CHAPTER I.

A NEW IRELANDER.

“I’m afraid your shooting party is spoiled,” said my mother, handing me a letter across the breakfast-table in the well-known hieroglyphics of my Uncle Jimmy.

“I should hope not,” I retorted, as the expedition in question had been looked forward to with considerable pleasure, on account of Harry Welstone, my old chum at the Catholic University, having announced his intention of “turning the head of his dromedary to the desert of Kilkenley,” the name of my ancestral seat, in the snug morning-room of which my mother and myself were discussing cream, tea, new-laid eggs, and crisp rashers.

My Uncle Jimmy’s note, addressed to my mother, his only sister, ran thus:

“UNITED SERVICE CLUB, “LONDON, Sept. 10.

“MY DEAR SUSEY: My old and valued friend, Mr. Fribscombe Hawthorne, the member for Doodleshire, is most anxious to treat Ireland fairly on the Home-Rule question. He is well disposed towards the Green Isle, and the country cannot afford to lose an ally in this crisis. Freddy [myself], although no politician, manages his tenants exceedingly well, and I should like Hawthorne to learn that at least one Irish landlord can live upon his estate without fear of bullet or bludgeon. Hawthorne leaves to-night, and will stop at the Shelborne Hotel, Dublin. Tell Freddy to drop him a line, asking him to put up at Kilkenley, and to give him some of that Sneyd and Barton claret which I love, not wisely but too well. My enemy is at work on my big toe, but I hope to be with you as usual at Christmas. The grouse were capital, fat and large, and I am on the look-out for partridge. Your affectionate brother,

“JIMMY L’ESTRANGE.”

“P.S. I forgot to mention that Hawthorne’s daughter accompanies him; you had better enclose a note to her.

“J. L’E.”

“_Con_found it!” I cried, “it’s really too bad of Uncle Jimmy to saddle us with some dried-up statistician and his mummy daughter. You must write to him, _madre mia_, saying that I am at Derravanagh and beyond reach of post and wire.”

“If your uncle wasn’t very anxious about this he would never write so urgently; and don’t you think a little sacrifice is due to him?”

My mother was in the right. A moment’s reflection told me that my uncle’s letter was as forcible as an act of Parliament.

“Besides,” added my mother, with a cheery smile like a ray of sunshine, “this Mr. Hawthorne may be a sportsman and enjoy the shooting as keenly as Harry Welstone or yourself.”

My uncle was, or I should say is—for while I write he is enjoying a pipe in the company of Barney Corcoran, who stands to him in the same capacity as did Corporal Trim to “My Uncle Toby”—as thorough a gentleman as ever saw the light of day. Simple, unassuming, loyal, generous, brave, he actually refused the recommendation for the Victoria Cross, in order that a fair-haired boy, whose very soul was set upon its possession, might receive the decoration. Pure-minded and good, he is at once, as Bayard, _sans peur et sans reproche_.

Jimmy entered the army in the year 1847, roving about with his regiment from clime to clime with a superb indifference as to change of scene, but with a fervid determination to remain with the gallant Thirty-third; and it was only when the Crimean war-cloud loomed overhead that he resolved upon quitting the old corps for one under orders for the East. One-half of the fighting Thirty-third volunteered with him, and the great redoubt at the Alma is steeped in the blood of many a gallant fellow who chose to follow the fortunes of Jimmy L’Estrange.

Jimmy was badly hit at Inkerman, and was sent home invalided, to be nursed by my mother. In a few months, however, he returned to the seat of war, only to be knocked over at the taking of the Redan, which he entered side by side with the dashing Tom Esmonde, where, in addition to a bayonet thrust in the chest, he was made the depositary of a bullet in the right leg. This bullet, clumsily extracted by an unskilful surgeon, constitutes the only decoration my uncle deigns to wear, and he carries it suspended from the steel chain attached to a huge gold watch formerly in possession of his great-grandfather, to whom King James presented it ere he rode from the disastrous battle-field of the Boyne.

Jimmy has eight thousand pounds lent out at four per cent., and lives like a nabob at his London club—reading the _Army and Navy Gazette_ all the morning, gossiping with his former companions-in-arms during the afternoon, sunning himself in the park until dinner-time, and playing shilling whist up to his wonted hour for turning in for the night. He spends three months in every year at Kilkenley, during which, by a judicious course of open air, early hours, plain food, and ‘34 claret, he is enabled to undertake the London campaign with renewed vigor and vitality.

Visions of a crabbed, hard-headed, hard-fact, singularly uninteresting Englishman crossed my mind as I helplessly gazed at my uncle’s epistle—of mornings spent in debating the question of Home Rule _versus_ Imperial legislation; of days engaged in quoting acts of Parliament and compiling statistics; of evenings behind the horror of a white choker, passed in dissecting and arranging these statistics, converting figures into facts, and facts into figures—this dreary drudgery instead of the delectable society of the bright, happy, and joyous Harry Welstone, of mornings on the hillside, of days in the turnip-fields looking for the identical partridge of which my uncle had made honorable mention in his letter, of evenings whirled through in chatting over old times and old associations. What cared I for Mr. Butt or Home Rule, the land question, fixity of tenure, tenant right, and such bother? If my tenants required time to pay the rent, they got it. If they required help toward fencing, draining, top-dressing, or thatching, they got it. If they were twelve months in arrear, they came to my mother to plead for them; if over that period, they invariably waited for the annual visit of my Uncle Jimmy, in order to utilize him as ambassador; and my private opinion is, that upon one occasion, in order to keep up the credit of a family distantly related to his valet, Barney Corcoran, he paid the rent himself. I dare not hint at such a thing, but I feel thoroughly assured that the money came out of his own pocket. In the end, however, things generally came right, and delay in this case did not prove dangerous.

I read my uncle’s epistle twice, confounded him once, and contented myself by showering mild maledictions upon the heads of his English friends with a fervor that bore witness to my feelings of chagrin and disappointment.

The letters were duly written to Mr. and Miss Hawthorne and forwarded to the Shelborne.

“An’ yez are not goin’ to Derravanagh?” asked Ned Clancy, my game-keeper, in tones betraying the deepest dejection—“afther all me thrubble wud the birds, an’ the dogs blue-mowlded for a set. Begorra, I dunno what I’ll do wud the poor bastes. I tould thim we wor aff in the mornin’, an’ now be me song it’s at home they’ll have for to stay an’ set gruel.”

“I’m sorry to say I can’t go, Ned, as I expect an English gentleman and his daughter to visit us”; and, wishing to impress him with their importance, added: “He is a member of Parliament, and is coming over to study the Home-Rule question.”

My _addendum_ failed to produce the desired effect.

“An’ much he’ll larn here,” observed Clancy with a toss of his head. “Av he axes the quollity for information, sorra an information they have for to give him; an’ if he axes the poorer soart, they’ll only cod him, bad cess to him!”

Ned Clancy was even more fatally “sold” than I by the postponement of our visit to Derravanagh; for a certain blue-eyed colleen, the daughter of a “warm” farmer living close to the shooting-lodge, had succeeded in stirring tender emotions in the region lying beneath Mr. Clancy’s waistcoat on the left side, which, while productive of joy, were equally productive of pain, since the sunshine of her presence was unhappily counterbalanced by the very prolonged shadow of her absence. Forty miles lay between him and the object of his admiration; and although there are but seventy thousand four hundred yards in forty miles, still it is a long road for a gentleman to travel, unless he is pretty certain of his welcome, and as yet Ned Clancy had “never told his love.”

“Mebbe yer honor wud like for to show this English gintleman the counthry; an’ shure, in regard to scenery, there’s no batin’ Derrynacushla all the ways be Derravanagh. Sorra a finer sight nor the view from Ballyknocksheelin hill; it flogs Rooshia, Ashia, an’ Africa—so Misther Corcoran, yer uncle’s boy, tould me; an’ shure he ought for to know, be raisin’ av his havin’ travelled all the world, likewise Arabia.”

“I’m afraid it’s a little too far, Ned.”

“Far!” he contemptuously ejaculated—“a few dirty mile, an’ the horses atin’ their heds aff. Lily av the Valley darted through her stall this mornin’, an’ it tuk me an’ a cupple more for to hould Primrose.”

This was special pleading with a vengeance.

“Mebbe the gintleman wud take a gun. Give him a lind av Miss Blake, sir. She goes aff soft an’ aisy, an’ wudn’t rub the dew aff th’ eyebrow av a grasshopper. Blur an’ ages, Masther Fred! for th’ honor av ould Ireland give him a shot. The birds is as thick as hayves, an’ he cudn’t miss thim no more nor a haystack; an’ shure,” he added, “anything _he_ misses I’ll be on the luk out for, so betune us we’ll make it soft anyhow.”

“It’s not to be done, Ned; besides, Miss Hawthorne accompanies her father, and she possibly would not like to separate from him.”

“Bad cess to thim for wimmen!” he muttered, as he tossed the gun across his shoulders; “they spile everything. I wish they wor niver invinted.”

In the course of post two very polite letters reached us, one addressed to my mother from Miss Hawthorne, the other to myself from the M.P., accepting the invitation and stating that the writer would leave Dublin by the one o’clock train upon the following day, reaching Ballyvoreen station at 5.30.

The letters were excellently well written, both as regards style and caligraphy, especially that of the lady, whom I now felt assured must be a distinguished member of the Social Science or of the British Association.

“They will be here to-morrow, mother. How on earth are we to amuse them? We are in for it now, and must do our best to make their visit agreeable. I know little, and care less, about Home Rule, so I’ll hand Mr. Hawthorne over to Myles Casey, of Loftus Park, who opposed our present member. Father O’Dowd, too, will give this base, bloody, and brutal Saxon enough to think about for a dozen sessions of Parliament. I’ll do _my_ part like a man.”

“We must give a dinner-party,” said my mother with a weary sigh, visions of unpacking the family plate, which had not seen the light of day since my poor father’s death, floating across her mind’s eye. “I can drive Miss Hawthorne about the country and pay visits.”

“Don’t trouble yourself about her, mother. She’ll be able to amuse herself. Show her the old quarry at Rathnamon, and she can geologize until she’s black in the face. Or bring her to Carrignageena, and she’ll find ferns to bother her; and if she’s a dab at antiquities, the old church at Bohernacapple ought to put her on the treadmill for a week. There is one tombstone there that has bewildered Sir William Wilde and the entire Royal Irish Academy.”

“She may be interested in the Home-Rule question,” suggested my mother with a smile, adding: “And perhaps political economy is her _forte_.”

“In that case I’ll hand her over to Harry Welstone. He can talk Adam Smith, Martin Tupper, and Stuart Mill. He can enlighten her on the land question as well as A. M. Sullivan or Mitchel Henry; and he _shall_ do it as sure as my name is Frederick Fitzgerald Ormonde. Besides, he can imitate Gladstone, Bright, Toole, Mathews, and Buckstone. He’s just the sort of fellow to encounter this antediluvian female, and, if such a thing were within the realms of possibility, metamorphose her.”

Visitors to a country house, should the entertainers be not in the habit of receiving company, are about the severest penances that can by any possibility be inflicted. Everything requires to be turned topsy-turvy for them—beds, bedrooms, furniture, carpets, “fixins’” of every description. The cellar must be overhauled and confidential conferences held with the cook. The “trap” used for knocking about the roads and attending markets and fairs must be shoved aside, and the family coach put into formidable requisition. The horses must be clipped, while the harness is found to be defective and a new whip an absolute necessity. The very door-mats suggest renovation.

As regards Harry Welstone, his room and his tub were always ready. I would have felt no hesitation in quartering him on the house-top, and the only preparation I went in for with reference to his visit was a scrupulous overhauling of the billiard-table. Having no person to practise with except Martin Heaviside of the Grove, or Captain O’Reilly of the Connaught Rangers when home on leave, the cushions became more like bags of sand than those springy, elastic walls from which the pale white or the blushing red ball bounds gaily towards the coquettish pocket or the artfully-arranged collision of the carrom. With the aid of Ned Clancy—who, in addition to being game-keeper, was a sort of Jack-of-all-trades—and the usual _formulæ_, I succeeded in imparting the necessary tone to the table, and was satisfied that Harry would scarcely fail to appreciate the utility of the preparations.

I felt no anxiety whatever to “show off” to the English member of Parliament, while I honestly confess to a burning desire to appear the “correct thing” in the eyes of my old college chum; and while I ordered a homely vehicle called the shandradan—half pilentum, half brougham, very old, very rickety, and very seedy—to meet Mr. and Miss Hawthorne upon the following day, I turned out my own dog-cart, built by Bates, of Gorey—stained ash, brass-boxed wheels, brass-mounted harness, ‘possum rug, with Lily of the Valley and Primrose tandem—in order to bowl Harry Welstone from Ballyvoreen station to the lodge gate, nine miles, in the forty minutes.

In accordance with preconcerted arrangement, I met Harry, hugged him, whacked him on the back, refreshed him from my flask, rolled him in the ‘possum rug as though the mercury were in the tens below zero, and almost yelled with pleasure the entire way back.

Is any meeting equal to the meeting of old school-fellows?

_Ay de mi!_ no.

He had grown much stouter and much handsomer. His eyes were more romantically dark, and his black moustache, which I recollected so well in its struggling tooth-brush infancy, was now pointed after the fashion of the third Napoleon.

After he had received a cordial welcome from my mother I dragged him up to his room, and there we sat talking over Jim Cooper, that went to the diggings, and Bobby Thyne, now a leader at the Indian bar, and Tom O’Brien, who was a Jesuit, and Phil Dempsey, whose last speech on circuit had elicited the warm encomiums of Mr. Justice Fitzgerald; of the Corbet girls, and the Walshs’ picnic at the Dargle, when Harry fell overhead into the river in a chivalrous endeavor to pluck a maiden-hair fern for Miss Walsh, and a host of similar delightful _souvenirs_, until the dinner-bell rang.

“Harry, my old bird, what will you dip your beak into—claret or the ding-dong?”

“Well, I stand by the solid liquor, Fred, but the pace is too heavy.”

Over our punch we resumed the conversation on the olden, golden time. Ah! how weary, as we approach the end, to look back at the milestones we have passed on our journey. Why did we tarry here, why not have rested there, why not have halted for good and aye? With us it was _couleur de rose_. We had no shadows to sadden memory. Our gossip was of our college days, when life was on the spring and every nerve braced for the forthcoming struggle. We talked late into the night, disregarding dove-like messages from the ark announcing coffee.

The next day Harry went on a ferreting expedition with Ned Clancy, and my mother was too deeply immersed in household affairs to be enabled to take my place and go to meet our expected guests; so, with feelings of no very amiable description, I threw myself, all untidy and ill-dressed as I was, into the shandradan, and jingled the nine miles to Ballyvoreen behind as sorry a pair of nags as ever ploughed a nine-acre field.

I had to wait at the station, as _of course_ the train was five-and-twenty minutes late, and I was seriously hoping that some untoward accident had occurred which would retard its progress for four-and-twenty hours at the very least, when it came creaking and groaning in. Just as I had anticipated, a tall, grim, gaunt, elderly gentleman alighted, followed by a tall, grim, gaunt, elderly young lady, with a nose as sharp as a shilling razor, wearing her hair in wiry curls, and dragging by a long blue ribbon a plunging, howling, ill-visaged pug. The sight of the dog was somewhat of a relief to me, as I foresaw the miserable existence he was likely to lead with my two Skye terriers—a counterpart of the torture I should be compelled to endure with his master and mistress.

“Mr. Hawthorne, I presume,” bowing and lifting my hat.

He bowed stiffly.

I repeated the question, fearing, perhaps, that he had not heard me.

“You are mistaken, sir,” in freezing tones. “I am Lord Mulligatawney.”

“I _was_ mistaken.”

Apologizing for the error, I looked up the line and perceived in the distance—for the train was a long one—a well-dressed, dapper little man engaged in lugging a valise from beneath the seat of a first-class carriage. “This must be my guest,” thought I, advancing, and as I reached the carriage the portmanteau came to earth with a chuck that nearly precipitated its proprietor into an adjacent hedge. Following the “leathern conveniency,” and with a spring graceful as that of a gazelle, a young girl alighted from the compartment. She was small but exquisitely proportioned. Her hair, pure gold, was wound round the back of her head in ponderous plaits. Her eyes were of that blue which in certain lights cries “check” unto the violet. Her nose was straight and delicately shaped, but not in the least classical. Her mouth was large, full, and generous, and adorned with flashing white teeth, somewhat irregular, it is true, but in their irregularity lay a special charm all their own. She was attired in a shepherd’s plaid silk travelling dress, a Die Vernon hat with a sweeping blue feather almost caressing her left shoulder, and her dainty little hands were encased in black kid gauntleted gloves. Struck by her singular grace and beauty, I remained staring at her—staring like a schoolboy at a waxen effigy.

“You are Mr. Ormonde,” she said laughingly, and advancing towards me.

“You are Miss Hawthorne,” I stammered.

“I am, and papa, as usual, is fussing about our luggage—_impedimenta_ you scholars call it nowadays. I knew you from your photograph. It is _so_ kind of you to come and meet us.” She put out her hand as she said this in a winning, confiding way that was fraught with captivation. I bowed over the tips of her fingers in respectful reverence, scarcely daring to touch her hand.

“May I ask _where_ you saw my photograph?” I asked, inwardly hoping she had come across the one taken for the Rathaldron hunt, in which I figured in full field toggery, my right hand caressing the shoulder of Galloping Bess, my favorite hunter.

“In your uncle’s album,” she replied.

Of course it was that photograph, done while at the university, with the lackadaisical expression around the eyes and a general limpness about the form, while my garments bore the appearance of having been constructed for the celebrated Irish giant. If I had had the artist in my hands at that particular moment, it is possible that I might have taken _his_ photograph with something akin to a vengeance.

“Papa, this is mine host.” And she curtsied towards me after the fashion of the ladies at the Court of St. James, when hoops were worn at the hips and patches and powder held their parti-colored sway. I grasped the little man by the hand, telling him fervently that his acquaintance was the greatest favor ever bestowed upon me by my uncle, that my house was his home, together with several similar expressions of intense good-will and of the liveliest satisfaction. How I inwardly anathematized my seedy coat, my unkempt beard, and above all the jingling shandradan with its villanous pair of _garrons_ standing at the exit gate! I believe I offered Miss Hawthorne my arm to lead her to the vehicle in question, calling loudly to Peter O’Brien, who acted in the duplicate capacity of coachman and butler. Finding that my servant failed to respond to the summons, I flung open the door of the carriage, and was about to hand her into it, when, to my utter shame, misery, and mortification, I beheld my missing retainer rolled up like a ball in the space between the seats, fast asleep, and snoring like a fog-horn. In a blaze of indignation I caught him by the coat-collar, with the intention of giving him a shake that would rattle him into an eel-like liveliness; but while in the act of inserting my fingers deftly around the collar, so as to afford me the grip necessary to the effectual carrying out of my intention, he suddenly awoke from his slumbers, and, upon perceiving the condition of affairs, with the howl of a startled wolf, plunged upwards with such overwhelming force as to cause me to lose my hold, to lurch against the step of the carriage, carrom off the open door, and lastly, O agony! O shame! to measure my full length in the dusty roadway, whilst a shout of laughter from porters, passengers, and by-standers, in which I could detect the silvery notes of Miss Hawthorne, greeted my tingling ears. I sprang to my feet, full of the intention of throttling the misguided rascal, but was restrained, _bon gré mal gré_, on discovering him upon his knees in the centre of a sympathizing audience, whom he was addressing with astonishing volubility ere I could possibly interpose.

“O mother o’ Moses! I was overkem wud sleep; an’ shure I’m not for to blame afther all, for never a sight o’ me bed I seen last night till daylight this blessed mornin’. But shure I’d sit up for a month like a Banshee for his honor, av it divarted him. Let me aff this wanst, Masther Fred, an’ I’ll carry ye up to bed every night in—”

Deeming it advisable to stop this dangerous harangue as speedily as possible, as I found myself quietly dropping from out of the frying-pan into the fire, and as, in his anxiety to make out a good case for himself, the rascal was using me as a scapegoat, I sternly bade him look to his horses.

Finding himself once more approaching the sunshine of favor, he hastily scrambled to his feet, and, before I could intercept his movement, had commenced to rub me down as if I were one of the quadrupeds under his especial care, accompanying each vigorous rub with that purring sound wherein the groom proper delights to indulge.

“Bad cess to it for dirt! it ‘ill never come out,” he began, as, with a slap that brought tears to my eyes, he endeavored to remove the dust from the back of my coat.

“Silence, sir! Go to your box!” I shouted, as I handed Miss Hawthorne into the shandradan, placing her father beside her, and my miserable, humiliated self opposite directly beneath the perilous influence of her violet eyes.

“I trust, Miss Hawthorne,” I blurted, as we started for Kilkenley, “that you are not too deeply influenced by first impressions?”

“Will you permit me to be very Irish, and answer your question by putting another? Are _you_?”

Despite my late discomfiture, my unkempt hair, my gloveless hands, and general seediness, I had sufficient grace within me to gaze for one brief second into her lovely eyes until red as a rose was she, and reply with a well-toned emphasis: “Most decidedly.”

I then, in a disjointed and desultory way, endeavored to explain why so shaky a vehicle had been sent to the station; why Peter O’Brien’s hat was so brown and bore such traces of snail-creeping from brim to crown; why I had turned out so shabbily; why the horses were so slow—in a word, it was the old story of _qui s’excuse s’accuse_, and my explanations, such as they were, will ever remain a matter of the profoundest mystery to myself, as I never by any possibility could recall their tenor to my memory.

I believe that during the drive Mr. Hawthorne spoke a good deal of my uncle, of London, Parliament, late hours, divisions, of the Home-Rule question, and upon several other equally agreeable and interesting topics, all of which seemed to afford the most exquisite delight to Peter O’Brien, who sat perched sideways upon the box, with one eye approvingly upon the “mimber” and the other skewise upon the road; but as for me, I was so lost in contemplating the charms of my _vis-à-vis_ that the eloquence of the member for Doodleshire was as completely wasted as if he were addressing Mr. Speaker himself.

Miss Hawthorne only spoke upon two occasions—once to comment upon the beauty of the foliage at Ballyknockscroggery, the name amusing her immensely, and which she endeavored to repeat with a childlike glee; and once to ask about my mother—but the sounds were as music, and my ears quaffed the delicious, dreamy draught with greedy avidity. How those nine miles passed I never knew; they seemed but so many yards.

Peter kept “a trot for the avenue,” and brought us to a standstill with a jerk that spoke volumes in favor of the anxiety of the screws for a respite from their labors. I handed the young and lovely girl to my mother, who stood upon the steps awaiting our approach, and, having escorted Mr. Hawthorne to his room, retired to my own in a whirlwind of new and pleasing emotion—ay, new and pleasing indeed!

I ate no dinner. What cared I for food? Mabel Hawthorne’s presence enthralled me with an undefinable ecstasy. Every gesture, every movement seemed fraught with a new-born grace, while her every word filled my very being as with melody. I envied my mother that she talked so much to her; I envied Harry Welstone for looking so confoundedly handsome and because he sat opposite to her; I envied Peter when she addressed even a “yes” or “no” to him; I envied her father, who called her “Mabel” and “darling.” Heigh-ho! How I hated the approach of that fatal moment when the conventionalities demanded the withdrawal of the ladies—a cruel and barbarous custom, and I said so. She brushed past me as I held the door open, her eyes lifting themselves like violets from beneath the leafy lashes; and when she had glided away on my mother’s arm, I felt that the light had ceased to live in the apartment. I longed for a cigar in the stillness of the autumn night, surrounded by the lordly gloom of nature, and yearned for the priceless _abandon_ of my own musings. But, as in duty bound, I descended to the realities and the ‘34 claret.

“A good wine, sir,” exclaimed Mr. Hawthorne, smacking his lips and cunningly holding his glass between the lamp and his left eye; the right being carefully closed. “A grand wine, sir. A comet vintage, sir. Mr. Speaker has no wine like this; and the Speaker of the House of Commons has the best cellar in England, sir.”

Mr. Hawthorne spoke solemnly. His sentences seemed carefully weighed, and were delivered with an unctuousness that bespoke considerable satisfaction with himself. He addressed me as if I were the Speaker of the House of Commons, and as though he were desirous of catching my eye. Some persons hold you with their eye. It’s not pleasant. He was one of this class.

“It’s a ‘34, sir; you are quite correct. My poor father was very particular about his cellar. I have too much of it; you must permit me to send you a dozen at Christmas.” What would I not give _her_ father?

“On the condition that you will come and help me to drink it, sir.”

Need I say how profuse were my thanks? This was a chance—to see her in her own home, too.

“We live in the Regent’s Park, York Terrace. Our windows command a very pleasing prospect. It’s a nice walk for me to the House, and from my roof I can tell by the electric light in the clock tower whether the House is sitting or not. This is of immense importance, as to lose a division very often means to lose a seat—ha! ha! ha!”

I must be forgiven if I joined in this melancholy merriment.

“Full well I laughed, with counterfeited glee, At all his jokes, for many a joke had he.”

I kicked Harry Welstone beneath the table as a signal to join in, but he maintained a grim, stolid silence. He told me subsequently that it wasn’t to be done at any price.

“You may not possibly have heard Mr. Disraeli’s last, gentlemen,” said Mr. Hawthorne, placing his left hand inside his waistcoat and flourishing the right in my direction. “It’s—ha! ha!—so _very_ like Dizzy that—ha! ha!—I cannot help repeating it.” Here he laughed “consumedly” for fully a minute.

The reader is possibly acquainted with some one man who cozens time by inward chuckles at his own conceits. It is a melancholy ordeal to have to endure this individual, to reflect back his dulness, and to return smile for smile. All bores are terrors, but the worst class of bore is the political; he is the embodiment, the concentrated essence, the amalgam and epitome of bores. He mounts his dreary Rosinante, and jogs along, taking acts of Parliament for milestones and the dullest utterances in the lives of eminent men as his halting-places, quoting long-winded, meaningless speeches as epigrams, and paralyzing his auditory with wooden extracts from a blue-book of exploded theories. His pertinacity is as inexhaustible as it is undaunted; he is free from the faintest suspicion of self-distrust; he is a bore within a bore. Of course, as the father of Mabel, Mr. Hawthorne interested _me_, and I listened with a reverence that begat the reputation of a shrewd, sensible fellow—an encomium never heretofore passed upon me under any circumstance whatsoever.

“The Right Honorable the senior member for the city of Dublin,” commenced Mr. Hawthorne, after his merriment had cooled off a little, “is—ha! ha!—a Mr. Jonathan Pim, Quaker, and a laborious statistician. The House likes a statistician on the budget or in committee, but we will not have him in debate—no, gentlemen, we will not tolerate him in debate. A question arose in which I had fruitlessly endeavored to catch the Speaker’s eye—the Speaker is, by the bye, no particular friend of mine, as I once overruled his decision on a point of order; consequently, I seldom get an opportunity of speaking, and am compelled to write to the _Times_. Well, gentlemen, as I was observing, a question came up in which the Right Honorable the senior member for the city of Dublin felt himself interested, and he made a very creditable speech, bristling with figures—quite a surprise to some of us; but it bored us, gentlemen, and the House will not tolerate a bore.”

Harry trod upon my toe; my boots were tight—I involuntarily groaned.

“I perceive that you agree with me,” said the M.P.; “the affliction _is_ terrible.”

“Awful!” said Harry, peeling a plum.

“Well, gentlemen, the Right Honorable gentleman, the senior member for the city of Dublin, had—ha! ha!—just concluded his speech, when Mr. Disraeli, who sat upon the Opposition benches, said to the honorable member for Shrewsbury, who sat behind him, and placing his eyeglass up so”—suiting the action to the word—

“‘Who is this person?’

“‘Mr. Pim, sir, the senior member for the city of Dublin,’ responded the honorable member for Shrewsbury.

“‘Oh! indeed. Dublin used to send us a gentleman and a blackguard; this creature is neither.’”

This was not quite so bad, and we joined the honorable member for Doodleshire in his mirth, which continued long after our responsive haw-haws had become things of the past.

Mr. Hawthorne, being thus encouraged, was good enough to enliven us with a prolonged description of his original Parliamentary yearnings, his first and unsuccessful contest, and his subsequent triumphant victory—a victory which we were led to believe was unparalleled in the annals of electioneering struggles, and one that caused a thrill of dismay all along the entire line of the great conservative party. We were solemnly inducted into the forms of the House, from the entrance of a newly-fledged member to his maiden speech. We were initiated into the mysteries of the “Opposition benches,” the “gangway,” the “table,” the “bar,” the duties of the “whip” and the “tellers,” the _modus operandi_ as regards notices of motion and divisions, the striking of committees, and the rules of Parliament generally, until we were surfeited _ad nauseam_. These pleasing preliminaries having been satisfactorily gone through, Mr. Hawthorne very obligingly proceeded to give us brief biographical sketches of Gladstone, Bright, Disraeli, Northcote, Hartington, and other leading men of that august assembly, dilating upon the peculiarities in their style and the mistakes in their several Parliamentary careers, until I wished him—in the drawing-room. The windows were open, and across the sensuous night-glow came sweet, soothing strains from the piano, now in low, wailing cadences soft and sorrow-laden as the cry of the Banshee, now in the dashing brilliancy, the _élan_ of those chromatic fireworks which none but the most skilled pyrotechnist dare handle save _à deux mains_.

“Miss Hawthorne is at the piano,” I ventured, in the earnest hope that her father, in the pride of parental fondness, might suggest an adjournment.

“Yes, yes,” coolly and imperturbably.

“She plays divinely.”

“Rubinstein, who gave her lessons at I’m ashamed to say how much per lesson, said she was his best amateur pupil. But, as I was observing, Mr. Gladstone pronounces some words very strangely; for instance, issue he always pronounces ‘issew,’ and Mr. Bright invariably says ‘can’t’ for ‘cawnt.’”

After a dissertation of about half an hour’s duration upon the Marquis of Hartington’s lisp, the unwieldy oratory of Ward Hunt, Mr. Roebuck’s ‘no,’ and Mr. Whalley’s ‘heaw, heaw,’ I again hinted at an adjournment, and on this occasion with a view to a general move, suggested the billiard-room.

“Ah! no, my dear sir, we overworked members of the legislature value too much the delightful tranquillity of our claret to ‘rush things,’ as they say in America. We must make hay while the sun shines. How many nights during the coming session shall I not have to snap at my food with the ting! ting! of the division-bell ringing in my ear! How often have I just raised my soup to my lips, when ting! ting! and away into the House or to the division-lobby, and back to find it cold. Fish!—ting! ting!” playfully tapping a wine-glass with his dessert-knife by way of illustration. “Entrée!—ting! ting! And as for wine, I have been compelled, ay, six nights out of the seven, to gulp it, gentlemen. Fancy gulping claret as a navvy tosses off a quart of ale. _Festina lente_, young gentlemen. Make haste slowly with your dinner and your post-prandial wine; the pace of the tortoise is the winning, and assuredly the most pleasant, one.”

Harry Welstone, who had been sipping his claret in dogged silence, suddenly started from his chair, and exclaiming, “By Jove! she’s playing _Les Baisers d’Amour_; excuse me, Fred,” hurriedly quitted the apartment, leaving me in a condition of the deepest dejection, and writhing under the dreary torture of the Parliamentary _souvenirs_ of the member for Doodleshire.

“I—ha! ha!—call to mind another _mot_ of Mr. Disraeli’s; not at all a bad one, either,” continued the M.P., deliberately attacking a fresh decanter of claret—attacking it in that steady, methodical way which indicated a determination to reduce it by slow degrees to the last extremity. “Dizzy says a thing, sir, in a quaint, dry way peculiarly his own—_Multum in parvo_ I call it—and he looks so demure, seated upon the Opposition bench in his short black velvet coat, and caressing his daintily-booted left foot upon his right knee. One night during the last session a very particular friend of mine, Sir Brisbane Bullflier, the junior member for Hants, happened to ask him what he thought of Mr. Gladstone. Dizzy turned his gaze toward the government benches, and coolly surveying the prime minister, who was parrying an adroit question, said, as he calmly surveyed him:

“‘Mr. Gladstone is a man without a single redeeming vice.’”

My heart was in the drawing-room, where I now imagined Harry Welstone leaning with his elbows upon the piano and his chin upon his hands (his favorite position when my mother played for him), gazing at Mabel—I had commenced to think of her by this gracious and winsome name—uttering some of his daring _facetiæ_, and being rewarded by a glance from those bewildering violet eyes, while I, bound in the iron fetters of a vile conventionalism, was compelled to listen to “I thus addressed the Speaker: ‘Mr. Speaker, sir,’” or, “I called for a division, sir, and insisted upon explaining to the House my motives for adopting this somewhat daring and untoward course,” and “Would you believe it, sir, the _Times_ never noticed my speech upon the church disestablishment; it is positively amusing—ha! ha! ha!”; his face bore no traces of the amusement in question—“and that contemptible rag, the _Daily Telegraph_, merely mentioned that the honorable member for Doodleshire said a few words which were inaudible—this, sir, to a speech that cost me three weeks in the preparation and three hours in the delivery.” This sort of thing under ordinary circumstances, would have been dry and prosy enough, but under the special conditions of the case it became simply unbearable.

I suggested cigars; he didn’t smoke. A Bras Mouton instead of Château Lafitte; he preferred the existing vintage. Coffee I dared not venture upon, and I relinquished the hopeless struggle with a weary sigh. He was there for the evening, and in that spot he would remain until the contents of the decanter had disappeared.

“Do you take an active part in politics, Mr. Ormonde?” he asked after a prolonged silence, during which I had the dismal satisfaction of hearing the strains of a _valse brillante_, accompanied by an occasional ripple of laughter, wafted in through the windows.

“None whatever.”

“No?” uttered in a tone almost of dismay.

“No, sir. Our country is in the hands of an Orange _clique_, who will not allow a Catholic to hold a position of any consequence whatever. The representation is, as a matter of course, in their hands, and the family of De Ruthven have supplied the members since the sacking of Drogheda under Cromwell, and will continue so to do, although, perhaps, under the recent Ballot Act some outsider may get a chance, There are but two Catholics in the grand panel. I am one of them, and was never even summoned to attend until I threatened to horsewhip the high sheriff. My colleague is what we call in this country a ‘Cawtholic’—that is, one who invariably votes with the Orange party, and who would drink the great, glorious, pious, and immortal King William in preference to the health of Pius the Ninth.”

“You have done away with that absurd toast,” said Mr. Hawthorne.

“Not at all, sir; it is given at every dinner-party in the country, and it was once given in this very room.”

“In this room? Why, I thought you Ormondes were always out-and-out papists.”

“And so we have been, and so we are. I’ll tell you how it happened. My father—God be merciful to him!—was always noted for his hospitality, and one evening, after a hard run with the Bohernabreena hounds, he invited the hunt, at least as many as were in at the death, home to dinner, sending a boy across the bog with the news to my mother.”

“‘I haven’t much to offer you to eat, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘but we’ll make it up in the liquor.’

“About twenty gentlemen rode over here, and, after having dined in a scratch sort of way, they plunged on the claret—this identical wine.”

“It is too good for fox-hunters,” observed my guest. “Such liquid nectar is for brain-workers like _me_.”

“After a very joyous carouse one of the party, called ‘Orange Dick,’ a Mr. Templeton, of Ashbrooke Hall, about ten miles from this, a deputy lieutenant and J.P., stood up and asked permission to propose a toast. The permission was freely accorded by my father, and full bumpers were called for. When the glasses were all filled and the company on their feet, Mr. Templeton gave the memory of the great, glorious, pious, and immortal King William, which was received with three times three, my father, to the astonishment of one or two, joining in.

“‘Now, gentlemen,’ said my father, ‘I drank your toast; you’ll drink mine. Fill your glasses.’

“They required but little inducement to do as he bade, and in an instant were in readiness.

“‘To your feet, gentlemen.’

“This order having been complied with—for it was given as such, and not as a request—my father shouted in a voice of thunder:

“‘Here’s to the sorrel nag that broke King William’s neck.’”

Mr. Hawthorne was about to enter into the question of the Hanoverian succession, and had already briefly sketched the career of the Prince of Orange, when Peter entered, and, approaching me as though he were treading upon eggs, whispered in a voice which betrayed a vigorous _razzia_ upon the decanter, and sufficiently loud to make itself distinctly overheard:

“The sooner the punch is riz the betther, sir; the kittle’s gettin’ cowld an’ the mould fours is runnin’ low.”

Inwardly cursing the fellow’s garrulity, I proposed to my guest that we should join the ladies.

“Begorra, yez may save yourselves the thrubble, gintlemin, for it’s in their beds th’ are”; here he lowered his voice into a whisper solely addressed to my ear: “The young leddy axed me confidintial: ‘When will he be comin’ to the dhrawin’-room?’ sez she.

“‘Not till he’s had his five,’ sez I.

“‘What five?’ sez she.

“‘Tumblers av punch, miss!’ sez I. “An’ didn’t I do well, Masther Fred, for to keep up the credit av’ the family?”

My hands clenched involuntarily, preparatory to making themselves acquainted with the body of my blundering retainer, when Mr. Hawthorne, upon whom the fatigue of the journey, and perhaps his Parliamentary reminiscences, had produced a somniferous effect, suggested following the good example of the ladies—a proposition which I joyfully acceded to. I assisted him to his bed-chamber, where, after listening to a very lengthened and no doubt excessively profound disquisition upon a proposed amendment in the Irish Poor-Law Act, I left him to “nature’s sweet restorer,” and, gruffly refusing to partake of a night-cap with Harry Welstone, lighted a cigar and went out into the night.

What a revolution had taken place in my existence within a few hours! Behind yonder lighted casement a young girl was preparing for rest, the very thoughts of whom, but a short while back, were a source of mortification and chagrin, and now—love and light and joy beckoned me towards her, drawing me to her by a chain of roses.

TO BE CONTINUED.

A CHILD-BEGGAR.

Soul, from thy casement look, and thou shalt see How he persists to knock and wait for thee! —LOPE DE VEGA, _Longfellow’s Translation_.

There knocketh at thy door to-night A tender little hand. Without the portal, waiting thee, Two feet, way-weary, stand. So oft to-night that hand hath knocked, So often been denied; O wavering soul! ope thou thy house, Bid this child-beggar bide.

Without the bitter moonlight casts Cold glitter on the snow; With icy fingers ‘mid the boughs The wind wakes sounds of woe; Unclouded is the light of stars Filling the frosty blue; Yet, heedless of the winter chill, A childish voice doth sue:

“Open, dear love, and let me in, The world without is cold; In the warm shelter of thy heart I pray thee me enfold. Weary I wander forth to-night, I knock at many a door, I call, but seems my voice too weak To rise the bleak wind o’er.

“A little exile here I stand, Begging an easy grace— Beside thy hearth this biting night A little resting-place.” O patient voice! O weary feet! O soul! be thou beguiled, Thy bolts undo, thy bars let fly, Keep Love no more exiled.

’Tis Love that knocks and begs for love In that soft, childish tone, Who pleads a beggar at thy gate, Whose right is thy heart’s throne. Open, dear heart, and do not fear; With him can enter in Not any ill—nay, from his hand Thou shalt all blessing win.

Though heaped thy house with treasure rare Ah! do not Love deny; He may not seek thee any more, Scorning to-night his cry. And do not fear that thou shalt find A little rosy elf With laughing eyes that look through tears That pity but himself.

No fretful, pouting lips are his Who waiteth at thy gate; No querulous tone shall dim his voice Who knocks so long and late; His are no folded rainbow wings Wherewith he may ensure His safe retreat when his weak faith No longer shall endure.

He bears no burden of barbed shafts; A cross his quiver is, And of a crown of thorns his brow Beareth the cruelties; His feet are pierced with wounds whose stain Lies on the moonlit snow, And in his tender baby hands Twin blood-red roses blow.

Beneath the cross and crowning thorn Infinite peace doth shine. Ah! open quick. O doubting heart! Let in this Love Divine. Have thou no fear of heavy cross— His shoulders bear its weight; The thorny wreath with sharp, strong touch Shall joy undreamed create.

These infant lips shall bless thy tears, This tender voice give peace; The hand that begs thy grace to-night Shall sign thy woe’s release. He asks so little, gives so much, And sigheth to give more Who, patient in the wintry world, Stands knocking at thy door.

Hasten, my soul, let Him not wait; Fling thy heart’s portal wide; Bid thou this weary little Child Fore’er with thee abide. Kneel thou a beggar at his feet Who begs to-night of thee; No alteration knows this Love Born of eternity.

THE ISLES OF LÉRINS.

There like a jewel in the Midland Sea Far off discerned, the isle of Lérins hangs Upon the coast of Provence, no fit haunt, As from its beauty might at first appear, For summer revel or a moonlit masque, But where in studious cloister Vincent lived And taught, and, in the simple panoply Of Catholic tradition armed, struck down The heretics. —FABER.

The town of Cannes, to which so many English and Americans resort on account of its delicious climate, its healing air, and the lovely shores where grow the olive and the vine, has, too, its balmy atmosphere for the soul. All the neighboring heights are clothed with the mystic lore of mediæval saint and chapel, the waves of the azure sea still seem to move to the holy impulses that once swept the air, and across the beautiful bay are two fair isles at the entrance—St. Marguerite, associated in most persons’ minds with the prison in which was confined the mysterious Man of the Iron Mask, but once was more happily peopled with

“Virgins good Who gave their days to heaven”;

and St. Honorat, the Happy Isle (_beata illa insula_), as it was once called, famous for its ancient monastery, that played so glorious a _rôle_ in the religious history of Gaul. These are the isles of Lérins, two gems of that collar of pearls thrown by God around the Mediterranean Sea, to quote St. Ambrose, where once those who would escape from the perilous charms of the world found refuge.

The island of St. Honorat is now occupied by the Cistercians, and early one morning, soon after our arrival at Cannes, we went in search of the boat they send to the mainland every day for their necessary supplies. We were so fortunate as to find on board a young monk of great intelligence, who was well versed in all the traditions of Lérins and the surrounding region. He kindly volunteered to become our guide, and proved an invaluable one. The islands are between two and three miles distant, and we were about an hour in crossing. A sail on those blue waters, in sight of their shores of radiant beauty, is always a delight, but especially so on a lovely day such as we had chosen, in the middle of October, with just air enough—and what soft air it was!—to ripple the sea and make it give out a thousand flashes from the tiny waves. We first came to St. Marguerite, which is the largest of the islands. It is seven kilometres in circumference, oval in shape, and almost entirely covered with maritime pines. It looks indeed like a gem, this emerald isle rising out of the sea of dazzling gold. It is said to have once borne the name of Léro, from some person of ancient times whose prowess excited the admiration of his contemporaries, and the sister isle took the diminutive of this name—Lérina. St. Honorat is said to have overthrown the temple of the deified Léro, and perhaps built the church early erected here in honor of the illustrious virgin martyr of Antioch. An old legend says when he retired to the neighboring isle his sister Margaret came here to live, and gathered around her a community of pious maidens, to whom the sea, as it were, offered its mystic veil. As Lérina was interdicted to women, she begged St. Honorat to visit her frequently, and complained that her wish was so seldom gratified. On the other hand, the saint feared that he held converse with his sister too often, and thought such visits disturbed his recollection in prayer. At length he told her he should restrict his visits to a periodical one, and selected the time when the cherry-trees should be in bloom—meaning, of course, once a year. Margaret wept and entreated, but nothing could change his resolution. Then she declared God would be less inflexible, and, in answer to the prayers she addressed to him, a cherry-tree planted on the shore put forth its snowy blossoms every month. Honorat no longer felt disposed to resist, and whenever he saw their white banner on St. Marguerite’s Isle he crossed the water, which became solid under his feet.

This island is also said to have afforded a secret asylum to the monks called to the contemplative life, or who wished to pass some time in utter solitude. Little is known of these lofty contemplatives, but it is believed that it was here St. Vincent of Lérins wrote his immortal work, the _Commonitorium_. St. Eucher also dwelt here for a time, and here received letters from St. Paulinus of Nola, who, like him, had abandoned the world.

It is melancholy that an isle, once consecrated to virginal purity and holy contemplation, should become a place of expiation for criminals, and that the most noted of its prisoners should almost efface the memory of St. Vincent and St. Margaret.

St. Honorat is just beyond the island of St. Marguerite. It is a low, flat island, also oval in form, only about a mile in length, and three kilometres in circumference.

“Parva, sed felix meritis Lérina, Quam Paraclito, Genito, Patrique Rité quingenti roseo dicârunt Sanguine testes”

—Lérins is small in extent, but illustrious by its glory; five hundred martyrs have worthily consecrated it to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost by shedding their noble blood, says Gregorius Cortesius. Along the edge is a line of low, craggy rocks, called monks or brothers, which protect the shore from the encroachment of the waves. At the east are some little islets, the largest of which bears the name of St. Féréol, who, according to tradition, was here martyred by the Saracens and received burial.

The numerous trees that formerly grew on St. Honorat gave it the poetic title of the _aigrette de la mer_, but they are all gone except a few olives in the centre, and a girdle of pines along the shore which protect the interior from the winds injurious to vegetation, and serve as an agreeable promenade. But no, there is one more tree—it is rather a monument—the ancient palm of St. Honorat, which stands before the door of the conventual church. “Honor thy paternal aunt, the palm-tree,” says the prophet of Islam, “for she was created in Paradise and of the same earth from which Adam was made!” Let us especially honor this legendary palm; for if we understood, as the rabbis say Abraham did, the language of its leaves, that never cease their mysterious murmuring, even on a windless day, what a page in the history of the church we should learn!

A legend tells us that the island in ancient times was infested with venomous serpents, of which a frightful picture was drawn by the inhabitants of the mainland to retain St. Honorat at Cap Roux, whither he at first went on retiring from the world. When the saint arrived at Lérina, and beheld their number and size, he prostrated himself on the ground and cried to the Lord to exterminate them, and they all died at once. Their bodies infecting the air, the saint climbed a palm-tree and prayed to Him who had led him into this solitude, and the waves of the sea immediately rose and swept over the isle, carrying off the serpents that covered it.

This miracle of the palm, as it is called, is attested by St. Hilaire, who passed several years as a monk at Lérins, and speaks of the numbers of serpents that still infested the neighboring shores. At all events, this isle, like Ireland, is free from them to this day, though they are to be found on St. Marguerite, which is not saying much for the gallantry of St. Honorat. This palm-tree has always been regarded with great veneration, and the legend was represented on the old shrine of St. Honorat—the saint in the palm-tree, and the waves sweeping the serpents into the sea. And on the arms of Lérins the abbatial crosier is placed between two palms.

Under the care of St. Honorat and his disciples the aspect of the island was before long so changed that St. Eucher, one of the first to inhabit it, says: “Watered by gushing fountains, rich with verdure, brilliant with flowers, odorous with sweet perfumes, and with delightful views on every side, it seems to those who inhabit it the very image of heaven toward which tend all their desires.” And Isidore, the monk, speaking of its eternal verdure, exclaims: “_Pulchrior in toto non est locus orbe Lerina_”—No, the universe presents not a more beautiful spot than Lérins.

But it appears that the holy cenobites suffered greatly at first from the want of pure water, and at length they came one day and prostrated themselves at St. Honorat’s feet, beseeching him to obtain by his prayers what nature had refused to the island. “Go, brethren,” he replied, “and dig perseveringly in the centre of the isle between the two palms. [It appears there were two then, as on the arms.] God, who has created the living springs of the earth, is sufficiently powerful to grant what you ask with faith.” The monks set to work with ardor, and dug till they came to a solid rock, without finding water or the least sign of humidity. Discouraged, they returned to St. Honorat, who ordered them to attack the live rock and confide in the Lord. They returned obediently to the task, and succeeded in excavating a few feet deeper, but still without any result, and they finally requested permission to try another spot; but St. Honorat went with unshaken faith to the place and descended into the pit. After praying to the Lord he smote the rock thrice in the name of the Holy Trinity, and an abundant stream gushed forth. Such is the tradition of Lérins, founded on the testimony of SS. Eucher and Hilaire, who both lived with St. Honorat. St. Eucher says the waters rose to the surface and spread over the land around. There is nothing miraculous in the present appearance of the well, but an old farmer of this region, who has been down several times to clean it out, says the water issues from four different points, as from the extremities of a cross. It is now covered with a little rotunda, and over the entrance is an inscription in Latin to this purpose:

“The leader of the hosts of Israel made sweet the bitter waters; his rod brought forth a stream from the rock. Behold here the fountain that sprang up from the hard rock, the sweet water that welled from the bosom of the sea. Honorat smote the rock, and abundant waters gushed forth, thus renewing at once the prodigies Moses wrought with the tree and the rod.”

Everywhere on the island are _débris_ of all kinds—hewn stones, old cement, bricks of Roman type, fragments of inscriptions, etc. The soil is red and stony. The centre is partly cultivated, and bears a few grapes, olives, and vegetables. The Cistercians, who have been here eight years, have built a new convent near one end, which includes part of the old abbey and St. Honorat’s palm. This is enclosed by a high wall, as if they were not girt about by the great deep, and beyond this wall no woman is permitted to go. Even the Duchess of Vallombrosa, the great benefactress of the house, has been allowed to enter but once, and then as part of a suite of a princess to whom the pope had given a special permission. But there are some low buildings without the walls where pilgrims can find shelter, even those of the obnoxious sex, and be provided with refreshments. There are about fifty monks in the community, one of them a novice of sixteen, who looked like an anachronism in his Cistercian robes. Near the monastery is an orphan asylum containing about thirty boys under the care of Brother Boniface. They are taught trades, and for this purpose there are joiner’s shops, a printing establishment, etc., on the island.

While the monks were attending some rite we made the entire circuit of the island, following the path among the odorous pines on the shore, calm, peaceful, and embowered as the arcades of a cloister. These tall pines are aslant, as if bent by the winds, and the foliage, high up in the air, shelters from the sun, without excluding the sea breeze or obstructing the view. Everywhere was the flash of the waves, and the mysterious sound of the waters that gently broke upon the shore of this happy isle, mingled, as in the olden time, with the solemn measure of holy psalmody. It was delightful to wander in this lone aisle of nature, and drink in the beauty of sea and land, and give one’s self up to the memories that embalm the place.

It was early in the fifth century when St. Honorat established himself here. He belonged to a patrician race, and his father, to divert his mind from religious things, sent him at an early age to the East with his brother Venance, who was of a livelier turn. Venance, however, soon yielded to Honorat’s moral ascendency, but died at Messenia, and the latter returned sorrowfully to Gaul with St. Caprais, his spiritual guide, who had accompanied them. For some time he lived as a hermit in a cave at Cap Roux. Then he came to Lérins, where numerous disciples gathered around him who are now numbered among the most eminent churchmen of Gaul. Maxime, Bishop of Riez, Hilary of Arles, Jacques of Tarentaise, Vincent of Saintes, Fauste of Riez, Ausile of Fréjus, were all formed in his school of Christian philosophy. St. Eucher, whom Bossuet calls “the great Eucher,” here forgot his noble birth and attained the sanctity which raised him to the see of Lyons. Salvian, surnamed “the Master of Bishops,” and styled “the Jeremias of his age,” on account of his lamentations over the woes and corruptions of the world, here wrote his treatise on the government of God. Cassian, after long journeys and great sorrows, spent a year at Lérins before he founded the abbey of St. Victor at Marseilles. St. Patrick, according to the tradition of the island, passed long years here in prayer and frightful austerities. St. Vincent of Lérins here wrote those works which have made him an authority in the church. St. Cæsarius also, who became one of the most influential bishops of southern Gaul, and St. Loup of Troyes, who inspired so much deference in Attila, the Scourge of God, were among the first disciples of St. Honorat, and many more, some of whom have left no name on earth, but whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. “How many assemblies of saints have I seen in this isle!” cries St. Eucher—“precious vases, which spread abroad the sweet perfume of their virtues.” And St. Sidonius Apollinaris, with a bolder figure, says:

“Quanto illa insula plana Miserit ad cœlum montes!”

—How many lofty mountains rise toward heaven from this low isle! And St. Cæsarius of Arles: “Happy, blessed isle of Lérins, thou art small and level, but from thee have risen innumerable mountains!” Over forty saints are mentioned by name in the Litany of Lérins, besides the hundreds of martyrs who are invoked.

Salvian thus alludes to the paternal rule of St. Honorat: “As the sun changes the aspect of the firmament by its splendor or obscurity, so joy and sadness are diffused among those who, under his paternal guidance, aim at heaven and devote themselves to the angelic functions. If Honorat suffers, all suffer; restored to health, all return to new life.”

Lérins became so renowned as a school of theology that, in the seventh century, there were three thousand and seven hundred monks, and the Christian world sent here to obtain its bishops and the directors for its monasteries. It was in this century that St. Aygulph established here the rule of St. Benedict. In the eighth century, when the Saracens invaded the island, more than five hundred monks fell victims to their hatred of Christianity. Eleuthère, by the aid of King Pepin, restored the ruined buildings, but the enemy returned again, committing fresh ravages, and, indeed, devastating the island. These attacks at length became so frequent that the pope granted indulgences to all who would aid in defending it against the infidel. Whosoever devoted himself to this good work for the space of three months acquired the same indulgences as a pilgrim to the Holy Places at Jerusalem, and minor ones were accorded to those who sent substitutes. In 1088 was erected the lofty citadel, which is still the most prominent object on the island, as a retreat for the monks in time of danger. It was connected with the abbey by a subterranean passage. This is now a picturesque ruin. It is on the eastern shore of the island, and rises directly out of the water. The massive walls of hewn stone have acquired a soft, mellow tint that contrasts admirably with the sky and sea. They are scarred with many a cannon-ball that tells of more than one rude assault.

Here and there are narrow loop-holes, and high up in the air is a line of battlements that still seem to defy both the sea and the Moor. There was formerly a drawbridge, and nothing was lacking necessary to sustain a siege. This stronghold formed part of a line of signals along the sea-coast. It was four or five stories high, and contained four kitchens, several chapels, thirty-six cells for the monks and five for strangers, with cisterns, and everything to render it a complete monastery as well as castle. The Père Antonin was our guide around this interesting ruin. It is entered by a spiral staircase, which brought us into a small court or cloister with several galleries around it, one above the other, communicating with the different stories, sustained by pillars of marble, porphyry, and granite. Old fragments of carved capitals, and inscriptions, some Roman, some Christian, were scattered here and there. In the centre is an immense cistern, paved with marble, which contains a never-failing supply of water. This was constructed by Gastolius de Grasse, who, having lost his wife and children, retired to the island to console himself with the thought of heaven and eternal reunion, devoting his whole fortune to the poor and the improvement of the monastery. The old chapter-room is utterly ruined. Its arches were blown up by some Scotchman in his attempts to find the supposed treasure of St. Honorat, and the rank grass is growing from the accumulated soil. There is the old refectory with its crumbling pulpit, and, in the next room, the lavatory of calcareous stone, like an ancient sarcophagus, where the monks washed their hands before entering the refectory. On it is graven in Latin: “O Christ! by thy right hand, which can cleanse us within and without, purify our souls, which this water cannot cleanse.” Then there is the chapel which once contained the relics of SS. Honorat,[167] Caprais, Venance, Aygulph, etc., and the three sacred altars to which indulgences were attached at the request of the Emperor Charles V. The chapel of Notre Dame de Pitié, or of the dead, was used for domestic purposes by some layman who held the island after the Revolution, and the place where once rose the solemn requiem and the odor of incense was now filled with the fumes of a kitchen. We went up, still by the spiral staircase, to the battlements. Here we looked down on the whole island. Before us was stretched the neighboring shore with fair towns and villages from Cannes to Nice, with the purple mountains in the background. On the other hand, in the distance, rose the mountains of Corsica. And all around was the sea that bathes the shores of so many storied lands.

With increased means of defence the prosperity of the abbey revived. It had the exclusive right, conferred by the counts of Provence, of fishing in the surrounding waters. It owned numerous priories all along the coast from Genoa to Barcelona, as well as in the interior. And it continued to be a centre from which radiated light, and many a person escaped from the _Mare Magnum_ of the profane world to this haven of spiritual rest. We read that Bertrand, Bishop of Fréjus in the eleventh century, retired to St. Honorat (as the bishop of Valence has recently done) and died here in the odor of sanctity. For those who wished to lead the eremitical life there were formerly many cells around the island. How dear this holy retreat was to its inmates may be seen by a letter from Denis Faucher, whose duties retained him from the isle, to his superior: “My thoughts turn eagerly towards Lérins. Sad, I bewail my long exile. In spite of my oft-renewed entreaties, you defer my deliverance. A cruel grief torments my desolate soul. I love not these magnificent palaces. Let kings inhabit them. For them, they gleam with marble; for me, the desert and the lonely shore. That little isle suffices for my happiness.”

Around the island were seven small chapels, or oratories, mostly on the shore, to which, like the seven stations at Rome, great indulgences were attached. These were successively visited by the pilgrims as a preparation for receiving the Holy Eucharist.

The tombs of the saints, the holy chapels, the soil impregnated with the blood of the martyrs, and the wondrous history of the island, gave it a glorious prestige that made it not only a resort for pilgrims, but even the dead were brought across the waters, with crucifix and lanterns held aloft in the boats, and chants mingling with the sad murmur of the waves, to be laid in this consecrated isle. Many remains of their marble tombs are still to be found.

We, too, made the stations of the seven holy chapels, though they are mostly in ruins. That of the Holy Trinity, in the eastern part of the island, is the most ancient. Its walls of massive stones are still erect. It is a Romanesque chapel, with three bays, the remains of an ancient porch, and vaults beneath for recluses or the dead. But the windows are gone, and rank weeds grow in the interior.

Only a few traces remain of St. Cyprian’s chapel; not St. Cyprian who shed his blood at Carthage, but St. Cyprian of Lérins, surnamed the Magician, who is honored September 26.

Further on, among the rocks on the shore, is the legendary cave known as the _Baoumo de l’Abbat_, only accessible by going down into the water and wading through a narrow crevice between two tall rocks. It was here, when St. Porcaire and his five hundred companions were martyred by the Saracens, that two of the monks, Colomb and Eleuthère, fled in terror to conceal themselves. But they could still hear the vociferations of the infidel, and, their eyes being opened, could see the souls of their brethren ascending to heaven, conducted by the angels. Ravished by this spectacle, Colomb cried out with holy enthusiasm: “Let us go forth to be crowned like them. Let us fly to the Lord!” Eleuthère still shrank with fear, but Colomb went boldly out to share the glory of his brethren. Eleuthère afterwards gathered together the monks who had escaped, and became abbot of Lérins. Hence the name of the Abbot’s Cave, given to the place of his concealment.

Nearly opposite, in the centre of the island, is the octagon chapel of the Transfiguration, or St. Sauveur, with a star-shaped vault. It is twenty feet in diameter and twelve high. It has been rudely restored by the bishop of Fréjus, and has an ancient stone altar pierced with holes, as if for the passage of liquids. Some consider this chapel the ancient baptistery. The sailors call a neighboring inlet the _Caranquo dé Sant Saouvadou_, or Crique de St. Sauveur.

Several of these chapels were used in the construction of batteries by the Spaniards in the seventeenth century, as that of St. Pierre on the southern shore, near the remains of which is an old votive altar to Neptune with the inscription: _Neptvno Veratia Montana_.

The walls of St. Caprais are partly standing. This saint is still invoked in our day for rheumatism. A portion of his relics, hidden at the Revolution, is religiously preserved at Chartèves, in the diocese of Soissons, and is the object of pilgrimages on the 20th of October. “_Quæ sancta Caprasi vita senis!_” says St. Sidonius Apollinaris—What an admirable life is that of the aged Caprais!

The chapel of St. Porcaire and the Five Hundred Martyrs, on the place where they were buried, has recently been repaired, and Father Boniface says Mass there every morning. Over the altar is a painting of St. Porcaire pointing to heaven and encouraging his brethren. The seventh chapel, St. Michael’s, is within the walls of the Cistercian convent.

The isles of Lérins have been a place of pilgrimage for more than a thousand years. They were already frequented when Pope Eugenius II. came here early in the ninth century to venerate the traces of the saints and martyrs. When he landed on the shore of St. Honorat, he put off his shoes and made the tour of the island in his bare feet. He consecrated the church, blessed the whole isle, and granted those who visited it with the proper dispositions between the eve of the Ascension and Whit Monday all the indulgences to be gained by a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as well as smaller ones to those who came here at other seasons, with the exception of those who had been guilty of striking their parents or violating their marriage vows. In accordance with his wish, all who had gained the indulgence used to receive a palm in testimony thereof. These pilgrimages were called, in the language of the country, _Romipetæ_. All the towns on the neighboring coast were numerously represented here at the Grand Pardon. Twenty-seven nobles are mentioned as coming once from Arles. Pilgrims even came from Italy. The old records tell how fifty-three came from Pisa to offer thanks for their miraculous escape after being taken by the corsairs. But the annual pilgrimage from Rians was the most famous, and has been celebrated in a quaint old Provençal ballad that is delightfully redolent of the age. It consisted of the greater part of the villagers, and to sanctify the journey, they used to halt at all the places of devotion along the road. Every one of these places had its holy legend that, like a fragrant flower, embalmed the way. At Cotignac they paused to drink at the miraculous fountain of St. Joseph—

Foou ana boiro à la sourço Doou benhurux Sant Jaousé—

which, say the people, sprang up to quench the extreme thirst of a poor simple country laborer, named Gaspar, to whom the compassionate St. Joseph appeared under the form of an aged man, and pointed out the spot where water could be found—a spot since widely known as a place of miraculous cures and abundant spiritual favors.

Then the pilgrims ascended the hill of Verdale, near Cotignac, to pray at the altar of Nouastro Damo dé Graci. This is quite a noted chapel. It was visited in 1600 by Louis XIV. and his mother, Anne of Austria, for whom a new road was expressly constructed, still known as the _Chemin de Louis Quartorze_. He hung his _cordon bleu_ on the Virgin’s breast, and Anne of Austria founded six Masses in the chapel. The king afterwards sent here copies of his marriage contract and the treaty of the Pyrenees in a magnificently-bound volume, by way of placing these important transactions under the protection of our great Lady; and when his mother died he founded Masses here for her soul, and set up a marble tablet with a commemorative inscription. Pope Leo X. conferred indulgences on this chapel.

At the village of Arcs, or near it, the pilgrims turned aside to venerate the remains of the beautiful St. Rossoline, who sprang from the barons of Villeneuve and Sabran. Her cradle in infancy was surrounded by a supernatural light. The miracle of the roses was renewed in her favor to avert the anger of her father, who was weary of the importunity of beggars at his castle. At the age of seventeen she buried her youth and beauty in the Chartreuse of Celle Roubaud, and was consecrated deaconess by the bishop of Fréjus in 1288, which gave her, by an exceptional privilege to the nuns of this house, the right of reading the Gospel in church. Hence she is represented in art, not only with the crown of roses wherewith she was crowned on the day of her sacred espousals, but wearing a stole. She spent the remainder of her life in transcribing the sacred books, in order, as she said, to be always holding intercourse with God, and, as she could not preach in public, aid in propagating the Gospel. She held the office of prioress for a time, but, at her own request, ended her days as a recluse. While she was breathing her last St. Hugh of Lincoln and St. Hugo of Grenoble appeared and incensed her cell, and she died with _Deo gratias_ on her lips.

An old ballad tells how, after her death, St. Rossoline delivered her brother, Helion de Villeneuve, a crusader, who had been taken prisoner by the Saracens. She appeared to him in his dungeon, loosed his heavy chains, opened the doors, and conducted him to the sea-coast, where, spreading her veil on the waters, they both placed themselves thereon, and so came safely to Provence. Helion now happened to fall asleep, and when he awoke his sister was missing. He thought she had gone home to announce his arrival, but, when he came to the manor-house, learned she had for some time been dead. Her tomb became noted in Provence, and was one of the stations where pilgrims loved to pay their vows.

Our villagers next came to Fréjus to see the image of the Holy Child Jesus venerated in the cathedral. At Esterel the prior gave them refreshments under the great chestnut-trees near the inn. Cannes welcomed them with the ringing of bells, and went out to meet them in procession:

“Canno, villo maritimo— Remplido dé zèlo è d’estimo Per leis pélérins dé Rians— Seis campanos souanoun toutos Per faire la proucession.”

Then they came with

“_Allegresso Dins leis ilos dé Lérins_.”

It seemed to them like entering Paradise. They went to shrift, visited the seven chapels, and finally came to the church of the _glourious Sant Hounourat_, where they received the Holy Eucharist and their palms. Besides the latter, they also carried away, as the custom was, some sprigs of a marine plant still known as the _herbo doou par doun_—the herb of the Pardon or Indulgence. This is the _cineraire maritime_, common on the shores of the isle, which has hoary, pinnatifid leaves and a flower that grows in panicles.

On their way home the pilgrims went to pray at the tomb of Sant Armentari, a great miracle-worker at Draguignan, specially invoked for those who have lost their reason. But we shall speak of him further on. Arriving home, they were met by their fellow-townsmen and led in triumph to the church, when Benediction was given, thus ending the pilgrimage.

The expense of the journey, or the gradual lukewarmness of the people, at length diminished the number from Rians, and finally the pilgrimage ceased altogether, till a failure of the crops induced the town to revive it partially by sending a yearly deputation as its representative.

There is a naïve legend of one Boniface who lived at Oraison—a simple, upright man whom lack of worldly wisdom had reduced to such want as to force him to become the swineherd of a wicked usurer, named Garinus, who was blind. For six successive years he had visited Lérins at the time of the Grand Pardon, and, when the seventh arrived, he humbly begged permission of Garinus to go and gain the indulgence. Garinus refused, and, lest the swineherd should secretly join the other pilgrims, he carefully fastened him up. Boniface’s grief increased as the feast of Pentecost drew near. The eve arrived, but he was prevented from keeping even a lonely vigil by an overpowering drowsiness.

Suddenly the sound of music awoke him, and, opening his eyes, he found himself before the altar of the church of Lérins. When the stations were made and the divine offices were over, the monks, as usual, distributed the palms among the _Rominæ_. Boniface also approached with the others to receive his, and then retired to an obscure corner of the church, where he soon fell sound asleep. When he awoke he found himself once more in the prison where he had been confined by his master. The rest of the pilgrims from Oraison arrived three days after, and, not knowing the state of affairs, complimented the usurer on his kindness to his servant. He denied having given Boniface permission to go, and summoned him to his presence. The swineherd related with great simplicity what had happened to him. Garinus was at once astonished and affected by the account, and besought Boniface to give him the palm he had brought from the holy isle. Taking it reverently in his hands, he applied it to his eyes, and at once not only recovered his sight, but the eyes of his soul were likewise opened.

But to return to the history of the island. The abbey was secularized in 1788—some say on account of the luxuries and excesses of the monks. But the inventory shows how few luxuries they really had—not more than the simplest villagers now possess. The monks withdrew to their families. Not one was left to guard the graves of the martyrs and continue the prayers of so many ages. The last prior of Lérins, Dom Théodule Bon, died at his sister’s residence in Vallauris. The people of Cannes used to say of him: _Moussu lou Priour es Bouan dé noum et dé fach_—M. le Prieur is good by name and good by nature.

In 1791 the island was sold at public auction, and the purchaser’s daughter, who had been an actress, came here to reside. O isle of saints!... In 1856 Mr. Sims, an Anglican minister, bought it. He showed some respect for the ancient monuments, and had begun to restore the citadel when he died. The bishop of Fréjus bought it in 1859. Two bishops, several dignitaries of the church, and a number of priests came over to take possession of the island. A great crowd awaited them. The clergy (those of Cannes bearing the relics of St. Honorat) advanced toward the old church, chanting the mournful psalm, _Deus, venerunt gentes_, many verses of which were so particularly applicable. The walls so long profaned were blessed, and the crowd prostrated themselves while the Litany of Lérins was solemnly sung. Some agricultural brothers of the Order of St. Francis were established here for a time. On the eve of the feast of St. Caprais (St. Honorat’s spiritual guide) the bishop blessed the chapel of St. Porcaire and the Five Hundred Martyrs, which had been restored, and Mass was said amid the ruins of the old church of St. Honorat.

* * * * *

There are several places of great interest on the mainland, associated with the saints of Lérins, all of which we devoutly visited as a part of our pilgrimage. One is Cap Roux, at the western termination of the Bay of Cannes, always dear to the monks of the isle on account of the _baume_, or cave, on the western side of the cliff, inhabited for some time by St. Honorat after his return from the East, and still called by his name. The ascent to this grotto is rather dangerous, and at the foot was once an oratory where pilgrims stopped to pray before undertaking the ascent. They used to cry: “Sancte Maguncti!” perhaps because they associated the name of this saint of Lérins with the Provençal word _m’aganti_, as if they would say, _Saint I-cling-to_, as they seized hold of the sides of the cliff.

Denis Faucher, the monk, graved an inscription in Latin verse over the entrance to the Baume de St. Honorat, which may thus be rendered: “Reader, in Honorat, our father, thou wilt find an example of lofty virtue and reason to admire the wonderful gifts of God. Others visit the holy places and seek afar off the noble models they have not at home. The renown of Honorat renders sacred every place he approached, though now devoid of his presence. Behold this retreat, once almost inaccessible to the wild beasts, now rendered so famous by the holy bishop as to attract innumerable visitors from every land.” In the cave there has been for centuries an altar for celebrating the Christian mysteries. At the left is a well that rarely fails, even in the greatest drought. At the right is a hollow in the rock like the impress of the human form, called by the people the _Couche de St. Honorat_. Over it is also an inscription by the same monk: “Illustrious pontiff, from the height of heaven reveal thy august presence to him who seeks thy traces upon earth.”

Another cave in the side of the mount near the sea was inhabited for a time by St. Eucher, to whom his wife, Galla, came to bring food while he gave himself up to contemplation. An angel revealed to the people of Lyons where he lived concealed, and they sent messengers to ask him to be their bishop.

St. Armentaire, who was bishop of Embrun in the middle of the fifth century, being deposed by the council of Riez, retired to Cap Roux. It was he who slew the dragon that infested the neighborhood of Draguignan. The fame of his sanctity led to his being chosen bishop of Antibes, but his body was, after his death, brought back to Draguignan and placed in a church he himself had erected in honor of St. Peter. The concourse to his tomb was formerly very great, as we have seen in the case of the pilgrimage from Rians.

There were hermits at Cap Roux as late as the eighteenth century, and pilgrims used to go there in procession, chanting the litany of Lérins, to implore the cessation of some scourge. Now it is only visited from time to time by a solitary devotee, or some naturalist to study the flora and the formation of the rocks, who pauses awhile at the cave and drinks at the fountain.

About a league west of Cannes, above Cap Roux, is Mt. Arluc, which rises out of the plain of Laval. It belongs to the tertiary formation, and looks so artificial that it has often been regarded as a tumulus made by the Romans, who, according to tradition, had an intrenched camp here to protect the Aurelian road[168] that ran through the plain, as well as the galleys on the coast. After the submission of the province to the Roman domination a temple was built here in honor of Venus, who could not have desired a fairer shore, in sight of the very sea from which she sprang. Her altar was surrounded by trees to veil her unholy rites, and the mount took the name of _Ara-luci_—altar of the sacred wood—whence the name of Arluc. This consecrated grove was cut down by St. Nazaire, abbot of Lérins, who knew the importance of destroying these high places of the Gentiles. To him, too, the waves beneath were always whispering of love, but not profane love. They spoke of “love eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of the world or by the end of time, but ranging beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away.” And he set up an altar to the Infinite One, and beside the church built a monastery, which he peopled with holy maidens under the direction of Hélène, a princess of Riez. One of the first abbesses bore the name of Oratorie. It was to her St. Césaire of Arles addressed two of his essays: one on the qualities that should be possessed by those who have the direction of souls; the other on the text, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!”

About the year 677 St. Aygulph, abbot of Lérins, rebuilt or enlarged this monastery at the request of several noble ladies of the region, and, the house having perhaps been depopulated by the Saracens, a colony of nuns came here from Blois under the care of St. Angarisma. When the holy abbot was martyred, Angarisma, learning the fate of her spiritual father, went with the sisterhood to venerate his remains. The monks who had escaped described the sufferings and constancy of the martyrs, and showed their mangled remains. One of the nuns, named Glauconia, who was blind, applied the right arm of St. Aygulph to her eyes and at once recovered her sight. Whereupon the abbess begged for his body, but in vain. The arm which had restored Glauconia’s sight was given to her, however, and they carried it with them to Arluc. St. Aygulph is invoked in this region still, under the name of St. Aïgou, for diseases of the eye, and a statue of him is to be seen at Châteauneuf in the chapel of Notre Dame de Brusc.

The nuns of Arluc fled several times before the Saracens, but we read of the monastery in the tenth century, when St. Maxime, of the illustrious family of De Grasse, came here in search of Christian perfection. She was afterwards sent to found a house at Callian, where part of her remains are still preserved.

In the life of St. Honorat there is an interesting legend of one of the nuns of Arluc, named Cibeline, the daughter of Reybaud, a lord of Antibes. She had been married in early life, but lost her husband soon after, and was still renowned for her beauty when she became infected with leprosy. St. Honorat appeared to Reybaud in a dream and said to him: “Give me thy daughter as a bride.” He had the same vision three times, which at last so impressed him that he took Cibeline with him and went to Lérins to relate it to the holy abbot Porcaire. The latter at once comprehended its spiritual significance and said to Cibeline: “Wilt thou, out of love to God and devotion to St. Honorat, lead henceforth a pure life and take the sacred veil in the monastery of Arluc?” Cibeline then confessed this had been the earliest desire of her heart, and that she regarded her disease as the judgment of God for having violated the vow she had made in yielding to worldly persuasions and wedding the husband she had lost. St. Porcaire then took pure water, in which he plunged holy relics, and ordered her to bathe therein. She was instantly cured of her leprosy, and her father led her to Arluc and consecrated her to God.

Arluc probably took the name of St. Cassian, by which it is now more generally known, in the fourteenth century, when it fell under the jurisdiction of the abbey of St. Victor at Marseilles, which Cassian had founded. Nor is the name inappropriate for this mount that stands in sight of the places rendered sacred by St. Honorat and St. Eucher, for whom Cassian had so great an admiration as to cry in one of his books on the ascetic life dedicated to them: “O holy brothers! your virtues shine upon the world like great beacon-lights. Many saints will be formed by your example, but will scarcely be able to imitate your perfection.”

Cassian has been regarded as a saint in Provence, and the people of Cannes used to make a _romérage_, or pilgrimage, to the chapel that took his name at Arluc, on the 23d of July, the festival of St. Cassian.

When the Revolution arrived the republicans wished to sell the mount, and two hundred soldiers were sent to strip the chapel. The number was none too large, for at the news the people of Cannes sounded the tocsin and went in crowds to the rescue. The very women were armed. One in particular aimed her reaping-hook at the neck of the leader. They bore triumphantly away the relics and ornaments, but the chapel and land were sold some time after to nine men belonging to Cannes. St. Cassian, or Arluc, is still crowned with oaks, as in the time when Venus held sway there, though Bonaparte, when in the vicinity, had many of them cut down.

The monastery of Arluc gave its name to a village on the sea-shore at the mouth of the Siagne. This stream, in which the monks of Lérins once had the sole right to fish, derives its name from the Provençal word _saignos_ or _siagnos_, given to the cat-tails that grow so abundantly on its banks. On the Siagne is the hamlet of Mandelieu, on land which once belonged to St. Consortia, the daughter of St. Eucher. She gave her fortune to works of charity, and founded here a hospital under the invocation of St. Stephen. And there is a cape on the coast, near La Napoule, called Theoule, from another daughter of St. Eucher, named Tullia. When St. Eucher abandoned the world and retired to Lérins he took with him his two sons, Véran and Salonius, leaving his wife, Galla, and her two daughters on his domains near La Napoule, where Tullia, who died young, was buried.

Such are the memories associated with the isles of Lérins, for many of which we are indebted to the interesting work by M. l’Abbé Alliez. We made a second visit to St. Honorat before leaving Cannes, to take a farewell look at the old donjon on the shore, the holy palm in the cloister, and the ruined chapels. When we left the isle several of the white-robed monks accompanied us to the shore, and, on looking back from our swiftly-receding boat, we saw two of them still standing at the foot of a huge cross among the sad pines....

“O satis nunquam celebrata tellus! Dulce solamen, requiesque cordis! Cœlitum sedes procul a profani Turbine vulgi!”

—O land that can never be sufficiently praised! Sweet consolation, repose of the heart! Haven sheltered from the tempests of a profane world!

IN RETREAT.

“Break, my heart, and let me die! Burst with sorrow, drown with love!... Lord, if Thou the boon deny, Thou wilt not the wish reprove.” ...

Whence that piercing, burning ray, Seem’d to reach me from the light Where, behind the Veil, ’tis day— Where the Blessèd walk by sight?

Thine, ’twas thine, O Sacred Heart! Mercy-sent—that I might see Something of the all Thou art, Something of the naught in me.

Ah! I saw Thy patient love Watching o’er me year on year; Guarding, guiding, move for move— Always faithful, always near:

Saw Thy pardon’s ceaseless flow Evermore my soul bedew; Washing scarlet white as snow,[169] Sere and blight to morning-new:

Saw this self—how weak, how base!— Still go sinning, blundering, on; Thankless with its waste of grace, Wearied with the little done.

Then I murmur’d: “O my King! What are all my acts of will? Each best effort can but bring Failure and confusion still!

“This poor heart, which ought to burn, Smoulders feebly; yet may dare Offer Thine one last return— One fond, fierce, atoning prayer?

“Let it break, this very hour— Burst with sorrow, drown with love! For if Thou withhold thy power, Thou wilt not the wish reprove.” ...

Pass’d that moment: but, as fall Lovers’ whispers, answer’d He; “_Daily_ die[170]—with thy Saint Paul. Die to self—and live to Me.”

SEPTEMBER, 1877.

PREACHERS ON THE RAMPAGE.[171]

Men who are by no means optimists are apt unconsciously to allow themselves to get a dim impression that the world is becoming better, more kindly, more charitable, and that we are approximating a time when, by the pure influences of increased material appliances and “well-regulated human nature,” the hatreds and strifes both of nations and sects will have measurably ceased. The delusion is a pleasant one, but it is none the less a delusion, and will not endure the slightest contact with the sharp edge of fact. In this nineteenth century, notwithstanding the peace society, more human beings have lost their lives by war than in any other since the advent of our Lord. In this, the freest, the most prosperous, and, so far as the masses are concerned, the best-instructed of all Christian countries, we have but had breathing time since one of the bloodiest civil wars on record. In the lull (protracted by war and its results) many Catholics seem to have become in like manner possessed with an undefined notion that the people who made the Penal Laws and executed them have become imbued with a milder spirit toward the church; that Know-nothingism is a thing of the past, the virtue of the cry of “No Popery” dissipated, and the fell spirit of the Native American party utterly extinct.

Those who think thus will see cause to awake from their dream on examining the volume whose title heads this article. In October, 1876, a Joint Special Committee of three senators and three members of the Lower House sat in San Francisco for the purpose of procuring testimony in regard to the advisability of restricting or abolishing the immigration of Mongolians to this country—a question which has been for some time exciting at least a considerable section of the inhabitants of our Pacific coast. Whether truly or falsely we cannot say, but the impression is produced that the Catholic, and more particularly the Irish Catholic, population of California has ranged itself in hostility to the Chinese. If this be true we should be very sorry for it, knowing full well that by any such action foreigners of all sorts, more especially Catholics, are simply supplying whips of scorpions with which they will be lashed on the outburst of the next campaign (under whatsoever name it may be known) conducted on principles of hostility to them. On its face it looks altogether likely that so plausible a movement as this opposition to the Chinese should take with a laboring class not very well posted in the principles of political economy, and we know that the large majority of white laboring people are in San Francisco Catholic, while certainly a great many of them are Irishmen. Their priests are too few and have too much to do to give them lectures on Say, Smith, and Ricardo; and it is no part of their duty, still less would it be a pleasure, to instruct them how they shall view purely political issues, whether local or national. Repeating, then, that we cannot but deem it a terrible blunder for their own sakes, and utterly against their own real interests, that these people should so range themselves against the influx of the Chinese, we have certainly no right to dictate to them how they shall vote or on what side they shall exert any influence they may have; and we must add that they seem to err (if error there be) in very good company, and plenty of it, since both political parties have in their national platforms endorsed the views said to be held by the Irish Catholics of California, as did also both Republicans and Democrats in the last campaign of the Golden State.

This report contains the sworn testimony on the subject at issue of one hundred and thirty witnesses; but we only call attention to the evidence of some of the preachers, and that, too, not on the general merits of their testimony or concerning Chinese immigration at all, but on account of the Vatinian hatred which they have gone out of the way to display towards Catholics, and the deadly venom they exhibit towards Irishmen especially. For just as women are sometimes most bloodthirsty during a war, far outdoing in rancor the combatants themselves, so would preachers seem to be the least charitable of the human species—to have, as Dean Swift well remarked, “just enough religion to make them hate, and not enough to make them love, one another.” The first of these worthy representatives of Christian charity and disseminators of the truth is a certain Rev. O. W. Loomis, in the employ of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, who takes occasion to say: “_Unlike some others who come to America, as we have been told (and who manage to get to the ballot-boxes very soon), they [the Chinese] are not sworn to support any foreign hierarchy and foreign ecclesiastical magnate who claims the whole earth as his dominion_” (p. 417). While the English of this sentence is very far from clear, yet the animus of the whole is so patent that he must needs be a very stupid fellow indeed who does not perceive that Catholics are aimed at. Whether Mr. Loomis “_has been informed_” that Catholics come to America, or that they reach the ballot-boxes early, or that they are sworn to support a foreign hierarchy, or that the Chinese are not under such obligations, is far from being as limpid as “bog-water,” and it is to be hoped that, in his instructions to his neophytes, he seldom degenerates into such want of perspicuity; still more would it be desirable that he should confine himself more strictly in his usual ministrations to the truth and to matters within his own knowledge than he does when before the committee and on oath.

It is distinctly _false_ that Catholic foreigners, in coming to this country, make a business of getting to the ballot-boxes any sooner than the law allows them to do. It is equally mendacious, if he means to assert the same thing of any one set of Catholics as a specific nationality. If the statement were as true as it is false, scurrilous, and malicious, that “man of God” could not possibly know more than a few individual instances, and could not predicate the fact as true of a whole nationality, any more than the writer (who happens to have known in his life four instances in which young Americans voted without having attained their majority) would be justified in slanderously describing the young men of the United States as in the habit of perjuring themselves in order to anticipate the right of elective franchise. But our friend, though on oath, never blinks—in fact, he has, while on oath, gone out of his way to drag in the above statement, and is only prevented from taking the bit in his teeth and careering madly over the whole plain of anti-Catholic bigotry by being checked peremptorily with the information furnished him by Representative Piper: “_That is entirely foreign to the matter at issue._”

As to the assertion that Catholics swear allegiance to the Pope in any sense that would interfere with their fealty to any temporal rule or government, its absurdity has been so often, so ably, and so clearly demonstrated that it is only persons of the third sex who at this day pretend to believe it. We will give even Mr. Loomis credit for appreciating the distinction between the loyalty which his people owe to the confession of faith, their synods and presbyteries, and that which they owe to the government of the land. We wish we could in conscience credit him with as much candor as ability and knowledge in the premises; for a great deal of his testimony proves him to be by no means one of those persons whom we pass by as being entitled to a “fool’s pardon.” Did it never occur to this man, and to others of his way of thought or expression, that this oath or obligation of two hundred million Catholics must be of very little avail—might, in short, quite as well not have been taken—if its only result is to land the Pope here in the fag end of the nineteenth century, in the Vatican, without an acre of land over which he can exercise temporal jurisdiction, while Catholics all over the world, with the numbers, the power, and the means to restore him, if they had but the will, lie supinely by, not making a move, either as governments or as individuals, in his behalf? That bugbear is too transparent for use; people can no longer be scared by it; it is high time to excogitate another and a more plausible one, if you are still bent on war with the Pope. For our own part, we would recommend the propriety of a change; but that change should be to the culture of Christian charity, the practice of the golden rule, not forgetting the commandment which people of Mr. Loomis’ persuasion call the _ninth_. Ah! Mr. Loomis, hatred springs apace fast enough among men without any necessity for its culture on the part of professing religious teachers.

Again, the same professor of the doctrine that “the earth is the Lord’s,” that “we are all his children,” and that “we are all one in Christ,” announces: “_I was a Native American on principle, and I believe that America should belong to Americans_” (p. 464). This is bad, in our opinion, but it is English, it is intelligible, and it is no doubt true as an utterance of his individual sentiment. The set of principles referred to have twice been adjudged by the voice of the American people, and condemned on both occasions as anti-American, opposed to the genius and traditions of our people, and subversive of the aims which made us one of the foremost nations of the earth. Mr. Loomis, or any other man, has an inherent right to believe in them, if he so list; but we question much his discretion in dragging his enunciation of political principles into his sworn evidence on the Chinese question, and we doubt much whether a knowledge that such is his belief would be calculated to enhance the regard of the Chinese, among whom he states that he is an evangelist, for either the philanthropy or the hard sense of their coryphæus.

That there may be no doubt about the intensity of his virulence against the church, he returns to the charge; and, strangely enough, it is the same committeeman that now goads him on who, on the previously-mentioned reference to foreign hierarchs, stopped his mouth by stating that his opinions on that subject were not at issue in the examination.

“_Ques._ You spoke about these Irish as people coming here who have sworn allegiance to some foreign potentate. To whom have you reference?

“_Ans._ I refer to the Roman Catholics.

“_Ques._ Do you, then, think Chinese immigration less dangerous to our institutions than that of Roman Catholics?

“_Ans._ I think so; decidedly less. The Chinese do not purpose to intermeddle with our religious rights. They have no hierarchy. They are not sworn to support any religious system. They are mixed up at home. They have no one religion. They may be Mahometans.

“_Ques._ You think they are less dangerous than European Christians of a certain persuasion?

“_Ans._ I think they are less dangerous than Roman Catholics.

“_Ques._ Are they less dangerous than Europeans?

“_Ans._ Whether they be Europeans or of any other nationality, providing they are Romanists.

“_Ques._ Suppose the Chinese should become Catholics; then they would become dangerous?

“_Ans._ I think so.

“_Ques._ The Roman Catholics are not Christians, then?

“_Ans._ They are Christians, but not Protestant Christians. They are Roman Catholic Christians. I make a wide distinction between Protestants and Romanists” (p. 469).

Thus this man, professing himself an ambassador of Christ, deliberately puts himself on record as holding that pagans who know nothing of Christ’s atonement, and who, in his phrase, worship idols, are preferable to those who have had invoked upon them the name of God in baptism, who believe in the Divinity, bow at the name and hope to be saved by the merits of Jesus. Could the spirit of the most malevolent _odium theologicum_ go further? Would such an assertion be believed of any ignorant communist, much less of one who claims to be a minister of Christ, were it not contained in print in the report of a Congressional committee? If the man believes so little in the influence of the religion of the Saviour whom he preaches as his statement would indicate, it is his duty at once to resign, and relieve the society which supports him of the burden of a salary which he cannot conscientiously earn. “Believe,” said the apostle, “in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved!” “Not enough,” says Rev. Loomis; “you must be additionally a Protestant, or a belief in the Saviour will profit you no whit.” Has any man yet ever had a clear definition of that term, “_Protestant_”? Thomas à Kempis and St. Vincent of Paul, St. Augustine and St. Charles Borromeo, the glorious cohort of martyrs and confessors, would be dangerous citizens of the United States compared with Ah Sin and Fan Chow! This is certainly information of an unlooked-for kind, and the man competent to impart it does not usually hide his light in the dreary pages of a Congressional committee’s report. He says himself that he has been a missionary since 1844. By consequence he must have attained to a good age, and the great wonder to us is that a man of such astoundingly original views has not heretofore made his mark upon an age always anxious “to see or hear some new thing.”

The assertion that Catholics purpose to interfere with the rights of Protestants or other unbelievers, implied in the statement that the Chinese have no such intention, is both too indefinite and too futile for discussion. Catholics in all countries, but more especially in English-speaking countries, have for the past two hundred years had all they could manage to be allowed to follow the dictates of their own faith, free of legal pains and penalties, to have any time to spare for concocting plans against the civil or religious rights of others. In the only English-speaking state that they founded they established liberty of conscience, which statute was abolished by the friends of Mr. Loomis just as soon as they had the power.

But Mr. Loomis assigns reasons in favor of the superior desirability of pagan over Christian immigration, and the prominent ones seem to be that they have essentially no religion—or rather, that they have fifty; that they have no hierarchy; that, in fact, they do not support any religious system—to sum it up, that they are _mixed up at home_! How ill does not the adversary of mankind brook the distinctive unity of the church of God! Like Pharao’s magicians, everything else he can counterfeit or imitate; but the unity of the church is too much for him. Common sense teaches the most ignorant, that if our Saviour founded any church at all he founded _one_, and not four hundred jarring and jangling conventicles. Probably this is the gravamen. The Catholic, strong in the oneness of his church, and stanch in the conviction that everything not of it must be a sham emanating from the father of lies, will not be perverted by Mr. Loomis, charm he never so wisely; while, on the other hand, a lot of pagans, especially of pagans who were “considerably mixed up at home,” might furnish grist for Mr. Loomis’ peculiar gospel mill, with due toll for the miller. As with the apostle before, so this preacher now differs with the Saviour, who said and thought that there should be “_one fold and one Shepherd_.” _Absit blasphemia!_ but the sects all differ widely both from the Master, his apostles, and the church, with which he promised to abide for ever.

Lest, however, any Catholic should lay to his soul the flattering unction that his American birth might eliminate him from the general unfitness of Catholics for citizenship in the United States or from an entire appreciation of the institutions of his native country, Mr. Loomis is very careful to inform us that it does not matter whether they be Europeans or _of any other nationality; if they are Catholics_, they are not so fit for immigration to this country, still less for the exercise of citizenship, as if they were “_heathen Chinese_.” Here is a man who declaims against Catholics and denounces them for purposing to interfere with the rights of those who disagree with them in religious views, and in the same breath argues the unfitness of a population of possibly nine millions for citizenship in his own country, they being at the time all residents, mostly citizens and largely natives, merely because they belong to the old religion—the religion of Charles Carroll of Carrollton. “Resolved,” said the meeting, “that the earth belongs to the saints.” “Resolved,” added the same body, “that we are the saints.” Did it ever by chance occur to our friend of decidedly original, if limited, intellect that Senator Casserly lives in his own town, and is looked upon, with some reason, as a representative man, very well posted upon American institutions, and that it would be very hard to persuade the people of the United States of any latent disability on the part of that senator to appreciate or support them? Mr. Loomis makes a great distinction between a Catholic and a Protestant, and no doubt the difference is considerable; but the chasm is by no means as great as that which separates the Christian from the bigot, and it is hard for us to put Mr. Loomis in the ranks of the former. _Abeat_ Loomis.

Rev. W. W. Brier, after describing himself as “a Presbyterian minister by profession, who makes his living by raising fruit,” proceeds thus:

“_Ques._ Would a reasonable restriction of Chinamen be an advantage or not?

“_Ans._ If a restriction is to be made in respect to China, it ought to be made upon people who are far worse for us than Chinese. I would trade a certain nationality off for Chinamen until there was not one of the stock left in trade” (p. 575).

Other portions of his evidence show that he herein refers to the Irish as inferior to the Chinese. How he regards the latter is shown by his response to the suggestion of a possible danger resulting from the presence of sixty thousand Chinamen in the State, without any women of their kind, viz.:

“_Ans._ The fact is, they are laborers, and I regard them very much in the light I do any other thing we want to use—horses, mules, or machinery” (p. 577).

When asked if he would be willing to give the Chinese a chance to overrun California, he says:

“_Ans._ Why not? As well as to give the Irish a chance! My real opinion is that we would be better off without any more foreigners (p. 580).

“_Ques._ Are you quite willing there shall be no laws to prevent this State from becoming a Chinese province?

“_Ans._ My opinion is that there is a great deal worse class of foreigners in our land, who have all the rights of citizenship and everything else” (p. 581).

That a man saturated to the heart’s core with such bitter prejudices against any portion of God’s children should have, under any circumstances, engaged in the work of saving souls may seem strange, and we shall not here go into the explication, which would detain us from our subject; but it is by no means surprising that such a person should fail of success as an evangelist and devote his time and prejudices to fruit-raising. He describes himself as a successful fruit-grower, and we have good authority for believing that “no man can serve two masters.” Not that he has given up preaching by any means; for he tells of his ministering in the vineyard, which means with people of his stamp delivering on Sunday an essay or so something after the fashion of a screed from the _Spectator_, and taking leave of all practical religion till the next Sunday. Of the ministrations of the Catholic priest—going in and out daily among his parishioners, preparing this one for death, comforting that one bereaved, advising and warning the vicious, alleviating want and encouraging all—he knows as little as his own mules. It appears by his evidence that he hires at times as many as sixty-five or seventy Chinamen, and, as he confessedly regards them in the same light as so much machinery, it is by no means to be wondered at that he should prefer men who will submit to be so regarded. The Chinaman possibly may, certainly the Irishman will not; and, upon the whole, we should think very much less of an Irishman if he had proved a favorite with such a specimen fossil as Rev. Brier. The Irishman is quick, full of life, strong, prone to resent an insult, courageous, and of all men least likely to allow himself to be trampled upon, ignored, or regarded in the same light as the mules and horses about the place. Further, it is more than likely that, in an encounter of wit with an Irishman, Rev. Mr. Brier would not come out first; and it is a dead certainty that Brier’s view of religion would appeal as little to the Irishman’s sympathies as it probably does to those of the reader. Taking, then, everything into account, we are not surprised that this person should not like Irishmen, but we do wonder that he should not have the grace to conceal the hypocrisy involved between his own ostensible profession on the one side, and his utter disregard of the dignity of humanity, of the value of the human soul, on the other. Under such shepherds it is no wonder that the flock becomes scattered, and, while we do not wish well to Protestantism at any time (for individual Protestants we entertain the most kindly feelings), it would be impossible for us to wish the system worse than that the watchmen upon the walls of the fortress founded by Luther and Calvin may all have the osseous heart, the hypocritical profession, and the eocene brain of Rev. Mr. Brier. Calvinism is disintegrating very rapidly, in all conscience; it needs but a few more years of the ministrations of such reverend gentlemen as this to give it the final _quietus_.

Why, even Chinamen have in this century been touched by the progressive spirit of the age. They emigrate, are found in California, the Sandwich Islands, Australia, Singapore, etc. They have opened their ports to foreigners, and are sending their young men to be educated both in the United States and in Europe. And here we have the Rev. Mr. Brier—who would build up in these United States a Chinese wall of exclusion, who would have Japan and China return to their ancient policy of non-intercourse, and who, if he had his way, would cause this great country to join them—who says deliberately that the United States would be “better off without any more foreigners.” He is a credit to the college that educated him, the State that bred him, and the religion he professes! _Exeat_ Brier.

Rev. S. V. Blakeslee is an orthodox Congregational minister, acting now as editor of the _Pacific_, which he describes as “the oldest religious newspaper on the coast.” Contrary to the former two ministers, he is bitterly opposed to Chinamen, and is only less rancorous against them than he is against the hated Irish Catholics. We give parts of his examination, omitting much that would but lead us over ground already trodden:

“_Ques._ Is there any other class of foreign labor that you think has a tendency to render labor disreputable?

“_Ans._ Yes, I mean all whom we regard as inferior; to whom we consign the work—all who are really inferior.

“_Ques._ What race would you put in that category?

“_Ans._ If I were to mention names, I believe the Americans generally regard the Irish as very much inferior; yet I believe if the priests were out of the way, if Romanism were out of the way, the Irish would be equal to any people on earth. As it is, they are inferior in intelligence, inferior in morality” (p. 1035).

In another portion of his testimony he complains that the people of his town (Oakland), with forty thousand inhabitants, have by no means the supply of Congregational and other Protestant churches which in the East would be considered necessary, and is asked:

“_Ques._ There are many Catholics, are there not?

“_Ans._ Oh! Catholics can hardly be said to go to church. They do not go to listen to a sermon; they do not go to get instructed (p. 1037).

“_Ques._ Do the Irish assimilate with the American people?

“_Ans._ They do, if they are Protestant; but the priests mean to keep them separate, and mean to keep them as a power in America under their control” (p. 1041).

As to his knowledge of Catholic practice and belief, the following will suffice, viz.:

“_Ques._ Have you as much prejudice against an American or German Catholic as against an Irish Roman Catholic?

“_Ans._ If you ask, is my judgment more in approval of an American or German than of an Irish Catholic, I should say it was, because I do not find that the priest can control the German as he can the Irish Catholic.

“_Ques._ Does the priest control them for evil or for good?

“_Ans._ I think that a great many priests teach them that the end justifies the means, and that to tell a lie for mother church is honest.

“_Ques._ Did you ever hear one preach that?

“_Ans._ Well, they were so near it—it’s all the same, probably; but they did not use those words.

“_Ques._ Have you heard them preach?

“_Ans._ No, sir; they don’t preach much. They will stand a long time, going through a performance, and ring a little bell for a man to rise and kneel down, and then they will rise up again, but they don’t preach much!”

The reader will observe the marked contempt with which those to whom _we consign the work_ are regarded as being _really inferior_. Why, in the eyes of this exponent of Christian doctrine and republican practice, labor, and those who do it, are quite as disreputable as used to be, in their own region, a class known as _poor white trash_. Now, from the conditions of this world in which we are placed, there can never, by any possibility, come a time (as there never has hitherto been one) in which it will not be incumbent on two-thirds of earth’s inhabitants to earn their _bread in the sweat of their brow_. It is God’s decree, man’s destiny, and a large proportion of the one-third who in any age of the world have managed to exempt themselves from the consequence of the _fiat_ of the Omnipotent in respect to labor, have done so by taking advantage of the honesty or simplicity of their fellow-men. They or their ancestors must have converted to their own use more than their share of the soil, the common heritage of the human race and the source of all wealth. There are not wanting at this day those who consider the laws which perpetuated the right to such original seizures unjust, and it is just such despisers of the laborer and appropriators of his work as this reverend gentleman who unwittingly give the greatest occasion for discontent to those who fancy themselves aggrieved by the existing condition of things. We are neither communists nor agrarians, but we see that, even in this happy country, it will be very possible to convert the laboring class into such by subjecting them to the scorn of such men as this witness, causing them to feel that they are regarded as really inferior, and incidentally exciting the envy which the sight of ranches of seventy-six thousand acres of land in the hands of one individual is calculated to produce. Such contempt of the laborer is un-American, to say nothing of its entire lack of Christianity, and to us it seems that no men of any nationality or religion could be so injurious to the real interests of any country as those entertaining it. We do not say that we would _trade_ the Rev. Mr. Blakeslee _for a Chinaman_, but we hope and believe that there are few Americans of his way of thinking in regard to labor, and trust that soon there will be none of _that stock_ left. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence must have long ceased to be remembered, and Christianity will be in her last throes, ere such views shall obtain; and we have confidence in the permanence of this republic, with an abiding faith that God will be with his church.

We will not bandy words with Mr. Blakeslee as to his opinion that Americans generally regard the Irish as _inferior in intelligence and morality_. It is one of those lump statements which impulsive or prejudiced men sometimes make about a whole nation in the heat of conversation, but which seldom find their way into sworn testimony. We are American to the manner born, and we not only do not believe the fact, but, so far as both reading and intercourse with our countrymen have enabled us to form an opinion, we should assert the direct contrary. There is, we well know, about all our large cities a class corresponding to the “hoodlums” of San Francisco (and we are sorry to add that they are nearly all Americans) who fancy that their mere accidental birth upon this soil has not only elevated them above all other nationalities, but raised them above the necessity of work. We can lay no stress on the opinions of this class. By all other Americans not influenced by hatred of the church, and, indeed, by many who do not regard her favorably, we have always heard remarked (and statistics will prove) the almost entire immunity of the Irish from the crime of fœticide; their large generosity to their friends and relatives, as proved by the proportionately larger amounts of money yearly transmitted by them to the old country; their unconquerable industry; the chastity of their women, though, by their condition in life, more exposed to temptation than perhaps any other body of females in the world. It is denied by nobody that where a soldier is wanted the Irishman is always on hand, and that he compares very favorably with the soldier of any other nation. As to intelligence, Mr. Blakeslee must surely be poking some mild fun at us under the sanctity of his oath. If he had ever tried to get the advantage of the most illiterate Irishman in conversation, if he had ever heard or read a true account of the result to any one who did so, he would not, for shame’s sake, appear making the wild assertion that the Irishman is deficient in intelligence. The common experience of any local community in the United States will at once brand the statement with its proper stamp, for which three letters are quite sufficient.

But here comes the real gist of Mr. Blakeslee’s charge of immorality and stupidity against the countrymen of Swift and Burke, of Wolfe Tone and O’Connell, of Moore and John of Tuam. “If,” says he, “it were not for Romanism, they would be in course of time a very excellent people.” In other words, if they would cease to be what they are, if they would sit under the ministrations of Rev. Blakeslee and his like, if they would now give up the religion from which centuries of persecution and penal laws have failed to dissever them, they might finally come to have as thorough-paced a contempt for labor and as strong a belief in the inferiority of the laborer as this reverend gentleman himself. “Paddy,” says Mr. Blakeslee, “you are a Papist, you are an idolater, you are very immoral, and you have very little sense. Will you be good enough now to become a Congregationalist?” The Irishman’s blood boils, fire flashes from his eye, the church militant is roused in him, and away runs Rev. Blakeslee, more than ever convinced of the inferiority of the mean Irish and their imperviousness to the charms of Protestantism!

Among the ephemeral sects of the day, depending, as they do, on the temporary whims or idiosyncrasies of the individuals who “run them,” there is apt to arise a fashion in morality, so that it is something not unlike fashion in ladies’ dress—very different this season from what it was the last. Now, these sects are loud and noisy, making up in vehemence for what they lack in numbers, logic, and authority. Just now, and for some years past, the sin which it is the fashion to decry to the neglect of all others is that of drunkenness, which the church has always held to be a great scandal amongst men and a sin against the Almighty. But, while the church has received no new light on the subject, the various sectaries have erected “drinking” into the one typical, the sole crying vice, the incorporation of all the other sins. A man is now practically “a moral man,” provided he does not use liquor; and no other crime, short of murder, is, in the eyes of the Protestant community, so damning as is addictedness to drink. There is no doubt but that, in the early part of this century, liquor was drunk by the Irish to too great an extent. There is just as little doubt that a great change for the better has come over the Irish in this regard, and that the good work is still going on. But the Irish at no time exceeded the Scotch in their consumption of liquor, nor did they ever equal either the Danes or Swedes, both thoroughly Protestant nations. But if you give a man a bad name you may as well hang him; and the same holds good of a nation. It suited the sectarian temperance orators to select the Irish as the “shocking example” among nations, and falsely to attribute the exaggerated drunkenness which they represented as then existing to the influence of the church. Such a cry, once well set going from Exeter Hall and the various Ebenezer chapels, is not easily quelled; and as it is much easier for most men to take their opinions ready made than to frame them for themselves, there does remain on the minds of a large number of people a lurking distrust of the sobriety of the individual Irishman, and a general belief that drunkenness is his peculiar and besetting national vice. The statistics of the quantity of ardent spirits consumed in Ireland since the year 1870, as compared with the quantities used in England, Scotland, or Wales, will convince any one who desires to know the truth; and we are not writing for those who are content to defame a people by the dishonest repetition of a false cry. These tables prove that, man for man, the consumption referred to is in Ireland not so much as in Scotland by over three gallons, in England by nearly two gallons, and in Wales by a little less than in England. So long, however, as Sweden overtops the consumption of the highest of them by the annual amount of two and a half gallons per man, and Catholic Ireland holds the lowest rank as a consumer of ardent spirits, we have no hope that it will “suit the books” of sectarian temperance agitators to call attention to the facts. It is much easier to defame than to do justice, and by this craft many people nowadays are making a livelihood. Yet this false charge of a vice which betrays by no means the blackheartedness involved in many others—which, bad as it is, is by no means so heinous as defrauding the laborer of his hire, swindling the poor of their savings, watering stocks, accepting bribes, etc., etc., and which is not even mentioned in the decalogue—is the only one that could at any time have been charged with a decent show of plausibility against the Irish as a nation, or against the individual Irishmen whom we have in this country. We ourselves must admit that we thought there was some truth in it, till we searched the statistical tables to find out the facts, and we here make to the Irish people the _amende honorable_ for having misjudged them on the strength of the cry of sectarian demagogues.

Going to church can, in the mind of Mr. Blakeslee, mean only one thing—_i.e._, going to hear a sermon—and so he says that “_Catholics can hardly be said to go to church_.” Certainly the prime object of a Catholic in going to church is not _to listen to a sermon_, nor should it be so. It is hardly worth while to attempt to enlighten a man like Mr. Blakeslee, who himself habitually sheds light from both pulpit and press; but if we are to take the knowledge he seems to possess of the Catholic Church as a specimen of the information he diffuses on other points, what rare ideas must not his hearers and readers attain of matters and things in general! Yet he is a man who professes to have made a theological course, which should involve not only the study of the doctrines and practises of his own sect, but also, to some slight extent, of the remaining sects of Protestantism, to say nothing of the church on which two hundred million Christians rest their hopes of salvation. He knows no more of the celebration of the Blessed Eucharist in the Church of Rome than to describe it as “_going through a performance and ringing a little bell for a man to rise and kneel down_”; and yet the fellow does not hesitate to announce what is the doctrine and what the practice of the church—nay, to hold himself forth as a champion against her tenets, as though he were divinely commissioned to instruct thereon. To see ignorance is at all times unpleasant; blatant ignorance combined with assumption of knowledge is doubly nauseous; but the supereminent degree of loathing is only excited when ignorance or conceit of knowledge elevates itself into the chair of the spiritual guide and denounces what it in no whit understands. _Be these thy gods, O Israel?_ Surely it is not to hear the lucubrations of men of this stamp that any sane people would go to church. We can only wish to the sheep of such a pastor increase of knowledge, decrease of prejudice, and an enlarged ability to tell truth on the part of their shepherd! We repeat that Catholics do not go to church primarily or solely to hear a sermon. But they do go there to join in spirit at the celebration of the divine Sacrifice, to pray to God for grace to assist them through life, to make and strengthen good resolutions, and to obey the command of the church. We all believe that the devout hearing of one Mass is far more valuable than the hearing of all the sermons ever delivered or printed since the sermon on the Mountain of Beatitudes; and we lay no stress whatever on the best formulæ of words ever strung together by the ingenuity even of the most pious and learned of mere men, when compared with the expiatory sacrifice of Christ’s body and blood, instituted by him and celebrated, not merely commemorated, by the priest to whom he has given the power. Should it ever happen—and as the mercy of God is infinite, and his ways past finding out, it is not impossible—that this poor deluded man should be brought to a knowledge of the truth, with what shame and confusion of face would he not read his ignorant and impudent travesty of the worship of God in his church!

If there be, as there doubtless are, other Protestants who get their instruction about Catholics from Mr. Blakeslee and his like, and who believe with this witness that the _priests mean to keep them_ (the Catholics) _as a power in America_ under their (the priests’) control, it would not be, and is not, worth our while to attempt to argue the point with such. They will so believe, like the relatives of Dives, though one rose from the dead to confute them. Ephraim is joined to his idols; let him alone! But we appeal to the Catholic voters of this country, of American or foreign birth, to answer: Has your bishop or parish priest ever undertaken to dictate to you how you should vote? Has your vote, on whatever side given, interfered in the slightest degree with your status in the church? Do you know of a single instance in which one or the other of these things has taken place? We cannot lay down a fairer gauge. If these things take place they cannot occur without the knowledge of those among whom they are done and upon whom they are practised. They are Americans, and it is a free country. Long ere this would the country have rung with the proof, had any such been forthcoming. Mr. Blakeslee’s lying charge meant, if it meant anything, that Catholics were to be kept apart as a political power; for neither we nor any other Catholic desires or hopes otherwise than that the church, _as a religious body_, shall, till the end of time, be kept separate and apart from all the sects of Protestantism, which we believe to be heresy and schism.

One would naturally always rather give an adversary the credit of having honestly mistaken the facts than be obliged to consider him a wilful slanderer and falsifier. But there are circumstances in which the assertion made is so patently false, or has been so often thoroughly refuted, that, though the heart would fain take refuge in the former course, the brain refuses to accept any but the latter. Such a case occurs where Mr. Blakeslee says that “_a great many priests teach them that the end justifies the means, ... that to tell a lie for mother church is honest_.” Every Catholic who has learned his catechism knows that this is not so. We believe that _he_ knew it was not so when he said it, but that his own innate malevolence against the church, and the spirit of the father of lies speaking through him, compelled him to the utterance of this vile slander. For which great sin may God forgive him: he stands in sore need of it.

But after all, if Satan is so easily caught on a cross-examination as he on this occasion allowed his servant to be, we need not stand in much dread of his lies. The same man whose lips are not yet dry from saying _on oath_ that the priests teach their people to tell lies, when asked if he ever heard any single priest so teach, shuffles out of it thus—his own words need no comment from us:

“_Ans._ Well, they were so near it; it’s all the same, _probably_! They didn’t use those words!

“_Ques._ Have you ever heard them preach?

“_Ans._ _No, sir!_

We, on the contrary, think that it was not all the same “_probably_,” and heartily thank his satanic majesty for his negligence in failing to inspirit his servant with the knowledge that, in order to be believed, in swearing as to what priests preach in their sermons, it is necessary to be able also to swear that the witness has heard at least one such sermon. _Valeat_ Blakeslee.

Other preachers testified; and when the question arose as to Catholic foreigners, more especially Irish Catholic, all betrayed the cloven hoof, though some veiled their hatred in much more seemly words than did others. It had been our intention to examine their testimony, in so far as it touched the church, _seriatim_; but further reflection induces us to believe that from these few pages the reader can learn sufficiently the depth of the ignorance and the extent of the hatred of these blind leaders of the blind. If the reward in heaven be exceeding great to those whom all men shall hate, revile, and despitefully use, surely the glory of Catholics, and of Catholic Irishmen especially, will be great in the next world; for certainly they are not loved of men in this.

A LITTLE SERMON.

FROM “THE LITTLE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS.”

The Poor One of Assisi trod one day Bevagna’s road, and, praying by the way—

His heart seraphic, like the choirs above, Filled with the sweetness born of heavenly love—

Lifting his eyes, that loved the earth’s fair face, He saw, thick gathered in a bosky place,

A host of birds that flitted to and fro, Filling the boughs with twittering murmur low.

“Wait here, my brothers,” fell in gentle speech; “Unto this multitude needs must I preach:

“Here by the wayside, good Masseo, bide Till I these little birds have satisfied.”

Into the field he passed, the flowers among, Where, on the bending stems, the songsters swung.

Gathered the wingèd things about his feet, Dropped from the boughs amid the grasses sweet:

Reverent dropt down to listen to God’s word, Silenced their song that his Poor One be heard.

Touching with his gray robe their eager wings, St. Francis softly stilled their flutterings.

Sedate they sat with crested heads alert, The near ones nestling in their brother’s skirt.

“My little birds, ye owe deep gratitude To God, who has your forms with life imbued,

“And ever in all places should ye praise Your Maker, who in love keeps you always,

“Since by His hand to you is freedom given To fly where’er ye will, on earth, in heaven:

“Since from his strong and loving hand ye hold Your double garments guarding you from cold:

“Since, that no evil blight fall on your race, He gave in Noe’s ark your sires a place.

“And unto him deep gratitude ye owe For this pure air whence life itself doth flow.

“And then ye sow not, neither do ye reap, Yet God for you doth plenteous harvest keep;

“The streams He gives you, and the limpid spring Where ye may drink of waters freshening;

“He gives the hills and valleys for your rest, The great-armed trees where each may make his nest.

“And, since ye cannot spin nor sew, his care Weaves the soft robes ye and your fledglings wear.

“How much he loves that doth so richly give! Praise him, my little birds, all days ye live!

“So keep ye well from sin of thanklessness, And God keep you, whom let all creatures bless!”

Bowed all the little birds their heads to earth, Oped wide their bills, and sang with holy mirth

Their _Deo gratias_ when St. Francis ceased, Yet rose not till his hand their wings released

With Christian cross signed in the happy air, Giving the songsters leave to scatter there.

Softly, so blessed, the grateful birds up-soared And marvellous music in their flight outpoured:

Looked not at earth, nor him they left behind, Parting in ways the holy cross had signed.

Singing they cleft the quarters of the sky— Type of St. Francis’ mission wide and high:

Type of his little ones who nothing own, Whose humble trust is in their Lord alone—

So nourished as their brother birds are fed, Whose great Creator doth their table spread.

Listening the lessening chant, St. Francis smiled, Praising his Lord for joy so undefiled. —_From the French of F. A. Ozanam_.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE KNOWLEDGE OF MARY. By the Rev. J. De Concilio, Pastor of St. Michael’s Church, Jersey City, author of _Catholicity and Pantheism_. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co., 9 Barclay Street. 1878.

We must apologize to Father De Concilio for being late with our notice of his book. Our excuse is, simply, lack of time for its perusal—anything but lack of desire; for, on learning that the author of _Catholicity and Pantheism_—a work that has won unstinted and generous praise from all competent critics, and established the fame of its author as a profound philosophical thinker—was engaged upon a work about the Blessed Virgin, we hailed the promised boon as a feast, both intellectual and devotional, of the rarest kind. And are we disappointed? On the contrary, our most sanguine expectations are surpassed.

Father De Concilio tells us in his preface that this new book is “a necessary part” of his former work on _Catholicity and Pantheism_, “though it may seem to have very little to do with it.” “For Mary,” he says, “is the best refutation of pantheism, the universal error of our time. The substance of this error is to absorb the finite in the infinite, and, consequently, to abolish, to do away with, all created agency. Now, Mary, as we shall prove, represents created agency in its grandest, sublimest, and most magnificent expression. She represents created agency in all the mysteries of God relating to the creature. She is, therefore, the best and most convincing refutation of pantheism, the rock against which the mighty waves of this universal error must exhaust their force.” Again: “Pantheism, in pretending to exalt humanity, degrades it and deprives it of everything that causes its glory. Mary, the grandest specimen of human nature, exhibits human personality in its most colossal proportions, and is the glory, the pride, the magnificence of our race.”

We quote these passages from the author’s preface, because they furnish the key-note to the whole work.

The volume opens with an admirable “Introduction,” showing how Christianity was needed to bring fallen man to the knowledge and love of God, and how “the world owes Christianity, along with its results, to Mary”; also, how the same instrument must bring back the knowledge and love of God to-day, lost again as they have been in great part; whence “the necessity of true, accurate, solid knowledge of Mary.” Then follow the five books into which the essay is divided, the chapters of each book being subdivided into articles. This arrangement at once gives conciseness to the argument, and much relieves the strain upon the reader’s thought.

The first, second, and fourth books are the most important: the first dealing with “Mary’s place in the divine plan of the universe”; the second with “the grandeur of Mary’s destiny”; and the fourth with “the consequences of Mary’s dignity relatively to God, to the human race, and to herself.” The third book treats of “the perfections of Mary in general,” and its arguments will be readily admitted by the reader who has accepted those of the preceding books; the fifth, again, elucidates “Mary’s merit and glory,” which no one will question who agrees with the fourth book.

Father De Concilio shows himself a master by the easy strength with which he expounds the divine plan of the universe, and the place which the Incarnation holds therein. The eight articles of his first chapter are thus recapitulated:

“End: The greatest possible manifestation and communication of divine goodness.

“Preliminary means: Creation of substances, spiritual, material, and composite—angels, matter, and men.

“Best means to the object: The hypostatic union of the Word with human nature.

“Effects of the Incarnation with regard to God: Infinite glory and honor.

“With regard to created nature: Universal deification.

“With regard to personalities: Deification of their nature in Christ, and beatific union with the Trinity through their union with Christ by sanctification.

“God foresees the fall, and permits it in order to enhance these effects by redemption.”

We do not at all wonder at a reviewer in the Chicago _Interior_ complimenting our author on “profound scholarship in Catholic theology.” “The book,” he says, “is bold to familiarity in describing with scientific particularity and clearness of outline the constitution of the Holy Trinity as defined by Catholic theologians.” We do, however, wonder that this writer, if a believer in revelation, should go on to compare Father De Concilio to a chemist analyzing “a pyrite of iron,” and still more that he should declare his “ideas as grossly _anthropomorphic_ as it is possible to be”(!) Would this critic call the Bible anthropomorphic? He says nothing about our author’s theology of the Incarnation—unless he means to hit at _that_ as “anthropomorphic.” It is precisely about the Incarnation that Protestants are utterly at sea. When the reviewer adds: “We can understand, after examining this book, the character of Catholic devotion to Mary as we never understood it before,” we are compelled to reply: “Then your understanding of it is a greater mistake than ever before, unless you have first come to realize the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation with its bearings; and if that were the case you would avow it, for you could not remain a Protestant another hour.”

Let any Protestant of sufficient education read the first of these five books earnestly and prayerfully, and he will have to acknowledge that his hitherto Christianity, be it what it may, is divided _toto cœlo_ from Catholic Christianity—the _totum cœlum_ being precisely his lack of that “knowledge of Mary” which is inseparable from an intelligent belief in the Incarnation.

The Catholic student will be specially interested by the way in which Father De Concilio treats of Mary’s “co-operation.” She is set forth—and in a clearer light than ever before by any book in the English language—as the great “representative _personality_” of our race. It is in this capacity that she consents to the Incarnation and Redemption. “A God-Man was necessary to expiate for the sins of mankind. But that was not sufficient. According to the law of wisdom, mentioned in our last argument, God was ready to help human nature to that extent as to effect the Incarnation and produce the God-Man; but God required, also, that mankind should do all it could towards its own redemption. It could not give the God who was to divinize the acts of human nature; it could not actually effect the union between human nature and the divine person of the Word; but it could freely and deliberately offer the nature to be united for the express purpose and intent of suffering; and this offering could only be made by means of a _representative human person_ fully conscious of the necessity of expiation, of the conditions required by it, and of the consequences resulting therefrom” (pp. 77, 78).

Again (pp. 78, 79): “The consent of Mary was required in the plan of God in order to elevate created _personality_ to the highest possible dignity, and thus to fulfil the end which God had proposed to himself in exterior work.” This purpose, he goes on to say, was not completed by God “taking human _nature_ to be his own nature, and to be God with him.” ... “Human _personality_ does not exist in Christ, and receives no honor from him. There is one person in him, and that is divine.” ... “Mary, therefore (p. 80), fulfils the office of creation, and especially of created personality, in its most sovereign act—the act which this personality would have elicited in Jesus Christ, if it had been in him. Human nature, such as it was in Christ, could not give itself, because to give is a personal act, and God wished to carry to its utmost extremity the communication of goodness, that human nature should give itself in order to be made partaker of the responsibility and attribution of the effects of that mysterious union.”

Having thus shown the inestimable importance of Mary’s consent to the Incarnation, our author proceeds to point out “the extent or comprehensiveness” of that consent—to wit, that “in giving her consent to the Incarnation and redemption” she “not only agreed to become the Mother of Jesus Christ the _Redeemer_, ... but also to become a _co-sufferer_ with him; so that Mary’s Compassion was to accompany, to go hand in hand with, Christ’s Passion, _both_ being _necessary_ for the redemption of mankind, according to the plan selected by God’s wisdom.”

Here is something new to us, but very delightful to discover, since it glorifies Our Blessed Lady so much more than the ordinary view of her Dolors. We knew that “she consented to undergo all the anguish and sorrow and martyrdom consequent upon her from the sacrifice and immolation of her divine Son,” and thus “join her _Compassion_ to his Passion, in order to redeem mankind”; that, in this sense, she “consented to become the _corredemptrix_ of the human race.” But it had not occurred to us that “all this, implied in her consent, was _necessary_ as that consent itself.”

Our author here quotes Father Faber’s theory about Mary’s privilege of being “corredemptrix”—the term by which saints and doctors call her—and shows that the gifted Oratorian, in his exquisite book on Mary’s sorrows (_The Foot of the Cross_), “has not done justice to the subject.” He even quarrels with Faber’s “co-redemptress” as a “_substitution_” for the ancient “corredemptrix,” whereas it would appear but a translation—that is, as Faber uses it. We feel sure, too, that the English word _may_ mean the full equivalent of the Latin. But, at all events, Father Faber’s theory is that Mary’s dolors were among the _unnecessary_ sufferings of the Passion. “Indeed,” he says, “they were literally our Lord’s unnecessary sufferings.... Her co-operation with the Passion by means of her dolors is wanting, certainly, in that indispensable necessity which characterizes the co-operation of her maternity.” To this Father De Concilio remarks that Father Faber “had an incomplete idea of the office of Mary as to redemption,” and objects to the doctrine of “unnecessary sufferings” as “theologically inaccurate, to say the least.” “The Passion of Christ,” he says, “must be considered as a _variety_ of sorrows _co-ordained_ by the _unity_ of the sacrifice—the beginning of which was the maternal womb, in which the Incarnate Word placed himself in the state of a victim, and the termination Calvary, where the grand holocaust was consummated.” And, after establishing this point, he proceeds to prove that Mary’s Compassion was “among the necessary elements of the redemption.” He brings to light, both from the Fathers and from reason, “a principle in the economy of our redemption,” whereby God had to supply, indeed, a means of infinite merit (through the Incarnation), but, equally, had to exact from humanity all that itself could do towards atonement. From this principle he deduces three consequences:

_First_. That “our Lord’s humanity was to suffer as much as ... would bear a kind of proportion to the offence and realize the principle that human nature was to do as much as possible towards its own redemption.” Whence, obviously, “the distinction of necessary and unnecessary sufferings in the life of our Lord” is untenable.

_Second_. That “human nature was required to do more than suffer in Christ. It was required to deliberately and willingly offer up that human nature to be united to the Word of God for the purpose of redemption, by means of a representative of the whole human race.” Whence “the necessity of Mary’s consent to the Incarnation and redemption.”

_Third_. That “it was necessary that the highest representative of human personality, the human head of the race, _should be subject also to the highest possible martyrdom which a human person may be subject to_, as a reparation coming from a human personality, and unite it with the sufferings of the humanity of the Word, and thus bring its own meed of suffering required by God’s wisdom for our ransom.” “This was necessary,” he adds, “because in our Lord _humanity suffered as a nature, not as a personality_.”

From these deductions, then, the author concludes that “Mary’s Compassion is a necessary element of the redemption, and Mary is really and truly the corredemptrix of the human race.” But, of course, he is careful to add that “Christ alone redeemed us truly, really, and efficaciously, because he alone could give infinite value to those sufferings, and, therefore, he is the only Redeemer. Mary is the corredemptrix, but only in the sense just explained.” “Those,” he says, “who are afraid to think Mary’s sufferings necessary for our redemption are thinking only of the infinite value required for our sacrifice. Mary has nothing to do with that. In speaking of her co-operation we limit ourselves to speaking of what was required from human nature and human personality as their mite towards redemption, independent of the infinite worth to be given only by Christ’s infinite personality.”

To us, we must joyfully avow, this elaborate argument for Mary’s greater glory appears irrefragable.

What specially delights us in the fourth book, again, is to see our heavenly Mother proved the “channel” and “dispenser” of all grace. This, also, is an unspeakable gain to us. And we need not say that if, on the one hand, our learned theologian has invested his Queen with a sublimity and an awe that makes us feel how unworthy of her notice is our best of love and service, he has inspired us, on the other hand, with more confidence than ever in her tenderness and power.

Those, too, of our readers who have a turn for contemplation and have thought much on Our Lady will meet in these pages with many an idea which has come into their minds before, and which, perhaps, they have been afraid to disclose, or even harbor. Such will join with us in revelling over the logic which makes blessed certainties of these exquisite guesses.

In conclusion, we are quite unable to express our thanks to Father De Concilio for his magnificent book. But he does not need our gratitude. She whose champion he is will not fail to fulfil in his regard the promise which to him must be so precious: _Qui elucidant me vitam æternam habebunt_—“They who make me shine forth shall have life everlasting.”

WHY A CATHOLIC IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY? By William Giles Dix. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co., 9 Barclay Street. 1878.

The author of this essay once contributed to THE CATHOLIC WORLD a thoughtful article called “The Roman Gathering.” (See CATHOLIC WORLD, May, 1868.) He was then a Protestant. It is consoling to find him no longer among those who, while forced to envy the Catholic Church, remain outside her communion on the strength of some hazy theory or from a superstitious dread of using their reason. Having come, by God’s grace, to see the truth himself, he aims at making others see it equally clearly. He shows very forcibly, and in simple language, “that the New Testament, and the Protestant version of that, proves these propositions:

“I. Christ founded a church.

“II. Christ founded _one_ church, one only: _not a corporation of national churches, not a federal union of churches_, but literally one church.

“III. That one church of Christ was intended to be the only spiritual guide, on earth, of Christians.

“IV. That [this] church had the promise of endurance and of guidance until the end of the world.

“V. That [this] church was the beginning of the church known historically as the Catholic Church.”

Of course this is very old ground; but Mr. Dix goes over it in a way that ought to induce earnest Protestants of any denomination to follow him.

Here is an excellent hit:

“A word is in many mouths—_Ultramontane_—intended to represent extreme views of papal rights. Now, I care not whom you select among the defenders of the powers of St. Peter and his successors, you will find the attributes ascribed by any such writer to the successors of St. Peter not so strong as the single commission of our Lord to his apostles recorded in the New Testament. _The most ultramontane writers that I know of are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John._ The only difficulty which any one finds in the interpretation of the words of our Lord referring to his church is because those words are so plain and direct. They so clearly set forth the amplest prerogatives ever claimed for the Church of Christ that many people seem to believe that they cannot mean what they seem to mean, and, therefore, must be explained away.”

We hope this short essay will meet with the success its ability deserves. We regret, however, to say that while the plainness of its language is a great point in its favor, its style is open to improvement.

THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. A Book of Instruction for Women in the World. By Rev. Bernard O’Reilly. New York: Peter F. Collier. 1878.

Dr. O’Reilly continues to lay Catholics under obligation to his fluent and versatile pen. He has a keen instinct for what is wanting in Catholic popular literature, and this large and handsome volume fills a niche in the Catholic household that was too long left empty. Women in the world are apt to be overlooked by spiritual writers, or the works intended for them are of a character not well adapted to attract the average woman of the world, however good she may be. They need something to take hold of their homes and their hearts, and to enter into their ordinary daily life. This Dr. O’Reilly’s excellent volume aims at doing, and, we trust, will succeed in doing. It is a work of practical suggestion, illustrated and annotated, so to say, by examples from the lives of women in all ages and in every station of life. A tender heart, a practical mind, and a pious soul speak in every line. It is the mother first of all who is chiefly instrumental in shaping the life of man. If she is good and pure and high-minded, a constant example of the height and greatness of those noblest of estates, wifehood and motherhood, the chances are altogether in favor of her children following her example. She is their great safeguard, their earthly guardian-angel until they are properly launched upon the sea of life, and even after that period her heart follows them and her virtues live in their memory and their lives. It is because so many women neglect this high office that so many children go astray. Virtue belongs to no class; it is common to all Christians. The truest nobility is a Christian life, which is open to all. The object of his book is well described by Dr. O’Reilly in the “Introductory”: “It is precisely because women are, by the noble instincts which God has given to their nature, prone to all that is most heroic that this book has been written for them. It aims at setting before their eyes such admirable examples of every virtue most suited to their sex, in every age and condition of life, that they have only to open its pages in order to learn at a glance what graces and excellences render girlhood as bright and fragrant as the garden of God in its unfading bloom, and ripe womanhood as glorious and peerless in its loveliness and power as the May moon in its perfect fulness when she reigns alone over the starry heavens.” We cannot too earnestly recommend _The Mirror of True Womanhood_ to women of every class, station, and time of life.

SHAKSPEARE’S HOME: Visited and Described by Washington Irving and F. W. Fairholt. With a letter from Stratford. By J. F. Sabin. With etchings by J. F. and W. W. Sabin. New York: J. Sabin & Sons. 1877.

This is an interesting little volume. A fair idea of its contents may be gathered from the title. The etchings are carefully executed, and are full of promise.

WHAT CATHOLICS DO NOT BELIEVE. A Lecture delivered in Mercantile Library Hall, on Sunday evening. Dec. 16, 1877. By Right Rev. P. J. Ryan, Bishop of Triconia, and Coadjutor to the Archbishop of St. Louis. St. Louis: P. Fox. 1878.

It was a happy thought to publish this lecture in pamphlet form; for the matter which it contains is worthy of wide dissemination and close study. Bishop Ryan has here presented some admirable points in an admirable manner to the consideration of fair-minded men who are interested in the doings and the faith of the Catholic Church. He has taken up a few of the chief current objections against the church, set them strongly forward, and then disposed of them in a manner that wins admiration as much for its honesty and calmness as for its completeness and skill. We understand that it has provoked much discussion in St. Louis, in the public press and elsewhere. Such discussion can only do good. We strongly recommend the pamphlet to Catholic and Protestant alike. It is interesting for its own sake; it will be of great use to the Catholic who is thrown into non-Catholic society; it will relieve the fairly-disposed Protestant mind of some inherited darkness and much foolish misconception.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

THE WRITTEN WORD; or, Considerations on the Sacred Scriptures. By William Humphrey, Priest of the Society of Jesus.

THE CHRISTIAN REFORMED IN MIND AND MANNERS. By Benedict Rogacci, of the Society of Jesus. Translation edited by Henry James Coleridge, of the same Society.

THE ART OF KNOWING OURSELVES; or, The Looking-Glass which does not Deceive. By Fr. John Peter Pinamonti, S.J. With Twelve Considerations on Death, by Fr. Luigi La Nuza, S.J., and Four on Eternity, by Fr. John Baptist Manni, S.J.

LIFE OF HENRI PLANCHAT, Priest of the Congregation of the Brothers of St. Vincent de Paul, etc., etc., One of the Hostages Massacred by the Commune at Belleville, May 36, 1871. By Maurice Maignen, Member of the Congregation of Brothers of St. Vincent de Paul. Translated from the French, with an Introductory Preface, by Rev. W. H. Anderdon, S.J.

A VISIT TO THE ROMAN CATACOMBS. By Rev. J. Spencer Northcote, D.D.

MEDITATIONS. From the Spanish of Rev. Fr. Alonso de Andrade, S.J.

ERLESTON GLEN. A Lancashire Story of the Sixteenth Century. By Alice O’Hanlon.

[All the above are published by Burns & Oates, London, and are for sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.

PENITENTIARY SERMONS. By Rev. Theodore Noethen, Catholic Chaplain. Albany: Van Benthuysen Printing-House. 1877.

THE TOWER OF PERCEMONT. A Novel. From the French of George Sand. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1877.

THE SCHOLASTIC ALMANAC for the year of our Lord 1878. Compiled by J. A. Lyons. Notre Dame, Ind.: The Scholastic Printing-Office.

TO THE SUN. A Journey through Planetary Space. From the French of Jules Verne. By Edward Roth. Illustrated. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger. 1878.

IRELAND: As She Is, As She Has Been, and As She Ought To Be. By James J. Clancy. New York: Thomas Kelly. 1877.

NEW IRELAND. By A. M. Sullivan, Member of Parliament for Louth. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1878.

LIVES AND TIMES OF ILLUSTRIOUS AND REPRESENTATIVE IRISHMEN. By Thomas Clarke Luby, A.B., T.C.D. Part II. New York: Thomas Kelly.

HOLY CHURCH, THE CENTRE OF UNITY; or, Ritualism Compared with Catholicism: Reasons for Returning to the True Fold. By T. H. Shaw. London: R. Washbourne. 1877.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXVI., No. 156.—MARCH, 1878.

IRELAND IN 1878.

I.

A history of Ireland still remains to be written; nor has there been even an attempt to collect some of the chief materials for such a work. Ten centuries of almost continuous conflict since the Danish incursions, or seven since the Anglo-Norman settlement and the destruction or dispersion of the national archives, are sufficient to account for the absence of any full, authentic, or valuable Irish history. From Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century to Froude in our day, there have never been wanting subsidized, and even able, writers to defame and revile the native population and laud the English rule in Ireland. Nor, on the other hand, has there been any lack of enthusiasts whose patriotism, more ardent than their erudition is profound or exact, is ever ready to excuse or defend the natives and execrate the Anglo-Norman and Saxon tyrants and despoilers. Even in Ireland it is difficult to obtain reliable information regarding the country; while outside of it such aim is impossible of attainment. The dispersion of the Irish race during the last thirty years has been greater in extent and over a larger area of the globe than any exodus of humanity known to history. These millions have carried the traditions of their country’s wrongs, and the dismal tales of the misgovernment of Ireland, to the uttermost ends of the earth, exaggerating, perhaps, the oppression of their persecutors, and depicting in touching sympathy the glowing virtues of the victims. The largest contingent of this Irish emigration has enriched the United States of America, where partiality has culminated in alternate praise and censure of the Irish race. The circumstances under which most of these people reached the American shores were truly tragic and appalling, and are well-nigh forgotten by the older portion of the generation now passing away.

The estimated population of Ireland in 1845 was 8,295,061, which made it then one of the most densely peopled countries in Europe. In the autumn of that year the potato crop, one of the chief products of the country and the staple food of three-fifths of the people, failed, involving a loss estimated by Mr. Labouchere, the British minister, of eighty million dollars, or sixteen millions sterling. This failure in 1845 was followed by successive blights of the potato-crop in 1846 and subsequent years, causing what is called the Irish famine, and with it the great emigration, which brought an increase of millions of citizens to the United States. There had been an Irish immigration in America from the earliest days of the colony—to Maryland, for example, in the seventeenth century; but the Irish famine of 1845–49 marks the opening of the great influx of Irish into the United States and Canada.

We propose to consider the social and industrial condition and the political and religious prospects of Ireland in 1878, making the eve of the famine, in 1845, the basis of comparison. We write from Ireland, with the amplest knowledge of our subject, and, as we hope, having no object in view save a full and clear statement of the main facts necessary for its elucidation. We have travelled over every province, every county, every parish, every locality of its soil; are intimate with every phase of its history and every section of its population, and feel every throb of its national life. Yet we invite the fullest criticism of our attempt to discuss the present condition of Ireland from a scientific, a truthful, and an impartial stand-point. Nowhere out of Ireland is such discussion more desirable or more difficult than in the United States. The republic contains about the same number of Irish, by birth or by descent, that remain in the old country. The emigrants of the famine period left under dire pressure, the origin of which is not fully understood abroad. In the forty-four years 1801–1845 the population of Ireland increased from 5,216,329 to 8,295,061, or by 3,078,732 persons—an increase of fifty-nine per cent. Emigration was throughout that period inconsiderable; in the decade 1831–41 it was only 403,459, or about 40,000 a year; in the next four years it fell to little over half that average; while in the year 1843, when O’Connell led the great agitation for repeal of the Union, only 13,026 persons left the country, being the lowest on record. Although the potato blight appeared in 1845, it was not until 1847 that the horrors of the famine and of emigration assumed their most awful aspect. In the single year 1847, that of O’Connell’s death, there was a loss of population of 262,574, or three per cent., by the conjoint action of emigration and the excess of deaths over births; while in the next four years the aggregate decrease reached 1,510,801 persons—little short of nineteen per cent. of the whole population. The following table exhibits the estimated population at the middle of the year relating to our inquiry:

─────┬────────────┬─────────────────────── │ │ DECREASE YEAR│ POPULATION│ PERSONS │ PER CENT. ─────┼────────────┼────────────┼────────── 1845│ 8,295,061│ ——│ —— 1846│ 8,287,848│ 7,213│ 0.09 1847│ 8,025,274│ 262,574│ 3.1 1848│ 7,639,800│ 385,474│ 4.3 1849│ 7,256,314│ 383,486│ 5.0 1850│ 6,877,549│ 378,765│ 5.1 1851│ 6,514,473│ 363,076│ 5.1 1861│ 5,778,415│ 736,058│ 11.3 1871│ 5,395,007│ 383,408│ 6.6 1875│ 5,309,494│ 65,513│ 1.0 1876│ 5,321,618│ ——│ —— 1877│ 5,338,906│ ——│ —— ─────┴────────────┴────────────┴──────────

Over the whole period from 1845 to 1875 population decreased, but the rate of decline diminished after 1851. In the thirty years there was a loss of 2,973,443—nearly 100,000 annually, or thirty-six per cent. of the inhabitants. The year 1876 is memorable as the starting-point of reactionary improvement. For the first time during a generation emigration has so diminished that the natural increase of births over deaths added 10,352 to the population in 1876, and 17,288 in 1877. Increase must henceforth be the normal law of population, but it is never again likely to reach the rate it attained in the thirty years 1801–31, when it expanded about fourteen per cent. each decade, or an increase of nearly one in seven every ten years.

We are now to inquire into the main causes of these terrible calamities, strange and conflicting explanations of which are advanced by public writers in the United States and other countries. One flippant, fertile, and accepted theory is the peculiar proneness of the Irish to contention and disunion—a theory generally credited as sound by those ignorant of history or those prejudiced against the Irish race. We shall adduce a few broad and suggestive facts in disproof of this theory. Can any nation exhibit a nobler proof of unity than the Brehon laws, or _Seanchus Mor_, which prevailed universally in Ireland for centuries before the Christian era, until revised by St. Patrick and the Christian kings, and which continued in force throughout the country, save the small patch called the Pale, until the seventeenth century, while the traditions and principles of that code yet influence the people after a lapse of twenty to five-and-twenty centuries? And so as regards the tenacity with which, for ages, the people have adhered to the use of the Gaelic or native tongue, still spoken by little short of a million of the inhabitants, after the Greeks, the Romans, the French, the Spaniards, the Britons, and the Scotch have mainly abandoned the primitive tongues of their ancestors. All pagan Ireland was converted to Christianity by one man—an example of unity and docility without parallel in the history of the human race. Ireland, like France, England, and other countries, was ravaged by the Danish and Norse invaders, yet the Irish defeated and expelled them in 1014, long before the Gauls or the Saxons had banished or crushed them in Normandy or in England. Towards the close of the twelfth century the Anglo-Normans found partial footing in Ireland, yet for seven hundred years the native race have opposed their rule, and oppose it to-day—an example of unity and persistency unsurpassed in the world. The English, the Scotch, and most of the nations in the north and northwest of Europe abandoned their ancient faith and accepted the Protestant Reformation, at the bidding of their sovereigns, in the sixteenth century; while Catholic Ireland, in defiance of penal laws that plundered property, denied education, reduced the people almost to barbarism, and sent them to the scaffold for adherence to their church, has remained, through centuries of suffering, loyal to conscience, and by unity, fidelity, and perseverance has effected the overthrow of the Protestant Church Establishment of the Tudors. Proud and great memories these for the Irish nation—memories sufficient to disprove the shallow and unfounded charge that to disunion, peculiar to their race, must be attributed the sad and chequered history of the country. While if we turn to all other kingdoms at corresponding periods, even to the present time, we find analogous internal strife and domestic political factions as numerous and as intense as any in Ireland. England, Scotland, the several British colonies, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, and the United States were quite as much torn by internal dissension as Ireland, and are so at the present day; so that this hypothesis is wholly unfounded and quite inadequate to account for the disastrous decadence, or at least want of progress, of Ireland, compared in many respects with other countries.

The causes of Irish discontent and comparative social backwardness are remote, chronic, and cumulative. From the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in 1169 to the defeat of the Irish in the Williamite war, near the close of the seventeenth century, one clear purpose was kept in view by the aliens—the extirpation of the natives from ownership and even occupancy of the soil. Attainders, escheatments, plantations, transplantations, and settlements—all had the same purpose. Penal Laws, the Court of Wards, and dire persecution had driven the Catholic natives from proprietorship, and almost from occupancy, of the soil. Cupidity led many Cromwellian and planter landlords to baffle the Penal Laws and pocket the higher rents offered by popish recusants. Protestants of the humbler classes complained that the protection promised and due to them as of right in the English interest was denied and defeated by the planter and palatine landlords in preferring popish tenants whose lower standard of living and degraded social caste enabled them to pay a higher rent than Protestant tenants, who claimed, by right of class, a better mode of living. Thus robbed and deprived of their estates, denied leases, and rackrented by middlemen and others, the mass of the Irish people before the famine were mere squatters on the soil, neither owners nor, in any true sense, occupiers.

Catholics were emancipated in 1829 and rendered admissible to almost all the offices in the state; they obtained an instalment of educational concession in 1831, and a modification of the grinding oppression of the tithe system and the Protestant Church Establishment a few years afterwards; a Poor Law, directed by a London board, was passed in 1838, and corporate reform was granted in 1840; but these and other remedial measures, in operation for a few years, could effect little towards the elevation of a people impoverished and degraded by centuries of foreign and crushing legislation.

From an economic and industrial stand-point the condition of Catholics, in relation to land, was the chief cause of the wretchedness of the country. The agricultural laborers were in the lowest social state in Europe, scarcely excepting the Russian serfs. Employment was precarious and rarely secured a higher average wages than sixpence to eightpence a day, or scarcely a dollar a week. From Connaught a large number went to England for some weeks at the hay, corn, and potato harvests, where they earned what paid the rent of the cabin and the potato-plot; while many of the cotters and small farmers were little better in position. A few facts from the census of 1841 and 1851 will suffice to illustrate the large number and the terrible fate of these classes, as indicated by the grades of house accommodation before and after the famine:

────────────────────┬───────────────────┬───────────────── │ 1841. │ 1851. HOUSE ACCOMMODATION.│ │ PER│ │ PER │ HOUSES│ CENT.│ HOUSES│ CENT. ────────────────────┼────────────┼──────┼──────────┼────── First class │ 31,333│ 2.1│ 39,370│ 3.3 Second class │ 241,664│ 16.4│ 292,280│ 24.3 Third class │ 574,386│ 39.0│ 588,440│ 48.9 Fourth (cabin) class│ 625,356│ 42.5│ 284,229│ 23.5 ────────────────────┼────────────┼──────┼──────────┼────── Total│ 1,472,739│ 100.0│ 1,204,319│ 100.0 ────────────────────┴────────────┴──────┴──────────┴──────

Here we see that, seemingly in ten but really in five years, no less than 341,127 fourth-class houses—mud, sod, or stone, thatched cabins with only a single apartment—were swept away, inhabited by that number of families, which included about 1,800,000 persons; while the table of population above given shows that in these years the estimated decrease was 1,780,588—a striking concurrence between both. Another proof as regards the class swept away is found in the following table of agricultural holdings, grouped by extent, in 1841 and 1851:

──────────────────┬──────────┬────────── HOLDINGS. │ 1841. │ 1851. ──────────────────┼──────────┼────────── Not exceeding one │Not known.│ 37,728 acre │ │ One to five acres │ 310,436│ 88,083 Five to fifteen │ 252,799│ 191,854 acres │ │ Fifteen to thirty │ 79,342│ 141,311 acres │ │ Above thirty acres│ 48,625│ 149,090 ──────────────────┼──────────┼────────── Total│ 691,202│ 608,066 ──────────────────┴──────────┴──────────

Excluding the very large number of holdings under an acre not ascertained in 1841, we find the disappearance in that decade, or rather in half of it, of 222,353 tenements between one and five acres, which represents a diminished population of 1,200,000 persons. The decrease of 60,945, in the tenements from five to fifteen acres, representing about 320,000 people, is portion of this same subject. If we now turn to another head of evidence we find that the population was thinned from the least educated classes. The census of 1841 returned fifty-three per cent. of the whole population, aged five years and upwards, as illiterate, being unable to read or write, while the return for 1851 showed a decrease to forty-seven per cent.; and turning to the great decrease in the percentage of the Irish-speaking population between 1841 and 1851, we find similar results. Lastly, the creed census demands attention.

The first taken in Ireland was that by the Royal Commission of Public Instruction in 1834, when, of a population of 7,954,100, it was found there were 6,436,000, or 80.9 per cent., Catholics; while the followers of the intruded Anglican Church, established for three centuries, numbered only 853,160, or 10.7 per cent. The adherents of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, endowed by the state, though not established, 643,058, or 8.1 per cent.; and all other Protestant dissenters mustered only 21,822 or 0.3 per cent. Between 1834 and 1845, when the potato blight first appeared, the population had increased from 7,954,100 to 8,295,061, during which period of eleven years there are ample evidences to prove that the Catholic element underwent a larger increase than the Protestant, so that we may fairly assume the whole population in 1845 to have been thus composed:

PER CENT.

Catholics 6,760,475 81.5

Protestants 1,534,586 18.5

———— ——

Total 8,295,061 100.

These millions of Catholics, emancipated only sixteen years, were the descendants of the natives who for over six centuries had battled against English domination; whose estates and lands had been wrested from them and given to soldiers and adventurers from England and Scotland—“the scum of both nations”; whose ancient church had been despoiled of her property; to whom education was denied and the profession of their faith made penal; whose manufacturing industries were suppressed by English laws; who were excluded from all offices, civil and military, and from all social rank and distinction, and denied not alone a seat in Parliament for 137 years, 1692 to 1829, but from 1727 to 1793, a period of 66 years, the right to vote.

Such is a broad outline of the main facts concerning the population of Ireland in 1845, as to quantity and quality. We must, however, supplement these by a few particulars.

From one-third to one-half the rental of the kingdom went to absentee and alien landlords, who spent it in England or on the Continent. The imperial taxes borne by Ireland were in excess of her capacity and in violation of the articles of the Act of Union. All the state departments had their headquarters in London, while Ireland had slender share either in the appropriating or the enjoyment of those taxes. The local taxation, through grand jury and other cess, was enormous, but levied and appropriated by the country gentry, all predominantly Protestant. The county officers, the grand jury, the jail, the lunatic asylum, infirmary, and poor-law union boards were almost exclusively Protestant. The corporations, reformed by statute in 1840, were still Protestant. One or two Catholic judges had reached the bench, as O’Loghlen, and many Catholics were pressing to the front at the bar and in medicine, while in all the professions, in trade, and in commerce Catholic influence was beginning to be felt. Catholics had, it is true, only trifling share in the administration of the government and the laws. They had little representation in the magistracy or on the grand juries; while jury-packing was the normal condition of the administration of justice. The Orange system, stimulated by the triumph of Catholic emancipation, was rampant and aggressive at the prospect of social equality.

Yet, amidst such disadvantages, Ireland, in the two or three years before the famine, presented a moral and political spectacle such as the modern world had never witnessed. O’Connell, the greatest political leader of this century, led the millions of Irish people in their demand for justice to Ireland. He claimed the restoration of the legislative independence of Ireland as it existed from 1782 to 1801, or a repeal of the Act of Union. His efforts towards that object, the millions who rose to support him, and the moral, intellectual, and national sympathy that his demand elicited, are perfectly well known. The famine appeared in 1845 and blasted the whole agitation, while O’Connell died at Genoa, May 15, 1847, when the country that he wildly, passionately loved was in the throes of the famine, the horrors of which O’Connell vainly endeavored to avert by appeals for substantial relief to the British government. The present prime minister of England, the Earl of Beaconsfield, declared in the House of Commons, in reference to Ireland, on the opening of the famine, that for a country with an absentee proprietary, an alien established church, and a population starving or fleeing the country, most Englishmen can see but one remedy, and that _revolution_.

The great Irish famine, contrary to popular opinion, was exceeded by many visitations of the kind in India and elsewhere, and perhaps equalled by some that had occurred even in Ireland, so far as extent of mortality is concerned; but, measured by the aggregate of its social and economic effects, no such disaster is recorded in history. The mortality was considerably less than was supposed—that is, of deaths caused directly by starvation, suffering, and sickness arising out of the famine. Dysentery, diarrhœa, fever, cholera—all supervened. Workhouse accommodation failed, notwithstanding the utilization, as auxiliary houses, of nearly all the idle and abandoned stores in cities and towns, and of large numbers of rural mansions deserted by the country gentry. All the habits, feelings, and traditions of the Irish nation were opposed to a poor-law. Passed in 1838, although a poor-law had been in operation in England from 1601, it was only in 1847, the third year of the famine, that the last of the 131 Irish workhouses was opened, in Clifden, Connemara, and then by _mandamus_ of the Queen’s Bench. In 1844, the year before the appearance of the potato blight, there were only 113 workhouses open, with an aggregate of 105,358 paupers relieved that year at an expense of $1,085,336. In 1847 the number relieved in the workhouses, auxiliaries included, was 417,139, or nearly fourfold, while the expenditure was $3,214,744, or threefold. The entire Poor-Law Act and the workhouse system utterly broke down under pressure of the mass of destitution. That act was administered from Somerset House, London, under an English commission, from 1838 to 1847. All the leading officers, assistant commissioners, and others were sent from England to carry out a law amongst a people of whose feelings and social circumstances they were thoroughly ignorant, and to their race and faith were totally opposed. That act expressly denied out-door relief, in any form or towards any destitution, how acute soever, in Ireland; while out-door relief was the general and normal form of poor relief in England for centuries, and continues so at present. The law was framed so as to throw the whole influence of its administration into the hands of the landlords and magistracy, or their agents, the vast majority of whom were planters and Cromwellians, hostile in faith and feeling to the destitute classes. A temporary Poor Relief Extension Act, passed June 8, 1847, was necessitated, or the destitute classes must have seized in self-defence the cattle, corn, and other edibles abounding in the country to prevent starvation. Out-door relief was permitted, but should be administered solely in food; while the able-bodied recipients were subjected to severe tests of stone-breaking or other unproductive labor. The tenth section of this act was the infamous quarter-acre clause, which declared that,

“If any person so occupying more than the _quarter of a statute acre_ (less than thirty-five yards square) shall apply for relief, or if any person on his behalf shall apply for relief, _it shall not be lawful for any Board of Guardians to grant such relief, within or without the workhouse_, to any such person.”

This horrible clause gave the alternative of death or the surrender of their cabins, cottages, and small farms to the tens, the hundreds of thousands who occupied the humbler allotments and homesteads in Ireland. If they refused to surrender possession to the landlord, they perished, relief being denied them; while if they yielded, the crowded workhouse, with a weekly mortality of twenty-five in every one thousand inmates, precipitated them from the trap-coffin, often unshrived and always unshrouded, into the common fosse without a semblance of Christian burial. As an adjunct to the quarter-acre clause, and further to effect the clearance of the mass of the laboring and industrious classes, urban as well as rural, occupiers rated at under twenty-five dollars who surrendered their holdings, whether held on lease or otherwise, to their landlords, were, with their families, assisted to emigrate, two-thirds of the expenses of the same to be borne on the rates of the electoral division, the other third by the landlord. And to complete and give effect to these provisions for the death or the extermination of the population, the landlords were secured, by a radical change in the act of 1838, a monopoly in the whole administration of relief. Under that act each Board of Guardians consisted of three-fourths elected members and one-fourth _ex-officio_ members, being magistrates resident in the union; whereas, by an amendment introduced into the act of 1847 the proportion of _ex-officio_ members is doubled, being increased from one-fourth to one-half the whole strength of the board. With a full moiety of the members of the landlord class, the territorial influence through the _multiple_ vote, which gives rated property from one to six votes, and also voting by proxy, the land magnates are always able to command, if not a majority, at least a large number, of seats amongst the elected guardians, and thus secure dominance in the administration of the whole poor-law.

Under the original act of 1838 the incidence of the poor’s rate was divided equally between the occupier and the owner, while occupiers whose tenements were below twenty-five dollars annual valuation were exempt, the rate being charged to the landlord; and, moreover, a clause declared that any contract made between owner and occupier which would release the former from liability to a moiety of the poor’s rate was null and void. The landlord added, of course, the rates to the rent, save in the case of the small number of tenants holding under lease, so that the whole cost of relief fell on the occupier; while a clause in the Poor-Law Amendment Act passed in 1849 repealed the annulling provision of the act of 1838, and legalized the enabling power of the tenant to contract himself, under compulsion, out of the protection secured to him that property should bear a moiety of the cost of poor relief. We may mention that the savage quarter-acre clause continued in operation from 1847 until partially repealed in 1862, a period of fifteen years, during which it quenched many a hearth, dismantled thousands of roof-trees, and sent more than a million of the Irish race to the grave or as scattered exiles over the face of the globe. In 1862, its fell purpose fulfilled, it was partially repealed, to the extent that destitute persons, although occupiers of a quarter of an acre of land, may be relieved, _but in the workhouse only_; so that still a cotter with forty perches of a garden, or a small farmer, suffering under temporary distress from failure of crop, sickness, or accident, must either surrender his little holding and enter the workhouse, _or starve_ under the scheme of legal charity devised to extirpate the Irish from the soil of which their ancestors had been robbed through ages.

We write fact and law, and repudiate all but sober statement in our attempt to illustrate the present position of the Irish people. In the most acute throes of the famine, July 22, 1847, an act was passed for the punishment of vagrants and persons offending against the laws in force for the relief of the poor in Ireland—an act worthy of the worst days of Nero or Diocletian. Let us inquire what was the condition of the country when this act was passed. At the end of February that year there were 116,321 inmates in receipt of relief in the workhouses, and in July there were 10,000 cases of fever, apart from other terrible diseases, in those institutions, the mortality being enormous. Under the Temporary Relief Act there were issued, July 3, rations equal to the support of 3,020,712 persons. Yet the Vagrant Act inflicted imprisonment in a common jail and hard labor for a month upon any person “placing himself in any public place, street, highway, court, or passage to beg or gather alms,” with the same punishment for removing from one poor-law union, or even one electoral division, to another for the purpose of relief. More than half the population were then in receipt of relief, a vast portion of them being engaged upon relief works, which necessitated the migration to considerable distances of the male heads of families. Yet a clause in this act imposed imprisonment for three months, with hard labor, for desertion or wilful neglect of a family by its head—desertion that might have arisen from removal for some miles to another union or electoral division, in order to provide food for them.

Ireland was one uncovered lazar-house in 1847. We write from vivid and painful remembrance of personal travel of 5,000 to 10,000 miles yearly, in an official capacity, over the most afflicted of the famine-stricken districts, from Waterford round to Sligo, during that and subsequent years up to 1858. We visited every workhouse, every auxiliary, every fever hospital, every relief depot, every soup-kitchen, every centre of public works, by way of relief, every missionary station for proselytizing purposes, every ragged-school, every jail, and made a minute personal survey of the most distressed localities in the south and west of Ireland in 1847 and throughout the famine. Holding an important commission from the government, we had access to and command of sources of reliable information open to few, while we had personal communication with the chief officers of several public departments that enabled us to understand thoroughly the precise condition of the suffering classes throughout the whole period of acute distress in Ireland. Charged, unsolicited, by the government with a special inquiry connected with the condition of the destitute and criminal classes which embraced the whole kingdom, owing to experience acquired during the famine period, we visited officially every county, every diocese, every poor-law union, every parish in Ireland, and willingly place the results of that experience before the readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. The history of the famine is yet to be written, and, if not soon prepared, the records of personal experience will be lost, and a reliable account of it rendered impossible. When political factions in the United States traduce the Irish race, and when factions in the several British colonies do likewise, as regards Irish immigrants, they do so ignorant, it is to be hoped, of the precise circumstances under which these immigrants reached those countries during pressure of the famine. We have treated the amount of decline of population in Ireland, and the social quality of that decline, in this article. The decrease of population directly through the famine is, as we have said, exaggerated. The census commissioners of 1851 set down the deaths from _extraordinary_ causes, between 1841 and 1851, or rather from 1845, as follows:

Deaths from fever 222,029

Deaths from dissentery 134,355 and diarrhœa

Deaths from cholera 35,989

Deaths from starvation 21,770

———

Total 414,143

These figures, sad and enormous as they are, we are prepared to show are an entire understatement of the true facts of the case. The whole condition of society below the middle classes was disorganized and demoralized. Panic and paralysis seized the entire population. The dependent perished at home or in the workhouses, while those with means to emigrate fled the country. Flying from famine, fever, and pestilence, these reluctant emigrants, numbers of whom perished before settlement, have helped to lay the foundation of the prosperity of the United States and of the British colonies. The author of the _Record of the O’Connell Centenary_, describing the character of the early Irish emigrants, says, with great truth and force:

“Snatched from rough rural labor, little skilled in handicraft, a very large number wholly illiterate, and many unable to speak any tongue save the native Gaelic; nearly half of them females, without that cultured training in domestic service required by other countries; a heavy, helpless juvenile element hanging on them; intensely clannish, yet removed from those tribal and religious standards of morality and social life which powerfully influence the Irish at home; memory saddened with the recollection of the roofless cabin and the loved little ancestral farm lost for ever, the dead who had been starved at home or fell in fever, the dear relatives who sought the shelter of the workhouse, but through whose trap-coffin they were precipitated into the famine fosse without shroud or requiem; and the uncertainty of despair as to the living remnant of the family left behind—agonized by such feelings, the millions were hastily deported on the shores of America, Australia, and New Zealand, objects of sympathy and affection to the generous, of pity to the benevolent, of alarm and horror to the timid, of contempt to the misanthropic, and of scorn and hatred to the enemies of the race and faith of the Irish nation. Never before was spectacle so sad, so gigantic, so appalling submitted to the contemplation of humanity; the history of Ireland was dramatized throughout Christendom, and its tragic story personated on every hospitable shore on both hemispheres, when Moore’s prediction was literally and amply fulfilled:

“‘The stranger shall hear thy lament on his plain; The sigh of thy harp shall be sent o’er the deep.’”

We have given an outline sketch of the condition of Ireland just before and in the early stages of the famine; in our next we shall endeavor to trace what progress she has made from that sad period to her present improved position in 1878.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. HECKER. 1878.

THE BLESSED VIRGIN.

Like chants which fade yet linger still to bless, While float their formless notes of joy or dole, So thought doth grieve for words beyond control, That to itself it may thy charms confess, And tell each grace with joyous eagerness, As did the morning stars their anthems roll, Or as the angels greet a ransom’d soul. Such tongues alone could paint the loveliness Which o’er thy face in sad, sweet beauty smiled; As though in unseen wingings, ever near, The Dove had coo’d a legend in thine ear Of some rare tenderness to grief beguiled— Perchance of love which bought redemption dear, With all its cost of sorrow to thy Child.

AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.

VIRGIL AND HORACE—III.

The work of translation seems in an odd way to enlist that mimetic impulse which is so strong an element of human nature, and which is really at the bottom of so much of human rivalry. To wish to do as much as others in any given line of effort is but an after-thought, a secondary motion of the mind; the initial instinct is to do _the same_ as they. That men do not rest at this; that they are not content with merely duplicating what they see done about them, like the late lamented Mr. Pongo; that they are for ever seeking “to better their instruction,” is due to that further instinctive yearning for perfection which helps to differentiate them from Mr. Pongo, and interferes so sadly with many most ingenious and scientific schemes for recreating the universe without a Creator. All literatures, it may be said, all poets, begin with translation—that is, with imitation of some other literature or poet. Alcæus and Sophron, no doubt, are but Horace and Theocritus to the unknown who went before them; Homer is first, doubtless, only because we know not the greater than Homer—rapt from us by the irrevocable years—whom Homer may have copied, as Virgil copied Homer.

This, however, is a law of literature which was known as long ago as the days of Solomon, at least. What is not so obvious, and even more curious as well as more to the present point, is why translators under certain conditions should be so fond of repeating one another in regard to any particular bit of work.

For a generation or so some one of the poets who are the favorite objects of the translator’s zeal will be neglected and seemingly forgotten. Then some day appears a version which attracts attention and gets talked of, and, _presto_! a dozen pens are in eager chase to rival or surpass it. Now it is Homer which is thus brought into notice, and we have Professor Newman, Lord Derby, Mr. Wright, Mr. Worsley, Mr. Dart, Professor Blackie, Mr. Bryant—what muse shall catalogue the host?—giving us in quick succession and in every kind of metre their versions of the _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_, or both? Again it is Virgil, and within a brief interval Professor Conington, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Cranch have done the _Æneid_ into English. Or once more Horace sways the hour, and in a twinkling or thereabouts a dozen translations of the _Odes_ are smoking hot from the press on the critic’s table, and bewildering him to choose among their various merits. Within the last half-century, nay, within the last twenty-five years, we have seen just this revolution. Is it because our own is so peculiarly one of those transitional periods in the history of a literature which are most favorable to translation—indeed, most provocative of it; one of those intervals when the national imagination is, as it were, lying fallow after the exhaustion of some great creative epoch, and intellectual effort takes chiefly the form of criticism, which in one sense translation is? Well, such generalizations are as perilous as they are fascinating and we must not yield to them too rashly. In this case, if we did yield, we should be told, no doubt, that translation was no more a peculiarity of a transitional period than of a creative one; that the notion of such divisions in the history of a literature is preposterous and but another invention of the arch-enemy, like comparative philology and the Eastern question, to set the mildest and wisest of sages—even ourselves, beloved reader—thirsting for each other’s blood; or that, finally, an epoch which has produced Tennyson and Browning, De Vere and Arnold, Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, and—let nothing tempt us back to our own side of the Atlantic, where poets grow like pumpkins, big and little, in every garden patch; yet surely, if originality goes for anything, we may add—Tupper—that a time so prolific of poetic genius is not to be counted a transitional period at all.

This, or something like it, we should no doubt hear, if we ventured upon putting forth as our own the enticing proposition we have but modestly thrown out as a suggestion to the reader. And if we were not withheld by that providential want of time and opportunity which so often saves us from our rasher selves, we should no doubt go on to make the venture even now: to assert that, in spite of Tennyson and Browning, in spite even of Matthew Arnold—in one sense a truer voice of his time than either of them—in spite of the pagan and mediæval renaissance piloted by that wonderfully clever coterie of the Rossettis, the present can in no sense be called a creative epoch in our literature, as we call creative the two epochs of which Shakspeare and Wordsworth are, broadly speaking, the representative names—representative, however, in different ways and in widely different degrees; that it is, on the contrary, a true transitional period, as the period of Pope and Dryden was transitional, and for analogous reasons; and that, because it is so, the art of translation flourishes now as then. Nor should we forget, in saying this, the numerous translations which marked the Elizabethan era. But it is to be noted that while all, or nearly all, the then extant classics were turned into English before the close of the Elizabethan era, translations of any one of them were not repeated, and precisely for this reason: that the age, being a creative epoch, made its main effort in the direction of knowledge, and not of criticism—sought to acquire ideas, and not to arrange them, as was the case with the translating periods which came after it. Then, too, it was the virtual beginning of our literature, when translation, as we have said, came natural to it. Chaucer two hundred years before was a creative poet, if the term may be used, in a time that was not creative, a time that was not his, a time whose sluggishness not even his pregnant genius could inform; Chaucer was the glad premature swallow of a lingering, long-delaying spring, whose settled sunshine came to us only with Spenser’s later bird-song,

“Preluding those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still.”

Milton may be said to have concluded, as Spenser preluded, that mighty time, without fairly belonging to it. They belonged rather to each other. “Milton has owned to me,” says Dryden, “that his original was Spenser.” They were the epilogue and the prologue of that mighty opening chorus of our literature, in which the translators, too, had their parts, but only as prompters to the great singers, to help them to add to their native melody here and there some sweetness of a foreign note.

The time of critical translation, of translation for its own sake, as an art, came in only with Dryden—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest of the transition poets. Then, too, translators began first to repeat each other’s work. Before the year 1580 most of the classic poets had been translated into English verse. They were not duplicated, because, as we have said, the time wanted first of all the knowledge of them, and it was not fastidious as to the shape in which it came. For a hundred years after its appearance Phaer’s version of the _Æneid_ had no rival. Then came Vicars’, only to disappear almost as quickly. Doubly lapped in lead, it sank at once in that Stygian pool where Dulness tries the weight of her favorites, and there it has since remained, like Prospero’s book and staff, drowned

“Deeper than did ever plummet sound.”

Undeterred by this untoward fate, John Ogilby brought out his translation soon after, first at Cambridge and again in London, “adorned with sculptures and illustrated with annotations”—“the fairest edition,” grave Anthony à Wood assures us, “that till then the English press ever produced.” This gorgeous work, pronounced by Pope to be below criticism, nevertheless went through four editions before descending to the congenial fellowship of Vicars under the forgetful wave—a proof how much a good English version of the _Æneid_ was desired. Ogilby had been a dancing-master, and perhaps learned in his profession to rival Lucilius, who

“In hora sæpe ducentos Ut magnum versus dictabat stans pede in uno.”[172]

At all events, although he took to literature late in life—he was past forty before he learned Latin or Greek—he was a prodigious author, as we learn from the _Dunciad_:

“Here groans the shelf with Ogilby the great.”

Besides translating remorselessly everything he could lay hands on, from Homer to Æsop, he found time to write various heroic poems, and had even completed an epic in twelve books on Charles I., when fate took pity on his fellows and sent the great fire of London to the rescue. Phillips, in the _Theatrum Poetarum_, styles Ogilby a prodigy, and avers that his “Paraphrase on Æsop’s Fables” “is generally confessed to have exceeded whatever hath been done before in that kind.”[173] As Milton’s nephew can scarcely be suspected of a joke, we must conclude that this is not one of the critical judgments which Milton inspired. Nevertheless, Ogilby’s translations and paraphrases procured him a “genteel livelihood” which many better poems have failed to do for their authors.

Neither Vicars nor Ogilby, however, was of sufficient note, nor had their labors sufficient vitality, to set the current of translation fairly going. That was reserved for Dryden, whose famous work came out in 1697. Dryden had all the qualifications necessary to ensure him a full harvest of imitation and rivalry at once. He was the most famous poet and critic of his day, and in either capacity had found means to excite abundance of jealousies and resentments. Moreover, his change of religion, and the vigor with which he had espoused the Catholic cause in his _Hind and Panther_, made him many additional enemies. So it is not to be wondered at that when, as Pope puts it,

“Pride, malice, folly, against Dryden rose In various shapes of parsons, critics, beaux,”

the parsons led the onslaught. First came Parson Milbourn, “the fairest of critics,” who printed his own version side by side with the one he found fault with, and whom Dulness also promptly claimed for her own. Then Dr. Brady, giving over to his worthy coadjutor, Tate, for the nonce the herculean task of promoting Sternhold and Hopkins to be next to the worst poets in the world, devoted himself to the equally gigantic labor of proving that there was a work he could translate more abominably than the Psalms. His version in blank-verse, “when dragged into the light,” says Dr. Johnson, “did not live long enough to cry.” Then Dr. Trapp, the Oxford professor of poetry—_majora viribus audens_—rushed to the attack and did the _Æneid_ into, if possible, still blanker verse than his predecessor’s. It was he who said of Dryden’s version “that where Dryden shines most we often see the least of Virgil.” This was true enough; and it was, no doubt, to avoid the like reproach that the good doctor forbore to shine at all. On him was made the well-known epigram apropos of a certain poem said to be better than Virgil:

“Better than Virgil? Yes, perhaps; But then, by Jove, ’tis Dr. Trapp’s!”

This is only another form of Bentley’s famous judgment: “A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” The doctor has had no better luck than his fellows.

“Olli dura quies oculos et ferreus urguet Somnus; in æternam clauduntur lumina noctem.”[174]

These efforts of the parsons, however, were no doubt inspired at least as much by _odium theologicum_ as by the genuine impulse of emulation. The first true exemplification of this came about 1729 with the version of Pitt,[175] whose choice of Dryden’s couplet was a direct challenge. Johnson’s estimate of the success of this rivalry is not, on the whole, unfair—or, at least, as fair as such comparisons often are. “Dryden,” he says, “leads the reader forward by his general vigor and sprightliness, and Pitt often stops him to contemplate the excellence of a single couplet; Dryden’s faults are forgotten in the hurry of delight, and Pitt’s beauties neglected in the languor of a cold and listless perusal; Pitt pleases the critics and Dryden the people; Pitt is quoted and Dryden read.” Dryden, however, is probably oftener read nowadays than Pitt is quoted. It is something to be a poet after all, and in the exchange of translation we allow for the purity of his metal and the beauty of his coinage. Most of us would rather have the gold of Dryden, though it fall a piece or two short in the reckoning, than the small change of Pitt, though every silver sixpence and copper farthing be accounted for.

Other translations of the _Æneid_ there were during the eighteenth century, among them one by another Oxford professor of poetry, Hawkins, but none have survived. Pope’s translation of Homer, which was published soon after Pitt’s _Æneid_, diverted attention to the Greek poet, and gave him with translators a pre-eminence over his Latin rival which only within a few years he can be said to have lost. Pope had no imitators, however, till long after. Even more absolutely than Dryden he swayed the sceptre of poetry in his time; and the presumptuous wight who had ventured to challenge his sovereignty or to measure strength with “that poetical wonder, the translation of the _Iliad_, a performance which no age or nation can pretend to rival,” gods—critical gods—and men and booksellers would have laughed to scorn. It is true, Addison, that most uneasy “brother near the throne,” was shrewdly suspected of meditating such a design under the cloak of his friend and follower, Tickell, and even went so far as to publish—so ran the current gossip of the coffee-houses—a version of the first book of the _Iliad_ in Tickell’s name. But the scheme stopped there; Pope’s triumph was too splendid and overwhelming, and his great work calmly defied competition, until the spell of his honeyed couplet was broken, and Cowper could find a hearing for his ponderous Miltonic periods, a full half-century after Pope’s death. The battle which soon thereafter came to be joined between the partisans of the Popian and Cowperian methods—both of them, as Mr. Arnold assures us, really on a complete equality of error—had the effect of keeping Homer in the foreground and Virgil in the shade, despite the praiseworthy versions of the latter by Simmons in rhymed couplets about 1817, and Kennedy in blank-verse some thirty years later, until the critical _furore_ created by the appearance of Prof. Conington’s _Æneid_ about ten years since once more turned the tide and brought our Mantuan to the front.

Conington’s translation, by the novelty of its metre, the freshness of its treatment, the spirit of its movement, its union of fidelity and grace, took the public ear and at once won a popularity which, if we may judge from the fact that a new edition has been lately advertised, it has not yet lost nor is destined speedily to lose. Moreover, its peculiar metre gave rise to a discussion among the critics, which has no doubt had its share in bringing out the two additional versions by Mr. Cranch and Mr. Morris at brief intervals after Professor Conington’s, the former at Boston, the latter in England and reprinted here. Each of these three versions has that “proper reason for existing” in novelty of method and manner which Mr. Arnold demands, and without which, indeed, multiplied translations are but cumberers of the book-stall and a weariness to the flesh. Of Mr. Cranch this assertion may sound a trifle odd, since his work upon its face presents little that is new. In place of the galloping octosyllabics of Prof. Conington or the resurrected Alexandrines of Mr. Morris, he offers us only the familiar blank-verse which Kennedy and Trapp and Brady used, or misused, before him; he has no theories to illustrate, but translates his author as faithfully as he knows how, and his rendering is neither so exceedingly good nor so excessively bad as to give it any claim to originality upon that score. But then it is the first American translation of Virgil, and that is surely novelty enough.

For as each age, so every country, looks at a classic author through spectacles of its own. “Each age,” as Conington well says in his preface, “will naturally think that it understands an author whom it studies better than the ages which have gone before it”; and it is for this reason, he adds, “that the great works of antiquity require to be translated afresh from time to time to preserve their interest as part of modern literary culture.” But it is not alone that each age will understand an author better than preceding ages; it will understand him differently; it will see him in another light, from far other points of view, modified and interpreted by its own spirit. What Heyne says of the poet is in a measure true of the translator—that he has the genius of his era, which must necessarily qualify his work. We have sometimes fancied even that this business of translation was a kind of metempsychosis through which the poet’s soul shall speak to many different times and lands through forms and in voices changing to suit the moods of each. This, of course, is only one of those fantastic notions which a writer must sometimes be indulged in, if he is to be kept in reasonable good-humor. But we think we may venture to say that two nations translating for themselves what antiquity has to say to them will insensibly find its utterances modified for each of them by their natural modes of thought. Nay, may we not go further and say that no two human minds will find precisely the same message in Homer or Virgil or Horace—so infinite are the gradations of thought, so innumerable the shades of meaning and suggestion in a word. Of Virgil this is especially true; for he has, says Prof. Conington, “that peculiar habit, ... common to him and Sophocles, of hinting at two or three modes of expression while actually employing one.”

It is just for this reason that repeated translations of a great author are not only useful but desirable; that, to quote Conington again, “it is well that we should know how our ancestors of the Revolution period conceived of Virgil; it is well that we should be obliged consciously to realize how we conceive of him ourselves.” How true this is no one can fail to perceive who contrasts Dryden’s method in any given passage with Conington’s. The sense of Virgil may be given with equal exactness by each—we say _may_ be, which is rather stretching a point, for, in respect of verbal fidelity, the two versions are not to be compared—the interpretation may be equally poetical, but there will remain a subtle something which stamps each, and which we can only say is the flavor of the time. Or, again, compare the Abbé Delille’s French version with Dryden’s English—perhaps a fairer comparison; for both are equally free, though by no means equally acquainted with their author, and both to a certain extent belonged to the same school of composition. Nor are they so very far apart as they seem in point of time; the century or so which divides them was a very much longer period in England than in France. Charles II. was nearer to Louis XV. than to George III. in point of taste. Yet how different from Dryden’s Virgil, or from any Englishman’s, is Delille’s, even though he does not find in his text such enchanting gallicisms as Jean Regnault de Segrais could twist out of the lines,

“Ubi templum illi centumque Sabæo Thure calent aræ, sertisque recentibus halant”:[176]

“Dans le temple où toujours quelque Amant irrité Accuse dans ses vœux quelque jeune Beauté.”

This is an extreme case, no doubt, and there are Frenchmen even who would not be beyond laughing at it. We are not to forget, as we laugh at it ourselves, that Segrais was not unknown in the Hôtel Rambouillet, and that although his own poetry was not all of this order, not even his _Æneid_—Saint-Evremond liked it—he also wrote novels which not even the Hôtel Rambouillet could read. But when that really able man and accomplished scholar, Cardinal Du Perron, turns Horace’s lines in the charming farewell to Virgil (_Carm._ i. 3):

“Ventorumque regat Pater Obstrictis aliis præter Iapygia,”

into this sort of thing:

“Ainsi des vents l’humide Père Ton cours heureusement tempere, Tenant ses enfants emplumez Si bien sous la clef enfermez Excepté l’opportun Zephyr,”

we have a version which no doubt seems correct and poetical enough to a Frenchman, but to an English mind suggests nothing so much as a damp and aged poultry-fancier locking up his chickens in the hen-house out of the rain. And a countryman of the cardinal can make nothing more of the “laughing eyes” of Dante’s Piccarda:

“Ond’ ella pronta e con _occhi ridenti_,”[177]

than

“L’ombre me repondit _d’un air satisfait_!”

as though the celestial phantom had been a small girl bribed with a tart to answer. To the post-academic Gaul, shivering in the chaste but chilly shadow of that awful Pantheon of the verbal proprieties, the “Marguerite aux yeulx rians et verds” whom his forebears loved to sing would be but a green-eyed monster indeed. Ronsard’s parodies of Pindar were no worse than Ambrose Philips’ travesties of the deep-mouthed Theban—the sparrow-hawk aping the eagle—and not much worse, indeed, than West’s or even Wheelwright’s, or any other imitation of the inimitable that we have seen. But the badness of the one is thoroughly French and of his time, even to his bragging that it was his noble birth which enabled him to reproduce Pindar, wherein Horace, for lack of that virtue, had failed; the badness of the other as thoroughly English and of his age. And what more salient instance could be given of this natural difference in mental constitution, in “the way of looking at things,” than Voltaire’s treatment of the scene in _Hamlet_ where the sentinel answers the question, “Have you had quiet guard?” by the familiar household idiom, “Not a mouse stirring”? “_Pas un souris qui trotte_” the author of _Zaire_ makes it, and proceeds to inform his countrymen that this Shakspeare was a drunken savage.

Now, while there is no such radical difference between English and American ways of thought as between English and French ways, there is still difference enough to justify us in giving place to Mr. Cranch’s blank-verse _Æneid_, as being _à priori_ another thing from the English blank-verse _Æneids_ of forty or one hundred and forty years ago. So, without more ado, let us repeat that these three versions of the last decade are sufficiently unlike one another or any that have gone before to warrant attentive notice.

In choosing for the vehicle of his attempt the octosyllabic line—the well-known metre of Scott’s _Marmion_—Prof. Conington turned his back intrepidly on all the traditions. Scarcely any rhythm we have would seem at first blush worse fitted to give the unlearned reader an adequate idea of the sonorous march of the Latin hexameter or of the stately melody of Virgil’s verse, of the dignity of his sentiments, or the noble gravity of his style. For him who uses such a metre to render the _Æneid_ one half anticipates the need of some such frank confession as that Ronsard, in a fit of remorse, or perhaps a verbal indigestion over his own inconceivable pedantry, puts at the end—at the _end_, mark you—of one of his never-ending series of odes:

“Les François qui mes vers liront, S’ils ne sont et Grecs et Romains, En lieu de ce livre, ils n’auront Qu’un pesant faix entre les mains”—

which for our present purpose we may paraphrase: My excellent reader, if you don’t know Virgil as well as I do, you will find very little of him here, and if you do you will find still less. But Professor Conington soon puts away from us all such forebodings. He gives us, in spite of his metre, for the most part, in rare instances, by the help of it, a great deal of Virgil—more, on the whole, than almost any other of the poet’s translators. He has put the story of the _Æneid_ into bright and animated English verse which may be read with pleasure as a poem for itself, and is yet strictly faithful to the sense and spirit of its original, as close as need be—wonderfully close in many parts—to its language, often skilfully suggestive of some of the most salient peculiarities of its form, and only failing conspicuously, where all translations most conspicuously fail, in rendering the poet’s manner, because the manner of any poet—and we mean by manner that union of thought and form of the poet’s way of seeing with his way of saying things which is the full manifestation of his genius—only failing here because this part of any poet it is next to impossible to reproduce in a foreign tongue, and because the vehicle chosen by Prof. Conington, so opposite in every way to Virgil’s vehicle, increased that difficulty tenfold. But a translation of a long narrative poem is not like the translation of a brief lyric. Is the former to be written for those who understand the original and care for no translation, or for those who, not understanding the original, ask first of the translator that he shall not put them to sleep, and, second, that he shall give them all that his author gives as nearly as possible in the same manner? Two of these demands Prof. Conington’s version fully meets, and it comes as near to the third as was consistent with a metre which gave him the best chance of combining the other two. If any translation of Virgil can hope to be popular it is his; and we hold to the belief that it will share with Dryden’s, which, if only for its author’s sake, will live, the affections of the _unlatined_ English reader for long to come.

As might be expected, it is in battle-pieces and in scenes of swift and animated action, to which Scott’s metre naturally lends itself, and with which it is as naturally associated, that this version chiefly excels. Take, for example, the onset in the eleventh book:

“Meantime the Trojans near the wall, The Tuscans and the horsemen all, In separate troops arrayed; Their mettled steeds the champaign spurn, And, chafing, this and that way turn; Spears bristle o’er the fields, that burn With arms on high displayed. Messapus and the Latian force, And Coras and Camilla’s horse, An adverse front array; With hands drawn back they couch the spear, And aim the dart in full career; The tramp of heroes strikes the ear, Mixed with the charger’s neigh. Arrived within a javelin’s throw, The armies halt a space; when, lo! Sudden they let their good steeds go And meet with deafening cry; Their volleyed darts fly thick as snow, Dark-shadowing all the sky.”

The Latin could scarcely be given with more spirit or closeness; though in neither respect does Morris fall short of his predecessor, from whom in manner, however, he differs _toto cœlo_:

“But in meanwhile the Trojan folk the city draw anigh, The Tuscan dukes and all their horse in many a company Well ordered; over all the plain, neighing, the steed doth fare, Prancing and champing on the bit that turns him here and here. And far and wide the lea is rough with iron harvest now, And with the weapons tost aloft the level meadows glow. Messapus and the Latins swift, lo! on the other hand, And Coras with his brother-lord, and maid Camilla’s band, Against them in the field; and, lo! far back their arms they fling In couching of the level spears, and shot-spears brandishing. All is afire with neigh of steeds and onfall of the men. And now, within a spear-shot come, short up they rein, and then They break out with a mighty cry and spur the maddened steeds; And all at once from every side the storm of spear-shot speeds, As thick as very snowing is, and darkens down the sun.”

It would be hard to say which version is closer to the original. Conington leaves out the epithet _celeres_ which Virgil bestows on the Latins, and also—a graver omission—that brother whom Virgil makes attend him like his shadow (_et cum fratre Coras_) in every battle-field of the _Æneid_. This fraternal warrior Morris gives us, indeed, but not very intelligibly, as Coras’ “brother-lord.” On the other hand, although Morris renders the Latin line for line, he is not so concise as Conington, who puts Virgil’s fifteen hexameters into twenty of his short lines as opposed to fifteen of Morris’ long ones. Virgil has nothing of Morris’ “iron harvest”; here—

“Tum late ferreus hastis Horret ager, campique armis sublimibus ardent”—

we should give Conington the preference, while Morris excels in rendering the verse:

“Adventusque virum fremitusque ardescit equorum.”

In Morris’ version four words are to be specially noted: _folk_, _dukes_, _maid_, and _very_. They contain the key to his method, and we shall recur to them again.

Our American’s blank-verse here helps him to no greater degree of fidelity than either of his rivals, while even patriotism must own his version, as compared with theirs, a trifle tame:

“Meanwhile, the Trojan troops, the Etruscan chiefs, And all the cavalry approach the walls, In order ranged. The coursers leap and neigh Along the fields, and fight against the curb, And wheel about. An iron field of spears Bristles afar, and lifted weapons blaze. Upon the other side the Latins swift, Messapus, Coras, and his brother come, Also Camilla’s wing; in hostile ranks They threaten with their lances backward drawn, And shake their javelins. On the warriors press, And fierce and fiercer neigh the battle steeds. Advancing now within a javelin’s throw, Each army halted; then, with sudden shouts, They cheer and spur their fiery horses on. From all sides now the spears fly thick and fast As showers of sleet, and darken all the sky.”

The word “cavalry” here is too modern in its associations to suit us entirely, nor strikes us as highly poetical.

“Wave, Munich, all thy banners wave, And charge with all thy _chivalry_,”

is the way Campbell put it. Again, the rendering of the line _Adventusque virum fremitusque ardescit equorum_ is less exact than Morris’, if not than Conington’s, and much less poetical than either; and were it not for the printer’s aid, we should be unable to tell such blank-verse as “Messapus, Coras, and his brother come, also Camilla’s wing,” from the very prosiest of prose. Mr. Cranch, like Prof. Conington, omits Camilla’s attribute of _virginis_—though that is, perhaps, better than to call her, as Dryden does, a “virago”—and turns Virgil’s snow into sleet, no doubt having in mind Gray’s

“Iron sleet of arrowy shower Hurtles in the darkened air,”

or the “sharp sleet of arrowy shower” in _Paradise Regained_.

It may be of interest to set side by side with these English translations the French version of Delille. It will show us, at least, where Mr. Morris went, perhaps, for his “iron harvest”:

“Mais déjà les Troyens, déjà les fiers Toscans Pour attaquer vers Lausente ont déployé leurs rangs; Ils marchent; le coursier de sa tête hautaine Bat l’air, ronge le frein, et bondit dans la plaine; Les champs sont hérissés d’une moisson de fer, Et chaque javelot fait partir un éclair. Et Messape, et Coras et son valeureux frère, Et la chaste Camille et sa troupe légère, Se présentent ensemble. On voit de toutes parts Et s’alonger la lance et s’agiter les dards. Sous les pas des guerriers les champs poudreux gémissent; Et soldats et coursiers de colère frémissent. Enfin, à la distance où le trait peut porter, Les partis ennemis viennent de s’arrêter: On s’écrie, on s’élance, et d’un essor rapide. Chacun pousse en avant son coursier intrépide. Plus pressés que la neige au retour des hivers Des nuages de traits en obscurci les airs.”

In a future number we purpose concluding our present examination and taking a final leave of the translators.

THE HOME-RULE CANDIDATE.

_A STORY OF “NEW IRELAND.”_

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE LITTLE CHAPEL AT MONAMULLIN,” “THE ROMANCE OF A PORTMANTEAU,” ETC., ETC.