prepared for anything she may do; yet, in fact, she proves singularly innocuous.

The play opens with a discussion between Gardiner and Fakenham on the subject of the queen’s marriage. Both are agreed that she ought to marry, for the good of State and Church; but either has his eye on a very different candidate for her hand. The abbot’s candidate is Reginald Cardinal Pole—a character to whom our author does full justice as among the loftiest of his time. Fakenham thus describes him as a “student at Padua”:

“A nobler presence Never embodied a more gracious soul: Ardent, yet thoughtful; in the search of knowledge Unwearied, yet most temperate in its use. _Whate’er he learned he wore with such an ease, It seemed incorporated with his substance; And beamed forth, like the light that emanates From a saint’s brow._”

And again:

“Oft have I watched him sitting For hours, on some rude promontory’s edge, Wrapt in his mantle, his broad brow, sustained With outspread palm, o’ershadowing his eyes. And there, as one of Titan birth, he lingered In strange community with nature; mingling With all around—the boundless sky, the ocean, The rock, the forest—looking back defiance Unto the elements: _as some lone column Beneath the shadow of a thunder-cloud_.”

For the thought in these last six lines Sir Aubrey seems indebted to Lord Byron, that poet “of Titan birth”—who, indeed, would have sat for the picture far better, we imagine, than Pole; except that, instead of “looking defiance at the elements” (an attitude for which we see no reason in Pole’s case either), his face would have shown ecstatic joy at “mingling with all around.”

“Ye elements, in whose ennobling stir I feel myself exalted!”

(_Childe Harold_, canto iv.)

The way Gardiner sneers at Fakenham’s candidate, and then introduces his own, affords us an opportunity of correcting the author’s misconceptions of this prelate. First, then, there is no proof whatever that Gardiner was blood-thirsty, or even severe. Had he been the relentless persecutor he is popularly represented, his own diocese of Winchester would have become the scene of numerous executions for heresy; whereas, in fact, not one such execution can be shown to have taken place there. Neither, again, is there any more evidence that he egged on Mary to acts of cruelty. If he did make the attempt, he failed signally; for the real Mary Tudor was personally guiltless of a single act of intolerance even. The only authentic instance in which Gardiner played the part of evil genius to the queen was when he urged her to retain the Royal Supremacy established by her father—her title and authority as head of the English Church—a counsel which elicited the witty reply: “Women, I have read in Scripture, are forbidden to speak in the church. Is it, then, fitting that _your_ church should have a dumb head?” At the time of giving this bad advice Gardiner belonged to the anti-papal party—which, of course, was therefore schismatical, though nominally Catholic. And this time-serving adhesion was the one great sin of his life. He repented of it some time before his death, and publicly lamented it in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross, preached on occasion of the reconciliation of the kingdom with the Holy See; nevertheless, the memory of it so weighed upon his conscience when he lay on his death-bed that he asked to have the Passion of Our Saviour read to him, and, when the reader came to the denial of Peter, said: “Stop! I, too, have denied my Lord with Peter; but I have not learned to weep bitterly with Peter.”

We may here remark that, had our author been acquainted with the above facts of Gardiner’s history, he would not have sacrificed truth to poetic effect by making him die suddenly after the burning of Cranmer; nor, again, have put into his mouth such an un-English argument as this against Pole’s fitness to share the throne with Mary:

“He is _but an Englishman_: And ’tis an adage older than the hills That prophets are not honored in their land.”

One so anxious, as Gardiner must have been at that time, to keep _foreign domination_ out of England could never have advocated the marriage of his sovereign with “Spanish Philip,” nor, indeed, have been likely to call the latter’s father

“That wisest monarch, most devout of Christians, Potent of captains, fortunate of men.”

But, of course, the poet stands to his colors. Having selected Gardiner for the villain _par excellence_, he makes him welcome even foreign domination in the person of a bigoted prince, who, he knows, will imbrue his hands in the blood of heretics.

Philip does not come upon the scene till the third Act; but the intervening scenes form a prelude to his advent.

First we have the queen in council on the question of her marriage, and particularly of the Spanish prince’s suit. While asking Gardiner’s advice she betrays her love for Reginald, and is quickly crushed into abandoning that hope by the chancellor’s daring assurance that her cousin is certainly Pope. Accordingly, she yields reluctant assent to the prayer of Philip’s ambassador. Then, in the same scene, follows a “patient hearing” of Ridley and Latimer, whose contumacious spirit is well shown by the dramatist. Mary treats them with great forbearance, and leaves them to ponder what she has said. The closing passage of this scene is noteworthy. Latimer boasts:

“O queen! that day is past When spiritual knowledge was confined to priests. Our very babes drink knowledge as they suck. Each stripling, as he runs, plucks from each bough The fruit of knowledge.”

Mary’s reply is of surprising force and beauty:

“Ah, sirs, have a care! The tree of knowledge was an evil thing, _With root in hell, and fruitage unto death_. But in the self-same garden likewise grew Another mystery, the tree of life. This too bore fruit, unseen till after-time: And this was Christ. Children of Adam, we, _Condemned to cultivate what first we stole, Must tend the second tree with watchful love, Or perish by the poison of the first_.”

The remaining scene of this Act and the opening scene of the next are taken up chiefly with the disturbance occasioned by the approaching nuptials. Underhill, the “Hot-Gospeller,” is introduced, together with riotous citizens and the antagonists Sandys and Weston. Underhill is an honest fellow, and loyal to his queen, whose panegyrist he becomes at the play’s close. Though the rioters are in the minority, the rebellion becomes strong enough to attack Whitehall Palace, where Mary is seen at the opening of the second Act. Her masculine valor is here displayed. First she leans from the window to encourage her soldiers, then actually sallies forth to head them in person, and wins the day by thus risking her life. In the second scene Underhill excites the indignation of Sandys by his chivalrous defence of the queen not only as the one

“Whom the Lord gives to rule o’er Israel,”

but for her clemency.

“UNDERHILL. _The queen is not well served_. You heard yourself How, leaning from the Holbein gallery, Where she so long stood target to your shafts, She bade her furious knights to spare, and spake Peace to the suppliant throng.”

“SANDYS. Yet your fierce captains Do ramp along the streets with bloody staves, Hunting the white-faced citizens like rats; Or at their own doors summarily hang them.”

* * * * *

“UNDERHILL. Not fifty thus have died: a sorrowful sum If measured by domestic pangs, yet _small If balanced by the evil of their plots_: Small if contrasted with the precedents Of former feuds. In Henry’s time, they say, Full seventy thousand their viaticum Had from the hangman.”

But our author does more than make Underhill her apologist. He seems anxious, every now and then, to remind us that he privately thinks much better of his heroine than the history he has read allows him to represent. He sets off the gentler side of her nature in strong contrast to the vindictive, and, indeed, attributes the latter to inherited qualities for which she is not responsible. Accordingly, in the third and fourth scenes of the second Act Mary’s generous forgivingness, and especially to Elizabeth, shines out gloriously.

Count Egmont, Philip’s envoy, has placed upon her finger his master’s betrothal ring, when Renaud, the Spanish ambassador, strikes in with:

“Permit me To be so bold as to suggest ’twere prudent His Grace delayed till treason be put down. _Too many prisoners your Grace releases_.

QUEEN. It was the custom of my forefathers To pardon criminals upon Good Friday.

* * * * *

RENAUD. Pardon me: there may be Some guiltier. Our prince must be kept back Should your Grace yield to mistimed clemency.

* * * * *

Forgive my plainness. Can King Philip come While criminals remain unjustified? _Your sister waits her trial._

GARDINER. Let me speak. While she, the princess, lives, there is no safety For England, for the Church.”

Here Bridges, Lieutenant of the Tower, enters with a sealed warrant.

“BRIDGES. Your Grace will pardon, if, in a case like this, Your servant feels misgiving. This sealed warrant Commands me yield the princess—to be dealt with As sentence shall direct.

QUEEN. O thou good servant! Thy queen, on her heart’s knees, thanks and rewards thee. Whose is this deed? By God’s death, answer me! Ay, Gardiner, thou shalt answer for this thing, If thou hast done it.

GARDINER. Let me see the paper. A sorry trick to fright the princess! Trust me, I had no hand in it. [_He tears the warrant._

QUEEN. _Inhuman hounds! That worry your poor victim ere you slay it._ But I shall balk your malice. Silence, Gardiner! Too much already hath been said: your tongues Are deadlier than poison. Bridges, through you, Who pitied poor Jane Grey, I shall henceforth Secure my sister. You have known and loved her. You are my servant now. Receive your knighthood.”

Thus foiled in their design, Renaud and Gardiner pretend, of course, that they did not for a moment mean the death of the princess, but only her removal; and the Spaniard goes on to explain that this “removal” was to be effected “by a bridegroom’s sweet compulsion”—mentioning Philibert of Savoy as a suitor—and then, finding that offer contemptuously rejected, suggests “the kind keeping of the Hungarian queen.”

“QUEEN. Be content, sir. _My sister hath but one friend in this council— Myself_, companion of her youth. _It may be She hath compassed ill against me: yet will not I, Who fostered her lone childhood, now destroy her By death or exile._ You are malcontent. Conform ye to my will: I shall not swerve.”

In the following scene, where Mary and Elizabeth have it all to themselves, the generosity of the former is the more touching by reason of her reproaches, which Elizabeth can only answer by acting a part which such a dissembler could very easily feign. Mary shows strong grounds for suspecting her loyalty, but nobly acquits her and replaces on her finger the ring which was the pledge of love between them, saying:

“Or innocent or guilty, I forgive you.”

We regret that space does not allow us to transcribe this scene in full.

We pass to the third Act, which introduces the two best-drawn characters of the play—Philip and Reginald Pole.

In these two men the author has illustrated—perhaps unconsciously—the antipodal extremes of the moral results of the Catholic religion. In Pole we see a character perfectly Christlike in its mixture of majesty with gentleness; in Philip one who has degraded faith into superstition, and made doctrines and means of grace the instruments of selfishness and passion. The greater the good in a system, the greater the evil into which it may be perverted. The amiable Fakenham tells Gardiner, in the previous scene, his mind about the Spaniard’s portrait:

“A moody man, Whose countenance is ghastly, bearing dismal: For ever wrangling, rude. His glance is sinister, Stealthy: his laughter a sardonic sneer. _I would rather face a vulture o’er a corpse, Than such a man, whose hell is in himself._ He is a tree of death.”

Gardiner may well wince as he replies:

“You have a caustic brush: The canvas burns beneath it.”

Yet poor Queen Mary fondly looks forward to the coming of her affianced as (to borrow Byron’s exquisite metaphor)

“the rainbow of her future years— Before whose heavenly hues all sorrow disappears.”

Neither does she betray any foreboding in consequence of the storm that ushers in her wedding-day. The bridegroom, on the contrary, peevishly exclaims:

“A sorry day for our solemnities! I kiss this crucifix. Avert the omen, Most holy James of Compostella!”

_He_ does not see in this conjugal union

“The cloud-compelling harbinger of love.”

The “omen” is not unfelt, though, by some of the spectators, particularly when Doctor Sandys gives tongue about it. The wedding-scene is simple enough. The queen says, very prettily, when Philip offers a diamond ring:

“Nay, my lord: I would be wed, like any other maiden, With the plain hoop of gold.”

It is the remaining half of the play which makes the whole so inferior to the first play. Not that, as we have said, there is any deficiency of dramatic power. Philip and the cardinal are masterfully handled. Full justice, too, is done—from the author’s stand-point—to the characters of Gardiner, Cranmer, and the rest. But a thick gloom overhangs the entire picture; and the glaring historical untruth of much of it is no relief to Catholic eyes.

Philip and Pole clash instantly. The Spaniard has a presentiment of this at the moment when Sir John Gage announces

“The cardinal legate’s boat hath touched the beach.

QUEEN. The cardinal arrived! My dear, dear cousin! Go, my lord chamberlain—go, Sir John Gage, And bear our greetings to his Eminence. Let his legantine cross be borne before him; And all appliances of holy state Attend his blessed footsteps. This our king, And we, shall welcome him on Whitehall stairs.

PHILIP. You are right gracious to the cardinal. In Spain we condescend less.

QUEEN. Ah! you’ll love him, As I do, when familiarly you know him.

PHILIP. I somewhat doubt it.”

In the next scene, when the cardinal has congratulated the queen on the return of England to the faith—telling the nation:

“Be sure The light devolving from great Gregory Still shines from Peter’s chair. Who turns from it Renounces hope. Peace ripens in its beams”—

and Mary has joyfully responded:

“Here stand we without question, king and queen; And, with our Parliament, implore the pope For reconciliation. Take this missive: It is sincere. Kneeling we crave your blessing!”—

Philip interjects:

“Your Eminence shall pardon my stiff knees— Stiff, Spanish manners. Ha! I cannot kneel.”

No wonder the queen faints as the cardinal blesses her.

Philip, having thus early begun with insolence, loses no time in showing the mixture of brute and devil that he is. He threatens to leave England because his sanguinary counsels are not taken; whereupon we are rejoiced to see the author make Mary as well as Pole defend the policy of “free discussion.” Of course Gardiner supports Philip eagerly. Presently—so outrageous is Philip’s conduct to his wife—the cardinal’s indignation can contain itself no longer, and his dignified remonstrance stings the king into exclaiming:

“Were I a basilisk, I’d look thee dead!”

Gardiner urges Pole to retire; but the hero answers:

“Not so. My heart is strong: And like some stalwart wrestler, who hath need Of exercise, and doubts nor heart nor limb, I shrink not from the combat. _He who carries His cross, a daily burden, well may stand In front of any giant of the ring Who boasts he can move spheres._”

And again he warns the monster:

“Ay: you are great Above us by your station, as the vulture Upon his mountain pinnacle. What then? The arrow makes a pathway in the air: _The peasant’s hands can reach the feathered tyrant_, _And from the vale quench his despotic eye_.”

—“Vulture,” mark: not eagle.

We find a profound study in Mary’s love for Philip, and particularly in its persistence. How she could feel toward such a man anything beyond wife-like duty—she, too, who had loved Reginald Pole from her childhood—is mysterious indeed. It will doubtless be said that the poet intends this new love for a part of her madness—like her passion for the worthless Courtenaye: her craving for love being such as to invest any spouse with “Cytherea’s zone.” Then, again, the treatment Pole receives at Philip’s hands, and his sublime bearing under it, ought to have the result of alienating her affections from the Spaniard even more than the latter’s behavior to herself. Hear her cry, one moment:

“Poor heart! Thou wilt not break! Insult unmitigated! Witnessed—by him!—by Pole! O Reginald! Avenged!”

And the next, see her so overjoyed by an usher announcing “the king” that she springs up from the suppliant posture in which she has just been praying

“that even as the thief On the third cross I may have peace in heaven”—

springs up, and exclaims wildly:

“The king! King Philip! O speed him hither! Stay: here’s for thy news— A jewel from my finger. Haste thee, friend.”

And again, though his Majesty enters “moodily,” she can actually greet him thus:

“O Philip. Philip! art thou come to me? _And shall there not now be an end of weeping?_ I was thinking of thee—whom else think I of? I talked of thee—of whom is all my talking? But thou art here again: _and my poor heart, Like a caged bird, is beating at its bars, To fly forth to the comfort of thy bosom_. Speak—speak—_my soul_! and give me peace.”

Verily, this _is_ madness! Who has ever seen so extraordinary a picture of woman before? Has not the poet drawn something impossible? Not at all. He simply displays, we think, an unusual knowledge of the feminine heart. A much less acquaintance with that organ should prevent surprise at any phenomena it may exhibit—particularly in the shape of undeserved love or unreasoning constancy.

Of course the poor woman’s fondness only irritates her lord, instead of appeasing him; so he tells her bluntly what he has come for—to deliver his ultimatum; which is, first, the removal of the legate; and, secondly, the death of the heretical prelates. Of his feeling towards the cardinal he says:

“Call it not hatred, but antipathy: Such as the callow chicken feels for hawks, Or wild horse for the wolf. Aversion call it: That wraps me in a cold and clammy horror When we approach. I know he cannot harm me; _And have small doubt he would not if he could_. But still, my flesh creeps if I do but touch him, As when one strokes a cat’s hair ’gainst the grain.

* * * * *

Odious is his garb Of ostentatious purple; jewelled hands; _That beard down-streaming like the chisel’d locks Of Moses from the hand of Angelo_.”

Like a gleam of sunshine, for a moment, comes a happy description of a visit from Elizabeth to the queen. Underhill is the narrator. It is in the ninth scene of this too long third Act.

“Her royal barge Was garlanded with flowers, festooned around An awning of green satin, richly broidered With eglantine and buds of gold. The bright one Beneath this canopy reclined in state, Fairer than Cleopatra with her Roman. Her royal sister on the bowery shore Of Richmond met her, kissing her 'tween whiles; Her wan cheek flushing to a healthier glow. With hospitable care, and love, she led Elizabeth to where, shrined in green leaves And flowers, a tent, curtained with cloth of gold And purple samite, stood; whose folds were wrought With silver fleur-de-lys and gold pomegranates. The music they so love breathed in their ears Like amorous blandishment: and when the morn Rippled along the wave with soberer ray, The princess stept once more into her barge, And floated down the current like a swan.”

Yet one more quotation from this Act; for we shall have but little to cite from Acts fourth and fifth. The cardinal, after arguing with Gardiner against the severe measures that are being taken under his and Bonner’s supervision, and defending the queen from the charge of approval—her consent having been forced, and things of which she was ignorant done in her name—finds relief in conversing with Fakenham, whose virtues he thoroughly appreciates. The latter speaks of his friend’s failing strength; and Pole, at a loss to account for it, says he has “heard of vampire poisons,” but instantly suppresses the suspicion. They have been up all night, apparently.

“CARDINAL. A sudden sunburst!—Lo! God’s Image in our heart is as yon orb Unto the universe; _the eye of nature, Dispersing rays more eloquent than tongues_; Beams that give life as well as light; whose absence Wraps in cold shadow all that moves and breathes. At times that Image walks through spheres remote; Unobvious to the largely wandering eye: Then nightmare darkness sits upon the soul: Then, by its own shade mantled, waits the soul, Like some dark mourner, lonely in his house. _But the harmonious hours fulfil themselves; And sunrise comes unlooked for, peak to peak Answering in spiritual radiance. This is indeed So palpably to meet Divinity, That hence the Pagan erred, not knowing God._”

In the fourth Act we have, first, the recall of Pole to Rome, contrived by Philip and Gardiner. The queen refuses to let him go; but while, in obedience to her, he remains in England, he resigns his legateship in submission to the interdict. Then comes the picture-scene, which is admirably contrived. The poor queen stops before Philip’s picture and talks to it as if it were a shrine. The original enters and brutally disenchants his worshipper. After a bitter interview, in which Mary accuses him of conjugal infidelity, the Spaniard takes his departure, answering her “Begone!” with a sudden “For ever!”

“QUEEN (_alone_). I submit to God’s decree. Was it for this my maiden liberty Was yielded?—to be spurned, despised, and still Bear on without redress? O grief! O shame! [_She approaches the picture of Philip._ Back, silken folds, that hide what was my joy, And is my torture! Back!—See, I have rent you, False, senseless idol, from thy tinselled frame! I wrench thee forth—I look on thee no more! And thus—and thus— [_she tears up the picture_] I scatter thee from out The desecrated temple of my heart! [_A pause._ My brain is hot—this swoln heart chokes my throat Yet I am better thus than self-deceived. Die, wretched queen! O die, dishonored wife! _I pant for the cold blessing of the grave!_”

Next follows the trial of Ridley and Latimer. Cranmer, too, is present, and disputes, but is not on trial. The contrast between Gardiner and Pole is admirable. Mary, too, is represented as sedulously just. Ridley and Latimer speak, of course, as if perfectly conscientious and worthy of martyrdom, but make no attempt to disprove the principle of submission to authority, insisting solely on their own infallibility. The cardinal is at last compelled to say of them:

“This is very grievous! Madam, so please you, these be heated men, Who may not be convinced, and will not bend.”

He has better hopes of Cranmer; but his gentle earnestness is lost upon him no less.

Here be it remembered that it was the secular, and not the ecclesiastical, arm which inflicted the death-penalty for obdurate heresy. This penalty was the law in those days—days when every kind of felony was more severely punished than now. Whatever we moderns may think of this law, we must not forget that heresy is the greatest and most pernicious of crimes; and, again, that it was only formal and aggressive heresy that got itself arraigned and condemned. Moreover, what made the civil power so severe upon it was the fact that it was always coupled with sedition and treason.

But before we close our remarks upon the executions in Mary’s reign, let us look for a moment on the beautiful scene which intervenes between the one we have been examining and the prison-scene at Oxford—the last of the fourth Act.

Mary and Reginald are closeted together. The holy priest seeks to comfort his cousin.

“Poor soul! Be to yourself more charitable. Think That One there is who answers for your faults And multiplies your merits.

QUEEN. Hope rests there: Or I were mad.

CARDINAL. All men are born to suffer. What are the consolations of the Scripture, The fruit of exhortation and of prayer, If now you quail? No, you shall quail no more.

QUEEN. _My web of life was woven with the nettle._ My very triumphs were bedewed with tears. What now is left?

CARDINAL. Religion. _As the sunbow Shines in the showery gloom and makes the cloud A shape of glory_, in thy path she stands A herald of high promise. Blessed emblem! Religion bids thee hope. This gloomy life Must be amended. We must draw thee hence.

QUEEN. Thanks be to God! time works while we grieve on. _Deprive not sorrow of the shade she needs, The sad quiescence of desponding thought_. Job also raised his voice, and wailed aloud, And so was comforted. Remember, also, In weeping I can pray. Should I not?

CARDINAL. Yea. Pray with thanksgiving: ’tis the sum of duty.”

The sublimity of this passage needs no comment. The rest of the scene is equally touching. Mary speaks for an instant of Philip. She is still obliged to say:

“Whene’er I turn my thoughts to God, one image Stands between me and heaven. Instead of prayer A sigh for Philip trembles on my lips.

CARDINAL. To pine thus for the absent, as men mourn The dead, is sinful.

QUEEN. Speak no more of him. Thoughts holier be my guide.”

Then Reginald teaches her what it is

“To stablish thrones on bounty; reign through love.”

* * * * *

_The chief of greatness is surpassing goodness_: And that outsoars the ken of mortal eyes— Hidden with God.”

She offers him the archbishopric of Canterbury. He answers musingly:

“He who hath stood Upon the first step of the papal throne, And vacant left the Vatican, may look With eye undazzled on the chair of Lambeth.”

Then he accepts, and presently the queen observes:

“I have long thought it strange that you refused The greater honor though the heavier burden: The proffered crown of Rome.

CARDINAL [_after much agitation_]. Look not alarmed. [_A pause._ You touch the mind’s immedicable wound. O God! that I had died before I knew thee! Pardon me—pardon me!

QUEEN. We both need pardon. Let us forget the past. God strengthen us!

CARDINAL. Fear not. _Henceforth we gaze upon each other, As the two Cherubim upon the Ark— The living God between._

QUEEN. Then take my hand. It will be colder soon. May God be with you!”

This “immedicable wound” is the poet’s Protestant fancy, yet the pathos of the scene is exquisite.

The prison-scene at Oxford gives us, first, Masters Ridley and Latimer taking leave of Cranmer; then Cranmer watching their execution from the window, and Gardiner, unobserved, watching him. The famous recantation number one takes place; and the subsequent despair of the wretch closes the fourth Act.

The fifth Act we do not care to analyze minutely, so much of it is sickeningly untrue. Mary has become fanatical again. Pole tells her that “the poor, by thousands, perish in the flames.” This is utterly false. All the executions under Mary’s government did not amount to more than two hundred and seventy-seven, and “from this list of 'martyrs for the Gospel’ must be excluded,” says a learned writer, “the names of those who suffered for political offences or other crimes.” Dr. Maitland, the celebrated librarian of Lambeth, in his _Essays on Subjects connected with the Reformation in England_, speaks of “the bitter and provoking spirit of some of those who were very active and forward in promoting the progress of the Reformation; the political opinions which they held, and the language in which they disseminated them; the fierce personal attacks which they made on those whom they considered as enemies; and, to say the least, the little care which was taken by those who were really actuated by religious motives, and seeking a true reformation of the Church, to shake off _a lewd, ungodly, profane rabble_, who joined in the cause of Protestantism, thinking it, in their depraved imaginations, or hoping to make it by their wicked devices, the cause of liberty against law, of the poor against the rich, of the laity against the clergy, of the people against their rulers.” From this rabble, then, came the “poor” who “perished in the flames.”

As to Oxford’s pretended “martyrs,” Ridley and Latimer were inciters of sedition and brought upon themselves the vengeance of the law; while Thomas Cranmer was, without exception, the most unmitigated miscreant in the whole disgraceful business of what is called the Reformation. Who will question that he richly deserved the stake after bringing to it so many victims, in Henry’s reign, for denying doctrines which he himself was secretly denying at the time? There are living Anglican writers who rejoice in calling all these boasted reformers a set of “unredeemed villains.”

Of course, as we said in our review of the first play, we acquit the author of all conscious prejudice. The last words he puts into his heroine’s mouth—“Time unveils Truth”—are an appeal to “the avenger,” who will not fail to do her justice yet. It was a noble thought to make Underhill, the Hot-Gospeller, her panegyrist. Oxford vaticinates:

“Awful queen! Hardly of thee Posterity shall judge: For they shall measure thee—

UNDERHILL. Let me speak, sir: For I have known, and been protected by her, When fierce men thirsted for my blood. I say not That she was innocent of grave offence; Nor aught done in her name extenuate. But I insist upon her maiden mercies, _In proof that cruelty was not her nature_. She abrogated the tyrannic laws Made by her father. She restored her subjects To personal liberty; to judge and jury; Inculcating impartiality. Good laws, made or revived, attest her fitness Like Deborah to judge. She loved the poor: And fed the destitute: and they loved her. _A worthy queen she had been if as little Of cruelty had been done under her As by her._ To equivocate she hated: And was just what she seemed. In fine, she was _In all things excellent while she pursued Her own free inclination without fear_.”

NANETTE. _A LEGEND OF THE DAYS OF LOUIS XV._

I.

A police report is scarcely the place where one would look to find an idyl—least of all a French police report. But just as one comes at times upon a shy violet nestling in the dusty city ways, even in such an unpromising quarter, and in the records of a still more unpromising time, did the present writer stumble upon a veritable romance—

“Silly sooth That dallies with the innocence of love Like the old age.”

Let the reader judge if it be not a genuine violet.

Of the many strange functions of the Parisian police in the days of the well-beloved Louis XV.—and altogether most worthless of his name—one of the strangest appears to have been that of furnishing for the amusement of the royal circle regular reports, or rather novelettes, of all episodes, striking or romantic, that came under their notice. The French have always had a taste for the dramatic aspect of the law, and to this day a _procès-verbal_ reads often like a _feuilleton_ of Ponson du Terrail. It may be supposed that, in the narratives which thus tickled the languid leisure of Louis, a rigid adherence to truth was not deemed essential where a slight embellishment enhanced the interest. But all had probably a basis in fact, which one is fain to hope was more than usually broad in so innocent and touching a history as that of Nanette Lollier, the Flower-Girl of the Palais Royal.

In the year 1740 there dwelt in the parish of St. Leu, at Paris, an honest, hard-working couple named André Lollier and Marie Jeanne Ladure, his wife; the former of whom held a subordinate position in the Bureau of Markets, while the latter attended to their fish-stand. Between them they earned ample to keep the pot boiling comfortably, had it not been for the prodigious number of small mouths that daily watered around that savory and capacious vessel; and when there came a sixteenth, it is to be feared that honest André received it rather ruefully and altogether as a discord in the harmony of existence—a blessing very much in disguise. So despite the new-comer’s beauty and precocity and countless pretty baby ways, her aggrieved parents were only too glad to accept her godmother’s offer to take her off their hands and to bring her up. By that good lady—who seems to have been really a most kind-hearted person, although she _was_ a beadle’s widow—the little Nanette (so the child had been named) was carefully instructed in such branches of learning as a young person of her station was at that time expected to know, and which, in truth, were not very many. There is little doubt that one young lady of Vassar would have put the entire faculty of St. Cyr to rout.

But Nanette was soon found to possess a fine voice, and pains were taken to cultivate it—so successfully that when, at the mature age of twelve, the youthful chorister made her _début_ in a Christmas anthem at the parish church, everybody was delighted. And when during the following Holy Week she sang a _Stabat_ better than many persons four times her age, everybody said at once she was a prodigy.

Now, we all know what comes to prodigies. The praises, pettings, and presents this prodigy received turned her small and not very wise head. Good Mère Lollier wished to make a fish-mongress of her; mademoiselle spurned the proposal. What! she, a genius, a beauty, a divine voice, waste her life on horrid, ill-smelling fish? (She made no objection, you will observe, to dining on them when her mother cooked them for her, but that was quite a different matter.) She soil her pretty fingers with scales, haggle over herrings, or dicker about dace? Perish the thought! Her mother did it, to be sure, but then—her mother was not a genius. (Do young ladies nowadays ever reason thus?) No; she would be a flower-girl and sing her nosegays into every buttonhole—or wherever else they then wore their nosegays—in Paris. The manners of the fish-market even then lacked something of the repose of Vere de Vere, and Mère Lollier’s only answer to this astounding proposal was a slap and—we regret to say—a kick. She was not aware that genius is not to be kicked with impunity. She soon discovered it to her sorrow; for in her way she loved Nanette, and kicked her, we may be sure, only in kindness.

Shortly after this affront Nanette disappeared, and from that moment all trace of her was lost. Word came to her parents from time to time that she was well, but of her whereabouts their most persistent efforts could gain no tidings. Her absence lasted three years; how or where passed no one—we sniff the touch of the embellisher here—could ever discover, nor would she herself divulge. At last one fine morning comes a message to Mère Lollier that her daughter is at the convent of the Carmelites, and will be handed over to them in person, or to any priest who comes with an order from them.

Beside herself with joy, Mère Lollier, with just a hasty touch to her cap—even a _Dame de la Halle_ is, outside of business, a woman—rushes off to M. le Curé with the great news. In those days M. le Curé was the first applied to in every emergency of joy or grief: perhaps it would have been better for Paris if the custom had not been survived by others less wholesome. The good priest lent a sympathetic ear; for the piety and industry of the Lolliers had made them prime favorites with him, and he had, besides, taken a lively interest in the fate of his little chorister. A _fiacre_ is called at once, and the _curé_ and Mère Lollier, with her eldest son, a strapping sergeant in the French guards—not then such pigmies as absinthe has left them now—fly to the convent at such a pace as only the promise of a fabulous _pourboire_ can extract from a Parisian cab-horse. The lady-superior greets them in the convent parlor and presently ushers in a lovely young girl—what! a girl?—a princess, to whom Mère Lollier with difficulty represses an inclination to courtesy, while M. le Curé wipes his spectacles and the gaping sergeant at once comes to a salute. But the princess speedily puts an end to their doubts by embracing them all in turn with the liveliest emotion. It is indeed Nanette, but Nanette developed into such beauty and grace and sprightliness as many a princess might envy. Nor is her moral nature less improved. She is now as modest and docile as before she was vain and headstrong; only—she will still be a flower-girl. And yet women are sometimes called weak!

Before the young lady’s appearance in the parlor the superior had explained to her wondering auditors how a strange lady the evening before had brought Nanette to the convent—“Hum!” says M. le Curé dubiously, taking snuff—and on leaving her had left at the same time 20,000 francs for her dowry, if she wished to become a religious—“Ha!” says M. le Curé thoughtfully, brushing away the snuff that has fallen on his band. Then he beams upon Nanette, rubbing his hands encouragingly, while Mère Lollier nods acquiescence and the sergeant shifts to the other leg and gapes. But Nanette, in spite of these diverse blandishments, respectfully but firmly declined to be a religious. Her vocation was to be a flower-girl, and a flower-girl she would be.

“’Tis the devil’s trade,” cries the _curé_, quite out of patience.

“All roads lead to heaven, my father,” answers Nanette mildly.

So a flower-girl she becomes; and it must be confessed that, in spite of Undine, beauty seems more at home with the flowers than with the fishes.

II.

One bright morning in the summer of 1756 the loungers under the chestnuts which then adorned the garden of the Palais Royal—that forehanded and long-headed (though, long as his head was, he could not keep it long) personage, Philippe Égalité, thought shops would be more ornamental as well as more useful, so he put the chestnuts in his pocket and built that splendid colonnade which is the wonder and delight of the wandering American—the loungers in the shade of the Palais Royal chestnuts were conscious of a new sensation. Not that sensations were just then going begging. By no means. One or two royal gentlemen, by laying their crowned heads together, had already contrived that famous misunderstanding which was to turn a large part of three continents into a shambles for the next seven years; to cost the “well-beloved,” in Canada and India, the brightest jewels of his crown, and to make of Montcalm, for losing one and his life with it, a hero, and of Lally-Tollendal, for having the bad taste to survive the loss of the other, a traitor or a martyr as you were for him or against him. So often is it that for precisely the same services a grateful and discriminating country decrees to one of her sons a monument, to another a halter. Perhaps there is not so much difference between the two—to the dead men, at least—as some folks imagine.

But the heroes we are to deal with are by no means of the stuff of martyrs, and fighting, beyond an ornamental pass or two in the Bois de Boulogne, they vote vulgar and _bourgeois_. Here under the chestnut blossoms is a sensation much more to their taste. It is a new flower-girl. But what a flower-girl! Figure to yourself, then, Mme. la Duchesse, a flower-girl arrayed in silks and laces and jewels a marchioness would give her head for (marchionesses’ heads were rated higher then than they came to be before the century was over), with a golden shell for her flower-basket, lined with blue satin and suspended by an embroidered scarf from the daintiest waist in the world—a flower-girl with the face of a seraph and the figure of a sylph, with eyes of liquid light and hair of woven sunshine, with the foot of Cinderella and a hand—a hand only less perfect than that of Madame, which your humble servant most respectfully salutes.

News so important must be sent post-haste to Versailles. A score of noblemen sprang to the saddle and rushed to lay their hearts and their diamonds at the feet of this strange paragon. But Nanette, young as she was, could tell base metal from good. The jewels she took from her adorers with smiling impartiality; the other sort of trinkets—sadly battered by use, it must be confessed, and not worth much at any time—she rejected with equally smiling disdain. Always gracious, gay, and self-possessed, sparkling with raillery and wit, she yet maintained a maidenly reserve that abashed the boldest license, and her reputation grew even faster than her fortune.

And the latter grew apace. She became the rage. Her appearance on the Palais Royal, followed at a little distance by footmen in livery and her maid, gathered about her straightway all the gallants and wits in Paris. Her basket was emptied in a trice, and emptied again as often as refilled by her servants. It was deemed an honor to receive a nosegay from her pretty fingers, and more louis than half-franc pieces repaid them.

Great ladies came to her _levées_—for such they really were—and even deigned to accept from the beautiful flower-girl the gift of a rose or a violet—gifts always sure to be recompensed in noble fashion with jewels or costly laces, rich silks or pieces of plate. Within two years Nanette had thus accumulated in houses, lands, and rents an annual income of forty thousand francs, besides loading her kindred with presents.

Naturally, this circumstance did not cool the ardor of the followers whom her beauty had attracted. One of these was particularly noticeable for his assiduity. He was a young man about twenty-two years old, of distinguished air and handsome features, tinged with that shadow of melancholy thought to be so irresistible to the feminine imagination. His clothes, too, were in his favor; for though irreproachably neat and faultlessly cut, they had plainly seen their best days. We all know what a sly rogue Pity is, and how untiringly he panders for a certain nameless kinsman. Every afternoon found the melancholy young man at the garden awaiting the flower-girl’s coming. On her arrival he would advance, select a flower, pay a dozen sous, exchange a word, perhaps, and disappear till the following day. Once he was absent, and the fair florist’s brow was clouded. In other words, Nanette was extremely cross, and many an unlucky _petit-maître_ was that day unmercifully snubbed for presuming on previous condescension. The garden trembled and was immersed in gloom. But presently the laggard made his appearance, Nanette’s lovely face was again wreathed in smiles, the garden breathed freely once more, and the _petit-maîtres_ were astonished to find their vapid pleasantries received more graciously than ever. From this remarkable circumstance the sagacious reader will doubtless form his own conclusion; and we do not say that the sagacious reader will be wrong.

In point of fact, we may as well admit at once that Nanette, without knowing it, was already in love with this handsome, melancholy stranger, of whom she knew nothing, except that he was noble, since he wore a sword. She would have given half she was worth to know even his name, but she dared not ask it. As often as the question trembled on her tongue she felt herself blushing violently and unable, for the life of her, to open her lips. Her modesty had not been educated away by a season in the civilizing atmosphere of the court.

Chance at last befriended her. One evening the brilliant Marquis de Louvois, after talking awhile with the unknown, came up to the Count de la Châtre, who was seated beside her, and said to him:

“This ass of a De Courtenaye puts me out of all patience. The king has asked why he does not come to Versailles. I repeat to him his majesty’s flattering question. Well! it goes in one ear and out the other. Can one so bury one’s self in Paris?”

Think of that, good Americans, before you die! In the year of grace 1756 Paris was only a burying place for Versailles! So that 1870 had a precedent.

“What else is he to do?” asks the count. “It takes money to live as we do, and his father, poor fellow, left him nothing but a name, which, although one of the first in France, is rather a drawback than otherwise, since it won’t permit him even to marry for money anything less than a princess; and rich princesses like to get as well as to give.”

“True, true,” murmurs the compassionate marquis. “I had forgotten. More’s the pity; such a good-looking fellow as he is—”

“And a connection of the royal family.”

“Faith, the king is not over and above kind to his cousins.” And the gentlemen dismiss the royal poor relation from their noble minds as they would brush a grain of snuff from their ruffles, and stroll off, humming an aria from the latest opera of the famous Favart, the little Offenbach of his little day. Forgotten art thou now, O famous Favart! and thy immortal airs are as dead as Julius Cæsar.

But not so easily did M. de Courtenaye’s tribulations pass from the mind of Nanette, who had lost not a word of this conversation. She thought of him all through a wakeful night; she was still thinking of him the next morning—having arisen for that fond purpose long before the household was stirring—when she was startled by feeling a kiss upon her arm. She sprang up with a little cry of anger and alarm; but her frown changed to a smile when she recognized the offender. It was Marcel, the handsome Marcel, her favorite brother, a year her senior, but so like her they were often mistaken for twins.

“O Marcel!” she cried, “how you frightened me. How was one to look for such gallantry from one’s brother?”

“But if one is the brother of Nanette?” says Marcel still more gallantly.

Marcel has been in good company and flatters himself he has quite the _bel air_. As an apprentice to M. Panckoucke to learn the bookseller’s trade, wherein his sister, when he got old enough, was to set him up for himself, he had many opportunities of seeing and hearing the wits of the capital, not without profit to mind and manners. Indeed, he fairly considered himself one of them already.

“Yes, my dear little sister,” he added with a patronizing air, “you are positively the talk of the town. Go where I will—and you know I go into the best circles,” he says pompously, adjusting his ruffles as he has seen the dandies do—“I hear of nothing but the beautiful, the witty Nanette. Why, it was only the other day I was at M. de Marmontel’s”—the ingenuous youth did not deem it essential to state that he had been sent in the honorable though humble capacity of “printer’s devil” with a bundle of proofs for correction (the proofs, indeed, of the _Contes Moraux_: the dullest, surely—always excepting the delightful, interminable romances of the incomparable Mlle. de Scudéry—ever penned in the tongue of Montaigne and Molière,) but his sister understood his harmless vanity and did not so much as smile—“at M. de Marmontel’s with the Duke de Nivernais, the Count de Lauraguais, M. de Voltaire, and the Prince de Courtenaye.”

Nanette started slightly, but her brother did not perceive it. It is the way of brothers, and this brother, besides, was for the moment rapt in contemplation of the greatness reflected upon him by association with these great names. He fairly grew an inch in stature as he rolled them out, dwelling fondly on the titles. It is something to have a king speak to you, if only to ask you to get out of the way. Marcel continued:

“The talk was all of you. M. de Lauraguais, not knowing me to be your near relation, presumed to deny your wit and to question your virtue.”

Nanette’s beautiful eyes flashed in a way that would have made the slanderer uncomfortable had he seen it.

“Insolent!” she murmured, clenching her little fists.

“You may imagine how my blood boiled,” went on Marcel. “I was on the point of doing something rash when M. de Courtenaye took up the cudgels in your behalf. 'M. de Lauraguais,’ he said with grave severity, 'is it possible that you, a gentleman, can give currency to the lies set afloat by baffled libertines or malicious fools against the reputation of a defenceless girl? My life upon it, Nanette is as pure as she is lovely; and were proof of her innocence needed, I should ask none better than these stories of lovers whom no one has seen, or can even name. Why, had Nanette a lover, all Paris would ring with it in an hour.’ The impassioned earnestness of the prince made the company smile; but M. Diderot, siding with him, said he was sure you were better than the best that was said of you.”

Nanette’s eyes filled with tears. Had the youthful pedant been less intent on showing his familiarity with fashionable life, he must have had his suspicions aroused by her agitation. As it was, he was not even enlightened when Nanette, suddenly flinging her arms about his neck in a tender fury, kissed him twice or thrice passionately. He took the kisses complacently as a guerdon for his story. Fraternal obtuseness in such cases is simply limitless. “By the way, Nanette,” he added, “why wouldn’t it be a good idea to thank the prince by sending him some of your prettiest flowers? I can take them to-morrow with some books I am to convey to him.”

“Nonsense!” says Nanette incredulously. “I don’t believe you even know where he lives.”

“Don’t know where he lives?” cries Marcel indignantly. “Perhaps you will tell me next I don’t know where the Hôtel Carnavalet is, or how to find the Rue Culture Ste. Catherine? Don’t know where he lives, indeed!” And Marcel flings out of the room in a state of high dudgeon that his acquaintance with a great man should be doubted, and, worst of all, by Nanette. We are sorry to say he slammed the door after him. The best of brothers will do such things under strong provocation. But Nanette only smiled—the wily Nanette!

III.

The next morning, at his frugal breakfast in a rather lofty apartment of the Hôtel Carnavalet, the Prince de Courtenaye read with much amazement the following letter:

“MY DEAR COUSIN: I am an old woman and your near relation. I have long observed with pain the poverty which keeps you from assuming your proper station. I have wealth, and not many years to keep it. What is a burden to me will be a help to you. Suffer me, then, from my superfluity to relieve your necessity—I claim it as the twofold privilege of age and love—and accept as frankly as I tender it the 25,000 francs which I enclose to procure you an establishment suited to your rank. On the first of every month 4,000 francs will be forwarded to you in addition.”

Some commonplaces of civility ended this remarkable but not unpleasant epistle—would that such a one some celestial postman might leave at the door of the present writer, to whom documents of a far different nature—but this is a painful and unnecessary digression. Let us continue. The prince read the queer communication with conflicting emotions, in which wonder predominated. He was not aware of any wealthy aunt or female relative particularly prone to this sort of furtive benevolence; but his connections were legion, and women were odd fish. Still, his honor seemed to him to forbid his accepting a fortune so acquired. But older and wiser heads stifled, or at least silenced, his scruples; and secretly resolving to leave no stone unturned to discover his mysterious benefactress, and to return to her or to her heirs every sou of the money, which in his heart he accepted only as a loan, he resigned himself to his good-luck with tolerable cheerfulness. Henceforth no more elegant equipage was to be seen than the Prince de Courtenaye’s. He became the fashion; he was the life and talk of every _salon_—as we should say, the success of the season. Nevertheless, he failed not to go every afternoon to the garden of the Palais Royal for his nosegay, with this difference only: that he now paid francs instead of sous.

A year sped away, spent by the prince in buying nosegays and in sharing the gayeties, though not the dissipations, of the court; by Nanette in continuing to perfect herself secretly in all the feminine accomplishments of her time, so that now, at the age of nineteen, she was not only peerless in beauty, but as cultivated as Mme. de Sévigné and as learned as Mme. Dacier—no, not as Mme. Dacier—no mere mortal was ever so learned as Mme. Dacier; but let us say as Mme. de La Fayette, who could set Father Rapin right in his Latin and silence Ménage. Was it for herself she underwent these prodigious labors? It is not known that she ever mentioned. But she still sold nosegays and still reaped a golden harvest.

One evening the Count de la Châtre was again sitting beside her when the Marquis de Louvois once more accosted him.

“My dear fellow,” said he, “what the mischief ails Pierre?” (he spoke of De Courtenaye). “He must be going mad. Have you heard his latest freak? Mlle. de Craon, one of our wealthiest heiresses, with a royal dowry and a princely income, is proposed to him, and what do you think? He refuses her—positively refuses. What bee is in his bonnet?”

“Love.”

“Love! Is it one of the Royal Princesses, then?”

“I imagine not.”

“Who then? Some divinity of the _coulisses_, I’ll wager.”

“Louvois,” said the count gravely, “you wrong our friend. De Courtenaye, as you know, abhors vice, and I am much mistaken if she whom he loves is not a virtuous woman.”

Louvois shrugged his shoulders as only a certain kind of Frenchman can. Virtue was a word not in his dictionary.

The next day the prince received this note, the second from his unknown relative:

“MY NEPHEW: Why do you decline to marry Mlle. de Craon, who unites all that is illustrious in birth and splendid in fortune? I will provide you with the capital of the income I now allow you. Accept also as a wedding-gift for your intended the jewels I send herewith.

“If you consent, wear for eight days in your buttonhole a carnation; if you refuse, a rose.”

With the letter came a handsome jewel-case containing a million of francs in bills—it is well for the romancer to be liberal in these matters—and a magnificent parure of diamonds of the purest water, valued by the Tiffany of the time at 100,000 more.

That afternoon it was noticed in the garden that Nanette was unusually pale and silent. The Prince de Courtenaye entered at his usual hour; the nosegay in his buttonhole bore neither pink nor rose. He drew near the flower-girl, who offered him a posy with a hand she vainly tried to make steady. Like his own, it had neither pink nor rose.

The prince examined Nanette’s offering attentively, smiled sadly, stood for an instant in a musing attitude twirling the bouquet in his fingers, and then suddenly, as one whose mind is made up:

“My child,” he said, “will you make me the present of a rose?”

Nanette fainted.

IV.

When the flower-girl recovered she found herself in her own room, her family around her. But her eyes sought in vain the one face she most wished to see. Her mother and sisters told her with prodigious clamor and excitement, all talking at once at the tops of their voices, how she had fainted—“from the heat,” the gentleman said. “Yes, from the heat,” murmured Nanette softly, closing her eyes—how a great nobleman, the Prince de Courtenaye, had raised her, and how, without waiting for a carriage, and rejecting all aid, he had borne her in his arms to her house near by.

Nanette listened with closed eyes and a happy smile. All this was balm to her poor, sorely-tried heart. She even ventured to ask what had become of the kind gentleman. He had waited, they told her, to hear the doctor’s report giving assurance of her safety, and had then gone away, invoking for her their most zealous care. Presently the prince’s valet came to inquire after her health; but he himself did not come. Nanette was wounded, but she said nothing. Even pain in such a cause was too sacred a thing to be shared with another. Woman-like, she hugged her grief as though it were a treasure, and smiled, without knowing why, at the empty compliments of a crowd of _petits-maîtres_, who, after the fashion of the time, had rushed to pay her their condolences, and who ransacked Dorat for their vapid homage. Each took the smile to himself and redoubled his insipid gallantries. But Nanette was too much in love, if she had not been too clever, to heed them. So she contented herself and them by smiling.

At heart she was happy, in spite of the prince’s neglect. At least he would not marry; so much was secure. But the future: might he not have surprised her secret—she blushed as she thought it—and would he seek to abuse his power? No, she felt he was too noble for that, and, come what might, she would enjoy the present hour, the happiest she had known. So in vague, delicious hopes, and doubts not less delicious; in fluttering fears and half-formed, undefined resolves; in pain that seemed to be pleasure and pleasure whose sweetest element was pain—all the exquisite _mélange_ of confused and dreamy emotions which take possession of a young and innocent heart so soon as it has fairly admitted to itself it loves—Nanette awaited her prince. She knew he would come; her heart told her so. And she was not deceived.

Early the next day he was announced. She essayed to rise as he entered, but sank back into her chair, half from weakness, half from agitation, murmuring incoherent excuses for her awkwardness. In an instant the prince was at her feet.

“Ah!” he cried, “I have found you out at last, my good cousin. But I am not come to return you your benefactions; only to beseech you to make it possible for me to keep them by adding to them a still more precious boon.”

“And that is—?”

“This fair, kind hand. Ah darling! you cannot refuse it me when you have already given me your heart.”

In sacrificing his name to this obscure young girl the prince was no doubt conscious of doing a noble and magnanimous act. And so it was—how noble, can only be realized by those who know the measureless distance which, in the days of Louis XV., divided the nobility from the people, or the insolent disdain with which the former looked down on the latter—a disdain commemorated to this day in the use of the word _peuple_ to indicate a vulgar fellow. But if he thought to conquer Nanette in generosity, he was mistaken. The flower-girl, after a moment’s reflection, begged her lover to give her till to-morrow to answer. He consented reluctantly, but not doubting the result. Who could have looked in the eighteenth century to see a fish-monger's daughter refuse the hand of a French prince?

De Courtenaye arose the next morning satisfied with himself and with the world, and more in love than ever. He longed impatiently for the message which should summon him to the feet of his adored mistress to receive the seal of his happiness. At last, after, it seemed to his eagerness, an age of waiting, his servant brought him a letter. He glanced at the superscription; it was in the well-known hand. He pressed the dear characters to his lips and tore the missive open with trembling fingers. This is what he read:

“Love blinds you. A marriage with me would dishonor you. You love me too well for me to refuse you the most convincing proof of my love. I give you up, and I give up life for you. When you read this the flower-girl Nanette will have quitted the world for ever. Do not scruple to keep the money you have received, in your aunt’s name; it is yours by right. A kinsman, who accomplished your father’s ruin, simply made me the instrument of his tardy atonement. I leave to my family a fortune ample for their wants. Adieu! Think of me sometimes in the cloister, wherein I take refuge from my heart, and where I shall never cease to pray for you.”

So ends the history of Nanette Lollier. The Archbishop of Paris in person, it is said, conducted her to the convent of her choice, and the Palais Royal went into mourning. The prince was almost wild with grief; but his prayers, his supplications, his almost frenzied entreaties, could not shake Nanette’s resolve. He never married. The allusion in the flower-girl’s letter recalled to him certain rumors current at the time of his father’s death; but, as our chronicler shrewdly surmises, the story of the kinsman was simply a device of Nanette’s affection to disarm her lover’s pride.

This is the romance of Nanette, the flower-girl of the Palais Royal, as it is recorded in a chronicle of the time. In the foul and fetid annals of that most polluted reign, barren alike of manly honor and womanly virtue, it comes to us like a jewel we lift from the mire, or a fresh-blown rose we rescue from the kennel. Let us not ask if it be true. Stories of disinterested love, of magnanimity and devotion, let us rather accept as always true, saving our incredulity for narratives of another sort. For our own part we had rather believe Tiberius to be a myth than that Cordelia is a fiction; that Nero never fiddled in his life than that Henry Esmond never put his birthright in the fire to spare his benefactress pain.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

CLASSIC LITERATURE, PRINCIPALLY SANSKRIT, GREEK, AND ROMAN. With some account of the Persian, Chinese, and Japanese in the Form of Sketches of the Authors and Specimens from Translations of their Works. By C. A. White, author of _The Student’s Mythology_. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1877.

We find on p. 12 of this new _Hand-book of Classic Literature_, as it is entitled on the back, among the “most commendable maxims” of the _Pancha-Trantra_—a work on morals composed by Hindoo sages—the following: “As long as a person remains silent he is honored; but as soon as he opens his mouth men sit in judgment upon his capacity.” The young people who will make use of this book, which is principally intended for their benefit and pleasure, must be the final judges of the capacity of its author to make classic literature intelligible and interesting to their minds. The author appears to understand them, and to have acquired that experience and skill in adapting instruction to the juvenile mind, by practical familiarity with young students in the class-room, which is almost necessary to ensure success in preparing a good text-book. The _Hand-book of Classic Literature_ is not intended as a manual for lessons and recitations. It is not exclusively intended for those who study Latin or Greek; and we are not aware of any considerable number of young people who are studying Sanskrit, Persian, or Chinese, so that evidently no such class of pupils could have been in the eye of the author. In fact, the aim of the author is to give some general notion of the ancient authors and their principal works, and some fine specimens of the best translations which have been made into English, to those who do not study the ancient languages at all, or at most learn only the rudiments of one or two of them. Three-fourths of the volume are devoted to the Greek and Latin classics. The remaining eighty pages are divided between the Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese, with a brief notice of the Japanese. The most elaborate and valuable portion of the work is that devoted to Greek literature. The author has made use of the best critical works and selected a large number of the most excellent translations. So much learning, pains, skill in faithful and idiomatic rendering, and even poetic genius, have been expended by English scholars in translating the Greek classics that any reader of intelligence and taste may understand and enjoy to a very great extent these ancient masterpieces without learning a word of Greek. We notice as particularly discriminating and just the criticisms of the author on the three great tragedians. Specimens of several different authors who have translated Homer are presented, and a number of extracts from Aristophanes and others of the generally less known poets. There must be many whose curiosity will be excited by these choice morsels to read the entire translated works themselves. Next in interest to the sketches and translations from the Greek are those from the Sanskrit and Persian, on account both of the novelty of the subject-matter to the generality of readers, and also the intrinsic beauty of the selected passages. The author writes enthusiastically about Zoroaster, and we think with great justice. The song of the tea-pickers, from the Chinese, pleases us extremely, and is one of the prettiest and most touching of the minor pieces in the volume. The author has shown remarkable judgment and good taste in making this compilation, and writes in all that part of it which is of original composition in a style of peculiar accuracy and felicity of diction. The strict and conscientious regard in which the old saying _Maxima reverentia debetur pueris_ has been kept throughout is an example for all those who write for the young. There is nothing which can endanger the faith or damage the moral delicacy of the young Christian pupil in all this volume filled up with the literature of heathen nations. On the contrary, its effect is salutary, and shows beautifully not only the great obscurity in which those gifted pagans lay from the want of a clear revelation of truth, but also that the human mind everywhere, in all times, naturally Christian, longs for the light.

The mechanical execution of the _Classical Hand-book_ is remarkable for beauty and accuracy. We have noticed only two or three typographical faults in the whole volume. It is a most attractive book to take up and read. We have said that it is not properly a class-book. It is a reading-book for higher pupils, and a companion for lectures, suitable for reference or use in class-readings. We recommend it most cordially to all higher schools, especially academies for young ladies, and others where classical studies are not made one of the chief branches of instruction. The great number of choice and elegant extracts from the best writers, many of which are unfamiliar, as well as the historical notices and criticisms, make this book equally suitable for use in families and literary circles, especially for reading aloud, as for schools. We wish for the author the best reward which can be bestowed on one who is devoted to the culture of young pupils—the love and gratitude of their generous, affectionate hearts.

THE CRADLE OF THE CHRIST: a Study in Primitive Christianity. By Octavius Brooks Frothingham. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1877.

The author of this volume is one of the representative men of the left section of Unitarianism in this country. He is distinguished by a clear style, a finely-cultivated imagination, and his writings are characterized by a pervading placidity which is only occasionally ruffled by a mocking scepticism that suggests the too close proximity of Dr. Faust’s intimate friend.

The volume abounds in sweeping assertions, slovenly-expressed ideas, and lacks throughout the cement of a sound logic. It fosters on Cardinal Wiseman and Dr. Newman opinions which can only be accounted for on the supposition of the author’s inaccurate scholarship or his contempt for the intelligence of his readers. (See preface, page 5.) Among other things, he informs his readers that “it has been customary with Christians to widen as much as possible the gulf between the Old and the New Testaments, in order that Christianity might appear in the light of a fresh and transcendent revelation, supplementing the ancient, but supplanting it” (page 10). The custom of St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Catholic theologians generally is precisely the contrary. There is a remarkable book by a Catholic on this very point, published in our own day, entitled _De l’Harmonie entre l’Eglise et la Synagogue_, par Le Chevalier P. L. B. Drach, a converted rabbi. The rabbi, in his two volumes, aims at showing that a Jew, in becoming a Catholic, does not deny or change his religion, but follows out, completes, and perfects it. The Jewish Church and the Catholic Church are identically one, and the former is to the latter as the bud to the full-blown flower.

With a criticism that kills beforehand the life it would dissect, Mr. O. B. Frothingham ends by coolly telling his readers that Christianity is extinct. And with a self-satisfied air he naïvely exhorts them, by the efforts of their imagination, to build up a new and superior religion to Christianity. His readers will, we opine, politely decline this task, and leave to him who had the genius to conceive the idea its accomplishment. What a pity he did not tell them what he means by the imaginative faculty! For if in this, as in other things, he follows his foreign masters, we have no reason to expect as the result of its exercise in this direction, other than an additional illusion to the long list of religious vagaries given to the world, from Simon Magus down to Joe Smith and the Fox girls.

A scholar who has read the volume describes its contents as “theological, philosophical, and speculative old shreds picked up in German and French tailor-shops and cunningly sewed together in the shape of a cloak by a 'cute’ Yankee apprentice, in order to cover the nudity of the latest form of the unbelief of New England.”

The book before us shows no mean literary skill, but contains nothing original in the way of thought or erudition, not even an original error, though its errors are many more than the number of its pages.

THE PROBLEM OF PROBLEMS, AND ITS VARIOUS SOLUTIONS; OR, ATHEISM, DARWINISM, AND THEISM. By Clark Braden, President of Abingdon College, Ill. 8vo. pp. 480. Cincinnati: Chase & Hall. 1877.

Recent scientific research has at last put the orthodox world on its mettle and elicited expressions of opinion from all shades of believers. Coquetting with dangerous premises, even in the guise of science, toleration of views implicitly or indirectly infidel, and a general disposition to compromise, are not indicative of a healthy tone in any organization avowedly Christian. Yet such tendencies have for a long time characterized the relation of the various Protestant sects towards scientism, and one of the greatest outcries raised against the Syllabus proceeded from its alleged intolerance of, and general hostility to, unhampered scientific inquiry. But coaxing and cajoling, and a concurrent cry against the stupidity of Catholics, had no weight with Messrs. Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, and Draper, who went on just as ever dealing their blows against revelation and all positive forms of belief, as though his Lordship of Canterbury were a myth and his faith a sham.

At length consistency compelled the representative men of the various denominations to resist the further encroachments of an irreligious philosophy, and they are beginning to do so with the bitter consciousness that they were the very ones who most ridiculed the sagacity of the Holy Father when he censured the tone and tendency of modern scientism. But it is better late than never; and if the gentlemen who, from Princeton to Abingdon, feel themselves called upon to do the work will only graciously allow that they are eleventh-hour workers, we will find no fault with their intention, but confine ourselves to a criticism of its execution.

The _Problem of Problems_ is the latest addition to the religio-scientific controversy, and it is entitled to serious consideration because of the earnestness of the author and the elaborate character of the work. This elaborateness is, however, more apparent than real, and consists in a measure of diluted thought and diffuse expression. Whether it is unfortunately a peculiarity of Western authors to strip a thought entirely bare and leave nothing to suggestion, as the charge is made, we are not prepared to say, but certain it is that Mr. Clark Braden has gone far towards justifying such a suspicion. He is not satisfied with a placid presentment of his own views, nor with a brief arraignment of what he deems to be the errors of others, but he must reiterate, emphasize, and in general lash himself into a state of incandescence not at all needful for his purpose. Dignified opposition, even if a little tame, is somewhat more congenial to the frigid tastes of persons living east of the Alleghenies than those fervid utterances which mistake sound for sense. This, however, is an error of form which does not necessarily militate against the intrinsic value of the work, nor do we think that an allusion to it is likely to discompose the learned author; for in a little prologue, addressed to “Reviewers and Critics,” he courts and solicits dispassionate and impartial criticism. In addition he requests that all publishers send him a copy of what their _imprimatur_ has allowed critics to say concerning his book. We presume this is right; but when the request comes coupled with the condition that every one undertaking to comment on his work must not do so before having read it from cover to cover, we fear that it will not always be faithfully complied with, or that he will have to read some pages in which gall and wormwood abound more than the milk of human kindness. The reason of this we have hinted at. The book is prolix and repeats to a fault. Many excellent thoughts are covered up in a mass of verbiage which emasculates and obscures them. We wish the author had the academic fitness to cope with his antagonists—whose culture has made their productions marvels of composition and terribly enhanced their influence for evil. We are sorry that this charge should be the main one to prefer against a book which was prompted by the best of motives and which really exhibits rare evidences of argumentative power. Take even the opening sentence, and we find ourselves face to face with a flagrant grammatical inaccuracy: “One of the wise utterances of one whom his contemporaries declared spoke as never man spoke was, that no wise man, etc.” Here, apart from the slovenly repetition of “one” we find no subject for the first “spoke,” unless it be “whom,” and that is in the objective case. Similar mistakes occur throughout, and give painful evidence that Mr. Braden began his scientific investigations before he had made himself familiar with Blair or Lord Kames. We would, in connection with this same matter of style, suggest that the too frequent use of interrogation not only mars the beauty of a page, but has an inevitable tendency to wearisome diffuseness. Lest, however, we may be suspected of harshness towards the author, we select a passage at random, that the reader may judge for himself how little Mr. Braden is acquainted with the quality of a good style. On page 171 he says: “We have no horses on the pampas of the New World, _although they existed as the most adapted to horses of any portion of the globe for ages_, and there were _equine types in the New World for several geologic epochs_. Multitudes of cases might be given where man has carried animals into places where they did not exist and they flourished, and even improved, thus showing that the conditions were especially fitted for them, yet had not produced them, although they had existed for vast ages. Hence conditions have failed to evolve what was especially fitted to them, and just what they would produce, did they produce anything.” We submit that these sentences are not only clumsy in construction, but are positively ungrammatical, and no one who undertakes the guidance of others along the thorny paths of scientific research has a right to tax the general patience with slipshod composition of this kind. Such examples as those given are not isolated, but disfigure nearly every page. On page 87 we find the following; “There was at first use of bodily organs in appropriating food and slaying for food animals, and the use of spontaneous productions of the earth, like animals.”

So much for the form of the book. The matter is indeed better, though necessarily much impaired by the many faults of style. In consideration of fair play towards the author we will not accept his own standard of judgment while passing an opinion on his book; for we would then have either to mistrust our own intelligence entirely or to utter unqualified censure of all that he has written. In his appeal to “Reviewers and Critics” he says: “If there is censure or condemnation of what is written, let it be only after the critic understands what he condemns, and _because he understands it_.” Now, we do not propose to condemn any portion of the book _because we understand it_; for we freely confess that there is much valuable thought to be found in its pages, and the author gives proof of having a good logical mind, not hampered, indeed, by the subtleties of _Port Royal_ or the _Grammar of Assent_, but sturdy and vigorous, with a Western breadth and freedom. We have not space to give even an outline of the plan Mr. Braden has mapped out for himself. Method is an important feature of a scientific and argumentative work, and, when judiciously adopted, goes far to promote the purpose of the author.

Clearness, natural development, logical sequence of thought, and ready conviction are the results of a suitable method, while confusion, weariness, and dissatisfaction follow from a neglect thereof. Mr. Braden’s lack of method will do much in the way of injuriously interfering with the effect of his book. Divisions and subdivisions without number, irrespective of reason, may swell the dimensions of a work, but do not certainly contribute to the satisfaction of the reader.

If all Mr. Braden has written in the present volume were presented in a more orderly and attractive manner his book would be a valuable contribution to polemics, but the faults we have indicated will constantly militate against its usefulness.

In the Appendix both Draper and Huxley come in for a share of censure, but while the author utterly fails to make a point against Draper, he so overloads with irrelevant matter his review of Huxley’s three lectures, delivered in this city, that the reader rises from the perusal of it with a tired memory and a dissatisfied mind.

THE CHILDHOOD OF THE ENGLISH NATION; or, The Beginnings of English History. By Ella S. Armitage. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1877.

The authoress of this “little” book tells us, in her preface, that when she began to write it “no _short and simple_ history of England had appeared _which made any attempt to give unlearned people an insight below the surface of bare facts_,” but that “since then numerous works of the kind have appeared.” Yes, indeed, too numerous; yet, as far as we know, not one of them so pretentious as this. With a very readable style and a great show of erudition (an appalling “list of authorities” is appended to her volume) she sets up for “an interpreter to those who have no knowledge of history,” taking for her theme what she is pleased to call the “childhood of the English nation”—by which she means the history of England “till the end of the twelfth century.” Of course, therefore, she has to deal largely with the work and influence of the Catholic Church. Now, when those who are not Catholic undertake to expound a philosophy to which they have not the key—to wit, the philosophy of any part of history with which Catholic faith has been concerned—we can pardon their mistakes, provided they evince that humility which is the mark of fair-mindedness. But, if this condition be wanting, we can only regard their attempt as a piece of insufferable impertinence; their very concessions to our cause—a trick quite fashionable of late—but making them the less excusable.

Here, then, lies our quarrel with the writer of this book. She goes out of her way to theorize on matters she does not understand, instead of confining herself to “bare facts.” For example, after acknowledging (p. 19) that “there is no saying how long the English might not have remained heathen if Pope Gregory I., in the year 597, had not sent missionaries to bring them to the faith of Christ,” she must needs endeavor to account for the Papacy as follows:

“Gregory was Pope or Bishop of Rome from 590 to 604. In his time the popes of Rome had not yet risen to the position of universal bishops and supreme heads of the church, though they were tending towards it. All men were agreed that there must be one, and only one, visible, united church, but all had not yet made up their minds that the Bishop of Rome was to be the head of that church. The church of the Welsh, for example, and that of Ireland (!), owed no obedience to Rome. The pope himself did not dare to call himself universal bishop: 'Whosoever calls himself so is Antichrist,’ said Gregory I. Still, it was natural that Rome, which had been the ruling city of the one universal empire, the queen of the West, should be the chief centre of the one universal church, and that the Bishop of Rome should become the head of the church, and all other bishops should bow to his authority. This was what did come to pass in time, but at the time of which I am now speaking it seemed very uncertain; for things had sadly changed with Rome. She had no emperor now; the emperor was at Constantinople; Italy was invaded by barbarians, Rome herself was scourged by plague and famine. The Bishop of Constantinople tried to set himself up as Universal Bishop and Head of the Church; and that the popes afterwards won the day in this struggle was largely due to the great influence which Pope Gregory I. gained by his wisdom and his powerful character.”

The cluster of absurdities contained in this passage would be “matter for a flying smile,” were it not that the ignorance displayed looks too much like perverted knowledge. Can the lady have really failed to perceive the transparent nonsense of supposing that such a power as the Papacy originated in people making up their minds that the church ought to have a visible head, and that the Bishop of Rome was the right man because, forsooth, Rome _had been_ the seat of empire? If, again, she knows what St. Gregory said to the ambitious John of Constantinople, why does she not quote a few more of his remarks? “_The care of the whole church_,” said he, “_was committed to Peter; yet he is not called 'Universal Apostle_.’” “_Who does not know that his see_ (of Constantinople) _is subject to the Apostolic See_ (of Rome)?” St. Gregory, like his predecessor St. Pelagius, refused the title of Œcumenical Patriarch, or Universal Bishop, for himself out of humility; how, then, could he tolerate the assumption of it by a bishop who did _not_ sit in Peter’s chair?

But we need not cite this book further to show that it is valueless in Catholic eyes.

DR. JOSEPH SALZMANN’S LEBEN UND WIRKEN DARGESTELLT VON JOSEPH RAINER, PRIESTER DER ERZDIÖCESE MILWAUKEE, PROFESSOR AM PRIESTERSEMINAR SALESIANUM. St. Louis: Herder.

The Salesianum is an ecclesiastical seminary near Milwaukee which enjoys a very high reputation for the learning of its professors, the solidity of its course of studies, and the strictness of its discipline. Near it there is a Normal College for the training of school-teachers, and another college for the intermediate education of boys. The man who was the principal founder of these excellent institutions was the Very Rev. Joseph Salzmann, D.D., an Austrian priest, who came to Wisconsin as a missionary thirty years ago and finished his earthly course in January, 1874, honored and regretted throughout the United States. The venerable Archbishop of Milwaukee first conceived the idea of founding a seminary to educate priests for the Northwest more than thirty years ago, while praying at the tomb of St. Francis de Sales, and this is the reason of the name Salesianum by which the seminary was christened. The first rector was the present learned Bishop of La Crosse, Dr. Heiss. Dr. Salzmann succeeded him in office in 1868. The Rev. Professor Rainer, in the little volume before us, gives an interesting account of the whole life of Dr. Salzmann, but especially of his great and arduous work of founding and establishing the Salesianum, which we may truly call a heroic achievement. He was a thoroughly learned and accomplished scholar, a man of sacerdotal dignity and personal attractiveness, an eloquent preacher, with fair and seductive prospects before him in his own beautiful Catholic land. He was well fitted to adorn those positions in the church which are surrounded with the most outward _éclat_, and give the opportunity of enjoying all the ease, comfort, and pleasure in literary pursuits and quiet seclusion which are lawful and honorable in the priesthood. Nevertheless, he chose the life of a Western missionary, and devoted the greater part of his time and energies, not to the intellectual and attractive employments of preaching and instruction in the sciences, but to that most repugnant and arduous work of collecting money and looking after the drudgery of building, providing, caring for the material wants of new, poor, struggling institutions. It is not possible for any who have not been brought up in some one of the old Catholic countries of Europe to estimate the sacrifice made by young men of refined character and education, and strong love of home and country, when they devote themselves to missionary labor in a new country, and to its hardest, most repulsive departments. There are special difficulties and hardships to be encountered by those who work among our German population. When they are bad or indifferent Catholics, they are the most obstinate and unmanageable people with whom a priest can have to deal, and very difficult to reclaim. Apostate and infidel Germans have a brutality in their hatred to the Catholic Church and all religion which is extremely odious and cannot be fully appreciated by one who has not come into personal contact with that class, whose only god is beer and whose church is the lager-beer saloon. _Zur Hölle_ is the appropriate motto we have seen over one of these dens in New York. When thoroughly imbued with the Catholic spirit, the German people are admirable. The wonderful work of Christian civilization wrought out among them in past ages is known to all readers of true history. Dr. Salzmann, and others like him, are worthy successors of the apostolic men whose names are recorded in the history of the church. They are the men who carry on the true Cultur-Kampf in the vast realms of our Western territory. Their acts are worthy to be classed with those so charmingly related in _The Monks of the West_ and _Christian Schools and Scholars_. A keen Western speculator said that “a bishop was worth as much as a railroad to a Western town.” All that is wanted to repeat in the immense regions of our new States and Territories the creation and development of great civilized and Christian communities is the virile force, the manhood, of those early times. Land and material resources exist in prodigal abundance. It is men that are wanted—masses of people with strength and spirit to abandon our crowded cities and old States and colonize new domains, and men with the ability and virtue of leaders, guides, founders, instructors, legislators, rulers, and benefactors. We trust that the modest recital of the life of one generous young priest who left his charming Austrian home to engage in this work may find its way among the educated young men and young ecclesiastics of Germany. There is work here for some among the hundreds of such young men, full of vigorous health, full of intellectual vigor, full of sound learning, who are at a loss to find a sufficient sphere for their activity in their own country.

The greatest and noblest project of Dr. Salzmann was one which he could not even begin to carry into execution—that of founding a university, a new _Fulda_, for the Germans of America. We do not think that such an institution could or should remain permanently an exclusively German university. We desire, nevertheless, to see this grand idea carried out, as a special work of our Catholics of German origin and language, under the direction of a _corps_ of learned German professors, and with special reference to the education of youth who are of the same descent or who wish to study the language and literature of Germany. Time and the course of nature will eventually blend all our heterogeneous elements together, but we do not believe in violent efforts to hurry on the process. All that we can borrow from any European language or literature, all the recruits we can gain from the nurseries of scholars or population in the Old World, is so much added to our intellectual, social, and political strength and breadth. Of course the English language and literature, American history and institutions, ought to be assiduously studied by the learned foreigners who are domesticated among us, and taught to their pupils of a different mother-tongue. This may be done without abdicating the advantage which they possess, and which others must acquire at the cost of great labor, by being born heirs to the inheritance of their own immediate ancestors.

The great practical question of the moment is that of Catholic education. The advocates of compulsory secular education are the enemies of religion, of their country, and of true culture. The seminaries, colleges, and schools where Catholic priests, youths, and children are trained in sound religious knowledge, morality, and science are the fortresses and the centres of real civilization. Whoever does a great work in the cause of Catholic education is a benefactor to the church and the country. Such a noble and meritorious man was Dr. Salzmann, a priest powerful in word and work, a model for the young ecclesiastics of the Salesianum to imitate, an encouraging example for all who are laboring to found and perfect similar institutions. The diocese of Milwaukee was a poor and feeble little bishopric when the venerable Dr. Henni was consecrated in 1844. Now it is a metropolitan see, with above 190,000 Catholics in its diocesan limits, above 180 priests, several flourishing institutions for the higher education of both sexes, and schools in almost every parish. The Salesianum, where the first rector, Dr. Heiss, was professor of Greek, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and moral theology, numbers thirteen professors and two hundred and fifty students. Surely, the prayers and labors of a good bishop, seconded by those of able and zealous priests, can work wonders now as well as in the best ages of the past. Indeed, works which a St. Francis of Sales was unable to accomplish are now successfully performed within a short time and with comparatively little difficulty. Assuredly, we cannot fail to recognize a special benediction of God upon the church of the United States.

THE CONSOLATION OF THE DEVOUT SOUL. By the Very Rev. Joseph Frassinetti, Prior of Santa Sabina, in Genoa. Translated by Georgiana Lady Chatterton. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

The worth of a book ought to be estimated chiefly from its intrinsic merits, yet, even without being acquainted with these, we may often obtain a fair idea of its character by knowing something about the author.

Father Frassinetti was an extraordinary man. He was born in the city of Genoa on Dec. 15, 1803, and died there on the 3d of January, 1868. Thirty-nine years of his life were spent in the priesthood, with an unsullied reputation for piety and zeal, and a wide-spread fame as a preacher, director of consciences, and writer on spiritual matters. A uniform edition of his works, which are all in Italian, was published shortly before his death in ten volumes, and dedicated to the late Cardinal Patrizi, Vicar of Rome.

The first volume of his collected works contains _Il conforto dell’ Anima Divota_, of which we have the excellent translation before us. Its author was not only a remarkably learned man, but also a singularly pious man—one whom our Holy Father Pope Pius IX. called, in a certain brief, a priest _spectatæ doctrinæ et virtutis_—and distinguished by the rare faculty of being able to communicate his knowledge to others, and of knowing how to lead others on to personal holiness. Nearly forty years of his life were passed in leaching his fellow-men by word and example how to love, serve, and honor God and save their souls. That such a one should have written this little book on _The Consolation of the Devout Soul_ is a sufficient guarantee of its usefulness and doctrine. The work is divided into five chapters and an appendix, in which the author successively defines what is meant by Christian perfection, shows that it is not a thing too difficult to be acquired, solves certain objections against facility of sanctification, explains the beauty and utility of Christian perfection, points out the means of arriving at this much-desired end, and concludes with a short treatise on the holy fear of God. Several notes are added.

This translation bears the _imprimatur_ of the devout and learned Bishop of Birmingham. We earnestly recommend it to the members of religious orders, and to people who serve God in the world.

THE CODE POETICAL READER, for school and home use. With marginal notes, and biographical notices of authors. By a Teacher. London: Burns & Oates. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This Reader is made up of eighty short poems from British and American authors. Each selection is accompanied by marginal notes and is headed by a short biographical notice. The plan is excellent, the publishers’ work is well done, but the biographical notices are so brief as to be of little value, and the marginal notes are nothing more than commonplace definitions of difficult words. Perhaps it is hardly just to call the words referred to difficult, since the majority of the poems are as simple in diction as _Lord Ullin’s Daughter_. The fault may be attributed partly to the marginal-note plan, since an absence of notes would leave an unsightly page. Still, this is no excuse for careless definitions: _unfriended_ is a poor substitute for _forlorn_; _California_ is not _a mountainous country of North America on the Pacific coast_; _Indian_ is a name given to the _aboriginal_ inhabitants of America, not to the _ancient_ inhabitants; _pollution_ does not mean _to corrupt_; concealing can hardly mean at once _hiding_ and _to keep secret_. In the lines from _The Village Blacksmith_,

“Each morning sees some task begun, Each evening sees its close,”

the word _close_ is defined _finished_. These are a few inaccuracies out of many. The selections comprise some of the most exquisite short poems in the language, there being few extracts and but one translation. Were it not for the absence of selections from Catholic sources, this would be a desirable class-book. Why Adelaide Procter, Aubrey de Vere, Gerald Griffin, Davis, McGee, are excluded, and Bret Harte honored in two places, is a mystery. Nor do other poets fare better. Caswall is not mentioned; in truth, there is not one poem from a Catholic author. Catholics are not the only persons who suffer from the editor’s discrimination. Tennyson is excluded, while Rev. Charles Kingsley contributes two pieces. Six selections come from Longfellow. These facts show that it was not for want of space that Catholic poems find no room in a text-book published by a Catholic firm. Nor was it merit alone that prompted the editor in his selection. The book seems to have been prepared for schools in which neither the name nor the sentiment of a Catholic writer might enter. The system that excludes the grace and purity of Adelaide Procter, the sweetness and vigor of De Vere, and the perfect rhythm of Tennyson will bring forth bitter fruit, and those who assist the projectors in their plans may expect to reap the usual harvest of ingratitude, together with the unpleasant memory of having closed their eyes to the merits of Catholic poets because of the hostility of some so-called non sectarian school-board.

SUMMA SUMMÆ. Pars Prima—De Deo. Confecit ac edidit T. J. O’Mahony, S.T.D., Philos. in Collegio OO.SS., Dublinii, Professor. Dublinii: apud M. H. Gill et Fil.; Lond.: Burns et Oates; Paris: J. Lecoffre et Soc. 1877.

This summary of the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas is chiefly intended as an aid to ecclesiastical students in the study of the great work of the Angelic Doctor. The first part only is yet published. Dr. O’Mahony, of All-Hallow’s College, its author, with great skill and painstaking, has endeavored to make the order and arrangement of topics and divisions in the _Summa_ more intelligible by means of a convenient type-arrangement and distinctive headings, and to facilitate the understanding of the text by an analytical abstract which contains many literal quotations, followed by a synthetic synopsis of subjects. The work seems to have been done intelligently and well, and its utility is obvious to every student who has attempted to read even one page of the _Summa_. It is neatly printed, and we trust may soon be completed.

WHY ARE WE ROMAN CATHOLICS? BECAUSE WE ARE REASONABLE MEN. By Hermann Joseph Graf Fugger Glött, Priest of the Society of Jesus. From the German. London: Burns & Oates. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

A clear, solid, and short exposition of the Catholic faith, in view of actual objections against its reasonableness. It would be well if there were more works of this kind. The rational side of revealed truth needs a various development to meet the many intellectual demands of our age. Besides, there are many sincere persons in Protestant communities who are disposed to be Christians, but are in suspense because of the inconsistency of Protestantism with reason. These need only the obstacles to faith to be removed for them to become Catholics. For such this short treatise will be of special service. It should be also read by Catholics, as they ought to be prepared when asked to know how “to give a reason for the hope that is in them.” The author shows a familiar knowledge of the anti-Christian writers of our day, is free from all bitterness, and we hope to hear from his pen in this field again. The translation reads as if written in English.

CARTE ECCLESIASTIQUE DES ETATS-UNIS DE L’AMERIQUE. LYONS. 1877.

A few copies of this chart have been sent to this country, and we have received one through the courtesy of Father Perron, of Woodstock College. It is a handsome, well-executed, and, so far as we have discovered, correct map of the provinces and bishoprics of the United States. Such a map is convenient and valuable. We think it would be improved by making each of the provinces of one distinct color, and marking the dioceses by broad colored lines, and the States by similar black lines. The titles of the provinces and dioceses might also be printed in large letters, and the sees receive more conspicuous signs. The chart is published by the Society of Catholic Missions, 6 Rue d’Auvergne, à Lyon. Directeur, M. l’Abbé Stanislas Laverrière. All the profits are given to the missions. We suggest to our Catholic publishers to send for copies and keep them on hand for sale.

HEROIC WOMEN OF THE BIBLE AND THE CHURCH. By the Rev. Bernard O’Reilly, D.D. With art illustrations. New York: J. B. Ford & Co. 1877.

We can do no more now than call the attention of our readers to this most beautiful work—beautiful in every sense—of which we have received advance sheets. The author’s name needs no introduction to Catholic readers. We reserve for a future date a fuller notice of a well-conceived and admirably executed work, one too of great practical utility. Father O’Reilly’s statement in the preface, that “the publishers have spared neither labor nor expense to make this book most beautiful in form,” is obviously true at the first glance.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXV., No. 147.—JUNE, 1877.

THE PAPAL JUBILEE. SONNETS BY AUBREY DE VERE.

I. THE GREAT PILGRIMAGE.

What beam is that, guiding once more from far Earth’s Elders Rome-ward over sea and land? What Sanctity, serene as Bethlehem’s star, From East and West leads on each pilgrim band? God’s light it is—on an unsceptred Hand! God’s promise, shining without let or bar, O’er sleeping realms that yet may wake in war, Forth from that Brow Discrowned whose high command Freshens in splendor with the advancing night Missioned to blot all godless crowns with gloom:— Like fruits untimely from a tree in blight Such crowns shall fall. Even now they know their doom! Advance, pure hearts! Your instinct guides you right The Bethlehem Crib, this day, is by Saint Peter’s tomb.

II. THE JERUSALEM OF THE NEW LAW.

“The Tribes ascend.” Ten centuries and nine Have well-nigh passed since first the earth’s green breast Confessed, deep-graved, those feet that Christ confessed,— Those feet which, then when earth was Palestine, Circled her Salem new. Mankind was thine, O Rome, that time. All nations sent their best To waft thee offerings, and their faith attest:— They love thee most who love thee in decline. The noble seek thy courts. What gibbering crew Snarls at their heels? The brood that fears and hates;— Prescient Defeat in bonds, that jeers the brave: Ascend, true hearts! Such tribute is your due! In Rome’s old triumphs thus the car-bound slave Scoffed, as he passed, of Fortune’s spite, and Fate’s.[42]

Footnote 42:

In the Roman triumphs a captive slave was bound to the car of the conqueror, into whose ear his office was to whisper of fortune’s instability.

III. THE CONFESSOR PONTIFF.

Full fifty years are past since first that weight Descended on his head which made more strong His heart, his hands more swift to war with wrong— His martyred Master’s dread Episcopate: Full thirty years beside the Apostles’ Gate He reigned, and reigns: he roamed, an exile, long: Restored, he faced once more the apostate throng, Unbowed in woes, in greatness unelate. New Hierarchies he sped to realms remote: Central, by Peter’s Tomb he raised his hands Blessing his thousand bishops from all lands; Confirmed their great decree. False kings he smote:— How long, just God, shall Treason’s banner float O’er faith’s chief shrine profaned by rebel bands?

POPE PIUS THE NINTH.[43]

Footnote 43:

_Pie IX.: sa vie, son Histoire, son Siècle._ Par J. M. Villefranche. Lyons. 1876.

_Rome: its Ruler and its Institutions._ By John Francis Maguire, M.P. New York. 1858.

_Italy in 1848._ By L. Mariotti. London. 1851.

_The Secret Societies of the European Revolution, 1776-1876._ By Thomas Frost. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1876.

The whole Catholic world prepares to celebrate on the 3d of June of this year the fiftieth anniversary of an episcopate which has no parallel in the history of the church. Our Holy Father Pius IX. has surpassed most of his predecessors in the importance of his labors, and has far exceeded them all in the length of his pontificate. He was young when he reached the dignity of bishop, but Leo XII., to whom he owed his promotion, had already discerned the beauty of his character. Sinigaglia, where he was born, on the 13th of May, 1792; Volterra, where he passed six years at college; Rome, where he studied theology, abound with stories of the sweet and sunny disposition, the fervent piety, and the burning zeal which illustrated even his tenderest years. He was six years of age when the venerable Pius VI. was dragged away into captivity, and the biographers of Pius IX. speak of the excitement which stirred his boyish heart, and the prayers which he poured out night and morning at his mother’s knee for the outraged church. His earliest recollections of the Papacy were a fit preparation for what he was to undergo in after-life. The Holy Father appeared to his young eyes, not as the crowned pontiff, but as the suffering and heroic confessor. He saw Pius VII. following Pius VI. into banishment. He saw the last inch of territory taken from the Holy See. One of his uncles, a canon of St. Peter’s, was driven from Rome on account of his fidelity to the pope; and another uncle, who was Bishop of Pesaro, was thrown into prison for the same cause. He had finished his course at college and was living at home when Pius VII. returned from exile, and he was presented to the pontiff as he passed through Sinigaglia on the road to Rome. The Mastai family were distantly related to Pius VII., and the pope took an interest in his kinsman. But there was an obstacle which seemed likely to defeat the young Mastai’s desire to enter holy orders. He was subject to fits of epilepsy. The physicians gave him no hope of a cure. About the time of the pope’s return, however, the violence of the disorder began to abate, and his health was soon so far restored that he was encouraged to continue his studies for the church. He always ascribed his relief to the protection of the Blessed Virgin. In 1819 he was ordained priest by special dispensation, and appointed to the humble duty of serving the asylum for poor children established in the Via Giulia in Rome by a pious mason named Giovanni Borgi. It was called the Asylum Tata Giovanni, because “Tata Giovanni”—or Papa John—was the name which the lads used to give their protector. The Abbate Mastai had been a good friend and helper of Papa John, and was glad of the privilege of continuing his work now that the benevolent old man had gone to his reward. He occupied a little chamber in the asylum. He ate at the table with the boys. He spent all his income in their service. He kept his regard for them long after they had grown up, and even as Pope he remembered the names of his pupils and followed their fortunes with a tender interest. It has often been said that Pius IX. never forgot anybody.

The first employment which brought him into public notice was a mission to the New World. Some of the clergy of the South American states had petitioned the Holy See to fill their long-vacant bishoprics. Many years had passed since the close of their war of independence with Spain, but the mother-country still asserted the authority which she no longer attempted to enforce, and claimed the right of presentation to sees long withdrawn from her jurisdiction. The church in South America remained, consequently, in lamentable confusion until the Sovereign Pontiff resolved to re-establish order by the exercise of his prerogative, without government interference from either side; and the embassy of which we speak was despatched in consequence. Monsignore Muzi, with the title of vicar-apostolic, was at the head of it, and the Abbate Mastai was appointed adjunct.[44] Before the expedition sailed Pope Pius VII. died, but Leo XII. confirmed the selections made by his predecessor; and, indeed, the choice of the Abbate Mastai had been made originally by his advice. On the voyage the ship was driven by stress of weather into the Spanish port of Palma, in the island of Majorca. The governor threw the embassy into prison and kept them for some days in seclusion, on the ground that the country to which they were bound was in rebellion against the Spanish crown. “Then,” said the Pope, in telling this adventure nearly half a century afterward, “I realized the necessity of the papal independence. They sent me a ration of food every day from the ship, but I was allowed neither letters nor papers. I was initiated on this occasion, however, into the little stratagems of solitary prisoners; for we hid our correspondence in loaves of bread.” The embassy got away at last and spent two years of fatigue and danger in South America, visiting the missions of Chili, Peru, and Colombia, traversing the awful passes of the Cordilleras, and crossing the continent in bullock-carts—a journey which took them nearly two months. Once, in going by sea from Valparaiso to Callao, their vessel, caught near the coast in a gale, was driving upon the rocks when a fisherman put off in his boat, boarded them in the midst of the storm, and brought them through intricate passages into the harbor of Arica. The next day the Abbate Mastai visited the hut of this daring pilot, and left with him a purse containing about four hundred dollars. After becoming Pope he sent the man a second purse of equal value and his picture. The fisherman was overwhelmed with gratitude. The first four hundred dollars had proved the making of his fortune. He gave the second to the poor, and placed the picture of the Pope in a little chapel which he had built on a spot overlooking the sea.

Footnote 44:

For a full account of this mission see THE CATHOLIC WORLD for January, 1876.

The embassy returned to Rome in 1825, and the Abbate Mastai was appointed canon of Santa Maria in Via Lata, a little church on the Corso, with an oratory in which pious tradition relates that St. Paul and St. Luke used to teach the faith to the first Christians of Rome. He was also promoted to the prelacy and placed at the head of the great Hospital of St. Michael. “The Hospital of St. Michael,” says one of the latest of the biographers of Pius IX., “is a city in itself, and its administration is a real government.” Founded two centuries ago by Innocent X., it grew, by the additions of later pontiffs, to be one of the greatest and grandest asylums in existence—a house of refuge for the young, a retreat for the aged and infirm, a hospital for the sick, a reformatory for Magdalens, a home for virtuous girls, and, besides all that, a school of arts and industries. When Monsignore Mastai assumed the presidency of this vast and complicated institution, every department of it was in a deplorable state of disorganization. Nearly all the earnings of the boys and girls in the industrial schools went towards the support of the establishment, and yet there was an enormous deficit in the revenues. Bankruptcy seemed at hand. The new president took up his task with magnificent ardor and equally magnificent discretion, with the enthusiasm of a reformer and the practical sagacity of a man of business. In two years the disorder was at an end. The expenses of the institution were brought within its income, yet its charity was enlarged rather than restricted, and a large share of the earnings of the boys was paid into a savings’ fund, to be returned to them when they went out into the world. Monsignore Mastai had obtained this remarkable result in part by his talent for business; but not wholly by that, for when the work was done his own patrimony had disappeared. “Of what use is money to a priest,” said he, “except to be spent in the cause of charity?” So it happened that when Leo XII. called him to the archbishopric of Spoleto in 1827 he had not money enough to pay for his bulls. The last acre of his estate was sold for the customary fees, and he entered Spoleto as penniless as the apostle whom our Lord commanded to take the tax-money from the mouth of a fish.

The first years of his episcopate were passed as any one who had watched the labors of his priesthood might have predicted that they would be. He was rarely seen by the courtiers of the papal palace, but his people knew him as the friend and father of the poor, and loved him for a tenderness and generosity almost without bounds. He filled his diocese with good works, founding seminaries and asylums, introducing charitable orders, always setting a practical example of beneficence by attending personally to the wants of the unfortunate. He spent in alms the last copper in his purse, and sold the ornaments from his parlor for the poor when his purse was empty. It was the golden time of his life—a time of peace and consolation. The church in Italy just then was at rest. A long period of political disturbance had been followed by comparative quiet. Convents and pious schools were multiplied, and the saintly Archbishop of Spoleto found himself in the midst of a devout clergy and a grateful people. There was a short outbreak in the Romagna in 1831, premature and easily suppressed, and it was then that the archbishop was brought for the first time into contact with the spirit of revolution destined to make such a bitter and memorable war upon him in later years. Among the adventurers implicated in the movement were two scions of the Bonaparte family. The elder brother died during the enterprise; the younger lived to become emperor. There is a story that when Louis Napoleon fled from the ruin of the revolt in the Romagna, he knocked one night at the door of the Archbishop of Spoleto, and owed his safety to the charity of that most charitable of men. It is a story which rests upon no very firm authority, and yet, though often published, it stands uncontradicted. It is certain, however, that in the last days of the insurrection the archbishop did show his tenderness for the unfortunate in a signal manner. Four thousand revolutionists, pursued by Austrian troops, presented themselves before Spoleto. The archbishop went out to meet them. He persuaded them, since their cause was lost, to lay down their arms. He gave them several thousand crowns for their immediate needs. He pledged his word that they should not be molested. Then he performed the still more difficult task of inducing the Austrian commander to ratify the promise. The pursuit was abandoned; the insurgents retired quietly to their homes. Pope Gregory XVI., however, was not pleased with this transaction, and the archbishop was called to Rome to defend himself. We must presume that his explanation was satisfactory; for the next year he was advanced to the see of Imola. This is only a suffragan see, but it is more important in itself than the archbishopric of Spoleto, and is, moreover, what is called a cardinalitial post—under ordinary circumstances a step towards the higher dignity of the scarlet hat. It was held by Pius VII. when he was Cardinal Chiaramonti. The promotion of Bishop Mastai came in due course. His creation as cardinal was announced in December, 1840, having been reserved _in petto_ since the previous year, and he took his title from the church of SS. Peter and Marcellinus. With his new dignity he adopted no new mode of life. Works of charity and devotion still filled his days. The love and respect of all classes of men still encompassed him. It is the best proof of the tranquil and happy course of his episcopate that of the nineteen years which he passed at Spoleto and Imola there is hardly an incident to be related.

His whole life thus far seems to have been a providential preparation for the two great works for which he was destined by Almighty God. On the spiritual side of the church he was to bring about the consolidation of Catholic dogma and the complete definition and development of the authority of the church over the minds and hearts of her children. On the secular side, after showing the perfect compatibility of the temporal power with the needs of modern society, he was to guide the church with fortitude and prudence, and give the Christian world a shining example of constancy during the trying days that were to see that power destroyed. What better training could he have had for this double destiny than so many years of charitable labor and close intercourse with God? He issued at last from his pious retirement with a character enriched by the daily practice of virtue, a disposition sweetened by the habit of self-sacrifice, a resolution strengthened by reliance upon God, and a heavenly courage that was proof against the threats and buffets of the world.

I.

We have spoken of the brief season of repose in Italian politics about the time of our Holy Father’s elevation to the episcopate. It was, indeed, only a transient gleam of sunlight in the midst of a tempestuous era. We come now to a period of universal disturbance. This is not the place to discuss the causes of the great revulsions of 1848. Probably they were more complex and reached further back than the world generally supposes. But whatever may have been the local provocations for revolt in particular states, it is clear that, for more than a quarter of a century before the date with which we are now occupied, the revolutionary tendencies of all Europe had shown a unity of direction which implied a single guiding impulse. It is not credible that a few clubs of political enthusiasts, visionary young students, hare-brained apothecaries, and metaphysical breeches-makers should be able by the fire of their own genius to set a continent in flames. The revolutionary propaganda of 1830-1848 found in every country of Europe a combustible population only waiting for the spark. Some states were rotten with social and moral disorders of long standing; some, like Poland, were writhing under an oppression which moved the sympathies of the whole world; some fretted under the restrictions of antiquated forms of government, unsuited to the wants of an expanding society. Thus the generous and patriotic were easily hurried into enterprises whose true purpose they were far from suspecting. The central influence which vitalized and directed all the scattered tendencies towards revolt was the conspiracy of the secret societies. “In the attempt to conduct the government of the world,” said the British prime minister last autumn, in his address at Aylesbury, “there are new elements to be considered which our predecessors had not to deal with. We have not only to deal with emperors, princes, and ministers, but there are the secret societies—an element which we must take into consideration, which at the last moment may baffle all our arrangements, which have their agents everywhere, which countenance assassination, and which, if necessary, could produce a massacre.” Lord Beaconsfield’s statement was a very mild one. The secret societies had become, at the time of which we write, the most formidable force in European politics. There was not a corner of the Continent in which their power was not felt. Intimately allied with Freemasonry, their origin dates back to a remote, unknown time. They were already strong in the eighteenth century, and their share in the great French Revolution is well understood. They became formidable in the Illuminism of Weishaupt in Germany a hundred years ago. They appeared in the Tugendbund, which had so large a share in the overthrow of the governments imposed upon the German states by Napoleon I. They were busy in Russia, in Greece, in Ireland, in Spain, and even in the Swiss Republic; in Italy they have never been idle since the first appearance of the Carbonari at the beginning of the century; in France they are the only power which seems to be permanent. As early as 1821 the Italian revolutionist, Pepe, gave Carbonarism an international character by establishing in Spain a secret association of the “advanced political reformers of all the European states”; and in 1834 Mazzini made a much more effective union of the revolutionary elements when, with the aid of Italian, Polish, and German refugees, he founded at Berne the society of Young Europe. The organization of Young Germany, Young Poland, and Young Switzerland dates from the same time and place, and Switzerland became the centre of all the agitations of the Continent. Young Italy had been grafted upon Carbonarism by Mazzini as early as 1831.

Many of these associations, as we have already intimated, professed an excellent object. They would have been comparatively harmless, if they had not attracted and deceived the good. The Tugendbund, for instance, originally aimed at the deliverance of Germany from a foreign yoke; Young Poland captivated the noble and the ardent; even the Carbonari had an alluring watchword in the Unity and Independence of Italy. But there was always an ulterior purpose, revealed only to the initiated. That purpose was one and unchanging, and it was the bond which united all the leaders of the vast conspiracy from the Irish Sea to the Grecian Archipelago, from Gibraltar to Nova Zembla. It was the establishment everywhere of an atheistic democracy; or rather the destruction simultaneously of all religion, all government, and all social bonds. Kings and priests were equally hateful to the “Illuminated.” There was to be no recognition of God in their republic. It was hostile not only to the Catholic Church as an organization, but to Christianity as a moral influence. The Illuminati were founded in the midst of the Masonic lodges of Bavaria; they passed thence into Austria, Saxony, Holland, Italy, and Switzerland; they were carried to Paris by Mirabeau, who was initiated in Germany; they were united with the Freemasons all over France. Recognized as the parents of the later societies, they sounded as early as 1777 the key-note of the whole complex movement. Findel, the Masonic historian of Freemasonry, declares that “the most decisive agent” in giving the order a political and anti-religious character was “that intellectual movement known under the name of English deism, which boldly rejected all revelation and all religious dogmas, and under the victorious banner of reason and criticism broke down all barriers in its path.” But Weishaupt found still too much “political and religious prejudice” remaining in the Freemasons, and consequently devised a system which, as he expressed it, would “attract Christians of every communion and gradually free them from all religious prejudices.” The “illumination” of the brethren was to be accomplished by a course of gradual education in which Christianity was carefully ignored. It was only in the higher degrees that the initiated were taught that the fall of man meant nothing but the subjection of the individual to civil society; that “illumination” consisted in getting rid of all governments; and that “the secret associations were gradually and silently to possess themselves of the government of the states, making use for this purpose of the means which the wicked use for attaining their base ends.” We quote this from the discourse read at initiation into one of the higher degrees, and discovered when the papers of the fraternity were seized by the Elector of Bavaria in 1785. The same document continues: “Princes and priests are in particular the wicked whose hands we must tie up by means of these associations, if we cannot wipe them out altogether.” Patriotism was defined as a narrow-minded prejudice; and, finally, the illuminated man was taught that everything is material, that religion has no foundation, that all nations must be brought back, either by peaceable means or by force, to their pristine condition of unrestricted liberty, for “all subordination must vanish from the face of the earth.” The ceremonies of initiation into the lodges of the Carbonari remind us so strongly of this explanation of the principles of Illuminism that it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the two associations are closely connected. The neophyte was taught the same doctrine in both: that man had everywhere fallen into the hands of oppressors, whose authority it was the mission of the enlightened to cast off. Here, however, as in the earlier society, the pagan character of the proposed new life was only revealed by degrees to those who were prepared for it. The conspirators seem to have accommodated their system of education to the peculiarities of national training and disposition. For example, they humored the religious tendencies of the Italians by retaining the name of God and the image of the crucifix in the ceremonial of the lower degrees, and even published a forged bull, in the name of Pope Pius VII., approving the Carbonari; while in the training of Young Germany just a contrary course was adopted. “We are obliged to treat new-comers very cautiously,” says a report from a propagandist committee established among the Germans in Switzerland, “to bring them step by step into the right road, and the principal thing in this respect is to show them that religion is nothing but a pile of rubbish.” Indeed, the rampant atheism of the secret societies of Germany, and also of France, has always been notorious. Of the still more horrible manifestations of impiety to which they were carried in Italy we hesitate to speak, lest we be suspected of sensational exaggerations. All that we have said thus far of the principles and practices of the Masons, Illuminati, and Carbonari is quoted from their own books and papers, and may be found in the work of their admirer and apologist, Thomas Frost, the title of which we have placed at the head of this article. For a more startling picture of their inner mysteries we refer the reader to Father Bresciani,[45] who lived in Rome in 1848 and had direct testimony of horrors which almost defy belief. Mr. Frost, however, gives a glimpse of the worse than pagan spirit of Carbonarism when he describes the initiation into the second degree—a ceremony wherein the candidate, crowned with thorns and bearing a cross, personated our divine Lord, and knelt to ask pardon of Pilate, Caiphas, and Herod, represented by the grand master and two assistants, the pardon being granted at the intercession of the assembled Carbonari! In all the societies an abstract morality was taught which was not the morality of Jesus Christ, and laws were laid down at variance with the laws of the state. Assassination was one of the chief duties which the fraternity enjoined upon its votaries. The initiated fancied that they emancipated themselves from all subordination; but they bound themselves by the most awful penalties to murder any one, even friend or brother, who might be pointed out for death by some unseen, unknown, and shadowy authority.

Footnote 45:

_The Jew of Verona._ English translation, 2 vols. 12mo. Baltimore. 1854.

When Pope Gregory XVI. came to the throne the conspiracies of ten years were just ripening. He was assailed in the very first month of his pontificate by the rising in the Romagna, and he spent the fifteen years of his reign in a struggle to keep down the evil spirit whose apparition then alarmed him. All Europe during these fifteen years was a volcano sending forth the deep mutterings and sulphurous vapors which presage an eruption. France was never at peace from the overthrow of Charles X. in 1830 till after the re-establishment of the empire—if even she is at peace yet. Every capital in Germany was in nightly danger of the dagger, the torch, and the barricade. Switzerland, though a free republic, was no less severely tormented by conspiracies than the monarchical countries, and after several years of contention her secret societies took arms in 1844 to compel the Catholic cantons, against the constitution of the confederation, to expel the Jesuits. In Poland, at the very moment when the nobles were preparing a revolt against the Austrian yoke, a socialistic and agrarian rising of the peasants against the nobles filled Galicia with massacres of incredible barbarity. In Italy the Carbonari negotiated for a while with the Duke of Modena, by whose aid they proposed to expel the Austrians from Lombardy and Venice, and unite the states of the north and centre under one sovereign—of course with the further object, held in reserve, of getting rid of the Duke of Modena as soon as they had no further use for him: a scheme almost exactly like that which Young Italy tried a few years later with Charles Albert of Sardinia. Defeated in this project and crushed in attempts at insurrection, they worked for some time in secret, but they worked with furious energy. The doctrines of Illumination were carried into every corner of the peninsula. A score of local secret associations came into existence, adding to the wickedness of the parent society some peculiar brutality of their own. Ancona had its “Society of Death,” Sinigaglia its “Infernal Association,” Leghorn its “Society of Slayers,” Faenza its “Band of Stabbers.”

Between 1831 and 1840, however, the policy of the Italian revolutionists was greatly modified. Mazzini established Young Italy under the conviction that the old methods of conspiracy must fail. Instead of wasting their strength in vain efforts to overturn the Italian princes singly, he urged the brethren to concentrate their energies upon a movement for the expulsion of the Austrians and a consolidation of all the Italian states. The fate of pope, and kings, and princes could be settled afterwards. “All questions as to forms of internal policy,” he wrote, “can be put off till the close of the war of independence.” Italy and independence! This was a programme, not for the secret societies alone, but for the whole peninsula. It captivated the generous, the impulsive, the ardent, the ambitious. It brought to the same work poetry, patriotism, and religion, the pistol, the dagger, and the poisoned cup. What was to be done with Italy, when it was united and rid of the Austrians, was one of the secrets of the initiated never explained to the common people; but remarkable illustrations of the inner character of this movement were found in 1844 among certain papers seized by the police in Rome. “Our watchword,” wrote one of the leaders, “must be Religion, Union, Independence. As for the King of Sardinia, we should seek some favorable opportunity to poignard him. I recommend the same course to be pursued in regard to the King of Naples. The Lombards may second our efforts by poison, or by insurrection, under the form of little 'Sicilian Vespers’ against the Germans. Functionaries or private citizens who show a hostile spirit must be put to death. Let them be arrested quietly during the night, and the report be circulated that they have been exiled or sent to prison, or have absconded.” Mazzini himself a little later, in an address to Young Italy, gave a significant explanation of his idea. “In your country,” said he, “regeneration must come through the princes. Get them on your side. Attack their vanity. Let them march at the head, if they will, so long as they march your way. Few will go to the end. If they make concessions, praise them and insist upon something further. The essential thing is not to let them know what the goal of the revolution is. They must never see more than one step at a time.” And he urged also the importance of “managing” the clergy. “Its habits and hierarchy make it the imp of authority—that is to say, of despotism”; but the people believe in it, and we must make its influence of use. With the Jesuits, however, he proclaimed war to the knife. None of the socialists and infidels were willing to make any terms with the sons of St. Ignatius.

In the prosecution of this new scheme of revolution the conspirators obtained invaluable help from a most unexpected ally. The erring genius of the unfortunate Abbate Gioberti did more for them than the machinations of the lodges. Carried away by visions of a new Italy and a new Catholicism, he forgot the divine mission of the church in speculations as to what she might accomplish in purely secular enterprises. His great error was in thinking of religion as an agent of civilization rather than an instrumentality for saving souls, and thus he was led into the blunder of attempting to unite God and the world in an equal partnership. He conceived the idea of an Italian federation with the King of Sardinia as military head and the Pope as spiritual president—a sort of dual empire like that of Japan, with a tycoon at Turin, a mikado at the Vatican. But the clergy were to abdicate their dominion over the minds of men, and bend their energies to effecting an alliance of religion with a material progress that in his theory had outstripped the church and become for ever incompatible with ecclesiastical tutelage. He wished the priests to put themselves at the head of the new social movements, and, hand in hand with the political agitators, to lead Italy to a material glory such as no nation on earth had ever seen. His book, _Del Primato_, was welcomed with unparalleled enthusiasm. The charm of a brilliant style, the force of an original, cultivated, and poetic mind, the glamour of a philosophy which seemed to meet all the wants of an exciting and uneasy time, turned the heads of the whole nation. Gioberti, Cesare Balbo, Massimo d’Azeglio, were the creators of a new literature, and all Italy read them with flashing eyes and quickening pulse. Theirs was a reform which seized upon the fancy of good and bad alike, and hurried into a common delusion the heedless Christian and the veteran Carbonaro, the young, the imaginative, the adventurous, and the artful. Mazzini, who afterwards became one of Gioberti’s bitterest enemies, was too shrewd to undervalue this influence. He sought an interview with Gioberti in Paris; he offered terms of co-operation; he even went through the form of renouncing what he styled his own “more narrow views,” and proposed a National Association which, adjourning all questions of forms and spirit of government, faith or scepticism, God or the devil, should unite Italy in the single purpose of creating an Italian nation. Different as the aims of the two men were—for Gioberti included even the Austrian government of Lombardy and Venice in his union—they embraced each other for the moment. Together they swept the peninsula. Every city from Palermo to Milan was aflame with the new ideas. The soberest patriots lost their composure, and many of the clergy began to dream wild dreams of political change, and to see visions of reformed conspirators kneeling at the feet of a democratic pope. We look back upon those days from the vantage-ground of experience, and we wonder that men should have been so deceived. But 1848 had not then given the lie to the professions of 1846. Devout Italians at that time did not see, as we do, that the secret societies which assailed the church on one side of the Alps with fire and sword could not be sincere in offering to place it in a new position of power and glory on the other, nor did they realize the extent of the conspiracy to overwhelm religion, government, and social order throughout Europe in one general ruin.

That conspiracy was more formidable in Italy than anywhere else, and it was more formidable not only because it was better organized, but because it involved so many men of blameless character and offered to satisfy a lofty national aspiration. During the last years of Pope Gregory XVI. an explosion seemed inevitable. Probably nothing kept it back except the age and infirmities of the venerable pontiff; the leaders preferred to wait for his death. He died on the 1st of June, 1846. The whole peninsula was instantly in commotion, and the symptoms of violence in Rome were so alarming that people doubted the possibility of an election. Austria, as the power most directly interested in the secular politics of the Holy See, was understood to demand a continuance of the restrictive policy of Gregory; France, on the contrary, was said to desire a moderately liberal pope. To avoid pressure upon the conclave, as well as to forestall an outbreak, the Italian cardinals resolved to begin their deliberations at once and finish them quickly. Without waiting for their distant colleagues, they entered the Quirinal on the 14th, the doors were closed, the guards were set, and the balloting began. Two ballots are taken in the conclave every day. The persons whom public opinion selected as most likely to command the necessary thirty-four votes were Cardinals Gizzi and Lambruschini. The modest and retiring Cardinal Mastai seems to have been little known by the outside world, though his merit was no secret to the Sacred College. He was appointed scrutator, to open and read the ballots. At the first session of the conclave his name was proposed by Cardinal Altieri, Prince-Bishop of Albano, and the first scrutiny showed that he united a large party of the cardinals. On the second ballot he gained a little. On the third his vote was twenty-seven—only seven less than a majority. He retired to his cell and spent the whole time in prayer till the evening meeting. He came to the performance of his functions pale and agitated. When the ballots were taken from the chalice in which they had been collected, he read his own name on the first, on the second, on the third, on every paper up to the eighteenth. He could not go on; he begged the conclave to commit the rest of the task to another. But to change the scrutator in the midst of the vote would invalidate the election. The cardinals gathered around him; for some time he sat terrified and almost insensible, while streams of tears flowed down his cheeks. On the completion of the count it was found that he had the suffrages of thirty-six out of the fifty-four cardinals present. As the whole assembly rose to confirm the choice by unanimous acclamation, the Pope-elect fell upon his knees, and profound silence reigned in the Pauline Chapel while he communed with Almighty God.

It was on the following day, June 18, that, according to custom, the bricked-up window in the front of the Quirinal Palace was broken open, and the cardinals came out upon the balcony to announce to the waiting multitude the choice of a new pope. It is said that men turned to one another in surprise when they heard the name, and asked who this Cardinal Mastai could be. But when his beautiful and benignant face appeared among the throng, and his hand was raised in that gesture of benediction which all who have seen him will for ever associate with his memory, he won the love and admiration of the Roman people; and the true Romans have loved him ever since.

The story of his first days in the pontificate reads like a charming romance. He called the steward of the palace and said to him: “When I was bishop I spent for my personal expenses a crown a day; when I was cardinal I spent a crown and a half; and now that I am Pope you must not go beyond two crowns.” He went about the city alone to search out abuses and to look into the condition of the poor. He presented himself without warning at public institutions. He knocked at the doors of religious houses at night. He startled the congregation at St. Andrea del Valle by appearing unannounced in the pulpit to preach against blasphemy. He delighted children by visiting the schools. He talked freely with the humble whom he met in the streets and on the country roads. He gave lavishly to the needy. A poor market-gardener lost his horse and walked boldly into the palace to ask the Pope if he could not spare an old one from the Quirinal stables. A secretary found the man on the stairs and took his message to the Holy Father. “Yes,” was the Pope’s reply; “and give him this money, too. He must be very poor, or he never would come to the Quirinal to get a horse.”

But Pius IX. was not ignorant of the dangers which surrounded his throne. He chose his course promptly. It may be doubted whether stern measures of repression could have accomplished any good in the excitement of that time, but at any rate he had no taste for them. He favored the idea of a national confederation under the presidency of the Pope, wishing to accomplish it by a friendly alliance of the existing governments, not by war and revolution. For the rest, he looked forward to a reform in the administration of his states, and the introduction of liberal and popular institutions as fast as the old forms could be safely changed, and he purposed to rule by kindness, generosity, and confidence. Yet, as we shall see, he did not lack firmness when firmness was needed. One of his first acts was to declare an amnesty for political offences, and a characteristic anecdote is told of him in connection with it. He called a council of his principal advisers and asked their votes upon the proposed measure of mercy. To his chagrin, a majority of the balls voted were black. He took off his white cap and placed it over them; “Now,” said he, “they are all white.” The prisons were opened. The exiles returned. One thousand six hundred persons were restored to freedom and friends. Rome was in a tumult of joy. The populace thronged about the pontiff whenever he went abroad, and waited long hours before the palace windows to get his blessing. On the feast of St. Peter’s Chains a great number of the pardoned received communion from the Holy Father's hands, and the occasion was celebrated with lively demonstrations. Nor was the Pope satisfied with an easy act of clemency. He made a close personal study of the administration. A multitude of petty abuses were swept away. The taxes were reduced. The liberty of the press was enlarged. Industries were fostered; railways were planned. The Jews were relieved of burdensome and humiliating restrictions. Then the old municipal privileges of Rome were restored, and a long stride ahead was made by the formation of a lay consulta of state and the popular representation of the provinces in the central government.

Nothing could surpass the enthusiasm of the people at this dawn of a new political era. It was almost a continuous holiday in Rome, with gay processions by day and torch-light parades by night, public banquets in the vineyards and gardens, triumphal arches spanning the streets, the papal colors fluttering from every window and decorating every breast. Because those colors were white and yellow, it became a point of honor with delighted Romans to breakfast every morning on boiled eggs. Nor was it only Italy which raised the chorus of applause. All over the world the Papacy shone with a glory which it had hardly displayed since Leo XII. The Protestants of New York held a monster meeting of felicitation at the Broadway Tabernacle, where cordial letters were read from ex-President Van Buren and Vice-President Dallas, and an enthusiastic address to the Pope, prepared by Horace Greeley, was adopted by acclamation. The British government offered its congratulations. The French ministry, led by M. Guizot, rivalled the French opposition, led by M. Thiers, in resolutions and speeches of encouragement. Mazzini, true to the policy already explained, addressed to the Holy Father a letter of ostensible sympathy and praise. Such halcyon days might well have filled the most wary with a dangerous confidence.

The Pope was not deceived. He knew that under this outward show of peace the conspiracy was active. The first attempt of the revolutionary party was to separate him from the cardinals. Three weeks after the amnesty, as he drove under one of the arches erected in his honor, the mob stopped some of the prelates of his suite and refused to let them pass. Certain demonstrations at the popular out-of-door repasts became so significant that the gatherings had to be forbidden. Before the end of the year the cry of “Viva Pio Nono!” changed to “Viva Pio Nono Solo!” and mingled with shouts of “Down with the Jesuits!” and “Death to the retrograders!” The next summer Rome was thrown into a fever of rage by an invention so outrageous and yet so ridiculous that one reads of it with amazement. It was alleged that Cardinal Lambruschini, the Austrian government, and the General of the Jesuits had organized a plot to fall upon the populace on the anniversary of the amnesty, and in the midst of the massacre to get possession of the Pope and put a stop to his liberalism. The _fête_ appointed for the anniversary was given up, and the excitement enabled the revolutionists to depose the old police and throw the city into the arms of the civic guard, of which they were really the directing force. On New Year’s day, 1848, the Pope was molested in the street by a disorderly mob, shouting menaces against “reactionists” and “Jesuits.” The violence of the radical faction increased; their demeanor became more and more insulting; the danger of riot grew imminent; the civil guard showed plain symptoms of disloyalty. Yet all this while the Holy Father persevered in his reforms. He took no step backward. He withdrew no concession. The measure of popular liberty was constantly enlarging, the administration becoming more thoroughly representative. If it was “progress” that the agitators wanted, what was this?

We cannot understand the history of this strange time without bearing in mind that the danger arose, not from anything the Pope had done or failed to do, but from the steady and stealthy advance of the pagan conspiracy. Rome, under the mild rule of Pius IX., became the resort of all the chief revolutionists of the Continent, and it is hardly too much to say that the particular house in Rome where they met and plotted with the most comfort was the British embassy. Palmerston’s policy was always to encourage radical movements on the Continent. When he sent Lord Minto, therefore, as a special envoy to Italy, the parlors of that nobleman were instantly thronged by the Carbonari. In this diplomatic sanctuary gathered a strange company of princes and demagogues—Ciceruacchio, the orator of the rabble; Prince Charles Bonaparte, the radical in purple; Sterbini, the poet, physician, and journalist; Tofanelli, the tavern-keeper; Materazzi, patriot and joiner; Galetti, the grocer, who became Minister of Police in one of the later democratic cabinets.

A letter of Mazzini’s, written in 1847, taught Young Italy that the time for action was close at hand; it was useless to count upon the Pope; their best policy was to inflame the popular hatred of Austria; then provoke Austria to attack them; and in the heat of war to accomplish the rest. But at this critical time Austria herself committed an act which hastened the explosion. Alarmed at the aspect of affairs in Central Italy, she marched a body of troops into the papal territory. The treaty of 1815 gave her the right to place a garrison in the citadel of Ferrara; she went further and occupied the town; and although the spirited protest of the Pope caused her to withdraw after some delay, the occasion which the secret societies desired had been given, and a cry for war and independence resounded from the Gulf of Genoa to the Bay of Naples. We know but imperfectly the hidden springs of action of that year of revolutions; but, as if by concert, the insurrection flashed up almost simultaneously all over the Continent. The Milanese flew to arms. The revolt broke out in Vienna. Barricades arose at Berlin. The Republic was proclaimed in Paris. Naples and Tuscany were menaced. The municipality of Rome waited upon the Pope and demanded a constitution. He consented to give it. “I would have preferred,” said he, “to watch for a while the result of the reforms already instituted; but other Italian princes have granted constitutions, and I will not show less confidence in my subjects than they have had in theirs.” At the same time the ministry was changed. Cardinal Antonelli, whose management of the finances had made him very popular, became Secretary of State, and three of the most moderate of the liberals—Minghetti, Galetti, and Sturbinetti—entered the cabinet. It is characteristic of the spirit of the revolution that the first effect of these concessions was to stimulate a fresh attack upon the church, disorders in Rome, and an assault upon the Gesù. The Jesuits were forced to close their establishment, some taking flight, others finding shelter in private houses. The constitution was proclaimed in March. It provided for a Senate and a House of Deputies—the senators to be appointed for life, the deputies to be elected by the taxpayers of Rome and the provinces. This parliament was not to meddle with ecclesiastical affairs, but in other matters it had the usual powers of legislation.

Meantime, the war of independence in the north of Italy was in the full tide of success. Young Italy believed it had found a leader in Charles Albert of Sardinia. The Austrians were driven from Milan. The republic lived again in Venice. The Pope sent 17,000 men to protect his frontiers, with strict orders not to cross them. At once the conspirators spread the report that he had declared war against Austria. They called the people together in the Colosseum to ratify the new crusade, and there the Barnabite monk, Gavazzi, masquerading in the character of a new Peter the Hermit and brandishing a tricolored cross, made his first bid for notoriety. There were only 7,000 regular troops in the papal expedition; the rest were motley volunteers—the flower of the nobility and the dregs of the wine-shop, the most gallant lads of Rome and the scum of all the political clubs of the Continent. They hurried through the Romagna, gutting taverns and hunting Jesuits by the way, and when they reached Bologna their general (the Piedmontese, Durando) announced that the Austrians were making war upon our Lord, and that the soldiers of the Pope would give them battle with the cry, “God wills it!” It was afterwards discovered that this direct defiance of the Pope’s commands, this open act of hostility against a power with which the states of the church were at peace, was in accordance with secret instructions from the Pope’s radical Minister of War. While the sovereign ordered his troops to remain strictly on the defensive within their own boundaries, the ministers told Durando to cross over into Lombardy and place himself at the disposal of Charles Albert; and Durando prepared to obey them. It was impossible for the Holy Father to remain silent under such an outrage. He repudiated Durando’s order of the day in the official press, and he spoke more fully in an allocution: “We shall not make war upon Austria; we embrace all countries, all nations, with an equal paternal love.” And he took occasion at the same time to denounce the project of destroying all the governments of the peninsula in order to build out of their ruins one Italian republic with the Pope at the head of it. He was no doubt prepared for the explosion of wrath which followed. But the revolution was not to be ignored any longer. For some time ministers had been in the habit of counterfeiting his assent to measures of which he disapproved; if the army was to make war without his consent, his reign was at an end. Rome was in a tempest. The cry of “Treason!” rang through the streets. Ciceruacchio proposed to kill all the priests. The civic guards flew to arms, posted soldiers at the doors of the cardinals, and refused to recognize the Pope’s orders. A new and more radical ministry, led by Count Mamiani, came into office on the 3d of May, and on the same day the Holy Father wrote a touching letter to the Emperor of Austria—a plea for peace and Italian independence: “We exhort your majesty with the most paternal affection to withdraw from a contest which cannot reconquer for the empire the hearts of the Lombards and Venetians. There is no grandeur in a domination which rests only on the sword.”

The new ministry insisted at once upon war, but here it found the determination of the Pope unalterable. There seems to have been an attempt, of which the ministers themselves were possibly innocent, to precipitate hostilities by rousing an uncontrollable popular impulse. One day a courier, breathless and dusty, rode through the Corso announcing a great victory of Charles Albert over the Austrians. The city was illuminated; there was talk of forcing the clergy to chant _Te Deum_ in the churches. But the next day it was discovered that the messenger, who entered Rome as if from Lombardy by the Porta del Popolo, had left the city only an hour before by the Porta Angelica, gathering all the stains of travel in an easy ride along the walls, and had been paid three dollars for the performance. Charles Albert had been signally defeated.

Whatever fitness for self-government might be latent in the Roman people, it was certain that, in the existing condition of the Pontifical States, a government by the people was out of the question. Every attempt to satisfy the popular aspirations, every scheme for the introduction of parliamentary and representative institutions, was baffled by the Mazzinian clubs, whose rule, supported by conspiracy and assassination, was the most cruel and absolute of despotisms, yet destitute of that stability and force which make some despotisms respectable. They threatened the church with spoliation, the clergy with death, the young with atheism. They undermined the authority of all government, not merely of this or that particular form, but of all forms. Italy appeared to be rushing towards anarchy. It was time to cry, Halt! Pius resolved to yield not another inch, but, without withdrawing any reasonable concession, to put what remained of his authority upon a firm basis. He invited Count Pellegrino Rossi to form a cabinet.

Count Rossi was an Italian by birth, a Swiss by adoption, a Frenchman by subsequent choice, an old Carbonaro, an old conspirator, an old political exile. He was an ardent partisan of Italian unity, but he had seen the emptiness of some of his early illusions, and he had abandoned the secret societies. He had come to Rome in the time of Gregory XVI. as ambassador of Louis Philippe, charged with a negotiation for the removal of the Jesuits from France; in his diplomatic capacity he had been one of the most moderate advisers of Pius IX.; and after the fall of Louis Philippe he had remained in Rome as a private citizen. He accepted the task of restoring order; he reorganized the administration, negotiated with Naples, Turin, and Florence for the formation of an Italian confederation under the presidency of the Pope, arrested Gavazzi, who was preaching rebellion, and brought back some of the troops which his predecessors had sent away from Rome. The radical press speedily opened an attack upon him. The clubs began to prepare for his downfall. The 15th of November, two months after his accession to power, was the date fixed for the opening of the Chambers. He received more than one warning that the same day had been appointed for his death. The wife of the Minister of War wrote him that his life was to be attempted as he entered the Chamber. A Frenchman sent him a note to the same effect. A priest stopped him at the Quirinal and repeated the warning. The Pope had also learned of the plans of the conspirators and begged Rossi to beware. “They are cowards,” replied the count; “they will not dare to strike.” “The cause of the Pope,” said the intrepid minister to one of his colleagues, “is the cause of God. I must go where my duty calls me.” On the night before the opening of the parliament a corpse was taken from one of the hospitals and carried secretly to the little Capranica theatre. There a select band of conspirators rehearsed the assassination, and the chosen instrument of the vengeance of the societies, a young sculptor named Costantini, learned by repeated practice where to strike. They were waiting for the count at the entrance to the hall of Deputies. As he placed his foot upon the steps they gathered around him. One struck him on the side. He turned his head, and Costantini plunged a dagger into the carotid artery. The nearest priest was called, and Rossi lived just long enough to receive absolution. He had yielded to the fears of his friends so far as to post extra guards about the court and staircase; _sed quis custodiet custodes?_ The assassin and his accomplices walked away unmolested and passed the night promenading the city with songs of triumph. The streets were hung with flags. The bloody dagger, decked with flowers, was exposed to the veneration of their party on the top of a tricolored standard, and held up before the windows of the weeping family of the victim. When the news of the awful crime committed on the stairs was carried into the Chamber, the deputies manifested no concern. “It is nothing, gentlemen,” said Sterbini; “let us to business.” When it was made known to the Pope he fell upon his knees and remained some time in silent prayer. “Count Rossi has died a martyr,” said he; “God will receive his soul in peace.”

The next day the Quirinal was surrounded by a menacing crowd demanding an immediate declaration of war against Austria, the convocation of a Constituent Assembly to devise a new form of government, and the surrender of all power in the meantime to a ministry headed by Sterbini. The Pope would not listen to them. Then they tried to burn the palace. A single volley from the Swiss Guard, fired over the heads of the mob, drove them back. But they returned in force, with an ultimatum, backed by cannon and the whole civic guard. Sharp-shooters occupied the house-tops or sheltered themselves behind the famous equestrian groups in the centre of the piazza, and poured a shower of balls into the palace windows. One of the papal secretaries was killed. A bullet entered the Pope’s chamber. The Holy Father called the diplomatic corps together and told them that he must yield. “But let Europe know that I am a prisoner here; I have no part in the government; they shall rule in their own name, not mine.”

His chief thought now was flight. But he was closely watched and the guards invaded even his private apartments. On the 22d of November, six days after the attack upon the Quirinal, he received from the Bishop of Valence in France a silver pyx in which Pope Pius VI. used to carry the Blessed Sacrament suspended from his neck during his painful exile. “Heir to the name, the see, the virtues, the courage, and many of the tribulations of this great pontiff,” wrote the bishop, “you will perhaps attach some value to this interesting little relic, which I trust may not serve the same destiny in your Holiness’s hands as in those of its former possessor.” The Pope looked upon this as a providential provision for his journey. The ingenuity of the Duke d’Harcourt, ambassador of France, and the boldness of the Bavarian minister, Count Spaur, aided by the quick wit of his pious French wife, finally arranged the escape. The Pope’s faithful gentleman-in-waiting, Filippani, collected the little articles absolutely needed on the route, and at night carried them under his cloak, one by one, to the residence of Count Spaur. Meanwhile, it was announced in Rome that the count, accompanied by his family, was going to Naples on a diplomatic errand. The countess started first in her travelling carriage with her son and his tutor, giving out that her husband, detained a few hours in Rome by important business, would overtake her at Albano. Towards evening on the same day (November 24, 1848) the Duke d’Harcourt visited the Quirinal in state, and, being admitted to a private official interview with the Holy Father, began to read to him a series of long despatches. He read in a loud tone, so that his voice could be heard by the guards in the ante-room. If they could have seen what passed as well as they heard, they would have been very much astonished. For no sooner had the duke begun than the Pope retired to an inner chamber and transformed himself into a simple priest. He put on a black robe, an ample cloak, and a low, round hat, and, accompanied by Filippani, he reached the grand staircase by a private door, passed the guards unsuspected, and found himself in the street. Filippani had a carriage in readiness, and drove with his august master to the church of SS. Peter and Marcellinus, beyond the Colosseum, where Count Spaur was waiting with another conveyance. The Pope entered it; the count took the reins; they passed out by the gate of St. Giovanni, near the Lateran, the sentries being satisfied with the count’s declaration of his name and quality; and late in the night they reached a certain fountain on the Appian Way, where the countess was to meet them with the coach and four. When she drove up a few minutes later she was terrified at finding the fugitive surrounded by an armed patrol. Count Spaur was answering the questions of the soldiers, and the Pope and a trooper stood side by side against the fence. The countess did not lose her presence of mind. “Come, doctor,” she exclaimed, “jump in; you have kept us waiting”; and bidding good-night to the patrol, the party drove off at full speed. The Pope was the first to speak. “Courage!” said he; “I carry the Blessed Sacrament in the same pyx in which it was borne by Pius VI.” They crossed the Neapolitan frontier at daylight, and as soon as they were safe beyond the Pontifical States they all recited the _Te Deum_. They reached Gaeta in the afternoon. There Cardinal Antonelli joined them in disguise, and Count Spaur, posting on to Naples, with a letter from the Pope to King Ferdinand, resigned the care of the Holy Father to the secretary of the Spanish embassy. Refused admission to the bishop’s palace because the bishop was absent, the Pope and his companions took up their quarters at a poor inn, and there they were placed under surveillance by the military commander, Gen. Gross, who suspected them as spies. The general was questioning the countess and the cardinal next day, when he was astounded by the arrival of the king and queen with three vessels of war and a guard of honor. Count Spaur had reached Naples and delivered his letter to the king in person about midnight, and his majesty, after spending the rest of the night in preparations, embarked in the early morning to do honor to his illustrious guest. And during the year and a half spent by the Pope in the Neapolitan dominions, either at Gaeta or Portici, there was no possible mark of respect which King Ferdinand failed to show him. His purpose had been to embark in a Spanish frigate for the Balearic Islands, the scene of his brief and absurd imprisonment in 1823, but Ferdinand persuaded him to remain in Gaeta, where the royal palace was prepared for his occupation. There the diplomatic body gathered around him, and the cardinals assembled after escaping from Rome by various stratagems and disguises.

And how was it in Rome? The ministry of Sterbini, the parliament, and the authorities left by the Pope disappeared with equal suddenness, and the government passed into the hands, not by any means of the Roman people, but of Mazzini with the secret clubs, and of Garibaldi with two or three thousand soldiers of fortune, brought into the city from other parts of Italy. They pronounced the deposition of the Pope, and declared a republic with an executive triumvirate. Nominally the triumvirs were Mazzini, Armellini, and Saffi; in reality the head of the administration was Mazzini alone. Wherever the pagan democracy triumphed, even for a few days, the result was the same. Religion, the rights of property, and common morality suffered together and personal liberty vanished. Private estates in Rome were confiscated to the uses of the triumvirate under the guise of forced loans. The goods of the church were seized. The shrines and altars were stripped bare. Confessionals were burned in the Piazza del Popolo. The houses of the cardinals were sacked, convents were assaulted. Profane rites were celebrated in St. Peter’s at Easter and Corpus Christi; the papal benediction _urbi et orbi_ was travestied by a suspended priest; the canons of St. Peter’s were fined for refusing to take part in the impious ceremonies; the provost of the cathedral of Sinigaglia was put to death for a similar cause. The clergy were hunted like vermin, cut down in the public roads, dragged from hiding-places. The convent of St. Callisto was turned into a slaughter-house, where one of the Roman priest-catchers used to shut up his victims, and kill them at pleasure without the formality of trial or sentence. He killed fourteen there in one day. Two vine-dressers, accused of being Jesuits in disguise, were torn to pieces on the bridge of St. Angelo. Murder and pillage stalked hand in hand through the city. There soon ceased to be any real government at all in Rome, until on the 2d of July, 1849, the French army restored the papal authority after the horrors of a severe siege, in which foreigners, not Romans, manned the defences. Anywhere else in the world the quelling of such a revolt would have been followed by wholesale condemnations to the galleys and the scaffold. But nothing could conquer the kindness of Pius IX. His restoration, like his accession, was followed by an act of amnesty. It left in exile the guiltiest of the leaders; and care was taken to give the re-established government as much strength as the situation demanded. Some restrictions were certainly necessary; several priests had been assassinated since the surrender of the city; two attempts had been made to burn the Quirinal; and placards menaced with the vengeance of the societies all Romans who should welcome the Pope on his return.

Nevertheless, the Holy Father’s journey home in April was a continuous triumph, and his entrance into Rome was celebrated with frantic demonstrations of delight. He confirmed many of the most valuable of his political reforms, and resumed his old life of charity and devotion. The next ten years of his reign are commonly described as a period of severe reaction. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pius IX. has never been an absolutist, never ceased to favor all true liberty, never believed that nations can be governed in the nineteenth century by the methods which prevailed in the ninth. From his accession down to the present day he has not only been the kindest ruler known to history, but he has invariably granted his people the most liberal institutions and the fullest measure of personal freedom which the incessant activity of the secret conspirators would allow. The enemies of Italian liberty are the dagger and the bayonet. It is mere cant and bigotry to assume that everything calling itself a republic, whatever its true character, is entitled to the sympathy of a free people.

When Charles Albert was defeated by the Austrians, Mazzini declared that the war of the kings had ended and the war of the peoples was about to begin. The war of the peoples had failed in its turn, and now the secret societies went back to a conspiracy of the kings. They found Victor Emanuel a more useful instrument than his father, and with him they made a compact whose terms we can gather plainly enough from the event. As the destruction of Christianity was the avowed purpose of the secret societies from the very beginning, so the first service which Sardinia must render them in payment for the crown of Italy was a systematic attack upon the church in the Sardinian territory. The method of these attacks is always the same. They begin by silencing the clergy, dispersing the religious orders, and giving an anti-religious character to public education. In Sardinia the government went so far as to found a state school of heretical theology, and to impose it upon the episcopate by force. In the university of Turin it was taught that the state is omnipotent over the church, that the temporal power of the Pope is incompatible with the spiritual, that marriage cannot be proved a sacrament; and the government prohibited the appointment of any clergyman to a benefice who had not followed the condemned theological course at this university. For warning their clergy against such heresies the bishops were imprisoned and their revenues were seized. Priests were arrested for preaching “insubordination.” Convents were suppressed without warning, and even without law. Nuns were turned into the streets in the middle of the night. Clerics were pressed into the army. Religious communities engaged in teaching were treated with especial rigor. Church property was confiscated and priests were reduced to beggary. Thus so early as 1849 did the Sardinian government join the pagan conspiracy, and lend itself for a price to the work of emancipating the people from all religious belief.

It was not until 1859 that the plot was ripe, and then, to the dismay of the great Catholic party in France, an accomplice of Victor Emanuel presented himself in the person of Napoleon III. There was no reason to wonder at such an unnatural alliance. Napoleon, whose empire was built upon revolution, and who held despotic power by the double and doubly false titles of massacre and counterfeit suffrage, was always treacherous to the Pope. After the fall of the Mazzinian republic in 1848 he attempted to impose upon the Holy Father a policy in the interest of the revolutionists, and that was the cause of the Pope’s long delay at Portici; Pius IX. would not return to Rome until he could return without conditions. He declared that he “would sooner go to America; he knew the way thither already: or he would take refuge in Austria.”[46] Napoleon was compelled to yield. Then came the demonstration of Count Cavour at the Congress of 1856, made, undoubtedly, with Napoleon’s connivance. Cavour hurled “the Roman question” into the midst of European politics by his proposal for the separation of the Legations from the Pontifical States, and their government by a lay vicar; and although the subject was postponed, the mere discussion of it served a practical purpose. “It is the first spark,” said Count Cavour’s own newspaper, “of an irresistible conflagration.” Count Rayneval, the French representative at Rome, refuted the charges brought by Cavour against the papal administration, but his able report to the Minister of Foreign Affairs was suppressed in Paris, and only saw the light through the pages of a London daily paper. Two years later (January 14, 1858) Orsini made his attempt upon Napoleon’s life, and from his prison he warned the emperor that the Carbonari held him to his ancient engagements. “So long as Italy shall not be independent the tranquillity of Europe _and that of your majesty_ will be but a chimera.” From this time there was no more mystery about Napoleon’s purposes. He had a long private conference with Cavour at Plombières, and on the 1st of January, 1859, he made the famous unfriendly remark to the Austrian ambassador at the Tuileries which proved the signal for the Franco-Italian war. A month later appeared his pamphlet, _Napoleon III. and Italy_, in which he denounced the civil government of the Pope as incompatible with modern civilization, and proposed anew the double-headed confederation of Gioberti, with the King of Sardinia as military chief and the Sovereign Pontiff as honorary president. And Piedmont, in the meantime, played her part astutely. For a long time her agents had been busy among the Italian states. A circular signed by Garibaldi, who was now a general in the Piedmontese service, gave instructions to the conspirators:

Footnote 46:

Villefranche.

“1. Before hostilities have commenced between Piedmont and Austria you are to rise with the cry of 'Italy for ever! Victor Emanuel for ever!’ 2. Wherever the insurrection triumphs, he among you who enjoys most public esteem and confidence is to take the military and civil command, with the title of provisional commissioner, acting for King Victor Emanuel, and to retain it until the arrival of a commissioner sent by the Sardinian government.” But it is unnecessary to quote proofs of the plot; Mazzini himself laid it bare when he attacked the government on account of its prosecution of the authors of the abortive revolt at Genoa, in 1857: “Monarchico-Piedmontese committees exist at Rome, Bologna, Florence, and several cities of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom; and there are secondary centres in several other towns. I could name to you the persons, several of them deputies, who are the agents between the poor dupes and the personages of the government.” In Florence the plot against the Grand Duke of Tuscany, which resulted in his abdication after his troops had been bribed to desert him, was matured in the very house of the Sardinian ambassador. In Parma the Sardinian agents instigated the expulsion of the Duchess Regent, who was yet so popular that her subjects spontaneously recalled her, and Victor Emanuel had to drive her out a second time. In the Papal States the Sardinians stood upon no ceremony, but, when the insurrection took place, they boldly marched in troops to sustain it.

Before the peace of Villafranca all Central Italy was in the hands of the Piedmontese commissioners. By the terms of that treaty these commissioners were to be withdrawn. The amazement of Europe, therefore, was profound when, even before the signatures to the convention were dry, Victor Emanuel was found to be setting up provisional governments in Parma, Modena, Tuscany, and the Romagna, and getting ready to play the favorite French farce of the plebiscitum. As it was managed in one state it was managed in all. The Romagna has a million of inhabitants. The Sardinian agents prepared voting lists, restricted to the large towns where the revolutionary party was strong and bold, and put on these lists only eighteen thousand names. Of these not more than a third voted. The total vote for and against annexation represented, therefore, only three-fifths of one per cent. of the population. And this is called a plebiscitum! Nevertheless, on the 18th of March, 1860, the Legations Parma, Modena, and Tuscany were declared annexed, like Lombardy, to the Sardinian monarchy, and the king, assured of the countenance of the emperor, made preparations for the invasion of Umbria and the Marches.[47] It was a comparatively simple process; in this case Sardinia frankly took the coveted provinces by force of arms. The expedition was concerted at Chambery between Napoleon and the Piedmontese general Cialdini, and in closing the interview the emperor is reported to have said, _Faites, mais faites vite!_—almost the very words which our Lord spoke to Judas: “What thou doest, do quickly.” On the tenth anniversary of this interview Napoleon, a prisoner in the power of the great German Empire which he had done more than any other one man to create, ceased to reign.

Footnote 47:

When the Pope launched a bull of excommunication against the spoliators of his territory, Napoleon forbade its publication in France. He allowed the official and radical journals, however, to publish a forged bull, and to ridicule and denounce at pleasure the extravagant language which it imputed to the Holy Father. The bishops tried to expose the forgery, but the press was closed to them.

We are near the end. A fortnight after Sedan the Piedmontese army, 60,000 strong, appeared before the walls of Rome to seize the last of the temporal possessions of the Holy See. Defence was impossible. The pontiff instructed his little army to resist only until a breach had been made in the walls. Then he went to pray in the venerable Lateran basilica, the mother-church of Christendom. He visited the neighboring chapel of the Scala Santa, and made on his knees the painful ascent of the twenty-eight marble steps from the judgment-hall of Pilate which our Saviour’s blessed feet had pressed. In the little chapel at the top he implored the pity and protection of Almighty God for the afflicted church. Then, followed by the acclamations of a crowd of affectionate subjects, and blessing them as he went, he entered the Vatican, and Rome has never seen him since.

The troops of Victor Emanuel made themselves masters of Rome the next day, September 20, 1870. The king followed them in time and established his court in the Quirinal. And since then, in Rome as in the rest of Italy, the pagan revolution has gone steadily forward to the suppression of Christian education, of monastic and charitable orders, and, as far as possible, of all divine worship. When Garibaldi rode on horseback into the church of Monte Rotondo and ordered his prisoners to cover their heads, which they had bared out of respect to the sacred place, he only gave emphasis to the sentiment which pervades the whole movement. The convents are empty; the churches are desolate; libraries are scattered; great seminaries of theology are broken up; Christian education has been driven from the school-room; there are hundreds of priests who go hungry and in rags; there are nuns in Rome whose whole income is three cents a day; the bishops have been robbed of everything and live on the charity of the Pope; pious processions are prohibited; members of religious orders who survive the suppression of their houses are forbidden to receive novices; the father-general of the Jesuits is an exile from Rome, and his nearest representative lives as a private lay person in hired lodgings. Today a bill is pending in the Italian parliament, and has already passed one branch of it, to punish bishops, priests, religious writers, and journalists for what is styled “disturbing the public conscience” and the “peace of families.” The Italian government has pretended to guarantee the freedom and independence of the Sovereign Pontiff in the exercise of all his spiritual functions, but now it proposes to prevent the publication of his encyclicals and allocutions; to condemn him not only to perpetual imprisonment, but to perpetual silence; to prosecute the bishops if they transmit his instructions to the faithful, and the priests if they preach against any heresy sanctioned by the state. To censure, by speech or writing, any law or institution approved by the civil authority is to be treated as a felony calculated to “disturb consciences.” Our divine Lord passed the whole period of his ministry on earth in disturbing consciences; the history of Christianity, the labors of missionaries and reformers, are nothing else than a record of the disturbance of consciences. But the pagan revolution has no toleration for Christianity. Close the confessionals, tear down the pulpits, burn the Bibles, break the tables of the law; the sleeping conscience of Italy must not be disturbed.

Thus the conspiracy of the kings has moved on towards the subjugation of the church. The secret societies are only using the kingdom of Italy and the despotic empire of Germany for the accomplishment of their anti-religious purpose, and when that is done the kings, in their turn, will be the victims of the deep-laid and long-cherished plot for the abolition of “subordination” and worship. Let nobody imagine that they are inactive or that they are satisfied with national unity. Mazzini never pretended that their work was done when a king was set up in the Pope’s palace. He died conspiring against Victor Emanuel and urging Italy to press on to “the goal of the revolution.” Nor did his projects die with him. The anniversary of his death was celebrated last March by democratic demonstrations all over Italy which the government was helpless to suppress. “A funeral march, a national hymn, and a few short, earnest words from some well-known and esteemed local republicans and _capi-popolo_,” says an English liberal journal, “declaring the commemorative ceremony to be not merely a token of remembrance, but 'a _promise_,’ was all that took place; but the fact that these things did take place on the same day throughout the whole of Italy is one of great significance. In many instances the authorities did their best previously, by warnings and even by threats, to prevent these demonstrations, but we have heard of no case in which they ventured upon any attempt to put them down by force.”[48] The flags which the associations carried were “free from the stain,” to use the popular phrase—that is to say, they did not show the arms of Savoy; and the letters read and addresses delivered spoke openly of a “time for action” which was yet to come. And while the clubs were thus parading and declaiming the following circular was distributed among the rank and file of the Italian army:

Footnote 48:

_The Examiner_ (London), March 31, 1877.

“Free citizens! Brother Carbonari! Every sect, every family, every individual is free to investigate, as best he may, the road which leads to heaven; but it belongs to the Carboneria to indicate and open up the way to the kingdom of liberty, to the triumph of justice, to social amelioration upon earth. The Carboneria, in its principles, in its development, and in the means which it proposes to employ for its purpose—_i.e._, for the amelioration, economic and moral, of mankind, for the diffusion of liberty, and for the perfect equalization of society—is the one association which can boast of the right of nature and the most perfect justice. All other associations, because based on privilege and ambition, either miss their aim or become useless. Persuaded of this, the apostles of our principle have devoted themselves to propagating and defending it with ardor, defying dangers, condemnations, and calumnies of the most deadly kind. Many were the acquisitions which our association made in a short time in every branch of social science, in the arts, and in commerce, and now all our aspirations are turned towards you who compose the army—the material force of nations. Soldiers! remember that you are sons of the people, free citizens, and at the same time the obstacle to the common weal and the hope of all. Do you wish to serve tyranny, privilege—in a word, the oppressors? Remember that you are sons of the people; that force alone dragged you from the bosom of your desolated families; that, slaves of a stern discipline, you are forced to shoot down the oppressed, to protect the oppressors; and do not forget that to-morrow, wounded and crippled, you will return to the ranks of the people whom you charged with the bayonet, and that in your turn you will then be charged and oppressed. Remember that before being slaves you were free, and that before serving the despot you were citizens. The Carboneria expects you among its ranks; come and range yourselves by the side of thousands of other brave ones, officers and graduates, who do not disdain to stake everything to preserve themselves true sons of the people, generous citizens of our common country.”

II.

We have endeavored to follow thus far the progress of that general revolt of the world against the divine authority which has marked the pontificate of Pius IX. and embraces the Holy Father’s heroic life of constancy and suffering. But simultaneously there has gone on a contrary movement—a clearer development and consolidation of the authority of God’s church over the minds of the faithful; and herein we trace his glorious life of triumphant action. For his attitude towards the revolution has not been one of mere passive resistance. He has fought a stout fight for the imperilled truth. It is a time of corruption and unbelief, when the world is lifted up with satanic pride to defy Heaven, and society is sacrificing all the guarantees of order, and even the elect are sorely tempted. History will record that the great mission of Pope Pius IX. was to expose the fallacies and illusions of these evil days, to stamp every error as it arose with the reprobation of the infallible judge, and, after empires, and kingdoms, and republics have been racked by a century of the pagan revolt, to prepare again the foundations of Christian civilization. “God has laid on me,” said he to the great assembly of bishops in 1867, “the duty to declare the truths on which Christian society is based, and to condemn the errors which undermine its foundations. And I have not been silent. In the Encyclical of 1864, and in that which is called the Syllabus, I declared to the world the dangers which threaten society and I condemned the falsehoods which assail its life. To you, venerable brethren, I now appeal to assist me in this conflict with error. On you I rely for support. I am aged and alone, praying on the mountain, and you, the bishops of the church, are come to hold up my arms.” “There is perhaps hardly any pontiff,” says Cardinal Manning, “who has governed the church with more frequent exercises of supreme authority than Pius IX.”; and surely there is something magnificent in the courage with which he has met every attack of the world by a new and bolder assertion of the everlasting truths against which the world is in arms. There is not a characteristic heresy of the time for which we Catholics cannot find in the utterances of this great pontiff a complete antidote; there is not a loss inflicted upon the church by her enemies for which we cannot trace a compensation in some clearer recognition of her spiritual power, some sublime restatement of her sovereign authority. Our Holy Father has healed divisions, abolished national and doctrinal parties within the pale of the church, and displayed to the universe the household of Christ one not only in the bonds of faith, but in unity of sympathies. Four times he has summoned the bishops to meet him at the tomb of the apostle. In 1854 more than two hundred bishops and cardinals assembled for the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception—an act which, besides its importance in a doctrinal sense, had a special significance as illustrating the supreme authority of the see of Peter. In 1862, just after the first spoliation of the temporalities of the Papacy by Victor Emanuel, two hundred and sixty-five bishops assembled in Rome for the canonization of the martyrs of Japan, and their meeting, both for the circumstances under which it was summoned and the strong terms in which the prelates expressed their union with the Holy See and their absolute submission to its teachings, made a profound impression throughout Christendom. Five years later the revolution had made immense progress; yet in the midst of political disturbance the world not only saw five hundred bishops gather at Rome to celebrate the centenary of St. Peter’s martyrdom, and again to testify their devotion to Peter’s successor, but it heard the announcement of a general council, the first in three hundred years, called at a time when to the unaided human eye the papal throne seemed tottering to its fall. Here was an inspiring example of faith and Christian courage!

Cardinal Manning’s admirable sketch of the history of the Vatican Council,[49] now in course of publication, shows the reasons for calling that grand assembly, and the reasons especially for the definition of infallibility, its supreme and most glorious achievement; and it brings out in clear light the fact that it was with Pius himself that the idea of the council originated. If it could ever be said that a general council was the work of one man, the Council of the Vatican might be called the crowning work of the long life of Pius IX.—one which alone would place him among the most illustrious of all the Roman pontiffs, and make his reign a remarkable era in the history of the Catholic Church. The circumstances of the time which give such immense importance to the convocation of this council are summarized in the opinions of the cardinals to whom the Pope submitted the question as early as 1864, and we find an excellent synopsis of them in the papers by Cardinal Manning already cited. “The special character of the age,” say their eminences, “is the tendency of a dominant party of men to destroy all the ancient Christian institutions, the life of which consists in a supernatural principle, and to erect upon their ruins and with their remains a new order founded on natural reason alone.... From these principles follows the exclusion of the church and of revelation from the sphere of civil society and of science; and, further, from this withdrawal of civil society and of science from the authority of revelation spring the naturalism, rationalism, pantheism, socialism, communism of these times. From these speculative errors flows in practice the modern revolutionary liberalism which consists in the supremacy of the state over the spiritual jurisdiction of the church, over education, marriage, consecrated property, and the temporal power of the head of the church.” These and a multitude of other prevalent errors Pius IX. had condemned in the Syllabus and Encyclical which Cardinal Manning elsewhere refers to as “among the greatest acts of this pontificate,” summing up the declarations of many years, and giving them “a new promulgation and a sensible accession of power over the minds not only of the faithful, but even of opponents, by the concentrated force and weight of their application.”[50] But it was expedient that the declaration should be published again with the united voice of the whole episcopate joined to its head. Thus the council was almost unanimously approved as a sovereign remedy for the disorders of the time, an encouragement for the faithful, a cure for dissensions, an antidote for evil tendencies within the church, an impulse to the new and nobler life which even amid the political and social confusion had already begun to spring up among the Catholic peoples. And so, even while the pagan revolution was preparing its last assault upon the pontifical throne, an astonished world witnessed this most majestic demonstration of the authority, the unity, and the power of the church, and the whole body of the faithful were filled with courage and fresh enthusiasm. Driven from his capital, robbed, and insulted, the captive of the Vatican, whose voice rings out clear and firm above the din of the century, whose strong arm sustains, whose saintly example inspires, is yet victor over the world in the council and the Syllabus.

Footnote 49:

_The Nineteenth Century_ (London), March and April, 1877.

Footnote 50:

_Petri Privilegium._ London. 1871.

It would be pleasant, if space allowed, to follow the course of his beautiful private life. It is a model of devotion and simplicity. In his great palace he occupies only a plain bed-chamber with a bare stone floor, and a working-cabinet with little furniture except a table and two chairs. He rises, summer and winter, at half-past five. He says Mass, and hears a second Mass of thanksgiving; or if sickness prevents him from celebrating the Holy Sacrifice, he does not fail to receive communion. His hours of work are long and regular. His fare is plain, even to meagreness. Every day he takes exercise in the Vatican gardens, and one of his favorite resorts is a beautiful alley of orange-trees, where the pigeons come to feed from his hand. One day he was discovered with three cardinals, playing “hide and seek” in the gardens with a little boy. Yet with all his gentleness he has a keen and caustic wit. The author of a pious biography sent his book to the Pope for approval. The pontiff read till he came to these words: “Our saint triumphed over all temptations, but there was one snare which he could not escape: he married”; and then he threw the book from him. “What!” said he, “shall it be written that the church has six sacraments and one snare?” Of a Catholic diplomatist whose conduct and professions were at variance he said: “I do not like these accommodating consciences. If that man’s master should order him to put me in jail, he would come on his knees to tell me I must go, and his wife would work me a pair of slippers.” During the French occupation of Rome a certain French colonel was guilty of so gross an offence to the Pope’s authority that the Holy Father demanded his recall. Before his departure he had the effrontery to present himself at the Vatican and ask for a number of small favors, ending with a request for the Pope’s autograph. The Pontiff wrote on a card the words which our Lord addressed to Judas in the garden, “_Amice, ad quid venisti?_” (“Friend, wherefore hast thou come hither?”), and the colonel, who did not understand Latin, showed it to all his friends as a testimonial of the Pope’s regard, until somebody unkindly supplied him with the translation. It is the etiquette of the Vatican that carriages with only one horse must not enter the inner court. This rule was enforced one day in 1867 against the Prussian ambassador, Count von Arnim, and Bismarck, for purposes of his own, endeavored to make a diplomatic scandal of the transaction, instructing the ambassador to close the legation and quit Rome instantly unless he was allowed to drive with one horse to the very foot of the papal staircase. But Bismarck was no match for Pius IX. The Pope caused Cardinal Antonelli to write that “His Holiness, taking compassion on the difficulties of the diplomatic body, would in future allow the representatives of the great powers to approach his presence with one quadruped _of any sort_”—avec _un quadrupède quelconque_. It is believed that the Prussian minister never availed himself of this permission in its full extent.

The newspapers bring us bad news from time to time of the Pope’s health. Let us not be alarmed. He comes of a long-lived family. His grandfather died at ninety-three, his father at eighty-three, his mother at eighty-eight, his eldest brother at ninety. “I am in the hands of God,” he said to an English gentleman; “I shall bless my hour when it comes. But, my son, when I take up certain newspapers nowadays, and do not find in them an account of my last illness and my end, it always seems to me as if the editors had forgotten something.”

A VISION OF THE COLOSSEUM, A.D. 1873

O God, the heathens are come into thy inheritance, they have defiled thy holy temple: they have made Jerusalem as a place to keep fruit.—_Ps._ lxxviii.

I had been idly reading, through the quiet afternoon, A poet’s passionate verses, falling softly into tune Of even, measured rhythm, and of fine, melodious words, Rippling along with easy grace like careless song of birds; Now warblings, half unconscious, like the happy songster’s trill Poured from some wind-swayed bough when all the woods are still; Now shriller notes that rose above harsh, grating sounds of war, Loud clarion-notes, above the drums, proclaiming peace afar— Loud pæan sounds triumphant that Italy was free, United, and one mighty realm from smiling sea to sea; From Sicily’s smoke-crowned peak to Savoy’s Alpine chain One flag met every rambling breeze that breathed o’er hill and plain; And haughty Rome, in truth, the Cæsar’s city now once more, The perilous reign of Peter passed for ever safely o’er. “_Io!_ _triumphe!_ onward! All ye guarding eagles, come! And with its ancient glory fill your old imperial home.”

I, sighing, closed the volume. Ah! for me how sadly dim The poet’s glowing setting of pale Freedom’s Roman hymn, Whose music, as I heard it, only direst discord made. The martial beat of rattling drum, the trumpet’s mellowing shade, Hid all the sweeter utterance of a happy people’s voice Or sound of pealing church-bells bidding kindly skies rejoice. I heard above the loudest note the dull, persistent sound Of forging iron fetters—even riveted while crowned, Sweet Freedom saw, indignant, built her frail and crumbling throne Of consecrated marble newly stolen, stone by stone.

“_Io!_ _triumphe!_ onward! But the shouting could not drown The psalm of homeless friars, weary exiles, marching down, Chapel and cell denied them; for of these the state has need. And from the cross’s folly must St. Francis’ sons be freed! I heard in plaintive chorus nuns sad _Miserere_ sing, As ceased for them for ever their old convent’s sheltering— Let them seek aid from Him on high whose faithful sheep they are; The horses of the hero-king seek not their help so far!

I heard, above th’ exultant fife, the loud-voiced auctioneer Strike down the church’s garment 'mid the idle jest and jeer Of souls that trembled not to see the sacred chalice borne By hands that would have helped of old to press the twisted thorn, Who would for thirty pieces once their loving Lord have sold— Why not his spouse’s raiment for twice that, glittering gold? I heard the heavy rustle of quaint, figured tapestry By pious fingers cunning wrought in days of chivalry. Loud chimed the strangers’ clanking coin that paid the moneyed worth, But faint the modern anthem’s notes proclaiming Freedom’s birth!

Of wandering peoples, too, I heard the tired and restless tread, Their little harvest grown too scant for even daily bread, Fair Freedom’s added burden grown too heavy to be borne; While Italy, sad-hearted, watched her children sail forlorn To seek across the western sea the life she could not give; For her cannon must be cast, and a nation she must live. A nation crowned! Ah! royal state is very heavy dole; All too quick the world’s pulse beats to heed plaint of weary soul. Still with triumphant pæans did the poet’s verses ring: “Shout, Italy, our Italy! all-joyous anthems sing! Clang out, sad-voiced Roman bells! hail Piedmont’s Victor,—king!”

“_Miserere, miserere_,” Sounded church and convent steeple; “In thy mercy spare us, Saviour, Leading back thy erring people.”

And as the clanging belfries trembled strangely with the sound, The _Miserere_ drifting to the peoples gathered round, Methought the quiet afternoon had faded from my sight, And I, beneath a Roman sky, alone with deepening night, Stood in the Colosseum’s shade, with many a wondering thought, No touch of moonlight falling on the walls the Romans wrought; The calm stars, gazing earthward, seemed to give nor light nor shade; No torches’ fitful splendor through the lonely arches played; And, even as the shade was deep, so deep the silence fell, So calm the night it scarce could wake the wind-harp’s sighing swell; No beaded _aves_ drifted from cowled pilgrims of the cross, No murmur of atoning prayers pleading the nations’ loss; No tourists’ idle laughter broke the silence of the scene, While the shrouding arches sheltered my thoughts of what had been.

Years, centuries had vanished as my wingèd thoughts flew fast To days when Rome imperial o’er the world her robe had cast; O’er the wild, barbarian legions I saw her eagles shine, While her nobles quaffed Greek learning in draughts of Grecian wine— Expounding, too, with easy art, the Christians’ foolish faith: How traitorous to Cæsar’s state was every Christian breath. And then I saw the glitter of their perfumed robes no more, As gleaming wings of seraphs stroked my eyelids softly o’er.

Then I heard the sweet intoning of the Christians’ matin psalm, And I saw them lowly kneeling before the mystic Lamb: Maid patrician bent in prayer with the dark slave of the East, Egypt’s sage, Juda’s captive, meeting at the angels’ feast. Before that holy altar all one sacred likeness wear— His who, on the cross outstretched, all our sin and weakness bare: Subtle Greek before the cross laying down his pride of art; Falling meekly peace divine on some savage Scythian heart; Hapless Jew, haughty Northman, Roman proud, and cowering slave, Bound together by the blood of Him who died all men to save; One by the bond of suffering, one in the voice of prayer That rose with solemn sweetness through the catacombs’ dull air:

“_Miserere, miserere_,” Rose the sad and earnest pleading; “In thy mercy spare us, Saviour, Unto thee the nations leading.”

Lo! as entranced I listened, there mingled with the song A sound as if of many steps passing the streets along, And the ancient Roman arches 'neath which I dreaming stood Grew peopled with the city’s fierce and restless multitude. What noble game should fitly while the idle hours away, What gracious pastime fill with joy the Roman holiday? Should some strong-limbed barbarian lay his life down in its strength, That the day for Roman matrons should have less of weary length? Nay, daintier sight the maiden tells, binding her mistress’ zone: To-day, by Cæsar’s lions, Christian maid shall be o’erthrown!

Within the dread arena pale and firm the martyr stood— A strange and dazzling sight she seemed amid the soldiers rude; So slight the little, childish form, so young the radiant face, Whence streams of holy glory flooded all the pagan place; The happy lips half-parted with a love that fain would speak, And the eyes to heaven uplifted beneath the forehead meek— The eyes whence earth had vanished, heaven’s shadow resting there, The glimmer of its shining falling softly on her hair. Ah! happy maid, that, listening, heard above the tumult wild The loved voice of the Father calling home his little child; The voice of the Belovèd bidding sweet his loved one come: “Arise, my Dove, my Beautiful”—it sounded o’er the hum Of wondering crowds who could not guess whence came the martyr’s strength, Her heart with joy nigh breaking that it should rest at length On His whose love had bought it with a price exceeding far The spoils of all the nations gracing Cæsar’s triumph-car. One little grain of incense still might save the martyr’s life, But one little breath for Cæsar still win release from strife— Unto Cæsar what is Cæsar’s, to God the life he gave; Less duty could she offer Him who died that life to save? And then the vision faded, and once more I stood alone Where thought of sainted martyrs seemed to consecrate each stone, And stars as calmly watching o’er as once in days bygone When Cæsar’s dearest pastime won his slaves a deathless crown.

“_Miserere, miserere_,” Seemed the night-wind lowly sighing; “Call thy erring sheep, O Saviour, Dearest Lord of love undying!”

Soft then I saw advancing through the darkness’ mighty shade A tall and stately figure in wide, trailing robes arrayed, The fair, white arms in longing stretched, as if in woe to seek The comfort of the broken heart, the strength of all the weak— Christ’s blessèd cross with arms outspread, as if to mutely plead For mercy for the sinner, from tender hearts love’s meed; Of mightiest love the symbol true, the link ’twixt heaven and earth, The sign by which earth’s frailest one is cleansed for heavenly birth. In vain! No craving hand can touch that sacred symbol now, Its holy vision bring no rest to world-tossed, aching brow; The modern Cæsar has no need to mark where martyrs fell: “Unto Cæsar what is Cæsar’s”—that word they kept too well. And murmuring monks but echo, their chaplets telling o’er, The words these stones repeated in the Roman days of yore; To earthly science dearer far the walls the pagans built Than the precious blood of martyrs for love of Jesus spilt. Perchance beneath these stones might lie rare treasures of old Rome— The cross in Christian kingdom must not wander from its home!

“_Miserere, miserere_,” Seemed the very stones outcrying; “In thy mercy spare the nations. Heed, O God! the prisoners’ sighing.”

A sound of low lamenting then filled all the silent place, Whose darkness won unearthly light from out the stranger’s face— A face so fair not Paphos’ queen could claim a grace so rare; Ah! only she, the much-desired, such peerless mien could wear. And low I heard her murmuring: “Ah! me, woe, woe is me! So weary are my ears with sound of shouts that speak me free. Free! Am I free? Upon my head rests weight of royal crown, And Piedmont’s soldiers guard me, fearing lest I lay it down. Italy! Am I Italy? That name indeed I bear; And among the nations standing a nation’s crown I wear— Proud empires that salute me fair, green lands beyond the sea, Crying aloud: 'Shout, Italy! Thank Victor thou art free; Thy peoples shall no longer 'neath the tyrant’s scourge bend low, And, too, thy seemly garment no unseemly rent shall show; Among thy peers come thou once more to take thy place and name, Fair Southern queen, King Victor has ta’en away thy shame.’

“O gold-haired northern peoples! know ye not the sound of chains? Ne’er heard ye clink of German spur along my Lombard plains? O rosy-cheeked barbarians! do ye deem that I am free Because my rulers speed you when ye prate of liberty!’ When ye the wide arms shorten of the world-redeeming cross Since too far its shadow falls, and ye deem that shade your loss! Far, far across the western seas I hear their poets sing, While Freedom’s joy-bells pealing, loud, exulting anthems ring: 'Rise up, dear Italy unchained; thank Victor thou art free, And bend, oppressed, at Peter’s throne no more thy trembling knee. Thy sons shall waste in convent cell no more their manhood’s strength; See! open wide, their prison-doors: free men they are at length! Dark tyranny and priestcraft prostrate fall before thy king; Thy children freemen rise once more beneath his sheltering.’

“O strong-armed western people! in your home beyond the sea, Bearing even as your birthright the grace of liberty, List not the songs such poets sing: they know not me or mine; Studded with cruel thorns for me each laurel wreath they twine. A mournful queen I am, alas! crowned in another’s place— The mighty One from whom my face hath won its look of grace. I sit as a usurper where I fain would kneel and pray, Crowned with Rome’s earthly circlet from her forehead stol’n away! The world’s imperial mistress once, now queen of love and peace, Holds she her life and liberty but as earth’s monarchs please? Fain would they on her gracious brow my coronet have set, Its lustre dimmed with Savoy’s loss, with Naples’ tears all wet! The handmaid of her Maker, fair with lustre not of earth. Should she to Piedmont’s Victor bend her brow of heavenly birth? The mother of all peoples where the cross’s light is shed, Was my dull, narrow diadem fit crown to grace her head? In her old palace I sit throned, crowned with her earthly crown, With jealous care watched ever, lest I cast the honor down. I see my children wander wide in exile from their own, And, when they ask for living bread, my masters give them stone. I sit beside St. Peter’s chair; like his, my hands are bound; My eyes weep bitter sorrow at your pæans’ wild, glad sound; Beneath the heavy cuirass that is girded on my breast I bear the wreath mysterious St. Peter’s hand hath blessed. Upon the cannon rests my hand craving to lift the cross, And 'neath Sardinian colors I bewail the blind world’s loss.

“_Miserere, miserere_,” Seemed the weary voice outcrying, “Spare thy heritage, O Saviour! Hearken thou the prisoners’ sighing.

“O credulous Western people! cease shouting I am free. My masters have no knowledge of the truth of liberty, Who murmur with ignoble lips my old and honored name, And seek to rebaptize me with unholy rites of shame. Are ye drunk with Freedom’s dregs that ye have forgot her face, And bend before th’ unworthy thing men show you in her place? Stretch not your hands, God-fearing race, to welcome such as these: God, who your shepherd is, and judge, gives not to such his peace.

“_Miserere, miserere_, Mighty Lord of all the living, In thy mercy spare the erring, Sacred Heart of love forgiving!”

“The great arched walls sent echoing back the sad, indignant plaint, The light from that fair, mournful face grew evermore more faint, Till, fading in the darkness, light and shadow both were gone, And I sat where crimson sunset with southern splendor shone, Lighting the western city with a flood of harmless fire, With a glory, quickly fading, enwreathing mast and spire; Whence no mellow bells pealed earthward, sounding the angel’s call, Nor _Miserere_ drifted from roof and tower tall; The busy craft went sailing up and down the crowded stream— Upon my lap the poet’s book, the conjurer of my dream. Vision and sound had vanished, only still dim echoes fell Of pleading voices rising on the night-wind’s scarce-felt swell:

“_Miserere, miserere_, Hear, O God! the prisoners’ sighing; Spare thy heritage, O Saviour! Dearest Lord of love undying.”

THE DOOM OF THE BELL.

Two men were sitting in a garret at the very top of one of the craziest old houses in Bruges—_not_ a house dating from the fifteenth century, such as those we admire to this day, but a house that was already two hundred years old when those were built. It stood on the brink of the canal beyond which are now the public gardens that have displaced the ramparts of the once turbulent and independent city. _Then_ the houses crowded into the wide fosse of not too fragrant water, and leaned their balconied gables over it. This was not in the busy or the splendid quarter; it was far from the cathedral and the Guildhall. And in those prosperous times of the Hanseatic League, of the Venetian and Genoese merchant-princes visiting and marrying among their full peers of the city of Bruges—the times of the grand palaces built by those royal and learned traders—these two men I speak of were poor, obscure, and with little prospect of ever being anything else. Yet one of them had it in him to do as great things as the Van Eycks, and to take the art-loving city by storm, if he could only get “a chance.” It was the same in the year 1425 as it is now, and men in picturesque short-hose and flat caps were marvellously like those we see in ugly chimney-pots and tight trousers. The rivalry of other artists—none _very_ eminent—and the ungetable patronage of rich men stood in this young painter’s way, and he got disheartened and disgusted. This garret was his studio, his bedroom, and his kitchen. It was cheap, and the light could be managed easily and properly to suit his painting; but it was not one of those elaborately artistic studios, a picture in itself, which we associate with the idea of the “old masters.” The things that were there had evidently drifted there and got heaped up by accident—homely things most of them, and disposed with the carelessness natural to a man who had little belief or hope in his future. There was an air about the whole place as well as its owner that seemed to say as plainly as any words, “What is the use?” But the other man was a contrast to him. He was much older; a wiry form, and eager, small eyes, and an air of resistance to outward circumstances, “as if he could not help it,” but not in the sense of what is popularly called an “iron will,” were his chief distinguishing marks. He was neither artist nor merchant, and he lived “by his wits.” In those days, just the same as now, that meant something bordering on dishonesty; and such men were known as useful, but scarcely reputable. This individual was seated on a low trunk or chest of polished wood, but not carved, nor even adorned with curious hinges or iron-work; the other stood opposite, leaning on the high sill of a window in the gable, looking down into the canal.

“Peter,” said the latter after a pause, “have you heard of any one dying lately in the great houses, or, for that matter, in the rookeries?”

“No, not _dying_—at least, not lately,” said the other slowly.

“Not _dying?_” said the first, laying the same emphasis on the word as his friend had done, and not showing any lack of understanding or sign of surprise.

“Well, I mean she recovered; but she was pretty near death, and of course will be again as soon as it is safe. It put some of his lordship’s plans out a little when he heard how badly Simon had done his work. But you know it was not at his house, but in a kind of prison, and she was put there on a charge of stealing her mistress’ Genoese pearl-embroidered robe, and _it was said_ the lady begged as a favor she might not be publicly executed for the attempt, but allowed some time to repent and prepare; and when she was ready, she was to be told that one day, within the week, she would be poisoned by something in her food, which she could not taste and which would give her no pain, but put her to sleep—_for ever_. But no one believed that this was her mistress’ request, nor that she ever stole anything, of course. Every one knows that poor Dame Margaret is a cipher in her husband’s house—a worse victim of my Lord Conrad’s than any one there, many as they are; and he is just now out of reach of punishment, being, by the Count of Flanders’ influence, a member of the government, a councillor, and I know not what besides. But it seems Simon did not do his work aright, and the poor girl is still there, and no doubt, in a week or two, the experiment will be quietly tried again and with success. Jan, are you listening?”

“Yes,” said the artist as he turned round with absent look and a gesture, as if he had unconsciously been picking off some buttons from his sleeve and dropping them in the canal below.

“Well, what do you think of it?”

“Peter,” said the other abruptly, “is Simon your friend?”

“Well, we have had dealings together sometimes. He sells me clothes now and then; you know he has a good deal of such stuff on his hands.”

“If I could pay him,” said the artist bitterly, “I should not need any go-between; but I have nothing. I want something he could give me, and, if I had it, I should not need any patron, and would take none, short of the Count of Flanders himself.”

“Riddles again,” said Peter quietly; “poverty makes you mysterious.”

“I’ll tell you plainly what the riddle is, if you’ll help me.”

“For friendship’s sake?”

“Oh! no, indeed. Is there one in all Bruges would do it, or I expect it of him?”

“Well, well, do not croak; but _you_ know by experience that it is hard to live.”

“If you will get me what I want of Simon, you shall have one-fourth of my future reward and Simon one-fourth.”

“Too mean terms, those, Jan,” said Peter quietly, but intently watching his friend’s face.

“Very well, each a third, then; I knew you would want no less. But, look you,” he added, brightening up, “no one can share the fame, and I shall be known all over Flanders and Brabant, and France—ay, even Italy and Germany; and who knows if the Greek merchants will not carry my name to the court of Constantinople itself?—and you two poor wretches will have nothing but a pitiful handful of gold.”

“Quite enough for me, at any rate,” said Peter composedly; “it will be more than I ever had before. But do not let us 'count our chickens before they are hatched.’ What is it, though, that you want to work this miracle with?”

“Only a vial of her blood after the girl has been dead four hours.”

Peter betrayed no emotion.

“Rather an unusual request,” he said meditatively, “and one that savors strongly of witchcraft, which you know is scarcely less dangerous than heresy. You remember what happened at Constance scarcely more than ten years ago?”

“Nonsense! What has heresy to do with the mixing of my colors? And who but a leech will find out the mixture? And after all, if a fool were to use this potion just mixed as I shall mix it, and paint a picture with it, his picture would be only fit for a tavern-sign, and no one could tell the difference. If you need the ingredients, you need the skill more.”

“Why, Jan, you are getting enthusiastic—a miracle, that, in itself. I thought you had made up your mind that you would never do anything that would get known.”

“Well, I have a feeling, since you mentioned this case, that I _shall_ be known before I die, and known by _this_ means too. Can you get me what I want?”

“I dare say I can. But shall I tell the old sinner Simon that I want it for you, or say it is for a leech?”

“Why lie about it?” said the young man fiercely.

“Prudence, you know,” said the other, perfectly unabashed.

“No; tell him the bare truth, but swear him to secrecy. If he tells it, he shall forfeit his share.”

“He could get twice as much for denouncing you.”

“Let him! Where is his interest to denounce me? He is not a fiend, and _he_ knows it is hard to live.”

“He _did_, but may be he has forgotten it in his present position. All the grandees know him now.”

“But you forget, Peter, that his own business is more dangerous than my undertaking could be, even taking it for granted I should be suspected of witchcraft, and he would scarcely like to draw attention on his own delicate doings.”

“So far true,” said Peter. “I respect your shrewdness; you _can_ talk sense sometimes. I will get that vial for you some time this week or next.”

“Do not forget the _exact_ time after death—four hours. The perfection of the mixture would be gone if you did not attend to that. I shall come with you to the door, and wait for you and the vial, any night and any hour you mention.”

“Very well,” said Peter, as he got up and stretched himself. “I suppose your larder is empty?”

“Oh! I forgot. You can have what there is—cheese three days old, and some fresh brown bread, and two eggs, new-laid yesterday morning, which my friend the washerwoman gave me for sitting up at night with her sick boy. She _would_ make me take them, and I am glad now _I_ need not eat them myself. I should feel mean, if I did; and yet, if they stayed there till to-morrow, hunger would drive me to it. You are welcome to them.”

Meanwhile, Peter had silently helped himself to all the articles mentioned except one “hunch” of bread, and left the garret with a cool “Thank you.” Jan turned back to the window, and stayed nearly an hour looking down into the drowsy canal with its fringe of dark, huddled houses, each, as he thought, a frame for a picture full of the same agony of hopeless aspirations and submission to grim and sordid circumstances as his own. But he saw through glasses of his own staining; for many of those wretched, crazy, but beautiful houses held pictures of a bright home life and love that looked no higher or farther for happiness, and was, in truth, the outcome of a mind more philosophical than the future glory of Flemish art, staring into the flood from his garret window, could boast of possessing.

Three months went by, and no one saw the young artist, save the man who sold him his meagre provisions, Peter, and his friend of the eggs. Five days after the conversation we have recorded Peter and he were walking home at two o’clock in the morning through the streets, where no one but the watchman had leave and license to be, calling out the hour when the chimes struck it. It was bright moonlight, and the two men would gladly have dispensed with the beauty of the night, much as it enhanced the charm of the great mansions they passed, the carved doorways, the delicate balconies, the ponderous, magnificent iron bell-pulls, the lions’ and griffins’ heads on the many bridges over the narrow canals. Even Jan passed hurriedly by, standing nervously back in a doorway if he heard the clear cry of a watchman, starting as a loose stone rattled under his feet in the pavement, and even when his companion ill-naturedly put his hand in a fountain and noisily disturbed the water with a “swish” that made the other turn pale and look around in horror of being pursued.

As the weeks went by and the young man worked on alone, feverishly and battling with his own superstitions as well as the fear of being denounced by his two associates, an odd change came over him. Peter noticed it about one month after the day they had procured the vial of blood. Jan was taken with a pious fit that day, and insisted on spending some miserable pence he had on candles offered for the soul of the poisoned girl, and which he, with genuine devoutness, put on the iron spikes provided for the purpose in the church of Notre Dame. That day, having spent all in this way, he fasted altogether and nearly fainted at his easel; but when he left off work Peter saw that a startled, expectant look was in his eyes, which he directed furtively every now and then to one particular corner of his room. When questioned he hurriedly turned the conversation; but the scared look grew more and more intense as time went on. At last, one night, the young man asked Peter seriously and with great trepidation to stay and sleep with him.

“I believe I am getting nervous,” he said, with a laugh that was anything but genuine. Peter made no objection, but in the middle of the night he was awakened by Jan. The poor fellow was in a violent cold perspiration, and, pointing excitedly to the same corner, cried:

“There she is; and she never says a word, but only looks at me reproachfully! She has been there every night since the first Month’s Mind!”

“Pshaw!” said Peter, “I see nothing there, Jan; you should be bled—that is all. You have been overworking yourself.”

But nothing would persuade the artist that the ghost of the poisoned girl was not there, silent and reproachful; and there, day after day and night after night, he saw her, and, though he longed to speak to her, he never dared.

Three months were over and his picture was done; but he was only the skeleton of his former self, and he looked, as Peter said, like what the Florentine woman had said of Dante—“the man who had gone down to hell and come back again.” His bitterness was gone, so was his hopelessness, but there was no healthy joy or youthful enthusiasm in their place; he seemed to have grown old all at once, except for the feverish, eager haste to show his picture and win the name that should darken that of the national pets and the popular favorites. Where to show it? was a question Peter put more than once, but Jan waived it as not worth any anxiety. He should write a notice, and post it on the church doors and those of the Guildhall and the Exchange, to the effect that a new and unknown painter had a picture for sale and exhibition at such and such a place; and if the public did not care to come there to see it, they might see it once on next market-day in the Grande Place, where the artist would show it himself, free to all.

The subject was “Judith and Holofernes”—a common subject enough in those days, but the artist thought that no one had ever treated it in the same way before. When we see it in the market-place and hear the comments of the people, we shall understand in what lay the difference.

The day appointed by the artist came. All the rich and learned men had noticed the placard on the church doors, and the connoisseurs and critics were on the alert. This unpatroned and self-confident painter stung their curiosity, and the merchants, native and foreign, were also eager to see and, if they liked it, “buy up” the new sensation. The people, too, had heard of the exhibition, and many crowded earlier than usual to the market-place to get a glimpse of the mysterious picture being set up by the artist.

No one did see it, however. A good many stalls, booths, and awnings were up long before daylight, and no one noticed the stand of the new-comer, put up in a corner, and screened all round with the commonest tent-cloth. As soon as dawn made it possible to see things a little, the stand was found to be open, and a picture, unframed, was seen set up on trestles, and some coarse crimson drapery skilfully arranged round it, so as to take the place of the frame which the artist was too poor to buy. A few loungers came up, and, fancying this was the screen to some mystery-play to be acted later in the day, sauntered away again, like uncritical creatures as they were. Presently a priest and a merchant came up, evidently searching for some particular booth, and soon stopped before the picture.

“Here it is,” shortly said one of them.

“So _that_ is the picture?” said the other; and for a while they both stood in silence, examining it in detail.

“Wonderful!” said the merchant presently. “It beats the hospital 'St. John.’”

“There _is_ a strange power about the drawing,” said the other.

“But the coloring!” retorted the merchant. “See the depth, the life-likeness, the intensity; and yet there is nothing violent or merely sense-appealing. It is horror, but rather mental than physical horror.”

“True,” said the priest. “I wonder if he had a model.”

“Most likely, but there is more than he ever saw in any common model; the merit rests with himself alone, I should judge.”

“Well, do you think of buying it?”

“I am inclined to do so, but want to examine it more closely first. Besides, I see no one here to represent the painter, or even guard the picture.”

“Oh! I have no doubt there is some one hovering about—perhaps that countryman who looks so vacant. You know the professional tricks of our worthy artists!”

And with this he called the person in question, who surely looked vacant enough to be in disguise.

“Can you tell me what you think of this picture, friend?” he asked.

“Very fine, messire.”

“You do not think it like one of Hendrick Corlaens, do you?”

“I never saw that, messire,” bashfully said the countryman.

“But you think _this_ is fine?”

“Very, very.”

“Why do you like it?”

“It seems like life.”

“Like death too?”

“Yes, messire.”

“How far did you come this morning?” asked the merchant, fancying his companion’s shrewdness had overshot the mark this time.

“Forty-three miles. I started before midnight from Stundsen.”

“I think,” said the merchant to his brother-critic, “we shall make nothing of this man. He must be one of my brother-in-law’s men at Stundsen. He is quite genuine in his stupidity.”

And the pair moved nearer the picture, while others came up and stopped, till there was soon a little knot of admirers talking in whispers. The crowd grew as the day went on. In the side street leading into the Place the doors of Notre Dame opened to let out the flood of worshippers that had flowed in since dawn from the country, and who now rushed from their devotions to their business. Noise was uppermost, trade was brisk; the sun got hot and men got thirsty. It was soon a riotous as well as a picturesque scene, and a spectator on that balcony of the curiously-carved corner window on the same side of the Place as the Guildhall could scarcely have told which stalls the hurrying masses most besieged, so tangled was the web of human beings jostling and jolting each other along the uneven pavement. A good many had stared and gazed at the picture. It was the subject of many comments and disputes that day; men quarrelled over its merits as they drank their sour wine, and women talked of it in whispers over their bargains. Some children had screamed and kicked at first sight of it; altogether it had not failed to be known, seen, and talked about. Our two friends of early morning had hung about it all day and overheard most of the remarks of the crowd. Some people had been disappointed in finding that it was not the sign of a play representing the slaying of Holofernes, but only a picture; a Venetian and a Greek, daintily dressed and speaking some soft, foreign tongue—a wonder to the sturdy Flemish peasants from the dykes and canals by the sea—lounged near the unpainted railing that protected the picture from the crowd. No one could see behind the picture, but many thought the artist was hidden within the closely _sewn_ curtains, that never flapped in the breeze like the rest of the market awnings. These two and the first critics listened in eager silence to the judgment of the crowd, put forth in short sentences at long intervals. On coming up one woman said to her companion:

“Why, I thought they always painted Judith with black hair; this one has hair the color of mine.”

“Perhaps it was his betrothed he painted,” said the other, “and in compliment to her he made it a portrait.”

“Then I should not like to be he. A ghostly bride he would have.”

“But look at her eyes; they seem like a corpse’s just come back to life.”

“Pshaw! how could a _corpse_ come back to life? You mean a ghost.”

“No—Lazarus, you know. I can fancy how frightened and reproachful he might have looked when he woke up and found himself in his shroud.”

“_I_ think he would look glad and thankful. But come away. It seems as if I should dream of that face.”

“Yes; it makes me feel very strange the more I look at it.”

And the two women moved off.

Presently another voice was heard in a muffled tone.

“See the blood in Holofernes’ throat. It looks as if it were moving.”

“Judith looks too weak and small to kill him,” said another.

“So she does,” said a third, and he added, in a lower tone: “I once had a cousin very like that picture.”

“Is she dead?” asked a woman, a stranger to the speaker.

“Yes,” said the man, with some surprise.

“I thought no live person could remind you of _this_ face,” answered the woman, as if in explanation.

The two couples of critics glanced appreciatively and with a smile at each other, and the Greek said to his friend:

“Your _boors_ are no bad critics, after all. I think the barbarians rather beat us in painting.”

“Beat _you_!” laughed the Venetian. “Speak for yourself. But it is your religion that has fossilized your art; otherwise you would have been—”

“No,” said the other thoughtfully, “I think you mistake; I doubt if we have the gift you, and the Flemings also, have for painting. Our literature is as far above that of this northern people as heaven is above the earth, and our sculpture, of course, is unrivalled; but they have the gift of music, and of architecture, and of painting—the two last marvellously developed. And in the first I think your people—I do not mean Venetians, but some of your other Italian neighbors—have just now reached a good climax. At Milan I heard some chanting that would put us to shame, and even here I have heard something not unlike it. Yes, I cede the palm to the barbarians in the arts of Euterpe and—”

“But in architecture yours is the peer of any northern style,” said the Venetian.

“I doubt it,” said the Greek. “There is a strange impression comes over me in these vast, sky-high, delicately-carved cathedrals, dim and resonant, that comes nowhere else—not in our gold-colored, mosaic-paved, dome-crowned churches, nor your St. Mark, the daughter of our St. Sophia.”

“Every one knows how liberal are your views,” said the other, with a smile.

“Yes?” asked the Greek, evidently in innocence. “But I am only fair to others. I would rather be a Greek than a barbarian, as the adage of one of our old heathen philosophers has it; but I can see that God has not rained every blessing on one spot, and that my native land, as he did on the Garden of Eden before Adam fell.”

“Hush!” said the Venetian, interrupting him. “Some girl has fainted.”

Some little stir was taking place in the crowd; it _was_ a girl who had fainted, and an old woman, strong and powerful, was holding her.

Among the many questions tossed to and fro and never answered, our four friends all managed to hear the words of the old woman to her nearest neighbors.

“Yes, that is the portrait of her sister and my granddaughter, just as if the poor lost girl had sat for it herself. But then this must have been painted since she lost her rosy color. And I believe the painter knows what became of her, and where she is, if she is alive; and, God forgive me! I always accused the Lord Conrad of Schön of her ruin and disappearance. I _will_ know, too, if this painter is to be found anywhere in Flanders. Oh! yes, Agnes is very well; she will be herself again directly, nervous little thing!” And the old woman, with a kind of savage tenderness, shielded the face of her granddaughter in her bosom, while the girl slowly revived.

Some people hinted that the painter was hidden in the closed tent behind the picture, and others brought out shears to cut the curtains; but the priest here interposed.

“I think, my friends,” he said in a clear, authoritative voice, “that you had better leave this matter to the proper authorities. Messire Van Simler and I will see that this good woman is heard, and, if need be, helped to find her granddaughter, or any news of her death and fate. It would be an unwarrantable act to cut these curtains open: if there is no one there, you will feel like fools, the dupes of the childish trick of an unknown painter; if you find the person you are looking for, you may do him a mischief and come yourselves under the eye of the law. I advise you to let the matter rest. And you, my good friend, here is an address you may find useful whenever you wish to make further inquiries. It would be best to take your charge home.”

The manner rather than the words of the speaker took effect at once, and the group dissolved to make room for other sight-seers, all gaping, all admiring, and all ending by feeling uncomfortable and leaving the stand with muttered words of equal wonder and fear. But it is impossible to follow each comment, and we have yet other scenes to look at before we close the history of this picture.

Among the crowd that day had been Peter and Simon, and the former, familiar as he was with the painting, had ceased to feel impressed by the weird, indescribable beauty and awe that were its very essence. But he had been, in a business-like way, alive to everything connected with what was to him the instrument of future success, and the fainting scene and its close were especially observed. He noticed the drift of all the remarks made on the picture; he had foretold it himself—for he was nothing if not worldly-wise—and he carefully scanned the faces of the four critics who had so pertinaciously lingered round the stand all day. He knew them all for enlightened men, above the nonsense of the age, good art-critics, and men born to be masters of their kind. Even the young Venetian had the making of a statesman in him; the Greek was as simple-minded as he was generous, and, though his countrymen had a bad name at Bruges for conventional sins of which not half of them were really guilty, he was, even with the most ignorant, a signal exception. The other two were trusted native citizens, bosom friends, patrons of all that was good, learned, and improving, and, what was more, powerful in the council and civic government. The first, by the way, was a canon of the cathedral, by private inheritance a rich man, and, by dint of charity to the starving and liberality to men of letters, raised above the scandal that attended on rich ecclesiastics. These four were representative men, and though each a representative of the best type of his own class and nation, still no less entitled to be called representative men.

Peter noted the way Messire Van Simler went that evening; the canon he knew well by reputation. Then he came back to the Place and helped a young peasant to lift and pack the picture, leaving on the planks in front of the booth the address of the artist and a notice that purchasers were asked to meet the painter at his own studio any time each day before dark. The peasant seemed slim and tall for a Flemish countryman, but his cap concealed his face, and his loose vest was well calculated to increase his seeming bulk; still, when he got to the studio in the old garret over the canal, and threw off his cap, he proved to be the person you must have suspected—the painter himself. He said nothing, and Peter did not offer to speak; but the former, as soon as he came in, glanced hurriedly into one corner and then back at the picture. Over their scanty supper the two exchanged a few monosyllables as to the result of the show, but each was uneasy and spoke as if compelled by the suspicion of the other. Next morning Peter went to Van Simler’s house before the latter was out of bed, and was received during the merchant’s ample breakfast. No one came to Jan’s garret the first day, and he stayed at home alone with his work, now and then retouching it, as if drawn to it by a spell he could not master; but each time he worked at it he seemed more ill and nervous. Towards dusk he heard a footstep on the stair, and opened the door to let in some light on the break-neck place, full of corners and broken steps, where some stranger was evidently groping his way. It was the Greek. He greeted the painter with grave earnestness and more interest than is usual with a purchaser.

“I have come,” he said after the first civilities, “to buy both your pictures and _you_, and pack both at once, as my ships will be in port by the night after to-morrow night, and it needs time to meet them. They cannot wait—at least, _that_ one cannot which happens to be most convenient for you to go in. Have you any objection to go with me to Greece?—any tie to detain you here?”

Jan looked into the corner before he answered, and shuddered. “I fear I have,” he said unwillingly. The Greek looked fixedly at him.

“I will not keep you any longer than you like, and you probably like travelling? There are scenes in Greece and the East that will delight you, if you have a liking for Scriptural subjects; and the journey need not be longer than the interval between this cargo _from_ here and the next cargo back.”

Jan said nothing.

“You see I am bent on having _you_ as well as your picture,” the merchant went on; “but if you insist on refusing me your company, I will take the picture at once. I have men below ready to carry it away, and I will give you your own price at once, in gold coin.”

And Jan still gazed into the furthest—and empty—corner.

“I have reasons for my haste,” said the Greek, slowly, at last. Jan turned inquiringly.

“Good reasons,” said his visitor gravely and gently, “which I will tell you when we are at sea, if you will trust me till then; if not, I will even tell you now, though the proverb says that 'walls have ears.’”

Jan seemed to need no immediate explanation, but said:

“Take the picture, and welcome, and believe in my gratitude, though I cannot put it into words; but I can take no gold for the picture.”

“Why, you invited purchasers to come here to you!”

“I have learned to-day that I cannot sell it.”

“Well,” said the Greek, with a look of intelligence, “I think you and I understand each other, then, and I may as well take you and the picture too.”

“No,” said Jan, “you do not understand _me_, but I understand you and am grateful. If I am in danger, it matters little; I prefer meeting such a danger as you fear for me to seeing what I should see always, on the ship, in the East, as well as here—or at the stake.”

“Your mind is—preoccupied, my young friend,” said the merchant. “But let me take the picture; at least, it is better to have the evidence put out of the way in time. Let me call to my men.”

“Yes, but no gold for it,” said Jan without emotion, as he pushed away the purse on the table. “Take the picture; there will be only _one_ face then, and I shall not be torturing myself as to whether the likeness is faithful enough or not.”

The Greek bent out of the window and whistled to two men sitting on the narrow stone-work of the canal; one of them struck a flint, lit a pine torch, and, beckoning the other to follow him, came up the winding stairs. Jan said not a word, and the picture was packed and carried away, while the merchant lingered yet, pressing gold, protection, and future patronage upon the benumbed artist. Even the hint of fame could not stir the young man.

“I have done my life’s work,” he said gloomily. “I shall never paint the equal of that picture again, and I do not wish to,” he added with a shudder; “and for the sake of my reputation I must not paint anything below that standard.”

“But why should not you do even better?” said the Greek.

“I thought you knew,” said the young man, in puzzled uncertainty.

“I _know_ nothing, and my suspicions are too vague to shape my judgment on the merits of this particular work of yours. I gathered all I _do_ know, or even suspect, from the remarks of the people to-day. I am used to watching indications of men’s fancies, prejudices, passions, say even superstitions, and I thought it a pity that such people as we heard to-day should have it in their power to end or mar the career of an artist of your genius. We want some young, rising painter—one who can rival the Italians; one who can show that there is a future for art, that it is progressive and improvable; one especially who will defy conventionalities—for I own that your independent treatment of a 'Judith’ fascinated me. But if I cannot prevail upon you to accept my services at present, you will not refuse to take this address; it will find me, no matter where I may be, and it will be even a personal safeguard for you in my absence and during the interval that may elapse before I hear of your appeal.”

“Thank you a thousand times for your unprovoked and generous interest!” said Jan more warmly than he had spoken before. “I shall never forget it. God grant my life or death may be guided and determined by the highest Power! I should not trust myself to decide wisely, if I had the choice offered me; but if it is ordained that I should live long, I prefer _your_ being the instrument of my salvation.”

The merchant left, and Jan stayed alone all night; he was stonily calm, watching, thinking, waiting as if for an expected event, and never breaking his fast through the long, dark hours. When early morning came, two men in gray cloaks opened his door and respectfully _ordered_ him to come with them to Van Simler’s house, which he did without surprise and without remonstrance. Here he found the canon, who with Van Simler told him briefly that they thought it for his good to be taken into the country to the castle of Stundsen, belonging to the merchant’s brother-in-law. They did not tell him why, and it did not even occur to him to ask. As he passed from the large dining-hall where this short interview took place to a room furnished with Spanish leather and carved oak—_his_ room, he was told, for a few hours—he thought he recognized the Greek anxiously and quickly open a door that led to the passage, as if to assure himself of the presence of some expected person.

Van Simler and his friend, meanwhile, had a short and significant talk, a few words of which are here set down to explain facts that may look to the undiscerning reader like the conventional tricks of modern mediævalists, to whom plots and kidnapping are “daily bread.” “Now,” said the merchant, “if that scoundrel Peter goes no further, there is every hope of getting this obstinate young genius out of the city in safety; but he may try to get _two_ prices and hint the matter to Conrad Schön.”

The canon shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, in that case,” he said, “all would be in vain, for Count Conrad has the sovereign’s ear; and you know the hobby the Count of Flanders has lately bestridden.”

“The youth ought to have gone with the Greek; but the latter says he believes him half-mad, which accounts for his staying in the jaws of the lion.”

“I have heard of Jan the painter before,” said the priest, “and, had he been a different person, I should have gone to him myself; but, from my general knowledge of his character, any one would do better than one of us, and I am glad the Greek forestalled me. Why did not you keep Peter under lock and key when he came here?”

“It was a mistake, I own,” said the other; “but still, if I had, there was Simon in the secret.”

“Simon is a fool, and nothing of this would have occurred to him.”

“I doubt about his being a fool; at any rate, he is a dangerous one.

“He _is_ a fool in such matters as these, though dangerous enough in his way, as you say. Now, our Greek friend has just left the house, I see, and there is nothing to detain _me_ here just now. You take the transport business in your hands? Well and good; while I attend to any foolish charge made in the city. I expect I shall see old Mother Colette before dark to-night.”

There is no need to go through the details of the few days that followed. In one word, Peter was more powerful than Jan’s four protectors put together, but only because he had Conrad Schön at his back, and behind him a greater “presence” yet—no less a person than the Count of Flanders, who had lately taken a mania about witchcraft. It was easy to play upon his vanity and tickle his supposed superior sense of discovery, and Conrad had reasons for diverting to the young artist the opprobrium which even he, with all his power, could not fail to have brought upon himself in such an independent and proud burgher-city as Bruges for the wrong done to the orphan daughter of one of her citizens and an attendant of his wife; for there was still a lingering in Flanders of the old knightly feeling of the earlier days of chivalry, which made it the duty of a knight to consider every house-maiden within his walls as his own daughter or sister, and protect, and even defend, her as such.

The dark accusations of Conrad and his informant against the defenceless painter were but too readily listened to, and, before his friends could conceal him, the sovereign had already sent to demand his person. We will pass over the mock examination which the count held, more with a view to satisfy his own curiosity than to assure himself of the prisoner’s guilt; over the honest but bitter malignity with which old Mother Colette, an unconscious tool sought out by Jan’s enemies, testified against the man who, to make such a startling and mysterious likeness of her lost granddaughter, must have been intimately acquainted with her; and, lastly, over Jan’s strange apathy and silence, his refusal to deny the charges brought against him, and his seeming relief at being condemned to die.

He never told any one the reason of all this, and the secret would have died with him, if Peter, years afterwards, when the picture again came to light and became famous, had not made known the hallucination of the painter, to which was really due the success others had stupidly attributed to forbidden practices. The last thing that concerns us is the strange sentence and fanciful doom pronounced by the Count of Flanders, the carrying out of which will take us up into the belfry of the Guildhall, just above the market-place where the unlucky picture had first roused the ignorant suspicions of the mob.

Here, where swings the largest bell of the famous carillon, we find the artist once more. The great dark mass hangs dumb beside him; very little light is here, but enough to see by dimly, and make out some of the maze of beams and iron-braced stays that uphold the old bell. Even some of the inscription is visible; its gilt letters in relief gleam out of the dimness and naturally fix the eye in that kind of magnetic gaze which some say is favorable to sleep. Jan was half crouched in one corner, wondering why he was there and how long it was intended he should stay; the two men who had brought him had simply told him that the count had sent him up there to see if he could rival the penance of St. Simeon Stylites, for a few hours at least. Presently the bell began to stir and sway softly, slowly; one dull, muffled tone came out as the tongue touched the outbent lips of the mighty bell; the next stroke came louder, the next swing was wider, and Jan’s head already throbbed with the unwelcome noise. Now the monster was alive in earnest. Warming to its work, it swung further and further; it tossed its base upwards, till the beams groaned and creaked, and all kinds of hideous minor noises seemed to be embroidered on the constant dull echo between each stroke. A strange wind blew in Jan’s face; it was the breath of the bell, whose relentless beat grew more and more regular, more and more monotonous, as it went on. The artist dared not move; one hair’s breadth nearer the terrific engine would be his death, one blow of its lips would be more effectual than any stroke of axe or pile of faggots. He shrank close to the wall, but, as his body just cleared the bell in its mad flingings and tossings, his mind seemed to be struck by it at every toll, almost absorbed in it, drawn to it with fatal curiosity. Was that the bell whose sound had been so majestic, so solemn, so beautiful in his ears as a child, so grand when it rang out above the others—eighty of them—that chimed on the great church holidays and welcomed the victorious sovereign when he came back from war? Was this the heart of the great angel that poetry and popular belief had endowed the belfry with—this terrible, maddening, brazen-tongued, relentless engine? It only just missed touching him each time it flung itself on his side of the beam-chamber; if it were to swing only a little more fiercely, as it seemed easy for it to do, one blow would crush him. Already the air seemed to suck him in under the bell, into some dark vault, no doubt—some bottomless pit; had his conductors known, when they put him there, that it was time for the bell to toll, or had they forgotten him? How long would this go on? His brain could not stand it much longer, he felt, but to scream was useless; the great, dread voice hushed all other sound. It seemed presently as if the gilt lettering got brighter; it took the shape of a glaring yellow eye; now redder, like fire, now alive, now like the eyes in his “Judith,” that the woman had said were the “eyes of a corpse just come back to life.” But had bells eyes as well as tongues? he asked himself helplessly. He remembered learning about the Cyclops and their single eyes in the middle of their foreheads; now he really saw a worse monster, with an eye of flame set in its huge, black, bulging lip. Was that the gold the Greek had offered him? Surely it was that, and no eye. Of course his fancy had betrayed him. But how could the gold have got there and got stuck to the rim of the accursed bell? How long had he been there, and when were they coming to fetch him? But they could not get in while that fiend was tossing and bellowing in these narrow walls. What was that other noise now?—a whirring of a thousand wheels! Where? It seemed all round; and now the bell appeared to him in a network of wheels, all going round faster than the eye could follow—a mass of moving air formed of many hazy circles intertwined; he _knew_ they were wheels, but could not actually see them. He dared not hold his ears and head with his hands, for between each fling of the bell there was not time to lift his hands; and if they were caught—Some one was there now—come to bring him away. How did he get in? But it was not a man; it had long, fair hair and a misty sort of covering. He knew the face. Was there an angel of the bell, after all, who was going to stop the great tongue and deliver him? No; that face was a dead face—Judith just as he had painted her, just as he saw her in the corner of his room; and _this_ was his room, and he had been dreaming of the bell. Scarcely—he could not dream of such a noise; then the devil must have got into his room and changed everything. But the clangor never stopped, and never spoke either louder or softer—one eternal, dreary, vexing, maddening ring. He would go mad, no doubt, if he stayed there another quarter of an hour; how long had he been there? Now he was fascinated by the unerring accuracy of the strokes, and, in a trance, expected feverishly the next dull boom, and mechanically counted on his fingers till the next was due again, and so on for five minutes. Suppose he should hang on to the tongue; would it make a feather’s weight of difference in the time or the sound of the stroke? He wondered how the bell sounded to those in the Place; they did not heed it at all, most likely, or some thought it must be getting near their time for dinner, while pious women were reminded to say a prayer, and some gleeful child would clap its hands and count the strokes. He could count the beats of his heart and the throbs in his head. He was not mad yet, he hoped, and his thoughts came regularly, and he saw pictures burned into the air one minute and gone the next; if he could have put them on canvas, they would have made his name and fortune. He was sure he could catch their shading; they looked as if fire had been made liquid and colored. It was better than any of the windows in the cathedral, famous as they were through the art-world for their undiscoverable secret of vivid, jewel-like coloring. But one picture followed the other so soon that, had he painted them all, it would have taken him twice the threescore years and ten of an ordinary life, and they would have filled every Church in Flanders fuller than twenty chapels in each could require. What was the coloring of “Judith,” with the pitiful chemical combination for which he had risked so much, to these rich, mellow, miraculous tones, with a thousand new, unnamable shades, and shadows that looked more like the depths of a dark-blue Italian lake than the darkness of common air? But through all these meditations of a second’s length, though they seemed like the reveries of hours, the boom of the pitiless bell went on, crashing through the brain of the prisoner, shattering each new picture which the last interval had stamped on his fancy, sounding to him now like a roaring fall of water, now a ploughing avalanche, now a thunder-clap, now the fall of a burning house, now the thud of earth upon a coffin, now the blow of a massive cudgel on his own head. Instinctively he cowered lower, and a beam struck him on the back with a sudden violent blow that made him stand upright and remember that the bell was there, but no cudgel; but as he rose he had stretched out his hand, blindly feeling for support, and touched the great rocking monster. A thrill went through his frame; he looked upward and vaguely wondered if this was the end, and he saw his “Judith” again, a shadowy form among the rafters. The next feeling of consciousness was that of lying flat on his back and a strong, cold wind wafting across his feet; he put up his hand to lift his head a little and press his left temple, and then— The bell had only tolled for a quarter of an hour. As soon as it stopped the same men who had taken Jan up came again and found him dead, lying in a cramped position on his side, and one leg still stretched out beneath the now silent bell.[51]

Footnote 51:

If any one cares to know what became of the picture, he may be interested to hear that it hangs now over the altar of a private oratory in the same city where it was painted. The Greek merchant took it to Constantinople, where it remained in his family till the siege, twenty-eight years later. It was then given by him for safe keeping to his Venetian friend and transferred to Venice, whence the Greek himself, having become a resident of that place, took it back to Bruges and offered it to the canon, on condition of no further mention being made of the circumstances connected with it. The offer was gratefully accepted, and it remained till the priest’s death in his private collection, the Greek having declared that, what with having paid no price for it and its being a Scriptural subject, he preferred that it should in some way belong to the church rather than to the world. At the canon’s death it was sold to a dealer, who sold it again for a high price to an Italian collector, whose descendants, in “hard times,” parted with it to a rich Englishman. It happened, strangely enough, that it returned to the native city of its unlucky author by an intermarriage between the family of the English connoisseur and that of a passionate lover of art in Bruges, and this time it was transferred as a _gift_. It has been freely shown to any and every one who asked to see it, and the story attached to it made it one of the “sights” of the old city.

WILD ROSES BY THE SEA.

Untrimmed, uncared for, filling all the ways That stretch between the shadow of the pine And sea-washed rock where in the soft sunshine The sea breaks white through all the long June days,

The fair wild roses, flushed like Eastern skies When sinks the sun to rest in radiance calm, Their pink bloom lift amid the sweet-bay’s balm And shine a welcome true to loving eyes.

Sweet June’s rich gladness in the rosy flush, As if rejoicing with our human souls, While solemn melody from wave-beat rolls, Whose endless anthem knows not any hush:

And ever answering from the pines sweep down The wailing chords the wandering wind doth wake— Sad undertones that through June’s singing break, But cannot dim her roses’ radiant crown,

Beyond whose jewelled zone spreads on and on The long, low level of the endless sea, Blue with the shadow of infinity From cloudless skies, in sparkling light, dropped down;

With here and there a sail, in shade and light, Wind-seeking, bearing careless o’er the crest Of summer waves the whiteness of its breast— A moment’s dazzling vision on our sight:

Earth, air, and sea, with mirth unsullied filled, With happy sunshine from June’s roses flushed. We hold our rose-leaves all to-day uncrushed, Our cup of spring-time joyousness unspilled.

But spring-time passes, rosy petals all Drop down and mingle with earth’s earlier dead, Though faithful sweet-bay still breathes balm o’erhead, And ocean’s anthem e’er doth rise and fall.

Almost unfelt the summer hours die, Green leaves grow russet on the salty shore, The crimson vines droop rocky crevice o’er, And wild ducks’ marshalled columns southward fly.

Low asters gleam with delicate light amid The massive sunshine of the golden-rod; A stray Houstonia shines above the sod And lifts to gold-spun skies its pale blue lid.

The autumn’s glory lavishly is spread, But summer dieth, loving sung to sleep By western wind and murmur of the deep, The softened sunshine on her gently shed.

Where are our roses?—that rare gift of June That filled to perfectness our human life, That hushed with silent touch all earthly strife, That voiceless sang to keep our hearts in tune.

Lo! crowning each rich, sun-browned stem Where once its rose the summer’s sunrise flushed, Where shone our coronal of joy, now crushed, Stands, round and firm, a deeper-tinted gem.

Rich summer faileth, and true-hearted June, For whom birds sang, and perfect blessedness Filled every grass-blade with a sense of bliss, Tells o’er her beads for one to die so soon.

Her rosary strung around the rose-crowned shore, Our pure June gladness, gathered into prayers, The sweet-bay’s incense ever upward bears, While we, 'mid loss, seem richer than before!

DIVORCE, AND DIVORCE LAWS.

Of the many evils now arrayed against society, none is greater than that threatened by the frequency and facility with which divorces are obtained. This bane of our day, if not plucked up by the roots, will inevitably bring on the country disasters tenfold greater than the bitterest political strifes. Already its incursions into our midst have cast a blight on our morals, have infected all classes of society, have rudely shaken our best institutions, and, if not checked, will prove a greater scourge than in our apathy we dream of. Yet it continues to grow among us day by day; it rears its head higher and higher each moment; it strikes deeper root on all sides; its hideous mien is ever becoming more familiar to us; some even smile over its attendant disclosures of depravity as pleasant tidbits of scandal with which the morning papers agreeably enliven the breakfast-table, while few reflect over the awful magnitude of the danger with which it is fraught. So dulled, indeed, has become the public conscience in this respect, so slow its apprehension of the mighty evil pressing on us, that scarcely has a warning voice been lifted against this social hydra, which goes on tightening its coils more closely around us every moment. It is not alone our crowded cities that are poisoned by its breath, but it has invaded the stillness of hillside and hamlet, and no part of the land is a stranger to its presence.

In olden times a special act of Parliament was required in England to legalize a remarriage during the life-time of husbands and wives, but so tedious and expensive was the proceeding that few cared to avail themselves of the privilege; whereas of late days and in our land so simple and easy has become the severance of the marriage-knot that the mechanic as well as the millionaire figures before courts and referees, and multitudes now throng this new high-road to social ruin.

Chief among the evils resulting from the laxity of our divorce laws is their active warfare against society. The family, as known among us, is a creation of the church wrought out through the indissolubility and sacredness of marriage. It is the nursery of society, the hope of the state, and the cradle of its destinies. While it remains pure and intact, so long will our sound social institutions flourish, so long will a healthy public sentiment live among us, ready to rebuke the shortcomings of the powerful and to lighten the burdens of the poor, to frown upon official corruption and to encourage disinterested public action. Indeed, this is a point we need scarcely insist upon. All moralists and sociologists allow that the family is the parent of society, as the seed is of the crop and the acorn of the oak. They agree that with its extinction we are at once driven on the breakers of socialism, communism, and free-love—in a word, that society ceases to exist. Now, divorce is the entering-wedge which the law supplies for the ruin of the family; it is as the priming to a loaded gun. Once give the world to understand that marriage is but a simple compact by which two persons of opposite sexes agree to live together conditionally for a time, and the permanency of the family is destroyed; the sacredness of conjugal love is degraded before the law into mere sexual desire; that institution which Christ blessed and declared to symbolize his own union with the church becomes at the best a system of stirpiculture, and nuptial altars are converted into shambles of licentiousness. Let the cause be what it may bestowing on either party to the marriage contract the right to annul it, and the cohesion of family ties is fatally weakened. This fact our court records ominously demonstrate every day. Applications for divorce, based on the special enactments of each State, are constantly filed, in which release from marriage is sought in accordance with the provisions of the law. In Indiana, for instance, mere incompatibility of temper is made the ground of petition; and in only very few cases do we find adultery or grossly cruel treatment alleged as a reason. The easier conditions of the State law are naturally enough invoked, whatever may be the true inner grounds of disagreement. The law of the State offers a means of escape from an onerous condition, and, either through the perverse temper of the litigants or the legal skill of counsel, the circumstances of the case are readily adapted to the requirements of the law. Thus the law in reality supplies to those who are weary of wedlock the means of escaping from it, while apparently striving to hedge in its interests. This fact will for ever and essentially stultify divorce laws. No matter how ingeniously framed they may be, how buttressed with conditions and exactions of proof, such are the peculiar relations of married life that, given on the side of the law the possibility, and on the side of the husband or wife the desire of escaping from a yoke that has become galling, and mere legal restrictions melt as wax before the sun.

As has just been said, the court records constantly prove this. Let us examine the facts in New York State, where adultery is the only recognized ground on which absolute divorce can be procured. A husband desires to free himself from married thraldom. He consults a convenient friend or an accommodating lawyer. (Happily, there are not many such, but we all know that one can work an infinity of mischief.) A conspiracy is entered into against the wife; detectives are set on her track; her incomings and outgoings are narrowly watched; her innocent visits are painted over with the color of criminality; her letters are intercepted; she is lured into the paths of temptation; and such proof, devised with devilish cunning, is soon obtained as brands that woman with the most infamous of crimes. The picture is not of the imagination; the revelations of the law attest its terrible reality every day, and so defiant of public opinion have some discreditable practitioners become that they take no pains to cover up the tracks of their infamy. Indeed, it was with something like surprise that a short time ago a lawyer in New York City listened to the scathing words which debarred him from future practice in our courts, because of his participation in a conspiracy to prove an innocent woman an adulteress.

Circumstantial evidence is all that the law requires in these cases. As a rule, indeed, none other can be furnished. Now, this evidence, proposing to establish what is after all but the semblance of crime, since the facts necessarily elude ocular proof, is such that by asking for it the law seems to invite those who are desirous of so doing to weave around innocence itself a web of circumstances calculated to immesh it in the appearance of guilt. Thus the law defeats its own intent and places a premium on sin. It aggravates the evil it endeavors to estop. Like the smitten eagle, it is forced to—

“View its own feathers on the fatal dart Which winged the shaft that quivers in its heart. Keen are its pangs, but keener far to feel _It nursed the pinion that impelled the steel_.”

Two hundred divorces _a vinculo_, obtained in the State of New York in the course of a single year, give point to these remarks. And in most of these cases, it must be remembered, the defendants denied the charge and were convicted only by such evidence as, though necessarily deemed sufficient by the court or referee, is essentially and of its nature such that it might have been manufactured. But if these attempts on the part of husbands to take advantage of the laxity of our divorce laws by blasting the character of their wives excite our honest indignation and disgust, infinitely more heinous must appear the conduct of some wives in their efforts to procure evidence against their husbands. Our readers must here pardon a few details which the cause of truth compels us to set down, but which we will couch in as few and modest words as possible. What we are about to state proves the truth of the holy proverb that when woman falls “her feet go down into death, and her steps go in as far as hell” (Prov. v. 5). There is a fashionable physiology which denies the physical possibility of absolute continence without serious impairment of health. The easy votaries of sensuality do not hesitate to uphold this odious doctrine in so-called scientific treatises, and to proclaim with Dr. Draper that “public celibacy is private wickedness.” We call this fashionable physiology; for the mass of intelligent non-Catholics make open avowal of it. Indeed, the doctrine is essentially non-Catholic, and has been acted upon by all rebels against the church from Luther to Loyson. Swedenborg condemns celibacy as a crime against nature. From being a purely religious doctrine, however, it has recently come to be regarded as a scientific tenet. Pseudo-science now shelters it under its ægis, and it is as much the vogue to believe in it as it is to accept the other views of so-called advanced modern scientists. It is this very notion which supplies to many a recalcitrant wife the weapon with which she has succeeded in breaking down the law and bringing irretrievable ruin on her family. If, as the writer has taken pains to assure himself, the inner history of our most notorious and disgraceful divorce cases could be read in the light of broad day, the facts would appears as follows:

A faithless wife, impressed with the doctrine just stated, takes such steps as will, in her belief, compel her husband to compromise himself. He then is watched, snares are set about his feet, he is encompassed by enemies, and, alas! sharing as he does the views entertained by his wife, he soon furnishes such evidences of wrong-doing as justify a recourse to legal proceedings. We have stated the case briefly, but at sufficient length to indicate the lowness of the depths to which human nature, deprived of grace, can sink, and how ingeniously the law has constructed a pitfall for itself. One author says that “such stratagems are of frequent occurrence,” and the mournful testimony of our tribunals is overwhelming in proof of the appalling frequency with which this repulsive drama is enacted. But to wade through the putrescent mass of evidence were to make the cheek grow crimson and burn, so that a scant allusion to it is all that decency can permit. What we especially desire to impress upon our readers is the fact that the imagination is here powerless to compete with the reality, and that human ingenuity has exhausted itself in the contrivance of the most abominable devices in its successful efforts to overreach a stupid law. But it is not alone in thus inviting infraction of its provisions that the law of New York State is weak and faulty; it is, in addition, guilty of contradicting itself in a matter of vital importance. Marriage is either a contract for life or can be limited by previous mutual consent. Now, the law denounces such limitation as immoral and strictly forbids it. But does it therefore recognize marriage as in reality a contract for life? We emphatically answer in the negative, and for the following reason: It is of the nature of a contract that all its essential terms and conditions be such as to come within the jurisdiction of the authority appointed for the purpose of directing its fulfilment. But if the authority be so crippled as not to be able to take cognizance of conditions admitted to be essential to the proper fulfilment of the contract, the latter must be regarded as null and void, or binding only _in foro interno_. All outside authority, all outside jurisdiction over it, is at an end. This is precisely what happens in civil marriage. Ostensibly the law recognizes it as a contract for life; indeed, openly proclaims it to be so; even provides a penalty for its violation as such; and yet, by admitting its dissolubility on certain conditions, leaves it in reality as much the subject-matter of temporary stipulation as a lease or a business copartnership, and, in addition, baits it with the temptation to commit an enormous crime. What is there to prevent two persons from entering into a civil marriage with the understanding that they should live together for a certain time, be as other married persons before the law, sharing its protection and enjoying its privileges, and then separate by complying with the conditions on which the law allows a separation? The case is entirely possible—has, indeed, occurred time and again—so that we are forced to admit that among us the law virtually treats marriage as a temporary partnership, however much it may insist upon its being regarded as a life-long contract, and is thus guilty of the inconsistency of declaring a certain thing to be what it in reality treats as quite another.

Nor can it be contended, as against this argument, that the law will not grant a divorce where connivance is attempted; for the case, typical of thousands, supposes that neither party desires to reveal such connivance. Nor is it of any avail to affirm that the party proved to be guilty is debarred the right of contracting a new marriage. Technically the law so reads, but practically it is powerless to enforce its provision. In such a case, indeed, it may be said that love laughs law to scorn. Its hope to punish a transgressor of the sort is as futile as the

“Desire of the moth for the star.”

It is proper to assume that the purpose of the law is to punish the criminal partner and to restore to the injured one privileges which ought not to be forfeited because of another’s guilt. These two objects represent the policy and expediency of the law; and in view of its entire failure to work them out wisely and effectually, we will show that the law is neither politic nor expedient. We will grant, indeed, that the law is competent, in all cases coming under its notice, both to punish the wrong-doer and partially to redress the wrong; but what is the use, if, instead of effectually repressing the wrong, it tends rather to encourage its commission? And such is indeed the anomalous condition of the law, both as it reads and as it works. The easier and more numerous the terms on which the marriage contract can be dissolved, the greater, of course, will be the number of divorces sought; but whether it be for one reason or many, once given a gateway from marriage bonds, and none who are desirous of escape will find much trouble in passing through the portals which the law has flung open. The facts, as attested by the courts of Connecticut and Indiana, prove the truth of the first part of this proposition; for nowhere are cases looking to the absolute severance of the marriage tie more frequently argued, and in no other States are so many divorces granted. The reason obviously is because the conditions for obtaining such concessions are there easiest of all. Where the conditions for procuring divorce are more onerous fewer applications are made; and the facts, as occurring in New York State, verify this sum in proportion and thus prove the second part of our proposition.

In the State of New York adultery is the sole condition of divorce, and just in proportion as such a crime is less frequent than mere family jars and broils, so are divorces less frequently sought. The proposition is therefore true that the permission to dissolve marriage begets a demand to that effect in proportion to the ease with which it may be obtained. The corollary of this proposition is that, the more easily divorce may be obtained, the less regard is had to the obstacles which may stand in the way of its coming at our beck. Should marriage be declared to be absolutely indissoluble, and come to be viewed as such by the masses, few would dream of assuming its responsibilities in the hope that, should time render it irksome, they could slip the noose and again soar “in maiden meditation fancy free.” On the other hand, they would be disposed rather to approach the matter with deliberation, to take to heart the conditions of the contract, and seriously to study the surroundings of a state which is to endure till death. It is for this reason that the church advises her children to ponder long and deeply the consequences of the step they are about to take when proposing to cross this moral Rubicon. If Cæsar felt that, the traditionary river once crossed, fate had marked him for her own, or Cortez that, his ships ablaze, all hope of return was gone, more still does the church insist that sacramental marriage is a step that cannot be retraced. Divorce laws ignore these considerations, and make light thereby of that social institution on which all others depend for their perpetuity. They forget that—

“Marriage is a matter of more worth Than to be dealt in by attorneyship.”

With siren voice they lure the unwary and unreflecting to a fate fraught with untold possibilities of unhappiness. The result is that persons take less account of the solemn nature of the contract. It suits their humor at the moment to get married, and little they reck of the future. _Carpe diem._ The rosy present bounds the view, and there is no thought of to-morrow. Time enough for the disillusioned groom to wail:

_Miseri quibus intentata nites_—

when “marriage vows have proved as false as dicers’ oaths,” and bitter hate succeeded the short-lived joys of the honeymoon. And why should it be otherwise? Is not the potent panacea of matrimonial ills ever within ken and reach? What need is there to cloud the golden prospect with thoughts of possible future wrangles and rancor, and in advance study to avert or mitigate them, since, should they come along, a benignant law is at hand to end them? We are convinced on the best of grounds that the frequency of divorce suits has its root in the neglect of duly considering the conditions essential to the happiness of married life. Were Dante’s words written over marriage portals:

_Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’intrate,_

a deal of curious prying, at least, would precede the decisive steps and few would rashly fly to a “bourn whence no traveller returns.” But when the law points to an easy escape from the consequences of a heedless step, what necessity can there be for heeding? Plenty of prior deliberation and a close scrutiny of its obligations would not have failed to render marriage tolerable, at least, for many who now fret and fume 'neath its galling yoke because they had flown to it in a wanton hour as to a flower to gather sweets from. _Festina lente_—or, as Sir Thomas Browne quaintly translates it, “Celerity should be contempered with cunctation”—would be a valuable maxim to hold up to the giddy gaze of our modern youth who woo and wed with more sentimental sighs than sober sense; better, by all means, than the cynical “Don’t” of Douglas Jerrold. The knowledge that what God hath joined together no human authority must put asunder, alone can stop those unhallowed unions which curse society by the filthy disclosures they occasion, and blast the happiness, both temporal and eternal, of so many.

At the time when this question was widely discussed in England, and so many eminent authorities opposed the project of law which now rules in the British realms, and which is in the main identical with our own State law, Lord Stowell held the following language, which goes at once to the kernel of the matter and shows a keen appreciation of the worst results of easy divorce. He says: “The general happiness of the married life is secured by its indissolubility. When people understand that they must live together, except for a very few reasons known to the law, they learn to soften, by mutual accommodation, that yoke which they know they cannot shake off; they become good husbands and good wives; for necessity is a powerful master in teaching the duties it imposes.” The church in surrounding marriage with that solemnity which it possesses in the eyes of Catholics, and thus giving greater prominence to its indissoluble character, has thereby supplied to her children the means of softening a union so binding, and from the crucible of suffering offers to both husband and wife a purer gold. In the schedule of conditions essential to the procurement of the best results from marriage she holds to our gaze a larger and deeper culture than current philosophy dreams of—a culture that appeals to the intellect through moral sense, unlike that modern culture which is addressed to the intellect alone. It has almost passed into an axiom in political economy that self must sink out of sight where the interests of many are concerned; and so the church teaches that men and women, having reached that period when the duties of married life ought to be assumed, should thenceforth devote to the service of society those labors they had hitherto bestowed on the prosecution of their individual aims. The culture proceeds from this. Tolerance of each other’s shortcomings on the part of husband and wife is strongly inculcated. A gentle forbearance of mutual peculiarities is enjoined, whereby the noble disposition to forgive the countless trifles of manner, thought, and action which might offend a morbid or fastidious idiosyncrasy is fostered. Thus the Catholic wife or husband, in view of the indissoluble nature of marriage, is taught to round off angularities, to tolerate oddities, to adapt individual views and feelings to special requirements, and to hold all subject to that higher and holier law which tells us that self should not be consulted where duty is concerned.

How many bickerings and misunderstandings, how many of the heart-burnings, how much of all the unhappiness that now mars and disfigures married life, might be avoided if these large and liberal views more generally prevailed! Petty jealousies, the offspring of our baser nature; furtive suspicions, exaggeration of faults, imputation of wrong motives, misinterpretation of harmless actions—in a word, the hundred-and-one incentives to disagreement which beset each day’s path—could find no room in a household harboring this pure and enlightened conception of marriage. We know that the will is as much the subject of discipline as the intellect, and we likewise know that as it is tried, as temptations beset it and are repelled, as suffering is endured without repining, as petty torments, numerous in proportion to their smallness, are patiently borne, the whole character comes forth from the ordeal smoother, sweeter, more spiritual, and stronger, with a life that is not likely to die. Marriage, rightly conceived, is a training-school where many salutary lessons are taught. Its tendency is to strengthen the will, to soften the heart, to remove asperities of character, to evoke the tender and gentle in our nature, and to beget a happiness all its own. Wrongly understood and blindly sought, it is full of perils, not, indeed, imaginary, but real with that terrible reality which court calendars daily reveal in sickening colors.

Thus the standard by which the Catholic Church measures marriage makes it yield a higher culture, more generous, large, and abiding, than can flow from the gross conception which represents it as a contract to be rescinded at will. The Catholic view promotes among the married that freedom of action which loves to borrow the consciousness of doing right from the conviction that the right is freely courted and the wrong freely spurned, and thus paves the way for a nobler plane of conduct. That irritability which inheres so deeply in our nature is what unfits most of us for companionship. It seeks to fasten on others the blame which is our own, or holds them responsible for grievances which are the necessary outcome of human life. If not controlled, it either causes entire estrangement and forfeiture of affection, or leads those towards whom it is manifested to deceptiveness and the employment of crooked ways to reach legitimate ends. A narrow and illiberal life is the result. Darkness and trickery prevail where all should be light and freedom. Evil accumulates on evil, till both parties seek through divorce to free themselves from a yoke that has become intolerable. The shrew will nag and the tyrant husband domineer because a narrow selfishness, bred of this unrestrained irritability, has usurped the place of a large-hearted and gentle forbearance. The knowledge of these possibilities is the most effective armor against their actual occurrence; for it demonstrates in advance the necessity of patience and a tolerant spirit; it hints at a delicate regard for the feelings of others; it leads to a vivid introspection of self, and inclines to a mezzotint view of actions not our own; it discriminates between true love, which is self-sacrificing, gentle, and forgiving, and the counterfeit presentment of love, which is lurid passion, fire without light. And this knowledge is best guaranteed by the conviction that marriage is indissoluble. Urging this view of marriage and the study of these things, the church implicitly holds that a liberal toleration of individual action is essential to the happiness of married life, and that the ignorance which accompanies intolerance must be dispelled ere the ideal picture of married bliss can meet the gaze. Thus Christian freedom goes by the golden mean, on one side of which is domestic tyranny and on the other the rampant license of immorality. Unlike the generality of guides, however the church possesses the means of enforcing her enlightened views, of imparting wise counsel, and offering helpful advice in concrete cases through the Sacrament of Penance. Those who have derived their notion of the confessional from the scurrilous writings of Michelet, the senseless diatribes of Gavazzi, or the eminently vulgar flings of some sensational preachers will be a little startled by this proposition. But let those whose knowledge of the tribunal of penance has been fashioned in the school of bigotry and ignorance consult any intelligent Catholic, husband or wife, and they will find that the web of falsehood in which they have been caught is such that they should blush at their own simplicity for having become entangled in it and held “faster than gnats in cobwebs.” They will find that all those virtues which, even to the commonest understanding, shine clearly forth as the basis of contentment in married life, are here inculcated; that here on the heat and flame of distemper cool patience is sprinkled; that chafes are healed and rankling barbs plucked out; and that magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and love brighten afresh at the latticed crate of the confessional.

But notwithstanding that the church has exhausted prudence and employed every means which common sense could suggest in compassing the integrity of marriage, she seeks not in these the _ultima ratio_ of her action. To her marriage is a sacrament, bestowing grace on those who approach it worthily, and sealing married life with a supernatural impress. This sacramental notion of marriage it is which elevates, purifies, and sanctifies the relation, enables the church to mitigate the evils with which human perversity leavens it, and gives her control where the most restless plotters for the regeneration of society have acknowledged their utter powerlessness to act.

During the controversy which marked the adoption of the Divorce Bill in England its opponents, when twitted with their inconsistency in rejecting the Catholic notion of marriage as a sacrament and still insisting upon its inherent indissolubility, fell, through their reply, into an error which, in proportion to its prevalence, has led to a wide-spread misconception of the grounds on which the Catholic Church claims marriage to be indissoluble. A prominent writer at the time said: “The opinion of the Roman Church itself does not found the indissolubility of marriage on its character as a sacrament, but only conceives the obligation to be enhanced by that circumstance”; and in confirmation of the assertion he quotes the words of the Council of Trent, which are to this effect: _Matrimonium, ut naturæ officium consideratur et maxime ut sacramentum, dissolvi non potest._ Now, if the words _ut maxime_ be allowed to bear their proper meaning, they certainly prove that the Tridentine fathers intended that the indissolubility of marriage should, before all and above all, rest upon and grow out of the sacramental character of the contract. _Ut maxime_, if meaning anything, means _as far as it is possible, pre-eminently_; and so the church regards marriage as naturally indissoluble, but especially so when viewed as a sacrament. The fact proves that the opponents of the bill had little else to fall back on than the falsely-advanced statement that the Catholic Church, the most strenuous advocate of indissolubility, sought the reason of her opinion in the nature of the contract rather than in the character of the sacrament.

But, apart from the declaration of the Council of Trent, the whole history of the church exhibits beyond peradventure her higher estimate of marriage as a sacrament rather than as a contract. She holds it to be, in a mystical sense, the symbol of our Lord’s union with the church, and surely no higher character could attach to it. But this symbolic meaning of marriage rests altogether on its sacramental phase, so that the church views it as a sacrament supernaturally, as a contract naturally, her higher regard for it being in the former sense. The English indissolubilists, therefore, could in no manner object to the proposed Divorce Bill; for, denying marriage to be a sacrament, they surrendered the strongest reason for proclaiming it to be indissoluble. If, as even Gibbon admits, the church has lifted woman from the lowest degradation into which she could be plunged, in which she was the mere slave of man and the toy of his passions, to her present position of respect and independence by investing matrimony with the holiness of a sacrament; and if the church has by the same means purified home-life and cemented its affections, is there not danger that, by dragging down marriage from its high estate, woman may again come to be regarded “not as a _person_,” as Gibbon says, “but as a _thing_, so that, if the original title were deficient, she might be claimed, like other valuables, by the use and possession of an entire year”? Such was the law in pagan times, and such it may be again if we list too readily to those modern renovators of society who call marriage tyranny and a “system of legalized prostitution.” Not in vain did St. Simon, Fourier, Le Roux, Fanny Wright, and their co-workers inveigh against Christian marriage. We are now reaping the fruits of their unholy crusade against it. Their labors are to-day blossoming in Oneida County as well as in Utah, in the general rush all round to snap uncongenial ties, and in the woful spread of an evil too base to be mentioned. These form the goal to which such pestilent agitations tend; and if some well-meaning advocates of innovation have not kept step with the leaders, it is not because their principles restrained them, but rather because they have not quite broken away from the influence of early teachings. Marriage, once stripped of its supernatural character, and reduced to the level of a contract, becomes as much the subject-matter of speculation as political systems. Reformers object to this feature of it or to that, and suggest endless modifications. Plato contended that there should be no such thing as marriage proper, and that all children should be surrendered to the state. To-day, in the light which the Gospel has shed on the question, civilized states tolerate a condition akin to that which the Athenian philosopher advocated. And just as Plato, by the sheer force of his commanding intellect, imposed his views on many both in his own time and subsequently, so, it is to be regretted, the skill and eloquence of some modern opponents of marriage are such that they have succeeded in winning hundreds to their standard.

It is a law of our nature that great intellectual force is never unproductive; that it triumphs over many obstacles; and, no matter what may be the cause on the side of which its influence is cast, it is always attended with at least partial success in the achievement of its aims. Now, we have witnessed the most strenuous efforts of powerful minds enlisted in the attempt to abolish marriage. We have had eloquent pleas for socialism, phalansterianism, etc., and it could not but be that these labors were destined to bear issue of some sort. That issue we are contemplating at the present moment; for these assaults on marriage have lowered the general conception of its obligations, its sanctity, and its importance to society. They have lured to a mere mockery hundreds who, when scarce the marriage-kiss has impressed their lips, besiege our courts with petitions for divorce. The influence of pernicious doctrines is deeper and wider than their authors imagine. It does not consist alone in the fact that they draw disciples and beget neophytes; but they weaken faith in what they assail, and thus engender the most pitiful lot of man—scepticism. This is precisely what we now complain of. Our neighbors round about us emphatically eschew the doctrines of the _illuminati_, of Heine and of Prudhomme, yet they more or less admit that there is some reason in what has been so well said, so forcibly and so eloquently urged. The consequence is that their faith in the true order of things is shaken; they are dissatisfied; they declare the doctrine of indissolubility to be rigoristic; and, provocation given, qualms are brushed aside and they hesitate not to fly to the ready remedy of the law. We may thus set down to the erratic speculations of a few self-appointed social reconstructionists many of the matrimonial miseries and scandals we now deplore. And the leaven is working not alone in the United States, but in every country where the same low estimate of marriage prevails, and where the law is the ready tool of those who desire escape from shackles of their own forging.

In England, where law machinery is more cumbersome than among us and its processes more tedious, not quite so many divorces are obtained, but still the number is on the increase. The English law is much the same as that which rules in New York State, and it is interesting to inquire what reason there can be for the greater percentage of divorces in New York than in England. We hinted that the administration of English law is slower, but that fact is not sufficient to account for a difference so marked. All the influences already enumerated as tending to favor the multiplicity of divorces are as actively at work over there as among ourselves, and hence we must strive to find the explanation of the difference in the different character of the social systems of the two countries. In England society is stratified with such extreme nicety that seldom, if ever, a waif is borne from one stratum to another. Lines are sharply drawn between classes, and the fact is well recognized; for the lowly do not seek to soar, nor do the higher ever entirely lose their social grade. Hence marriages are contracted only between those whose tastes by birth and education agree, whose general views are more apt to harmonize, and whose sympathies mainly run in the same channels. They come to the altar (we employ the word in its current sense) with a better understanding of what each expects from the other, with fewer doubts to frighten them and stronger hopes to sustain them, and hence subsequent collisions and estrangements are less frequent. In our country society has not quite passed out of its formative stage, the elements have not settled into their allotted planes. It still is like an estuary in which the conflict of opposing tides brings to the surface what had just lain at the bottom, and drives to the bottom the bead that had glistened for a moment on the brimming top; in a word, social stratification is not yet complete among us. The result is a tendency to the intermingling of incongruous forces. In the social ferment which is going on some rise suddenly from a lower depth and crystallize in their new plane by marriage, some fall and remain below on the same condition. Here wealth is a potent escort to lead its possessors higher up than they could hope to reach without the aid of this glittering talisman. A little veneer and a resolute lack of shamefacedness often enable those whom suddenly-acquired riches have lifted above their former level to hold their new station till marriage has assured it to them and given them a title to their position. But rapidly as wealth lifts in the social scale, more rapidly still does poverty drag down, and we have not yet fully developed, though happily we are fast coming to it, that public sentiment which refuses to behold loss of caste in loss of wealth. Till then a lower social level is the certain bourn of those who have fallen from opulence, just as a niche higher up in the social temple awaits the _nouveau riche_.

We are not sticklers for the social classification of aristocratic countries, but simply for that which is founded on cultivated taste, refinement, and general intelligence; and we contend that where the social condition is such as to permit the barriers between vulgarity and refinement to be broken down, no matter though the former may vie with Crœsus or the latter appear in the tattered garb of Lazarus, matrimonial misalliances will be the result. December and May are no more fitly mated than platinum and lead—_i.e._, sixteen and fifty make no more suitable alliance than refinement and its opposite.

“For in companions That do converse and waste the time together, Whose lives do bear an equal yoke of love, There must be needs a like proportion Of lineaments, of manners and of spirit.”

—_Merchant of Venice._

Till, therefore, this social ferment has settled and all the elements have reached their allotted planes, there to remain, misalliances will continue to occur, and misalliances, we know, are a fruitful source of separation. There may be more satisfactory and truthful explanations of the fact we are endeavoring to account for, but of this we are convinced: that, for whatever cause, antagonistic social conditions operate more frequently against happiness in married life in this country than in Europe.

Space will not allow us to pursue the discussion of this question much farther, so we will devote the few remaining lines to the consideration of the leading objection which is constantly urged against absolute indissolubility, and which may consequently be taken as a strong argument in favor of divorce. Divorce, it is contended, favors morality; for, whether law intervenes or not, passion will assert its supremacy, and it is better to let those depart in peace and with the sanction of the law who cannot live together than have them burst their bonds illegally and contract new relations in despite of the law. By so permitting, the advocates of divorce hope to stem the torrent of evil which they say deluges some European continental nations where the proportion of illegitimate births is wofully excessive. The same thing, they maintain, is especially true of Spain, Italy, and, in a word, of all Catholic countries. Wherever divorce is not sanctioned by law dissoluteness, they affirm, is far greater than where divorces are granted. So the statistics seem to prove; and, in a spasm of virtue, believers in mere statistical figures denounce indissolubility as a stepping-stone to lust. We will grant the reliability of statistical reports for the nonce, and prove by them that, so far from immorality abounding in those countries where divorces are prohibited, a greater amount of immorality really exists in divorce countries, with the added immorality of a law which cloaks it. We know that passion, blind and impetuous, is the reigning force which orders the actions of those who contemplate emancipation from marriage bonds. Certainly they do not act under the inspiration of grace. When, therefore, they break loose from their unsuiting partners, it matters little to them whether the law approves or disapproves of their action, provided they can act with impunity. This impunity is guaranteed in most cases in countries where divorce is permitted, and new marriages, having all the seemingness of virtue, are contracted with the sanction of the law. In Catholic countries this is not permitted; new post-marital relations are branded as adulterous and their issue illegitimate. Is it any wonder, then, that illegitimacy is more prevalent in those countries where divorce is unknown than where caprice or crime can sever old bonds and weld new ones, all with the countenance of the law?

The only difference is that adultery and its consequences are called by their proper names in the former case, whereas in the latter an anti-Scriptural law retrieves them from stigma. And as there is in the human heart a disposition to do more frequently and more extensively what the law allows than what it prohibits, we may be sure that there are many more pseudo-marriages contracted in countries where divorce is permitted than there are adulteries where it is prohibited. Were, then, the mask of the law removed, we should find in the former more infamy and crime than even in those Catholic countries where the record of morality is lowest. There is one Catholic country in which divorce is a thing known only in name, and yet where even the illegitimacy which affects not to seek shelter behind the law is very much less than in the adjoining country, where divorces are frequently obtained. In Ireland the courts are most rarely troubled with such applications, and yet illicit relations on the part of married persons are fewer than in any country of Europe. Does not this fact evidently disprove the claim that absolute indissolubility is unfavorable to morality? While the Catholic Church holds to view on the one hand the indissolubility of marriage, and on the other the precept of conjugal chastity, and while even in one country she has established a higher rate of morality under those rigid conditions, it is evident her wisdom in this trying matter has been attested by the facts.

But the attempt to bolster up divorce morality by an appeal to statistics is radically wrong. It is based on the supposition that the end justifies the means; that it is better, for the sake of avoiding the scandals incident to adulterous cohabitation, to legalize it, and thus exhibit to the eyes of society a whitened sepulchre rather than hold to view the rottenness of “an enseamed bed.” It is the duty of moralists and teachers of religion rather to stem the torrent of vice and pluck the brand from the burning than attempt to cloak over and extenuate by legal devices what is essentially and for ever wrong. There are times, indeed, when separation is the only hope for two unfortunates whom an unlucky fate had thrown in each other’s way; but separation does not imply remarriage, and theirs it is, while reaping the fruits of an enforced singleness, to reflect that they are answerable for the consequences of their own deliberate action, while their case may serve as an example to others. Let the beautiful conception of Christian marriage more abound; let men and women learn to view marriage as something holy, in which the husband is the protector, the wife the comforter, and we may meet with more marriages in which, while the husband faithfully performs his allotted _rôle_, the wife embodies the beautiful picture of her drawn by Washington Irving: “As the vine which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and has been lifted by it in sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils and bind up its shattered boughs, so it is beautifully ordered by Providence that woman, who is the mere dependant and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the broken heart.”

FROM THE HECUBA OF EURIPIDES. _A free translation._ BY AUBREY DE VERE.

[_The Chorus laments the Judgment of Paris._]

STROPHE.

My doom was sealed, my lot decided, Not now, not now, but long ago, When first the all-beauteous Dardan boy, By that pernicious goddess guided, Laid Ida’s stateliest pinewood low, And built his ships, and sailed from Troy, To seek her gift—the richest, rarest— That wife most fatal; yet the fairest.

ANTISTROPHE.

A netted deer our country lies: One sinned; and all partook his ruin! O fatal, fatal was the hour, Fatal the contest and the prize How ill adjudged for my undoing, When in green Ida’s mountain bower That awful Three—my bane—contended: Even then our golden reign was ended.

EPODE.

And haply some Achaian bride Even now, by far Eurotas’ wave, Widowed like me, like me is mourning! Perhaps some mother by her side Laments for those she could not save, The early lost, and unreturning; Raising her withered hand to tear Her last thin locks of whitening hair.

SIX SUNNY MONTHS. BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.