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THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

MONTHLY MAGAZINE

GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE,

v, VOL. XLIV.

R, 1886, TO MARCH, 1887,

NEW YORK:
THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY CO.,

9 Barclay Street.

,1887.

CONTENTS.

Acta Concilii Neo-Ebofacensis IV. Rev. A.

F. He-wit, ....... 543

Along the Green Bienne. M. P. Thompson, . 227

Anatomy of Selfishness. A . F. Marshall, . 588

" At Last, Though Long." Agnes Power^ . 239

At the Theatre. Conde B. Fallen, . . . ifl2

Black" Christmas, A.^-Mrt. Lucy C. Lil*

529

Borgia Myth, The. Rev. Henry A, Brann,

D.D.,LL.D., ...... I

Catholic View of Prison Life, A. A. F. Mar-

shall, . . , . . 42
Chat about New Books, PL. Maurice F.

Egan, , . . 127, 277, 407, 554, 701, 846
Christian Public Schools. Rev. Patrick F.

McSweeny, D.D., ..... 788

Christian Unity. Rev. H. H. Wyman, . . 76
Christian Unity vs. Unity of Christians -~-Rev.

H. H. Wyman) ...... 185

Christmas Carols. Agnes Repplier, . . 433

Claddagh of Galway, The. Mary Banim, . 798

"Clifford Abbey." Mary C. Croivley, . . 694
Cosmogony and its Critics, The. W. Mar-

sham Adams, ...... 317

Creeds, Old and New. Rev. H. H. Wyman, . 690

Eight-Hour Law, The. Rev. J. Talbot

Smith, ..... . 397

English Hymns. Agnes Repplier, . . 64

Episcopal Convention, The : A Layman's

View. John H. Phelan, .... 684

Fair Emigrant, A. Rosa Mulholland, . . 83
J 57 33 SGI 1 618, 829

Few More Words with Contributors, A, . . 425
Franz Liszt. 7. R. G. Hassard, ... 53

"Has Rome Jurisdiction?" Rev. Arthur

H. Cullen, ..... 215, 365

Henry George and hii Land Theories. Rev.

Henry A. Brann, D.D.,LL.D. , . . 810

How Shall we Support our Orphans? Very

Rev. P. A . Baart, S. T.L., ... 644

In Port. Afr*. C. R. Carson, . . , . 762
Is the Negro Problem Becoming Local ? Rev.

John R. Slattery, 309

King of Shreds and Patches, K. Louise Imo-
gen Guiney, '<. 668
Kitchens and Wages. Rev. J. Talbot Smith, 779

Man of his Time, A. Jean M< Stone ^ . . 199
Mr. Thomas Chivers' Boarder.-"/?, M. John-
ston, 736

Nativity in Art, The. Eliza Allen Starr, . 460
Negro Problem and the Catholic Church,

The. Rt. Rev, Francis Janssens, D.D., 721

Present State of the Chinese Missions. Hugh

P. McElrone, s6<S

Progressive Orthodoxy. Rev. H. H. Wy-

man^ 79-

Protestant Episcopal Convention, The./?/.

Rev. Monsignor T. S. Preston, . . jai
Provincial Life in England. Mrs, Lucy C.

Lillie, 253

Religion in Education. Rev. Thomas J t

Conaty, ........ 145

Royal Spanish Crusader, A. D. A. Casserly, 16

Scriptural Questions. Rev. A . F. Heivit^ . 351,

445i 654i 74i
Secularized Germany and the Vatican. W.

Marsham Adams, ..... 107
Shoneen, Thc.^-Edivard Moran, . . . 378
Social Problems. *Rev, Edward McS-weeny^

D-D 577

Some Characteristics of Irish Lyric Poetry.

R. M. Johnston, 484

" Something Touching the Lord Hamlet."

Appleton Morgan, 29

Summer in Rhenish Prussia, A.F. W. Grey, 419

Thomas Kane, Cutler. Agnes Power^ . . 473
True Man of His Time, The. Rev. Walter

Elliott, 2 Jo

Turning Point in Irish History, The. T.

O'Neill Russell, ...... 6oj

CONTENTS.

POETRY.

A Queen. Edith W. Cook, . . . .212
Constantine at Constantinople. Aubrey de

Vere, 297

Constantine in Thrace. Aubrey de Vere, . 189
Faith. Wm. R. Williams, . . . .364
In the Soudan M. B, M., . . . .349
Legend of St. Longinus. Aubrey de Vere, . 610

Morning. Christine Yorke, .... 54

Sorrow's Vigil. Eleanor C. Donnelly, . . 786

The Christmas Gift. Margaret H. Lawless, 444

The Church at Puteoli. Rev. J. Costello, . 740

The Director. E. F., 809

Tota Pulchra Es.Kfv. M. Barrett, O.S.B., 552
Two Minstrels. Wnt. J. Duggett, . . .459

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Among the Fairies, 288

Ancient History from the Creation to the Fall

of the Western Empire in A.D. 476, An, . 141

Anecdotes Illustrative of Old Testament Texts, 575
Apparatus Juris Ecclesiastici, inusum Episco-
porum et Sacerdotum praesertim Apostoli-

cp Munere fungentium, .... 568

Applied Christianity, 567

Arabic Manual, An, 720

Bible and Belief, The 568

Christian Patience the Strength and Discipline

of the Soul, 431

Cursing Psalm, The, 288

Companion to the Catechism, A, ... 286
Complete Works of R. Southwell, S.J., with

Life and Death, The, 140

Development of the Roman Constitution, The, 574

Diary of a Tour in America, .... 576

Duke of Somerset's Scepticism, . . . 288

During the Persecution, 138

Earthquakes and other Earth Movements, . 575

Ecclesiastical English 142

Eighty-five Years of Irish History, . . . 430

Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century, 570

Eucharistic Hours, 572

Five-Minute Sermons for Low Masses on all

Sundays of the Year, 427

From Meadow Sweet to Mistletoe, . . . 575

Gems of Catholic Thought, . . . . 573

Genius in Sunshine and Shadow, . . . 573
Glories of Divine Grace, The, . . . .565
Great Means of Salvation and of Perfection,

The 57i

Henry Grattan, I43

History of Chevalier Bayard, .... 430

How to Strengthen the Memory, ... 860

Illustrated Catholic Family Annual for 1887,

The, 429

Incarnation, Birth, and Infancy of Jesus

Christ, The, ..." 8 so

Irish Question, The, ... .143

Irish Question, The, 569

King, Prophet, and Priest 139

Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, . 57,;

Letter to the Rev. S. Davidson D.D., LL.D., 288

Life of Antonio Rosmini Serbati, . . . 857
Life of Dom Bartholomew of the Martyrs,

Life of Father Barbel'in, S J., '. \?l
Life of Jean-Baptiste Muard, . . . .859

Lives of the Apostles, The, their Contem-
poraries and Successors, .... 565

Little Compliments of the Season, and other

Tiny Rhymes for Tiny Readers, . . 573

Mary, the Queen of the House of David and

Mother of Jesus. 572

Memoirs of the Rev. J. L. Diman, D.D., . 714

Microbes, Ferments, and Moulds, . . . 574

Miraculous Element in the Gospels, The, . 714
Missionary Labors of Frs. Marquette, Menard,

and Allouez in the Lake Superior Region, 429
Monotheism the Primitive Religion of the City

of Rome, 138

More about the Huguenots, . . . . 719

Nature and the Bible, 428

Novissima, 719

Ordo Divini Officii Recitandi Missaeque Cele-
brandae juxta Rubricas Breviarii Missalis-

que Romani, 859

Orphans and Orphan Asylums, . . .286

Oscotian, The, 140

Papers in Penology, 718

Pope Leo XIII., . ... . . .566

Practical Introduction to English Rhetoric, A, 140

Preaching of the Cross, The 571

Purgatory, 719

Rear-Guard of the Revolution, The, . . 142

Religious Unity as Prescribed by our Lord, . 432
Report of Proceedings at the Fourth General
Assembly of the Society of St. Vincent de

Paul, 716

Sadliers' Catholic Directory, Almanac, and

Ordo for 1887, 859

Saint Augustine, Bishop and Doctor, . . 858

Scholastic Annual for 1887 860

Self-Consciousness of Noted Persons, . . 431

Sermons of the Rev. Joseph Farrell, . 286
Simple Readings on some of the Parables of

our Lord Jesus Christ, .... 566
Sketch of the History of the Catholic Church

in the City of Natchez, Miss., . , . 571

Sketches of the Royal Irish Constabulary, . 288

S. Thomas et Doctrina Praemotionis Physicae, 139

Studies in Church History, .... 139

Talks with Socrates about Life, . . . 717

Technic, 574

Thomas Grant, First Bishop of Southwark, . 431
Treatise on Plane and Spherical Trigonometry,

A 576

Watch on Calvary, The, 431

Whom God hath Joined, 141

Young Philistine, and other Stories, The,

860

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XLIV. OCTOBER, 1886. No. 259.

THE BORGIA MYTH.

MR. ASTOR, in a recent number of the North American Review,
has vindicated the character of Lucretia Borgia. Following in
the wake of distinguished historians, he shows that the charges of
murder, poisoning, and incest brought against %er by scurrilous
poets and vindictive scribes who hated the Borgia name are
groundless. But while he spares the woman of the notorious
family, he is unmerciful, and perhaps unjust, to two of its male
members the head, Pope Alexander VI., and his son, the re-
nowned Caesar, Duke of Romagna. In his novel, Valentino, he
repeats and accentuates the charges made against Caesar by the
gossiping Burchard, the vindictive Infessura, the purchasable
forger Paul Jovius,* the calumnious Guicciardini, and the Nea-
politan poetic libellers Pontano and Sannazaro. That these
epithets are not undeserved the reader who has studied their
works can attest. The last edition of Burchard by Thuasne, at
Paris, shows the old papal master of ceremonies to be a mere re-
corder of gossip. It is fertur and dicitur on every page of his
diary the "on dit " and the " it is said " of the modern detractor.

Besides the hostility of Burchard to the Borgias, so clearly
pointed out by Gregorovius in his work on Lucretia Borgia, the

* Tiraboschi (Letteratura Italiana, tome vii. pp. 3, 903, Modena, 1792) shows that Jov;us
is unworthy of belief and a forger by his own testimony. Gregorovius {Lucretia Borgia, Stutt-
gart, 1874, chap. ii. p. 10) points out mistakes of Jovius and Infessura in the simplest matters
affecting the Borgias. Litta holds that Caesar's mother, Vanozza an abbreviation of Giovajina
was of the Farnese family. But Gregorovius contradicts him (ibidem, p. 10). So discordant
are authorities even in small matters regarding the Borgias.

2 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct.,

fact that the edition of the ancient Diarium is not authentic for
there are slips and unquestionable interpolations in it throws
doubt on many of its statements.* Paris de Grassis, another
chronicler of the early portion of the sixteenth century, for a
time Burchard's associate, says of him that he was " not only
not human, but above all beasts the most beastly, the most inhu-
man, and the most envious." As to Infessura, he was a radical,
a revolutionist, a strong partisan of the Colonnas and therefore
hostile to the Borgias, bitterly opposed to the temporal sove-
reignty of the popes, and so foul a writer that the learned Mura-
tori, in his Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, was obliged to expunge
obscenities from the Diarium of the Hortan chronicler before
publishing it ; and of the writer he says : " I have to admit that
he was very prone to calumny." Paul Jovius in his letters con-
fesses that his pen is purchasable, that he is a writer for sale like
the mercenary Condottieri of the times ; and Caesar Cantu calls
him " the lying gazetteer of the epoch." Paul Jovius, the im-
moral bishop of Nocera, whose chief grievance against the pope
was that he would not give him a better see viz., that of Como
because his holiness considered him unfit for it, as Tiraboschi
states, is rivallecLin lying by the Florentine Guicciardini. This
man, who owed all his fortune to the popes, showed his gratitude
by maligning his benefactors. Full of the Florentine hatred of
the temporal sovereignty of the Papacy, which Caesar Borgia did
so much to re-establish in the Romagna, the Italian historian uses
all the graces of style and his wonderful powers of expression to
calumniate those whom he considered the foes of the political
influence of his beloved republic. Audin, in his Life of Leo X.,
tells us that conscience smote Guicciardini at the hour of his
death, and that when the notary asked him what he was to do
with the History of Italy, he replied, " Burn it." Caesar Cantu,
whose reputation for impartiality is above suspicion, says of him
" that he measures the justice of a cause by success alone. He
blames the popes for everything and attributes to them all the
calamities of the age." f The hatred of the Venetians and Floren-
tines towards the increase of the papal sovereignty in the fif-

* A learned critic of Thuasne's " Burchard," in the Zeitschrift fiir Katholische Theologie
(i Quartalheft, Innsbruck, 1886), points out, ist. That Eccard's text, from which that of Thuasne
is taken, is corrupt" Seven copies but no original " of Eccard's original exist ; 2d. The Chigi
copy which Thuasne follows is not proven to be faithful to the Vatican original, still unpub-
lished ; 3d. The Diarium from A.D. 150010 the end is not authenticated because not signed by
Burchard ; this covers the "ball" story, to which we refer later on. Other breaks in the narra-
tive are pointed out, as well as the quarrel which caused the enmity of Burchard to Alexander
at the beginning of the pope's reign. .^

t The Historians of Italy ', discourse ix.

1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 3

teenth and sixteenth centuries is well known. Both republics had
interests in the Romagna. Its rebellious feudatories looked to
them for aid in their struggle against the conquering Csesar of the
house of Borgia. The Colonnas and the Orsinis were always se-
cretly, and sometimes openly, aided and abetted by their Floren-
tine and Venetian allies ; both interested in thwarting the plans
of Alexander VI. for the destruction of the " tyranni," as they
were called, in Central Italy. Hence the Venetian and Florentine
ambassadors, whether at Naples or at Rome, sent to their respec-
tive governments malicious reports of all that was done at the
Vatican. Paolo Cappello and the rest show bias in all their de-
spatches ; and the compilation of the Venetian Marino Sanuto is
a mixture of gossip, fable, fact, and fiction ! *

The league of the Borgias with the French under Charles
VIII. and Louis XII., and the war of Alexander against Ferdinand
of Naples, caused the pontiff to be detested at the court of that
monarch. Gibes and satires against the Borgias became the
amusement of his table, and epigrams against Alexander, Lucre-
da, and Caesar the stock in trade of the court poets. Pontano,
one of them, while he satirized the pope and Lucretia, did not
spare even his royal master and benefactor, whom he afterwards
deserted for the French conqueror in A.D. 1501. Sannazaro was
more faithful, for he followed Ferdinand into exile. These poets,
in common with others of the Renaissance, affected to imitate
their pagan exemplars in obscenity as well as in style, and to
such excesses did they go that, according to Roscoe in his Life of
Leo X,, they surpassed even Catullus and Martial in libertinism
and indecency. Ulrich von Hutten and the other early Reform-
ers of the sixteenth century imported into Germany the writings
of these Italian satirists, and sent the flood of licentiousness and
falsehood of which they were the source rolling down the cen-
turies to the present day. It is not astonishing, therefore, that
serious writers like Roscoe, Ranke, and Gregorovius, who believe
that history should be a faithful record of facts proven by docu-
ments and other trustworthy testimony, instead of a gazette of
gossip, should protest against the slanders forged against the
Borgias and aid in restoring their character to the level of truth
and justice. These writers deserve credit for having to a great
extent conquered their prejudices of creed and nationality in the
interest of historical truth.

Along with them we must name Edoardo Alvisi, a liberal
Italian, who published, a few years ago, a work entitled Cesare

* Alberi, Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti, Firenze, 1864.

4 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct.,

Borgia, Duca di Romagna* This book' is a model of historical
style and fairness. It is honest and unimpassioned. The author
extenuates nothing and sets down naught in malice. The style
is clear as Caesar and terse as Tacitus. He produces the original
documents or the unquestionable proof of every fact stated.
Had Mr. Astor read this work before writing Valentino or the
article on Lucretia, we are sure he would have changed the plot
of the one and modified many of his assertions in the other.

Anyway, when Mr. Astor vindicates Lucretia does not he also
vindicate Alexander from some of the foulest crimes charged to
him ? Does not the father share in the benefit of his child's vindi-
cation ? If Lucretia was not guilty of incest with her own father
or brother, then her father and brother were not guilty of incest
with her ; and if Caesar is not as black as he is portrayed, ma} 7 we
not begin to suspect that Alexander's offence^ are less than they
are said to be ? If Alvisi's authority on Caesar is as good as Mr.
Astor's on Lucretia, both of these members of the Borgia family
throw light on the dark shadows that surround their father's
Hife.

However, let us forget Mr. Astor for the present. He has
simply retailed the stories of other writers. He hardly pretends
to be an historian, whatever he may be as a novelist. Let us,
then, examine the chief charges brought against the Duke of
Romagna, with a single eye to historical truth :

The first charge is that Caesar murdered his brother, the
Duke of Gandia. This charge was not made until a year after
the assassination ; and it was made first in Venice by the Fer-
rarese orator Pigna. His words are: " I have just heard that the
cause of the death of the Duke of Gandia was his brother the
cardinal" Caesar, f Caesar had just declared his purpose of
giving up the cardinalate and celibacy to return to a layman's
ambitions and the possibility of matrimony. It was currently
reported in 1498 that both he and Lucretia, just divorced from
Giovanni Sforza, were about to contract marriages with mem-
bers of the royal family of Naples. The Borgias were going
to increase their temporalities. The children of Alexander-
born, according to excellent authorities, before he had received
holy orders were about to become princes in Central Italy,
and thus become rivals of Ferrarese, Florentine, Venetian, and
even Neapolitan power. At once Venice becomes a forge of
attacks against the Borgias. Alexander, who had been lauded by
the Venetians, during the first four years of his pontificate, for

* Imola, A.D. 1878. f Alvisi, p. 44.

1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 5

his economy, sobriety, and " divine virtues," began to be repre-
sented as a glutton and a debauchee, Caesar as an assassin, and
Lucretia as a courtesan.

On the I4th of February (1498) the body of a certain Pierotto
or Peter Calderon, a servant of the pope, was found in the Tiber.
Burchard, living in Rome and not friendly to the Borgias, says
he did not fall in " of his own free will." In Venice the story is
circulated by Cappello that Pierotto was assassinated by Csesar
before the very eyes of the pope, one of whose favorites Pierotto
was. About the same time Lucretia is reported as having be-
gotten an illegitimate child, and Alexander as having imported a
beautiful Spaniard for his amusement.* The " black as a crow "
in Rome in those days became " the three black crows " in Venice,
Ferrara, and Florence. A hint in Burchard becomes, under the
pen of Cappello, Jovius, and Sanuto, a vividly-colored picture,
as erotic as a story of the Decameron.

There is not a solitary fact to show that Caesar murdered his
brother. The Orsinis, in exile in Venice, helped to spread the
tale, and Cappello and the exiled Savelli recorded it. The first
reports of the assassination attributed it either to Giovanni
Sforza or to Antonio Mario Pico della Mirandola as agent of
Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. Neither the Neapolitan, nor the Peru-
gian, nor the Florentine, nor the Modenese, nor the Ferrarese
chronicles of the day accuse Caesar of the crime.f

Gandia had killed an adherent of the Sforzas and refused to
give them satisfaction. They had other reasons for seeking ven-
geance on the Borgias, because one of their family was divorced
from Lucretia on account of impotency, and the new marriage
proposed for her endangered their family possessions. On them,
therefore, rather than on his own brother, properly rests the sus-
picion of having murdered the Duke of Gandia.

But even in smaller matters lies against the Borgias have been
transmitted by respectable writers. We may mention an in-
stance by way of diversion. Vasari, in his lives of the Italian
painters, says that Pinturicchio, a favorite artist of those times,
painted in the Torre Borgia, in the Vatican, Julia Farnese as the
Madonna, and Alexander VI. worshipping her. Well, as Julia Far-
nese was a very handsome woman, who married in 1489 the pope's
grandnephew, it is quite probable that Pinturicchio may have
taken her face as a model for his Madonnas, but it is absolutely
false that he painted the pope in any such surroundings as Vasari

* His son John, the Duke of Gandia, is reported as the pontifical pander on this occasion!
t Alvisi, p. 34,

6 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct.,

states. The Madonna which he describes is in a panel " over the
door of the third room, with angels around her ; but the pope is
not in that picture, but in one of the Resurrection in the second
room, where Alexander is really portrayed in the act of prayer." *
Julia was married to Ursino Orsini, son of Adriana Mila, a Bor-
gia and Alexander's niece. Julia had a son that looked like the
pope, and the scandal-mongers in Rome, pretending to forget
that the child came by his looks by legitimate descent, spread
the report that he was Alexander's son. There is not one iota of
historical proof for the statement. And although to a class of
men who do not believe in the possibility of clerical chastity, be-
cause they judge the clergy from their own subjective stand-
point, the presence of a handsome relative of Alexander for a
time in the Vatican will always afford an opportunity for a sneer
or a gibe, those whose experience of human nature is better will
discredit the unproved aspersions of the calumniator against the
character of a pontiff then nearing the seventieth year of his age.
On a par with the story of this murder is the statement made
regarding Caesar's complicity in the divorce which the King of
France, Louis XII., obtained from his old queen that he might
marry Anne of Bretagne. Machiavelli, who was the incarna-
tion of the perfidy and duplicity of the Italian republics of his
time, in a despatch to the Florentine authorities states that Cassar,
going to France to marry Charlotte d'Albret, and carrying a car-
dinal's hat to De Rohan, prime minister of the king, brought
also a private decree of divorce for Louis, and that it was to be
sold to his majesty for a considerable sum of money. This state-
ment is a falsehood. The decree was so notoriously public
that the Ferrarese orator Manfredi speaks of it in a despatch
of October 2, 1498, ten days before Caesar had reached Mar-
seilles on his way to the French court. The facts are that on
the 1 7th of December in the same year, the day before Cassar ar-
rived at Chinon, where the French court then was, the three
papal commissioners, the Cardinal of Luxembourg and the bi-
shops of Albi and of Setta, publicly pronounced " the defini-
tive sentence '* of divorce in the church of St. Denis in Am-
boise. The marriage between Louis and Anne was solemnized at
Nantes January 7, 1499, about a month after the judgment ren-
dered by the papal commissioners. From all which it appears
evident that Caesar did not carry the decree of divorce to France,
and that he did not sell it, as Machiavelli and novelists assert.
Machiavelli says further that the Bishop of Setta was put to

* Alvisi, p. 15.

1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 7

death by order of Caesar for having revealed the existence of the
secret decree of divorce, while contemporary chronicles show
that this bishop was alive two years afterwards and took part
with Caesar in the siege of Forli.*

Having seen what to think of some of the murders by the
sword or dagger attributed to Csesar, let us now examine one
said to have been caused by him by poison. Cardinal Borgia,
Caesar's cousin, died at Urbino in 1499. The worthy Sanuto first
starts the story in Venice that Caesar poisoned him because " the
pope loved him and was going to give him a place." Paul
Jovius, this time using his iron pen,f says " Caesar murdered him
because he had been friendly to the Duke of Gandia." Bur-
chard, after noticing the death of the cardinal, adds it was " sus-
pected by the physicians." A certain Prato, in a Storia di Milano,
" says that the cardinal and his friends were cut to pieces by Ro-
mans." Such are the contradictory reports. Now, the fact is
that the cardinal died of fever seventeen days' journey away
from Duke Caesar's camp, as we know from the chronicles of
Forli and the Cesenan Diary. There is not an item of proof for
this charge against him. He was at that very time engaged in
subduing the papal vassals at Forli. Brantome says that his
coat of arms was "a dragon devouring several serpents." No-
thing could be more appropriate to express the task in which he
was engaged. The Romagna was full of petty tyrants, every
one of whom made his castle a nest of vultures. Even the wo-
men of the Colonnas and Sforzas were tigresses.:]: Catharine
Sforza, feudal sovereign of Imola and Forli, is an instance, for
she tried to poison the pope. The people everywhere detested
these rulers ; sometimes the mobs rose in the towns and murdered
them. Everywhere Caesar was hailed as a deliverer by the op-
pressed populace. According to ail authorities the serfs suffered
unendurable misery under the tyranny of the rebellious vassals
of the Holy See. Of all the fiefs of the pope, Cesena alone was
faithful and paid its taxes. Astor Manfredi had not paid his
taxes in years, and when summoned to do so by the papal officers
the Venetians came to his rescue. The Malatestas, Savellis, and
Orsinis were also in arrears and unwilling to obey. The Vene-
tians and Florentines protected the " vicars," as they were called.
Exiles from the oppressed fiefs were continually going to Rome

* The chroniclers of Forli speak of the death of this bishop, Ferdinando d'Almedia, and
describe his funeral. Alvisi, p. 54.

t He said he had an iron pen for his enemies, a golden one for his friends.

% " Viragoes," as they were then called. Gregorovius describes them well in Lucretia Bor-
gia. Alvisi, p. 63.

$ THE BORGIA MYTB. [Oct.,

with complaints against these rapacious barons, and the aid of the
pope, the legal sovereign of the Romagna, was continually in-
voked. The Venetians sheltered the rebel Sforzas, and protected
Pandolfo Malatesta and Astor Manfredi in their refusal to obey
Caesar, the pope's lieutenant. The Florentines, on the other
hand, to save Forli tried to form a league among Bologna, Fer-
rara, Forli, Piombino, and Sienna. Not being able to contend
against Valentino in the field for he marched through the Ro-
magna, conquering wherever he went his enemies tried to avenge
themselves by creating a public opinion against him by the pub-
lication of all manner of calumnies against his family. Certainly
we do not claim that any of them at that time deserved canoniza-
tion, but a historian should be just to them.

Among those who assailed the character of the Borgias most
violently was the Venetian orator in Rome, Paolo Cappello.*"
He is the chief authority for the charge so often made since, and
repeated by Gregorovius, that Csesar murdered his brother-in-law,
Lucretia's husband, Don Alfonso di Biselli, of the royal family of
Naples. This unfortunate prince was found dangerously wound-
ed on the steps of St. Peter's on the night of July i$, 1500. On
the i9th of the same month the Venetian orator sent a despatch
home stating that Csesar had forbidden, under pain of death, any
one to appear under arms between St. Peter's and the Castle of
St. Angelo. Alfonso remained ill for thirty-three days, nursed
by his wife, Lucretia. The Venetian states in this despatch that
no one knew who were the assailers of Alfonso, but that suspi-
cion fell on Caesar. The orator knew what would please his
government. In a subsequent despatch in September Cappello
states as a fact what he had recorded before as a mere suspicion.f
Yet Burchard, who was living in the Vatican at the time,, does
not say that Caesar was the assassin. On the contrary, he states
that Caesar denied that he was the assailer.ij: The difference be-
tween Burchard's statement and that of Cappello or rather of
Sanuto, who " doctored " Cappello's despatches becomes more
marked when they tell of the subsequent murder of Alfonso on
August 1 8, A.D. 1500. Burchard says:

" On the 1 8th of the month of August Don Alphonsus de Aragon, Duke
of Biselli, . . . was strangled in his bed. . . . The physicians of the dead
prince and a certain hunchback who had been caring for him were arrested

*The despatches attributed to Cappello are not his, however, but the work of a Venetian
compiler, Marino Sanuto. (See Les Borgias, by Clement. Paris, 1882.)

t This if we are to believe Sanuto's Diarii, which Clement accuses of falsehood, and
forgery- (Les Borgias, p. 53)..

Burchard, vol. ii., Thuasne's edition, p^ 68.

1 886,] THE BORGIA MYTH. 9

and imprisoned in the Castle of St. Angelo. An investigation was ordered ;
but they were afterwards liberated, for they were guiltless a fact well
known to those who had ordered the murder."*

Burchard adds that the body of the dead prince was brought
to St. Peter's and buried in the chapel of St. Mary de Febribus,
under the supervision of Francis Borgia, Archbishop of Cosenza.
Not one word of Caesar or of his complicity in the crime. Now,
the Venetian, or rather his editor, Sanuto, says that Caesar en-
tered the room of the sick man, caused his wife and sister to be
put out, and, calling Don Michele (Caesar's Spanish lieutenant),
strangled the prince. The duke said that he strangled Don Al-
fonso " because he had tried to kill him (Caesar)." Thus, while
Cappello says that Caesar wounded first and afterwards mur-
dered the prince, Burchard excludes Caesar altogether from the
wounding and attributes it to several ; and while Cappello says
that Caesar publicly boasted of being the murderer, Burchard
says that whoever was the chief, the mandans, in the crime,
tried to throw the blame on the physicians. Other contempc -
raneous chroniclers say that the assassins were unknown, or, ig-
noring the murder, say that the young prince died of the wounds
first received. Even the author of the Neapolitan chronicle, ho -
tile to the Borgias, is not able to name the guilty party, though
he tells that King Ferdinand sent a physician to heal the wound-
ed Don Alfonso. In course of time, however, hatred of the
Borgias caused writers to attribute the deed to Caesar. Yet if
public opinion could be impartial enough to do justice to any
Borgia, it would have to acquit Caesar of the murder, or at least
to bring in a Scotch verdict of "not proven." Cappello's testi-
mony, even if Sanuto have not added to it, is not sufficient, in de-
fault of Burchard, to convict any one, especially a Borgia. f The
family, a Spanish one, surrounded by Spanish officials, was detest-
ed by the Italians, whose power, benefices, and fiefs it was gradu-
ally absorbing not only in Rome but in the rest of Central Italy.
There were Sforzas enough alive to kill a prince who had taken
their property as well as a wife divorced from one of them, and
French partisans enough in Rome to kill a prince who was one
of the bitterest enemies of French ambition in Naples, without
seeking for the assassin in his brother-in-law, the Duke of
Romagna.

Caesar was only thirty-one years of age when he died. He

* I quote from the last edition of Burchard's Diarium^ published in Paris by L. Thuasne,
1885, vol. ii. p. 73.

fAlvisi, p. 114; Clement, p. 53.

io THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct.,

was not much better than the princes of his time or the ave-
rage aristocratic young man of our day on the score of purity.
Certainly he did not wish to live a life of hypocrisy in regard to
women. Although a deacon and a cardinal, and thus entered on
a career that might lead him to the highest honors in the church,
feeling that he had no vocation for clerical life, he obtained at the
outset of his career a dispensation from the law of celibacy and
laid aside his cardinalitial long robe to assume the short frock of
the secular. Yet he was not guilty of all the offences against
morality laid to his charge. Thus ,Bembo states that by order
of Caesar a young lady of the household of the Duchess of LJrbi-
no was carried off by a party of soldiers while on her way to
marry Caracciolo, a captain of infantry in Ravenna. Yet there
is no foundation for the charge except rumor. The event hap-
pened in the evening of February 15, and is thus recorded by
Pascoli, one of the duke's secretaries, writing on the same day
from Cesena to his wife :

" I have no other desire than to go to you, but we must travel with
leaden feet in these times. This very night a young lady of Urbino was
carried off between Cervia and Ravenna, and her escort wounded."

The criminals who committed the rape were probably disbanded
soldiers of the company under Russi and Granarolo.* The Ve-
netians at once complained to Caesar, who promised to make dili-
gent inquiry as to the perpetrators of the outrage, in order to
have them punished. He further expressed regret that it should
have occurred so close to the borders of his dukedom. In fact,
the woman was liberated and sent to her husband, by whom she
afterwards had four children/)- Csesar might have well said, as
one of his defenders remarks, that a prince like him could find
women enough for his amusement without forcing into his ser-
vice strangers whom he had never seen.

A statement based on seemingly better authority than that of
Bembo, affecting not only the character for decency of Csesar,
but of Lucretia and Alexander, is found in the third volume of
Burchard's famous Diarium. This passage has given opportu-
nity for painters and novelists to represent the Borgias in the
most indecent light. It is worth translating entire from the old
chronicle. He is speaking of the festivities in Rome on the
occasion of the marriage of Lucretia with Prince Alfonso of
Ferrara, her third husband :

" In the evening [the last of October, 1501] fifty honest prostitutes, called
* Alvisi, p. 162. t Delia vita e de'fattidi Guidobaldo. Di Baldi, Milano, 1821.

1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 11

courtesans, supped with the duke [Caesar] in his room in the apostolic pal-
ace. These after supper, at first clothed, afterwards naked, danced with
the servants and others present ; . . . the pope, the duke, and Lucretia, his
sister, being present and looking on." *

The credibility of Burchard's testimony is doubtful. This
part of the Diary, as we have already noted, is not authenticated.
The editions of the Diary are faulty and interpolated. Eccard,
Leibnitz, Thuasne, and Gennarelli, who published editions of it,
were enemies of the Borgias ; and until the original manuscript
of the work, still in the Vatican Library, finds the light of day,
doubt must rest even on Thuasne's copy. This is the conclusion
to which the reader of his preface and notes must arrive. Is the
passage above quoted an interpolation? Did Burchard write
this, or does he give what he saw or knew, or merely retail gos-
sip, as he so frequently does ? It is true that the fertur and dicitur
so usual to the chronicler when he is telling an interesting story
is wanting to this passage. Yet there are grave reasons for sus-
pecting that the chronicler merely copies the fictions of the great
libel published against the Borgia family just at this time. It is
in the form of a letter supposed to be written to Silvio Savelli,
an outlawed enemy of the Borgias, then at shelter in the impe-
rial court of Germany. The author first of all congratulates
Savelli on having escaped from the hands of the thieves who had
confiscated his property by " the crime and perfidy of the pon-
tiff," and at having found refuge in the court of the emperor.
Then the anonymous writer blames Savelli for asking the pope
to restore his property, for being so credulous as to suppose that
a pontiff " who is the betrayer of the human race, and who spends
his time in follies," would ever do anything just except under
compulsion. Between Savelli, betrayed and proscribed, and the
pope there should be eternal war and eternal hatred. Savelli
should try other means than petition ; he should make known to
the emperor and the German princes the crimes of " this infa-
mous beast " Alexander " a disgrace to God and religion. This
pope has committed murders, rapines, rapes, and incests too nu-
merous to mention." f Cassar, Lucretia, and all the other Borgias
have had a share in them. The pope's simonies, perfidies, and
rapes are enumerated ; and the ball with fifty meretrices honesta
of Burchard is laid to Lucretia's charge. She and Cassar are
accused of incest. Cassar is the murderer of Alfonso of Biselli

* Burchard, tome iii. p. 167.

t The letter is found in Thuasne's Burchard and Sanuto's Diaries. Sanuto very probably
embellished Cappello's despatches with extracts from this letter. Alvisi, p. 224.

12 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct.,

and of Pierotto ; Cassar has ruined the Romagna, from which he
has driven the lawful sovereigns. All fear him, the fratricide,
" who was a cardinal and has become an assassin."

This letter is a summary of all the charges ever made by
angry Italian writers in Milan, Venice, Naples, and Rome against
the strong-willed Spanish intruders. Burchard's Diarium tells
us that the pope asked to see the famous letter. He was accus-
tomed for years to the style of the Roman satirists, the most vio-
lent in Europe, reading daily, for the amusement of his courtiers,
all that Marforio and Pasquino could say against himself. But
Caesar was angered by it, and, a short time after its publication,
caused a Venetian who had written calumnies against the Bor-
gias to be put to death ; and a Neapolitan rhetorician, Jeronimo
Mancioni most probably the author of the Savelli letter who
had previously slandered them, to be mutilated. The stocks, and
sometimes death, were then the punishments for the calumniator,
as they were long after in our own New England.*

Is the famous " ball," then, a calumny, or did it actually take
place? Must we admit that Kaulbach'sf obscene picture of it
has as little foundation in truth as Donizetti's opera or Victor
Hugo's tragedy? Certainly, if the ball be genuine, Mr. Astor
would have to take up his pen again in defence of his heroine, for
she is said to have been present at it. Or is the text of Burchard
interpolated by Eccard, the enemy of the popes ? The original
Vatican manuscript alone, when it comes to light, will solve
the doubt. Alvisi insinuates that the Burchard story is taken
from the Savelli libel. The diarist does not say that he was at
the ball. He is giving only a report of what he heard. What
is meant by fifty meretrices konesta, anyway " fifty respectable
prostitutes " ? Was it not easy for the copyist to mistake Bur-
chard's word granting for the moment the authenticity of the
text and to assume it to be meretrices? Certainly Burchard's
penmanship was not easy to read. He was a German, accus-
tomed to use peculiar characters in his writings, and his calli-
graphy sadly puzzled the Italians who tried to read it. Even Jiis
associates could not make out what he wrote. Paris de Grassis,
his fellow-master of ceremonies and afterwards his successor,
says : " The books which he wrote no one can understand ex-
cept the devil, his aider, or the sibyl ; for such crooks, most ob-

* Even pontifical briefs and bulls were forged in those days. Floridus, Archbishop of Co-
senza, was put to death by Caesar for such forgeries.

t Kaulbach is an instance of the tendency of certain artists to assume that the indecent is
true art. Lucretia Borgia's dance is not the worst sin of a Kaulbach against decency.

1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 13

scure pothooks, and obliterated and scratched letters does he
form that I think he must have had the devil for his amanu-
ensis."*

The "ball" story is incredible also when we consider the
character of Alexander and Caesar as given by Gregorovius.
They were men of refinement and culture, patrons of the arts
and sciences. Both were wonderfully gifted and of a serious
character. Both had great executive qualities. Alexander's pub-
lic acts as head of the church prove him a statesman and a pro-
moter of the spiritual welfare of Christianity. Even his enemies
say that he was abstemious. The pious custom of ringing the
bells in Rome at a certain hour in the evening, called the " Ave
Maria," comes from him ; and whatever may be believed of his
private life, no true historian has accused him or Caesar of being
gross, vulgar, or boorish. The " ball '* is credible of a Russian
court two hundred years ago, but not of the papal court in the
age of the " Renaissance," with a pope nearly seventy years of
age and in presence of a woman whose chastity Mr. Astor and
Roscoe have vindicated. The fact that the careful and painstak-
ing historians De Reumont and Gregorovius, both unfriendly
to the Borgias, reject the " ball " story, is a strong argument
against its truth. Matarazzo (Arch. Stor. Ital., t. xvi. p. 189)
says that the dance was performed by ladies and gentlemen of
the court cortigiane, improperly translated in this case " courte-
sans." The nudity does not mean absolute nudity, but a throw-
ing-off of the outer robes. The Florentine orator Francis Pepi
says they were courtiers, and not " courtesans," who danced.
Shall we believe these authorities, or perhaps the interpolator
of Burchard ? Must not the impartial doubt, at least, and not
repeat a charge which is certainly not proven ? Is it not bigotry
to asperse character without proof ?

But the Borgian perfidy is attacked perhaps more even
than the so called Borgian orgies and murders. Caesar espe-
cially is singled out as a monster of the worst form of Italian
treachery in the age which saw Nicholas Machiavelli's Prin-
cipe. But the duke even at his worst could hardly surpass the
duplicity of the government whose secretary Machiavelli was,
or the treasons often repeated of the papal vassals, the Orsi-
ni, the Vitelli, the Bentivoglios, Vitelozzo, and their confede-
rates. Under the pen of careful historians the " treason " of
Sinigaglia laid to Caesar's charge assumes a very different as-
pect from that which it has in Mr. Astor's prejudiced romance.

* Note to Burchard's Diarium, Thuasne's edition, Paris, 1883, tome i. p. 2.

14 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct.,

The "confederates" conspired in September, 1502, at^Todi, to
murder the duke and thus tree the Romagna from his sway. The
time was favorable. The French contingent in his army had
gone. The vassals rose. Oliverotto of Fermo took Camerino
and murdered all the Spaniards found in it. Baglioni besieged
Michelotto Caesar's Spanish lieutenant in Pesaro ; and the
Feltrese, violating their oaths, took Tavoletto and ravaged the
country around Rimini. Caesar knew that no trust could be
placed in the perjured " vicars." At this time he besieged
Sinigaglia, where the confederates assembled for the purpose of
assassinating him. They tried, however, to conceal their pur-
pose, which had been confessed to him by Remiro di Lorgna,
his majordomo, a party to the conspiracy, whom the duke had
put to death for extorting money from the people and defraud-
ing them in grain transactions " for the duke hated every kind
of avarice."* The traitors, Paul and Francis Orsini, Vitelozzo,
Vitelli, and Oliverotto, came out of the town to meet Caesar with
pretended friendship, not knowing that he was aware of their
plot. They embraced him. All entered the town together and
the palace where the duke was to lodge and be assassinated.
But no sooner were they in than he caused the conspirators
to be arrested, their army attacked and routed, and the town
sacked by Caesar's troops. The Vitelli and Enfreducci were
put to death by his orders, and the ever-treacherous Orsini sent
prisoners to Rome. This is the fact which Machiavelli praises so
highly in the Principe, but which other writers condemn as an un-
pardonable breach of faith. Cassar's own explanation of his con-
duct is found in his published letters, and agrees with what we
have written :f that "the Orsini and their confederates, in spite
of failure in a former rebellion and pardon received, having heard
that the French troops were gone away, thinking that the duke
was weak, plotted a second treason ; pretending to help him take
Sinigaglia, hiding two-thirds of their army in the houses around
the town, making a secret agreement with the castellan to make
a secret assault on Caesar at night." He asks all Italy to rejoice
with him for having anticipated and thwarted the traitorous con-
spiracy, " for it is well to deceive those who have been masters of
deceit." Caesar was universally congratulated on his success,
and Francis Uberti wrote a poem on it in which the victor is

praised :

" Fortiter et vitulos Siemens, ursosque furentes "

the Vitelli and Orsini being the steeds and the bears. Cer-

* Alvisi, Documenti) n. 74, f Idem and Vita di Malatesta Baglioni) Perugia, 1839.

1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 15

tainly the end does not justify the means ; but considering that
the confederates would have murdered Caesar if he had not en-
trapped them in the snare set to catch himself, we cannot mourn,
as Mr. Astor does, over the fate of these Italian " tyranni " of the
sixteenth century as if they were martyrs to liberty or the vic-
tims of Borgian perfidy. It takes a good detective to catch a
skilful thief ; and it took Caesar Borgia to outwit the confederates
of Sinigaglia.

Pope Alexander VI. died on the i8th of August, 1502. It is
not true, as stated by Astor in his novel and by some historians,
that Alexander and Caesar were poisoned, the former dying in
consequence at a banquet, in which, by the malice of an atten-
dant, the poisoned wine intended by the pope and " Valentino"
for others was drunk by themselves. The truth is this : In the
month of August, 1502, the heat at Rome and in Central Italy
was excessive. In consequence of it fever spread throughout the
country. Cardinal Borgia of Monreale, Archbishop of Ferrara,
died of it. Tjhe pope and Caesar both caught it ; Caesar recov-
ered, but the pope died. Neither Burchard nor any one of the
ambassadors then at Rome mention a word about poisoning on
this occasion. On the evening of August 5 the pope, Valentino,
and many prelates supped at the vineyard of Cardinal Adrian da
Corneto. The pontiff's death occurred thirteen days .after this
supper. The swollen appearance of his corpse exposed in the
church of St. Peter gave the gossiping Romans occasion to say
he was poisoned ; and those well-known historical embellishers,
Bembo, Guicciardini, and Jovius with his " iron pen," added the
rest. Not one respectable historian now believes the romance
about the poisoning of Alexander and Caesar. Voltaire and
Muratori, as well as Gregorovius and De Reumont, ail reject it.

Clement, in Les Borgias, gives us a portrait of Caesar,* by
Raphael, which proves that Jovius lied even about the physical
appearance of the Duke of Romagna. The Venetian orator of
the time called him " most handsome." Indeed, all the Borgias,
by the testimony of their enemies, were endowed with physi-
cal charms, as well as with mental gifts and winning manners.
Valentino had mild, clear eyes, a smiling countenance, a high
brow, long face, and firm chin. Yet Jovius tells us that his
countenance was disfigured with pustules, and that his sunken
eyes gleamed so fiercely that his friends and servants were in
terror of him ! He was the friend and patron of scholars, poets,
and artists. Alvisi gives us a list of the Italian scholars who

* Still existing in the Borghese Gallery at Rome.

1 6 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [

were the duke's friends and companions. The sculptors
found in him a distinguished patron. Torrigiano followed him
to the wars against the "tyrants"; Michael Angelo lived for a
time with him in Rome ; Pinturicchio was his friend and bene-
ficiary ; and so popular was he among the Roman litterati that
the poets Agapito Gerardino, Vincenzo Calmeta, Justolo, Francis
Sperulo, and Orfino, all members of the Academy of Paul Cor-
tese, took up the sword to aid him in the subjugation of his
father's rebellious vassals. The bad character given to him and
hi family is not from the litterati of his own dominion, but from
foreigners like Burchard the Alsacian ; from Jovius and Guic-
ciardini, the North Italians ; from Pontano and Sannazaro, the
Neapolitans ; from Infessura, the disciple of Rienzi ; or from
Venetian, Florentine, and Neapolitan writers whose interests
lay ifc a direction contrary to that of the house of Borgia. No
court of justice, no jury of honest men, no impartial mind would
convict an accused on such testimony.

A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER.

IN the shining muster-roll of kings who wore the cross and
led their mail-clad chivalry to Palestine to win the Holy Sepul-
chre from the infidel, there is no Spanish name. For two cen-
turies, from uoo to 1300, during which the idea of the Crusade
still dominated the imagination of Christendom and sent its
knightliest and bravest in myriads to fight and perish on the hot
sands of Syria, nearly every country of Europe, at one time or
another, contributed its monarch to the crusading ranks. Kings
of England, France, Denmark, Hungary, and, we may add, Scot-
land if David the king can be credited with the deeds of David
the prince made that futile and fatal campaign. No less than
three emperors of Germany led mighty armies to the Holy Land,
where one of them, the most famous, Frederick Barbarossa, died
on the threshold of his enterprise. As many kings of France
risked life and fortune on the same glorious venture, one, the
saintly Loiais, leading two crusades, and, like the German Frede-
rick, dving- at the outset of the second on Saracenic soil before
the' walls of Tunis.

^Amid all this ferment of royal devotion and chivalry no Span-
ish king is found marshalling his hosts to the rescue of the Holy

r r ,.] A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. 17

City. We cannot say no king of Spain, for the kingdom of Spain
as yet had no existence ; but not one of the smaller kingdoms
into which the Christian part of the Iberian peninsula was divided
neither fiery Aragon, nor stately Leon, nor proud Castile sent
any royal pilgrim with lance in rest to clear the path first marked
out by Peter the Hermit and Godfrey of Bouillon, and strewn
since with the bones of thousands upon thousands of the faithful
who had fallen in sight of Jerusalem beneath the edge of the Mos-
lem scimeter or the still more deadly blasts of the Moslem desert.
For a people possessing the Spanish temperament, devout to
the point of fanaticism and brave to the verge of ferocity, natu-
rally warlike and trained by constant conflict to the use of arms,
passionately fond of the exercises of chivalry, nurtured, more-
over, from the cradle in a vigorous hatred of the Saracen such as
more northern nations who had never felt his yoke could never
know, such an omission seems particularly strange. Spanish
kings, it should seem, would have been first to lead the crusade,
the last to leave it. But the truth is, a Spanish king of those days
had no occasion, even if he had the time or will, to cross the
water in search of his crusade ; it was brought to his very doors.
For eight centuries, from the woful field of Xeres, where Rode-
rick lost life and kingdom, to the taking of Granada and the final
subjugation of the Moors by Ferdinand and Isabella, the history
of Spain is one long crusade. For eight centuries of almost
constant battle Spanish chivalry and valor upheld the cross
against the crescent with varying fortune now successful, as
in the glorious struggle of Simancas, where 40,000 Moors were
slain ; again overthrown, as on the disastrous day of Alarcos,
where Alonzo the Noble led the knighthood of Castile to slaugh-
ter; and finally triumphant, as in the crowning victory on the
Navas of Toloso, where the Moorish power was broken, and, with
the help of good St. James, 100,000 infidels were left dead upon
the field, the Christian loss being but 25.

With such neighbors to keep them busy, kings of Castile or
Leon, or even Aragon though this, from its northernmost posi-
tion, had less to fear from Moorish incursions than either of the
sister kingdoms had scant leisure to follow in the footsteps of
Richard Cceur de Lion and Philip Augustus, of Andrew of Hun-
gary and St. Louis of France. Even if the Paynim gave any
one of them breathing-space he would still have been kept at
home by distrust of his Christian neighbors, ever on the alert to
gobble up a stray kingdom left forsaken for the moment by its
unwary master. Yet it cannot be doubted that more than one of
VOL. XLIV 2

1 8 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [Oct.,

those chivalrous Catholic and Moslem-hating monarchs had to
stifle many a secret yearning for that martial pilgrimage which
every monarch of the time felt it his bounden duty to make, and
which one of them, Robert Bruce by name, was so grieved at
not making that his death-bed could only be consoled by brave
Black Douglas' promise to bury the king's heart in that Holy
Land his foot had never trod. It was these same pestilent
Moors of Spain, who kept so many good kings of Castile and
Leon and Aragon from going to fight for the Tomb of Christ,
that now would not even suffer the dead Bruce's heart to reach
that sacred goal. For the brave Lord James, on the way to fulfil
his mission, being tempted by his love of fighting to take a hand
in the Spanish wars, was there slain after performing prodigies of
valor, and the royal heart went back to Scotland and to the royal
palace at Scone.

But the day of retribution for the Moors was still to come,
and the beginning of their doom was written in the crushing de-
feat on the Navas (Plains) of Toloso, already mentioned, where,
if their loss was less than contemporary accounts would make it,
their army, at least, was destroyed, and their power received a
blow from which it never fully recovered. This was in 1212.
The conquest of Valencia, twenty-six years later, repeating the
most famous exploit of the Cid a century and a half before,
completed the discomfiture of the Moors, plucked from them
their terrors as an invading force, and put them almost wholly
on the defensive. It was a king of Aragon who achieved this
most notable victory, and, having secured himself in his king-
dom by a few more conquests, and by the marriage of his daugh-
ter to the king of Castile and Leon, now united in one, he seems
to have bethought himself that the time had come when a
Spanish king might win that battle of the cross in Palestine
which so many other Christian kings had failed in. Killing
Paynims in Spain was, no doubt, well enough a most merito-
rious work ; but killing Paynims in Palestine was, after all, the
real business of a genuine crusader. So good King Jayme I.,
surnamed El Conquistador" The Conqueror " recking nothing
of the sixty-six years that might have unnerved an arm or a heart
' less stout; than his, buckled on his harness and set his face toward
the Holy Sepulchre to strike a blow for the glory of God and
the honor of Aragon. In his Chronicle* written by himself in

* The Chronicle of James /., King of Aragon, surnamed The Conqueror, written by himself.
Translated from the Catalan by the late James Foster, M.P. for Berwick ; with Historical In-
roduction, etc., by Pascuale de Gayangos. 2 vols. London, 1883.

tS-86.] A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. 19

Catalan that forgotten language of troubadour and knight, and
only lately rendered into English he tells us with what pride and
satisfaction he received a summons from Pope Gregory X. to at-
tend the Council of Lyons, A.D. 1274:

"I was much pleased and very joyful," he says, "when summoned by
the pope to give him counsel and aid in the business of the Holy Land
beyond the sea. I sent him word that I would be there with him on the
day he had named. So I accordingly prepared to go to the council at
Lyons, as he had requested. And a long time before this I had my hostelries
taken in the city, and sent thither whatever I thought would be necessary
for two months or more. And in the middle of Lent I left Valencia and
went to Lyons. . . . When I got to Viana [Vienne] the pope sent me his
messengers in state, praying me to wait a day at St. Symphorien, that he
might the better prepare for my reception. I did so. The place was three
leagues from Lyons. Next day I rose at dawn and went into Lyons. It
was the first day of May. All the cardinals came to meet me a league out-
side the city, and the Master of the Temple beyond seas, En Juan Gil, En
Gasper de Rosellen, who held the city for the pope, and many other bishops
and barons; and it took me to make my entrance, for the distance of a
league, as far as the pope's palace, from morning till noon, so great was
the throng of people who came out to receive me."

He got there at last, however, and when the pope, who was
in his chamber, was told the king was coming,

" He came out in his full robes, and I saw him pass before me. He sat
down in his chair, and I did him that reverence which kings do to a pope,
according to the established custom. A chair was set for me near his own,
on the right, and I then told him how I had come the day he had appointed
for his meeting, but that I would not speak with him of any business till
the morrow, when I would be present and hear what he had to say to me."

Accordingly on the morrow he expounds his views in pre-
sence of the council. He tells the pope, first, that he has come
" for three purposes two of your own, and for a third of mine.
The first is that you sent to me for advice ; the second, that I
might give you aid. I have come here to give you the best ad-
vice I know or that God will inspire me with. The third is en-
tirely a reason of mine own that 1 may denounce others who
have no heart to serve God." Certainly this exordium is not
without a ring of the true crusading mettle. Then, premising
that he " desires to speak before any one, as there is no king here
but myself," he sets forth his plan for the crusade:

" I give you first my advice, which is to send to the Holy Land five
hundred knights and two thousand footmen, and forthwith to send your
letters to the Masters of the Temple ajid of the Hospital, to the King of
Cyprus and the city of Acre, and let them know that it is for the sake

20 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [Oct.,

of the land beyond the sea that you hold this present council ; to send at
once that company as vanguard, and set the others in motion to cross over.
These first will not go to fight, but merely to garrison the castles and hold
them till the great crusade goes that is, two years next St. John's day.
For the rest, I say that if you yourself go beyond sea, as you have pro-
posed, I will accompany you with one thousand knights ; but then do you
.aid me with the tithes of my land."

Unluckily, in the midst of these warlike proposals and plan-
nings there came a trifling financial difference between the high
contracting parties. King Jayme desired to be crowned by the
pope, and for that purpose had brought his crown with him,
" made of gold and set with precious stones, worth more than
one hundred thousand sous tournois. Not so good a one could
be got in Lyons." The pope's advisers, however, insisted that,
as a condition to the crowning, the king should pay certain ar-
rears due to the Holy See. Thence arose a squabble, the upshot
of which was that King Jayme went home uncrowned and in
some dudgeon, and the crusade was indefinitely postponed.
With the pope, however, he parted on the best of terms :

" I took him apart and said : ' Holy Father, I wish to leave, but not as
the proverb says : " He who goes to Rome a fool comes away a fool" \Qut
foil sen va a Roma foil sen torna\. Let it not be so with you. I never saw
any pope but yourself, and so I wish to confess to you.' He was much
pleased and content, and said he would confess me. I told him my sins,
and, on the other hand, what I could remember of the good deeds I had
done. He imposed no other penance on me but that I should keep from
evil for the future and persevere in good. Then I went on my knees be-
fore him, and he put his hand on my head and gave me his blessing full
five times. I kissed his hand and took my leave.'

Don Jayme never got any nearer to Jerusalem than this.
Before the allotted two years of preparation were completed
death seized upon him at Valencia, six days after he had ab-
dicated in favor of his eldest son, the Infante En Pere. But, in
or out of Palestine, the warrior-king of Aragon was a born crusa-
der. His whole life was a battle against the Crescent and " the
hosts of false Mahound," and it was, no doubt, but an accident
of fate which prevented the banner of Aragon from floating on
the walls of Jerusalem. One has but to read the Chronicle to see
how deeply the crusading spirit tinged the life and guided the
actions of its author. His first great exploit, performed when
he was barely twenty-one, was conquering " a Saracen kingdom
in the sea" the Balearic Isles; his dying aspiration, as we have
seen, was to lead a new crusade "to the Holy Land beyond the
sea." Nor was this merely the ardor of the soldier longing

i886.] A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. 21

for new conquests ; there was in it, too, something of the
zeal of the missionary. In a time and country wherein the
flame of religion, fanned on either side by counterblasts of in-
fidelity and heresy, burned brightest, Don Jayme was essentially
a Catholic king a type of 'the stern Christian warrior for whom
Simon de Montfort may stand as a model, who " denounced those
who have no heart to serve God," and thought it fitting to pun-
ish heretics because "they were bad and dangerous citizens."
It is to serve the Lord that Don Jayme sets out on his expedition
against Mallorca ; in danger of shipwreck, he puts up a " prayer
to our Lord and his Mother," which is given in full in the
Chronicle; he leads his knights to the charge "in Our Lady's
name." Almost the last act of his life, as we have seen, was to
receive absolution from the pope ; and it was his intention,
frustrated by his sudden death, to retire upon his abdication to
a monastery, and, like his great successor, Charles V., die wear-
ing the religious habit.

Yet the stock from which Don Jayme sprang gave scant pro-
mise of such a scion. His father was Don Pedro II. of Aragon ;
his mother Dona Maria, daughter and heiress of Guillen VIII.
(William), Count of Montpellier (where Don Jayme was born),
by Eudoxia, daughter of Manuel Comnenus, Emperor of Con-
stantinople. Dona Maria, indeed, was a pious Catholic and a
good woman " if ever there was a good woman in the world it
was she," says her son in the Chronicle. And he adds :

"This Doila Maria was called the holy queen, not only in Rome, where
she died, but all over the world besides. Many sick are to this day cured
by drinking, in water or in wine, the dust scraped from her tombstone in
the church of St. Peter at Rome, where she is buried, near Santa Petro-
nilla, the daughter of St. Peter."

She was a great favorite of Innocent III., who upheld her
rights against her father when he sought to disinherit her in
the interest of his children by a second marriage, and afterwards
against her husband when his profligacy and violence drove her
to seek the pope's protection. The account of Don Jayme's
christening at the church of Notre Dame des Tables at Mont-
pellier (a bit of autobiography in which the royal chronicler may
be supposed to have had collaboration), gives a notion of the
good queen's simple-hearted piety. It was a question of naming
the child :

" So she made twelve candles, all of one size and weight, and had them
all lighted together, and gave each the name of an apostle, and vowed to

22 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER^ [Oct.,

our Lord that I should be christened by the name of that which lasted long-
est. And so it happened that the candle that went by the name of St. James
lasted a good finger's breadth more than all the others. And owing to that
circumstance and to the grace of God I was christened El Jaime."

It was a strange and cruel fortune which married this good
woman and pious Catholic thrice to husbands of licentious life
and heretical leanings. Barral, Count of Marseilles, and Bernard,
Count of Comminges, her first two husbands, were, like so many
of the nobles of Provence, Languedoc, and Aquitaine, deeply in-
fected with that taint of heresy which came to them partly as an
ancestral legacy, partly as a deposit from the retiring flood of the
first Crusades, and an importation from the Jews and the Moors
of Spain. In that stronghold of Gothic Arianism, scotched but
not killed when Clovis slew Alaric the Visigoth on the plain of
Vouille in 507, because it " displeased him mightily that these
Arians should possess a portion of the Gauls," all strange doc-
trines took root and flourished. Jew and Saracen, the Talmud
and the Koran, Manichaean and Gnostic, Henricians who spat
upon the cross because it was the instrument of Christ's tor-
ture, and Paterins who held the Lord's Prayer to be the only
lawful form of petition all contributed to swell the mass of er-
ror professed and taught by the sectaries known to history as
the Albigenses, though they called themselves, with the modest
self-assertion of their kind, Cathari (naOapoi, pure).'* In Aqui-

* By one of those perversions of history on which evangelical fanaticism and ignorance are
fed, the Albigenses have been elevated, faute de mieux, to the rank of Protestant martyrs. Yet
not only did they hold doctrines which even Protestantism would reject with abhorrence and
Calvinism would have refuted with stake and fagot, but they were punished not so much be-
cause they were heretics as because they were law-breakers and rebels. Their teachings were
subversive of society and a menace to the state. Their defiance of all authority, civil and eccle-
siastical, which sought to curb their excesses, was indeed but another manifestation of that unruly
spirit which, from the time of its subjugation and settlement by the Visigoths in the fifth century,
made all Occitania assert a quasi-independence of the French kings. This feeling survived to
a much later period than the thirteenth century, in which it led the great lords of Languedoc and
Provence to head the Albigense insurrection, and it was, no doubt, a powerful support to the Eng-
lish domination in Aquitaine.

So far from being mainly chargeable with the chastisement of the Albigenses, it was the
Papacy which, for at least three-quarters of a century, interfered to postpone it. Legate after
legate, to the number of thirteen, besides numberless missionaries of lesser rank, had been sent
to lure back these lost sheep to the fold. St. Bernard himself, as early as 1145, had preached
to them, winning multitudes of the common folk, but failing utterly to touch the hard hearts of
the nobles, who even hid themselves in their houses, that they might not hear him ; so that on
leaving Vertfeuil, in the district of Toulouse, where " were at that time a hundred knights abid-
ing, having arms, banners, and horses, and keeping themselves at their own expense," the good
saint was moved to shake the dust from his feet and to curse the town, saying : " Vertfeuil, God
wither thee ! " Sixty years later the great St. Dominic had no better success. But it was not
until the papal legate, Peter de Castelnau, had been foully murdered at Saint Gilles, whither
he had come at the instance and invitation of Count Raymond, that Pope Innocent III. lost
patience and commanded the crusade. The merit of a cause is, to some extent, indicated by

1 886.] A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. 23

taine the Albigenses found the bulk of their votaries, and in
Aragon, akin to Aquitaine by community of blood and language
for both spoke the Catalan tongue they had sympathizers, if not
disciples. In Pedro II. they found not only a sympathizer but
a leader who, with his brother-in-law, Count Raymond of Tou-
louse degenerate grandson of that Raymond who had fought
with the Cid against the Moors, and, with Godfrey and Bohe-
mond, had led the first Crusade made ineffectual head against
Montfort's relentless onset until he was overthrown and slain
in the bloody battle of Muret. It is related that King Pedro
was almost the first one struck down in the fight, and, although
he cried out lustily, " En sol rets " (I am the king), the crusaders
speedily despatched him. Perhaps, like the Flemish weavers
who slew Count Robert of Artois a century later on the field
of Courtrai, while begging for quarter, " they couldn't under-
stand his lingo."

The son of a king killed in arms against a crusade proclaimed
for the extirpation of a heresy which he protected if not pro-
fessed, and the descendant of those emperors of Constantinople
in whom the first Crusaders found a foe scarcely less bitter, and
even more crafty, than the Saracen himself, would not be expected
to develop much of the crusading fervor. But Don Jayme's
training made amends for any defect of ancestry. His first
tutor was grim Simon de Montfort himself, to whom his father
committed him soon after birth, perhaps for some reason of poli-
cy ; perhaps, as was not unusual in those days, that his martial
education might be conducted under the eye of him who was
beyond dispute the first soldier of his time. According to the
Chronicle, it was at Montfort's own wish :

"And after my birth En Simon de Montfort, who had the lands of Car-
cassonne and Bedarieux and of Toulouse, what the King of France had
conquered, desired to have friendship with my father, and asked for me
that he might bring me up at his court. And my father trusted so much
in Montfort that he delivered me to him to bring up."

But when the battle of Muret had left the young prince an
orphan in his fifth year, the lords of Aragon demanded his resti-
tution, and, at Pope Innocent's request, Montfort surrendered
him to another tutor who could most fitly continue his own
teaching. This was En Guillen de Montredon, the Master of the

the character of its leaders ; and the leaders of the Albigenses, almost without exception, from
Pedro and Raymond to the apostate monk Henri, were men of loose morals and abandoned
life.

24 A ROYAL SPAAVSH CRUSADER. [Oct.,

Temple in Spain, who received Don Jay me when he was six years
and four. months old. Such was the poverty of the country after
Don Pedro's wastefulness and wars that it is recorded in the
Chronicle : "When I entered Monzon [the fortress where Don
Jayme was to reside with the Master of the Temple] I had no
food for one day, the land being so wasted and mortgaged.'*

Don Jayme's school-days were destined to be brief. In those
perfervid times, and among that warlike race, the soldier's career
began early. The Knight of Bivar, afterwards to be immortal-
ized in his country's history as El Cid Campeador, while yet a
boy had made his name a terror to the Moor ; nor was Bernardo
del Carpio older when he slew the mighty Roland in the Pass of
Roncesvaux. At a later and less legendary period we find Don
John of Austria, while yet in his teens, acclaimed the most ac-
complished knight in Europe, and winning the battle of Lepanto,
which sa*ved Christendom, at an age when nowadays his coevals
are at college. But surely never did hero of legend or history
make his maiden battle younger than Don Jayme. At nine years
old his stern master put him in the field at Sagua against the
treacherous kinsmen who were conspiring for his throne, " a
knight, whose name I do not remember, lending me a light coat
of mail (gonio), which I put on ; and that was the beginning, the
first arms I ever wore." One king history tells of, indeed, who
wore arms at an age more tender. That was Louis, variously
surnamed the Debonair and the Pious, whom his father, Charle-
magne, in the hope to curb the rebellious restiveness of Aqui-
taine, sent, when three years old, to be king of that most unruly
province. Says Eginhard, the annalist of Charlemagne :

" From the banks of the Meuse to Orleans the little prince was carried
in his cradle. But once on the Loire, this manner of travelling beseemed
him no longer; his conductors would that his entry into his dominions
should have a manly and warrior-like appearance : they clad him in arms
proportioned to his height and age ; they put him and held him on horse-
back ; and it was in such guise that he entered Aquitaine."

But this was merely a peaceful parade, while the nine-year-
old prince of Aragon donned hauberk and took sword in hand
for the serious work of war. Thenceforward for the space of
nearly sixty years the harness was rarely off his back.

The same precocity marked his marriage. It was the counsel
of his liegemen that he should marry while still young

" Because there were great anxieties for my life, either from maladies or
from poison, and likewise because they wished on my account that I should
have an heir, so that the kingdom should not go out of the royal line ; for

1 886.] A ROYAL SPANISH CXUSADER. 25

Count Sancho, son of the Count of Barcelona [it was against him the young
soldier had taken arms at Sagua], and Don Fernando, my uncle, wished
each to be king, and had tried for it in my childhood when I was at
Monzon."

That touch about his childhood from the mature monarch of
twelve is delightful. So at the age of twelve Don Jayme was be
trothed and presently married to Dona Leanor of Castile, and,
what seemed to him probably a much more important cere-
mony, was knighted, making his knightly vigil and receiving the
knightly spurs at the church of St. Mary's of Orta. After that,
he says, with a gravity which makes one smile, " I went into
Aragon and Catalonia, and my wife, the queen, with me."

Married thus young, the bold spirit of the Conqueror-to-be
chafed under the subjection in which his barons sought to keep
him, and he meditated flight.

"I went to the queen and said to her: 'Well do I know and see the*
hurt and dishonor that you and I are suffering, and, though I am still a
child, I intend having my revenge, and you also> if you will only follow my
advice."

But as this advice included a descent from a window by
means of a rope, the poor child-queen shrank from the danger.
"Know you," she made answer, "that for nothing in the world
will I be lowered by a board on ropes/* This is the same queen
who a few years later conducts, with the skill of a trained diplo-
mat and the nerve of a veteran campaigner, the negotiations for
the surrender of Valencia. Deliverance came at last, and free-
dom of action was no sooner secured than the first thought of
the young prince is conquest. At a banquet in Tarragona " a
citizen of Barcelona who had great knowledge of the sea" tells
him about the rich and fertile island of Mallorca, a Saracen king-
dom at his very doors. Don Jayme summons his Cortes at
once, and after telling them how he intends "to serve the Lord
in this expedition that I mean to make against the kingdom of
Mallorca," sets about his preparations. Finally he sets sail from
the harbor of Salen in September, 1229, with twenty-five ships,
eighteen tartanas, seventeen galleys, and one hundred transports.
En Guillen de Moncada, Master of the Temple in Aragon since
the promotion of En Guillen de Montredon to the grand-mas-
tership of the order, led the van, and the king brought up the
rear " in the galley of Montpellier." In his train, by an odd
caprice of fortune, were many of the rebel, and now refugee,
lords of Aquitaine who had led the Albigenses and been beaten

26 . A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [Oct.,

and dispersed by De Montfort. The Vicomte of Carcassonne, the
lords of Lo and Laurac, of Saissac, Cabaret and Castres, Termes
and Miraval, now wore the cross they had once warred against.

All went well until a treacherous wind from Provence where,
to the fervent imagination of the time, the very airs of heaven
may have seemed tainted with heresy and inimical to the cross-
threatened the safety of the squadron, but gave the king also oc-
casion to show his piety and trust in God :

*' A wind from Provence springing up, the ships found themselves taken
in a white squall. Cala! Cala! cried the sailors, but there was a bad sea
with that Provence wind, and no one in my galley spoke a word. The
vessels were driving around us. I saw the danger we were in. I was
greatly discomforted, but I turned to our Lord and his Mother and prayed
thus : ' I well know thou hast made me king of the land and of the goods
my father held by thy grace. Until this time I had not begun any great
or perilous enterprise, seeing that thy help has been felt from my birth up
to this time, and thou hast given us honor and help against our bad sub-
jects who would overthrow us. Now, O Lord, my Creator, help me, if it
please thee, in this so great danger, that so good a work as I have begun
may not be lost ; for I alone would not lose, but thou wouldst lose more. I
go on this expedition to exalt the faith that thou hast given us, and to
abase and destroy those who do not believe in thee ; and so, O thou
true and powerful God, thou canst guard me in this danger and fulfil my
will, which is to serve thee. And I should remember thee, for as yet no
creature ever called to thee for mercy that did not find it, and especially
they who have it in their heart to serve thee and to suffer for thy sake ;
and I am one of them. And, O Lord, remember so many people who go
with me to serve thee ; and thou, Mother of God, who art a bridge and a
pathway for sinners, I beseech thee, by the seven joys and seven sorrows
that thou hadst for thy dear Lord, to remember me by praying to thy dear
Son to take from me this affliction and danger in which I am, and those
with me."

Happily the storm blew over, a landing was safely made in
the bay of Palamera, and battle joined with the Saracens at once.
After a stubborn conflict, in which the Christians were three
times beaten back, the Saracens took to flight and were pursued
to the walls of Mallorca. The city was formally invested and
battered with fonnevals and chattes, mangonels and trebuchets, and
all the enginery of mediaeval warfare, until, on St. Sylvester's eve,
orders were given that the army should, after hearing Mass, de-
liver the assault. So at daylight they charged " in Our Lady's
name," and through the breach the dismayed Saracens " saw a
knight on horseback, in white armor, enter first. My belief is
that it must have been St. George, as I find in history that in
many other battles of Christians and Saracens he was frequently

1 886.] A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. 27

seen." It is a little curious that Don Jayme should have fixed
upon St. George as his heavenly ally, since it is St. James (Sant-
iago) who generally figures in the Spanish legends in this charac-
ter ; and St. James was not only the patron saint of Spain, but his
own especial patron and name-saint. The victory was complete,
the King of Mallorca and his son being taken, and thirty thou-
sand infidels flying to the hills. Don Jayme set a guard of Do-
minicans over the palace and treasury (his fighting men, it
seems, were scarcely to be trusted there), and then, " wearied out,
went to sleep, for the sun had already set." The next morning
he naively records how lucky he thought himself to be asked to
breakfast by "a man who had cooked some very good beef" a
touch that veterans of our own war will appreciate.

By the end of the ensuing summer the island of Mallorca was
entirely subjugated and Don Jayme returned to Tarragona.
The following year he was recalled to Mallorca by a rumor that
the King of Tunis meant to cross there ; and, finding this false,
took occasion while he was on the spot to reduce Minorca and
Iviga. These, however, and some minor conquests during the
next ten years, were only preparations for his great exploit, the
conquest of Valencia, which he achieved in 1238, when he was
thirty years of age. The great military orders of Spain, the
Templars and the Hospitallers, were ever ready to urge and aid
him to fresh enterprises against the infidels, and it was the Master
of the Hospital who now pointed out to him that his glory would
be incomplete without the capture of Valencia. Mallorca was
nothing, he said ; in Valencia thdre would be found men so innu-
merable as to prevent approach to her walls, so that a king who
could take that might well say he was the greatest king in the
world. This was touching the king on his tenderest points his
pride as a soldier and his zeal as a Christian and he forthwith
set about redeeming the city of the Cid. This he accomplished
after a campaign so admirably planned that the Master of the
Hospital was sure " the Lord must guide a man whose resolu-
tions were so good." Valencia was surrendered, and the Chroni-
cle goes on :

" When I saw my standard upon the tower I dismounted, turned myself
to the East, and wept with my eyes, kissing the ground for the great mercy
that had been done me."

So our Conqueror went on from triumph to triumph, and
from conquest to conquest (he was victor in thirty battles), ex-
tending the boundaries of his kingdom, and winning great glory

28 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [Oct.,

of men and, let us hope, what he himself would have valued
more the approval of Heaven. Indeed, from all contemporary
accounts, James I. was a just and enlightened monarch, who
earned his subjects' love by his solicitude for their welfare. In
the intervals of his campaigns he devoted himself with equal
earnestness and ability to regulating the internal affairs of his
kingdom, and in particular to protecting the peasantry and
farming class from the oppression and rapacity of the great
lords. In his leisure moments, when freed from the cares of
war and administration, he was fond of making little excursions
into the neighboring friendly kingdoms, and especially to Mont-
pellier, where he was born and christened, and for which he
seems to have retained a fondness through his life. On his way
to the Council of Lyons, already referred to, he stayed eight
days at Montpellier, and at another time he made a formal visit
there to entertain his kinsmen, the Counts of Toulouse and Pro-
vence. These were his cousin, Raymond VII., son of that Ray-
mond of Toulouse who had headed the Albigense rebellion and
been by Simon de Montfort so wofully mauled and battered ;
and Raymond Berenger, celebrated by Dante as the father of
four fair daughters who all became queens.* Don Jayme's at-
tachment to Montpellier was shown in other ways. In that vo-
tive chapel of Our Lady built by Guillen VI. of Montpellier,
adjoining his castle, and afterwards known as the Sainte Chapelle,
he established a college of canons for the daily celebration of
Mass. And once when he fell sick there he had himself carried
to the church of Notre Dame-des Tables, where he was chris-
tened, and, being suddenly healed after prayer, he caused a
votive picture commemorating the event to be placed in the
church. This ancient sanctuary was sacked by the Huguenots,
and destroyed in the Revolution.

Such is, in brief, the story of Don Jayme El Conquistador,
as told in the pages of his Chronicle. It reveals him as a valiant
knight and a skilful captain, a good king and a devout Catholic,
fearing God and hating the infidel, as a true man should. In per-
son he was the model of a mediaeval knight. Of almost gigantic
stature, the most powerful man of his time, and expert in all the

* Of England, France, Sicily, and the Romans. Marguerite, the eldest, "held, "say the
chronicles, "to be the most noble, most beautiful, and best educated princess at that time in
Europe," was married to St. Louis. It was then that, the Count of Provence being anxious
about the immense dowry he would have to give his daughter, Romeo de Villeneuve, his senes-
chal, gave him the famous advice: " Count, leave it to me, and let not this great expense cause
you any trouble. If you marry your eldest high, the mere consideration of the alliance will get
the others married better and at less cost."

1 886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" 29

exercises of chivalry, he must, indeed, have carried terror to the
Moors on whom he charged shouting his favorite war-cry, " In
Our Lady's name! " Of him, no doubt, might be repeated what
he says of his father, Don Pedro: " He was a good man-at-arms,
as good as any in the world." His body was buried in the mon-
astery of St. Mary of Poblet, to which his will bequeathed it ; and
there, though the church was ruined in the Carlist wars, his
tomb may still be seen, with his effigy wearing the frock and
sandals of a Bernardine friar, in which he was interred.

"SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET."

THE acting conceptions of Hamlet have been almost as nu-
merous as the tragedians who have personated him. Burbage,
the great Hamlet of Shakspere's own day, is said to have re-
quired from the dramatist's hand the queen's description of the
prince as " fat and scant of breath." Betterton, of course, omit-
ted it, being (as indeed were Garrick, Kean, and as is Edwin
Booth) small of stature and of meagre build. Betterton also
omitted the passage commencing

" Angels and ministers of grace, defend us,"

while Garrick discarded the entire graveyard scene of the fifth
act, and took such other liberties as became a true inheritor of
the traditions of Dryden and Davenant, who worked over the
great text quite at pleasure, turning Macbeth's witches into a
ballet, giving Miranda a brother, and making Shylock a low
comedian with a red nose, or Portia a soubrette, with imitations
of leading local barristers, as happened to hit the ribald tone of
their day.

But while the actor may not be asked to overlook exigencies
of taste and audience, or managers to maintain a purity of con-
text at the expense of empty houses and bankruptcy, editors,
commentators, and critics cannot be permitted an equal license
of interpretation. These may, indeed, put their multitudinous
knowledge into foot-notes ; but between the foot-notes and the
text a broad line is to be drawn, below which is their preroga-
tive, but above which they can only read like the rest of us.

And yet when Ophelia exclaims, "Oh! what a noble mind is
here o'erthrown," she appears to have given the keynote to

3o "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET.*' [Oct.,

about two centuries of commentary. Doubtless to that gentle
lady so did appear the princely lover, who chided her in brusque
speech, and with rough denials dismissed her from his presence.
But I cannot help thinking that the exegesis which credits Ham-
let the Dane (as we have him in the First Folio) with madness,
indecision, a disjointed and diseased will, or other insignia of a
mind diseased, is drawn not so much from a desire to corro-
borate Ophelia as from a certain finical overstudy of the crude
" Hamblett" of Belleforest, or that earlier Saga of a rude and
formative literature, the " Amleth " of Saxo Grammaticus ; if,
indeed, it be anj^thing else than a supercilious and redundant
sapiency and show of profundity in the commentator himself.
That our average Shaksperean commentator is given to over-
much "letting of empty buckets into empty wells" is very fa-
miliar criticism. There are many commentaries to write and
very little to write about, and the temptation to archaeological
minutiae on the one hand, or aesthetic rhapsody on the other,
is perhaps too strong for resistance. But a ruthless sweeping
away of both alike will, I think, reveal the Hamlet that Shak-
spere himself wanted ; and this Hamlet, I think, will turn out a
very different sort of person from the one the commentators
manufacture for us.

Prince Hamlet as we have him in the First Folio seems to
me a manly, punctilious, and rational gentleman, with a legally
balanced mind, conservative in method and tendency, with a law-
yer's caution and respect for the conventional and established
order of things ; above all, suspicious of intuitions, surmise, and
guess-work. Far from being infirm of purpose, like that whilom
Macbeth who let " I dare not wait upon I would " who dared
not to think, much less to look upon what his own hands had
wrought here was, it seems to me, a man whose deliberate
and solemn judgment, once committed to an act, was suffered
neither to relax nor hurry its due issue and performance. Surely
that was an impatient and impertinent ghost who came a second
time from his prison-house to complain of the "almost blunted
purpose " of such a man as this ! He had taken a prince's word,
this ghost, that while memory held its sway his message should
be remembered, and should have rested in the assurance. For
the prince had weighed long and considered deeply before giving
his word or putting any reliance upon or believing in ghosts at all.
He is rather disposed, on the whole, to jeer at the very idea of
such things as unpent spirits, released from their confine, revisit-
ing the glimpses of this moon; albeit in the days of Shakspere

1 886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" 31

all kinds of spectres, supernatural and disembodied shapes, were
conceded a constant interposition in sublunary matters.

The story of Hamlet is not a record of usurpation, murder,
blood, and death like Macbeth, nor of domestic tragedy like
Othello, nor of madness like Lear. Rather is it the history of
purposes adhered to and of the end which compassed them.
The man who, living consecrated to a purpose, accomplishes that
purpose before he dies, is not ordinarily held to be a failure,
infirm of resolution, weak and listless of his purpose. To every
self-regarding, trustful, determined, and just man must come, at
some time, deliberation as to method ; as to consequences, hesi-
tancies, interruptions of time and circumstances. Did not Prince
Hamlet, perhaps, eat and sleep between the ghostly interview
and the catastrophe of his revenge, during the visit of the
players, their rehearsals and performance, the murder of Polo-
nius, the embassy to England, the escape, the return, the funeral
of Ophelia? Was there no more interval to these than the waits
and betweens of the play at our theatres?

Had the dramatist whose completed work is before us in the
First Folio desired to portray a madman named Hamlet, he had
plenty of models at hand. The Belleforest " Hamblett " would
rend his clothes, *' wallow in the mire, run through the streets
with fouled face, like a man distraught, not speaking one word
but such as seemed to proceed from madness and mere frenzy ;
all his actions and gestures being no other than the right counte-
nance of a man wholly deprived of all reason and understanding ;
in such sort that he seemed fit for nothing but to make sport to
the pages and ruffling courtiers that attended in the courts of his
stepfather." But is it not the patent fact that Shakspere fol-
lowed no such model ; that he deliberately rejected the childish
Saga and the almost equally crude " Hamblett " tale, and created
a new Hamlet with attributes of his own, whose story bore only
the most attenuated resemblance to these? And if Shakspere
deliberately discarded all the former Amleths and Hambletts,
why should we restore them ? What have they to do with Ham-
let the Dane, in inky cloak, who did not rant nor grovel, but cher-
ished only

" That within which passeth show " ?

To me this sombre and stately prince bears no likeness to pre-
decessors who were very mountebanks in silly apings of a mind
diseased. Is it not the very paradox of aesthetic criticism to
leave the perfect work of a master, and go back to the childhood

32 "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET?' [Oct.,

of a re-utilized tale for an inconsequent and irresponsible lunatic
" who fails to act in any definite line of consistent purpose ; neg-
lects what he deems a sacred duty ; wastes himself in trifling oc-
cupations ; descends to the ignoble part of a court-jester ; breaks
the heart of a lady he dearly loves ; uselessly and recklessly kills
her father, with no sign of sorrow or remorse for the deed ; in-
sults a brother's legitimate grief at her grave, and finally goes
stumbling to the catastrophe of his death, the most complete fail-
ure, in the direction of the avowed purpose of his life, ever re-
corded " ? The aesthete who thus declaims might, perhaps, have
labored under provincial disadvantage. Old Dr. Johnson, to be
sure, once delivered himself of a valuable note to the effect that
" the pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth " ; but
surely, not since the old doctor's day has a metropolitan Eng-
lish stage, ;sq interpreted the masterpiece of a master.

To begin ' : with, it is to be remembered that our Hamlet is an
Eng%himn, and the Denmark in which he moved an English
court], iruled by an absolute monarch of the Tudor cast, one
Clanditis;; a very passable Henry VIII., not quite so far along in
uxoriousness at his taking-off, perhaps, but well in for it. No
amount of scenic or critical realism will enable us to confess a
further obligation in Shakspere to Denmark than for a very
limited stock of allusion and nomenclature. There certainly is
neither habitude, cast of thought, method, or custom that can be
called Danish, or that suggests itself as characteristic of Den-
mark's warlike, simple, sturdy, and unphilosophic inhabitants
of any dynasty or date, in the salient points and characters of the
play.

The characteristic of the particular tragedian who enacts
Hamlet the blonde wig, the Danish court-dress, the mantle of
fur ; the portraits hung on the chamber- wall or worn " in little "
on the actor's breast ; the Tudor scenery which Garrick used, or
the barbaric court with its rude arches and columns hung in
arras ; its figures draped in habit of old Scandinavia all these,
while alike creditable to the study and conception of this or that
actor (and valuable as relieving the spectator from a too mono-
tonous usuetude), are still redundant, if we are to ask who, after
all, Hamlet, in the mind's eye of his creator, Shakspere, was.

Hamlet to the true critic, " in spite of all temptations to be-
long toother nations," -must ever be and remain an Englishman.
From the prince's philosophy of life and duty, the courtier phrases
of Polonius and Osric, to the burlesque dialect and dialectics of
the .grave-diggers, every speech and sense put into the mouth

1 886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" 33

of the dramatis persona is purely English English thought,
methods, habits of reasoning, analogies, and expression are every-
where before us. There was nothing incestuous in the marriage
of Claudius to his brother's widow, by Danish laws, traditions, or
customs. The technical denial of consecrated sepulture to sui-
cides, the polishing of young gallants at the French court, the
employment of strolling players every act, law, tenure, or cus-
tom on which the action of the play is anywhere suspended is
English, and English only.

Add to all these that the succession from Claudius is stated in.
such unmistakable terms of English law that nothing but sheer
good-nature can admit a flavor of Denmark into it,

" . , . Our valiant Hamlet

Did slay this Fortinbras, who by a sealed compact,
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands
Which he stood seized of, to the conqueror *
Against the which, a moiety competent
Was gaged b our king, which had returned
To the inheritance of Fortinbras * \ .* *

Had he been vanquisher, as, by the same cov'nant,
His fell to Hamlet." (I. i. 87.)

Had the wager between the two kings been a legal one in
England (and by importing the legend Shakspere so assumed
it), then the above is an exact statement of the result, by Anglo-
Saxon tenure, in equity. Technical terms of the lawyers' craft
are " packed into this passage so closely as to form the greater
part of its composition," says Mr. Davis. Others have shown
that not only was the argument of the grave-digger a legitimate
travesty on the old case of Hales vs. Petit, but that in the entire
graveyard scene clowns, priests, court, and all travel closely
within the customs sanctioned by English canon law of the peri-
od. And Horatio, at the last (as if conscious that a Platonic sui-
cide were out of place in Denmark), explains that he is " more an
antique Roman than a Dane."

What we are contemplating, then, is not a Danish but an
English Hamlet a Hamlet as he left the hands of Shakspere,
his creator ; a Hamlet dispossessed of the personal equation of
his particular interpreter, or the dust-heap of this or that par-
ticular annotator ; the Hamlet, in short, of the play as we have
it finally in the First Folio, not as it might have been or ought to
have been according to this or that more or less adult alienist or
protagonist. He is simply an English prince in waiting ; in his

VOL. XLIV. 3

34 " SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" [Oct.,

minority entitled to princely maintenance, but only so long as he
remains a cipher in the state. In this sense only can the King
say to him, " Be as ourselves in Denmark." The crown-prince
who should trifle with state affairs would have become, in Tudor
or Elizabethan usage, on the instant a crown prisoner instead.

This Prince Hamlet is restive. His first speech is a sotto voce
bitterly expressive of this very status. Left alone a moment
later, a friend, a late arrival from a German university, tells of a
ghostly visitor, and brings witnesses to his story of the appari-
tion, which, however, Hamlet declines, even upon the testimony
of these three, his sworn friend among them, to believe. But
his curiosity is aroused and he proposes to see for himself.
Just here the industrious gentlemen who find "trilogies" and
" groups " among the Canon Plays might well pause to point us
to the fact that this ghost of Hamlet's father is the only ghost
in all Shakspere which allows itself to be visible to outsiders, to
spectators, who are merely third persons to its business or mes-
sage. Caesar and Banquo, and Henry and Clarence, and the
young princes sent their shades only to the party who had un-
kindly assisted in their mortal taking-off. Even if not an inten-
tional proof, certainly it is an afforded proof of the conservatism
and manliness of Prince Hamlet that to convince him some-
thing even more than " the sensible and true avouch " of his
own senses is despatched ! A disbeliever in ghosts is to be made
over into a believer, and the mettle to be worked upon requires
nothing less than cumulative presumptive evidence. This stage
passed, however, Hamlet consents to see the Ghost alone. But
even afterwards, although half-convinced and profoundly im-
pressed with the interview, he will not yet admit to his friends
that he believes. He makes light of the whole affair, and, to as-
sure them how faintly the eerie interview has touched his reason,
puns and quibbles and jokes about it with careless, even heart-
less, badinage. We had supposed that it was onlv your true
German mind, with its strata of " under-soul " and "over-soul,"
which can see in this badinage, even if it be a little forced, the
gambols of a maddened mind. But it seems there are others
who forget that it is only with things familiar that we joke and
trifle. Had Hamlet been afraid of that ghost, those of us who
are willing to allow Shakspere somewhat to say of his own crea-
tions will not be indisposed to admit -in the teeth even of the
vast German introspection that Shakspere's text might, per-
haps, have so made it appear.

But whether Hamlet be or no, Hamlet's friends are afraid of

1 886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET'' 35

it; and so, like the prince that he is, he puts himself courte-
ously into a frame of tolerance with their mood. In heroic vein
he swears them on his sword to secrecy ; and then, when ready
for the whisper, puts them by with platitudes in short, acts as
any gentleman would who finely, but firmly and irrevocably,
wrests it out of any one's power to trifle with what he will,
nevertheless, in private deeply ponder over. Firmly, but yet
playfully, so as not to wound the feelings of those to whose
kindness he is, and may hereafter wish to become, indebted for
his evidence, he refuses to share his secret ; and when, from re-
flection, causation, and rational assessment of cumulative proof,
he finds the ghost's statements walking all-fours with his own in-
tuitive perceptions, even then this legal-minded, this exact young
prince will press to no conclusion will neither upon superna-.
tural testimony nor intuition base an overt act. He will, for the
present, do nothing more than doubt ; and, lawyer-like, he still
gives the benefit of the doubt to the de facto King. Even the
vision which three other sane men have seen may yet be the
chimera of his own melancholy :

" The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil : . . . yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me,"

And then he adds again the lawyer and acute and accom-
plished weigher of evidence :

" I'll have grounds
More relative than this! "

Wherein lies the " madness," so far at least, in the mental pro-
cesses of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?

There is a play, out of the Italian, made upon the murder of
one Gonzago. Here are strolling players, who have a power,
nevertheless, of recitation of which Hamlet himself has felt the
force. Hamlet has heard that one's conscience may be nay,
has been reached by such players as these. He conceives a
plan of using this very play about the Gonzago murder to test
the story he has heard, if so be it may deduce " matter more
relative." He revises the dumb-show of the act of murder to
suit the one portrayed by the Ghost, interpolates a speech or two
of his own, and gives minute direction to the actor entrusted
with them how to render his lines, beyond all perad venture,

36 "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" [Oct.,

effectively. And in the result, and not till then, will the prince
recognize " the sensible and true avouch " not only of those
senses to which the apparition has appeared, but of a whole
court. Then, and not till then, will this " madman," this crazed
Hamlet, " take the Ghost's word for a thousand pounds."

And now ensues a scene which for two centuries or so the
chorus of commentators has declared to be a breaking -forth of
Prince Hamlet's dementia. But what says the play ? Shall not
this pensive, this calm and self-repressing Hamlet at least allow
himself a burst of exultation at the complete success of his long-
maturing schemes ? That he does not declaim in rotund periods,
that he does not call on the avenging gods, is purely character-
istic of the balanced and self- correcting brain. Why he says,
in relaxing vein, to his friend if my fortunes should some day
turn against me, don't you think I could get a living with a
strolling company of players myself? Yes, indeed, I think
you might at least claim in time half a share in the profits of
the troupe, says Horatio. To which Hamlet replies, still in
complaisant mood, Nothing less than a whole share for me,
and recites in the popular vein a verse, wanting the final rhyme,
which Horatio suggests could have been completed in perfect
.appropriateness to the occasion :

" For thou dost know, O Damon dear,

This realm dismantled was
Of Jove himself ; and now reigns here
A very CLAUDIUS ! " *

only for Claudius Hamlet says " pajock " (that is, " peacock," or
anything that is mere pretence and show without substance).
The playfulness of two friends unbending may hardly pass as
madness with minds not maddish themselves !

The parry of harsh words with poor Lady Ophelia, leading
up to the abrupt dismissal, affords another recitemerit for the
" madman " view. Perhaps all lovers' vows and dicers' oaths are
madness. But here are lovers' vows reconsidered ; and recon-
sideration is not quite the regulation act of a madman. In the
leisure of a prince, no doubt, Hamlet has had love-passages with
the sweet lady ; perhaps had given her his heart of hearts, as, in-
deed, she has surely given hers to him. What matters it to the
now gruesome story of the play ? Now that the Ghost's story
has become a truth to the deep-thinking man, now that he sees
how henceforth his is a life committed to great purposes, there

* This reading is suggested to me by Mr. Davis.

1 8 86.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." 37

must be no more sports with Amaryllis in the shade nor with the
tangles of Nerea's hair, no more of marriages. There must be
harsh words sooner or later, and abrupt speeches. They may as
well come now as further on. A murderous and usurping king
is to be done for, a dear father murdered to be avenged. After
that. Ophelia again, perhaps. But until the times have been set
right and the cursed spite of duty performed, it is needs must to
wipe away all trivial fond records. They, with all saws of books,
all forms, all pressures past, all dilettante matter in idle courtier
life or at Wittenberg by youth and observation copied, must be
expunged from the book and volume of a brain hereafter to be
filled alone by that dear father's commandment, brought by that
father's own perturbed spirit to mortality again. Indeed, we
have found no madness yet. Perhaps it were better for Prince
Hamlet if we had. Even in this inter-scene it is not hard to re-
cognize the tender reluctance of the gentleman who is obliged,
in harsh half-dialogue and half-soliloquy, to tell the lady that she
must release for ever all thought of the man who perhaps loved
her once. It might, we even think, have been kindlier done by
taking the Lady Ophelia herself into a prince's confidence. The
woman who loved a Hamlet might have acquiesced in his honor
and the noblesse oblige of it. At least a woman like Macbeth's
lady would have acquiesced. But perhaps Ophelia was not a
Lady Macbeth. So far we go with the text. Hamlet so de-
cides, and we are reading, not composing, his story reading it,
not from Saxo Grammaticus, or Belleforest, or the aesthetic
commentators, but from Shakspere. Hamlet assumes aberra-
tion, perhaps to soften his cruelty, perhaps in cold blood ; but,
anyhow, Ophelia is to be sacrificed, and sacrificed she is.

Thereafter, the Ghost's word once taken, we see Hamlet
sword in hand; Twice he strikes at the King, who has, in the
face of the court, confessed the murder of his predecessor (con-
fessed it certainly as plainly as Macbeth at the banquet revealed
the taking-off of Banquo). The first time Hamlet drops his point
because King Claudius is at his prayers, and the prince will not
run the risk of having England (that is, his Denmark) take its
priest's cue and canonize a sovereign slain, like Becket, at the
altar ; the second time, so luck will have it, kills Polonius instead.
Conscience-stricken as he is, Claudius yet proposes to make
things endurable for himself. He has this troublesome prince
announced as mad to the court (to whom explanations of the
killing of Polonius and of that scene at the play are in order),
and announces that the throne in tenderest solicitude will ar-

38 "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." [Oct.,

range that he be sent abroad for change of scene and treatment.
Outside it is bulletined to the populace that Prince Hamlet is
despatched tyi embassy to England to exact a long- delayed in-
stalment of tribute-money. But such items leak through the
sieve of courts, and the very grave-diggers have the truth of
it. Had Hamlet been the madman the commentators make him
and Ophelia thought him, he had, perhaps, never penetrated
the subterfuge. But he had been on his guard against plots to
get him out of the way. Even when the King had called him
" cousin " and " son," and invited him to " be as ourselves in
Denmark," Hamlet had been swift to interpret the purposes for
which Rozencrantz and Guildenstern were imported, and had
mentioned to those insinuating gentlemen that he was not quite
yet bereft of reason ; nay, nor a pipe to be played upon.

He sees it to his advantage to accompany and outwit them,
and he does it with rare effectiveness. But our commenta-
tor is not disconcerted with this ruse contre ruse, and is ready
with his hermeneutics ; cites many learned works in mental
pathology, and shows how normal to a mind diseased is a cer-
tain penetrating shrewdness. Hamlet having been pronounced
stark mad to begin with, all the res gestce is to be bent to that
end, and bent it accordingly is.

But one scene more is to intervene ere the purpose of a
prince is made a fact accomplished the scene at poor Ophelia's
grave. To read madness into the intense pathos and philoso-
phy of that monologue over Yorick's skull and the mortality
that turns Csesars into clay puts even our commentators to
their reading. But they do it somehow. It is a tribute to the
vast penetration of the people, to the great common consent
of mankind, that this scene will subdue and dominate and
hold the breath of vast audiences, and that not an individual
will miss the modulated lesson of it all. How many of these
vast audiences read or think of reading a volume of our com-
mentators in order to comprehend that exquisite height of dra-
matic intensity ? Doubtless not one. And yet our commenta-
tor will write, and the old book-stalls will teem with the books
so written, and the copies are always choice finds because " un-
cut."

That could hardly be a chronicle of a human life which re-
corded that its subject never lost his patience or his temper. It
must be confessed that, a very few moments after this high strain,
Prince Hamlet is human is sane enough to entirely lose his.
He has 'been through much. And to a man so deeply conscious

1 886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." 39

of the perspective of events, so keenly cutting below the surface
and into the motives and hearts of men, so contemptuous of mere
words and noise and phrases, to see Laertes, tricked out in the
fopperies of France, playing maudlin mourner where he, Ham-
let, had suppressed everything it was hardly to be borne with-
out a little touch of nature. But he is not long beside himself.
He knows that he rants, and that a hostile court are taking notes
to pin lunacy once more upon him. He contents himself:

" I loved you ever: but 'tis no matter;
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, the dog will have his day !"

The excitement of return; of the meditation on mortality, on
Yorick's skull, and on Caesar turned to clay; of the funeral in
consecrated ground, and the sudden confronting of the court,
are subdued into only just this little measure. After all, the cat
will mew, the dog will have his day and so, enough.

With unerring perception, once more a calm and determined
man, Hamlet falls in with the King's second subterfuge of the
wager, and instantly recognizes the perfect and fitting oppor-
tunityfor all these days, months, and years awaited sent by
Fate at last. At last he will have a weapon in his hand in full
view of the court and in the presence of the King a King not at
prayers, but on his throne. He will make short work of him
now. The matter is out of scheming, and the prince has only
to bide the hour. The weight of the disjointed times off his
mind, he has leisure and mood for trifling. He can fool Osric to
the top of his bent, or he may for the first time talk of himself to
his only friend: "Thou wouldst not think how ill's all here
about my heart: but it is no matter." But when Horatio would
undertake to put off the sword-play, "Not a whit. ... If it be
now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now ; if it
be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." The readiness
of long years, the readiness that never has relaxed through all
the interruption of events the readiness is all; and here it is!

There is surely very little of the "court-jester" in the clos-
ing scene, when the dying Hamlet, although. he has accomplished
his never relented-from purpose, and has no wish to live, yet, as
his blood ebbs, remembers -that this accomplished purpose may
be set down to a moment's impulse, and the long, silent struggle
for opportunity, the once more accorded lesson of revenge, be
never known by those whose judgment he could yet wish kind
to the last prince of a lapsed dynasty ! Perhaps Hamlet foresaw

40 "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." [Oct ,

let us admit the fancy for a moment the long line of com-
mentators who to-day, as for the last one hundred years, are in-
terrupting the reader of Prince Hamlet's story at every word by
superimposed numeral or asterisk, or other zodiacal sign, to ask
him if he is quite sure he understands what he is reading, and
wouldn't rather please stop and see what a nice little wheelbar-
row-load of archaic and dusty debris he has just trundled up and
emptied at this, that, and the other point ; who is bending, per-
haps, all his little sapiency to prove the incapacity, the shiftless-
ness, the puling imbecility, vacillation, and all the rest of it, of
Hamlet the Dane. Perhaps Prince Hamlet saw all this in his
mind's eye when he said to Horatio :

" O good Horatio \ what a wounded name,
Things standing- thus unknown, shall live behind me I
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,"

(for Horatio was himself proposing to drink the cup and follow
his friend,)

"Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain r
To tell my story."

Endure the buffetings of life to say a word for me ; show why
I broke Ophelia's heart, by mischance killed her harmless old
father, why I took the Ghost's word for a thousand pounds ; put
down the poisoned cup, and tarry here to report me and my cause
aright nothing extenuate, but tell them the story of harsh fate,
and of my duty all, all done 1 " If thou didst ever hold me in
thy heart," do this for Hamlet I " The rest is Silence ! "

We confess that, unless, indeed, Hamlet is a mystery for each
man to read himself into, unless every man is to make of Hamlet
w t hat he himself under the circumstances would have been, and
unless it is of no sort of consequence what Shakspere drew him to
be, we cannot read any blunted purposes into the soul of this Eng-
lish prince. Under what standard of comparison does he merit
the interpretation? Surrounded by Claudius, the conscience-
eaten ; Polonius, the parasite ; Osric, the flunky ; Laertes, true
cub of Polonius, coming from dissipation in Paris to remouth his
father's platitudes and do the cat's paw for a murderous and
cowardly King surely not by confronting him with these does
Prince Hamlet appear " cruel, evasive, dilatory, infirm of pur-
pose, a court-jester" ! Surely not out of this precious directory
shall we select Hamlet as the madman 1 In Macbeth,, indeed, we

1 886.] " SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET'' 41

had the man who would " proceed no further in this business" ;
in Brutus one whose " whole mind," spurred amid his rhetorical
patriotism to a single overt act,

" is suffering the nature of an insurrection " ;

but not in the Hamlet of Shakspere can we find one of these
paradoxes.

And yet what little necessity for any analysis at all to find a
madman, when we consider that Horatio is at Hamlet's side?
Surely to no one but a Shaksperean commentator is it neces-
sary to suggest that Horatio was no keeper of lunatics, nor quite
the person to figure throughout the play as the friend, confidant,
and alter ego of a madman. The aesthetic critic who can conceive
of Horatio, clear- minded, strong-headed, acute, practical, who
checks his friend with a

" 'twere to consider too curiously to consider so,"

and who, when all is over, can say above his lifelong and now
lifeless friend :

" Give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placdd to the view ;
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about : so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc'd cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors* heads " ;

continuing, during the entire period covered by the Shak-
sperean chronicle, the follower of a man who had better have
been in a madhouse is perhaps best as he is: an aesthetic critic!
To such a one Hamlet the Dane may have been a candidate for
Bedlam. But at least King Fortinbras knew better when he
pronounced the proper and fitting eulogium of this just man,
tenacious of his purpose :

" Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage ;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov'd most royally : and, for his passage,
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him."

42 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. [Oct.,

A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE.

IT must be doubted whether any government in the world,
in this year of grace 1886, has grasped the whole ideal of the
object of punishment, and therefore of its method or its spirit. If
I may hazard an opinion where so many of the wisest thinkers
have differed both in principle and in detail, I should imagine
that to change the heart and the character of a criminal was the
first and last motive in all punishment. If it be replied that this
is not the legal idea, because punishment means the legal pay-
ment of a debt which has been incurred both to the law and to
society, I should rejoin that this may be so from a law-court
point of view, but that it is not so from a Christian or a philoso-
phical. If punishment be regarded as a deterrent from crime
(a deterrent both in endurance and in prospect), it must follow
that, since to prevent crime is a chief object in punishment, to im-
prove the criminal must be a means to the same end. " I punish
you that you may not do it again, or that others may be fore-
warned of the penalty," is only half of that motive which, Chris-
tianly and philosophically, should influence the legislative mind.
" I punish you that, in the process of your being punished, you
may be built up into a totally new character," seems much more
suggestive of the divine ideal of punishment, which I should im-
agine to be " purification by pain."

Yet when we use the word " pain " we are using a loose
word which may. be interpreted in a variety of senses. Pain
may mean physical or mental suffering, without a touch even of
motive or of object. It may mean simply the infliction of a woe
not the endurance of, the submission to, a woe, with high cour-
age, religious patience, a penitent spirit ; it may mean nothing
better than a detested evil, a thing to be hated for its own self.
Now, this wrong estimate of pain both physical and mental pain
is just precisely that estimate which ninety-nine prisoners out of
every hundred naturally take of their law-inflicted punishment.
I say " naturally take," for neither in law-courts nor in prisons
is there any earnest recognition of the duty of suggesting a higher
estimate. Barring only the ''attendance at divine worship " and
the kindly sympathies of the chaplain of a jail (with, of course,
the use of libraries in prisons, and also the practically helpful
service of " learning a trade "), there is positively, at least in Eng-

1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 43

land, scarcely any attempt whatever at the rebuilding of the
whole character of a convict. A prison means only a place of
working out a sentence, whether it be for six months or for a
whole life. It is not a place for Christian penance and edifica-
tion, any more than for intellectual invigoration. It is rather a
place where the one sentiment is degradation ; the one object, to
"get through " the horrid task.

I have visited Catholic prisons in France and in Italy, and
have recognized the high intention of the officials. Particularly
at Belle Isle, near St. Nazaire, I was wonderfully struck with
three excellent characteristics : the prominence given to the
attractiveness of the prison chapel, the constant, affectionate
fatherliness of the prison chaplain, and the soothing influence of
the surrounding sea and tranquil country. The idea of the place
was that of a retreat ; there was nothing which was repugnant
or degrading. And some of the worst classes of criminals were
sent there. I talked to some of them, in the company of the
prison chaplain, and they all seemed resigned, not degraded.
(This was twenty-two years ago.) I compared, in my own mind,
such a penal religious house with some of the dens of demorali-
zation I had seen in England. The atmosphere of the two " sys-
tems " was quite opposite. It appeared to me that in this Ca-
tholic prison the first object of the officials was to refine, and
so to purify, the prisoners' characters; whereas it had always
seemed to me that in England the (at least) result of prison life
must be to degrade prisoners down and down to semi-brutedom ;
as though a criminal, because a law-breaker, ought to be made to
realize the possibility that he might, after all, be not human.

I know nothing of American systems of penal servitude, and
must therefore build up my inferences, and also my " philo-
sophy," on the foundation of my English experience. It has
appeared to me that even inspectors have stopped short at the
inquiry : " Is the discipline carried out according to law ? " Now,
it is the very law as to the whole matter that I should object to.
I may be presumptuous, but it seems to me that the English
judges, as well as the whole legislative body, utterly fail to ap-
prehend that punishment is first curative, and only afterwards
penal or retributive. I cannot conceive of erring mortals, be
they judges or criminals, taking any other view of human pun-
ishments than that they are designed for the improvement of the
delinquents. Let us first discuss the " religious " view of the
subject. It is obvious that, spiritually, no one man can judge
another man ; nor can he (therefore) mete out to him exact pun-

44 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. [Oct.,

ishment. Ne judicas, et non judicaberis, has obvious reference to
our intellectual incapacity, as well as to our fitting- Christian hu-
mility. Punishment, therefore, can never be intended as the ad-
ministration of the lex talionis, since it is absolutely impossible to
know (none but God can know) what "measure for measure"
would be in any case. To know what would be " measure for
measure," it would be necessary to know, (i) the whole nature of
a culprit, his constitution of mind, heart, and nerve ; (2) the exact
pressure of the temptation on that whole nature at the exact mo-
ment when the offence was committed ; (3) all the incidental cir-
cumstances, auxiliaries, incitements, which constructed a momen-
tary attitude of the will. God knows all this no one else. So
that, spiritually, all "judgment " is both indecent and imbecile,
save the judgment which we may perhaps pass on ourself. The
only fact of which we are sure (in another's crime) is that there
must have been some moral defect; and, therefore, since we
are sure of the defect, but not sure of the (precise) guilt, what
we have first to try to do is to cure the defect. The very effort
at being cured will be the punishment. What is Christianly
called penance involves a combat with the lower will, as well as
the foregoing of lower pleasures ; it is punishment both in will
and in deed ; and the more superlative the penance the more
superlative will be the frustration of the promptings of the
lower will to gratification. But if you take away the conversion
of the will you take away the real object of the penance. Pen-
ance without good-will is not penance. It is punishment, but it
is spiritually of little use. And it is just here that we touch the
point where the utter hollowness of the penal system is made
transparent to the Catholic mind. Punishment can frighten,
it can disgust, it can pay the bill which the culprit owes to the
law, but it does not of itself do the mind the smallest good ;
nay, of itself it may only harden the disposition. Penal servi-
tude, as it is understood in England, is the dry performance of a
task which is not improving that is, which is not necessarily im-
proving which cannot remotely touch the confines of the spiri-
tual man ; which degrades but cannot elevate, sours but cannot
sweeten, hardens but cannot soften ; demoralizes by the self-con-
viction of one's own ignominy, and demoralizes all the more be-
cause it does not take into recognition the capacity of the con-
vict's soul for what is highest.

How, then, it may be asked, would you so administer law-
punishments as to combine the penal with the spiritualizing ele-
ments ?

1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 45

First, by setting steadily before the minds of all prisoners
that they are to improve themselves by the opportunities which
are given them. I know that this is impossible, save in a limited
degree, in any prison which is not Catholic in its whole control.
I know that no non-Catholic apprehension can initiate, still less
develop in execution, that perfect system of " supernatural "
education which is possible only within the ark of the church.
Yet it is necessary to speak only as a Catholic in order to speak
truthfully on the whole subject. The first idea, then, in a Ca-
tholic prison is purification. I do not use the word " sanctinca-
tion," because it would sound too " interior " in any essay upon
a lay view of penal servitude. Purification in a mental or moral
sense ; purification of purpose, and therefore of habit ; purifica-
tion of the intellectual conceptions of the highest aims this ap-
pears to me to be the first object in punishment, as it is also its
last and happiest fruit. I cannot believe that in this little life we
can ever regard another's punishment save as a means to an end
which shall be the best. And what is that " best," save the eter-
nal regeneration of the whole being of the man who has "gone
wrong"? In simple fairness apart from all hypocrisy, all pre-
tence, all cant or affectation let it be asked : What is the dif-
ference between a sinner who is in jail and a sinner who has the
luck to be out of it ? The difference is that the one has been
" caught " in an overt act of breaking an act of Parliament, while
the other has only broken perhaps half a dozen divine laws, and
has not been caught, and could not be. Be it remembered that
the breaches of the criminal laws need not be exceptionally hor-
rid " sins," save only so far as they are breaches of the divine
laws, which alone are of the essence of obligation. So that a
man may be condemned to penal servitude for twenty years for
some offence which, in the judgment of the Divine Mind, was but
a very small infraction of a divine law some offence which was
as nothing when compared with the colossal sins which the " man
of the world " commits gaily every day, but which society gra-
ciously pardons in " men of position." It is the criminal code,
not the divine law, which the prisoner has dared to mock ; it is
the penal statutes, not the commandments of the New Testa-
ment, which the vulgar thief or drunkard has outraged. And
if every man who should commit a mortal sin, by breaking a law
of God or of the church, were to be tried and sent to prison for
each offence, we should be obliged to have a prison attached to
every big house a prison which would be much more tenanted
than would be the big house. This puts the truth candidly,

46 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. . [Oct.,

without cant or hypocrisy, without lies, either social or conven-
tional. Therefore, when we treat of prison life let us remember
that we are treating of the punishment of those few who have
been " caught " breaking civil or criminal laws ; we are not
treating of the lucky exemption of the many who walk the streets
in the serenest liberty of their complacency, while breaking daily
one or more of the divine commandments.

How, then, with any justice, with any manliness or mag-
nanimity, can we fail to admit that we owe to " criminal " pri-
soners some exceptional reparation or restitution, since it is
partly through our own fault our neglect of duty or our bad
example that they have been snared into committing vulgar
crimes, and since they are not, in the eye of God, any worse
than, if so bad as, the habitual worldling or schemer or voluptu-
ary ? This reparation, this restitution, ought to be, as I have
suggested, their " education," both spiritual and intellectual;
their building up in the science of the spiritual life and their
building up in intellectual apprehension ; their being taught such
honest trades as shall remove future temptations, with such in-
vigoration as shall make them brave and industrious. Will it be
objected : " Then where will be your punishment?" I call this
objection most unintelligent. Who does not know that restraint
for liberty, sharp discipline for lazy self-pleasing, the devotion of
the mind and habit to lofty ideas for the habitual looseness of
immorality or turpitude, are exchanges which are necessarily
penal in the extreme, however softened by the loving spirit of
the whole object ? If the M religious life " be a life of mortification
that is, a resistance to the lower will must not the penal
life, which adds chastisement to the mortification, be essentially
"punishment" in severe sense? To my thinking, if you made
prisons religious houses, plus only forced industrial retreats, you
would preserve every element of just punishment, while getting
rid of every element of degradation. It is that " degradation "
which is the bane of our prisons. It is the wrong, the obvious
injustice, of our prisons. A prisoner is degraded by being " con-
demned." What you have now to do is to undegrade him. You
have to lift up, not to beat down ; you have to encourage, not to
depress ; you have to improve the mind, not to weary out the
body ; you have to make a Christian out of an assumed pagan, a
fair scholar out of an ignoramus, a sensible man out of a dull
libertine, a good workman out of a waif-and-stray. In doing
this you would regenerate "the criminal classes." You would
make it impossible that " the dog should return to its vomit, the

1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 47

sow to its wallowing in the mire." Why is it that " returned
convicts " go to the bad again and commit precisely the same
offences as before ? For two reasons : first, that you have not
taught them ; secondly, that society that cruel, canting, unjust
hypocrite shuts its doors upon the returned convict who has
done his penance, while it is careful not to do penance for its own
sins. But if prisons were made schools as much as prisons, re-
ligious retreats rather than coarse penal cages, society would
not have the excuse (which it most certainly has now) for refus-
ing to give work to the unimproved. If society were assured,
on the authority of prison officials, that the returned convict was
a criminal no longer, that he was a thoroughly renewed and
taught man, society, for very shame, could not refuse to give
employment to a man whp was at least as good as itself. I
would have the whole prison system radically altered in some
such respects as the following : That all prison life should be
probationary ; that no sentence passed by judge and jury should
be considered to be absolutely final in its allotment, but that the
prisoner's prison conduct, his progress, his real improvement,
should be the ultimate awarder of his length of punishment ; that
prison guardians of the highest character and personal fitness
should be continually in communication with all prisoners, and
should take counsel with chaplains and with governors, and also
with regular standing committees, as to the advancement which
had been made by each prisoner, and as to the (possible) misap-
prehension of judge and jury ; and thus I would put an end to
the flagrant wrong which is now normal the passing hasty sen-
tences on a hasty trial ; the trusting the keys of a life's liberty to
one fallible judge, who may be a savage or who may be illusion-
ed ; the leaving no locus penitentia to the victim of a temptation,
who may or may not be bad in will, but whose trial was a one-
sided affair. And, above all, I would never commit any young
person to the same character of punishment as I would commit
matured persons a disgraceful mistake in the English system,
which is equally barbarous and imbecile, and which stamps the
nation which commits it as hardly civilized.

Manifestly, for young persons say for youths under twenty
a much gentler and more sympathetic treatment is required than
for those who have grown old in their iniquities. In nine cases
out of ten very young persons have gone wrong through defects
in their moral education, through the neglect or the incompetency
of their guardians, or through having no guardians at all. No-
thing can be more absurd or more wicked than to treat the

48 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF FKISON LIFE. [Oct.,

fledgling, " the flighty and frisky juvenile,'' as one would treat a
man of, say, thirty years of age, who might be presumed to have
sown his wild oats. Yet in England it is quite common to con-
demn a mere youth to incarceration along with the " hardened
criminals " of the worst class, whose society he has given to him
to reform him ! Now, I should imagine that if the " probation-
ary " principle, which I have ventured to advocate in all cases, can
be justified in one case more than in another, it must be in the
case of a first offender, whose youth and whose ignorance are his
apologists. I should maintain that in no instance whatever
ought a youth to be sent to prison at all. He ought to be sent
only to an industrial retreat. It is true that in England we have
no such retreats none that are even worthy to be mentioned.
In Rome, in the days of Pius IX., I well remember that there
were such institutions. I am informed, too, that they are still
to be found in exceptional states. But why are they not a first
requirement in every state? Take any huge metropolis say
London or New York and it follows necessarily that a certain
proportion of the population must be " neglected " in every
moral and social sense. And how monstrous that, when the
young criminals come to be "tried," they are to be dealt with,
in punishment, precisely as though their antecedents had been
most favorable to the development of their characters! Nay, as
a rule, it is the irresponsible the almost irresponsible youth
or neglected young man who " catches it hardest " from the
Christian judges; while the youths of fair position who have
been well brought up are let off with a fine or a mild rebuke !
That there is " one law for the rich and another for the poor ' is
true not only in regard to relative punishment, but in regard to
the inciting causes which poverty vainly pleads, but which " re-
spectability " usually pleads with great success.

I have said that society owes reparation and restitution to the
criminal classes who have been netted in overt crimes, and I sup-
pose it is natural that society which sets a bad example should
be indifferent to the reformation of the captives. Yet society, be
it remembered, is not the government; is not the judicial or
ecclesiastical power of the realm ; is not the de facto responsibly
paternal authority at whose door lies the duty of perfecting pun-
ishment. How is it that our bishops I mean our Anglican
bishops or dignitaries do not busy themselves with this subject
of supreme import;- do not hold congresses, and make their sug-
gestions to the government, on matters which are most especially
withlo their province? True, non-Catholics cannot grasp the

1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 49

whole of the subject: they have not the "spiritual science" at
their command; yet the Christian aspect of penalty would seem
to be a study which ought to come within the province of their
ministry. Nor is it possible not to regret that, even in Catholic
countries, this most delicate groove of "charity" is not more
cultivated. Spite of the hardness of governments, it might be pos-
sible for ecclesiastics to exercise much more influence over them
than is attempted. In England we can scarcely look for such
influence : there is not the motive, the apprehension, the instinct.
In England the inspectors of prisons are the sole counsellors.
They appear to think themselves quite equal to their task. So
they are from the standpoint which they profess. They give
us their official reports by the dozen ; and these reports are
almost always highly complacent. I have read every volume of
such reports which has been issued for a long series of years.
The " reading " is somewhat heavy and dry. The chaplains
usually tell the same tale : " they have every reason to think the
system is working well." The medical inspectors pile up cate-
gories of the invalids, but always tell us that the sanitary arrange-
ments are excellent. The disciplinarians are of opinion that recent
improvements will work wonders in the reformation of even the
worst class of criminals. And the governors and the committees
of inspection publish volumes on the amount of labor which has
been -accomplished in the way of building a magnificent break-
water, or some great basin in a dock-yard at Chatham, or pos-
sibly a new harbor or lighthouse. We have also the assurance
that the convict classes earn (for the country) about a quarter
of a million sterling per annum; that the " educational depart-
ments " are in most respects progressive ; that the prisoners are
generally anxious to read good books (the 'Bible, Pilgrim s Pro.
gress, and books of travel), and that the new system of separating
first offenders from old offenders gives promise of most beneficent
results. So far, so well. No one doubts that " prison reform "
is not neglected. No one supposes that, in eighteen hundred and
eighty-six years, some advance has not been made over the
pagan Roman style of prisons, where the only appreciable ob-
ject was to punish, the only ethical indoctrination was to com-
mit suicide.

Yet what does all such "advance" really amount to, whether
Christianly, philosophically, or experimentally? To tell us that
there are now tailors' shops and basket-makers' shops in which
some of the prisoners may learn such trades; that there are two
thousand volumes in a prison library, and that some prisoners

VOL. XLIV. 4

5o A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. [Oct.,

" prefer reading to having their dinners " ; that the worst class
of prisoners acquire habits of steady industry by working at
stone-masonry or at carpentering, or that the sanitary and the
culinary arrangements have been brought up to a high standard
of efficiency ; all such items of " reports rj and they are weari-
somely repeated only touch the mere outline of the machinery
of prison life \ they do not even suggest the highest objects. Let
us, for a moment, put together a few of the aspects which we
have touched upon, and see if we can arrive at some conclu-
sions.

Why do some of the criminal classes get into prisons?
Chiefly for three reasons : because they have been badly brought
up, because they have been maddened by extreme hardship,
because society sets them a bad example. It comes to this, then,
that most of the criminal classes might plead misfortune as at
least auxiliary to the climax of their career. And as to the ques-
tion of morals, the criminal classes might plead gravely that the
laws are not framed with a view to morals so much as with a
VIQW to social security to the protection of the property of the
individual. It is most important to bear in rnind what the laws
appear to him when we are judging the law-breaker who has been
caught. Such laws, in regard to honesty, are mainly constructed
on the principle that you must not thieve save in some business
or some trade; but that "in business" you may thieve as much
as you like. " Business " may be defined, equally in truth and in
pleasantry, as the art of extracting money out of other persons'
pockets without getting into the hands of the police. And the
criminal classes see around them many thousands of examples of
the world bending its knee to successful villany, while at the
same time the world turns up its nose in sovereign contempt at
the unsuccessful industries of virtuous men. The criminal classes
know well that if they had the means to start companies or to
embark in any speculative kind of enterprise, with the certainty
of making fortunes by injuring the poor, society would hug them
to its bosom and eat their dinners and drink their wines with pro-
found respect. They know, too, that in most businesses there is
trickiness and shabbiness, over-reaching, over-charging, and legal
robbery ; and that the laws are not designed to place any sup-
pression on such rogueries, but, on the contrary, to protect the
business-man in practising them. " Morals," therefore, as the
criminal classes apprehend them, mean the science of robbing
legally and respectably, and, above all, of robbing with success.
It would be unpardonable affectation to speak of the criminal

1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 51

classes save as being created out of the bad morals of the success-
ful classes, or to deny that the successful classes differ chiefly
from the criminal classes in having superior opportunities and
education.

More than this, the average selfishness of the employing
classes, their want of delicate sympathy with the employed,
engenders the feeling in the working-classes indeed, the convic-
tion more tftan the feeling that they are not cared for morally,
but only financially. They are cared for as being the instru-
ments of fortune-making by those who are so lucky as to h'ave
capital, and who would give them in charge for a paltry theft of
half a dollar while they themselves swindle the public every
day.

If, then, the moral relations of the criminal classes to those
classes on whom they make a rough war are such as society has-
first created, it must follow that society owes a deep debt of
reparation to thousands of those prisoners who would not have:
stolen had they not learned the trick from their " superiors."

And it must follow that deep pity and compassion, the utmost
magnanimity of charity, ought to be extended to those victims of
misfortune who, in a really Christian society, would have been
too well taught and exampled to have fallen into law-breaking
enormities. I have said that it cannot be expected of society
that it should play the part of the Catholic priest to its own vic-
tims. But it can be expected of Christian governments that they
should take counsel of the best authorities of men renowned for
their sartctity and their wisdom as to the purest philosophy of
" penal reform." I have in particular mentioned three points on
which the discretion of government might with great advantage
be exercised. First, I have advocated that no sentence of any
judge should be accepted as final in regard to time, both on ac-
count of the personal caprice which measures sentences and the
inadequacy or injustice of many trials. In connection with this
reform I would make all punishment probationary, dependent, as
to severity, on the prisoner's conduct, and subject to such modifi-
cation as the after-light on a criminal's story might show to be
reasonable or equitable. At present, at least in England, no
after-light on a hasty estimate, on a hasty trial, on a hasty ver-
dict of twelve intelligent (?) jurymen can modify the extent of
any punishment without a cumbrous appeal to the Home Secre-
tary ; and since it is nobody's business to take the trouble of such
appeal, the poor prisoner has to work out a hard sentence.
Thirdly, I would do away altogether with the practice of send-

52 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. [Oct.,

ing young persons to jail; sending them, on the contrary, to an
industrial home, and subsequently placing them under the care
of chosen guardians, who should be responsible to the govern-
ment for wise conduct. These three points are comprehensive of
many minor points, and, in particular, of the after-career of ex-
convicts.

In regard to that after-career, there exists in England
though on a small scale what is called the Prisoners' Aid So-
ciety, a modern invention, which has unquestionably done good,
and which is prospered by the wisest philanthropy. Yet it is
obvious that no society can work with great success against the
obstinate and stupid verdict of society, which has gone forth all
over the country in the anti-Christian formula: "Let the excom-
municated remain outcast for evermore." Society wont forgive
any one who has been in prison ; won't give him " a clean bill "
and start him afresh. Society orders the police to hunt down
every ex-convict, and the police obey the mandate most scrupu-
lously. The cruelty of such conduct is only equalled by the
hypocrisy with which society pretended to be shocked by the
'" crime." If society were really shocked at any " crime " it
would take every care to draw a veil over it, to welcome the
sinner to true repentance, and to insure his having no further
provocation. But that detestable hypocrite, society, which rev-
els in divorce-cases and in every scandal, and positively gloats
over every fall of a fair famed woman, will not hear of receiving
back to its impure arms the wretched culprits who have done a
sharp penance, and who would lead virtuous lives if th'ey were
permitted. Now, this fact is absolutely inseparable from the con-
sideration of the whole science of prison life, prison reform, prison
consequences. We have to teach society the first principles of
Christian philosophy before we can persuade it to take an inte-
rest in those criminals who have been sent to prison through the
.evil example^ in most cases, of society. This may perhaps be a
hopeless task. The world is too old to become regenerate. It
is too rotten to be converted to magnanimity. It is too soaked
in conventionalism, in the puerile falsehoods of "propriety," to
face truth with manliness or common sense. But though society
must be despaired of, as abandoned to its vanities, its toilets, its
.money-worship, its animalism, there is still the huge army of
Catholic ecclesiastics who might take the whole subject into
their care.

May it be respectfully noted that the points which have been
touched upon are never alluded to from the pulpit nor in

1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 53

pastorals ; that in " fashionable churches [the expression has
some warranty !] the frock-coated or silk-costumed congregation
is seldom outraged by allusion to prison life." Lacordaire once
fulminated in a Paris pulpit against the " crimes of heart which
make respectable persons criminals " ; but it is not usual to hear
preachers honestly informing their congregations that they may
be much worse than prison convicts. Still less do they urge on
them their own moral responsibility in first creating a criminal
class by their own selfishness, and then not caring one straw
whether that class continue criminal or be encouraged by Chris-
tian kindness to a better life. Now, might not this subject be so
elaborated by ecclesiastics as to gain the attention of Christian
governments, so as to lead governments ta call in the aid of ec-
clesiastics to counsel them on the most interior points ? Is it a
matter of no serious interest that, say in England alone, some ten
thousand ex-convicts should be roaming about, not precisely
" seeking whom they may devour," but seeking how not to be
devoured by society ? These men cannot live. They are not
allowed to live. They are driven by society to hide in holes and
corners, out of the sight of every " respectable " person. Then
they starve. Then they thieve again. Then society says : " What
can we do with the criminal classes, who are so incorrigible, and
seem to like being sent to prison?" Well, if society had to go
without a dinner for a fortnight it would probably relax its
morals on the subject of taking food when no one would make it
possible to earn it. I could not blame a man who stole my forks
and spoons if, after he had asked me to give him work, I had
pointed him out to a policeman. I should hold him to be justified
against me ; and I should regard myself, not him, as the thief. Yet
this is how society acts in England ; and cannot the bishops and
clergy take the subject up in earnest and teach society its duty to
ex-convicts ? The two grand objects to be achieved as I have
ventured to suggest are, first, to make prison life probationary,
and, next, to provide homes for ex-convicts. To do either requires
a desperate amount of earnestness. And this is just what cannot
be looked for from society, but what can be looked for can be
respectfully asked from the clergy. The whole subject may be
"surrounded with difficulties." No one doubts that a certain
proportion of the criminal class are " bad," in the worst senses
of the unpleasant word " bad " ; that they are the self-constituted
enemies of society, and that society is not responsible for them.
Say about one-quarter of the criminal class is " bad," one-quarter
the victims of sheer ignorance, one-quarter the mere dupes of

54 MORNING. [Oct.,

evil associates, and one-quarter not criminal but weak. Here,
then, we have three out of the four quarters arbitrarily classed
with the one quarter, " bad " ! This is cruel. It is false. It is
anti-Christian. The probationary system which I have ventured
to advocate would be a God-send to these three-fourths of the
" criminal class " ; would be an act of justice to them as well as a
benefit to society, which would cease to compel men to become
criminal against their will. In this year 1886 we ought to have
arrived at an apprehension of two truths which are still fear-
fully obscured : that moral guilt and legal guilt are not twins
nor necessarily brothers, and that there are more criminals in
society than there are in jails.

MORNING.

A GLEAMING opal in a sapphire sea
Flashing across the orient seems the sun,
His bright crest topped with rubies all ablaze,
While o'er the distant hills a purple haze
Hangs with a royal splendor.

The grasses lift their shields of living green,
The birds sing fervently their matin song,
A thousand blossoms burst to perfect flowers ;
It is day's resurrection I Happy hours
So pure, so rare, so tender.

I quaff in draughts the perfume-freighted air r
Elixir pure of life that youth restores ;
I watch the bee within the rose's heart
Steal her life's wine, then (changeful lover !) dart
And woo the lily slender.

I feel the fresh, free breezes on my face,
I feel my being thrill with wild delight;
Like Adam when he stood in Paradise
And knew he lived, I feel the glad surprise
Of life and all its splendor.

i8S6.] FRANZ LISZT. 55

FRANZ LISZT.

THE personal adventures of Franz Liszt were so peculiar,
and his individual traits were so interesting, that in making a
romance out of his career biographers have been apt to overlook
the importance of his place in the history of modern music.
That will be more justly and more highly valued hereafter,
when apocryphal stories of his eccentricities and his escapades
are no longer sought with avidity by a sensation-loving public,
and supplied in quantities and patterns to suit the demand. In
truth, there was matter enough in his early and middle life to
keep gossips busy. Fie was not only one of the most astonish-
ing pianists who ever lived, but he was also one of the most bril-
liant and erratic personages who ever dazzled that alluring
world where art and society, genius and fashion, condescend to
each other and frolic in company. The Parisian Bohemia in
which he reigned was not a paradise of beer and tobacco, popu-
lated by jovial poor students and reckless journalists; it was a
land flowing with Burgundy and sparkling with wax-lights, a
pleasure-land of unconventional aristocrats, prosperous poets,
and successful artists, among whom nobody shone without rank,
or fame, or at least some piquant kind of notoriety. Only the
union of remarkable gifts with the most audacious vagaries could
have made Liszt what he was to the Paris of half a century ago-
the despair of other artists, the wonder of the concert-room, the
favorite Of the salon, the idol of susceptible women, at once a
fascination and a riddle, by turns a recluse and a man of the
world, a fashionable rout and a St. Simonian philosopher, the
most striking figure in a circle of notabilities which even Paris
has not often matched, and the most impressive musician in an
art-epoch to which Chopin was teaching the poetry of the piano
and Thalberg revealing unimagined possibilities of execution.

His later life was more decorous than these years of riotous
triumph, but it was not less picturesque. When he gave up the
exciting role of a virtuoso, it was to play the benign part of a
general musical Mentor. In his quasi-retirement he never shrank
very resolutely from the public gaze. At the grand- ducal court
of Weimar he made the opera-house illustrious by a model repre-
sentation of neglected master-works, and the connoisseurs of
all Europe learned to watch that little capital, long famous by

56 FRANZ LISZT. [Oct.,

its artistic and literary glories, for interpretations of the musical
drama unique in their high purpose and reverential fidelity.
When he received the tonsure and betook himself to Rome for
intervals of monastic quiet the public tongue wagged faster
than ever. He never "entered the church," as many imagined.
He only haunted the gate of the outer courts and rested there
awhile in its shadow, assuming no clerical obligations, and no-
thing of the clerical character except an unmeaning courtesy-
title and a close row of buttons on his straight coat. He was
now the greatest living master of his art, and perhaps it seemed
convenient to borrow a little sobriety from the sanctuary. But
Liszt was also sensitive to religious impressions and profoundly
moved by the grandeur and beauty of the church, and in his last
years all his finest thoughts were inspired by sacred themes. I
met him at Bayreuth in 1876, where a little court clustered
around him, comprising ladies of title, distinguished artists, and
young musicians from many parts of the world. He passed his
days receiving incense ; but in the early morning I used to see
him at Mass in the church, alone, and very simple and devout in
his demeanor. He was a man in whom the religious tempera-
ment, at all events, was highly developed. He has been the sub-
ject of a copious literature, scandalous enough in early days, but
overflowing in these recent years with testimonies of strong
affection. For he not only founded a splendid original school of
playing, but by his charm of manner, his tender and sympathetic
disposition, his gentleness towards the young and earnest, and
his fine generosity he converted his multitude of pupils into ar-
dent disciples, who have traversed the world telling stories in
his honor.

The appearance of Liszt was a part of the general movement
of Romanticism, which, after deeply affecting literature, especially
in Germany and England, began to exercise a remarkable in-
fluence upon musical and dramatic art. In England the romantic
drama had always flourished since Shakspere, while in music
romanticism had never obtained, and has not yet obtained, the
slightest foothold. In Germany the reaction against classical
formality could be traced as far back as the later works of Bee-
thoven, and was clearly marked in Schumann's songs and piano
pieces. But it was in France that romanticism presented the
most curious study. Here the new movement was for a while a
noisy revolution. The poetry of Victor Hugo and the acted
plays of Hugo and Dumas, with their bold defiance of conven-
tionalisms which French art had regarded almost as axiomatic

1 886.] FRANZ LISZT. 57

truths, produced a comic disturbance in mercurial Paris, where
the literary debate quite reached the fervor of politics. The
romanticists broke with the established school in their choice of
subjects, in their feeling for the past, and in their imaginative
treatment of purely ideal conditions ; but their rebellion was also
a defiance of certain stringent rules of composition, for which no
better reason could be given than that, like Sir Anthony Absolute,
they were old and arbitrary. Perhaps it was the best service of
romanticism, not that it extended the choice of literary subjects,
but that it made this fight for liberty the final and successful
contest against the periwig style of poetry, the drama of dress-
swords and red heels, of togas and buskins.

The three men who did most to extend the principles of the
new school into the domain of music were Franz Liszt, Hector
Berlioz, and Richard Wagner. Only the second of these was a
Frenchman, but all three happened to be working in the French
capital at the same time. Liszt was at the height of prosperity,
so fortunate and so fond of pleasure that his capacity for serious
undertakings was probably not suspected. Wagner, h.ungry and
disheartened, earning a miserable pittance by hack-work for the
music-sellers, and rebuffed by the opera-houses, looked up at the
famous pianist as Lazarus looked up at Dives. They only
brushed each other's skirts in passing ; one little suspecting that
the shabby young German was a transcendent genius, the other
as little imagining that the illustrious Hungarian was to become
his best friend and interpreter. Berlioz was not on intimate
terms with either of his great musical contemporaries, though in
art matters he had more in common with both of them than they
or he, perhaps, ever acknowledged. Proud, sensitive, irritable,
poor, misunderstood, neglected, raging at the insincerity and
mediocrity of popular favorites and the ignorance and frivolity
of the public, he was doubtless unhappier than Wagner, because
the source of so much of his misery lay less in the injustice of
fortune than in his own heart. He did not live to taste the re-
ward of appreciation. It was not until long after his death that
the world realized what he had done for the progress of music ;
and even then the popularity of his compositions was a fashion
rather than a well-grown fame. In Liszt and Wagner the roman-
tic spirit expressed itself in the choice of subjects quite as plainly
as in the method of treatment. In Berlioz the subject was of less
consequence ; the great innovation was the discarding of estab-
lished forms for the sake of the fullest possible development of
the poetical idea. Possibly one of these days the rules of con-

58 FRANZ LISZT. [Oct.,

struction observed by the classical composers, especially in large
works such as symphonies and operas, will seem as pedantic as
the laws of the mediaeval mastersingers. Berlioz, at all events,
found them absurd. In his zeal for their destruction he became,
if not the founder, certainly the most successful apostle, of " Pro-
gramme Music," which undertakes to illustrate a definite poetical
text, and to follow it, thought by thought, without reference to
the conventional restrictions as to form. The principle of free
expression is carried into every department of music, including
the song and the opera ; but its most striking use is in the sym-
phony, and in those complex works for many voices and instru-
ments for which no precise designation has yet been agreed upon.
The habit of Berlioz was to write out a synopsis of a poem or
poetical fragment, and to represent every item in this text by an
appropriate musical passage. To understand the music it was
necessary to read the programme as one listened. Sometimes
the effect was admirable, for Berlioz had moments of high in-
spiration ; in his musical setting of Romeo and Juliet, for example,
there are pages of ravishing beauty, which bring before us scenes
of the drama even more vividly than the acting stage. But it is
obvious that the system must often confound the provinces of
music and speech, throwing upon the former art a function to
which it is essentially incompetent, or else reducing it from the
dignity of an independent exponent of noble and poetical thought
to the humbler place of a mere accompaniment of the printed
line. Berlioz not only marred his music by thus degrading its
rdle, but in trying to be faithful to his text he was sometimes
betrayed into the most prosaic realism. Thus in the famous
Marche au Supplice, which enters into the opium dreams of his
love-sick artist, the representation of the procession to the scaf-
fold closes with an imitation of the chop of the headsman's axe
a contrivance which is probably the most hideously vulgar effect
in any reputable piece of music. He had that imperfect percep-
tion of the grotesque which seems to be a common defect of the
French genius. In his occasional inability to distinguish between
the poetic and the merely sensational, his lack of that fine, incom-
municable, sure artistic sense which we call taste, he sometimes
reminds us of Victor Hugo. Moreover, for the conception of the
purest music there is surely need of a serenity, dignity, and ab-
straction of mind which lift the composer above turbulence and
passion. We doubt whether Berlioz ever attained repose of soul
except for brief and infrequent moments. If we read his painful
Memoirs, filled with extravagance, bitterness, contempt, despair,

1 886.] FRANZ LISZT. 59

vanity, self-pity, and absurdity, and saddest when they are most
absurd, we shall understand why his music speaks to us so often
of grandiose fancies and so rarely of lofty aspiration, so often of
vexation and struggle and so rarely of calm delight.

Liszt also has been classed among the writers of Programme
Music. That place, perhaps, may suit him if we call the compo-
sitions of the Berlioz school " Panorama Music " ; but between
the French and the Hungarian master there is an important dif-
ference of method. Liszt never attempted to make music repre-
sent language, or even definite thoughts ; he seldom used it as
an illustration of any particular words or actions ; at most he
wished it to call up in the listener the state of mind which was his
when he wrote it. The series of compositions for the orchestra
to which he gave the name of S3 r mphonic Poems are the best
examples of his plan. These are all based upon a text a poem,
a poetic extract, a painting, a biography but the musician em-
ploys it only as an inspiration for himself and a general hint for
his audience. It is not at all a guide to the contents of the com-
position. It is sometimes a help to enjoyment, but the music,
whose value is absolute and complete in itself, can always do
without it. I say sometimes a help to enjoyment ; the Tasso, for
instance, is made more interesting by the prefatory lines which tell
us that it symbolizes the sufferings and triumph of the poet, and
that it is founded upon a song in which the Venetian gondoliers
celebrate his memory ; on the other hand, I am by no means sure
that the magnificent movement of Les Preludes derives any
additional effect from the fragment of Lamartine by which it
was suggested. The text, with Liszt, is only the point of depar-
ture. The idea which he proceeds to follow out is not literary,
but purely musical, and he treats it by a purely musical method,
with all the art of the classical symphonist. There is no thought
of forcing his musical theme into correspondence with the
changes of the poet's fancies ; the object is only to develop
its own beauty and suggestiveness. Thus it is that the Sym-
phonic Poems are distinguished by a simplicity and unity in
which the parallel works of Berlioz are lacking. They are not
all beautiful, for Liszt's imagination sometimes led him a strange
road ; but when they are charming their charm is complete and
continuous, while the most striking music of the Programme
school, exhibiting snips and patches of unrelated melody, too
often reminds us of a crazy- quilt.

Liszt therefore differs from Berlioz essentially in the manner
of looking at his subject perhaps it would be better to say of

60 FRANZ LISZT. [Oct.,

feeling his subject. It is in their independence of hampering
rules of construction that the two masters agreed. Subject only
to certain well-understood principles of rhythm and harmony,
they claimed entire freedom in the musical expression of their
feelings. The classical school allowed no such liberty. First
subject and second subject, theme and variation, development
and combination, must follow one another in due order ; and in
the older writers each subdivision was rounded off with a little
flourish, which meant nothing musically, but served to mark the
boundary-lines and keep the sections apart. Somebody has com-
pared these separation passages to the stuffing in which eggs are
packed. In Haydn's symphonies they are quite obvious ; in the
opera, until Wagner's time, they were so conspicuous that a large
part, even of the most popular works, consisted of worthless fill-
ing ; they were thought indispensable in the song, and they
figured largely in solos for the pianoforte. Liszt had no use for
them, because he paid no respect to arbitrary divisions. There
is no trace in the Symphonic Poems of the systematic arrange-
ment of sections and subsections in which the art of musical con-
struction was supposed largely to lie. Even in the two longer
works, the Faust and Dante, to which Liszt gave the name and
something of the conventional outline of " symphonies, 5 ' the
musical impulse flows steadily on without regard to customary
boundaries. The pianoforte music of Liszt, embracing almost
every species of composition for that instrument, is characterized
by similar, or even greater, freedom ; and in his songs the subor-
dination of the constructive plan to the poetical and musical sen-
timent is complete. The same principle of free feeling is carried
out in his sacred music. Although not much that he has done
in this department has been adopted by the churches, nearly all
of it is profoundly religious in spirit. The oratorio and the sa-
cred cantata, perhaps, owe him a new lease of life. It needs
courage to speak disrespectfully of those allied art-forms, illus-
trated by the genius of Handel and so often consecrated to noble
purposes ; but it is certain that they have no hold upon the peo-
ple except in backward-looking England, where the middle-classes
regard them with the same just, measured, and respectful affec-
tion which is extended to the British constitution and the lord-
chancellor's wig. Here they have never been cultivated save
from a sense of duty, and at present we can hardly say that they
are cultivated at all. Some excellent persons persuade them-
selves that they enjoy oratorios ; but in most cases this is an
amiable delusion. There are passages, of course, in all the great

1 886.] FRANZ LISZT. 61

works of this class, to which no one with musical sensibilities can
listen without delight. But the complaint that oratorio belongs
to an antiquated pattern of composition is not unreasonable.
Old-fashioned things are not always the best. The formality of
the oratorio is hopelessly at odds with the restless and impulsive
modern temperament. It is impossible to imagine a man of our
time inventing such an art-form ; and it is an unwise reverence
for ancient authority which induces composers to go on repeat-
ing devices adapted to the taste of an earlier generation. The
oratorio of the future must differ widely from the oratorio of the
past. It is not to be supposed that Liszt's Christus will ever dis-
place Handel's Messiah ; but it may well turn out that the Hun-
garian composer has indicated the lines upon which Handel's
successors will have to modify the sacred music of festivals and
concert-rooms.

While we assign a high importance to Liszt's innovations, we
must all admit that their immediate success with popular audi-
ences has been questionable. The most remarkable and original
of his orchestral works, the Symphonic Poems, have always been
a puzzle. Ten years ago, in a conversation with him about
music in America, I mentioned that the whole series of these
compositions had been performed in New York. He shook his
head, with a serious smile, and remarked that no city of Europe
had treated him so well as that. One, at least, of the poems had
never been played anywhere except in New York. With us, in
several cases, the performance was at best a curious experiment ;
it cannot be said that more than two or three of the set really
won acceptance with the public, and the interest in them for a
few years past has been growing not greater but less. The
truth is that, while Liszt possessed the artistic temperament in a
phenomenal degree, his aesthetic perceptions were always im-
perfect. The last refinements of a cultivated sensibility strug-
gled in him with the inherited instincts of a half-barbaric taste-
barbaric delight in splendors and surprises of sound, in passion-
ate movement, in startling and changing rhythm, in strong sensa-
tions, in fierce contrasts. Hence there is a great deal of his
music which astonishes but does not please. It can only be de-
scribed as ugly music. This is enough to account for the failure
of his symphonic compositions to keep their ground after their
novelty was gone. It is still more significant that they have
not been imitated. Saint-Saens has produced a few Symphonic
Poems, but they are illustrations of particular incidents rather
than poems in Liszt's sense, and they do not constitute an ex-

62 FRANZ LISZT. [Oct.,

ception to the general statement that composers have concurred
in rejecting the new art-form and keeping to the old style of
symphony, with its divisions and fences and laws of form sub-
stantially intact. They are doubtless wise. The free system
may suit a musician of genius whose thought is clear and
manageable ; but most composers will fail to produce a sym-
metrical, compact, intelligible work unless the ground-plan is
measured out for them in advance.

The influence of Liszt, then, has not been at its strongest in the
establishment of new forms, but it has infused freshness and the
spirit of freedom into the treatment of the old. There is no suc-
cessful composer of the present day who has not felt the life-giv-
ing impulse which pulses in Liszt's vigorous genius, and who has
not learned from him many a secret of poetical expression. In
the art of pianoforte playing, as well as in compositions for
that instrument, he brought in a new era, enormously enlarging
the capacities of the performer, while he gave a new richness and
meaning to the music. Here he reached an unbounded popular
success, which time has not impaired. It used to be thought
that Thalberg had carried the technique of the piano to the
furthest possible point ; it seemed as if he had found what pian-
ists had long wanted a third hand to fill up the middle parts
while right and left were busy at opposite ends of the key-board.
But Liszt surpassed even Thalberg's wonderful technique. His
music sounded fuller, his harmonic combinations more extended,
his command of the range of the instrument more complete ; and
with all this was the abounding passion whose intense accents
made us forget the marvels of execution. Such brilliant effects
were not altogether the result of Liszt's personal accomplish-
ments and temper. Most of them he taught to his pupils and
perpetuated in his printed scores. They are reproduced, more
or less imperfectly, in every concert-room and in thousands of
private houses ; and, like all the other manifestations of his poeti-
cal spirit, they have left an impression upon the character and
tendencies of the art which will not soon be obscured.

In a record of his services to music it would be a great error
to overlook his influence in raising the standards of excellence
among the working members of the profession. How much he
did for the advancement of the technique of the piano every
amateur understands. What he did for the orchestra is not so
well known. He shares with Hector Berlioz the credit of in-
venting many daring and beautiful combinations of instruments,
and of treating individual instruments in novel and delightful

1 886.] FRANZ LISZT. 63

ways. Berlioz probably excelled all other masters of our time
in the intimate knowledge of the characters and capabilities
of every component part of the band ; but his felicity in the
arrangement of striking tone-effects sometimes led him into ex-
cessive indulgence in such experiments. Liszt's use of a paral-
lel talent was more discreet, and his orchestral coloring, w'hile
hardly less brilliant and original than that of Berlioz, is more
homogeneous and satisfying. As a painter would say, he under-
stands " values." The inventions and methods of both these
masters have become the common property of musicians, and
nearly all the best recent works for the orchestra are full of
them. But the new mode of writing supposes a very different
sort of band from that which the old symphonists worked with.
An orchestra is now treated as a company of virtuosi, and the
principal men in such organizations as that of Thomas are re-
quired to be artists of high training. The ability of orches-
tra-players has been rising for many years. A wonderful im-
provement has taken place since Beethoven had to lay aside
a Leonora overture because the opera-band could not play it.
Only forty years ago, however, some of the most respectable
orchestras of Germany found the music of Berlioz beyond their
powers when the French composer made a professional tour of
that country. The condition of things has changed very rapidly
since then, and the change has been hastened principally by the
new demands of the new composers. Liszt's influence in this
direction was incalculable. He not only gave a powerful incen-
tive to technical training, but he taught orchestral players to
bring to their work feeling, expression, and a sense of indivi-
duality ; and he taught conductors how to use the new powers
of their men.

64 ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct.,

ENGLISH HYMNS.

THE average hymn is an anomaly in literature. Its wide-
spread influence, so seemingly disproportionate to its real merit,
is due to the swift communication of a welcome thought, rather
than to any comeliness of language with which that thought is
dressed. . In a minor degree this is also the case with national an-
thems struck off at a white heat and crudely strong, like new
wine ; with patriotic war-songs, where the fervor of the moment
atones for all deficiencies, and with those wisely commonplace
poems which have succeeded in rendering faithfully back to us
the conventional emotions of our own hearts. But the national
anthem can only arouse us when the nation's honor or interests
are at stake ; in calmer moments we are languidly unconcerned
about the star-spangled banner, and listen to " God save the
Queen " as to a decorous prayer. The war-songs cease to thrill
us when the battle-flags are furled, and after many years' acquain-
tance with " A Psalm of Life " we no longer find in it that depth
of moral philosophy which can be relied on for a vigorous sup-
port. But the strength of a hymn lies in the few great facts it
represents, and with which our interests are too vitally connected
to permit us to grow weary of the theme. To the mourner it
whispers consolation ; to the despairing, hope ; to the weary,
rest; and what wonder that, listening to this voice of comfort,
we cease to be fastidious about halting numbers and imperfect
rhymes. Wide as the sea is its sphere of usefulness ; to the illit-
erate, to the commonplace, and to the learned it carries a healing
message, proving by its catholicity the hidden source from which
it draws its being.

Mr. Samuel Duflfield has recently published a bulky and
rather pretentious volume, entitled English Hymns: Their Authors
and History, in which he has sought to gratify that pious curi-
osity which a great many good people are presumed to feel con-
cerning the origin and vicissitudes of their favorite songs. Here
we find Newman and Watts, Faber and Wesley, Kebteand George
Herbert, with a host of less famous writers, whose poems are
alphabetically indexed and made the subject matter for some
harmless criticism and a vast fund of anecdotes, which go far to-
wards swelling the six hundred and seventy-five pages of which
the book is composed. Some of these tales have so little connec-

1 886.] ENGLISH HYMNS. 65

tion with the hymns that we are at a loss to imagine why they
were inserted. Episodes of the late war, village stories on the
" Shepherd of Salisbury Plain " order, and trifling incidents in
the lives of ordinary men serve only to rob the volume of its
literary compactness, while adding sorely to its weight. We
turn, for instance, to

" Guide me, O thou great Jehovah,"

and find a detailed account of an estimable old lady, who wore a
black silk gown, a white muslin kerchief, a cream-colored shawl,
and a mob-cap, and who sat in an elbow-chair, with " a little para-
dise of a conservatory " opening out from her drawing-room.
Beyond the fact that the old lady was heard on one occasion to
sing a few verses of the hymn in question, there is absolutely no
reason why all these particulars, and a great many more, should
have been related about her, and it is hard to understand just
what she is doing in a book at all. On the same principle Mr.
Charles Wesley's admirers are edified with the history of old
William Hiskins, of Fexham, Wiltshire, who came to church one
fine morning, notwithstanding his years and decrepitude. Wes-
ley's hymn,

" Arise, my soul, arise \ "

being given out, Hiskins joined in devoutly, and on his way
home stumbled into the canal and. was drowned a climax for
which we were hardly prepared, and which, to say the least, is
discouraging to the church-goer. Again, why should Mr. Duf-
field think it necessary to commend to our notice a hymn by
William Knox, on the singular ground that another poem by the
same author was a favorite with President Lincoln ; and why
strain our credulity by relating the conversion of a young man
on hearing a companion recite during the pauses of a storm the
following wretched verse :

"The God that reigns on high,

And thunders when he please, .
That rides the stormy sky
And manages the seas " ?

The lines, which are by Dr. Watts, are probably the very worst
he ever wrote, and ought not to be associated in any sane mind
either with the majestic voices of nature or with the awful attri-
butes of God.

Notwithstanding its serious defects, Mr. Duffield's work has
been received with an unstinted praise which compels us to
VOL. XLIV 5

66 ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct.,

doubt whether the critics of the press are in the habit of reading
what they review. One enthusiastic writer assures us, indeed,
that " the refined enjoyment provided by the book begins with
the first page and continues to the last " which would seem to
imply that he has mastered all its contents, but which, we fear,
only means that he has spared himself the fatigue of its perusal.
This eulogist is likewise of the opinion that " the beautiful inspi-
ration of very many of our modern Christian hymns is, no doubt,
a much stronger argument in favor of the continuance of divine
inspiration than all the reasoning that has ever been done on the
subject." Yet we doubt if the evidences of Christianity, as re-
vealed in the modern hymn-book, will ever greatly ease the theo-
logians of their burden. The " inspired " hymns are few and far
between, and the greater number express nothing but a vague
religious sentiment, emotional rather than instructive, and bear-
ing no real proportion in their literary value to the m|bgnitude of
the topic which, even in this age of scepticism, rivets the central
interests ,of mankind. The best sacred poems are in no sense
hymns, and have never gained the widespread popularity which
belongs to the more simple and direct effusion. Newman and
Kebleare not household names like Dr. Watts and John Newton ;
and even Blackie's beautiful " Angels holy, high and lowly " can
hardly hope to stand side by side in the public estimation with
such songs as "I would not live alway " and "Rock of Ages."
In the sustained excellence of The Christian Year, which neither
sinks into mediocrity nor rises to perfection, we see the well-
balanced serenity of Keble's mind, and remember gladly that
he was Newman's chosen friend. The two so widely different
worked hand-in-hand on the famous Tracts for the Times, the one
directing, the other eagerly following in his lead. " In the sort
of warfare they had undertaken to wage together," says a writer
in Blackwood, " Keble was incapable of keeping abreast with
Newman, and Newman became almost immediately the master-
spirit of the campaign. His was then, as it still is, an intellect
which could not be satisfied with what appeared to him only half
a truth. He could not, like Keble, rest upon probability. He
must have certainty or nothing." So one went forward into the
clearer light, and the other remained behind, dazed and saddened
by the separation ; happy, indeed, in his clerical duties and his
domestic life, but " in exceeding doubt and perplexity respecting
the affairs of the church." There is something inexpressibly
touching in that last reunion at Hursley vicarage, when, after
the publication of the Apologia, Newman, Keble, and Fusey dined

1 886.] ENGLISH HYMNS. 67

together once more, and once more, before death parted them for
ever, united the broken links of their affection.

It is very hard to warm up to Keble's poems. Many of them
are really fine, and all express with fitting dignity the great
truths they aspire to handle ; but the flame to light our souls is
lacking, the true poetic instinct is seldom visible in their creation.
That they awoke at first as much resentment as admiration was
naturally due to the extreme Catholicity of their tone. Men said
they were songs of the church rather than of God, and felt
stunned by the writer's unqualified admission of the Real Pre-
sence in the Eucharist and by his loving reverence for the Bless-
ed Virgin. From a long hymn on the Annunciation we quote
the last three stanzas, both as proving how tenderly Keble has
dealt with his subject, and because they are among the most
graceful and pleasing he has ever written:

" Ave Maria ! Mother blest !
To whom, caressing and caress'd,

Clings the Eternal Child ;
Favor'd beyond archangels' dream,
When first on thee with tenderest gleam

Thy new-born Saviour smiled.

" Ave Maria ! thou whose name
All but adoring love may claim,

Yet may we reach thy shrine ;
For he, thy son and Saviour, vows
To crown all lowly, lofty brows

With love and joy like thine.

" Bless'd is the womb that bare him bless'd
The bosom where his lips were pressed ;

But rather bless'd are they
Who hear his word and keep it well,
The living homes where Christ shall dwell

And never pass away."

It is not possible to compare Keble as a poet to Newman*
Newman's poems have been well designated as " the work of a
powerful intellect, unbent for a season from sterner tasks"; and
while not equal to his incomparable prose, they stand to-day
without any peer in the world of English religious verse. Keble
is so lavish of his fancy that his best pictures are indistinct from
being overcrowded. Newman presents his subject unsoftened by
accessories, and, with the tranquillity of restrained power, seeks
rather to veil than to give expression to that depth of thought
and emotion which reaches the very fibre of our souls. All our

68 ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct.,

longings, aspirations, fears, doubts, terrors, are reflected in his
pages; and the voice that answers them is fraught with human
sympathy, tempered by that wise, sad resignation which is our
only strength. Who has not echoed in his heart this passionate

cry :

" O Christ ! that it were possible,

After long years, to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be " ?

There is so much sentiment written nowadays on the loneli-
ness of the forgotten dead a favorite topic with modern morbid
poets that the real loneliness of the living is well-nigh over-
looked, and with it that unanswered question, that heart-break-
ing doubt, as to whether the heaven-centred souls concern them-
selves about our daily lives. Once our burdens were theirs, our
pleasures, successes, disappointments shared by them ; now these
things still mean as much to us as ever, but the dead give no
token, and we cannot tell whether their radiant eyes are fixed
upon us as we go. To this wistful -desire to still interest those
who loved and cherished us on earth comes as a healing message
a little poem of such pure and tranquil beauty that the two last
verses are surely unsurpassed in their absolute perfection of form
.and thought. It was written in 1829, and is entitled

"A VOICE FROM AFAR.

" Weep not for me :

Be blithe as wont, nor tinge with gloom
The stream of love that circles home,

Light hearts and free !
Joy in the gifts Heaven's bounty lends ;
Nor miss my face, dear friends !

" I still am near,

Watching the smiles I prized on earth,
Your converse mild, your "blameless mirth ;

Now, too, I hear

Of whispered sounds the tale complete,
Low prayers and musings sweet.

" A sea before

The Throne is spread its pure, still glass
Pictures all earth-scenes as they pass.

We, on its shore,
Share, in the bosom of our rest,
God's knowledge, and are blest."

' The extreme pureness and lucidity of Newman's style often
deceive uncultivated minds into thinking his poems simple rather

1 8 86.] ENGLISH HYMNS. 6g

than profound ; and it is to these good people that an English
critic offers the sharp reminder that, while such poetry looks
easy to write, it is in truth very difficult to imitate. " It is al-
ways possible to be trivial and vulgar ; but to unite, as here,
great simplicity of thought and great plainness of speech to dig-
nity, is a formidable task." The same may be truthfully observed
of his prose. It looks so much harder until we try it to write
like Mr. Pater than like Newman that we do not always under-
stand the rare perfection which makes every page seem easy to
our eyes. A marked individuality of style is common enough,
and we have plenty of striking instances under our notice. Car-
lyle, Browning, Blackmore, and a host of others can be readily
recognized by their cultured peculiarities ; but for absolute
purity of language we have only two great living masters
Matthew Arnold and Newman ; nor are there at present many
shoulders in training to receive their mantles.

Father Faber's hymns well known and well loved as they
are belong to a wholly different order of creation. Some one
has harshly said that the world lost a poet when Faber became a
priest, and it is singular that any one so deeply imbued with the
poetic spirit should have written lines of such unequal merit, or
have clothed many of his most beautiful thoughts in such loosely
constructed verse. The delicacy and pathos of his conceptions
will never be denied ; but these things, while sufficient for a good
hymn, cannot of themselves make a perfect poem and Faber
is essentially a poet. No one can doubt this who has ever
read " Pilgrims of the Night," 4< The Sorrowful World," or those
strange verses called " The Creation of the Angels," and begin-
ning,

" In pulses deep of threefold love,

Self-hushed and self-possessed,
The mighty, unbeginning God
Had lived in silent rest."

It is to be regretted that the New England publishers of an il-
lustrated, " unsectarian " edition of Father Faber's hymns should
have thought fit to decorate this mysterious and noble poem
with a woodcut representing a fat little cupid riding in a high-
heeled slipper, by way of car, with a rose for a pillow, an arrow
for a whip, and two of Aphrodite's doves for horses. This may
be what Mr. Gosse calls " unconscious impiety," but as a matter
of fact it is hard to assign any reason for the unconsciousness.

The most serious defect that can be urged against Faber's
hymns is an occasional lack of reverence, a freedom with holy

;o ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct.,

things and holy names, which in his case was but the outspoken
expression of an abiding love, but which nevertheless is a dan-
gerous precedent to establish. There is no fault more common
in the ordinary hymns for the populace than the easy assump-
tion that we are in the full enjoyment of the divine favor, and
nothing is more rare than any hint of our unworthiness to oc-
cupy that position. " Perfect love casteth out fear " ; but the
emotion which is produced by aid of a favorite tune and a
mellifluous verse is not a perfect love, and can hardly be relied
on in the practical battles of life. It is strange to see a writer
like Faber, whose prose works have been considered the most
severe of spiritual guides, abandon himself so readily in his
hymns to this confident familiarity with God. It is stranger
still that the same man who gave us the solemn warning,

*' Prayer was not meant for luxury,

Or selfish pleasures sweet :
It is the prostrate creature's place
At his Creator's feet/'

should ever have written such lines as these:

M The solemn face, the downcast eye,
The words constrained and cold
These are the homage, poor at best,
Of those outside the fold.

* They know not how our God can play ^

The babe's, the brother's part ;
They dream not of the ways he has

Of getting at the heart '> ;
or these :

" How can they tell how Jesus oft

His secret thirst will slake
On those strange freedoms childlike hearts
Are taught by God to take ? "

while in such poems as " The True Shepherd " the same tone of
familiar freedom is even more apparent.

We lay stress on this point only because it is a device too
easily followed, and too aptly developed by coarser hands into
something infinitely worse. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes has
expressed himself very strongly on the subject of those dismal
old hymns, dear at one time to the Presbyterian heart, which
gave you distinctly to understand that hell was yawning beneath
your feet, and the vast majority of mankind dropping quickly
into it. He has drawn a vivid picture of the defiant young soul
driven to the verge of suicide by the horror of such accumulated

1 886.] ENGLISH HYMNS. 71

ideas, and tempted, in mingled fear and resentment, to " dare the
worst" with which she was so pitilessly threatened. And be-
yond doubt the dreadful certainty with which revivalists were
wont to promise eternal punishment has, in its time, overthrown
many sensitive organizations and helped liberally to populate
the madhouse. Richard Weaver used to boast of shaking a
dying woman "over hell" until, one by one, she dropped the
money-bags from beneath her pillow to the floor; and while the
self-denying devotion of Weaver's life is proof of his sincerity
in the work of conversion, his methods remind us irresistibly of
the missionary who carried a Bible in one hand and a revolver
in the other, and gave the heathen their choice in true high-
wayman fashion. As for the point which is occasionally made
by the biographers of these stalwart preachers, that " the Al-
mighty Arbiter set his seal " upon their denunciations meaning
that penalties of some sort followed their neglected warnings it
is well to recollect that several of the unfortunates " cursed " by
Ludovick Muggleton, the illiterate founder of a forgotten sect,
actually died from sheer fright, to the great strengthening of his
cause and the comfort and consolation of his disciples. Never-
theless, if we take the trouble to peruse some of the modern
hymn-books, especially those of an exoteric order, we cannot
fail to perceive how the cheerless visions of judgment and hell
have yielded place to a most genial assurance of heaven, and
how sinners are counselled, not exactly to repent and do pen-
ance, but to cast away all fear, and rejoice in the love of their
Saviour. Surely Faber is not altogether innocent of this tone
when he writes thus of God the Father:

44 Thy justice is the gladdest thing

Creation can behold ;
Thy tenderness so meek, it wins
The guilty to be bold."

But for the keynote to Faber's confidence we must turn to an-
other and nobler poem, and there learn how awe may be ex-
tinguished in devotion. He who could say truthfully :

" O God ! who wert my childhood's love,

My boyhood's pure delight,
A presence felt the livelong day,
A welcome fear at night,"

might well lift his eyes tranquilly to the Judgment Seat ; but it
is hardly safe to assume that we have all cause to feel elated on
this matter. In too many popular hymns ^salvation is guaran-

72 ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct.,

teed us on the easiest of terms, and with a jovial conviction that
leaves no room for doubt. The blood of the Lamb has washed
away our sins one hymn even assures us

" He's graciously waiting to wash more "

end Chanaan's happy shores lie stretched before us all.

As a result of this frame of mind condemned criminals of the
most brutal type face the unknown future with unruffled com-
posure, convinced, in the words of one of them, that they " will
awaken in the bosom of their Saviour''' ; and men of dubious
morals live two distinct lives, one of emotional piety fit for Sun-
day use, and one of tricky dishonesty more congenial to their
e very-day avocations. All thoughts of God's justice, which will
not be for most of us

" the gladdest thing
Creation can behold/'

are merged in an assurance of his love ; all fears for our own de-
ficiencies are lost in the comfortable feeling that we are loving
him very much in return, and,, though giving frail proof of our
sincerity, are telling him so with unexampled fervor.

Walter Bagehot has administered to this class of religionists
a rebuke so sternly and truthfully disheartening that his words
are not likely to win their way abroad, or reach the ears to which
they are directed :

"The attractive aspects of God's character must not be made more
apparent to such a being as man than his chastening and severer aspects.
We must not be invited to approach the Holy of holies without being made
aware painfully aware what holiness is. We must know our own un-
worthiness ere we are fit to approach or imagine an Infinite Perfection.
The most nauseous of false religions is that which affects a fulsome fond-
ness for a Being not to be thought of without awe, or spoken of without
reluctance."*

If the young men and women who, in the intervals of gossip
and flirtation, sing hymns at the sea-shore on Sunday evenings,
shouting out the holiest of names in a lusty chorus, could realize
that it was " a Being not to be thought of without awe, or spoken
of without reluctance," whom they are addressing with such
careless irreverence, it might occur to them that this species of
religious dissipation should be conducted on a less broadly hu-
morous basis.

Few literary qualifications are required for a popular hymn,
and few are noticeable in its construction. Some of the best

* The Ignorance of Man.

1 886.] ENGLISH HYMNS. 73

sound like echoes from older voices, as in George Herbert's
"Said I not so?" where we see a reflection common to most
serious poets, from St. Gregory Nazianzen to Adelaide Procter.
And in the long-drawn weakness of Bishop Ken's " Awake, my
Soul, and with the Sun " we recognize the same impulse which
stirred St. Gregory in his " Morning Prayer," now familiar to
us all through Newman's beautiful translation. But the hymns
which delight the populace are not Newman's, nor Herbert's, nor
even Bishop Ken's. They are to be found in vastly different
compilations, published under the patronage of Tate and Brady,
or Moody and Sankey, or the Salvation Army, or some equally
capable literary judges. They abound in grotesque imagery and
noisy zeal, and assume that the first duty of a Christian is to make
his religion as clamorous as possible :

" O God ! my heart with love inflame,
That I may in thy holy name
Aloud in songs of praise rejoice
While I have breath to raise my voice.

" Then will I shout, then will I sing !
I'll make the heavenly arches ring"!
I'll sing and shout for evermore
On that eternal, happy shore."

They are particularly fertile in curious parallels, which are
presumed to hold the attention of a crowd by presenting some
well-known image to its mind : We are soldiers marching to
glory ; we are sailors weathering a storm ; we are wayfarers
resting in shady places ; we are modern tourists travelling com-
fortably by rail the last device being particularly welcome to
the enervated penitent of advanced civilization :

' The lines to heaven by Christ were made ;
With heavenly truths the rails were laid;
From earth to heaven the line extends,
To life eternal, where it ends.

" Repentance is the station, then,
Where passengers are taken in ;
No fee for them is there to pay,
For Jesus is himself the way.

" The Bible is the engineer;
It points the way to heaven so clear ;
Through tunnels dark and dreary here
It doth the way to heaven steer."

And so on through several more verses, reading which we no
longer wonder at Mr. Matthew Arnold's vigorous denunciation of

74 ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct.,

hymns, a subject on which he has many times expressed the most
heterodox views.

" In the long run," he argues, " bad music and bad poetry, to whatever
good and useful purposes a man may often manage to turn them, are in
themselves mischievous and deteriorating to him. Somewhere and some-
how and at some time or other he has to pay a penalty and to suffer a loss
for taking delight in them. It is bad for people to hear such words and
such a tune as the words or tune of

" ' O happy place ! when Shall I be,
My God, with thee to see thy face ? '

worse for them to take pleasure in it." *

Without thinking that the penalty for such transgressions will
be a very heavy one, we cannot but regret that religious im-
pulses should often manifest themselves in this fashion ; not so
much for the offence given to our more cultivated tastes as for
their own utter barrenness of purpose. Except in the tempe-
rance hymns, there is seldom a practical suggestion of reform in
all these noisy verses. To tell a loafing, swearing vagabond

that

" Repentance is the station, then,
Where passengers are taken in "

is not making it plain to him that he must cleanse his foul mouth
and support his little children. He would never shout half so
lustily over these unwelcome truths. As for the temperance
hymns, they are perhaps more pointed than pleasing :

" May drunkards see sobriety
In an alluring light ''

is a wish in which we all heartily concur ; that they

" May be brought to hate
Drinks that intoxicate "

is a most desirable possibility ; but, as a Blackwood reviewer ob-
serves, none of these sentiments are presented with any great
felicity of language. Still, as keeping the idea of one needful
reformation steadily before a man's mind, they are of more value
than smoother lines about golden gates, and golden streets, and
golden harps, and all the wealth of gilded imagery so vaguely
dazzling to the shrunken conceptions of the poor.

Mr. Arnold tells us that the German hymns are much better
than the English, and Mr. Ruskin finds a real merit in the sim-
ple, pious songs of Italy. Cardinal Antonelli used to say that
the poorest and most ignorant Italian never lost a certain inborn

*\Last Essays on Church and Religion.

1886.] ENGLISH HYMNS. 75

accuracy of taste which enabled him to know what was beauti-
ful ; and the same thing has been observed of the Spanish peasant,
who, hopelessly illiterate, has not, like our own artisan, been
warped into vulgarity by the sordid ugliness of his surroundings
and the sharp edge of a contentious life. There is a little hymn
the prayer of Calabrian shepherds to the Virgin which is oc-
casionally sung by Catholic choirs, and which for grace and sim-
plicity caji hardly be surpassed. Take but the three following
verses, and see how easily they express the sentiments natural to
the rustic suppliants : a loving admiration for their beautiful coun-
try, a devout reverence for the Mother of God, and a docile con-
fidence in her protection :

" Madonna, keep the cold north wind

Amid his native seas ;
So that no withering blight come down
Upon our olive-trees.

"And bid the sunshine glad our hills

The dew rejoice our vines,
And bid the healthful sea-breeze sweep
In music through the; pines.

"Pray for us, that our hearts and homes

Be kept in fear and love
Love for all things around our path,
And fear for those above."

Here we have all the true requisites of a hymn : the emotions
of fear, hope, and love, a devout and yet definite petition, simple
thoughts that all can grasp, and language which neither puzzles
the ignorant by its subtility nor offends the cultivated by its
crudeness. Such artless verses do not aspire to the province of
poetry, but they fulfil the purpose for which they were designed :
penetrating into hearts that the poet has never touched, drawing
us together in the common fellowship of prayer, and linking our
wandering, selfish thoughts to the great problems which make
our interests one.

76 CHRISTIAN UNITY. [Oct.,

CHRISTIAN UNITY.

THE revelation which God has made to man through his Son
jesus Christ is one of authority. This is a legitimate aspect of
divine revelation. A large class of mankind see divine revela-
tion under this aspect as its most prominent feature, and to this
class divine revelation must give perfect satisfaction, though the
essence of Christianity is not authority. True faith brings man
to the acceptance of the divine authority ; therefore, faith is
necessary that man may know and worship God aright.

Faith includes as one of its essential features believing what
God has revealed on the authority of God revealing. This defi-
nition implies that God has made a revelation which he proposes
on his own authority. If this be so, the truths revealed must be
certain ; if they come from God, who can neither deceive nor be
deceived, they cannot be questioned without impugning the
veracity of God ; if they are proposed on the authority of God
revealing, the rejection of them is the denial of God. It is, more-
over, the same destruction of faith whether one or all of the
revealed truths are denied. But how are we to know what God
has revealed? St. Paul asks this question: "How shall they
believe on him of whom they have not heard ? And how shall
they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless
they be sent?" (Rom. x. 14, 15). From this text it is evident
that the hearing of a preacher divinely sent is the means ap-
pointed for giving us this knowledge. Who have been divinely
sent to preach the gospel ? The apostles were ; and an examina-
tion of their commission will settle the question about others.
After his resurrection Jesus spoke to them, saying: "All power
is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going, therefore, teach
ye all nations. . . . Teaching them to observe all things whatso-
ever I have commanded you, and behold I am with you all days,
even to the consummation of the world " (St. Matt, xxviii. 18, 19,
20). Jesus also said to them : " As the Father hath sent me, I
also send you " (St. John xx. 21).

The apostles, as their commission declares, had authority from
Jesus Christ to teach men to observe all that he had commanded,
which they were to do until the consummation of the world.
He made their message complete and the cessation of their office

1 886.] CHRISTIAN UNITY. 77

impossible. This living- authority necessarily produces and per-
petuates unity. Authority and unity go together ; unity without
authority would be something like a circle without a centre.

Rev. Dr. Caldwell, in the Andover Review, says that " nothing
but explicit divine command can be the basis for such a perfect
and indivisible unity" (as organic unity). He also says: "It
seems almost impossible for all variations in worship to be har-
monized except by some oecumenical authority.'' But divine
authority in it makes unity an essential mark of the true church.

Where are authority and unity to be found in Protestantism ?

Rev. Dr. Richards, in the Andover Review, says: " Protestant-
ism is something far removed from the ideal of the church as one
body with one Lord, one faith, one baptism." Yet he says " that
ideal is not strained or unnatural. One Lord and Saviour comes
into the world, lives one perfect life, and dies one blessed sacri-
fice. To one mankind he comes bestowing one full salvation.
To be of him, to be in him, to be like him is the one goodness
possible for believers. All are agreed that he founded one spiri-
tual kingdom. Its essential unity would seem more simply and
effectively symbolized by a single organic structure, of however
varied and diverse parts, than by many. . . . Every believer has
his vision and dream of one body at last ; ... he at least awaits
it as a heavenly fruition. What we all look to hereafter may we
not aspire to now?" He adds, in conclusion : " The prayer of
Jesus (* That they may be one ' ) shall prevail : the head shall have
one body, the foundation one building, the shepherd one flock,
the bridegroom one bride, the Lord of all one kingdom." The
actual Roman Catholic Church is Dr. Richard's ideal church.
It is "a single structure of varied and diverse parts." Its unity
" is not strained or unnatural," for it embodies men and women,
such as we are. It is more sensitive of race characteristics,
of nationalities and individualities, than all others. Did Catholi-
city resist Protestantism on account of these distinctions ? How
could it, when these had always existed, and exist now, among
Catholic peoples more distinct than among any other?

Catholicity abhors what Dr. Caldwell calls *' uniformity " and
"absorption." Whoever needs or wishes proof of this should
look at the races, nations, and individuals in the Catholic Church.
The church insists, when they have historic value, that different
religious rites must be retained. Have Celts, Saxons, Italians,
Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, Japanese, or Chinese
been denationalized by the church ?

" Let " every believer who has had his vision and dream of

78 CHRISTIAN UNITY. [Oct.,

one body at last" rejoice; the one body is here, and, if he will
be faithful, " the heavenly fruition " will come.

Dr. Caldwell holds with Catholics that organic unity without
divine authority is impossible, but Dr. Richards says that such a
unity is going to be in the future. If it is to come, on what
basis will it rest? Can human authority, perhaps the decision
of a great body, an elite few, or an individual genius, produce it?
If so, it would be a despicable surrender of the very thing aimed
at, which is a unity that perfects liberty.

But who would dare to call the recognition of a divinely
established authority anything but a reception of divine light, an
emancipation, an entrance into liberty.

Happily, the vocation of the Catholic Christian is to liberty ;
he is one whom " the truth makes free." He is one whom a
church which is " the pillar and ground of truth " elevates and
enlightens. " Peter and the eleven " were members of such a
church. Later <n Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenseus,. Cyprian, Chry-
sostom, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine were not in severed
churches.

It is not strange that one who will not "hear" a divinely
established .church has to be regarded " as heathen and pub-
lican," but it is passing strange that men without guile read
the commission of Christ to the apostles, admit with St. Paul
that " sects," like " fornication, idolatry, and witchcraft, are works
of the flesh " (Gal. v. 20), and persist in sectarianism !

1886.] "PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY." 79

"PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY."*

WHAT is known as Orthodox Congregationalism has been
shaken to its very foundations by a new departure in theology,
called " Progressive Orthodoxy." The time-honored and famous
citadel of Andover has fallen, partially at least, into the hands of
the innovators, who, conscious of the stronghold which they have
secured, have boldly proclaimed to the world their nicely-chosen
interpretations of Christian doctrines.

Probation after death for those who in this life have not had
explicit knowledge of the Christian faith is the central idea of
11 Progressive Orthodoxy." A theory of the Incarnation and Re-
demption has been framed to suit this idea.

Passing by the many errors which are to be found in the
whole system, we shall consider in this article only the question
of probation after death.

In the first place, we would like to know how a disembodied
soul is properly in a state of probation ? Is not this life (the
union of soul and body) the normal condition for moral action ?
The sin of Adam, which was the cause of the fall, and the actual
sins of all men have been expiated by the sufferings of Jesus Christ
in the flesh, because they are the sins of man, as man in the flesh.
The work of redemption was consummated when the Son of
God expired on the cross ; the glorified body of the Redeemer
was on the third day reunited to his glorified soul, because it was
fitting that the body should share in the glory of the soul, having
been humiliated with the soul. But the resurrection of the
Saviour was like what the resurrection of the just will be on the
last day. Is it conceivable, then, that a man may depart this life
in sin, leaving behind him a body of sin, and after leaving this
world his soul by itself repent and on the last day be reunited to
its body of sin ? By no means, unless by an almost unheard-of
exception, similar to that of the deliverance of a soul from hell
after death.f The whole man must repent or the whole mao

* Progressive Orthodoxy : A Contribution to the Christian Interpretation of Christian
Doctrine. By the Editors of the Andover Review^ Professors in Andovef Theological Seminary.
Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Cp.

t The accounts of these exceptions are only pious legends. If true, they cannot be satis-
factorily explained, unless we suppose that these exceptional persons were restored to this life
by a miracle, and in this way an opportunity for repentance given. In such cases the particular
judgment would appear to have been temporarily suspended.

The opinion that even one person will be delivered from hell after the general judgment is
against faith.

8o "PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY." [Oct.,

cannot be saved. " For we must all be manifested before the
judgment seat of Christ," says St. Paul, "that every one may re-
ceive the proper things of the body, according as he hath done,
whether it be good or evil " (2 Cor. v. 10).

The proper conditions both for repentance and the commis-
sion of sin are wanting in the soul of man as separated from the
body. A man does not renounce the world for Christ's sake
when it is beyond his reach ; he does not mortify the flesh which
he no longer has ; his body will not be given up to Satan at death
and his soul afterwards be given up to God. If he is to have a
glorified body in heaven, it will be because his " members " have
been "the temple of the Holy Ghost" ; because he has glorified
and borne "God in his body" (i Cor. vi. 19,20). Can a body
that has not been mortified and subjected to the spirit share in
the glory of the spirit? Moreover, when the soul has been sepa-
rated from the body by death it may not sin further without hav-
ing a deeper guilt than at the time of death, which would make
it unsuitable to be reunited to its body as that body was at death.

Now, soul and body are to be at least as intimately united for
all eternity after the general resurrection as they are in the present
life. But " Progressive Orthodoxy " teaches that a man who has
knowledge of the Gospel in this life, if he wishes to be saved,
has got to fight his way to heaven by keeping the command-
ments, overcoming the world, the flesh, and the devil, while the
man who has died without the knowledge of the Gospel has got
no such battle for salvation, because he cannot have it. Once a
man who had listened to a preacher's lucid explanation of the
Christian doctrine remarked afterwards to the preacher : " It is
not the faith but the morals of religion that sticks me." If that
man could have died without knowledge of the Gospel, perhaps
Andover could deal with him more lightly than it knows how to
now ! Whence may we trace the origin of this new doctrine of
probation after death ?

We think that the orthodox Protestant notion of hell has had
a tendency to make many seek for some explanation of theology
which would keep men out of it. If hell be considered as simply
and only a place of torment, if both original and actual sin bring
a soul to endless suffering, there is more difficulty in believing
that probation ends with this life than, if it be thought not against
faith, to hold that hell is a place of perfect natural beatitude * for
those not guilty of actual sin and for those who have deliberately
sinned, a place where the suffering is rigidly proportionate to the
actual guilt.

* St. Thomas Aquin, other saints, and many great theologians hold this opinion.

1 886.] "PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY" Si

Another source of the new doctrine of probation after death
is the theory that explicit knowledge and acceptance of the
Christian faith is absolutely necessary for salvation. If Chris-
tianity is for all men, why put such a limit to the operation of
grace? What is Christianity but divine grace itself? If it be
believed that sufficient, or at least remotely sufficient, grace for
salvation is given in this life to every man, and that a man may
make an act of faith in God as existing and " as a rewarder to
them that seek him " (Heb. xi. 6) without an explicit knowl-
edge of the Incarnation and Redemption, the condition in this
life of those who are invincibly ignorant of the true faith is not
so hopeless as Andover theologians would wish us to believe.
They require more explicit conditions for salvation than right
x reason or orthodox theologians of all ages have. It is of no use
to increase strict conditions which do not follow from reason.
How can God be the rewarder of those " who believe in his ex-
istence " and " seek " him and reject those who do this ? With
this extreme theory of explicit knowledge and acceptance of the
Christian faith as necessary for salvation, labelled as " orthodox
ballast," they launch out into the wind and waves with probation
after death for the heathen who have not had in this life explicit
knowledge of the Christian faith in flying colors ! We do not
predict for them a safe voyage. Andover theology evidently
does not rely on the general drift of the Scriptures in teaching
probation after death, but relies on the exceptions that God could
make if he would, and perhaps has made for some, and makes
of them a divine rule of action. Error readily proceeds from
trying to make of exceptions general rules.

Let us preach what is revealed and what we know, and not
run after exceptions. Why thrust in our faces an exception which
tends to weaken in the minds of the faithful a general rule of
Scripture? Because St. Jerome interprets the Scripture as say-
ing that God will not judge in eternity * (Gen. vi. 3) those
who perished in the deluge, should we infer that God never
judges or punishes in eternity when he does so in this life ? Do
you think because of this exception that St. Jerome believed the
unorthodox opinion of a law of pardon for all in like circum-
stances ? But what do you mean by " Progressive Orthodoxy " ?
Have you explicitly brought out what \yas implicitly in the
Christian revelation before? If your doctrine is new it is not
true. It is too late in the day for us to make experiments on the

* St. Jerome holds that all these persons were saved by their repentance previous to death.
VOL. XLIV. 6

82 "PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY." [Oct.,

Gospel ; we ought to know by this time, if ever, what the Gospel
generally means.

" But Orthodox Protestantism makes men's chances of salva-
tion too small," you say. Therein lies the difficulty which you
aim to set aside by probation after death.

Do you not know that the Catholic faith gives one a larger
hope for men than Orthodox Protestantism ? By Protestant
Orthodoxy, however, must not be understood Progressive Or-
thodoxy. But it will be in vain for you to think that you can
long maintain Progressive Orthodoxy. Probation after death will
not stand the test of theological criticism. It can be traced only
to your individualism. It is an eccentricity of faith as uncatholic
as Swedenborgianism or Spiritism. Be careful lest, in your anx-
iety to get the heathen into heaven, you shut yourselves out.

Missions will not overtax the energies of the church with such
an appendage to its faith. A missionary is a messenger of God,
"a shining torch," "a fire on a mountain," sent forth with the
spirit and power of an Elias, St. John the Baptist, St. Paul, St.
Xavier to preach by his life and words to a dying world.

In the single question of probation after death it is easy to see
that the Orthodox Congregationalists have the advantage over
the Andover Progressionists. The Orthodox Congregationalists
have our sympathy in their grief at what has happened in An-
dover. All upholders of orthodoxy should stand by them and
help them to combat the new error. Not a few Episcopalians,
all Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, are with them heart
and soul.

Let the Progressionists shift for themselves. Mr. D. L. Moody
with his Bible and Scott's Commentary is a better guide than the
Andover scientists with all their knowledge of Hebrew and
Greek.

Is the memory of George Whitefield, who, though not a Con-
gregationalist, yet preached in the orthodox churches of New
England, dead ? Were it not for Whitefield's continual holding
up of Calvinism one would suppose that his sermons were those
of a Catholic Liguorian missioner ! We say to the Orthodox Con-
gregationalists : Unseat " Progressive Orthodoxy " from An-
dover if you can. See if the teaching of the present professors
(on the Incarnation, for example) is different from what their pro-
mises or contracts require that it should be. The Massachusetts
courts should decide whether the trustees can give the emolu-
ments of those chairs to those who depart from the doctrinal
standards fixed by the benefactors.

1 8 86.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 83

We think that you once let Harvard University be taken
away from you too easily. We know the history of Harvard
University. We know it was founded by an orthodox minister
to be an orthodox institution, and now we know it is teaching
Unitarianism and Rationalism ! In our judgment there is noth-
ing like having men with new doctrines found new colleges and
seminaries.

A FAIR EMIGRANT.

CHAPTER III.
INTERRUPTION.

" AND now, dear," said Desmond, " as I have given you my
serious promise, let me go my own way for the rest of the even
ing. I want to look over the papers in the old wooden box in
the shanty, to put them in order for your reading. Don't expect
to see me again till to-morrow morning, and tell Jeanne I shall
not come in to supper. I shall spend most of the night at my
task."

" I fear it will be a painful one," said Bawn, beginning to
tremble for the consequences of her own boldness.

" Not so painful as it might have been. Your faith and con-
fidence have given me courage, and, after a life-time of silence
and isolation with my trouble, your sympathy is very sweet.
Already I feel happier than I believed it possible I could ever
feel again. Little daughter, you have comforted me."

" Daddy, I hold you to be one of God's martyrs."

" That is wild talk, my darling. Only to-night do I realize
fully how wicked I have been. I have suffered morosely, with-
out admitting the blessedness of suffering."

" I cannot wonder."

" My daughter's trust has broken my pride. I freely pardon
all who injured me. Go, now, my precious one, and pray for
me if you would help me."

" I am always praying for you. Sometimes I think I hear
the angels grumbling, * Here is this Bawn again, clamoring about
her father ! ' "

" Continue your violence, my dearest. A most unusual hope
and happiness have descended upon me to-night.''

84 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct.,

" Thank Heaven for it ! And after this we shall be so happy ! "

Then they parted, Desmond going to his shanty and Bawn
returning to the house, where she baffled Jeanne's inquiries about
her father, merely saying that she had seen him and that he
would not return in time for supper. Retiring early to her
room, the girl remained long on her knees trying once more to
weary out the patience of the angels. In the vigorous hopeful-
ness of her healthy youth she was not satisfied with asking resig-
nation and peace for her martyr, but demanded comfort the most
complete, a crown of happiness the most absolute, to make amends
for long years of desolation and pain. How strangely such vehe-
ment prayers are sometimes answered only those can know who
have dared to utter them.

Having made her demands of Heaven, Bawn lingered still,
looking out of her window, her eyes resting on the sleeping,
sombre woods, the dreaming prairie spanned by the star-sown
sky, the white, moon-silvered gables and roofs of the homestead.
A dog bayed in the distance, a faint lowing came from the cattle-
sheds, and the geese gabbled in the farm-yard. Echoes of whis-
tling and faint laughter floated up from the fields, where some
of the laborers were amusing themselves. Red fire-side lights
shone under the eaves arid made the moonlight more white, more
ethereal by contrast.

While her eyes took in the beauty of the night her heart
swelled with indignation as she thought over her father's com-
munication of the evening, and asked herself in amazement what
kind of men and women these might be whom he had described
,as good and true, yet who could believe him a criminal, and,
driving him away from them deliberately, could lose him out of
their lives for evermore. Stupid, base, inconceivable beings!
There was no word in her vocabulary strong enough to express
her contempt and disgust for them. So patient, so kindly as he
was, and so quietly brave in spite of that amiable weakness of
character which his daughter felt in him, and which made him
more lovable in her eyes ! Why could he not have forgotten
them? Why could he not despise them as she did? To think
that, after all these thirty years, the memory of their love should
live so cruelly within him and would not die!

"Oh! that he and I could go back among them," she thought,
"and force them to believe in the truth. I am not blighted and
heart-broken, but young and strong, and full of faith. I would
walk into their homes and reproach them with their falsehood.
I would tell them of his noble, gentle, and laborious life ; of how

i886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 85

the poor come to him for help and the rich entrust him with
their interests. I would ask them to look at his sad eyes, his
white hair, and I would say, ' Is this the man you branded and
drove out from you ? '

Flinging herself on her bed, she cried herself to sleep, and
soon slept the undisturbed slumber of pure and perfect health.
After some hours she wakened suddenly with a strange, startled
feeling, a belief that her father had been standing at her bedside
the moment before her eyes had opened, that he had bent over
her and spoken to her. Even when wide awake and aware that
this must have been a delusion, a dream, she felt uneasy, as
though intelligence had been given her that something unusual
had happened. Dawn was already making objects dimly visible
in the room, giving them that ghostly aspect which all things
take at the first sign of the approach of another day, and, won-
dering if her father had returned to the house, she lay listening,
thinking it possible his entrance might have wakened her. All
was still, and, with an anxiety that would not be controlled, she
rose and went to the window commanding a view of one end of
the log hut. The faint star of light which she could always see
when he was there at night was burning still. How long he was
lingering over that painful retrospection ! How tired he would
be to-morrow ! Full of a tender concern for him, she dressed
quickly, went noiselessly down the staircase, and let herself out
of the house, with the intention of persuading him to give up his
vigil, and of preparing some refreshment which he might take
before going to his much-needed rest.

She was soon at the door of the shanty, and, finding it unfast-
ened, went in, calling softly to her father that it was she.

There was no answer. The light on the table was burning
low with a flicker that seemed to struggle with the encroach-
ments of the dawn-light, and she could see her father's figure sit-
ting in his chair by the table, his head leaned slightly to one side
and resting on his hand. His other hand lay upon some papers
which were before him on the table the letters he had taken
from the casket, which stood empty by their side. Her first im-
pression was that he had fallen asleep no unnatural consequence
of his long day's wandering in the open air, followed by hours of
vigil. She hesitated, unwilling to disturb him, and waited, ex-
pecting to see him wake or stir.

The lamp flickered out, and the daylight grew stronger in
the room. Desmond's face was in shadow, and his attitude was
one of such perfect repose that his daughter felt no alarm, only

86 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct.,

remained patiently standing at the window, debating whether
she should return to the house and prepare some coffee, or wake
him first and persuade him to accompany her.

It struck her at last, with a vague sensation of chill, that the
room was unnaturally still, that she had heard neither breath nor
slightest movement from the figure in the chair since her en-
trance into the hut. The moment after this vague alarm had
seized her she was by her father's side, kneeling at his chair and
looking fearfully and scrutinizingly into his face.

Something she saw there made her start with a cry of fear and
anguish, and seize him by the hands, which were stiff and cold to
her touch, like hands of the dead. The noble face was gray and
rigid, with an awful look which even the sweetness on the lips
and the peace on the brow could not soften. Had death indeed
found him in this moment of forgiveness and contentment, and
had the brave heart broken while thus reviewing in a tender
spirit the evidences of the wreck of its happiness? How Bawn
regained the house and summoned aid she never knew, but in
a short time every remedy that could be brought to bear upon
the apparently lifeless man had been tried, and not without effect.
He recovered at last from what was proved to have been a long
and very deathlike swoon.

The next day the swooning returned, and the doctor from
St. Paul whispered to Bawn that, though her father was stricken
with heart-disease, yet if properly cared for and saved from all
anxiety he might recover so far as to linger, an invalid, for years.
It was a shadowy hope, and all but Bawn admitted it to be so.
No better sign of the seriousness of his case could have been
given than Jeanne's unwonted control over her tongue, or at
least her tones; for had her husband been likely to recover she
would not have so spared him. As it was, she did all her grum-
bling in her store-rooms and dairy, where she lamented much
that she was so soon to be a widow after all the pains she had
taken to be a wife.

Meanwhile Bawn sat by her father's bedside, looking neither
despairing nor melancholy. A run round the garden, morning
and evening, kept a speck of color the size of a carnation-bud in
her cheek, so that Desmond should not say she was wearing her-
self pale with her constant and devoted attendance on him. With
smiles that never failed smiles, sweet and penetrating, that had
a restoring power, like good wine she tended, cheered, and
amused him. If good nursing could bring back any half-dead
man to life, then Arthur Desmond must soon have arisen and

i886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 87

walked. For some time he hoped with Bawn that he should do
so, but little by little he learned from his friend, Dr. Ackroyd,
how small was the amount of such expectation he could dare to
indulge in. Making- up his mind to die, he felt no regret, except
for the sake of the beloved daughter he was leaving behind him.
Watching her sitting at his window, at work on nice things for
his comfort, to be worn, as she fondly hoped, in the coming win-
ter, which he knew he should never see, he remarked the beauty
of her face and form, and the signs of an ardent though con-
trolled nature which were so clearly visible under her serene
and smiling aspect. In her pale-blue linen dress and bunch of
field-daisies he thought her so charming that nothing could be
added to her beauty. What would become of her when he should
belaid in the earth? Rich, 'handsome, good, with a mind culti-
vated far beyond those with whom she was ever likely to come
in contact, how was her life likely to be spent ? Ah ! if he might
be spared yet a few years longer, the time he had hitherto spent
in selfish, retrospective sorrow should be used in the endeavor to
pilot his darling into some secure harbor for life. He would
make a trip to Europe take her, not to England, but to those
Continental places where varieties of people are to be met. Who
would recognize him now or remember his story? It was not
possible but that some good man, her mate in heart and mind,
seeing her, should love this dear Bawn ; and, a shelter having
been found for her, what mattered about the rest?

Then, having travelled in imagination as far as Europe, Des-
mond's thoughts went further still, and the face of another woman
became present to his mind. After half an hour of dreaming
he sighed heavily.

" Daddy, what is ailing you ? " said Bawn, with all her heart
in her eyes.

" I have been thinking, dear, it is a pity I told you all I told
you that evening. What is the use of it now ? The bitterness -is
gone, for ever gone. Under the shadow of Death's wings all
things take an even surface. I have often thought to ask you
about the letters and papers, dearest. I was reading them when
I got this blow"

Bawn's heart always stood still when he would speak like
this, calmly, of death. But she answered in her cheerful way*
" They are all safe in the casket. I have not looked at
them."

" Better not look at them at all, then, my dear at least not till
I am gone."

88 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct.,

Bawn left her seat and knelt by his bed, laying her head on
the pillow beside his.

" Do not talk so," she said, " if you would not kill me. You
are going to be well, and then we will forget and be happy. And
I must read those letters, though not until you bid me. I have a
presentiment that in the course of my years I shall meet those
people who spoiled my father's life ; and I should like to know
all about it."

"Dreams, my darling dreams. How should you ever meet
with them ; and what could come of it but pain? "

"I don't know how I shall meet them, but I have a long time
to live in this world, and they are in it, too some of them, surely
and there is no knowing how things may happen. And as for
pain, there might be pain, indeed, but the truth might come out
of it."

" Well, dear, I feel that I have no right to deny your request
in the matter, having told you so much as I did. You know the
worst, and, if your mind will run on the subject, it may be well,
as you say, that all the circumstances should be known to you.
Open the casket when you like, and make your own of the con-
tents."

"May I speak to you of this again when I have done so?"
44 Dear, I would rather not. My life has been lived, my bur-
den borne. Peace has come to me at last, and I will not give it
away again. Make what use you please of your knowledge in
after-years, but smile and prattle to me now while I am with you.
I have done with the past, and let us think of it no more."

Bawn was afraid to move her head lest he should see the tears
dripping down her cheeks. His perfect peace, forgivingness,
satisfaction, wrung her heart more than the most bitter com-
plaints could have done. The peace of approaching death was
upon him, though Bawn would not have it so. How sweet it
would be when he should get quite well and would talk like this
about what in former days had been a horror not to be shared or
softened ! After a long time of silence she ventured to with-
draw her head from the pillow and steal a look at his face. She
thought he had fallen asleep, and so he had ; only she need not
have feared to awake him, for, though his eyes were fast closed,
his spirit was already awake in the sunshine of eternity.

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 89

CHAPTER IV.
FROM THE PAST.

THE second winter after Arthur Desmond's death had come
round, and his grave was covered with snow. Bawn, having
lived through one tragic year, was trying to begin another with
patience, which was the more difficult to her as Jeanne had begun
to wear a gold locket and bracelets and to entertain friends and
relations who in her husband's life-time were not welcome in his
home.

One clear, frosty evening she came slowly down-stairs from
her own rooms, where she had of late lived almost entirely, and
looked wearily through the windows as she passed them, up at the
keen stars and across at the forest darkness, lingering, loath to
enter the drawing-room, and yet resolved to conciliate her step-
mother, whose wrath she often excited by her avoidance of the
obnoxious cousins and friends.

As she sat down by the fire in the lamp-light she looked very
unlike the blooming, vigorous Bawn who had lived so full a life
at her father's side. Near her were the books he and she had
read together, but she did not read, nor did she sew much, though
a work-basket stood at her hand with varieties of material for
such feminine occupation.

" Bawn, I wish you would talk a little," said Jeanne pettishly.
" It makes one fidget to look at your quietness. And I want
particularly to have some communication with you. Very sel-
dom indeed you allow me to set an eye on you."

" Well, Jeanne, you cannot say you are lonely. You have
company that pleases you better than mine."

" That may be, miss. As you say, I am not fitted for a lonely
life. Now you, for instance, judging by your ways, are fond of
mooning all by yourself, and so you will find it easy to grow into
an old maid, as, from your demeanor to gentlemen, I see is your
intent. But I can tell you I am of a different character and am
not going to follow your example."

u Jeanne," said Bawn, with a gleam of her old smile, "you al-
ways will make me laugh. And I dare say it is good of you. I
have not smiled for a long time, I think. How, dear Jeanne, could
you manage to turn into an old maid ? "

" Oh ! you can make pleasantries, can you, though you were
so angry at my Cousin Henri's clever jest the other day, sweep-
ing out of the room like the goddess Dinah ! "

90 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct.,

" Don't, Jeanne don't remind me of it, please," said Bawn, a
slight frown crossing her fair brows. " I fear I am not as good-
tempered as I used to be. I am growing irritable ; don't provoke
me till I can get back to my natural ways. Some day when your
Cousin Henri is tired of coming here you will find me less un-
amiable than I am now."

" No, he will not cease to come here, miss ; as long as I
please he shall come here. And that reminds me. I was going
to tell you I suppose you are aware that I am a widow a year
to-day."

" Yes," said Bawn sadly, and she shivered and drew nearer to
the fire.

Bold as Jeanne was, she grew a little nervous as she tried
to proceed with her communication. Bawn's utter obtuseness
took her by surprise and made what she had to say more dif-
ficult. Could not the girl guess what was coming? On the
contrary, her eyes had fixed themselves on the fire with an ab-
stracted look. She was evidently not thinking of Mrs. Desmond
at all.

" I want to tell you, if you will listen to me," said Jeanne
desperately, " that I am not a woman to have her life blighted
by one man "

Bawn was now sitting bolt upright, startled more by the
simper that had come upon her stepmother's face than by the
woman's words.

" Hush ! " she said sternly, and threw out her hands as if to
stop further conversation.

Jeanne shrank back, shocked by the look on the girl's face.

" I am acting for the best in all our interests," she said whim-
peringly, and flourishing a handkerchief of black some inches
deep.

Bawn bent her head with one deep sob, and there was silence
in the room for some minutes. The younger woman struggled
with her grief and disgust; the elder fumed and told herself that
she would tell her news that evening, no matter how disagree-
able her stepdaughter might be.

" If you would not always intercept me I would tell you
what I want to say," she burst forth at last. " Well, then, I
am going to be married."

" Married ! " repeated Bawn mechanically.

"You will be jealous, I suppose, that I have had the first
offer; but, indeed, I assure you Cousin Henri is serious in his
intentions, too."

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 91

" Married ! " repeated Bawn to herself. It seemed she could
not be persuaded that the woman whom her father had dignified
with his name could be in earnest in making such a state-
ment.

" Yes, I tell you. The young man is a patriot of my own."

" Young man ! " murmured Bawn, more and more amazed.

" And why not a young man ? I suppose you mean to pre-
dict that I am not a young woman. Have I a gray hair in my
head any more than you, miss ? "

Bawn was silent while all the truth pressed upon her. Jeanne
was but a year her father's widow, and she was going to become
the wife of some vulgar acquaintance.

" I know what you are thinking of, of course," pursued
Jeanne. " The house and farm are yours, and you can turn us
out of them if you please. But if you would only be reasonable,
Bawn, and think of Cousin Henri, we might all live here to-
gether and make our fortunes again and again.''

Bawn was thinking and did not hear her. After all, the
woman was only following her natural instinct in returning to
the coarse associations from which Desmond had withdrawn her.
Let her go. A few minutes' reflection assured the girl that this
ought to be a relief to her rather than anything else. Only it
would leave her, Bawn, so solitary.

Jeanne's last words rang upon her ear, and the meaning of
them came back to her after a few minutes.

" Put me out of the question," she said quietly ; " and please
do not mention your cousin's name to me again. I will think the
matter over and tell you what I shall do about the house and
farm."

" You could never work it," cried Jeanne ; " and a manager
would be sure to rob you."

And this was all that was said on the subject then.

When Bawn laid her head on her pillow that night she felt a
bitter sense of renewed desolation which she knew to be in re-
ality meaningless, but which had to be suffered, nevertheless.
Jeanne, disagreeable as she might be, was the only creature to
whom she was bound by any tie. She had shared the past with
her, and to part from her utterly was to break the last link that
bound her to it. Yet this was what had to be done, and there
was only one generous and sensible way of doing it. The most
rational thing that she, Bawn, could do would be to leave this
great place, in which she could not think of living alone, to her
who had been mistress of it so long, who knew how to manage it

92 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct.,

and thrive in it. Yes, she must go forth out of her home and
find herself a shelter elsewhere.

Upon this decision she slept ; but in the middle of the night
she awoke suddenly, as if some one had called her. It seemed as
if a voice had spoken in her ear, saying : " Why not go to Eu-
rope to Ireland ? Why not carry out your old idea of seeking
for your father's friends and enemies ? " As a strong light springs
up in a darkened room and reveals all the details that had been
only hidden and not annihilated in it, so the thought that had
roused her from sleep showed her the deep desire and unshaped
purpose which sorrow and weakness had held dormant in her
brain.

Excellent idea! To what better account could she turn her
time and the wealth which her father had left to her? Here was
a new interest for her life, and closely linked with the beloved
who had suffered and was at rest.

She rose, lit her fire and lamp, and unlocked the drawer
where a year ago she had, with heavy tears, deposited her fa-
ther's old wooden casket. In proportion as the contents had
been precious to him they were precious to her, but until now
she had not trusted herself to look at them. Now she eagerly
unfolded document after document, as if she would find between
their pages light and instruction to carry out the plan she had
conceived.

Under the papers was a miniature portrait, the face of a
beautiful girl soft blue eyes, a cloud of dark hair, face like a
blush-rose, mouth and chin tender but weak. The dress was of
conventional elegance in the fashion of a by-gone day.

" You are the woman who loved and yet condemned him,"
she said to the pictured face. " Poor weak creature, I pity you !
Perhaps you married a man who was really bad, and so suffered
for your sin ; or may be at this moment your heart is broken by
the evil ways of a son. If so you are justly punished for -not
knowing a good man when you saw him."

The fair face smiled undisturbed by her reproaches, and Bawn
wept.

Desmond's own notes and statement ran as follows :

" I solemnly swear that I am not guilty of the crime laid to
me ; that I had no act or part in the death of Roderick Fingall,
who lost his life on the mountain of Aura, in the Glens of An-
trim, on a May evening in 18 . Even if I were capable of the
crime I had no motive to urge me to it.

" It is true we both loved Mave Adare ; but she had given

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 93

her promise to me, and I never dreamed of doubting her. The
circumstances were these : Roderick and I had been good friends
enough till he learned of my engagement to Mave, and then he
took a dislike to me, fancying I had supplanted him. He had
never spoken to her of his love, nor had she suspected it ; but he
thought she understood him, and mistook for a deeper feeling
what was only sisterly friendship for himself. This she declared
to me, and I believed her; but he chose to hug his grievance
and fancy himself wronged.

" Neither Roderick nor I was rich, but accident had for the
moment given me a probable advantage over him. An old man
from Barbadoes had turned up in the Glens, and, though the
Adares, Fingalls, and I were unconnected by ties of blood, he
was related in a distant way to each of us. He boasted of hav-
ing made a large fortune, and, having returned to bestow his
bones in his native land, intended to bequeath his money to some
one of his kindred. He constantly declared that he would not
divide it, but would leave it to whichever of his relatives pleased
him the best. This was, perhaps, intended to put all on their
mettle to be good to him, though it might have had the effect of
keeping some at a distance. I may truly say I did not think of
him at all, so absorbed was I in my happiness as Mave's accepted
lover and in the daily enjoyment of her companionship. Still,
in some way why I never could tell a report got abroad that
' Old Barbadoes/ as he was called, had taken a fancy to me and
intended to make me his heir. People said that when Mave and
I were married he could benefit both Adare and Desmond by
giving us the bulk of his wealth. I declare that neither she nor
I believed there was any foundation for this gossip, nor did we
allow ourselves to wish it might be true.

" The rumor had the effect of making Roderick more restless
and irritable. In the bitterness of his disappointment all the
generosity of his nature seemed obscured for the time, and he
was heard to say that Mave had preferred me because I was the
favorite of ' Old Barbadoes.'

" He was a good fellow at bottom, though of a passionate
temper and a little melodramatic in his ways, and Mave and I
did not despair of winning back his friendship in time. But death
barred that.

" I was a stranger in the Glens, and my small patrimony lay
in the south of Ireland. Father, mother, and sister being dead,
I was the only remaining member of my own family. After my
mother's death I had been induced to visit Antrim, which was her

94 -4 FAIR EMIGRANT, [Oct.,

birth-place, and there I spent the happiest as well as the most
terrible months of my life. Mave, in the midst of her family,
seemed to me like a wild rose blooming in a poisoned atmos-
phere ; for the Adares were strange people, proud, thriftless, and
of a morbid turn of mind, who, with failing fortunes and ex-
travagant habits, considered themselves above the degradation of
any kind of work. The men led idle and unwholesome lives, and
were hated and feared by their poorer neighbors and dependants.
I delighted in the thought of taking my Mave out of the strange
company of her people, away from the gloomy hollow of the
mountain which was her home, and bringing her to my bright
little Kerry domain. We should not have been rich, but I was
full of plans for earnest work, for building up my fortunes by de-
termined industry. I said to myself, ' Idleness is the rock on
which so many of my class in my country split and go to wreck.
I will steer clear of it.'

" Roderick Fingall's statement that Mave had been influenced
by the fact of my being ' Old Barbadoes' ' favorite stung me
more than any other of his taunts, and on one or two occasions I
spoke angrily of his impertinence and carelessness of the truth.
Mave did her best to soothe me, and seemed, I thought, unneces-
sarily fearful of a quarrel arising between us.

" I will make a plain statement of what occurred, as far as I
know, on the evening of Fingall's violent death.

" There had occurred that day between Mave and me some-
thing like a misunderstanding on the subject of Roderick, and I
was a good deal vexed in spirit when I set out to take a long
ramble across the mountains, hoping to walk off my ill-humor.

" 1 had done so. Heaven is my witness that I had forgotten
all bitterness by the time I found myself climbing the side of Aura.
My mind had gone gladly back to the contemplation of my own
happiness, and, full of hope and joy, I felt my veins thrilling with
the glory of the sunset, often so magnificent among those Antrim
hills. I had no thought of unkindness towards any one when I
saw Roderick Fingall approaching me with bent head and
gloomy eyes ; I felt nothing but pity for his disappointment, self-
reproach for having allowed myself to be irritated by the expres-
sions of his morbid jealousy. He was walking to .meet me, with-
out having perceived my approach, and, thinking himself alone
in this mountain solitude, had allowed his face to express unre-
servedly the bitterness of his soul. Filled with compassion and
compunction, I disliked the idea of surprising him, and began to
whistle that he might be warned of my nearness to him.

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 95

" He misunderstood me and took my whistling for a sign of
triumph and derision, as I found when, a few moments afterwards,
we passed face to face on a narrow path above a steep and ugly
precipice.

" * So,' he said, ' you have come to dog my steps even here, to
flourish your confounded good fortune in my face ! ' or words to
that effect.

'"No, indeed, Fingall,' I said. ' I had no such thought. We
have met by accident. Let it not be an unfortunate chance. I
feel no ill-will towards you. I wish to God you felt none towards
me.'

" I thought I saw a gleam of relenting in his eyes as I went
on.

" ' We were once good friends ; let us be so again. I never
knowingly did you wrong, and if I have caused you pain it is a
grief to me. On some points I believe you to be mistaken. You
will live to find it out.'

" He looked at me scrutinizingly. I think he was beginning to
believe in me. The bracing, brilliant mountain air, the glorious
sunlight, the ennobling beauty of the scenery around us were all
in my favor, and I felt it. He looked up, threw the hair from
his brow. I saw that a struggle was going on between his natural
generosity and the evil spirit that had got possession of him.
Finally his eye sought mine.

" ' God is around and above us/ I said ; ' let not this glori-
ous sun go down upon our wrath. Fingall, why cannot we be
friends?'

" I stretched out my hands towards him, and he made a move-
ment. As God is my judge, I do not know whether he intended
to advance towards me in friendship or to retreat in denial of
my appeal. His step backward may have been an involuntary
one; the next moment he might have flung himself forward into
my arms. My memory of the look in his eyes assures me that
to do so was his intention. But he stood upon treacherous
ground. In the excitement of our feelings neither of us had no-
ticed that he had backed while speaking to the very edge of an
abyss. He took one fatal step and vanished. I heard his cry as
he went whirling down the precipice then all was silent. . . .

" I hurried down the mountain in a terrible state of agitation ;
met some people and told my story, and we went in search of
him. He was found quite dead. At the inquest I gave my evi-
dence, and a verdict of accidental death was returned. His fam-
ily were in a frantic state of grief. He was his mother's young-

96 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct.,

est and favorite son, and the calamity threatened to deprive her
of her reason. So deep was my own affliction that it was some
time before I began to perceive that people were looking askance
at me. Some one was whispering away my fair fame. A name-
less horror rose up beside me, dogged my steps, haunted me like
an evil spirit'; when I tried to grasp it, it slipped through my fin-
gers and vanished. I resolved not to see it, tried to forget it,
ascribed its existence to my own over-excited imagination ; but
still the reality of it was there, asserting itself at every opportu-
nity. At last one day with a sudden shock I came in front of
it and saw its face, ghastly with falsehood and corruption. It
was believed that I had murdered Fingall! ....

" The whisper grew and swelled into a murmur so loud that
I could not shut my ears to it. Even in Mave's tender eyes there
arose a cloud of doubt. Her smile grew colder and colder, and
a look of fear came over her face when I appeared. I 'became
aware that I had a powerful though secret accuser, who, while
assuming to screen me, was all the time gradually and persist-
ently blasting my good name.

" There came a day when I could bear it no longer, and I
went to Mave and asked an explanation of the change in her
manner towards me. I said I knew there were evil rumors in
circulation concerning me, but I should not care for them. I
couid live them down, if only she would bravely believe in me.
At once I saw my doom in her averted eyes. It seemed that,
whoever my accuser might be, he had her ear and that her mind
was becoming poisoned against me. Seeing the despair in my
face, she burst into passionate weeping ; but when I drew near to
comfort her she shrank from me. In the agonizing scene that
followed I learned that some secret evidence had been laid before
her which she considered overwhelming. Timorous and gentle
I had known her to be, but that she could be so miserably weak
and wanting in trust of me, whom she had chosen and dignified
with her love of disloyalty like this I had not dreamed. I went
to her brother Luke, who was the dominant spirit in that un-
wholesome household, stated my case, declared my innocence,
and asked him, as man to man, to help me to free myself from
this curse that was threatening to blast me. I found him cool,
reticent, suspicious, professing to be my friend, unwilling to say
anything hurtful to me, but evidently firmly convinced of my
guilt. He said that, for the sake of old friendship and of his
sister's former love for me, they were all anxious to screen me
from the consequences of what had happened. I answered that. I

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 97

wanted no screen, only to come face to face with my accuser.
He smiled slightly, saying that that I could never do.

" I left him feeling as if I had been beating my heart against
a rock, and for some time longer I held my ground, lying in wait
for my enemy, striving to kill the lie that was slowly withering
up the sap of my veins ; but as air escapes the clutch of the hand,
so did this cruel calumny fatally and perpetually elude my grasp.
As the wretch doomed to be walled up alive watches stone placed
upon stone, building up the barrier that separates him from life,
so, slowly and surely, I saw the last glimpse of light disappear
from my horizon. One day I rose up and shook myself together,
and owned that I could bear it no longer. I went to Mave for
the last time, and, finding her still possessed by the belief in my
guilt, I bade her an abrupt farewell and went forth like a lost
soul out of her presence. I shook the dust of the Glens from my
feet and departed from the country without taking leave of any
one. Strange looks and wags of the head had so long followed
me that I believed scarce a man in the place would have cared
to shake hands with me. I was looked on as a murderer who for
certain reasons of old friendship had been allowed to escape jus-
tice, but whose presence was not to be desired in an honest com-
munity.

" To understand fully the general abhorrence in which I was
held one would need to know the character of the Glens people.
A murder had not occurred among them within the memory of
man, hardly a theft, or anything that could be called a crime.
The people had their faults and their squabbles, no doubt, but
they were, on the whole, a singularly upright and simple-minded
race, who kept the Commandments and knew little of the world
beyond their mountains.

" I went forth from among them with the brand of Cain on
my forehead, to go on with my life as best I might in some spot
where rumor could not follow me. No man. bade me God-speed.
Every one shrank from my path as I walked the road, and doors
were shut as I passed them by. In all this there was only one
exception. As I walked up Glenan with my heart swooning in
my breast and my brain on fire, a woman opened her door and
came a little way to meet me. Her name was Betty Macalister.
She had been a servant in the Fingall family, and had recently
married and gone to live in Glenan. Doubtless she knew the
whole tragedy as well as any one knew it, but she opened her
door and came out and offered me a drink of milk, which, I
suppose, was the best way that occurred to her of expressing
VOL. XLIV. 7

98 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct.,

her good- will. My first impulse was to dash it from her hand
and pass on. How could she dare to be kind when Mave ?
But a look in her homely eyes, which had an angel's light in
them at the moment, altered my mood. I took it and tasted it,
and returned it to her with thanks,

"'Good-by, Mr. Arthur/ she said, 'and God defend the
innocent ! '

" I could not answer her. I looked at her silently, and Heaven
knows what she saw in my gaze. She threw her apron over her
face and rushed sobbing into the house.

" I went to London, where I stayed till I had effected the sale
of my little property in Kerry, and the home that was to have
been hers and mine was made over to strangers. All that time
I walked the streets of London like a man in a nightmare. So
long as I kept walking I felt that I had a hold on my life, had
my will in control ; but when I sat down the desire for self-
destruction rushed upon me. I believe I walked the entire of
London many times over, yet I did not know where I walked
and remember nothing that I saw. During this time I wrote to
Luke Adare, telling him I was going to Minnesota and would
send him my address when I arrived there. I was not going to
behave like a criminal who had been glad to be allowed to escape.
If at any future time I were to be wanted by friends or enemies
they should know where to find me.

" After that Luke wrote to me, once to London and two or
three times to Minnesota. There was nothing in his letter which
seemed to require an answer, and I did not answer him. Indeed,
it was, and is still, a wonder to me that he wrote as he did to a
man whom he believed to be a murderer, and one who would
not even confess or regret his crime. There was a sympathizing
and pitying tone in his communication which surprised me, for
Luke was no tender sentimentalist. He gave me no information
about home; he never mentioned Mave. What was the reason
of his writing at all I could never make out.

" I received one other letter from the Glens, and that was
from Betty Macalister, to whom I had also given my address,
having an instinctive feeling that if anything were to turn up
to clear my good name she would be more likely than Luke to
let me know."

Bawn here turned to Betty's letter, which was as follows :

" YOUR HON. DEAR MISSTER ARTHUR :

" This comes hoppin' you are well as leaves me in this present

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 99

time the same and husband. The hollow fokes is not doin' well.
The ould Misster Barbadus he left all he had to Misster Look.
The ould house luks bad an' Miss Mave she dozzint walk out at
all. The gentlemen has quare ways an' the people dozzint like
them a bit better nor they did. There was great doin's for a
while, but the munny dozzint last with them, A think, for the ould
place is lukkin' bad now. My man an' me stiks to you thru
thick an' thin, but yure better where ye are.
" Yures to kommand,

" BETTY MACALISTER."

This epistle, which bore a date ten years after Arthur's
departure, Bawn read over and over again, and one piece of
information it contained struck her as remarkable : " Old Bar-
badoes " had left all his money to Luke Adare the money
which it was supposed would, under other circumstances, have
come to Arthur as his favorite.

The next letter she opened was from Luke himself. He
wrote :

" I hope you are doing well, for in spite of all that has hap-
pened I feel a deep interest in your welfare. The New World is
before you, and your story cannot follow you there. Indeed, it
is hushed up here, for all sakes, though it never can be quite for-
gotten. You may yet be a prosperous man, outlive the past, and
make new friends. I shall always be glad to hear of you and to
know what you are doing, etc., etc., etc.

"Your sincere well-wisher,

" LUKE ADARE/'

The remaining letters were much in the same strain, express-
ing a desire to know something of the exile and showing a leni-
ency towards him as a murderer which was hard to understand.
Some of them contained reproaches of Arthur for not having
written to give an account of himself. " Only that Betty Mac-
alister has had a line from you I should think you were dead,"
he wrote in the latest date of twenty-five years ago. It was evi-
dent that Desmond had never gratified the curiosity of this anx-
ious friend.

Bawn was very apt to jump, rightly or wrongly, to a con-
clusion, and by the time she had folded up all the papers and re-
placed them in a box she had made up her mind that Luke Adare
was the person who, for his own selfish ends, had whispered away
her father's good name, blighted the lives of both sister and

ioo A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Get ,

friend. Arthur a murderer and banished, and Roderick Fingall
dead, the inheritance had devolved upon Luke as the eldest of
the Adares.

" And this frail creature," she said, studying Mave's portrait
again, " this was a tool easy enough to work with. Had you
been a brave, true woman, ready to stand up in his defence and
fight the lie with him, he might have been able to hunt down the
liar and clear himself before the world. But you quailed and
deserted him, you coward ! Luke was the villain and you were
the fool ! "

The greater part of that day Bawn spent riding alone over
the prairie, revolving and maturing her project as she went, con-
sidering the details of it and the dangers and difficulties it might
linclude. That evening she walked up to Mrs. Desmond in the
.drawing-room and said in a tone of simple friendliness :

"Jeanne, I have made up my mind to let you have the
ihouse."

Jeanne was amazed. She had made her demand, well aware
-she had no right to make it, and without expecting to find her
.audacity so quickly rewarded.

Bawn continued : " I am going to St. Paul in the morning to
.speak about it to Dr. Ackroyd."

Mrs. Desmond was instantly alarmed. She did not like the
.interference of Dr. Ackroyd, who would make it a matter of
.business.

"Why need he interfere between us?" she said. "Cannot
we make our own arrangements? You are of age."

" I wish to consult him," said Bawn quietly. " It is not long
.since he was my guardian. And you forget, Jeanne: it will be
necessary for me to find some shelter for myself when I leave the
place to you."

" This is very provoking of you," cried Jeanne, "to talk as if
I wanted to turn you out. Why can we not all go on together?"

"Let that be; it is my affair," said Bawn. "I have other
plans for my future."

" Now what plans can she have?" thought Jeanne, looking
round the handsome room, and running over in her mind all the
goodly possessions and advantages she was gaining by Bawn's
generosity. " It must be that she means to go to Europe and
figure as an heiress at the fashionable places." And Jeanne
thought, with an impatient sigh, of how admirably that part
would have suited her, if she had just been twenty or thirty years
younger and had not acquired the passion for making money.

1 8 86.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 101

CHAPTER v.

A WILFUL WOMAN.

THE next day Bavvn made a journey into St. Paul to consult
her guardian.

Dr. Ackroyd had been her father's oldest friend in Minnesota,
and the only man who had ever approached to anything like in-
timacy with him. At a time when the doctor had been hardly
pressed by pecuniary troubles Desmond's generosity had laid
the foundation of his ultimate prosperity a fact which he had
never forgotten.

" Doctor," said Bawn, walking into the snug room where he
and his wife were sitting, " I have come to talk to you on busi-
ness. You know I am a woman of business capabilities now
twenty-one years of age last month."

The doctor nodded. " Yes, yes ; she has found it all out. I
was her guardian a month ago, Molly, but now she will be for
taking the bit in her own teeth, no doubt."

" I have a pretty good fortune, haven't I, Dr. Ackroyd ? "

" As pretty a fortune as any young woman in America, I
should say at a guess ; and that is saying much. Come, now,
what do you want to do? Trip away to Paris, and all the rest
of it?"

" And quite natural too, Andrew, at her age, and with such a
fortune and such a face ! " said Mrs. Ackroyd, a motherly old
lady, with whom Bawn was a favorite.

The same thought was present in the minds of husband and
wife as they looked at Bawn's fine, fair face, with its grave sweet-
ness and a certain majesty of womanly dignity which in her most
thoughtful moments sat on her brow. At such moments her coil
of golden hair looked like a royal crown. Now, as she gazed
into the fire, seeing something which they did not see, they easily
fancied her in brilliant rooms, shining in white satin or some
such raiment, with crowds of adorers hovering round her. They
knew the sort of thing that happens, well enough. Many a lovely
young heiress sails from America and gets turned into a countess
or a marquise before many summers have poured their choicest
flowers into her lap.

" Yes, I have been thinking of going to Europe," said Bawn,
" though not to Paris."

" It is the gayest place and the prettiest," said the doctor.
" Of course there are the summer resorts "

" I was not thinking of gayety, nor even of prettiness," said

102 A FAIR EMIGRANT. . [Oct.,

Bawn ; " though the place I mean to go to is, I believe, beautiful
enough. But if it were the ugliest place on earth, and the dull-
est, as -it probably is, I should want to go all the same."

She spoke musingly and looked into the fire, seeing in the
burning wood fairy glens, and mountains with giddy paths from
which a false step might hurl a man in an instant mountains
with lonely hollows of their own, and secret paths dark enough
to overshadow a human being's life.

The doctor gazed at her in astonishment. " Come," he said,
" I give it up."

" Doctor," said the girl suddenly, looking at him straight,
" did it ever strike you that my father had had a great trouble in
his life, one that must have been more than the ordinary kind of
trouble?"

The doctor's face changed. " I always thought it," he said
gently.

Bawn turned red and then quite white. " It is true," she said ;
" and the journey I want to make has reference to that trouble."

She paused and hesitated.

" My dear," said Dr. Ackroyd, "if you have anything to say
to me in confidence, my wife will go away."

"No," said Bawn firmly, stretching out her hand to the old
lady, who was regarding her with deep concern. " I can trust
you both, if you will bear with me."

Mrs. Ackroyd stirred in her chair with good-natured emotion
and a little curiosity, and, wiping her spectacles with the hand
that was not in Bawn's grip, put them on, as if they would help
her to see well into whatever was going to be laid before her.

Bawn went on speaking, white to the lips, but with firm voice
and calm eyes :

" My father left his country, you know, as a young, quite a
young man. Well, he left it under a cloud. Some enemy had
whispered away his good name and blighted his life. He had
friends, and there was a woman who had loved him and was to
have married him ; and they one and all good God! can you
believe it? they one and all cast him out of their lives, with-
drew their faith and their friendship from him, and sent him
across the world with a broken heart and spirit poor heart that
nothing could ever heal ; noble spirit that is free from pain at
last ! "

Grief brimmed over Bawn's sad eyes as she finished. She
suddenly covered her face and sat drowned in tears.

Her friends did not worry her with questions and consola-

1 8 86.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 103

tions, only suffered the floods that had opened to wash them-
selves away ; and the girl said presently :

" There, that is over. You are very, very good to listen to
me/'

" Now," she continued, with a light leaping into her eyes and
determination straightening the quiver of her lips, " I know that
he had an enemy who slandered him, or all this could never have
happened. He himself believed that he was the victim of cir-
cumstances, but I do not believe it. Certain notes and papers
have been put in my hands to read, and I have formed my own
conclusions from them. I shall never rest till I have sifted the
matter to the bottom in as far as it can be sifted," she added
wistfully, "at the end of thirty years."

" Ah ! that is it," said the doctor with a smothered sigh. " And,
my dear child, I don't want to contradict you I feel with you
intensely but how, if at the time he found it so impossible to
clear himself, how do you dream of being able to do it now?"

" Not by walking into the country, into the houses of those
people, and saying, ' You are my deadly enemies. I am Arthur
Desmond's daughter, and you calumniated my father. Confess
your sins, or I shall I shall go back crestfallen where I came
from ! ' " said Bawn, with lips relaxing into a little smile. " No ;
that is not my plan. I think t have been studying to acquire the
guile of the serpent during the last few days, and I have laid a
little plot which t cannot put into execution without the assist-
ance of a friend."

"Well? "said the doctor, looking at her inquiringly. "Con-
tinue."

" I intend," pursued Bawn, " to go to the place a secluded
spot it was ; and I believe, I have been told, it is not the sort of
place that changes much a glenny and mountainy place such as
we read about but do not see here."

" I know," said the doctor, nodding, and instantly seeing pic-
tures in his memory ; for he, too, was an exile and loved Scotland.

" I shall go there," said Bawn, " not in my own name and char-
acter, but as the orphan daughter of a farmer, an emigrant, who,
from what she has heard from her father about his native land,
has taken a fancy to see it and live in it. She has brought her
small fortune say five hundred pounds, her father's savings to
invest in a little farm such as a woman can manage. In this way
I will settle down among those people, as near them as possible,
and, without exciting their suspicion or putting them on their
guard, will try to get at the long-hidden secret, strive to unearth

A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct.,

the too-long-buried truth. When I succeed I shall disclose my
identity, pour out the vials of my wrath upon the false or good-for-
nothing friends, shake the dust off my feet and come back here
to you."

" A pretty romance, my dear, but about as wild and impossible
as pretty/'

" Do not say so."

" What do you propose to do if you find it beyond your
power to get at that long-lost truth ? "

" Come back here all the same, only worsted," said Bawn ;
" but it will be long before I confess myself beaten. A number
of people must be dead first."

11 And if you find them all already dead ? "

" That is not likely," said Bawn quickly. " Not in such a
healthy country place, where the people live long. I have
thought it all out, and the chances are with me."

Dr. Ackroyd was silent. Wild as the girl's scheme was, he
saw she was completely in earnest, and he knew her long enough
and well enough to have had experience of a character indicated
by the shape of her broad, fair brows and certain expressions of
her clear gray eyes and good-tempered mouth. There had al-
ways been a simple and intelligent directness about her intentions
and a robust fearlessness in carrying them out that made such a
proposal from her somewhat different to what it might have been
coming from any ordinary impulsive, romantic girl, who would
be pretty sure to give up her plan in disgust and dismay after a
first tussle with a few uncomfortable obstacles. He admitted to
himself that, if any girl could carry out such an enterprise, no
better one than this could be found to undertake it. But of
what was he thinking ? All the strength of his influence over
her must be exerted to prevent her entering on such a wild and
uncertain path.

He was sufficiently a man of the world to know what had
never entered into the saddest dreams that ever flitted through
Bawn's golden head to be well aware that there existed a pos-
sibility, if not a likelihood, that Arthur Desmond had been really
guilty of whatever crime or transgression had been laid to his
charge. During all the long life that he had spent in this new
country Dr. Ackroyd had met with a great number of men who
in their youth had blundered into evil, and had either come
out here of their own free will or been sent by their indignant
friends to begin life afresh where their past was unknown. And
why might not Desmond have been one of these? He would
prefer to believe, with Bawn, that the man who had lived here so

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 105

stainless a life and suffered so deeply had been guiltless from
the beginning, and the victim of malice or a mistake. But the
entire faith of Bawn's heart could not make its way into his.
Not only did he see the probability of failure for her enterprise,
but feared that she might be met by some overwhelming testi-
mony to his guilt guilt long expiated, and perhaps for ever for-
gotten had not her rash and loving hand rooted it out from the
past which had buried it. Might not even such a bright and
strong creature as this be felled by such a blow?

These thoughts trooped quickly through his mind, and Bawn
watched the changing expressions of his face.

" Well/' she said quietly, " you are not going to oppose me? "

" My dear/' he said, " I will oppose you with every argument,
with all the persuasion, I am capable of compelling to my aid.
Had this occurred some time ago I should have been in a posi-
tion to forbid you absolutely to carry out so wild an intention.
As it is, you are your own mistress. I cannot control your ac-
tions. I can only beseech you to take an old man's advice, and
let the dead past bury its dead. Your father is at rest; the waves
of time have rolled over his sorrow. You need never come in
contact with any one who knows anything of his story. In any
other plan for your life, in any indulgence you can imagine, I
will help you to the best of my ability ; but 1 cannot see you act
in a way which I believe would be the ruin of every prospect
you have in the world/'

" I have no prospect/' answered Bawn sadly. " What could
I do with my life while this shadow rests on it ? "

" Your idea is over-strained. By and by you will form new
ties"

" Never!" said Bawn solemnly. "Even if I wished it, and it
were likely, never could I till this cloud is cleared away."

The doctor was startled and silent. He had not been told
what was the nature of the wrong thing of which Desmond had
been accused, and the look in Bawn's eyes at this moment sug-
gested that it was something even worse than he had imagined.
But he spoke cheerfully.

" Pooh ! " he said ; " you are in a morbid humor. Put off the
consideration of this matter, for a time at least. You will change
your mind ; you will give it up."

" I will never give it up," said Bawn, her soft lips closing
and tightening with resolution. "The wish has gone too deep.
There is nothing else to live for in my life."

This was the beginning of a struggle which lasted for two
months between Bawn and her ex-guardian, and at the end of

io6 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct.,

that time Dr. Ackroyd felt himself obliged to lower his colors
and let the girl have her way. Rather than allow her to follow
it without help or protection of any kind, he was forced to yield
and take the affair into his own hands. Step by step she gained
upon him ; bit by bit she got all her will. His first concession in-
cluded the proviso that he was to be allowed to bring her across
the ocean himself, and that, before he suffered her to go seeking
her fortune in that unknown spot towards which her desires
were carrying her, he was to pay a visit to the place as a tourist,
take note of how things stood there, gather information about
the people, and make up his mind as to how far her plan for
coming among them was safe and practicable. To all this Bawn
uneasily consented at first, fearing much that such protection
and precaution might excite attention and frustrate her aims.
Fate in the end decreed that she was to go her wilful way and
perform her pilgrimage according to the programme she had at
first marked out for herself. A dearly-loved child of Dr. Ack-
royd's was discovered to have fallen into a dangerous state of
health, and he found it impossible to leave her. Bawn must
either go alone or not at all. She chose to go.

" You can put me on board and give me in charge to the
captain," she said; "and when I land, if I find any difficult}*, I
can telegraph to you, and you can telegraph to your English
friends, whom I will not go near if I can help it. This will
surely be protection enough for a steady young woman like me,
of the class to which I shall belong. Nobody will mind a simple
farmer's daughter. How many poor girls come out to America
every day to earn their bread under circumstances so much
worse than mine ! If I were travelling with you I should be
always betraying myself ; and if, as you say, ' the world is so
small,' somebody would be sure to see me who might meet me
afterwards and find me out."

Her friends felt themselves unable to restrain her. After all,
their own child was their first consideration, and Desmond's
daughter was impatient to be away. Jeanne was married, and
Bawn felt herself pushed bodily out of her home. There was
nothing more for her to do here except to procure an outfit of
very plain clothing to suit the station of life she had chosen, to
make some money arrangements transferring a few hundred
pounds to an Irish bank, and, leaving her fortune in Dr. Ack-
royd's hands, to say good-by to the dear old home and to the be-
loved grave where peacefully her father slept.

TO BE CONTINUED.

1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 10;

SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN.

THERE can be little doubt that in this queer*world of ours
very great men, and very wise men too, sometimes say extremely
foolish things, or, at all events, have exceedingly silly things at-
tributed to them ; and in one or other of these categories must
be classed the famous saying for which Prince Bismarck has the
credit, that " he never would go to Canossa." Of course he
never would go to Canossa ; how could he ? To go to Canossa
implies previous excommunication, and excommunication implies
previous membership. As a Lutheran, it is true, the prince is
presumably a baptized Christian ; and if the rite were validly
performed, and if no mortal sin has ever cut him off from a
state of grace, he belongs to the soul of the church ; but so long
as he remains in even unconscious schism he cannot belong to
the body. Powerful as his highness undoubtedly is, he can
neither claim the privileges nor incur the penalties of the hum-
blest Catholic in his dominions. A mosquito which has been
annoying a shepherd, and trying to divert his auction from the
flock, might as well vow it would never return to its place in the
sheepfold ; an urchin who has been amusing himself by throwing
stones at the steam-cars might as naturally vow that he never
would return to his duty as conductor ; or if these images be
unworthy the dignity of the great chancellor the Emperor Nero
might as reasonably have announced his firm determination never
to return to the true faith of a Christian, as Prince Bismarck
that he never would seek absolution from the censures of excom-
munication. If, by the grace of God, his highness should ever
desire reconciliation with the church, not penance but baptism,
conditionally imposed no doubt, must be the sacrament employed.
There is no need of hair-shirt or of pontifical authority. A
penny catechism and the nearest priest will be sufficient for the
exigency. The mediaeval struggle of the investitures was a ques-
tion of the internal economy of the church, and endured through
centuries. The Kulturkampf of Prince Bismarck has been from
beginning to end the device of an alien power to overcome the
church itself, and has perished in its own foolishness.

Perhaps, however, the prince was talking a little at random
or metaphorically, let us say and all he meant to convey was
that, having once attempted to force the church into action con-

io8 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Get*,

trary to her conscience, he had no intention of leaving off until
the conscience of the church had given in. If that were his
meaning as there can be but little doubt it was he had far
better have gone a few ages still further back for the metaphor
addressed to another illustrious persecutor, and have announced
his fixed determination to go on kicking against the pricks as
long as any pricks remained for him to kick against. For if his
highness had studied history with that diligence and generality
with which he is anxious to inoculate the Catholic clergy, and
more especially ' the epoch-making events " and " motive-ten-
dencies " of the different ages, he might have learned for himself,
without illustrating for the thousandth time in his own person,
that whoever attempts to coerce the Holy Father may cause tem-
porary bitterness to the church, but will chiefly succeed in per-
manently undermining his own authority ; that whoever, in short,
falls on the stone of Peter will be broken, but on whomsoever it
shall fall it will grind him to powder. The gnat is brushed away
from the face of the shepherd ; the idle boy runs from the train
as soon as he has flung his stone ; the Emperor Nero but really
the Emperor Nero is altogether too grand for the occasion ; and
what remains but a few cuts and bruises and drops of blood, and
perhaps a gertfcral laugh at the wantonness and the defeat of the
mischief?

For, indeed, were it not for these same scars and bruises, for
the misery, spiritual and temporal, inflicted upon the faithful of
Germany by these fantastic tricks before high Heaven, for the
parishes left pastorless, the priests imprisoned, the bishops exiled,
one could do little else than laugh at this latest, idlest, most
useless, and most aimless attack upon the liberty of conscience.
The very battle-cry of the persecutors the Kulturkampf be-
trays the genuine spirit of " priggishness " which animates that
which does duty fora soul in the breast of every persecutor;
and the business was conducted from beginning to end in a
spirit worthy of its inception. The campaign commenced with
the expulsion of the order of the Jesuits. And why the Jesuits?
one asks with surprise, not having yet become acclimatized to
the atmosphere of happy inconsequence pervading all the pro-
ceedings. Why dismiss, in the name of culture and education, the
community which, beyond all others, has maintained a reputa-
tion for educative ability and cultured intellect? Well, it is
difficult to suggest a reason. Perhaps his excellency was expe-
riencing a little reaction after his successful "flutters" with
Austria and France, and that personage who is always ready

1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 109

with some attractive work for idle hands took the opportunity to
make the suggestion. Or possibly the prince, not having as yet
the novels of M. Gaboriau for his recreation, was suffering an in-
digestion from perusing the works of Eugene Sue or the late
lamented Mr. Charles Kingsley, wherein the Jesuit is for ever at
work forging wills, upsetting families, caballing against govern-
ments, or varying these useful and creditable occupations by act-
ing, with the permission of his superiors, in the capacity of Ang-
lican clergymen and retaining at the same time a "dispensation
from holding" the Immaculate Conception or the infallibility of
the Holy Father. For our own part, we believe that the prince
acted upon none of these profound considerations, but upon
another principle of about equal value namely, the principle
upon which the late Lord Beacorisfield used to be fond of talking
about ordering the British fleet to move up into the Dardanelles:
not, as the event made clear, that any particular object was to be
gained by his vessels entering those mysterious waters, but that
the phrase carried with it a delicious ring of high diplomacy,
and would stand for an excellent sample of a vigorous foreign
policy.

The Jesuits expelled, wider measures were to be taken, and a
brand-new minister with a brand-new broom came forward to
sweep all the school-rooms of a brand-new empire. Humanity
was to be enlightened at last. All the ignorance of the miserable
clergy who had preserved the light of learning as far back as
Christian learning could reach was to be swept away. The dark-
minded church to whose influence was due the foundation of half
the schools and far more than half the universities of Europe was
to be taught something at last, now that a Prussian minister
had arisen to teach at once the true theories of religion, of edu-
cation, and of medicine. For ordinary students the common
curriculum still sufficed; but Catholic theologians must spend
three years beyond the common course in studying everything
except theology. The arcana of German philosophy were to
be revealed to them, and they were to understand the mysteries
of Hegel and of Fichte. Psychology was to tell them all about
the plastodylic soul, and they were to be learned in all the ways,
not of virtue, but of Virchow. History was to unfold to them,
not her simple facts, which were of little value to a German phi-
losopher, but her most recondite teachings as to her " historic
moments" and her " inner developing forces," and the ecclesias-
tical student was to be assiduously trained in the use of every
weapon in the whole German armory for darkening counsel by

iro SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct.,

words without knowledge. Meanwhile the means by which he
could maintain himself during the prolonged period required
for these useful acquirements was a problem to be considered ;
and as a contribution towards its solution the minister shut up
the cheap boarding-houses to which the Catholic clergy had
hitherto resorted.

Such was the mellifluous invitation which Dr. Falk, like an-
other Dr. Dulcamara, issued to the Catholic clergy ; and yet,
strange to say, the ears of those whom he addressed remained
impervious to its sweetness. Somehow the church persisted in
thinking that she knew as much about the proper education of
her clergy as the Prussian state a notion fundamentally opposed
both to German philosophy and to Prussian officialism. Then
the strife began in earnest. The empire offered certificates upon
its own terms. The church refused to allow other hands to
interfere with the training of her own ministers. The state
declared it to be illegal to ordain uncertificated candidates. The
bishops refused to acknowledge secular authority in spiritual
matters. What followed ? Parish after parish beheld its pastor
driven away by the government. Bishop after bishop went first
to prison and then to exile. Thus at one time all the archbishop-
rics and bishoprics of Prussia were lying without an occupant,
either through death or banishment, except those of Kulm, Osna-
burg, Ermeland, and Hildesheim. For years the prince persisted
in this cruel and idle crusade, until at last it dawned upon his
highness, who is an acute man and can sometimes take in a novel
idea when it is very plainly and persistently placed before him
say for a decade of years together that the only fruit he was
reaping or likely to reap from this useless struggle was the
opposition of the Catholic party in the Reichstag. Thereupon
there came a change. The drum of Dr. Dulcamara ceased to
beat, and Dr. Falk himself had disappeared from view. Then the
chancellor looked over his spectacles at the Vatican and vowed
he never would go to Canossa. The pope gave it to be under-
stood that there was no question of Canossa in the matter. The
church desired neither secular dominion over Germany nor spiri-
tual submission from Prince Bismarck, but simply the right of
educating her own ministers in her own way. Then the prince
went a step further. Supposing the full requirements of the
ecclesiastical laws were not insisted upon, could those laws be so
far recognized that notification of appointments could be made
to the state ? Of course they could, provided that such notifi-
cation in no way interfered with the education of the clergy or

1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. in

the spiritual jurisdiction of the Holy Father ; and such, in fact, was
the response of the Vatican. Then the storm began to abate ; the
chancellor's teacup sank to a much-needed rest, the exiled bishops
were brought back, the state payments were resumed, the Crown
Prince of Germany paid a personal visit to His Holiness; and the
greatest mess made by the greatest statesman of the age was,
partly at least, wiped up.

But though the quarrel thus forced by the chancellor upon
the church in Germany has been perfectly gratuitous and absurd,
yet there is a historical aspect of the case, from which it might be
inferred that a fundamental antagonism exists of necessity be-
tween the modern empire of Germany and the Vatican, inasmuch
as the former is the secularized form of the sacred empire which in
former times acknowledged the Vatican for its supreme head ; and
Prince Bismarck himself holds the office once belonging to the
Prince Archbishop of Mainz. It will well repay us, therefore, to
look back to that empire as it existed at the close of the last cen-
tury, and to trace the series of extraordinary events whereby the
relations between Germany and the Vatican have been modified
so profoundly.

" It was not strange," says a well-known Protestant writer,
"that in the year 1799 even sagacious observers should have
thought that the, end of the Church of Rome was come. An in-
fidel power ascendant, the pope dying in captivity, the most illus-
trious prelates of France living in a foreign country upon Protes-
tant alms, the noblest edifices which the munificence of former
ages had consecrated to the worship of God turned into temples
of victory, or into banqueting-houses for political societies, or into
theo-philanthropic chapels such signs might well be supposed to
indicate the approaching end of that long domination. But the
end was not yet." And then Lord Macaulay, with singular per-
spicacity, goes on to compare the Roman Church with the Grand
Pyramid, which, according to Arab tradition, alone of all human
buildings sustained the weight of the waters of the Deluge ; and
to enumerate the European institutions which the Revolution had
laid in ruins or swept bodily from the face of the earth. Indeed
there is, perhaps, no more startling lesson to be learned in history
than in the total transformation which well-nigh every social and
political organization, save one, appears to have undergone
through the action of the Revolution. It is difficult to believe
that during the last hundred years there have been more terri-
torial and constitutional changes in Christendom than during the
entire millennium which preceded them. For a thousand years

i [2 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct.,

backward we see the two great powers the empire of the church
and the empire of the false prophet locked in deadly strife, the
heretical dominions falling one after another beneath the power
of Islam, the Catholic dominions preserving their freedom and at
last breaking down the long-dreaded and once irresistible foe ;
we see dissensions break 'out hither and thither, and provinces
and kingdoms agglomerate and dissever; but the great outlines
and landmarks remain ever unchanged, and to go back a century
is well-nigh equivalent to going back a millennium. Less than a
hundred years ago the heir of St. Louis was still seated on the
throne of Capet, to all appearance without possibility of subver-
sion. Less than a hundred years ago German archbishops were
petty sovereigns in their own right and made treaties with
Great Britain to supply the British government with men for
foreign service. Less than a hundred years ago the Red Sea was
closed to all "infidel" travellers, and the most tremendous pen-
alties, both in this world and the next, were denounced by the
Sublime Porte against any Turkish officer who should allow a
Christian vessel to approach the port of Suez " the privileged
route," as the sultan expressed it, "of the holy pilgrimage of
Mecca." Less than a hundred years ago England was not in
dread of every accidental change amongst foreign nations for fear
of her magnificent and suicidal empire of Hindostfn ; while Russia
was a more or less insignificant and more rather than less bar-
baric power, confining herself pretty much to annoying her
neighbors in the East of Europe, and interfering little or not at all
in the general comity of nations. But, above all, two great insti-
tutions bore every mark of the most venerable antiquity the
pope still retained the oldest sovereignty in Europe, and still
obtained recognition as the mediator amongst Catholic princes ;
the Holy Roman Empire remained the venerable structure
founded a thousand years before by Charlemagne and Leo.

To study the organization of this latter community, and to
trace the fate of its various elements during the century now pass-
ing away, is to read the very anatomy of history in its innermost
operations. For the ancient empire of Germany was a kind of
political sacrament. It expressed the spiritual authority ruling
through the temporal power ; and the process to which it has
been subjected in the crucible of the Revolution has been of
separation and reconstitution of the two authorities independently
of each other.

The contrast between the great empire of Germany which
came to a close in 1806 and that which arose in its place sixty-

1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 113

five years later is in many respects so violent that no slight
difficulty may be found in recognizing- any connection between
the two. In the former constitution the secular power was
based, as we have said, upon the ecclesiastical authority, and as-
sumed to a very great extent an ecclesiastical form, while even
the military organization was subject to ecclesiastical as well as
military direction ; in the latter the ecclesiastical element has ab-
solutely disappeared, and the civil power rests entirely upon the
organization of the army. In the former empire a variety of
states of greater or lesser importance were united by relations ot
great complexity ; in the latter the whole mass of minor states
are placed in the simple relation of regiments under a single
commander. In a word, the conception of the former empire
was a kind of republic of Christendom with an elective head,
subject alike, in general and in detail, to the jurisdiction of the
church ; the conception of the latter is simply an absorption of
the German nation into the army of Prussia.

Yet notwithstanding the opposition in their most distinctive
features, the two constitutions undoubtedly possess an essential
and clearly demonstrable connection ; and it may shed no little
light upon the political relations even of other European coun-
tries if we trace shortly how far the empire which William
erected upon the defeat of Napoleon III. is identical with that
which Francis laid down upon the triumph of Napoleon I.
For if, following the natural method by which the mind con-
nects the present with the past, we gaze backwards through the
vista of the present century, each scene presented is full of inte-
rest. First, at the present moment we have before our eyes an
enormous but most compact military organization, wherein each
citizen is a soldier, each state the section of an army, and the
monarch himself literally an imperator or commander-in-chief.
Next, but a few years ago, we see a multitude of states with no
central executive, but with two great rivals threatening to seize
it. Then, again, backward from 1866 to 1815, we behold a chaos
of disconnected atoms, of which the very confusion tells the tale
of former unity. Next we come upon that fantastic vision, that
anomalous congeries of disjointed states, that dream or idea of
Napoleon the Confederation of the Rhine. Then, further again
for a brief period of three years, we come upon the mediatized
Diet, the mutilated form of the Holy Roman Empire, with its
broken pillars and tottering foundations, foreboding its total and
speedy fall. Lastly, that same empire rises up before us as it
existed a hundred years ago, and as it had existed for century
VOL. XLIV. 8

ii4 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct.,

beyond century, if not with all harmony of outline, at least with
all variety of detail, and we trace each portion of the ruins to
their original position in the majestic pile. It is not, therefore,
so much the history as the framework of the former and present
constitutions of Germany with which we are concerned, and we
shall only require to photograph, as it were, the organization as
it existed in the days previous to its overthrow, and then to
show its successive states of decline, decay, dissolution, revival,
and reconstruction.

The structure of the Holy Roman Empire was unquestion-
ably one of the most complicated political creations ever present-
ed to mankind. Originated by Charlemagne and Pope Leo III.,
and more fully regulated by the Golden Bull of Charles IV., it
received its most distinctive definition in the Diet held at Frank-
fort towards the close of the sixteenth century, and may be said
to have preserved its form unchanged till the days of Napoleon.
Its great fundamental principles of combining territorial repre-
sentation with the independence of the ecclesiastical and civil
authorities, and of guaranteeing the freedom of the members by
rendering the executive elective, were sufficiently complicated in
themselves ; but the action of the principles became even more in-
tricate through the modifications imperceptibly introduced in the
progress of time. One feature, however, marked the whole his-
tory of the empire in general, and every detail in particular,
from first to last, and that was the precedence of the ecclesiastical
over the civil authority of corresponding rank. A somewhat
similar usage prevailed in England during Saxon times, when a
bishop, assisted by an ealdorman, sat upon the secular judgment-
seat. And even to this day in the British House of Lords, which
affords a faint copy of the ancient College of Princes in the Diet
of Germany (as the House of Commons, or Communes, paral-
lels the College of Free Towns), the bishops take precedence of
all secular barons, and the Archbishop of Canterbury of all peers
whatsoever.

This principle of ecclesiastical precedence was carried out
even in the military organization of the empire, which was alto-
gether different in itself, and had a different history from its civil
constitution. And as the military element is much less complex
than the ciyil, and as it, moreover, predominates largely in the
ultimate issue, we cannot do better than to trace first its growth
and transformation.

The military system which prevailed down to the fall of the
Empire was inaugurated about the year A.D. 1500, when the

r 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 115

ancient provinces were formed into circles, the forces of each
circle being theoretically placed under the command of an eccle-
siastical and civil director, although practically, as we shall more
clearly see in dealing with the constitution of the Diet, the tem-
poral prince often united both characters in his single person.
Thus the Archduke of Austria, in view of the primacy of his
house, was always considered an ecclesiastical as well as secular
personage, and was sole director of the military circle compre-
hending not only his own archduchy, but also the Austrian do-
minions of Carinthia, Carniola, Styria, Switzerland, the Grisons,
and the Tyrol. So the Elector of Saxony was sole director of his
circle of Upper Saxony, and the King of Spain of his duchy of
Burgundy until the detachment of that province by the treaty of
Westphalia in 1648. But the rest were all subject to double rule.
The Archbishop of Salzburg and the Elector of Bavaria presided
over the military circle of Bavaria, the Bishop of Bamberg and
the Margrave of Baireuth over that of Franconia ; and the circles
of the Upper and Lower Rhine, of Suabia and Westphalia, had
each an ecclesiastic as well as civil dignitary at their head. In-
congruous as this subjection of the military to the spiritual power
may seem to a modern conception and certainly what the his-
tory of England would have been if the Protestant bishops had'
exercised direct power over particular regiments demands a flight
which may well take one's breath away yet it is difficult to see
in what other way any effectual restraint can be placed upon
the multitudes now in arms, when one nation will go to war at
an instant's notice for the imaginary succession of a phantom-
prince to a foreign throne, and another considers the invasion of
an unoffending country to be fully justified by the supposed re-
quirement of a scientific frontier.

However this may be, the ecclesiastical superintendence of the
army was an essential element of the spiritual empire, and with
the dissolution of that empire came to a natural termination,,
when the supreme jurisdiction over the forces of each state re-
verted directly to its particular sovereign. In this position mat-
ters remained until the Germanic Confederation was brought
about, when a new and a most peculiar organization was effect-
ed. The scattered kingdoms of Germany were formed once more
into a single federation, each state preserving its own indepen-
dence and retaining command of its own little army ; but the
united forces of the community were placed under the direction
of the General Diet, which, however, could exercise no direct
authority over them, but could merely authorize some one or

1(6 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct.,

more particular states to take command of the general forces
in order to carry out the decrees of the Diet, or, as it was called,
to perform federal execution. An arrangement of this kind was
exactly adapted to afford plenty of opportunities to a statesman
possessed of many iron generals and very few and extremely
elastic principles. By the war of 1863 Prussia succeeded in ob-
taining the command of the forces as executor of the Diet in the
case of Schleswig-Holstein, and, on the ground of vicinity to
the seat of war, graciously took the lead out of the hands of
her Austrian rival. By the war of 1866 the centre of imperial
gravity was fairly shifted to the north, and a new confederation
was formed with Prussia for its informing power. Finally, by
the war of 1870, the whole forces of the late Diet, those of Aus-
tria alone excepted, became subject to the command of the King
of Prussia, and the victorious commander-in-chief of so many
kings and princes was naturally raised to the rank of " impera-
:tor." To peruse the titles of the German regiments is to trace
the course of the absorption of Germany by Prussia. East and
West Prussia, with Pomerania and Lithuania Prussia proper, in
fact form the first two corps ; Brandenburg, the homestead, so
to speak, of the kingdom, having the third corps to itself. A
separate corps also is supported by each of the states of Han-
over, Saxony, Wiirtemberg, Bavaria, and Hesse. Schleswig-
Holstein, with the Hanse Towns, make up another regiment ;
while the remainder are furnished by Silesia, Thuringia, West-
phalia, and the Rhine. The whole list is a powerful sermon upon
the prince's favorite text of " blood and iron." So much for the
military organization.

In the civil constitution of the former empire the Diet con-
sisted of three distinct bodies, a College of Electors, a College of
Princes, and a College of Free Towns, of which the first namely,
that of the Electors though much the smallest, was by far the
most important in rank and influence. According to the theory
of the empire, seven personages alone made up the sacred num-
ber, but after the Reformation had commenced its inroads an
eighth elector was added to the college. Of the seven origi-
.nal members the three principal were ecclesiastics namely, the
Archbishop of Mainz, chancellor for the entire empire ; the Arch-
bishop of Trier, chancellor throughout the old Roman province
of Aries ; and the Archbishop of Kb'ln, chancellor through the
Italian dominions. Of the other four electors, all being laymen,
each discharged some feudal duty towards his sovereign: the
King of Bohemia being grand cup-bearer, the Count Palatine

1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 117

of the Rhine high-treasurer and vicar-general of the empire,
the Duke of Saxony discharging the office of grand marshal, and
the Marquis of Brandenburg that of the grand chamberlain,
just as the emperor himself, when about to receive the imperial
crown at Rome, held the stirrup of the Holy Father. Yet, not-
withstanding the feudal duties thus exacted, each elector was
none the less a sovereign prince, and exercised within his own
territories the same rights and privileges as the emperor en-
joyed throughout the entire dominion.

Although the hereditary and not the elective principle regu-
lated originally the devolution of the crown, yet the latter was
adopted for a basis as early as the eleventh century, and was ever
afterwards preserved with the greatest care and scrupulosity.
Even when, as not unfrequently happened, the choice of the elec-
tors fell upon the legitimate heir for generation after generation,
his hereditary character was considered as a mere incident and
not as the essence of his tenure. " It is agreed," says the historian
of the Holy Roman Empire, writing in the seventeenth century,
" that the imperial power should not accrue through hereditary
right, as the custom had hitherto been, but that the emperor's
son, even if he were right worthy, should acquire by election
rather than succession. But if he were not worthy, or if the
people in making an emperor did not wish to have him, the peo-
ple had the matter in their own power." And similar sentiments
were expressed in yet plainer language, if possible, in the address
to the emperor when the crown was conferred. To preserve the
integrity of the electoral process recourse was had to the strict-
est regulations. Within a month of the emperor's decease the
grand marshal was bound to convene the electors within a fur-
ther period of three months for the purpose of solemnly electing
a " King of the Romans " for the full title was not bestowed tilJ
the coronation had been performed by the Holy Father. Frank-
fort was the legitimate and usual place of meeting, though the
ceremony was occasionally held at Aachen and elsewhere. A
retinue of not more than two hundred followers was allowed to
each elector, and so great was the jealousy of alien interference
that throughout the whole period during which an election
might last no other prince or potentate, of rank however exalted,
was permitted to reside in the city.

In the second college, that of the Princes, a similar division ex-
isted to that in the College of Electors ; the house being com-
posed of two distinct benches, whereof the ecclesiastical always
took precedence of the secular principality of corresponding rank.

n8 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct.,

During the sixteenth century the former house was made up of
one archbishop, three prelates, twenty-one bishops, ten abbots,
and the grand-masters of the orders of the Teutonic Knights and
of Malta ; while the civil bench was composed, nominally at least,
of about sixty members of the ranks of dukes, margraves, land-
graves, princes, and counts, but included incidentally both elec-
tors and foreign and domestic kings. By the theory of the
law each principality was represented by an immediate tenant
of the crown holding either a secular or spiritual benefice, but
in practice all sorts of influences were at work to amalgamate
and occasionally to divide the seats, and gradually to render the
franchise rather a personal privilege than a territorial appanage.
Marriage, succession, alienation, and, above all, secularization, all
combined to destroy the simplicity of the organization, and some-
times to introduce elements altogether foreign to the country.
Thus for several centuries the emperor himself had a seat on the
ecclesiastical bench in right of his archduchy of Austria, while
the King of Prussia (or Elector of Brandenburg), besides his seat
(fourth in rank) on the ecclesiastical bench, which he held as
representing the grand-master of the Teutonic Knights, held
also the forty-second ecclesiastical seat in right of Minden, and
four secular seats for Camen, Halberstadt, Magdeburg, and Fur-
ther Pomerania. So also foreign kings became involved in
German affairs, not for any consequence to the nations they
ruled, but because of their accidental possession of a German
principality. Spain was represented there at one time, not be-
cause Spain ever formed any part of the empire, but because its
king held the duchy of Burgundy ; Sweden became mixed up in
German wars through Hither Pomerania, Denmark through
Holstein-Gluckstadt, England through the electorate of Hano-
ver. A whole chapter of clues to the interference of one country
or another in the general disputes of Europe may be found in the
constitution of the German College of Princes.

As for the College of the Free Towns twenty-four on the
Rhine bench and thirty-eight on the Suabian bench we cannot
now say more than that it also betrayed its ecclesiastical origin
in the fact that every free town was, originally at least, an episco-
pal city ; and the relations are well worth studying between this
college and the great mediaeval association of the Hanseatic
League a league which we may yet see revived in another shape
by the international organization of labor.

The first severe blow given to this unique and venerable
structure came from within. At the dawn of Protestantism,

1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 119

Albert, Grand-Master of the Teutonic Knights, apostatized from
his vows in A.D. 1525, and, taking the whole appanage of the
order for his private possessions, married the daughter of the
King of Poland. This was the origin of the famous margra-
viate of Brandenburg, from which was developed first by the
deglutition of bishoprics the kingdom of Prussia, and afterwards,
by the agglutination of whole states, the modern empire of
Germany.

Yet, though the seeds of decay were already implanted, the
stately fabric remained fair and sound to view up to the very
close of the eighteenth century. Traces of dissension no doubt
were to be found, as when the Protestant electors withdrew
during the Mass of the Holy Ghost preceding the act of election,
and when assistant bishops had to be appointed to certain offices
because their official incumbents were incapable of discharging
the religious duties appertaining to them. But it was a strange
hand which brought the august structure into ruin. Through-
out the entire millennium which elapsed from the coronation of
Charlemagne that venerable edifice remained unchanged, and
yielded only to the earthquake of the Revolution ; and the pre-
amble of the treaty of Campo Formio, betraying even in its two-
fold date the revolutionary impress, marks, as it were, the exact
spot of time when the mediaeval spirit passed from European
statesmanship and the spirit of modern politics took its place.
Every line in that preamble is pregnant with silent instruction.

Four gentlemen of high distinction, though leaving no mark
whereby posterity may recognize them, are required to repre-
sent the " Emperor of the Romans and King of Hungary and
Bohemia" the Sieur Louis, and Sieur Maximilian, and the Sieur
de Gallo, and the Sieur Ignace, each with titles dating back for
centuries and offices covering half a page. And then comes a sin-
gle line bearing a single name filling a single office : " And on the
part of the French Republic, Bonaparte, commander-in-chief of
the French forces in Italy." No dramatist was ever more concise.
Three years later came the coronation of Napoleon, and the com-
pensations necessitated by the treaty of Luneville compensa-
tions, that is to say, granted out of the possessions of the church
to the states which had lost territory through the wars of the
Revolution. This was the process embodied in the famous Act
of Mediation drawn up under Napoleon in 1803, whereby the
distinctive features of the three colleges were in great measure
obliterated, the ecclesiastical privileges and those of the free
towns almost wholly swept away, the territorial representation

120 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct.,

so altered as almost to become personal, and the whole media r
tized Diet to bear somewhat the same resemblance to the Diet of
the former empire as exists between chess-men when set out in
array and the same pieces when huddled together in a box. No
human power could now avert the final crash, which yet was hur-
ried on by the acts of its own members. In 1804 the emperor,
in a document wherein the crown of Charlemagne quotes as a
precedent the action of the crown of Napoleon, raised his own
archduchy to the imperial rank, violating thereby the funda-
mental rule of equality among the states ; and two years after-
wards he dissolved the Empire of Germany, laid down the ti-
tle, and released all princes and people from their oath of alle-
giance, reserving only his new-created rank of Austrian emperor.

The sequel of those dissociated states was curious enough.
Out of the broken columns and fragments of the ecclesiastical
empire Napoleon reared up his Confederation of the Rhine, still
preserving the hierarchical form of a College of Kings and a Col-
lege of Princes, and still retaining a survival of hierarchical con-
nection in the presidency of the Archbishop of Ratisbon ; but
the principle of election had wholly given way to the nomina-
tion of a dictator. That organization it doubtless was which
suggested to the mind of Napoleon the fatal idea of a general
confederation of European states, with the pope at their head,
under the hegemony of France, which dominated all the rest of
his career, and which resembled the image set up by the con-
queror of another holy city, with its head of gold, and its body
of brass, and legs partly iron and partly clay. This idea it was
which led to his ill-fated marriage with a daughter of his Aus-
trian enemy ; which caused him to confer upon his little son the
title of King of the Romans, borrowed from the disrupted empire ;
which led him, against his will, to lay sacrilegious hands upon
.the holy pontiff, and finally to destroy his fortunes in the snows
of Russia in his frantic attempt to restore the monarchy of Po-
land. Thence came the curse of the excommunication, the thun-
derbolt of Moscow, the catastrophe of Fonlainebleau. The huge
image was struck upon the feet by an invisible hand, and the
gold and the silver, the brass and the clay, were shattered into
a thousand fragments.

From this point the history of the states of Germany passes
from the civil into the military form. After the exile of Napo-
leon, France, to use the exquisite formula of diplomacy, " re-
entered the limits of 1793," or, in the more brutal language of
the world, was forced to give up the foreign possessions she had

1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN, 121

seized, and amongst them the German dominions. Part, therefore,
of the gigantic task performed by the statesmen assembled at
the Congress of Vienna in 1814 was the reconstitution of Ger-
manic kingdoms into a single confederation a work which, in-
deed, would probably have been beyond the strength of any to
accomplish, but that every nation of Europe was well-nigh ex-
hausted by the incessant wars of a quarter of a century. The ar-
rangement here concluded may seem in some respects compli-
cated, and unquestionably had the effect of rendering the German
nation almost a nullity in Europe, but at least it lasted for nearly
half a century. In that confederation, as the old elective princi-
ple was already lost, so now the hierarchical element utterly dis-
appeared, and the territorial basis of representation was changed
into a plurality of votes proportional to the importance of the
state. The events by which the feeble tie thus created was
broken at last, and how one kingdom after another became
absorbed in the army of Prussia, has been already narrated ;
and thus we see the various steps by which the old ecclesiastical
elective republic (for a republic it was in all but name) of the
south has been transformed into the secular military empire
which owns Prince Bismarck as its uncontrolled dictator.

What may be the ultimate issue of these curious relations
between Germany and the Vatican is a point too difficult for
discussion, for it is part of that larger question which looms more
and more quietly, and yet more and more sullenly, every year
upon the political horizon : What is to be the relation of the spiri-
tual to the temporal authority throughout the world? Still, so
far as the experience of sixteen years will carry us and that is
but a very little way the antagonism between the empire and
the Vatican, which one would have naturally inferred from the
creating of the former, does not appear necessarily to exist; and
the issue of Prince Bismarck's gratuitous attack undoubtedly
tends to confirm that impression. The empire would seem to be
a kind of jolly giant, very fierce, a trifle stupid, but by no means
radically ill-natured ; and as for the Vatican, that most diploma-
tic of courts has been accustomed to deal with giants ever since
it came into existence. It is possible, no doubt, that the revolu-
tion may yet break out in Germany with tenfold the violence with
which it ever raged in France, as Heine, if we remember rightly,
foretold long ago ; and after the wreck of that storm perhaps
the lines of the old Holy Roman Empire, with their elective
principle and independent head, may suggest the outlines of a
plan for the re-edification of Christendom. But at present there

122 AT THE THEATRE. [Oct.,

is no question of the kind. The jurisdiction claimed by the Holy
Father is purely spiritual ; the jurisdiction demanded by the em-
peror and the prince is wholly secular. So long, therefore, as
the latter require nothing contrary to faith or morals, so long
there is no reason why, past history notwithstanding, perfect ac-
cord should not be maintained between secularized Germany and
the Vatican.

AT THE THEATRE.

IF anywhere, it is at the theatre that human nature shows its
motley side. There the world gathers to see itself as in a mirror
held up to nature. Youth and age, riches and poverty, gaze
with riveted eyes upon the mimic scene. Sympathy plays with
nimble fingers upon the gamut of the human heart, ringing her
changes from the deep bass of woe to the shrill treble of mirth.
Eyes moisten and hearts beat faster over the sorrows in the play.
The world, there looking upon its own picture, trembles and
weeps, laughs and applauds, and forgets its real existence in the
fiction of the moment. At the door of the theatre black Care
hastily dismounts from the weary shoulders he bestrides like the
Old Man of the Sea, and Sindbad forgets all about the odious
burden waiting for him outside when he sees the effigy of his
demon on the shoulders of Sindbad in the play.

How the human heart responds to the touch of nature, and
this brief panorama of life stirs it to its depths ! A queer com-
pound this human nature of ours ! See this vast audience with
bated breath hanging on the words of the actors ! With mouths
agape and eyes a-wonder they stare at the painted scene, all the
reality of life absorbed in the narrow compass of the boards the
players tread. Observe that man with the iron-gray beard in
the sixth row of the parquette; he is weeping yes, it may look
odd, but he is actually weeping over the sorrows of the neglected
young wife in the play. Hers is the old story a selfish hus-
band whose love cools and whose indifference grows day by day.
Her tender young heart lies bleeding and bruised under this
brute's feet. The tears stand in the eyes of the man in the par-
quette when he sees how bravely, patiently she bears her humi-
liation, hoping so hopelessly to win the errant love back again.
The roses fade from her cheek ; the lithe young form grows

1 886.] AT THE THEATRE. 123

slighter and old ; she wilts like a sweet flower that, hidden away
in a damp, dark place, gets no blessed sunshine, and so she droops
day by day for the lack of the warm love that would bring color
and life back to her faded eyes. The man in theparquette grows
indignant at the conduct of that brute of a husband trampling
under foot this tender, beautiful love, so precious, so pure, so
true ! In his burst of indignation he grips the arms of his
chair! Between his clenched teeth he mutters how he would like
to strip that brute to the waist, and bind him to a public
whipping-post, and lash him till the flesh is raw, crying out
at each stroke: "This for the wife-killer!" For was not the
husband in the play killing his wife by inches ? Do not neglect
and indifference kill as well as blows ? So the man in the par-
quette would execute summary vengeance on the man in the
play. But not so fast, Mr. Indignity ; this is all make-believe,
sham brutality, sham sorrow, sham killing, sham everything.
Whence this hot indignation over shams? Are you shedding
precious tears of sympathy over shams? Not a bit of it, Sir
Critic. This is no sham at all. Of course the picture is not the
thing itself, but it represents one of the saddest realities of life
the waning of the light of affection, leaving life blank and dark.
The brute in the play is an excellent portrayal of the brute in the
parquette, the very man we saw just now weeping over these
fictitious sorrows. Do you notice that the man in the parquette
is alone ? At home sits a silent woman, whose heart this man's
selfishness has long ago buried, and sealed the grave with a great,
heavy stone to make sure that there may be no escape from this
living tomb. Yes, he is just such another animal as the brute in
the play, whom he would lash at the public whipping-post while
he weeps over the sorrows of the young wife in the play. Brute
No. i doesn't recognize his own picture in brute No. 2, or he
wouldn't be so zealous to mete out chastisement to his represen-
tative in the play. He weeps because in the play he sees clear-
ly enough the brutality of the husband, whose blind selfishness
stands out well defined. The skill of the playwright has wrought
the plot so cleverly that the husband's cruelty is brought out in
full contrast with the wife's wrong. The man in the parquette
sees the young wife's heart laid bare, its anguish, the deadly,
sickening blight of a lost affection, its courage, its hope, its pa-
tience, its sweet devotion under its heavy sorrow. His sympa-
thies are aroused, his pity excited, and there is nothing in his
heart to interfere with their outburst. But at home ah ! that's
a different thing. There all that the playwright makes so evident

J24 AT THE THEATRE. [Oct.,

is hidden from his dull eyes. At home there are a thousand-and-
one things happening at every moment to fret his temper, a
thousand-and-one others to absorb his attention and make him
forgetful of that silent woman, who bears it all with such sweet
endurance ; and so he neglects her and acts the part of the brute
in the reality, while he grows indignant enough to throttle the
brute in the play ! So vice believes itself virtuous, and grows so
false that it grows blind.

But this man is not the only one who weeps. Over there in the
front row of the dress-circle, to the extreme left, with a dainty laced
handkerchief held to her eyes, sits a dainty damsel, distilling from
her sweet eyes pearly drops of sympathy. Her virgin heart is
moved, and in the glow of her pity she would take the young
wife in the play to her tender bosom, that they might mingle
their tears together. Ah! if she could but peep into the future,
that dark, silent, and unknown sea stretching its vast expanse be-
fore us all, perchance she would behold the vision of a young wife
in reality whose cheeks would show the faded rose and the tear-
stained courses of sorrow. Is the same fate awaiting her out
there in that dim, shadowy time to come when she, too, shall be
a young wife? Will the pitiless storm of life rain its fire But
there,' draw the curtain over the scene. Are there not enough
dreadful realities in this grinding world without borrowing
them from the unborn future? Cassandra, hold thy tongue!
Presto! but here's a funny fellow just come in! A merry smirk
lurks about the corners of his mouth as he gyrates on two toes,
jingling his bells. Motley's his name, and his quirks and his
quips, and merry good-humor and pinches of wit, like flashes of
light make rainbows on the tears of the weepers. Dry your
eyes, sweet friends ; here's cause for merriment. Heyday !
Life 's a holiday ; put aside your burden, put out of your hearts
that dull load of care ! Forget and be merry ! How easily we
are moved to either side of nature ! And the fool in the play
whisks off the stage, leaving us in great good-humor with our-
selves and the rest of the world. What a rollicking, jolly thing
is life ! Like a going to the fair on a holiday. Ribbons are fly-
ing, bells jingling, bands playing, the crowd flowing forward
and the crowd flowing back, with here and there a strain of song
from the throats of some happy, jolly dogs out, like the rest of
us, for a holiday and a going to the fair. Plenty of sunshine and
the bluest of skies, and the balmiest air ever breathed by merry,
holiday lungs! What a glorious, glorious thing to live ! Light

1 886.] AT THE THEATRE. 125

hearts, bright eyes, and the blood dancing in the veins to the
merriest tune of life ! A great alchemist is the fool in the play !
How he changes the dull, sombre metal of sorrow into the bright,
glittering gold of enjoyment!

Presto again ! the scene is changed as if by magic, as they
always do in the theatre. So it is in life : one play is scarcely over
before another begins. A gloomy, chill, heavy room, its walls
of massive, solid masonry, looks blankly out upon the audience.
Above the huge doorway a visorless helmet between two crossed
swords stares blindly. How oppressing is the atmosphere in this
room ! A vague feeling of terror seizes upon us, and such an un-
speakable silence falls upon us that each one can hear his heart
thundering in his ears ! Some dreadful deed is being perpe-
trated ! There seems to be murder in the air. Yes, there the
assassin comes with stealthy step, a brawny man with a fierce,
red beard, and, horrible ! he holds a bloody dagger in either
hand. His face is ghastly with fear, and his eyeballs bulge from
their sockets ! How noiselessly he glides over the damp stones,
keeping his protruding eyes fixed upon the doorway he has just
come through ! So intent is he that he does not see the dark-
haired, dark-browed woman standing in the middle of the room
watching and waiting for him. She lays her hand on his arm ;
he starts back, lifting the blood-stained blades as if to strike, but,
recognizing her, hoarsely whispers, " I have done the deed ; didst
thou hear a noise ? " How breathless and silent the audience
now ! All that vast throng spellbound with the horror of the
deed. A pin dropped could be heard all over the house. Every-
body is on the edge of his seat, with neck craned, eagerly leaning
forward, lips parted and eyes dilated ! Murder has been done,
most sacrilegious murder, and this is the murderer before them,
his fatal daggers yet dripping with the hot blood of his victim
a venerable, silver-haired man of benign aspect, and this man's
guest ! The horror and the terror of the deed has seized upon
the audience. But this is only a sham murder, we say; that
blood sham blood it is all sham terror, sham horror. Again
you are wrong, Sir Critic; no sham ever held the human heart
in that way. It is a faultless picture of an awful reality, which
the great heart of humanity realizes under the master-brush of
genius. It is the same old story of human nature, this time
burned up and consumed in the red-hot crucible of ambition the
demon that has led more than one to murder and infamy, and
consumed him to ashes. Nothing that is human is foreign to the
human heart, and the oft-repeated tale of love and hate, of sorrow

126 AT THE THEATRE. [Oct.,

and wrong, of life and death, will always hold their fascinatiqn
and mystery as long as that heart beats with the pulse of life.
That which misrepresents life is only sham. Exaggeration and
burlesque or false sentiment never strike deep roots in the soil,
and soon wither away. But the true and natural sentiments,
whose life is deep-rooted in the universal heart of man, can never
perish, for they are the realities of life and find an inexhaustible
fountain-head wherever nature flourishes.

And the players there what about them ? In a few short
hours they have lived a whole lifetime ! Then off go paint and
powder, doublet and hose all the tinsel paraphernalia of the show
is laid away, for the play is over. Yes, the play on the stage is
over, and the play in the world begins again. For actors and
audience there has been an intermission in the drama of life. As
the curtain in the theatre goes down, the curtain rises again in
the world, and the throng that has been witnessing that brief tale
of love, ambition, mirth, and hate turn once more into the busy
world to act their parts of love, ambition, hate, or strife. As
each one goes out he finds his Old Man of the Sea waiting for
him. There is no escape from him, that relentless, dogging old
demon, and at best you can only get a respite from his torments.
So each one accepts his burden and marches home to play his
part as best he may. Behind the curtain the players hasten away
from the painted scene and step into the street with the audience
who have just been witnessing their representation of life's vicissi-
tudes. The real play for ail begins again ; the interlude is over
and the curtain of life goes up once more. Look at the crowd as
it empties itself into the street. There goes the man we saw
weeping in the parquette. Can that man shed a tear ? Who
would suppose so to look at him ? His face is stern, hard, selfish.
He is going home, where a lonely woman sits patiently awaiting
him. He has no sympathy, no tears for her. He doesn't see the
purple pain in her heart, nor the dreadful gashes the daggers of
his neglect have made. There just back of him comes the sweet
face of the young girl we saw weeping so S} r mpathetically at the
sorrows of the young wife in the play. You can see that she has
been weeping, but she is smiling now as she looks up into the
face of the young man by her side. Their play is begun again.
What will be the end of this beginning? On she goes with the
crowd, one of the many to take her small or great part in the
world's play, where each shall play his part well or ill until the
curtain shall fall upon the last act and the play be over.

My lord who strutted the stage-boards with bright, bespan-

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 127

gled doublet and brave plume dancing in his gay cap shall lay
them aside, and the beggar shall put off his rags, and they shall
pass out together. His majesty the king shall lay aside his paper
crown and tinsel sceptre, and his fool shall lay aside his bauble,
and they shall pass out together. For the play is over, and the
sombre curtain has rolled down from above, hiding the deserted
scene where motley life had so bravely trod the boards.

A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

EVERY Catholic writer who has been sufficiently successful to
make him hopeful of earning a living by his pen must undertake
to solve a difficult problem. He must face an unknown thing to
which the position of choosing between two roads in an un-
known country is comfort itself. He must conclude to write as
a Catholic, openly and squarely, choosing, as Mrs. E. G. Martin
has done in Whom God Hath Joined (New York : Henry Holt &
Co.), subjects dear to his heart, entwined with his daily thoughts
and inextricably part of his life, or he must, as Christian Reid
used to do, put aside much that he seems almost forced to utter,
because he knows that, though he may write like an angel, he
will lose his audience if he offend its prejudices.

The experienced author knows very well that he must look to
the non-Catholic book-buyers for his income. Catholics some-
times say in print that there is an immense crowd of Catholic
readers waiting to buy the book of a Catholic novelist of merit,
but nobody believes this. For instance, we are safe in saying
that Christian Reid's profits from Morton House were much
greater than from Armine. One was a delightful novel, but one
that might have been written by Mrs. Oliphant, let us say, with
some literary differences. Armine is also a delightful novel, but
seriously Catholic ; it could have been written only by a Catho-
lic.

The Catholic who would make a living income by the pro-
fession of literature and letters in the United States deserves to
be called a profession must cultivate reticence and reserve, and
acquire the " colorlessness " of the public-school plan, or choose
subjects which he sees through an artificial medium formed of
the prejudices of his readers. This being the literary situation,
Mrs. Martin's courage in offering a thoroughly Catholic novel

128 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.,

to the general public is remarkable. The readers of " Katharine,"
which now appears under the name of Whom God Hath Joined,
will at once understand that there is no compromise with non-
Catholic prejudice in that book, no reticence for the sake of
making Protestant readers feel comfortable, and no artificial
medium to soften the rays of truth. There has been only one
change in " Katharine " to fit it for its new readers. The baptism
of Marlow's child one of the strongest situations in the novel-
has been left out.

It will be wonderful, indeed, if Whom God Hath Joined suc-
ceeds with the great body of novel-readers. In the first place,
it is too serious, and it has an evident motive. In the second
place, it has not enough of what is called "human sympathy."
Mrs. Martin concerns herself too much with souls. Novel-
readers do not care about souls. They do not care whether a
heroine's soul is saved or not, or whether the hero has any soul
or not. Mrs, Martin's seriousness, her having a perceptible mo-
tive, and even her Catholic bias, might be overlooked if her
novel was somewhat risque. If there was a delicately-managed
bit of impropriety as there is in that very successful novel East
Angels we could understand why Mrs. Martin should address
herself to the general reader. As it is, the pure, strong style of
the book it ranks as among the best specimens of English style
written by man or woman for many a day the true and heart-
felt feeling, the logic of the narrative, its high morality, will not
make it sell. Mrs. Martin must turn to Catholics to find readers
for it. And to such of them as appreciate a good novel, and are
willing to make the author's sacrifice in writing less of a sacri-
fice, we earnestly commend Whom Gad Hath Joined.

An historical romance which is neither historical nor roman-
tic is a sad example of bad judgment. Sometimes people are
inclined to forgive the doubtfulness of the history in romances
as they do in Sir Walter Scott's if there be interest, brilliant
color, and dramatic movement ; but when the history is doubtful,
and the doubtfulness of it does not flavor the story with pungent
spice, a romance of that kind has no reason to give for its exist-
ence. Constance of Arcadia (Boston : Roberts Brothers) has a
good name. It calls up associations at once picturesque and
tender. It is suggestive of romance and of times in which an
author could find dramatic contrast and gorgeous color. It is
anonymous, too, which is in its favor. And yet the author has
contrived to make a very dull narrative, full of absurdities about
the Jesuits, written with a very solemn air. It is not necessary

t886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 129

to warn anybody against them, for the character of Constance is
too uninteresting to excite interest. Her mother-in-law, Henri-
etta de la Tour, is another puppet, and Charles and Claude de
la Tour are, like Charnace, only names without anything but the
author's assurance that they ate, drank, talked, and thought, to
justify their place among human beings.

Constance de la Tour is the wife of Charles, who was lieu-
tenant-governor of Arcadia when Arcadia was liable to be
seized at any moment by Charles I. of England or Louis XIII.
Constance is a Huguenot from La Rochelie. She loved in
France the Sieur Charnace, but Charnac6 was a Catholic and
she refused to marry him. She took Charles de la Tour, a canny
Frenchman, who was making a fortune in Arcadia in the fur
trade. De la Tour was strictly a man of business, an Arcadian
Vicar of Bray. And Constance begins to ask herself whether she
would not have done better to have married the " Papistical "
Charnace, when the latter appears in Arcadia. Charnace has
been sent out by the superior of the Jesuits. He is, it seems, a
Jesuit of the " short robe." So soon as he hears that Constance
is alive he fancied that she had died during the siege of La
Rochelie he, in his cheerful " Jesuitical " way, thinks on means
for destroying Constance's husband.

" He would not/' writes the author, "be too scrupulous. It was surely
an accusation of the enemies of the holy church, emanating from the great
adversary, that he himself " (Charnace, not the devil), " in obeying his su-
perior, was willing to do evil that good might come. Is not all evil in the
motive ? The motive is good the greater glory of God. Does not this
holy end make holy the means needful to reach that end ? The life, or at
least the liberty, or at least the carnal prosperity of La Tour must be sac-
rificed for the good of the church, the state, the holy Hundred Associates
who were to plant Catholic colonies, and also for the spiritual good of La
Tour himself."

Charnace, having convinced himself in this manner that it is
his duty to ruin Constance's husband, goes to " his priest, Fra
Cupavo, and receives the sacrament." This confessor is a Jesuit,
too, but, according to the author of Constance, he is also a friar.
Later Charnac6, in spite of his piety, shoots off the lobes of his
confessor's ears, who looks on the sieur as his " master." This
condition of affairs has evidently been evolved from the inner
consciousness of the author. Charnace longs earnestly to dispose
of De la Tour, that Constance might perhaps, under his influence,
become the founder of a house of religious. Both Charnace
and Constance die Charnace very suddenly without having
VOL. XLIV. 9

130 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.,

spoken the affection they feel. After this the singular Jesuits,
who call one another " Fra," begin to conspire to get Charnace's
fortune, which he has left to Constance's son, who is to be in
charge of a Huguenot guardian. The Jesuit "friars" arrange
that a very charming widow shall declare that she is Charnace's
wife ; and on the head of this are written these exceedingly silly
sentences:

"Jean Cupavo [Charnace's confessor] did not, however, in his mourn-
ing altogether lose his wits. * What is to become of the governor's pro-
perty ?' asked the priest. ' Is our mission of St. Ignatius to exist only on
paper? ' To be sure his excellency left no will or wife, but with the church
all things are possible. Was it possible, also, that the church would
avenge the father confessor for the loss of the lobes of his ears, which he
had borne without a wrinkle or apparent disturbance of temper ? Silent
grudges have often borne an important part in the great crises of history.
Why not in Arcadia ? "

De la Tour, for reasons of a pecuniary nature, finally marries
the widow, who

"Accordingly, at the suggestion of her confessor, mingled in her hus-
band's cup of the wedding-wine powder of relics of Saint Brebceuf, the
Jesuit father who suffered martyrdom at the hands of the Iroquois. And,
after that, neither she nor the friars had reason to suspect Governor La
Tour of heresy ! "

It is a pity that the author of Constance of Arcadia should have
written such a book. His enemies have reason to rejoice.

Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson has taken advantage of the popu-
larity he has acquired, by writing book after book in rapid suc-
cession, each better than the other. His Kidnapped (Czssz\\ &
Co., limited) is a De-Foe-like narrative of the adventures of a
Scotch youth, David Balfour, who was kidnapped and cast away,
who suffered on a desert isle, lived among Jacobites in the High-
lands, and who begins another series of adventures at the end of
the book. The characteristics of this story are manliness and an
exact comprehension of the Highland character. The dialogue
between David Balfour, a Presbyterian, and Alan Stewart, whose
conceptions of Christianity may be described as " Highland,"
shows a keen perception of the motives of that strange people,
whose fidelity and bravery are proverbial :

"Troth and indeed!" said Alan, speaking of a hated Campbell, "they
will do him no harm ; the more's the pity. And barring that about Christi-
anity" David had reproved him for the " un-Christianity of blowing off
so many words in anger" "barring that about Christianity (of which my

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 131

opinion is quite otherwise, or I would be nae Christian), I am much of
your mind."

" Opinion here or opinion there," said David, " it's a kent thing that
Christianity forbids revenge."

"Ay, it's well seen it was a Campbell taught ye ! It would be a con-
venient thing for them and their sort if there was no such a thing as a lad
and a gun behind a heather bush."

The Highlands were in process of conversion, however, by
various catechists sent from Edinburgh, some also appointed by
local dignitaries. One of these was accused of highway rob-
beries. And of him another catechist says :

" It was MacLean of Duart gave it to him because he was blind. ' But
perhaps it was a peety,' says my host ; ' for he is always on the road, going
from one place to another to hear the young folk say their catechism, and
doubtless that is a great temptation to the poor man.'

" We had no sooner come to the door of Mr. Henderson's dwelling
than, to my great surprise (for I was now used to the politeness of the
Highlanders), he (another catechist) burst rudely past me, dashed into the
room, caught up a jar and a small horn spoon, and began ladling snuff into
his nose in most excessive quantities. Then he had a hearty fit of sneez-
ing, and looked around upon me with rather a silly smile.

" ' It's a vow I took,' says he. ' I took a vow upon me that I would nae
carry it. Doubtless it's a great privation ; but when I think upon the
martyrs, not only to the Scottish Covenant but to other points of Christi-
anity, I think shame to mind it.' "

Kidnapped is a novel without a love-story running through
it, and it is the more to be commended for that. The old
Germans held that there was a great deal to be done in life by
their young men before they should "turn to thoughts of love,"
and David Balfour is an exemplification of this opinion, for which
modern society would be better and more manly. Kidnapped is
decidedly the most popular novel of the month.

An American political novel does not entice the cautious
reader of light literature. One knows rather well what to ex-
pect by this time. The caucus, the convention; the point-lace
candidate admitting plebeian voters into his house ; the agonies
of his wife when the " heeler " expectorates on her carpet and
brushes against her bric-a-brac ; Saratoga, high white hats, big gold
chains, and German and Irish slang borrowed from the news-
paper reporters all this we have had, and all this is considered
to be an epitome of American political life. Mrs. Myra Sawyer
Hamlin, in A Politician's Daughter (D. Appleton & Co.), has intro-
duced us to new scenes. She takes us to a Massachusetts country
town. A Boston snob of the kind fortunately growing less

132 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.,

common who fancies that the fact that his great-grandfather
worked hard to live around Plymouth Rock gives him a patent
of nobility, walks home with Miss Harcourt, the politician's
daughter, from church. His name is Arthur Bradley, and he
carries a tightly-rolled umbrella after the English fashion :

" The avenue to Elmholm was a long, winding walk, quite an eighth of a
mile in extent ; but, arrived at the great iron gate, solidly guarded by two
lions, young Bradley paused, charged with his umbrella the turf at his feet,
and began rather awkwardly : ' You know you see you will understand,
my dear Miss Harcourt, how impossible how utterly impossible it is for
me to go further. My party principles/ my personal feelings, my family
and education are so opposed to your father's political attitude that I should
compromise my dignity by even entering the gates. It must have seemed
very strange to you that I have so repeatedly excused myself from accept-
ing your invitations, especially as I have been unable to conceal from you
or myself the unbounded admiration I have for you. You are the only at-
traction which holds me in Terratine. Coming here transiently on busi-
ness, I have been held here week after week in the hope of a casual meet-
ing with you, and I have been rewarded here and there, as you know first
by Mrs. Allen in allowing me to take you out to dinner, and then by other
kind people who have given me impersonal social opportunities. And
here, at the end of six weeks, I cannot go and I have no right to stay.
You know what my family is "

It is understood that the sentiments expressed in this speech,
which is suddenly cut short by Miss Harcourt, are quite proper to
a Bostonian whose ancestors have grown in grandeur, like Becky
Sharp's, because their descendant has concentrated his mind on
them, and for no other reason. They seem to mean insufferable
conceit to the outside Englishman or American who is not a
Bostonian. But we all have our weaknesses. The Philadelphia
matron who would die rather than visit persons that live west of
Broad Street and north of Market; the Baltimorean who posi-
tively cannot bow to vulgar people without a pedigree from
the Cecils ; the New York maiden who must drop all acquaint-
ances who cannot afford to join the proper dancing classes all
smile at the pretensions of the Bostonian. Probably there was
caste in early Rome when the third generation of the somewhat
dubious and tarnished gentlemen who founded that ancient co-
lony refused to know anybody not descended from the Sabine
women.

Miss Harcourt has no amiable tolerance for the Bostonian's
belief in his family. She sacrilegiously declares that she does not
entirely understand what his family is. He answers that " they
have been cultured gentlemen ; they have been educated men ;

i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 133

they have never been in politics." Then Miss Harcourt makes
a speech that, if delivered on the stage, would " bring down"
the gallery. She asks if the gentlemen of '76 had kept out of
politics, what would have become of the republic?

Miss Harcourt bears herself in a spirited manner throughout
the novel, rejects a typical politician's son, and marries Bradley.
After this she was, we presume, translated alive to the heights
where the Boston Brahmins sit on high and meditate on their
great merits. A Politician s Daughter is a clever story, sketched
rather than filled out. There are some good satirical hits, and
some speeches worth remembering. The style is interesting
but careless ; it is evidently the work of a woman of refinement,
whose observation of life is quick but not far-reaching.

George Manville Fenn's Double Cunning (Appleton & Co.) is a
sensational novel, nothing more. Katharine Blythe, by Katharine
Lee, is a harmless and flavorless story of the kind that English
writers turn out by the hundred every year.

Sefior Juan Valera is one of the modern Spanish novelists
who, from a literary point of view, deserve recognition from the
world. He knows and loves Spain; he has a delightful style,
crisp and with a sub-acid, humorous flavor ; and he knows how
to tell a story. Pepita Ximinez (Appleton & Co.), translated into
English, is the best known of his works. Sefior Valera has writ-
ten a long explanatory preface to the American edition of this
work, in which he explains how it came to exist. He knows
what life in the United States is, for he was till recently Spanish
minister at Washington. Sefior Valera's preface is like a heavy
stone tied to the tail of a light and ascending kite. It is too
heavy for it, and the kite would fly through the air all the more
gracefully without it. The preface contains some wise sentences,
more absurd ones, and several replete with that delicious Spanish
humor with which Pepita Ximinez is seasoned, and which is ob-
scured, but rendered nevertheless, as well as is possible, in the
English translation.

It seems strange that Sefior Valera had thought it necessary
to study the religious mystical literature of Spain in order to
create a pastoral like Pepita Ximinez. It would be a very charm-
ing book if it were not for an episode which will prevent it from
having a place in the family library an episode which was not
needed and which spoils a story as naive and reflective of the An-
dalusian life as any of Fernan Caballero's, and with a higher
literary finish. Sefior Valera pretends in his preface that he in-
tended to do a number of high-sounding things in writing Pepita

134 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.,

Ximinez. He has, after all, taken a young theological student, fer-
vent, pure, docile, but without a religious vocation, and showed
how, during a vacation at home, he fell in love with the } 7 oung
widow, Pepita, and married her. A Catholic reading the story
feels that Sefior Valera knows his hero and his hero's surround-
ings. Being a Catholic himself, though, he confesses, not a very
devout one, Senor Valera does not shock our sensibilities by any
of those exasperating misrepresentations that make absurd books
touching on the life of Catholics and written by non-Catholics.
It is a pity that Sefior Valera did not leave out one objectionable
scene and keep his preface for his biography. We cannot recom-
mend Pepita Ximinez because of that one scene in which the stu-
dent succumbs to temptation. It spoils a fresh and true pastoral
comedy. The old dean is an excellent specimen of the Spanish
priesthood, and the student himself is a witness for the inspiring
power of the Catholic Church and the wisdom of her discipline.
Sefior Valera very superfluously supplies his lesson in a high-
flown paragraph :

" What is certain is that, if it be allowable to draw any conclusion from
a story, the inference that may be deduced from mine is, that faith in an
all-seeing and personal God, and in the love of this God, who is present in
the depths of the soul, even when we refuse to follow the higher vocation
to which he would persuade and solicit us even were we carried away by
the violence of mundane passions to commit, like Don Luis, almost all the
capital sins in a single day elevates the soul, purifies the other emotions,
sustains human dignity, and lends poetry, nobility, and holiness to the
commonest state, condition, and manner of life."

The absence of that cynicism to be expected from a man of
the modern school of literature which would deny the dignity
and solemnity of the priestly vocation is a consolatory character-
istic of Senor Valera's work. The letter of the old dean, Don
Luis' preceptor, in which he says that a theological student of
" more poetry than piety " had better not become a priest, is
worthy of Cervantes.

Aphrodite (New York : Gottsberger) is a romance of ancient
Greece, without any particular merit. It is translated from the
German of Ernest Eckstein by Mary J. Safford.

It gives us great pleasure to describe Flights Inside and Out-
side Paradise by a Penitent Peri (George Cullen Pearson ; New
York : G. P. Putnam's Sons) as utterly unworthy of a compli-
mentary adjective that can be applied to a book, except that it is
short. An air of frivolous vivacity, generally forced, makes it re-
semble the European letters of N. P. Willis at his worst. It has

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS, 135

been pronounced by several journalistic reviewers as a valuable
book on Japan. The writer might have made it valuable ; but,
as he considered the condition of his own stomach while in Japan
more interesting than anything else, he has given the result of
this preoccupation in a sprightly way. This sprightliness, how-
ever, is applied to other objects occasionally for instance, to
a relic of St. John the Baptist at Genoa, and to indulgences.
Some reflections on page 285, supposed to be made by St. John,
are not only in bad taste, but without one grain of the comic salt
which is supposed to make them piquant. The author tells us
that M. Blanc, late proprietor of the gambling establishment at
Monaco, was

"An extravagant believer in the benefits to be derived from the pur-
chase of indulgences ; but he was a trustful man, and so he put the entire
sum at the disposition of the prince, who, it is said, did not expend the
money to the entire satisfaction of the propagators. Madame Blanc, in her
widowhood, also set aside a like amount for the same pious purposes, but,
like Mrs. Squeers, she allows no one to administer this cure for sick souls
but herself. Protestantism, not so readily providing for immediate and
facile absolution from peccadilloes, was, and I believe is still, forbidden in
the principality ; only that form of religion which can give the most ex-
tended indulgences being allowed."

This is a specimen of " smartness." The book is not immoral ;
it is only vulgar and flippant.

A very refreshing and honestly written book is Mrs. Abba
Goold Woolson's George Eliot and her Heroines. It is refreshing
because it comes at a time when the worship of George Eliot is
reaching a point at which it becomes a " craze." People are be-
ginning to put Mrs. Cross on a pedestal higher than Shakspere's,
and an unreasoning crowd acclaim as supreme an author who
had great merit as a keen observer of human life around her, but
whose gloomy, barren, and, we cannot help suspecting, affected
philosophy distorted much that ought to have been beautiful
into failure.

It would be silly to pretend that George Eliot was not a
great literary artist because her opinions, her objectless altruism,
her determination to show that most marriages are disastrous,
and her ponderous self-consciousness interfere with the value of
her work. But we rejoice that a clear-thinking writer, basing
her conclusions on Christian teaching, has pointed out the flaws
that exist in the composition of a literary idol whose worship,
unstinted and unreflecting, must have an ill effect on minds and

136 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.,

morals. Mrs. Woolson sums up the tenets of the creed which
Mrs. Cross taught, more or less veiled, in all her writings :

" Perhaps the fundamental principles of her belief cannot be more
clearly and briefly indicated than by giving the words of a personal friend,
in his report of her conversation : *

'"Taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as
the inspiring trumpet-calls of men the words God, Immortality, Duty she
pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how
unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.
Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of imper-
sonal and unrecompensing law.'

" Or, in our own words, there was, according to her creed, no supreme
Creator, demanding right conduct from his creatures, and himself furnish-
ing the instinctive sense to determine what right conduct is ; no life be-
yond this, to supplement our existence here, to atone for its suffering and
to recompense its steadfast adherence to duty ; no comprehension of duty,
except as a generous impulse we may chance to feel to extend aid and
comfort to fellow-creatures as hopeless as ourselves creatures who have
no home in any other world, and, like the butterflies, are fashioned but for
a day, and that a day, not of warmth and bloom and fragrance, but often-
er of searching blasts, sullen skies, and frozen fields."

Of the heroines of George Eliot, Mrs. Woolson truly says :

" They de not die ; they do not plunge wildly into sin, suffer stout mar-
tyrdom, or surrender proudly to fate. They simply live and live on. What
was a leaping flame becomes a lingering smudge. There are no graves for
us to weep over, no consoling visions of a translation to the stars."

Dorothea, admirably depicted by the touch of genius, fails
miserably ; Romola floats away into self-sacrifice that seems to
hold no compensation for her ; Maggie, in the Mill on the Floss,
owing to a crooked view of morality, suffers horribly ; Gwen-
dolen becomes a wreck ; Savonarola, a shadow in her hands, fails
miserably ; Tito, the most masterly of her characters, falls little
by little ; Grandcourt, Lydgate all pass before us disconsolate,
unsatisfied, unconsoled.

Mrs. Woolson's critique is thoroughly comprehensive and
very sound in both an ethical and literary sense. It is a distinc-
tion, and a valuable one for her, that she has not let herself be
carried away from her honest conclusions regarding George
Eliot and her works by the uncritical estimate which a great
part of those who form public opinion have made of the works
of a woman of genius who deserves a place as a novelist beside
Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Austen rather than near Thackeray or

* F. W. H. Meyers, in the Century Magazine, November, 1881.

i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 137

Balzac, and as a philosopher to be ranked among- those that
tried to pull down while the Light that enlighteneth the world
shone full upon them. Fortunately, generations to come will
" skip " her theories, as they have forgotten the purpose of Gulli-
ver, and read her novels for the stories which, once read, can
never be recalled without admiration and wonder at such po-
tency and vividness of imagination and expression.

We are so ready to pounce on the non-Catholic who, through
carelessness or ignorance, makes a mistake in statements concern-
ing the church, that it would be unfair not to praise the honesty
of Mrs. Clara Erskine Clement in doing all in her power to make
her Christian Symbols and Stories of the Saints (Boston : Ticknor
& Co.) correct in every detail. Mrs. Clement has had the vol-
ume revised by a hand entirely competent that of Miss Katha-
rine E. Conway, a lady whose writings are well known to the
public, and whose position in literature is well established. Miss
Conway is in every way qualified to make Christian Symbols
worthy of its dedication to the Most Rev. Archbishop of Boston.
The purpose of the work is fulfilled religiously and artistically.

" It has been undertaken," writes the author, " to satisfy a want often
felt personally by the writer and often expressed to her by others. Those
who go abroad and travel in Christian lands meet at every step, through
town and country, in the broad light of day and in the mysterious gloom
of sacred places, symbolic forms which are known in a general way to
represent the mysteries and facts of the Christian faith, but which fail to
recall them in anything like a distinct and accurate manner."

That the "intelligent" traveller needs such a book the re-
marks overheard in any church or picture-gallery are sufficient
evidence. This book will be the means of making the general
ignorance of " Christian symbolism " less dense. It is excel-
lently arranged.

138 NEW PUBLIC A TIONS. [Oct.,

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

MONOTHEISM THE PRIMITIVE RELIGION OF THE CITY OF ROME. By the
Rev. Henry Formby. London: Burns & Gates; New York: The Ca-
tholic Publication Society Co. 1886.

Father Formby attempts to prove that monotheism was the primitive
religion of Rome, established by Numa Pompilius, who learned both re-
ligion and law from the Hebrew nation and the books of Moses during a
visit which he made to Palestine. Father Formby is a very original, learned,
ingenious, and instructive writer. His thesis respecting Rome and Numa
is sustained by very plausible reasoning, which to a certain extent, we
think, may safely be called probable. We will not venture an opinion
on its conclusiveness. The whole subject is one upon which we prefer
to await the final verdict of a consent of competent scholars.

The discussion of his special thesis has led the author to enunciate his
opinions upon the more general topic of God's providence toward the
heathen world, and the survival of monotheism in the midst of polytheism
in the pagan nations. He takes a more generous and favorable view of the
religious and moral state of the ancient pagan world as a whole than the
common one of Christian writers. We concur with his views in this re-
spect, and admire their philosophical breadth as well as their conformity
to real facts and authentic history. Although he adheres to some tradi-
tional notions of chronology which are now becoming obsolete, yet his
general ideas are easily reconcilable with recent and improved science
and exegesis. .The work as a whole and in many parts, whatever we may
think of its most particular thesis, is one of great interest and value. We
could wish to see its thesis proved and adopted, if that be possible.

DURING THE PERSECUTION. Autobiography of Father John Gerard, of the
Society of Jesus. Translated from the original Latin by G. R. King-
don, Priest of the Society of Jesus. London: Burns & Gates; New
York : The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1886.

This book enables us to look back three hundred years through a time-
telescope, and to realize vividly the dangers to which a priest was exposed
in England during the persecution waged by Queen Elizabeth. Father
Gerard was a veritable "Jesuit in disguise," who was not terrified by the
acts of Parliament framed for the extirpation of Roman Catholics. Not
rashly did he undertake his dangerous mission, but with remarkable pru-
dence and unflinching courage. He was many times suspected of being in
league with the Papists, but he adroitly contrived to throw the burden of
proof on his persecutors. The priest-hunters constantly pursued him, and
great was the ingenuity he displayed in his frequent hairbreadth escapes.
Ultimately he was captured, and suffered the agony of the torture three
times while in the Tower, whence he escaped in a most extraordinary way.

The work of the translator is worthy of special commendation. In
this narrative of a heroic priest there is much that is intensely interesting
as well as profitable reading.

1 886.] NE w PUBLIC A TIONS. 1 39

STUDIES IN CHURCH HISTORY. By Rev. Reuben Parsons, D.D. Vol. I.
Centuries I.-VIII. New York and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co. 1886.

Dr. Parsons has prepared a series of historical abstracts from the best
authorities which students and intelligent laymen will find readable and
useful. The topics are such as have a polemical bearing in regard to
dogma, discipline, church polity, etc. The author's work in the second
volume will be much more difficult than it has been in this one. If it is-
accomplished in an equally successful manner with that in which he has
executed the first part of his task, the entire collection of studies will make
a most valuable addition to the library of English historical works.

S. THOMAS ET DOCTRINA PR^MOTIONIS PHYSICS, seu resppnsio ad R. P.
Schneemann, S.J., aliosque doctrinae scholae thomisticag impugnatores.
Auctore P. F. A. Dummermuth, Ord. Prasd. Sac. Theol. Magistro, et in
Collegio Lovaniensi ejusdem Ordinis Stud. Reg. Parisiis : apud editores
ephemeridis Annde Dominicaine, via dicta du Cherche. Midi, 19, 1886.

The above work will not fail to interest all serious theologians. Its au-
thor is regent of the Dominican Studium Generale at Louvain. Since the
study of St. Thomas, owing to the exhortations and patronage of Pope Leo
XIII. , has been restored to the high and honorable position it formerly oc-
cupied in Catholic schools, many have eagerly inquired as to who have
been the faithful guardians of his doctrine. Defenders of certain theologi-
cal systems, taking up under a new form old and celebrated controversies,
have presented themselves as the true interpreters of the.teaching of St.
Thomas. But this is an honor which the Dominican Order, quoting the
words of Pope Leo XIII. in his immortal encyclical, ^Eterni Patris, claim
as peculiarly their own (" Dominicana familia quag summo hoc magistro
Sancto Thoma jure quodam suo gloriatur"). Particularly in the very im-
portant question of grace and free will is it desirable that the doctrine of
the Angelic Doctor should not be erroneously interpreted. It was to pre-
vent any such evil result that the author undertook the above-mentioned
work, and all competent to pass a judgment on it will agree that he has
performed his task in a masterly manner. The work evidently is not ad-
dressed to the laity ; but ecclesiastics whose taste or whose professional
occupations lead them to a more profound study of theology and sacred
science will find in it a true light thrown on a profound question. *

KING, PROPHET, AND PRIEST ; or, Lectures on the Catholic Church. By
Rev. H. C. Duke. London : Burns & Gates ; New York : The Catholic
Publication Society Co. 1886.

These lectures of Father Duke give a clear and forcible explanation of
the nature of the church, whose mission is identical with that of our Lord
Jesus Christ, who was King, Prophet, and Priest.

The author knows generally how to reason with Protestants without
repelling them, which is the chief excellency in controversy. He treats of
the most important of all religious questions the office of the church. It
is of little use to treat of isolated doctrines of the church, unless the divine
authority of the church be satisfactorily explained. The conversion of Pro-
testants depends more upon their understanding this one point of Catholic
doctrine than any other. Father Duke's lectures explain this point tho-
roughly, and their publication will do good service to the cause of truth.

140 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Oct.,

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF R. SOUTHWELL, S.J., WITH LIFE AND DEATH.
New edition. London : Burns & Gates ; New York : The Catholic Pub-
lication Society Co. 1886.

The title-page of this volume is misleading, for it does not contain the
complete works of the poet and martyr, but only his poetical works. The
present publication is, in fact, a reprint of the edition edited by Mr. Turn-
bull and published by Mr. John Russell Smith in 1856. Mr. Turnbull's
preface, however, has been omitted and another one written in its place.
The bibliographical portion of the life found in the former edition is not to
be found in the present. The appendix has been placed in its more natural
position at the end of the volume. The pedigree of the Bellamy family,
although it is referred to on page xvi., is not to be found. With these ex-
ceptions the two editions are the same. We may add, however, in com-
mendation of this volume, that it is very well printed and sold at a very low
price.

THE OSCOTIAN. Bishop Ullathorne : The Story of his Life ; Selected Let-
ters, with Fac-simile ; four portraits of his Lordship ; views of Coventry
Church and Oscott College. London : Burns and Gates ; New York :
The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1886.

The Oscotians have made the "Bishop Ullathorne number" of their
magazine a worthy companion to the Newman and Manning numbers of
the Month. The bishop's career before he settled down quietly in Birming-
ham first as a sailor-boy, aijd then as an Australian missionary was
eventful almost to a romantic degree, and furnishes some attractive and
entertaining as well as edifying materials for a biographical sketch. It is
interesting both for young and old, and boys and bishops may peruse it
with equal pleasure and profit.

A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH RHETORIC : Precepts and Ex-
ercises. By Rev. Charles Coppens, S.J., author of The Art of Oratorical
Composition. New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.; Lon-
don : Burns & Gates. 1886.

In all our institutions of learning increased attention is being given
to the study of the English language. Formerly an acquaintance with the
great Latin and Greek models was considered sufficient to make one a good
scholar in his own language ; bt, while we do not believe that the value
of the ancient classics has been overestimated, we nevertheless see the
great necessity of giving all our students a special and thorough training
in the English language. Every one ought to know the rules of his own
language better than those of any other. Next to the English grammar
and dictionary comes rhetoric.

Father Coppens, S.J., the author of the book before us, has spent
nearly thirty years in teaching, and over twenty years in teaching English.
He is distinguished as a professor of rhetoric. Teachers, when they exam-
ine his Introduction to English Rhetoric, will pronounce it one of the best
if not the best text-book that they have ever seen. His Art of Oratorical
Composition has been extensively used in our colleges ; but this book will
find its way not only into colleges, but also into academies for young ladies.
In "the first part of the work many matters are explained and exercises
suggested " which are suitable for young pupils.

1 886.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 141

AN ANCIENT HISTORY FROM THE CREATION TO THE FALL OF THE WEST-
ERN EMPIRE IN A.D. 476. With maps, plans, etc. By Rev. A. J. B.
Vuibert, S.S., A.M., Professor of History in St. Charles' College, Elli-
cott City, Md. Baltimore: Foley Bros. j886.

This history has been written to serve as a text-book in academies, col-
leges, and generally for more advanced pupils in schools.

Originally intended as a revision of Fredet's Ancient History, the author
was obliged to abandon this attempt and compose a history which should
embody modern researches and be free from the defects and deficiencies of
the older work. Father Vuibert brings to the task his own practical know-
ledge of the needs of students, based on an experience of nearly twenty
years in teaching history and the classics, careful research and sifting of
the best and latest authorities Rawlinson, Grote, Merivale, Lenormant,
Cantu, and others well-marked divisions, clear arrangement, and a plea-
sant, animated narrative.

It is manifestly necessary, yet very difficult where so many subjects are
treated of, to unite brevity and clearness, comprehensiveness and condensa-
tion, details of facts, dates, and names, with a smooth, continuous, and in-
teresting narration. This new work, however, combines these qualities in
an eminent degree.

Without anticipating the public judgment, we think it will come to be
regarded as the standard text-book and merit very general adoption.

The other integral and accidental parts of the book maps, plans of
cities, index and dictionary of proper names add very much to its value
and usefulness.

THE LIFE OF DOM BARTHOLOMEW OF THE MARTYRS, RELIGIOUS OF THE
ORDER OF ST. DOMINIC, ARCHBISHOP OF BRAGA IN PORTUGAL. Trans-
lated from his Biographies, written in Portuguese, Spanish, and French,
by Lady Herbert. (For sale by the Catholic Publication Society Co.)

Dom Bartholomew of the Martyrs was a holy prelate of the sixteenth
century, who, like St. Charles Borromeo, was raised up by the Spirit of
God to promote ecclesiastical discipline. He proposed the most useful
reforms in discipline and morals decreed by the Council of Trent under
Pius IV. His influence over the fathers of the council was such that he
was looked upon as a "mouthpiece full of burning wisdom, zeal, and pru-
dence." The assembled prelates used to say, "The school of the Arch-
bishop of Braga is the best school in the world." After the close of the
council he devoted his energies to the utmost in carrying out in his
diocese the law and spirit of the Council of Trent. He deserves to be
compared with the canonized bishops of holy church. The translator of
this biography deserves more thanks than we are able to express for
giving us this beautiful and edifying life in our own language.

WHOM GOD HATH JOINED. A Novel. By Elizabeth Gilbert Martin.
New York : Holt & Co. 1886.

This is Mrs. Martin's first novel, and it was originally published in THE
CATHOLIC WORLD under the title " Katharine." It is a psychological
study, based on experience and observation, very true and very acute. The
title indicates that the one salient moral lesson inculcated by the story is
the paramount necessity of obeying conscience and the law 6f God at

142 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Oct.,

whatever personal sacrifice, specifically in respect to marriage. The man-
ner in which the Catholic Church, and it alone, lays down this law in the
name of Christ, is brought out with distinctness, and also the more general
lesson is inculcated throughout the story that only the Catholic religion
can satisfy the reason, the conscience, the heart, the personal and social
needs of men.

Mrs. Martin has a fine metaphysical and analytical mind, besides other
qualities and the practice of literary composition, which fit a writer to make
an artistic and readable work of fiction. We were best pleased, in reading
this story, with the earlier part of Katharine's history. The thoughts,
sentiments, mental and moral processes educed out of the large portion of
our present American generation, during its transition from the religion of
the past to something better or worse in the present or the future, are well
described in the instances of Katharine and several other persons, by
one who is competent and skilful in this kind of delineation.

We believe that the author has already attained a very considerable
fame by this first effort, and we heartily wish her success in future works
of the same kind.

ECCLESIASTICAL ENGLISH. By G. Washington Moon. London : Hatch-
ards, Publishers. 1886.

This is a criticism, and a severe one, of the English of the " Revised
Edition " of the Old Testament. The author, who is well known as a purist
in language, accuses the revisers of "violations of grammar, ungraceful-
ness of style, and infelicities of expression," and insists "that gross and
flagrant errors abound in their work " ; and we think he establishes these
accusations in the volume before us, though we consider him hypercritical
and even captious at times.

It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to avoid every error in
language in so vast an undertaking, but some of the errors Mr. Moon
points out seem inexcusable, and many of them are extremely inconsistent.

Much has no doubt been gained in accuracy of translation in the recent
revision, but not a little has been lost in the strength and purity of lan-
guage which were the chief merits of the old King James Version.

THE REAR-GUARD OF THE REVOLUTION. By Edmund Kirke. New York :
D. Appleton & Co. 1886.

History has not sufficiently honored the brave men west of the Alle-
ghanies who fought so well for liberty during the war of the Revolution.
It was these men who fought and won the battle of King's Mountain, which
turned the tide of the Revolution and prepared the way for the surrender
of Cornwallis. These men rushed of their own accord to the rescue of their
country, without pay and without hope of reward. Their greatest hero,
John Sevier, lies now in a forgotten grave, without headstone or inscrip-
tion. With the life of this man, and of two others, his comrades, Isaac
Shelby and James Robertson, the book is principally concerned. These
three, in the words of the author, "unknown backwoodsmen, clad in buck-
skin hunting-shirts, and leading inconsiderable forces to battle in the
depths of a far-away forest, not only planted civilization beyond the Alle-
ghanies, but exerted a most important influence in shaping the destinies of

1 8 8 6.] NE w PUB Lie A TIONS. 1 4 3

the country." The work of these men is depicted from their settlement of
the Watauga Colony to the close of the Revolutionary war. A most
graphic account is given of their struggles with the Indians, and the won-
derful manner in which they frustrated the English plans, which included
an attack from the rear by the allied Indians and Tories at the time when
the Southern seaboard was to have been descended upon. The men of the
rear-guard of the Revolution deserve to be held in grateful remembrance.
It is well that a history should be written which does them a tardy justice.
The book is written in a very engaging manner, and the descriptions of
some of the skirmishes and of the battle of King's Mountain are very vivid.
At times sudden transitions from the past to the present tense somewhat
mar the evenness of the work.

HENRY GRATTAN : A Historical Study. By John George MacCarthy.
Third edition. Dublin : Hodges, Figgis & Co. 1886.

Every Irishman loves the name of Grattan, and remembers with grati-
tude the great services he performed for his country, yet very little is spe-
cifically known about him. His services were too eminent and their results
too lasting ever to fall into obscurity, but about the man himself little is
known ; the mind's eye forms no clear portrait of him. Indeed, his life has
yet to be written. The book before us, though it gives us some idea of the
man, is but a mere outline sketch, too brief to be satisfactory. It is a pity
that Mr. MacCarthy has not written a fuller biography. After speaking of
how little is generally known of Grattan himself, he says in his preface :

" In order to find out for myself the manner of man Grattan actually was, to get a clear
conception of his individuality, to judge whether he was honest or a humbug, to know what he
aimed at, what he failed in, what he succeeded in, what were his virtues, what were his foibles,
what were his faults, how he looked, spoke, and worked, what was his private life, and what,
on the whole, was the true tenor of the man's existence in this world, I had to ransack, and get
ransacked, the dustiest shelves of a dozen libraries in Cork, Dublin, and London, to read scores
of books long since out of print, and to seek traces of him through all sorts of old memoirs,
magazines, newspapers, and parliamentary reports. I now respectfully submit the result of this
investigation."

After this amount of research we wonder that the author contented
himself with making a mere sketch. The sketch is very well done, it is
true so well done that we wish the same hand had given us a full-length
portrait.

THE IRISH QUESTION, as Viewed by One Hundred Eminent Statesmen of
England, Ireland, and America. With a sketch of Irish History. New
York : Ford's National Library. 1886.

This book contains a great number of letters from prominent Ameri-
cans to the editor of the Irish World expressing their sympathy with Ire-
land in the struggle for Home Rule ; Elaine's speech delivered at Portland,
Me., last June ; a verbatim report of Gladstone's great speech, April 8 last,
together with his second speech on the second reading of the Home Rule
Bill ; Parnell's speech, and other interesting matter.

The O'Connell Press Popular Library is issuing in a very cheap form
standard and popular works. The last volumes of this library that we have
received are the Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith, On Irish Affairs,

144 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Oct., 1886.

by Edmund Burke, and Poems by Gerald Griffin. Each volume is very neat-
ly printed and is small enough to be easily thrust into the pocket. Good
literature at a low price is always a great boon. The Library is issued
by M. H. Gill & Son, Dublin.

BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

ANNUAL REPORT OF THE OPERATIONS OF THE U. S. LIFE-SAVING SERVICE, 1885. Wash-
ington : Government Printing-Office. 1886.

CIRCULARS OF INFORMATION OF THE BUREAU OF INFORMATION. No. 5. 1885. Washing-
ton : Government Printing-Office. 1886.

QUARTERLY REPORT OF THE CHIEF OF THE BUREAU OF STATISTICS, Treasury Depart-
ment, for the Three Months ending March' 31, 1886. Washington: Government Printing-
Office. 1886.

THE JUDGES OF FAITH : Christian vs. Godless Schools. By Thomas J. Jenkins. Baltimore :
Murphy & Co. 1886.

HENRY GRATTAN : A Historical Study. By John George MacCarthy. Third edition. Dub-
lin : Hodges, Figgis & Co.; London : Simpkin, Marshall & Co. 1886.

HISTORY OF THE IRISH PEOPLE. By W. A. O'Connor, B.A. Second edition. London:
John Heywood, 1886.

SKETCHES OF THE ROYAL IRISH CONSTABULARY. By Michael Brophy, ex-Sergt. R. I. C.
London : Burns & Oates; New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1886.

TECHNIC. By Hugo L. Mansfeldt. San Francisco : A. Waldteufel.

LAND LESSONS, IRISH PARLIAMENTS, AND CONSTITUTIONAL CRITICISMS. By Clio. Dublin :
James Duffy & Sons. 1886.

CATHOLIC ALMANAC, Archdiocese of St. Louis. 1886.

MANUAL OF THE SODALITY. New York and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co. 1886.

THE SODALITY MANUAL. Dublin; : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886.

GOLDEN SANDS. Translated from the French by Miss Ella McMahon. New York : Benziger
Bros. 1886.

PRECES ANTE ET POST MISSAM PRO OPPORTUNITATE SACERDOTIS DICENDA. New York
and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co.

A CATECHISM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. Prepared and enjoined by order of the Third Plen-
ary Council of Baltimore. New York: Benziger Bros. 1886.

RELIGION IN A COLLEGE: What place it should have. James McCosh, D.D., LL.D. New
York : A. C. Armstrong. 1886.

THE ALLEGED BULL OF POPE ADRIAN IV. A Lecture delivered by Rev. P. A. Yorke.
Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886.

SOCIETY OF ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. Report of Superior Council of New York to General
Council in Paris. New York : Donovan & Londrigan. 1886.

LONDON OF TO-DAY : An Illustrated Handbook for the Season. By Chas. Eyre Pascoe.
Boston : Roberts Bros. 1886.

STUDIES IN MODERN SOCIALISM AND LABOR PROBLEMS. By T. Edward Brown, D.D. New
York : D. Appleton & Co. 1886.

A HYMNAL AND VESPERAL FOR THE SEASONS AND PRINCIPAL FESTIVALS OF THE ECCLESI-
ASTICAL YEAR. With the approbation of the Most Rev. J. Gibbons, Archbishop of Balti-
more. Baltimore : John]*Murphy & Co. 1886.

THE TIMES PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES FOR THE WEEK ENDING JUNE 12, 1886. London :
George Edward Wright. Times Office, Printing House Square.

WARD AND LOCK'S ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO, AND POPULAR HISTORY OF, DUBLIN AND ITS
NEIGHBORHOOD. London : Ward, Lock & Co. 1886.

We have received from Cassell & Co. the following numbers of their National Library :
POEMS, by George Crabbe. VOYAGES AND TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO. THE MERCHANT
OF VENICE, by William Shakspere. HAMLET, by William Shakspere. PLUTARCH'S LIVES
OF ALCIBIADES AND CORIOLANUS, ARISTIDES AND CATO THE CENSOR. SIR ROGER DE

COVERLEY AND THE SPECTATOR'S CLUB. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS, and Other short

Pieces, by Jonathan Swift. RELIGIO MEDICI, by Sir Thomas Browne, M.D. NATURE
AND ART, by Mrs. Inchbald. VOYAGERS' TALES FROM THE COLLECTION OF RICHARD
HAKLUYT. ESSAYS by Abraham Cowley. It will be seen that this Library contains most
excellent reading put into very cheap and very convenient little books.

ERRATUM. In article " The Borgia Myth," on page 14, last
line, for steeds read steers.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD

VOL. XLIV. NOVEMBER, 1886. No. 260.

RELIGION IN EDUCATION.

ELEMENTS fraught with danger are entering American' so-
ciety and rendering the solution of the social problem extremely
difficult. How shall those elements be treated so that strength
may be found where weakness is feared, and support where dan-
ger appears? How shall they be assimilated to the body politic
and assist in the development of the ideas which underlie our
structure of government. Socialism and anarchy may be driven
beneath the surface by the severity of justice, but law alone
cannot destroy Socialism nor answer its questions. Capital and
labor, both powerful in organization, have grappled for the mas-
tery, and the consequences of the struggle outreach any calcula-
tion. How to reconcile them and save society is a very serious
problem. The moral degradation, the disregard of God and duty,,
the increase of those crimes that destroy confidence in men, the
spread of infidelity and its attendant evils, are forcing thoughtful
men to look about them for means of salvation. Education of the
masses at public expense has been placed in our plan of govern-
ment as a panacea for all our social ills, the enemy of crime
and of pauperism. In accordance with these ideas millions of
dollars are annually spent upon buildings and in salaries, and the
energy of the government is directed to the support of the free
public schools. The results are such that men are beginning
to ask if the benefits compensate the outlay. Educators are
finding defects in the system and are seeking for remedies.
The Catholic Church, speaking for her own children, boldly.

146 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov.,

asserts that the defect is a radical one, and that the education,
which is becoming entirely secular, lacks one of the essentials
necessary for the complete development of manhood, without
which no harmony can exist in society namely, religion. To
ameliorate the social condition, to lift man up to virtue and
keep him out of vice, to teach him his relations to his fellow-men,
religion is necessary, and, for the Catholic, Catholicity. The
church loudly proclaims that the world is fast dividing itself into
the camps of Christianity and infidelity. Society's salvation is
in Christianity ; it is inseparably connected with the Redemption
effected by the Son of God. Society's manhood is hidden in the
child, and the education which draws it forth and develops it
must be impregnated with and informed by Christianity ; in a
word, it must be Christian. All that can be said upon the abso-
lute necessity of religion in education has been so often repeated
that it seems foolish to recur to it again. The truth must be con-
stantly told in order to repel falsehood, and the grounds upon
which Catholics base their objections to the public schools need
to be kept in view in order that non-Catholic Christians may
finally accord us justice and sacrificing Catholics may be encour-
aged to strain every nerve to supply the defects and save their
children to the church and to God.

Let us consider education in itself and then examine what
religion has done for it. What is education ? What does it mean ?
As the word itself implies, education is the drawing out, the de-
velopment, the cultivation, the polishing of all the faculties
of man, and the disposing of man to use these faculties for the
best interests of man and society. It is a development of man's
most generous instincts, an expansion of his most legitimate
wants, a cultivation of his dispositions for good, a curbing of his
inclinations for evil. Education makes or unmakes the man ; it
is the mould in which his character is cast. Man has mind,
intelligence; education trains the faculties of mind to grasp
the truth. Man has heart; education trains the faculties of the
heart to cling to the true and the good. Man has a body, and
education is to train the physical faculties to maintain a sound
body as a necessity for a sound mind. Education, then, is the
training of the entire man, soul and body. In a word, it gives to
a man's whole nature its completeness and perfection, so that he
may be what he ought to be and may do what he should do.
How false, then, the theory of the education that devotes all
attention to the mind and neglects the soul, forming intellectual
giants with depraved hearts !

1 886.] RELIGION IN EDUCATION. 147

Where will education seek for the principles by which the
heart will be developed in the virtues necessary to control the
intelligence and guide its knowledge? We know that the source
is religion, and religion finds its highest expression in Christianity.
Whence have I come, whither am I going, why am I here? are
questions of the soul. Education must answer them and assist
man in working out the ends of his existence. Science and the
world cannot answer satisfactorily. Christianity alone, which is
the voice of God, tells man that he is from God and that his life
should be spent in God's obedience.

Man, then, demands that education assist him to work out his
destiny ; that his faculties be trained to interweave in his life the
two ideas of God and himself ; that he be led by his intelligence
to know God, and by his heart to love God, and thus attain to
the highest and best results of his manhood.

All men have recognized this religious necessity in the educa-
tion of youth. The pagan between the lines of his favorite
authors read of the gods of Olympus. The Hebrew children
were guided by the laws of Moses as the basis of education.
Among them was the proverb that even the building of the
temple should be suspended that the children might be educated
in the law. The Mohammedans used the Koran, and the first
Christians the books of the Gospel, as school-books; the early
settlers in these colonies recognized the necessity of religious
schooling, as their church schools attest. Our theorists of to-day
acknowledge its necessity, but they differ as to what religion
means in this connection. Some consider it an abstract science
which ought to be taught in the home, in the Sunday-school, in
the church as if the knowledge of God had no place in public
instruction, but was fit for certain places only ; others would
make it that grain of spirituality given by a few moments of Bible
reading, or by the moral influence of the Bible upon a teacher's
desk ; others those broad principles of general morality which are
pagan as well as Christian, and which teach a shallow and sense-
less Deism.

But with all this no consistent Christian can be satisfied. Re-
ligion is not an abstract science confined within a limited and
determined sphere, but a universal science, the science of sciences,
to be found daily and hourly in the course of study, imparting a
sweetness to all ; not found in one book but in every book, form-
ing the heart of a child, correcting his young intelligence, develop-
ing the trend of young dispositions ; in a word, showing him the
true source of the beautiful, the good, and the true, finding God's

148 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov.,

footprints everywhere in creation. It is the eye of all the sciences
looking to the great end of all things the glory of God and the
salvation of man. It is the source of public and private virtue.
Law and order rest on the moving sand, if religion enter not
into the character of the youth called upon to sustain them.
Irreligion breeds a licentious manhood, disrespectful to legiti-
mate authority, restless under law, shifting with every wind, and
finally destructive of society.

Religion tells education man's destiny ; it points out man's
duties and man's wants ; it opens up the field and guides the
hand that cultivates. The child is a man in miniature, with
soul and body made to God's image and likeness, destined for
eternal happiness which is purchased by fidelity to God's laws.
The child has a character to be formed ; that character must
be Christian. He has an intellect which demands truth, a heart
wanting to love truth, passions to be restrained, virtues to be
developed. The child is clay in the potter's hand, wax ready
for impressions. He is ready for the mould in which his man-
hood is to be cast ; and as that manhood should be Christian,
the mould must be Christian. The child must be fed on Chris-
tian food, that he may be able to stand in presence of creation
and interrogate men and things, know the world and its past,
and build up for the future a social fabric of virtue by which
he may be saved, and with him society. For the Christian child
nature bears the imprint of God, and every force in nature
ought to be made to bear with it some conception of the unseen
power hidden under its veils. His great want is God, a know-
ledge of God's laws and obedience to them, by which vice is
eradicated, virtue inculcated; by which he becomes an obedient
child, a virtuous parent, an honest workman, a conscientious
citizen.

Government requires that its citizens be educated in their
duties. Republics demand that they be able to read and write
in order to exercise the franchise. But every government needs,
first of all, that its citizens be honest, good, pure. It needs that
the masses be educated, but as Christians. It is useless to put
tools in the hands of miners unless you give them means of dis-
criminating the true metal from the base. Religion does this for
man, Neglect religion in teaching youth, and what security for
law, for life, for property? What avail guarantees? Duty and
loyalty are high-sounding names, but vain, dead, if not arising
from religion. Neglect religion and you forge links which time
and chance will unite in producing revolutions which will upheave

1 886.] RELIGION IN EDUCATION. 149

society and finally destroy it. If you place keen weapons in a
vicious man's hands you breed Catilines and Robespierres.

Intellectual culture, even in its highest development, cannot
subdue the passions nor enable a nation to attain its destiny.
The sound mind requires a sound heart to preserve the na-
tion from the passions of men. Greek and Roman masters
are the models in modern education, but the arts and sciences
did not save Greece and Rome when immorality invaded their
homes.

Our government needs patriotism, but patriotism founded
upon morality. Authority, obedience, justice, are the virtues
upon which a good government is built, and who can teach and
sanction them except religion ? Where are these citizens, these
patriots, to be formed ? In the schools. If virtue, then, be essen-
tial for good citizenship, if morality be necessary for true patriot-
ism, and if morality and virtue find their teacher in Christianity
and what Christian can consistently deny it? how in the name
of common sense exclude it from the school which is instituted
to form it ?

Religion in modern education is like a foreign language,
studied or omitted at will. But it requires more than culture of
mind to make morality ; it requires virtue, it requires Christian
life, which will make a man love the government because God
wills it, and not from any fear of dungeon or in accordance with
theory or self-interest, prompting one thing to-day and another
to-morrow. It is certain that Christian education alone can rear
a people Christian. Education without Christianity will rear a
people without Christianity, and a people so educated will soon
become anti-Christian.

All this calls for Christian morality, and society for its own
preservation must see that these virtues be taught, and public
education which forms the members pf society must incorporate
in its teaching that which will supply this necessity.

Leading minds in every age have recognized the necessity of
religion as an essential factor in education. De Tocqueville, who
understood our institutions as well as any man, recognized this
when he wrote :

" Where virtue and reason prevail the most popular form of government
may exist without danger; where religion does not rule it is useless to pro-
claim religious doctrine. You may talk of the people and their majesty,
but where there is no respect for God, can there be much for man? You
may talk of the supremacy of the ballot, respect for order, denounce riot,
secession ; unless religion be the first link all is vain."

1 50 RELIGION IN ED UCA TION. [Nov.,

And Bonaparte, that great reader of men and society, ex-
claimed that "society without religion is like a ship without a
compass, uncertain as to whither it is going."

Plato, who reasoned so well, said that " ignorance of the true
God was the greatest pest of all republics."

And Robespierre, a short time before execution, was forced by
truth to utter: " The Republic can only be established upon the
eternal basis of morality."

Public education which moulds society, which builds the re-
public, must be based upon religion in order to found a republic
upon morality. Statesmen have recognized this.

Ex-Governor Clifford said : " Moral culture and discipline
ought to be an essential part of every system of school edu-
cation."

President Seelye has said :

" It is not the illiteracy of any people, but their immorality, it is not
their knowledge but their virtue, on which either their destruction or their
salvation hinges. But the morality of a people is not secured by teaching
them moral precepts. Men are not made virtuous by instruction in virtue.
We have yet to see a moral renovation of society accomplished by the
teaching of morality, however pure. Without a question the great moral
reformations of society have been wrought by religion."

Guizot, the great French Protestant historian, has said :

"In order to make education truly good and socially useful it must be
fundamentally religious ; national education must be given and received in
the midst of an atmosphere religious. Religion is not a study or an exer-
cise to be restricted to a certain place or hour. It is a faith and a law
which ought to be felt everywhere."

Disraeli, the English prime minister, said :

" I am not disposed to believe that there is any existing government
that can long prevail founded on the neglect to supply or regulate reli-
gious instruction of the people.*'

Derby, a leading statesman of Great Britain, said : " Public
education should be considered as inseparable with religion."

Gladstone, the great leader of the English Commons, said :
" Every system which places religious education in the back-
ground is pernicious."

Huxley, the leader of English infidelity, said: "If I am a
knave or a fool, reading or writing will not make me less so."

Horace Mann, the great patron of common schools, said:

"If the intellect, however gifted, be not guided by a sense of justice, a
love of mankind, and a devotion to duty, its possessor is only a more splen-

[886.] RELIGION IN EDUCATION. 151

did as he is a more dangerous barbarian. We are fully persuaded that the
salt of religious truth can alone preserve education from abuse."

In the Church Quarterly Review of July, 1881, are these words:

"The ignorance of the three R's is not the cause of crime. The real
cause is our depraved nature our anger, greed, lust; and these will break
out into crime under favorable circumstances, both among the literate and
illiterate, unless they are brought into subjection by religious training."

Men, then, are agreed ; government demands ; society, the
family, the child, the soul, all cry out for religion as the basis,
the life of every system of public education. And, for the Chris-
tian, religion means Christianity ; and for the Catholic, Chris-
tianity means Catholicity.

There are men who will ask if this does not mean to go back
to ignorance and the darkness of the middle ages. We answer
that in those days there may have been ignorance of science, but
men knew God. Better the ignorance of science with a know-
ledge of God than the ignorance of God with a knowledge of
science. Better the faith of the middle ages, with all their ig-
norance, than the enlightenment of to-day with its denial of
God. St. John Chrysostom says: "Learning is of relatively
small value in comparison with integrity of soul. We must not
give up literature, but we must not kill the soul.'*

Those men who fear religion in education forget that truth is
not darkness, Christianity is not ignorance, and that when we
clamor for religion in education we are calling for true know-
ledge, for that. true light which enlightens every man coming
into this world ; we clamor for the torch to guide our footsteps
through the mazes of science ; we are seeking for a staff to sup-
port our limbs ; we are demanding manna to strengthen our souls
in the desert of life.

We simply ask that Christ be in our life, and especially in the
school, where character is formed. We ask that Christ be in our
life to teach us morality.

The most glowing pages of history are those that tell of the
labor of religion in education. In the beginning of the Christian
era Christianity had to contend with the paganism of the tyrant
emperors, and in education it had the schools of the empire to
battle against.

In the days of St. Mark, in Alexandria, under the shadow of
the bishop's cathedral the first Christian schools were estab-
lished. Entering Alexandria he found the classics of Greece
and Rome in the schools, the science of numbers from Egypt,
the Hebrew scriptures translated into Greek because of the

152 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov.

beauties contained therein. He brought to the schools the
books of the Gospels, the traditions of St. Peter and St. Paul, the
Apostles' Creed which contained more true philosophy than all
the books of Greek and Roman sages and the chant of the
church ; and these were the first class-books of the Christian
schools. Clement, Origen, Tertullian are the names of some of
the great masters of those early Christian schools, where the lite-
rature of the pagans was studied side by side with the literature
of Christianity. As we look back to those schools can we won-
der that the young Christian student found the^story of Ovid and
the Golden Age insipid when compared with the glowing image-
ry of the prophets painting the kingdom of the Son of Jesse, the
Saviour of man ?

Can we wonder that the Christian student laid aside the
sweetly-flowing verses of Horace and Virgil, and the elegant
periods of Tacitus, and the glowing story of the gods, to fill his
heart with the sweet lessons of the Incarnate Word, the God
made man? During the first three centuries schools were estab-
lished at Jerusalem, Edessa, Ephesus, Smyrna, and Antioch.
These were the beginning of the episcopal seminaries, where
the young clerics were taught the liberal arts and the science
of theology. In those days there were also the priests' schools,
established in each parish under the charge of the parish priest,
where the children of the poor received their education free.
The Council of Vaison in 528 obliged pastors to found such
schools, and to this may be traced the origin of parochial schools.
Then came the monastic system, which trained the monks, like
bees, to cull the honey from the flowers of literature and store
it for future generations. Prominent in that system were the
Benedictines in 552, the source of the schools of the middle
ages. The monastery had its interior schools, where the subjects
of the order were instructed ; its exterior schools, where the
poor children of the neighborhood received not only their edu-
cation gratuitously, but were even fed and clothed. And yet
men talk of free schools as an institution of this age of ours.

" The praise of having originally established schools," says
Hallam, " belongs to some abbots and bishops of the sixth cen-
tury." Anglo-Saxon records tell of Theodoric, Archbishop of
Canterbury, sent by the pope in 668 to propagate schools in the
Anglo-Saxon church. In the beginning of the eighth century
we find the schools of England under Egbert remarkable for art
and science. In council at Aix-la-Chapelle in 789 bishops were
commanded to establish free public schools. The Third General

1 886.] RELIGION IN ED UCA TION. 1 5 3

Lateran Council, 1179, renewed the order. In Rome, in 1078, a
school of liberal arts was placed beside ever)' episcopal school.
Through the " dark ages " every bishop had his seminary, every
monastery its exterior school, every priest obliged to sustain free
parochial schools, as we may see from the Synod of Mentz in
800, Council of Rome in 836, and Lateran Council in 1178. In
1245 the General Council of Lyons spoke of it. In the eleventh
century the monastic system began to decay, scholasticism arose,
and with it arose the universities of Paris, Padua, Salamanca,
Bologna, Oxford. Here it is good to remember that Huber, a
Protestant, has said :

" Most of the Continental universities originated in entire dependence
on the church. This new intellectual impulse sprang up not only on the
domain and under the guidance but out of ecclesiastical schools." Ranke
adds : " A sure and unbroken progress of intellectual culture had been
going on in the bosom of the Catholic Church for a series of aeges. The
vital and productive elements of human culture were here mingled and
united."

No man can justly dispute the claims of Christianity and re-
member, Christianity was then the Catholic Church to the edu-
cation and civilization of Europe, even that of the barbaric hordes
who swept across the Continent. No scholar can ignore the
popes who during all these long ages were the nursing fathers of
Christian science, whether in maintaining free schools for the
poor or in establishing and supporting the universities ; sending
an Augustine to the Angles, a Patrick and a Palladius to Erin, a
Boniface to Germany, a Cyril and a Methodius to the Slavs.

We may be pardoned for alluding in a special manner to the
work of the church in Catholic Ireland when the Green Isle was
the land of schools and scholars, " the refuge of civilization and
literature learned Ireland," as Usher says. St. Patrick estab-
lished a university at Armagh, which in the ninth century had
over seven thousand students, representing all the countries of
Europe. St. Finian taught at Clonard, " whence issued," says
Usher, " a stream of saints and doctors like Greek warriors from
the wooden horse at Troy." The church of Ireland during the
sixth and seventh centuries was the leader in education. No
country at that period could boast of such pious foundations or of
religious communities for education equal to what adorned that
land. When the rest of Europe was in barbarism Armagh, Clon-
macnoise, Clonard, and Lismore had their masters of philosophy
and sacred science, whose learning had passed into a proverb.

154 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov.,

The Irish schools sent forth their scholars to civilize Saxon and
Teuton and Gaul, and teach them their letters. Camden says :
" Moved by the example of our fathers for a love of reading, we
went to the Irish, renowned for their philosophy." These were
the glories of her learning in the days when Ireland was free.

And these are but fragments of the work of the Christian
Church in education. What might be said of the epochs of
Bede, of Alcuin, of Alfred the Great, of Charlemagne, of Leo X.,
Gregory the Great, Benedict XIV., and Louis XIV.? They
stand forth in letters of gold to give the lie to any man who
would assert that true science has anything to fear from religion.
They cry out that Christianity has developed the Christian idea
in man, that it has been an active principle permeating every
walk in life, individual, social, and national ; that it has pro-
duced an atmosphere of faith, moulding simple, strong, and able
characters; that it preserved the literature of the ancients, and
clothed art, sculpture, painting, and architecture with immortal
glory ; that it has laid stone upon stone in those universities and
schools which made the cities in which they were, and which re-
peat in undying tones: Christianity built us, and we have edu-
cated the world !

Theorists of to-day would have us forget the past, divorce re-
ligion from science, and give us, instead of Christian schools, their
methods for secular education. Greece and Rome tried that
system, and the republics are long since in ruins. Secular educa-
tion made men mere machines of the state, mere nationalists,
and when the crisis came the social structure had no morality
to sustain it ; its eloquence, art, and philosophy all failed, and
Greece and Rome fell, leaving the lesson that science is not
morality, that mind-culture alone ''leads to bewilder and dazzles
to blind," that religion alone can save the state. Secular educa-
tion, as it is called, has had time even with us to prove itself, and
what is the result? Are our citizens better? Is virtue more
prevalent? Does vice find no place in public life? The crimes
that cover the columns of our daily papers are the crimes of
educated men, not those of ignorance. The disregard of au-
thority, parental and national; the tendency to deny God's exis-
tence, to scoff at his sacred revelation ; the infidelity, communism,
and socialism of the age ; the lack of reverence for all that has
been considered sacred ; the immorality of society, that might
shame a Sodom and Gomorrah these are the fruits of secular
education, of education divorced from religion.

Secular education has made religion an abstract science and

1 886.] RELIGION IN EDUCATION. 155

left it to chance. It has reduced science to abject materialism.
It has taught the lives of statesmen, of warriors, of men of fame,
but has omitted to tell the heroism and virtues of the Christian
martyrs and saints, and has spoken of the great Redeemer,
Christ, as an ordinary hero. It has sent into society a discon-
tented and grasping youth who think that shrewdness is per-
fection, that material prosperity is the end of life ; averse to
manly labor, ready to sit in judgment upon everything and
everybody, even God himself; creating shallow, conceited scep-
tics, more learned in law than the judges, more theological than
the theologians ; hating restraint, disregarding parental authori-
ty, and becoming in so many cases the masters of intellectual
vices. And yet they have had the Sunday-school, the home, and
pulpit influences, and these are the results.

Secular education cannot be neutral it will at least make
men indifferent; and religion is a thing too important to have
men indifferent about it. Indifference leads to irreligion, and
how can we, who believe religion to be our life, accept it?
Men who love Christianity and fear God may well shudder at
the future of society if the theories of scientists are to be allowed
to drive religion from our education.

To the Catholic education is a question of principle as to the
union of religion and science in public instruction. His guide
in faith and in life is the old Catholic Church which, amid the
revilings of centuries, still asserts the doctrine of Jesus Christ
that man is from God and for God ; that the best citizen for a
state is the man who is faithful to his God, whose morality is not
only exterior but interior; who obeys authority, not for self,
ambition, or fear of punishment, but because it comes from God.
She asserts that her children need more than secular knowledge,
and she warns educators against the fallacies that strip their
vocation of its usefulness by removing it from the refining in-
fluences of Christianity.

Conscience is our imperative monitor, and conscience tells us
that knowledge of the sciences with ignorance of God and of the
soul is a curse and not a blessing; that as our forefathers, the
early Christians under the Roman emperors, gladly gave their
lives rather than sacrifice to false gods, so we will gladly make
all sacrifices necessary to preserve the inheritance of their faith ;
that as our fathers, under English monarchs, proudly refused the
food and clothing, ay, and the life, offered rather than yield, so
we will be true to our religion, which can alone make true men
of us.

156 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov.,

How much longer will Christians be deceived by the idea that
a republic of freemen necessarily depends upon one mould in
which all its character must be formed, and that that mould is
the public-school system, which excludes religion, and which
must not be opposed under the penalty of treason to American
institutions? What the republic needs is men, and the education
that develops the best manhood is its best friend :

" What constitutes a state ?
Not high-raised battlement or labored mound,

Thick wall or moated gate ;
Not cities proud, nor spires and turrets crowned :

No ! men, high-minded men ;

Men who their duties know,
But know their rights, and, knowing, dare maintain :

These constitute a state."

The strength of manhood is in virtue which springs from faith
in Christ, whose maxims are to guide in the development of true
character. Christianity is divinely commissioned to teach all
nations, and insists that the child be taught according to the
Gospel.

Religious men and women, consecrated to education, receive
the blessing of Mother Church, and. teach science and literature in
an atmosphere of religion in the church schools. America need
never fear those schools. They are not rivals but co-workers in
the education of the people. Patriotism is taught there side by
side with the Commandments of God. Inseparably intertwined
are country and God. Love of America and her republican in-
stitutions is inculcated from the first primer lesson. In times
past Catholic valor was not wanting when the freeman's blood
was demanded that the country might live. When the crisis
comes and it comes to every country no stronger power will
be ready to sustain the people than that springing from schools
where men are taught to be virtuous and upright according to
the Gospel of Christ. To socialism, anarchy, the tyranny of
capital, and the cry of oppressed labor the Catholic Church
answers with the teachings of her divine Founder, which alone
can regulate society and save it from ruin ; and she demands
that society, in justice to itself, educate her children at least
in those saving precepts.

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 157

A FAIR EMIGRANT.

CHAFTER VI.
AFLOAT.

" I WAS a madman to let her go," muttered the doctor, taking
off his hat and wiping his troubled brow. " I ought to have had
her committed to a lunatic asylum first."

" I don't see how you could, dear," said his mild, literal wife,
" as she is not mad. People would have thought you were plot-
ting for her money."

The doctor groaned. " There is no help for spilt milk," he
said. " So wilful though so sweet a specimen of womankind I
never knew. She-has turned me round her finger like a skein of
worsted. God send it may not yet be the breaking of our
hearts ; for if anything happens amiss to Bawn we can never
hold up our heads again."

That triumphant young woman, having looked her last
through tears at her receding native shores, had now seated her-
self in a convenient nook on deck with her face oceanwards, and
was regarding the boundless, glistening vista before her with a
strange and solemn delight. It was her first introduction to the
sea. Most of us behold that great wonder first from afar off,
then we make acquaintance with it piecemeal ; some blue, sand-
skirted bay becomes dear to us, or we learn to worship it from
purple clad cliffs, with the gulls riding on the green waves be-
neath at our feet. But Bawn had suddenly been lifted from her
forests and prairies, and flung, dazzled and amazed, upon this il-
limitable world of waters. As the view became wider and the
ocean became more and more a living, all-absorbing presence
to her mind, regret, courage, hope, loneliness, confidence, all of
which had been shaking her and inspiring her by turns, alike
vanished and were forgotten, and she sat breathing in long, deep
draughts of salt air and delight, enjoying her young existence
with the joy that is the inheritance of sea-birds.

She had planted herself in a corner, so that her back was to
the other passengers on board, whose tramp, tramp as they took
their walk up and down the deck, and the occasional sound of
whose voices, fell on her ear but did not disturb her privacy.

i $8 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

She was right in the front of the vessel, all her being- going will-
ingly forward with it, her face set outward towards the horizon
of sea and sky behind which lay the secrets she had tasked her-
self to penetrate and the lands she had never seen. The books
with which the doctor had supplied her were untouched. Who
could read in a world of such ever-shifting, ever-shimmering
enchantment? Leaning well forward, her firm, white chin set
in the pink hollow of her hand, she let the hours go by without
once turning her head to see how it fared with the humanity
behind her. The only person who for a minute engaged her
notice during those first morning hours was a man who had got
further even than herself into the very end of the vessel, and,
mounted on a heap of ropes, gazed for some time out seaward
through a glass. She observed that it was a straight, well-built
figure, and that the profile had a clean-cut outline. Long before
he had done gazing through his glass Bawn had forgotten him
and was again looking out, out far, with fascinated eyes at the
glittering, ever-shifting boundary lines of the realms of light
towards which the great heart of the steamer was straining and
panting. As he turned to spring from his vantage-ground of
coiled ropes the man glanced towards the figure that had sat so
persistently motionless during all the first hours of the voyage
hours when people are generally so full of fidgets and so eagerly
speculating on the chances of desirable acquaintance among fel-
low-passengers. Evidently this person, young or old (her back
had looked young, though muffled in a shepherd's plaid scarf
and broad-brimmed black straw hat), desired to become acquaint-
ed with no one, for she deliberately set her face from all. It was
not for the purpose of seeing what that face was like that he had
scaled the height of the rope-heap, but, having glanced at it once,
he stopped a moment, gazing, and then, though she had not been
conscious of him at all, involuntarily lifted his hat before he
sprang lightly back on the deck.

At evening he noticed her again, thinking : " I wonder how
much longer that girl will be able to sit still? Will she keep in
that one position for eight or nine days to come?"

On the instant the wind carried off her hat and a quick hand
caught it, and Bawn stood facing her fellow-traveller sooner than
he had expected, her smooth gold head laid bare, its locks ruffled
with the breeze, and her fair cheeks dyed a rich damask, partly
with surprise, partly from the flame-colored reflections in the air.

" Thank you greatly," she said with unaffected gratitude, re-
ceiving her hat from his hands.

1 8 86.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 159

" You must take better care of it."

" Yes ; if it had gone what should I have done ? I have not
another," said Bawn gravely, and then smiled as the image of
herself sitting on deck hatless for the rest of the journey rose be-
fore her.

" I shall tie a string to it for you. On board ship and on the
top of a mountain there is nothing else of use. Allow me. I
know the right place to fasten it," taking the hat from her
hand.

" I have never been at sea before," said Bawn, " and so I
could not know."

Bawn was standing in the red glow of the sun, heavenly fire
in her gray eyes, her face gleaming in cool tones against the
rose-dusk of the sky, like that of some fair saint set in an old
jewelled window. Her new acquaintance was not observing her,
busied with his good-natured exertions.

" There ! " he%aid, lifting his glance, "that will" He stop-
ped short, gazing at her in surprise.

" Good heavens, how beautiful ! And who sent her off to
cross the ocean alone ? "

" That will hold," he went on quickly, as Bawn took the hat
and put it on her head, suddenly remembering that she had re-
solved to make acquaintance with nobody, and had been spe-
cially counselled to keep young men at a distance.

" They will always be wanting to do things for you, my
dear," good Mrs. Ackroyd had said ; " but if you allow them it
will end by their getting in your way, so that you won't know
how to get rid of them." And Bawn, thinking with a shudder
of Jeanne's cousin Henri, the only young man she had ever
come much in contact with, had believed she should find it very
easy indeed to prevent them from coming within miles of her.
But this person was not like cousin Henri.

She made her hat fast, and with a great effort checked the
pleasant, sociable feeling that had been growing on her, threaten-
ing to loosen her tongue and make her feel at home with this
stranger.

" I am greatly obliged to you," she said in a voice that sound-
ed suddenly cold, and then, making him a bow the manner of
which was never learned on the prairie and must have come to
her by inheritance, like the sheen on her hair, she withdrew into
the shelter of her corner again and resumed her old attitude of
solitary reserve.

He felt his dismissal to be a little abrupt, and yet, continuing

160 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

his walk about the deck as if nothing had happened, the man
was noway displeased at it.

" What a brute I was to stare at her like that ! " he reflected.
" If I had seen another fellow do it I should have knocked him
down. Had she not curled herself up in her corner after it I
should no longer feel an interest in her. I wonder how long it
will be before she allows me to speak to her again ? "

The next morning, before going on deck, Bawn provided her-
self with books and some knitting. Her chief desire at present
was to pass unnoticed and unquestioned on the voyage, as there
was danger to be dreaded from even the most harmless inter-
course. Some one might come to identify her as her father's
daughter, and make her known to some other who might pro-
bably cross her future path in that yet unknown region towards
which she was so eagerly travelling. She thought of her friend
of the evening before, and decided that to no one's curiosity
would she make the slightest concession, beyond a statement of
the fact that she was a farmer's daughter from Minnesota and
alone in the world. The man was a gentleman and would hardly
ask questions; but things leak out in conversation, and she knew
herself well enough to be aware that the most difficult part of the
task she had assumed would be the concealment it was bound to
entail. For though she owed no confidence to any one, it is so
much more pleasant to be frank.

She had scarcely got the needles arranged in her knitting be-
fore she perceived that one of the many pairs of passing feet had
stopped beside her, and there was her friend of the evening be-
fore, cap in hand, regarding her with as much deference as if she
had been a queen.

" It is cold to-day, and it is going to be colder. Will you
allow me to open your rugs and make you a little more comfort-
able?"

Bawn looked at him kindly, and for a moment was so incon-
sistent as to be glad to hear any voice breaking on her solitude ;
but the next she remembered that here was a possible enemy,
who, after some time, if he got encouragement, might, voluntarily
or involuntarily, become aware of her identity. Before she had
had time to make up her mind whether to repulse him or not he
was stooping over her rugs and shaking them out. " You had
better take this chair," he said, bringing one forward. " You
will soon get tired of your camp-stool."

Spreading a rug over the chair, he bade her sit on it, and
wrapped the warm woollen stuff about her feet. All this was

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 161

done so quickly and easily that she felt dismayed to observe how
soon her power of keeping- people at a distance had deserted her,
another person's power of service having put it to rout. Prying
and officiousness she had prepared herself to deal with, but genu-
ine good-nature is not easy to repulse. Feeling at once the im-
provement in her condition, she felt bound to admit it with
thanks.

" I am glad you have books," he continued, picking them up
to place them beside her. The Count of Monte-Christo and Hia-
watha were two of the volumes bought almost at random by Dr.
Ackroyd at the book-stall. " Hiawatha ah ! I meant to have gone
out to that country, had not business called me home sooner than
I expected. Have you read the poem, or do you know the
Dakota country ? "

Bawn bit her lip. She had a strong misgiving that farmers'
daughters of the class to which she wished to belong did not
read poetry, yet how could she deny her acquaintance with the
poem, every word of which had been read to her by her father
lying under the forest-trees?

" My home was in Minnesota," she said, "and I have seen the
Falls of Minnehaha ; and yes, I know Hiawatha pretty well."

The words came forth reluctantly. How lamentably she was
breaking down at the very beginning in the acting of her part!
Should she ever learn to conceal or evade the truth? But the
stranger was not thinking of her, but of the book.

" I read it long ago," he said, "and everything concerning the
Indians always possessed an interest for me. I must read it up
again. Have you any objection to hear a little of it now while
you work? ''

Bawn breathed a silent sigh and pricked her finger. Was
this man going to make her acquaintance in spite of herself?
Oh ! if he were only like cousin Henri, how easily she could
snub him ; but, as it was, she could not think of any form of denial
which would not seem like downright rudeness on her part in<
return for his politeness.

" Do not let me fatigue you," she said, making one great efforts
to discourage him, but he only answered, smiling :

" It will be a new kind of fatigue, that will savor of rest.
My limbs have been well exercised of late, my tongue not at all.
If I do not bore you "

" No," said Bawn with unwilling truth, and keeping her eyes
.on her work.

" If I do not look at him at all," she thought, /'perhaps there
VOL. XLIV. ii

162 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

will be less danger of his remembering- afterwards what I am
like."

The reading began. An earnest, deep-toned voice took up
the rhythm of the poem and gave forth the words as if they
were set to music, and a mist came over the listener's eyes as the
sound of the familiar lines awakened painful memories in her
heart. She had wanted to forget everything but the future; and
was this a good or an evil spirit that had crossed her path and
baffled her intentions? Sometimes she missed the sense of what
was read while enjoying the melody of the voice and the pure
intonation of the words, uttered with an accent a little foreign
to her ears. Of course he was a foreigner. Had he not spoken
of being called home on business ? The certainty of this brought
a feeling of relief to the girl as she listened. If he was only an
Englishman returning from a trip to New York, not having been
as far as Minnesota, never having met with or heard of her or
hers while on American soil, what reason had she to imagine
that discovery of her identity by those from whom she wished
to conceal it could ever overtake her through his agency ?
None, if she could only be wise and control her too candid
tongue. Whatsoever she represented herself to be, as that and
nothing else must he accept her. Considering this and the ex-
treme unlikelihood that, having parted on reaching Great Bri-
tain, they should ever meet again, Bawn felt the anxious strain
upon her mind relax and her heart rise high within her. She
raised her eyes fearlessly, and for the first time took accurate
note of her companion's appearance. The blue cloth cap which
had replaced the hat he had worn last evening was pushed back
.a little, showing the whole of a broad forehead, the upper half of
which looked white above the sun-tanned brownness of the rest
of the face. His crisp, dark hair would have been curly if not
so closely cut, and he wore a thick brown beard that did not
hide a somewhat large and sensible mouth. His eyes were deep-
^set under strong brows, and almost sombre in color, though
readily emitting flashes of fun. It was altogether a practical
and keenly sympathetic face, with humor lurking in all its little
curves. Just now a slight languor, expressive of his enjoyment
of the rest he had spoken of as desired by him, lent him a charac-
ter not always his own. Seeing that her observation was unno-
ticed, Bawn studied him with care for some moments and made
up her mind that he was worthy of her interest. A pleasant
;and most unwonted feeling of the suitability of their companion-
ship grew n her, and as she plied her needles she glanced at

i886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 163

him again. This time his eyes met her stolen investigating
glance.

" Minnehaha, Laughing Water,
Loveliest of Dakota maidens,"

he was saying as he raised his dark eyes to take an equally stolen
and investigating glance at his silent and industrious auditress.
She said she had come from the Dakota country, she had stood
beside the Falls of Minnehaha; and some analogy between the
fair face that looked up at times and out to sea beyond him with
an expression in the wide, gray eyes that he could not fathom,
some fancied resemblance between this present maiden and the
Laughing Water of the woods and prairies, had doubtless oc-
curred to his mind and caused him to glance at her, unexpectedly
meeting her gaze.

Bawn, aware of all the cool observation that had been in her
own gaze, reddened, and said quickly : " I have been thinking."

" Yes?" said her companion, glancing away, planting himself
more firmly on his elbow, and speaking in the most matter-of-fact
voice. " So was I. You were going to tell me "

" Nothing."

" I beg your pardon. Look ! Did you ever see anything so
marvellous as the sun on the wings of yonder flight of birds ? "

" Wonderful ! " said Bawn, shading her eyes with her fair
hand, not yet browned and reddened by farming labors as she
could have wished it to appear. " How fast they go ! They
will be there long before us."

"There? Where?"

" Oh ! anywhere. Great Britain, I suppose." She was un-
willing to name Ireland, lest in the very tone of her voice as
she pronounced the word he should hear her whole history.

" Are you so very anxious to have the journey over ? "

" Yes," said Bawn, fervently wishing she could fly after those
birds and reach her destination at once, escaping perilous t$te-a
t$tes with strange and possibly inquisitive people.

" 1 do not feel at all impatient," said her friend with the blue
cap ; " though, if I were properly alive to consequences, I ought
to be, for I am bound to be in London on the morning of the
eighth day from this."

" Why, then, not have sailed on an earlier date and given
yourself more time? "

" Why not, indeed, except that Fate plays us curious tricks?
I thought to have done so, but, owing to an accident, I arrived

164 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.

at New York in great haste only at the last moment before this
steamer sailed. However, I am of a philosophic turn of mind,
and I said to myself, ' I will take this disappointment as a stroke
of good luck. Who knows what may turn up on the way to
make glad that I was disappointed ? ' "

A satisfied smile brightened on his face as he spoke, and,
though he was looking out to sea and not at her, Bawn felt that
he meant to convey that he was already grown pleased with the
existing state of things, and, partly at least, because he had found
a companion in her. She could not reflect his contentment.
Why need his voyage have been inconveniently delayed only, it
would seem, for the purpose of embarrassing her?

One grain of comfort she did extract from his statement, how-
ever. " He is not Irish, at all events," she thought, " and, once I
land in Queenstown, will, in all human probability, never cross
my path again." Reflecting on this, she unbent her fair brows
a little and consented to become a trifle more friendly.

CHAPTER VII.
ACQUAINTANCES.

WHEN lying awake in her berth that night Bawn, reflecting
on the swiftness and pleasantness with which her day had flown
by in the society of the person in the blue cap, acknowledged to
herself that she had very foolishly departed from her original
plan of making acquaintance with no one on board, allowing no
one to intrude upon her privacy. She was running a great risk
in permitting herself a friendly intercourse with this individual.
True, she had been very careful, had given him no clue to her
identity. He did not know her name not even the name she
had chosen to bear during her stay in Ireland and she now
made a firm resolve that she would not betray it to him. He
had certainly not shown any curiosity, though on one occasion
she fancied he had given her an opening to mention her name,
possibly wishing to know it as a matter of convenience. She was
well aware that she had passed over the opportunity, and that he
had noticed it, and it hurt her that she had been forced to be so
secretive. But then had she not entered on a course which
would necessitate the utmost secretiveness ? Bawn sighed as
she thought of how ill she was in this respect fitted by nature
to play the part she had undertaken, but reflected that she must

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 165

make up by determination for what she lacked in other ways.
In arranging her plans she had never calculated on the likelihood
of her caring much for what others might think of her, being
fully persuaded that the loneliness and singleness of her own
purpose would be sufficient to carry her through every difficulty.
And now already she winced because she had not been able to be
perfectly frank with an acquaintance of forty-eight hours.

" Well," she thought, " the only way to avert this danger is to
keep him at a distance. It will be but a matter of a few days.
To-morrow I must begin by staying away from deck all day."

And, having settled the affair in this way, she slept pro-
foundly.

When the morrow arrived it was hard to keep to so unplea-
sant a line of conduct as that on which she had decided. The
sun shone, the breeze was pleasant. Down-stairs she felt in
prison, but still she stayed below in the places inaccessible to
gentlemen. She appeared at table in her place beside the cap-
tain, and at lunch her friend of the blue cap hoped she had not
been ill, and told her how delightful it was on deck to-day.
Bawn was obliged to admit that she was not ill, but stated her
intention of resting in the ladies' cabin all day. Her friend
looked surprised.

4< You are not ill now," he said. " I never saw any one look
more healthy, more undisturbed by the sea. But if you begin to
stay down-stairs you will make yourself ill."

" I hope not," said Bawn serenely, and passed into the prison
to which she had condemned herself.

The day passed wearily. All the unpleasantnesses of the
sea now forced themselves upon her. Her companions were sick
or unmanageable children who could not be trusted long on deck,
and a few of those women who, no matter how good the passage,
are always grievously ill on a voyage. She tried to pass the
time by making herself useful and agreeable, but when evening
came she felt jaded and depressed for want of the abundance of
fresh air to which she had been always accustomed. As soon as
it was quite dusk she concluded that she must breathe freely for a
little while before settling to rest for the night, and went boldly
up on deck.

It is too late for Hiawatha, at any rate, she thought, as she
leaned over the ship's side and rejoiced in her freedom. The
>tars crept out one by one, the phosphor-tracks gleamed on the
rater, the breeze was wild and fresh, and the watery world
>oundless around her. Her heart widened within her, and her

1 66 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.

nervous little fears took to themselves wings and flitted away
into the night. How foolish she had been to feel afraid of any
creature ! A certain power within her that power of heart and
brain which gave her temper its buoyancy and strength had
been suffering cramp all day, and now recovered its vigor, so
that she was able to turn with a quiet smile on hearing the now
well-known and importunate voice at her side.

" I ask your pardon," said the Blue Cap, " for trying to inter-
fere with your good resolves this morning. I had no idea you
were sacrificing yourself for the benefit of others. I heard one
lady singing your praises to another just now, telling how you
had been acting as a sister of mercy all day."

" I did not stay for the sake of others, I am sorry to say," she
answered quickly ; " I was thinking only of myself."

" I fear I bored you yesterday with Hiawatha" said the Blue
Cap. His tone was penitent, but Bawn's quick ear detected a
something which suggested that there was a sly gleam of humor
in his eyes as he spoke. It seemed that she was making matters
worse. Not having been clever enough to pretend to be ill, nor
yet to allow it to be supposed that charity towards the sick had
altogether influenced her, she had led him to suspect the truth
and to imagine himself formidable enough to frighten her out of
his presence.

44 No," she answered, " you did not bore me," thinking how
very much pleasanter yesterday had been than to-day, and of how
ungrateful she certainly was.

" Thank you. After that I may venture to ask you to take a
turn up and down the deck. A little exercise before sleeping will
be quite as good as a little air."

" I dare say it will," said Bawn readily, and, feeling as if she
was making some amends for her bad treatment of a friend, she
accepted his arm and threaded with him the groups of other
peripatetics, feeling unaccountably at home with this stranger in
the crowd.

" How clear the stars are to-night ! " he said. " That is one of
the best things about being at sea, one gets such a fine view of
them all round ; and if one only had a powerful telescope "

" Yes," said Bawn gladly, " how I wish we had ! " And by the
sound of her voice her companion knew that his choice of a sub-
ject of conversation was a lucky one. It had not been made
without deliberation, and had been selected among others that
occurred to his mind as being furthest off from this world of
cares and dangers, secrets and sorrows, and less likely to scare

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 167

away his reticent fellow-traveller from his side. That this lonely
girl, with the frank, true eyes, had some good reason for wishing
to keep her own counsel and to pass unknown through the crowd
was evident to him; and though he wished to cultivate her ac-
quaintance, and, if possible, make her voyage more pleasant for
her, he was anxious also that she should not feel embarrassed by
his companionship. Therefore he did not ask her where she had
been and whither she was going, how much she had seen of this
beautiful and interesting world and what particular part of it she
was now expecting to see, but suddenly placed a ladder of escape
from such questioning at her feet, and mounted boldly with her
to the stars.

"I suppose you understand something of astronomy," he said.
" I used to know a little, but I confess I am beginning to forget
it."

" I don't know much more than the names of the planets. I
am a farmer's daughter, and astronomy can hardly be expected
of me. Some of the constellations seem like old friends when I
look up at them."

The Blue Cap here overcame a temptation to draw out the
farmer's daughter a little, even to the extent of ascertaining what
portion of this wide earth her father farmed, and he felt that he
had gained a victory over her distrust of him when he heard her
make even so vague a statement as to her circumstances.

" When I was a youth," he said, " I used to think I would like
to have a star of my own, a country-house among the cool fields
above, and a sort of celestial estate, which I could manage in my
own way, without so much trouble as one is obliged to take
thanklessly enough here."

" Rather a solitary state of grandeur to live in."

" Oh ! I did not mean to be there alone. I was to rejoice in
the love of some angelic being, an inhabitant of the star, who was
to be as far above mere ordinary women as my star was above
the earth."

"You are not so romantic now," said Bawn, smiling.

" No ; I was thinking a little while ago, just before I saw your
head appear above the stair yonder, that those dreams of mine
were a long way off, and that it made me very old to remember
them ; and also," he added, as if half to himself, " that I am now
fain to be content to mate myself among the daughters of men."

Bawn said nothing, but the query naturally arose in her mind,
Had some charming daughter of men already taken possession of
his heart, and, while speaking like this, was he thinking of her ?

i68 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

And for the first time it occurred to Bawn to think of him as a
person with a story of his own, with a home, with pursuits, occu-
pations, loves, and friendships. He was no longer only a trouble-
some shadow haunting her to her sore annoyance and perplexity,
but an individual who interested her and had the power to make
her forget herself and her own affairs. On the instant she felt
that she would have liked to ask him some questions, but, being
so resolutely uncommunicative herself, upon what pretext could
she look for anything approaching to confidence from him ? She
remained silent with the surprise of these new thoughts.

They continued their walk mutely, each wrapped in reflec-
tion. The stars waxed brighter overhead, the night-breeze blew
freshly against them. Most of the passengers had gone down to
rest; a few sat clustered in dark groups or tramped up and
down deck like themselves. The watery world lay dark, restless,
and mysterious around, and Bawn experienced the pleasant feel-
ing of comradeship a feeling which gradually grew on her.

" I have been thinking," said the Blue Cap, " how very wide
apart our thoughts have probably flown while we have been
walking the last three lengths of the deck. Your hand was on
my arm, but who shall say where you were carried in the
spirit ? "

" Or you? I shall never know where you have been, nor you
where I have been."

" I will tell you, if you give me the slightest encouragement,
all that I have seen and said during the last five minutes."

" That would hardly be fair, for I am not willing to be equally
communicative."

" You have guessed rightly ; I should look for some return.
But then a very small fragment of your thought would purchase
a large proportion of mine."

" Well, then," said Bawn, " part of my thought not the whole
nor even a large share of it was this : I wondered to perceive
how two utter strangers like you and me could become so friend-
ly, enjoy each other's company, exchange thoughts, and all the
while remain perfectly ignorant of each other's lives, past and fu-
ture, and content to be so ; and that, having made acquaintance,
we should immediately afterwards pass out of sight of each other
and be thought of no more. You see I have not met many stran-
gers, or 1 suppose such a thought could not have dwelt on my
mind."

" Life has often been compared to a journey," said the Blue
Cap, " for the reason that people meet and part thus at all points,

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 169

exactly like fellow-travellers. Now, my thought was simpler
than yours ; for I was trying- to merely trying to think of you
as a farmer's daughter, and, for the life of me, I could not do it."

" I told you the truth," said Bawn quickly.

11 The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ? "

" Not the whole truth. My statement was correct, and that
is all."

" What an extraordinarily beautiful radiance has that phos-
phor-light upon the water ! "

" Yes ; but I am tired. It is time for me to go below."

He turned at once and led her silently to the top of the stair.
As Bawn stood on the steps and looked up to bid him good-
night, her face appeared fairer than ever in the fresh twilight of
the starry night.

" By what you said just now," he said, looking at her atten-
tively, " did you mean to hint that perfect oblivion of each other
must necessarily descend upon us once we touch our mother-
earth again ? Why should the sea be so kind and the land so
harsh ? Is there any reason why we should not continue to be
friends ? "

" Every reason," said Bawn decidedly, as she disappeared out
of the starlight into the well of shadow gaping for her.

CHAPTER VIII.
FRIENDS.

THE next morning Bawn made up her mind that she would not
be a coward any longer. She fancied she had given the gentleman
to understand that she wished to. remain unknown, and therefore
might feel herself secure. After what had passed he could never
press her for information about herself. Upon these terms she
was willing to be friendly and might accept the pleasure of his
companionship occasionally.

Going on deck, she found that he had already prepared a com-
fortable seat for her, and he soon installed himself at her feet.

" Shall we return to the Indians?" he said, looking about for
Hiawatlia.

" No," said Bawn, fearing that this might lead to more per-
sonal talk concerning her home and native State.

" You dislike the Indians ? "

" I have known much about them that is noble," she answered

i;o A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

evasively, and then closed her lips arid fastened her eyes upon
her work.

" I suppose you have been to Paris?" said Bawn suddenly,
raising her head and looking at him calmly. She had made up
her mind to dash into any subject that would lead far from her
own future and past. Paris would do. A man would be sure to
have plenty to say about Paris.

" She is going there, perhaps," thought the Blue Cap, " and
I wonder in what capacity? American women sometimes make
the Grand Tour alone, and I have heard that even charming
young creatures will do so in case they have no male relations
to travel with. Perhaps she is going to be a governess there ;
but no, in that case she would have professed more knowledge
of astronomy. She may be a princess in disguise travelling to
meet her friends, who will bring her out in Paris to the delight
of their world. She has been warned to avoid all young men as
dangerous, and therein lies her mystery. Yes," he said, pushing
back his blue cap and showing a broad forehead, the uncovering
of which increased the look of strength and reliability which
belonged to his face " yes, I do know Paris as well as most for-
eigners of my age. And for one who has friends there what a
charming place it is! You will find it a delightful entrance to the
European world."

Bawn bit her lips to prevent words of explanation crossing
them. Why should she tell him that she was not likely to see
Paris or to mix with any gay world ? If he persisted in disbe-
lieving that she was a farmer's daughter, and chose to think of
her as a young lady debutante on her way to Paris, why, let him
do so, and it would be all for the best. That he should be him-
self a frequenter of gay cities seemed to lessen the chances of
their meeting again.

"I wonder have I hit the mark?" thought the Blue Cap,
watching furtively the humorous smile that gleamed in Bawn's
eyes as she resolved to mislead him. " What affair is it of mine
that I should trouble myself about it? If I were only sure that
her circumstances were safe and happy, and that a pleasant future
lay before her, I certainly should not let curiosity disturb the
serenity of my mind."

The breeze was fluttering round Bawn, ruffling the hair about
her temples and ears, bringing a rosy color to her face, and
sometimes carrying her skeins of silk a little way out of reach, to
be captured and returned to her hand by her watchful companion.
It happened that a small white handkerchief also fluttered forth

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 171

from her lap and was whirled into the Blue Cap's face. Catching
it as it made a sudden wheel round and tried to escape over the
ship's side, he was about to return .it to its owner when a very
distinct word of four letters caught his eye, embroidered in the
corner. " Bawn " was daintily and flowerily stitched on the deli-
cate bit of cambric in the place where ladies mark their names.

'* Is it your Christian name ? " he asked eagerly. " Come,
there is no confidence in that. I will forget it again, if you like.
But let me know it for a few moments. What a curious, uncom-
mon name is Bawn ! Perhaps the famous Molly Bawn was your
ancestress ? "

" Yes," said Bawn placidly. Yesterday she would have been
distressed at this slight accident, but, having accepted the r61e
of a debutante on her way to Paris, she was rather pleased than
otherwise at having been detected as the owner of a lady's pock-
et-handkerchief. It was testimony to the fact that she was a
wealthy demoiselle travelling (unavoidably) alone to France,
where her friends waited to receive her, and behaving with
proper reserve towards chance acquaintances by the way. This
was precisely the impression which the sight of the bit of em-
broidered cambric produced on the Blue Cap's mind,, and as
Bawn, after a stolen glance at his reflecting face, assured herself
of the fact, a sense of the humor of the situation grew on her and
a sly, repressed smile curled her lips.

Her companion saw it and fancied it told him she was not
sorry to be found out, after all ; that she had been willing to tease
him. And now he felt willing to tease her.

<l Now that I know your Christian name," he said, " I am
bound to tell you mine. It is Somerled almost as strange a
one as yours. After this we shall be more comfortable. It is a
great advantage to have a name to call one's friend by."

" Strangers do not call one another by their Christian names,
especially when one is a man and the other a woman."

"But we are hardly strangers, are we? On board ship
friendships spring up so rapidly. And then you and I, being
each solitary, are thrown upon one another more than in an ordi-
nary case. However, this is, of course, subject to your approval.
I will not pronounce that pretty name of yours without your
leave, not even with a 'Miss' before it for you see I have
come to the conclusion that you are not married."

. "No, I am not married," said Bawn, with a look of extreme
surprise that the question could have occurred to any one.
. " I thought so by your fingers," said Somerled, smiling with

172 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

great satisfaction. " It is always pleasant to know that one has
guessed aright. I do not like to think of how I should have felt
had I been told that I must address you as Mistress Bawn."

" What difference could it have made, after all?" said Bawn
demurely.

" Ah ! who knows ? What difference could it have made ? It
is impossible to answer such a question. Somehow I should like
to think that when I meet you again in Paris there will be no
devoted husband hovering round you. I would like that our
open-air, breezy friendship might continue undisturbed by any
new element."

" Why do you think we shall meet in Paris? "

" Because I have friends there and I sometimes visit them. I
know I shall find you out, radiant in satins and laces, perhaps
with your head already turned by flattery. Indeed, I shall then
perhaps have only the past to live upon. For I shall find so
many newer friends gathered round you that I shall scarce get a
word."

Bawn was silent, suddenly carried back to the evening when
Dr. Ackroyd had concluded that she was bent on coming out in
Paris as an American heiress. " What do you want to do with
your fortune ? " he had said. " Trip away to Paris, and all the
rest of it?" declaring the French capital to be the gayest and
prettiest place for her. Suppose she had been able to put all
memory of her father's wrongs out of her mind, and to do as the
good doctor and his wife had thought but natural she should do ?
She might have been now really on her way to the pleasantest
city in the world, under suitable protection, and likely to meet
this young man, as he expected, in those brilliant salons of which
she had so often heard tell. And suppose that after months and
years he were to prove that he really valued her friendship as
much as he now appeared, perhaps pretended to do, and suppose,
and suppose ! For a few moments she saw herself surrounded
with these fair circumstances, and thought that, had they been
realized, she could have been glad at the prospect of meeting this
blue-capped Somerled again. Such a position, which had been
so possible to her and was now so impossible, appeared to her for
a minute sunned by such happiness as she had never yet imagin-
ed. But it was only for an instant. The dark forests of her old
home rose sombre and forbidding out of the background of her
thoughts, and. in the well-known leaf-strewn hollow which they
shaded she saw the lonely grave that held all that had been dear
to her in life, and which appealed from its solitude and silence to

1 8 86.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 173

the fidelity of her nature. Those dazzling- scenes which were so
familiar to her new friend, and which she could imagine so well,
were not for her; that gay and brilliant Bawn whom she had
seen just now moving light-hearted through the crowd was only
a phantom of herself, an impersonation of the most volatile side
of her nature. No, the world of Paris must live on without her,
as it had always done, and, alas ! was but too well able to do. She
had bound herself to live on the shady side of life, under the
gloom of mountains, in the shadow of concealment, with the
sorrow and wrong-doing of the past always present to her
mind.

" Do not look so grave," said Somerled. " Have I been too
familiar in my manner of talking to you? If you are displeased
tell me, and I will vanish for the day."

" No," said Bawn, brightening. " You need not go. I fear I
should now feel lonely if altogether left to myself."

This speech was the result of her reflections, which had just
proved to her how completely apart their future paths must lie,
and how utterly unlikely it was that they should ever meet again
in this world.

He glanced at her gratefully, with that bright smile which
always looked so good as well as gay.

" And what about the cross children and the sick ladies ? " he
asked. " With them you could not have been lonely."

" It is far pleasanter here."

" Even with me as a drawback?"

" Even with you as a drawback."

" For the life of me I cannot bring myself to be sorry I missed
the boat I ought to have sailed by, though for your sake I ought
to regret it. I have seen several charming persons gazing at
you with benevolence, and looking daggers at me. That old
gentleman with the flowing beard, for instance, is dying to oust
me from my position as your knight and to step into my shoes.
Had I not been here he would have spread your rugs and car-
ried your camp-stool."

" That prosy old gentleman who worries the captain with
questions all dinner-time?"

" The very man. I see you might have found him almost as
much a nuisance as myself."

And so the day wore away, and the Blue Cap, as he walked
up and down deck that evening at dusk, told himself that the
gold-haired young woman with the broad brow and firm mouth,
whose peculiar look of strength, humor, and sweetness had fasci-

174 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

nated him, was really surrounded by no unpleasant mystery, but
was only as reticent and dignified as maidens ought to be.

He wished he could ask her plainly to tell him her name,
antecedents, and real position in the world. At first he had
fancied that she had a downright fear of his acquiring any such
information concerning her, but now it seemed to him that she
only took a sly delight in withholding it. He concluded that it
did not matter to him at present how silent she might be, but
resolved that before they left the steamer he would persuade her
to be more communicative. He remembered with a little vexa-
tion that she had shown an utter want of interest in his affairs
and no curiosity even to learn his name. That they should part
in this state of ignorance and indifference was not to be thought
of. Three days of almost hourly companionship with this girl
had made him feel that he did not want to lose sight of her. And
yet he acknowledged that there was in her a certain power which
would enable her to baffle him, if she pleased.

While his mind was still occupied with these reflections he
saw Bawn come forward as if to meet him, walking with a quick
step and seeming to have some word of importance on her lips.
But no, she had not seen him. though she paused at the ship's
side close to the spot where he stood. At this hour he was gen-
erally down below and she was resting in the ladies' quarters,
and she evidently had not expected to see him. He noticed that
she held in her hands the little, delicate cambric pocket-hand-
kerchief which he had picked up and restored to her in the morn-
ing, and saw her deliberately tie it up in a knot and drop it into
the sea. He watched her with surprise. Was it for having
accidentally revealed to him her Christian name that she thus
punished the otherwise unoffending bit of cambric?

The truth -was that Bawn, having unwittingly allowed it to
get among her new and plain belongings, and having used it un-
awares, had now resolved to get rid of it, considering that, though
it had served her this morning by setting her fellow-traveller's
speculations on a wrong track, yet it was an undesirable posses-
sion for a person of the class to which she wished in future to
belong. And meanwhile the young man, observing her, felt his
former wonder at her great desire to remain quite unknown
revive, and did not venture to speak to her as she turned away
without seeing him and went straight down-stairs again for the
night.

1 8 86.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 175

CHAPTER IX.
ENEMIES.

u WHAT a nice sort of hotel this steamer makes!" said the
brown-faced, dark-eyed man who called himself Somerled.
Again it. was early, bright morning, and he was sitting idly
watching Bawn's white hands plying their knitting-needles. " I
should have no objection to go on as we are going for ever, or
at least for ever so long that is, if we could only stop at some
port now and again and have a good walk. A man wants to
stretch his legs occasionally, but otherwise

He broke off abruptly, and, as Bawn did not answer, began to
whistle softly an air which she knew well, one of the Irish melo-
dies with which her father had early made her familiar. As the
strain stole across her ear, memory supplied the words belong-
ing to it :

"Come o'er the sea,

Maiden, with me,
Mine through sunshine, storms, and snows :

Seasons may roll,

But the true soul
Burns the same where'er it goes."

" Are all American steamers as nice as this one ? " asked
Bawn, interrupting the whistling at the end of the first part of
the melody.

" Well, the only other one of which I have had any experi-
ence was not at all nice. It was an emigrant-ship, and perhaps
you do not know all that is included in those two words."

" You came out to America in an emigrant-ship?"

" I have succeeded in getting you to ask me a question at
last," said the Blue Cap, smiling genially.

"You need not answer it unless you please. My organ of
curiosity is not a large one."

" I have noticed that you are a remarkable woman. But I am
willing to be questioned. I have been hoping you would ask me
many questions about myself."

" I cannot do that, because I am not anxious to make confi-
ences on my own part."

" As I have said, perhaps more than once, I am well aware of
it. At present I am not disposed to molest you. I own I should
be glad (as, I think, I have also said before) if a large amount of

i/6 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

confidence on my side were to purchase even a small scrap of
yours. But that shall be just as you please. It is a breach of
good-breeding to ask personal questions, nevertheless I tell you
plainly I shall not be willing to shake hands and say good- by to
you when this voyage is over without knowing where and by
what name I am to find you again. I do not make friends and
drop them so easily as that. I should not say so did I not per-
ceive that you have made up your mind that I am a gentle-
man."

" Were I not satisfied on that point, I should not sit here day
after day talking to you."

" Then, having accepted me as a friend, why be so exceed-
ingly reticent with me ? "

" You always speak of our being friends, while in reality we
are only chance acquaintances."

" But life-long friendships are begun in this way."

" Must I tell you downrightly that there are reasons why we
can never be friends after we leave this vessel? "

" I will not believe it without explanation," he answered after
a slight pause, and in a low voice whose earnestness contrasted
with his hitherto gay, careless manner. A slight flush had risen
on his brown cheek. Bawn grew a little paler, but silently con-
tinued her work, her heart throbbing with the consciousness that
the thing she most dreaded had happened.

She had drawn on herself the notice of a person who might
want to know too much about her and thus increase the diffi-
culties in her way. Reflecting on her curious position, she asked
herself why she could not tell him the little tale about herself
which she had prepared for the enlightenment of those with
whom she must come in contact after reaching her destination-
inform him that she was the orphan daughter of an Irish emi-
grant, who was bringing her father's savings to Ireland to invest
them there in a farm, which she intended to work by her own ex-
ertions ? Why could she not narrate this little story to one who
was at once so interesting to, and so greatly concerned about, her?
Partly because she found it easier to annoy than to deceive him
explicitly in words, and partly because she would not be driven
into laying her future open to an* interference which might pos-
sibly thwart her plans. As she quietly reviewed her position
and strengthened her resolve to remain unknown, the Blue Cap's
look of disturbance gradually disappeared, and, quitting her side,
he walked away to a distance and leaned over the vessel's edge.
Presently she heard him whistling the second part of the air

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 177

which she interrupted, and to which her memory again supplied
the words :

" Let Fate frown on,

So we love and part not ;
Tis life where thou art,

Tis death where thou art not."

Then he went and talked to one of the sailors, and half an hour
passed before he returned to her.

" You have not told me yet about the ship," said Bawn, with
a conciliatory smile. " I do wish to know how you came to be
there, and I am willing to pay for the information with any little
experience of my own that you will think worth listening to."

" Good ! " said Somerled. " That makes me feel better. I
have been savagely cross for the last half-hour. How I wish I
had a longer story to relate to you ! It will be told too soon. I
simply went out to America with some hundreds of emigrants,
that I might know by experience how they are treated on the
way ; we hear so many complaints of the sufferings of the poor
on their voyage out to the New World. And I had reasons for
wanting to know."

" I see ; reasons like mine, that are not to be told."

" Exactly. Not until I see my way more clearly towards
selling them at a profit."

" I can guess yours easily enough. And so you made com-
mon cause with the poor. Mr. Somerled, I will shake hands
with you without waiting for the moment of leaving the ship."

4< Even though we are only chance acquaintances," he said,
with a brilliant change of countenance, taking the firm, white
hand that had suddenly dropped the needle and outstretched
itself to him. Bawn's eyes were turned full on him, glistening
with moisture and overflowing with a light he had never seen in
them and thought he had never seen anywhere before.

" I shall always remember you as a friend," she said, carried
away by enthusiasm, and with a kind of radiant solemnity of face
and manner.

" Will you ? Perhaps among your dead ? "

" If you knew how precious are my dead," she answered, with,
a sudden darkening of all her lights, "you would be proud to.be
admitted into their company."

" That may be, but I would rather be in the company of your
living," he said, dropping her hand which he had held. And
Bawn, wishing she had been less impulsive, picked up her
needles again and became busier than ever with hex work..

VOL. XLIV. 12

178 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

" I want to hear more of your emigrants," she said presently,
as serenely as ever. " How were they and you treated, and what
have you been doing for them ? "

" To the first question I answer, ' Badly.' To the second I
must admit, * Not much/ I hope, however, to be able to say
something about the matter in Parliament one day."

" Are you in the English Parliament? "

"You are surprised at the suggestion that so dull a fellow
could hope to get admittance there. But sometimes it is easier
to please a nation than a woman."

11 Do you expect to please a nation?" asked Bawn, elevating
her eyebrows slightly.

" Not exactly, perhaps, though I expect to get on pretty well
with that small section of one which will be made up by my con-
stituents."

" And the nation will go down before you afterwards ? "

" Perhaps less than that may content me, though I have my
ambitions. However, I am not in Parliament yet. And now,
having confessed so much, it is time for me to receive some small
dole from your hands."

Bawn's face fell. " What can I tell you ? I have seen a
prairie on fire; I have spoken to an Indian chief "

" All my experiences pale before adventures like those," said
the Blue Cap, trying to read the changes in her face.

A great change had come over her, for, in thinking of her
past, events of one sad night had suddenly arisen before her
mind.

" I have aroused painful memories," said Somerled, gazing re-
morsefully at her colorless cheeks and troubled eyes.

" You would drive me back upon them."

" Do you mean that you have experienced nothing in your
past but what is painful?"

" I do not say that," she said, brightening up again. u But
what is there to tell about happy days? They slip through our
fingers like soap-bubbles, glistening with all the colors of the
rainbow. How can we tell what has made the days so happy or
the soap-bubbles so beautiful? Common things mere 'suds,' as
the washerwoman calls them catch a glory from the sunlight
and vanish. And when they have vanished what has any one to
say about them ? ? '

Somerled sat gazing at her with a slight frown, observing how
cleverly she always contrived to give him a ready answer with-
out enlightening him at all, to talk so much and convey to him

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 179

so little. Without saying more he got up and walked away, and
after a while she saw him down at the other end of the deck
playing with some children, hoisting the little ones on his
shoulders and setting the bigger ones to run races along the
deck. She heard his merry laugh among theirs, and noted the
fact that her disobligingness had not the power to annoy him.
Why, she asked of her common sense, should she allow herself
to be bullied or wheedled into running risks for the sake of mo-
mentarily gratifying the curiosity of an idle and inquisitive fel-
low-traveller ? She would not do it. Let him stay among those
children and their lady relatives (there were one or two pretty
girls among them) for the rest of the voyage. His doing so
would certainly be an unexpected relief and advantage to her.

Having finished playing with the children and conversing
with their mother and young aunts, the Blue Cap pulled a 'book
out of his pocket and threw himself on a bench to read. What
he read was a very unsatisfactory chapter, and all out of his own
head. He did not like that girl, after all (his reading informed
him). There was too much mystery about her, too deeply root-
ed and watchful a reticence for so young and apparently simple
a woman. She must have some strong, almost desperate, reason
for closing her lips so firmly when he tried to beguile her into
speaking, for changing color so rapidly at times when he pressed
her, as if she feared he would perceive the very thought in her
mind.

He turned the pages of his book impatiently, and owned that
he would give much to see the thoughts lying behind that wide,
white brow, which seemed expressive at once of the innocence
of the child and the wisdom and courage of a woman experi-
enced in life. What was the story, what were the scenes in the
background of her youth which were accountable for that sad
look starting so often unawares into her eyes ? With what sort
of people had she lived, and whither and to whom was she tra-
velling now in the great, giddy world of Paris? Well, what did
it matter to him ? He had no intention of falling in love with
her. He had never fallen thoroughly in love in his life, and he
was now thirty years of age. Two or three fresh, pretty faces of
girls he had known floated up from his past and smiled at him as
he made this declaration to himself, and yet he persevered in the
avowal. He had liked them, flirted a little with them, been very
near falling in love with them ; but either he had been too busy
setting his little world to rights,, or they had lacked something
that his soul desired, for he had certainly never as yet given the

i8o A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

whole heart of his manhood into the keeping of any feminine
hands.

As yet he had not seen the woman to whom he could give up
his masculine liberty ; and still, while he emphatically stated this
to his own mind, he distinctly saw a vision of Bawn sitting
knitting at his fireside, the light of his hearth shining on her fair
face, into which color and dimple would come at the sound of
his voice, and his care and protection surrounding her with a
paradisiacal atmosphere. When, at the end of his chapter, he
found this picture before his eyes, he flung away his book in
something like a passion, and got up and tramped about the
deck.

No, he was not going to fall in love with a nameless, secre-
tive, obstinate-tempered, wilful woman. His wife must be open
as the day, transparent in thought, and with all her antecedents
well known to the world. She must be of a particularly yield-
ing and gentle disposition, and have exceedingly little will of her
own.

CHAPTER X.

MISLEADINGS.

"Do please tell me more about Paris," said Bawn, with a
sweet beseechingness in her eyes and voice, and her lips curling
with the fun of leading him further and further astray in his
speculations concerning her. " If you knew how impatient I
feel to see it ! "

" Which is true enough," she thought, " only I am not at all
likely to gratify my desire."

" It is not the place for a person of your disposition."

" How is that ? "

" The French are a nation not remarkable for frankness."

".And you think my natural reticence may increase in Pari-
sian society ! Now, that is not kind. I have heard the French
character charged with untruth rather than reserve. I have told
you no falsehoods, and I might, if I would, have satisfied your
curiosity with a dozen."

" True. That is something. How many days have we yet
got to live ? "

" On board ? Four, perhaps, or five, I think."

" Four will finish thejvoyage for those who land at/JQueens-
town."

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 181

" In what part of England is Queenstown ? " asked Bawn de-
murely.

" It is in Ireland the first British port at which we touch.
But for you and me, who are going on to Liverpool, there remain
five whole days to enjoy each other's society."

u Do not let us quarrel away our time, then," said Bawn per-
suasively. " Five days would be very long if we were to keep
making ourselves disagreeable to each other all the time."

" Five days are but a short space for happiness out of a life-
time," said Somerled brusquely, with an ardent, angry glance at
her downcast eyelids.

" Yes, they would be," she said quietly, " but let us hope
that few lives are so unhappy as not to possess a larger share of
happy days than that."

She heard him shift in his seat impatiently, but, being busy
with a dropped stitch, she naturally could not see his face.

" Do you intend to travel on to Paris alone? I hope there is
no offence in a gentleman's asking such a question as that of a
lady. The journey from Liverpool to Paris will be a trouble-
some one. Perhaps you will allow me to give you some hints
for its safe accomplishment."

" Certainly," said Bawn, raising her eyes and looking at him
straight, while she controlled the corners of her lips with diffi-
culty. " There will be no one to meet me at Liverpool."

" I will write out a little memorandum of what you are to do
after you have got out of my reach," he said. " I suppose, as
we shall both be going on to London, you will allow me to
escort you so far."

" If I step into one car there is no reason why you should
step into another, unless, indeed, you want to smoke "

" We call them carriages in England."

" That is nicer. Carriage sounds so much more like a private
conveyance."

The Blue Cap was silent. His imagination played him a sud-
den trick, and showed him a certain well-known private convey-
ance drawn by certain favorite horses, within which were seated
a man and a woman, and the man was taking the woman by a
certain well-known road to his home, as his wife. The man who
held the reins was himself, and the woman was this golden-
tressed, aggravating, unimpressionable Bawn.

" In London I shall certainly have to bid you good-by," he
grumbled.

" Until we meet again in Paris ? "

1 82 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

"So likely that 1 should find you ! asking about the streets
for a person of the name of ' Bawn.' "

" Is Paris as nice a place as they say for buying pretty things
clothes and jewelry I mean ? " said Bawn in the most matter-of-
fact manner.

"Oh! yes; first-rate for all that kind of thing. And so this
is what your mind has been running on for the last ten min-
utes?"

"Why should it not?"

" Why, indeed ? For no reason. Only I fancied you were
not the kind of woman to let your mind get totally absorbed by
clothes and jewelry."

" Men are never good judges of the characters of women."

" Probably not."

" In my case you have had ample material fi;om which to
form your conclusions. Why should a young woman come all
the way from New York to Paris, if not to attend to her ward-
robe and general personal decoration ? Have you not heard that
American women pine for this opportunity from their cradle up-
wards? Now, I feel sure that the very first morning I awake in
Paris " (she paused, thinking that such a morning would probably
never dawn, or that, if it did, the hour was so far away as to be
practically nowhere in her future) " I shall make a rush to the
shops before breakfast, just to see what they have got for me.
And I shall probably spend the half of my fortune before I return
to my hotel."

" I am really disenchanting him now," she thought. " How
disgusted he looks ! "

" Your hotel ! Do you mean to say that you intend to stay
alone at a hotel ? "

" I certainly did not intend to tell you so. You betray me
into forgetting myself."

The Blue Cap looked pale and displeased, and Bawn bent
over her knitting and bit her lip, thinking with a sting of regret
that she would rather he had not obliged her to shock him so
much.

"Do you not know," she said, "that American women go
where they please and do what they have a mind to ? "

" I have heard a great deal that I do not like about certain
females of your nation. But I did not expect to see them look-
ing like you."
" Why?"

" Why ? why ? Your face, your manner, your gestures, your

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 183

slightest movement, all express a character directly opposite to
that which you are now making known to me."

" It is always so with us," said Bawn gravely. " Our appear-
ance is the best of us. We are not half worth what we look."

" So it seems, indeed. With your peculiar brow and eyes and
glance, I did not expect to find you harboring the sentiments of
a French grisette."

<4 My stepmother was half French," exclaimed Bawn.

" Your stepmother ! That does not give you French blood,
I suppose," he said impatiently.

" Neither it does, when I think of it. But might it not have
taught me French ways?"

" And opened up the path to Paris for you."

" You are so quick at guessing that I need to tell you nothing."

" And so you have been dreaming all this time about clothes
and jewelry," he reiterated contemptuously. " When you were
sitting looking out to sea, as I first saw you, with a peculiar ex-
pression in your eyes which I had never observed in any eyes
before and yet seemed to recognize when I saw it, I must con-
clude now that you were merely pondering the fashion of a new
necklace or the color of a gown."

" You recognized the expression of all that ? " .said Bawn in a
tone of keen amusement. " This leads me to think you have
sisters, or cousins, or a wife "

" I have no wife " (crossly).

" How fortunate for her ! A man who would fly in a passion
because a woman gave a thought to her dress would not be a
pleasant husband."

The Blue Cap scowled. " I hope you may get a better one,
madam."

" I devoutly hope so if ever I am to have one at all, which
is doubtful."

" I dare say you would rather continue to go shopping about
the world alone."

11 I admit that I find liberty very sweet."

" So I have concluded. Do not imagine that I could desire
to deprive you of a fragment of it."

Bawn laughed gaily. " Oh ! no," she said. " Your ideal
woman (who lives in the clouds, by the way, and will certainly
not come down to you) will never know the color of the gown
she has on. But seriously, Mr. Somerled, why have you chang-
ed so much for the worse since you first began to talk to me ?
You spoke of the pleasure of meeting me in gay salons of Paris,

1 84 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov.,

and you did not suppose I should walk into them in my travel-
ling dress ? "

" And seriously, madam, why have you changed so much for
the worse since you first allowed me the privilege of talking to
you ? Then you had the face of an angel, with the thoughts of
an angel behind it. You have still the face "

" But the thoughts, translated into words, have proved to be
the thoughts of a"

" Milliner."

" I thought you were going to say ' fiend,' but it is the same
thing, since bonnets and gowns are anathema."

" How shall I make you feel that you have bitterly disap-
pointed me?" he said, looking at her with a mixture of anger
and tenderness.

" It is," said Bawn gravely, " silly in a man to expect to meet
an ideal woman that is, an angel in every female fellow-tra-
veller he may chance to encounter."

While she said this her gray eyes took an expression he failed
to read, and a pathetic look which he could not reconcile with
her late conversation crept over her mouth. Perhaps the
thought arose almost unconsciously in her mind that, under
other circumstances, she would have been pleased to have en-
couraged that delusion of his with regard to the angel that
might possibly live in her.

Yet when she lay down to sleep that night she congratulated
herself on her success in lowering the inconvenient degree of
.interest which this stranger had so perversely taken in her.
Why could he not have devoted himself to the children and their
pretty aunts, who always seemed so pleased to speak to him, and
so saved her the trouble of baffling his curiosity? For that
curiosity alone was the cause of his devotion to her she was re-
solved to believe, electing to deny that any genuine liking for
herself strong enough to influence him could have sprung up
within the limits of so short an acquaintance. And then certain
looks and words of his which gainsaid this belief occurred to
her memory, insisting that here was a good man who was want-
ing to love her if she would let him. If such was indeed the
case, then had she so bound herself to a difficult future that she
could not turn on her steps and allow herself to be carried on to
a happier destiny than she had dreamed of?

Ah ! of what was she thinking ? Forget her father and her
determination to clear the stain of guilt from his beloved name?
Confess the whole story to this stranger, merely because he had

1 886.] CHRISTIAN UNITY vs. UNITY OF CHRISTIANS. 185

assumed the position of her guardian for the moment ; because
he had eyes that could charm, now by their grave tenderness,
and now by their electric flashes of fun, and was also the owner
of a sympathetic voice and a thinking forehead? Was she to
own that by merely putting forth his great powers to attract he
had been able to overturn all her plans, and that she was ready
to await his disposal of her heart and fortune ? Oh ! no not
even if he, being the gentleman she took him to be, could con-
tinue to interest himself about her, once he knew of the cloud
that rested on her father's memory.

TO BE CONTINUED.

CHRISTIAN UNITY VERSUS UNITY OF CHRISTIANS.

AN article on " National Christianity in America," by Presi-
dent Thomas G. Apple, D.D., LL.D., of Franklin and Marshall
College, which appeared in the Independent of August 5, has been
read by us with great interest and pleasure. The writer is in
favor of Christian organization. Although he does not argue
that the different religious bodies of Protestantism should be
consolidated so as to form one church organization, if this were
possible, he nevertheless thinks there may be an effective union
reached somehow.

We are interested in the various tendencies to union among
non-Catholic Christians, because we have dreamed that as soon
as Protestants aimed at unity the question would be settled prac-
tically where it is to be found. Moreover, we do not wholly
misunderstand evangelical Protestants, having ourselves once
in all sincerity believed as they do, and, knowing their difficul-
ties, have not forgotten to pray and labor for them as well. The
question is, How is this unity to be found ? God's grace assist-
ing, there are many ways of finding it. Lacordaire found it by the
study of socialism, Overbeck by treading the paths of art, Hur-
ter by the road of history, Cardinal Newman by patristic learn-
ing, Haller by political science, Brownson by philosophy ; but
we have thought that the way in which we found the truth
might be the way in which others similarly constituted and en-
vironed would, if the evidence was put before them, see it also.

One key for the solution of the question of unity may be

1 86 CHRISTIAN UNITY vs. UNITY OF CHRISTIANS. [Nov.,

found by comparing the apostolic church, as we have it described
in the New Testament, with the churches existing at the present
day. The first Christians, after the coming of the Holy Ghost
on the day of Pentecost, " were persevering in the doctrine of the
apostles, and in the communication of the breaking of bread, and
prayers" (Acts ii. 42). " The doctrine of the apostles," since
Christ had promised that the Holy Ghost should teach them and
bring to their minds all things whatsoever he had said to them
(St. John xiv. 26), was, unless we deny that the Paraclete was the
Spirit of Truth, an unerring rule of faith. What a bond of unity
was the doctrine taught by the apostles! The teaching of the
apostles to whom Christ had said, " He that heareth you heareth
me, but he that despiseth you despiseth me" (St. Luke x. 16),
could not be departed from, though it was no substitute for the
interior personal guidance of the Holy Ghost, but was coincident
and correlative with it. The two were not in conflict, and there
could be no better evidence of the personal guidance of the Holy
Ghost than harmony with this teaching. This is what the first
Christians had external as well as internal witness to the truth.
Religion is nothing if not personal ; yet the church is not per-
sonal, as Emerson, Frothingham, and Abbott would make her ; nor
is she merely an association of individuals having only the interior
guidance of the Holy Ghost, as the numerous sects affirm ; nor
national, as Anglicans, and such men as Schelling, Dr. Dollinger,
and Bishop Reinkens, would reduce her; nor racial, as the Greeks,
Slavs, and others tend to make her ; but she is that body of Chris-
tians who, together with the interior guidance of the Holy Ghost,
have the external teaching of the apostles, with whom Christ pro-
mised to abide till the consummation of the world. With us this
definition of the church solves the question of unity. " The doc-
trine of the apostles " is the work of the Holy Ghost, who abides
for ever with them, as Christ promised he should (St. John xiv.
16). If, therefore, the unity of the apostolic church is what Pro-
testants are aiming at, it must be reached by following the doc-
trine of the apostles revealed by the Holy Ghost, and which the
Holy Ghost alone has power to perpetuate. If merely human
organization is the only thing to which they may aspire, what is
to prevent their divergence from the truth as a body? So what-
ever other advantages may be derived from such a unity, im-
munity from error cannot be one, and we know that they do not
think so and have never intimated such a thing.

Organization merely human, like the sticks in the fable, may,
however, produce many of the benefits which they look for ; and

1 886.] CHRISTIAN UNITY vs. UNITY OF CHRISTIANS. 187

Catholics do not ignore this fact, but merely human unity cannot
supply what is the desideratum of all Christians the unerring,
divine teaching of the apostles. Why can it not supply it? Be-
cause the Holy Ghost gave it, and the Holy Ghost alone is able
to perpetuate it. Having shown that Christian unity differs
fundamentally from unity of Christians, and expressed our views
on Christian organization in general, and our great interest in
the movement, we will proceed to discuss the method of organi-
zation which President Apple proposes. He says :

" The United States has taken the lead in the establishment of a great
-free republic. It now remains to organize a national Christianity in this
great republic. The history of Christianity clearly reveals its tendency to
nationalize itself. Whilst it is catholic in spirit an interest that will, in
the end, bind all nations in one common brotherhood yet in working out
this result it adapts itself to the order of human life. As nationality is one
of the integral forms in which humanity comes to expression in history,
Christianity becomes national in Christianizing the nations. Even in those
ages when the centralizing tendency of the Roman hierarchy was in the
ascendency, a decentralizing tendency manifested itself in the national
churches of modern Europe."

President Apple does not take into consideration whether the
human is capable of producing the. divine or not. (We don't be-
lieve in this evolution.) This is our first objection ; and, secondly,
if by Christianity he means schismatical or Protestant Chris-
tianity when he says that "Christianity becomes national in
Christianizing the nations," this evolution is correct, but of apos-
tolical Christianity it ought to be said in Christianizing the
nations it Christianizes nationality. What he calls "the centraliz-
ing tendency of the Roman hierarchy " is evidence of this. We
would like to ask him what Christianity was foretold by Isaias
the prophet when he said : " The nation and the kingdom that
will not serve thee shall perish ; and the Gentiles shall be wasted
with desolation"? (Isa. Ix. 12).

We have had enough of national Christianity ; we want some-
thing higher.

President Apple also says :

"The question now is, whether we cannot have a national Christianity
withoot a national church in the strict sense of the term that is, a form of
organization in which Christianity shall exert its full moulding power upon
the national life without the entangling alliances that accompany the
union of church and state in the Old World."

Neither individuals nor states can be moulded by Christianity

1 88 CHRISTIAN UNITY vs. UNITY OF CHRISTIANS. [Nov.,

against their own will. We do not see the wisdom of this pro-
position. Never could we wish for a better field for Christian
work than we have already got in this country. Faithful and
zealous apostles of Christianity can reap a harvest of souls for
the kingdom of heaven here, if anywhere on earth. We can do
more for Christianity by exerting ourselves to the utmost to
have the state, as it now is, enforce its present good laws and
pass and enforce more good laws, than by trying to establish any
new relationship between the state and Christianity. We are in
favor of keeping to the political organization that has come down
to us from the founders of our republic we wonder that it was
founded so well ; at the same time we are good Catholics ex corde,
loyal to every proposition of the Syllabus of Pius IX. of happy
memory, and to the encyclical Mirari of Gregory XVI. , and have
no confidence in any Catholic who is not, but we know who are
the proper authorities to interpret these documents. Bismarck
says that there is no man in all Europe that he can get along
with so well as with His Holiness Leo XIII. We Americans
are perhaps more attached to our government than any other
people on earth, and with good reason, because we have the
fullest liberty without prejudice to law and order. Catholic
Americans are unanimous in the opinion that we have at present
the best possible political system for our people.
President Apple says further on :

"It is high time, for instance, for the churches of this country to ex-
press a judgment on the subject of marriage and divorce, on the observ-
ance of the Sabbath, and other matters of a similar character which per-
tain to both church and state."

We do so wish that the churches would do this. Of what
avail is it, for example, to complain because the state permits
divorce, if Protestant ministers perform adulterous marriages?
The church that sanctions such marriages is more to blame than
the state. Why blame the state for permitting what the churches
are continually doing? If all Protestant ministers and Christian
magistrates would refuse to perform unlawful marriages the evil
of divorce would disappear.

Why not develop the resources of churches before appealing
to the state? We have a live state, let us have a live Chris-
tianity. Christian unity has given the world a live Christianity.

1 886.] CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. 189

CONSTANTINE IN THRACE.

The Emperor Constantine, the day before he reaches Byzantium, projects the building of
Constantinople upon its site, esteeming that site the fittest for the metropolis of a Christian
Empire, or, more properly, of a Christian Caliphate, one and universal, to be created by him.
He resolves, that task completed, to be baptized.

HA, Pagan City ! hast thou heard the tidings,

Rome, the world's mistress, whom I never loved !

Whilst yet a boy I read of thy renown,

Thy Kings, thy Consuls, and thine Emperors,

Thy triumphs, slow but certain, in all lands,

Yet never yearned to see thy face. Thy heart

Was as my heart averse, recalcitrant.

I left my charge ; I clave that British sea ;

I crossed the snowy Alps ; I burst thy chain ;

I drowned thy tyrant in the Tyber's wave,

Maxentius, him whose foot was on thy neck:

I sat lip-worship'd on thy Palatine Hill,

But well I knew that to that heart of thine

Nero's black memory was a welcomer thing

Than all my glories. Hast thou heard the tidings ?

The Cross of Christ is found ! By whom ? Not thee !

Thou grop'st and grovel'st in the gold stream's bed

Not there where lies the Cross ! I, Constantine

The Unbaptized, am cleaner thrice than thou

I found it through my mother ! The Cross is found !

I left thee : I had heard a mighty voice :
Eastward it called me : there Licinius reigned,
Ill-crowned compeer and of my rivals last,
Who made the inviolate Empire twain, not one :
One crown suffices earth. Licinius fell :
I saw him kneeling at his conqueror's feet :
I saw him seated at his conqueror's board ;
I spared him, but dethroned. New tumults rose:
Men said they rose through him. Licinius died ; .
Twas rumored, by my hand. I never loved him ;
The truth came out at last: I let it be.

He died : that day the Empire stood uncloven,

CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. [Nov.,

One as in great Augustus' regal prime,

One as when Trajan reigned and Adrian reigned

Great kings, though somewhat flecked with Christian blood :

Whom basest Emperors spared the best trod down ;

I judge them not for that : not yet had dawned

That day when Faith could be the base of Empire.

The Antonines came later; trivial stock,

Philosophers enthroned. Philosophers !

I never loved them : Life to me was teacher :

That great Caesarian Empire is gone by :

'Twas but the old Republic in a mask,

With Consul, Tribune, Pontiff rolled in one ;

A great man wrought its ruin, Diocletian :

The greatest save those three who built it up:

He split his realm in four. Amid the wreck

What basis now subsists for permanent empire ?

Religion. Of Religions one remains:

Who spurns it lives amerced of all Religion.

The old gods stand in ivory, stone, and gold,

Dozing above the dust-heaps round their .feet :

The Flamen dozes on the altar-step :

The People doze within the colonnades :

The Augurs pass each other with a smile :

The Faith that lives is Christ's. Three hundred years

The strong ones and the wise ones trod it down :

Red flames but washed it clean I noted that :

This day the Christian Empire claims its own.

The Christian Empire stranger things have been ;
Christ called his Church a Kingdom. Such it is :
The mystery of its strength is in that oneness
Which heals its wounds, and keeps it self-renewed.
It rises fair with order and degree,
And brooks division none. That realm shall stand :
I blend therewith my Empire ; warp and woof
These twain I intertwine. Like organism
Shall raise in each a hierarchy of powers
Ascending gradual to a single head,
The Empire's head crowned in the Empire's Church.
The West dreamed never of that realm twin-dowered
With. spiritual sway and temporal : the East,
I think, was never long without such dream,
Yet wrought not dream to substance. Persia failed :
Earlier, the Assyrian and the Babylonian ;

1 886.] CONSTANTINE IN THRACE.

Colossal statues these without a soul.

The Alexandrian Empire later came

And more deserved to live. A nobler fault

Was hers, a bodiless fragment shaped of cloud :

The Conqueror lacked material ; he had naught

To work on save the dialectics keen

And Amphionic song of ancient Greece.

His dream was this an Empire based on Mind,

The large Greek Mind. Mind makes a base unstable :

Large minds have ever skill to change their mind :

Then comes the fabric down. He died a youth,

A stripling; ay, but had his scheme been sound

Tis likely he had lived. Religion lives.

Perhaps a true Faith only could sustain

A permanent Empire's burthen. Mine is true:

If any speaks against it he shall die:

'Tis known long since I brook not bootless battles.

The Church had met in synod, fora man
Had made division in that u seamless robe "
Regal this day. Arius schismatic stood
For what? A doctrine! Fool! and knew he not
The essence of Religion is a Law ?
Doctrine is but the standard o'er it flying .
To daunt, to cheer ; daunt foes, and cheer the friend.
What was that Hebrew Church? A sceptred Law
Set up in Saul, and, when that strong man died,
Less aptly in the Shepherd with the harp.
The Church had met in synod at Nicsea,
Nicasa near Byzantium. There was I :
The Church in synod sat, and I within it.
Flocking from every land her bishops came ;
They sat, and I in the midst, albeit in Rome.
My title stood, " Pontifex Maximus."
They came at my command, by me conveyed.
A man astonished long I sat ; I claimed
To sit " a bishop for the things without."
Amid those bishops some were Confessors
Maimed by the fire or brand. I kissed their wounds :
None said, " What dost thou 'mid the Prophet Race ? "
They saw I honored God, and honored me.
Day after day went on the great debate,
And gradual in me knowledge grew. 'Twas strange!
I, neither priest nor layman ; I, that ne'er

192 CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. [Nov.,

Had knelt a Catechumen in the porch ;

I, patron of the Church, yet not her son,

Her Emperor, yet an Emperor unbaptized

I sat in the synod. At the gates stood guards :

Not all were Christian : two, the best, were bold :

One from Danubius winked at me ; and one

From Rhenus smiled at me. The weeks went by,

And in me daily swelled some spirit new :

I know it now ; it was the imperial spirit.

The imperial spirit ay ! I at the first

Had willed the question should be trivial deemed,

And license given, <4 think, each man, what he will."

The fires had burned too deep for that : I changed :

I sided with the strong, and kept the peace :

Rulers must take my course, or stand o'er-ruled.

That was my triumph's hour: then came the fall.
I made return to Rome. Twelve years gone by
My sword had riven the Western tyrant's chain:
Since then the tyrant of the East had perished :
The world was echoing with my name. I reached
The Gate Flaminian and the Palatine ;
I looked for welcome such as brides accord
Their lords new-laurelled. Rome, a bride malign,
Held forth her welcome in a poisoned cup :
Mine Asian garb, my ceremonious court,
Its trappings, titles, and heraldic gear,
To her were hateful. Centuries of bonds
Had left her swollen with Freedom's vacant name :
A buskined greatness trampled still her stage:
By law the gods reigned still. The senate sat
In Jove's old temple on the Capitol :
My fame Nicaean edged their hate. The priest
Shouldering through grinning crowds to sacrifice
Cast on me glance oblique. Fabii and Claudii
Whose lives hung powerless on their Emperor's nod
Eyed me as he who says, " This man is new."
One festal morning to some pagan fane
The whole Equestrian Order rode their wont
In toga red. I saw, and laughing cried,
" Better their worship than their horsemanship ! "
That noon the rabble pressed me in the streets
With wrong premeditate ; hissed me ; spat at me ;
That eve they brake my statues. Choice was none

1 886.] CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. 1 93

Save this, to drown the Roman streets in blood

Or feign indifference. Scorn twelve years of scorn

Changed suddenly to hate. A fevered night

Went by, and morning dawned.

My Council met;

Then came that fateful hour, my wreck and ruin.
Fausta, my wife, hated her rival's son,
Mine eldest born, my Crispus ; hated her
The glory and the gladness of rny youth,
By me for Empire's sake repudiated,
The sweetness of whose eyes looked forth from his.
She lived but in one thought to crown her sons,
My second brood, portioning betwixt those three
My realm when I was dead.

My brothers holp her plot. She watched her time:
She waited till the eclipse which falls, at seasons,
Black on our House was dealing with my soul ;
Then in that Council-hall her minions rose ;
They spake; they called their witnesses suborned,
Amongst them of my counsellors some the best ;
They brought their letters forged and spurious parchments;
And showed it plainlier thrice than sun and moon
That he it was, my Crispus, Portia's child,
Who, whilst his sire was absent at Nicsea,
Month after month had plotted 'gainst him, made
His parricidal covenant with Rome :
The father was to fall in civil broil,
The son to reign. Their league the day gone by
Had made its first assay.

That hour the Fates

Around me spread their net; that hour the chains
Of OEdipus were tangled round my feet :
I stood among them blind.

The noontide flamed:
I, in full Council sitting I since youth
A man of marble nerve and iron will,
A man in whom mad fancy's dreams alike
And fleshly lusts had held no part, subdued
By that Religion grave, a great Ambition ;
I self-controlled, continent in hate itself,
Deliberate and foreseeing I that hour
Down on that judgment-parchment pressed my seal:
That was my crime, the greatest earth hath known ;.j
VOL. XLIV. 13

194 CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. |_ Nov '

My life's one crime. I never wrought another.

'Twas rage pent up 'gainst her I could not strike,
Rome, hated Rome! I smote her through my son,
Her hope, the partner of her guilt. That night
My purpose I repented. 'Twas too late :
The ship had sailed for Pola. Tempest dire,
By demons raised, brake on our coasts ! Five days,
And in his Istrian dungeon Crispus died.
I willed that he, but not his fame, should perish ;
Therefore that deed was hid. With brow sun-bright,
Hell in my heart, I took my place at feasts :
At last the deed was blabbed.

My mother loved

My mother, Helena, the earth's revered one,
Cyb6le of the Christians termed by Greeks
Loved well my Crispus for his mother's sake,
Wronged, like herself, by royal nuptials new,
And hated Fausta with her younger brood.
She brake upon my presence like a storm :
With dreadful eyes and hands upraised she banned me :
She came once more, that time with manifest proof
Of Fausta's guilt. The courtiers had confessed it ;
My brothers later ; last the Accursed herself.
Two days I sat in darkness : on the third
I sent to judgment Fausta and her crew :
That act I deem the elect of all my acts.
They died: at eve I rose from the earth and ate.

But fifteen months before, I at Nicsea
Had sat a god below ! No more of that !
'Twas false, the rumor that by night, disguised,
I knelt within a pagan fane, and sought
Pagan lustration from a pagan priest,
And gat for answer that for crime like mine
Earth held lustration none.

I built great fanes,

Temples which all the ages shall revere :
Saint Peter's huge Basilica ; Saint John's ;
I roamed from each to each, like him who sought
A place for penitence, and found it not ;
Then (rom that city doomed oh ! to what heights
I, loving not, had raised her ! forth I fared,
Never thenceforth to see her. Rome has reigned :
She had her thousand years. Unless some greatness

1 886.] CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. I

Hidden from man remains for man, her doom
Approaches dust and ashes.

I went forth :

I deemed the God I served had cast me off:
The Pagan world I knew my foe : the Christian
Thundered against me from a thousand shores :
There was a dreadful purpose in my soul :
It was my mother saved me ! She, keen-eyed,
Discerned the crisis ; kenned the sole solution.
In expiation of my crime she sped,
A holy pilgrim, to the Holy Land :
She spread her hands above the sacred spot,
As when the Mother- Beast updrags to light
The prey earth-hidden for her famished young :
Instinct had led her to it : she dug and dug ;
She found the world's one treasure, lost till then,
That Cross which saved the world. With lightning speed
The tidings went abroad : I marched : last night
I raised mine eyes to heaven. I ne'er was one
Of spirit religious, though my life was pure,
Austerely pure amid an age corrupt:
I never was a man athirst for wonders ;
My fifty years have witnessed three alone :
The first was this while yet Maxentius lived,
My army nearing Rome, I marked in her,
Though bond-slave long, a majesty divine ;
She seemed earth's sum of greatness closed in one :
Some help divine I needed to confront her :
That help was given : I looked aloft: I saw
In heaven the God-Man on His Cross, thenceforth
My battle-sign, " Labarum." Yesternight
Once more I saw it ! He that hung thereon
Spake thus : " Work on, and fear not."

Those two Visions,

The first, the third, shine on me still as one:
The second was of alien race and breed.
New-throned in Rome, I doubted oft her future :
One night I watched upon Mount Palatine,
My seat a half-wrought column. It had lain
For centuries seven rejected, none knew why,
By earlier builders : in more recent times
Ill-omened it was deemed, yet unremoved.
The murmur from the City far beneath

196 CONSTANTINE IN THRACE, [Nov.,

Induced oblivion. Sudden by me stood

A queenly Form, the Genius of great Rome ;

Regal her face ; her brow, though crowned, was ploughed

With plaits of age. She spake : " Attend my steps."

Ere long I marked her footing the great sea

Eastward : I followed close. Then came a change :

Seven hills before me glittered in her light:

Save these the world was dark. I looked again :

On one of these she stood. Immortal youth

Shone splendid from her strong and strenuous face ;

And all her form was martial. On her head

She bore a helm, and in her hand a spear

High-raised. She plunged that spear into the soil ;

Then spake : " Build here my City and my Throne,"

Then vanished from my sight. High up I heard

The winnowing of great wings. The self-same sound

Had reached me while that Goddess trod the sea :

'Twas Victory following that bright crest for aye.

Morn broke : I knew that site ; it was Byzantium ;

So be it ! There shall stand the second Rome,

Not on the plain far-famed that once was Troy,

A dream of mine in youth.

Byzantium ! Ay !

The site is there: there meet the double seas
Of East and West. The Empire rooted there
Shall stand the wide earth's centre, clasping in one
That earlier Rome was only Rome rehearsed
The Alexandrian and Caesarean worlds:
Atlas and Calp are our western bound ;
Ganges shall guard our Eastern. To the North
Not Rhenus, not Danubius that is past
But Vistula and far Boristhenes ;

Tanais comes next. Those Antonines, poor dreamers,
Boasted their sageness, limiting their realm :
They spared Rome's hand to freeze her head and heart :
An Empire's growth surceased, its death begins :
Long death is shame prolonged. Let Persia tremble !
Rome's sole of Rivals ! Distance shields her now :
My Rome shall fix on her that eye which slays :
She like a gourd shall wither. O my son,
That task had been for thee !

Ha, Roman Nobles !
Your judgment-time approaches ! Shadows ye !

1 886.] CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. l

Shadows since then are ye. Those shades shall flit :

My city shall be substance, not a shadow.

Ye slew the Gracchi ; they shall rise and plague you :

Ye clutched the Italian lands ; stocked them with slaves ;

Then ceased the honest wars : your reign shall cease :

Again, as when Fabricius left his farm

To scourge his country's foes, Italian hands,

The hands of Latium, Umbria, and Etruria,

In honorable households bred, made strong

By labor on their native fields, shall fence

Their mother-land from insult. Mercenaries !

Who made our Roman armies mercenary ?

Slave-lords that drave the free men from the soil !

Your mercenaries bought and sold the realm !

In sport or spleen they chose Rome's Emperor!

The British hosts chose me. I, barbarous styled,

I Constantine decree that in the ranks

Of Rome the Roman blood, once more supreme,

Shall leave scant place for hirelings ill to trust :

The army to the Emperor shall belong,

Not he to it, henceforth.

On these seven hills

The seven of Rome, with these compared, are pigmies
I build earth's Empire City. They shall lift
High up the temples of the Christian Law,
Gold-domed, descried far off by homeward fleets,
Cross-crowned in record of my victory.
To it shall flock those senators of Rome,
Their Roman brag surceased. Their gods shall stand
Grateful for incense doles diminishing daily,
If so they please, thronging the lower streets,
These, and the abjects of the Emperors dead ;
Ay, but from those seven hills to heaven shall rise
The Apostolic Statues, and mine own,
Making that race beneath ridiculous.
Above the Empire which that city crowns.
Above its Midland, Euxine, Caspian seas,
Above its Syrian Paradises lulled
By soft Orontes' and Euphrates' murmurs,
Above its Persian gardens, and the rush
Of those five Indian rivers o'er whose merge
The Emathian sadly fixed his eastward eyes,
Above all these God's Angels, keeping watch,

198 CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. [Nov.,

From East to West shall sweep, for aye sustaining
My Standard, my "Labarum" !

It shall last,

That Empire, till the world herself decays,
Since all the old Empires, each from each devolved,
It blends, and marries to a Law Divine.
Its throne shall rest on Right Hereditary,
Not will of splenetic legions or the crowd ;
Its Sovereigns be the elect of God, not man :
Its nobles round their Lord shall stand, sun-clad
In light from him reflected ; stand in grades
Hierarchal, and impersonating, each,
Office and function, not the dangerous boast
Of mythic deeds and lineage. Age by age
Let those my emperors that wear not names
Of Csesar or Augustus, but rny name,
Walk in my steps, honoring the Church aright:
The Empire and the Church must dwell together
The one within the other. Which in which ?
The Empire clasps the world ; clasps then the Church ;
To shield that Church must rule her. Hers the gain :
I, who was never son of hers, enriched her
Making the ends o' the earth her heritage :
I ever knew 'tis poverty not wealth
That kindles knave to fanatic : silken saints
Like him of Nicomedia, my Eusebius,

Mate best with Empire's needs. When death draws nigh,
I, that was ever jealous lest the Font
Might give the Church of Christ advantage o'er me,
Will humbly sue for baptism, doffing then
My royal for my chrysome robe. Let those
Who through the far millenniums fill my throne
In this from me take pattern. Wise men choose
For wisest acts wise season.

Hark that trump !

The army wakens from its noontide rest :
Ere sunset fires its walls I reach Byzantium.

1 88 6.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 199

A MAN OF HIS TIME.

No period of history has been more frequently discussed than
the golden age of French literature. Sevignes Letters, Voltaire's
Siecle de Louis Quatorze, Saint-Simon's Memoirs, and a great num-
ber of works at least as famous as these, have drawn a picture of
the reign of Louis XIV. so complete and minute in detail that,
as we read, we seem to live in the throbbing, feverish pulsations
of that time. So vivid is the picture that the extraordinary bril-
liancy of all that surrounded the court of the Grand Monarque is
as dazzling to our eyes as if its gay pageants were still passing
before the world, and we are well-nigh bewildered at the exhibi-
tion of so much wit and sparkle, such genius, beauty, and grace.
Then, as we read on, the show ceases to charm us. The moral
turpitude underlying what at first was most alluring and fasci-
nating becomes apparent. Society is rotten to the very core.
The condition of the poor is little better than that of the beasts
of the field. Mme. de Montespan is virtually Queen of France ;
the high offices of church and state are held by her favor ; the
royal dukedoms are bestowed on the king's illegitimate children.
The salons of Paris are swarming with bewigged and powdered
abbe's ; Csesarism having invaded the sanctuary, ecclesiastics are
transformed into courtiers. Still the church is not completely
stifled ; there is power, earnestness, and religion at work even
in France. St. Vincent de Paul is laboring with the zeal of an
apostle at Saint Lazare ; Bossuet and Bourdaloue are denouncing
with fearless eloquence the sins of king and court. If there are
preachers, there are penitents too such as La Valliere at the
Carmelites, such as De Ranee* at La Trappe.

It was an age of extremes, just as this is an age of compro-
mise. The same awful strength that prompted men to abominable
wickedness, when once the tide had turned led them to do most
heroic acts of penance. No sooner were men's consciences awak-
ened to the sins of their past lives, and to the perils that sur-
rounded them, than they unflinchingly cut off every tie that bound
them to the world, and fled into the desert. Penance, silence,
solitude is the perpetual refrain of these lives. The very vio-
lence of the disease which infected society suggested violent
remedies, and this is perhaps the reason why the asceticism of

200 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov.,

that time is tinged with a certain rigor that reminds us of Jan-
senism divested of its malice.

Armand-Jean Bouthillier de Ranee was all through his check-
ered career a representative man, and we have chosen him as
the subject of this paper because his life is an epitome of most
of the characteristics of his time. He was born in Paris the
9th of January, 1626. His father was a man of the world, ambi-
tious for his children and for their advancement in life. Armand-
Jean was his second son, the godchild of Richelieu, who gave
him his own name. From his infancy the boy was surrounded
with honors ; his family was not only allied to the noblest in
France, but he was the pet and darling of two queens, the
queen-dowager, Marie de Medicis, and afterwards of the regent,
Anne of Austria. M. de Ranee had incurred the displeasure
of the regent by his unswerving fidelity to the unfortunate
Marie de Medicis, and the first-fruit of his restoration to favor
at court was the bestowal of a canonry of Notre Dame on his
eldest son, Francois. This was soon followed by a dowry to his
daughter, Claude-Catherine, and by many other signal benefits.
The little Armand-Jean was meanwhile giving signs of remark-
able intelligence and of a capacity considerably above the aver-
age. His father had destined him for a military career, having
settled that Frangois should receive as many ecclesiastical honors
as could be obtained, and become a priest. Armand was ac-
cordingly taught to dance, to ride, to fence, and to shine in all
those accomplishments which were then thought necessary for
a Knight of Malta. But of these projects not one was to be
realized. Francois fell ill, and from the first it was recognized
that his malady, although of its nature a lingering one, would
prove mortal. If he died from ten to twelve thousand livres
of ecclesiastical revenue would be lost to the family. M. de
Ranee's worldly wisdom was equal to the occasion : Armand
should be a priest, and heir to his brother's preferments. With
all speed he procured for him the tonsure at the hands of the
Archbishop of Paris, and when, less than two years afterwards,
the Abbe Francois died, Armand was solemnly installed canon of
Notre Dame in his place. He was eleven years old. In a short
time his brother's remaining benefices were also transferred to
him with the consent of the king, and thus the boy was not only
canon of the great metropolitan cathedral, but abbot of La
Trappe and of two other monasteries, as well as prior of Bou-
logne, near Chambord. In 1635 he had come into the possession
of the abbey of St. Clementine, in Poitou, and, at an age when he

1 886.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 201

was still unable to render the least service to the church, was in
the enjoyment of about fifteen thousand livres of ecclesiastical
revenue.

It is impossible to exaggerate the evils which made such a
condition of things not only possible but a matter of every-day
occurrence. The abuse was so general, and was moreover coun-
tenanced by so many persons of merit, that M. de Ranee could
not be expected to be very scrupulous in accepting such advan-
tages for his son. But the church had from time to time, under
several popes, remonstrated against the holding of abbeys in
commendam, and had repeatedly revoked them. If she at any
time tolerated the practice, it was less a concession to men's
weakness than an ostensible proof of the humiliating bondage in
which the state held her. She had ever opposed the holding of
more than one such benefice at a time, in spite of the frequent
practice.

If anything could justify the choice made of Armand de
Ranee as the recipient of these contraband favors, the extraordi-
nary promise and brilliancy of his intellectual faculties might
have afforded some excuse. It was clear to all that his career
would be no insignificant one. His memory was no less remark-
able than his other gifts ; what he had once learnt he never for-
got, and he was studious in proportion to his grasp of mind and
capacity. Greek was the language he preferred to all others, and
in which he loved to clothe his thoughts. He was only twelve
years old when he published an edition of Anacreon with Greek
scholia and dedicated it to Richelieu. The work was of such
recognized merit, and was considered such a marvellous produc-
tion for a boy of his years, that the cardinal proposed to confer
on the author yet another abbev in commendam. But Pere Caus-
sin, the king's confessor, represented to Lpuis that to heap bene-
fices on the head of such a child was to pervert the property of
the church to a wrong use. Nothing could justify it, not even
the most extraordinary talents; and, after all, who could tell
what the boy would turn out? The king, informed by Riche-
lieu of the very high order of the young scholar's attainments,
replied that the boy already knew more Greek and Latin than
all the abbes in the realm.

Pere Caussin, wishing to judge for himself whether such were
the case, wrote to M. de Ranee", expressing a desire to make the
acquaintance of his son. The next day the learned young abb6
got into his carriage and drove to the Grands-Jesuites, in the Rue
Saint Antoine. He was shown into the library, where the Pere

202 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov.,

Caussin soon joined him. After a few civilities the Jesuit began
to draw his visitor out on the subject of his studies. He handed
him a Homer and begged him to translate some passages at any
place the book might chance to open. Not stopping to read out
the original text, Armand began without hesitation to give the
French rendering, and in such perfect language that one might
have supposed he was reading a French author. This so aston-
ished the listener that he thought the boy must be translating
from the Latin in a parallel column. So he turned over several
pages and threw the abbe's gloves over the Latin part to hide it.
Armand went on as before, and the Pere Caussin was not only
convinced of his learning and merit, but was completely won
over to him. Embracing him with effusion, he exclaimed:

" My child, you have not only the eyes of a lynx, but a still
more discerning mind ! "

Nevertheless no more honors were conferred upon the boy
for the present, and that was a good thing.

Thus the years of his education sped on, full of literary achieve-
ment. Aristotle was studied with avidity; then for a time the
fantastic theories of astrology fascinated a mind bent on investi-
gating every real or pretended science it came across. In 1643
Armand finished his course of philosophy and began his theology.
He was just seventeen. " I hope soon to be a great theologian,"
he wrote priggishly to his former tutor, M. Favier. " In eight
months I shall have got through my scholastic theology, and
during the sixteen more which must elapse before I can be a
bachelor I shall devote myself to the reading of the Fathers, the
councils, and ecclesiastical history ! ... As soon as ever I can I
shall begin preaching."

With the self-sufficiency of extreme youth, he criticises St.
Thomas, and proposes to give his opinion on the disputes then
going on between M. Arnauld, representing Jansenism, and the
Jesuits. Being, however, advised to follow the lectures given
by some learned Carmelites of Charenton, he is gradually con-
vinced that St. Thomas is an inspired writer; and is probably
also set right with regard to Jansenism, for the Carmelites were
noted for their fidelity to the Holy See, and we hear no more of
the subject.

Without ceasing to be a student, De Ranee now began to have
other interests besides study; and as it was his nature to throw
himself heart and soul into everything that interested him, his life
began to be a sort of wild medley of the most incompatible pur-
suits. Fencing, shooting, hunting, theology, and preaching he

1 886.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 203

had a taste for them all. He would sit writing the most erudite
thesis on the Blessed Trinity, showing the wide difference that
exists between the Christian doctrine concerning the Three in
One and the theory of Plato and other philosophers of anti-
quity ; then, throwing himself upon his horse, he would ride to
hunt, dressed in the most fashionable costume. He had long
thought it would be a fine thing to have vast congregations lis-
tening with bated breath to his sermons, and he actually asked for
and obtained permission to preach. Then he soon began to shine
as a preacher, as he had shone as a student. But hunting was
perhaps, after all, what he most cared for. Often he would pass
whole days and nights in the forests, bareheaded, worn out with
fatigue, watching in some hiding-place for a stag or a wild boar.
Brimful of life and energy, he never shopped to consider whether
his recreations were altogether suitable for a canon, an abbot, a
prior, and a preacher. This kind of life was little calculated to
nurture in him devout aspirations for the priesthood, and, although
it was an understood thing that he was to receive holy orders, he
put off the final step as long as he could. At last, however, his re-
lations urged him to make no further delay. The road to fortune
lay solely in this direction. The Archbishop of Tours, his uncle,
was anxious to have him as his coadjutor; but the prelate was al-
ready old and infirm, and if he died before Armand was ordained
the post would be lost to him, with the right of succession.

Armand was not so utterly steeped in ambition and the love of
pleasure as not to feel his extreme unfitness for the new respon-
sibility he was about to take upon himself. St. Vincent de Paul
was forming young ecclesiastics at St. Lazare, and had already
grouped around him all that was most distinguished for piety in
the great French metropolis. Gently but surely he was build-
ing up what the corruption and decay of centuries had been
gradually destroying. To him De Ranc6 went, conscious of his
own deficiencies, and put himself into the hands of " le saint
M. Vincent," as all Paris even then called him. At St. Lazare
he made a retreat of twelve days, learnt how to meditate and to
examine his conscience, had himself taught the ceremonies of the
church, and began to wear a clerical dress.

In quaint old pictures of the lives of the saints, where every
incident is told by symbols, a flower rudely outlined sometimes
shows how a grace was coming to the soul, and afterwards every-
thing is changed in that life. A grace had now come to De
Ranee, and if it did not at the time change the whole tenor of his
way, it was perhaps the first of all his chances. This grace was

204 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov.,

his intercourse with St. Vincent de Paul, who first startled him
with regard to the unseemliness of his life and to the unlawful-
ness of a plurality of benefices, showing him the consequences of
an abuse like this. De Ranee was softened and humbled by all
he had seen and heard at St. Lazare, but he was not prepared to
make a sacrifice that would cloud over the prospects of his whole
career and probably bring him into bad odor at court. He would
try what good intentions without much personal discomfort
would do. Still, he had been made thoroughly uneasy, and from
this moment, although he returned in a measure to his old pur-
suits, there are occasional rifts in the clouds indicative of some-
thing within him at war with his other restless, impatient, undis-
ciplined self. He continued to study everything that came in his
way, and in the midst of all his history and geography, his her-
aldry, painting, chronology, and controversy, was ordained priest,
the 22d of January, 165 1. He was to have said his first Mass with
great pomp and display in the church of the Annunciades, in
Paris; but during the elaborate preparations he disappeared, and
went off quite alone to a monastery of Carthusians, where he of-
fered the Holy Sacrifice in perfect solitude, to the discomfiture of
all his friends. Strange to relate, this solemn event, earnestly
and thoughtfully as he had celebrated it, fixed no permanent
landmark in his life ; his studies, amusements, and dissipation
went on as before. In 1654 he took his degree of doctor at the
Sorbonne, his father having died the preceding year. He was
now in possession of his patrimony, the barony of Veretz, a large
and beautiful estate in Touraine, and of two magnificent houses
in Paris. The Abbe de Ranee was one of the richest and finest
gentlemen in France. When he went to court or to brilliant en-
tertainments he usually wore a purple doublet of some costly
material, silk stockings of the same color, a rich lace cravat of
the most fashionable shape and pattern, long hair well curled
and powdered, two enormous emeralds as sleeve-buttons, and a
diamond ring of great value on his finger. In the country he
carried a sword, wore a fawn-colored coat and a black silk cravat
with gold embroidery.

After a time he threw aside his books and gave himself up to
idleness. From morning till night there was no break in the
ceaseless round of pleasures, entertainments, visits, day-dreams,
and extravagances of every kind. Here and there a friend was
brave enough to administer a rebuke. " You might do better
than this," said one day the Bishop of Chalons ; " you are wanting
neither in talents nor in understanding:." But remonstrances

1 886.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 205

were in vain; by this time the world had taken such hold of
De Ranee that nothing short of a moral earthquake could break
the silken bonds with which he was bound. The earthquake
came in this wise :

Mme. la Duchesse de Montbazon was one of the reigning
beauties of Paris. Witty, graceful, and charming, of her the
ambassador of Queen Christina said that, having seen all that
was considered beautiful in the French capital, it was as if he
had seen nothing till he had been presented to the Duchesse de
Montbazon.

Her salon, the most brilliant and seductive of the gay capital,
was the resort of all the beaux esprits of fashion and celebrity.
Among the guests that assembled there and there was not one
who was not distinguished De Ranee was the moving spirit, en-
livening every entertainment with his sparkling wit and that
keen delight in enjoyment which is almost enough in itself to
make others enjoy. His remarks were the Attic salt of the most
lively conversations, and his manners were thought polished even
in that age of exquisite politeness.

Veretz was at no great distance from the country-seat of the
Montbazons, and here, as in Paris, there was a continuous round
of amusements, of which De Ranee was still the life and soul. In
the spring of 1657 he went to Paris, but in a short time the
Duchesse de Montbazon was seized with a malignant fever.
De Ranee, hurried to her bedside, and the sounds of music and
revelry are still ringing in our ears when we hear him pronounc-
ing the solemn words, " Not an instant to lose death, repent-
ance !"

At length the scales had fallen from his eyes. " There is no
hope of your recovery," he said to her, " and but little time ; do
not put off your reconciliation with God a single moment." The
third day of her illness, having procured the dying woman the
last sacraments, he left the house in order to take a little rest, and
returned towards evening.

On his way up-stairs he met her son, M. de Soubise, who
told him that his mother had just died.

There was something so appalling in the swift end of a life in
which the thought of death had never found a place, in the sud-
den passing away of a soul in the midst of balls and fetes, of reck-
lessness, and perhaps of worse still, that De Ranee was struck
down to the earth as by a blow.

He at once left Paris and shut himself up at Veretz. In his
account of this period of his life he says that his mind was full

206 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov.,

of darkness and confusion ; that he wandered about his great,
gloomy corridors a prey to grief, remorse, and desolation, alone
with the terrible reproaches of his conscience. The world was
as hateful to him now as it had been attractive before, and, look-
ing back on the past, one horrible phantom after another rose up
to paralyze him with fear. In how much he had sinned none but
his confessors ever knew, but his repentance and heroic, life-long
penance are matters of history. Here at Veretz he spent whole
days in the forest, seeing and speaking to no one, and in the even-
ing would sit plunged in reverie by the empty fire-place while
the wind swept moaning through the trees in the park and rat-
tled the window-frames.

One day, sitting thus, he cried out with tears of repentance:
" O pauvre Abbe * de Ranee" , oh serais- tu maintenant, si tit, ttais mart
dans ce temps-la ! "

For three months he remained in this state of misery, then,
taking with him one servant, and travelling in the simplest man-
ner, so as to attract no attention, he returned to Paris and
begged hospitality of the Fathers of the Oratory. Here he made
a general confession of his whole life, after which he put himself
for direction into the hands of Pere de Mouchy. That which
caused him the most poignant regret was the unprepared and
unworthy manner in which he had been used to offer Mass, and
so intense was now his contrition for this that he imposed on
himself the penance of abstaining from celebrating .the Holy
Sacrifice for six months. Then he consulted his director as to
the kind of life he should adopt for the future, but the advice of
the Pere de Mouchy that he should strive to render himself wor-
thy of his holy calling only partially satisfied him.

There was that in De Ranc6 prompting him to do greater
things than these an intense longing for something beyond ; as
yet he knew not what, much less could he define the want. The
Oratorian referred him to several priests noted for their enlight-
enment, but they were no help to him.

By this time it had become known that he was in Paris, and
one day two ladies of fashion having paid him a visit to invite
him to return to their receptions, he began to feel that it would
be dangerous for him to remain longer in such close proximity
to his old haunts. All undecided as he was, he made up his mind
to return to Veretz.

At the Oratory he had put his conscience in order, but it did
not seem likely that he would be helped on much further by the
Pere de Mouchy, and on the road to Veretz he made a halt at

1 8 86.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 207

Port Royal in the hope that Arnauld d'Andilly might give him
the key to his vocation.

De Ranee's connection with the Port-Royalists has been too
persistently misrepresented by them not to need a word of ex-
planation here. It is quite admissible that the Abbe de Ranee at
this period was attracted by the severe and rigorous tone adopt-
ed by the self-styled hermits of Port Royal, and by the long
penances they prescribed, before it might be hoped that the sin-
ner was reconciled to God. Nevertheless he never bartered
away his liberty to them, and, in spite of all their advances and
his esteem for M. d'Andilly, he never linked himself in any way
to the Jansenists as a party. When a decision had to be made,
and it became a question of showing his colors, he proved him-
self to be what indeed he had ever been a submissive and de-
voted son of the Catholic Church.

M. d'Andilly, however, was for a time the chosen director
of De Ranee's conscience, and the penitent corresponded with
him from his retreat at Veretz. He consulted him as to the
books he should read, as to his rule of life, and never left his
solitude, even for the most indispensable journey, without first
obtaining permission from Port Royal. This might have led
to another Babylonian captivity as dangerous as the toils of the
world had been, for the Jansenists did all they could to maintain
absolute power at Veretz. None but Jansenistic priests and Jan-
senistic books were admitted there. But this state of things only
lasted as long as De Ranee chose that it should last. He was
no more pledged to Jansenism than he was to Quietism, and the
more the Arnauids strove to tighten the reins the more did
De Ranee show himself to be independent of them. Still, even
when he broke away from their direction, he continued for a long
time to keep up cordial relations with M. d'Andilly, and it was
not till much later that he began to perceive the real spirit of
hostility to the church which animated the party.

Three years had passed away since the death of Mme. de
Montbazon, and the life at Veretz, hidden as it was, full of
pious aspirations, of study, and of good works, began to seem too
luxurious to a mind thirsting for penance and a deeper, holier soli-
tude. It was a life worthy of a Greek philosopher, but scarcely
one to satisfy a penitent such as De Ranee. He consulted the
Bishop of Chalons on the subject of giving up his benefices, and
was told that he could not lawfully retain them.

The Jansenists made one more effort to influence him and
to allay his scruples, but without success. There were to

2o8 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov.,

be no more half-measures, and, above all, there should be no
sophistry.

It would lead us far beyond the scope of this paper were we
to follow De Ranee" through all the difficulties he encountered
from his family and from others before he was allowed to di-
vest himself of all his benefices save one, to effect the sale of
his beloved Veretz, to make over his houses in Paris to the
hospital of the Hdtel-Dieu, to distribute his fortune among the
poor, and to retire to La Trappe. Nor, interesting as the study
would be, may we follow him through the mazes he had to
thread from the moment when he exclaimed with horror, " Moi,
me faire frocard ! " at the bare suggestion of his becoming a monk,
to the moment when we see him, stripped of all his pride, humbly
craving admission at the novitiate of Perseigne.

His first plan was to go for a time to La Trappe the one
abbey he had retained and there establish some kind of reform.
As yet any idea of taking the religious habit was as remote from
his intention as it had been in the days of his worldly life. He
was still in doubt as to the future, a desert in which to pray
being his only desire. But he was still commendatory abbot of
this monastery, and the very title was a mark of corruption.

For more than a century the abbots of the Cistercian monas-
tery of La Trappe had been ecclesiastics living in the world,
recognizing no obligations in return for the revenues which the
abbey was bound to make over to them.

It will be easily imagined that such an irregularity could not
have taken place without serious detriment to the monks, who
by degrees came to have nothing of their state but the name and
the habit. In 1662 La Trappe was virtually a ruin. The divine
office had long ceased to be recited, the doors of the monastery
were allowed to remain open day and night, the cloisters were
accessible to men and women of the world, and the filthy con-
dition into which the house had fallen was only equalled by that
of the church. The walls of the sacred edifice were crumbling
away, the pavement was unsafe, the roof let the rain in, and the
altars were in a deplorable and unseemly state.

It was comparatively easy to remedy these material evils, but
the reform of the monks themselves was a task that needed all De
Ranc6's firmness, patience, and courage. Not only would they
listen to none of his remonstrances, but they even threatened to
take his life if he did not abandon his plans of reform. They had
degenerated into little else but a band of lawless brigands, the
terror of the country around. Crimes of every sort lurked in the

1 886.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 209

shadow of their forests ; robbers and assassins took refuge within
the very walls of the sanctuary.

The difficulties to be overcome before even the first principles
of religious life were re-established in the community would have
daunted a spirit less determined than De Ranee's, for neither
entreaties, menaces, nor exhortations were of any avail. His
friends besought him to have some regard for his own safety, and
to abandon a task that seemed hopeless from the beginning. But
these motives were not likely to have much weight with De
Ranee*, and when he had exhausted all other resources he ap-
pealed to the king.

If the monks of La Trappe had lost all fear of God, they had
a most craven fear of Louis XLV., and this step of their abbot's
produced an instantaneous result. Their threats gave way to the
humblest submission, and De Ranee at once profited by the favor-
able moment to put the monastery into the hands of the Cister-
cians of the Strict Observance. Six religious were sent from
Perseigne to introduce the Reform, the old monks, also six in
number, obtaining permission to live within the precincts of the
monastery, or to retire altogether on a pension of four hundred
livres each.

Thus, then, was the first step gained ; the second led the abbot
himself into a new path. For months he had been living the life
of a Cistercian in all its austerity, and with the practice of re-
ligious life his aversion to the religious habit gradually vanished.
The old repugnance had now and again to be combated, but dur-
ing these months of struggle it had become clearer and clearer to
him that the solitude to which he felt himself called was none
other than the solitude of La Trappe. His final resolve was taken
one day after Mass, during his thanksgiving, while the monks
were singing Sext in the office of the Blessed Virgin. Suddenly
the words of the psalm fell like rays of light into his soul: Qui
confidunt in Domino, sicut mons Sion : non cotnmovebitur in aternum
qui habitat in Jerusalem.

The news that the Abb6 de Ranee, the learned doctor of the-
Sorbonne, the cultivated man of letters, the luxury-loving world-
ling, was about to put on the humble habit of St. Bernard and
bury himself in a living tomb for the rest of his days, was a scan-
dal to his friends in the world. The consent of the king for
transforming the abbey in commendam into an abbey regular had,
been obtained, and De Ranc6 had already begun his novitiate at
Perseigne, before many would believe in the miracle. Even, the-
vicar-general of the Reform could hardly credit the seriousness

VOL. XLIV. 14

210 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov.,

of his intention when he applied to him for admission into the
order. But to all his objections De Ranee replied : " It is true I
am a priest, but I have lived in a manner unworthy of my office ;
I have possessed several abbeys, but instead of being a father to
my religious 1 have squandered their goods and the patrimony
of the Crucifix. I am a doctor, but I am ignorant of the very
alphabet of Christianity." The year of the novitiate was passed
in the exercise of the most humble offices. No work, however
repugnant to nature, seemed hard to him when performed in the
light of fraternal charity and expiation for past sins. His favorite
maxim was this : " The higher a man is placed in authority over
others, the more should he humble himself in the spirit of charity
to those under him." There were two breaks, however, in this
year of novice life, the one occasioned by a severe illness brought
on by his excessive austerities ; the other was an order from the
prior of Perseigne to proceed into Champagne and settle a dis-
pute that had arisen between the relaxed members of a religious
community and those who had voted for the Reform.

On the iQth of June, 1664, the bulls authorizing the profession
of the Abbe de Ranee arrived from Rome, and a day was fixed
for the ceremony. But before finally binding himself by vows
he announced solemnly that he saw nothing in the so-called Strict
Observance approaching to the primitive Cistercian spirit, and
that it was his intention to revive that spirit at La Trappe. The
declaration was like a thunder-clap both to the prior of Perseigne
and the vicar-general. They disapproved of any attempt to re-
store the ancient order of things more completely than had been
thought prudent in the Reform actually existing ; and yet in re-
fusing to profess the Abbe de Ranee* they saw that they would
be depriving Citeaux of one who was perhaps destined to be its
chiefest support and ornament in that century. After some de-
liberation they replied that he would be at liberty to do the best
he could with his own monastery ; but they were convinced that
he would find no one to second him in his views, and that proba-
bly, finding his plan impracticable, he would be content to aban-
don it. De Ranee accordingly pronounced his vows (26th of
June, 1664), and, after being consecrated abbot by Mgr. Plunket,
Bishop of Ardagh, in Ireland, proceeded to take possession of La
Trappe.

It would have been impossible that a man so distinguished as
De Ranee should have passed through this solemn crisis unnoticed
by the world he was leaving behind him. The eyes of France
were upon him, and friends and enemies were anxiously waiting
to see what he would do. They had not to wait long. The kind

1 886.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 211

of life introduced into La Trappe by the religious of the Strict
Observance was not very austere. On fast-days they dined at
eleven; a liberal collation was allowed, and silence was not very
strictly observed. There was an hour's recreation every day
after dinner, and a walk once a week. The religious might still
receive visits in the parlors. Soon, however, after the consecra-
tion of their abbot, his fervor communicated itself to those around
him ; laxity gave way to a relish for penance, and his example
was a keen incentive to the practice of every kind of mortifica-
tion.

By common consent of the religious fish ceased entirely to be
an article of their food, eggs were only to be allowed in cases of
sickness, meat was altogether prohibited except in serious mal-
adies. Hitherto butter had been used in preparing the various
dishes of vegetables on which they dined, but, the abbot having
forbidden any butter to be put into his portion of food, the whole
community followed his example. With regard to the rule of
silence, De Ranee began by allowing his religious to speak once
a day; then, as they were very careful to accuse themselves in
chapter of every idle word that had escaped them, and of the
least imperfection they had noticed in themselves or in each
other, the penance he usually imposed for this kind of fault was
to keep silence for several days together, thus preparing them
for the perpetual silence he purposed to introduce among them.
Then when they appeared ripe for such an austerity he de-
creed :

1. That the community being assembled, either in the re-
fectory, the chapter-house, at conference, or elsewhere, no re-
ligious should speak except to the superior presiding.

2. That the religious should have no communication with
each other, either by word of mouth, by letter, or by signs, and
much less with individuals from without..

It was decreed further that, to avoid every occasion for speak-
ing, no two religious were to be together without necessity,
and that a breach of this rule should be considered a breach of
silence.

This rule of silence came to be so strictly observed at La
Trappe that the effect produced on the guests, always hospitably
received there, was like the hush of some vast sanctuary in the
desert. At the same time each monk was exhorted to open his
heart to his superior as often as he felt the need, and the Abbe de
Ranee was always ready to counsel, direct, and encourage his
spiritual sons, like a kind father, almost with the tenderness of a
mother.

212 A QUEEN. [Nov.,

Manual labor, such as ploughing, sowing, reaping, gardening,
occupied three hours of the day, the monks going to their work
in procession, one by one, headed by their abbot.

But the life and soul of their austerities was the prayer and
psalmody with which this desert place was incessantly vibrating.
Our Lord's command to "pray without ceasing " was here carried
out in full.

Gregorian plain chant was the psalmody in use, and De Ranee
brought it to such perfection that each word, each note seemed
palpitating with life. It was as if angels had joined their voices to
those of the monks to make them so plaintively sweet. At night,
when they rose to sing Matins, their voices, welling up out of the
darkness and the deep silence, swept through the great, dim
arches of the church in strains 'of unearthly beauty.

This picture of the white-robed penitents of La Trappe, bare-
headed and with naked feet on the cold stones, making sweet
melody in their hearts to God, is pleasanter to look upon than
the picture with which we began, with all its pomp and splendor.
Both belong to the past, but this lives on.

A QUEEN.

LET happy lovers sing the bliss of June,

When with life's sweetest chords earth keepeth tune,

The growing year's full maiden perfectness

With untried heart and open hand to bless.

Be mine October's deeper grace to sing
Of golden sunshine daily shortening,
Of empty nests and songs of summer stilled :
With sense of loss each passing hour filled.

Strong-armed and beautiful she comes, like one
That holds the labor of her life undone
So long as from deep fountain of her heart
Life's crimson currents on life's errands start.

To-day a queen ; her draperies of gold
And royal scarlet falling fold on fold
About the firm-shod feet so swift to move
On womanly mission of untiring love.

i886.] A QUEEN. 213

Smiling she stands and softly sings to rest
With gracious deeds the sorrow of her breast
The empty nests she never hath seen filled,
June's loving-cup before her coming spilled.

In the sharp air the tired earth lies a-coid
Gently our queen lets fall her robe of gold :
She heeds not chill nor loss of raiment fine.
Her lessened shadow lets sun wider shine.

She lights 'mid wreck the hazel's trembling rays,
For her blue gentians wait, 'mid untrod ways,
The brown nuts ripen, and pale April flowers
Awake to live the dream of summer hours :

Late blossoming of violets her gift,
Amid decay, the weary earth to lift
To thought of joy beyond the dark to be
May's tender grace her eyes shall never see.

A queen to-day. To-morrow she shall stand
Rifled by rain and frost ; her open hand,
Save her sweet self, scarce holding any gift,
Her scattered gold on whirling winds a-drift

So softly all the sky and sunlit hills
And leafless woods her gracious presence fills :
So life's loss veiling with love's tender art,
Sweet lips betraying not heroic heart.

To-day a queen with life at her behest ;
After of life and kingdom dispossessed.
Wise spendthrift! whom ail loss but readier finds
To give her sunshine to warm wintry winds.

To-morrow we shall look for her in vain,"
Though rest on perfect skies not any stain
Of tears to tell of earth's beloved dead.
Who love, shall feel their winsome mistress fled.

Then, when upon November, naked, cold,
St. Martin's Summer spreads its cloak of gold,
Soft we shall murmur: Lo ! October's wraith
T^hat blessing brings beyond the gates of death.

214 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Nov.,

"HAS ROME JURISDICTION?"

SOME little time ago two articles appeared in the London
Church Times under the above heading. The title is so singular,
it possesses an air of such startling novelty, that the Catholic
reader naturally pauses, if only in mere curiosity, to ascertain
what new tactics can have prompted a question so foreign in its
wording to the ordinary lingo of Protestant polemics, and particu-
larly to that of the right wing of the Anglican High-Church party,
which has always been credited with at least maintaining a re-
spectful bearing towards the claims of the Catholic hierarchy as
being the only source and foundation of their own. But a very
cursory perusal of these articles will clear up the mystery and
supply the solution of the riddle. Defeated at all points, routed
along the entire line, their orders discredited, their sacraments
exploded, their mimicry of Catholic worship and Catholic prac-
tices proved a delusion and a snare by reason of its very barren-
ness in producing any of those higher phases of the spiritual life
without which elaborate ceremonial and orthodox views, even
coupled with much of earnestness and refinement, are but as
whited sepulchres, the Ritualists have at last reached that con-
ventional straw which is represented as the final and but too de-
ceptive refuge of a drowning man, and in very desperation cry
out, regardless alike of their own hopeless condition in this re-
spect and of the invulnerable position of those whom they attack :
Has Rome Jurisdiction ?

To us, who for long years have watched the progress of their
gallant struggle for existence and recognition, there is something
truly melancholy in this crv ; it is as the last and final challenge
of a brave and vanquished people, driven from their fair low-
lands and smiling pastures into some mountain fastness deemed
by them impregnable, but in vain! The cohorts of ever-victo-
rious Rome can follow them even there; her universal dominion
and her invincible standards will and must make themselves re-
spected per totam orbem terrarum, and the defiant shout of the
defeated but heroic fugitives serves but as their death-cry.

Just such is the feeling which possesses a Catholic convert on
perusing the articles referred to. The very fact that a,t this late

i886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION." 215

hour every other question has been implicitly abandoned, as is
proved by the adoption of this final subterfuge, is in itself a con-
fession of defeat. We grant you, they say by implication, that
Parker's consecration was decidedly " fishy "; we admit that the
arguments in favor of one visible Rome-headed church as a ful-
filment of our Lord's promise, if only it can be shown to have a
practical and real existence, are absolutely unanswerable, and
that the idea is both comforting and assuring ; we know but too
well that even the last grand effort of so redoubtable a champion
of Anglo Catholicism as Dr. Littledale, in his Plain Reasons against
joining the Church of Rome, has fallen flat and innoxious : but we
have gone on too far and too long to surrender easily ; we must
attack the enemy in his very acropolis, and prove in our own
unique way that this boasted centre of unity and jurisdiction is
but a phantom after all ; that no jurisdiction can possibly flow
from, or be rightfully claimed by, the Roman pontiff in conse-
quence of the very simple fact -which we, after tflree centuries of
Anglo-Roman controversy, have been the first to discover that
there has been no canonical election to the Papacy possibly for a
thousand years, nor possible for about four hundred, and that
" the Petrine line, if ever a reality," in all probability " ended in
the tenth century." Risutn teneatis, amid?

For ourselves, in sooth, we do not know whether to laugh or
to cry ! The witness of the church throughout all these centu-
ries, the testimony of history, the recognition of the nations, the
common sense of Catholic and Protestant Europe, all are to go
to the wall in the presence of this latest discovery of the sages of
Little Queen Street ! There is no pope, and there has been no
pope, possibly since the fourth century, probably since the tenth,
certainly since the year 1484 !

The above astounding statements have been deliberately put
forward not merely by the Church Times, but at still greater
length by so grave and sober a periodical as the Church Quarterly
Review ; put forward, moreover, with a flourish of trumpets evi-
dently intended to convey the impression that Rome, the great
opponent of Anglicanism, is once for all vanquished, her arrogant
claims demolished, and her very superstructure undermined,
little recking that their boastful shout, Delenda est Carthago, is but
the presage of their own permanent immersion into the ocean of
oblivion.

Three distinct lines of argument are adduced by these periodi-
cals as proving the non-existence of the Papacy, and consequently
the downfall of the whole system of jurisdiction flowing there-

216 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" (Nov.,

from ; all are professedly based upon the fundamental principles
of Roman canon law. They are as follows :

i. In the course of the tenth century, during- a period of some
sixty years, the Holy See was occupied by a series of usurpers
infamous alike for the methods adopted to secure their elevation,
and in their private lives both before and afterwards. This line
of false pontiffs, which was ushered in by the violent deposition
of the lawful pope, was maintained by simony, force, deception,
and the machinations of three disreputable women, Theodora the
elder and her daughters Theodora and Marozia. This period is
termed by historians the Tuscan Domination, or, in the refined lan-
guage of our Anglican contemporary, the scortocracy. The ar-
gument in general is that, during this long series of invalidly-
elected pontiffs, the race of validly-appointed cardinals must
have died out, and that consequently at the end of this period,
there being no ^legitimately-constituted body of papal electors,
the papal office lapsed and came to an end. To make assurance
still more sure, further instances of a somewhat similar nature
are given in succeeding centuries.

2. The second line of argument, to be adopted failing the
one just exposed, may be best, set forth in the ipsissima verba of
the article:

" But, in addition to the two huge gaps in the succession to which we
have already drawn attention, there is another of an equally serious kind,
and, on the principles of canon law, equally making that succession in-
valid. We mean the seventy years' residence of the popes at Avignon,
from 1309 to 1379. It is canonically the duty of all bishops to reside in
their sees, and it is on this very ground of the alleged residence of St. Peter
at Rome for twenty-five years that the Roman Church claims him as Bishop
of Rome rather than as Bishop of Antioch." (Then follows a quotation
from the Church Quarterly maintaining that just as St. Peter vacated the
see of Antioch on his setting up his episcopal chair in Rome, so did Pope
Clement V. cease to be Bishop of Rome and became simply Bishop of
Avignon, concluding :) "It is certainly startling, but no less true, the see of
Rome was ipso facto void during the long residence of the popes at Avignon"

3. The third argument in favor of this novel theory consists
in the difficulties connected with the great Schism of the West
and the action of the Council of Constance.

The writer of the first article in the Church Times commences
by laying down the axiom, for which he claims the authority of
Bellarmine, that a doubtfully valid pope is no pope at all; and in
this category he places all cases of disputed elections not merely
those which he considers " distinctly invalid elections " (of which

1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 217

more anon), but those in which the " valid election of the suc-
cessful candidate has never been fully proved."

"The cases of absolute nullity," says the Church Quarterly, "admitting
of no dispute, are these : Intrusion by some external influence, without
any election by the constituency ; election by those who are not qualified
to elect ; simony, and antecedent ineligibility of certain definite kinds. The
cases of highly probable nullity are those of heresy, whether manifest or
secret, and whether previous to or after election to the Papacy."

This short quotation is sufficient to afford a plan of the cam-
paign, the details of which simply consist in applying to concrete
instances the principles here laid down in the abstract. The
names of about thirty popes, reigning during the tenth, eleventh,
thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, are either
mentioned or referred to in the course of these two articles as
having been doubtful or invalid. The Church Quarterly, observes
the writer, swells the list to yet larger proportions :

"The names reach from Victor I., A.D. 193, to Leo X., A.D. 1513; and
within that period, out of the two hundred and three occupants of the
papal throne, we find twenty-seven popes whose elections were certainly
invalid according to Roman canon law, and thirty-one probably invalid
fifty eight in all. The causes of the legal flaws in the several cases are as
follows : Heresy, eight ; probable simony, three ; intrusion and simony,
four; intrusion, seventeen; simony, four; disputed election, nine ; doubt-
ful election, ten ; irregular election, one; invalid election, two."

It is claimed that none of the disavowed anti-popes are in-
cluded in this catalogue, and that the " compiler of this most for-
midable list gives the documentary authority for the statement
which he makes." As we have not the Church Quarterly Review
before us, we must content ourselves with examining, as far as
space will permit, a few specimens of the instances adduced by
the Church Times and, indeed, they will be amply sufficient.
Nor is it necessary to dwell at length upon each of them ; for, in
spite of the minute, one might almost say hair-splitting, subdi-
visions above quoted, we shall see that one and the same reply
will serve for most of them.

The writer commences with the year 903, in which he states
that Pope Leo V., having reigned only about six weeks, was im-
prisoned by one Christopher, his own chaplain, who usurped the
apostolic throne for himself. He was expelled by the infamous
Sergius III., the paramour of Marozia, wife of Alberic, Marquis
of Camarino.*

* As regards Sergius III., two of his contemporaries, Flodoard of Rheims and John the
Deacon, give quite a different account of his character, describing him as virtuous, pious, and

2i8 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION." [Nov.,

"It was under his auspices," according to the Church Quarterly, "that
the infamous triad of courtesans, the two Theodoras and Marozia, obtained
the influence which enabled them to dispose several times of the papal
crown. They, or Alberic of Spoleto, son of Marozia, nominated to the
Papacy Anastasius III., Lando, John X., Leo VI., Stephen VII., John XL,
Martin III.,* Agapitus II., and John XII., the last of whom, a mere boy at
the time of his intrusion, was deposed for various atrocious crimes by a
synod convened by the Emperor Otho I. in A.D. 963. The whole series, as
Baronius declares, consisted of false pontiffs, having no right to their
office either by election or by the subsequent assent of the electors."

In the second article the actual quotation from the Annals of
Cardinal Baronius is given in the following translation, which we
have collated with the original, and find, as the reader will see, to
be substantially correct :

" What was then the semblance of the Holy Roman Church? As foul
as it could be ; when harlots, superior in power as in profligacy, governed at
Rome, at whose will sees were transferred, bishops were appointed, and
what is horrible and awful to say their paramours were intruded into the
see of Peter : false pontiffs who are set down in the catalogue of Roman
pontiffs merely for chronological purposes ; for who can venture to say
that persons thus shamefully intruded by such courtesans were legitimate
Roman pontiffs ? No mention can be found of election or subsequent con-
sent on the part of the clergy. All the canons were buried in oblivion, the
decrees of the popes stifled, the ancient traditions put under ban, and the
old customs, sacred rights [sic], and former usages in the election of the
chief pontiff were quite abolished. Mad lust, relying on worldly power,
thus claimed all as its own, goaded on by the sting of ambition. Christ
was then in a deep sleep in the ship, when the ship itself was covered by
the waves and the great tempests were blowing. And, what seemed worse,
there were no disciples to wake him with their cries as they slept, for all
were snoring. You can imagine as you please what sort of priests and dea-
cons were chosen as cardinals by these monsters " t (Ann., 912, viii.)

The reader will by this time have gained a tolerable insight
into the bent of the argument. It is throughout an argumentum

zealous ; while the epitaph on his tomb represents him as "an excellent pastor, beloved by all
classes." (Cf. Alzog, vol. ii. p. 293.)

* Called also Marinus II.

t The original of this remarkable passage runs as follows : Quae tune facies sanctae Eccle-
siae Romanae ? Quam fcedissima, cum Romas dominarentur potentissimae aeque ac sordidis-
simas meretrices ? Quarum arbitrio mutarentur sedes, darentur Episcopi, et quod auditu hor-
rendum et infandum est, intruderentur in sedem Petri earum amasii, pseudo pontifices, qui non
sint nisi ad consignanda tanta tempora in catalogo Romanorum pontificum scripti. Quis enim
a scortis hujusmodi intrusos sine lege, legitimos dicere posset Romanes fuisse pontifices ? Nus-
quam cleri eligentis vel postea consentientis aliqua mentio, canones omnesque pressi silentio,
decreta pontificum suffocata, proscriptas antiquae traditiones, veteresque in eligendo Summo Pon-
tifice consuetudines, sacrique ritus et pristinus usus prorsus extincti. Sic vindicaverat omnia
sibi libido, saeculari potentia freta, etc. (Annales Ecclesiastic! , torn. x. anno 912, viii. p. 577.
Ed. Venetiis, MDCCXI.)

i886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 219

ad liondnem, based professedly " upon the principles of Roman
canon law." The "pseudo-papacy" of the present day is to be
convicted, like the wicked servant in the Gospel, out of its own
mouth and by the testimony of its stanchest adherents ; Bellar-
mine is to be cited as a witness " that a doubtful pope is to be
esteemed as not a pope," and the inference will be drawn that
such false popes could of course themselves, throughout this
long 1 period of sixty-odd years, create " none but invalid clerical
electors." Thus the whole edifice of " ultramontane Romanism "
is to be brought clattering down like the walls of Jericho ; popery,
that old bugbear of "our pure reformed church," is shown to be
but a distended bladder after all; the bladder is pricked solvun-
tur tabula risu and Anglicanism remains master of the situation !

Well, hardly ! We trust that we are not hard-hearted, and a
man must be callous indeed who could, without a qualm, attempt
to turn the laugh against those who have thus mapped out their
plans for the destruction of the Papacy with such winning com-
placency ; but the interests of truth are paramount, and we trust
that before laying down the pen we shall be able to show clearly
that the truth in the present instance, both as regards the real
nature of all these transactions, the genuine history of the times,
and the true principles of canon law, has been grossly violated.

To begin at the beginning: The opening scene of lawlessness
and violence which represents Leo V. as being imprisoned by
Christopher, a priest of that pontiff's household, who usurps the
see of Rome for himself, has for centuries been a matter of con-
troversy. So far as we know, the earliest writer who records
these supposed events is Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth
century, who is followed by Platina in the fifteenth, and subse-
quently by many others, among whom is the illustrious Cardinal
Baronius himself. But surely these authorities come very late,
and are scarcely deserving of much credit in the presence of the
fact that Luitprand, Bishop of Cremona, a contemporary of these
very events and a bitter and extravagant denouncer of the cor-
ruptions of the Papacy in his time,* is entirely silent upon the
point. Nor is his the only voice we should have expected to hear
raised in lamentation over so great an evil ; we have other con-
temporaneous historians whose reputation for accuracy and im-
partiality is of a far higher order, such as Flodoard, or Frodoard,

* Of this writer the Abbe Fleury (a favorite with Anglicans) says: " Le style de Luitprand
temoigneplus d'esprit et d'erudition, que de jugement. II affecte d'une maniere puerile de mon-
trer qu'il se avoit le grec. II mele souvent des vers a sa prose ; il est partout extremement pas-
sione, chargeant les uns d'injures, les autres de louanges et de flatteries " (Fleury, Histoire Eccte-
siastigue, vol. vii^ book Ivi. No. 22).

22o "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Nov.,

a canon of Rheims, and John the Deacon, the former of whom sim-
ply records the death of Leo and the subsequent accession soon
afterwards (mox) of Christopher.* The testimony of these con-
temporary writers is corroborated by others who, although liv-
ing- some centuries afterwards, were anterior to the earliest au-
thority on the other sideviz., Peter Mallius, who flourished in
the twelfth century, an anonymous writer of Salerno of the same
period, and Leo of Ostia in the succeeding century. Neither of
these authors know anything of these deeds of violence which are
supposed to have ushered in what has been called the Tuscan
Domination ; and, dark as that period may have been and prob-
ably was, utterly unfitted as some of the occupants of the papal
throne undoubtedly were for their sublime office, we must not,
however, allow things to be represented as worse than they in
reality were, nor admit, in such a discussion and with such issues
at stake, a class of evidence coming far too late and based upon
foundations much too slender to support such a superstructure.
Nor, when the evidence is duly weighed, do the charges against
several of the other popes in this category appear to be any more
worthy of credence. More than one of these " monsters" Ser-
gius III., Anastasius III., Lando, John X., Leo VI., Stephen
VIII. (VII.), John XL, Leo VII, Stephen VIII. (IX.), Martin
III. (Marinus II.), Agapitus II., and John XII. given in the list
of the Church Times, turn out to be respectable and blameless men.
Anastasius III. and Leo VI. were distinguished for integrity and
zeal for reform. Even of Sergius III, " infamous '' though he be
in the eyes of the Church Times, there is much to be said. He
appears neither to have been invalidly elected nor to have shown
himself a monster of iniquity. Almaricus Angerius, an ancient
chronicler whose writings are preserved by Muratori, thus re-
cords the event :

" Sergius III., a Roman and the son of one Benedict, succeeded the
aforesaid intruder Christopher by canonical election, and became the hun-
dred and twenty-seventh pope after St. Peter." t

The testimony of Flodoard is still more emphatic. Speaking
of his return from exile, he says :

" Thence returned Sergius, who, though long since elected to the high-
est dignity, had been driven away into exile, and for seven long years re-
mained concealed as a fugitive. Recalled from hence by the suffrages of the
people, he is consecrated to the exalted office once before awarded to him.

* Flodoard, Vita Romanorum Pontificum, apud Muratori, Rertim Italicarum Scriptores.
t Ibidem.

i886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 221

On the accession of this pontiff, the third of the name, the entire world en-
tered upon a period of happiness lasting seven years." *

The witness of Luitprand, upon whom Baronius mostly de-
pends, against this pontiff, is in open conflict with the most an-
cient and authentic records. It was not, as Luitprand asserts, in
opposition to Formosus that he had been set up as anti-pope, but
to John IX.; f he was called back to Rome, not, as that historian
maintains, by the arms of Albert of Tuscany, but, as we have
seen, by the voice of the Roman people themselves, and by them
elected to the Apostolic See;J it was not he but Stephen VII.
Who offered shameful indignities to the dead body and to the
memory of Formosus ; not he but Duke Alberic of Spoleto
was the father of John IX. It must be borne in mind in this
connection that Luitprand was a partisan writer of intensely
Germanic tendencies, who spared no opportunity of defaming
the Italians, and the Tuscan court in particular. When, there-
fore, we find the assertions of a chronicler of this description
conflicting with all other contemporaneous authorities, and par-
ticularly with one so grave and impartial as Flodoard, we may
safely refuse to accept the charges as in any way proved.

Space forbids us to continue this investigation in detail with
reference to each of the succeeding pontiffs on the list, or we
might show that even John X., a relative of Theodora the elder,
was not without apologists in his own day, who, though person-
ally opposed to him, admitted his good qualities, while Flodoard
speaks in terms of praise of his government both of the arch-
bishopric of Ravenna and of the Apostolic See. And if we are
forced to admit that one or two in this series, especially the pon-
tiff who closes the number the youthful debauchee, John XII.
were a disgrace to the church, no argument can be deduced there-
from prejudicial to the existence of the Papacy or the survival of
its jurisdiction. The unmeasured terms in which Baronius, as
we have seen, declares that there was nowhere any mention of

* Ibidem. " Sergius inde redit, dudum qui lectus ad arcem
Culminis, exsilio tulerat rapiente repulsam :
Qui profugus latuit septem volventibus annis.
Hinc populi remeans precibus, sacratur honore,
Pridem adsignato, quo nomine tertius exit
Antistes : Petri eximia quo sede recepto

t Praesule gaudet orans annis septe amplius orbis."

t Flodoard, De Rom. Pont. Epitaph Sergii III.
\ Ibidem et Johan. Diac. De Eccl. Lateran.

The Abbe Blanc, in his Cours (THistoire Eccttsiastique, vol. i. p. 703, says: " Les cri-
tiques s'accordent 3. reconnaftre dans Flodoard, d un degre eminent, les qualites, qui concilient i
1'historien la confiance, et dans ses ecrits la source la plus pure pour tous les faits dont il a
parle."

222 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Nov.,

election by the clergy or of subsequent consent, which contains
the pith of the argument adduced by the Church Times, has been
shown from contemporary authorities, as regards the first instance
(Sergius III.), to have been incorrect; and drawn, as all his infor-
mation was, from the jaundiced and untrustworthy pages of Luit-
prand, we may reasonably suppose that he may have been equally
misled as to the rest.

But let us waive the point. Let us admit to the full the alle-
gations of Luitprand and Baronius, and go so far as to grant to
the Church Times that all these twelve popes were in valid ly elect-
ed, or even not elected at all, but were thrust by crime, force,
bribery, cajolery, and deception into the papal throne through
means of that clique over which the courtesan Theodora and her
daughters reigned supreme; does the consequence drawn by the
articles under review legitimately follow? Are we driven to con-
clude that, the see of Peter having been in reality vacant for such
a lapse of time, the succession of pontiffs necessarily came to an
end by reason of the extinction of the only electoral body capa-
ble of perpetuating it? The Catholic, of course, with our Lord's
promise before his eyes and divine faith in his heart, will only
smile at this question ; but we are not dealing with Catholics.
Our object is to expose, if possible, to those sincere and well-
meaning seekers after truth whom the sophistries and misstate-
ments of such articles as those we are discussing may stagger and
upset, that the only merit possessed by these specious composi-
tions lies in the coolness of assumption ; that we are not in the
slightest degree alarmed at their high-handed and aggressive
tone ; that we are perfectly willing to meet them on their own
ground, to accept their challenge, and to prove that, upon " the
fundamental principles of Roman canon law " and of Catholic
theology, their fusilade against the Papacy is as futile as it is
absurd. Ccesarem appellasti ? Ad Ccesarem ibis !

Our reply, therefore, to the assertion that the see of Peter
must have been vacant through all these years on account of the
invalidity of the election of each succeeding pontiff, is simply
this : The invalidity or nullity of the canonical election in each and
all of tliese cases was remedied by the subsequent and ultimate assent,
recognition, and acceptance of the entire church.

That this is so we shall proceed to prove by unimpe'ach-
able authorities.

The entire argument of the Church Times is based upon the
assumption that, inasmuch as under the present organization of
the church the Roman cardinals constitute the elective body,

i886.J "HAS ROME JURISDICTION." 223

when a vacancy occurs in the Papacy, should no legitimately-
appointed college of cardinals be in existence, no pope can be
elected, at all events until the privilege of electing has been for-
mally withdrawn from the cardinals and placed in other hands.
And so, failing any such formal revocation during the interval
which has elapsed between the accession of Sergius III. and the
present time, the sovereign pontificate, wanting a legitimate body
of electors, has been ipso facto vacant.

To this argument we might reply that it is exceedingly im-
probable that the election of the pontiffs was at this early date
confined to the cardinals, but was still in the hands of the Roman
clergy and people, in which case the plea of our contemporary
falls to the ground at once. There is, however, some contro-
versy upon this point, more, indeed, in the direction of a later,
than an earlier period for the introduction of the change,* and
we will therefore cede the point. We may also pass over the
assumption ((or we doubt very much whether the ChurcJi Times
has had the time or the materials for verifying the statement)
that all the cardinals who had been appointed before the year
903 were dead in 963, the year of the deposition of John XII. and
the introduction of a line of reforming German pontiffs. Con-
sidering the early age at which many youthful scions of noble
families were admitted to the most exalted dignities in those de-
generate times, it is quite within the range of possibility that
some of the original electors might have been living. But be
this as it may, granting that they had all passed away, granting,
too, what is merely another assumption on the part of our con-
temporary, that not a single one of all these twelve popes was
validly elected, does the conclusion of that journal legitimately
follow upon those principles of canon law to which it appeals?

The great canonist Ferraris treats of a cognate question
which has a distinct bearing upon the matter under review viz.,
the difficulty that might arise in the improbable contingency of
all the cardinals dying during the conclave. He says :

" If all the cardinals (which may God avert !) should die before the papal
election has been consummated, theologians are not agreed upon whom
the right of electing the pontiff should fall. Many assert that in such a

* Some authorities place it as late as 1562 under Pius IV., others in 1160 during the pon-
tificate of Alexander III. The earliest date would appear to be 1059 (almost at the end of the
period under review), when Nicholas II. held a council at Rome, thus described by Natalis Alex-
ander : " Nicolaus II. ... Romas concilium habuit anno MLIX,, cui cxin. episcopi interfuere.
Eadem synodus . . . decretum de Romani pontificis electione edidit, statuensut vacante sede car-
dinales episcopi convenirent, de electione Iractaturi, assumptisque secum cltricis cardinalibus,
communibus suffragiis pontificem eligerent, etc." (torn. vii. p. 12).

224 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION:' [Nov.,

contingency the right would devolve upon the canons of the Lateran
Basilica, whose church is, in the strictest sense, the pope's cathedral as
bishop of the city and of the world ; and some regard this opinion as very
safe and probable. Others hold that this right would be vested in an
oecumenical council, because the pope is pastor not only of the city of
Rome but of the universal church. Others maintain that it pertains to
the patriarchs." *

We quote these words of this illustrious canonist, not as hav-
ing an immediate bearing upon the case under discussion, but
because they distinctly show that " upon the fundamental princi-
ples of canon law " the absence of a body of cardinal electors, even
under the present constitution of the church, is no bar to the
filling-up of the vacancv which may be provided for in various
other duly-recognized ways. Schmalzgrueber, however, an au-
thority of no less weight, gives a solution directly to the point,
and entirely sweeps away the contention of the Church Times.
He says :

" Question 8. Whether the pope becomes truly such immediately on his
election by the cardinals ?

" Resp. A distinction must be made as to whether the election were
legitimate or otherwise.

" If the latter t ihQ election of the cardinals, since it is invalid, can confer
no rights upon the elected. Hence the acceptance of the universal church
must be waited for, which, should it supervene, // will remedy the defect in
the election invalidly made by the cardinals, if a condition required by
human law alone be wanting; for the church cannot heal the defect of a
condition required by the divine law.t But since, from the common con-
sent of theologians, it is credible with divine faith that any*pope, after he
has been accepted as such by the universal church, is the true vicar of
Christ and the successor of blessed Peter, there can be no danger of the
church consenting to a pontiff who suffers from the defect of a condition
required by the divine law." \

The rationale of this doctrine, which one would think would
be palpable to all who profess to believe in the church's indefec-
tibility, is thus set forth by Suarez :

" Reply to the first argument in No. I. (The question proposed in the
number referred to is IVhether ive can be certain with the assent of faith
that such and such a man is the true pontiff and head of the church. The
first argument is as follows : We have said that as, in order that a rule of
faith should be of utility, it ought not only to be believed simply in confuso
but also as something determined, and this presupposes an individual or
something which we can behold with our eyes, and in this sense it is called
visible ; so in the present instance we inquire whether in like manner the

* Ferraris, vol. vii., Papa, art. i. No. 44.

t Such as heresy, the absence of reason, and so on.

I Schmalzgrueber, 'jus. Eccl, Univ., lib. i. pars ii. tit. vi. No. 93.

i886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 225

true pontiff should be some visible and determined individual, so that we
should not only believe that there is a supreme head in the church which
has its seat at Rome, but also that he is such and such a man whom we
behold with our eyes. This appears not to be so, since God has never re-
vealed it.) To the first argument (here quoted) we reply that this is re-
vealed by God in the same way that it is revealed that such and such an
organization is the true church, whence, when he revealed that Peter is
head of the church, he equally revealed it in a general way concerning
each of his successors, and all that is wanting is sufficient demonstration
that this or that is contained under such and such revelation ; but such
demonstration is afforded by the universal testimony and approbation of
the church, which fact is plainly set forth by the example of a similar case,
for it does not appear that God ever revealed that the bishop of Rome
rather than he of Alexandria is the sovereign pontiff, because this was
never stated in express terms, but merely implied in confuso when he re-
vealed to St. Peter the dignity and perpetuity of his office, because such
revelation manifests itself in, and has for its object, those bishops or their
episcopate who hold the succession from Peter after that succession
has been sufficiently demonstrated through the tradition and universal
consent of the church ; but seeing that it must be clearly manifest that
sufficient demonstration has been given to place all under the obligation
of assent, this demonstration appears to some to be offered when a
rightly and duly elected and so veritable pontiff is set forth ; and this,
indeed, is all that is necessary in order that from the precept of obedience
and charity we should be bound to obey such a pontiff, and that no one
should rightly be able to disjoin himself from him without schism ; never-
theless, speaking as we do on the present occasion concerning the assent
of faith, the demonstration will not, perhaps, be sufficiently sure until it be
made morally certain that he has been accepted by the whole church and
is in peaceful possession of his primatial dignity, and so can place all the
faithful under the obligation of believing whatever he defines ; for in such
case it is most certainly to be believed that the universal church cannot fall into
error in so grave a matter as would be a mistake regarding the living rule of
faith, such an error being tantamount to an error in the faith itself." *

Hence it is very clear that no such calamity as that imagined
by the Church Times can ever overtake the church of Christ.
He founded it upon a rock the rock of Peter f and placed in
Peter's see that centre of unity which was throughout all time
to be the basis and foundation, the radix et matrix, of that visible
oneness by means of which his church should be unmistakably
distinguished from surrounding sects ; and since any aggregation
of beings endowed with free-will is liable to become the subject
of disagreement and division, he placed that centre of unity in

* Suarez, De Fide, disp. x. sect. v. No. 6.

t Tertullian, De Prescript., c. 22. Origen, In Exod., horn. v. No. 4, torn. ii. p. 145
Migne. St. Greg. Naz., Orat. xxxii. No. 18, p. 591, ed. Bened. Migne. St. Epiphanius,
Adv. Hares. (59), Nos. 7, 8, p. 500. St. Jerome, lib. iii. Comment in Matt, xvi., p. 124. St.
Augustine, In Ps. Ixix., n. 4.
VOL. XLIV. 15

226 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION." [Nov.,

one man, the occupant of Peter's see. Were it possible that by
the malice of the devil or the wickedness of man, through the
violence of tyrants or the intrigues of harlots, that office should
cease to exist, the church of Christ would have been shattered
to its foundations, the rule of faith destroyed, the light shining in
the darkness extinguished, and the gates of hell would have pre-
vailed against the kingdom of God. This we, as Catholics, know
cannot be, and those who pretend to argue with us on Catholic
principles ought in justice to acknowledge this fact.

So much, then, for the line of popes who occupied St. Peter's
chair during the " Tuscan Domination." In the next century, says
the Church Times, " we have another series of intruding popes,
who secured their position by simony viz., Benedict VIII., John
XIX., Benedict IX., and Gregory VI., covering " a period of
" thirty-four years." Of course, in view of what we have already
shown regarding the revalidation of all such questionable elec-
tions by the subsequent assent of the church, it would avail
nothing were our contemporary able to prove its assertion relat-
ing to these pontiffs an attempt from which it wisely refrains.
Of Benedict VIII. Natalis Alexander says emphatically that " he
succeeded to Sergius IV. by canonical election " (" Sergio IV.
canonica electione successit Benedictus VII 7.") * The same historian
does, indeed, assert of John XIX , or XX., that he secured the
Apostolic See by a large pecuniary expenditure, but he does so
on the authority of a contemporary chronicler, Glaber, who is
acknowledged as having been biassed, while the contrary is most
plainly implied in a letter addressed to that pontiff by St. Ful-
bert, Bishop of Chartres. It is, on the other hand, admitted on
all sides that the youthful profligate Benedict IX. was elected
through the bribery of his father, Alberic of Tuscany, and that
his pontificate was a disgraceful episode in the annals of the
Holy See ; but he was a true pope : " Son autorite," says Rohr-
bacher, " fut reconnue et respectee par toute la terre." f The
last pope in the list surely nothing but the most inveterate odium
theologicum would charge with the crime of simony. The scandals
connected with the life of Benedict IX. had become intolerable,
and his evil example was producing a disastrous effect upon the
morals and discipline of the clergy. To obviate these evils he
was persuaded to resign and accept a pension of fifteen hundred
livres. That this very moderate allowance was in no sense simo-

* Natalis Alexander, torn. vii. p. 3. Ditmar, according to Rohrbacher, bears his testimony
that Benedict was elected by a majority of the suffrages of the people,
t Rohrbacher, vol. xiii. book Ixiii. p. 481.

1 886.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 227

niacal is proved by the fact, attested by St. Peter Damian at the
time, that the early councils of the church had awarded as much to
mere bishops on resigning- their sees,* while the exalted personal
character of Pope Gregory VI. himself, and the manifestly justi-
fiable motives which prompted his action, render the accusation
unworthy of notice.

ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE.

THE most delightful of all thoroughfares in the Jura are the
rivers and streams that wind among the mountains, linking one
beautiful valley with another. One of these water-courses is the
Bienne the wayward, freakish Bienne which leads the traveller
through a succession of charming valleys, amazing him at every
turn with the varied and wonderful beauty of the landscapes.
And there is no less variety of temperature. Winter and sum-
mer are often found within a few hours of each other, affording
great contrasts of vegetation and atmospheric phenomena. In
one place the river pours through a wild, picturesque gorge over-
hung by precipitous rocks, through which the wind rushes howl-
ing, with frequent squalls of snow and hail ; and the torrent, with
emulous roar, dashes over huge rocks which beat the waters into
a raging foam, and then, as if by magic, issues with many-tinted
hues into a vernal region of richest green, radiant with the sun,
girt by mountains, to be sure, but their bases are covered with
vines, orchards, and gardens that give out a balmy fragrance de-
licious to inhale. On every side a beautiful picture meets the
2ye. Mountains, woods, torrents, verdant glades, woodland
chapels, little homesteads sheltered among fruit-trees and gar-
dens, the solitude of the mountains, and the busy hum of the val-
eys, by turn attract and charm the explorer. . To wander on,
day after day, through this maze of sylvan beauty, following the
deep bends of

" That many-winding river
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses/'

is the very height of enjoyment to the lover of mountain scenery.
We came upon the Bienne just where its clear green waters

* Darras, vol. ii. p. 59.

228 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov.,

unite, as if reluctantly, with the blue current of the Ain, a little
north of Mt. Oliferne of legendary fame. Here, at the meeting of
the waters, stands the village of Condes so called from a Celtic
word signifying confluence a little back from the capricious
stream to escape its frequent inundations, its soil full of Roman
and Celtic remains. Overlooking it is a votive chapel on the tip
of a fang-like prominence called a molard, greatly frequented by
the river boatmen, who annually celebrate here the festival of St.
Nicholas with picturesque effect. Standing around are the dru-
idical heights of Mt. Beauregard, the Montagne du Solier, and
other purple peaks, which at dawn and sunset are lit up with floods
of living fire, as if once more aflame in honor of the god Belenus.

At Jeurre the valley grows broader, the gloom disappears,
the sharp gray cliffs give place to gentler slopes vine-wreathed
along the grassy meadows. Everything is fresh and verdur-
ous. The Biennfc, no longer pent up, is left free to follow its
frolicsome instincts, which the people, even in remotest times,
feared so much as to erect their dwellings for the most part
above its reach. Pensive willows and stately poplars border the
stream, which goes rippling merrily along in tune with the boat-
men, whose cheery songs may be heard echoed on every side
here, by the washerwomen bleaching their clothes along the ver-
dant banks ; beyond, by the goat-herds on the heights; and not
unfrequently by the stern, cloud-capped mountains themselves.
The latter, in receding, put off some of their gloom. Soft, ghost-
like flecks of mist disappear among the pines on the upper ridges.
The sun lights up the glades below, where graze the herds. And
great patches on the nether slopes are covered with beneficent
chestnuts and broad-spreading beeches beneath which the rustic
Tityrus might still practise his lay, " recubans sub tegmine fagi"
after the good old bucolic fashion. Forsaken towers lend a mel-
ancholy interest to the sharpest peaks, and higher feelings are
awakened by legendary chapels with villages piously gathered
around them. Lezat, for instance, is perched on the top of a
steep mount, overlooking a narrow gorge through which the
Bienne dashes swiftly along between tall, jagged cliffs and pre-
cipitous mountains, the sides of which are beautifully draped
with soft moss and graceful, palm-like fronds, kept vividly green
by the oozing moisture of the rocks.

Further on the river is overhung by the village of La Mou-
ille, on the side of a cone, the very apex of which is crowned by
the church of St. Eustache a saint dear to hunters and foresters.
This is one of the most ancient churches along the Bienne, and

1 8 86.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 229

in early times the mountaineers were summoned to the Christian
mysteries, as at Coldres and other places in the Jura, by the light-
ing of fires. And at the most solemn part of the rite a fresh illu-
mination was usually kindled for the benefit of those unable to
attend by reason of infirmity. The porch of this church affords a
view remarkable for its extent and wild beauty.

A little to the north is another peak, on the top of which is
the church of St. Isidore, patron of husbandmen, shaded by two
immense lindens the tree of the resurrection. And not far off,
on a lofty plateau overlooking the Bienne, stands Longchaumois
(a named derived from chaume, a coarse grass of these mountains),
a town of only fifteen hundred inhabitants, though so ancient as
to be mentioned in a cartulary of King Lothaire in 855. It is
peopled with herdsmen, hunters, wood-choppers, fur-dressers,
carvers, lapidaries, etc., who are grave, intelligent, and noted for
their industry, like all the people in the Jura. yhe streets are full
of life and activity, and resonant with sonorous voices. Well-
built stone houses bespeak the thrift and comfortable circum-
stances of the owners, and the spacious, handsomely-ornamented
Gothic church testifies to their piety.

In this remote town was born Mannon, or Manno, the cele-
brated monk of St. Cyan, whose reputation for learning induced
Charles le Chauve to appoint him successor of Joannes Scotus
Erigena as master of the Palatine school. But after the death of
Louis le Begue he returned to the abbey of St. Oyan, in' whose
peaceful solitude he composed his treatises on Plato and Aris-
totle, which not long since were disinterred from the libraries of
Holland. And it was here he died in the odor of sanctity about
the year 880.

In the neighborhood of Longchaumois linger many customs
and beliefs handed down from Celtic times. Around the Fon-
taine Laurent the witches and sorcerers of former days held their
unholy sabbaths. The Ruisseau de la Givre, or Vouivre, is so
called from the winged serpent famous in the Jura. The foun-
tain of Tr6piere (trots pierres) and the height of Mirbey are asso-
ciated with druidical observances, as well as the monumental
stone of the Borne des Sarrasins, and the Trou des Sarrasins, a
deep cavern in the mountain-side where the people took refuge
from the Moors of the eighth century.

The Saracens have left many other traces in this region, such
as the Vie (Via, or way) des Maures, the Champ Sarrasin, the
Chateau Sarrasin, etc. And associated with their ravages is
Maringa, a village on one of these mountains, which derives its

230 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov.,

name from St. Marin, who, more than a thousand years ago, fled
from Italy to escape the honors of the episcopate, and took refuge
in a cave of this mountain, where he attained such power over
the wild beasts that the very bears ministered to his wants.
Hermit as he was, he took such a deep interest in the welfare of
the peasants that when the country was invaded by the Saracens
he came forth from his cell to intercede in their behalf. The
enemy seized him and cast him into a fiery furnace, but he passed
through the flames uninjured and was finally beheaded, and thus
went to join the noble army of

" Martyrs crowned with heavenly meed."

It is in the legend of St. Marin the first mention is made of
the ancient town of Moirans, which became the seat of a barony
on whose escutcheon is a Saracen's head, surmounted by the cross
of St. Andrew another reminiscence of the Moorish invasion.
This town stands at the entrance of a narrow gorge between the
Ain and the Bienne, and its former importance is shown by the
ruins of two old castles on opposite heights which defended the
pass and still bear the marks of more than one attack of the Swiss
Calvinists. These religionists took special pleasure in ravaging
the monastic lands of St. Claude, to which Moirans seems to have
belonged at an early period, for the abbot of that monastery was
obliged to mortgage his castle here in 1296 to Andre Chatard,
lord-chatelain of Arbent. It was soon redeemed, however, and
the town became a flourishing place under abbatial rule. Then
were weavers, dyers, tanners, carvers, turners, shoemakers, an<
other craftsmen, all of whom had their guilds. The abbot him-
self came here from time to time to administer justice, followe<
by a train of dignitaries, both clerical and lay, which increase<
the life and consequence of the town. Standing on the highway
of travel to .Geneva, it carried on a brisk trade with the people oi
the neighboring valleys, especially at fair-times, and on market-
days, and whenever the abbot held court here. But an en<
was put to all this prosperity by the Calvinists of the sixteentl
century, who burned the mills, workshops, and farm-hou!
destroyed the crops, laid waste the lands, and carried off th<
flocks and herds. A more pleasant recollection is that of th<
benign St. Francois de Sales, whose statue near the presbyth
points out the house where he lodged in his apostolic coui
through the Jura.

The country around Moirans was once covered with druidi<
forests, and the stones of the Champ Dolent remind one of th<

1 886.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 231

menhirs of Dolerit in Brittany. It is a place full of folk-lore and
tales of fairies and fabulous animals, such as the Brack and the
Cheval Blanc a pale phantom-horse that haunts the old mill at
Moirans. And there are many Celtic monuments around Lect,
which stands on the side of a mountain at the south. In full view
of the old church of St. Pierre is "a dismal cirque of Druid
stones," several of which are still erect; and there is a mysterious
passage or aisle on a cliff, walled in by great blocks of stone, to
which you ascend by a flight of steps hewn in the rock. This
now bears the name of the " Fairies' Baume" or Cavern, though
suggestive of giants rather than of fairies.

Other places in this vicinity have names more pleasant to the
Christian ear, such as the Combe St. Romain, the Champ St.
Pierre, the Combe du Saint, etc. places in which is centred all
the charm of these delightful mountain valleys. It was in this
region we came upon the Vie des Ptlerins the Pilgrims' Road
so named because it led to the thrice famous sanctuary of St.
Claude, where many popular saints once lay enshrined. It was
in the same direction our pilgrim feet were tending.

The town of St. Claude is in the very heart of the Jura moun-
tains, surrounded by some of their loftiest peaks. It owes its
origin to the abbey of that name one of the countless monasteries
in Europe whose downfall was the result of state interference,
such as the sequestration of property, which paralyzed the indus-
tries carried on by the monks and' diminished their power of
usefulness in other directions; and the appointment of commen-
datory abbots, which introduced a worldly element, leading in-
evitably to the decay of the monastic spirit. This abbey became
famous under three different names. In the fifth century it bore
the name of Condat, because established by St. Romain at the
confluence of the Tacon and the Bienne. The next century it
took the name of St. Oyan, or Oyand, from one of the holy
abbots, whose tomb had become noted for miracles. But in the
twelfth century the shrine of St. Claude more especially attracted
public attention, and his name gradually superseded the others.

Full of active industry as the town of St. Claude now is, it is
difficult to realize what an appalling wilderness the place was
fourteen hundred years ago, when St. Romain came here, leaving
behind all the comforts of a patrician home at Izernore. Old
legends tell of the commotion of the elements at his arrival.
The powers of darkness were let loose against him. Terrible
storms made the very mountains tremble storms such as long
after inspired Byron's lines, when the red-bearded thunder leaped

232 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov.,

from crag to crag-, threatening to annihilate him. But nothing
could daunt the stout-hearted saint. He planted his staff beside
a spring that gushed out from the mountain-side, overshadowed
by an immense pine, and betook himself earnestly to watching
and praying in a way that has grown " obsolete in these impious
times," as Carlyle says. In a short time he was joined by his
brother Lupicin and several others, and a kind of laura was
organized, combining the solitary and cenobitic life the brethren
living in separate cabins or cells, but coming together to chant
the Psalms after the custom of the East, and for their frugal meals.
They spent the day in labor and prayer, and in summer slept
under the forest trees. St. Lupicin's couch, however, is said to
have been a log hollowed out like a coffin, which he sometimes
bore into the chapel that he might peacefully slumber sub oculis
Domini.

The two brothers were admirably fitted to be a counter-re-
straint on each other. The gentle nature of St. Remain mitigated
the sternness of St. Lupicin, and the firmness of the latter strength-
ened the holy impulses of the former. When the monks, weary
of rigid fasts, took advantage of the plenteous harvests, and the
abundance of game in the forests and fish in the streams, and
spread a bounteous repast for themselves, St. Romain, grieved
at heart, sent for his brother, who appeared suddenly in their
midst, and, gazing with astonishment and wrath at the variety
of dishes, cast herbs, vegetables, and fish all together into a
huge caldron, exclaiming: "There is the mess a monk ought to
eat, instead of savory dishes that lead him away from the service
of God ! " And when those who were weak in the flesh fled back
in terror to the world, he comforted St. Romain, and said :
" The jackdaws and crows have taken their flight ; let us who
remain take such food as suiteth the gentle doves of Christ." St.
Lupicin, however, was not without tenderness of heart, and he
always showed himself compassionate to the sick and the afflicted.
He was a man of greater learning than his brother, and was
regarded with great respect by King Chilperic, to whom he went
on several errands of mercy, such as reclaiming the liberty of
some mountaineers unjustly held in captivity. His influence
extended even to Rome, where he found means of delivering
from imprisonment his friend Agrippinus, who had been governor
of Sequania.

The monks of Condat, in spite of the severity of their rule,
increased so rapidly that a new monastery, called Lauconne, was
founded by St. Lupicin, who became the prior. Around it sprang

1 8 86.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 233

up a village which now bears his name. It is about seven miles
from St. Claude, on the slope of a mountain overlooking- the val-
ley of the Lizon, not far from the place where St. Mario was
martyred. Here the vine is cultivated, which does not flourish
at St. Claude. A tower of the old priory still remains, and an
interesting church of the eleventh century in which the relics of
St. Lupicin, the titular saint, are preserved in a shrine of gilded
wood. Clustered around are the well-built stone houses of the
village, some of the fourteenth century, peopled by industrious
mountaineers, who, among other occupations, turn and carve the
so-called articles de St. Claude.

A few miles distant is St. Romain de Roche, where the two
brothers founded a convent for their sister, St. lole, who followed
them into the wilderness, accompanied by a large number of de-
vout women. No spot could have been more happily chosen for
them than this lofty plateau, at once secluded and picturesque,
and at that time nearly inaccessible. The convent stood on a
broad shelf of the mountain that overhangs a lovely green val-
ley, through which, far below, pours the swift Bienne. It could
only be approached from the west, where grew an almost im-
penetrable forest infested by wild beasts. This convent became
so flourishing as to contain five hundred nuns, and still existed in
the year 480, but was eventually given up to the monks of Con-
dat. Of their monastery nothing now remains but the church,
which stands solitary on the brink of the precipice, surrounded
by fragments of tombs and the ruins of the ancient cloister. It
contains a beautiful shrine in which is kept a portion of St. Ro-
main's remains, who died here while on a visit to his sister. A
procession comes here every year from St. Lupicin a touching
memorial of the tender affection which united the two sainted
brothers with their sister, St. lole.

These three monasteries, Condat (or St. Cyan), Lauconne,
and St. Romain de Roche, became centres of civilization in
the Jura, around which gathered by degrees the people dis-
persed in the forests, who preferred to be the vassals of the
monks rather than of the turbulent barons who involved them
in wars and oppressed them with exactions of all kinds. But St.
Cyan, of course, was pre-eminent on account of the size of the
abbey, the extent of its domains, and the number of its saints.
Charlemagne, whose name always appears wherever there are
traces of the Saracens, gave this monastery a large tract of land
in the Jura, sixty leagues in extent, at that time overspread with
forests where roamed bears, wolves, and other wild beasts, and

234 ALOA'G THE GREEN BlENNE. [Nov.,

covered with snow a great part of the year. The early monks
clothed themselves with the skins of these animals, after the ex-
ample of St. Lupicin, but never fully exterminated them per-
haps never wished to do so, regarding everything as good, atter
its kind. We read that, seven hundred years later, the hunter
who slew the first wolf oi the season brought the tail to the sa-
cristan of St. Claude, who used it to dust the statues of the saints
and the carvings of the stalls ; and in return the hunter was pre-
sented with two loaves of bread and two jugs of wine.

In the course of centuries the cultivation of these lands, and
their colonization, rendered the abbey enormously wealthy. In
the year 1245 it held rule over a great number of baronies, cas-
tles, villages, and parishes, which comprised thirty-seven priories,
one hundred and five churches, and twenty-five chapels. King
Pepin gave the abbots the right to coin money the earliest
known instance of such a privilege being granted to a monastery.
This right was confirmed by the Emperor Frederick in 1175. A
spacious abbey was built, more in accordance with the improved
fortunes and needs of the monks. It stood on a plateau along the
mountain-side, with terraced gardens overlooking the Tacon, and
surrounded by embattled walls flanked with towers, built by Jean
de Chalon, ancestor of William of Orange. Louis XI. built the
ramparts, of which a portion may be seen on the Place St. Claude.
And a castle of defence was erected on a neighboring height.

The sumptuousness of the two abbatial churches was amaz-
ing, particularly that of St. Claude, in which stood about thirty
rich shrines of sainted abbots and brethren, hung round with
lamps of silver and gold and finely-wrought brass. Chief among
them were the silver shrines of St. Oyan and St. Claude, set with
precious stones. The stalls of the choir were exquisitely carved,
the screen was of iron artistically wrought, and along its outer
walls were ranged statues of the benefactors of the church, be-
tween which were hung chains of silver and gold and other ex-
votos of all kinds.

The monks built a hospice for pilgrims, who came here in
bands from remote provinces. Alms were constantly given at
the gates. Every poor person was daily presented with a loaf,
and meals were furnished to those who wished to be received in
the infirmary. The parliaments of many cities sent deputations
of pilgrims in times of public calamity. And princes came here
with great devotion, such as the Dukes of Burgundy, the Counts
of Savoy, and the Kings of France and Spain. Louis XL, when
he came, made many rich offerings and founded a daily service

1 8 86.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 235

in honor of " Monseigneur St. Claude." There was a special
influx of pilgrims at the high festival of this saint. It was joy-
fully announced on the eve by the peal of trumpets, the beating
of drums, the discharge of cannon, the playing of musical instru-
ments, and the united peal of all the bells, as soon as the monks
began to intone the " Magnificat" of the Vesper service. The fol-
lowing day the feretrum magnum, containing the incorrupt body
of St. Claude, was brought forth, preceded by one of the great
barons of the province bearing a lighted torch, and followed by
another carrying a palm. One holy shrine after another fol-
lowed St. Oyan, St. Minase, St. Antidiole, St. Injurieux, St.
Olympe,'St. Dagamond, St. Aufrede, St. Auderic, etc., etc. care-
fully guarded by soldiers as they were borne in solemn proces-
sion through the narrow, winding streets, the mountains mean-
while echoing the chanted litanies and pealing bells. In the
afternoon the " Mystery of St. Claude " was acted in public, to
the great delight and edification of the people.

The wealth of the abbey excited the cupidity of the Calvinists
of Geneva, and in December, 1571, they planned an attack in the
night. It was, however, two o'clock in the morning when they
arrived at the foot of the mountain, and hearing the bell ringing
as usual for Matins, and the drums beating to summon the inha-
bitants to the office, as the custom was here in Advent, they sup-
posed themselves discovered and made haste to escape.

Alas ! that we are obliged to say this thrice glorious abbey
was finally secularized, and afterwards destroyed by fires and
revolutionists, and its shrines and priceless treasures of all kinds
the accumulation of centuries were almost completely swept
away. Of the monastic churches, only that of St. Pierre re-
mains, which is now used as the cathedral. Here is gathered
everything saved from the church of St. Claude, including the
relics, which were all mingled and confounded, except those of
St. Oyan, in the Revolution of 1793. In the choir of this church
are some beautiful stalls of the Renaissance, the work of Pierre
de Vitry. Prophets, apostles, and the saints of the abbey are
carved on the panels, which are overhung by a canopy wrought
with great delicacy and beauty. The altar-piece is another boast
of the church, painted by Holbein, the friend of Pierre de Vitry,
who induced him to come here. It is on wood, and represents
the Prince of the Apostles between St. Paul and St. Andrew,
with a gradino of scenes from the life of St. Peter.

The town of St. Claude has a delightful aspect of mediaeval

236 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov.,

times, quite in harmony with its history, though in reality it is
chiefly of modern construction, the whole place having repeat-
edly been nearly destroyed by fire. It is most romantically situ-
ated between three high mountains, with two beautiful streams
pouring rapidly through it. It is very irregularly built, but this
irregularity only adds to its charm by the agreeable surprises it
affords at every step. The narrowness of the valley forces the
town up the hillsides, so that the streets are steep and difficult to
climb, going zigzag around the acclivities, and many of the
houses are built on the shelves of the mountains, with terraces
and hanging gardens, or wander down into the hollows along the
sinuous rivers, or go straying off along the roads that wind
through the mountains. The most regular street is the Rue du
Pre, the very name of which has a pleasant, rural sound. On
every side may be heard the ripple and murmur of running
water; everywhere its flash meets the eye, from streams, canals,
and sparkling fountains. Of the latter there are eleven, brighten-
ing the crossways and cooling the air quite enough of them-
selves to enliven so small a place. Some of them have beautiful
basins, of which one is adorned with cupids riding on dolphins.
The fountain which used to supply the whole abbey with water,
and never fails, even in the driest season, is fed by the sacred
spring of Bugnon, which is further up the mountain-side where
St. Romain first established his hermitage. The public prome-
nade is pleasantly overarched by umbrageous trees, and there
are old bridges of legendary interest and picturesque aspect, like
the Pont du Diable across the Tacon, and a fine suspension bridge
of modern workmanship across the Bienne.

St. Claude is full of life and industry. Everywhere are mills
and factories and workshops, mingling the sound of their turn-
ing wheels with the music of the waters; but the various pur-
suits carried on here lose their usual character of mere vulgar
industries, for they do not clash with the religious memories of
the place. They have been handed down from monastic times,
when the monks themselves practised the mechanical arts and
taught them to the mountaineers, such as the art of carving and
turning, so common all through the Jura, which has come down
from the eighth century, when St. Viventiole, abbot of St. Oyan,
founded a school near by, the first in Sequania, at a place still
known as the Maison de Jouvent (Domus Juventutis), in which
the monks not only taught letters, but various crafts, such as
carving and the making of all kinds of utensils and furniture, re-

1 886.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 237

markable for beauty of workmanship. St. Viventiole himself, a
man of great erudition, versed in Greek and Latin literature,
sent an armchair of his own handiwork to his friend St. Avitus,
Bishop of Vienne, who thanked him in a playful letter, hoping in
return for so commodious a seat that he might be presented with
a see. This wish was realized shortly after, when St. Viventioie
was appointed Bishop of Lyons. The school he founded here
continued in great repute for a long time, and in the ninth cen-
tury was under the direction of the learned Manno, before men-
tioned.

Within the last century a fresh impulse has been given to
carving and other industries by several public-spirited men of the
place, among whom the Abbe* Tournier may be mentioned. The
first cotton-mill in the Jura was established here by the Bishop of
St. Claude in 1780 to give employment to poor girls, And for a
like purpose the Annonciade nuns erected a fulling-mill. The art
of dyeing, too, has been revived, which was so successfully prac-
tised here in the middle ages that the dyers had a guild and cul-
tivated saffron (which was used as a dye as well as a condiment)
on two neighboring farms still known as Saffranieres. And there
are a great number of goldsmiths, watch-makers, lapidaries, cabi-
net-makers, clothiers, and manufacturers of paper, wire, matches,
pottery, etc., so that the whole valley is as busy as a hive. The
soil being poor, the people require other means of livelihood than
agriculture alone. Carving especially can be carried on at home
at all seasons and in the long winter evenings. Hence the im-
mense number of toys, boxes, canes, pipes, rosaries, statuettes,
and other objects known in commerce as articles de St. Claude,
elaborately carved out of bone, ivory, stag's horn, boxwood, and
bruytre, which is a kind of heather.

Many delightful rambles can be made around St. Claude.
There are cool, deep valleys, walled in by mountains and over-
arched by interlaced branches, making them dim and solemn as
the narrow aisles of some vast cathedral. Other paths lead up to
groves of pine and larch, or green, sunny pastures along the
mountain-shelves where sheep and cattle graze, or grassy dells
among the ridges, kept perpetually verdant by the spray of sil-
very cascades that pour down the mountain-side. Everywhere
are wonderful contrasts of color, everywhere green and gold,
blue sky, and cool, gray rock, the shining of mountain-tops and
the gloom of deep, umbrageous valleys, and changing lights and
shadows at every step through hill and dale. One path leads to

238 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov.,

the hermitage of St. Ann, half-way up the mountain a cavern as
large as a church, containing a spring of pure, delicious water.
This was used as an oratory in the middle ages, attended by a
hermit who was appointed by the abbot of St. Claude. During
the religious wars of the sixteenth century this cavern was
strongly fortified, and the relics and other valuables of the abbey
were brought here for safety. Among the ancient hermits was
the Blessed John of Ghent, generally styled the fLremite de St.
Claude, who, divinely inspired, went on a mission to Charles VII.
of France and Henry V. of England. The former received him
with respect and more than once profited by his counsels, but
the latter treated him with contempt and scoffed at his admoni-
tions. The saintly hermit foretold King Henry's melancholy
end, and declared that the English would soon be driven out of
France, as was effected shortly after by the holy Maid of Or-
leans. His canonization was solicited by Louis XL, whose birth
he had predicted, but the death of the king suspended the pro-
cess, and it has never been resumed.

The most charming excursion around St. Claude, however, is
up the valley of the Ta"con, which is remarkably wild and pic-
turesque. This stream has its source in a vast cave called the
Baume des Sarrasins, whence from two fathomless pools issue
ten or twelve cascades, that pour down the mountain-side from
one ridge to another with constantly accelerated fury, uniting at
the base in one roaring, impetuous torrent that dashes over great,
black rocks, raging and foaming as if lashed by the winds. The
valley through which it passes is wonderfully beautiful, with
fairy-like paths in every direction, amid the gloom of intricate
woods and the majesty of towering mountains. Finally, spanned
by the Pont du Diable, it empties into the green Bienne.

1 886.] "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG:' 239

"AT LAST, THOUGH LONG."

WE had just experienced one of those general breakings-up
that occur from time to time in the history of private families.
There had been seven of us children, living with mother though
all grown up. Life with us had been a very easy-going affair
and not particularly eventful, when suddenly there came a rush
of exciting occurrences. One brother got an appointment at
Aberdeen, another was ordered with his regiment to the Cape,
my eldest sister married, and Herbert, the youngest boy, announc-
ed his determination to be a farmer, which, as that is a profession
not easily followed in London, would entail our leaving town and
settling in some country place, or his making one more absentee
from the home-circle. After many discussions and a great deal
of that tiresome process known as " talking things over," we de-
cided to leave Kensington and move into Sussex, to a country-
place where Herbert could study practical agriculture.

I was away at the time of the actual difmenagement, and did
not put in an appeararfce at the new home until the others had
been there nearly three months. The house was called Broom-
er's Hill, and was a nice, old-fashioned place with about thirty
acres of land around it, situated in the parish of Saxonholt. The
surrounding country was beautiful, and the village itself not un-
picturesque, and containing between twelve and fourteen hun-
dred inhabitants, mostly agricultural laborers.

There was no squire, properly so speaking ; there were several
large houses round, but they were all just beyond the boundaries,
and undoubtedly the chief man of the place was the rector. He
lived in a fine old house near the church, and wrote himself "hon-
orable " as well as " reverend," being the younger son of a peer.
The living was a very large one and he had private means, of
which, to do him justice, he was not stingy, but was always ready
to help those who went to him for aid.

The church itself was an old Norman building, cruciform in
shape, with some fine brasses in the interior and one or two in-
teresting monuments. I made a pilgrimage to it with my sisters
the first morning after my arrival, and they showed me with glee
the Broomer's Hill pew a spacious affair with red cushions and
hassocks, and a perfect library of hymn and prayer books. They
gave me a graphic account of the service how the little clerk

240 "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG." [Nov.,

was always behindhand and came in with a quavering " Amen "
when every one else had finished ; they were getting used to it all
now, they said, but it had struck them at first as very primitive,
accustomed as they had been all their lives to the ornate func-
tions of an extreme Ritualistic London church.

Not the church only but the whole manner of life at Saxon-
holt was new and strange to them, and very old-world in its sim-
plicity.

" You won't have been here a week before every one in the
parish will have called on you," said Maude. u They are of a
most sociable disposition, besides which they are devoured with
curiosity. A real live Catholic is unknown here. I don't believe
such a thing has ever been seen, and I am sure that many of
them expect you to have hoofs, if not horns.'''

" They know, then, that this strange, wild creature is coming
into their midst?"

"Oh! yes. Daisy has been at great pains to inform every-
body, for the sake of seeing what she calls ' their pained sur-
prise.' "

" Really, Ethel," put in Daisy, " it was amusing when Mr.
Chandos (that's the rector) and his wife called the first time.
We had said we would be pleased to help with the Easter de-
corations, and so forth, but that Maude was not strong enough to
undertake a Sunday-school class, and mother considered me too
young. * Well,' said he, 'perhaps when your other daughter
comes home she may feel inclined to assist us in that way.'
' Oh ! no,' mother said, ' I'm afraid you must not count on her aid,
as she is a Roman Catholic.' '

"What did they say?"

" They both said ' Oh ! ' in a shocked voice, and there was
quite five minutes' silence before they spoke again/'

" Have you been over to Ashly, either of you ? "

" Yes, we drove over one day. Does not the prospect of
seven miles there and seven miles back rather scare you ?"

" No ; I have been taking long walks lately in order to get
into condition, and I believe I can do fourteen miles easily, with
a rest between."

A sister of my father's had become a Catholic many years ago,
and when I was born she begged my father to let me be bap-
tized in her faith. He refused then, but later on, when his family
became more numerous, he was glad to accept her offer of
charging herself with my education on condition that she was
allowed to accomplish it in, a convent school. At ten years old

i886.] "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" 241

1 was placed with the Sisters of Jerusalem, and when, at sixteen,
I expressed a desire to be received into the church, neither he
nor my mother made any objection, only stipulating that I
should in no way allow my religious opinions to obtrude them-
selves or to clash with family arrangements. When the ques-
tion of taking Broomer's Hill arose some regret was expressed
at the distance I should have to go to Mass ; but as it was in
every other way desirable, it was decided that I must surmount
that difficulty somehow. At Ashly Park, a place about seven
miles from Saxonholt, there was a chapel and priest,*maintained
at the expense of Sir James Ashly ; and that was where I intend-
ed to go when the weather was fine enough to permit so long a
walk. On wet Sundays I must resign myself to staying at home,
unless I could induce Herbert to drive me in the dog-cart. My
first Sunday was beautifully fine. I started about eight, Mass be-
ing at half-past ten. The way was varied and delightful. After a
mile or so I left the high-road and struck across an undulating
common all covered with the golden glory of the gorse ; then
through an ideal English village where the cottages lay up
round a green, with the church on one side and on the other the
blacksmith's forge, and the inn, "The Queen's Head," with a sign-
post out in the road, and a portrait of her Majesty Victoria in
her robes of state, with sceptre and crown, swaying gently up and
down in the breeze ; then for nearly two miles through the pine
woods where the path was covered thick with soft brown nee-
dles and all the air was full of aromatic scents, and then through
a white gate into the park.

Oddly enough, both the Protestant and Catholic churches
were built in the park, the former a funny little gray stone edifice
with high, pitched roof and lancet windows ; the latter, only a
short way across the fine, springy turf, and well within sight, was
modern Gothic, built about twenty years ago by Sir James' fa-
ther. Each church possessed one bell, and ringing, as they did,,
within a second of each other, they produced two jerky notes,
that sounded like " Do come, do come."

The villagers entered at the west gate of the park, and then,
divided and went off in straggling groups to their separate des-.
tinations. The old women with their prayer-books wrapped in
clean pocket-handkerchiefs, and the old men in wonderfully-
stitched smock-frocks and high silk hats, harmonized as well?
with the landscape as the smoke-colored Alderney cows that
were dotted about in twos and threes ; and once when I passed. a,

VOL. XLIV. 16

242 "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" [Nov.,

hollow in the ground I saw the broad antlers of some deer toss-
ing above the bracken.

To my great joy I recognized the priest as Father Naylor,
who had been for some time chaplain at the convent. He came
down to speak to me after Mass, and I went round to his house
to rest.

" By the bye/' he said, when I had told him where I was liv-
ing, " there is a co-religionist at Saxonholt I go to see sometimes.
You ought to make his acquaintance and his wife's."

"What is their name?"

"Tugwell."

"Tugwell? They have not called on me yet."

" Well, no ; they would hardly do that. Mr. Tugwell earns a
precarious livelihood as a hedger and ditcher, I believe, and Mrs.
Tugwell takes in washing; so perhaps you had better call first."

" I will. Where do they live, and how do they come to be
Catholics ? "

" In answer to your first question, they live in one of those
cottages at the foot of Church Hill ; in answer to the second, he
is a convert. But you must ask his wife to tell you the story ; I
can't do it justice, as she can. He doesn't often come to church,
as it is too far for him to walk ; but he comes at Christmas and
Easter in great style in a fly. If you ever drive over, give the
old man a lift if you can."

" Do you know a Mrs. Tugwell, Sarah? " I asked our house-
maid a day or two after this conversation.

" Well, miss, there's a many Mrs. Tugwells. There's her
whose husband works down to the Red Lion, and there's Mrs.
Richard Tugwell at the shop, and Mrs. Jim Tugwell does plain
sewing, and Mrs. John she's awidder; then there's Mrs. Tug-
well, her as washes for your ma."

" I think that must be the one," said I, anxious to stem this
torrent of Tugwells ; " her husband goes to Ashly Park to
church."

"Oh! her. That's Nance Tugwell. Yes, I knows her well
enough, and so does most people, I fancy. She's a deal too fond
of giving folks the rough side of her tongue, is Nance. And
gossip ? My eye ! can't she talk ! "

" Where does she live ? I want to go and see her."

Sarah explained, at the same time adding : " I wouldn't go if
I was you, miss. She doesn't care for the quality. None of them
ever goes near her."

1 886.] "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG." 243

In spite of this discouraging- remark I started about six the
next evening to call on her. I found the house without difficulty.
There were three or four of them clustered at the bottom of
Church Hill, a winding road cut through high banks of sand-
stone, overgrown with birch and hazel, and tangled with ferns
and creeping plants. The houses were old and built of plaster
and wood, with immense thatched roofs. A gate opened into a
garden all full of pinks and larkspur, and tall hollyhocks holding
up their beautiful cups to catch the dust from the road.

The door stood open and I could see into the kitchen, a good-
sized room with a flagged floor as clean as soap and water could
make it. A large clock ticked away in one corner, and in the
window was a trestle- table piled high with linen which Mrs.
Tugwell was ironing. She had heard my step on the gravel and
came to the door to meet me a tall woman, stout too, though
not ungainly, and still handsome in spite of the forbidding ex-
pression of her face.

" Good-evening, Mrs. Tugwell," I began rather nervously ;
"my name is Turner"

" Oh ! I know who you are fast enough," was her not very
gracious answer ; " will you walk in ? "

" As you know my name," I said, accepting her invitation,
" you very likely know that I belong to the same faith as your
husband ; and, as we are the only Catholics in Saxonholt, we
ought to be friends don't you think so?"

A loud sniff was the only answer vouchsafed by this very im-
possible woman, and I was beginning to feel extremely uncom-
fortable ; however, I started again :

"Father Naylor " when she broke in :

" I'm not a papist, so don't think it, though my husband is
more fool he, says I. I saw you go by on Sunday. * She's off to
Ashly Park,' says I to myself ; * but she'll soon give that up.'
Dan'l used to do it, but he was fit for naught on a Monday when
he'd traipesed all the way over there."

"Your husband is not in, I suppose?" I ventured, thinking
Mr. Tugwell might prove less difficult than his spouse.

" No, he's not. He's at work ; that's where he is. It's only
the gentry who have time to go round visiting and hindering
folks, keeping them talking while their irons are cooling! "

" Oh ! I beg your pardon ; I won't detain you any longer,"
I said, mustering all my dignity, but feeling wonderfully small.
"Good-evening." And I moved towards the door. I suppose her
conscience smote her, for she said :

24 " Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" [Nov.,

" You mean well by calling, miss, I'm sure, but you must
come some time when I an't so busy. Mondays, Tuesdays, and
Wednesdays I am up to my eyes in the clothes, but Thursdays
and Fridays I gets a bit of peace."

I was a good deal teased at home about my unsuccessful at-
tempt to establish social relations with the TugwellS; and we
heard such stories about her from Sarah that Herbert gave her
the name of " The Dragon." All the village seemed to hold her
in wholesome awe, and there were many legends of her prowess
and feats of strength. One was how she had returned from mar-
ket one day to find the colporteur of the Bible Society in her
kitchen haranguing her husband, who, from all accounts, seemed
to be a nervous, easily dispirited man. With one thrust of her
vigorous arm she sent this apostle of the printing-press flying
down the path to the gate, pursued by a shower of his own tracts
and leaflets. That was his last attempt at evangelizing the Tug-
well family, and he was observed, from that time, to avoid the
road past her house. Another story ran that she had marched
straight into the cottage where John Millarn, the brutal black-
smith, was beating his wife, and, wrenching the stick from his
hands, had then and there administered the soundest thrashing to
him he'd ever had in his life !

One afternoon I met her, wheeling a barrow full of clean
clothes.

" Well, miss," she began, " you've not been to see me again?
You aren't so wonderful anxious for us to be friends, after all, it
seems."

" Indeed yes I am, Mrs. Tugwell ; but I was afraid of bother-
ing you."

"Oh! ah! I daresay. There's more ways than one of roast-
ing eggs." And with that she took up the shafts of her barrow
again and went her way.

Two days after this I screwed up courage enough to once
more beard the lioness in her den.

This time I found her darning stockings, with the cottage all
tidied up, and- her husband, " Marster Tugwell," seated in the
chimney-corner smoking, and nursing his knee. She really
seemed pleased to see me, and presented me as " Miss Turner,
the young lady as goes over to Ashly Park, Dan'l."

" Please sit down, Mr. Tugwell," 1 said, " and don't put your
pipe away. My brother smokes all the time at home, so I'm
used to tobacco."

He was a great contrast to his wife, though he had evidently

1 886.] "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG:' 245

been handsome, too. He was a timid, deprecating old man, very
thin, and bent nearly double, with trembling hands whose joints
were swollen with rheumatism. His scanty white hair fell round
a face wrinkled with age and toil, his features were sharp and
clearly cut, his blue eyes mild and singularly gentle, and every
line of his person expressed that wonderful, pathetic patience so
noticeable in old poor people. It was some time before he spoke,
and then only in answer to a direct question from me.

" Will you go to Mass with me next Sunday ? " I asked. " My
brother is going to drive me, and there will be plenty of room
for you, if you like to come."

His whole face lighted up.

" If it an't troublin' you, I should dearly like to," he said. ]

" Ah ! that he would," said his wife ; " he don't often get a
chance to go, 'ceptin' twice a year at Christmas and Easter
when I strains a point and has a fly from the George. Seven shil-
lin's is a deal of money; but since he is a papist, folks sha'n't say
he's too poor to be one properly."

To this somewhat embarrassing remark I replied vaguely by
saying: " It ts a. very long way to walk."

"Ah ! " he said, " I used not to find it so, but it's too much for
me now. I'm an old man seventy-odd."

" And old as that," put in his wife, " you wouldn't think there
was but ten years 'tvvixt him and me, miss, would you? "

" No, indeed," I answered, looking at her upright, stalwart
figure. " Have you been a Catholic long, Mr. Tugwell?"

" Fifteen years next month, missy ; and, please the Lord, I'll
die one."

" Tell her how it happened, Dan'l," said his wife. " I can see
she's dying to know, though she is too pretty-behaved to ask."

He lifted his rheumatic leg slowly with both hands, and
crossed it over the other one ; then, after two or three pulls at his
pipe, he began :

" It was when the duke was building his big church, just after
he come of age. He sent out notices that he wanted seven hun-
dred men, and he wanted 'em all from this part of the country, if
he could get 'em, bein' like his own people. So all who were in
want of a job went to his agent. There was men came from all
round, many more than was wanted, but I was lucky enough to
get on in the first hundred. It's too far to go from here and
back every day, so I used to go there a Monday mornin's and
stop till Saturday noon.

" The duke he used to come round himself sometimes when

246 "AT LAST, THOUGH LONG." [Nov.,

we was working, and speak to us ; a little bit of a fellow he was,
not much more than a boy, but so pleasant and kind in his man-
ner. Well, one day it was give out that there was to be a mis-
sion for the workmen. Some priests were coming from Lunnon,
and the hours were arranged so that all could attend if they see
fit ; if they didn't, why they needn't. There was lots of 'em went,
and I was one ; and the very first sermon that priest preached
took right hold of me, and before I knew where I was I see it all.
I went to him that day, and many times arter, and he tried to
teach me ; but I warn't very bright I never was only I knowed
it was all right somehow, and he teached me as much as he
could"

" He come home one Saturday," broke in Mrs. Tugwell,
"and 'Nance,' says he, 'I've joined the church.' 'Why, you
great cuckoo,' says I, ' you an't a Methody,' says I. So then he
ups and tells me all about it; and I was that mad I could ha'
knocked him down. And I found his rosary in his pocket, and
I just ups and chucks it into the midden at the back of Marster
Home's yard. And I told him what I done when he comes home
in the evenin', for ' I an't goin' to have no popish clutter about
here! says I. ' Nance, lass,' says he, ' you shouldn't ha' done that ;
I'll have to get another.' * You won't bring it to this house,
Daniel Tugwell,' says I, 'so I tells you frank and free.' Well, he
never says nothin' more till the evenin', and then he tells me he'll
have to be up earlier than usual the next day. I was surprised,
for he generally lay abed a bit Sunday mornin's, and * What's that
for? ' says I. ' I am goin' to Mass to Ashly Park,' says he ; ' will
you come with me?' * No, I won't,' says I. And when he was
asleep I gets up and hides his clothes, and slips out myself, and
doesn't come home till past church time and too late for him to
go. * There, my man,' says I, 'you won't talk about Mass to me
again in a hurry,' says I. ' Don't you ever serve me that trick
again, Nance,' says he wonderful quiet like ; and he puts on his
things and walks out. Well, it's ' the still sow sups the milk,'
you know, miss; and I talks to him all that day about his fool-
ishness. But lor ! you might as well ha' preached to a stone ; am
he goes off to work the next mornin' as full of his nonsense as
ever, and leavin' me as cross as you please, when who shoul<
come down but Mr. Chandos. Mrs. Tugwell,' he begins, ' what'j
this I hear about your husband? ' ' I don't know, sir, I'm sure, 1
says I, firing up ; ' nothing bad, Pm sure.' ' Nothing bad ! ' say<
he. 'I don't know what you call bad,' says he; 'but they te\
me he's become a papist.' ' Oh ! dear me,' says I, trying to kee|

i886.] "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG'' 247

cool, ' is that all? ' says I. ' That's true enough. Father Moxon
over to Stokesly, where he is workin', has been and converted
him.' ' And what does Father Moxon mean by interfering with
a parishioner of mine, I should like to know?' says he. 'I will
not have such doings in Saxonholt/ says he ; * and so I would
have you to understand, Mrs. Tugwell,' says he ; 'I will not have
such things in my parish.' Now, I was as mad as mad with
Dan'l myself, but I wasn't goin' to have him ordered about by
Mr. Chandos, so ' As to that, sir,' says I, ' you can't help yourself ;
we live in a free country,' says I, ' and if Dan'l bows down to
wood and stone,' says I, ' there's no man can hinder him.' * Mrs.
Tugwell,' says he, ' you've always gone to church regular, and
as such you've had a deal of work from the rectory, not to speak
of other things, and I expect you/ says he ' I expect you to see
that your husband conies to his senses.' Well, a worm will turn
at last, as you know, miss, and that was too much for me, hintin'
at the work I'd had from him and his, and the drops of broth
and things when Dan'l was down with the fever; so I ups, and
' Mr. Chandos,' I says, ' I'm much obleeged for past favors,' says
I, ' but, washin' or no washin', I am not your black slave; and as
for Dan'l,' says I, ' I don't care if he turns papist fifty times over,
and I'll never set foot in your church again,' says I, * though it's
not very often you're there yourself, if you can find some one else
to do your work,' says I. Well, he went the color of that candle,
and he takes up his hat. ' You're a very impertinent woman,' says
he. ' Woman yourself,' says I, and I shows him the door, and
from that day to this I've not seen the inside of a church. And,
if you'll believe me, I spent the whole of that afternoon in the
midden lookin' for DanTs rosary, and I found it at last ; and I
washed it and rubbed it, and I took the three o'clock train over
to Stokesly, and I come upon Dan'l all in the midst on his work,
and you never see a man so struck of a heap. And ' Here's your
rosary, Dan'l,' says I, * and you'll go to church where you please,'
says I, * and I'll not be the woman to hinder you.' Well, the
great soft-head ! he bursts out a-cryin', and it was ever so long
before I could make him understand. We went to see the priest

> together that evenin', and I told him just all about it ; and laugh !
I never see a man laugh more in my life. * You'd better let me
instruct you too, Mrs. Tugwell,' says he ; ' if you don't go to one
church you must to another.' ' No, thank you,' says I. 4 Once bit,
twice shy, your reverence; and I've had enough of the clergy,'
says I ; ' and if Dan'l there wasn't a great chuffin 'ed he wouldn't
take up with such foolery neither. Not to speak of quarrellin'

248 u AT LAST, THOUGH LONG" [Nov.,

with his bread and butter/ says I ; * for there's no denyin' Mrs.
Chandos's starched gowns mounts up, and the housemaid's
aprons, and if we come to the workhouse I shall know who to
thank for it,' says I."

" Why don't you move somewhere nearer a church?" I asked
as soon as I had a little recovered my gravity, which was as
much upset as Father Moxon's had been ; a then you might get
the surplices and so forth to wash, and Daniel could go to Mass
on Sundays."

They both looked blankly at me, and Daniel shook his head ;
evidently leaving Saxonholt was too bold a step to have present-
ed itself even to Mrs. Tugwell's independent mind.

" The missis has never been further away than Pelbury," said
he, " though I were in Lunnon myself once.''

" And a nasty place it is, if all folks tells you is true," said
Nance, " with the blacks a-fallin' all the while, and the milk as
weak as weak. I was bred and born in Saxonholt, and in Saxon-
holt I'll die ; and if you, Dan'l Tugwell, can't be content to do
likewise, why it's a pity, says I."

" Do you work at Stokesly now? " I asked.

" Oh ! no ; the duke he turned off half the men a year or so
after I joined the church, and he's cut 'em down still more since,
though he's building still. Ah ! we had a hard time just then,
for the quality all took their washin' away, and I only got odd
jobs. Do you mind that time, Nance ? "

"Mind it!" she cried. "Yes, I mind it. It was a bitter bad
winter, and we came precious nigh starving; but, thank God ! we
never went near the house or asked help from any one. But you
wouldn't wonder at his being bent, miss, if you knew what we
went through, and all along of that great gowk there a meddling
with matters he don't understand. If he'd 'a' been content to wor-
ship as his father and mother did afore him, we shouldn't have
lost the rectory washin'. It's all very well for the likes of you
to take fads into their heads, but it don't do for them as has their
living to get. What would become of him if I fell sick, I should
like to know? And he can't even eat his bit of vittle now like a
Christian, but must have this, and mustn't have that, on certain
days ; and won't let his bread look at the bacon fat on a Friday,
but eats it dry when the Lord he knows we don't pamper our
inwards, and it's little else we get sometimes."

"Well, well, Nance," put in her husband meekly, "after all, we
have only our two selves to look after, and we've always been fed ;
we've no cause to grumble."

i886.] "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" 249

" Grumble ! No, you've no cause to grumble, but /have. You
went with your eyes open and walked into a pit, but it's hard on
her as you've dragged in with you. As you've made your bed,
so you must He on it, Dan'l Tugvvell ; but the toad that's put under
the harrow has a right to complain ! "

When I left the cottage the old man walked to the gate with
me.

" Don't you mind what she says, missy," he said ; " she
wouldn't have said that much if you hadn't ha' been a Catholic
too. She always stands up for us to the others, but it's been a bit
hard on her, and you can't wonder if she complains now and
then. She's been a good wife to me ; her tongue 's her only trou-
ble. Come again, if you please, miss ; she's taken a fancy to you,
I can see."

Poor old Tugwell ! " Her tongue 's been her only trouble ! "
but what a trouble only a shrinking, sensitive nature like his
could know.

" Did you never feel like giving up, Daniel ? " I asked him once.

He shook his head. " It's been mighty hard at times, miss. The
men used to badger me at first, but they left that off. And I never
minded the going short ; there was things that more than made
up for that. It was through the missis I used to feel it most. I
won't deny she made me nigh despairin' sometimes, for she's
never left off nag-nagging me, but somehow, poor soul, I believe
she'll be sorry for it some day. And though I liked her for
standing up to the parson, it don't seem right of her not to go to
church, and so I've told her times and again."

At home they took a great interest in this couple. " Why,
the man is a martyr a positive martyr," exclaimed Herbert when
I repeated the above remark to them. " Fifteen years' nagging is
considerably worse than wild beasts, 7 think. Does he ever scold
back ? "

" No ; she told me he never gave her a hard word."

" More fool he. If he rounded on her sometimes she would be
all the better for it."

" Perhaps ; but he is not that sort of man. His is the gentlest,
most patient temper I've ever met."

My brother Herbert was a very good-natured fellow, and also,
perhaps, not a little glad to miss the service at Saxonholt, so
he used to contrive to take me to church in his dog-cart very
often, and we always took Dan Tugwell on the back seat. He
would come down to the gate in a clean white smock, with a
flower pinned in the breast of it, a bird's-eye handkerchief round

250 "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG." [Nov ,

his neck and another in the crown of the wonderful beaver hat
that had been his Sunday head-gear ever since his wedding-day,
for which occasion it was bought. His wife would follow him,
scolding all the time as he slowly and painfully clambered into
his place. But poor old man ! how happy he was in church. One
got a faint idea of the " beauty of holiness " when one stole a look
at his face during Mass.

In the summer he had plenty of work in the hay and harvest
fields, and in the autumn we took him on to do odd jobs in the
garden. I used to go and have five minutes' chat with him some-
times, for I found that a little time devoted to him brightened the
whole of his day.

" He do think a wonderful deal of you, miss," his wife said to
me once, and I really think, without vanity, that she herself was
not indifferent to me.

I came in from a walk one afternoon towards the end of No-
vember, and went in search of Dan. I found him in the kitchen
garden, hard at work as usual. The house was on a hill, and
the ground sloped down to flat meadows, at this time under water,
for the floods were out.

He rose from his stooping position over the celery-trench he
was weeding, straightened his back with a hardly suppressed
groan, and stood, his knotted hands crossed on his spud, and his
bent figure silhouetted against the waste of water where the sun
was dying away in a sea of crimson splendor.

- " Well, Dan," I began, " I've come to say good-by to you for
a little while. I am going away to-morrow to stay with my
brother in Aberdeen."

" I don't rightly know where that is, missy ; is it far away ? "

" Yes ; I shall be travelling all day, and all night nearly, after I
leave London."

" Beant you afraid to go so long alone ? "

" Why, no ; my brother will meet me, you know. It is not like
going among strangers."

" Ah ! that's it. If one has a brother or a father waitin' it takes
away the fear, don't it ? "

I knew what he meant, but I was shy of talking to him on
such a subject, he was so ignorant, and yet so much wiser than I.

I gave him some muffetees I had knitted for him.

" Why, bless your pretty heart! "he said, " they be a mort
too fine for me! You'll go round and see the missis before you
go?"

" I've just come from there. She was getting your suppei

1 886.] "AT LAST, THOUGH LONG:' 251

ready, and you had better be quick home, and not keep it wait-
ing, or you'll get scolded, perhaps."

It was the end of January when I came home. After two
months' absence there was, of course, much home and village gos-
sip to be told me.

We sat round the fire in my room until late on into the night ;
then, in a momentary silence, Maude said :

" O Ethel, poor old Daniel is dead ! "

"Dan Tugweli?"

"Yes; he died three days ago, very suddenly. He is to be
buried on Friday. Mr. Chandos has been very nice. He came to
see Herbert about it, and said he was sure Dan would choose to
be buried in the churchyard among all his people, and he asked
Herbert if he thought Father Naylor would read the service
there, as it was Protestant ground. Herbert drove over to
Ashly, and Father Naylor said the ground had been consecrated
centuries ago, and he 'had no reason to believe desecrated since ;
and he thanked Mr. Chandos for his courtesy, and said he would
come."

Herbert and I went to the funeral. There were a few, very
few, mourners at the grave, and when all was over Father Nay-
lor and I walked down to the cottage with Mrs. Tugweli.

" Come in," she said, drawing the key from her pocket.
Everything was in its usual place, but the whole room looked
bare and desolate, and seemed to have undergone a change.

" He was sitting there," she said, pointing to the chimney-
corner, and speaking as though she were talking to herself rather
than to us. " He had been telling his beads, and I had been going
on at him, as I always did, when suddenly he gets up and comes
over to where I stands. * Give us a kiss, Nance,' he says in his
old voice just like his courting days. I was too took aback to
speak rough to him, and I oh, thank God ! I kissed him. And
he sat down in that chair with a little gasp, and died."

Father Naylor tried to comfort the poor woman a little, but
she seemed almost in despair, and at last he had to go.

" Come to me or send for me at any time, if you want help,
as Daniel would have done, Mrs. Tugweli," he said as he went
away. " Try and persuade her to have a neighbor in ; she ought
not to be left," he whispered to me.

Although she had made enemies with her unkind tongue,
there were several good-hearted women who would gladly have
stayed with her; but she would have none of them, neither would

252 "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" [Nov.,

she listen to me when I wanted her to come to Broomer's, for
that night at least.

" Leave me in peace," she said at last, and as I closed the
door I heard her cry : " I didn't mean it, Dan'l not one word
of it."

We woke next morning to a white world. Such a snow-storm
broke over England that night as had not been known for fifty
years. Every line of rail was blocked, and train after train
stopped, some in cuttings where the half-frozen passengers shiv-
ered for hours before help came to them. London was like a
city of the dead, all traffic stopped and the roar of the streets
silenced.

In country-places the snow drifted, hiding the high-roads and
completely obliterating lesser tracks, and the wind swirled and
blew it into wreaths, piling it high above the roofs of lonely cot-
tages, and burying sheep and cattle in a soft white shroud.

Many strange stories were told of people snowed up in distant
farm-houses till the thaw released them after three weeks' im-
prisonment. More than one poor shepherd perished on the
Downs near Saxonholt, and we were all frantic with anxiety
about the fate of Toby Scult, our diminutive cow-boy, till we
found him, after eight-and-forty hours' search, in the pen with
the sheep, lying close up against an old bell-wether, and as warm
as toast.

It was, as I have said, three weeks before the thaw set in.
Long before then it was known that Mrs. Tugwell was missing,
had not been seen since the day of her husband's funeral.

Gradually the snow melted away, excepting on the hill-tops
and in the sheltered hollows. Then they found her close by the
church-door in Ashly Park, with Dan's brown rosary grasped in
her frozen fingers.

1 886.] vt, /%S5 3 fej^c7^ LIFE IN ENGLAND. 253

^
ItVfiQ

PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND.

WERE Sir Roger de Coverley to come to life to-day I am in-
clined to believe he would consider society in the nineteenth
century a very interesting study, and some of its problems pecu-
liarly puzzling, so various are the outgrowths of the civilization
over which he speculated with mild cynicism and the gallantry of
his period, and so many the forms and fashions we have revived
from his generation in our pursuit of novelty without in every
case a corresponding sense of the eternal fitness of things. I
fancy that our quaint old friend would find himself oppressed by
some of the most brilliant scenes in Belgravia. The region below
Half Moon Street and nearer to the Strand and Charing Cross
might appeal to his senses with something like familiarity, out-
wardly at least, but Mayfair would be a sorrowful pilgrimage to
him. Sir Gorgius Midas would startle him ; all his preconceived
ideas of even mushroom splendor would fail him here, while the
haute noblesse of Park Lane and Carlton Terrace would afford him
the material for profound philosophies too deep to utter. We
can fancy that he might direct his steps hopefully towards the
suburban places where at least Nature, in her loyalty to the forms
and colors she first assumed, would welcome him with the green
fields and blue skies which are as much of his time as our own ;
while were he to wander down into the provinces of England
remote from this chaotic London his traditions might receive few
shocks.

To assert that the English people cling to social prejudices,
to forms of thought and feeling about every-day life, is almost
superfluous, but journeying through the southern and western
part of England the fact that this is the case becomes at times
startlingly apparent; the incongruities are often surprising. Peo-
ple of the most modern influences and necessity for novel action
cling to early traditions, and preserve customs, and have the spirit
of the past with the letter of the present, in a way that makes one
appreciate and understand where the Pilgrim Fathers procured
that firmness of spirit and dogmatic will which made them perse-
cute while they declared it their intention to protect.

Country life in England has many phases, from the state of
splendid informality of a large country-house where there are
thirty or forty guests and fifty servants, to the town or over-

254 PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov.,

grown village where a certain amount of caste feeling dominates
the community and the rules for society are as fixed as those of
Mayfair nay, more so, since they are subject to none of those
fascinating vacillations which are like the caprices of a beauty
whose every phase has its own charm, and whose whims have the
grace of an artistic decision. Vibrations such as sway the social
atmosphere of " passionate Brompton " are welcome to the
dwellers in provincial England. They accept modern innova-
tions in a staid and resolute manner, recognizing no power to
please in the subtleties which make terra cotta effective to-day
and tiresome to-morrow. They are anxious to look prosperous
and fashionable, but the variations of "temperament" are little
known.

With the life in a conservative country-town I have to deal at
present, and it seems to me that the best preface I can make is to
say that it is, in all its essentials except that of human nature,
radically different from life in a corresponding place in America.
We take, for example, a town in one of the southern counties a
market-town, something between the fascinating Casterbridge of
Mr. Hardy's novels and the Barchester of Mr. Trollope's en-
chanting chronicles. Leaving the railway-station at such a place,
we encounter immediately the newest features of the town. Ra-
diating from this point are some circles of brand-new villas,
stucco and brick dwellings, with a " smart" look about them, not
to be called pretentious for architecture in England is generally
too solid to be thus characterized but perhaps " genteel " in ap-
pearance ; houses, set back a little, with bow-windows at either
side of a pretty doorway, and latticed panes in the casements
above, with here and there a dormer roof or gable end showing.
Nothing especially quaint, and hardly to be called picturesque.
New bricks and mortar are what the dwellers within dearly love;
new colors, new-looking gardens, freshly-sprinkled gravelled
walks, bright paint, and a well-laid strip of pavement.

A green or common exists in this region of the town, tra-
versed with foot-paths and circled by a low hedge, with gat<
here and there and admitting the foot-passengers who enjoj
this approach to what may be called a square. One or tw<
churches dominate this district. The church a new one, per-
haps, but governed by English law and rubric stands at a litth
distance from the green, tribute to the modern prosperity of th<
people in the villas round about; while further up the hilly roa<
to the right is the dissenting chapel, which assembles a l
number of towns-people, and is as defiantly prosperous as " Salei

1 886.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 255

Chapel," in Mrs. Oliphant's story, in the period of Mr. Togers'
supremacy.

Perhaps a certain chill of disappointment settles down upon
the American visitor who has journeyed south for the sake of
finding quaint forms in architecture as well as manners, on be-
holding so much of to-day in the looks of things near to the sta-
tion ; but he need only turn his steps up the first narrow street
back of the smart-looking terrace confronting him, with its twink-
ling windows and solid style, and the England of the seventeenth
century is before him. In the town of which I write the High
Street* was full of quaint picturesqueness, such as made one feel,
on leaving the new town, as though an unexpected slide in a
magic-lantern had been pushed in. Houses which were built
in the reign of Charles I. were converted into shops with as
little injury to their original form as possible. The butcher sold,
his wares in a building where it was said that the Protector held
one of his few genial merry-makings, and William of Orange had
supped in the place where the baker now cooked delicious-look-
ing loaves and sold buns by the score to the parish-school chil-
dren.

Midway in the High Street a circular space was devoted to
the market on Thursdays. Here was a huge town cross, which
formed an attractive centre for indifferent-mannered people, in
smock-frocks or corduroys, who were more interested in local
topics and the aspect of the weather than the sales more active
minds were busy over in the porch of the Town Hall. Such
figures moved about on market-days with leisurely abandon, af-
fording fine types for the curious observer of the English coun-
tryman of narrow boundaries and limitless traditions. They gave
a piquancy to the scene and their animation fitted well with
their utterances in dialect. Deep in their hearts a belief in
science and symbols, and brought up on oath few could have
denied their faith in such witchcraft as lay in the evil eye or the
virtues of nails buried at cross-roads or bones dipped in wax and
melted before a fire. Radiating from this centre were small
streets intersecting the heart of this lovely country like adven-
turous foot-paths which had outgrown their original intention.
The houses bordering these were for the most part very quaint
in form, with bulging upper stories and strangely-devised inte-
riors. The High Street wandered on past the town cross, widen-
ing as it neared the open country, and presenting certain digni-

*The High Street of an English town corresponds to our "Main" or principal busi-
ness street.

256 PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov.,

fied landmarks. A large old manor-house, shut in by a brick wall,
held its own in spite of the poverty of certain places in its near
vicinity houses which had mouldered into decay, and whose
original grace was forgotten in the presence of poverty and in-
difference to anything but the need of walls and roof for a shelter
and a door-yard for the fast-increasing families. Perhaps such a
house gave the strongest emphasis to the conservatism of the
place. It was too well known to suffer any loss of dignity
through its surroundings, and the maiden lady who resided
there bore her title of " Honorable " with as much respect as
though her house, with its quaint proportions dominating a
poor part of the street, its garden and orchards dipping down-
wards to the river, were set in the midst of a stately park.

From this point the country spread itself with luxurious un-
dulations, dotted here and there with houses belonging to the
" county" families. The roadways, of gracious width and bor-
dered by most fertile lands, wound up and down, while the land-
scape presented every variety of the southern English country,
the Tors rising bluely in the distance, and the river, which had
its source further north, flowing in and out of the meadow-lands,
past the quaint old mill, curving about a bank of pollards ; or
below the farm-lands of the country, its ripple or its rush giving
character and variation to the scene. Here in due season the
otter might be hunted. Here were fords and pools, craggy bends
in the little river that could tell stories of many an exciting day-
break chase of the old " fishmonger," as the otter is called, while
on every side, up hill and down dale, the fox has a skurrying
time of it as soon as the hunting season sets in.

Naturally, as a Catholic, one of my first interests in the remote
little town of which I speak was my church ; and well do I re-
member the setting-down which I received from my landlady on
inquiring its whereabouts the only church to her being the recog-
nized one of England.

" Oh ! the chapel you mean, ma'am," understanding at last
"the Catholic chapel," and proceeded to give me the various
directions by which I found myself led and misled up and down
some country-looking streets, finally to a lane where stood the
little building devoted to our Lord's service.

It was a Sunday morning, and I had been told that the service
took place at nine o'clock, and I pushed open the little, worm-
eaten door of the church to find myself in the most cheerless of
all sacred edifices. It was, perhaps, the size of one of our smallest
and poorest Catholic churches, say in the far West or in som<

1 886.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 257

northern districts of New York State, and where any attempt even
at cleanliness had been made certain traces were left conspicuous
from the fact of their making a contrast to the very rough and
very dingy main part of the building. About six: people were
seated here and there in the broken-down pews; a very feeble,
venerable priest was officiating. Fortunate for me, thought I,
that the service is the same and may go on, no matter how
meagre or how unsuggestive the surroundings ; and 1 responded,
of course, in my heart, feeling everything as tangible and real as
in the cathedral in London. But the poverty, indeed the squalor,
of the place, the extremely feeble looks of the aged priest, and
the apparent indifference of the people struck me as being almost
unnatural even for a poor parish; since the town was large, and
if the Catholics within it were not prosperous, at least in num-
bers, they might have maintained the church in better order.
Wishing to discover something about the week-day Masses, I
presented myself a little later at the priest's house, to be received
by the most deplorable-looking old woman, who led me into a
scantiiv-furnished parlor, listened to my inquiries, and answered
at once: " Week-days? No, indeed, miss; it is more than he can
do to say the Mass on Sunday ." And so, indeed, it shortly proved ;
for the old man, whose failing health had made it so long almost
impossible for him to keep up the duties of his situation, and yet
who had, from desire to administer to his little flock, kept his
feelings from the bishop, died suddenly about two weeks later.
I knew that in the neighborhood a well-known Catholic noble-
man had his own chaplain and private chapel, also that several
rich Catholics in the county attended elsewhere ; yet this little
chapel had to be maintained, and a very brief search brought to
light many who, for want of special encouragement or instruction,
had been remaining away from their duty, but who professed
themselves glad enough to attend the services were they recom-
menced. Such matters proceed very slowly in England. The
bishop was absent at the time, and only by a fortunate chance
did any one appear in the actual town itself ready to take an,
interest in the religious growth of the place.

We had passed and repassed very often the quaint old manor-
house of the town, and knew only that its present occupants had.
but recently taken up their abode within its walls. A doorway
opened in the garden-wall sometimes and revealed a lady and gen-
tleman, a happy party of young children and scampering dogs,
while glimpses were obtained of a fine old tree on the lawn, of a,
garden in the rear, and sounds as of a perfect rookery in the-

VOL. XLIV. 17

258 PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov.,

taller tree-tops. At an evening party, soon after the old priest's
death, I remember hearing- it mentioned that the people from the
manor-house were expected ; and, sure enough, Mr. and Mrs.

H were announced. It chanced to be my good-fortune that

Mr. H - took me down to supper, and a little conversation
brought to light the fact that he was one of those Catholic con-
verts to whom the Whitehall had given special fame. He had
been a clergyman of some distinction, holding one of the finest
livings of the English church, but his conversion had been slow
and sure. If not "with the rushing of a mighty wind," it had
come from deliberate daily convictions which either preceded or
followed an investigation leading him directly into the Church
of Rome. Of course his living was abandoned, but, fortunately
for his family, much of his fortune was a private one, and he had

felt happier in coming down to B to live in the old manor

than in remaining in the midst of parishioners he had dearly
loved and who were n6w mourning him as one led astray.* His
wife was bitterly opposed to his conversion, as she told me that
very evening, but of course she could not, or would not, interfere
with what her husband considered the only lawful and godly
thing for him to do.

I can hardly remember all that passed between us about the
little church, but 5 know that it resulted in a decision to do

something, and thlat at once. A day or two later the H s

drove me to a convent situated charmingly two or three miles
from the town. n The order was an enclosed one the motive
Perpetual Adoration but I believe only two houses of the espe-
cial order exist, and in the convent to which I refer several ladies
of noble English families had vowed their lives to the service of
God.

We saw the; prioress sitting in a little parlor, and talked to
her across a large window-space from which the grating was re-
moved, and where we might have shaken hands with her. Her
dress was spotless white, of a soft, heavy serge, and I think that,
but for their very evident contentment with their lot, the nuns of
this convent would have afforded any amount of suggestion for
the picturesque and romantic to outsiders. The grounds of their
house were very old ; there were alley-ways and certain cypress
walks, up and down which the white-robed sisters took their exer-

* I would like to mention that since then a large number of Mr. H 's former parishion-
ers, under his instruction, have become Catholics. A significant fact connected with his con-
version was that when his living came to be sold, so great was the dread of disestablishment
that it was hard to find a buyer !

1 886.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 259

cise daily, and on one or two occasions sang together sweet-toned
chorals, rehearsing for their daily service, to which outsiders came,
sitting within the grating. The prioress was a woman of decided
views and much kindly common sense. She said she believed it
could readily be arranged for their chaplain to officiate Sundays
and holydays at our church; and this being the final agreement,
we set to work to improve the condition of things in the chapel
and to form a choir.

I think some of us well remember with much deep satisfaction
those wintry days in the little church. The cold weather passed
so rapidly that we had no particularly dreary experiences, and
when the bloom of February appeared we were able to begin to
dress the altar with wild-flowers, and by St. Joseph's day it seemed
as though the woodlands and the hedgerows fairly teemed with
blossoms. Well do I remember sitting with Mr. and Mrs.

H on the steps of St. Joseph's altar, waiting for the boys

whom we had sent out in the country-side for a fresh relay of
flowers; and I can see them now coming up the dimly-lighted
aisle, fairly staggering beneath their load of blossoms, for the
daffodils were out, primroses were plenty, and the violets lay in
great purple clusters amidst the green boughs the boys were bear-
ing. We thought St. Joseph fared very well that day, and I am
sure he must have been lonely for years in that neighborhood.
The altar-linen and the boys' cassocks were mended, and our
choir, who had done well in all Lenten services, made glad all
hearts on the feast-day morning ; and it was very soon after this
that Mrs. H - and her husband took a memorable journey, on
which occasion she received conditional baptism and made her
first communion, returning to the manor-house a far happier
woman than she had been for many a day. All this time the
chaplain of the convent was officiating; but things were looking
very prosperous, the congregation had greatly increased, and the
bishop promised a regular priest, who came in course of time.
But for that one winter and spring time it was almost like build-
ing up a house of God in the wilderness, and I am sure that it
made the service and its requirements dearer than it had ever
been before to the few who were there constantly and working
so harmoniously together.

The opposition to Catholicism which I found in such places
was like that which our Calvinistic brethren might harbor. It
was downright bitter and severe. The very priest to whom I
refer told me once that sooner than walk on the same side of the
street with a Catholic priest during his own Protestant boyhood,

PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov.,

he would go a decided distance out of his own way ; and the first
time a Catholic entered his father's house as a guest he refused
to be one of the party at the dinner-table. Such places as the
town of which I write cannot in any way be compared to an
American place of the same size and importance, so far as our
church is concerned. Within an area of fifteen miles two private
chapels were maintained. Consequently, the town chapel ap-
pealed to a very small number of people. It was not a manufac-
turing place at best scarcely more than two hundred people ever
attended service but I have heard from it since that it is flourish-
ing and vigorous. There is a school-house now. I doubt not
but that they have also enlarged the church itself. Rumors of a
fine boys' choir and other such matters have come to my ears,
and I know that the priest is an Oxford man with an income of
his own ; but can anything ever make it seem so dear to us as it
did when, having done all that hands and feet could do to prepare
the table of our Lord, we few could kneel together, uniting pray-
ers and the homage of grateful hearts for the light which was
slowly but surely growing there where once it had so nearly
come to darkness?

The country teemed with romance, nearly every great house
having its story. On the principle that a ghost-story is rarely
out of place, I will mention one or two household traditions
which came to my immediate knowledge. Dining at a town
place one evening, we commented upon a portrait in the library
of the house, and which represented a beautiful woman in the
prime of life and wearing upon her neck a collarette of diamonds
with a pendant of amber-colored stones. Our host informed us
that the picture had a singular history, which he good-naturedly
related. In the beginning of the century the heir to the estate
was seated one evening in his dressing-room, thinking of no more
emotional subject than the new kennels being built for his hounds.
His mind was entirely absorbed with practical details, and he was
startled from a very prosaic reverie by a knock upon the door.
Thinking it was his valet, he answered " Come in " without mov-
ing from his position or allowing the interruption to break his
chain of thoughts. As no sound of an opening door occurred, he
turned his head, and in the firelight behind his chair saw dis-
tinctly the figure of a beautiful woman wearing a collarette of
diamonds and a singular-looking pendant of yellow stones. The
young man started, but, as he said later, was by no means alarmed.
He could not imagine who his visitor might be, and as he moved
forward to address her she made an appealing gesture with her

i886.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 261

hand towards the pendant at her throat, and vanished. So unex-
pected and apparently useless was the apparition that he could
only conclude he had been dozing 1 unawares; but late in the
same evening, as he was going upstairs to an old study in which
some diagrams of former kennels were kept, he again encoun-
tered this strange presence. The lady stood at the end of a long
hall and very distinctly beckoned to the young man to approach.
He followed this time, overcome with awe-struck curiosity. She
retreated, still beckoning to him, and vanished behind the study-
door. He entered the room to find it vacant. The next day he
related these strange occurrences to the only other person in the
house at the time an old clergyman who had been his father's
tutor. The reverend gentleman seemed much struck with what
he had to say, and informed him that in his boyhood a robbery

had taken place at G House, and some valuable East Indian

ornaments belonging to his grandmother, together with her por-
trait, were stolen. Search had been made, but the only clue to
either picture or jewels had been the fragmentary confession of a
man arrested for another crime, and Who in dying had murmured
sentences which were taken down, and on being produced read as
follows: " Picture left in the west room. Could not break spring
of locket." As he had admitted to having taken part in the
famous robbery at G House, these dying words were sup-
posed to relate to that affair; but a search in the west room for
the picture proved unavailing. The father of the young man
who had seen the apparition had always supposed that the rob-
bery was planned by a cousin of his who had some covert design
in securing the jewels. But circumstances were not strong
enough against him to warrant his arrest. The young man,
roused to the keenest interest by what had taken place, deter-
mined to make a thorough study of the west room, and the result
was that the wall between the study and this apartment was
taken down. In so doing a secret panel or sliding door was dis-
covered, and behind it the missing picture together with a small
box containing the East Indian jewels. Why or how they had
been deposited there no one could ever tell ; but the owner of
the house carried the pendant at once to London and had the
spring of the locket opened by an expert jeweller. A faded
piece of parchment, on which something in cipher was written,
was disclosed. But, like most of ghost-stories, the end was shad-
owy and mysterious. No one had ever succeeded in decipher-
ing the writing or in determining as to its origin. There it lay
while we were talking, locked in a small cabinet in the library at

262 PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov.,

G - House, perhaps some day to be clearly understood. The
picture was restored to its former place, and in spite of many
suggestions of the supernatural no one had been found who could
substantiate any story of the strange lady's further appearance.
Connected with another house in this vicinity was a weird tale,
which, however, had become like a commonplace fact to the
neighborhood. Charles I. had passed a week there shortly be-
fore his downfall, and on the eve of his execution he is supposed
to revisit the place and walk, holding his luckless head in his
hand, up and down a certain corridor where it is said the master
of the house denounced his king 1 .

Society in such a town has two distinct phases. Some of
these are too subtle to define, but for the most part they represent
rules and prejudices which form governing influences and which
are respected by all the people as traditions too sacred to be dis-
turbed. The " county " families rarely visit in the town. They
have their own gatherings in their fine mansions, detachments
of visitors from town, gatherings from the county, all forming- a
little world of their own. While the town society pursues the
even tenor of its way with varied entertainments, all more or
less formal in character, the winter season having a fair show
of dinner-parties, afternoon teas and dances ; the more purely
bourgeois element and the people who are generally known as
Dissenters form a certain distinct set apart from the upper town
society, and having a world in which the festivities are sociable
and decidedly hilarious. Some of the town-people, of course,
visit among the county families, but the exceptions are few : a
leading barrister, a clergyman or physician, an army officer or
naval commander, some lady of blue blood residing in the town,
being eligible for county invitations; while to the American
mind certain caste distinctions afford endless variety for study.
To understand the raison d'etre for some of their closest dis-
tinctions was very difficult. There were some families who
seemed to be accepted without any analysis at all or any discus-
sion, although, from what I used to hear, they did not impress me
as being of pedigree or position, according to English social
rules, to warrant such reception. Whether it was that in a weak
moment they had been taken up and could not be discarded, or
that they had some claim to recognition too subtle for the Ameri-
can mind, I could not understand. Nevertheless the fact re-
mained of their undoubted position among the elect ones, and I
used to think their cases must cause an additional heart-burn to
the waiting souls who hovered on the debatable border-line be-

1 886.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 263

tween the leading town-people and the second-rate bourgeoisie.
It would be hard to find a more agreeably social community
than the better class formed in this little town. The dinner-
parties given among them were delightful. They combined the
latest novelty in fashion with something of the substantial home-
life of an older generation, and were in some respects better
'than the more stately entertainments to which one went driving
five or six miles, sometimes in the wet and darkness, recompensed
only by the sense that the invitation and the entertainment were
distinctly to one's credit. The hour of dining was quarter before
eight ; every one appeared in full evening toilet; there was evi-
dent the usual reticence among the young girls present and the
comfortable affability among the dowagers, while the men talked
politics and local affairs agreeably enough; and there was sure to
be good music and a comfortable hour of conversation on con-
genial topics among the ladies in the drawing-room. The five-
o'clock tea-parties brought together the most agreeable elements
in the town society. The young gtils*were fond of long walks,
and would come in fresh from such exercise to discuss all sorts
of things over a genial fire, and perhaps to flirt a little with the
young men, who might have spent their morning in the hunting-
field and were ready enough for this hour of light-hearted amuse-
ment. The drawing-rooms in which such gatherings took place
had all the charms, as I recall them, which belong to an English
home ; there was a sense of being chaperonized, with no special re-
straint. And if I ventured to be critical with anything, it would
be of the limited point of view so often found in regard to the
art and literature of the world beyond their ken. Here conven-
tional rules which may have been laid down five-and-twenty
years ago still govern feelings and ideas, in spite of the agreeable
fact that Mudie furnished the town with plenty of current litera-
ture twice a week, and nearly everybody went to London during
the spring exhibitions. An older, quainter, and perhaps more
entertaining little circle belonged to the place and suggested at
all times such towns as Cram ford to my mind. Small card-par-
ties were here given, the invitations coming upon pink note-
paper, with sometimes a suggestion that there would be "a little
music." We usually went to these at about eight o'clock in
quiet evening-dress, many of the ladies coming with the escort
of a maid or man-servant carrying a lantern, and I do not think
I would have been startled by the appearance of a sedan-chair.
If it rained we often wore waterproof cloaks, as it was not ex-
pected that we should always hire a " fly." Little bits of finery,

264 PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov.,

like hats or laces, might be brought in a paper parcel ; and at one
house to which we often went, and where we were always most
agreeably entertained, we used to pin on such last touches in a
large, roomy bed-chamber, with a four-post bedstead hung in
damask, and a dressing table with a large mirror that reflected
our anxious faces and the sober gayeties as well as the vast
corners of the candle-lit room. To have worn anything very
new in style at such gatherings would have seemed a trifle out
of place, for I remember that flowered silks of quite an antique
pattern, large, solid-looking jewelry, and Honiton laces appeared
decidedly' in keeping. We would go down-stairs to the draw-
ing-room with a peculiar air of formality, where we were receiv-
ed cordially, but with a dignity of manner fitting the occasion;
and we had a little light refreshment before going to cards. On
such occasions no men-servants appeared, but the things were
handed about by the brightest, neatest of maids, who bloomed
like spring flowers in the large, old-fashioned, stately house.
Oar hostess was a genuine Mrs. Battle in regard to whist; but,
cards over, her cheerful voice was lifted again, and we always
had the most bountiful sort of a supper. They always had a
dish called "jannet " at these parties, which was very delicious
and tasted as if it had been spiced in some Oriental country a
long time ago. When we came to leave I think we all felt sorry
and wished for another invitation soon again. The atmosphere
of these parties was so home-like yet so quaint, and the flavor
of everything so unlike anything we had ever experienced
in America, that it was to us like being set down in the
middle of some interesting, old-fashioned novel to partake of it.
It often rained so that going home one could see the lanterns
swaying over the wet pavements curious little flames of light
that seemed to suggest large, damp fireflies; but somehow we
always liked that method of escort better than driving, and the
friendly good-nights exchanged here and there among us had a
piquancy of their own, whether uttered in the soft, quiet rain of
the winter or under the clear, star-lit sky. Everything connected
with such entertainments appeals to me now in retrospection so
agreeably that the very prejudices which baffled and amused me
at the time seem to have gained a dignity of their own. I recall
the discussions over Mr. So-and-so's marriage with a girl of " no
family at all " ; the question as to whether it would be possible
to call upon her ; the horror expressed as to Mr. - 's will dis-
inheriting his daughter Jane ; the question whether Admiral -
would ever be reconciled to his wife, as among the various topics

i886.J PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 265

under discussion at the present time, and the figures in the pic-
tures suggested rise to mind like characters in some story, and a
dozen plots such as Trollope would have used to admirable ad-
vantage are suggested by the incidents of their every-day lives.
For be it known that in the social condition of tilings in England
lies a mine of wealth for any novelist of the day. Every tradi-
tion suggests a set of circumstances for a writer of any ingenuity
to weave together, and the merest externals of society in a pro-
vincial place such as I describe make up the outlines of a picture
which the story-writer can use without the necessity of resorting
to any tricks or sensational incidents, or unexpected dilemmas
and developments.

While the system of home-education is still popular, even
among the middle classes, in England, school-life is carried on
much more admirably of late years than during the first decades
of this century. Boys are sent to the grammar-schools of the
towns in which they live, and may compete there for scholar-
ships in the great public schools of England, whence they go on
to the universities ; and if the schools for girls fall short of cor-
responding ones in America, there are decided advantages for
the gentler sex in special studies. Painting and music are libe-
rally open to all, while the board-schools are beginning to find
their way among the masses of people, even in the provinces.

The general method of life, or what I may call its routine, in a
provincial English town, corresponds nearly to our own. The
root of difference lies in the whole system of feeling the point
of view with which, so to speak, an Englishman is born, and
which he accepts as a general thing without a murmur. The
fondness for home-life noticeable among high and low in Great
Britain might well be imitated on this side of the water, where
the young people of the present day are always anxious to fly
away from the parent nest and try their own wings in a new
atmosphere. One thing further to be remarked in the provinces
is the admirable manner in which domestic service is viewed.
The girl who would go into a shop or factory in America regu-
larly prepares herself for household work in England, and by
doing well dignifies the labor she undertakes. The positions of
mistress and maid, if more clearly defined in England than in our
country, have the inestimable advantage of being so regulated
that the mistress provides a real home for her servant, and the
maid is conscious that she increases her own self-respect by
doing her duty to her employer. I have heard it said, and it

266 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov.,

seems to me with admirable justice, that the middle classes of
England, the wives and daughters in a provincial town such as
I have been describing, formed the real backbone of England's
well-being. The nobility have their rights and their excellent
qualities, no doubt ; but the middle classes, the professional and
solid business people of the country, form its standing-ground
and certainly uphold its position socially among the nations of
the world.

PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS*

THE appointment by the Holy See of Mgr. Agliardi as diplo-
matic representative to the court of Pekin marks an important
era in the history of the Chinese missions. The exclusive pro-
tectorate exercised since the treaty of 1860 by France over all
the Christians of the Celestial Empire had become an anomaly to
the other European nations and a cause of offence on the part of
China. A government engaged at home in making war on reli-
gion acted in queer character abroad while masquerading as the
special champion of the faith. For a long period all Christians
seeking to travel into China did so on the passes of the French
consuls; and thus, in the course of time, Frenchmen and Chris-
tians have come to be identified in the Chinese mind, the latter be-
ing held responsible for the actions or the hostility of the former.
How disastrously this arrangement works has been revealed in
the massacres of last 3 7 ear, which were directly provoked by the
military operations of France in Ton-kin. In the interest of the
church and for the sake of the Chinese Cnristians it had become
necessary that a change should be made, and the Pope has acted
at last.

How every resource of patience was exhausted, and how
every tenderness was shown for French feeling, is demonstrated
by an elaborate account of the negotiations published in the
Osservatore Romano. The initiative came from Pekin as far back
as the month of May, 1881, when Li Hung Chang first sent a let-
ter to Cardinal Jacobini, Secretary of State, touching the ques-
tion of re-establishing diplomatic relations between China and
the Holy See. Chang expressed much solicitude for the safety

* Missiones Catholicce" Ritus Latini euro. S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, De-
scripta in annum MDCCCLXXXVI. Romae : Ex Typographia Polyglotta S. C. de Propa-
ganda Fide. 1886.

1 886.] PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. 267

of the Chinese converts, and urged that in their interests the
Pope should send to Pekin a nuncio, for whom he promised the
honors and the station accorded to the ambassadors of sovereign
states. At that time the idea was not entertained by the Holy
See, or at least not acted upon. Last year's persecution, how-
ever, induced the Pope to address a personal letter to the Em-
peror of China, to which a respectful answer was returned. As
a consequence of this correspondence, perhaps, Mr. Dunn was, in
January last, made the bearer of another letter from the viceroy,
Li Hung Chang, to Cardinal Jacobim, asking that Mr. Dunn be
received as a special envoy empowered to open negotiations for
the establishment of closer and more formal relations. At the
same time the viceroy took occasion to say that this step was not
suggested by any European power, but was spontaneous on the
part of China. Under these circumstances the Holy See felt
that, while all due regard should be paid to the claims of France,
this offer of the Chinese government could not well be rejected.

These facts were communicated to the French ministry, to-
gether with the assurance that the representative whom the Vati-
can proposed to send to Pekin would always respect the rights of
France and cordially co-operate in mutual assistance in the East.
The French government at once raised objections, and requested
that the papal representative at Pekin should have no diplomatic
standing, but be of the same character as the apostolic delegate
at Constantinople. This would have been equivalent to a rejec-
tion of China's offer, since the very object desired, according to
Li Hung Chang's letter, was a fully-accredited ambassador and
direct relations with the Holy See. Finding that France per-
sisted in her stubborn attitude, the Holy Father yielded to the
feelings of France by the appointment of Mgr. Agliardi as diplo-
matic representative to the court of Pekin, with instructions to
examine the situation in China and report thereupon to the Holy
See.

These momentous proceedings forcibly call attention to the
present state of the missions in China, and lend considerable ad-
ditional interest to the account which we find in the volume de-
voted to the missions under the care of the Propaganda Fide, and
compiled from the reports of the missionaries. While not so
strictly accurate and full as one could desire, yet, by a little
study, a tolerably fair account can be drawn from the badly-
arranged facts flung together between the two covers of the
book.

The first province on the list is that of Chan-si, into which the

268 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov.,

Jesuits introduced Christianity some time during the sixteenth
century, though the mission is now in charge of the Franciscans.
Chan-si was separated from the Pekin diocese by Alexander
VII., and in 1696 it was, in conjunction with Chen-si, erected into
a vicariate-apostolic by Innocent XII.; in 1762 the region of
Hu-quang was added to it, but in 1838 the last-named was sepa-
rated and erected into an independent diocese, the provinces of
Chan-si and Chen-si being divided and formed into two vicari-
ates by a decree of February 5, 1844. The present vicariate cov-
ers an immense area. The number of inhabitants is 17,000,000 ;
number of Catholics, 14,980; catechumens, 2,500; churches and
chapels, 10 ; European missionaries, 7 ; native priests, 9 ; schools,
31, pupils 1,250; college, I, students 40; seminary, I, seminari-
ans 18 ; orphans, 578.

In 1839 the vicariate of Chan-tong was erected by Gregory
XVI., including within its bounds the quondam pro- vicar iates of
Hu-pe and Hu-nan. This mission has been often and grievously
afflicted by persecutions. By a decree of December 22, 1885,
Chan-tong was divided into northern and southern vicariates.
In Northern Chan-tong the population numbers 29,500,000, of
whom Catholics are 15,000; catechumens, 6,000 ; there being 14
European missionaries; 9 native priests; schools, 36, pupils
200; seminary, i, seminarians 22; orphanages, 5, orphans 600;
number of churches not stated. The slimness of the school re-
port is perhaps owing to the severe persecutions recently suf-
fered.

On January 2, 1882, the vicar-apostolic of Chan-tong, who
was then Bishop Cosi, nominated the Rev. John B. Anzer, of the
College of Sleyl, Holland, pro-vicar of Southern Chan-tong, then
in his own vicariate ; the idea was to more thoroughly organize
the work in a district which had been scarcely touched. The
College of Steyl has undertaken to supply this mission, and
several young priests were sent out a few months ago. By the
decree mentioned above, on December 22, 1885, the province
was formally erected into a vicariate-apostolic, with Right Rev.
John B. Anzer as incumbent. There are 2,000 Catholics; 2,264
catechumens; 5 churches; 26 chapels ; I seminary with 12 semi-
narians ; 25 schools, and 2 orphanages. No other statistics are
given. The vicariate is in a disorganized condition from perse-
cution.

The Christian religion was introduced into the province ot
Chen-si in 1640. Its fortunes varied with the alternate favor or
persecution of the Chinese emperors. By a decree of February

1 886.] PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. 263

5, 1844, a vicariate was formed of Chen-si, Kan-su, and the ad-
joining Tartar regions. On May 21, 1878, Chen-si was separated
from the Tartar regions and the district known as Ku-ku-noor.
It extends from the Mon-ku desert on the north to Hu-pe and
Su-tchaen on the south ; from Chan-si and Ho-nan on the east to
Kan-su on the west. There are 10,500,000 inhabitants; 21,300
Catholics; 107 churches and chapels; 8 European missionaries ;
14 native priests; 8 schools, 50 pupils; I seminary, 20 semina-
rians ; 2 orphan asylums.

The vicariate of Emoi was separated from that of Fo-kien on
December 5, 1883. It includes the Formosan peninsula; Fo-
kien bounds it on the southeast, whence it extends towards the
northwest to the provinces of Chuan-cheu and Chiang-cheu. The
continental part of the vicariate is under the Chinese govern-
ment ; the peninsula of Formosa below Keelung is occupied by
French troops. There are 4,500,000 inhabitants ; 5,000 Catholics,
of whom about 1,000 are in Formosa ; 7 churches and chapels ;
II European missionaries; 3 native priests; 3 schools, 20 pupils;
i seminary, 20 seminarians.

The vicariate of Fo-kien, erected in 1696, included Nankin,
Tche-kiang, and Kiang-si, the last two being separated into inde-
pendent vicariates in 1790, and the first-named divided in 1838.
Emoi was cut off from Fo-kien, as we have shown above, in 1883.
There are 18,000,000 inhabitants; 30,355 Catholics; 114 cate-
chumens; 37 churches and chapels; 12 European missionaries ; 13
native priests; 12 schools, 60 pupils ; I seminary, 20 seminarians.
In the year 1622 the Jesuit Fathers penetrated Ho-nan and
planted the seeds of Christianity. They had a very difficult
work, whose Jruits, so far as this world goes, were often trampled
out by persecutions. In 1774 a firmer footing was obtained, and,
in spite of great and persistent afflictions, a nucleus of the faithful
was formed. Until 1843 tne Catholics of Ho-nan were subject
to the spiritual authorities of Nankin ; then the province was
raised to a vicariate in 1869; and on August 28, 1883, Ho-nan
was divided into two vicariates known as Northern and Southern
Ho-nan.

In Northern Ho-nan there are 9,000,000 inhabitants; 1,067
Catholics ; 6 chapels ; 3 European missionaries ; 3 native priests ;
2 schools, 18 pupils.

Southern Ho-nan comprises 20,000,000 inhabitants ; 5,000 Ca-
tholics; 45 churches and chapels; 7 European missionaries; 12
native priests; 20 schools, 100 pupils; i seminary, 17 semina-
rians.

270 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov.,

Solicitous for the needs and safety of the Catholic English
soldiers, Gregory XVI. insulated Hong-kong and erected it
into a prefecture-apostolic, which it remained until 1874, when it
was raised to a vicariate. It includes the island of Hong-kong
and the adjacent islands ; including on the continent the districts
of Fung-koun, Sing-gan-hien, Hay-fou-hien, and Hai-cha-hien,
with the exception of the city of Quei-tscheo-fou. The islands
belong to England ; the rest of the vicariate lies in the Chinese
Empire. There are 3,000,000 inhabitants, speaking Chinese, Eng-
lish, and Portuguese, or a mixture of the three ; 6,600 Catholics ;
27 churches and chapels; II European priests; 3 native priests ;
19 schools, 118 pupils; I seminary, 12 seminarians. A Catholic
journal, the Hong-kong Catholic Register, a very small four-page
sheet, is published in this city.

It is conjectured that the Christian religion was introduced
into Hu-nan about the middle of the seventeenth century ; at
least records of the date of the reign of the Emperor Kan-si, of
the Cin dynasty, would lead one to suppose so. From the first
the faithful of this province suffered severely, persecution follow-
ing persecution with steady rapidity. Last year's affliction came
near extinguishing the few remaining sparks in Northern Hu-nan,
but as fast as the missionaries fell at their posts of duty others
took their places, and are laboring now to repair the ravages of
the enemy. In 1856 Hu-nan was separated from Hu-pe ; and on
September 19, 1879. the province was divided into two vicariates,
Northern and Southern Hu-nan.

Northern Hu-nan numbers 10,000,000 inhabitants ; 100 Catho-
lics ; 6 European missionaries ; 4 native priests ; I school, 10
pupils. In Southern Hu-nan there are 10,000,000 inhabitants;
5,000 Catholics ; 10 churches and chapels ; 3 European missiona-
ries ; 7 native priests ; 4 schools, Si pupils ; I seminary, 24 semi-
narians ; i orphanage.

In the year 1636 Antonius de Govea, S.J., introduced the
faith into Hu-pe. For a long period it was included in the
vicariate of Chan-si ; but in 1870 Pius IX., by his brief Chris-
tiana rei procuration^ separated Hu-pe from Chan-si, and divided
it into three distinct vicariates Northwestern Hu-pe, Eastern
Hu-pe, and Southwestern Hu-pe.

Northwestern Hu-pe contains 9,000,000 inhabitants ; 8,000 Ca-
tholics; 26 churches and chapels; 7 European missionaries; 18
native priests; 9 schools, 310 pupils ; I seminary, 12 seminarians ;
I .college, 12 students ; 2 orphanages with 28 boys and 68 girls.

Eastern Hu-pe has 9,000,000 inhabitants ; 16,000 Catholics ; 42

i886.J PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. 271

churches and chapels; 16 European missionaries; 14 native
priests; 16 schools, 525 pupils; I seminary, 54 seminarians; I
college, 24 students. There are various other institutions, or-
phanages, industrial schools, etc., but no statistics are given of
these. We may remark that the same is the case with other
vicariates, as regards orphan asylums at least.

In Southwestern Hu-pe there are 9,00x3,000 inhabitants ; 3,500
Catholics ; 13 churches and chapels ; 7 European missionaries ; 4
native priests ; 2 schools, 82 pupils ; I seminary, 31 seminarians.

The vicariate-apostolic of Kan-su was a part of the Chan-si
vicariate until May 21, 1878, when it was erected into an inde-
pendent vicariate. It includes the province of Kan-su, the Ku-
kii-noor region, and the wandering Tartars. Missionaries have
been sent into the unknown interior as far as they can go, even
beyond the scope of imperial authority. There are a multitude
of mixed dialects spoken within the limits of the vicariate, but
they are broadly divided into these three languages : in Kan-su
proper, Chinese ; in Ku-ku-noor, Sifon ; in Tartary, Turkestan.
There are 21,500,000 inhabitants; 1,500 Catholics; 9 churches
and chapels ; 5 European missionaries ; 3 schools, 32 pupils ; I
seminary, 10 seminarians.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century Matthew Ricci,
S.J., preached the Gospel to the Chinese of the province of
Kiang-nan. Pauli Siu, the reigning emperor, admired the zeal of
Ricci and his companions, and the good results of their labor.
Thousands of converts were made, and the Christian religion
placed upon a firm foundation. In 1660 the vicariate-apostolic
of Kiang-nan, or Nankin, was formally erected, and Ignatius Coto-
lendi named its bishop. In 1690 Alexander VII. instituted the
diocese of Nankin, and made it a suffragan see of the archbish-
opric of Goa ; and Innocent XII. united to it the^provinces of
Kiang-nan and Ho-nan by his constitution of October 15, 1696.
Alexander Ceceri, consecrated titular bishop of Macai, February
5, 1696, was the first to occupy the see of Nankin ; and with the
death of his last successor, Cajetan Pires-Pereira, a Portuguese,
at Pekin in the year 1838, the see became practically extinct.
After his death apostolic administrators continued to rule the
see until 1856, when the Holy See entirely suppressed it. Then
the province of Kiang-nan was erected into a separate vicariate
and confided to the care of the Jesuits. The vicariate comprises
the whole civil province of Kiang-nan and two sub-provinces,
Ngaii and Kiang-sou. There are American and European mili-
tary posts at Ou-hon, Nan-king, Tcheu-kiang, and Shang-hai, the

272 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov.,

very gates of the province. There are 50,000000 inhabitants;
101,206 Catholics ; 606 churches and chapels; Si European mis-
sionaries; 30 native priests; 667 schools, 1 1,237 pupils ; 2 semi-
naries, 27 seminarians ; I large and 3 small colleges ; 2 large
orphanages at Shang-hai and many smaller ones throughout the
provinces.

The Rev. Matthew Ricci did not confine his labors to spread-
ing the faith in Kiang-nan; he also pushed into Kiang-si. In 1696
Innocent XII. confided this region to the care of Alvaro Benevente,
whose work was very fruitful. But he soon died ; persecutions
fell thick and fast; no successor was appointed, and the martyred
missionaries' places were voluntarily filled by priests from other
provinces. About 1790 Kiang-si was placed under the spiritifal
charge of the Right Rev. D. Carpena, vicar-apostolic of Fo-kien,
by the authority of Pius VI. ; and it remained a suffragan of Fo-
kien until 1838, at which time, with the approbation of Gregory
XVI., the Propaganda Fide named the Right Rev. Alexius Ra-
meaux vicar-apostolic of Kiang-si and Tche-kiang. On his
death in 1845 Kiang-si was separated from Tche-kiang, and the
Right Rev. Bernard Laribe, the dead vicar's coadjutor, was
named vicar-apostolic. In 1879 Leo XIII. divided the vicariate
of Kiang-si into two distinct parts, the northern and the southern.

There are in Northern Kiang-si 14,000,000 inhabitants; 13,007
Catholics; 1,368 catechumens; 49 churches and chapels ; 10 Eu-
ropean missionaries; 13 native priests; 40 schools, 260 pupils;
I seminary, 16 seminarians ; 4 colleges, 200 students ; 5 orphan-
ages, 1,579 orphans; 2 hospitals.

Southern Kiang-si is very fertile, being traversed by innume-
rable streams. There are 11,000,000 in habitants ; 3,753 Catholics ;
1,440 catechumens ; 25 churches and chapels; 3 European mis-
sionaries; 5. native priests; 16 schools, 140 pupils; I college, 28
students ; I orphanage, 77 orphans.*

Kuang-si was evangelized in the seventeenth century. De-
spite the many bitter persecutions, the seeds of the faith were
never completely destroyed, and, though often separated from the
outside world, the children of the church, here as elsewhere in
China, kept up the tradition of their fathers and the practice of
their religion. In the year 1853 the Very Rev. Father Guille-
min, then prefect-apostolic of Kuang-tong and Kuang-si, sent the
Rev. Father Chapdelaine into the western extremities of the
province of Kuang-si, and there he found abundance of neo-

* By a decree of August 14, 1885, this vicariate has been again divided, and a new one
erected, called East Kiang-si, comprising the prefectures of Koan-si-fu and Kieg-tchang-fu.

1 886.] PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. 273

phytes. With two native Christians as companions he penetrated
as far as the city of Si-lin-hien, where, notwithstanding- the jealous
vigilance of the mandarins, he found about 80 Christians living.
Several missionaries were, from time to time, sent into Kuang-si
from Kuang-tong. On August 6, 1875, Pius IX. separated the
mission from Kuang-tong and erected it into a prefecture-apos-
tolic, with the Very Rev. Father Jolly as incumbent. It is nomi-
nally subject to the Chinese emperor, but the real rulers, most of
the time, are the Miao-tse and Tchang-ko tribes. It has a number
of difficult languages and a confusing variety of dialects. There
are 8,000,000 inhabitants; 1,013 Catholics; 10 churches and
chapels; n European missionaries; 4 native priests; 5 schools,
70 pupils ; 2 seminaries, 20 seminarians.

In 1850 Kuang-tong, Kuang-si, and Hai-nan were united into
one prefecture. In 1875 Kuang-si was separated from it and
erected into an independent prefecture ; at the same time Hai-nan
and Heung-shan were given to Macao, while the vicar-apostolic
of Hong-kong obtained three districts of the territory, San-on,
Kwai-shan, and Hoi-fong. There are in Kuang-tong 25,000,000 in-
habitants ; 28,076 Catholics ; 100 churches and chapels ; 41 Eu-
ropean missionaries ; 5 native priests ; 101 schools, 1,000 pupils;
i seminary, 25 seminarians ; I college, 20 students.

How long back the Christians from the older evangelized
field of Su-tchuen penetrated Kuy-tcheou is not known ; but it
must have been at an early date. In 1708 Cardinal de Tournon,
legate of the Holy See in China, consecrated Claud Visdelon a
titular bishop and made him vicar-apostolic of Yun-nan and Kuy-
tcheou. He died in India in 1737. From that time forward the
Christians of these regions endured a stormy existence, suffering
many persecutions. In 1849 Kuy-tcheou was made a separate
vicariate, with the Right Rev. Bishop Allrand as incumbent.
The Franco-Chinese war had a disastrous effect upon this mis-
sion ; but in spite of the obstacles in its way the Christian religion
has steadily gained ground. There are 8,000,000 inhabitants ;
16,892 Catholics; 73 churches and chapels; 26 European mis-
sionaries; 7 native priests; 84 schools, 1,081 pupils; 2 seminaries,.
20 seminarians ; 12 orphanages, 700 orphans.

It must have been under the Emperor Tang that the Chris-
tians first penetrated the distant regions of Su-tchuen. At least
there are monumental remains which would lead to that con-
clusion. Certainly there were many Catholics there before 1630,
but the atrocities of Tartar war, in ruining the civil state, ap-
pear also to have annihilated the Christians. When Bishop

VOL. XLIV. 1 8

274 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov.,

Pallu, in 1658, visited Su-tchuen he found nothing but desolation.
He, however, labored there until his death in 1684. Then Bish-
op de Syonne was put in his place. Frequent and direful per-
secutions vexed the church in this province, Bishop Dufierse,
among others, being martyred for the faith on September 17,
1815. The number of Christians, however, increased, and it be-
came necessary to separate Yun-nan from the vicariate in 1838.
In 1848 Kuy-tcheou was set apart ; in 1856 Su-tchuen was divided
into northern and southern parts ; in 1858 the three present divi-
sions were made, Northwestern Su-tchuen, Eastern Su-tchuen,
and Southern Su-tchuen. In the three Su-tchuens there are
45,000,000 inhabitants; 84,079 Catholics; 120 churches and cha-
pels ; 78 European missionaries ; 83 native priests ; 400 schools,
4,514 pupils; 5 seminaries, 204 seminarians; 2 orphanages, 171
orphans.

Hang-tcheou, the metropolis of the Tche-kiang province, was
once, during the old Franciscan missions, an episcopal see, a suf-
fragan of the archbishopric of Pekin. During the sixteenth cen-
tury missionaries spread the faith throughout the province; in
the year 1696 Innocent XII. raised it to an independent vicariate,
with the learned Dominican, Right Rev. Bishop Alcala, as in-
cumbent. Subsequently it was united under one administration
with Fo-kien and Kiang-si. Fo-kien was separated in 1838, and
the others in 1845. The Christians suffered many persecutions
in this province; thousands were martyred between 1858 and
1864 during the Tchang-mao rebellion. There are 8,000,000 in-
habitants ; 11,480 Catholics; 39 churches and chapels; 9 Euro-
pean missionaries ; 7 native priests ; 37 schools, 500 pupils ; 2
seminaries, 9 seminarians ; i orphanage, 8 orphans ; i industrial
school.

The Rev. Matthew Ricci, S.J., went to the city of Pekin in
1601, where he won the favor of the emperor, Wang-lie, and the
other men of power, for the Christian faith. He established the
Pekin mission. In 1688 the episcopal see of Pekin was formally
erected, having within its jurisdiction Chang-tong, Eastern Tar-
tary (Leao-tong), the whole province of Tche-ly, the kingdom of
Corea, and other adjacent regions. In 1831 the kingdom of
Corea was erected into an independent vicariate, and subse-
quently the other provinces were separated as occasion seemed
to demand. On the abrogation of the bishopric of Pekin the
territory of the see was constituted a vicariate, and in 1856 the
province was divided into three parts, one of which, Northern
Tche-ly, contains the city of Pekin. In Northern Tche-ly there

1 886.] PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. 275

are 10,000,000 inhabitants; 28,000 Catholics; 166 churches and
chapels; 16 European missionaries; 13 native priests; 120
schools, 1,000 pupils; 2 seminaries, 40 seminarians; 9 orphan-
ages, 800 orphans.

Notwithstanding the various calamities which have fallen
upon the mission of Southeastern Tche-ly, from wars, rebellions,
famines, persecutions, the faith has made no little progress in it,
and it ranks among the first in the number of Catholics in pro-
portion to the population. On the north lies Northern Tche-ly ;
on the south Ho-nan ; on the east Ho-nan and Eastern Tche-ly ;
on the west Chan-tong and Northern Tche-ly. There are 10,000,-

000 inhabitants; 33,488 Catholics; 462 churches and chapels; 32
European missionaries; 7 native priests; 89 schools, 2,331 pupils;

1 seminary, 7 seminarians; I college, 170 students; 13 gymna-
siums, 584 attendants.

Southwestern Tche-ly has 10,000,000 inhabitants; 21,000 Ca-
tholics; 81 churches and chapels; 7 European priests; 12 native
priests ; 4 schools, 30 pupils ; 2 seminaries, 17 seminarians ; about
1,000 orphans.

The first vicar-apostolic of Yun-nan was the Right Rev.
Bishop Le Blanc, who in 1702 established the mission. He was
succeeded by Bishop de Martillac, who died in Rome in 1755.
The vicariate was then attached to that of Su-tchuen, in which
state it remained until August 6, 1840, when the vicariate was
re-established, with the Right Rev. Bishop Ponsot as ruler. It is
the extreme southwestern corner of the Chinese Empire. There
are 12,000,000 inhabitants; 11,207 Catholics; 53 churches and
chapels; 21 European missionaries ; 8 native priests; 40 schools,
200 pupils; i seminary, 18 seminarians ; 25 orphans.

Let us now recapitulate : In the twenty-nine vicariates and
prefectures of the Chinese Empire there are 390,000,000 inhabi-
tants ; 485,403 Catholics ; 2,460 churches and chapels; 440 Euro-
pean missionaries; 303 native priests; 1,779 schools, 2 5> 2I 9 pupils;
34 seminaries, 665 seminarians. The returns of the sisters, nuns,
orphans, industrial schools, colleges, students, etc., are so incom-
plete that no total can be given, but there are proportionate num-
bers of all these.

The first thing observable in the careful and accurate survey
of the Chinese missions which we have just placed before our
readers is not only the number of Catholic converts in China
about half a million but also, and much more so, the striking way
in which they are scattered throughout the territory of the Ce-
lestial kingdom. There are Catholics, there are missionaries,

276 PRESENT STA TE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov.,

there are native priests, there are churches, schools, seminaries,
colleges, orphan asylums, from Thibet to the Yellow Sea, from
Siberia on the north to Annam on the south. Every province
has its vicariate sometimes one province has two or three ;
every vicariate, with the exception of one, has its bishop. The
complete organization is there. The seeds are planted. The
500,000 are scattered among the 400,000,000, fruitfully working
at every point, not massed together in one locality. In this
respect the condition of China is very much like that of the old
Roman Empire in the first centuries of the Christian era. The
early missioners of the Catholic Church did not pause to convert
every nation they came to ; they pushed on, forming colonies of
the faithful here and there, until the whole empire was dotted
with centres of the cross. They knew the fructifying power of
Christ's religion ; they knew thev had but to plant the seeds and
await the time and season of their coming to maturity. And
they were justified in their course, for the despised religion of
the Galilean grew like a giant and soon overthrew the pagan
mummeries of the ancient world. Just so is it in China to-day ;
only, perhaps, the Chinese Empire is a more extended and more
populous field than that afforded by the majestic structure of the
Seven- Hilled City. Those huge provinces of the strange king-
dom of the far East are as large as the mighty nations that olden
Rome chained to the chariot-wheels of her triumphant progress.
Mere man, unaided from above, would shrink from the stupen-
dous task of changing the long-settled religion of half a world.
It is foolish, it is a strange, fantastic dream, which these deluded
missioners cherish. They can do nothing to move that impalpa-
ble bulk. But see! The Catholic missioners do not weigh hu-
man probabilities, or even possibilities. They have upon them
the charge of God himself ; they have his Holy Spirit in their
hearts. Against the dictates of reason itself they attack, with no
weapon but the cross, this uncounted conglomeration of humani-
ty. They stop at no point ; they push ahead ; they penetrate
every nook of the empire, and detached bands stray out into
those lost regions of the earth, the steppes of Siberia, the plains
of Tartary, the mountain fastnesses of Thibet. In China, from
Tche-ly to Emoi, from Hong-kong to Su-tchuen, they establish
a network of flawless organization twenty-nine perfect sees, with
rulers in them, with clergy, with people, with churches, with
schools. It is magic ! How can we explain it except upon the
theory that God is in the work ? And now that the increasing
numbers of the converts, and the exalted station of many for

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 277

there are high mandarins in the ranks of the Catholic Chinese
laity compel such a signal recognition from the emperor as a
request for closer relations with the Holy See, may we not ex-
pect to behold something like that old conversion of the Roman
Empire in the not remote future?

A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

Miss VERNON LEE has a great many admirers. She is a lady
of a Positivist turn of mind. She shows in her writings much
familiarity with the nastiest works of fiction and poetry. She
dwells on these with the tenderness peculiar to the new aesthetic
school to which she belongs, and in her pages we are taught that
Maupassant's Une Vie, Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Mau-
pin, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mai are oft-recurring topics in
the only circles where the highest philosophy is talked. It is
rather hard to grasp this high philosophy as taught in Baldwin :
Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (Boston : Roberts Bros.)
It has such little body. Mr. Mallock's New Republic has doubtless
given Vernon Lee who prefers to pose as a man the idea of
the form of Baldwin, as Lander's Imaginary Conversations probably
gave Mallock the idea of the New Republic. Mr. Mallock is
bitten by the pruriency that disfigures Vernon Lee's writings,
and one of the strongest chapters in Is Life Worth Living? is ruined
by a quotation from the worst novel written in any language,
which quotation in Mallock's book, taken with its context, becomes
blasphemous.

If Mr. Mallock and Vernon Lee reflect the opinions of the
English " high thinkers," we have reason to conclude that the
emancipation from all religious belief which Vernon Lee teaches
us to believe to be the nirvana of the philosophical aesthete has
led to a return to the most horrible forms of pagan vice. The
most remarkable thing about Vernon Lee's writings, aside from
the constant playing with thoughts forbidden to Christians, is
the art by which so large a number of well-formed English sen-
tences are made to cover so little real knowledge. She gives
one the impression that she has dipped into hand-books and satu-
rated herself with certain poetry and novels in which the use of
art for art's sake is made an excuse for positive obscenity.

It is natural to conclude that a young woman who has written

278 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

in a learned manner on the Renaissance a large book on the
Renaissance should take the trouble to learn something of the
Catholic Church. But she is evidently as ignorant of its theology
and its philosophy as Mr. Frederic Harrison, who considers it
unworthy of " philosophical consideration " !

Baldwin is in the shape of dialogues. Labored efforts are
made to give individuality to the characters, and descriptions of
nature are introduced and greatly elaborated. " The Responsi-
bilities of Unbelief " is the first dialogue in the book. Vere,
Rheinhardt, and Baldwin talk over the sermon of a Monsignor
Russell, whom they have heard preach. They are all unbelievers.
All of them have gotten over the " weakness " of believing in
God. But Rheinhardt is the most advanced.

"Ladies," Rheinhardt says, "I admit, may require for their complete
happiness to abandon their conscience occasionally into the hands of some
saintly person ; but do you mean to say that a man in the possession of all
his faculties, with plenty to do in the world, with a library of good books,
some intelligent friends, a good digestion, and a good theatre when he has
a mind to go there do you mean to tell me that such a man can ever be
troubled by wants of the soul? "

After Rheinhardt asks this question the author drops into one
of those over- worked bits of description held by her admirers to
be exceedingly vivid and graphic :

" Beyond the blush and gold (coppery and lilac and tawny tints united
by the faint undergrowing green) of the seeding grasses and flowering
rushes, was a patch of sunlit common-ground of pale, luminous brown, like
that of a sunlit brook-bed, fretted and frosted with the gray and rustiness
of moss and gorse, specks of green grass and tufts of purple heather merged
in that permeating golden brown. The light seemed to emanate from the
soil, and in it were visible, clear at many yards' distance, the delicate out-
lines of minute sprays and twigs, connected by a network of shining cob-
webs, in which moved flies and bees diaphanous and luminous like the rest,
and whose faint, all-overish hum seemed to carry out in sound the visible
pattern of that sun-steeped piece of ground."

This is a good example of the manner in which some modern
writers overlay words with words in the effort to imitate the
effects of the paint-brush. Sir Walter Scott's and Cooper's man-
ner of suggesting natural pictures have gone out of fashion, and
in return we get this sort of thing. The talkers go on consider-
ing the responsibility of unbelief. Now, one of the most fascinat-
ing qualities of unbelief seems to most people its absence of respon-
sibilities. But Baldwin tries to make it plain, taking for a text
Monsignor Russell's zeal in preaching the faith, that unbelievers

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 279

have resting on them the responsibility of propagating un-faith.
Whom they are responsible to does not appear, and Rheinhardt
voices the logical conclusion of the religion of humanity, to whom
they all belong, when he says : " Upon my word, I don't know
which is the greater plague, the old-fashioned nuisance called a
soul or the new-fangled bore called mankind."

But Baldwin, who is a wretchedly hypocritical and "talky "
prig, tries to convince Ver that he ought to destroy the religious
belief of his wife and children:

" Do you consider this as complete union with another, this deliberate
silence and indifference, this growing and changing and maturing of your
own mind, while you see her mind cramped and maimed by beliefs which
you have long cast behind you ? This divorce of your minds, which I can
understand only towards a mistress, a creature for whom your mind does
not exist how can you reconcile it to your idea of the love of a husband
to a wife ? "

Vere, in real life, would probably answer that a wife without
religion would run the risk of becoming less of a mother and
more of a mistress. But in Vernon^ Lee's hands he only says:

" I respect my wife's happiness, then, and my children's happiness ; and
for that reason I refrain from laying rough hands upon illusions which are
part of that happiness. Accident has brought us into contact with what
you and I call truth I have been shorn of my belief ; I am emancipated,
free, superior all things which a thorough rationalist is in the eyes of
rationalists ; but " and Vere turned round upon Baldwin with a look of pity
and bitterness " I have not yet attained to the perfection of living a hypo-
crite, a sophist to myself, of daring to pretend to my own soul that this be-
lief of ours, this truth, is not bitter and abominable, icy and arid to our
hearts."

Nevertheless Baldwin goes on arguing on the responsibility
of unbelievers to communicate the truth that there is no truth,
until at the end Vere says : " But you see I love my children a
great deal ; and well, I mean that I have not the heart to assume
the responsibility of such a decision." " You shirk your responsi-
bilities," answers Baldwin, " and in doing so you take upon your-
self the heaviest responsibility of any."

All this is mere juggling with puppets and words. And if
there is any evidence needed to show how inadequate this Posi-
tivism is for any useful or logical purpose, Vernon Lee's dialogues
furnish it conclusively. Another dialogue, " The Consolations of
Belief," is almost as serio-comic in effect as " The Responsibilities
of Unbelief." Baldwin talks at a young lady named Agnes Stuart,
who has been a Christian. Finally "a strange melancholy, al-

22o A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

most like a physical ache, came over Agatha." People who have
followed Baldwin's limitless flow of talk will understand that this
was the kind of ache that afflicted the hapless wedding-guest.
" I think you are deserving of envy," answered Agnes coldly.
" But I prefer to believe in the goodness of God." This is the
most triumphant declaration of belief that Vernon Lee permits
any of her puppets to utter. She cannot conceive of a Chris-
tian, strong and logical, because she is ignorant of the church,
and because her studies of life and literature have been all on the
surface. The arguments of these dialogues can unsettle no clear
and well-instructed mind. But the allusions to nasty literature,
similar to the allusions to nasty vices which made Vernon Lee's
Miss Brocvn an indecent book, may help to make thoughts already
corrupted more corrupt. Vernon Lee is regarded by a certain
class of shallow thinkers and readers as a strong representative
of high and refined philosophy and literature. Her work is a con-
stant example of the truth that pretended belief in Neo-Paganism
we say " pretended," for it is plain that these infidels protest too
much their disbelief in God leads to the contemplation of the
lowest objects under the most high-sounding names. Priapus
looks well in a phrase of poetry ; but it is a symbol of things
which only the inhabitants of slums and dives dare utter in plain
English to their fellows. And in this revival of " culture " we find
the morals of Horace gilded in imitation of the gold of his
phrases. Progress, with people like the teachers of Vernon Lee,
means that we are to go back to the Augustan age, but with no
hope that God will come as Christ to save the world.

A refreshing book, which reminds one of the cool air of an early
winter night after the artificial atmosphere of Baldwin, is the Medi-
tations of a Parish Priest (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.),
by the Abbe Roux. The Abbe Roux's Thoughts or Meditations
have excited a sensation among the literary men of Paris, in spite
of the fact that he is a priest, and evidently a good priest. The
critic of Pense'es for Blackwood's Magazine frankly acknowledges
that this prejudice is not confined to the Parisian writers, but he
as frankly acknowledges the merit of the work. He says :

" It was the centenary of Petrarch, held in 1874, that first called Roux,
into notice a festival celebrated in southern France by the Felibres, that
society for the promotion and revival of Provengal poetry, of which Mistral
is the outcome and to the present time the chief glory. M. Paul Marieton,
himself a young Felibre, a poet in French and Provengal, made the ac-
quaintance of the Abbe Roux, and, struck with his work in dialect, sought
to gain closer intimacy with the author. He unearthed him one day in his

i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 281

retired nest. ' He appeared to me,' says Marieton, 'like one of the Limou-
sin giants of his Geste de Charlemagne, with his strong, square frame, his
deep bass voice. His visage, large and tender, sweet and yet rough-hewn,
resembled that of those English lords of Henry VIIL's time, Northern co-
lossi, painted by Holbein. With the gentleness of a child and a poet, he
showed me the simplicity of his life; and I departed more moved than I can
express.' . . . It was during this visit from the ardent young Felibre that the
Abbe Roux diffidently confided to him a large number of copy-books, writ-
ten in a mighty, firm hand a hand that would delight graphologists in
which were put down the mile-stones of thought marking the way tra-
versed by this lonely minister of God during his twenty-five years of iso-
lated life. Delighted, M. Marieton at once proposed to publish a selection.
At first the abbe demurred. ' You would publish my Pensees,' he said. ' Be-
ware ! I am not independent enough to seek calumny, for I am not an in-
dividual, but a legion ; and the good Abbe Roux will bear the mountain of
prejudice that weighs on the clergy of all times, and above all of this time.
Prudence, m) r friend ! You would have me think that I shall become a per-
sonage. I can scarcely hope it. I shall always be an immured. With a
proud and timid character one never arrives at anything.' But M. Marie-
ton did not let himself be deterred; and to-day the world can decide
whether he did well or not to drag forth this priest from his lonely
obscurity."

The greater part of the intelligent world will decide that these
thoughts which are more like points of the most brilliant and
concentrated light than anything else, and which are both epi-
grams and maxims are new treasures of great worth added to a
literature already rich in similar treasures. It is not exaggera-
tion to say that the Abbe Roux possesses the keenness of La
Rochefoucauld without his cynicism, the perception of Montaigne
without his scepticism, and the sagacity of La Bruyere without his
prejudice. Above all, the Abbe Roux is Christian without reserve,
without any sacrifice to the literary spirit of the time. And this
is a great thing. It is also a great thing to be able, in a trained
voice of such quality, to declare that the intellect of the civilized
world must listen, that Pan is dead, but that Christ lives, glorified
and eternal. The quality of the Abbe Roux's thoughts must be
our excuse for making him speak for himself, instead of writing
about him. No man has opened the life of the French peasant to
us as Abbe Roux has done. The peasants of current French litera-
ture are as unreal as the Arcadians of Watteau, with their be-
ribboned perukes and crooks, compared with the peasant as
drawn from living models.

"The war of the slaves in Italy, the war of the serfs in France, have be-
queathed to history a particularly mournful memory. . . .

"Oh ! ye who rob the peasant of his beliefs and his money, stuffing his

282 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

pocket with vile journals and his heart with brutal desires, beware of the
reprisals which he will owe you for having put him back into slavery, into
servitude."

4< The peasant," Abbe Roux says, " passed from paganism to
Christianity through a great expenditure of miracles ; he would
return from Christianity to paganism at a less cost." He con-
tinues: " A monster has lately come into existence the infidel
peasant."

Of the influence of a modern kind of thrift on the peasant's
mind he gives a vivid example :

" Far away yonder the sky appears all red.

"' It is the sunset,' says the man.

" Wrong ! It is his house on fire.

" One of those wretches, so many of whom pass among us nowadays,
set a fuse beneath the/loor, and the house has burst into flames.

" The man darts forward, crying ' Fire ! '

"Then he bethinks himself, halts at a reasonable distance, crouches
down on the trunk of a tree, listening to see if any one is coming, and wish-
ing that they may come too late.

"The house is insured.

"Meanwhile the alarm bell bleats; people rush from the neighboring
villages. ' The furniture ? Come!'

"The man stirs not, makes no reply.

"The furniture is insured !

"So burn on in peace, ye cupboards and chests of his ancestors; burn,
bridal bed, and cradle lately cold ; burn, picture of the Blessed Virgin, pa-
tron of the dead wife (alas ! he will soon replace her when his house has
been rebuilt) ; burn, military tunic; burn, little frame of his First Com-
munion, souvenirs of glory, of love, and of grief, souvenirs ancient and
recent, burn on in peace.

" He is insured!"

The Abbe Roux, withal, has a great love for the French pea-
sants among whom he labors. He sees their faults without an-
ger, only with a certain melancholy patience. He sees that their
natural faults have been exaggerated by what is called modern
progress. They are bad enough, in spite of the priest ; what
would they be without him ? he asks.

"Our peasants tolerate God well : ' He is not there, if he is anywhere;
and besides he demands neither gold nor silver.' On the other hand, they
endure but ill the men of God, the pope, the bishop, the cure.

"To tell the truth, they would tolerate their other masters still less, if
they dared."

Of the causes which are helping to ruin France, and which
the infidel tries to cure by means of atheistical schools, Abbe
Roux speaks in no uncertain manner :

i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NLW BOOKS. 283

"Absenteeism and Malthusianism are visibly depopulating our country
districts. The Natchez and the Mohican have had their turn. The next
subject for a book will be ' The Last of the Peasants.' "

" The petty peasant who wishes to acquire a competency ; the peasant
in easy circumstances who wishes to found a family ; the ex-peasant who
wishes to become monsieur M althus furnishes the law for all of you, does
he not ? "

"If the ex-peasant is father to a male child first of all, it is enough. If
he has only daughters, he may in time have a son. The tardy son will be
the eldest, the only child, to speak rightly. The rest will stir only at his
beck and call. He will have as many servants as he has sisters. None of
them will get settled, all of them will devote themselves to monsieur their
brother and to his wife. If one of them speaks of taking the veil, there is
a long suit to argue. The good father is inexhaustible in whys and hows t
' So you no longer love me,' he sighs. ' Who will counsel, guide, take care
of your poor brother ? ' Then he begins to discourse about the clergy who
tear children from their family, and to rage against that 'era of ignorance
and fanaticism, abolished by the great Revolution, when the victims of the
cloister, etc.' The vocation will be finely tempered in this assault of sen-
sibility and hypocrisy."

One is forced to agree fully with the Abbe Roux that the
French peasant, in spite of his " emancipation by the great Re-
volution," is almost a clod, yet a clod capable of helping- good
things to germinate, but that when infidel is veritably a " mon-
ster, and a shameless one."

It would be easy enough to put a great number of these
"Thoughts" in a kind of paraphrase; but they would lose that
aroma which has been well preserved in the present translation.
We cannot refrain from quoting entire from the fascinating chap-
ter, " Literature, Poets," the Abbe Roux's analysis of the qualities
of Eugenie and Maurice de Guerin :

" It is in vain that Eugenie de Guerin praises Maurice ; the more she
recommends him, the more she effaces him.

" Eugenie never rests from loving; she ardently desires literary glory
for Maurice, and, above all, that celestial glory which is preferable. This
anguish of a Christian sister is something new in French literature. One
admires and loves this sweet, pious Eugenie, devoted in life and death. As
for Maurice, he is only insipid and colorless. He has some imagination, no
character. He does nothing but flutter about in a fickle or, what is worse,
an undecided way.

" Maurice disenchants, even in his finest passages, by a certain school-
boy accent. Le Centaur e is only a brilliant imitation of Bitaube, of Chateau-
briand, and of Quinet. Eugenie conceals, perhaps ignores, her art, which
is exquisite. She appears solicitous of writing well, without, for that rea-
son, believing herself to be a writer."

284 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

The Abbe Roux does injustice to Le Centaure, which is most
exquisite in its individuality, and which preserves the Grecian
spirit in a far greater degree than any of the poems of Keats.
But he does no injustice to the character of the poet, who, per-
sonally, has only the interest of being loved by Eugenie.

With great regret, only pausing for one more quotation, we
take leave of one of the most brilliant books that has appeared,
either in French or English, for many years:

" St. Thomas d'Aquinas verifies as though he could not believe, and be-
lieves as though he ought not to verify."

John Boyle O'Reilly's latest volume, In Bohemia, is one that
will force the attention of all discriminating lovers of true poetry.
We may criticise Mr. O'Reilly's occasional boldness of expres-
sion when his indignation against the existing order of things
leads him beyond those limits of phraseology within which
writers careful about their theology keep themselves. Beyond
this, which may seem like a hypercritical suggestion, In Bohemia
is warm and cordial, generous and true, and in technical treat-
ment almost perfect. It is consoling to know that a heart beats
under the polished rhymes of these poems.

"A Lost Friend" will be an old friend for ever, since it has
been given to the world. To many of us it may be a reminis-
cence ; to all of us it ought to be a lesson :

" My friend he was ; my friend from all the rest ;
With childlike faith he oped to me his breast;
No door was locked on altar, grave or grief;
No weakness veiled, concealed no disbelief;
The hope, the sorrow, and the wrong were bare,
And ah ! the shadow only showed the fair.

" I gave him love for love ; but, deep within,
I magnified each frailty into sin ;
Each hill-topped foible in the sunset glowed,
Obscuring vales where rivered virtues flowed.
Reproof became reproach, till common grew
The captious word at every fault I knew.
He smiled upon the censorship, and bore
With patient love the touch that wounded sore;
Until at length, so had my blindness grown,
He knew I judged him by his faults alone.

" Alone, of all men, I who knew him best
Refused the gold, to take the dross for test !
Cold strangers honored for the worth they saw ;
His friend forgot the diamond in the flaw.

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 285

" At last it came the day he stood apart,
When from my eyes he proudly veiled his heart;
When carping judgment and uncertain word
A stern resentment in his bosom stirred ;
When in his face I read what I had been,
And with his vision saw what he had seen.

" Too late ! too late ! Oh ! could he then have known,
When his love died, that mine had perfect grown ;
That when the veil was drawn, abased, chastised,
The censor stood, the lost one truly prized.

t " Too late we learn a man must hold his friend
Unjudged, accepted, trusted to the end."

Mr. O'Reilly is a thorough republican, and he voices his con-
victions very plainly. He cries, in "America":

" O, this thy work, Republic ! this thy health,
To prove man's birthright to a commonwealth :
To teach the peoples to be strong and wise,
Till armies, nations, nobles, royalties,
Are laid at rest with all their fears and hates ;
Till Europe's thirteen Monarchies are States,
Without a barrier and without a throne,
Of one grand Federation like our own ! "

But, above all, even above the passionate poetry of " Erin,"
when the poet's heart burns with a white heat, beyond the
strength, the subtle and deep poetic thought, of "Songs that are
not Sung,"" we prefer " The Dead Singer," in which Mr. O'Reilly
has found newer and higher qualities than he showed in Songs of
the Southern Seas or The Statues in the Block. He lacks neither a
theme nor a heart. And in this he is unlike most modern poets,
who seem to have neither themes nor hearts, but only what is
called technique. In " The Dead Singer " Mr. O'Reilly adds to
the vivid color and human interest of Songs of the Southern Seas
and the classic sweetness of Statues in the Block qualities of
deeper thought and poetic insight, which complete the circle in
which are all the bays for a true poet's crown.

286 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Nov.,

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

SERMONS OF THE REV. JOSEPH FARRELL, late C. C., Monasterevan, with
an Appendix containing some of his speeches on quasi-religious sub-
jects. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. (For sale by the Catholic Publica-
tion Society Co., New York.)

The writer of these sermons died some eighteen months ago in the
prime of life. He had been a contributor, both in prose and poetry, to
Catholic magazines in Ireland. These beautiful sermons are now for the
first time printed, and they are worthy of the memory of one who seems to
have been a man of far more than ordinary talent and a most zealous
priest. They embrace subjects for the whole ecclesiastical year, a few Sun-
days excepted. There is much originality of thought in them, a very de-
vout tone, and a literary style which is very attractive. There is hardly any
commonplace matter and no slovenly writing to be found in these sermons.
Although the style has the finish and elegance of the essay, it also pos-
sesses the freshness and unction necessary fora sermon; and there are
very many passages of really lofty eloquence.

That one who could write and preach such stately and powerful dis-
courses was hidden in a country curacy and should have died at the age of
forty-four are mysterious dispensations of Providence.

The sermons are none of them long, and the book will be of much prac-
tical use to the parochial clergy. The speech on education in the appen-
dix is a fine specimen of a philosophical, and at the same time popular,
treatment of that question. The publisher's work is well done.

A COMPANION TO THE CATECHISM. Designed ch'iefly for the use of young

catechists and the heads of families. Dublin : M. H. Gili & Son. 1886.

(For sale by the Catholic Publication Society Co.)

Those who have had experience in teaching catechism know that one
of the difficulties most often met with is that the children do not under-
stand the meaning of the words they repeat. Very frequently they can
give the answer to the question asked them in the exact words of the
book, without having any adequate knowledge of what they are talking
about the very words, to say nothing of the idea, being beyond them.

The book before us aims at improving this matter. It suggests a
scheme of class- work to the teacher which, if followed and developed, can-
not but give the pupils a clearer insight into the subject-matter. The text
of the catechism is explained, not simply in reference to the ideas expressed
therein, but especially as regards the meaning of words which little people
most likely would not grasp of themselves. Thus a great help is given to
the inexperienced teacher, by showing how to make the children think
and how to have them understand Christian doctrine, when otherwise they
would wander aimlessly in a maze of words.

ORPHANS AND ORPHAN ASYLUMS. By Rev. P. A. Baart, S.T.L. With an
Introduction by Rt. Rev. C. P. Maes, D.D., Bishop of Covington.
Buffalo, N. Y.: Catholic Publication Co. 1886.

This very interesting book gives a full account of the origin and growth,
up to the present time, of the two hundred and twenty-one orphan asylums
now in active existence in the archdioceses and dioceses of the Unit(

1 886.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 287

States. It is a most valuable work of reference, and is, moreover, likely
to exert an instructive and edifying influence on the minds of persons out-
side of the Catholic Church who may have the good fortune to read its
pages.

The introduction treats of the duty which, "as a church, we Catholics
have to perform towards the orphans of America," and of " the great ques-
tion " how it is to be done. It describes the main difficulties with which
the work of taking care of the orphan has to contend, and which are well
known to observant persons who have had experience in the management
of orphan asylums : viz., the defects of the " drill-like training " which has to
be made to take the place of " family life " " that one thing which fits the
child for its duties and prepares it to meet the many temptations thrown
in its way." The arduous problem, how to put youths who, from necessity
in most cases, have to leave the asylum and go out into the world before
their characters are formed, in the way of earning an honest livelihood, is
earnestly dwelt upon, and valuable suggestions are given in relation thereto,
as also to the comprehensive questions, " What shall our orphan asylums
be? Where shall they be built? How should they be managed? " In the
matter of providing for orphans we have not certain advantages and facili-
ties existing in European countries, where the old apprenticeship system
has been retained.

The opening chapter, which is entirely historical and statistical, points
out that among the Gentile nations " little, if any, regard was paid to works
of beneficence that had the orphan for their object"; and that the Ro-
mans, of whom St. Paul speaks as a people " without affection, without
fidelity, without mercy," were reproached by Justin for their inhuman
treatment of foundlings whom they gathered up into flocks in the same
manner as herds of oxen, or goats or sheep. To the kindlier feeling of
the Jews for the orphan, brought about, probably, " by their stricter
family ties and more exalted notion of religion," justice is done. Then the
extraordinary progress of beneficence co-existent with the rapid spread-
ing of the Gospel is explained, as also that bishops considered it their
duty to provide for the poor and the orphan. " The noblest epitaph
which could be inscribed on the tombs of the popes was their charity to
the helpless and destitute, to the afflicted and the orphan." "We read
in the Apostolic Constitutions that the widows and the orphans were con-
sidered as ' altars for holocausts or whole burnt-offerings in the temple
of our Jerusalem 'a text which shows the exalted idea that the church
entertained of the charity that had the orphan for its object." The singu-
lar statute is mentioned which was afterwards inserted in canon law "for-
bidding a bishop to keep a large dog, lest the poo?- be frightened thereat and
driven from his door." The progress of the establishment of orphan asy-
lums is rapidly traced, and the check given to it by the Reformation and
the confiscation of ecclesiastical property in England and Germany is ex-
plained. "The fruit of benevolence that springs from the seed of Protes-
tantism " is, in certain cases, briefly and impartially reviewed. The admi-
rably-conducted and munificently-supported charitable institutions of Hol-
land are praised as they deserve. The writer of these lines, who has visited
the Catholic male and female orphan asylums of Amsterdam, is glad to
bear testimony to the fact that they effectually carry out in practice one of
the recommendations given in the introduction of this book viz., the ap-

288 NE w PUBLICA TIONS. [Nov., 1 886.

prenticing of orphans and giving them a home while they are serving their
time. A list is given of one hundred different orders or congregations or-
ganized for the work of charity to the poor, the sick, the orphan, and the
foundling; and brief, interesting descriptive statistics are given, in this and
in the last chapter, of the work they have done and still do.

We allow ourselves to point out a slight oversight on the part of the
writer of this very interesting work. He uses the word " orphanage " in
the sense of a habitation for orphans. It means " the state of being an
orphan.'' There is in English no single word (if we except " orphanotro-
phy") which is equivalent to the French word orphelinat.

The book is got up in good, clear type, and fair style, the only omis-
sion being that the name of the particular diocese treated of is not at the
head of each page, where it would have been useful for reference.

THE DUKE OF SOMERSET'S SCEPTICISM ;
THE CURSING PSALM (cix. of King James' Version) ;

A LETTER TO REV. S. DAVIDSON, D.D., LL.D., in answer to his Essay
against the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel. By Kentish
Bache. Oxford and London : Parker & Co. 1886.

These three pamphlets are recent re-issues, having been first published
about fourteen years ago. The first two are very brief, and it is enough to
say that they are clever and acute. The third one is larger and of more im-
portance. We can endorse the numerous laudatory notices it has received
from respectable English periodicals. It is, in fact, learned, while very direct
and incisive in its style, and quite satisfactory.

Dr. Davidson's criticisms are indeed so unfair, and even trivial
worthy in this respect to have proceeded from Renan that they are not
deserving of refutation. There are extrinsic reasons, however, for taking
the trouble of refuting them, which Mr. Bache has done remarkably well.
His work is a little masterpiece of its kind.

AMONG THE FAIRIES. A Story for Children. By the author of Alice Leigh-
ton. A new edition. London : Burns & Oates; New York : The Catho-
lic Publication Society Co.

Notwithstanding the Mr. Gradgrinds with their cries of ' Facts ! Facts!
Facts ! " it is well that Fairyland is not allowed to become a thing of the
past. A child's mind has need of playthings. It would be as cruel to sweep
away the fairies as to break all the dolls and toys. In the little book before
us the fairies are brought upon the scene through the medium of a child's
dream. It is a dream so full of delightful adventures among all kinds of
good-natured fairies that it must needs be pleasing to every fanciful child.

SKETCHES OF THE ROYAL IRISH CONSTABULARY. By Michael Brophy,
ex-Sergeant R. I. C. London : Burns & Oates; New York : The Catho-
lic Publication Society Co. 1886.

Together with considerable information though given in a somewhat
desultory fashion concerning the formation, work, and methods of the
Royal Irish Constabulary, a number of more or less amusing anecdotes
and incidents are strung together illustrative of life in the force, and de-
picting the eccentricities of its odd fish. Though the book is put together
in a rather haphazard manner, it succeeds in bringing before the mind quite
a vivid picture of a constabulary which, in the author's words, "has been,
since its first embodiment in the year 1823, made up of a more curiousl
checkered and miscellaneous class of men than any other police force
the empire, or perhaps in Europe."

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD

VOL. XLIV. DECEiMBER, 1886. No. 261.

THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES.

THE dominant trait of the man of the times should be attach-
ment'to the truth as it is universal. One is attached to the truth
by personal conviction because he is an honest man, and because,
however it may be reached, there is no religion without per-
sonal conviction ; and he is attached to it as a race-heritage by
tradition: these should hold their place. But the dominant
trait of our minds as men of the age should be attachment to
universal truth as children of God. Guileless minds embrace
universal truth when fairly presented and seen. Catholic means
universal. We must dbt stop short of the universal if we would
meet the needs of the times. The grounds upon which live men
act, and the motives of their belief, should be such as are appli-
cable to all mankind ; otherwise we shall be unable to appreciate
or to display the unity of the truth. If there is any defect in the
universality of our views our catholicity will not be organic and
our unity will be defective ; nor can our convictions be imparted
outside of a range narrowed by personal, national, or race char-
acteristics. This is the spirit of sectarianism. This is the special
fault of Protestantism. None of its varieties has had room for all.
Its converts must embrace not only a peculiar doctrine but a
peculiar civilization. This malady is constitutional in Protestan-
tism, but Catholics may catch the contagion, at least to some extent.
Beware of acting as if the controversy were not purely one of
truth against error, but of man against man or race against race.
We ought not to confuse the defects or excesses of a race with

290 THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. [Dec.,

the errors of a sect. If race-traits have intensified religious
errors, the cure is not to substitute the traits of another race;
the cure of errors which are racial is the application of truths
which are universal. Christianity is neither Celtic nor Saxon, if
either race seeks to monopolize it ; it is both Celtic and Saxon, if
both races are willing to be catholicized by it ; it is above both
races and all races. There can be no doubt that every race of
men has a weakness which favors some kind of untruth in reli-
gion. But it is equally certain that man, as he is always and
everywhere, is made for the truth ; if it is presented as it is uni-
versal he will develop sooner or later those laws of his reason
which attract him to it. For three centuries and more the con-
traries in religion have been universals against locals, universals
against nationals, universals against personals.

Many a man has all his life borne the name of Catholic with
just pride whose mind is but now enlarged to appreciate its
true significance. This is owing to the surroundings in which
he has been placed. Circumstances have brought into promi-
nence the necessity of Catholics emphasizing the universality of
the truth which they hold. Nor will this aspect of it weaken per-
sonal conviction or the sacredness of race-inheritance. It en-
hances the value of both. As an influence on the individual the
universality of the truth has an essential office in intensifying
personal convictions. Right reason, indeed, constrains man to a
sincere conviction; but if 1 know that what I thus believe is ap-
proved by human reason, when rightly directed, the world over,
it strengthens me. As to my neighbor who is in error, the real-
izing sense that truth is a universal heritage afflicts my con-
science. If I am devoted to the spread of truth I am driven, ac-
cording to my place and station, to undertake its diffusion and
to display its note of Catholicity to others.

What is religion, if it be not Catholic? At best racial or na-
tional Teutonic or Latin, Celtic or Saxon. Or it is less than
national, as is now the case with Protestantism : it holds but the
fragment of a nation or a caste in a race as does Methodism
or Episcopalianism till, by the wasting action of time and man's
reason, it becomes an affair of little corners of a people, a distinct
.sect for each neighborhood, finally an affair of individuals of
weakened convictions, ending in hesitation, doubt, and general
-scepticism.

Amidst such surroundings how plain is our policy a polic} r ,
itoo, forced upon us by the character of divine truth and human
.reason ! It is our duty to say : What ! will you affirm one Lord

1 886.] THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. 291

and Father of all, and make his religion not one but sectarian ?
Will you declare all men brethren and deny them a common
faith ?

A man is a fanatic or is feeble-minded who is content with any
opinion in the natural order of truth which is not buttressed by
the common convictions of mankind, or who can complacently
adhere to a view of revealed religion which lacks the approval of
divine, organic, historic Christianity.

We can learn a* lesson from the martyrs. Doubtless they
were supported by personal conviction never men more so ; such
of them as were Jews, also, by a traditional faith founded on a
revelation peculiar to their race. But they were primarily wit-
nesses of a truth that was universal. The special mission of St.
Paul, and the vision of St. Peter and his message to Cornelius,
prove this, and so does the whole history of the apostles and
martyrs. Furthermore, what the office of the martyr was in the
eyes of the heathen, that was his office by appointment of Provi-
dence. And to the heathen world the martyr was primarily a
witness of a Mediator and Saviour of all humankind. Little do
we appreciate that if universal truth our dearest birthright
had not been witnessed to by men superior to flesh and blood, na-
tionalism and race, perhaps we should not now have it either as
a personal conviction or as a traditional belief of our kindred.
Christian truth has come to us sealed in blood, a charter of univer-
sal liberty, adorned with the palm-branch of victory. But whose
victory? Not the martyr's alone, but his and ours and all men's
who love the universal truth. Do we appreciate how much the
world owes to such heroic witnesses as Lawrence, Agatha, and
Ignatius ? The martyr was the expression of an elevated type of
universal manhood.

Of all ages of the world this transitional age is most unsuitable
for men who are sectarian in their religious views or convictions.
God's way now is to break down barriers between races and indi-
viduals. Not only men but nations are being born again ; they are
migrating from their ancient seats and filling the vacant conti-
nents, or migrating into each other and mingling together. Pro-
vidence has chosen America as the most conspicuous theatre of
these transformations. More Germans have landed in America
in the last five years than sufficed to conquer Italy fourteen hun-
dred years ago. More Celts have settled among us in a single
year than sufficed to sack Rome. And there is little friction in
this movement; there is no thought of subjugation on the one
hand or resistance on the other. The foundations of the deep

292 THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. [Dec.,

are breaking up without destructive convulsions. Humanity is
providentially readjusting its relationships all around. Millions
of men are denationalizing themselves every decade; not outcasts
either, or the scum, or men of effete nationalities, but the best
specimens of the noblest races on earth. The emigrants, taken
as a body, are bringing away from Europe more of true manhood
than they leave behind. The continents of the New World and
the islands of the Pacific are receiving the fairest and mightiest
children of the dominant races of the earth. God has made it a
virtue for multitudes of men to leave home ; and not in driblets
of families or to form patches of settlements, not in creeping
caravans, but swiftly by those newest instruments of divine Pro-
vidence, steam and electricity, and in half-millions a year. In
a single year over seven hundred thousand men and women of
Europe settled in the United States, changing their form of
government, their homes and neighborhoods, most of them learn-
ing new tongues and from Europeans becoming Americans. So
that when you talk of divine truth nowadays, expect that men
will square your theories with the spiritual aspirations of all man-
kind. The universal race of man, and not a particular national
family, is now in the thoughts of men who set out to solve the
problems of the soul. And, more, God is preparing the human
race by the inspirations of his providence for something above
natural and human ideals. If you would be a true man of the
times seek after that which makes for divine unity.

Since it is the will of God that human virtue should be tested
by the most untried liberty in government and the choice of the
whole earth for a dwelling-place, we can but expect that men will
demand broad views of religious questions broader, indeed,
than some teachers are ordinarily willing to impart. Divine Pro-
vidence in the natural order is but the forerunner of his provi-
dence in the revealed or Christian dispensation. Any method,
therefore, of dealing with God and that is the meaning of re-
ligion which cannot call itself and prove itself universal has
little hope of winning the intelligence of this age of transition.
Woe to a religion which can be only personal when men are re-
adjusting the essential relations of all mankind with God ! Woe
to a religion which bears the marks of a particular race in an age
of widening international relations! There are processes now at
work among men in which sectarianism will be broken up and
destroyed.

The religion which has so much as the name of Catholic
has an immense advantage in this era. Why else do the sects

1 886.] THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. 293

enviously claim that name and reach so eagerly after organic
unity ? What, then, shall be the advantage of a religion whose
name is not only Catholic, but whose organization is world-wide
and yet central ; whose doctrines are quod semper, quod ubiqite,
quod ab omnibus ; whose worship is familiar to all tribes and na-
tions, and whose unbroken tradition is of God's dealing, not with
a petty corner of a kingdom or a little island, but with the hu-
man race ; whose chief shepherd sends his messengers to speak
for God as well to China as to Alaska, to Paris and Dahomey, to
New York and Patagonia, and to all mankind ? No narrow-
minded man can expound the doctrines of such a religion in this
epoch ; it requires one conscious of universal sympathies, be he
pontiff, priest, or layman.

We are persuaded that much of the difficulty between our-
selves and non-Catholics is just here : they dread that our re-
ligion would exclude personal conviction and what is a most
singular delusion fasten upon them a " system " adapted only to
certain races. All do not perceive, some had rather not per-
ceive, that the universal is alone essential with us. Trained
themselves in the narrowness of sectarianism, their tendency is to
think that sectarianism is a form necessary to religion. Even the
better-disposed, those who admire the virtues of Catholics, who
praise their wide-reaching charity, their heroic zeal as mission-
aries, their self-denial in establishing institutions of education and
building splendid churches, attribute these virtues to motives
purely human. It is esprit de corps, they say, which inspires the
missionary with heroism. The obedience, the silence, the self-
restraint of the religious is owing to disappointment of worldly
hopes, or to the security and peace of a cloister enfolding in its
gentle embrace spirits too timid for the rough contact of a rude
world. This is the way they talk. They admire the discipline
of the church, even submission to authority, and are perhaps
eloquent in praise. They seek no deep religious motive, but
they affirm that their own race is not amenable to such discipline,
and that they are willing to forego the advantages of a perfect
organization in order to retain their native liberty.

Now, all this is but attributing to peculiarities of race or to
the temporary adaptations of Providence what in the innermost
springs is due solely to causes in their nature universal and eter-
nal ; in other words, to Christian principles. The same universal
truths, held in the very same supernatural state of soul, will make
an Englishman or an American a Catholic hero just as well as an
Italian or a Frenchman, but by different methods. In the one

294 THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. [Dec.,

case the heroic results of divine action will be developed by
methods which consecrate a high degree of personal liberty to
the service of God, and in the other by methods which utilize and
sanctify external discipline. Personal liberty and external dis-
cipline will, in different races, both minister to the same end ; the
life-giving principle will follow race-characteristics in choice of
methods. What is servility in one is Christian humility in an-
other. One may be a martyr in the free spirit of his native
race, another just as noble a martyr in the instinctive obedience
peculiar to his people ; both are equally witnesses for the same
principle. If in your investigations you stop at means and
methods you will never understand how the Catholic religion
is equally fitted for different races. Means and methods are but
adjuncts, however men may be attached to them or however
prominent they may appear; the efficient cause of religious traits
lies in principles sincerely held, needed universally, and efficacious
everywhere. The nearer we approach to God the plainer it
becomes that the conventional in Religion is of but little force,
and the real power is in the universal natural and supernatural
motives of conduct.

Now, if Catholics, in explaining or even in publicly practis-
ing their religion, lay too much stress on anything but universal
and fundamental principles, they will too often confirm the delu-
sions of honest inquirers. There are many practices which are
useful to me in my private devotions. Shall I dwell upon them
in an exposition of the Catholic truth ? They are but the habili-
ments of religion, useful to me and others, perhaps in a certain
sense necessary; for religion must have its clothing. But re-
ligion thus viewed is personal, not universal. If I am not careful
I may, by my language and conduct, give a sectarian appearance
to a faith which is the universal and eternal truth.

For example, will you say that a priest thrown amidst non-
Catholics shall have nothing to bend or straighten out in his par-
ticular school of theology, the customs of his order, the religious
traditions of his race ; nothing in practice or demeanor to change
for the love of God ? To a class of lookers-on a priest means no-
thing but Rome and the pope, and Rome and the pope mean no-
thing but the autocracy of an Italian bishop produced by the
accidents of time. To them priest, church, and people are but
exponents of mere discipline, uniformity, obedience, and, alas!
the substitution of authority for conscience. But, we ask you,
intelligent Catholic, what does it all mean to you? Tell your
non-Catholic neighbor the difference between form and substance

i886.] THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. 295

in your religion ; tell him in what manner he may discover in
your priesthood and in yourself the marks of the indwelling
Spirit of God and the personal conviction of the universal truth.

It is possible for one to mistake the motives which lie deepest in
his own soul. We often notice, for example, that the fervor of con-
version clothes the whole of Catholicity with the raiment of that
particular doctrine which led the way to the entire truth. Was
it the sacramental system which gave the initiative to the Ritualist
when he became a Catholic? There is danger of his becoming a
ritualistic Catholic that is to say, unduly emphasizing the ex-
ternal channels of grace. Did a man reason his way in by the
argument of historical continuity ? Such a convert is inclined to
despise the difficulties of Quakers and others whose attrait is
towards the guide of the inner light. Was one led on by the
spectacle of unity and the majesty of the church's authority ?
Then you may see a tendency to out-Rome Rome itself, clamor-
ing for the decisions of ecclesiastical tribunals as the exclu-
sive motive of doctrinal certainty, and a manifest impatience
with legitimate personal independence. Has another been con-
verted by the need of a sin-destroyer, flying to the church's
sacramental aids to escape the deluge of vice ? Expect the
thunders of the judgment from such a one, the extremest views
of divine justice; the Mediator lost in the Judge; the sor-
rows of Good Friday obscuring the joys of Easter morn. Does
the convert come from transcendentalism ? The danger is that
he will unduly emphasize the natural order of things, and will
dream that the only business of the Catholic Church is to antago-
nize Calvinism. So with the "genuine, original article" of old
style, born-and-bred Catholicity ; seeking to transplant among us
a state of things peculiar to the providential necessities of a dif-
ferent land ; endeavoring to make the priest not simply teacher,
father, and friend, but boss-teacher, boss-father, boss-friend, per-
haps boss-politician.

We have seen a sign set up in vacant lots which, it struck us,
might apply to the religious world of this age, and especially this
country : " Dump no rubbish here under penalty of the law ! "
We have reference meaning no contempt whatever to worn-
out and cast-off race or national religious expedients. They may
be consecrated by the tenderest religious memories, and may
have brought you nearer to God ; to another class of minds they
may but serve to impede the action of the Holy Spirit, even to
make religion odious, becoming hindrances cumbering the ground.
It is the universal truths, the fundamental doctrines, and the uni-

296 THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. Dec.,

versal and preceptive practices of the church which cannot be
hindrances, which must advance the soul towards union with
God, and can only be worn out or cast off by degenerate children
of heroic ancestors.

If any man objects to anything in your Catholicity, and you
are aware that it is not of the essence of your faith or integral to
its fulness, he is entitled to know it. Your idiosyncrasy may be
good German Catholicity or sound Irish Catholicity, but your
neighbor is entitled to know whether it is Catholicity pure and
simple. For an active mind the search is not after religious bric-
a-brac. To earnest men whatever old custom is without a pre-
sent significance is but a memorial of the dead. Sepeliendum est
corpus cum honor e.

Universality is a mark of the divine action, whether natural or
supernatural, personal or general. The true church is universal.
A guileless soul is one which acts from universal principles ; as
soon as they are presented it receives them spontaneously. The
man who has acted on universal principles of the natural order
will instinctively accept universal principles in the supernatural
order. The man of this age who is true to his vocation and who
lives up to the times will render the universal more explicit and
make it more emphatic. All true souls aspire after that religion
which embraces in one grasp the whole natural and supernatural
truth.

1 886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 297

II.

CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE.

The Emperor Constantine at Constantinople, a few days before his death, A.D. 337. revolves
his past life and the failure of his design for the creation of an Imperial Church, or Christian
Caliphate. He calls to mind several of the causes which have forced him with his own hand
to break up the unity of his Empire : but he suspects also the existence of some higher and hid-
den cause. His career he declares to be finished; yet he suddenly decrees a new military expe-
dition.

A MISSIVE from the Persian King ! Those kings !
Their prayers and flatteries are more rankly base
Than those of humbler flatterers. I'll not read it :
Place it, Euphorbos, on my desk. 'Tis well :
The sea-wind curls its page, but wafts me not
Its perfumed fetor. Leave me.

From the seas,

The streets, the Forum, from the Hippodrome,
From circus, bath, and columned portico,
But chiefly from the base of that huge pillar
Whereon Apollo's statue stood, now mine,
Its eastern-bending head rayed round with gold,
Say, dost thou grudge thy gift, Helopolis?
The multitudinous murmur spreads and grows.
Wherefore ? Because a life compact of pangs
Boasts now its four-and-sixtieth year, and last.
Give me that year when first I fought with beasts
In Nicomedia's amphitheatre ;
Gallerius sent me there in hope to slay me :
Not less he laughed to see that panther die ;
Laughed louder when I charged him with the crime.
Give me that year when first my wife not Fausta
That year, when launching from the British shore,
I ceased not till my standard, my Labarum,
Waved from the walls of Rome. When Troy had fallen
That brave and pious exile-prince, ./Eneas,
Presaged the site of Rome : great Romulus
Laid the first stone : Augustus laid the second :
I laid the last : 'twas mine to crown their work:
From her she flung me, and her latest chance :
Eastward I turned.

298 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec.,

Three empires to the ground
I trod. My warrant? Unauthentic they:
Their ruling was misrule. Huge, barbarous hosts
I hurled successive back o'er frozen floods :
Yet these, the labors of my sword, were naught:
The brain it was that labored. I have written
The laws that bind a province in one night :
Such tasks have their revenge. O for a draught
Brimmed from the beaming beaker of my youth
Though all Medea's poisons drugged its wave,
And all the sighs by sad Cocytus heard
O'er-swept its dusky margin ! Give me youth !
At times I feel as if this total being
That once o'er-strode the subject world of man,
This body and soul insensibly had shrunk
As shrinks the sculptor's model of wet clay
In sunshine, unobserved by him who shaped it,
Till some chance-comer laughs.

I touch once more dead times : their touch is chill:
My hand is chill, my heart.

I thought and wrought :
No dreamer I. I never fought for fame :
I strove for definite ends ; for personal ends ;
Ends helpful to mankind. Sacred Religion
I honored not for mysteries occult
Hid 'neath her veil, as Alexandria boasts
Faithful to speculative Greece, its mother ;
I honored her because with both her hands
She stamps the broad seal of the Moral Law,
Red with God's Blood, upon the heart of man,
Teaching self-rule through rule of Law, and thus
Rendering the civil rule, the politic rule
A feasible emprise. My Empire made,
At once I sheathed my sword. For fifteen years
I, warrior-bred, maintained the world at peace,
There following, 'gainst my wont, the counsel cleric.
What came thereof? Fret of interior sores,
A realm's heart-sickness and soul weariness,
The schism of classes warring each on each,
And all to ruin tending, spite of cramps
Bound daily round the out-swelling wall. 'Twas vain!
Some Power there was that counter-worked my work
With hand too swift for sight, which, crossing mine,

1 886] CONSTANT1NE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 299

Set warp 'gainst woof, and ever with my dawn
Inwove its nisrht. What hand was that I know not :

Perchance it was the Demon's of my House;
Perchance a Hand Divine.

I had two worlds to shape and blend in one,
The Christian and the Pagan, glorious- both,
One past her day, one nascent. Thus I mused
Old pagan Rome vanquished ignobler lands,
Then won them to herself through healing laws:
Thus Christian Rome must vanquish pagan Rome,
The barbarous races next ; both victories won,
Thus draw them to her, vanquishing their hearts
Through Law divine. What followed? Pagan Rome
Hates Christian Rome for my sake daily more ;
Gnashes her teeth at me. <c Who was it," she cries,
" That laid the old Roman Legion prone in dust,
Cancelling that law which freed it from taxation?
Who quelled the honest vices of the host
By laws that maimed all military pride?
Who hurled to the earth the nobles of old race,
And o'er them set his titular nobles new
And courtier prelates freed from tax and toll?
Who ground our merchants as they grind their corn ? "
Their charge is false ; they know it to be false :
The Roman legion ere my birth was dead :
Those other scandals were in substance old ;
My laws were needfullest efforts to abate them.
They failed : when once the vital powers are spent
Best medicines turn to poisons. " God," 'tis writ,
" Made curable the nations." Pagan Rome
Had with a two-edged dagger slain herself:
Who cures the dead ? To her own level Rome
By equal laws had raised the conquered nations ;
Thus far was well. Ay, but by vices worse
Than theirs, the spawn of sensual sloth and pride,
Below their level Rome had sunk herself.
The hordes she lifted knew it and despised her;
I came too late : the last, sole possible cure
Hastened, I grant, the judgment.

Pagan Rome

Deserved her doom and met it. Christian Rome
'Twas there my scheme imperial struck 'its root ;
Earliest there too it withered. Christians cold

CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec.,

Cheat both themselves and others. I to such

Preferred at first the ardent for my friends :

Betimes I learned a lesson. Zealous Christians

Have passion that outsoars imperial heats,

Makes null imperial bribes. To such a man

Earth's total sphere appears a petty spot

Too small for sage ambitions. Hope is his

To mount a heavenly, not an earthly throne,

And mount it treading paths of humbleness.

Such men I honored ; such men, soon 1 found,

Loved not my empire. Christians of their sort,

Though loyal, eyed us with a beamless eye,

Remembering Rome's red hand, remembering too

This, that the barbarous race is foe to Rome

And friendly oft to Christ. To Him they rush

Sudden, like herds that change their haunts at spring,

Taught from above. At Rome the Christians gain

A noble here, a peasant there. Those Christians,

I note them, lean away from empires ; mark

Egypt in each or Babel. I from these

Turned to their brethren of the colder mould,

But found them false, though friendly ; found besides

That, lacking honor 'mid the authentic Faithful,

Small power was theirs to aid me. Diocletian

Affirmed that Christians, whether true or false,

At best were aliens in his scheme of empire,

At worst were hostile. Oft and loud he sware

That only on the old virtues, old traditions,

The patriot manliness of days gone by,

The fierce and fixed belief in temporal good

And earthly recompense for earthly merit,

Rome's Empire could find base. That Emperor erred

In what he saw not. What he saw was true.

I saw the old Rome was ended. What if I,

Like him, have missed some Truth the Christians see?

Men call the Race Baptized the illuminated.

The Race Baptized : To me it gave small aid !
That sin was doubly fatal. It amerced
My growing empire of that centre firm
Round which a universe might have hung self-poised :
The onward-streaming flood of my resolve
It froze in 'mid career. The cleric counsel
Was evermore for peace. The Barbarous Race

1 886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 3OI

For that cause lies beyond my hand this day,
Likelier perchance to absorb, more late, my empire
Than be in it absorbed.

I missed my spring: no second chance was given :
I failed ; none know it : I have known it long.
What were the lesser causes of that failure ?
The sophists and seditious thus reply :
" The Emperor caught the old imperial lusts ;
He bound his realm in chains." They lie, and know it:
The People, not their Emperor, forged their chains:
The old nobles had expelled the native poor :
Slaves filled their place ; these gladdened in their bondage ;
It gave them life inert and vacant mind
Unburdened by the weight of liberty.
Slaves tilled the fields. What followed next ? Ere long
Stigma was cast on wholesome Industry.
The slave worked ill ; the master sought no more
His wealth from grateful glebe, and honest hand
But tribute-plagued the world. The Italians bought
Exemption from the tax world-wide. What next ?
Through the whole Roman world, thus doubly mulct,
The o'er-weighted tax crumbled ; brought no return :
Then dropped the strong hands baffled. Slowly, surely
The weed became the inheritor of all :
The tribute withered : offices of state
Were starved: and from the gold crown to her feet
Beneath her golden robe the Empire shrank :
Fair was the face ; the rest was skeleton ;
Dead breast ; miscarrying womb. A hand not mine
Had counterworked my work.

" The slave," they say,

" Finds lot more kindly in a Christian state " :
That saying lacks not truth. What followed ? This,
That freemen daily valued freedom less ;
At least the Pagan freemen slaves within.
Slavery with us was complicate in malice :
From rank to rank half-bondage crept and crept
Yearly more high and bound the class late free,
Their burdens waxing as their incomes waned.
Sorrowing I marked the deadly change; heart-sore
I learned my edicts were in part its cause :
The tribute lost, perforce I had replaced it
With net-work fine of taxes nearer home,

302 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec.,

Small but vexatious imposts. Rose the cry,

" No Roman no\v can move or hand or foot

Save as some law prescribes." The Citizen

Deserted like the soldier. Streets, like farms,

Became a desolation. Edicts new

Hurled back the fugitive to city or glebe,

Henceforth a serf ascript. In rage of shame

Or seeking humblest peace at vilest cost,

There were that voluntary changed to slaves !

A priest made oath to me, " There's many a man

Sir, in your realm, who gladly, while I speak,

Would doff his human pride and hope immortal,

And run, a careless leveret of the woods,

Contented ne'er to see his Maker's Face

Here or in worlds to come." Death-pale he sware it !

What help? I worked with tools: my best were rotten.

Some Strong One worked against me.

Let me compare my present with my past.
My courtier bishops helped me once : this day
The Spiritual Power hath passed to men their foes.
Of late I made my youngest son a Csesar :
I craved for him the blessing of God's Church :
I sought it not from prelates of my court :
I cast away from me imperial pride :
I sent an embassage of princes twelve
In long procession o'er the Egyptian sands
To where within his lion-cinctured cave
Sits Anthony the Hermit. Thus he answered :
" Well dost thou, Emperor, in adoring Christ;
Attend. Regard no more the things that pass:
Revere what lasts, God's judgment and thy soul :
Serve God, and help His poor." His words meant this:
" That work thou wouldst complete is unbegun ;
Begin it Infant crowned."

Three years of toil

With all earth's fleets and armies in my hand
Raised up this sovereign city. Mountains cleft
Sheer to the sea, and isles now sea-submerged,
Surrendered all their marbles and their pines ;
And river-beds dried up yielded their gold
To flame along the roofs of palace halls
And basilics more palatial. Syrian wastes
Gave up their gems ; her porphyries Egypt sent;

1 886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 303

Athens and Rome their Phidian shapes eterne :

The Cross stood high o'er all. That work was dream !

That city should have been an Empire's centre :

That Empire had existence, but not life :

The child it was of Rome's decrepitude,

Imbecile as its sire. No youth-tide swelled

Its breast one moment's space, or lit its eye :

Its sins themselves had naught of youth within them.

On Rome the shadow of great times was stayed;

The shadow and the substance here alike

Were absent; and the grandeur of the site

But signalized its lack. To the end Rome nursed

Some rock-flower virtues sown in years of freedom :

Music of Virgil thrilled the Palatine :

Great Arts lived on ; great thoughts. Pagan was Rome :

Ay, but the Catacombs were under Rome

With all their Christian dead.

That Rome was mine.
I left it for some future man ; for whom ?
Old Sabine Numa can he "come again
To list Egeria's whisper, or those priests
White-robed that, throned on Alba Longa's height,
Discoursed of peace to mortals? Romulus?
Augustus? These have left their Rome for ever :
With me they left it. Till some deluge sweeps
Her seven-hilled basis, life is hers no more :
Haply some barbarous race may prove that wave :
Haply, that v/ave back-driven or re-absorbed
Into some infinite ocean's breast unknown,
From the cleansed soil a stem may yet ascend ;
A tree o'er-shade the earth.

That Rome I left :

I willed to raise a city great like Rome,
And yet in spirit Rome's great opposite,
His city, His, the Man she Crucified.
What see I ? Masking in the name of Christ
A city like to Rome but worse than Rome;
A Rome with blunted sword and hollow heart,
And brain that came to her at second-hand,
Weak, thin, worn out by one who had it first,
And, having it, abused. I vowed to lift
Religion's loftiest fane and amplest shrine :
My work will prove a Pagan reliquary

304 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec.,

With Christian incrustations froz'n around.

It moulders. To corruption it hath said,

" My sister " ; to the wormy grave, " My home."

Not less that city for a thousand years
May keep its mummied mockery of rule
Like forms that sleep 'neath Egypt's Pyramids
Swathed round in balm and unguent, with blind eyes.
That were of dooms the worst.

My hope it was

That that high mercy of the Christian Law,
Tempering the justice of the Roman Law,
Might make a single Law, and bless the world :
But Law is for the free man, not the slave:
I look abroad o'er all the earth : what see I ?
One bondage, and self-willed.

I never sinned

As David sinned except in blood in blood :
Was this my sin, that not like him I loved?
Or this, that, sworn to raise o'er all the earth
Christ's realm, I drew not to his Church's font?
The Church's son could ne'er have shaped her course.

Again I mete the present with the past.
Central I sat in council at Nicaea :
In honor next to mine there stood a man
I never loved that man with piercing eye
And winged foot whene'er he moved ; till then
Immovable as statue carved from rock;
That man was Athanasius. Late last year
A second sacred council sat at Tyre :
It lifted Arius from Nicasa's ban :
From Alexandria's Apostolic throne
Her Patriarch, Athanasius, it deposed :
Her priesthood and her people sued his pardon ;
He was seditious, and I exiled him :
That was my last of spiritual acts.
Was it well done ? Arius since then hath died :
Since then God's Church is cloven.

Since then, since then

My Empire too is cloven, and cloven in five.
No choice remained. I never was the man
To close my eyes against unwelcome truth.
My sons, my nephews, these are each and all
Alike ambitious men and ineffectual:

[886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 30$

Since childhood left them I have loved them not,
And late have learned that they conspire against me.
No zeal parental warps my life's resolve
To leave my Empire one, and only one:
Once more a net is round me. To bequeath
To one among those rivals five that Empire
Were with the sceptre's self to slay that Empire,
To raise the war-cry o'er my funeral feast,
And, ere the snapt wand lay upon my grave,
To utter from that grave my race's doom
And yield the labor of my life a prey
To Vandal and to Goth.

Conviction came :

It comes to all; slowliest to him who knows
That Hope must flee before its face for ever :
It came at first a shadow, not a shape ;
It came again, a body iron-handed':
It took me by the hand from plausive hosts ;
It took me by the hand from senate halls ;
It took me by the hand from basilic shrines ;
It dragged me to the peak ice-cold ; to depths
Caverned above earth's centre. From that depth
I kenned no star; chanted no "De Profundis."
One night, the revel past, I sat alone
Musing on things to come. In sleep I heard
The billow breaking 'gainst the huge sea-wall,
Then backward dragged, o'erspent. Inly I mused r.
"The life of man is Action and Frustration
Alternate. Both exhausted, what remains?
Endurance. Night is near its term. The morn
Will see my last of Acts, a parchment writ,
A parchment signed and sealed." Sudden I heard
Advancing, as from all the ends of earth,
Tramp of huge armies to the city walls:
Then silence fell. Anon my palace courts
Were thronged by warring hosts from- every land,
Headed by those disastrous rivals five,
My sons, my nephews. Long that strife rang out ;
First in the courts, then nearer shrieks I heard :
Amid the orange-scented colonnades
And inmost alabaster chambers dim ;
And all the marble pavements gasped in blood,
And all the combatants at last lay dead :
VOL. XLIV. 20

305 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec ,

Then o'er the dead without and dead within

A woman rode ; one hand, far-stretched, sustained

A portent what I guessed beneath a veil :

She dropped it at my feet : it was a Head,

She spake : " The deed was thine : take back thine own !

Bid Crispus bind in one thy broken Empire !"

Then fires burst forth as though all earth were flame,

And thunders rolled abroad of falling domes,

And tower, and temple, and a shout o'er all,

"The Goth, the Vandal!" 'Twas not these that roused me;

It was a voice well loved, for years unheard,

" Father, grieve not! That deed was never thine ! "

Standing I woke, and in my hand my sword.

This was no vision : 'twas a dream ; no more :

Next day at twelve I wrote my testament,

Designed, and partly writ, the year before.

I wrote that testament in my heart's best blood :

That Empire, vaster far than in the old time,

That Empire sundered long, at last by me

Consolidated, and by Christian Law

Lifted to heights that touch on heaven, that Empire

This hand that hour divided into five.

This hand it was which wrote that testament ;

This hand which pressed thereon the imperial seal:

Then too I heard those shouting crowds. Poor fools!

They knew not that the labor of my life

Before me stood that hour, a grinning mask

Disfleshed by death. Later they'll swear I blundered :

'Tis false ! What man could work to save my Empire

I worked. It willed not to be saved. So be it!

When in the Apostles' Church entombed I lie

Five kinglings shall divide my realm. That act,

Like Diocletian's last, was abdication :

How oft at his I scoffed !

They scoff not less

The ripples of yon glittering sea! they too
Shoot out their lips against me ! They recall
That second crisis in my vanished years,
When from this seat, Byzantium then, forth fled
Vanquished Licinius. There, from yonder rock,
Once more I see my fleet steer up full-sailed,
Glassing its standards in the Hellespont,
Triumphant; see the Apostate's navy load

1 886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 307

The Asian shore with wrecks. He too beheld it :

Amazed he fled ; and all the East was mine.

It was my Crispus ruled my fleet that hour!

That victory I saw was his, not mine:

His was the heroic strength that awes mankind,

The grace that wins, the majesty that rules them :

No vile competitor had he to fear.

Had he but lived ! Well spake my dying sister,

Wedded to that Licinius whom I slew,

" God for thy sins will part from thee thy realm."

I heard that whisper as my city's walls

Ascended, daily. Night by night I heard

The tread of Remus, by his brother slain,

Circling the walls half-raised of Rome.

'Tis past !

My Empire's dead : alone my city lives:
My portion in that city is yon Church
Named of the Apostles: there I built my tomb :
In that alone my foresight stands approved :
Around it rise twelve kingly cenotaphs
In honor of the Twelve Apostles raised ;
These are my guards against the Powers unblest :
Within that circle I shall sleep secure.
Thou Hermit of the Egyptian cave, be still !
Regret I then my life, my birth ? Not so !
To seek great ends is worthy of a man :
To mourn that one more life has failed, unworthy.
But be ye still, O mocking throngs far off!
Be still, sweet song and adulating hymn!
What scroll is that wind-curled? Ha ! Persia's missive !

I ever scorned that Persia ! I reject
Her mendicant hand, stretched from her bed of roses ;
She that of Cyrus made of old her boast,
That tamed the steed, and spake the truth ; even now
The one sole possible rival of my Rome ;
One from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf,
The Tigris to the Ganges ; she that raised
In part that Empire I designed but wrought not,
An Empire throned o'er trampled idol bones,
An Empire based on God and on his law,
A mighty line of kings hereditary,
Each " the Great King," sole lord of half the world,

308 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec.,

And, raising, proved my work was feasible !

This day she whines and fawns ; one day she dragged

A Roman Emperor through her realm in chains,

By name Valerian. Roman none forgives her !

Dotard at last, she wastes her crazy wits

On mystic lore and Manichean dreams:

I'll send no answer; yet I'll read her missive.

" The Great King thus to Constantine of Rome :
Galerius stole from Persia, while she slept,
Five provinces Caucasian. Yield them back.
If not, we launch our armies on thy coasts
And drag thee chained o'er that rough road and long
Trod by Valerian." Let me read once more :
Writ by his hand, and by his sigil sealed !
So be it ! My boyhood's vision stands fulfilled !
Great Alexander's vow accomplished: Earth
From Ganges' mouths to Calpe's Rock one realm !
Insolent boy ! Well knows he I am old :
I was : I am not: youth is mine once more:
To-morrow in my army's van I ride.
Euphorbos ! Sleep'st thou ? Send me heralds forth !
Summon my captains! Bid these mummers cease !
The error of my life lies plain before me,
That fifteen years of peace.

NOTE. The next day Constantine set out on his Persian expedition ; he fell sick at Hellen-
opolis, a city erected by him in honor of his mother, the Empress Helena. He demanded Bap-
tism, and died soon after he had received it.

1 886.] Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? 309

IS THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL?

AN affirmative answer is ventured upon. And the reasons for
it will be given in this paper. Of course, in the eyes of the negro
himself, the question of his race is not in any wise restricted.
In his newspapers, books, and pamphlets, in the pulpit and the
rostrum, before judges and magistrates, he struggles for many
wants, real and imaginary. Seven millions in numbers, the ne-
groes are determined to make their presence felt. The latest turn
is a proposal to organize themselves into a National League.
Like the great Irish scheme, it will have a different aim. As for
the whites, however, a local question is the negro problem,
chiefly affecting the South : not, indeed, all of the former slave
States, but only the ones lying between the Potomac and the
Gulf.

The States in question are Virginia, North and South Caro-
lina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Of
all the blacks of the Union two-thirds live in these States ; man
for man are they to-day with the whites.

" Leaving out of consideration the population of the mountain regions
the slopes of the Appalachian range we may safely say that in every
house (including, of course, the curtilage) and on every plantation in eight
States there is one colored person living side by side with each white per-
son : master and servant, mistress and maid, child and nurse, employer
and employee, in the shop, on the farm, wherever capital and labor or
oversight and service meet. From the cradle to the grave the white life
and the black touch each other every hour" (An Appeal to Ctzsar, p. 116).

From the census of 1880 two facts are plain. On the one
hand the whites are gradually moving from, and on the other the
negroes are as steadily and surely moving into, these same States,
now known as the " Black Belt." Two great streams of domestic
migration are continually carrying in their courses the white in-
habitants of the Northern and Eastern States, as also those of the
eight States under consideration. These streams are divergent
one, going to the West, throws off a branch to the Southwest ;
while the other, starting from the " Black Belt," sends its main
stream of whites to the Southwest and the branch to the West.
Independently of these there is another, a black stream, whose
waters are ever bearing the dark-hued children of the tropics
southward where the hot sun makes life more attractive and
where companionship is more genial.

310 Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? [Dec.,

Before the year 1900 within fifteen years, that is it is likely
that there will be a chain of States, from the Potomac to the delta
of the Mississippi, in every one of which the blacks will outnum-
ber the whites, and in some will even double them. " Where
are the boys that have finished school ?" lately asked a Southern
bishop of the principal of his cathedral school. " Gone away,"
was the answer, terse and pointed. The lads could do better in
the West and North, and left their homes, where the negro problem
faced them, to put themselves in a more genial competition in the
race of life. Like reasons will lead the blacks to change. In the
other States the negro is in a hopeless minority : out of thirty-odd
millions numbering not two millions, of which over three-fourths
are living in the other six old slave States Maryland, Kentucky,
Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee ; the remainder, about
half a million, are scattered throughout the rest of the country.
For a long time it was thought that trade and commerce and
Northern capital would tend to act as a lever in the South for the
balancing of the races ; but they have left the whites and the
blacks decidedly unbalanced, and have proven a poor lever. Eu-
ropean emigration was also going to the South, and would crowd
the negro out. The wish was father to the thought ; but, alas !
the sunny land threw back too dark a reflection for the emi-
grants, who in seeking a colder climate found also fairer sur-
roundings. In fact, since emancipation there has been a falling
off of white immigrants. In 1880 there were 28,976 less foreign-
born persons in these eight States than in 1860. And all compe-
tent judges of the writer's acquaintance will bear this out.

The colonization which is so strongly advocated by Professor
Gilliam in both the Popular Science Monthly ( 1883) and North Ameri-
can Review (1884) seems to be under way. " For their common
good let them be separated, and the African turn or be turned
to Africa," are his concluding words to the second article. The
African is turning, and is also being turned ; but the Africa is
at home. He will not cross the Atlantic, whose western waves
now wash the new Africa's coast. In the North, New Ireland
is spoken of ; in the South, New Africa will be its rival. Henry
Clay's scheme and, if we are not mistaken, Gen. Sherman's idea
also will, after all, be realized, with the addition of citizenship
and the franchise, with also a difference of locality. A handful
of States, if the portents are true, are going to be swallowed up
by the negroes ; and the rest of the country will mind its busi-
ness. " This is a white man's country and a white man's govern-
ment, and the white race will never allow a section of it to be

1 886.] Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? 311

Africanized " (" The African Problem," North American Review,
November, 1884). This simply provokes a smile. As long as the
blacks behave themselves nobody will bother them.

To day the whites are steadily making- room for the dark-
skinned ; to-morrow and the next day they will do the same.
Both races only seek more congenial fields. There need be no
collision, and if fanatics do not sway the blacks there will be
none. There is plenty of room in the North and West for the
whites ; plenty in the South for the blacks. The natives will find
it hard to give up their homes and leave their sunny land; but
other people have done so, leaving behind them as beautiful lands
as the South. In bringing about these " black republics " cli-
mate will have a big share:

" The African, on climatic grounds, finds in the southern country a more
congenial home. In many districts there, and these by far the most fertile,
the white man is unable to take the field and have health. It is otherwise
with the African, who, the child of the sun, gathers strength and multiplies
in these low, hot, feverish regions " (Popular Science Monthly, February 18,
1883).

Besides, the best cultivators of the great Southern staples are the
colored race :

" For the agricultural labor of the South it is impossible to provide any
substitute for the African. It is his field ; he holds it far beyond all com-
petition, and whosoever seeks to invade it must adopt not only his meth-
ods but come down to his level also. The same is true in a less exclusive
sense of mechanical laborers at the South. Little by little all of the plain
mechanical labor of the South is centring in the hands of the colored people.
Long before the abolition of slavery it was found profitable to teach cer-
tain trades to slaves. Blacksmiths and carpenters, house-painters and, in
some instances, wagon-makers, were to be found among the slaves. Al-
most every plantation had its rude blacksmith-shop, and a slave presided
at the forge and anvil. Some masters paid large sums to have their slaves
taught the trade of the carpenter, so far as building could be taught with-
out the knowledge of reading and writing and the laws of mechanics.
These men have not been slow to seize upon their opportunities " (An Ap-
peal 'to Casar, p. 163).

Last year, in the building of St. Joseph's (colored) Church,
Richmond, all of the laborers were colored ; of eight bricklayers,
five were colored ; two of the three carpenters were of the sable
race, and none but a black hand spread even a trowel of plaster.

The negro question, then, territorially at least, is being nar-
rowed down to small limits. As far as the problem's circumfer-
ence goes, a few States monopolize it. Is this the state of the
question in all its phases, political, educational, social ? A little
reflection will show that it is. Questions like the labor question,

312 fs THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? [Dec.,

prohibition, and socialism agitate the whole country. If it were
possible to transfer all the workmen, grog-shops, and socialists to
any eight States grouped together, no agitation would disturb
the others. Now, from one cause or other, the colored race are
settling down in a well-defined locality. There also will they
settle their problems. The work entitled An Appeal to C&sar is
simply a protest -against ignoring this result. In his last chapter
the author cries out in a wail of despair:

" Will Caesar hear ? Will the public the myriad-minded Caesar hear ?
Will anyone of influence the individual Caesar hear? The President,
the Senate, a national political convention, and the press, one and all at
different times this writer addressed in order to catch Caesar's ear. And
Caesar heard not. Take up any book or pamphlet or article on this ques-
tion ; it is all about the South and the negro, or vice versa : the North is
invoked as a mighty Caesar, but the South is the Egypt where the new
Antony must be met."*

For us Catholics it has received, we may say, a final decision
in the decree of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore which
left the negro's salvation and Christian education specially to the
synods of the provinces in which the blacks for the most part
live. There are but two such provinces Baltimore and New
Orleans. A handful of sees with slim Catholic populations are
affected.

The question once localized, the next step is to understand it
fully. A clear result of this localization will be negro rule; not,
indeed, such as was seen some fifteen years ago, but one with
growth and experience stamped upon it. To-day writers like Pro-
fessor Gilliam (North American Review) and Mr. Grady, of Atlanta
(Century], cry out : White men must rule ! They are simply giving
the blacks a watchword : The negro must rule. What is sauce
for the goose is sauce for the gander. A great deal of gerryman-
dering is done now to keep the colored people out of positions
which, numerically, they would hold. I speak not of their fitness,
but of their numbers. Will the negroes, when their turn comes,
forget this ? They may forget it, for, paradoxical as it may seem,
it is the oppressed who forgives, not the oppressor. Man never
forgives him whom he has wronged, although he will forgive his
wrong-doer. The negro may forgive and forget. And he may
not. It is now too late to speak of disenfranchising him. He is
a citizen, and will stay one.

With this outlook before the race the negro's warmest friends
see only evil and danger if he remain as now. The fears and
forebodings of friend and foe alike are a dire arraignment and

1 8 86.] Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? 313

condemnation of sectarianism, Avhich is stronger and more life-
like in the South than elsewhere in the United States. In seven
of these "black republics" Protestantism has its happy hunting--
grounds, while the Catholic Church has a bare foothold. For
two and one-half centuries the Reformation has had the colored
race under its thumb; and the result is that the very thought of
its black proteges controlling a few States sends a nightmare of
horror, not throughout the land, but in the South, among the
very Protestants who made them, mentally and morally, what
they are.

The loudest among the prophets of evil thus writes :

" One hesitates to address to any one professing a belief in the doctrines
of Christianity anything like a specific argument or appeal in favor of any
measure the sole object and purpose of which is the general betterment of
humanity. It would seem that one who claimed in any degree to be con-
trolled by the command, ' Do good to all men,' must feel as if an injunction
were laid upon him actively and earnestly to promote such a measure as we
have discussed (national aid to education). . . . Taken in connection with
that mysterious providence which made the greed of man the instrumen-
tality for bringing the colored race to these shores, which appointed for the
lot of the negro Christian stripes and tears and woe, but kept for ever green
in his heart the faith in that ' year of jubilee' which should bring him de-
liverance, it would seem that every believer must regard this measure as an
opportunity to offer the sacrifice of good works in extenuation of the evil
wrought before by those who bore the Christian name and with the sanc-
tion of Christian churches " (An Appeal to Ccesar, p. 402).

that is, Protestant churches. For the Roman Catholic always
condemned the slave-trade, and never was strong in the South.

A diagnosis of the outcome which the " black republics " will
offer is beyond the writer's scope and, very likely, power. The
popular magazines now and then furnish the views of men who
make, or pretend to make, the negro a study. There is smatter-
ing enough. It is very sad to notice in these effusions the ignor-
ing of religious influence. Effects, good, bad, and indifferent,
are given, and reasons are laid down for them ; but, barring some
sentimental twang, the divine and eternal standpoint is ignored.
" Leave them alone ; they are blind," the Master said of such
teachers.

Of the remedies education is held up as the chief. It is the
Lux, Lex, Dux, Rex of An Appeal to Ccesar. Of course it is the
popular or common-school education that is all this. The curse
which this so called education is bringing upon white children
will be fourfold worse upon the colored, whose morality an Epis-
copal bishop has called a shame. And particularly so in those

314 fs THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? [Dec.,

schools where both sexes attend. Two facts that have come
under my notice will serve to illustrate this. At a public meet-
ing held in the Academy of Music, Baltimore, some vears ago,
the president of one of these tk mixed " places of study declared
his conviction in the utter depravity of the negro. Fancy the
tendency of such a man's care! When once visiting a mixed
school of higher grade, I saw a young woman, one of the pupils,
about twenty-five or so, with her head and shoulder on the breast
of a young man, apparently older and a pupil also. There was
one book between them, which the girl was holding open. Neither
the woman teacher (colored), nor the large class of both sexes,
nor the pair themselves gave any sign of feeling the impropriety
of the mise-en-scene. And this was a State Normal School ; that
pair will be teachers in the schools to establish and support
which national aid is sought. This is laying the paint on with
the trowel, we admit; qui potest capere, capiat.

Notwithstanding, it is pretty sure that some scheme of national
education will be enacted before long. Sooner or later the " Blair
Education Bill," or one like it, will be saddled upon the country.
Then the mind will be enlightened in some sections; but the
heart ?

The principle underlying the demand that the whole country
make itself responsible for the education of the negro has been
recognized by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore. In leav-
ing the work of converting the blacks to the ecclesiastical pro-
vinces the council localized the responsibility of management;
but, by ordering a collection in every church of the land from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, it determined the duty of support to be of
the whole country. It orders a yearly collection, on the first
Sunday of Lent, in every diocese of the United States. In those
dioceses where the Association for the Propagation of the Faith
exists the whole collection will go to the negro and Indian mis-
sions; in the others, one-half only for those missions, and the
other half to the Association. The sums for the home work will
be given to a commission, composed of the Archbishop of Balti-
more and two bishops of sees not affected by the negro problem
or the Indian. Once more, the council draws the spiritual " Ma-
son and Dixon's line." Rightly does the council re-echo the whole
country's cry. From outside must come the sinews of war in
order to educate the negro. He needs, not a partial education,
but a Christian education, to receive which both teachers and
schools are needed.

Of all teachers the most vitally necessary are priests who will

1 886.] Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? 315

" consecrate their thoughts, their time, and themselves wholly
and entirely to the service of the colored people " (II. Cone. Bait.)
It is simply impossible for the Southern clergy to do this work.
The late Plenary Council, while gratefully expressing its thanks
for what was done in the past, commands bishops interested to get
priests " whose sole duty will be to preach God's Word to those
members of Christ's flock, teach their children the principles of
faith, and fulfil in their regard the work of apostles" (ill. Cone.
Bait., No. 238).

A seminary is the first step towards a large body of priests. At
present the few exclusively devoted to the negro mission come
from England. True, all of them, save one or two, are of other
races; still the work was conceived by an English mind and is
executed under English direction. The great American church,
said a bishop to the writer, ought to be able to do its own work.
Moreover, Europeans anxious to be missionaries long for the East.
No halo adorns the brow nor glory the path of him who turns
his steps to the American blacks. It is not seldom for the negro
missionary to find people looking askance at him. and now and
then see the index-finger knowingly touch the forehead; but this
narrow-mindedness is passing away.

For eight years has this seminary been talked of; it seemed
two years ago that it would then be started. At that time the
Sulpitian Fathers of St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, had, in the
spirit of the saintly Olier, consented to the zealous desire of his
Eminence Cardinal Gibbons, who wished the students of the pro-
posed seminary to attend the lectures at St. Mary's. Just as is
done in Rome, Louvain, and other places, the aspirants for the
negro missions would go to the grand seminary at the lecture-
hours, returning home for studies, special training for their work,
and lodging. Besides the decided advantage of the thorough
training, friendships would be formed which in the end would
greatly help the black mustard-seed. At present the priests of
this work are strangers; in the proposed plan they would grow
up with the other clergy.

Next come the religious communities devoted to teaching.
It is very much to be regretted that no brother of any teaching
order is imparting even the rudiments to any black child. Indi-
vidual brothers are anxious for the work; and the writer has been
told that, some years ago, a band of Christian Brothers asked
their superiors to send them among the negroes. The complaint,
so common nowadays, of the loss of boys after reaching the four-
teenth or fifteenth year, is most sadly true of colored boys. God

316 Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? [Dec.,

help such boys ! Their future is blacker than the stain nature
gave them. Three white sisterhoods, all Franciscans, are devoted
to the colored work. Again, no matter to what races the sisters
belong, the communities all hail from England. It is certainly
enough to make us all bow down our heads in shame. Both the
priests and the sisters on the negro missions have one very great
claim on all the clergy: to keep them supplied with subjects.
Other religious bodies of men and women serve the ordinary
parishes and can get subjects; not so those in charge of the
blacks: they must depend on the charity of the clergy, to whom
the wretched state of the colored people appeals.

There are quite a number of colored schools attached to the
parochial schools, in charge of some seven or eight religious
orders. The dioceses of Natchez, St. Augustine, and Savannah
have a number of such schools. The system has the advantage
of having both schools under the same management a great
boon for the colored people, whose tender spot is thus left intact.
Another advantage is the certainty of keeping up a good supply
of teachers. The chief drawback is the danger that such schools
will be always at a discount the fag-end of all work. May they
grow larger and larger until separate communities are needed !

Lastly, there is no reason why, with the annual collection to
help on the work, lay teachers cannot open schools in many
places. The local clergy and the examiners of schools ordered
by the last council may be able to look after these schools, or, if
unable to do so, priests belonging to the negro missions would, I
am sure, be placed at the disposal of the bishops for this purpose.
After school-hours the parents and friends of the children could
be gathered and taught the faith, just as the Protestants have
done with the schools built by the " Freedmen's Bureau." Be-
hold an almost unopened field! Over one million colored chil-
dren go to no school ; and this number, instead of lessening, is
going up at an alarming rate yearly. Hundreds of Catholic
teachers should be thus employed. What sort of schools should
we have? Every sort. The only rule is: Whatever Protestants
do, Catholics must also do better. The church ought to lead.

1 886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 317

THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS.

" DID he talk a long- string of learning," asks Mr. Flam-
borough of Dr. Primrose when the latter has described his disas-
trous deal with Ephraim Jenkinson, " about Greek and the cos-
mogony of the world ? " To this, says Goldsmith's immortal Vicar \
" I replied with a groan " ; and it is quite possible that that groan
may be re-echoed by more than one of our subscribers when they
read the heading of the present article. There have been so
many conflicting interpretations of the Scriptural account put
forward, not indeed by Catholic writers, but by men conversant
with the sacred text and confessing the inspiration of Holy
Scripture; there have been so many theories first devised, then
accepted, and ultimately rejected by the representatives of science
as to the genesis of the material world ; there have been so
many reconciliations between science and inspiration, so many re-
pudiations of the reconciliations, and so many refutations of those
repudiations, that the only result of attempting to follow such a
discussion is for the most part to superinduce a kind of vertigo,
and to make the reader inclined to agree with the sentiment of
the above-mentioned Mr. Ephraim Jenkinson, " that the world is
in its dotage." Nevertheless, reluctant as one may be to enter
upon a grave discussion of a topic with regard to which pro-
bably nine-tenths of magazine-readers know little, yet these
are not the days in which it is possible for any one safely
to remain indifferent to that which affects the whole atmos-
phere of society, or complacently to close his ears when an
opportunity is afforded of knowing what objections are urged
against our holy faith by those competent to expound them in a
clear and intelligible fashion. When, therefore, the president of
the Royal Society of England a man not only at the head of his
special branch of knowledge, but practised in literary produc-
tion, and especially in that most rare and difficult art of render-
ing the depths of science clear to the unlearned reader comes
forward in the pages of a popular magazine to enunciate the
objections raised by the science of to-day to the account of the
creation given by Moses more than three thousand years ago, to
formulate, in fact, the non-cred of zoology and to give his rea-
sons for considering the account of Genesis to be, as he frankly
confesses, " a myth," it is well to take the opportunity of listen-
ing to the master, that we may not hereafter be deceived or en-

318 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec.,

snared through any false issues raised by less capable exponents.
The original occasion which gave rise to the discussion was one
of no slight importance, and itself marks another rise in the ever-
advancing flood of revolutionary thought.

Some months ago Dr. Reviile, a distinguished member of the
French Academy, took the first step towards the foundation of
that experimental religion which, in the view of some theorists,
is destined to succeed our exploded Christianity, by publishing a
work intended as a preface to the history of religions, wherein
he set forth his ideas with regard to the improbability of any
divine revelation having been vouchsafed to primitive man.
In the course of this work he not only impugned the veracity
of the statements relating to the cosmogony in Genesis, as might
have been expected from such a source, but he went on to make
remarks upon the probable solar origin of certain myths con-
tained in Homer. Now, it happened, in the perpetual see-saw of
British politics, that the publication of the book took place while
Lord Salisbury was enjoying his present lease of power, and
Mr. Gladstone, therefore, was left to the three great pursuits of
his leisure hours yachting, Homer, and theology. Had Gene-
sis alone been attacked it is possible that the attraction would
not have been sufficient ; but when the domain of Homer was in-
vaded also the well-worn axe leaped forth as fresh as ever, and
Mr. Gladstone plied it vigorously in both directions. There-
upon, as the hydra of old when bereft of one head immediately de-
veloped two in its place, so here the president of the Royal Society
in London and the ex-professor of Sanskrit at Oxford rose up
to join issue with the ex-premier. Then Mr. Gladstone replied
to Professor Huxley, and both the latter and Dr. Reville replied
to Mr. Gladstone, while a fifth writer in a very able article chal-
lenged generally the theories of Professor Max Miilier.
i .R We shall not attempt in a few pages to lay down the law
upon the exact meaning of the inspiration of Holy Scripture, nor
the precise rendering of the Hebrew text, nor of the Septuagint,
nor of the Vulgate, nor of the Benedictine translation, nor that of
King James or of the Revisers, nor upon the proper method of
exegesis, nor upon the accuracy of the theory of evolution, nor
upon any one of the innumerable points arising out of the discus-
sion, but shall confine ourselves to the humbler yet not wholly
useless task of recording the incidents of this grand tournament
with the heroes of scientific lore, interposing every now and thei
a few criticisms of our oxvn as to the fashion in which the coi
batants conduct themselves.

1 886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 319

One promise, at all events, may be made pretty safely : that
is, that one who follows the discussion will not find it infected
with the cardinal sin of dulness. Since the days when the men of
Christchurch wrote, as Lord Macaulay expresses it, the best work
that ever was written by any one upon the wrong side of a sub-
ject of which he was profoundly ignorant, a livelier controversy
never spoiled paper than that which has lately been raging in the
English periodical press. In so rare a conjunction of intellects of
the highest order as is furnished by the series of articles to which
we allude, it is natural to expect not only that the characteristic
view of each contributor to the discussion will be set out with
special accuracy and distinctness, but also that a certain smooth-
ness and literary ease will pervade every movement ; and this ex-
pectation is by no means unfulfilled. Nothing can show more
clearly the change which has come over the aspect of contro-
versial discussion or at least of controversial discussion of this
particular kind as conducted in England than the tone and ad-
dress of the writers towards each other. There is a total and
most happy absence of acrimony and of imputation ; and if one
combatant insinuate that another is an ignoramus or fool of the
first water, the language is so polished and delicate as to assume
rather the form of compliment. Every one seems to be enjoying
himself at a hearty game of football; and they trip each other
up and knock each other down with perfect courtesy and good-
will. Thus, when Mr. Gladstone observes that " the Mosaic
writer," as he oddly calls Moses, had in view moral rather than
physical instruction, and was consequently more attentive to the
general summary than to particular details that, in short, his
account was intended rather as a sermon than a lecture Mr.
Huxley gaily retorts that evidently the differentia between a lec-
ture and a sermon, in Mr. Gladstone's mind, is that the former
must be accurate in its facts, while the latter need not be so ;
and doubts whether the clergy will be complimented by the dis-
tinction. Again, when Mr. Huxley has spent several pages in
demolishing Mr. Gladstone's scientific averments, the latter
thanks his opponent for his corrections with a smile, and wonders
at the small amount he has found to correct. Equally if not
more remarkable is the frankness with which Mr. Huxley con-
fesses to the narrow limits of his ascertained domain and the
constant revolutions that occur therein. He admits without dis-
guise that the limits of certainty in his branch of knowledge are
so narrow as to render the contents almost imperceptible, and
quietly classes " the Ptolemaic astronomy and the cataclysmic

320 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec.,

geology of his youth " u-nder the head of science, without for a
moment perceiving, apparently, that he thereby pays precisely
the same left-handed compliment to its professors as he considers
Mr. Gladstone to have paid to preachers of theology. Yet even
he would seem scarcely to understand the universal applicability
of his remark to all knowledge acquired by man ; for possibly
because he has not adopted numbers as his particular study
he makes mathematics an exception to the general rule that if
only that of which we are absolutely certain is to be taken as
knowledge, its limits are so narrow as almost to disappear.
Mathematics, indeed! Mathematics quotha! Ask a modern
mathematician to give up his quaternions or his infinitesimals,
and see what he will say to you. As well might you expect a
stock-broker to give up his telephone or an astronomer his spec-
troscope. And yet what is the meaning of a quaternion? It is
the symbol of an impossible process. What is the basis of infini-
tesimal calculus? The expression of an inconceivable number.
A notable exception to this general prevalence of fairness and
courtesy is found in an article written by Mr. Laing in the Fort-
nightly Revieiv, commenting upon the discussion. According to
the account given in Genesis, the earth, says Mr. Laing, was
first formed out of chaos, light from darkness, the seas from
the land, and the whole surrounded by a firmament or crys-
tal vault solid enough to separate the waters above, which
cause the rain, from the waters below, and to support the
heavenly bodies which revolve around it every twenty-four
hours. And then, after informing us that the Mosaic narrative
states that the stars were added as things of minor importance
probably as ornaments or to assist the moon in nights when the
lunar orb is invisible he winds up this curious summary by ob-
serving that this is the plain, simple, and obvious meaning which
the narrative must have conveyed to every one to whom it was
addressed at the time, as it did to every one who read it until
quite recently. In this brief compass the ingenious writer has
contrived to compress excellent specimens of every kind of error
into which a transcriber can fall, beginning with the moderately
incorrect, and passing through the wholly false to the palpably
ridiculous. It is quite incorrect to represent the Mosaic narra-
tive as stating that the earth was formed out of chaos ; it is
wholly without foundation to say that there is a word about the
firmament supporting the heavenly bodies, or about the heavenly
bodies themselves revolving in twenty-four hours. It is totally
false to speak of it as describing the stars to be of minor impor

1 886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 321

tance, or mentioning them as ornaments or assistants to the moon
when that luminary is out of an evening. And it is a crowning
absurdity to state that these wild misreadings have always been
accepted, not by the ignorant or prejudiced or thoughtless alone,
but by every one who has ever read the Scriptural account.

In one respect, at least, and that of a most important char-
acter, our acquiescence with Professor Huxley is complete. Un-
doubtedly no one, whatever may be his creed and in whatever
difficulties he may be thereby involved, is at liberty to reject a
single fact once definitely and sufficiently proved, and that for
this simple reason : that to doubt the compatibility of truth with
truth is to deny the existence of truth altogether. " Above all
things, we must take diligent care," says a celebrated Jesuit
writer, " in treating of the Mosaic doctrine, to avoid positively
and decidedly thinking or affirming anything which may be re-
pugnant to clear experiments and true reasonings in philosophy
or other studies. For since truth must be congruous with truth,
the truth of the sacred writings cannot conflict with the true
reasonings and experiments of human sciences." And what, then,
it may be asked, is a believer in- Holy Scripture to do when some
fact is clearly ascertained to all appearance hopelessly irrecon-
cilable with the facts related in the Pentateuch ? Under these
circumstances the first thing necessary is to make sure that the
difficulty arises from facts which are immutable, and not from
theories which change every day ; but supposing this to be the
case, then

" Via prima salutis
Quod minime reris Graia pandetur ab urbe."

The very first place to turn is to Professor Huxley himself. In
an eloquent peroration, not wholly untinged with a somewhat
unaccountable passion, he tells us that his idea of morality is
summed up in the saying of Micah : " And what hath the Lord
required of thee, but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk hum-
bly with thy God?" Now, to a plain man the way out of the
difficulty Svould seem to be indicated with sufficient plainness,
one would think, in the final clause of the verse just quoted ; but
this not very recondite solution appears unaccountably to have
escaped the observation of the president of the Royal Society.
Still, it is something to find on such unexceptionable authority
that there is one verse of Scripture which we may still consider
as worthy of respect, and that humility is to be regarded as a
scientific virtue.

Coming now to the objections raised by Mr. Huxley to the

VOL. XLIV. 21

3 22 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec.,

Scriptural cosmogony, it is impossible to refrain from observ-
ing- that several of them appear to be surprisingly puerile and
trivial. Who could have expected the president of the Royal
Society to fall foul of the time-honored interpretation of period
for day, and to speak as though the substitution had been ex-
pressly devised to reconcile the cosmogony of Holy Writ with
the discoveries of the last fifty years? Why, St. Augustine was
familiar with it; St. Peter was familiar with it; King David was
familiar with it. To say that it is more reverent to presume
that if the Almighty had made any revelation to man he would
have done so in language not inconsistent with the phenomena
of nature as known to science, has a very pretty sound ; but what
is there unreasonable or irreverent in conceiving that a revela-
tion made to man should be made in terms which man could
understand? Would matters have been improved if the sacred
writer had said "a cycle of darkness and a cycle of light, one
aeon " ? Or would the president of the Royal Society, the high-
priest of the interpreters of nature, excommunicate from his fellow-
ship any one who should venture to talk of the phenomena of sun-
set, or of the egress or ingress of Venus in its transit, and declare
that it was a mere evasion to say that any one using those terms
could claim authority as a scientific teacher ? As well might one
say that whoever talks of right ascension and declination must
seriously suppose the stars to climb and to fall off from the eclip-
tic, or that when Sir John Herschel in a magnificent passage de-
scribes the rocking and changing of the orbits of the planets and
their ultimate return after countless ages to their original posi-
tion, and ends his description with the striking words, " the great
bell of eternity will then have tolled one," he was betraying his
untrustworthiness as an authority upon astronomy, because all
these transcendent operations cannot certainly be completed ii
the course of an hour.

Moreover, there is another method by which we may easily
conceive enormous intervals of time to have elapsed in the earlier
periods, while yet only a single return of darkness and'light tool
place in each period. For suppose that the rotation of the earth
about its own axis, instead of being constant as at present, at-
tained its present velocity by degrees of acceleration, just as a
railway train does not start at full speed ; and suppose that the
earth received during each " day," or period of creation, a force
increasing its velocity ten times then on the second day th<
velocity of rotation would be ten times as great as on the first,
and consequently the interval between darkness and the nex
succeeding darkness only one-tenth as long ; on the third day th<

i886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 323

velocity would be ten times as great as on the second, and so
forth. Conversely, therefore, the velocity of rotation ultimately
attained on the seventh day would be ten times as great as on
the sixth, and the sixth day itself would be ten times as long as
the seventh, the fifth day ten times as long as the sixth and one
hundred times as long as the seventh, the fourth day a thousand
times, and the first day one million times, as long as the seventh
that is, as the " day " with which we are familiar. In the same
way we may observe that if we conceive the axis of rotation to
have been originally inclined at a variable angle to the plane of
the orbit, all kinds of cosmic phenomena will result which at
present require immense intervals of time for their explanation.
And this would correspond with the regularity of the seasons
mentioned in Scripture as established after the Deluge. Not, in-
deed, that these suggestions are offered as explanations of the
Mosaic narrative, but simply as illustrations that the language of
Genesis may be difficult to follow, not from its inaccuracy, but
from the truth of its knowledge.

In connection with this point it may be well to note the
strictly astronomical manner in which that great primary con-
dition of the exertion of human intelligence, the measurement
of time, is here described. For what are the means by which
that most difficult problem is effected ? By the sun and moon
primarily, by the stars secondarily. And how are the sun and
moon here described ? As animals, as gods, as different species
of creatures ? Not at all ; but as the greater and lesser of the
principal lights of heaven relatively to the earth, the motion of
which gives to us our measure of time; the stars, as secondary
measures, being parenthetically mentioned also, and every part
being the handiwork of God. And, again, in what manner are
these movements utilized for dividing time to man ? The re-
volution of the earth gives the year, and the rotation of the
earth the day, the inclination of its axis to the plane of its orbit
the seasons, and the conjunction of the earth with the sun and
moon and stars the signs or epochs from which the measure-
ments are dated. The hour is an artificial division having no
basis in celestial mechanism ; and if we now read the Mosaic
account we shall find the hour to be omitted : " And God said,
Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the
day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons,
and for days and for years." Could any astronomer have de-
scribed to an unlettered audience the measurement of time more
clearly or more justly, or could any human being except Profes-
sor Huxley be content to class such a summary along with the

324 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec.,

Egyptian mythology that Hermes, playing at counters with
the moon, won seventy of her lights and made five days out of
them, kept as the birthdays of the gods: that on the first was
born Osiris, and that a voice issued forth with him that " the
Lord of all was entering into light " ; that on the second was
born the elder Horus, on the third Typhon, breaking out of his
own accord, on the fourth Isis in very wet places, and on the fifth
Nephthys or Venus ?

Another threadbare platitude of a similar kind, gravely pro-
pounded by the " science proctor," is that the word rendered
"firmament " by the loose though literary translators of the days
of James, but " extentio " by the more accurate St. Thomas and
"expanse " by the Revisers, must necessarily mean a solid body,
because the waters are said to be divided thereby. If the writer
of the Pentateuch did mean to imply that the firmament was solid,
one would be glad to know what he intended to convey by stating
that fowls fly about in it, unless, indeed, we consider the atmos-
pheric envelope to be a solid, as, with all deference to Mr. Huxley,
we are fully prepared to do. But, apart from this latter point, it is
evident, first, that the sacred text does not say that the waters were
divided by the firmament, but simply that Almighty God divided
the waters that were above the firmament from the waters below
it a very different statement ; and, secondly, even supposing such
an expression had been used, that would in no way of neces-
sity imply solidity. Has Mr. Huxley never heard nay, has he
never used the description of the horizon as dividing the sea
from the sky, or of the equator as the circle which divides the
earth at equal distances from the poles ? Or has he not pro-
gressed so far in elementary astronomy as to have come across
the definition of the first point of Aries, as the point where the
ecliptic cuts the plane of the equinoctial ? Or will he gravely
tell us that navigation, geodesy, and astronomy are all to be re-
garded as myths because they teach that the ecliptic, the equa-
tor, and the horizon are necessarily solid ?

Still more surprising is Mr. Huxley's complaint or lament
over the impossibility of finding any definite point on which to
challenge the believers in Holy Scripture to mortal combat.
He seems to look on the race of reconcilers much as an old Eng-
lish squire might regard a fox which skulks from earth to earth
instead of breaking covert boldly and giving a good run and a
hard death in the open. There must, he says, be some point
which cannot be surrendered without giving up the whole.
That is true enough, although one might think it no bad test of
the truth of the Mosaic account and one which we should be

1 886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 325

curious to apply to those Egyptian and Babylonian cosmogonies
accounted by the professor as on the same rank with the Scrip-
tural narrative that it should be capable of remaining uninjured,
while the false interpretations introduced into its exegesis by the
ignorance or carelessness of commentators are one by one elimi-
nated ; but, however this may be, the point that must not be con-
ceded ought surely to be expressed pretty clearly in the text.
Now, the test devised by Mr. Huxley of a stantis vel cadentis
histories namely, that no new species of any genus came into
existence after the first creative act in regard to that genus is
not only unsupported by any statement contained in the narra-
tive, but it is absolutely opposed to certain expressions contain-
ed in it. When, for instance, the sacred writer speaks of the
herbs yielding seed after their kind, or rather " into their spe-
cies," is it to be maintained that all the trees, herbs, and fruits
suddenly not only grew up but yielded seed for a fresh crop ?
Surely no one can seriously maintain that that could have been
the intention of the writer of the Pentateuch. Far more reason-
able does it seem to say that such an expression gives color to
the doctrine of evolution, and that the seed of the genus was
differentiated into the subsequent variety, " produxerant in
species suas," as the Vulgate has it; a translation which exactly
gives the force of the Hebrew original, le-min.

As to the central idea, which cannot be surrendered without
giving up everything in its entirety, who but Professor Huxley
ever doubted that the primary and central notion involved in the
Mosaic account of the creation is the existence and operation of a
Creator the doctrine that the entire material universe, sun,
earth, and stars, light and darkness, seas, plants, animals, and man,
were one and all the work of Almighty God ? This teaching it is,
and not any imported theory as to the supposed limitation of the
divine energy to instantaneous action, which supplies the point
of resistance somewhat plaintively demanded by Mr. Huxley,
which forms the citadel of Christian belief, that cannot be
evacuated without total surrender. If zoology can show that
matter can exist of itself or can create itself of its own mere im-
pulse, it were idle indeed to reconcile one theory of creation or
another. Nay, if inanimate matter could of its own mere voli-
tion commence to move itself, the Mosaic record would be hard
to understand ; but then we must give over at the same time the
whole teaching of the science of mechanics, which has for its
basis the law of inertia. What, then, is the latest reply given
by its representative upon this momentous question ? It is
silence, says the professor, for we have no evidence one way

326 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec.,

or the other. If that be the case the problem remains un-
touched. But before giving up the question let us seek an an-
swer from an authority that Mr. Huxley cannot well repudi-
ate. It happens that in the eighth volume of the Encyclopedia
Britannica there are two articles on the subject of evolution. To
the second of these, written by Professor Sully, wherein it is stated
that that theory is directly contrary to the doctrine of creation,
Mr. Huxley refers Mr. Gladstone for certain information. It
is a pity that modesty should have prevented him from referring
to the first one also ; for with such exquisite simplicity and lucid-
ity is that deep and difficult subject there set out that to peruse it
gives one a feeling like looking down into the blue depths of the
Lake of Geneva, where the objects lying hundreds of feet below
seem close beneath the surface, or as a child who looks into the
heavens on a frosty night fancies that if he could but get to the top
of a tree he could lay his hand upon the stars. Now, what does
" T. H. H.'' (initials impossible not to identify with those of
Thomas H. Huxley) say in this remarkable article? He tells us,
first, that everything living may be considered not only as com-
ing from a germ, but from a living germ or, in his own language,
not only oinne vivum ex ovo, but omne vivum ex vivo ; and it
follows from this that if we admit the eternity of matter we
must admit also the eternity of life, for either life, must come
from that which existed from eternity or it must be itself eternal.
We arrive, then, at the admitting of necessity the existence of
eternal life which may vivify matter but cannot be subject to it,
for it is of itself eternal. Again, as animals grow and increase
by the absorption of inanimate objects life must be thereby
imparted to those inanimate objects (since the whole organism
lives) ; and this, we conclude, must be effected by a force external
to the matter, otherwise the matter would of itself produce life.
And as life and matter are conceived to be eternal, this force also
must be conceived to have acted from eternity.

Further, he teaches that every living thing is derived from a
particle of matter in which no trace exists of the distinctive char-
acteristics of the adult structure, and that the formation of the
creature takes place, not by simultaneous accretion of all rudi-
ments nor by sudden metamorphosis of the formative substance,
but by successful differentiation of a relatively homogeneous ele-
ment into the parts and structures which are characteristic of the
adult. Since, then, that which devises and creates new forms
adapted for particular purposes must evidently be conscious in ac-
tion and intelligent in purpose, it follows that the eternal force that
gives rise to these differentiations must be both conscious and in-

1 886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 327

telligent ; that is to say, admitting the hypothesis of evolution, we
must admit also the existence of a conscious and intelligent
agent acting from all eternity upon matter and producing the
variety it assumes; but this agent, it is evident, cannot be the
creature itself, for what animal, however highly organized, can
adapt its own structure to its environment, or add one cubit to
its stature, or develop one fresh organ to aid it in its struggle
for existence? Assuming, then, the principles there adopted
as the latest theory of science, we are bound to admit that a
conscious and intelligent agent, living from all eternity outside of
all creation, imparts life at every moment to every living crea-
ture, and never ceases to mould the structure of each in Accord-
ance with the necessities of its existence. Now in what ma-
terial respect, we would ask, does this scientific conception differ
from the doctrine of the Catholic Church that the eternal God is
the Lord and giver of life, and that every breath we draw is a
direct gift from the Creator, the withdrawal of whose power for
a single instant would reduce the whole universe to nothingness?

Of a somewhat more substantial nature, at least at first sight,
are the objections raised to the general order of creation, though
even here they will be found to be directed rather against the
commentator than the original text. For, unfortunately, Mr.
Gladstone, with the proverbial light-heartedness of a new recruit,
adopted in his first paper an entirely fresh nomenclature of his
own, speaking of the air-population, the water-population, and
the land-population, and being all the while in blissful ignorance
that classification is one of the most dangerous pitfalls that the in-
vestigator has to face.

It is hard enough to obtain any definitions which shall not be
either redundant or defective, or more probably exhibit both those
deplorable qualities at once. It is harder still to find two ter-
minologies which will exactly coincide, genus for genus and
species for species. But when three methods of division the
Scriptural, the scientific, and the Gladstonian are all to be
compared together and every detail is to correspond, one need
lot be surprised if here and there certain lacunae not large,
indeed, but not less lamentable should appear. Consequently
it was not difficult for Mr. Huxley to demonstrate that the
icwly-invented definitions were inharmonious with the received
classifications, and in his second article Mr. Gladstone wisely
recurs to the ordinary terms of science. And he ultimately
>arallels the Mosaic narrative with the order given in Professor
Phillips' Manual, as edited by Professor Etheridge, as follows:
i. Azoic Period; 2. Plants; Invertebrates (omitted in Gene-

328 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec ,

sis); 3. Fishes; Reptiles (also omitted); 4. Mammals; 5. Man;
birds being afterwards inserted between reptiles and mam-
mals. And also with that of Professor Prestwick : I. Plants;
2. Fishes; 3. Birds; 4. Mammals; 5. Man.

To this arrangement, however, Professor Huxley takes seve-
ral exceptions, but he is by no means as clear in his arguments as
in his exegesis, and a perusal of his article, repeated several
times, still leaves one in doubt as to the exact points at which he
means to strike. Thus when he says that bats must come in at
stage number three, it is really difficult to understand whether he
is directing his arguments against the Manual, against Mr. Glad-
stone, or against the sacred text.

Another objection raised to the Scriptural order is not a little
hard to understand ; and Mr. Huxley appears to have anticipated
that difficulty would be experienced, for he unkindly hints that
it will be felt by those who know little of the subject in question.
This suggestion is somewhat on the line of the famous clothes in
Hans Andersen's well-known story, which were only perceptible
to persons well suited for the office they held, and comes with
little appropriateness from one claiming for the time to represent
the average opinion of ordinary men. But, true or untrue, it does
not mend matters. For the difficulty lies not so much in under-
standing the particular passage of Scripture, nor at all in under-
standing the zoological facts, but in following Mr. Huxley's de-
ductions from them. There are, he says, two kinds of marine
creatures mollusks, echinoderms, and such like creatures, and
true fishes which are a much later development. Yet he recog-
nizes as scientific the orders given by the Manuals above quoted,
wherein the marine creatures appear but once, and he condemns
as incorrect the account in Genesis where those creatures are
mentioned in two distinct stages. Now, it is difficult to see how
the most perfect attainment of all the knowledge in the world can
suffice to render such a criticism intelligible.

One more instance and we must conclude, partly because the
shafts in Mr. Huxley's quiver are well-nigh spent, and partly be-
cause it is time to finish. What possible meaning, we would ask,
is to be attached to the extraordinary argument that he cannot
accept the order of birds after fishes as a genuine interpreta-
tion of the Pentateuchal narrative, because both of these spe-
cies are mentioned as being created on the same day? Sup-
pose they are so mentioned arid nobody denies it what in the
name of all that is reasonable is there to prevent him from un-
derstanding it to mean that these creatures were created one
after the other in the order indicated ? Is it absolutely necessary

i886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 329

that everything- that is reported to have happened on a particu-
lar day must all have taken place precisely at the same moment?
Does it follow that if a man says that So-and-so had breakfast
on Tuesday and also had dinner on Tuesday he cannot be under-
stood as meaning- that dinner was later than breakfast, because
he records both as having- taken place on the same day? Nor
does the absurdity end here ; for if he cannot accept the state-
ment that the birds were made after the fishes, so, for the same
reason, neither can he accept the passage as stating- that fishes
were created after birds. Thus we are reduced to this amazing
conclusion : that whenever two or more events are recorded as
happening- on the same day, they must have happened at the
same instant ; and if we read in the paper that on a certain day
the learned president of the Royal Society delivered a lecture in
London before a large and delighted audience, and that on the
same day he dined with the queen at Windsor, we cannot accept
the interpretation that he delivered the lecture before he dined
with the queen, or that he dined at Windsor before he lectured
in London, but we are to take as the only possible meaning
that he lectured while he dined, and dined while he lectured,
and that he was talking in London while eating at Windsor.
Had Professor Huxley been dealing with anything but an ar-
gument in favor of Scripture, it is hardly probable that he would
have been guilty of writing that for which all the deference
due to his high station, his vast learning and singular powers
of exposition cannot find any other name than irredeemable non-
sense. Any stick, perhaps, will serve to beat a dog; but if our
leaders fall into such ditches on the broad highway, how are we
to trust them in the far and difficult passes of pre-historic time?

Such is the indictment against the Mosaic account of the
creation drawn up by Professor Huxley, acting, as no one is bet-
ter qualified to act, in the capacity of " proctor " on the part of
science; and the impression left upon the mind after careful con-
sideration of the whole controversy is one of surprise and satis-
faction at the paucity and comparative slight.ness of the charges
preferred, although the latter sentiment is somewhat modified by
the reflection that the more nearly the Scriptural account ap-
proaches to the scientific teaching of to-day, the more, probably,
will it differ from that of the succeeding generation.

Still, premature as the discussion has been for it may be cen-
turies yet before zoology can speak with reasonable certainty on
the subject it has rendered the most important service to Scrip-
ture by bringing out with great distinctness the most learned of
its scientific opponents.

33 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec.,

A FAIR EMIGRANT.

CHAPTER XI.
FURTHER MISLEADINGS.

NEVER had there been more perfect weather for a journey, so
far, but on the sixth day a gale met the good ship in the teeth.
Bawn made this a pretext for staying in her cabin all day, and the
Blue Cap weathered the storm on deck, feeling that he could not
ask her to face it with him, and anathematizing the mischance
that had lost him some of those hours which he had now begun
to count as precious beyond price. Towards evening, when the
wind was still howling and the steamer pitching, he could no
longer control his desire to see her, and went down to look for
her.

" Ask the young lady with the golden hair if she will speak to
me," he said to the stewardess. So strictly had he respected her
intention of keeping her name unknown to him that he had taken
no measures to discover it from any other than herself. He
would learn it only from her own lips.

She came to him at the foot of the stair, looking unusually
pale, but quiet and unalarmed.

" The worst of the storm is over," he said, looking at her with
a glow of gladness in his dark eyes that made her heart beat
faster. " You must be tired to death of that cabin by this time.
Every one has been sick, I suppose, and everybody cross but
yourself. Come up on deck, and I will take care of you while
you get a little air."

"Yes," she said readily. Why should she not go? Her
thoughts had been troubled with him all day, and she found
such thinking a very unwise occupation. Better go with him
and brace herself, if not him, by disenchanting him a little more
than she had yet done. There were now only two days of the
voyage yet to come, and after they were past she should see him
no longer.

He drew her arm within his and piloted her to a spot where
she could sit in safety by slipping her arms under some ropes,
which kept her lashed to her place.

" You have not been frightened ? " he said, in a tone which

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 331

made her suddenly repent of having exchanged the stifling cabin
for the airs, however grateful, of heaven.

" No; I am not easily frightened, I think, and I am not much
afraid of death, perhaps because I can never realize it for myself.
I am so young and strong that I suppose I hardly believe I have
got to die. And just now life seems more alarming to me than
death."

" Why ? "

"I cannot tell you."

" Is it because you fear the shops of Paris may disappoint
you ?"

"The shops?"

" Have you forgotten the shops which contain your heaven? "

" True. Oh ! yes, of course. t There may be things, you see,
in those shops which I may not be rich enough to buy."

" Bawn "

" Do not so call me, please."

" Why ? "

"You said you would not unless I gave you leave."

" And will you not give me leave? "

"No."

" I beseech you to allow me."

" I cannot. It hurts my dignity too much."

" Do you think I am a man who could bear to hurt your
dignity ?"

" I do not think you are ; but, at all events, I will not allow you
to be. Do you think any nice woman would allow a mere fellow-
traveller, the chance acquaintance of a week, to fall into a habit
of calling her by her Christian name ? Because I believe you a
gentleman I have, being alone and in peculiar circumstances,
accepted your kindness "

"I have shown you no kindness; I have simply loved you
from the first moment I looked upon you."

" You must not say so."

11 Why must not I say so ? I am free, independent, able to give
a home, if not a very splendid one, to my wife. Till now I have
not cared to marry because 1 never loved a woman before as I
love you. I have told you no particulars about myself, neither
my name, nor where is my place in the world, nor any other de-
tail which a man lays before a woman whom he asks to share his
lot. I have avoided doing this out of pique at your want of in-
terest in the matter and your persistent silence about yourself."

" That is a silence that must continue."

33 2 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec.,

"Oh ! no. Give me at least a chance of winning- your' love in
time. You do not positively dislike me ? "

" No."

"Nor distrust me?"

"No."

" Then why should you thrust me so terribly away out of
your life?"

"Because I have to go my way alone, and I cannot allow any
one to hinder me."

"Those are hard words coming from so young a woman. Do
you jnean that you have pledged yourself never to marry ? "

" I have not so pledged myself."

" You are not engaged to any other man ? "

" No."

" You have no mother nor father to exercise control over
your actions ? "

" I am quite alone in the world, and as free as air."

" Then let me tell you that you are in need of a protector and
of such a love as I offer you. I believe you are going to seek
your fortune in Paris ; for I have made up my mind that you are
not rich."

" Why ? "

" Do wealth}'- young ladies travel across the sea alone? Good,
noble, and true ones may do so, but the wealthy bring keepers and
care-takers in their train. Then, though your dress is neat as fit,
and more charming and becoming than any other lady's garb that
I see or have seen it is not the apparel of a woman of property."

" I do not like seal-skin ; it makes me too hot. I am too
healthy and vigorous to wear fur."

" You will not admit that you are poor, but it is one of the
things about you that I know without your telling."

" I am not a woman to marry a man merely to get out of a
difficulty."

" God forbid ! I think I should not care for you if you were.
You are, rather, a woman to reject what might be for your hap-
piness from an exaggerated fear of being suspected by yourself
or others of any but the purest motives for your actions."

" I am capable of making up my mind and sticking to it.
And I do not wish to marry."

"Never?"

" I will not say never. I think I hardly seem to believe in my
own future. The present I mean the present of a couple of
years or so is everything to me."

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 333

" And your reasons for all this you absolutely will not tell
me, not even if I were to swear to devote myself to assisting you
in any enterprise you have got on hand ? "

" I spoke of no enterprise."

" No, but all you say implies that you have one. There is
some difficulty before you, and it is your romantic fancy to meet
it single-handed."

"If that is your theory, what becomes of the salons and the
shops? "

" It may be a difficulty that lies among salons and shops.
How can I imagine what it may not be ? Can it be that you
think yourself under obligation to enter some convent?"

11 No ; I fear I am not good enough for that."

" Then what can it be, in which the services of a man might
not be acceptable, if not useful? What reason ought there to
be why you and I should part as utter strangers part, and never
see or hear of each other again?"

" Some of the reasons I cannot tell you, but one may be
enough. You would want to persuade me to marry you ; and
I do not want to marry you or anybody else."

" You could continue to refuse me ; or time might change
your mind."

" It would be exceedingly inconvenient to me if I were to
change my mind."

" You mean that you are afraid of that ? "

" I am a little afraid of it."

'' Upon what grounds, if I may dare to ask ? Do you dis-
trust your own powers of endurance, and dread to be betrayed
into marrying for a motive you consider unworthy, the weak de-
sire to escape from a dilemma ? "

" Not that."

" Are you afraid you could learn to love me ? "

"Yes."

" My God ! And after such a confession you expect me to
give you up ? "

" You will have to give me up," said Bawn sadly.

" O my love! do not speak so hardly. You have admitted
too much."

" I fear I have, and you ought not to have wrung it from me.
You ought to have been satisfied with my earnest statement that
I am doing the only thing that I can do."

" Bawn, you do not know what you are saying. As well say
that two people in the flush of youth and health would be justi-

334 ^ FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec.,

fied in casting- themselves, hand-in-hand, into the sea to drown
together. You would condemn us, with the love and happiness
that are in us, to sudden death at the end of this journey which
has been so fateful for us both. Do you really desire that we
should never meet again in this world ? "

" I do not desire it. But I know that it must be."

"Never? Have you considered all that that word' never'
means? It is not absence for a year or for twenty years ; it is en-
tire blotting out for evermore."

" It may be," said Bawn, "that in years to come we may hap-
pen to meet again."

"And your difficulty may then be cleared away ? "

" It may be so, or, on the contrary, it may have deepened so
terribly that I shall be glad to see that you have married and
made yourself happy in the meantime."

" You are a heartless woman."

" Am I ? It may be well for me if I can prove to myself that
I am."

Silence fell between them. The gale had abated and the sky
had cleared. He could see the expression of her face as she
looked straight before her with a downcast, wistful gaze. There
was such sorrow in her eyes those tender and brave gray
eyes which had seemed to him from the first moment he
had met their glance to be the sweetest in the world as
made his heart ache to deliver her from the mysterious diffi-
culty with which she was so sorely beset. That she had some
great struggle before her he no longer doubted ; that she was in
the hands of people whom she hated and was ashamed of he
feared. He did not for a moment question her own individual
goodness and nobility of purpose, but his very faith in her made
him the more alarmed for her sake. What might not such a girl
undertake if she could only get hold of a motive sufficiently lofty
and unselfish?

That he should lose her out of his life through her fidelity to
some worthless wretch or wretches, in some way bound up with
her fate, drove him wild ; and yet, even as he gazed at her face,
it seemed to grow paler and paler with determination, as, knitting
her soft brows, she pushed away her regrets and strengthened
her resolution to adhere to her own plans.

How, Bawn was asking herself, could she tell this man that
she was the daughter of one who had been branded and banishec
as a murderer? How could she persuade him to share her cer-
tainty that her father had been wrongfully accused ? And even

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 335

were he to prove most improbably generous, and were to accept
her faith and say to her, " Be you henceforth my wife, and
nothing more," could she then forget her father and his life-long
anguish, and utterly relinquish her endeavors to clear his name
in the eyes of the little world that had accused him ?

No, she could not bring herself to say, " I am the daughter
of Arthur Desmond, who lived under a ban for having taken the
life of his friend." And even if she could thus run the risk of
being rejected as the child of a murderer, she would not give up
her scheme for throwing the light of truth upon his memory.

After all, what was this man to her, this acquaintance of less
than a week, in comparison with the father who had for twenty
long years been the only object of her worship? Let him take
his ardent dark eyes, his winning voice, and the passionate ap-
peals and reproaches elsewhere. She could not afford to yield
up her heart to his persuasions.

CHAPTER XII.
LOVERS.

BAWN got up the next morning fully determined that she
would not allow herself to love this lover. Her heart might be
shaken, but her will was firm. She was not going to give up the
prospect for which she had sacrificed so much and struggled
through so many obstacles, at the bidding of a person who last
week was unknown to her. His eyes might grow tender when
gazing at her, his hands be readv and kind in waiting on her, his
companionship pleasant, and his voice like music in her ears, but
she could not change the whole tenor of her life because those
facts had been accidentally made known to her. She should cer-
tainly miss his face at her side, and his strong presence surround-
ing her like a Providence, but none the more was she willing
to bestow on him suddenly the gift of her future. And there
seemed to her no medium course between surrendering entire
fate at once into the hands he was outstretching to her and put-
ting him back into the shadows of the unknown from which he
had so unexpectedly and awkwardly emerged to cross her path.

And now she thought, as she finished dressing, there was only
this one last day throughout which to keep true to her better
1 judgment. To-morrow the captain expected to touch at Queens-
town, and she must give her friend what she feared would be a
painful surprise. She would bid him a short good-by and leave

336 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec.,

him to finish his voyage as though such a person as herself did
not exist in the world.

" People who fall in love so easily," she thought, " can surely
fall out of it again as quickly. By next week, perhaps, he will
be able to complain of me to some sympathizing friend, and in
a month I shall be forgotten as completely as if I never had ap-
peared on his horizon."

Such was Bawn's theory of loving. Love ought not to spring
up like mushrooms in a night, but should have a gradual, reason-
able, exquisitely imperceptible growth, striking deep roots before
making itself obtrusively evident. Her father was the only per-
son she had ever seriously loved, and her love for him had had
neither beginning nor end. How could a mere stranger imagine
that in the course of a week he had learned absolutely to need
her for the rest of his life?

In the meantime the man who called himself Somerled had
passed a wakeful night. While Bawn in her berth summoned up
all her resolution to resist for yet another day, and thus finally,
the fascination which she unwillingly acknowledged he exercised
over her, he lay and remembered but one saying of the woman
who had suddenly risen up in his life and at once widened his
heart and filled it with herself. She had admitted that she feared
to learn to love him, and to his fancy the admission meant all that
his soul desired. A girl who wa afraid to cultivate his acquaint-
ance, lest she should end by loving him, must already, he thought,
almost love him ; and a girl with so soft and young though so
determined a face, having made such an admission, must surely be
capable of being won by perseverance. He feared that he had
shocked her delicacy by speaking to her so suddenly, but he told
himself that the urgency of the circumstances excused him. He
chafed to see how his chances of success were lessened by the
mysterious difficulties of her position, and he set himself serious-
ly to guess what that position and those difficulties might be.
Looking at the case all round and recalling other words of hers
besides those few which it made him so inexpressibly happy
to dwell upon, he summed up all the evidence he could gather
as to her circumstances, and before daylight broke over a foam-
ing sea he thought he had made a tolerably good guess as to her
purpose and the trials she felt herself bound to meet alone. For
some reason which she believed to be compelling she was mak-
ing her way to Paris to endeavor to earn money, not, as he con-
ceived, for herself, but for the sake of some other person or per-
sons. And he thought he had hit the truth when the idea flashed

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 337

into his mind that it might be her intention to become a singer
or an actress.

The idea made him sick. An actress going through training
on a Parisian stage! He could not rest after the suggestion
came to him, and got up and walked the deck, and was so walk-
ing and chafing when Bawn appeared.

He did not know it was the last morning on which he would
see the trim, womanly figure, the fair, oval face under the round
black hat, the little, strongly-shod feet coming to meet him steadi-
ly and gallantly along the windy deck. No presentiment fore-
warned him that by the same hour next day he should be labor-
ing under the sorrow of having lost her out of his life for ever-
more.

At sight of her his mind became suddenly filled with the one
exultant thought that here she was still safely within his reach,
and not to be lost sight of, even at her own most earnest bidding,
unless death should lay hold of her or him and frustrate all his
hopes. He would throw over the urgent business that had
brought him hurrying back across the ocean, and which was
waiting for him in London, to be dealt with at a certain hour.
He would throw anything, everything else to the winds, follow
her to Paris, even (if it must be so) unknown to herself, be in-
formed of her whereabouts and her circumstances, and after
that leave the sequel of his wooing to the happier chances of the
future.

His face was flushed, his dark eyes shining with the force of
his determination to compel happiness, as he came forward with
his morning greetings. She accepted silently and meekly the
support he offered her in her walk, feeling warmed and con-
forted by his presence and protection, while thinking remorse-
fully of the necessary treachery of the morrow.

" Since daylight," he said, " I have been watching for you.
I almost began to fear I had frightened you away, and that you
were going to spend another day among the babies and the sick
ladies."

" I should have been wiser had I done so," said Bawm " I am
not easily enough frightened."

" You would not have been wiser. You are able to take care
of yourself to hold your own against me. When you yield to
my persuasion, to my counsel, you will do it with your eyes open
with the sanction of your own judgment."

-Shall I?"

" I have been wanting to talk to you."

VOL. XLIV. 22

338 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec.,

" You talked so much yesterday that I do not imagine you
can have anything left to say."

" You have no idea of my talking capacity when you say so.
I could talk for a week, if you would only listen to me. But if
deaf and cruel miles were to come between me and your ears,
then I feel that I could almost become dumb for the rest of my
life."

" Almost? That is, till some other young woman, like or un-
like me, should be found willing to listen to you for yet another
week perhaps for months and years."

" Bawn, look at me ! "

"Why should I look at you ? " she ans \vered gravely. "I
know very well what you are like ; and I am greatly in earnest
in saying I would rather you would talk of something else.
After all I said last night you ought not to go on speaking to
me like this."

" And after all I said to you last night you suppose I can talk
to you of nothing but the weather until the moment for parting
with you arrives? "

" It would be better for yourself and kinder to me if you were
to do so."

" You think, then, that I am going to lose you so easily ? "

" I know you will have to lose me. You had better make up
your mind to it, and talk to me for the rest of the time only
about Paris and the shops."

"And the theatres?"

" And the theatres, too, if you like. It would greatly amuse
me to hear something about the theatres."

" You would rather be amused than loved."

" Anything is better than to encourage the continued offering
of what one cannot accept."

" Perhaps you cannot accept what is offered because you have
;a preference for theatres."

" I do not understand you."

" An idea has occurred to me which seems to throw some light
upon your mystery. You are going to Paris, perhaps, to prepare
yourself for the stage."

Bawn blushed crimson, and her change of color did not escape
'her companion's eye. It was caused by vexation that he should
imagine her influenced in rejecting him by what seemed to her
such an ignoble and insufficient reason, but he took it as a sign
that he had hit upon the truth, to her sudden embarrassment and
'Chagrin.

i886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 339

" You are dreaming- of going on the stage. This time I have
guessed aright."

" I will not tell you," said Bawn, now as pale as the foam-
fleck that touched her cheek. Let him, she thought, follow this
false scent if he would. It would lessen the likelihood of their
meeting again.

" Great heaven ! You upon the stage ! "

" What do you find so shocking in the idea? Suppose I am
what you have taken me to be, a poor young woman with her
bread to earn in the world, why should I not go upon the stage?
Have not good and noble women been actresses before now? "

" I am not going to allow it for you."

Her hand trembled on his arm, and she turned her head
away that he might not see the expression of her eyes. She
was unspeakably grateful to him for the words he had just
spoken. Good women, greater women than herself, might
spend their lives upon the stage, but such an existence would,
she admitted, be intolerable to her.

"Pray how do you intend to interfere to prevent me?" she
said after a pause.

" I do not know," he said, with something like a groan. " I
cannot tell how I am going to find you and save you from such
a fate ; but I warn you I will leave no stone unturned in trying
to do it."

Bawn withdrew her hand from his arm.

" You mean that you will follow me persecute me ?"

" Persecute you ? No ! Guard you from yourself perhaps
yes."

" Guard me ! "

"Save you, may be, from the consequences of your own inno-
cent rashness and romantic daring."

Here he had hit home. The romantic daring was truly
hers, and only Heaven could know what the consequences of it
yet might be. As Dr. Ackroyd had warned her of trouble as
the issue of her wilfulness, so now was this other man threaten-
ing her with the dangers of that future to which she was ob-
stinately consigning herself. Yet as she had resisted the lawful
authority of the old friend, so much the more would she refuse
to yield to the masked counsel of the new one. Her father and
his good name and his fair memory were and should be more to
her than the approval of either more than her own happiness,
or her own liberty, or her own ease.

But an overwhelming sense of the responsibility she had

34Q A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec.,

taken upon herself pressed on her suddenly, and made her feel
more ill in body and mind than she had ever felt since first set-
ting out upon this path of her own seeking-, which already she
began to travel with so much pain. Why she should be so shaken
at this moment she could not tell. Dr. Ackroyd was now more
to her than any other person in the world, and yet his represen-
tations had not moved her as the entreaties and reproaches of
this audacious stranger were moving her. She drew her hand
quickly away as he sought to replace it on his arm, and stood
aloof by the side of the vessel, looking silently down to the flow-
ing of the water.

He saw that she suffered, and thought she was giving way
before the urgency and honesty of his desires. She was acknow-
ledging him in the right, and searching for a path by which she
might allow him to approach her. He saw her firmly-closed
hand relax and drop by her side, and that stern knitting of the
soft, white brovvs, which at times gave her the look of an angel
of justice rather than of tenderness, gradually smooth itself away.
Tears gathered under her eyelids.

He drew a step nearer to her.

" What are you thinking of now, Bawn my Bawn?"

" Not yours, nor any other's," she said, shaking her head sadly.
" I belong, I can belong, to no one.''

" Not even in that far-off future which you hinted at once?"

" I ought not to have spoken of any future of rny own. My
future is in bondage to another.'*

He drew a long, hard breath. He felt impatient and sick at
heart.

" Then you have not always told me the truth."

" Always."

" You were engaged to no other man, you preferred no other
man, you had no parents or relations who could control you have
not these statements all been made by you ? Did you not tell me
you were your own mistress, free as air, unfettered by any other
will than your own ? "

" I told you all that, and it was true."

" And yet your future is in bondage to another? "

" I cannot explain these things without telling you of matters
of which I have bound myself not to speak."

" You are a riddle and a mystery, and you have broken my
heart ! " he cried with sudden passion. " I wish to Heaven I had
never seen you ! "

" That is what I have been wishing every day since you first

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. , 341

spoke to me," said Bawn in a low, trembling voice, while she
threw back her head with dismay in her eyes and defiance in her
gesture. " It is what from the first I have wished to make you
feel."

" Good Lord ! do you, then, hate me ?"

" No ; I wish I did."

" O my dear ! do you know what you imply by those
words?"

" I do not know, and I do not want to know."

" I am going to tell you."

" You must not ; you shall not, for I will not hear you ! " cried
Bawn, and with a little wail of pain she dropped her face upon her
hands, leaning over the vessel's side. Then he turned away and
left her, and walked about by himself at the other side of the
ship, gloating over the admission which her words had again
made to him.

He remembered with satisfaction that he had yet some time
before him in which to overcome her resolution to work upon
that growing inclination towards himself which he thought he
saw in her, and which she feared and strove against. Who could
this person or those persons be to whom she was so bound, to
whom the disloyalty that bought her own happiness could be a
crime? It could not be a right or just bondage with so much
mystery attached to it ; for he was now convinced of the exist-
ence of some serious reasons for her silence as to all her circum-
stances, future and past. He was sure that she trusted him
enough to be willing to confide in him, if betrayal of others
were not involved in her confidence. That she was going upon
the stage he hardly doubted now. She had not denied it. Poor,
and anxious to earn money, what so likely as that she, being
young and beautiful, should hope to make a fortune by that ad-
venture ? He was sure that she was clever, ready to believe
she should be able to carry the world before her, and he chafed
with impatience as he thought that the next time he saw her she
might stand behind the footlights and under the eyes of a too
critical or of a delighted crowd.

The bell rang for breakfast, and when he looked up Bawn
had disappeared. When he next saw her she was seated by the
captain's side, as was usual at meal-times, and chatting to him
pleasantly. But her face was unusually pale.

" We are going to have a return of fine weather," said the
captain. " We shall probably be in Queenstown in the morning."

" Do many of your passengers land at Queenstown ? " asked

34 2 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec.,

Somerled, reflecting with satisfaction that Bawn was not one of
the number.

" A good many," said the captain, and Bawn held her breath,
expecting he would say something polite to the effect that he
was sorry that she was one of those to whom he should have to
say adieu on the morrow. But some one addressed him on the
moment, and the opportunity passed.

After breakfast she asked herself if it would not be better
were she to stay in the ladies' quarters for the whole of this long
day, only going on deck for a few minutes in the evening to bid
a final farewell to her friend. But no, she could not see that she
was called upon to act so harshly, now that the very hours of
their friendship were numbered. She would enjoy this one day
of companionship. The future would be long enough for sepa-
ration and silence.

He met her as usual as soon as she appeared, and led her to a
retired seat.

" That young pair only met first when they came on board,
and I am sure they are engaged," said a girl to her mother.

" They seem to differ a good deal while they talk," said her
sister, "and the man often looks disturbed, if not angry."

" She plagues him a good deal, I fancy, though she looks so
sweet and smooth," said the first girl.

"She has some trouble, I think," said their. mother. " I have
seen tears in her eyes when she thought nobody was looking."

" That must be very seldom, for the man is always looking."

" He is a distinguished-looking fellow, and I hope he is not
getting himself into any foolish entanglement," said another lady
sitting by.

" He is old enough to take care of himself. The girl may be
in more danger," said the mother.

" You need not be uneasy about her. She is a young lady
who can carry her point, equal to the management of more than
a flirtation, and able to carry it to a satisfactory conclusion."

" Perhaps all the more to be pitied on that account. If a girl
of that stamp takes her own affairs in her hands too early she
sometimes makes a wreck of her life."

" She seems to be quite her own mistress, at all events, travel-
ling from America all alone. For my part, I am fond of girls who
try to get under somebody's wing," said the other lady, who
meant no unkindness, but who suffered from overmuch conscien-
tiousness, and was accordingly inclined to be censorious.

That Bawn at present felt her own wings strong enough to

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 343

carry her there was no doubt, and it was for this reason that she
had consented to spend her last day on board in company with
the man who had declared her to be so necessary to his life, and
yet whom she was quite resolved never to see again. And in
the meantime the man, resting on the admissions she had already
made him, ha*d begun to hope in earnest, and relied on the many
hours that were yet before them to break down at last the bar-
riers she had built up between their future lives.

" Bawn," he said, " I want to say several things to you." He
paused, and she did not check him for calling her by her Chris-
tian name, though he gave her time to do so. He thought this
a sign of relenting, but in reality she was only thinking that he
might call her what he pleased to-day. The wind was carrying
the sound away from her ears even as it was spoken, and would
never return again bearing his voice. Once she was buried in
the mountains, this man, who led a busy life out in the world, a
dweller in London, a frequenter of Paris, would certainly never
stumble upon the paths of her retirement.

" I have been thinking deeply all night about the mystery that
surrounds you."

" How greatly you exaggerate ! Surely a little reticence need
not be magnified into mystery."

" I do not think I exaggerate. I believe your trust in me,
which you have avowed, would have overcome your reticence
before now if something more than mere personal reserve were
not included in your silence."

"What, then, do you think of me?''

"That you are cruelly bound to some other person or persons,
and that generosity to them, to him, or to her, whom you believe
to have the prior claim upon you, is the cause of your reticence.
I am sure that loyalty to some one has sealed your lips and
fettered your movements."

"Should I not be unworthy your regard did I forget such
prior claims granted that they exist?"

" Bawn, give up this lonely enterprise."

She started visibly, and looked at him with wide-open eyes.
The words struck her like a blow, and it was some moments be-
fore she could reassure herself with the remembrance that he
knew nothing of her intentions and alluded to a fancied scheme
which had originated in his own brain. Her eyes fell, and she
was silent. Neither did he speak, being occupied in adding this
look which he had surprised from her to the other scraps of evi-
dence he had gathered as to her lot.

344 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec.,

" I cannot give it up," she said at last, feeling a certain relief
in talking of her own affairs, under cover of a misunderstanding,
with this friend of to-day, who yesterday was not, and to-morrow
would not be. " I am bound by loyalty, by love, by pity, by the
energy and fidelity of my own character. My motive is strong
enough and sound enough to bear me through what I have un-
dertaken. It is .an older acquaintance than you. God grant it
may prove as good a friend ! "

" Believe me, it will not," he urged, loqking at her expectant-
ly, as if he thought the longed-for confidence was coming at last.
" Happiness is not to be looked for from it, comfort it will have
none, difficulty and disappointment will follow persistently in its
train."

"Ah, you evil prophet! " she cried, with something between
a laugh and a sob. " It may be that you are right," she added.
" My enterprise is, however, my life ; and with it my life shall be
overthrown."

A red spot burnt on her cheek, and the look on her face smote
him with remorse.

" I would not forecast evil for you," he said, " even if you per-
sist in putting me out of your future. No matter to what shadows
you may have devoted yourself, there will still be an escape for
you somewhere into the light."

" I shall not be easily crushed, I can tell you. So long as the
sun shines and the breeze blows there will always be a certain
vigor and gladness in my veins," she answered, smiling one of
her sunniest smiles upon him.

" It is getting cold, I think," he said, as a chill from the heart
ran through his stalwart frame. It was hardly easier to him to
picture her in a future of sunshine which he could never share
than to imagine her failing away from all the promises of her
young life for need of the protection that he could give her.

" I think it is turning cold," he said abruptly. " Have you
any objection to walk a little ? "

CHAPTER XIII.
TREACHERY.

DURING all the rest of that day Somerled exerted himself to
amuse and entertain his companion. That sob in her voice, that
flush under her eyes, when he had predicted evil for her, had
frightened him, and he sought to banish unhappy recollections.

1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 345

He was a man who hitherto had not needed to make much effort
in order to be beloved. Now that he was deliberately and ear-
nestly trying to be lovable, he felt some hope that he might not
ultimately fail. .

Assuming boldly that they were to meet again some day in
Paris, he chatted pleasantly of the delightful hours they might
spend together there. They would go to the old churches in the
mornings and to the theatres in the evenings ; in the day-time ex-
plore the quaint old quarters so full of interest. How the bells
on the horses' necks would ring, and how the animals' hoofs would
click on the asphalt pavement ! What visits they would pay to the
shops, the picture-galleries, the old museums and palaces! Bawn
laughed and asked a hundred questions, and as the day went past
it seemed as if they had been riding and driving, seeing sights
and making purchases together, instead of walking up and down
the deck of a steamer all the time or sitting upon two camp-stools
facing each other. By evening it seemed to her as if she must
have spent a week in Paris, and she could hardly persuade her-
self she had never been there. This day seemed to have added a
year to their acquaintance, so much pleasure, so many experiences
had they shared between them.

It was not until the dusk began to fall that Somerled ceased
talking and allowed her to find herself again in the steamer, with
the waves running beside them, and another day of their com-
panionship fled, bringing them so much the nearer to their final
separation. Of how near it had actually brought them he did not
dream.

It was an unusually clear, starry night, every one on deck and
in the highest spirits. Our two friends sat in a quiet corner
facing the breeze. Bawn's hat had fallen back on her shoulders,
and her face looked pale and grave under a cloud of ruffled
golden hair not the same eyes and mouth that had been laughing
so gaily all day. She was asking herself whether the moment had
come for telling him that they must part to-morrow morning.

" You are looking now," he said, " like that statue of Diana in
the Louvre. All this day you have had quite a different face.
But now you laugh and dimple up, the likeness to the Diana is
gone."

" I have always been so very much alive I cannot imagine
myself like a statue."

" Bawn, at what door am I to knock when I go say a fort-
night hence to look for you in Paris ? "

" At no door," said Bawn, all the laughter and dimples gone.

34 6 ^ FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec.,

" Then I am to give up my business and accompany you to
Paris now ? "

" Is that the alternative ? "

" I think it is. Look at the matter as I will, I can come to no
other conclusion."

She shook her head.

" It simply comes to this : I cannot make up my mind to lose
you out of my life."

" A week ago you had never heard of me. A fortnight hence
your business will fill your mind and I shall be forgotten."

" You do not think so. Your heart must tell you the reverse.
A week has done for me what the rest of the years of my life
cannot undo."

" What can I say to you that I have not already said ? "

" Half a dozen words the number of a door, the name of a
street, the name of a person, all of which you have kept carefully
locked up behind your lips."

Bawn turned pale. " If you knew all I could tell you, you
would turn your back upon me at once and go your way. But
I will not allow you so to reject me. It costs me a great deal to
say this, and I had not meant to say it. I had, and have, good
reasons and to spare to give you without this one ; but perhaps
it will satisfy you more than all the rest."

" It does not satisfy me, simply because I cannot accept what
you have said as the truth. I must judge of your obstacle with
my masculine brain before allowing it to stand. I can imagine
no barrier between you and me except such as cannot possibly
exist."

" I assure you again that if you knew my story you would
part with me willingly. I would spare you a great deal of pain.
More I cannot say."

" Then I repeat that I will not be frightened away by something
of which I know not the form nor the meaning a nursery bogie
mooing in a dark corner. I refuse to believe that an obstacle is
insurmountable unless I have touched and examined it and mea-
sured my strength with it. Bawn, listen to me once for all. I
am a man who does not make up his mind on a subject without
having thought it out. I have made up my mind about you.
My judgment approved of you even before my heart desired
you. You cannot shake my faith in yourself, and nothing that
is not yourself, nothing that does not destroy my belief in you,
can influence me to withdraw the claim that I have laid upon
you. In addition to this I may say that I am a man who desires

.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 347

only a few things in this world, but what I want I want quickly
that is, I know very soon when an object has become necessary
to my existence. Yours are the first eyes of woman that ever
assured me their light was necessary to my life. Because I am
threatened with some mysterious shadow behind your back shall
I weakly consent to extinguish such a light

He broke off abruptly, and Bawn was silent.

" Unless," he went on, " you tell me that you hate me, that
under no circumstances could you think of being my wife, I will
exert every faculty I possess to make your future one with mine/'

She wrung her hands together, and still said nothing.

"Bawn, you do not tell me that you hate me."

" I cannot tell you that, for it would not be true."

" Then you are going to tell me where we may meet? "

" No."

" I will not ask you to betray any one. I will not intrude on
your privacy or seek to alter your plans. Only let me know
where and at what time I may see or even hear from you. The
moment may come when you will be glad to call on me for
help."

He took out his pocket-book. " My address is written here
two addresses, in fact, one of which will find me at my club in
London and the other at my home. I will give them to you
in exchange for a couple of words from you a number and a
street in Paris."

Bawn suddenly felt all her resolution giving way, and a desire
to have that leaf from his pocket-book take possession of her.
But her will was not yet overcome. She clung on to her pre-
conceived intention of keeping her own counsel, even while at the
moment she could see the force of none of her reasons for so
doing.

" How do you know," she said lightly, " that I shall be in
Paris at all ? It is as likely that I shall go to London or Vienna."

Her words and tone jarred upon her own overwrought feel-
ing as she spoke, and nervousness made them seem even more
heartless than they were. They had the effect she intended them
to have, that of startling her companion and breaking up the dan-
gerous earnestness and persuasiveness of his mood.

He flushed as if he had been struck. *' Ah ! " he said, " I have
misunderstood you, after all. You are a heartless coquette, and
your reticence is a mere trick to torment me."

" Why did you not perceive that before ?" said she. " I have
not tried to impress you with a high opinion of my character."

348 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec.,

" No, you have not tried, but you did it without trying. The
fault was in myself. During the past few days I have forgotten
that some time ago I found you an empty-headed and disappoint-
ing woman. The idea returns to me "

" Perhaps in time to save you."

" As you say, perhaps in time to save me."

" If so, I shall rejoice to have freed you from delusion. I shall
have done you one good turn, at least, before we part," said Bawn,
smiling, though with straitened lips.

" Doubtless you know how to rejoice over the follies of men
who are deceived by the beautiful mask that nature has given to
your ungenerous soul ! " he cried angrily. " I

A little gasp from Bawn checked the rush of his words. A
bolt had fallen suddenly on her heart, her head. She threw out
her hands blindly and fell stiffly back in her seat.

" Good God ! she has swooned," he exclaimed in amazement
and dismay. He laid her flat upon the bench and flew for an old
lady who had shown her some kindness before.

" I thought she would be ill before all was over," said the old
lady, bathing her forehead and chafing her hands. " Very few es-
cape. It is nicer to be ill at first and enjoy yourself afterwards.
There, she is better. She must get down-stairs at once."

" Will you lean upon my arm ?" said Somerled penitently.

" Yes," she said. And together they made their way below.

She turned to him at the cabin-door and put her hand in his.

" After this," she said, " you will promise to think no further
ill of me?"

He answered by silently raising her fingers to his lips.

" Never any more ? "

"Never."

14 Thank you, my good friend. Good-night."

As Bawn slipped into her berth and laid her head on her pil-
low she told herself that the struggle was over, that this startling
episode in her life was finally closed. But the man, who returned
to the deck and paced there under the dark heavens till the small
hours of the morning, told the wind and the stars jubilantly that
this gold-haired, grave-eyed, sweet-mouthed woman was his own,
that she loved him in spite of the shackles that bound her and
through the cloud that hung around her, and that, with youth
and love on his side, he would baffle the whole world to make
her queen of his heart and of his home.

The stars paled, the breeze grew colder, the dawn broke
and showed the green coast of Ireland lying between sky and

1 8 86.] IN THE SOUDAN. 349

sea. The passengers were all asleep ; no one on deck was much
excited by the sight of the gray and green, hazy shore except a
home-sick sailor-lad who was hoping soon to feel his mother's
arms about his sunburnt neck. The man Somerled had flung
himself on his berth an hour before, and was sound asleep in the
expectation of a happier morrow than had ever yet dawned for
him. The stopping of the steamer did not wake him, neither did
Bawn's light feet as she passed up the stairs and crossed the
deck, selected her luggage from the pile that had been hoisted
from the hold, and inquired at what hour the earliest train would
leave Queenstown for Dublin. As she walked about, waiting for
the necessary arrangements to be made before she could touch
land, her eyes turned anxiously towards the stair, as she hoped
or feared, she scarce knew which, to see the well-known dark
head appear above the rail. Surely the noise, the tramping
overhead, the shouting and hauling, would awake him and he
would come on deck to see what was going on. If he were to
come to her at this last moment what foolish thing might she not
possibly say or do ? Never before had she found herself so near
the undoing in a moment of all that her deliberate judgment had
accomplished with so much forethought and pains.

A few words of thanks to the captain and of good wishes from
him, a vain effort to frame a kindly message of farewell to be de-
livered by him to her friend, and then, with the unspoken words
still choking her, Bawn was hurried along the gangway and into
her cab. She arrived at the railway-station just in time to catch
the earliest train, and was soon flying with the birds away across
Irish pastures.

TO BE CONTINUED.

IN THE SOUDAN.

WHAT news from the south from the great Dark Land,

Lit but by flash of gun,
Where tardy England came too late

To save her noblest son ?

Oh ! that bitter time is all forgot,

And nothing remains but pride ;
For English valor and English fame

Burned bright when Gordon died.

350 IN THE SOUDAN. [Dec.,

But what of the priests who are still fast bound

'Mid the myriad heathen hordes ?
Has their path to freedom yet been found,

Cut out by Christian swords ?

And what of the delicate women who went

To teach God's little ones,
With hearts as heroic as his who died

Ere roared the rescue's guns ?

They went not forth in the name of the queen,

No nation's praise was theirs :
Their silent lives were the gifts they gave,

Their only weapons prayers.

The veering fancy of the changeful time

No longer throbs to that proud tale of glory ;

Glad to forget a height we may not climb,
To read on smoother ways a softer story.

But God's great angels still keep watch and ward,

And turn to joy the long captivity,
When one by one the glory of the Lord

Is theirs, as one by one the captives die.

And on the hot, dead sand falls the dead seed,
But not to dwell in death ; for it shall quicken,

Till from the sowing of these lives that bleed

Some time and soon shall the white harvest thicken.

O ye who heard the Macedonian cry

For faith and help, as in the dream of Paul,

And with your life's whole service made reply,
Unmarked of worldlings and unpraised of all :

Great is the guerdon " To these little ones
What ye have done, that have ye done to Me."

Long was the toil and hard, but ye have won
With those hard hours a blest Eternity !

1 886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 351

SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS.*

SECOND SERIES.
No. I.

THE NEBULAR THEORY THE HYPOTHESIS OF LAPLACE RECTIFIED
NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS OF M. FAYE NEBULAR THEORY IN ITS
RELATION TO NATURAL THEOLOGY.

ONE series of articles on certain important Scriptural ques-
tions was published in THE CATHOLIC WORLD between the
months of November, 1884, an d February, 1885. The writer had
no intention of continuing- the discussion of the topics treated in
these articles any further when the fourth and last article was
published. But, since that time, the perusal of the three works
whose titles are given below has suggested the idea of the pre-

?nt series, with a view to supplement and complete, in respect
:o a few topics, the exposition partially made in the first series.

The first of these works embraces in its scope the whole do-
main of truth in respect to which the discussion concerning the
several relations and claims of faith and science arises. Its title
sufficiently shows what is the final object of its author. The

r ork which is put in the third place treats of one special topic

unbraced in the general scope of the first, and its author aims at
the same object at which the aim of the author of the first-named
work is directed. Both these writers are ecclesiastics, and have
in view the clearing away of the mist hanging over the topics of
which they treat and obscuring the connection between that

r hich is rationally concluded from scientific principles and that
ch is believed on the authority of revelation in regard to the
same.

The work mentioned in the second place is purely of a scien-
tific and philosophical character, free from any such ulterior pur-
pose as has just been indicated in respect to the two other works
we have mentioned. M. de Saint-Projet refers to it, however,

ind cites from it, in terms of great praise, as a work which is

* Apologie Scientifique de la Foi Chrdtienne. Par Le Chanoine F. Duilhe de Saint-Projet,
uireat de 1' Academic Francaise, etc. Sec. Ed. Paris : V. Palme. 1885.

Sur POrigine du Monde : Theories Cosmogoniques des Anciens et des Modernes. Par H.
Faye, de 1'Institut. Sec. Ed. Paris : Gauthier-Villars. 1885.

Le Dtluge Biblique devant la Fot, rcriture et la Science. Par Al. Motais, Pretre de
POratoire de Rennes, Prof. d'Ecr. S. et d'Hebreu au Chan. Hon. Paris : Berche' et Tralles.
1885.

352 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec.,

available for his own purpose. He also mentions with approba-
tion the work of M. Motais, who, in his turn, cites in the same
manner passages from the Apologie Scientifique. There is, there-
fore, a certain correspondence between these three works which
justifies our placing- them together as furnishing in common a
basis for remarks bearing on the matter we have proposed for
discussion. The reason of this will appear as we proceed further,
beginning from the scientific theory of M. Faye on the origin of
the world.

M. Faye holds a place among the living astronomers of the
first rank. His work, Sur V Origine du Monde, has excited much
attention and received high commendation in Europe. It is not
only exactly scientific in its method and substance, but also lite-
rary and attractive in its style. The exposition of theories in
cosmogony advanced by the Greek philosophers is clear, and,
though succinct, sufficiently ample to give a correct view of the
fanciful systems which preceded the one now universally re-
ceived. The most interesting chapter of this portion of the book
is the one which shows the heliocentric theory taught to a select
coterie of disciples and handed down under a discipline of the se-
cret, by Pythagoras; who anticipated in this marvellous species
of scientific prophecy, by many centuries, the discoveries of Co-
pernicus. About one-third part of the work is taken up with
considering the theories of the ancients. The author next pro-
ceeds to explain the ideas of modern philosophers respecting cos-
mogony, and specially of Descartes, Newton, Kant, and Laplace,
which brings him to about the middle of his volume. In the lat-
ter half there is an exposition of the most recent astronomy. In
this portion of his work the main thesis, to which all the fore-
going is chiefly an introduction and the remainder an accompa-
niment, is an original theory of M. Faye, which is a rectification
of the nebular hypothesis, proposed by him as a substitute for
Laplace's famous and, until recently, generally-received theory.
The author begins the " Avertissement " at the head of his work
by saying :

" The celebrated cosmogonic hypothesis of Laplace is in complete con-
tradiction with the actual state of science and the recent discoveries of
astronomers. It needs to be replaced by another hypothesis."

M. Faye made the exposition of his new hypothesis for the first
time at the Sorbonne, March 15, 1884, and published the first edi-
tion of his Origine du Monde during the same year. We will first
attempt a presentation of the theory in a purely scientific view,

i886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 353

reserving- the question of its relation to faith and the Scripture
until this has been finished.

The term "world" in this exposition is used to denote a
single body, or a system of bodies united by a bond of mutual
attraction, belonging to the entire collection of worlds visible by
the eye alone or as aided by the telescope. The term " universe"
denotes this entire collection. Our solar system is one of these
worlds. The nebular theory embraces all the worlds of the uni-
verse, but is particularly developed in respect to our world.
This theory in general supposes an initial chaos of extremely
rare nebulous matter diffused through space and finally becoming
divided into a multitude of separate masses, the whole and all
the parts being subject to the law of gravitation, and acted on by
whatever other force or forces, scientifically undetermined or un-
determinable, must be assumed as being necessary to impart a
double simultaneous movement of translation and rotation. As
the result of these movements the genesis of worlds is effected
through successive condensations and concentrations of the pri-
mordial nebulous matter. Atoms are grouped in different parts
of immensity, each group a nucleus of further increase; the
spherical form of these masses of condensing matters being a con-
sequence of a well-known law, and their movements of rotation
on their axes, and translation in space, being regulated by the
laws of those initial forces which have stirred them out of inertia
into activity in respect to their directions and velocities. In
this process rotating rings are formed, which break up into sepa-
rate spherical bodies; and these, in the long lapse of time, be-
come, in the instance of our system, a central sun with the
planets, satellites, etc., which constitute our world. This is, in a
general sense, the nebular theory, first suggested by Descartes,
favored by Newton, more distinctly proposed by Kant, and de-
veloped into a precise and scientifically-constructed hypothesis
by Laplace, who is commonly referred to as its author, and who
was confident that all future discoveries would confirm and finally
establish its correctness. We have seen, however, that these
subsequent discoveries have contradicted Laplace's expectation,
that his theory has for some time been generally called in< ques-
tion, and that M. Faye has declared it to be altogether untenable.
Some have gone so far as to assert that the nebular theory has
been completely exploded. This is a hasty and inexact state-
ment. M. de Saint- Projet considers the nebular hypothesis in a
general sense as explained above, apart from the detailed exposi-
tion of Laplace and others, to be one which remains absolutely
VOL. XLIV. 23

354 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec.,

intact. He says : " This grand conception, we have said, be-
comes continually more and more probable ; we might have said
that it has been demonstrated, that it ought to be classed among
scientific certitudes " (p. 142).

Let us now examine more closely the special theory of La-
place in comparison with the facts discovered since his time which
run counter to it, and then look into the way in which M. Faye
has reconstructed the nebular hypothesis with certain modifica-
tions and rectifications. The fundamental idea and principle of
genesis remain the same. The rectifications concern only the
order and mode of formation of the stars composing our solar
system.

Tn Laplace's theory the sun was first formed by the concen-
tration and condensation of the diffused nebulous matter, which
in its central portion became a more dense rotating globe sur-
rounded by a rarer vaporous atmosphere revolving around
it in concentric rings, which were thrown off and abandoned
successively by its increasing velocity of rotation, and which
broke up into planets, some of these by the same process throw-
ing off their satellites. Such a process, by which the planets
were all derived from the sun, must necessarily produce rota-
tions of planets and revolutions of satellites in the same direction,
from one end to the other of the solar system. In reality these
movements are direct in the first half of the solar system, i.e.,
from Mercury to Saturn inclusively, but a fact unknown to La-
place retrograde from Uranus to Neptune. Those who are
north of the equator look southward in turning toward the equa-
tor, which places the west on the right hand and the east on the
$eft. The revolution of the earth and other bodies from west to
east is therefore regarded as a movement from right to left, and
direct ; the opposite movement is from left to right, and retro-
grade. Now, Kant and Laplace knew of no rotations of bodies
on their axes, or revolutions in their orbits, within the solar sys-
tem, except direct ones. The movements of the satellites of
Uranus had not been calculated and were supposed to be direct.
Neptune had not been discovered. The comets, which have
such eccentric orbits some moving in them in a retrograde direc-
tion were not supposed to belong to the solar system. It was
inferred, therefore, 9 that all planets and satellites, as well those
which might be newly discovered as those which were already
known, must have their rotations and revolutions in the same di-
rection with the rotation of the sun i.e., direct, or from right to
jleft, by reason of a law pervading the entire solar system.

i886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 355

But when it was discovered that the satellites of Uranus re-
volve in orbits which deviate from this supposed law ; when
Neptune was discovered with a satellite revolving- in a retrograde
direction ; when it was found that the comets in their most re-
mote aphelia are still carried along by the sun in its rapid move-
ment at the rate of four or five miles a second through space
toward a star in the constellation Hercules, and therefore belong
to his system the theory of Laplace was found to be deficient
and to need rectification by means of a more complete induction
from all the facts which are now known in astronomy.

M. Faye's modification of the nebular theory is briefly this:
The opposite directions of different bodies in the solar system
contradict the hypothesis of their common derivation from the
sun. The planets and satellites which move in the direction of
the sun's rotation were formed before the sun, when the atoms of
cosmical dust had a velocity proportioned to their distance from
the centre of the nebulous sphere. Those which have a retrograde
movement were formed after the sun, whose acquired, increase of
attractive power was then sufficient to invert the order of their
linear velocities. This inversion was completely effected in the
case of the world of Neptune, while that of Uranus marks the
period of transition from the first to the second mode of forma-
tion. Moreover, M. Faye considers that it is necessary to revert
in a certain sense to Descartes' theory of vortices in order to ac-
count for the inauguration of the process of cosmogony which
has resulted in the formation of the solar system. The old no-
tion of a primitive state of incandescence of the chaotic cosmical
matter having become obsolete through the prevalence of the
thermo-dynamic theory, it is by this last theory that M. Faye ex-
plains the formation of hot bodies like our sun.

This statement will not be understood by any reader who is
not already well informed on the subject. But we hope to make
it plain enough to be easily understood by some further expla-
nation.

Let us suppose that the sun was first formed, that it threw off
rings, that these rings broke up into planets, and that these again
threw off their satellites in a similar manner. Kant supposed
that the sun, turning round on its axis with a direct rotation, must
have imparted a movement both of rotation and of revolution to
all the planets and satellites which was likewise direct. That is to
say, that there was one cause and one law producing and regulat-
ing both the movements of rotation and of revolution, and that
these must all be in the direction of the sun's rotation. Faye

356 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec.,

points out a capital mistake in this supposition viz., a confusion of
two orders of facts absolutely different, one of which is the direc-
tion of the planetary movements around the sun, the other the re-
volutions of the satellites around their planets. It is true that the
planets must revolve around the sun in the direction of its rota-
tion on its axis, and that the satellite must revolve around its
planet in the direction of the planet's rotation on its own axis.
But the rotation of the sun on its axis does not command a
rotation of the planet in the same direction, and consequently
not a revolution of the satellite in this direction around its planet.
The interior movements of the secondary systems are not deter-
mined a priori by the movements of the entire system, but by the
nature of the interior forces, of which the direction of the move-
ments of the entire system is independent.

Laplace as well as Kant fell into the mistake of confounding
these two orders of facts. But he did not, like Kant, overlook
one great objection to his theory : viz., that according to his sys-
tem all the planets ought to rotate, and all the satellites to revolve,
from left to right i.e., in a retrograde direction. The reason of
this is that, in order to produce a direct rotation, the velocities of
the rings thrown off ought to increase from their inner to their
outer border, whereas they actually decrease in proportion to the
distance. Hence something must intervene which inverts the
order by retarding the inner and accelerating the outer veloci-
ties. Laplace sought for this reason of inversion partly in the
friction of the molecules, and partly in the contraction of the ring
by cooling. But Faye rejects this explanation, because it sup-
poses the nebulous ring to be animated by a movement of rota-
tion, whereas its movement is a planetary circulation. In the
case of a rotating atmosphere, like that which surrounds our
globe, the various layers press on each other by virtue of the
predominance of gravitation over the centrifugal force. Let the
rotation of the central globe become accelerated, the lower layers
of atmosphere will receive by contact the same increase of velocity
and communicate it by degrees to the others, until the uppermost
layer will rotate at the same rate with the lowest, the whole
moving together, as if it were a solid, around the central globe.
Also, if the central mass contract by cooling, the layers approach
each other on account of their pressing upon one another through
the force of gravitation, which causes a reciprocal modification
of their several velocities.

Faje denies the parallelism between a cosmic ring with a
planetary circulation and an atmosphere rotating with a globe.

i886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 357

The concentric layers of a nebulous ring, he says, will not press
upon one another, because the gravitation of each will be exactly
compensated by the centrifugal force. The ring in its original
state will never undergo that inversion of velocities of which La-
place speaks. As a proof of this the ring of Saturn is referred
to, which circulates now as it has done for millions of years.
Faye concludes, therefore, that the sole fact that a planet rotates
from right to left proves that it does not owe its origin to a ring
derived from the sun. If Laplace's theory were correct, we
would see the stars rise in the west and set in the east.

Moreover, this theory excludes the comets from the solar
system.

Besides, it requires that any satellite, however near its planet,
should take a longer time to revolve around it than the planet
takes to rotate on its axis. But Phobos, one of the satellites of
Mars, revolves around this planet three times while the planet
makes one rotation.

Let us see now how M. Faye makes an ideal construction of
our world, in accordance with the present state of science, by a
modified and rectified nebular theory.

To begin with, we must have a vast nebula, of a spherical
form, so far isolated in space as to be free and independent in its
interior movements. This nebula must be animated by an initial
and rapid movement of linear translation in space. It cannot be,
like the great nebulosity of Orion, merely gaseous and there-
fore incapable of being subject to stellar transformation, but must
have a chemical constitution, composed of various elements, sus-
ceptible of receiving the forms of solid substances.

Next, the movements of the nebulous mass must be accounted
for. The force of gravitation will not suffice. For this attrac-
tion, of itself, would draw all the particles of the mass together
into one condensed, motionless sphere. Our own particular
nebula, together with the whole multitude of similar masses from
which the other worlds have been formed all these are supposed
to have made up originally one universal nebula, from which
they have become separated. This universal nebula, if it had
been without interior movements originally impressed upon it,
and animated solely by the force of the attraction of gravitation,
would have coalesced and become consolidated into one univer-
sal globe, without rotation or linear translation in space.

M. Faye develops quite at length his theory of vortices bor-
rowed from Descartes gyratory movements in different parts of
the mass, similar to those of whirlwinds in the air and whirlpools

358 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec.,

in the water. We find that want of space forbids anything more
than the most succinct statement of this part of his theory. Briefly,
our own nebulous mass must have brought with it at its begin-
ning of separate existence interior impulses sufficient to produce
rotation, circulation, translation in space, and to regulate these
movements.

If the sun had been first formed, as Laplace supposed, the ve-
locity of linear movement in the rings would have diminished in
proportion to their distance from the centre, producing retro-
grade movements of rotation. The rings having been actually
formed long before the complete condensation of the central star,
they revolved with a velocity which increased in proportion to
their distance from the centre, under the influence of the centri-
fugal force. This is the cause of the direct rotation of the plan-
ets nearest the sun and earliest formed viz., Mercury, Venus,
Earth, Mars, Jupiter, the asteroids, and Saturn. Meanwhile the
sun continued to increase, its attraction became more energetic
and inverted the order of linear velocities in those rings which
were the last to break up and from which the worlds of Uranus
and Neptune were formed. This last planet with its satellite
thus received a retrograde direction, while the world of Uranus,
in which the satellites revolve in a direction nearly perpendicular
to the plane of the planet's orbit, seems to mark a period of
transition from one mode of formation to the other.

We must reluctantly omit all mention of the formation of
comets and give all our attention now to the sun. The general
idea of M. Faye's theory is, as we have seen, that all the bodies
in the solar system except the sun are derived from some special
concentrations of parts of the common nebular mass, produced by
particular vortices in which these portions were involved and by
which they were controlled, the influence from the centre being
at first feeble, but gradually increasing towards its final, domi-
nating power, which at present gives stability to the whole sys-
tem, radiating light and heat through all its bounds, keeping
planets and comets alike to their orbits, and sweeping the entire
cortege of its attendant spheres in its company with a rapid move-
ment through space.

The sun is supposed to have begun with some nucleus as the
centre of the general gravitation of the nebulous mass around it.
By its dominant attractive force it has drawn to itself and concen-
trated into its vast globe all that material which we may call the
loose cosmic dust of the system i.e., all which the planets and

i886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 359

comets have not appropriated. This amounts, in fact, to fifths
of the whole mass.

The principal and most interesting point about the sun's con-
stitution is the way in which it obtained, in which it keeps up,
and in which it radiates its heat and light, especially so far as our
planet is concerned.

There are only three ways in which the heat of the sun has
been supposed to be generated. One is that of chemical combus-
tion. This supposition is inadmissible. For, under the most favor-
able conditions which can be imagined, this great stove and lamp
in one would consume all available fuel in two thousand years.
The second supposition is that of the friction of a ceaseless rain
of meteors upon the surface of the sun. This is liable to the
objection, seemingly unanswerable, that the increase of the sun's
mass by the falling into it of these foreign bodies would disturb
the equilibrium of the solar system. There remains only the
third hypothesis viz., that the sun is a vast thermo-dynamic ma-
chine, a globe made intensely incandescent by the very process
of its formation, by the concentration and condensation of the gas-
eous nebula which rushed together from its remotest bounds and
stored up dynamite enough in the body of the sun to last for mil-
lions of years. Such a supply is not, however, unlimited. A
sun, by radiating away its heat and light, is on the way to become
cold and dark. Stars, at the maximum of heat and brightness,
are white or bluish white. After a certain amount of radiation
has taken place they become yellow, then red, and finally they
become extinct as suns a catastrophe which seems to have befallen
several of the fixed stars already. Our sun has already faded
into the class of yellow stars, and astronomers think it probable
that it has advanced considerably on the way towards ultimate
extinction. Nevertheless there are no scientific data, from the
human, historic period, which indicate any observable diminution
in the heat and light radiated from the sun upon the earth.

M. Faye regards the tertiary period of our earth as the epoch
of the highest grade of incandescence in the sun, which began
to relent and diminish at the beginning of the quaternary period.
The length of the whole period of incandescence, according to
his calculations, is 15,000,000 of years. Several it is impossible
to say precisely how many of these millions of years have already
passed. It would seem that the constant condensation and cool-
ing of the sun ought to show itself in a diminished amount of heat
and light radiated upon the earth, even during the few thousand
years of human history. M. Faye has an ingenious hypothesis to

360 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec.,

account for the fact that the radiation keeps up to an unvarying
standard.

The contraction of the volume of the sun itself furnishes for a
time a new supply of heat. But the constancy of radiation is
chiefly accounted for by a double current of cooled matter from
the surface to the centre, where it becomes reheated, and of
intensely hot matter from the centre to the surface, so that the
formation of a cool crust at the surface is hindered, equality of
temperature in the whole mass of the sun is preserved, and, as it
were, the whole burns with a more concentrated fierceness as it
contracts in volume, and will continue to do so until the equili-
brium is destroyed, the forces leading to extinction obtain the
mastery, and at last incrustation takes place and the solar system
becomes like a room from which light is shut out by the sudden
closing of a shutter over its only window.

The wonderful discoveries of the spectroscope have made
known the similarity of construction which exists among all the
stars of the universe, and all probabilities from all scientific data
converge toward the conclusion of their common nebular origin.
Several splendid pages of M. Faye's volume are devoted to the
exposition of his nebular hypothesis as a universal theory.

One interesting chapter is devoted to the topic of " Geological
Concordances." The Treatise on Geology by M. A. de Lapparent,
a work of high authority in Europe, gives as the most moderate
probable estimate of the time required for the formation of that
part of the terrestrial crust accessible to investigation, a period
of 2 1, 000,000 of years. As M. Faye professes to have proved that
the quantity of heat annually expended by the sun multiplied by
14,500,000 expresses the whole amount which the sun has been
able to develop by its formation from the primitive chaos, he
logically infers that the sun has not been dispensing its present
annual amount of heat during 15,000,000 of years. On Laplace's
theory that the planets issued successively from the mass of the
sun, it is necessary to add all the heat which it expended during
the formation of all these planets to the amount expended since
the beginning of the primary epoch of our planet. This places
the data of astronomy in a contradiction with those of geology,
which appears to M. Faye insoluble except by his own theory.

He says :

" Unless we shut our "eyes, and reject embarrassing data with the sole
purpose of reducing the duration of the grand phenomena of the natural
history of our globe, we must conclude that our globe is more ancient than
the sun ; in other terms, the first rays of the nascent sun must have illumi-

1 8 86.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 361

nated an earth already consolidated, already manipulated by the waters
under the influence of the earth's central heat alone " (p. 280).

Before Laplace it was supposed that the conditions of per-
petual stability were wanting in the mechanism of the solar
system, which is, therefore, liable to become dislocated, or en-
tirely englobed into the mass of its central sun. Laplace estab-
lished the theorem of its mechanical stability. M. Faye proceeds
to show, however, with a sombre eloquence, that the sun is rapid-
ly proceeding toward its own extinction, as a sun, in the last sec-
tion of his last chapter, entitled " The End of the Actual World."
He says :

" But the world, in order to endure, expends no energy, while the sun,
in order to shine, expends an enormous quantity; and since its provision is
limited and cannot be renewed, we must look forward to the death of the
sun, as a sun, not indeed as near, but as inevitable. After having shone
with an equal brilliancy for many thousands of years to come, it will finish
by fading and becoming extinguished like a lamp whose oil is exhausted.
Moreover, a considerable number of celestial phenomena give us warning
of this event; these are the stars whose light vacillates, those which be-
come periodically extinguished, at least for the naked eye as the star
Omicron in the Whale and those which finally disappear.* . . . We must
therefore renounce those brilliant fancies by which some seek to delude
themselves into a view of the universe in which it is regarded as the im-
mense theatre where a spontaneous development is progressing which
will have no end. On the contrary, life must disappear from the earth, the
grandest material works of the human race must be effaced by the action
of the remaining physical forces which will outlive it for a time. Nothing
will remain, not even ruins " (pp. 306-309).

There are some celestial phenomena which seem like positive
traces and evidences of the actual process of world-construc-
tion in the universe, according to the ideal plan of the nebu-
lar theory. It aids much to a distinct conception of the succes-
sive stages of any constructive method in mechanical art if one
can inspect specimens of the work in these various stages, from
beginning to completion. The architect of the universe seems to
have left some specimens of this kind to the inspection of scienti-
fic observers. There are nebulosities in the universe which are
purely gaseous, as specimens of the cosmic matter in the condi-
tion of the most elementary composition of primary constitutive
principles. There are others of a more complex constitution,
apparently in the way of stellar formation. The ring of Saturn
is a solitary remaining specimen in our world of the cosmic rings
from which the planets were formed. The crowd of asteroids

* Instances are, a star in Cygnus, one in Serpentarlus, and one in Corona Borealis.

362 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec.,

between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter may be regarded as the
result of a failure in the process of planetary formation from a
ring-, the ring having broken up in such a way that no part of
it was large enough to attract the rest so as to form one large
planet. Mitchell's remark that the ring of Saturn was left to
show us how the world was made may be applied to all the
phenomena we have enumerated under this head.

Having now given a sufficient though not a complete analysis
of the strictly scientific part of M. Faye's able and brilliant work,
we may turn toward a consideration of the relation between his
astronomical theory and the dictates of natural religion or philo-
sophical theism. Questions immediately concerning revealed
truths and Holy Scripture will be postponed for future consi-
deration.

M. Faye has not avoided the theological side of cosmogony.
His introduction is entitled "La Science et 1'Idee de Dieu."
The following extract from it will show what M. Faye thinks of
the relation of science to theology :

" We contemplate, we know, at least in respect to its immediately appre-
hensible form, this world, which itself knows nothing. Thus, there is
something other than terrestrial objects, other than our own body, other
than the splendid stars; there is intelligence and thought. And since our
intelligence has not made itself, there must exist in the world a superior
intelligence from which our own is derived. Therefore, the greater the
idea one forms of this supreme intelligence, the nearer will it approach to
the truth. We run no risk of deception in regarding this intelligence as
the author of all things, in referring to it those splendors of the heavens
which have awakened our thought, in believing that we are not alien or
indifferent to him, and, in fine, we are altogether ready to accept under-
standingly the traditional formula : God, the Father Almighty, Creator of
Heaven and Earth.

"As to denying God, this is as if one should let himself fall heavily from
these heights upon the ground. These stars, these wonders of nature, that
they should be the effect of chance ! That our intelligence should be from
matter which set itself spontaneously to thinking! Man would then be-
come an animal like others; like them he would play for good or ill the
game of this life without an object, and end like them after fulfilling the
functions of nutrition and reproduction !

" It is false that science has ever by its own movement arrived at this
negation. . . .

"This is what I had to say of God, whose works it belongs to science
to examine."

Why should it be thought that there is any tendency in the
nebular theory toward a denial of the providence, the creative act,
or the existence of God ? A false report has been long and widely

i886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 363

circulated that Laplace said to Napoleon that his theory made it
superfluous to resort to the hypothesis of divine power, as New-
ton had been obliged to do by the exigencies of his deficient sys-
tem. Faye successfully exculpates Laplace from this charge, and
proves that the great astronomer merely asserted that he, by
proving the mechanical stability of the solar system, had shown
that there was no need of a direct divine interference to correct
from time to time its aberrations (p. 130).

This is something quite distinct from the nebular theory. But
because some atheists have adopted this theory, and have fool-
ishly attempted to trace the origin of the universe to a primitive
nebulous chaos as the ultimate and sufficient reason of its exis-
tence, a fear has beset some pious minds lest the theory itself
should logically lead to atheism.

This fear is groundless. For the putting back of the direct
creative and formative actions of divine power in the cosmogony
to a greater distance, so to speak, by interposing long ages of
duration, and a long series of second causes, between the present
time and the first instant of time at which the creation began ;
the present condition of complex facts in the universe and the
inchoate state which was next to the first cause, and in which
second causes first began to act this process of recession, as one
may call it, in no way affects the relation of effects and second
causes to the first cause.

M. Faye well and justly remarks that the demonstration of
the existence of God from the wonders of the heavens does not
depend on the exactness of our ideas respecting astronomy and
cosmogony. " No one of the systems of cosmogony adds or sub-
tracts an iota from the force of the argument " (p. 2). Cicero's
superb argument in his De Naturd Deorum is not damaged by his
incorrect astronomy. The argument is essentially the same, as
presented by Newton and by Faye, with that of Plato and of
Cicero. Newton supposed that the equilibrium of the solar sys-
tem was unstable and required a divine intervention from time
to time to rectify it. It has been proved to be stable through the
operation of constant laws. The divine power is just as neces-
sary to found a stable equilibrium as to regulate a system whose
equilibrium is unstable. Newton supposed that the Almighty
created our solar system, as it were, out of hand, as a maker of
scientific instruments constructs an orrery. Then he gave it
an impulse of centrifugal motion, and impressed the law of gravi-
tation as a controlling force, so that it continues to execute regu-
larly its rotations and revolutions. The nebular theory traces

364 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec.,

the reign of law under the controlling force of second causes
back to an original constitution and to original forces in the uni-
versal cosmic nebula.

Now, as we have retraced the ideal process of cosmogony in
M. Faye's theory back to the first elements of cosmic constitution
and development, what have we found ?

We have found, as the first and necessary conditions to the
beginning of this process, an immense mass of primary matter
and inconceivably powerful impulses of motive force. Every
atom of this matter, in the words of an eminent scientist, bears
the marks of a " manufactured article." This is true of the mi-
nutest molecule of the simplest gaseous substance. What shall we
say, then, of that variety of chemical composition necessary to a
nebulous mass which is destined to condense into more or less
solid spheres?

Then when we consider how powerful and how regulated
must have been the forces which drove the separated nebulous
masses into vast distances from each other, when we consider
how these forces developed in our world and in other worlds
into interior forces, acting so variously and producing such va-
rious results, what must we conclude ?

Rational thinking must lead us up to the First Cause, the Su-
preme Intelligence and Power, which has created and which gov-
erns all for a wise and good end. The nebular theory is in per-
fect accord with the dictates of natural, rational theology. What
relation it may bear to revealed theology we hope to consider in
another article.

FAITH.

THE fire, unfed, in ashes dies away ;

The lamp, unfilled, begets no gentle ray ;

So faith unproved in holy deeds must yield,

While sin, triumphant, guards the much-sought field.

1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION:' 365

-HAS ROME JURISDICTION?"
II.

THE residence, during seventy-odd years, of the Roman pon-
tiffs at Avignon is certainly a very singular episode in the his-
tory of the church. When Bertrand de Got, previously Arch-
bishop of Bordeaux, was elected pope in 1305 under the title of
Clement V., there appeared to be no valid reason for a change of
residence nothing, that is, which could counterbalance the evils
and inconveniences which must necessarily result to the church
from the removal of the seat of the supreme ecclesiastical govern-
ment from the Eternal City, where, securely imbedded in its
own patrimony of St. Peter and surrounded with the prestige of
centuries of sovereign independence, it could, as from some com-
manding watch-tower elevated high above the mists and storms
of conflicting nationalities, give laws to the churches and peoples
and decide in matters of faith. For the change in this respect
was no slight one. However sincere Clement might himself
have been in his intention of preserving the dignity and inde-
pendence of the Apostolic See, it could not be but that he, a
Frenchman, living within the borders of France, should be more
or less under French influences ; and even had he been a man of
such firm and self-reliant character (which was scarcely the case*)
as to be entirely innoxious to these influences, he could hardly, un-
der the circumstances, avoid being the victim of suspicions which
could not but be hurtful to his office and impede its full and free
exercise. However, our duty is not at present to discuss either
the utility or the morality of the course pursued by this pope and
his five successors ; we have simply to deal with the legal aspect of
the question arising from the position maintained by the Church
Times, which brieflv amounts to this: that inasmuch as, according
to the recognized principles of canon law, a bishop who does not
reside in his diocese thereby vacates it, " the see of Rome was
ipso facto void during the long residence of the popes at
Avignon," to which the CliurcJi Quarterly- adds the amazing
statement that " when the popes went to Avignon they broke

* " Philip," says Dr. Von Dollinger, "already knew what easy compliance he might expect
from this man when, by his ambassadors who had gone to Perugia for this express purpose, by
his gold, and by the influence of the Cardinal Peter Colonna, who had been deprived by Boni-
face, he guided the voices in favor of Bertrand " (Hist, of the Church, vol. iv. p. 98).

366 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION." [Dec.,

up the Roman succession and established a new primacy at
Avignon." *

Now, it is perfectly true that the law of the Catholic Church,
as it at present stands, strictly enjoins the residence of bishops
in their dioceses. Any prelate who absents himself without just
cause for more than three months incurs, according to the Tri-
dentine decree, the forfeiture of one-fourth part of one year's
fruits, and if his absence be extended to six months the penalty is
doubled. Beyond this it is further enacted that should this ab-
sence be still more prolonged it becomes the duty of the metropoli-
tan to denounce the offender to the Holy See, who in the last resort
may remove him from his office. But in regard to this matter
of the residence of bishops two things are to be noted. First, it
was not until the Council of Trent that these enactments came
into force ; previous to that, as all historians bear witness, the
discipline of the church had been exceedingly lax in this respect.
And, secondly, the extreme penalties of deprivation, when they
were determined, merely possessed force ex sententia ferenda
that is to say, after the formal sentence of the pope, and by no
means ipso facto by the commission of the offence itself, f But all
this is entirely irrelevant, as we shall now proceed to show that
" upon the fundamental principles of canon law " the disciplinary
enactments with their penalties relating to bishops have nothing
whatever to do with the pope, who is above all ecclesiastical law,
its source, and, when occasion serves, its abrogater.

In proof of this fact we cite the following from the learned
theologian Bouix, ; who, treating of the authority of the pope
over the canons and the other prerogatives which he possesses
by divine right, says :

" The power of the Roman pontiff over the canons necessarily and evi-
dently follows from his authority over an oecumenical council. It would
have been sufficient to refer the reader to that portion of this work which
treats upon that point. But having in view the fact that the negation of
this prerogative constituted one of the four ill-fated Gallican Articles of
1682, we shall, in order that the falsity of the Gallican tenets may the more

* The weakness of Anglican logic is nowhere better illustrated than in this passage. It is
sufficient for a bishop to desert his see and reside elsewhere to become bishop of his new home.
Nusquam cleri eligentis vel postea consentientis aliqua mentio !

f Cf. Pius IV. in constit. In supremo. ; also Concil. Trident., sess. vi. De Reform, cap. i.

J We ought, perhaps, to apologize for occupying so much space with excerpts from canon-
ists and theologians ; but inasmuch as this is the very ground upon which the Church Times has
challenged us, these quotations constitute, not merely as regards the arguments and evidence
contained in them, but as quotations in se, the reply needed. Original arguments would be of
no avail here.

Bouix, De Papa, vol. iii. part v. p. 309.

1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 367

easily be exposed, proceed briefly to vindicate the pontifical authority over
the canons."

The first thesis which he lays down in this connection is as
follows : Authority over the canons pertains to the Roman pontiff by
divine right :

" By the word canon is generally understood the decrees or laws both
of the Roman pontiffs and also of general councils. When, however, this
question is discussed among theologians no question arises regarding dog-
matical canons or decrees, but merely concerning canons of discipline
whether, to wit, the power of the pope over disciplinary regulations of this
sort extends not only to the abrogation of, or dispensation from, his own
canons and those of his predecessors, but also to those of general councils.
Nor, indeed, do the Gallicans deny this power with reference to the decrees
issued by the pope or his predecessors, but merely regarding those set forth
by a general council or established by the universal practice of the
church."

The author then proceeds to show that it is of faith that the
power given to St. Peter of feeding, ruling, and governing the
universal church passes on in its entirety to his successors to the
end of time. Therefore, he argues, each successive pontiff pos-
sesses at any given time precisely the same power as his pre-
decessors had. But he would not possess the same but an
inferior authority if he could not change or abrogate a law
enacted by one of his predecessors regarding disciplinary mat-
ters in themselves mutable; therefore, he maintains, there is no
canon of discipline, mutable in itself, enacted by any pope, which
cannot, should change of time and circumstances demand it, be
changed and abrogated by his successors. This argument is in
itself unanswerable, to all at least who accept the doctrine of the
Petrine succession of the primacy, and does not need, as the
author observes, further proof which could easily be given
from the constant practice of the church.

In the next place, the author maintains that the pope is superior
to the canons enacted by a council independently of the pope. This
again is in opposition to the Gallicans. As we are not at present
engaged in proving the truth of the theory here set forth, but
merely the fact that it is the recognized teaching of Catholic
theologians, it is unnecessary to quote from the passages referred
to by the author.

The third proposition is that tJie pope is superior to canons
enacted by the pope and council conjointly :

" Fourthly, the pope is superior to canons confirmed by the general accept-
ance and practice of the ecclesia dispersa." " It is evident that the authority

368 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION:' [Dec.,

of the church at large is not superior to that of the church assembled in
oecumenical council."

" Lastly, the practice of the church establishes the fact that the pope is
superior to the canons :

" (i.) According to the ancient canons and common discipline of the
church, the clergy were ordered to obtain dimissorial letters (litterce
formatce) each from his own bishop, and the bishops from the metropolitan,
whenever they wished to travel outside of their diocese. But Pope Zozi-
mus made an alteration in this law as regards the church of Gaul, enacting
as follows : // has pleased the Apostolic See that should any one from any part of
Gaul, in whatever grade of the ministry, desire to visit us at Rome or to travel
elsewhere, he shall in no case set out without having obtained dimissorial letters
from the bishop of the metropolitan church of Arhs (e pistol as R. P. editae a
D. Coustant, t. i. col. 938). Pope Zozimus, therefore, was of opinion that
authority had been transmitted to him even over conciliar canons. And it
is noteworthy that this was a change of no small moment, which compelled
the whole clergy of Gaul, including the archbishops and bishops, to obtain
their letters from the Bishop of Aries (who was then constituted vicar of
the Apostolic See for the whole of that country) as often as they wished to
travel abroad. And the aforesaid pontiff so enacted, not because it seemed
good to an oecumenical council, but because it -so pleased the Apostolic See."

" (ii.) Pope Symmachus, at the Sixth Council of Rome, A.D. 504 (Labbe,
t. iv. col. 1371): We are necessitated by the government of the Apostolic See,
and are constrained in order to the due disposition of ecclesiastical affairs, so to
weigh the decrees contained in the canons of the Fathers, and to estimate the ordi-
nances of our predecessors, as that, after all due consideration, we may regulate
as far as may be, under divine assistance, those things which the exigencies of
the times demand for the renovation of the churches."

"(iii.) Towards the end of the fourth century the bishops of Africa be-
sought Pope St. Anastasius to commute in their favor a certain decree
enacted by a transmarine that is (as they themselves observe), a Roman
council." (See their epistle apud Coustant, col. 3734.)

The author mentions among other instances that in the begin-
ning of the same century Pope St. Melchiades in like manner
abrogated the primitive canon forbidding bishops who had lapsed
into schism and who had subsequently returned to the unity of
the church from retaining their previous dignity. St. Gregory
the Great, too, dispensed with certain points in the fifth canon of
Nicasa prescribing the convocation of provincial synods twice in
each year.

While, however, it is perfectly clear from the foregoing that
the Roman pontiff possesses the power of changing, abrogating,
or suspending the disciplinary laws of the church, there is never-
theless, as our author distinctly states, a certain sense in which he
is himself bound to their observance. He explains that an obli-
gation of this kind may be understood in a twofold way :

" Either because he is subject to the law and to the power which made

1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 369

it, or because, although he is not subject, he is nevertheless, for the sake
of good example and of avoiding hurtful changes, bound to the observ-
ance of the canons, when neither necessity nor utility prompts a different
course."

What we have already said is sufficient to establish the gene-
ral fact that the Roman pontiffs are in no way bound in the
former sense, whereas the latter proposition needs no proof.
Hence the author remarks that the question regarding the
Roman pontiff in relation to the canons is of the same nature
as that concerning the temporal prince in his relation to the
laws:

" For inasmuch as the prince is the supreme authority, he can validly
change his own decrees or those of his predecessors, nor is he bound by
those laws as a subject. When, however, a change in the laws, effected with-
out reasonable cause, is harmful, and the example of the prince in not ob-
serving them equally so, the obligation constraining the prince to the ob-
servance of the existing laws arises from a higher law, to wit, the natural
or divine. He will therefore sin and be failing in his office of Supreme
Pastor if he should abrogate canons relating to mutable discipline, except
in cases of necessity or utility, or if he himself, who ought to be a model to the
flock of Christ, should not observe them. But since he himself is not subject
to them, nor is wanting in the power of abrogating, the abrogation will be
valid"

Space forbids us to continue our quotations from this learned
and orthodox writer, who proceeds to disprove at considerable
length the Gallican arguments, and subsequently to demonstrate
in his eighth proposition that this doctrine of the supremacy of
the pope over the canons is not merely certain but is of faith*
For this, however, we must refer the reader to the treatise itself.
We shall see in due course an application of this doctrine in re-
gard to simoniacal appointments and ordinations, by no less au-
thorities than Suarez and Ferraris, when we come to consider the
case of Alexander VI.

With regard, however, to the bearing of these principles upon
the papal residence at Avignon, it will be perfectly clear that,
however sinful the action of Clement V. may have been, how-
ever he may have allowed the interests of country, family, and
self to outweigh those of Christ and his church,* however cul-
pably neglectful he may have been of those lofty considerations
which should hold the first place in the mind of the Vicar of

* " Personal feelings of revenge, anxiety for the aggrandizement of his relatives and for the
interests of the French court, were the principal springs of the actions, of this pontiff" (Pol-
linger, History of the Church, vol. iv. p. 99).
VOL. XLIV. 24

370 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION." [Dec.,

Christ, there can be no possible doubt as to the validity of his
acts, whether in the creation of cardinals or in dispensing both
them and himself from those duties of residence which, as bishops
and priests, the canon law required in them.

Were other evidence required we might call in that of Suarez,
who asserts plainly that irregularity even in a case of homicide
cannot touch the Sovereign Pontiff, " for although he is under
obligation to his own laws as regards their directive force, he is
not, however, as regards their coercive "/ * while the strange theory
of the Church Quarterly Review that " when the popes went to
Avignon they broke up the Roman succession and created a
new primacy at Avignon," is thus completely refuted by Fer-
raris :

"Whence Eugenius IV. at the Council of Florence in the letters of
union clearly confirms our opinion: We define that the Holy Apostolic See
and the Roman pontiff hold the primacy over all the world, and that full power
of feeding, rttling, and guiding the universal church was confided to it by our
Lord Jesus Christ in the person of St. Peter. Hence the Apostolic See cannot
be removed from the city of Rome and transferred elsewhere : and so, not-
withstanding that the city of Rome has been so many times laid in ruins,
the Apostolic See has always remained fixed at Rome ; and although for
many years several of the Roman pontiffs resided at Avignon, as Clement
V., etc., nevertheless the Apostolic See always remained affixed to the
Roman episcopate, and this title the Roman pontiffs used in their apos-
tolical and pontifical rescripts, whence comes the common adage, Ubi Papa,
ibi Roma." t

This aphorism the Church Quarterly ', strangely enough, inverts :

" The popes living at Avignon could no more be considered bishops of
Rome than St. Peter, living in Rome, could be considered as still Bishop of
Antioch. And Pope Benedict XIV. says: ' No one who is not Bishop of
Rome can be styled successor of Peter, and for that reason the words of
our Lord, Feedmy sheep, can never be applied to him ' (De Synod. Dtceces.,
ii. i). Thus the Petrine principle is Ubi Roma, ibi Papa"

These words give the clue to the Anglican position in this
matter. Professing to argue upon the " principles of Roman
canon law," they proceed, in open violation of those principles,
to treat the Roman pontiff as an ordinary bishop. Accustomed
as the Ritualists are to be in everything a law to themselves,
repudiating alike the decisions of the courts of the Established
Church and the rulings of their own bishops whenever they do

* Suarez, In tertiam partem D. T/iomce, De Irregularitate^ disp. xl. sect. vii. No. 7.
t Ferraris, vol. iii. sub titulo Ecclesia, art. ii. Nos. 18 and 19.

1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION:' 371

not accord with their own fads and predilections, it is not sur-
prising that they should yield to the temptation of handling the
jurisprudence of the Catholic Church in the same manner. Au-
thority has no place in their code ; the recognized interpreters of
legal tradition in the church must make way for their own ipse
dixits. The pope is a bishop, therefore he is bound by the laws
regulating bishops. We have shown that it is an axiom in canon
law that the pope, of all men, alone is not so bound. If he were
so, if there were any tribunal upon earth capable of judging him,
any law ecclesiastical for failure in obedience to which he might
be judged, how then would he be supreme f Upon the prin-
ciples of Anglicanism or of Gallicanism, of course, he is not su-
preme ; but our contemporaries should remember that in the eyes
of the Catholic Church, upon whose principles they profess to
take their stand, Anglicanism is a monstrosity and Gallicanism an
extinct and exploded error.

And this brings us to the third argument adduced by the
Church Times. We have just denied that there is any earthly
tribunal which can judge the pope, or any law by which he can
be judged by man. What, then, it may not unnaturally be asked,
about the Council of Constance, by which two claimants to the
Papacy were deposed and a new pontiff elected irregularly, the
Church Times maintains in the person of Martin V.? Now, the
difficulties connected with this miserable period of schism and its
extraordinary termination are not new ; they have been treated
over and over again in the pages of historical and controversial
writers,* and to these we might well refer our readers, were it
not that the Church Quarterly Review, still harping on its favorite
idea that the jurisdiction of the Papacy has ceased to exist, de-
clares that it is " impossible to decide which of the rival popes
during this period had a rightful claim to his position, so that, on
Bellarmine's principle that ' a doubtful pope is accounted as no
pope,' the quasi-occupants of the Roman See during these many
years must all be rejected, and the Papacy be regarded as void."

We have already said enough to show that were we to admit
everything which is stated in this passage that Bellarmine, for
instance, ever had the intention of asserting that a doubtful pope
is no pope in the sense that the see is vacant during his pontifi-
cate, and, consequently, that throughout this whole period no
true pontiff sat in the chair of Peter the idea that the succession
of pontiffs thereby failed, and could never, under the present con-
stitution of the church, be resuscitated, is an illusory one. There

* Archbishop Spalding's Essays, for instance.

372 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION:' [Dec.,

is no reason why a general council like that of Constance should
not elect a valid pontiff who should subsequently ratify its other
acts and render it oecumenical. The absence of a head is mani-
festly no bar to such an election, because the mere fact of a papal
election presupposes this absence. If the local church of Rome,
widowed of its bishop, has the inherent power to assemble and
elect another, much more, surely, may the universal church of
Christ, assembled in general synod, proceed to the election of a
chief pastor necessary for the preservation of unity and the main-
tenance of sound doctrine. Nor in this particular election does
there appear, in spite of the Church Times, to have been anything
irregular. The council was certainly a general council ; it repre-
sented the entire church, for the cardinals, clergy, and people of
both obediences (that of John XXIII. and of Gregory XII.) took
part in the election, and the handful of fanatics who remained
with Pedro de Luna at Pefiiscola were surely of no account. The
possibility of this man being the true pope is of the slenderest
kind ; there can be but little doubt that whether the election of
Urban VI. was forced upon the cardinals in conclave by the
threats of the Roman people or not (and these threats appear to
have been of a very mild kind *), he was accepted as a true pon-
tiff by the entire church, and the subsequent election of his rival,
Clement VII., was undertaken in the face of the emphatic protest
of the most renowned canonists in Christendom. f The chances
of De Luna, who succeeded him, were rendered still more attenu-
ated by the openly simoniacal practices of his predecessor; he,
too, in company with the other schismatical cardinals, took an
oath previous to the election, whose conditions he subsequently
ostentatiously refused to fulfil ; even the sainted Dominican, Vin-
cent Ferrer, deserted him at last, declaring him to have been a
perjurer. Against the third claimant John XXIII. the crime of
simony was conclusively proved before the fathers at Constance;;):
and as there cannot in his case be even any pretence of subsequent
imiversal acceptation by the church, the council acted fully within
its powers in deposing him. It is of such men as these, doubtless,
that Bellarmine asserts that as doubtful popes they were no popes
at all. while he who was probably the successor of St. Peter, in
whose line, in all probability, the succession had been kept up
throughout all these trying times, the venerable Gregory XII.,

* "They speak only of prayers and entreaties, of the shouts that were heard in the streets,
and of iheirfear that worse might follow " (Dollinger, Hist, of the Church, vol. iv. p. 133).

t Ibidem, p. 132. \ Ibidem, p. 165.

In the sense that a general council might set them aside for the well-being of the church.
Neither of our contemporaries give any references.

1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 373

voluntarily resigned in the interests of the peace and unity of the
church. Behold how the true shepherd gives his life for the
sheep, while the hireling and impostor live but to ravage the
flock.

In dealing, however, with this matter of the great schism, the
question may not unnaturally arise as to its bearing upon the rule
or canon of St. Irenaeus, with which we have dealt at length on
a former occasion.* To what authority, throughout these forty-
odd years, were the faithful to look for that keynote of Catholic
doctrine which the saint establishes as existing in the teaching
of the See of Peter ? We have said more than once that the
church cannot be divided, because her centre of unity is consti-
tuted in an individual. Break that up, set up a double popedom,
or render doubtful for a long lapse of time which is the true pope,
and has not the dreaded calamity actually befallen the church ?
Has not the rule of faith broken down and left us in darkness
blacker than that of the pagans of old by reason of its contrast
with the seeming light which we had before possessed ? We are
bold to say that during the period of history referred to nothing
of the sort took place. It is quite conceivable, humanly speak-
ing, that it might have done so. Pontiff after pontiff might have
succeeded each other in double or triple line down to the present
day ; had the church not been divine they very possibly would
have done so, judging, at least, from the example of the Oriental
schismatics. Each of these three lines might have favored some
special school of theology or some pet doctrine say on the nature
and efficacy of divine grace and its respective pontiffs might have
elevated their favorite doctrines into dogmas of faith by ex cathe-
dra definitions. It is manifest that in such a case as this the whole
economy of the ecclesia docens would have been thrown into inex-
tricable and irremediable confusion, the rule of faith would have
been lost, Christ's promises to the church proved a delusion, and
the Catholic religion itself would probably not have survived
that revival of pagan ideas and that revolution in thought conse-
quent upon what is termed the Renaissance. Nor is it even pro-
bable that its outward shell would have long remained, as have
the outward shells of Nestorianism, Eutychianism, and Photian-
ism in the conservative and changeless East. In Europe the
old order was on the point of changing, giving place to new.
The seeds of negligence and corruption on the part of the Catho-
lic clergy were producing a plentiful crop of sceptics and scof-
fers at all ecclesiastical authority ; and had the schism but con-

* " St. Irenaeus and the Roman See " (THE CATHOLIC WORLD, July, 1883).

374 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Dec.,

tinued till the time of Luther; had there existed, when his hand
applied the torch, instead of one united church under the majestic
Leo X., a body weakened alike in faith and capacity for action
by schism and revolt, who could foretell the consequences? But
nothing of the sort took place. Not a solitary one of these rival
pontiffs meddled with the dogmas of religion in any way or
shape ; such as they found them, such they left them ; and the
faithful, consequently, could be in no doubt whatever as to what
to believe for their souls' salvation. They may have been, in fact
they were, in doubt as to who was the true pope, and so the dis-
cipline of the church suffered terribly. But no shadow of doubt,
having the schism as its cause, ever crossed their minds in mat-
ters of faith and morals. Why was this so ?

What was it that restrained these haughty, corrupt, and self-
seeking men from thus defiling the fold of Christ and leading his
flock astray? Fftfcr/wasit? Christ's promise registered in the
heavens and recorded there eternally : Thou art Peter, and upon
this rock I 'will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not pre-
vail against it. Peter's successor might be obscured and hidden
from view for a time, but Peter's see was there, and upon it as
upon a rock the church rested secure. And when, after well-
nigh forty years of storm and tempest, the boat of Peter emerg-
ed from the mists of doubt and anxiety which had racked the
minds and breasts of its most saintly sons and daughters, then
indeed was it plainly and visibly seen that Christ, Peter's master,
was himself at the helm ; then was men's faith strengthened and
their hearts rejoiced ; then indeed could the church raise her can-
ticle of praise to God and sing joyfully with the royal Psalmist :
For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, will I
fear no evils, because Thou art with me.

At the conclusion of its second article our contemporary,
quoting from the Church Quarterly Review, returns to its first
argument, declaring with absolute certainty that, even supposing
the Roman Church to have weathered all preceding storms, she
surely succumbed under the iniquities practised by Alexander
VI. at the end of the fifteenth century :

"There is not the smallest doubt that his election was simoniacal and ;
that he was returned by means of purchased votes. It is equally certain
that he systematically sold the cardinalate to the highest bidder. Thus i
not only was his own popedom void by reason of simony, but the cardinals I
whom he had nominated and he nominated a great many were no true
cardinals for the same reason."

1 86.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 375

From these alleged facts the Churc/i Quarterly draws the fol-
lowing conclusion :

"The electoral body was thus utterly vitiated and disqualified by canon
law at least as far back as 1513, and no conceivably valid election of a pope
has taken place since that of Innocent VIII. in 1484, even if every defect
prior to that date be condoned, and it be conceded that the breaches in the
tenth, eleventh, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were made good some-
how. There has not been any retrospective action taken in regard to this
final vitiation by simony, and to Alexander VI. belongs the responsibility
of having made any assertion of unbroken and canonical devolution of a
Petrine privilege in the line of Roman pontiffs impossible for any honest
canonist or historian since his time."

We have simply referred to this final attack in order to lay
before our readers the true position of canon law in relation to
simony. The absurd conclusion regarding vitiated electoral
bodies and permanently usurping and illicit pontiffs of course
needs no further refutation than has already been given.

Nothing is more clearly laid down by the great doctors of
canon law than the fact that in general, although simony renders
all exercise of the functions pertaining to the office simoniacally
obtained illicit, it does not render tliem invalid. The first point is
thus distinctly stated by Ferraris :

" He who has been simoniacally ordained and is cognizant of the fact,
in addition to the excommunication which he incurs ipso facto, is suspended
from the exercise of all his orders, not only of those simoniacally received,
but also of others, although the simony may have been effected secretly." *

But that this suspension does not render the same acts invalid, if
the suspended cleric has the temerity to perform them, is equally
clear from the following :

" It must, however, be understood that the exercise of orders and other
acts prohibited by suspension are valid, with the exception of elections.
Actions implying the exercise of jurisdiction are also to be excepted, and
on this account one who has been absolutely suspended cannot validly
absolve." t

This is the law of the church regarding simoniacal clerics in
general. It will be observed, however, that the exceptions laid
down appear to play into the hands of our contemporaries, in-
asmuch as the whole question turns upon the validity of elections

* Ferraris, vol. vii. Simonia, art. iii. No. 12.

t Ibidem sub titulo Suspensio, art. vii. No. 7. Cf. also Suarez, De Censuris, disp. xi.
sect. ii. 2.

376 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION'' [Dec.,

and of the exercise of jurisdiction after election. And, indeed,
their case from this point of view would be perfect were it not,
as we have already said, that the Vicar of Christ stands in this
respect upon an altogether different level from any one else, both
as regards his own exemption from the operation of the canons
and his power of dispensing others. His position in reference to
simony is thus fully explained by Suarez :

" Whether the pope selling a benefice may be regarded as dispensing the pur-
chaser. This involves another question which is usually introduced at
this point viz., whether the Roman pontiff, selling a benefice to any one
and committing simony with him, may .be regarded as dispensing him, at all
events as regards the legal penalties. For some so deny this as to say
that he remains excommunicate and incurs the remaining penalties. This
opinion is advocated by Adrianus, etc. The contrary, however, is the com-
mon opinion, and this appears to be the most agreeable to reason. For,
first, as regards the penalty of nullity in such a collation, this is manifest
from what has been said under the preceding heading. Secondly, as re-
gards the penalty of excommunication, that man certainly cannot be called
contumacious against the law of the pontiff who, in company with the
pope himself, commits an act prohibited by law ; and without contumacy
there is no excommunication. Moreover, it is highly improbable that a
prince should wish to punish an action in whose performance he himself
has shared, or which he has at least encouraged. Lastly, if simony were
contrary only to positive law, the pope should be understood as dispensing
as regards the sin also, and the subject himself should so regard it, since
he ought not to suppose that the pope wishes to commit simony. Indeed,
although simony should otherwise seem to be contrary to the divine law,
if, however, it could be excused in the pope per mutationem materia, the
subject ought thus to presume and thus in good faith avoid all blame.
When, however, the simony is of such a kind that the pontiff can by no
means avoid incurring it, the subject is indeed involved with him in the sin,
but together with him is excused from the penalty' 1

We have now discussed the entire argument in its threefold
ramification as served up by the Church Times for the instruc-
tion and profit of its readers. That journal sets out with a
mighty flourish of trumpets to announce the immediate demoli-
tion of all claims to universal jurisdiction on the part of the
actual occupant of the see of Peter by reason of failure in the
succession, appealing in proof of its assertions to the fundamen-
tal principles of Roman canon law ; and the second article con-
cludes with these words : " As God has not taken care to protect
the papal succession from illegitimacy and doubt, it is plain that
he cannot have conferred any such charter upon the Roman
Church as that which Roman Catholics allege." We have seen

1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 377

conclusively that, so far from the jurisprudence of the church
suppling any foundation for this amazing- theory, it is simply
the ignorance of non-Catholic writers (and for this, indeed, they
cannot be blamed) as to the real principles of canon law which
has given rise to this singular delusion. And now, in taking
leave of our two contemporaries, we would ask in all charity and
Christian kindness. To what purpose is all this bombast? Do the
conductors of the Chu-rch Quarterly Review, who are understood
to be clergymen of name and standing, imagine that the reputa-
tion of their periodical can possibly be enhanced in the eyes of
impartial men of any creed by the use of arguments such as
these, which can be accounted for only on the score of culpable
ignorance or intentional dishonesty? Of the latter we freely and
frankly acquit these gentlemen. We do not for a moment sup-
pose that the editors of either of these periodicals intended to
misrepresent the principles of canon law. Having obtained a
smattering of the laws relating to simony and irregularity from
some source or other (probably some elementary text-book
which would not contain the matter which we have extracted
from larger works), they imagined that they had got hold of a
good thing, and set themselves to work it for all that it was
worth. But, alas !

"A little learning is a dangerous thing,"

and when men without any theological training- and still less
knowledge of ecclesiastical jurisprudence undertake so stupen-
dous an operation as the destruction of the Papacy upon the
principles of canon law, they and their admirers must not be sur-
prised or disappointed if all that they effect is the making a mild
exhibition of themselves, when the pregnant rumblings of the
mountain of Protestantism, the birth-pangs of the Church Quar-
terly, and the portentous parturition of the Church Times can
only succeed in producing such a very ridiculous mouse.

THE SHOONEEN. [Dec.,

THE SHOONEEN.

ALEXANDER MACALLISTER, of Baremoor, in the County of
Wexford in Ireland familiarly known in his district as " Sandy
the Shooneen " was the impecunious proprietor of a broad, low-
lying tract of sterile, marshy land. His tenants were a lot of
half-starved, rack rented creatures, who toiled from morn till
night to meet the half-yearly " gale-day." Of Ulster extraction,
he was a rigid Presbyterian, a bitter hater of Catholicism, a vio-
lent loyalist as the term goes and a prominent member of a
Southern lodge.

With his wife and daughter, the latter a beautiful young girl
just budding into lovely womanhood, he resided in a big, ungainly
structure called Baremoor House, which was situated on the
only elevated and fertile portion of his property. This shabby-
genteel residence was deprived of much of its bleak appearance
by a profusion of wide-spreading shade-trees that enveloped it
at every side. From the porch fronting the hall-door a gravelled
carriage-way led down to the main entrance through a lawn of
vivid greensward, in spring and early summer profusely decked
with yellow daffodils and silvery daisies.

A large, leaden-colored, iron-barred gateway, a pair of white-
washed piers surmounted with bluestone globes, a tenantless
lodge-house, and several huge elm-trees, the home of a large
colony of cawing rooks, were the main outward characteristics
of this abode of struggling gentility as viewed from the public
road.

Major Brown, of the County Wexford militia, was a constant
visitor at Baremoor House. Gossip said he was paying his at-
tentions to the lovely Flora Macallister, but to the eye of an or-
dinary observer the cold and unresponsive manner in which
these attentions were received told plainly that his suit was not
a successful one.

The major, as a rule, met the family every Sunday at church,
and then drove home with them to a meagre yet ceremonious
dinner, after which his host and himself whiled away the evening
over a couple of tumblers of weak whiskey-toddy, discussing the
stirring political events of the day, which, he would remark with

1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 379

great pomposity, " were fast crushing out of existence all the
landed gentry in the country."

One Sunday evening, as the major and his host were engaged
in this harmless method of entertainment, the latter picked up a
copy of the local National newspaper, and, running his eye over
the columns, stopped at one particular paragraph, to which he in-
vited the attention of his gu^st.

" Major," he inquired, " is there any truth in this story head-
ed ' The Duncannon Warrior and the Jackass' ? "

" Not that I know of," replied the major, as his streaky, filmy
eyeballs bulged out in anticipation of a suspected unpleasant reve-
lation. " I don't know who the blackguards can mean by ' a
Duncannon warrior.' Of course I have to attend drill at the
fort whenever that rascally scum of papist rebels styled the
Wexford militia are called out for their annual training."

" Listen to this," said Macallister, adjusting his spectacles and
beginning to read : <; ' A few nights ago, as a well-known Dun-
cannon major was returning home at a rather advanced hour
after paying a visit to a sympathetic Shooneen, one of Shawn
Foddher's male donkeys insisted upon entering into a practical
discussion with this gallant son of Mars on the much-talked- of
subject of physical force. After a few brilliant rounds in the
dark the jawbone or the unshod heels of the jackass proved too
much for his military opponent, and had not the brisk scuffle
attracted the attention of Shawn Foddher, who came quickly on
the scene, the consequences might have proved fatal. We un-
derstand the owner of this bloodthirsty quadruped will be sum-
moned to attend the next Petty Sessions at Enniscorthy for allow-
ing his donkeys to wander, uncared for, on the public road.' >;

" Don't believe one word of it, sir ! " cried the major in a vio-
lent burst of simulated indignation. " I can't guess who it is the
rascals intend to lampoon ; but, at the same time, I think it only
right that I should tell you I have lodged a complaint with my
friend Captain Caldecott against that vile rebel Shawn Foddher
for allowing those lazy, starved, wicked-looking brutes of his to
wander at large on the public roads. There's one friend of ours,"
continued the major, "who wouldn't be sorry to see the rascal
turned out on the roadside."

"Who's that?"

" Our new rector, the Reverend Silas Lawson."

" Why, what did he do to him ? "

" Oh ! nothing very much," replied the major, as he reached
out the sugar-tongs and dropped a white lump into his tumbler

380 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec.,

of toddy. " You know the rector's misguided but still well-
meaning craze to bring the light of the Gospel into the hovels of
these benighted, priest-ridden papists. Well, sir," continued the
major, as he proceeded to crush the fast dissolving sugar-lump,
" the rector had the misfortune to meet this lazy rascal Shawn
Foddher on his rounds, and from his unkempt and forbidding ap-
pearance it struck the innocent clergyman that he would be a
good subject to make a commencement on for the spread of
Evangelical Truth. He stopped the blackguard and inquired if
he had any family dependent on him. ' I have, yer riverence,' said
the low scoundrel in a whining, hypocritical tone. ' I have nine in
family, -sir' although you and I, Sandy, know the rascal hasn't
wife or chick or child save his infernal donkeys. * Do they ever
read the Bible, my good man ? ' inquired Mr. Lawson.

" ' The divil ever' "

" I beg your pardon, major," broke in the host. " Speak
easy. That last word of yours, if it caught Mrs. Macallister's
ears, might not be very pleasant. You know this is the Sabbath
evening."

" Excuse me, Sandy. I was, perhaps, carried a bit away at
the thought of that low villain's cunning, and you know I was
quoting the exact words of Mr. Lawson himself, who told me
the story."

"All right; go on."

" Well, the rector asked him why his family never read the
Bible. c Bekase,' said the double-distilled ruffian, ' they can't
read, yer riverence. They don't know B from a bull's fut.' So,
to make a long story short, after further questions on the part of
the misguided, unsuspecting rector, and further lying answers on
the part of this knowing, deep-plotting villain, Mr. Lawson made
an appointment to make a morning call at the rascal's cabin."

" Rather foolish of the reverend gentleman, I should say,"
said Macallister. " He should have asked some of ;us about 'the
fellow's character."

" That's just what I said to him, Sandy my very words. But,
as Mr. Lawson told me, the low impostor looked so simple as he
scratched his scrubby, foxy poll and asked the reverend gentle-
man if he knew of any chapter on industry or industhry, as he
called it in the Bible, that the innocent clergyman was fairly
taken in. As Mr. Lawson told me, quoting the impostor's own
identical words, 'it would be a charity fur you, yer riverence, to
read a chapter or two on industhry to these lazy ally awns o'
mine, to try an' induce them to do a sthroke or two o' work ; for

1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 381

they'll do nothin' for me,' says the low villain, 'but ait their males
and rowl themse'fs in the dirt from mornin' till night.' '

"Well, major," interrupted the host, "your friend was
caught in the trap. I presume he visited the cabin prepared to
read the lecture ? "

" Not only that, Sandy, but he actually did read a large por-
tion of a suitable epistle from Paul ; and as his sight is naturally
weak and the cabin was so dark, he would have probably gone
on reading, I do not know how long, were it not that one of the
donkeys indulged in a violent fit of braying."

" You don't mean to say he actually read the Bible to the
donkeys ? "

" I regret to say that he did. They were inside a kind of low
partition, over which their heads alone protruded ; and as it was
very dark and Mr. Lawson was very anxious to get in some
Scripture reading, he did not perceive the deception which had
been practised on him until he heard the first roar of the
jackass ! "

" I am sorry for the reverend gentleman," said Macallister,
scarcely able to refrain from smiling. " 1 presume he won't
bother himself much further with fellows of this type ? "

" You may bet your life he won't, Sandy. All the benighted
papists in the district may go to well, they may go to Hong
Kong, or any other place of worship, before Mr. Lawson will
ever again make a single endeavor to effect their salvation. But
here is Mrs. Macallister, I declare. Her coming is my signal.
'Tis high time I should be moving for home."

" You seem to have had a very interesting discussion, what-
ever it may have been about," remarked the lady who had just
entered the room.

" Merely a little story I was telling, madame," answered the
major, rising and moving towards the hall rack, from which he
took his overcoat ; " but an end must come to everything, you
see. I'm off."

" Good-night, major," responded the host, as he followed his
guest out to the hall-door. "Tis a dark night. Take care you
don't knock up against Shawn Foddher on your way."

" The low, dirty scoundrel will keep clear of me, Sandy," re-
plied the major with a hollow laugh, " as long as I carry this
loaded stick in my hand. I will light my pipe now ; 'twill keep
me company on the road."

The major now struck a match, and, having ignited his pipe,

382 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec.,

puffed it into a blaze, and then, buttoning his coat up to his chin,
started out on his homeward journey.

II.

When Macallister heard his guest slamming the road-gate
after him he retired within the house, and barred and bolted the
outer door. Then he returned to the sitting-room he had just
quitted, and, throwing himself into the easy-chair lately occupied
by his friend, proceeded to brew himself another tumbler of
whiskey-toddy.

His wife sat moodily by the chimney-corner, gazing into the
embers of the now smouldering fire, and occasionally heaving a
kind of long-drawn sigh which caused her husband to turn his
eyes slowly in her direction.

" Heigho ! " she ejaculated, " what a weary, weary world this
is when the pocket is not as full as the desires."

" Do you want money, Susan ?" inquired her husband lan-
guidly.

" Do I want money ? Good gracious ! Sandy Macallister,
do you see a pair of horns growing out over my ears ? Of course
I want money. I always want money, and that is the very rea-
son I wished to speak to you about getting further time to pay
Malone's bill."

" What can I do about it ? " replied her husband, as he drained
down his glass of punch. " It is in the hands of that young fire-
brand lawyer O'Donoghue. He would not do me a favor. You
had better call on him yourself; he might not have the courage
to refuse you."

" I have been thinking over that very plan, Sandy ; but on re-
flection I deem it safer to send him a note asking him to come out
here to-morrow with his client and take an inventory of sufficient
articles of furniture for a bill of sale to secure the amount until
we can get in some of our outstanding rents. Florry knows him
she was introduced to him at the last fancy fair held in Gorey
and her presence will assist me in the endeavor."

" Very good, Susan," replied Macallister thoughtfully. " I
have no objection to your resorting to any means in your power
to stave off the immediate payment of this debt, but I must
object to Florry having anything to say to this young papist
lawyer. Major Brown "

" Major Fiddlesticks, Sandy ! " interrupted the lady. " Do

1 8 86.] THE SHOONEEN. 383

you think my daughter would throw herself away on him? a
regular sot, who is fully as old as you are ! No, no ; not if I can
help it. Florry has already given him a decisive answer which
has settled his aspirations in her regard. I only wish this young
lawyer O'Donoghue was not a papist. He is rich, and the alli-
ance would get us out of all our financial embarrassments."

The following day the lawyer and his client drove out to
Baremoor House in answer to the lady's invitation.

Desmond O'Donoghue, attorney-at-law, was a handsome,
well-built, intelligent young man. He was a prominent figure
at all the National meetings in the county, an eloquent speaker,
and a general favorite with every patriotically-disposed human
being in the district. His client, Dan Malone, was a stout, vulgar-
looking old man, whose life might be said to have been entirely
spent behind his counter, and who, as he took his seat upon a
handsome cushioned chair, seemed ill at ease at the comfort it
afforded. After wriggling about uneasily for some time he
sought relief in twirling his hat in his big, fat, speckled hands, and,
after giving an owl-like gaze about the tastefully-furnished apart-
ment, he turned his eyes in the direction of his legal adviser.

" I wondher, Misther Desmond," he began, in a low, whisper-
ing tone, as he inched his chair over towards the lawyer, " is the
Shooneen raaly sick, or is id on'y a dodge he's tryin' on uz?
You know I can't be hard, daalin' wid the wife."

'* I really can't tell you, Dan," replied O'Donoghue. " I take it
they want more time, and your permission to withhold marking
judgment against them to-morrow. It all rests with you, whether
you will force the immediate payment of your account, and per-
haps smash them up, or be lenient with them and take chance
for your money."

" What do you advise me to do, Misther Desmond ? "
" Whatever you please," was the quiet reply. " I have already
explained the situation to you."

" Well, then, Misther Desmond," said Malone, " in the name
o' God, I won't press him ; although I know the blaackguard
would on'y be too delighted to ruin me or you, or any of our
way o' thinkin'. But, thank God ! I can live iddout the money,
even if I lose it."

" I am glad you have come to that conclusion yourself. I
could not well have suggested it to you. But stay, I hear a step.
Here are the ladies."

The door was now thrown open, and Mrs. Macallister, fol-
lowed by her daughter, entered the room. Both visitors rose

384 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec.,

from their seats, and the lady of the house advanced towards the
lawyer with outstretched hand and smiling- countenance, after
which she bowed, in a most condescending manner, towards the
burly creditor. Her daughter retired to the extreme end of the
room, and, seating herself in an easy-chair with abashed and
downcast gaze, seemed awaiting her mother's invitation to lend
her aid in the unpleasant interview.

" I am so much obliged to you, Mr. O'Donoghue," began the
arch diplomatist, " for your kindness in calling here this evening.
I regret very much that my husband's indisposition unables him
to attend to this purely business matter. Of course I fully
explained his proposition to you with regard to the bill of sale,
and if you please we can now begin and make an inventory for
the schedule. My daughter will assist me."

" Well, Mrs. Macallister," began the lawyer, as he cast his
gaze in the direction of the room wherein the young lady was
seated, " my client, Mr. Malone, has been conferring with me on
the matter since I read your offer of security to him, and has
come to the conclusion that an unregistered bill of sale will give
him no better security for his debt than that which he has at
present; therefore "

" He refuses to accede to our offer," interrupted the lady, as a
hectic flush mantled her cheek, and she cast a sidelong look in
the direction of her daughter.

" Oh ! no, madame ; you mistake," replied the lawyer, slightly
elevating his voice. " Mr. Malone does not intend to direct me
to mark a judgment ; on the contrary, he is willing to give you
all further reasonable time you may require to liquidate his
demand."

" This is really very kind of Mr. Malone very kind indeed."
And here Mrs. Macallister turned and bowed towards the soft-
hearted, awkward creditor, who twirled his hat between his
hands and seemed anything but at his ease at the lady's courtly
politeness. " The times have been so very bad of late, Mr.
O'Donoghue," she continued, "owing to foreign competition in
food-products and the unfortunate political disturbances, that my
husband has not been able to collect his rents, and, therefore, our
circumstances have been so strained that we really have not been
able to keep our engagements."

" That'll be all right, ma'am," broke in Malone, to the evident
astonishment of his auditors, " whin we'll get Home Rule."

" Oh ! really, "replied Mrs. Macallister, turning quickly around
and darting a sharp glance at her unsophisticated creditor, " it

1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 385

may be so, sir; but we ladies do not presume to understand
politics."

" Av coorse not, ma'am. But how can the country be ever
well off wid one class fightin' agin the other, the landlord
squeezin' the poor tenant in the bad times, an* the Protestan'
threatenin' to make war on his Catholic fellow-countryman?
For my part, ma'am, although, av coorse, I have a private regard
for my own an' who'd blame me ? I wouldn't object to help a
Protestan', or even a Prosbytaarian, if I thought they stud in
need of it."

''Bravo! Dan," exclaimed the lawyer, with a jocular air,
seeking by his simulated hilarity to cover the rude remarks of
his client. " Your want of bigotry does honor to your head and
heart. But we will be going now. Mrs. Macallister, my client,
Mr. Malone, is a trifle outspoken in his manner, but I assure you
it is the liberality of his big Irish heart which sets his tongue in
motion. You need not further trouble yourself about that account
of his, but whenever convenient I will be happy to hear from
you. Come on, Dan."

The client rose and, with a kind of half-apologetic bow,
moved towards the door. The lawyer fixed his gaze upon a
pretty little water-color sketch which adorned the room, and
the lady of the house, perceiving the action, moved up towards-
him, and, adjusting a pair of gold spectacles, proceeded in her
turn to study the picture.

" That is one of my daughter Flora's sketches," she said'.
" She has a decided taste for art, and I regret here, in this coun^
try place, she cannot perfect herself in its study. Florry," she
called out, turning towards her daughter, " do you not know Mr..
O'Donoghue ? I think you told me you had been introduced to
him."

" Oh ! yes, madame," replied the blushing disciple of BJack-
stone. " I have had that pleasure."

The young lady now advanced, and, lifting her long, silken
eyelashes, gave the lawyer a glance from the depth of her violet
orbs which set his heart beating with increased tumult ; then
she extended her hand, which he grasped with lover-like fervor,
and said in a quiet, Half-abashed tone: " I would have recognized
Mr. O'Donoghue before this, mother, but that his visit here was
a strictly professional one, and, unfortunately, one paid under
very distressing circumstances."

"I am sorry, Mr. O'Donoghue," said the elder lady, " that
my husband's views on political and religious- matters are so
VOL. XLIV. 25

386 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec.,

widely different from jour own. He is what you style an
Orangeman and a loyalist, and you are a Roman Catholic and a
Nationalist. What a pity there should be a necessity for such
broad distinctions! "

" Still, madame," replied the lawyer, " mutual forbearance
will do much to conciliate conflicting parties. Your co-reli-
gionists need not fear the action of their Catholic brethren, even
in the moment of our triumph."

As the lawyer took his hat off the hall rack he turned towards
the young lady, who stood silently at the parlor entrance.

" Good-by, Miss Macallister," he said, stretching out his hand
and grasping hers : " I am sorry my first visit to Baremoor was
not made under more fortunate circumstances." Then in a sotto
voce, meant evidently for her private ear : " I will be at the
Long Lane to-morrow evening. Can you meet me? "

4< I will try," she whispered.

" Au revoir, then," he replied in an equally faint tone, after
which, with a polite bow, he passed quickly out through the hall-
door to the gravelled path in front of the building, where he
joined his burly client, who had been impatiently awaiting his
arrival.

III.

The day after the lawyer's visit Mrs. Macallister announced
her intention of driving into the neighboring market-town to
make some dry-goods purchases. Her daughter Florry, how-
ever, excused herself from accompanying her, and stole out as
soon as she saw the jaunting-car upon which her mother was
seated pass out through the front gate. Then she struck out
quickly across the dewy fields for the Long Lane, the hawthorn-
bound and primrose-fringed trysting-place wherein she had pro-
mised to meet her lover.

With two young and sympathetically-mated human beings
who meet to tell each other the old, old story, time flies with
wings of speed. It was not until the sun had cast the broad, flat
land in cool gray shade, and fired the yellow, furze-crowned sum-
mits of the distant uplands, that prudence suggested an immediate
homeward journey.

As the lovers emerged from the Long Lane upon the winding
high-road the portly form of Father Tom Doyle, the jolly old
iparish priest, was seen advancing towards them. Although
.Father Tom, as he was familiarly called, had his hat off and was

1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 387

evidently reciting from his breviary, still, as all the parish knew,
he had a quick eye for everything- passing round him.

" By Jove ! Florry," exclaimed O'Donoghue, as he recogniz-
ed the pastor, " what a misfortune ! My friend Father Tom, and
no way of escape. We must only make a bold front of it, and I
can say that I met you casually on the road, and was merely ac-
companying you as far as your own gate."

But Father Tom was too old a bird to be caught with chaff,
and when he approached within a few paces of his young friend
and parishioner, and noted the deep blush which suffused his
cheeks, he began to suspect there was something in the wind.

He knew, of course, the lawyer's companion, and were she of
his own fold there was no one in the entire county he would
have been better pleased to have met in the same situation ; but
a Presbyterian, and the penniless daughter of " Sandy the Shoo-
neen '' ! Father Tom took a vigorous pinch of snuff and blew
his nose with his big red handkerchief.

What was to be done ? The characteristic smile of friendly
recognition was beginning to broaden on Father Tom's big,
honest face, and in another moment they were within speaking
distance.

" Father Tom," began O'Donoghue, with ill-concealed bash-
fulness, " this is Miss Flora Macallister, of Baremoor."

The pastor lifted his hat and bowed.

" I was down by the bog," continued the amatory-disposed
lawyer, " merely to see if the young ducks were flying, as I in-
tend having an evening's shooting at them next week, when I
met Miss Macallister on the road."

Something seemed to interfere with the sight of one of Father
Tom's eyes, as he closed it into wrinkled tightness, while the
open one gleamed with a sort of funny knowingness at his young
parishioner.

" I think, Desmond," said he, as he pointed towards a path-
way a short distance from him, " this passage leads straight up
to Miss Macallister's house."

" Yes, sir," replied the young lady in a meek, bashful tone.
" I fear I have delayed already too long. Good-by, Mr. O'Dono-
ghue. I am obliged for your kindness in accompanying me so
lar.

Then she turned her eyes towards the priest, and, stretching
out her hand to meet his, said : " Good-by, sir."

" Good by, Miss Macallister," said Father Tom. " I am very
happy, I assure you, to have made your acquaintance."

388 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec.,

At this moment Flora's attention was attracted by the sound
of approaching footsteps, and, looking around in a frightened
manner, to her horror she perceived Major Brown, who had evi-
dently been a witness to her handshaking familiarity with the
priest. She quickened her footsteps to avoid him, but the major,
with rapid strides, came up near her and called out :

" Miss Florry, you seem to be in a great hurry. I am going
up to the house to see your father, and I will accompany you.
You ought to be as well pleased to walk and talk with me as you
were with that ignorant popish priest you have just left. I in-
tend telling your father all about your doings."

" You are a mean, low man to do so," retorted the girl, glar-
ing fiercely at her companion. " An accident caused me to meet
that gentleman whom you call a popish priest, and I did not ex-
change ten words with him. As a lady I could not insult him
when I found myself respectfully addressed. You know my
father's fierce antipathy to priests, and the misery you may en-
tail within our family by your officious, tell-tale interference. It
is therefore that I am forced to stoop, nay, even beg of you not
to make any allusion to this purely accidental occurrence."

11 The answer you gave me when I pressed my own suit, and
the sight of the man whom I have just found in your company,
and who has lost me your affection, preclude the possibility of
such an infringement of my duty. You have had your moment
of triumph, Miss Macallister; I now have mine. As an officer
in her most gracious majesty's militia, and as a Protestant gentle-
man, I cannot conscientiously refrain from acquainting your fa-
ther of all I have seen this evening. These rebellious priests,
with their communistic cries of Home Rule and abolition of the
landed interests, are now our bitterest foes. Am I, then, to see
the daughter of my friend and brother Mason degrade herself by
giving her hand to a vile political firebrand ? "

Flora Macallister felt a choking sensation in her throat. It
was useless to argue further with this inexorable bigot, this dis-
carded suitor for her hand. So, without another word or com-
ment, she pj-oceeded on her way, and on arriving at the hall-door
dashed hurriedly up-stairs to her own room. Meanwhile the
major, with his own additions and innuendoes, was telling his
story to his " brother Orangeman " ; and after a few moments
Flora heard a terrible voice, which she dreaded, calling her at
the foot of the stairs :

" Florry, Florry, come here at once."

With trembling and trepidation she crept down the stairs and

1 8 86.] THE SHOONEEN. 389

entered the parlor, wherein her father and Major Brown now sat
together.

" Florry," began the now excited head of the family, " what
is this I hear about your conduct? Have you determined on
disgracing me ? "

" I did not disgrace you, father; I could not do so."

" You lie, girl ! You did. Has not Major Brown seen you
hand-in-hand with a popish priest the arch-rascal who presides
at all the unlawful meetings in the county ? "

" I met him accidentally, father, and I could not avoid re-
turning a bare salute when it was given to me in common cour-
tesy."

" And is it not a fact that that blackguard Home Rule attor-
ney, O'Donoghue, introduced you to him ? "

" Yes, father, I was introduced to the priest by Mr. O'Dono-
ghue. On his visit to this house yesterday you know he did not
prove himself a blackguard ; and he is not one either, but a gen-
tleman and a man of honor ! "

All this while Major Brown was sniggering and shuffling un-
easily in his chair, evidently delighted at the domestic storm
which his revenge had been the means of arousing. He looked
for a moment at the girl, who, without evincing boldness or de-
fiance, still displayed no palpable demonstration of fear.

" You should make her solemnly promise, Sandy," he chimed
in, " that she will never speak to that papist lawyer again."

" She shall do so," roared Macallister, as he reached up to
the mantelpiece and grasped a large riding-whip. " I will see to
it that my orders are obeyed. Do you promise, girl, that you
will never again speak or exchange a word with this papist law-
yer-fellow with whom you were found this evening?"

" Father," cried the now terrified Flora, throwing herself
upon her knees, and with tearful, imploring gaze looking into her
parent's face, now wrinkled and distorted with passion, " for-
give me if I seem to be disobedient, but at another time, when we
are alone, I will give you satisfactory reasons."

"I want none of your reasons, you young Jezabel ! Do you
promise? "

With head bowed down the weeping girl murmured : " I
cannot."

" Then by the contents of this I will make you ! " And before
his affrighted daughter had time to lift her hands on guard, the
heavy whip descended with terrific force across her face and
neck, and with a wild cry of pain she fell upon the floor.

39 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec.,

IV.

When Mrs. Macallister arrived home she found her husband
and Major Brown seated in the front parlor. Their noticeable
silence and moody attitudes instantly suggested to her the idea
that something had gone wrong in her absence ; so, suspecting
possibly the quarter from which the trouble might have arisen,
she eagerly inquired for her daughter Florry.

" I don't know where she is," replied her husband gruffly,
without even lifting his eyes to look at his wife, " and, further-
more, I don't care. Possibly she has some popish priest keeping
her company.''

" Popish priest ! " exclaimed Mrs. Macallister. " Why, Sandy,
what do you mean?"

" I mean," replied her husband, rising from his chair, and ele-
vating his voice so that he might be heard by all the inmates of
the house " I mean that if any daughter of mine wishes to culti-
vate the acquaintance of Romish Mass-singers or rebellious Home-
Rulers she had better quit my house for ever."

" This is a strange expression, Sandy. I cannot understand
you. Tell me what has happened since I left here ! "

" Go and ask her," retorted the husband with a sneer, as he
pointed towards the staircase " your pet daughter. I have given
her a lesson she won't forget for some time, and if I ever catch
her again disobeying me I will turn her homeless on the road-
side."

" It is unfortunately too true, Mrs. Macallister," broke in
Major Brown, rising from his chair and moving towards the
door, as if to take his leave. " There is no doubt about the
matter. I saw her myself shaking hands with that old fire-brand
priest Doyle, and smiling at him as if she were one of his most
intimate friends."

" And you carried the pleasant news, did you? " inquired the
lady, with a tone of voice and a scornful glance at the informant
which did not bode well for his future welcome at the Sunday
dinner-table at Baremoor.

"I considered it my duty, madame," replied the major, with a
profound bow.

" Then allow me, sir, to offer you my thanks for your conde-
scension."

" How, madame ? I do not clearly understand."

" Perhaps not. Was it not a condescension that you should

1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 391

lower yourself from your high military position to become a little,
tale-bearing family disturber? "

" Susan," interrupted the husband, " you must not speak in that
manner to Major Brown. I think he deserves our best thanks for
his friendly interference." 4

" That is a matter of opinion, Sandy. It is fortunate for
Major Brown I was not here when he told his troublesome story.
I can mind my own daughter, and I have no need of military
spies to track her every footstep."

" Oh ! I beg your pardon, madame," rejoined the major, look-
ing palpably discomfited at his unpleasant position. " I believed
I was doing you and your husband a service with this intelli-
gence."

" It was one, sir, which was unsought, and which I hope will
never be repeated."

" Then, madame, I presume I had better say good-evening."

" Good-evening, sir," was the disdainful reply. *' You have
given me unpleasant employment enough to incapacitate me from
entertaining you any further."

Major Brown bowed coweringly before the irate mistress of
Baremoor, and quickly passed out of the room.

After a few ineffectual inquiries to her husband Mrs. Macal-
lister instantly quitted the parlor and proceeded towards the
bedroom of her offending daughter. The door was bolted from
the inside, and it was not without considerable knocking and
calling that it was opened by the fair occupant herself, who pre-
sented such a tristful and dishevelled appearance, after her terri-
ble paroxysm of grief and tears, that her mother was terror-
stricken at the sight.

" My own dear, darling Florry ! " she cried, as she threw her
arms around her daughter's neck and kissed her fervently on the
forehead. (< What, in Heaven's name, has happened since I left
here this morning ? Your father is wild with passion, and you,
my dear you frighten me with the appearance you present.
But stay, what is this? My God ! you have been cut upon the
cheek such a blow, too! Tell me quickly how it all occurred."

Through her sobs the girl told her the whole story of her
affection for the young lawyer and his reciprocal feeling; of the
appointment in the Long Lane, the walk home, the accidental
meeting with Father Doyle, and the unfortunate appearance of
Major Brown.

" O that contemptible little tell-tale! This is all revenge
at your refusal of his suit. But, Florry my dear, wipe your eyes

39 2 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec.,

and brush your hair, and come down with me to supper. You
know it will be all right when I am at the table. Brown is gone.
I gave him a piece of my mind ; and had I then known as much
as I do now he would not have got off so easily."

Yielding to the kind maternal invitation, Flora arranged the
fringe upon her neck-gear so as to hide the dark-red welt which
had arisen from the blow, and, with her mother's arm locked in
hers, descended slowly down the stairway. The moment the
pair entered the apartment there was a violent commotion.
The father swung his chair around and then sprang to his feet>
and, with outstretched arm and forefinger rigidly extended in the
direction of his unhappy daughter, called out in stentorian tones :

" This girl leaves the room, or I will leave it ! I cannot sit in
company with one who plots designing falsehoods to disgrace
my household by associating with the sworn enemies of my
friends and party ! "

" O Sandy, Sandy ! " broke in the wife, " what in the name
of wonder is the matter with you ? Are you losing your senses,
man ? Florry is deeply grieved that she has offended you, and
she has explained the whole matter to me. 'Twas an accident
she met "

"Another infernal lie of hers ! " roared the now excited man.
" Was it by accident she met that spouting rebel O'Donoghue,
or by accident they both met that popish priest on an unfre-
quented roadway? Leave the room, leave my presence, girl, or
I may rue the day I first called you daughter! "

The poor penitent, thus savagely addressed, could not articu-
late one syllable in reply ; even her garrulous mother was, for
the moment, tongue-tied at the sight of her husband's fearful
wrath, and releasing her hold of her daughter's arm, which she
had grasped at the first moment of attack, she allowed her to re-
cede a few paces, when she instantly rushed back to her room,
which she had just quitted.

The moment the young girl disappeared Alexander Macallis-
ter arose from the chair into which he had thrown himself after
his angry outburst, and, directing a piercing glance at his wife,
said in a deep, sarcastic tone :

"I suppose, Susan, you are going to take sides with that re-
bellious daughter of yours. Don't you know what I am that I
am Orange of the Orange, if by that is meant one loyal to his
queen and the integrity of the empire?"

" Oh ! nonsense, Sandy," retorted his wife, with marked acer-
bity in her tones. " I'm sick of all this talk about you Orange-

1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 393

men. You can be as Orange as you like, but you mustn't strike
my daughter with your whip. I'll see that this shall never
occur again."

The next morning Macallister arose in no good-humor with
the world in general. His outbreak with his daughter had
aroused his worst feelings; and then also debts pressed heavily
on the u Shooneen." The rents which should be paid him were
not forthcoming. A decrease in the value of all farm produce
and a wet, unfruitful season had incapacitated his unfortunate
tenants from giving him even an instalment of their payments,
and in a blind spirit of revenge he determined to invoke the un-
relenting aegis of the law to compass their eviction.

One of the most notable defaulters on his property was Mick
McGrath an honest, struggling, poor fellow whom inevitable
circumstances had reduced almost to a starving condition.
Against this man in particular Macallister had a grudge, and he
therefore determined upon making him what he styled a fear-
ful example of his power.

It was a drizzly, cheerless October morning that the measur-
ed tramp of marching feet attracted the attention of little Patsey
McGrath, and when he had satisfied himself as to the destination
of the military he instantly rushed into the house, crying out,
as he clapped his hands in the excitement of his grief: " O
mammy, mammy, he's de sogers! "

Mrs. McGrath was a delicate, attenuated woman, who for
many years had been a victim to heart-disease, and the dreaded
announcement, although daily expected, instantly threw her into
a fever of excitement. Her husband, who was abroad in the
fields working at the time, no sooner perceived the approach of
the military than he rushed wildly towards his house, and on
entering the door was horror-stricken to find his wife lying
fainting on the floor. The strange pallor of the woman's pinch-
ed-up features, her closed eyes and rigidity of body, at first
glance led him to the belief that she had succumbed to the fell
malady which had long threatened her life ; so in the wildness of
his grief he cast himself on his knees beside her, while the young
children, terror-stricken at the sight of their parents, crowded
around the motionless form of their mother, uttering piteous in-
fantine cries which might soften the most obdurate heart.

394 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec.,

The scene was one of those fearful ones which can be wit-
nessed in many parts of Ireland to-day, and which will continue
to disgrace the land as long as London-made laws shall hold
their power in the country.

"Halt!"

A loud military command, a cessation of the martial tread,
and in a few minutes the light in McGrath's kitchen was almost
extinguished by the forms of the Shooneen and the county sheriff
standing in the narrow doorway.

"McGrath," began the landlord, as he fixed his gaze on his
tenant, " I have been compelled to bring the sheriff here to get
possession of my place. You have not kept up to your pro-
mise."

" 'Twas the bad saison, yer honor," pleaded the poor man,
" an* the fall in prices, an' the sickness, that kep' me back. You
see my wife lyin' there; I'm afeared the shock ov bein' turned
out is afther killin* her."

" Oh ! nonsense," replied Macallister. " This is an old trick
to gain compassion ; but it won't work this time. Out you
must go."

When the sheriff had fully taken in the situation of the misery
of the poor people whom he was about to evict, he requested the
landlord to accompany him outside, and sought to dissuade him
from the proceeding.

" I fear this will be a bad business, Mr. Macallister," said he.
" I would strongly advise you to leave this man in his holding
for the winter. This eviction will be the talk of the whole
county."

" I do not care whether it is or not," was the brusque reply.
" The fellow owes me rent, the land is mine, and I am deter-
mined I will have possession."

" But, Mr. Macallister," said the sheriff, " can't you see you
are about to run a very great risk? Should the woman die on
your hands her death will be styled ' murder ' ; and even should
she recover sufficiently to walk away from the place her husband
may wreak his vengeance on you. My experience tells me it is
not safe to trust men in McGrath's unhappy condition."

" I have considered that point also, Mr. Sheriff, and here you
see I have come thoroughly prepared." The Shooneen then
threw open his overcoat and pointed to an inside pocket, from
which the shining mounting of a pistol was distinctly visible.
" A British bull-dog, Mr. Sheriff, the contents of which this rascal
tenant of mine will get if he dares to attack me with violence."

1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 395

" Very well, Mr. Macallister, you can do as you please. We
will proceed at your risk."

Both men now re-entered the house. Mrs. McGrath was
standing upright, surrounded by her little children, whom she
was caressing and encouraging to cease their tears, as she was
all right.

" We're goin' away, childher," she said, unable to repress the
tears that glistened in her eyes, "an* God an' his Holy Mother 'ill
take care of us. Don't cry, my launa " this to a handsome-faced
little fellow who burst into a loud lamentation when the sheriff
and the landlord approached his mother. "We're goin' to a fine
big house, agragh, where ye'll all get yer food an' good dhry
beds, an' where I can see ye now an' agen. God knows I never
thought the poor house would see me in it at the end of my
days."

" Mrs. McGrath," said the landlord, " you will oblige us by
walking outside, and bringing your children with you."

" Oh ! yis, sir," said the mother, gathering her little family
about her slender skirts as a hen does her chickens. " We're
goin', yer honner ; you needn't say another word."

As the group reached the door one of the children ran back
and clutched its father by the leg as he was sweeping up some
Indian meal out of a box and putting it in a bag preparatory to
his departure. Macallister turned quickly round and stretched
out his hand to stay the little urchin, when Mick McGrath turned
upon him with frenzy blazing in his eyes and roared out : " Laave
go that child, you black-hearted rascal ! He'll go out whin I'm
goin'."

" A trick, McGrath, to hold possession. It's not the first child
was stowed away in a hidden place to evade the law. But out
he must go, here ! "

The child sent up a wild howl as the landlord grasped him,
and the father with a bound clutched Macallister's arm as in a
vise. The Shooneen, though an aged man, was yet a strong one,
and with a desperate wrench he rid himself from his tenant's
clutch, then quickly his hand disappeared into his inside pocket
as he saw McGrath rush towards the smouldering embers of the
turf fire on the hearth. The sheriff stood spellbound with terror,
and the child managed to make another rush towards its father.
McGrath had quickly grasped a rough, murderous-looking iron
bar, and in the intensity of his passion caught the little boy up in
his arms as he whirled the rude weapon aloft in a defensive atti
tude.

39 6 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec ,

The Shooneen's blood was up, and the protection which he
believed was afforded him by the pistol impelled him to advance
a step nearer the poor hunted tenant. The child gave another
terrified yell as the men closed together, and before the sheriff or
any outsider could interfere there was a loud report, a pistol-flash
of fire and smoke, a terrible dull thud of the iron bar, and the
Shooneen with a death-groan lay writhing on the floor !

Then the wild shriek of a woman was heard, and a rush was
made from without. On the floor of the cabin lay the landlord,
the dark blood oozing from his skull ; near him lay a little white-
faced child over whom his horror-stricken father bent. The
bullet meant for the father had taken the life of his little child.

Why proceed further with this terrible picture? It is, alas !
the story of Ireland to-day Orange hate, landlord oppression,
unjust enactments ; the impecunious landlord on the one hand,
the over-weighted, helpless tenant-farmer on the other. Evic-
tions are as rife to-day in Ireland, notwithstanding all the bene-
ficial results which were to flow from the late Land Act, as they
were twenty years ago ; and so they will continue, and tragedies
like this will blur the page of Irish history, until a drastic remedy
shall be applied to the numerous ills of that unhappy country,
until her own people, on their own soil, shall meet and enact their
own laws.

Twelvemonths after the death of " the Shooneen " Flora Mac-
allister sat with her mother in the parlor of Baremoor House.
The violent shock which the latter had sustained had completely
silvered her hair.

" It is all arranged, then, Florry my dear," went on Mrs. Mac-
allister, resuming the thread of a conversation with her daughter,
"and you will marry him?"

" Yes, mother."

" I am pleased with the intelligence. It will ease my mind to
know that you are now safely established in life. Mr. O'Dono-
ghue is rich and kind-hearted, and can afford to keep you above
the little harassing wants which oppressed us in your poor
father's lifetime. But, Florry, is it true that you are about to
change your religion."

" It is, mother."

" And what have you found in Catholicism which was not
within your own ? "

1 886.] THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. 397

" I have found, mother, a peace which passeth all human un-
derstanding."

" God bless you, my child ! " said the old lady, as she leaned
forward and imprinted a fervent kiss on the soft cheek of the fair
convert. " May he send us all light in our ways, so that his
Divine Truth may to each one be apparent ! "

THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW.

SOME years ago labor advocates succeeded in raising much
enthusiasm among the politicians and other professional philan-
thropists over their strong demand for a sweeping reduction in
the hours of labor. Hitherto men, women, and children had
worked as many hours as their employers asked or cupidity
prompted. From twelve to fourteen hours daily were used by
work-people in earning their bread. This was the average.
Here and there a State legislature had limited the work-day to
ten hours, but only on State works and in State institutions was
the limit, with some exceptions, at all observed. Ten hours a
day was an object for the great majority. It looked like the
baseless fabric of a vision to most work-people, and has remained
a vision up to the present moment.

But, with the swiftness peculiar to crude revolutionary meth-
ods, the labor advocates picked up the idea of an eight-hour limit
and pushed it into the legislatures. The politicians were en-
tranced, in New York State at least. The uprising of the labor-
ers was come, and he who rode its topmost wave might glance
without shame at the first office in the country. The law was
passed that is, the letter of it. It can be seen on the statute-
book in black and white. But the spirit, the vivifying spirit, not
being at the beck of any legislature, has never entered into it.
In vain has many a political aspirant Polyphemus-like pursued
the principle that promised luck. The eight-hour law is dead as
the door-nail whose deadness Dickens doubted.

It has taken our law-makers long to understand that a law
must be born of other stuff than their scheming brains and prin-
ter's ink. Its necessity must be shown, the people whom it is to
benefit aroused, the people whom it is to hurt annihilated, so to
speak. Then there is a chance for the law to range outside the
statute-book. The time came, of course, when political leaders

398 THE EIGHT-HOUR LA w. [Dec.,

were glad the eight-hour law had no wider range. There was a
necessity for the law, and the working-people were aroused, but
so were their employers. Money was being made then in quan-
tities, and money-makers could not get hours and men enough to
pile up their treasures. They kicked with e'ffect against dimin-
ishing the hours of labor. Then the boom died away. The
strikes began their work of demoralizing all parties. In the
struggle to secure decent wages hour-limits have been for the
moment forgotten. It is to be hoped they will remain so until a
steady and well-managed movement to secure a fair limit can be
organized, in behalf of which this article has been written.

A good number of questions bristle around the eight-hour
idea like quills upon a famous animal : What do work-people
think about it? what do employers say ? is it feasible? is it neces-
sary ? will it disturb the national economy ? There has really
been no discussion of a limit to hours of labor, at least none that
has enlightened man^ on the subject. Men were agitating for a
ten-hour limit before the public had learned that it was true
economy to rest, recreate, and sleep a trifle between work-times.
They jumped at the eight-hour bait before the ten-hour worm
was nibbled at. So that from this haste a big sum of uncertainty
and indistinctness has accumulated in kindly, interested minds
and nobody seems to know anything about particulars of eight-
hour and ten-hour ideas.

The employers, as an interested party, have very precise and
strong opinions about them. They are founded mostly upon the
state of the market, the cost of raw material, the wages, general
expenses, and the balance-sheet, and they amount to this : that if
limiting the hours of labor will secure them as high or higher
profits as they enjoy under the present system, they will not
oppose an eight-hour law. The employer naturally regulates the
entire world by the state of his exchequer, and once it is proved
that he loses nothing by change you may transfer China to New
England without a murmur of opposition from him. Capitalists
are in the same state of mind as the general run of people. They
know nothing about it except this: that if the laborer expects the
same pay for eight hours as for ten, they are going to do their
best to disappoint him. They are satisfied with present condi-
tions, but if changes are to be made the party benefiting by the
change must bear the expense. This, within limits, is logic and
charity combined.

As a rule employers oppose a reduction of the hours of labor,
but more because of their present unstable relations with work-

1 886.] THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. 399

people than from reasons of state ; as also, perhaps, from a well-
founded idea that they will have to pay as much for eight hours
of labor as for ten. This they do not intend to do, but the ex-
pense of not doing it will be large. Many employers are neutral
on this question, and are waiting, like the public, for further in-
formation. In the April number of the Forum Mr. George Gun-
ton supplied a reasonable amount of this, and, as far as figures go,
made out a fair case for the economic feasibility of an eight-hour
law. In fact, his case was chiefly an argument before a jury of
capitalists to convince them that their profits would increase
under such a limit, and that, far from disturbing the economies of
America, the new system would materially strengthen them. To
which article interested readers are respectfully referred, as in
these pages no more can be done than to illustrate the proposed
scheme from the standpoint of the working-man.

To comprehend what his feelings are with regard to the eight-
hour idea, a year or two in a coal-mine, a forest, a forge, a cotton-
mill, or half that time on a freight-train, an ocean-steamer, or a
railroad-section, would open up the understanding and the sym-
pathies of any man. Saint-Simon thought it necessary, in order
to formulate a new scheme for the salvation of men, that the
scheme should embrace an experience of the heights of virtue and
the depths of shame, the depression of pain and the exaltation of
pleasure. His theory, in substance, is the highest tribute which
socialism has paid to Christianity, whose Founder knew these
mysteries as only God could know them. The working-people
think and speak of the eight-hour law as Tennyson thought and
spoke of "the golden time of good Haroun-al-Raschid." They
are sceptical of ever attaining such a height of bliss. A system
which would include a place for better things than the mere
labor, sleep, eating, and drinking of which their poor lives are
made up, has too close a resemblance to heaven to be at all prac-
tical. To work from eight until twelve and from two to six, to
have an hour for dinner, an hour for preparation and rest, a leis-
urely evening, a full measure of sleep, and a breath of morning
air, are luxuries which the rich, but not the poor, can afford. The
working-people, therefore, talk of an eight-hour law as a good
thing for the next world. They feel that it is their lot to work
hard and live cheaply, thankful if they have health and fair wages
to the last. And such Utopias as this they leave to the agita-
tors, whose vocation it is to fight against the nature of things.
They have seen the workings of thesjptem under the government,
where it is part of a species of fraud practised on taxpayers, and

400 THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. [Dec.,

they have come to suspect that the whole matter is of a fraudu-
lent stamp whose rottenness will shortly be uncovered. They
sometimes go so far as to think that it may even be a trap which
opens into a deeper depth of poverty for them an impression
strengthened by the employer, who carefully explains that if
wages are close to starvation-mark now, these must fall below it
after a change. So that, with the workingman as with the em-
ployer, notions concerning the eight-hour system are hazy and
incomplete.

There are three questions which put themselves forward the
moment the new system comes up for discussion : Is an eight-
hour system necessary? can the workingman support himself un-
der it? and can employers earn a reasonable profit over expenses?
Figures and inferences say yes, decidedly. To the first question
it seems to me an affirmative answer must be given. The eight-
hour system is a necessity not pressing, but at least imperative.
It may not need universal application, for greedy men will not
adopt it, and may be allowed to kill themselves without danger
to society ; but for certain large interests in our country it is
the only measure which can secure to the poor the few rights
they claim, to live comfortably and to live long.

And now a word as to the wages which the workers may get
for fewer hours of labor. There seems to be no way of stopping
the descent of wages towards zero except through the violent
convulsion of society known as the strike. It is now patent to
all that the condition of labor becomes poorer with every year,
and from causes which cannot be laid at any man's door. The
few arnass enormous fortunes, not alone from unjust practices, but
also from ability to control big monopolies. The many grow
poorer on wages which bear a fair proportion to the profits of
employers. There is no more melanchol}' sight than this in the
republic. Fathers of families, thousands of them, are forced to
support eight persons on one dollar and ten cents a day. This is
the limit. They do it in the country by leasing patches of land
on which to grow potatoes and corn ; in the city by putting the
women and children to work. From dawn to bed-time light
and dark are boundaries which they cannot respect they sweat
for a comfortable living, sweat not only to the extent of the Crea-
tor's primal ordinance but their very blood. For these people
there can be no lower condition permissible except beggary ; and
beggary, for the American multitude, means riot and revolution.
There can be no lower descent in the wages. The descent must
stop at the limit of support. Now, this is the position. Having

1 886.] THE EIGHT- HOUR LA w. 401

come to the riot-mark in wages, and it being shown that eight
hours' labor in a day is enough for all purposes,*it is more profit-
able for a poor man to take two-thirds of the day to himself than
to exhaust his vitality in a wild struggle for pie as well as bread.
He may leave it to the corporations to discover a method of get-
ting more time out of him. It is all one to him how they suc-
ceed. They cannot give him less wages without risking destruc-
tion, and he will not give them more time. This deadlock will
be wholly to his advantage, and that it is bound to come any
two-eyed individual may see. It will not settle the labor difficul-
ties, but it will leave contestants much leisure to think over the
position.

Is the eight- hour system a necessity? Yes. Why? Here
are the facts. Every man born into this world has a right to a
decent maintenance while he is in it. This is a crude statement,
but so the work-people express it. The community to which he
belongs should furnish him as payment for his steady labor with
a house, food, raiment, and protection, should ask no more from
him than he is able to accomplish, and only rarely should strain
his abilities. Now, these are the things which society finds most
difficult to do, and its incapacity becomes daily more apparent
and alarming. Poor housing, poor food, poor raiment, and a
grudging protection are the share of the multitude. And, worse-
than all, the strain put upon their physical and mental forces- is-
heavier than nature can stand. Neither nature, art, nor religion,
can repair the irreparable damage done the poor laborer in many
ways by the long hours of work. For this reason a diminution,
of the hours of labor is a necessity. And, not to mince matters,,
the new system must cost employers as heavily as twelve hours
at present. That fact may as well be understood now as later.

The eight-hour system is a necessity because the majority of
work-people cannot work longer hours and keep, hi good health.
This sounds like rank heresy to men who were born fifty years
ago and have remembered the primitive limits of a ; day's labor.
But all things are changed since then. Machinery has nearly
destroyed the individual laborer. It seizes him like the raw ma-
terial upon which it feeds, saps muscle and life fromihim as long
as he can supply them, and then tosses him aside like the refuse
of a pulp-mill. The mechanic of a half-century back ran no risk
of having his life jarred out of him. I repeat that the majority
of work-people cannot work longer than eight hours a day and
live.

We have mines, forests, and factories,. railroads, steamers, and
VOL. XLIV. 26

402 THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. [Dec.,

miscellaneous interests, where some millions of men, women, and
children are employed. The mines, to begin with. We all have
dim ideas of those infernal regions. The frightful catastrophes
peculiar to them chill us, and the death-like life of their inhabi-
tants fills us with dread. The gloom, the daily imprisonment,
the danger impress us, but these are really less painful than the
social condition of the miner. Once high wages made a com-
pensation for risk and misery ; now there is no compensation
whatever. For miserable wages the men and boys are buried in
the earth twelve hours out of the twenty-four, in cramped atti-
tudes, in poisonous atmospheres, in hourly dangers, in dampness,
and in loneliness. The hours that should be given to sleep are
the only social hours they may be said to know. The only re-
creation they enjoy is a brief visit to the saloon and the quick
excitement of bad whiskey and drugged beer. For education,
for kome enjoyment, for the training of children, for a little of
that leisure which the poorest ought to possess, there is no time.
From childhood to the mine, and from the mine to the grave, is
the history of the miner.

The forest employs during the winter months the hardiest
youth of the country. It is a health-giving employment. The
'hardships are great, the work severe, but the woodman is every-
where distinguished for his magnificent physique, and also for his
rheumatism. His working-hours are from twelve to fifteen a
day. At four o'clock of a winter's morning he is at work.
Rough food and rough quarters, intense cold, frequent and tho-
rough wettings, are the inseparable companions of his existence,
which has only one redeeming feature that his family do not
share his miseries. Like the miner, he has time only for the bad
whiskey of the log shanty ; unlike the miner, he may live like a
civilized being for nearly one-fourth of the year in spite of the
rheumatism. His only protection against sudden death is the
strength of his constitution. Those precautions which give the
body aid in recovering from exhaustion his scanty wages will
not permit him to use, nor do his employers dream of supply-
ing them. To work to the utmost, to rest the least, and to be
recompensed with a trifle is the condition of the forester.

The factory-people are in many places like an army on con-
tinuous battle-fields. Every decade but a tenth remains of those
who fought at the beginning. There are no veterans. Death,
sickness, and the absolute necessity of change force the lines, in
numerous instances, to form and form again. The new recruits
:are legion, eager to catch the same diseases and to suffer the

1 886.] THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. 403

same fate as those who went before. One half their lives are
spent in rooms with no ventilation, whose atmosphere is charged
with various foul odors. For nearly twelve hours all are subject-
ed to the jar of machinery. The spinners in cotton and woollen
mills, men, women, and children, never sit the entire day except
at meals, while the mule-spinners walk the entire twelve hours,
until it would seem as if legs so long a-going could never stop.
Weavers have intervals of rest, which saves considerable tissue.
Children get no rest whatever. In winter over two hours of
work is done by gaslight. The only recreation of these people
is the accidental holiday, Sunday, and the space between supper
and bed-time. The strain of factory-life proves too much for the
majority ; they pass into other occupations or into the grave. In
factory-towns, among factory-people, there is a painful scarcity
of the white hair of age.

Railroad men suffer in the same fashion as factory-people.
For those who have the charge of trains the jar is constant and
injurious. The passenger-train employees are fairly situated
with regard to hours and wages, but the freight-train men and
the section slaves are among the most poorly situated people of
the country. Not to speak of the danger and the exposure of
the first class, the long hours demanded of them are a standing
disgrace to humanity. The economy practised by the railroads
is the meanest because the most perfect known to civilized man.
It is founded on an infallible system. Men may break, but the
system never varies an inch from the rut. It is nothing to
squeeze eighteen hours a day from employees who are only paid
for ten ; nothing to call men from their rest two or three times in
a night ; nothing to break up the meal-hour and the meagre hour
of leisure; nothing to make one man do the work of two in sea-
sons of activity because the corporation has beforehand deter-
mined to keep no extra men. The economical system will not
allow it. The poor slaves who are employed in keeping the
road-bed in repair, for the hardest of work receive one dollar a
day. In summer ten cents is added. They are exposed to all
sorts of weather, and find the winters specially hard. Corpora-
tions like the Central Vermont or the Delaware and Hudson
railroad, whose territory suffers from stormy winters, need a
particular and pressing invitation from the labor powers to treat
their men with more humanity. Even in the country districts
the lower grade of railroad men find it impossible to support a
family on wages. Land must be leased and planted with pota-
toes and other vegetables after the day's labor is ended. The

404 THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. [Dec.,

children must hoe it and weed it, gather in the harvest, and other-
wise assist the parent as soon as their legs can carry them.

The same thread of misery runs through the whole manufac-
turing system of the time. The iron interests get in many dis-
tricts twelve full hours from each man daily. The paper manu-
facturers get the same from their machine-men. The obscure
towns and the obscure factories squeeze their work-people as an
orange might be squeezed flat. And, to add to the whole pic-
ture the last touch of wretchedness, it must be remembered that
not alone are strong, healthy men called on to endure these
things, but women and children are subject to the same unneces-
sary hardships. The most striking feature of our whole economy
is the fact that women and children are rapidly supplanting men
in every occupation where a feebler arm can be used.

I might multiply illustrations they grow thicker than mul-
berriesbut from these few one can make a reckoning. It is clear
that our working-people are overworked. It matters little for
our present argument that they are also underpaid. The case
would stand if they were overpaid. This multitude of miners,
foresters, railroaders, iron and cotton and woollen workers are
wearing their bodies away in labor of which the world has no
need. Here is the viciousness of it. They die to no purpose.
They have no aged men among them, being fast friends of death.
Behind them, and in the possession of their employers, they leave
heaps of useless gold and surrender their priceless bodies to the
dust. Twelve hours' continuous labor is a strain on the strong-
est man. Under the aggravation of enclosure in bad atmos-
pheres, etc., it is positive torture. Forced upon the young and
the old, the weak and the strong alike, it is downright cruelty.

Many who are acquainted with the facts which have been
here set forth profess to believe that they shape an argument for
shorter hours, but not especially an eight-hour system. True
enough. But they do convince men that a diminution in the hours
of labor is needed ; and when it comes to be asked to what extent
are we to diminish, a careful inquiry will prove that no man can
safely work more than ten hours daily, while the heavier trades
should require no more than eight.

At first sight the eight-hour system, by comparison with its
neighbor, looks like child's play. One-third of the day spent in
labor and two-thirds in sleep and recreation bears a striking resem-
blance to the so-called lazy habits of the Italians, who, by the way,
for all their habits, can work longer hours on bread and water
than any American on meat and potatoes. The hygiene of the
eight-hour system, however, and its social, moral, and religious

1 886.] THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. 405

aspects, change first impressions rapidly. Given the most per-
fect physical constitution and ten hours' labor of the most favor-
able kind farming, for instance and after it the physical consti-
tution requires absolutely- eight hours of sleep daily. Now, from
this standard measure the conditions of the work-people describ-
ed in this article. The miner, the sailor, the forester, the factory-
hand, the train-man must either have more sleep or less work
when in the best physical condition ; the women must have still
more, the aged and the young most of all ; and as none of these
have constitutions of the best, for all their endurance, the hours of
recuperation must be lengthened. I consider this argument un-
answerable.

All this has been admitted many times by opponents of the
eight or ten-hour system. They grant all that the argument
demands nine and ten hours' sleep for the work-people, two
hours for meals, Sunday for absolute rest, an occasional holiday.
But they maintain that these things can be granted and the old
system of eleven and twelve hours maintained at the same time.
I do not see how, nor have they yet risen to explain their as-
sertions. Twelve or thirteen hours of necessary sleep, refresh-
ment, and recreation leave no room for any kind of leisure, and
without that leisure I maintain no man can live his life out.
Statistics prove it and reason supports it. Work-people have
duties towards themselves, their neighbor, their children, and
their God. What time is left to them for these factors of their
earthly and heavenly destinies? From sleep must be snatched
the time to attend to them. Fathers cannot look after their chil-
dren except in the fashion of Congressional committees or State
inspectors, once or twice a year. Brothers and sisters make the
acquaintance of one another in the boarding-house style at
meals. They were intimate in childhood, but have no chance to
renew that intimacy except in sickness or after death. In order
to vote a man must be excused from his labor. To attempt a reli-
gious exercise on a week-day he must rise at four o clock and not retire
before eleven. As for his neighbor in distress, he must assist him
after dinner. To improve his mental, physical, or spiritual con-
dition, to look after his own, to cultivate social relations, there is
no time. In' order to earn a scanty living he must sleep in haste,
eat in haste, and, if he falls sick, get well in haste. Such a system
is condemned in its utterance.

Men's lives are not to be divided between the two occupations
of wage-working and sleeping. Work which exhausts nature so
completely that all spare time must be used in daily recuperation
is no part of God's scheme in creation. The duties which de-

406 THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. [Dec.,

volve upon men as citizens, fathers, friends, superiors, and chil-
dren of the Almighty require absolutely that time should be
given to them outside the hours of labor for support and sleep.
We blame the man who surrenders his whole time to money-
getting, yet this is what the working-men are compelled to do.
Ten hours in a coal-mine, a factory, a fancy-store, or even an
editor's room, unfit the worker for any kind of activity, mental or
physical. There is nothing to be done but rest and sleep after-
wards, and it is with difficulty these intervals renew the man for
the next day's labor.

Hardship does not harden constitutions. It destroys them.
Look for gray-haired men among our workers. They are rarer
than diamonds. Their presence honors few firesides. Working-
men are not sure of seeing their fiftieth year. What long hours
of labor do not accomplish sickness and anxiety do, and the
exhausted parent, originally blessed with a good constitution
which he has not been able to transmit to his children, sees them
die at the very moment when they might have been the support
and honor of his age. What have such men left them but to die ?
Death is far more merciful to the poor than any single individual
I know of.

I would have the eight-hour system applied to all the heavier
trades, and to the occupations of women and children. Ten
hours for sleep, two for meals, eight for labor, and four for abso-
lute leisure, to be used in any way which circumstances demand,
is the system which the facts set forth in this paper seem impera-
tively to demand. We have our choice of this system, I think,
or of another whose results are quite similar but strikingly
tragic. Our work-people must enjoy either the leisure and the
rest which common sense dictates, or the painful leisure of dis-
ease. The average of twelve hours' daily labor for thirty years,
ten years in rheumatic idleness or in a hospital, and ten years
in the grave, is wonderfully less than fifty years at eight hours
a day less by twelve thousand hours. Beside this gain of time
put the magnificent results to be obtained in other directions,
and you have a sum total that would convince the stingiest capi-
talist in the country.

The one difficulty with the eight-hour system, as Mr. Pow-
derly points out, is that no one understands it. Moneyed men
fear it, conservatives suspect it, and the work-people laugh at it.
It seems too good to be true, but it isn't. Without being a
panacea for labor troubles, it is, however, a key to hundreds of
the difficulties that guard the labor problem. Once obtained the
working-class can dispense with the strike and the boycott.

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 407

A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

THE Reminiscences of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, collected
and edited by Mr. Allen Thorndike Rice, editor of the North
American Review, is one of those symposia in which Mr. Rice de-
lights a " choir invisible," each member of it singing at once
and with more or less discord. Thirty-three gentlemen give
their reminiscences and opinions in this large volume, all of these
reminiscences and opinions being laudatory of President Lincoln,
except that of Mr. Bonn Piatt. There is a marked difference
as to Mr. Lincoln's literary attainments. Mr. Piatt says :

" He had little taste for, and less knowledge of, literature ; and, while well
up in what we call history, limited his acquaintance with fiction to that
sombre poem known as ' Why should the Spirit of Mortal be Proud ? ' '

The Honorable William D. Kelley narrates an episode show-
ing that Mr. Lincoln had an unusually nice appreciation of the
plays of Shakspere, and adds :

" It must not be supposed that Mr. Lincoln's studies had been confined
to his [Shakspere's] plays. He interspersed his remarks with extracts
striking from their similarity to, or contrast with, something of Shakspere's,
from Byron, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and other English poets."

General Butler's article is one of the most interesting in the
book, principally because he is a clear raconteur and he under-
stands the art of letting people speak for themselves. General
Butler tells us that President Lincoln looked with grave disquiet
to the consequences of the emancipation of the slaves, as well as
to the effects of the disbandment of the negro soldiers. Usually
we are given to understand that he felt that the Emancipation
Proclamation was the glorious consummation of the Civil War.
General Butler shows us how he did feel before the sad event of
his sudden taking off. During a conversation on the future of
the colored race General Butler said :

" ' If I understand you, Mr. President, your theory is this : That the
negro soldiers we have enlisted will not return to the peaceful pursuits of
laboring men, but will become a class of guerillas and criminals. Now,
while I do not see, under the Constitution, even with all the aid of Congress
how you can export a class of people who are citizens against their will,
yet the commander-in-chief can dispose of soldiers quite arbitrarily."'

408 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

General Butler went on to prove that an army organization was
the best for digging- up the soil and making entrenchments, and
that the negro soldiers might be sent into the United States of
Colombia to open a ship-canal. Later the wives and children of
these men might be sent to them and a colony be formed. Mr.
Lincoln seemed pleased by the suggestion of a means for getting
rid of the colored soldiers, and recommended General Butler to
see Secretary Seward, that all foreign complications might be
avoided. But the assassination of the President frustrated further
consideration of the plan :

" I soon discovered," Donn Piatt writes, " that this strange and strangely
gifted man, while not at all cynical, was a sceptic. His view of human nature
was low but good-natured. I could not call it suspicious, but he believed
only what he saw. This low estimate of humanity blinded him to the
South. He could not understand that men would get up in their wrath
and fight for an idea. He considered the movement South as a sort of po-
litical game of bluff, gotten up by politicians and meant solely to frighten
the North. He believed that, when the leaders saw their efforts in that
direction were unavailing, the tumult would subside. 'They won't give up
the offices,' he said ; ' were it believed that vacant places could be had at
the North Pole, the road there would be lined with Virginians.' "

Later President Lincoln found out his mistake, and even Mr.
Piatt admits that he grew in strength as the strain on him in-
creased. The Honorable Daniel W. Voorhees' paper shows Pre-
sident Lincoln at his best in exercising that prerogative of mercy
which so tried the patience of some of the military martinets.
Mr. Voorhees' sincerity and entire sympathy with the good
qualities of President Lincoln make a foil to Mr. Piatt's remi-
niscence, which, if not sceptical, is cynical. The book has value
for the future maker of history. It is a unique collection which
can never be duplicated ; and from it one can form a truer idea
of President Lincoln than all the rhetoric of a Macaulay could
have conveyed. Mr. Charles A. Dana relates an anecdote of a
trait of character which led to those sudden lapses from tragedy
to comedy that amazed and grieved his friends. Mr. Dana was
at the White House on the night of election day. Every effort
had been made by Mr. Lincoln's friends to secure his re-election.
The returns were coming in, and the suspense very great :

" ' Dana,' said he, have you ever read any of the writings of Petroleum
"V. Nasby?' 'No, sir,' I said; 'I have only looked at them, and they
seemed to me quite funny.' ' Well,' said he, ' let me read you a specimen.'
And, pulling out a thin, yellow-covered pamphlet from his breastpocket,
he began to read aloud. Mr. Stanton viewed this proceeding with great
-impatience, as I could see, but Mr. Lincoln paid no attention to that. He

i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 409

would read a page or a story, pause to con a new election telegram, and
then open the book again and go ahead with a new passage. Finally Mr.
Chase came in, and presently Mr. Whitelaw Reid, and then the reading was
interrupted. Mr. Stanton went to the door and beckoned me into the next
room. I shall never forget the fire of his indignation at what seemed to
him to be mere nonsense. The idea that when the safety of the republic
was thus- at issue, when the control of an empire was to be determined by a
few figures brought in by the telegraph, the leader, the man most deeply
concerned, not merely for himself but for his country, could turn aside to
read such balderdash and to laugh at such frivolous jests, was to his mind
something most repugnant and damnable. He could not understand, ap-
parently, that it was by the relief which these jests afforded to the strain
of mind under which Lincoln had so long been living, and to the natural
gloom of a desponding and melancholy temperament this was Mr. Lin-
coln's prevailing characteristic that the safety and sanity of his intelli-
gence was maintained .and preserved."

Japan and the Japanese are becoming more and more fashion-
able in literature. It is more than a passing fancy. Buddhism
a new caprice of the " cultured " being no longer the estab-
lished religion of Japan, the Japanese of the better classes are
dropping even the vague and colorless Shinto worship, which,
divested of gross superstitions, is simply Western Agnosticism.
The government, with true Japanese subtlety, has come to the
conclusion that Western civilization is the result of Christianity,
and it now aids rather than retards the efforts of missionaries.
A Budget of Letters from Japan, by Arthur Collins Maclay, A.M.,
LL.B., formerly instructor of English in the Ko-Gukko-Rio,
Tokio, Japan (New York : A. C. Armstrong & Son), confirms the
impressions that recent correspondents have given of the par-
tiality of the government and press to Christianity as a source
of material progress. Mr. Maclay, who has adopted a needless
nom de plume and created a useless friend to whom to address his
letters, is a more serious writer than the author of Outside of Pa-
radise a frivolous but well-written book on Japan lately noticed
here. Mr. Maclay is an American who went to Japan to teach
English. He seems to have had a comfortable berth, and to have
enjoyed himself moderately whenever there was no rumor of the
approach of a Catholic priest. He had less fear of a samurai run-
ning amuck than of the dreaded Jesuit. On page 112 he tells us
that the Jesuits and their converts plunged the country into a
frightful civil war, and "how, before the obstinate sect could be
extirpated, it became necessary to swell the royal ranks to a hun-
dred and fifty thousand warriors, and forty thousand lives had to
be sacrificed."

410 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

Mr. Maclay insists that, though employed by the Japanese
government, his work was a missionary one, and he admits that
he spent much of his scholastic time in defending Protestantism
against the attacks of the clever Japanese. And yet his indigna-
tion is tremendous when he hears that a Jesuit has entered Hiro-
saki as a teacher of science and European languages. After the
shameless defence of the persecutors of the Jesuits we have
quoted, Mr. Maclay writes of this same "sect" in whose extirpa-
tion he rejoices :

"Again, it is urged, the native Christians are not really and truly con-
verted ; they are insincere ; they will not stand fast should persecution
arise. Facts prove the contrary. Let the cliffs of Pappenberg and the
crucifixions and tortures of Shimambara testify."

Nevertheless, the places consecrated by the martyrdom of the
Japanese Christians cause Mr. Maclay to shudder at the horrors
wrought by Romanism ! It is no wonder that he found himself
puzzled by the subtle objections made to his presentation of the
doctrines of evangelical Christianity. He made them understand
that he was a Christian, but not a " sectarian," and then he pro-
ceeded to calumniate the " Church of Rome " in the most bitter
and " sectarian " manner. When he referred to the Bible as the
groundwork of his faith we can easily understand why the keen-
minded young Japanese Agnostics sneered. Who could vouch
to them that the Bible .was not a forgery, since it had been in
the keeping of the atrocious Church of Rome for so many cen-
turies? Mr. Maclay's encounters with the Buddhists he gives
only his side of the argument in the book are weakly sustained
on his part. If the intellectual among the Japanese could meet
only such evangelical exponents of Christianity there would be
little hope of their conversion.

Mr. Maclay's book has the charm which the fresh impression
of a new people on a young man must always have, particularly
if the young man is observant and sympathetic. He sketches
the every-day life of the Japanese deftly and accurately ; for, as
an admiring reader of Mr. Greey's translations from the Japanese,
we are. enabled to judge of the truth of Mr. Maclay's descrip-
tions. He points out the causes that led to the downfall of the
feudal system, the deprivation of the daimios of their power and
the dispersal of their retainers, the sumarai, and does not hesi-
tate to touch on the evils caused by the immorality which is un-
checked by Buddhism or the various sects of Japan. Most
modern writers seem to want to give the impression that Japan-

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 411

ese innocence would be hurt by the introduction of Christianity.
And even Mr. Greey, in his Captive of Love, smoothes, in the inte-
rest of public morality, the coarseness, and even obscenity, of
certain passages in that romance. Mr. Maclay is sufficiently
frank, but not too much so. It is evident that the guilelessness
of the Japanese is often a cloak for sins and vices which, since
the spread of Christianity in Western nations, have ceased to be
recognized as necessary and even commendable parts of the social
system. When Mr. Maclay attempts to explain the abstract ten-
ets of Buddhism authoritatively to the Buddhists themselves, he
puts himself in the absurd position occupied by so many Pro-
testants when they undertake to teach "Romanists" what they
really believe. If the ordinary missionary sent out by the Pro-
testant denominations is at once so ignorant of philosophy and
theology, so prejudiced and so illogical, the ill-success of Pro-
testant preachers in Japan is easily explained.

Miss Florence Marryat, daughter of Captain Marryat, whose
sea-novels Carlyle devoured in order to plunge himself into a
flood of inanity, sends out Tom Tiddlers Ground (London : Swan,
Sonnenschein, Lowry & Co.) Miss Marryat's volume is the re-
sult of a rapid "skim" through the United States. She has, no
doubt, seen some Americans at a distance, and viewed them with
the curiosity of a superior being. She concludes that, as she has
never seen American women drink brandy-and-soda in public
restaurants, they must drink that compound in their rooms. She
makes it plain that life to her seems unendurable without brandy-
and-soda. She was amazed at the impudence of a New England
manager Miss Marryat is an actress as well as an author who
protested against the low cut of her gown. "I am an Eng-
lishwoman," she retorted, " who has been used to move in the
best society. I know exactly what is the proper thing to wear.
But I have come over here to teach the people how to sing and
recite. I have not come to teach them how to dress. When I
do they will be at liberty to criticise my wardrobe." It is too
bad that England should generally be represented in America
by men and women whose coarseness and vulgar " provincial-
ism " are taken as traits of the national character. Miss Marryat
is no doubt regarded in her own country with the same good-
humored tolerance that induces Americans to pardon her imper-
tinences.

Mr. Anstey's Fallen Idol (Philadelphia : Lippincott & Co.) is
cleverer than A Tinted Venus and The Giant's Robe, and it ap-
proaches the inimitable Vice Versa. It is a very funny burlesque

412 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

on the craze for Buddhism lately developed in the society of
the cultured. It is of the same class as Mr. Frank Stockton's
delightful extravaganza, The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and
Mrs. Aleshine (The Century Co.) It is difficult to characterize
the quality of humor which Mr. Stockton diffuses through this
story of two good housewives wrecked in company with a young
man whom they take under their protection. Mr. Frank Stock-
ton is more of an artist than Mr. Anstey, and has more " staying
power." The strict honesty and " capability " of the two women
from the Middle States, who in the most extravagant situations
are entirely true to life, are drawn by a humorist who has all the
delicacy of Mr. Howells and the brilliancy, without the vulgarity
and cynicism, of M. Edrnond About. Mr. Stockton's humor is
a great advance on that of Orpheus C. Kerr and Petroleum V.
Nasby. It is indicative of the improved taste of the American
people.

Miss Alcott's Jos Boys (Boston: Roberts Bros.) is the last of
the series of young-folk books beginning with Little Women.
And the older folk, too, will take leave of them with regret.
Lingering over the pleasant pages, we too are moved with re-
gret that no Catholic writer has yet given us a book or series of
books for young people that will compare in attractiveness of
manner and knowledge of human nature with Miss Alcott's
books. Why should the best of our children's books not be
founded on a deeper and truer philosophy than that of Emer-
son ? Why should not the beauty of Catholic life be shown
through the most powerful of all mediums the stories loved of
the young? We are young during the greater part of our lives,
and we return again to our childhood when we grow old.

Old Boniface : A Novel (New York : White, Stokes & Allen)
is by Mr. George H. Picard, author of A Mission Flower, which
was a remarkable American novel. Old Boniface is an " interna-
tional " story. It has no merit whatever, except an easy style.

Mr. Thomas Wharton, author of A Latter-Day Saint, has
written Hannibal of New York (Henry Holt & Co.) It is a hard,
coarse caricature of life. The personages are newly rich mil-
lionaires, so vulgar and heartless that nobody can be benefited
by making their acquaintance. They are not even amusing.
There is some force in the picture of the wife of the millionaire
deprived of every dollar as a punishment, but her sufferings are
not edifying. One of the strongest pleas for idealism in modern
literature is the existence of would-be realistic books like Hanni-
bal of New York,

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 413

Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney's Bonnyborough (Houghton, Mifflin &
Co.) is a worthy successor to The Wide, Wide World and other
" talky " books, in which the characters made muffins, invented
new readings of Bible texts injected into New England slang, and
were generally harmless idiots with a mania. " Peace Polly " is
the name of the heroine of Bonnyborough. A vein of pleasantry is
introduced into the commonplace life of this young person by the
twisting of her name into " pease porridge." This bit of humor
vivifies a good many dreary pages of the four hundred which
make up Bonnyborough. Mrs. Whitney loses no opportunity to
hit those city people who are supposed to astound country peo-
ple in the summer by their superior savoir faire. She tells with
gusto of a picnic to which the " country boarders " were not in-
vited : " The ladies with country toilets carefully suggestive of
metropolitan art and resource, and the young men with the
water-cart whiskers and successful British intonations, took their
turn at standing about or sitting on piazzas, to see the equipment
and start of the simple, and to stare, as the simple had been sup-
posed to have stared only they never did at themselves." But
in spite of the queer theology of the book, the twisted applica-
tions of Scripture that sometimes seem irreverent, there are signs
of a desire to get nearer to the truth and of the conviction that
without God and his grace the earth is " earthy."

Miss Sarah Orne Jewett is another New-Englander of the
"Quietist" school. She has something of the tone of the charm-
ing Miss Mitford, whose Our Village and Belford Regis are clas-
sics. Her latest book is The White Heron, and Other Stories
(Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) " Marsh Rosemary " is the most care-
fully written of the sketches that make up the book. It is on the
same line as Tennyson's " Enoch Arden." An old maid marries
a young and lazy man. After a time he disappears; she mourns
in silence, forgetting his bad qualities and glorifying his good
ones. Suddenly, after a lapse of time, Mrs. Elton, a village
gossip, brings news of the man whom Ann Floyd had believed to
be dead :

"Ann was stitching busily upon the deacon's new coat, and looked up
with a friendly smile as her guest came in, in spite of an instinctive shrug
as she had seen her coming up the yard. The dislike of the poor souls for
each other was deeper than their philosophy could reach."

It is remarkable that in most of these New England stories in
which the life of the people is depicted with fidelity, religion
assumes a hard and repeliant aspect. The deacons, the farmers,

4 1 4 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

the seamstresses who seem to answer in social position to Miss
Mitford's poor English gentlewomen and even the minister, are
in their professionally religious capacity unforgiving and obsti-
nate. Ann, in u Marsh Rosemary," in her trouble is all the more
pathetic because religion has no consolations for her. She finds
that her husband has " married " another woman. She comes
suddenly, unobserved, upon a domestic scene made up of the
faithless Jerry, his wife, and the baby. She is pleased to hear
that Jerry, who, the neighbors predicted, could come to no good,
is thrifty and industrious ; but then the sense of her woe and his
treachery enters her heart :

"The other woman stood there looking at them, full of pride and love.
She was young and^trig and neat. She looked a brisk, efficient little crea-
ture. Perhaps Jerry would make something of himself now; he always had
it in him. The tears were running down Ann's cheeks; the rain, too, had
begun to fall. She stood there watching the little household sit down to
supper, and noticed with eager envy how well cooked the food was and
how hungrily the master of the house ate what was put before him. All
thoughts of ending the new wife's sin and folly vanished away. She could
not enter in and break another heart; hers was broken already, and it
would not matter."

Now, Ann or Nancy, as Miss Jewett prefers to call her was
a religious woman, according to her Congregational lights ; but
in this crisis, when it was a question of solving a social problem
which she had no right to solve in a sentimental way, her religion
offered her neither consolation nor direction. Jerry, evidently a
bad and heartless man, was left to his sin, and his innocent part-
ner to the consequence of it. He might desert his new wife as
he had deserted his old one. But Nancy, who paid out of her
scanty earnings her portion of the minister's salary and never
missed meeting, takes no thought of her responsibility as acces-
sory to her husband's crime. Miss Jewett's sketches are slight
but artistic, and so true to life that, like Mrs. Terry Cook's
Sphynx's Children, they have worth as material for the study of
New England life. Gogol and Tolstoi, and others of the Rus-
sian novelists now so greatly in vogue, have this merit of fidel-
ity. And in St. Johns Eve, by Gogol (New York : Crowell &
Co.), we find a clue to the present position of Russia among
novels. In fact, novels are to-day doing what we formerly ex-
pected history to do telling us the truth ; we gain more know-
ledge of the character of the Russian people from the Russian
realists than from all the cumbrous historical essays on the Cos-
sacks and Peter the Great yet written.

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 415

Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton's books, Thoughts about Art, The
Intellectual Life, and A Painter s Camp in the Highlands, are de-
servedly appreciated. It is no reflection on the supremely good
taste he has always shown that he married a Frenchwoman.
Madame Eugenie Hamerton is the author of Golden Mediocrity
(Boston : Roberts Brothers), a novel which must have a healthy
effect. It is subdued in tone, but in admirable taste. The in-
terest is gentle but well kept up. Madame Hamerton paints a
French interior not the kind of an interior which we usually see
in French feuilletons, but the inside of a home. Madame Ham-
erton contrasts the frugal elegance of French housekeeping with
the extravagance of the English and also the American meth-
ods. The French understand that elegance and " mediocrity "
of income are not incompatible. In the case of the Marquis de
Civray she has an example of the horrible results of the constant
intermarriages in noble families. She treats it, not as a moralist,
but as a sympathetic observer, and her narrative has the more
force. The experience of the young French people when they
feel for the first time the shock of English cookery is amusing.
Helene ventures unsuspiciously to eat horse-radish, while her
brother tries the Worcester sauce. " Immediately her temples and
forehead were pearled with tiny drops of perspiration, which soon
covered all her face to the roots of her hair, and, with a trembling,
moist hand, she helped herself to a full tumbler of water, which
she swallowed hurriedly." " It's one of the numerous sly devices
of the English to astonish the foreigners/'^said Jean ; " they choose
our mouths as the proper place to explode their fireworks in."

The astonishment of Helene's English friends on discovering
that a marquis may be on terms of equality in France- with a
"simple college master and his daughter" is graphically depicted.
The Marquis de Civray acknowledges the status of intellect and
goodness, while the amiable English of the upper middle class
can think of nothing but the condescension of rank.

But Madame Hamerton does not force her points ; she writes
with keen perception of lights and shades, but with none of that
detestable "smartness" of style which we have already noticed
in Miss Marryat's vulgar book on America. Madame Hamer-
ton's hero marries an English girl, who, however, is, like him, a
Catholic. We have to thank Madame Hamerton we under-
stand that she does not like to be called " Mrs." for a pure and
interesting story, which will do much to dissipate American pre-
judice against the French people and to teach American mothers

416 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

that riches and extravagance are not necessary to elegant and
contented lives.

Joan Wentworth (Harper & Bros.), by Katharine Macquoid,
is a pleasant story of French school-life and Breton manners. It
is probably an early work of Mrs. Macquoid.

A new novel from the pen of Mr. W. H, Mallock is sure to
make a literary sensation and to be read eagerly by people who
know the flavor of that author's previous books. The Old Order
Changeth is less a novel than a series of dialogues, managed with
inimitable grace and exquisite knowledge of those minor traits
of social human nature which make the highest comedy. Mr.
Mallock's usual tendency to pruriency is not so evident in this
work as in his preceding ones. There is, to be sure, a certain
divorced Madame de St. Valery, who has an interest for the
hero, Carew, and an American girl who " would have gone to
her ruin with the same look in her eyes that most girls would
have in going to their confirmation," yet much is not made of
them. The conflict between Carew's passions, the object being
this Miss Violet Capel, and his principles, which tend towards
Miss Consuelo Burton, is sufficiently accentuated without any of
that over sensuous coloring which is as vulgar as the modern
sculptor's habit of chiselling the temptress who appears to St.
Anthony with all possible power, and leaving out the expression
of that will and grace which made the saint victorious. Some of
Mr. Mallock's personages find Thackeray vulgar, and, from the
unanimity of their opinion, it seems as if Mr. Mallock agrees with
them. But Mr. Mallock, whose eye is very keen for marks of
vulgarity, should avoid the trick of pretending to take portraits
of living persons of celebrity and putting these weak sketches
into his books. What, for instance, can be more vulgar than the
use of "Mr. Herbert Spender" for Mr. Herbert Spencer? Mr.
Mallock's creations are vivid and vital enough not to need the
cheap arts of that most vulgar and meretricious of novelists, Lord
Beaconsfield.

Consuelo Burton and her two aunts are Catholics of a very
high English caste. The aunts are exceedingly devout ; Con-
suelo, a great beauty and of a firm character, believes all the
church teaches, but she has doubts whether the church can reach
the poor in this century or not. Carew is reverently in search
of truth, and also more or less in love with Consuelo. She thus
expresses her feelings to him :

"The world is changing and the church stands apart from the change.

1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 417

. . . And what," she went on, with a sound like a stifled sob "what has
the Mass got to do with this? It might have so much, but at present it
has nothing. It distracts us from our duty ; it does not nerve us to follow
it. What right have I to be listening to angels, when outside the chancel-
wall are the groans of the crowded alley? Often, often, often, when I have
heard the organ playing, Hang the organ ! ' I have thought ; ' let me listen
to the crying of the children/"

Of one of her aunts Miss Consuelo says :

" When I watch her trotting off to Mass in the morning, looking as if
she were doing the whole duty of woman, I feel as if, myself, I should never
be religious again."

Nevertheless she is religious, and Garew, seeing her at her
devotions, is astonished by the strange, unearthly brightness of her
face. She listens to a dialogue between Mr. Stanley, a priest,
and Foreman, a Socialist. The priest shows how absurd are pre-
tensions to the improvement of the human race founded on the
theory that all men are capable of the highest sacrifices. And,
hearing the priest's presentment of the Christian answer to anti-
religious Socialism, she ceases to doubt. Miss Consuelo Burton
is an interesting character, but Mr. Mallock has not rightly in-
terpreted what a well instructed Catholic girl of high mind would
say if she had a momentary fear that modern infidelity had made;
a gap between religion and the poor which the church would not
bridge. Surely no thoughtful assistant at the unbloody Sacrifice
could feel that appeals to the Lamb of God for mercy and peace
are not as applicable to the poor as the Sacrifice itself is to the
whole human race. Miss Consuelo Burton might have been
afraid that the children of the church had failed to grasp her
meaning, and to act towards the poor, stimulated by that mean^
ing ; but she would not except in Mr. Mallock's book talk
about the church or the Mass " distracting us from our duty.!'
The most sublime Sacrifice could not make those who understood
it selfish or self-centred. The truth is that, in causing his
heroine to talk this way, Mr. Mallock has thought too much of
the gorgeous vestments and the music, and too little of the
divine Fact of which they are only accessories. It is the way
even of the most sympathetic non-Catholics.

The conversation between Mr. Stanley, the priest, and Mr.
Foreman, the Agnostic Socialist, which converts Miss Consuelo, is
very spirited Mr. Mallock having recovered the art of talking in
books, which seemed lost when Walter Savage Landor died :

" If we were all equally clever and equally industrious* your theory
would be perfect. The state would be socialistic to-morrow. There is
VOL. XLIV. 27

4i8 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

only one other supposition on which the same result would be possible
if the average race of men were all of them to rise to heights of zeal and
self-sacrifice to which saints and heroes at present find it very hard to
attain. Will Mr. Foreman allow me to ask one question more? The kind
of life you contemplate in your Socialist state is one of enjoyment, comfort,
cheerfulness, is it not ? It does not, at all events, approach the gloom and
the hard discipline of monastic orders? Exactly. I thought so. I have
known other men of views similar to yours, and they have all declared that
the asceticism of the Christian church is little less than a blasphemy
against our healthy human nature."

Mr. Foreman agrees to this.

"You are doubtless aware," continues Mr. Stanley, "that this discipline
in its severest form is regarded by the Catholic Church as fitted only for a
small fraction of mankind. What I want to say to you is, that the severest
discipline ever devised for any handful of monks does far less violence to
our average human nature than the change in it which your system would
require to be universal. It would be easier, far easier, to make men Trap-
pists than Socialists."

The Old Order Changeth has the brilliancy, the wit, the delight-
ful play of humor witness the encounters, so entirely well-bred,
between the Tory Protestant, Lady Mangotsfield, and the Ca-
tholic, Lady Chiselhurst and the soundness of reasoning, up to a
certain point, that make the appearance of each of Mr. Mallock's
books a striking feature in modern literature. We say a great
deal when we say that it has all the best qualities of The New
Republic, with only one defect a plot which, while it does not
tfnake the dialogues and by-play more brilliant, gives a needless
vagueness and weakness to the work. Mr. Mallock need not
write a story in order to interest his readers ; he possesses in a
high degree the gift of enchaining attention by his charming style.
Mr- Stanley preaches on the necessity of the church's taking hu-
manity more into consideration and her power of doing it. But
it is no new thing for a priest of God's church to teach that the
church holds within her what is good in all creeds even in So-
cialism, and, above all, in what is called the religion of Humanity.
Mr. Mallock, unlike Mr. Harrison, Miss Vernon Lee, and the
others who prattle so complacently of " the choir invisible," rea-
sons. The saddest thing in all the modern worship of the God-
vdess of Reason is the unreason of her worshippers.

i886.] A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. 419

A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA.

A SUMMER afternoon in a little, old-fashioned German town.
The sun pours down on the streets paved with cobble-stones, and
glistens on the paint of the two-headed imperial eagle over the
" Kaiserliches Post-Amt " the government post-office, and wilt-
ing the trees planted on each side of the dusty highroad leading out
into the country. Not a picturesque country, Rhenish Prussia,
by any manner of means, lying, as it does, in the level plain of
the northwest Rhineland, extending, roughly speaking, from
Cologne to Diisseldorf. It is mostly flat, with here and there
low, rounded hills, covered generally by clumps of beech-trees,
which seem to flourish here, and broken now and then by the
long, narrow valley of some sluggish stream. It is in such a val-
ley that Odenkirchen lies. The Nier, a very insignificant little
stream, runs by the side of the town, and is useful chiefly for
turning the numerous flour-mills and for supplying water to the
large dye-works just outside the town. It is not at all a pretty
place : it is small, ill-paved, not over-well drained, and the Nier
in drought-time is not odoriferous; it is very hot in summer and
bitterly cold in winter ; but it is very quaint. The houses, with
their steep roofs and queer wood- work, remind one of some of the
old streets in Chester or Heidelberg; the customs seem to carry
one back to the middle ages, and to the true,/' good old times "
before Protestantism was heard of for most of the people are
Catholic in Rhenish Prussia, the " Evangelisch " being few and,
for the most part, rationalists. Just now the setting sun, tinge-
ing the beech-woods over there on the Berg, or \\\\\ par excellence ,
throws a fading splendor on what shows that Rhenish Prussia in
general, and Odenkirchen in particular, is Catholic in very deed.
It is a huge stone crucifix, standing where the three streets meet,
right in the very centre of the Platz. The carving is perfect as
ail German carving is and the golden radiance of the setting sun,
gleaming on the still water of the distant river and lighting up
the thorn-crowned Face of Divine Agony, seems like a celestial
"glory," and tells us that in this little town the grand old faith
still reigns supreme in the hearts of its people. As we shall see
later, the customs of the people are all Catholic ; and so much
has the true faith leavened the false that even the Lutheran
churches ring their bells three times a day morning, noon, and

4 2 o A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. [Dec.,

night little thinking-, or little caring, perhaps, that they are
ringing the threefold "Angelas."

The three principal buildings in a German town are the
church, the Stadthaus, and the post-office. The church in Oden-
kirchen is well worth a visit ; though in this out-of-the-way cor-
ner of the world visitors are few indeed. The summer spent in
Rhenish Prussia was spent chiefly in the cool, sacred shadows of
dusky aisles, in the " dim religious lights " of windows painted,
many of them, while glass was almost unknown in English coun-
try churches, for Munich was famous even then ; and to Catho-
lic readers it will, doubtless, be of interest to have some pen-and-
ink sketches of a few of these, with the Old-World customs of
the worshippers who frequent them.

The Church " des Heiiigen Petrus " (of St. Peter) in Oden-
kirchen is said to be seven hundred years old. The architecture,
as may be imagined, is neither very strict nor very correct in a
small provincial town, but it is evidently early Gothic in general
design, with pointed, narrow windows and doors. The arches
are also pointed and very plain, the church being cruciform, with
apse, nave, north and south transepts, and two side-aisles. Across
the entrance to the sanctuary is a carved screen of oak, black with
age and highly polished, the open work formed of the traditional
fleur-de-lis of Our Blessed Lady and the cross-keys of St. Peter.
It is perhaps a fortunate thing that the modern Goth has not
found his way to Odenkirchen, for the oak carvings of this rood-
screen would be worth their weight in gold.

At the back of the high altar is a reredos of carved oak, also
black with age, but touched up here and there with a gold edg-
ing representing the Ascension. The church is full of banners
belonging to different sodalities, and has many votive altars.
There is a fine statue of the patron saint, very much like that in
St. Peter's at Rome, at the south corner pillar of the sanctuary,
just outside the rood-screen. Outside and inside the church is
of dark-brown stone. The tower is high and narrow, with a nar-
row spire, which has a small window high up, from which on
saints' days the huge banner of the church waves triumphantly.
In the south aisle there is a crusader's tomb, so old that even
legend has forgotten the name of its occupant, and over it on
the wall two or three rust-eaten fragments of old armor. On
saints' days and Sundays all through the year the first Mass is
at six o'clock, and in the bright summer morning it is wonderful
and touching to see the crowds of townsfolk, mostly poor and
almost all in wooden shoes, pouring in through the high western

1 8 86.] A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. 421

door. As we are in Germany, it is needless to say that the music
is exquisite and the devotion most exemplary. The priest at
Odenkirchen is a young man, born and bred in the place and
educated in the seminary out on the hill yonder, and his life is
full of labor and of good works. During Mass the congregation
sing old German chorals in harmony, and after the Elevation a
boy's voice breaks the stillness with the " O Salutaris." Low
Mass without any music would be incomprehensible to the music-
loving Germans. High Mass or solemn Vespers must be heard
in Germany to be appreciated fully. We were present at High
Mass on the feast of Corpus Christi, when the music was
Mozart's Twelfth Mass very barbarous and " tuney," no doubt,
but sung by the choir of St. Peter's, Odenkirchen, most heart-
stirring and beautiful.

Among the quaint old customs in Rhenish Prussia is one
which is very striking to a visitor and which carries the mind back
to Scriptural times. When any one meets a funeral he uncovers
his head, and turns and walks a few yards in the procession. This
is a sure test of a man's faith, and shows him at once to be a
Catholic in this part of the country at least. Another most un-
mistakable evidence is a man's behavior in passing a wayside Cal-
vary : if he lifts his hat he is a Catholic ; if not, he is a Protestant.
On days of great processions, such as Corpus Christi or the As-
sumption, one can generally tell which houses are inhabited by
Catholics from the candles burning in the window, often very
numerous, and with a crucifix or a statue of Our Lady among
them. On Corpus Christi, when we were in Odenkirchen, the
whole town was decorated with flags, triumphal arches, and
flowers, the procession was very numerously attended, and the
crowds that lined the streets all knelt most reverently.

Small pilgrimages from one local shrine to another are very
common, and seem like echoes of the "ages of faith." We were
walking over the Berg one day when suddenly, at a turn of the
road, we met a party of these pilgrims. A man walked in front
carrying a large crucifix, and men, women, and children were
singing an old choral. Every little cluster of cottages has its
Calvary among them, and at every mile or two along the road we
found a clump of trees, and there in the shadow, amid the smiling
fields of grain, was the Image of Divine Agony. It was most
beautiful, and spoke of the one true faith, under whose holy wings
the whole land seems to rest in utter peace a peace which can be
felt after all the toil and turmoil and dreary unfaith of the busy,
steam-driven nineteenth century.

422 A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. [Dec.,

There are many places of interest within easy distance of
Odenkirchen. Rheydt, another small town about three miles
east, has a very fine church, and some unusually beautiful win-
dows in the sanctuary. The church itself, which is dedicated to
Our Blessed Lady, is very much like that of Odenkirchen in style,
except that there is no rood-screen. It is supposed to have be-
longed to the Augustinian Canons in earlier times a supposition
founded, in great measure, on the exquisitely-carved stalls in the
sanctuary, which resemble those at Wimborne Minster in Dorset-
shire (England) having the " misericorde " or little half-seat to sup-
port the form while standing. There is a life-size crucifix over
the altar of great beauty, the Figure being of wax, which is capable
of marvellous accuracy of representation. The long painted win-
dows in the sanctuary represent passages in the life of Our Lady
and of the saints, and are very beautiful. The choir of this church
is famous in the whole neighborhood. We were present at Ves-
pers one Sunday evening when one of the Psalms happened to be
the " In Exitu Israel," and the " Tonus Peregrinus," as chanted
by a choir of over a hundred voices and the whole congregation,
was worthy of Solomon's temple " in all its glory."

There is a little church a lew miles from Odenkirchen which is
a perfect little gem of art. It was built by a private family about
thirty years ago, and is almost circular. From floor to ceiling
it is covered with most exquisite frescoes, and is full of votive
altars and statues. The most curious of the frescoes is one of the
Crucifixion, where the cross, instead of being straight, as usually
represented, is simply a tree with two branches extending up-
wards, and a lopped head. Our Lord's arms are nailed to the
branches, and his head rests on the limb. It is difficult to give an
accurate conception of this curious painting without a sketch, but
the cross resembles exactly that on the old Gothic chasuble, from
which it was probably copied. Correct or not, the effect is most
realistic, and seems borne out not only by the cross on the vest-
ment, for which no valid reason has been assigned, but also by
the legend of the aspen-tree. A German priest, to whom I spoke
of it, said that it was very doubtful that the Roman soldiers
would, on such short notice, prepare an elaborate cross, but that
they probably lopped the first, tree that seemed suitable. Of course
centuries of traditional art have fixed unalterably the shape of the
cross, but a picture such as this by its very strangeness seems to
startle one into a keener realization of what the Crucifixion means.

Among the many beautiful statues in this church the most
beautiful of all is a " Mater Dolorosa " in Munich statuary, with

1 8 86.] A SUMMED IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. 423

the dead Christ on her knees. The expression of unutterable
agony on the face of Our Blessed Lady is wonderfully life-like,
and is a justification, if any were needed, of the violation of
the canons of Greek art by colored statuary. The dead body of
our Lord is startling and almost painful in its accuracy of color-
ing and detail. There is a lamp kept continually burning, filled
with perfumed oil, the sweet odor of which mingles with that of
incense which pervades the whole church for German Catholics
use incense lavishly. On the pedestal of the " Mater Dolorosa"
are some lines in gold letters, selected from that most touching
poem, Marguerite's prayer to the Mater Dolorosa in Faust. A
strange selection, truly, some may say, but perhaps none could
have been chosen which would have been more appropriate.

German people are proverbially fond of mottoes. There is
one over the priest's house, next door to this same church, which
is worth copying :

" GAVDEAT ingrediens, laetetur et sede recedens,
His, qui praetereunt, det dona cuncta Deus."

Passing on from Lindenkirchen, as this little village is called,
we went to what is said to be one of the greatest curiosities of the
whole province namely, Schloss Dyck, an old Flemish castle be-
longing to one of the most ancient Catholic families in western
Germany. The castle itself stands in the very centre of a grove
of limes, firs, and beeches, the home of thrushes, blackbirds, and
nightingales, which made the whole air musical on the day we
spent there. In front of the castle, which consists of an outer
fort, two court-yards, and the house itself, is a broad moat full of
water and covered with water-lilies, the home of some rare
breeds of swans, white European, and black from Australia. At
the back of the castle are the grounds, beautifully laid out, and
open to visitors five days a week, where the moat widens into a
small lake full of gold and silver fish. Inside the first and larger
court-} ard are the stables and other offices; inside the second,
round which the house is built, are the windows of the dining-
hall and family chapel. The latter was undergoing repairs, so
we were not allowed to see it; but the dining-hall was magnifi-
cent, in the true Flemish style, oak panelled and ceiled, with the
coats-of-arms of the numerous heads of the house quartered and
blazoned on walls, ceiling, and windows. In the side next the
court-yard is a large door, said to have been made to allow
Charles the Great, from whom the family claim descent, to
ride in in full armor; but this we concluded must be an anach-

424 A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. [Dec.,

ronism, though we were careful not to say so. In the portrait-
gallery we were shown a long line of ancestors, from Charles
the Great to the present owner's father, some of them probably
as mythical as the famous portraits of the Scottish kings in
Holyrood Palace. At all events, whether mythical or authentic,
there is a strong family likeness in them all. The line is said
to have been direct, from father to son, until the present owner,
who is childless. A curious coincidence was pointed out to us
on the walls of the gallery : there was only one vacant space
left, where the picture of this last of the direct line is to be put.
The property at his death reverts to a distant and, unfortunately,
a Protestant cousin. The Fiirst, or prince for that is his title
does not often visit his Rhenish estate, but when last here, a few
years ago, he entertained the emperor more like an independent
sovereign than a subject. We were shown in the gallery that
dearly-prized treasure of German (and other) hearts a family
tree. By this it seems that the family can trace their descent to
the year 19 B.C., and number among their ancestors the hero Her-
mann, or Arminius, who defeated Varus.

In the Schloss Dyck property, but some miles from the castle
itself, is a little village on a hill, known as Bergkirchen. We
walked to it along the highroad, which in Rhenish Prussia, as in
France, is bordered with trees, and paved where it passes through
the villages or towns. The presence of the Iron Chancellor's
power is visible everywhere : every few miles of country are
marked off into a " Kreis " or " Circle," every village and town
numbered according to its inhabitants, and assessed for so many
" Landwehr," or militia, and forced to support so many regular
soldiers. On entering a village you see on the wall of the first
house a white placard headed thus : " Village Bergkirchen,
Circle (district) of Gladbach (a large iron-working town), Regi-
ment of cavalry No. 5, so many men ; Regiment of Infantry No.
IOD, so many men ; Landwehr, so many." In Bergkirchen, just
outside the village, there is a ruined tower, supposed to have
been a border fortress in the disturbed times of the middle ages,
" when barons held their sway." On the wall of the church
there is a very ancient Calvary, the figures and coloring of which
are most rude and quaint, and inside the church an altar-tomb of
a mitred abbot, said to have been killed in an affray by a maraud-
ing baron, for which the family had to do perpetual penance.

Our whole summer in Rhenish Prussia was quiet and unevent-
ful. Living, as we were, amid primitive people, our only occu-
pation was to drive or walk to some neighboring village and

1 886.] A FEW MORE WORDS WITH CONTRIBUTORS. 425

inspect the church. The most remarkable of' these have been
sketched ; it would be wearisome and monotonous to enter into
endless details. The churches all have some point of interest ;
the customs, among- which was one which we did not see namely,
the lighting of lamps and candles on the graves of the dead on
All Souls' day are most beautiful, simple, and Catholic. Rhen-
ish Prussia is not a country likely to be visited by tourists.
Many of their customs the Germans bring with them to this
country, but their wayside and churchyard Calvaries, their pil-
grimages, their processions and funeral customs, are almost un-
known except to those who have lived, as we did, in a quiet little
country town in an out-of-the-way corner of the Fatherland.

A FEW MORE WORDS WITH CONTRIBUTORS.

" And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character."

SOMETHING over a year ago, in the May number (1885) f this
magazine, the editor indulged in quite a long talk with his con-
tributors. He set forth his woes, and, in our estimation, gave
some excellent advice. Now, this advice has either never been
read or has been calmly ignored by many contributors. To all
intents and purposes they remain as oblivious to it as did the fa-
mous fishes in the legend to the sermon said to have been
preached to them by St. Anthony :

" The sermon now ended,
Each turned and descended ;
The pikes went on stealing,
The eels went on eeling.
Much delighted were they,
But preferred their old way."

Now, many contributors undoubtedly prefer their own way,
but to assure their contributions a cordial welcome it would be
wiser to prefer the magazine's way. At the end of the last " Talk "
the editor summed up the magazine's way under four points.
They are important enough to be repeated, and were given as
follows (the first point is altered slightly, so as to allow a little
more latitude in the length of articles 6,000 words, however,
should be the very maximum) :

426 A FEW MORE WORDS WITH CONTRIBUTORS. [Dec.,

FOUR POINTS RESPECTFULLY RECOMMENDED TO THE ATTENTION
OF CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS MAGAZINE.

1. Never let your article exceed 6,000 words. Only the fiction
in a magazine is privileged to exceed this amount of words.
Keep the article under 5,000 words, if you can. If it did not run
beyond 3,000 or 4,000 words, and were otherwise acceptable, it
would be sure of almost immediate insertion.

2. Never allude to a "series" If you cannot treat a subject in
a single article, devote your article to one aspect of the subject.
Let that be a complete article which can stand by itself without
dependence on any other. By and by, if you like, send in an-
other article, equally complete and independent, dealing with an-
other aspect.

3. Never send in an article which is not as perfect as you can make
it. Count on no revisions or verifications.

4. Prepare your manuscript neatly. Let it all be written on the
same kind of paper. Let the handwriting be as clear as print.
A clean, legible manuscript gives an article a great advantage
with an editor whose eyes are not of brass, and who has a heart
to feel for his compositors and proof-readers.

If contributors would contrive to keep these four points
which should be to them what the four points of the compass are
to the mariner in their " memories locked," the lot of the editor
would become a comparatively happy one. To receive, for in-
stance, neat and legible MSS. would be an inestimable boon, and
would inspire him with hopes of being able to preserve his temper
and his eyesight. Contributors say to the editor: "Oh! but you
ought to be able to read anything ; I should think that you would
be used to it." He may be u used to it," but the mere fact that
he repeatedly pores over assorted varieties of hieroglyphics does
not furnish him with a key to their meaning. The editor is per-
suaded that when some contributors find themselves unable to
express a thought clearly they write as illegibly as possible, and
with many erasures, in the hope *hat a light will break in upon
the editor's brain which will enable him to divine the idea they
have been unable to express other than by blots of ink and illegi-
ble scratches. But the editor will refrain from again recount-
ing his woes; he could, of course, a tale unfold, etc., but he will
generously spare the contributors the infliction, merely referring
them, after the manner of circulars, to May number (1885) "for
further particulars."

He wishes to call the attention of the contributors to one more

1 886.] NE w PUBLIC A TIONS. 427

point. On the inside of the cover of each number a hand points
to this unvarying inscription : " The editor cannot undertake to
return rejected articles unless stamps are enclosed to prepay post-
age. Letter-postage is required on returned MSS."

And yet MSS. are continually sent without any enclosure of
stamps. If they are rejected, contributors wonder that the arti-
cles do not return, and sometimes get angry and write murmur-
ing letters. There is no publication in the world that we know of
which returns rejected MSS. at its own expense. This magazine
has neither the inclination nor the superfluous wealth to wish to
shine as the solitary exception to a universal rule. Let there be
enclosed with each MS. at least one stamp. This will be suffi-
cient to start it upon its homeward journey if rejected ; if ac-
cepted, the stamp will be utilized in bearing the news to the sen-
der. Foreign postage-stamps are of no possible service in this
country ; United States stamps alone should be sent (this is for
the especial benefit of foreign contributors). Sometimes MSS.
arrive which have not been properly stamped, and upon which
postage is due. Such gross carelessness should never occur.

And now, having said his brief say, the editor hopes that it
will sink kindly into the memories of contributors, many of whom
he has to thank for bearing in mind and acting upon the former
"Talk."

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

FIVE-MINUTE SERMONS FOR Low MASSES ON ALL SUNDAYS OF THE YEAR.
By Priests of the Congregation of St. Paul. Volume II. New York :
The Catholic Publication Society Co.; London : Burns & Gates.

It is with great pleasure that we notice this second volume of Five-
Minute Sermons by the Paulist Fathers. The well-deserved popularity of
the first issue and the constant demand for a second leave little doubt as
to the reception this book will receive from the clergy and the laity.

That there is need of books of this description is very evident. There
has been among the clergy a growing custom of delivering short discourses
at the earlier Masses on Sundays, and the Third Plenary Council of Balti-
more urged the doing of this upon all priests having the care of souls, so
that now, if time allow of it, it is matter of obligation.

A book, therefore, of this kind is of no small value to the priest whose
other duties are so engrossing as to leave him no opportunity for elaborat-
ing these little weekly sermons for his congregation. For, although such
discourses are short, they require care in their preparation indeed, even
greater care than if they were longer. They should be the kernel of the
divine word. They should be to the point and give a practical lesson.
They should be perfect in their way.

428 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Dec.,

It may seem that we are attaching too much importance to such little
things as five-minute sermons, but when we consider their end carefully we
think it becomes more evident that they are not only of importance, but of
the highest importance.

Many of those who generally listen to five-minute sermons in the
Church form a class who rarely hear any other preaching. They are people
who either will not or cannot attend the High Mass, who do not care for
long services nor for long sermons, and who not unfrequently are sadly in
want of practical piety. The word of God and the word of God presented
in a clear, concise manner is all the more necessary for them because of
this. They need the truth brought home to them ; they need arousing and
urging to the practice of virtue.

And let it not be imagined that the number of those habitually absent
from the regular sermon is small. The contrary is rather the case. The
attendants at the High Mass would in many places scarcely be a sixth part
of the congregation, and so five out of six of our Catholic people seldom
hear any sermon except the short discourses at the early Masses.

This being the case, it is not surprising that the late Council should
have declared its wish that the Gospel of the day be read in the vernacular
every Sunday and solemn feast-day, at all the Masses, and that, if time
permitted, the people be instructed in the law of God for at least five
minutes.

These little sermons also serve as suggestions for the regular ser-
mons. Although they are not written with a view to this, still we know in
the past that they have served in maay cases as skeletons of more preten-
tious discourses. Brief as they are, they contain thoughts which will suffer
development, and the structure of a good sermon.

For the laity, too, they are of value because they put in the hands of
people living far away from a church, and unable to assist at Mass except
on rare occasions, something with which they may nourish their souls.
Although they are prevented from hearing sermons, still they have an op-
portunity of reading them, and 'so they are not entirely cut off from the
ministry of the word.

NATURE AND THE BIBLE: Lectures on the Mosaic History of Creation in
its Relation to Natural Science. By Dr. Fr. H. Reusch, Professor of
Catholic Theology in the University of Bonn. Revised and corrected
by the author. Translated from the fourth edition by Kathleen Lyt-
tleton. 2 vols. Edinburgh : T. & T. Clark. 1886. (For sale by the Ca-
tholic Publication Society Co.)

Dr. Reusch belongs to the heretical sect of the so-called " Old Catholics."
This circumstance may create a suspicion of the orthodoxy of a work pro-
ceeding from his pen. His work must, however, be judged on its own objec-
tive merits ; and, in point of fact, it does not deserve, so far as we have per-
ceived, any censure on the score of orthodoxy. The author wrote it while
he was a Catholic in high esteem, and we do not see that his corrections and
additions have made it any less worthy of praise than it was before, when
it received high commendation and won a place among the best works of
its kind. It is written with German erudition and thoroughness. We do
not know of any similar work in English which equals it in these respects.
The style of the translation and the whole manner of the publication are

iS86.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 429

excellent. Now that special attention to this class of subjects in semina-
ries has been recommended and prescribed by ecclesiastical authority, a work
of this kind must be very useful to teachers who have to lecture on this
branch of study. It is a matter of regret that a man of Dr. Reusch's learn-
ing and ability should have fallen from his allegiance to the church into a
pitiful schism. We trust that those who profit by his labors in the cause
of sound doctrine and science will pray that he may have the grace to re-
turn to the bosom of the true Mother Church.

MISSIONARY LABORS OF FATHERS MARQUETTE, MENARD, AND ALLOUEZ
IN THE LAKE SUPERIOR REGION. By Rev. Chrysostom Verwyst, O.S.F.,
of Bayfield, Wis. Milwaukee and Chicago: Hoffman Bros. 1886.

This unpretending-looking pamphlet is a piece of the most authentic and
interesting history. Father Verwyst has the true historical spirit and
method, in marked contrast with "the superficial romancing style of his-
torical writing'' which he condemns so severely. He tells the story of the
labors, sufferings, heroic fortitude and devotion of men worthy to be classed
with saints and apostles a story which would seem almost incredible were
it not most certainly proved to be true. It makes one living amid all the
comforts of civilization feel almost ashamed to call himself a Christian
when he compares his easy condition with the hard lot of these Indian mis-
sionaries. If the author makes any money by his little book he will give it
all to the missions among the Indians. We hope he will make a great deal.

THE ILLUSTRATED CATHOLIC FAMILY ANNUAL for 1887 (nineteenth year).
New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. ; London : Burns &
Gates.

The Annual this year presents a most attractive appearance, not only
because it is beautifully printed and illustrated, but also because of its in-
teresting and varied table of contents.

The literary portion opens with a historical ballad " A Ballad of Iscan-
der-Beg," by Mr. Maurice F. Egan, written in this author's charming and
finished style, and interspersed with lovely thoughts like these :

" For childish thoughts are life-time's dreams

Within us unto death;
They come upon us when pain seems
To stop our very breath.

" Oh ! thoughts of childhood do not die

Like thoughts of man and youth ;
They change not like an April day,

They live in lies or truth ;
And be they false or be they true,

They work us good or ruth."

Following the ballad come some clearly written and brief sketches of
several of the archbishops of Baltimore, each of which contains an excellent
likeness of the subject. One sees so many caricatures which pretend to be
good likenesses of prominent people in cheap publications generally that it
is refreshing to find really good portraits in a book that is sold at a low figure.
Indeed, the illustrations throughout the Annual are worthy of high com-
mendation, as is also the fact that they have evidently been prepared for
the articles. It is often the case with cheap publications that old cuts are
bought up and reproduced, and hack articles written to fit them, which re-

43 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Dec.,

suits in a very unsatisfactory book. Of course illustrations should be made
for the articles, not the articles for the illustrations.

There are so many interesting sketches and articles in the present An-
nual that we '[cannot enumerate them in a brief review; though among the
sketches of eminent religious and of noted Catholic laymen we might spe-
cially mention those dealing with the Rev. Augustine J. Thebaud, S.J., Car-
dinals Taschereau and Guibert, Dr. Richard Robert Madden, Right Rev.
Thomas Francis Hendricken, D.D., Mary Aloysia Hardey, Murillo, Dryden,
Chateaubriand, Gabriel Franchere ; these are sufficient to give an idea of the
scope of the work. " The Jesuits in China " contains sketches and portraits
of Fathers Ricci, Schall, and Verbiest. We note interesting historical
sketches: "The Templars," "The Old Mission of San Xavier del Bac," and
others. Altogether The Catholic Family Annual for 1887 is a work upon
which the publisher may justly plume himself. When its excellence is
contrasted with its very low price it is hard to see how any Catholic family
can afford to be without it.

HISTORY OF CHEVALIER BAYARD. Translated from the French. London :
Chapman & Hall. (For sale by the Catholic Publication Society Co.,
New York.)

In these days of manufactured heroes it is a grateful thing to have our
attention called to a real hero ; for whatever doubt there may be as to the
sentiment of chivalry, there can be none as to the heroic character of its
truest representatives, among whom the Chevalier Bayard is the most con-
spicuous.

This is a history of his exploits in arms, told in the quaint style of the
mediaeval chronicler. The author the " Loyal Serviteur," as he calls him-
self is rather garrulous and not over-reliable, and we question whether the
true greatness of the " Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche" does not suf-
fer in his hands. Nevertheless, he glories in his hero, and presents him to
us in what he considers his grandest aspect. The translation is very imper-
fect. It is so fearfully literal that it gives not only the French idioms, but
often even the French words slightly modified. The book is profusely
illustrated.

EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS OF IRISH HISTORY: 1800-1885. B Y William Joseph
O'Neil Daunt. In two volumes. London : Ward & Downey. 1886.

These two volumes of Mr. Daunt are a valuable addition, we think,
the literature already extant bearing upon the question of the governmenl
of Ireland. The author is himself an earnest advocate of an Irish Parlia-
ment, and his books are written to show that Ireland has a perfect right t(
have a Parliament.

" The desire of the Irish people," says Mr. Daunt, " to recover their right of domestic legis
lation is as natural as a sick man's desire for restoration to health. Ireland's vital need is self
government, the exclusive control and development of her own resources. ' The powers
independent existence seemed to be marked in her structure in such bold .characters by natui
that it required the unceasing efforts of an active and malignant policy to defeat the ob\
purposes of creation.'

"That active and malignant policy was never more perniciously exercised than in its effor
first to corrupt and then to suppress the Irish legislature. To emancipate our country fror
its deadly influence is the purpose which has never been absent from the Irish mind for eighty-
five years. It is a purpose consistent with the most devoted loyalty to the crown. Its achieve-
ment would give strength and stability to Irish constitutional loyalty by removing that fruitful
source of discontent the denial to Ireland of her indefeasible right of self-government."

1 886.] NE w PUB LIC A TIONS. 43 1

To the intrinsic value of information afforded by these two volumes
there is added the charm of a very pleasing style. The author knows how
to entertain his readers as well as how to instruct them. Pleasanter histori-
cal reading- than Eighty-five Years of Irish History can hardly be desired.
It reminds us forcibly of Justin McCarthy's History of Our Own Times,
which had for us almost the attractions of a brilliant novel, and made us
as eager for the succeeding chapter as if we were in the midst of the plot
of a story and anxious to know the issue.

THOMAS GRANT, FIRST BISHOP OF SOUTHWARK. By Kathleen O'Meara.

Second edition. London : W. H. Allen & Co. 1886.

The great ability and saintly character of Bishop Grant are well known
and generally recognized. Miss O'Meara's reputation as a writer, especially
of biography, has long since been established. A second edition of her life
of the distinguished English prelate, prefaced by a very warm eulogium
and commendation from Bishop Ullathorne, is opportune and welcome.
The work itself has already been appreciated at its true and high value by
the Catholic public.

CHRISTIAN PATIENCE THE STRENGTH AND DISCIPLINE OF THE SOUL. A
Course of Lectures. By Bishop Ullathorne. London: Burns & Gates ;
New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1886.

The aged and illustrious author of this book gives it to us as his last
work, with a beautiful dedication to Cardinal Newman. Every reader who
knows the character of Bishop Ullathorne and his works will expect to find
this treatise admirable. He will not be disappointed, but will find his ex-
pectation amply fulfilled.

THE WATCH ON CALVARY. Meditations on the Seven Last Words of our
Dying Redeemer. By the Right Rev. Monsignor T. S. Preston, V.G.,
LL.D. New York : R. Coddington. 1886.

These Meditations for Lent are published in a form of remarkable
beauty, and the interior contents correspond well with their attractive ex-
terior form.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF NOTED PERSONS. Compiled by Justin S. Morrill.
Boston : Ticknor & Co. 1887.

The book is a compilation of the opinions which various noted persons
have entertained of themselves. Of course a great deal of egotism is re-
corded, and some instances of unbounded conceit. Voltaire's preposterous
and ridiculous saying is perhaps the sublimest piece of conceit given : "I
am tired of hearing it repeated that twelve men were sufficient to found
Christianity : I will show the world that one is sufficient to destroy it." It
is needless to add that Voltaire is dead and that Christianity lives. From
Whitman, never much given to modesty in any sense of the word, this gem
of egotism is selected :

" I conned old times,

I sat studying at the feet of the great masters ;

Now, if eligible, oh that the great masters might return and study me ! "

Of Nelson it is said: "It may not be generally known that Nelson's last
signal was not ' England,' but ' Nelson expects every man to do his duty.' "
It has been asserted that the officer to whom the order was given affected
to have misunderstood the egotistical direction, and substituted the sound-

43 2 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Dec., 1886.

ing rhetoric which was then, and has been ever since, received with so
much enthusiasm by Englishmen."

Looking through the book at random, one is forced to confess that hu-
mility among noted persons is a very rare virtue, and that, as Young has it,

' ' The love of praise, howe'er concealed by art,
Reigns more or less, and glows in every heart."

It would perhaps have been better had the "noted persons " been arranged
in the book with some regard to their chronological order. It is somewhat
startling to find Alexander the Great and Benjamin Franklin almost hand-
in-hand, and Jean Froissart succeeding to James A. Garfield.

RELIGIOUS UNITY AS PRESCRIBED BY OUR LORD ; or, Grounds of Faith
and Morals. By I. Van Luytelaar, C.SS.R. St. Louis : B. Herder. 1886.

This is a compendium of the doctrine of Christian unity. The subject
is treated with learning, and especially with a view to furnish a statement
of the grounds of the unity of the church which shall be complete. It is a
useful hand book both for study and reference.

OTHER BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

MURAL PAINTING. By Frederic Crowninshield. Boston : Ticknor & Co. 1887.

A LECTURE ON CATHOLIC IRELAND. By the Rev. J. P. Prendergast. Dublin : M. H. Gill &
Son. 1886.

THE SORROWS OF WERTHER, from the German of Goethe. THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS,
1660-1661. VOYAGES IN SEARCH OF THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE. LIVES OF THE ENGLISH
POETS, by Samuel Johnson. Cassell's National Library. New York : Cassell & Co.

SKETCH OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE CITY OF NATCHEZ, Miss., on the occasion of
the consecration of its cathedral, September 19, 1886.

QUARTERLY REPORT OF THE CHIEF OF THE BUREAU OF STATISTICS, Treasury Depart-
ment, for the Three Months ending June 30, 1886. Washington : Government Printing-
office.

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD, and other Poems. By John J. McGirr. Boston : Alfred
Mudge & Son. 1886.

WILLIAM PENN UNMASKED ; or, His Enmity towards the Catholic Religion clearly shown
from his own writings. By Rev. William P. Treacy.

THE ROSARY OF THE SACRED HEART. By Mrs. Frances Blundell. Dublin : M. H. Gill &
Son. 1886.

MAXIMS AND COUNSELS OF ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA. Translated from the French by Alice
Wilmot Chetwode. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886.

TO-DAY'S GEM FOR THE CASKET OF MARY. Compiled from various sources by a member of
the Ursuline Community. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886.

SHORT MEDITATIONS ON THE HOLY ROSARY. Translated from the French by a member of
the Order of St. Dominic. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886.

THOUGHTS OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. Translated from the French by Miss Margaret A.
Colton. New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis : Benziger Bros. 1886.

INSTRUCTIO SPONSORUM LINGUA ANGLIA CONSCRIPTA AD USUM PAROCHORUM. Auctore
Sacerdote Missionario. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. 1885.

A MEDITATION UPON WHISKEY. By Rev. B. Loison. Translated from the German by Rev.
J. B. Maus, of Allentown, Pa. Philadelphia : The Catholic Total Abstinence Archdio-
cesan Union. 1886.

SISTER SAINT-PETER AND THE WORK OF REPARATION. Historical Notice by M. L'Abbe
Janvier. Translated by K. A. C. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886.

NEW AND OLD SERMONS. Edited (in conjunction with many other Clergymen) by Rev. Au-
gustine Wirth, O.S.B., Elizabeth, N. J.

HUNTING AND FISHING-GROUNDS, AND FACILITIES FOR HEALTHFUL SPORT.

How TO STRENGTHEN THE MEMORY. By M. L. Holbrook, M.D. New York : M. L. Hoi-
brook & Co.

MICROBES, FERMENTS, AND MOULDS. By E. L . Trouessart. New York : D. Appleton & Co.
1886.

THE HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS. By A. Wilmot, F.R.G.S. London : Barns &
Gates; New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XLIV. JANUARY, 1887. No. 262.

CHRISTMAS CAROLS.

THE carol, like the ballad, belongs to the literature of the
past, to the days when songs were sung and not read, when the
rules of versification were few and simple, when poetry was the
pastime of the illiterate as well as of the learned, and when the
earnest simplicity of the narrative atoned for the roughness of
the style as well as for the occasional coarseness of the sentiment.
It is hard to sit down and decide in cold blood on the merits of
a printed poem that was meant to be sung in the open air, with
the crisp snow under foot and the flying moon overhead, with:
the Christmas bells pealing in the steeple and the Christmas
cheer spread bountifully on the board. These snatches of song
that rang jubilantly through the winter nights come floating
faintly down to us like the echo of far-off merriment and of dim
thanksgiving. They were not meant for us, but for those jocund
days when the mistletoe hung from the ceiling and the Yule-log
burned on the hearth ; when the Christmas candle flamed in its
stone socket and the mummers grew riotous in the hall ; when
the Lord of Misrule urged on his motley crew and the tables
groaned under their weight of food ; when strife was laid aside
and charity filled every heart ; when the poor feasted with the
rich, and the boar's head jostled the Christmas pie ; when care
was forgotten and the roof-tree rang with mirth then through
the frosty air came the sound of music, and lo ! under the silent
stars the waits were singing,

" Nowell, Nowell, Nowell, Nowell,
Born is the King of Israel !"

434 CHRISTMAS CAROLS. [Jan.,

and all, remembering that holy birth, did honor to their infant
Lord.

Carols were imported into England from Italy soon after the
Norman Conquest, and the earliest specimen that has been pre-
served for us is in Norman-French. They were of two kinds the
religious songs, originally chanted by the bishops at break of day
to their assembled flocks, and the jovial verses in praise of good
cheer that were intended to accompany the Christmas feasts.
Their antiquity, however, is a matter of dispute ; for. according
to tradition, St. Patrick's hymn, " Christ be with me," was first
sung in the halls of Tara on Christmas morn as part of the service
of thanksgiving. Its beautiful lines,

" Christ on my right hand,

Christ on my left hand,
Christ in the heart of all who heed me,
Christ in the mouth of all who speak to me,
Christ in the eye of all who see me,
Christ in the ear of all who hear me,"

are instinct with the breath of poetry and with the force of
prophecy ; but they have nothing in common with the carol,
which was less a hymn in honor of the Nativity than a rude pic-
ture of the sacred birth :

"This endnes* night I saw a sight

All in my sleep :
Mary, that may, she sang lullay,

And sore did weep ;
To keep she sought full fast about

Her Son from cold ;
Joseph said, Wife, my joy, my life,

Say what ye would ?
Nothing, my spouse, is in this house

Unto my pay ; t
My Son a king, that made all thing,

Lieth in hay.

Ah, my dear Son, said Mary, ah, my dear,
Kiss thy Mother, Jesu, with a laughing cheer."

The exquisite tenderness of the last two lines is full of a loving
significance, and throughout many of these old songs we see the
same maternal joy asserting itself triumphantly in sudden strains
of gladness 'mid the distress of poverty and pain. There is an-
other very similar carol, printed by the Percy Society from a
.manuscript of the fifteenth century, in which the Blessed Virgin

* Past. f Content.

1887.] CHRISTMAS CAROLS. 435

asks her Baby why he, the Master of all, should be so poor and
desolate :

" Now, sweet Son, since thou art king, why art thou laid in stall?
Why not thou ordain thy bedding in some great king's hall ? "

" Mary, mother, I am thy Child, though I be laid in stall ;
Lords and dukes shall worship me, and so shall kinges all.
Ye shall well see
That kinges three
Shall come on the twelfth day;
For this behest
Give me thy breast,
And sing, by-by, lullay.''

Whereupon our Blessed Mother acquiesces in the divine will,
and only begs, as an especial boon, that all Christians may be
merry upon this sacred day.

The first printed collection of carols was published by Wyn-
kyn de Worde in 1521. Only a fragment of it is left, and a sec-
ond volume, issued by Richard Kele, dates from 1550. After
this they were diligently sought from time to time, and in the
Bodleian Library are four small black-letter editions all of the
seventeenth century containing the cheerful, simple songs with
which shepherds and ploughmen were wont to brighten their
feasts and claim their masters' hospitality. " It is now Christ-
mas," writes Nicholas Breton in his Fantasticks, 1626, " and not
a cup of drink must go without a carol. Musicians now make
their instruments speak out, and a good song is worth the hear-
ing." Of the universal merriment that filled these jovial days we
have all read enough to make us wonder and sigh ; for the happy
fools whom Jacke of Dover found too scarce three hundred years
ago have since then well-nigh disappeared, and our folly now is
of so serious and dismal a cast that honest Jacke, were he alive
to-day, would hardly be tempted to seek it for exhilaration. We
have grown just wise enough for our own discomfort, and have
lost the knack of being mirthful. With us Christmas means self-
indulgence rather than good-fellowship among the rich, and cha-
rity instead of hospitality to the poor. But when Sir John
Reresby kept the festival among his neighbors and tenants, din-
ing three hundred people in one day, with whole roast sheep
upon the table, and " four violins, besides bagpipes, drums, and
trumpets," in the hall, he was not posing as a philanthropist, but
was merely enjoying the season after his own hearty fashion, with
a generous desire that others should enjoy it too. The cost, as

43 6 CHRISTMAS CAROLS. [Jan.,

he confesses in his memoirs, was by no means trifling ; but he
squares his accounts cheerfully, recollecting the satisfaction of
his guests. Like Master Breton, he probably held such merry-mak-
ing to be " a duty in Christians for the remembrance of Christ";
and if by chance their mirth exceeded decorum, he is prompt to
insert a penitential little note, praying forgiveness for an excess
which he emphatically declares was neither according to his cus-
tom nor his inclination.

With the advent of the Puritans all this good cheer was put
aside as savoring too strongly of carnal delights, and the Christ-
mas carol found itself in as sore disgrace as the Christmas pie,
that innocent object of Puritanical displeasure and wrath. The
feast of gladness became what Prynn'e said it ought to be " rather
a day of mourning than of rejoicing" and the waits were silenced
by law, a useless proceeding where no one had the heart to sing.
Those were dismal times, when the Yule-log was extinguished,
the wassail-bowl was empty, and when the banished mistletoe
carried in its wake the tender memory of stolen kisses.

" No lark could pipe to skies so dull and gray,"

and, in effect, none tried. Waller was busy bargaining with an
angry Parliament for exile and disgrace. Crashaw was starving
in the streets of Paris, and Herrick, who had sung so blithely

" Of may-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes,"

was lingering in lonely obscurity, mid the dingy gloom of London.
He sang of other themes as well, this jovial compound of
paganism and Christianity of the "homely manger" where the
divine Infant lay, scorned by the blinded Jews ; and of the East-
ern kings who sought from far a new-born Babe upon his Mo-
ther's breast. The beautiful Star Song is too well known to
need quotation, and, besides, it is properly a carol for Epiphany
rather than for Christmas day. But there is another most lovely
little poem in which a child is sent with baby-offerings to his
baby Lord :

"Go, pretty child, and bear this flower
Unto thy little Saviour;
And tell him, by that bud now blown,
He is the Rose of Sharon known.
When thou hast said so, stick it there
Upon his bib or stomacher;
And tell him, for good handsel too,
That thou hast brought a whistle new,

1887.] CHRISTMAS CAROLS. 437

Made of a clean, straight oaten reed,
To charm his cries at time of need.
Tell him, for coral thou hast none,
But if thou hadst, he should have one ;
But poor thou art, and known to be
Even as moneyless as he.
Lastly, if thou canst win a kiss
From those mellifluous lips of his,
Then never take a second on
To spoil the first impression."

We wish that the poet who wrote these tender lines had leit
unsung- much that was coarse and impious, but the license of his
day must plead as best it can in his behalf. To Herrick religion
was but an evanescent sentiment, and if we turn back to the older
carols written in all simplicity and reverence we will still find
that some of them are unfit for modern publication. Even Cra-
shaw and Southwell handle their sacred themes in a familiar
manner to which we are now unaccustomed, though " The Burn-
ing Babe " and " New Prince, New Pomp " must ever rank among
the most loving and pathetic of Christmas songs. Ben Jonson
told Drummond of Hawthornden that he would be content to
destroy many of his own productions if he could but have written
"The Burning Babe," and there is little doubt that he would
have been a gainer by the transaction.

The restoration of Charles II. sent the waits once more sing-
ing throughout Merrie England, carrying their "good tidings of
great joy " to cottage-windows and to castle-halls, to quiet hamlets
and to the noisy streets of London, where they met with an abun-
dant welcome from both rich and poor. Originally, indeed, the
waits were minstrels attached to the court, whose duty it was to
guard the streets at night and proclaim the passing hours an
office which involved some risk in those turbulent times, when
men who ventured out after dark took their lives into their own
keeping. Rymer gives us an account of one of these musical
guardians of the peace, who in the reign of Edward IV.
" nightelye from Mychelmas to Shreve Thorsdaye pipethe the
watche withen this courte fower times," receiving as a guerdon
for his services "cloathinge with the household yeomen or myn-
streilles lyke to the wages that he takethe, and eating in the halle
with the mynstreilles." It was likewise his especial privilege to
keep vigil with the newly-created knights, pacing up and down
the dim church-aisles through the long, lonely hours, for which
timely companionship he was given as a fee " the watchinge

438 CHRISTMAS CAROLS. [Jan.,

clothing that the knight shall wear upon him," so that his reward
depended greatly on the generosity or the extravagance of his
patron. The word waits was also applied in these early days to
musical instruments of different kinds, particularly to the haut-
boy ; but it was never used in the singular number, and soon
grew to mean musicians only, and finally those bands of wander-
ing singers who at Christmas-time travelled from door to door,
receiving largess of food and money according to the character
or means of their entertainers. The custom, like many other
ancient institutions, is less attractive in its modern aspect; and
Hector Malot has given us, in his charming story of Sans Farnille,
a pathetic account of the unhappy little waits who are now sent
out into the London streets to play and sing as best they may
under the nipping wind, while the rosy babies of the rich, tucked
snugly into warm, soft cribs, nod their sleepy heads to the fa-
miliar music.

Jeremy Taylor says that with the first Christmas day came
the first carol, sung by the angels in that happy dawn, and that,
having taught the infant church a hymn to put into her offices for
ever, the blessed choristers winged their flight back to heaven.
Milton also gives a very beautiful expression to the same
thought :

" His place of birth a solemn angel tells
To simple shepherds keeping watch by night;
They gladly thither haste, and by a quire
Of squadron'd angels hear his carol sung."

The greeting of these heaven-sent minstrels and the joy of
their astonished listeners form the burden of many an old Christ-
mas song. We hear the ewes bleating in the snow and the shep-
herds piping in the fields:

"Tyrle, tyrle, so merrily the shepherds began to blow ";
and presently the white-winged seraphim come fluttering down,

" A company
With merry songs and melody,"

bidding us lift up our hearts and rejoice, for the hour of our sal-
vation is at hand :

"The angels carolled loud their song of peace ;
The cursed oracles were strucken dumb ;
To see their Shepherd the poor shepherds press,
To see their King the kingly sophies* come.

* Wise men.

1 887.] CHRISTMAS CAROLS. 439

And, them to guide unto his Master's home,

A star comes dancing up the Orient,

That springs for joy over the strawy tent,

Where gold, to make their prince a crown, they all present." *

Did ever words express more gladness than in those two lines,

" A star comes dancing up the Orient,
That springs for joy over the strawy tent " ?

Surely they seem to dance along themselves in an indescribable
rapture of thanksgiving.

Again, many of the ancient carols are little else than hymns
in praise of the Maiden Mother :

" Fair and fresh as rose on thorn,
Lily-white, clean with pure virginity " ;

and one of the most beautiful of these taken from the Sloane
MS., and strangely overlooked by commentators has been re-
cently reprinted by A. H. Bullen in his admirable collection of
Christmas poems. Owing to its brevity a most unusual merit
I am able to quote it entire :

" I sing of a maiden

That is makeless ; t
King of all kings

To her Son she ches; \
He came also still

There his Mother was,
As dew in April

That falleth on the grass.
He came also still

To his Mother's bower,
As dew in April

That falleth on the flower.
He came also still

There his Mother lay,
As dew in April

That falleth on the spray.
Mother and maiden

Was never none but she ;
Well may such a lady

God's Mother be."

This little poem is more perfect in its simplicity than longer
md better known carols, as " The Moon Shines Bright," " A
"irgin Most Pure," and " The Seven Joys of Mary " one of the
quaintest of old songs ; but " St. Stephen was a Clerk " and

* Giles Fletcher. t Matchless. \ Chose. As.

440 CHRISTMAS CAROLS. [Jan.,

" The Carnal* and the Crane," if not familiar to most readers,
ought to be, for never were artless strains more purely and
sweetly sung. In the latter poem we hear the two birds talking
by the river-side on all the wonders of the Nativity, and the
carnal asks the crane :

" Where is the golden cradle

That Christ was rocked in ?
Where are the silken sheets
That Jesus was wrapped in ? "

"A manger was the cradle

That Christ was rocked in ;
The provender the asses left
So sweetly he slept on."

Then is told the story of the Magi, and of Herod's cruelty,
and how the divine Child, being carried into the desert for safety,
is closely pursued by the furious king :

"Then Jesus, ah ! and Joseph,

And Mary, that was so pure,
They travelled into Egypt,
As you shall find it sure.

" And when they came to Egypt's land,

Amongst those fierce wild beasts,
Mary, she being weary,

Must needs sit down to rest.

" ' Come, sit thee down,' says Jesus

' Come, sit thee down by me,
And thou shalt see how these wild beasts
Do come and worship me.'

" First came the lovely lion,

Which Jesu's grace did spring,
And of the wild beasts in the field
The lion shall be the king.

"Then Jesus, ah ! and Joseph,

And Mary, that was unknown,

They travelled by a husbandman

Just while his seed was sown."

At our Saviour's word the corn, that has been but that hour
hidden in the earth, springs up and bears ripe ears ready to be
harvested ; and when Herod comes riding past he is deceived by
the waving grain, for the husbandman assures him:

* Crow.

1 88;.] CHRISTMAS CAROLS. 44 1

"Jesus went by this way
When my seed was sown."

Upon hearing this the soldiers turn back to Judea, and the carol,
which is very long, ends with an earnest appeal to us to be kind
to all little children for the sake of the blessed Innocents who
shed their infant blood for Christ.

"The Holy Well" is even prettier than "The Carnal and
the Crane," though portions of it may seem irreverent to those
who do not strive to realize with what simple devotion these old
songs were written. Our little Saviour on a bright May morn-
ing begs his Mother's permission that he may go and play :

" Sweet Jesus went down to yonder town,

As far as the Holy Well,
And there did see as fine children
As any tongue can tell.

" He said, God bless you every one, >^. t VV % n

And your bodies Christ save and see :
Little children, shall I play with you,
And you shall play with me ? "

But they, being lords' and ladies' sons, have nothing but
scornful words for this new comrade, "born in an ox's stall ";
and Jesus, weeping sorely over their unkind ness, goes back to
his blessed Mother, who reminds him that he is " Christ, the King
of Heaven," and bids him punish these children for their wicked
pride:

" Nay, nay, sweet Jesus said,

Nay, nay, that may not be ;
For there are too many sinful souls
Crying out for the help of me."

If we turn from these genuine carols to the carmina sacra, or
Christmas hymns, we find ourselves in a field so vast that the
limits of a single article will, not suffice to give any adequate im-
pression of its scope. The Nativity is to poetry what the Holy
Family is to art a subject presented to us over and over again,
with every range of sentiment and every gradation of skill.
From Crashaw and Vaughan to Mr. Sy rounds and William
Morris, poets both Anglican and Catholic have vied with each
other in this grateful task; and men whose pens knew small
restraint on other themes have often curbed their license to
sing with pure lips the praises of their infant God. In the

442 CHRISTMAS CAROLS. [Jan ,

Paradise of Day nt ie Devises, published in 1579, there is a lovely
little poem in honor of Christmas day which seems fairly brim-
ming over with gladness ; and in England's Helicon, 1600, we find
a "Shepherd's Song," by Edmund Bolton, that is finer still in
its more restrained tone of devout thanksgiving.

" Sprung is the perfect day,
By prophets seen afar :
Sprung is the mirthful May,
Which winter cannot mar,"

sings Bolton joyfully; and the thought is sweetly echoed by Her-
rick's Christmas chorus:

"We see him come, and know him ours,
Who with his sunshine and his showers
Turns all the patient ground to flowers."

Ben Jonson's " Hymn on the Nativity " is almost as well
known as Milton's, and the scholarly poet Drummond of Haw-
thorden has left us two very beautiful sonnets on the angels and
the shepherds who shared between them the first homage to
the new-born King:

"Thus sang, unto the sound of oaten reed,
Before the Babe, the shepherds bowed on knees ;
And springs ran nectar, honey dropped from trees."

There is also a charming old French song or at least a song
so old that its origin, whether French or not, is shrouded in ob-
scurity which Mr. Morris has put into quaint English verse, and
which tells us how

"To Bethlem did they go, the shepherds three ;
To Bethlem did they go, to see whe'r it were so or no,
Whether Christ were born or no
To set men free."

In the stable of Bethlehem these thrice happy herdsmen be-
hold our Blessed Lady lying on the straw, with St. Joseph, "a
fair old man," watching tenderly over her:

"And a little Child

On her arm had she,
Wot ye who this is?
Said the hinds to me.

1887.] CHRISTMAS CAROLS. 443

This is Christ the Lord !

Masters, be ye glad !
Christmas is come in,

And no folk should be sad."

In the last two lines we have the motto with which most of
these songs are happily concluded, and which, in fact, forms the
sole burden of the non-religious carols meant to be sung through-
out Christmas day, but more especially at dinner time. They
are cheerful, unpretending verses as a rule, not equal in any way
to the devotional poems, but breathing a pleasant fragrance of
old-time jollity and mirth. Mr. Bullen has included all the best
in his Carols and Poems, and many of them are reprinted from
year to year as the merry season comes around. Naturally there
is a great deal in them about eating and drinking, and a great
deal more about giving our poor neighbors plenty to eat and
drink.

" It is a noble part

To bear a liberal mind ;
God bless our master's heart,
For here we comfort find."

They hold the key to many old customs now half-forgotten,
and initiate us into the mysteries of the boar's head, the wassail-
bowl, and the Twelfth-night cake. They welcome good King
Christmas right joyfully, crown him with holly and mistletoe, and
bid him a reluctant farewell when the hour for his flitting is at
hand. In like spirit we are loath to say good-by to this jocund
guest who comes but once a year, and whose departure leaves us
dully stranded on the every-day cares and duties which we have
briefly forgotten in his company.

"Yule's come, and Yule's gane,
And we have feasted weel ;
Sae Jock maun to his flail again,
And Jenny to her wheel."

444 THE CHRISTMAS GIFT.

THE CHRISTMAS GIFT.

AN angel comes down, as of old, in the night,
And fills all the world with the wonderful light
That is born of the blending of starlight and snow
And soft silver moonbeams; the sweet overflow
Of the joy that's in heaven may be almost like this:
'Tis the rapturous hush of the birthnight of bliss.

Though we see not the star, 'tis as bright as of yore ;
Though we hear no hosannas, they swell on the shore ;
Heaven turns to our world with the round of each year:
The fault is our own, in the dust-sealed ear
And dust-blinded eye of souls caught in the mesh
Woven round by desires and cares of the flesh.

Throughout all this beautiful world that I sing

There runs this one thought: " Oh ! what will LOVE bring,

'Tween the depth of the night and the dawning of morn,

To the hearts that await, be they blest or forlorn ?

Will it offer the gold of the uttermost mines ?

Or jewels and fabrics of rarest designs,

Hand-wrought in the years, hid away from the light,

Which robbed the poor toilers of hope and of sight?

" The song of the poet, the lore of the sage,
The wit of the jester, the wisdom of age ?
Sweet strains of rare music, imprisoned, intense?
The artist's creation, half-soul and half-sense ? "
Nay, nay! pass them by, the frail offspring of pain!
To nourish their growth human tears fell like rain !

Make ready your dwellings and garnish your board,
For the gift that awaits is the Heart of our Lord !
Be it hovel or palace, be it lowly or sad,
He will come at your bidding, the place be made glad ;
While the year turns around with its face to the past,
Neither time nor its joys nor its sorrows can last.

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 445

In this joy it offers atonement and crown,

On this night when God's love from the heavens comes down,

And, clothing itself in our sweet human graces,

Sits down at our firesides and smiles in our faces,

While HOSANNA, from earth unto Paradise swells,

THE WORD is MADE FLESH and among us it dwells !

SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS.

SECOND SERIES.
No. II.

PRINCIPLES OF HARMONIZING FAITH AND SCIENCE SYSTEMS OF CONCOR-
DISTS AND IDEALISTS RECONCILIATION OF THE TWO SYSTEMS CON-
CORD OF THE NEBULAR THEORY WITH SCRIPTURE AND CHRISTIAN
FAITH.

THE accordance of the nebular theory with philosophical
theism has been already proved. M. Faye's profession of his own
personal convictions on this head has also been given. There
remains the question of the accordance of M. Faye's hypothesis
and similar ones of other scientists with doctrines of divine re-
velation. This part of the discussion brings us to the considera-
tion of the work of Canon Duilh6 de Saint- Projet, Apologie Scien-
tifique de la Foi CJirttienne.

There is a certain timidity, hesitation, and prejudice, more or
less widely spread, in regard to the orthodoxy of a class of opin-
ions respecting cosmogony, chronology, biology, and similar
matters, presenting a phase of novelty, which are put forth as
probable or tenable by some recent authors of works on Christian
apologetics. It is important to remove this prejudice, if any
satisfactory result is to be attained in clearing away objections
which make a show of being scientific or historical, against the
Christian religion. For as long as a suspicion of being unortho-
dox adheres to any exposition of a matter in discussion, it is dis-
trusted by believers as a concession which compromises the faith,
and is dismissed by unbelievers as a mere pretext or piece of
special pleading. Unless it is plain that a plea for religion, or
any one part of it, is made in bona fide, without compromise on
any doctrine or fact covered by the sanction of revelation, the

446 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Jan.,

plea is worthless ; or, at best, has only the value of a tentative
effort to take soundings around the question, so as to find out
what may be probable or tenable.

As we are about to make use of the statements and arguments
contained in the work of M. de Saint-Projet in regard to a num-
ber of the class of topics just alluded to, we wish, first of all, to
make evident the orthodoxy and trustworthiness of the author
and his work, according to the Catholic criterion.

The author is a professor of apologetics in the Higher School
of Theology at Toulouse. The substance of his work, Apologie
Scientifique , is derived from a series of public lectures commenced
in 1869 at the instance of the Cardinal Archbishop of Toulouse.
The urgent request of the same prelate determined him to em-
body and publish these lectures in their present form as a system-
atic treatise, and the letter of the cardinal expressing this desire
is prefixed to the work. At the close of his letter the cardinal
writes :

" My Dear Canon, may the important work which you are about to write,
to prove the perfect harmony which exists between Catholic doctrine and
the most incontestable conclusions of general physics, biology, and anthro-
pology, demonstrate irresistibly to men of good faith that our God does not
in vain call himself the ' Master of Sciences' scienttarum Domtnus. This
noble design was worthy to tempt your pen. Now that you are about
happily to realize it, I thank you, I congratulate you, and I bless both the
work and its able author."

In the preface to the second edition the author mentions the
fact that the first edition received the explicit approbation of
bishops, the commendation of the Catholic journalists and of many
learned laymen, as well as the general favor of the public. More
than this, he received from the Pope a letter of commendation
and encouragement, which is published, and in which Leo XIII.
repeats what he has in other places so strongly urged : that it is a
most excellent and opportune effort to unite a study of the natural
sciences, more diligent than has been hitherto customary, to the
pursuits of theology proper ; and to apply the fruit of these studies
to the defence of religion by showing that " all those things which
have been delivered to us by God himself are in brilliant har-
mony with the results produced by the investigation and labor
of the human mind."

This is a sufficient guarantee for the orthodoxy of the learned
canon's work, taking that term in its just and reasonable sense.
There is another sense, an exaggerated one, in which it is em-
ployed by the class of timid adherents to respectable prejudices

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 447

before alluded to, who may be found everywhere, but are more
numerous in France than elsewhere. M. de Saint-Projet makes
a distinction which is fine and accurate between " reasonable
orthodoxy" and "sentimental orthodoxy " (p. 95, Note). Rea-
sonable orthodoxy consists in doctrinal conformity to all authori-
tative teaching- in the church, according to the rule which she
herself prescribes. Sentimental orthodoxy consists in a subjection
of the mind to human authorities in the church which exceeds
what she prescribes, not founded in sound reasons, but springing
from a sentiment of reverence for the great men and the preva-
lent opinions of antiquity which is exaggerated. The piety which
prompts this sentiment is respectable, but its exaggerations are
no part of that virtue which is called the piety of faith ; they are
an excrescence which adheres to it. They may be generally
harmless in individuals, but they can become noxious in certain
circumstances. This is especially the case when sentimental
orthodoxy is made a barrier and an obstacle in the way of pro-
gress and enlightenment by means of rational orthodoxy, allied
with sound philosophy and genuine science.

Let us hear what M. de Saint-Projet has to say on this head :

" In the religious crisis through which we are passing, one of the first
conditions of success for the defender of the Christian faith is to profess
on every occasion a high and sincere esteem for positive science that is,
for genuine science. Far from treating it as an enemy, he ought to salute it
as a necessary, a providential ally, the only one which can, in concert with
virtue, bring back troubled or wandering souls, and restore to religion its
ancient and legitimate influence over the masses of the people.

" There are some timid Christians whom I might call pusillanimous,
but more than all little enlightened, who are afraid of science, who 'look
on a man having two eyes the eye of knowledge and the eye of faith as
a monster/ and condemn as a dangerous weakening, almost as a culpable
compromising, every opinion in matters where freedom is in possession,
every interpretation which is new, when these are adopted in consequence
of scientific discoveries, even those which are the most certain. . . .

" We have summed up the duties of a Christian apologist in the pre-
sence of science. But duties imply rights. It is one of the first conditions
of success in this formidable combat against the contemporary error of
total negation that the apologist should be left in the possession of his
liberty of movement. His task is difficult and arduous enough without
having besides his road obstructed, his working hindered, and his shoul-
ders weighted by opinions of a school, particular doctrines, interpretations
more or less worthy of respect but certainly not obligatory, in philosophy,
theology, or exegesis. ... In what other way could the scholastic doctors
make an organic system of doctrine and construct a Summa Theological
For such an achievement, for such a high flight, it is necessary to have a
free use of the wings.

448 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. !"J an ->

"As for us, we have found a science all finished to our hand, and we
have our ready-made compendiums. Whatever cannot go into their nar-
row mould appears to us a dangerous novelty and puts us in a fright. But
yet at this day, as in the epochs of initiatory labor in systematic con-
struction, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we need new moulds large
enough to contain all the new forms of progress, all the conquests of
science ; the eternal youth of the church demands the Summa Theologica of
the modern age " (p. 77, etc.)

The author sums up the result of all this, and much more
which has not been quoted, in a rule and maxim which is not
new, but really a formula in perfect agreement with the most
ancient and universal tradition, and the perpetual practice of the
church, the Fathers, and the scholastic doctors:

"The authority of tradition, the infallible decisions of the church con-
cerning the fidelity of versions and the sense of texts, fall upon whatever
regards directly or indirectly faith and morals. As for all free interpreta-
tions, historical, chronological, scientific, tradition, even though constant and
universal, can be modified by the consequences of a discovery " (p. 104).

In respect to the matters now under discussion, the abuse of
tradition as a criterion for judging- and condemning opinions de-
rived from science is, in the last analysis, an abuse of the autho-
rity of Scripture. And, in respect to this, Dr. Schaeffer, a dis-
tinguished German author whom we had occasion to quote in
our first series of articles, says as follows :

" It is a cause of error to seek in the Scriptures, literally interpreted,
lights which it is not within their scope to afford upon the problems of
physics, astronomy, or biology ; to make of the Bible a sort of criterion of
truth in the .sciences, to mix up on all occasions sacred texts with contro-
versies on the phenomena of nature " (cited on p. 102).

There is more ancient and higher authority for condemning
this procedure, one which those who profess so great a reve-
rence for tradition and the Fathers ought to respect namely, that
of St. Augustine :

" It often happens that one not a Christian has acquired by experience
or reasoning most certain knowledge about something relating to the
earth, the heavens, the other elements of this world, the natures of animals,
plants, stones, and other things of the same sort. Now, it is too shameful,
it is dangerous, it is what ought to be shunned with the utmost care, for a
Christian to talk about these things with a pretence of giving the teaching
of the Christian Scripture, in such a way that any infidel hearing his insani-
ties and perceiving that he wanders, as one says, heaven-wide from the
truth, can scarcely contain his laughter" (De Gen. ad Litt., i. 39).

The abuse of a traditional interpretation of Scripture which
applies it as a criterion to determine the truth in scientific mat-

1 887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 449

ters, is really contrary to tradition itself as well as to sound rea-
son. The rule laid down by the Abbe Vigouroux is not only
reasonable, but it is the rule which has been followed by the
greatest Christian writers in all ages:

"The apologist in our age walks in the track of the Fathers of the
church, and conforms himself to their principles, when he interprets the word
of God by the aid of the lights 'which are furnished to him by science. Just as
he is obliged to avail himself of archaeological, historical, geographical, and
philological discoveries for the explanation of passages which have hither-
to remained obscure, or have even been incorrectly understood, so also he
is bound to make use of scientific discoveries, when they are certain, for
fixing the sense of passages in the Bible which can be made clear by their
light " (cited on p. 104).

There is a considerable difference in the method of procedure
adopted by the most eminent writers, as well Protestants as Ca-
tholics, who within the last half-century have endeavored to
harmonize the statements of the Bible with the certain or proba-
ble theories of modern science.

One class of these writers has received the designation of
Concordists, another that of Idealists.

The first class proceed from the position that the Bible-
contains a collection of scientific affirmations and of statements'
of facts of pure science. Hence they are obliged to maintain,,
even in details, the absolute truth of ail these supposed affirma-
tions and statements, and the positive agreement between these-
and all that is real and true in the supposed results of successive
discoveries of science.

Writers of this class have displayed a wonderful ingenuity
and subtlety, and many of their efforts have seemed, for a time, to-
be crowned with a considerable success. Nevertheless a great
deal of their ingenuity has really been exerted in torturing the
sacred text, and a great deal of their apparent success has proved
to be illusory. Not seldom their varying hypotheses have
mutually destroyed each other in their conflict, and still oftener
the provisional conclusions and pretended discoveries o-f science
with which they had with great pains made an accommodation
have been falsified by the progress of science itself.

The Idealists can trace their system back to the Jewish and
Christian schools of Alexandria, and claim a number of illus-
trious names in Christian antiquity from Ciement and Origen to-
St. Augustine. At the present time their number is large and
increasing among the scholars of Italy, Germany, Belgiunvand

VOL. XLIV. 29

45o SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Jan.,

England, and begins to be recruited in France, where the system
has hitherto met with more hesitation.

The primary maxim of this system is that the Scripture gives
no scientific instruction, wherefore its domain must be isolated
from that of science, and thus all antagonism be avoided; and a
negative concord being secured, the attempt must be given up
to establish a positive harmony.

M. de Saint-Projet points out a fault in this system, when
pushed to an extreme, which is the opposite of the error of an
extreme Concordism. There is a medium between both ex-
tremes in which the most sure and fruitful efforts of the best
authors of a concordist or idealistic tendency to establish both
the negative and the positive harmony between the affirmations
of Scripture and the teachings of science can be combined and
reconciled.

On the one hand, there are certain principal lines in both
orders viz., of revelation and of natural science which are par-
allel, as drawn by the same divine hand, and which must be posi-
tively shown to be parallel. There are some affirmations of Scrip-
ture, few in number, but absolutely clear, and interpreted by the
authority of the church, because closely connected with dogma,
which are inseparable from corresponding scientific statements;
e.g., the unity of the human species. A few others, though not
directly connected with dogma, and not authoritatively defined,
are in themselves perfectly clear and of a sense which is indubita-
ble. In respect to these, it is necessary to show a positive con-
cord between Scripture and science. The minute and subtle de-
tails of Concordist systems may be set aside as irrelevant, and be-
yond the lines within which there must be a positive concord
between faith and science, the negative concord suffices, and
more free and varying interpretations can be admitted, accord-
ing to the method off-the Idealists.

This gives us all the liberty and all the space we can desire
for expatiating in the domains of Scripture, of philosophy, of his-
tory, and of science. Beginning with absolute assent to the cer-
tainties in these several orders, we are free to hold and advocate
all probable opinions and to seek to make progress in the know
ledge of facts and truths. We do not allow dictation from senti-
mental orthodoxy or pseudo-scientific arrogance. Neither do we
wish to impose opinions and theories in a dogmatical manner
upon those who hold different views. Freedom to investigate,
to think, to discuss, within the bounds of that realm which God
'has thrown open to us, relying on the weight of evidence and

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 451

argument to give authority to rational judgments, is the way
to make rational orthodoxy and sound science progress, in
mutual alliance, with combined efforts, and with a certainty of
achieving some degree of success.

It may be asked by some why these questions should be
mooted at all, why discussion should be stirred up, and why we
should not be content to leave the quietude of those who keep
the faith in simplicity undisturbed.

It might be a sufficient answer to this question to say that it
is good and useful to seek after all kinds of scientific knowledge,
and after the most accurate and thorough knowledge attainable
of the contents of the Bible, for their own sake.

But there is a more imperative reason than this. Many minds,
as well of those who are believers as of those who are not, are al-
ready disquieted. They are not to be quieted by a mere waiving
of objections, or by simple affirmations of the falsity and futility
of the infidel and atheistic arguments which are aggressively
pressed against all natural and revealed theology, under the
aegis of science. Arguments must be met by arguments, per-
versions of history and sophisms which wear the appearance of
philosophy and science must be exposed by true presentation of
historical facts and by rational theories of genuine science. It
is the salvation of souls which is the great interest involved in
these momentous issues. Opinions and arguments which are
respectable only from their antiquity, which are preserved and
cherished merely from the force of habit and mental inertness,
which are not rationally tenable and are becoming obsolete, are
not only useless but positively injurious in the offensive and de-
fensive warfare of religion against impiety. They are guns
ready to burst ; they are fortifications which cannot stand against
modern artillery.

Moreover, a considerable part of the theology of polemics
and apologetics which is perfectly solid and irrefragable is be-
coming comparatively useless and inopportune. It is directed
against dead or dying errors, obsolete or decaying forms of infi-
delity and heresy. Wherefore it is important to reconstruct or
augment the text-books in philosophy and theology which form
the basis of professional instruction in seminaries and are the
manuals of continual reference for the clergy. The admonitions
of the Holy Father, and of other prelates in high positions, the
measures taken by councils, and the corresponding movement
pervading all higher intellectual circles in the Catholic Church
of all the principal nations, all tend in this direction. It is matter

45 2 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Jan.,

for congratulation that so many scholars of eminent ability and
learning are engaged in the work, and that by their excellent
writings in books and periodicals they are rapidly furnishing the
materials for those improved systematic Sums in philosophy and
theology which we may hope to see appear in due time, and
which will be adequate to the wants of this modern age.

Our own part in this labor is a very humble one, but, such as
it is, we must return to it and go on with our immediate task.
This is the consideration of the nebular hypothesis, particularly
in the new form in which M. Faye has proposed it, in reference
to the doctrines of faith and the affirmations of Holy Scripture.

In respect to the origin of the universe, the question is within
the domain of rational philosophy and within the domain of faith,
but not within the domain of science. The one dogma of faith
is that God created all things from a beginning of time out of
nothing. The conclusion of philosophy by natural reason is the
same. In revelation God affirms and teaches in a higher and su-
pernatural way the same truth which he discloses by his works
and the light of reason. Science begins with the effects of the
First Cause as these are already existing, going as near to their
beginning as it can get. But it cannot by its proper methods go
back of existence and find its producing cause i.e., it cannot
verify by experience the connection between this effect and its
first cause. This is what M. de Saint-Projet says on this head :

" Here is the whole Christian doctrine on this fundamental question of
the first origin of things; there is no other. What can ^science teach us
concerning the first origin of the universe? Nothing" (p. 126, etc.)

There is, therefore, no possibility of science clashing with the
Scripture and faith concerning the origin of the universe.

The nebular hypothesis is a theory concerning, not the origin,
but \heformation of the universe from matter already originated.

The author lays down the position that, in respect to forma-
tion, the evolutions or transformations of the primary matter in
virtue of laws established by the supreme intelligence, the faith
prescribes no dogma. Wherefore the sciences of cosmology-
astronomy, geogony, and general physics can pursue their in-
vestigations on their own principles, according to their own
methods, at their ease, without the slightest fear of a conflict with
faith. The author remarks, however, that there are some clear
and positive affirmations in the first ten verses of Genesis, inter-
preted by a nearly unanimous consent of Fathers and schoolmen,
which are neither pertaining to the substance of the faith nor in-

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 453

tentionally scientific, yet are enunciations of natural truths un-
known as such to past ages, but lately ascertained by science.
He signalizes two such statements. First, that chaos preceded
evolution and formal distinction of substances in the universe;
and, second, that an azoic state preceded the appearance of or-
ganic life on the earth. The famous materialist Haeckel declares
that " in the Mosaic hypothesis of the creation the idea of a
gradual differentiation of primitively simple matter is presented
to us with a surprising clearness and distinctness" (cited on
p. 144).

M. de Saint- Projet sums up the whole matter as follows:

" It is truly difficult not to recognize the real harmony, the positive
agreement between the history of the formation of the universe, discovered
and daily brought into clearer light by science, and the grand lines of
the same history as related in the Bible. We have in view only the first
ten verses of Genesis, not having yet arrived at the appearance of life and
organized beings, but only at the formation of the worlds and the earth,
the primary evolutions of material atoms. There is question, therefore,
only of that class of sciences called cosmogony astronomy, geogony,
general physics.

"The grand features of the Bible account comprise only so much as
this: The cosmic matter or obscure chaos ; the movement of the Creative
Spirit infusing the primitive energetic impulse ; * the nebulous masses when
sufficiently condensed becoming phosphorescent, indistinct but real radia-
tion and diffusion of a faint light before the complete formation of luminous
centres ; finally the earth gradually cooling, oceans and clouds forming,
primitive rocks, or ' dry land,' emerging, the atmosphere enveloping the
cool, solid crust of the earth, which is now ready to receive living things on
its surface .

" Is this a forced and artificial concord between a rendering of the sci-
entific phenomena and an interpretation of the Bible, both of which are
the most obvious, the best accredited, and sufficiently disentangled from
useless and embarrassing concordisms in detail ? In respect to the nebu-
lous chaos, is it not striking to see the commentators on the Bible from
the earliest times persisting in one and the same bold conception, unknown
until lately to profane science, and thus, as another expresses it, 'giving
the hand to Laplace, who probabty, when he created his magnificent sys-
tem, was not aware that on this point he was the continuator of the an-
cient traditional exegesis ' ?

" It seems, then, that the scientific apology for faith has fairly gained
this position : first, as to what touches the origin of matter and of the
world, faith, in accord with philosophy, affirms creation from nothing ; sci-
ence affirms nothing and cannot make any affirmation.

" Secondly, so far as the formation of the universe and of the earth is
concerned, the faith prescribes nothing; science does not offer anything as

* The exact translation of the Hebrew text, as the learned Rabbi Leeser gave it to the
author, is : " And the Spirit of God was over the face of the deep."

454 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Jan.,

absolutely certain, but the best authorized interpretations of Scripture, and
the most serious, universally accepted hypotheses of science, are mutually
in perfect harmony " (p. 142, etc.)

It follows from all the foregoing that the modified nebular
theory of M. Faye is one which is purely and simply scientific, to
be examined and judged merely on its own probability, by those
who are competent in such matters. It cannot claim scientific
certitude, but we are warranted by sufficient reasons and by
respectable scientific authority in regarding it as a very prob-
able hypothesis, far advanced towards scientific verification in re
spect to its essential parts, though as yet needing further con-
firmation, and perhaps rectification, in some of its details.

There is no reason whatever for theological prejudice or
suspicion against the nebular theory. A prejudice of this kind is
simply puerile and founded in the imagination only, not in rea-
son or in any just conception of the truths revealed by God con-
cerning his creative act and his providence over the world. It
is analogous to the puerile fear which prevailed so widely when
the Copernican system was first broached to the world.

Those who were accustomed to consider the earth as the im-
movable centre of the starry universe were made uncomfortable
and thrown into confusion when the wonders and splendors of
the genuine astronomy were suddenly revealed. The sensation
was like that of a person, brought up in a very quiet and remote
country-place, when he visits a large town like New York. In
the same manner, the notion of millions of years preceding the
brief period of human history has a stunning effect on some
minds, and disturbs the snug, homelike habit of feeling in respect
to the world and its past history. It seems to them that they are
thrown off to a great distance from God as their Creator and
Father, b}^ the measureless extent of his works, the countless
multitude of his creatures, and the interminable ages which
elapsed from the beginning of creation to the time when he
brought our human race into existence.

This is a mere illusion of the imagination. In truth, it is the
eternity and infinity of God which puts us at an infinite distance
from him in respect to the extent and duration of our being.
Every creature, whatever and wherever he is, is at the centre of
an infinite sphere of being and duration " whose centre is every-
where and circumference nowhere." No matter how vast the
dimensions of a universe extended in space, or how long the
periods of the duration of the universe or particular beings in it,
in time, this makes no difference whatever in the relation of any

1 887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 455

being- to its Creator. We are what we are and when we are.
The possibility of duration in time stretches endlessly behind us,
from any present now, and any point of time in the past, whether
near or remote. It makes no difference to the present of any in-
dividual, or to the present of the first human being-, whether we
conceive of the possible before as void of created existence, or as
occupied by a series of states of created existence going back-
ward through five preceding days, or five hundred, five thou-
sand, five million years, or a million of centuries. We are not
nearer or further off from the eternity of God in any case.
Neither does any imageable extent of the universe, or num-
ber of distinct existences within its bounds, alter our relation
to God as his creatures or his children. We gain nothing by
belonging to a small world with few beings in it, and we lose no-
thing by the increase and multiplication of the world and its con-
tained beings.

Moreover, it is most congruous to the idea of a creator who
is eternal and infinite that he should make his universe, in re-
spect to extent, multitude, and duration, on such a scale of mag-
nificence that it may represent to finite, rational beings in an
overwhelming manner the being, infinite in every respect, of the
creator. Modern astronomy, with the other cognate sciences, is
therefore in better harmony with the most sublime conceptions
of natural and revealed theology than any of the puerile sys-
tems of ancient times.

This is specifically true of the grand nebular theory of the
formation of the worlds. The power of God is more displayed
in creating efficient second causes than in producing any other
effects, and this in proportion to the degree of their force of
causation, which reaches its highest point in the free-will of ra-
tional beings. The most perfect kind of musical-box, which plays
its own tunes by an ingenious arrangement within itself, is a
higher work of artistic skill than a xylophone, which makes har-
mony by being struck with a hammer in the hand of the player.
So a universe which owes its formation and harmonious succes-
sion of movements to the working of intrinsic laws displays the
power of the creator much more than one which is mechanically
put together and kept going by an impulse from without, or a
succession of such impulses.

It is a universal law of the creative and providential action of-
God, in both the natural and the supernatural orders, that the
agency of second causes is raised to the maximum, and the im-
mediate agency of the first cause, without any co-operation of

456 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. (~J an -

secondary causes and instruments, is restrained by a law of par-
simony to what, relatively speaking, may be called a minimum.

And, again, it is also a mode of action generally followed in
the government of divine Providence that things start from
their first elements, and go on towards perfection and fulfilment
by progress in an order of development. This is another analogy
between the nebular theory and the best theories respecting other
departments of the grand domain of knowledge, in philosophy
and theology. A volume might be written on this topic alone.

The conformity of M. Faye's theory with Christian doctrine
in respect to the beginning and the ending of our own world and
the other worlds known to us has been shown in the foregoing
article. That all suns are rapidly going on toward extinction is a
scientific certainty. It follows from this that they necessarily had
a beginning. The essence of the nebular theory consists in an ex-
position of the formation of the worlds from a primitive chaos.
So far as our own world is concerned, a probable history of the
way in which its present order was evolved out of chaotic ele-
ments, a. certain demonstration of its stability in respect to the
rotations and revolutions of its component bodies, and an equally
certain demonstration of the future cessation of solar radiation
and therefore of all organic life on our earth, have been achieved
b}' science. But beyond this limit science has not yet, and there
is no reason to suppose that it ever will have, made any great dis-
coveries, even in regard to our own world, such as will show to
what future state of things the laws of nature are tending. It is
impossible to foresee what will become of the solar system after
its central body has ceased to be a sun. That the other suns and
systems were formed in a way similar to the one in which our own
was evolved is probable, though the process cannot be cal-
culated in any minute details. That these suns are wasting their
light and heat is certain. That some have become extinct and that
others are far advanced toward extinction is probable. That our
world and all the other worlds are moving rapidly in space we
know, but it surpasses all human calculation to determine the
orbits of their revolutions, the general system of the universe, its
centre of gravity, and the combinations of its millions of move-
ments, all tending toward an unknown result. Science shows no
evidence and no probability even of the existence of life on any
other world besides our own planet. Even here the necessary
conditions of life have existed for only a comparatively short pe-
riod, which cannot be prolonged very far into the future. For
what purpose has God made the worlds, for what purpose has

i88;.J SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 457

he placed a race of intelligent beings on the earth to inhabit it for
a short time? There must be some end, worthy of the infinite
wisdom, power, and goodness of the Creator.

Philosophy can show that the soul of man is fitted to survive
the extinction of the suns, and that whatever intelligent beings
may exist in the universe have been created for the attainment ot
their natural perfection and felicity in a state of endless existence.
Philosophy cannot show, however, for what end God has sent
so many blazing suns careering in space to become finally extinct,
or why he has prepared so carefully this earth at least, and per-
haps other globes in the universe, as the habitation of living, sen-
tient, and rational beings, for a comparatively short period, to
become eventually dark, cold, dead masses of inorganic matter,
liable, for anything science knows, to dash one another to pieces
by mutual collision. M. Faye's conclusion is a very lame and
feeble peroration to a magnificent discourse. It expresses his
conviction that the scientific triumphs of the human intellect will
survive for ever the final catastrophe of the world. Certainly,
the achievements of man through the exercise of his higher
faculties are admirable, considering the limitations of this earthly,
inchoate condition of his intelligence. Yet they are, after all,
but schoolboy performances, not likely to excite the wonder of
the universe through the everlasting ages to come.

Science stops short after ascending in its balloon to a low
height above the ground. Philosophy takes a higher flight, yet
it cannot soar beyond the atmosphere. The insatiable mind
cries out, gasping, for wider and higher knowledge. And where
science and philosophy leave off faith begins, not rejecting but
transcending all that lies within the rational sphere. On its
own boundless domain it can no more come into collision with
human science than a vast steamer on mid-ocean with a boat
plying between the riverside ports. Revelation has left some
blank pages in the great book of God for science and history
and philosophy to fill up from their age-long researches. These
are at the beginning and in the middle of the volume. The end
of it, which sums up, giving the final result, solving the com-
plete problem, exhibiting the accomplishment of the long, com-
plex drama, foretelling the ultimate destination of all things
visible and invisible which compose the spiritual and corporeal
universe, is written by the only hand competent to the task the
hand of God. Science can demonstrate that the present physi-
cal condition of the universe is temporary and tending to a ca-
tastrophe by the operation of the same laws which have brought

458 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Jan.,

it out from its primitive chaos. Philosophy can demonstrate
that an infinitely wise, powerful, and good Being has produced
the universe, and guided the course of its evolution through all
stages in view of an end in which a perfection will be attained
congruous to the divine wisdom and goodness. Beyond this
the scientist and the philosopher can only make guesses at truth.
The history of all these conjectural hypotheses is the best proof
of their insufficiency, and furnishes a very good negative argu-
ment for the necessity of a better light on the problem of the des-
tiny of man and the universe, radiated from a divine revelation.

What that divine revelation discloses has at least a negative
corroboration from science and philosophy. They cannot con-
tradict it in anything. They may even, in some things, afford a
positive confirmation, by their probable hypotheses or their con-
jectures which are not evidently unreasonable, to the sublime
truths whose certainty and credibility rest on the veracity of
God.

Now, whereas science proves that all living bodies tend to-
ward ultimate death, and that there is no known power of resur-
rection in nature ; and philosophy, unaided by the light of faith,
can show no reason why a rational soul should be united to a
mortal body, and living, intelligent, immortal spirits should in-
habit a material universe whose light and life are doomed to
extinction; Faith discloses the resurrection of the body and the
restitution of all things. The present glorious constitution of
the universe succeeded the state of chaos; the appearance of the
abundant flora and fauna of theearth,and at last of man, succeed-
ed the azoic period. In like manner the glorified state of risen
humanity, and a corresponding reconstruction of the universe,
will follow the present inchoate and imperfect order; which is
temporary, because it is only a preparation for that which will
be everlasting.

This doctrine, taught in numerous passages of the Holy Scrip-
ture and by the universal confession of the Catholic Church, is
sufficiently expressed in one text of St. Paul:

"The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared
with the glory to come that shall be revealed in us. For the expectation of
the creature [/.<?., of the whole creation] waiteth for the revelation of the
sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly,
but by reason of him that made it subject in hope. Because the creature
itself shall be delivered fro Jit tlie servitude of corruption into the glorious
liberty of the children of God. For we know that every creature groaneth
and is in labor even until now. And not only it, but ourselves also, who
have the first-fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves,

1887.] Two MINSTRELS. 459

waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, the redemption of our body"
(Rom. viii. 18, etc.)

A man who wishes to build a noble house upon the site of a
mean and decaying- dwelling is not obliged to wait until the old
house falls down. It is not necessary to wait until a set of gas-
fixtures are worn out before substituting electric lights. God will
make the transformation of the universe whenever it pleases him
to establish it in perpetuity as the kingdom of the blessed. He
is not subject to the laws which he has imposed on his universe.
He will not have to wait for the suns to burn out before he lights
them up again to shine through eternity. As soon as human
probation is finished he will establish on everlasting foundations
''the new heavens and the new earth, in which dwelleth right-
eousness." In that new world we shall have plenty of leisure
and every possible advantage for making observations in astro-
nomy ; and the Creator will disclose what are now the hidden
secrets of his wisdom, partially seen in glimpses as " through a
glass, darkly."

TWO MINSTRELS.

A MINSTREL came in the full noonday,

A youth of high degree,
And sang he forth in the great highway

No timid minstrel he :
He sang of his grand ancestral halls,

Of his noble name and kin,
And vaunted high of the noble deeds

His sires had gloried in.

And one there came when the sun was low ;

No noble name had he,
But oh ! he sang with a sweeter tone,

With truer minstrelsy :
.He told no story of warlike deeds,

His chant of a nobler strife
Of the battles won for the glorious God,

And the joys of the Endless Life !

460 THE NATIVITY IN ART. [Jan.,

THE NATIVITY IN ART.

BETHLEHEM, the city of David ; Bethlehem, of which God
said through his prophet, " Out of thee shall come forth the
Leader who shall rule my people Israel." And yet, precisely
like Jerusalem thirty-three years later, this small city, for which
sceptre and crown had been waiting, " knew not the day of her
visitation "failed to recognize her Prince, and gave her allegi-
ance to another.

On the hillsides around Bethlehem shone the wondrous light
that roused her shepherds from their dozing dreams under their
sheep-skins, until they saw plainly the angel of the Lord stand-
ing beside them, and they heard distinctly the words they could
never forget, declaring to these simple folks the birth of the
Messias of Israel, the Leader of the people of God, and that they
would find the new-born Child, wrapped in swaddling-clothes,
lying in a manger. And even as they listened, as if heaven could
not keep silence nor her exultant choirs be restrained, these
shepherds saw themselves surrounded by a multitude of the
heavenly host, while high above came the song, in which all
joined, " Gloria in excelsis Deo." No sooner had the angels dis-
appeared and their song wholly ceased than these shepherds
hastened to Bethlehem " to find all things as the angel had said " ;
and yet Bethlehem slept! As those who sleep through a tem-
pest are said to sleep even more profoundly for the tumult of
the elements, so the slumber of the dwellers in the little city of
David was more profound, perhaps, for the celestial light on
the hill-tops and the song of the angels in the star-lit welkin.
Certain it is, no mention is made of any but the Virgin Mother,
the divine Babe, St. Joseph, and the shepherds. Afterwards came
the Wise Men from the East. But while " all Jerusalem was
troubled," and the soul of her king quaked within him. our Beth-
lehemites saw the white camels come and go, saw, perhaps, the
glint of the pure gold of Saba, caught the perfume of frankin-
cense or the bitter myrrh, without attaching any significance to
them ; for were not strange sights coming every hour during this
enrolling of the children of the twelve tribes? And we know, also,
that there is no blindness, no deafness, like that of the heart.

But while Herod was plotting against the life of this Bal
born in a manger, and the Bethlehemites were unconscious of th<

iSS;.] THE NATIVITY IN ART. 461

fulfilment of the prophecy which took away the reproach of the
littleness of their city, the dwellers in Rome beyond the Tiber
were startled by a prodigy unheard of. A fountain of oil broke
forth from a spot hitherto occupied by a magazine for merchan-
dise and also as a hospital for sick soldiers, and so copious was
the stream that it found its way to the Tiber. In ancient Rome
they had a habit of noting events, small or great ; and, on the
watch as they were for portents, this overflowing of a fountain
of oil oil for healing ; oil, the symbol of peace was a portent to
be cherished. They would see what came of it, and it was duly
chronicled among the events of the year. Two hundred and
twenty-four years after, under the^pontiff Callistus, a church was
built on this very spot to commemorate this very event, and
called St. Mary the first church in Rome bearing this name so
dear to Christians. At least our Romans are not sleeping like our
Bethlehemites.

Turning to those treatises on Christian art which are found
in English, we might suppose the world had been as indifferent
to this story of the Infant of Bethlehem, and to the wonderful
circumstances attending his Nativity, as the Bethlehemites them-
selves. The instinct of delineation would seem to have stopped
short before one of the loveliest subjects for the pencil and brush
which even Christianity has supplied. This is painfully appa-
rent, and the incongruity is as apparent also. Mrs. Jameson, in
her extensive work upon Christian art giving one entire volume
to the Legends of the Madonna and Lady Eastlake, who carried
out Mrs. Jameson's intentions, after her death, in two volumes en-
titled The History of our Lord, simply leave out the Nativity as a
subject of art, with only this remarkable sentence : *

"There exists no proof, I believe, that the effigies of the Virgin with
the infant Christ in her arms, which existed before the end of the fifth cen-
tury, were placed before Christian worshippers as objects of veneration.
They appear to have been merely groups representing a particular incident
of the New Testament namely, the adoration of the Magi ; for I find no
other in which the Mother is seated with the infant Christ, and this is an
historical subject of which we shall have to speak hereafter."

Making no comment upon the assertion contained in this sen-
tence concerning the Adoration of the Magi as a mere historical
subject, let us say that Mrs. Jameson's work, begun in 1842 f and
ended by Lady Eastlake in 1864, really came into the world
before the discoveries bearing most directly upon this subject

* Legends of the Madonna, p. 58.

t See preface to first edition of Sacred and Legendary Art.

462 THE NATIVITY IN ART. [Jan.,

were made in the Roman Catacombs. It is only justice to say
that, had these discoveries been made, no one would have been
more eager to make use of them than Mrs. Jameson. For this
reason it is unjust to quote her words to-day against the fact of
the existence of these very pictures ; and to do thus is simply to
prove one's self a mere copyist, no faithful investigator, or even
observer, of art as it stands revealed to us of to-day.

It is to the precious cemetery or catacomb of St. Priscilia
that we turn for the very pictures unheard of by Mrs. Jameson
before the end of the fifth century viz., the Virgin Mother hold-
ing her divine Son in her arms ; and not only holding him in her
arms, but nourishing him at her breast.

This Priscilia, to whose cemetery or catacomb Christian art
is thus indebted, was the mother of that Pudens, of senatorial
rank, who sent greetings to the Christians of Asia through the
apostle St. Paul, as we read at the end of his Second Epistle to
Timothy, and, like her son, was one of the first converts made in
Rome by St. Peter. It was to their palace on the Vicus Patricitis
or Way of the Patricians that St. Peter was welcomed,* and the
hospitality given to him was extended to St. Paul. In fact, no
Christian tradition of that time in Rome is better established or
more generally received than this; and the chapel in which St.
Peter said Mass in the house of Pudens, with its ancient pave-
ment, is described in every guide-book in a way to show that no
slur can be cast upon the authenticity of the tradition. In the
midst of all these graces bestowed upon her house Priscilia dies,
and the august Roman matron is carried from her palace on the
Vicus Patricius to her last resting-place in the family tomb on
the Salarian Way ; laid there under the benediction of SS. Peter
and Paul. Around her precious remains, which her family be-
lieved would rise again a spiritual body in the day of the re-
surrection, were laid, as time went on, the mortal remains of
all this senatorial house, all Christians : Pudens and his wife
Claudia, their son Pudens and his children, including the two
saintly daughters so well known by the churches bearing their
names, SS. Pudenziana and Prassides. Around this tomb,
also in which, as we have said, the sleeper had been laid
under the benediction of SS. Peter and Paul gathered all the
most precious traditions of the apostolic age of the church,
and to its walls we can turn with as much confidence as to an
illuminated manuscript to learn the ideas and sentiments of the

* For a very careful working out of the historical evidences of this we refer the reader to
Dom Gueranger's Sainte Clcile et Socittt Romaine^ pp. 17-19.

1887.] THE NATIVITY IN ART. 463

first Christian century. The site of this catacomb, associated
with the very aurora of Christianity, its first triumphs, was
never forgotten. It had a place in Roman history and Roman
annals, as well as in Christian hearts and martyrologies. It was
one of the cemeteries visited by the early Christian writers, and
even by scholars down to the middle of the fifteenth century.*
But the singular treasures of this catacomb have been brought to
light in our day by the labors of the Archaeological Society under
the Chevalier de Rossi ; and since 1869 the results of their labors
have appeared in autotypes directly from the walls, and in
chromo-lithographs, made under the trained and exacting eye of
De Rossi himself. By a touching development of a natural senti-
ment under supernatural influences, we have clustered around
the immediate tomb of this mother of the Christian Church in
Rome, where Greek inscription, " vermil dyed," and the most
delicately-chiselled symbols, and the most skilful touches of the
Roman brush tell us are to be found the earliest vestiges of
Christian^art, a series of pictures delineating those events in the
childhood and infancy of our Lord which have proved such in-
spirations to the artists of all Christian ages. The most ancient
of these is a picture, on the wall and about two feet in height, in
which we see the Virgin Mother seated, holding the divine Child
in her arms. He is turning from her breast, on which one little
hand still^ lies according to the manner of a suckling infant, to
look, as it were, towards some one who is speaking; while imme-
diately at the side stands a prophet-like figure, one hand point-
ing to the Mother and Child, the other to the star shining above
them, as if alluding to the ancient prophecy, " a star has arisen
out of Jacob." This picture, which De Rossi declares, from in-
dubitable proofs, to have been painted under the eyes of the
apostles SS. Peter and Paul, leaves us nothing to desire as to
antiquity or an authorized type ; while as to grace of action, it
might have been a model for Raphael himself.

In the Roman Catacombs De Rossi has found more than
twenty representations of the Adoration of the Magi, in which
the Virgin Mary is the principal figure, and associated by the
artist in the honor paid to her divine Son. In most of these pic-
tures the Blessed Virgin is seated, holding her Infant on her
knees, and the Magi address themselves to the group thus formed
by the Mother and Child. One of the most beautiful of these is
in the catacomb of SS. Peter and Marcellin, in which the Virgin
Mother is seated on a chair, holding her Son in her arms close

* See Rome Souterraine, p. 4.

464. T.HE NATIVITY IN ART. [Jan.,

to her bosom rather than on her knees, while the Magi come to-
wards her with their gifts; and another of equal beauty is in the
catacomb of St. Domitilla. These twenty and more Adorations
are assigned by De Rossi to different periods, but to none later
than the first or last half of the third century. We can see by
this what reason there is to declare these representations " merely
historical," or "no earlier than the fifth century."

But the strictly entitled Nativity i.e. , with the Infant in
swaddling-clothes, lying in a manger, and the traditional ox and
the ass how soon do we find this ? " Not before the fifth cen-
tury," we are told in the most assured manner by those who
teach the world and our existing generation through illustrated
articles. This "fifth century " has become a convenient half-way
house between the luminous Christian era and the "dark ages."
It was a grand century, but, like all great epochs, had its fore-
runners, like every great temple its vestibule. Nor must we
forget to say that " the Nativity in art " by no means should
be supposed to exclude sculpture or engraved gems,, while re-
presentations on glass of various subjects are often found to be
more ancient than the same either in sculpture or painting. In
the Dictionnaire des Antiquites Chrttiennes an early bas-relief is
described in which the ox and the ass appear with the shepherds,
and still another where St. Joseph is seen with a stalk of the
traditional lilies put into his hand by the artist of to-day. The
precise date of these is not given, but in a foot-note of Rome
Souterraine* we .are told that the ox and the ass are seen in a
representation of the Nativity on a tomb bearing the date of
343 ; while a recent discovery in the catacomb of St. Sebastian
rescues painting from the charge of neglecting this charming
subject. The picture is given in De Rossi's Bulletin of Christian
Archaeology ft and fully explained. J The author prefaces his de-
scription by saying: " The cemetery properly called Catacumbus,
below the basilica of St. Sebastian on the Appian Way, is almost
as vulgarly famous as scientifically unknown." The portion of
this cemetery usually visited appears quite destitute of paint-
ings; but some practised excavators have cleared, on the wall of
a corridor, a painted arco soliutn. This picture, occupying the
arch itself, is divided into three parts. The first, to the right,
represents a woman in prayer, her arms extended and her hands
slightly raised according to the custom of those days. The.
whole figure is gracefully conceived, the head veiled, the drapery
simple, with a border on the edge of the Mowing sleeves, at the

* P. 380. t No. I. 1877. % No. III.-IV. pp. 153-6 ; also 1878, No. I.-II. p. 62.

1887.] THE NATIVITY IN ART. 465

throat, and also on the scapular, or mantle falling from the
shoulders to the feet at the front. To the left is the figure of
Moses striking the rock, while a youth springs forward, both
hands extended, towards the newly-opened fountain, as if to
quench his thirst. The centre of the arch is occupied by a
group representing the divine Infant in a crib, and above the
bust of the Saviour, young and beardless. " In the poor little
wooden bed on which the divine Infant is laid, wrapped in swad-
dling-clothes," the writer says, " we might not recognize the
manger " ; but it is distinctly indicated by the head of the ox
and of the ass rising behind and almost resting upon it. The
head of the Infant and also of the youth is crowned with a nim-
bus. The subject is not to be misunderstood; and, while stand-
ing alone to-day among the catacomb paintings to give evidence
to the devotion of the early Christians not only to the Nativity
of our Lord, but also to the traditional circumstance of the pre-
sence of the dumb animals as familiar to the Christians of the
first ages, we may hope that some "skilful excavator" may yet dis-
cover what will carry still farther back this much-desired testi-
mony. The picture is assigned to the time of Constantine i.e.,
between the years 313 and 350 giving us a clear gain of one cen-
tury's antiquity for the Nativity in art in its most restricted
and most literal sense.*

From these windings of subterranean galleries, from these
chambers of cemeteries dating from the first century of Chris-
tianity, we come into the full blaze of day and into the most
beautiful of all the Roman basilicas the Sancta Maria ad Nives
of the year 350, of Patrician John, and of Pope Liberius the
Santa Maria Maggiore of our day and times ; and clinging to it
like the subtle perfume of incense in a sanctuary, or of violets or
arbutus in some woodland haunt, that other name so dear to all
the lovers of the Holy Infancy, Sancta Maries Majoris ad Pr&sepe
" St. Mary Major of the Crib." And as we walk in a trance
of admiration over its pavement of purple and rose, between the
columns of white marble that stand on a nave two hundred and
eighty feet long, and above these columns an entablature of
mosaics, running the entire length of this nave, setting forth the
prefigured glories of the Virgin Mother, we come face to face
with that Arch of Triumph which, from the first design on its
gold background to the last, is one hymn of praise, from the
heart of the fifth century, to the mystery of the Incarnation and

* I am indebted for the Dictionnaire and numbers of the Bulletin d" 1 Archtologie quoted
and in my possession to the generous painstaking of Miss Ella B. Edes, Rome.
VOL. XLIV. 30

466 THE NATIVITY IN ART. [Jan.,

the glory of the Nativity. And as we bend our knees and our
hearts, our senses and our intellect, before this sublime monu-
ment of Christian faith 'and love, then raise our eyes to stud}'
the groups pictured forth in imperishable mosaic and catch the
gleam of its fifth-century gold, all its colors made harmonious
to the eye by more than fourteen centuries, we seem to realize
as never before not only the vitality of the traditions embodied
in Christian art, but their essential, integral character as a part
of Christianity itself, which not only committed herself to them
in the beginning, but infused into them her own indestructibility.
From all the cavils of men and all the jargon of tongues, and
even the learning of the schools, we go back to the early monu-
ments of Christianity to learn our lesson in faith, our lesson in
dogma. There is no illustrated magazine of to-day which can
controvert the testimony of the Christian monuments ; and the
Arch of Triumph of Santa Maria Maggiore is giving its silent
lessons to the nineteenth century precisely as in the fifth.

The story of the arch tells how each century buds and blos-
soms, because it has kept its hold on all preceding centuries, and
has thus assimilated to itself, as the tree by its roots, the elements
of life, of growth, and of fruitage. It is this, in fact, which gives
the surpassing value to this fifth-century arch. Standing alone,
linking itself with no antecedent, it would be absolutely worth-
less as to its testimony. But when we read that Celestine I. de-
signed this arch to commemorate the Third General Council of the
Church, held at Ephesus in 431, in which it was defined that in
Jesus Christ there is one person and two natures, and that Our
Blessed Lady, being the Mother of this same Jesus Christ, is truly
the Mother of God, in the same way as our own mothers, although
they have not formed our souls but only our bodies, are still
called our mothers, as of our bodies so of our souls ; read also
that this Celestine not only planned this monument to the divine
Maternity of Mary, but caused a painting to be made on the walls
of that catacomb in which this divine Maternity had been singu-
larly honored, so that it has been asserted over and over again
that it contains more Madonnas than all the other catacombs of
Rome, namely, the catacomb of St. Priscilla of the Apostolic
age ; and read, furthermore, that at his own request he was de-
posited in this catacomb at his death we are prepared to believe
that the Madonnas of the cemetery of St. Priscilla gave the
subjects and the types of the groups on the Arch of Triumph
in Santa Maria Maggiore, above all others St. Mary of the
Manger.*

* See Butler's Lives of the Saints for April 6.

1887.] THE NATIVITY IN ART. 467

The arch designed by Celestine I. was actually raised by Six-
tus III., his faithful arch-priest and successor; the subjects repre-
sented being- as follows : On the upper range or line, and at the
left as we face the arch, the Annunciation the Dove of the Holy
Spirit and the angel, both winging their way to Mary, who sits
crowned on her throne, while on each side stand attendant angels.
To the right is what may represent the stable of Bethlehem ; be-
fore its entrance is a curtain, parted, towards which turn two
angels, and one figure, that may be designated as St. Joseph,
stands as if to conduct them within. Immediately below this we
see the divine Infant, in all the majesty of a king, seated upon a
throne. At his right hand is seated his Virgin Mother with
marked honor. Above him scintillates the star which has an-
nounced his birth. Behind his throne stand four angels, and the
three Wise Kings are advancing towards him with their gifts. On
the right hand of the upper line we see the Presentation of the
Infant in the Temple Mary and Joseph, Simeon and Anna, and a
throng of persons eager to see the Infant announced by Anna as
the Messias of Israel, while the doves which have furnished an
offering for these chaste spouses to redeem the little Incarnate
One flutter still farther to the right. Below this is given the
Finding in the Temple, with all that loveliness of expression
which characterizes this scene in early Christian art, and gives
tacit evidence to the belief in the divine Maternity of Mary, who
thus claims her Son before the whole world. Still below
these subjects we see the scene in Jerusalem between the Magi
inquiring for the new-born King, and the murder of the Innocents,
completing the series of delineations that so often surround the
Nativity in art. The difficulty felt by every one in studying this
arch, even when under a good light, is greatly relieved by the
beautiful chromo- lithograph recently issued by the Archaeologi-
cal Society under the eye of De Rossi, and which can be studied
in America at a cost that is considered trivial when an illustrated
book for a Christmas gift is under consideration. The delicate
tints in the draperies are all preserved against the dead gold of
the background, making it a thing of beauty worthy of Fra
Angelico.

Before leaving these early tributes of devotion to the Nativity
of our Lord we must quote two from the sixth century, and en-
graved for the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, already quoted.
The first is an engraved gem on which we have the divine Infant,
with a cruciform nimbus, wrapped in swaddling-clothes and lying
in a manger. Between the bars of the manger appear the heads

468 THE NATIVITY IN ART. [Jan.,

of the ox and the ass. On one side the moon, symbol of the
night which enshrouded this august mystery ; on the other the
star of the Magi. Before the crib, one hand resting upon it, is
the Virgin Mother, veiled, with a simple nimbus, and sitting on a
couch, while St. Joseph is seated at the end of the crib with a
gesture and look of astonishment. The other Nativity is on a
glass ornament used like a cameo, one-half of which has been
lost. In this the Infant in his crib, with the two animals, is half-
concealed by clouds, on which the Virgin Mother is couched and
leans forward to receive the Magi approaching from below, while
St. Joseph is seen in the angle opposite the Magi, in deep medi-
tation. The type of this last is followed by Niccolo Pisano on his
great pulpit in the cathedral of Siena, and also in that of the
Baptistery at Pisa, although his other groups seem quite emanci-
pated from the Greek influence ; and still other magnificent pulpits
of this noble era of Christian sculpture bear witness to the honor
paid to the circumstances attending the Nativity, not only by the
people but by all those who ruled in the world of art, either as
artists or patrons.

But while the realm of painting was abloom with the loveli-
est offerings of Christian devotion to the Maternity of Mary and
the Infancy of our Lord, beginning with Guido and Mino of
Siena, Ugolino, Cimabue of Florence, and Simone Memmi, the
charm of whose pencil seems to be almost unknown, a flame of
devotion to the Nativity itself was kindled by St. Francis of
Assisi in his monastery at Ara Cceli, within sight, we may say,
of the chapel in which repose the five small boards of the crib of
Bethlehem a flame that has given to art, in sculpture and in
painting, not only incentives to piety but actual masterpieces.

The story runs that the soul of Francis melted within him as
he meditated upon the lowly birth of his Lord, upon the harsh
circumstances of this " coming unto his own when his own re-
ceived him not." The repulse at the doors of Bethlehem ; the
poverty of the stable ; the cold of the winter night, warmed only
by the breath of the dumb animals ; the compassion of the Vir-
gin Mother and St. Joseph for the shivering Infant; the tears on
his new-born cheeks all this inflamed the soul of Francis to offer
some reparation to the Infant in the crib on the feast of his Na-
tivity ; and this reparation should be joined in by his brethren
of the monastery. In the very heart of ancient Rome, close by
her Capitol, within sight of her palaces, in sight, too, from those
palaces themselves, in the midst of the luxury of the great city
and the sound of her festivities, Francis arranges a poor, rough

1887.] THE NATIVITY IN ART. 469

crib, a veritable manger, from which the ox and the ass might
have eaten. In this he places the hay and the straw, and on this
couch, poor even for the beggar, he places a tender image of the
divine Babe in its swaddling-clothes. Our Francis does not
seem to have had much skill in outward things, but there were
those around him who would do his will in such matters, even if
they deemed it strange and foolish ; and so the poor crib and the
Infant were placed near the sanctuary in the beautiful church of
Ara Cceli, so rich in marbles and in decorations, for the mid-
night Mass of Christmas, and at this Mass Francis preached.*

When we say that Francis of Assisi preached, what do we
say ? It is as if we had said that a seraph, glowing with the love
of God, had stepped from the ranks of shining ones and, taking
the form of a poor friar, stood in the pulpit of Ara Cceli. Never
had the disciples of St. Francis, even, heard such words as fell
from his lips ; never had such unction come to their souls with
the tender reproaches of the " poor little man of Assisi." Sobs
from the breasts of these strong men were heard on every side,
and when Francis ceased one and all prostrated themselves be-
fore the rude crib with its bed of straw, on which lay the image
of the new-born Babe. It was an act of reparation, and also an
expression of sympathy in unison with the sympathy of Mary
and of Joseph.

From this time the natural affections of the human heart efflo-
resced under the influence of a supernatural desire to make repa-
ration for the indifference of the Bethlehemites, and art was not
slow to lend her aid to this beautiful work. When the year
1401 came to the world already were born those who would give
the Nativity in all its picturesque circumstances, in all its divine
tenderness. Never had the world seen such Adorations of the
new born Babe from the Immaculate Heart of Mary herself as
came from the hand of Luca della Robbia in his glazed terra-
cotta. We have one veritable Nativity by the family Della Rob-
bia which will bear description. In the foreground we see the
Infant on his bed of straw, from which the ox and the ass are
feeding. At his feet kneels his Virgin Mother in a trance of joy
and devotion-, immediately behind her stands St. Joseph, with
the staff of a traveller still in his hand. At the head of the crib
kneels a male figure leaning against the tall, rude cross held by

* A marked proof of the influence of St. Francis upon the delineation of the Nativity as a
popular subject is seen in the lower border of the great mosaic on the apse of Santa Maria Mag-
giore, where it is one of the subjects represented between the windows ; and still farther accen-
tuated by the fact that the artist, Jacopo da Turrita, was a Franciscan and worked under the
cowl of the Friars Minor.

470 THE NATIVITY IN ART. [Jan.,

one hand, and a book in the other; and we may venture to call
this St. Luke, the historian of the Holy Infancy. Beside the
Virgin Mother kneels a female figure that seems also to carry
a book, but we cannot, with any assurance, give her a name.
All these figures wear the nimbus. Far off in the background,
on a hill-top, we see the shepherds surrounded by their flocks,
gazing, and listening as they gaze, to the angel flying towards
them. In the middle-ground we see the shepherds hastening
with young lambs tinder their arms as gifts for the Infant King,
while one of their number shades his eyes as he looks upward to
the low thatched roof of the stable where innumerable angels
are singing their "Gloria in excelsis Deo"; and in the line of
seraphs which make the decorated border is seen the star of the
Magi. The meditative sweetness in the kneeling figures, the
joyous movement among the angels and the shepherds, make
this a veritable Nativity. But the Adorations of the new-born
Child by Luca della Robbia will never be exceeded for their
mystical beauty. One of these is enclosed by an arched border
of flowers and fruits, in the lower border three seraphs' heads.
The Infant is couched on the coarse straw, but above him rise
three stalks of lilies in bud and bloom, while he seems to speak
to the enraptured Mother kneeling before him, loving and ador-
ing. On each side of her virginal head is a seraph, and we see
two hands holding a crown over her head. Another design is
even more profound in its sweet solemnity. The Infant is
couched on the rough straw, but he looks out on the world he
has come to redeem, with his small hands crossed on his breast.
To this figure of the adoring Virgin Mother has been given a
deeper prostration of soul, though she hardly seems to bend
lower, and we find it rather in the folds of her drapery than in
the figure itself; but it is there. Clouds plane at different alti-
tudes in the background, and angels in pairs, with hands joined
in adoration, eyes fixed upon the Child on his bed of straw, float
into the scene on the clouds ; only at one corner the angels con-
verse on the mystery, and above a scroll with the " Gloria in
excelsis Deo" set to musical notes and held by angels is the Eter-
nal Father crowned, his hands uplifted in benediction, the spaces
between him and the background filled with joyous seraphs'
heads, while below the scroll, the wing touching the head of
Mary, is the Eternal Holy Spirit under the form of a dove.

In the Borghese Palace, Rome, is a Nativity by Lorenzo di
Credi, conceived in the same mystical spirit. The kneeling
Virgin and St. Joseph, both in a rapture of devotion ; between

1887.] THE NATIVITY IN ART. 471

them the little Infant stretches forth one tiny hand towards his
Mother, and touches his lip with one finger of the other hand
with an infantile grace well known to mothers. The ruins of
the background, the open fields beyond, tell the story of the
stable.

Perugino's Nativities are all in the mystical spirit. One is a
triptych. In the central compartment the Virgin alone adores
the new-born Child, upheld by an angel, while three angels high
above in the heavens hold the " Gloria in excelsis " scroll as they
sing. One side-compartment gives the Archangel Michael, the
other the Archangel Raphael with the young Tobias. But his most
celebrated Nativity gives the open shed for a stable, in which
are the ox and the ass; in the foreground the divine Infant on
a bit of drapery, the Virgin Mother and St. Joseph, and two
kneeling shepherds a little distant, in that exaltation of worship
which seems to lift them from the very ground on which they are
kneeling. A Nativity by Giovanni Spagna, of the same period,
gives the open stable, the ox and the ass, and on the flowery
sward before it, in an open landscape, the adoring Virgin, St.
Joseph with hands outspread in admiration and worship, and,
instead of the shepherds, adoring angels; the shepherds, with
lambs in their arms and eagerly conversing, approach the group
in the foreground ; in the distance we see the Magi with their
retinue, and in the heavens above the three angels with the
" Gloria in excelsis" scroll. Luini has left us a Nativity with the
stable, the manger, the ox and the ass, the adoring Virgin Mother
and St. Joseph ; above the manger, within the stable, are ador-
ing angels also, and in the far distance the angels and the shep-
herds, while one small angel upholds the Child and another seems
to bring a cross to the crib.

Raphael, in his Loggia, gives us the Nativity, and there is in
this the budding of a fresh rendering of the subject afterwards
fulfilled. We have the divine Child surrounded by a brilliant
light, and he seems to speak to his Mother, who holds one of the
small feet, as if in sign of adoring fealty. Two shepherds are
hastening forward with their lambs on their shoulders, but pause,
astounded by the shining light, and another shepherd, falling on
his knees, is holding the hand of St. Joseph. Above the Infant
angels are bearing flowering wreaths, and a lovely distance fills
the background.

But the Nativity which embodies the Christian traditions as
to circumstance, as to dogma and ecstasy, in that perfection
which belongs to the most profound articulation of beauty, is

47 2 THE NATIVITY IN ART. [Jan.,

the Notte by Correggio. Never has the Virgin of fifteen im-
maculate years been so crowned by the bliss of a virginal mater-
nity as in this inspired canticle made visible to the eye. The
divine Babe in its linen bands, couched, indeed, upon the straw
of the manger, but held still closer to the virgin breast of his
Mother ; her enfolding arms, the young face bent over her ador-
able offspring with an ecstatic joy never fulfilled in any other
mortal ; the gloom of midnight wrapping the stable ; the patient
ox, the faithful ass which had borne the divine weight of Mother
and Child on the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and St.
Joseph himself, all in the background, the gloom relieved only by
the faintest line of a coming dawn on the far-off horizon; while
from this little One in his linen bands, and folded in the arms of
his Mother, comes a light, not like that of sun or moon or star,
or aught created, yet illuminating as no created light could do
the ecstatic form and face of Mary, of the wondering shepherds,
and of the exultant angels singing their " Gloria in excelsis Deo "
above the manger all this is a summing-up of traditions hidden
for centuries in the catacombs of Rome, on the glass of the sac-
ramental cups, on the tombs of the faithful, as well as a render-
ing of the Sacred Scriptures themselves and the beautiful story
of the Evangelists, such as the world has never seen before.
Other geniuses may arise to give new glory to the story of the
Nativity of Him who was born in Bethlehem of Juda, " no longer
among the least of the cities of Juda," but to us has come a re-
velation of beauty that may well make Christmas a holy time
holy in its joy, solemn in its gladness, like some strain of music
that recurs again and again to our memory to quicken prayer
and to sanctify the every-day happiness which God has put into
the world and keeps in the world, spite of our ingratitude.

Reviewing, as we have now done, the testimony of art, during
eighteen hundred years, to the Christian traditions, well may we
call this divine Babe the <k Emmanuel, or God with us" ! And as
the Advent days wear on, and our ears are listening to catch the
first note of the church's hymn learned from the choirs of angels
above the hills of Bethlehem, " Gloria in excelsis Deo," let us
attune even our sighs of expectation to those of our venerable
Mother, saying with her in her solemn offices: "O Emmanuel,
our King and our Law-giver, Longing of the Gentiles, yea, and
Salvation thereof : come to save us, O Lord our God ! "

1 887.] THOMAS KANE, CUTLER. 473

THOMAS KANE, CUTLER.

THE following- advertisement appeared one morning in the
columns of the London Times :

" Wanted A young lady as companion to another. Must be lively,
musical, and used to society. Age between twenty and thirty. Address,
enclosing photograph, T. K., Box 234."

I had answered a good many such during the past five weeks,
and the universal failure of my attempts had rather damped my
spirits. However, I made one more effort, and in a few days re-
ceived a reply in itself a hopeful sign, for the majority of my
communications had remained unanswered.

After some correspondence the affair was concluded. I was
to fill the position of companion to Miss Phoebe Kane, only
daughter of Thomas Kane, of The Whins, Blackfield.

I set off from Euston in the highest spirits. The few letters
that had passed between me and my employers, though brief
and business-like, had a certain largeness of tone about them
which was carried out in the unusually high salary offered.

It was a brilliant June morning, and much-maligned London,
as I drove across it, looked bright and sunny ; the trees in the
Park were resplendent in their new summer clothing, the lilacs
and laburnums in full flower, not a vestige of the proverbial fog
was to be seen, and smoke seemed a thing impossible in that
clear blue sky. But Blackfield ! What a hell upon earth it
looked as I steamed Into it about five hours later in the same
day ! Some slight obstacle caused our train to wait outside the
station for ten minutes, and I shall never forget the impression
the place made on me. The squalor, the filth, the misery of the
great, dirt-begrimed houses some of them unfinished, with the
ends of beams and joists sticking out ; others that a venturesome
spirit had begun to pull down, but. in despair of making any-
thing out of his bargain, had abandoned as unprofitable, leaving
the sides of half-demolished rooms open to the beholder piteous-
looking rooms, with strips of paper waving mournfully in the
breeze, and desolate, denuded hearths with the grates torn from
them hearths that the liveliest imagination could not picture as
the centre of bright household groups. Mine could not, at any
rate, with such a spur to it as was afforded by the wretched chil-
dren who were playing in the dust and debris of a small patch of
waste land. One boy, seated on an ash-heap, looked uncommon-

474 THOMAS KANE, CUTLER. [Jan.,

ly like a young Job perhaps because of his sickly appearance,
perhaps because of his familiarity with bits of broken pots ; his
patience, however, was not that of the patriarch, for he was
swearing shrilly, in the broadest Yorkshire dialect, at one of his
companions, who had thrown a stone at him. Over the whole
hideous scene hung a thick, black atmosphere, unpierceable even
by the hot afternoon sun.

" Is all Blackfield like this ? " I wondered, as the train moved
slowly in. " Does Mr. Kane live among such horrible homes?"

The cloud of smoke that enveloped the city, to which the
myriads of tall chimneys added unceasingly, the glaring furnaces,
and the generally demoniac aspect of the place so scared me that I
believe I should have taken the next up-train, but that the instant
we stopped a voice asked, " For Mr. Tom Kane's, mum ? " and a
tall footman took possession of rny wraps, my luggage, and my-
self, put us all three into a brougham, and drove us away before
I had time to remonstrate. We had been driving some time be-
fore I dared to look out of the window ; then t saw we had left
the town behind us and were in a broad private road with trees
on either side, not so advanced as those in Hyde Park, but almost
as fresh and green.

From time to time we passed large gates, beyond which I
caught glimpses of house-tops, the owners of which had dis-
played much ingenuity in the choice of names ; and they were
evidently fond of trees and banks, these good north countrymen,
for we went by " The Limes," " The Towers," " The Grange,"
" The Elms," " The Hollies," " Southbank," " Brookbank," "Oak-
bank " before we turned in at " The Whins." My southern mind
was still wondering what and where the " whins " could possibly
be, not connecting them in any way with the great clumps of
gorse which were flowering in all their golden glory on the lawn,
when we drew up before the door, which was flung wide open.
It was a great, pretentious place ; everything in the hall was
very new, very bright, very massive, and very expensive. The
lady who came forward to meet me was clad in the stiffest moire
antique and perfectly laden with chains, bracelets, and rings, but
there was nothing save kind homeliness in the tone of her greet-
ing.

" Ay, loove," she said, " I'm glad you're coom, but you moost
be very tired. I hope you will like your room." she continued a
little later on, after I had been introduced to her daughter, a tall,
slim girl with a shy manner. " Phoebe and I arranged it, but you
must alter it to suit your taste."

1887.] THOMAS KANE, CUTLER. 475

I expressed myself charmed with the room, which was, if any-
thing-, a little too overcrowded with pretty things. And by and
by they withdrew, leaving me to enjoy what they called " a coop
of tea."

From my window there was not much to see. A slight wire
fence divided the gardens of " The Whins " from those of " Haw-
thorndale " on one side and " The Hall " on the other, and the
grounds of all three bore a marked similarity to those of other
nicely-kept suburban places.

I did not know whether to be pleased with my new home or
not. The ostentatious display of wealth was vulgar, the house
was vulgar, the furniture was vulgar; but the people, the two I
had seen at least, were not so. They were uneducated, but simple
and evidently good-hearted. Some one was responsible for these
sins against taste. It must be the master ! Instantly I deter-
mined I should dislike him. I conjured up all the portraits of
" nouveaux riches" that I could remember, from Du Maurier's
" Sir Gorgeous Midas " to our dear old friend " Middlewick,"
and I decided that the man who signed his letters " Thos. Kane"
in such an oddly crooked way would be a large, pompous, 'and
altogether unpleasant person. His wife and daughter had a
rather subdued manner of speaking of him ; doubtless he sat on
them both.

There was the bell. I must go down and make the acquain-
tance of this awful potentate. A footman lounging in the hall
threw open the dining-room door. It was an enormous room, and
seemed to my startled gaze to possess half a dozen plate-glass
windows and at least a hundred chairs, all in shiny mahogany,
with the seats covered in the most " criant" violet leather. The
carpet was a perfect garden of lilies and roses; on the walls hung
five pictures, portraits of Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Kane, in alder-
manic robes, in black satin, in white muslin and pearls, separately
smiling from their separate frames, unitedly smiling from one
frame, where the artist had grouped them on a green hill side
with a distant view of mountain, lake, and ruined castle ; the fifth
and last work of art, an impossibly colossal fruit-piece hung over v
the side board. These were the sole attempts at mural decoration.
In ap arm-chair at the extreme end of the room sat the master.
" I was right," I thought to myself " he is an ill-mannered
boor," for he made no effort to rise, and I travelled slowly up
towards the great hand which he was holding out to me.

He was very peculiar-looking, immensely broad-shouldered,
with a large, square head, made to seem larger by the shock of

476 THOMAS KANE, CUTLER. [Jan.,

dark hair that fell forward on to his brow ; his eyes were black
and almost glittering- in their brightness. Altogether he struck
me with a sense of size. When I put my hand into his it seemed
lost in his broad grasp.

" Very pleased to see you, Miss Beaton," he said with an even
stronger accent than his wife's. " I hope you'll make yourself
happy with us, and cheer up t' little lass a bit."

I expressed a hope that we should get on well together, and
that our acquaintance would be productive of mutual satisfac-
tion.

While I was making my little speech he was looking me
over leisurely from head to foot.

" Ah ! well," he said at the close of his survey, " if you're as
good as your looks you'll do."

At this quaint compliment I was obliged to laugh, and the ice
was broken between us. Mrs. Kane had explained to me that it
was their custom to have " high tea" at seven, but, new as I was
to Yorkshire ways, I was astonished at the marvellous meal
spread out. O goodly Yorkshire teas ! Where else does one
have such toothsome feasts of fish, flesh, and fowl, such tempting
jams and sweetmeats, so many and so varied an assortment of
cakes, hot and cold, buttered and plain, griddle, muffin, and Sally
Lunn ?

We were all seated before Mr. Kane came to the table, and
then I saw why he had not risen before he was frightfully, hide-
ously deformed. His body, that of a tall man naturally, was so
drawn on one side that he could not have measured more than
five feet when standing, his long arms hung below his knees, and
he walked with a series of quick jerks most painful to watch.

I could hardly keep a shocked expression out of my face, he
was such a contrast to his wife, a tall, fine woman, who must
have been beautiful when young. Even now that her hair was
thickly sprinkled with gray she was strikingly handsome. What
could have induced her to marry such a cripple? I dared not
look at him ; I felt too uncomfortable, the more so as he kept his
eyes fixed on me in a sort of defiant manner, as much as to say,
" Look at me ; see what a monstrosity I am."

My duties at " The Whins " were not arduous ones,, and
consisted chiefly in, as Mr. Kane had said, " cheering up the
little lass," who was of a somewhat melancholy temperament.
She seemed to have few friends among the dashing young
women of Blackfield. At first I thought perhaps it was be-
cause her wealth was more recently acquired than theirs, and

1887.] [THOMAS KANE, CUTLER. 477

she felt herself, therefore, at a disadvantage ; but soon I learned
that this could not be so, five years counting as a genera-
tion in Blackfield aristocracy. It was her father's peculiari-
ties, and perhaps a little of his inherited temperament, that
stood in her way. He was certainly not an amiable person ;
he was decidedly gloomy and given to fits of temper, when
he would look like a thunder-cloud, and storm like one too, if
anything occurred to vex him. He would come to table some-
times looking as black as night, and woe to the unlucky servant
who jingled two forks together or rattled the plates ! He was
certainly not a social acquisition, as I suppose his neighbors had
found out long ago, for they mostly left him alone. Now and
again he gave a large dinner-party, to which came certain loud-
voiced, opulent gentlemen and their splendidly-arrayed wives.
They were queer affairs, these parties, and rarely went off without
some comical blunder or other. At the first I assisted at which
was also, I believe, the first on record Mrs. Kane had all the
champagne carefully poured into cut-glass bottles. I heard her
pressing it on one of her guests, recommending it as " only de-
canteRed that morning." I never got her to suppress that un-
necessary " r," but I did gently draw her attention to silver
bottle-holders, and induced her to adopt their use.

T was rather an amusement to them with what they called
my " London ways " and my " mincing speech," both of which,
however, Miss Phcebe copied to the best of her abilities.

Bit by bit I learned the family history. "Tom Kane," as he
was called by all, workmen and associates alike, had begun life
as a grinder, his wife as a factory-hand. All round Blackfield,
and even far out into the beautiful woods, one comes upon sheds
where the " grinders" work. They are men who are paid by the
piece to put an edge to cutlery, and they carry their work any-
where there is water, and put up long, low buildings by the side
of some quiet pool or brawling beck; so that when one is roam-
ing about, apparently far from all signs of life, one suddenly hears
the " whir" of the wheel, and one comes on perhaps fifty or sixty
men bending (half-undressed, in the stifling atmosphere) over
their grindstones, and forming an anything but pleasing adjunct
to the landscape. By degrees Kane had risen to be foreman of one
of these sheds, and in that position had remained for years, earn-
ing five or six pounds a week, and living in a small house in the
town, unpretendingly, but with every comfort. After a time he
saved up money and started in business for himself, had some of
those strange strokes of luck^ not uncommon in manufacturing

478 THOMAS KANE, CUTLER. [Jan.,

towns, and became a rich man one of the richest in that land of
big fortunes. The transition was too sudden to be comfortable ;
the change from the snug little home and the maid-of-all-work
to " The Whins " and the footmen was too abrupt, and I think
Mrs. Kane often wished herself back in her old place. But the
calmly self-assured Tom took it all as his due. His house, his
servants, his horses, came as a matter of course, outwardly at
any rate ; the possession of wealth was an intense joy to him, but
he would have forfeited it all rather than betray that he was un-
used to it. At times he seemed quite annoyed with his wife be-
cause she could not conquer her old habits of economy and spend
as lavishly as he wished. With it all he was not happy. He
seemed to me possessed with a longing for some unattainable
thing that he was always striving after. It puzzled me, too, that
he never went to church, though I knew he was born and bap-
tized a Catholic, for his wife had told me of the days when he
and she went to confession on Saturday evenings together, she
with a plaid shawl over her head like any other mill-girl, and he
in corduroys and "clog soiles." Those were the days when they
were courting, and coming home he would buy her " spice '' or
a new " brain bond." Now she and her daughter went to Mass
alone, and he stayed at home over his books and figures.

I supposed it was his terrible deformity that preyed upon
him so; but even in his worst moods, when, as I heard the
butler remark, " it was as much as one's place was worth to go
near him," he never spoke harshly to his wife. She would go and
sit beside him when apparently he was possessed by a demon of
despair, and. taking his hand in hers, would stroke it gently; then,
looking at her sweet face and his lowering scowl, the unsolved
problem, " How could s\\e marry him ? " would come back to me.

One day, something having occurred to vex him, he was more
than usually unbearable, and put a finishing touch to his bad be-
havior by swearing at the footman at dinner. I suppose I must
have betrayed my disgust in my face, for she came to my room
that night, and after a little desultory chat she told me the story
of his life. It was a tragedy, not uncommon even now, though,
thank God ! less frequent than twenty years ago, when the war
between master and man was raging, when workmen were band-
ing themselves against their employers, and the latter in their
turn were trying to coerce their workmen. There was wrong
on both sides exorbitant demands arid narrow-minded, selfish
monopoly. The strife was perhaps fiercer and more violent in
Biackfield than in any other town in England. Secret societies

1 887.] THOMAS KANE^ CUTLER. 479

existed there whose sole object was terrorism, the compelling
of capitalists by violence and brute force. Thomas Kane who
in those days was, as his wife said, " not the poor disfigured
creature that you know, my dear, but a fine, upstanding lad,
straight and strong as a tree" was among the representative
men. He was intellectually and physically superior to his fellows,
and was more than once chosen by them as a delegate. Though
siding, of course, with his own class, his views were singularly
clear and just. The privileges that he demanded were reasonable,
and, though he never truckled or abated one jot of what he con-
sidered a fair demand, he untiringly denounced anything like
foul play. The cruel, dastardly outrages on men who refused to
join the unions, or who continued to work on conditions con-
demned by them, were hateful to him; he had not language strong
eriough to express his contempt for them and their perpetrators.

Loud as were his protests and those of others like him,
scarcely a day passed without its ghastly catalogue of killed and
wounded. Mill-owners and manufacturers went in fear of their
lives, dreading the unseen bullet or the stab in the dark, and fresh
tales were constantly told of wheel-bands half sawn through,
of cunningly-hidden explosives, or machinery purposely put out
of gear, so as to be fatal to the lives of those whose duty it was
to go near it. More than once Kane had received warnings that
his conduct with regard to these dark doings was obnoxious, that
unless he held his tongue about them he himself would suffer ;
he only spoke against them more loudly than before. At last one
night, at a meeting, he declared that if the doer or instigator of
one of these crimes ever came to his knowledge he would un-
hesitatingly shoot him like a dog.

He took his sweetheart home that night, a strong, hale man,
full of life and energy. When she next saw him he was a
maimed, bleeding wretch. He had gone to his work in Singly
Wood grinding-shed in the early gray of the autumn morning ;
one whir of his wheel, only one, and he was lying in the far cor-
ner of the hut, stunned, crushed, disfigured, only not dead.

When he left the hospital after long weeks of agony, she
was waiting at the gate to tell him what, though not perhaps
in the same words, another brave woman once told her lover :
u If there is enough body left to hold your soul, I will marry
you."

The soul was there, indeed, but it had changed as fearfully
as the body : he had become warped, embittered, harsh, with
brooding on his wrongs.

480 THOMAS KANE, CUTLER. [Jan.,

They were married before the registrar he would not go to
church. " I shall never go again," he said, "till God has given
me my revenge ; then I'll go to thank him. I know the man who
did it. He was in the hut, and had I seen his face one second
sooner I'd have been saved ; but I only saw it through the smoke
and din, when it was too late. But I shall have him in my hands
some day ; that's all I pray for, night and day, and that I may
make him suffer."

So he put God out of his heart, erecting in his place a grim
idol called Vengeance.

What could his wife say to him ? What could she do, poor
woman, when he put before her so vividly the picture of his
ruined life ? He had been so full of ambitious schemes, planning
a career for himself which was to be productive of so much
good: it had been all destroyed by one dastardly blow. As- it
was, she was the one softening influence in his life, the one thing
he lived for, that kept him from utter despair. During the first
dark years of his deformity he would have ended his misery time
and again but for the thought of her ; for her he worked on, and
when he was rewarded with extraordinary success he was glad
for her sake.

She told me all this in language almost childish in its sim-
plicity, yet so much more touchingly, so much more dramati-
cally than I can write it; and I understood the whole thing. I
saw at a glance the man's character with all its sweetness turned
to gall, with nothing left for it to feed on but the old fierce
motto, " An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth."

I knew that it was great grief to Mrs. Kane that her husband
never went to Mass with her. Every Sunday before starting
she would ask him, " Wilt thou come, Tom?" and every Sun-
day he shook his head, answering, " Not to-day, Mary lass," and
she and Phoebe drove off alone.

It was a very hard winter that year. I had never spent one
so far north before, and the short, dark days and the intense
cold did not inspire me with a longing for another. There
was a fearful amount of distress in Blackfield, hundreds of men
out of employment, and lean starvation threatened to be the
Christmas guest at many a hearth. I was constantly in and
about the courts and alleys of the big city with Mrs. Kane and
Phcebe, trying to help a little; but it was like attempting to stem
a torrent. Tom Kane himself never went on any of these errands
of mercy, but he was always ready to give. In the one respect
of open-handed generosity he was unspoiled ; all he bargained for

1887] THOMAS KANE, CUTLER. 481

was that he might not be brought face to face with those he
helped, for he had a morbid horror of being thanked.

So the time went by, and the night of the 24th of December
came ; the brougham was ordered to take us in to Midnight Mass.

A few years ago a certain portion of the Protestant public of
England took it into their heads that Midnight Mass was a gra-
tuitous entertainment got up especially for their amusement ; an
entertainment, too, at which one's " company manners" were not
compulsory. So the cardinal archbishop ordained that it was
not to be celebrated save in private chapels or churches attached
to religious communities, where known members of the congre-
gation, and none otners, could be admitted through the convent
door. This prohibition somehow gave great umbrage to the
good people of Biackfield, and the year before the one I am
writing about they almost rioted round the closed church, con-
sidering themselves, for some inexplicable reason, defrauded of
their rights. Mrs. Kane's carriage had been surrounded by a
mob of roughs, and she and her daughter subjected to some very
unpleasant language. This year Mr. Kane announced his inten-
tion of accompanying them himself as tar as the door.

4 * 1 bet," he said, smiling rather grimly, "they won't interfere
with you if I am anywhere near." Which was true, for Torn
Kane, his tongue, and his temper were held in wholesome awe
by the Blackheldians.

Ttie church was built in the centre of the town, and to reach
it one had to go through the lowest slums. That night the
streets were more than usually busy, the sides of the pavement
lined with costermongers and their barrows, selling their goods
by the light of Hiring naphtha-lamps. Every now and then the
horses had to lapse into a walk on account of the crowded thor-
oughfares. At last they stopped altogether. Kane was out of
the brougham in a minute, and with an agility wonderful in one
so misshapen.

" What is it?" he asked.

" Mill afire, sir, in Kirkgate," was the answer from a dozen
throats at once.

Kirkgate was one of the narrowest, oldest parts of the town,
densely populated by the very poor. Already we could see the
sky lit up with a ruddy glare. Another moment and a loud'
cheer told us that the engine was on its way. It came tearing-
along, the brave (ellows seated on it Looking as elated as though
they were going to a feast.

" The roughs won't trouble you now, Mary," said Mr. Kane,
VOL. XLIV. 31

482 THOMAS KANE, CUTLER. CJ an '>

" and I shall leave Jessop to drive you on. Sutton [the footman]
and I will follow the crowd. Come, Sutton, give me your arm."

" Tom ! Tom ! " cried his wife, " thou'rt never going to the
fire, lad?"

" I'll be all right; it's not the first, lass, by many. You go
along and mind your prayers."

Mrs. Kane flung herself back in the carnage. " Ay dear !
ay dear ! " she said. " I doubt he'll be hurt ; he will push into the
thick of it all, and he's nowt nare fit."

There was nothing for it, however, but " minding our pray-
ers," as he said, but it was not an easy matter. All through
Mass the idea of what was going on in Kirkgate would occur to
me, and I am afraid I was not the only distracted worshipper.

It was an old mill, we heard afterwards, and burnt like tin-
der. The fire had arisen through the neglect of the caretaker,
who, coming in half-drunk (" Christmas eve, your honor," he
pleaded in excuse !), had let fall a spark from his candle. The
man himself slept heavily, and was dragged out of his den in the
basement, half-stupefied with the blinding smoke. When he came
to his senses a little he asked for his wife and children. They
told him that they had been saved with difficulty, in nothing
but their miserable night-attire, and that a gentleman in pity had
taken them home. The gentleman was Thomas Kane. We had
been back perhaps half an hour when he came into the library,
where we were. " Wife," he said, " I've brought you some
visitors."

There was a wretched, shivering woman and three small chil-
dren. We brought them to the fire, and, giving them wraps and
hot wine, tried to comfort them ; but the woman was almost be-
yond consolation. It seemed her husband had been out of work
for months, and they had been in the last stage of destitution,
when he got this place as watchman, since when she had been
comparatively at ease ; her only fear was lest he should lose it
by a relapse into his old drunken ways. He had gone on steadily
enough until this night, when by his criminal folly he had de-
stroyed the mill, and with it, of course, lost all chance of future
employment.

Kane was, for him, in a wonderfully melting mood.

" Don't you fret, missus," he said, laying his hand on the wo-
man's shoulder. " I'll try and find your husband a job, if he pro-
mises to let this be a lesson to him."

The poor creature was loud in her thanks and her assevera-
tions that she was sure " he would never, never be so weak

i88;.] THOMAS KANE, CUTLER. 483

again," when Sutton came in to tell us that the husband had
arrived and was waiting in the hall.

" Show him in," said his master; " it's Christmas eve, and we
might as well have a family party. It's a mighty queer one,
though," he added, with a little laugh, looking at the group
round the fire the poor burnt-out woman, wrapped in the clothes
that had been found for her, and nodding under the influence of
fatigue and mulled port, and the sleepy children leaning against
her, except the baby, who was curled up in Phoebe's lap.

The man came in a shambling, dirty figure, blackened with
smoke and smelling of singed clothing.

"God bless you for your kindness!" he began in a hoarse
voice, when Kane seized a lamp and held it so that the light
fell full on the man's face; then, breaking into a shrill cry, "At
last!" he said, "at last!"

1 knew what he meant. I think we all of us did. The shrink-
ing wretch himself made no attempt at denial, but stood cower-
ing back against the wall, his arm raised as if to ward off a blow.

There was dead silence for a moment, no one spoke, until
the man said :

" I couldn't help it ; they made me do it : we drew lots. And
God knows I've suffered more than you did."

Kane never answered, but stood looking at him like a man
who has suddenly awakened from a dream. All the long hope
of years, the treasured hope of some sweet and mighty vengeance,
had crumbled to pieces. This was no meet object for revenge,,
this miserable mortal clad in rags ! What could he do to him to-

make his condition worse he the rich, prosperous man? It
would be as bad, worse than revenging one's self upon an animal.

" They did not tell me who you were," went on the man in a
dull, forced voice ; " they only said a gentleman had taken them "
nodding towards his wife " and they brought me here. If I'd
'a' known, they never should have come. Your house is not the
place for me or mine. I've had your face before me day and night
since that morning, as you looked when I caught your eye
through the smother. I knew you knew I done it, and there's-
been a curse upon me ever since. If I could ha' given my life
for yours when you lay in the hospital, I'd ha' done it; and when
1 heard that you were growing rich I was glad. We were mates
once look at us now ! "

His wife, now wide awake, had been listening eagerly, look-
ing from one to another. I think she understood, for, with one

484 CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. [Jan.,

last, pitiful glance at Kane's hard face, she rose, and, taking the
child from Phoebe's arms, stood waiting.

" Come," said her husband, " we must go." And she followed
him, homeless but uncomplaining, on her way into the bitter
night. Just as she reached the door Kane cried out, "Stop!"
and, walking past his enemy, he left the room, his wife following.

" He means you are to stay," said Phcebe, the tears streaming
down her cheeks.

We none of us knew what passed between Kane and his
wife that night. He must have struggled fearfully with the
good and evil of his nature. He never saw Timothy Hoyle
again he and his family left The Whins as soon as it was
light next day but he forgave him with a very practical for-
giveness, sending them to Australia and keeping them till Hoyle
found work.

That Christmas morning the folks in church were much
amazed to see Tom Kane walk up the aisle and take his place
beside his wife.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC

POETRY.

IN his Life of Agrippa Tacitus wrote that the Romans, after
the conquest of Great Britain, were waiting for a convenient
season wherein to accomplish that of Ireland. The principal
reason assigned for this intention was that the vanquished in the
greater island would become more reconciled to the loss ot their
wn independence if they could see it overthrown in the less.
But throughout those four hundred years of occupation, although
the eagles went conquering into the fastnesses of the upper moun-
tains, and even crossed to the Orkneys, Ireland was left untouched,
and it remained for Rome afterwards with a different symbol to
subdue and ever retain her willing submission.

It is a proud history, that of this brave, suffering, constant
people. In it are things of which no other among moderns so
justly may boast. Its illustrious men of every period, prosperous
and adverse, in the enjoyment of freedom or writhing under op-
pression, have been the lull equals of the best else w lit re ; its
generals have led the greatest armies of England, its statesmen
have led in the making of her wisest laws, its priests have carried

1887.] CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 485

into Europe a civilization higher than what it had known before,
and its music is of the oldest and sweetest in the world. It is of
some characteristics of this music that it is proposed herein to
treat.

We say music, adopting the language of Homer, who was
wont to style the poet *Aoid6$, a Singer. The poetry of Ireland
for the most part has been of the lyric, and, sometimes in tri-
umphant, more often in wailing strains, has sung of the glories
and hopes, the oppressions and sufferings, of its native country.
Of all the forms of poetry the lyric most fitly represents the con-
ditions of our interior being. Its best songs have been its serious.
In the oldest times these were serious onlv, and for the most part
religious. Plutarch complained when the song that had been
theretofore consecrate to the temple had been raised, by voices not
pious, in the theatre. Not that the Greeks of a more ancient day
had not sung of women and wine, but their best strains had been
of gods, demigods, and heroes. Votaries had gone to the shrine
and warriors to the battle-field to the sound of the flute and the
lyre. The one eyed Tyrtseus, whom the Athenians in sport sent
as a general to the Lacedaemonians, led them to unexpected vic-
tory, and the bard was made a hero even above any who had
wielded the sword, the javelin, and the spear.

The indwellers of such a country as Ireland must be patriotic;
and if they are brave they must be poetic. Like Greece, exceeding
beautiful, giving birth to the gifted, the sentiments most dear
to the heart must find oft expression in song. In the Ireland of
remote foretime the harp was to be seen more often, perhaps, than
in any other country, ancient or modern. It was in nearly every
household ; if not for the use of the inmates, for that of the guest,
to whom the hospitality that was denied to none was extended
with greater cordiality according as he touched it more deftly to
the lays, especially those in honor of deity and national heroes.
When the Gospel was first preached in the island, to its honor, in
which no other country shared, its teachings were accepted with-
out the shedding of blood. Not that the bards at first did not
demur to the announcement that there had been, and that there
were, those who were greater than the greatest whom they had
sung; but the wise Patrick was not long in subduing their jeal-
ousies, and afterwards the monasteries that he founded became
the chief centres of Irish poetry. Monastic legends fondly tell of
the interest evinced by heavenly spirits in the new music of the
Irish harp; "and this," said Montalembert, "explains the reason

486 CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. [Jan.,

why the harp of the bards has continued the symbol and em-
blazonry of Catholic Ireland."

One of the characteristics of this poetry is the ardent love of
country by which it is inspired. This love sometimes has been
only sweet, sometimes highly passionate, but always most fond.
Sometimes it is evinced for the whole country, sometimes for a
whole district or county, and yet sometimes for one specially dear
spot, as in St. Columba's " Song of Derry " :

". My Derry, my fair oak grove,
My dear little cell and dwelling.

Beloved are Durrow and Derry,
Beloved is Raphoe the pure,
Beloved the fertile Drumhome,
Beloved are Swords and Kells :
But sweeter and fairer to me
The salt sea where the sea-gulls cry ;
When I come to Derry from far,
It is sweeter and dearer to me,
Sweeter to me."

This special fondness for the place where were situate his
" dear little cell and dwelling," though not forgotten, was merged,
when in exile, in the greater regrets for the whole of which it
was a part. The banishment that was allowed of Heaven, and
endured for the sake of the great mission to lona and Caledonia,
instead of subtracting from his patriotism, made it only more
general, constant, and heartfelt. Few things are more touching
than the words set down when he was an old man, and around
him were a thousand evidences of the blessings that had been
bestowed upon his missionary labors. In the midst of his visions
of heaven, and the rewards coming on his speedy ascension
thither, the longing for his native land remained as in the time of
his young manhood, and thus he wrote: " There is a gray eye
which ever turns to Erinn ; but never in this life shall it see
Erinn, nor her sons, nor her daughters. I look over the sea, and
great tears are in my eye." There was told a pretty story of a
stork that, having come from Ireland and descended, in order to
rest her wings, near the spot where the exile was sitting, he had
her cared for with tenderness; and when, with renewed strength,
she rose, he knew that she would return whence she had come,
to "her dear native country where she was born where I, too,
was born."

The harp, so sad in the hands of Columbkill, had been struck

1887.] CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 487

long- before his day to mournful notes. Among a people brave
and gifted, wherein were many independent chieftains emulous
in the continuance and extension of power, the death and the
exile of many a hero must be sung. Since the time of this poet-
priest Irish poetry has been mainly sad. Sufferings, national,
tribal, family, and individual, have been the principal themes for
its expression. Occasionally this sadness takes on a self-repre-
hending tone, when, after indulging one fond personal regret,
the singer pauses to reflect either upon the greater sorrows com-
mon to the whole country, or the coming of old age, which ought
to put an end to such regrets, since they have been shown to be
vain ; as in " Duhallow," an ode translated by Clarence Mangan.
The poet, an exile in Galway, has been singing of the good old
times once spent in Duhaliow, and he then concludes as follows :

" But my hopes, like my rhymes,
Are consumed and expended ;
What's the use of old times
When our time is ended ?

" Drop the talk ! Death will come

For the debt that we all owe,
And the grave is a home
Quite as old as Duhallow."

Sometimes the bard seeks to console the warrior who has fled,
or whom he is urging to flee from invasion that it is impossible to
resist, and from exactions that he foresees will be impossible to be
endured. There is much pathos in such consolation (in " The
Parting from Slemish ") as offered by Turlough, the harper, to
O'Niell, one of the princes of Claneboy, on the night of his cross-
ing the Bann, which at that time was the boundary of the English
Pale. After some most affectionate praise of his hero, whom he
styles Owen Bawri Con, he briefly mentions some of the exac-
tions of the successful invader:

" They tell me the stranger has given command
That crommeal and coolun shall cease in the land ;
That all our youth's tresses of yellow be shorn,
And bonnets, instead, of a new fashion worn ;

"That mantles like Owen Bawn's shield us no more,
That hunting and fishing henceforth we give o'er,
That the net and the arrow aside must be laid
For hammer and trowel, and mattock and spade ;

488 CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. [Jan.,

" That the echoes of music must sleep in their caves,
That the slave must forget his own tongue for a slave's,
That the sounds of our lips must be strange in our ears,
And our bleeding hands toil in the dew of our tears."

Then he offers his counsel that they both retire to Tyrone,
and the mingling of sorrow and hope is exquisitely touching:

" O sweetheart and comfort ! with thee by my side
I could love and live happy whatever betide;
But thou, in such bondage, would die ere a day
Away to Tir-oen, then, Owen, away!

"There are wild woods and mountains, and streams deep and clear,
There are rocks in Tir-oen as lovely as here ;
There are silver harps ringing in Yellow Hugh's hall,
And a bower by the forest side sweetest of all.

" We will dwell by the sunshiny skirts of the brake,
Where the sycamore shadows grow deep in the lake,
And the snowy swan, stirring the deep shadows there
Afloat on the water, seems floating in air.

"Farewell, then, black Slemish ! green Collon, adieu !
My heart is a-breaking at thinking of you ;
But tarry we dare not when freedom hath gone
Away to Tir-oen, then, Owen Bawn Con.

" Away to Tir-oen, then, Owen, away I
We will leave them the dust from our feet as a prey,
And our dwelling in ashes and flames for a spoil
'Twill be long when they quench them with streams from the Foyle."

It is interesting to notice always the devotion evinced by the
bard to his chieftain, living or dead. His affection was as tender
as his pride was exultant, and at his fall he wept with a grief that
is to be found in no other poetry. We know not where to go in
order to look fora more touching lamentation than in the " Kin-
kora " of the bard Mac Liag, translated, as the one just quoted, by
Mangan. It was composed after the battle of Clontarf (A.D 1014),
in which the great Brian Boru, with many of his auxiliary chiefs,
was slain. After commemorating and lamenting Morogh, Donogh
(Brian's son), and Conaing, and Kian, and Core, and Durlann,
and others, he thus concludes :

" They are gone, those heroes of royal birth,

Who plundered no churches and broke no trust ;
'Tis weary for me to be living on earth
When they, O Kinkora,* lie low in the dust!
Low, O Kirikora !

* Kinkora, the name of Brian's palace.

I88/.J CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 489

" Oh ! dear are the images my memory calls up

Of Brian Boru how he never would miss
To give me at banquet the first bright cup.
Ah ! why did he heap on me honor like this?
Why, O Kinkora?

" I am Mac Liag. and my home is on the lake :

Thither oft to that palace whose beauty is fled
Came Brian to ask me, and I went for his sake.
O my grief ! that I should live, and Brian be dead !
Dead, O Kinkora!"

Of the odes addressed to individual heroes we cannot refrain
from quoting a few stanzas from one whose grief is as profound, yet
is tempered by religious meditations and hopes. It is a translation
(again by Mangan) from the " Lament for the Princes of Tyrone
and Tyrconnell," composed by Owen Roe, the bard of the O'Don-
nells, and addressed to Nuala, the earl's sister. It was written
some time after the death of these princes in Rome, whither
with several of their kinsmen and families they had repaired
(in 1607) to avoid being taken to London, by the orders of the
English government, to answer charges which have since been
proven to have been wholly without foundation.

" The youths whose relics moulder here *

Were sprung from Hugh, high prince and lord

Of Aileach's lands :
Thy noble brothers justly dear,
Thy nephew long to be deplored

By Ulster's bands.

Theirs'were not souls wherein dull time
Could domicile decay or house

Decrepitude !

They passed from earth ere manhood's prime,
Ere years had power to dim their brows
Or chill their blood.

" And who can marvel o'er thy grief,
Or who can blame thy flowing tears,

That knows their source?
O'Donnell, Dunnasava's chief,
Cut off amid his vernal years,

Lies here a corse
Beside his brother Cathbar, whom
Tirconnell of the Helmets mourns

In deep despair,

For valor, truth, and comely bloom,
For all that greatens and adorns
A peerless pair."

* They were buried in one grave on St. Peter's HilL

490 CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. [Jan.,

The concluding stanzas of this fine ode show another marked
characteristic of the lyric poetry of Ireland a never-faltering
trust in God that he in his own time will bring deliverance to
the beloved land. After singing what mournings would have
been had these chiefs fallen in battle, he ends thus

" What do I say ? Ah, woe is me !
Already we bewail in vain

Their fatal fall !
And Erin, once the great and free,

Now vainly mourns her breakless chain

And iron thrall !

Then, daughter of O'Donnell! dry
Thine overflowing eyes, and turn

Thy heart aside ;
For Adam's race is born to die,
And sternly the sepulchral urn
Mocks human pride !

" Look not, nor sigh, for earthly throne,
Nor place thy trust in arm of clay;

But on thy knees
Uplift thy soul to God alone,
For all things go their destined way

As he decrees.

Embrace the faithful crucifix,
And seek the path of pain and prayer

Thy Saviour trod ;
Nor let thy spirit intermix

With earthly hope and worldly care
Its groans to God !

And thou, O mighty Lord ! whose ways
Are far above our feeble minds

To understand,

Sustain us in these doleful days,
And render light the chain that binds

Our fallen land !

Look down upon our dreary state,
And through the ages that may still

Roll sadly on

Watch thou o'er hapless Erin's fate,
And shield at least from darker ill
The blood of Conn."

It is interesting to contemplate in Irish poetry the love and
fidelity to country, clan, and chief. If those clans had been united
and so remained, subject only and with reasonable willing relation
to one lord paramount, their country never could have been sub-

1887.] CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. .491

dued. But as it was with Ireland, so it has been with Greece,
similarly prolific of heroes, who each had his following of the
bravest of the brave. Yet the glories of Greece have suffered
no diminution of lustre because of the internal strifes that led
to her fall. Leuctra is not less famous than Marathon, but Ireland
has often been reproached for yielding to Grecian example, and
gone unpitied for the loss of what otherwise she might have kept.
This is one of the saddest things in her history. In the midst of
those lamentations sung by the bards for the ruin of whatever was
dear, the most sorrowful are those that were poured for the whole
country, the mother of all her clans. It was said that when
Lysander had taken the city of Athens, he ordered, and his orders
were obeyed, that its walls be demolished at the sound of its na-
tive flute-players. How different the conduct of the Irish bards,
who shared in the fate of lords and country, and who, when in-
vited with offers of great indulgence and great pay to sing in
honor of Elizabeth, despised the bribe, and, with harps in hands,
repaired to their hiding-places, to come forth in the intervals of
security and strike them again, whether in sorrow for the past
or in hope of a happier future. It was vain that the minions of
power broke to pieces wherever found the instrument of national
music and forbade to those who touched it even the necessaries
of life. Persecution served but to make it more loved and sacred
in the island, and some of its songs six hundred years after the
fall of Irish independence were as bold and inspiriting as when
Tara was in the flushest of its glory.

That pride of ancestry, patriotism, and ever-struggling but
never-dying hopefulness should have stayed among the Irish so
long is one of the wonders of history. If ever a whole people
have illustrated the blessedness of suffering they have. The deep
abjectness of this suffering has served to keep it unknown to all
except themselves and God ; and so they have writhed in silence
and secrecy, and, receiving little sympathy from mankind, have
clung the closer to the compassion of Heaven and striven to wait
its deliverance. Until only of late the sufferings of the Irish peo-
ple have gone with less pity from the outside world than those of
any people who have been sorely oppressed. After they had
civilized Europe, their subjugation, followed by well-nigh as hard
exactions as were ever put upon the vanquished, has been little
considered when compared with Poland, Greece, and others that
have fallen before or been threatened with ruin by stronger pow-
ers. Not because the world is wanting in compassion, but that
these centuries of writhings have been unknown to it. The

492- CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. [Jan.,

prisoner with the Iron Mask languished unpitied because un-
known even to those who dwelt hard by the battlements wherein
he was confined, and he was drawn forth only to be assassinated.
So with Ireland. The chains that were riveted upon her were
so binding- that her very longings to break them were kept from
the world, and every endeavor thereto punished with a silent
rigor which it seems strange that a magnanimous victor, how-
ever powerful, would have had the heart to inflict. To the Eng-
lish people the Irishman has been made to appear fit only to wield
the mattock and the spade, and the Irish woman to be intended by
Heaven mainly as a maid for the chamber or a scullion for the
kitchen; and the cheerfulness which, because of their religious
faith, they have been able to maintain in these lowly conditions, has
been construed into evidence of alack of the sensibility that would
render them worthy of freedom. Even in this generation essay-
ists in English reviews and literary magazines, while contributing
articles upon matters of present or past concern in the condition
of Ireland, would calmly write of the ignorance of the English
people touching Irish affairs an ignorance admitted to be as
great as it was in the times of the oldest Plantagenets. As for
its language and literature, these were not known as well as those
of the Sanscrit. Indeed, until the coming of Thomas Moore
the outside world knew not, and hardly believed it worth
while to inquire, if Ireland ever had a literature or a language
beyond that common to all savage peoples for the expression
of necessary wants. The idea of Europe, especially anti-Catho-
lic Europe, seems to have been that Ireland ought to submit
resignedly, as in time it must, to the destiny that had rendered
vain her obsolete traditions, and fall in with the line of march on
the new fields of national endeavor. By the nation of whom she
has been the spoil she has been regarded with a sentiment that
conceived itself to be contempt, and this has been partaken by
the rest of the world. The greater power has seemed not only
indifferent to the advancement of civilization in the less, but hos-
tile to it. The planting of colonists upon confiscated lands, the
restrictions upon commerce, industry, and education, all seemed
to have been intended to repress all hope, and eventually sup-
press all desire, of independence. The Irish people have not
seemed important enough for serious attempts for their welfare.
They have been suffered to till the ground under the supervision
of middlemen who were robbers both of the tenantry and the
absentee landlords, and, in obedience to their habitude to conti-
nence, multiply and overrun and migrate to other lands. Ever

1 887.] CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 493

holding- their religious faith, from which nothing has been strong
enough to force them to depart, the ruling country has done lit-
tle except by penal laws for their conversion. For, with the
average English mind, they may worship Baal or a stone, pro-
vided only that they will keep the peace.

We were reading lately The State of Ireland, by Edmund
Spenser. The gentle poet, for want of more honest reward for
his verse, accepted the castle of Kilcolman on the Mulla. Here
he appealed for "learned, pious, and faithful preachers that would
have outpreached and outlived the Irish priests in holy and godly
conversation/' and he pleaded, with what boldness his meek na-
ture could employ, "that it be not sought forcibly to be im-
pressed into them with terrors and sharp penalties, as now is
the manner, but rather delivered and intimated with mildness and
gentleness, so as it may not be hated before it is understood, and
its professors despised and rejected." With much sadness he
further on calls attention to the difference between the clergy of
the established and those of the proscribed faith :

"Wherein it is a great wonder to see the odds which is between the
zeal of popish priests and the ministers of the Gospel. For they spare not
to come out of Spain, from Rome, and from Rheims, by long toil and dan-
gerous travelling, hither, where they know peril of death awaiteth them,
and no reward of riches is to be found, only to draw the people into the
Church of Rome. Whereas some of our idle ministers, having a way for
credit and estimation opened to them, and having the livings of the coun-
try offered to them without pains and without peril, will neither for the
same, nor any love of God, nor zeal of religion, nor for all the good they
may do by winning souls to Christ, be drawn from their warm nests."

Bishop Burnet, in his Life of Bishop Bedell, wrote :

"Bedell, then Bishop of Kilmore, had fifteen Protestant clergy, all
English, unable to speak the tongue of the people or converse with them,
which is no small cause of the continuance of the people in popery still.
The bishop observed with much regret that the English had all along
neglected the Irish, as a nation not only conquered but indisciplinable, and
that the clergy had scarce considered them as a part of their charge, but
had left them wholly in the hands of their own priests, without taking any
other care of them but the making them pay their tithes."

That was a curious kind of religious missionary work when the
clergy who were sent out to those whom they assumed <> be
worse and more needy than the heathen, not only ne^kct. d to
learn the language of those to whom they were sent, but uj.,<. nly
were guilty of conduct whose atrocity was the greater in that
it did not seek to be concealed. In the reports of Irish matters

494 CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. [Jan.,

made by Strafford during- the reign of Charles I. t among other
enumerated things are the following :

"The people untaught through the non-residence of the clergy, occa-
sioned by the unlimited shameful numbers of spiritual promotions with
cure of souls which they hold by commendams; the rites of the church run
over without all decency of habit, order, or gravity in the course of the ser-
vice ; the possessions of the church to a great proportion in lay hands ; the
bishops aliening their very principal houses and demesnes to their children
and strangers, farming out their jurisdictions to mean and unworthy
persons ; the popish titulars the whilst obeying a foreign jurisdiction much
greater than theirs."

It seemed to have been a maxim with the conquering power,
obtaining through centuries, that it was important, not that Ire-
land should be developed and cultivated, and made prosperous
and happy, but that it should be kept in subjugation, poverty,
and despair. The bard must be persecuted like the lord whom
he had served and sung. The legislation done in pursuance of
this policy was as effectually comprehensive as the human under-
standing was ever able to accomplish. If ever a work done on
such a line deserves praise for the sagacity which rendered it
complete for its purposes to repress instead of to exalt, it was
this. The poverty of resources, born as much of neglect as from
the resolution to hinder their improvement, served to keep from
Ireland not only sympathy with its condition, but acquaintance
with it and even its former history and literature.

But within this century over the minds of the nations has
come a change, and it has been wrought in great part by the re-
vival of Irish lyric poetry, partly new, but chiefly translations of
the old. It is not suitable in this connection to speak of the
struggles of Irish statesmen like Tone, and Emmet, and O'Don-
nell, and O'Brien, and others such. It is necessary to say of them
only that they were free to acknowledge how much they owed
to the Irish harp for the support that the cause they advocated
received at home and abroad. The " Irish Melodies " of Thomas
Moore drew to his native country the minds of cultivated
people all over the world. Doubtless this result was accom-
plished the more easily because they were composed away from
that native country by a poet who, having narrowly escaped
suffering, when a boy, for the interest taken by him in the move-
ment of the United Irishmen, gave up his revolutionary ideas
when all hope of their success had disappeared, and threw his
lot among those from whom it had appeared to be vain to ef-
fect a separation. Moore was a true patriot; but he was not

1 887.] CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 495

one to be made a martyr. The great Erasmus said that not
all and not many are adequate for the endurance of martyrdom.
Yet there is a love of truth, and country, and freedom, and
every good that is as pure, though it may not be as courage-
ous and as daring, as that of those who are willing to suffer for
it, and to fight for it with unswerving eagerness even when
defeat and death are unmistakably seen at the end of the con-
flict. Moore was not like Pindar, but like Anacreon. Pindar,
secure in Thebes, could boldly celebrate the heroes of his choice,
and even admonish Hiero, Arcesilaos, and other princes of his
time. Anacreon, an exile first from his native Teos, and after-
wards from Abdera and Samos, must console his griefs as he
might with light songs in honor of wine, beauty, and youth.
Yet he was far from being the sensualist that he often has been
regarded. The pious Plato commended him well, and by Athe-
naeus he was styled vr/cpcor nai dyaSot sober and honorable. Be-
neath his outward levity was a profound sense of the seriousness
which an exile can never forbear to feel. It subtracts little from
this argument that so many of his verses are addressed to
Chloe, Pyrrha, and other women ; for all who are familiar with
the poets know the wont of those whose muse is fettered to sing,
under one or another maiden name, the perfections of his native
land. Without country and home, instead of resigning himself
to useless regrets he would mingle in the sportive throng to
whom "measured cups" were to be brought, and so ever be
striving to live

" Warm in heart, but wisely gay."

We cannot doubt that sometimes in his breast were thoughts
like those that inspired the poet who has been likened to him,
when he wrote :

"Then blame not the bard if in pleasure's soft dream

He should try to forget what he never can heal ;
Oh ! give but a hope, let a vista but gleam

Through the gloom of his country, and mark how he'll fecit
That instant his heart at her shrine would lay down

Every passion it nursed, every bliss it adored,
While the myrtle, now idly entwined with his crown,

Like the wreath of Harmodius, should cover his sword."

In England Moore was an exile, knowing it and feeling it.
But his was not the soul to rouse others to things impossible ;
and so he submitted and bore part in a government that he could
not hope to overthrow, laughed and jested among the gay and

496 CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. [Jan.,

cultured; but, when alone, yielding to patriotic memories or fired
with patriotic pride, mused upon and put into song the noble
deeds of his ancestors of the far-distant time. His songs begat
an interest in his native country that was felt everywhere, and
the world was surprised and pleased to find that the people
whom they had despised or ignored had so glorious a history,
and that their bards, unknown for six centuries, were superior to
those of which any European nation could boast.

Throughout these poems runs a vein of sadness whose pathos
has touched, even to the shedding of tears, many a heart outside
as well as inside of Ireland. The laments for the braves of old
times, the illustrious and the humble, the soul-felt praise of their
never-outdone prowess, even the songs of love, especially when
unrequited or otherwise disappointed of its hopes of iruition,
are such as lead one to melancholy that seeks its most comfort-
ing relief in tears. For we know, I repeat, that the bards, in
making their songs of devotion to their native country, used to
substitute for its dear name that of a maiden. This name was
generally one or another of the daughters of hereditary chiefs,
such as Grace O'Malley, or Cecilia O'Gara, or Kathaleen Ny-
Houlahan, or Sabia, daughter of the great Brian Boru.

The amount of good done by Moore to ins country can never
be calculated. But better than him the Iribh people ol to-day
love Mangan, and Davis, and McGee, and others poets who
knew not themselves to be poets until the risings of lorty years
back inspired them to strike the neglected harp in bold unison
with the brave efforts made by some Irishmen who, conscious of
not being inferior to the men who fought in the days of old, were
resolved to strive to rival their deeds. It is distressing, but it is
most sad to contemplate the brief, ever-struggling careers of
these patriotic singers. The Irish cause, at the establishment of
the Nation, its journal, demanded songs, and men who had never
sung, and knew not that they could sing, answered to the call.
In poverty, sickness, abscondings from officers of English laws,
they sang their songs, some old, some new ; and the world mar-
velled, as it could not but pause and listen to strains so inspirit-
ing proceeding from the mouths of young men who poured them
forth in obedience to an inspiration as instantaneous as exalted.
Their season was brief. McGee was driven into exile, Davis
died of overwork and a broken heart, and Mangan, worn out
with disease and the contemplation of his glorious work, that
seemed to have been done in vain, was found dead in his poor
abode, where, in his tattered hat, they found, on soiled scraps of

1 38;.] CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 497

paper, fragmentary parts of other verses upon which he had been
employed to the last in endeavors to weave them into songs for
further incitement to the cause for which he died.

Some of the lyrics of these young- men may be compared
safely with the best in any tongue, such as " The Battle of Fon-
tenoy," " The Sack of Baltimore," " The True Irish King/' and
others of Thomas Davis. Of the kind we know not where to
seek for better than the verses entitled "My Grave." After an-
swering ' Oh ! no, oh ! no," to questions regarding various spots
in one of which it might be digged, he thus gives directions:

" No ! on an Irish green hillside,
On an opening lawn, but not too wide !
For I love the drip of the wetted trees ;
I love not the gales, but the gentle breeze,
To freshen the turf. Put no tombstone there,
But green sods decked with daisies fair ;
Nor sods too deep, but so that the dew
The matted grass-roots may trickle through.
Be my epitaph writ on my country's mind,
' He served his country and loved his kind.'

" Oh ! 'twere merry unto the grave to go,
If one were sure to be buried so."

These were written by a young man of twenty-eight, who
wrote only because the endeavors made by the leading spirits of
his country " required of him a song." He answered with a
humility less only than his genius. Two years afterwards he
died. John Mitchel said of him : " He, more than any one man,
inspired, created, and moulded the strong national feeling that
possessed the Irish people in 1843, made O'Connell a true un-
crowned king, and

" ' Placed the strength of all the land
Like a falchion in his hand.' "

But to our minds James Clarence Manga n must rise superior
to Davis and outlive him. It was he who did more than any
other to have called out of oblivion the music of Ireland's fore-
time. An invalid, almost a dwarf, inadequate to the big dangers
on the open field, his cheeks grew white as the hair that prema-
turely had bleached in comparing existing conditions of his coun-
try with those when she was the educator of all Europe and her
chiefs admitted to be the flushest flower of chivalry. Unable to
carry a gun or proclaim before the multitude, he searched for
and brought forth the songs of his ancestors, he put them in the
publicly-spoken language of the time, and the Irish people, as the

VOL. XLIV.32

498 CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. [Jan.,

rest of mankind, were surprised to know how fertile their native
country had been both in great deeds and in the records made of
them by contemporary bards. A melancholy man ; for ever
melancholy has been the Irish bard. Sometimes, but not often,
into the great deep of his country's sorrow he pours his own; but
he warns against the despondency that has fallen upon his heart,
and tries to extol the sufferings that God sends most abundantly
upon those who are his best beloved. Let us listen to these
verses from " Have Hope " :

" The wise, the thoughtful know full well

That God doth naught in vengeful ire ;
But this deep truth all ages tell

He purifies his own by fire.
Woe to the man who knows not woe,

Who never felt his soul grow dim !
Him threateneth dreadful overthrow;

Heaven's love and care are not for him.

" I too have sorrows, unseen, alone :

My own deep griefs, griefs writ on sand,
Until my heart grew like a stone ;

I struck it, and it hurt my hand.
My bitter bread was steeped in tears ;

Another Cain's mark marred my brow ;
I wept for long my wasted years :

Alas ! too oft I weep them now !"

Mangan had studied the history of other struggling peoples,
and he loved to sing of what their bravest had done, and hold
them up as examples ; as in the following from " The Highway of
Freedom," when, after praising the brave Winkelried, he breaks

forth :

" We want a man like this, with power
To rouse the world with one word ;
We want a chief to meet the hour,
And march the masses onward.
But, chief or none, through blood and fire,

My Fatherland, lies thy way ;
The men must fight who dare desire
For Freedom's course a highway."

Of all peoples since the establishment of Christianity the Irish
people, though they have been the most sorely tried, are most
free of that sin, numbered among those called by the church mor-
tal, of despairing of the mercy of God. It is this freedom from
despair that has upheld them throughout so many vicissitudes,
all of which were unhappy, and made them cling with unfalter-
ing devotion to the religious faith of their ancestors. They have
always felt that deliverance, however long delayed, must come in

1887.] CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. 499

the times of God, if, uncomplaining to him, they will persevere in
endurance, striving, and prayer. This truth is well illustrated in
the following, the last quotation from Irish lyric poetry which
this article will allow.

Among many names given by the bards to Ireland that of
Bauba was one especially dear. The verses following are from
" The Lament for Bauba." They were translated from the Irish

by Mangan :

" As a tree in its prime

Which the axe layeth low,
Didst thou fall, O unfortunate land!
Not by Time, nor thy crime,
Came the shock and the blow :
They were given by a false felon hand!

Alas, and alas, and alas
For the once proud people of Bauba !

" Oh ! my grief of all griefs
Is to see how thy throne
Is usurped, whilst thyself art in thrall !
Other lands have their chiefs,
Have their kings ; thou alone
Art a wife, yet a widow withal !

Alas, and alas, and alas
For the once proud people of Bauba !

" The high house of O'Neill
Is gone down to the dust,
The O'Brien is clanless and banned ;
And the steel, the red steel,
May no more be the trust
Of the faithful and brave in the land !

Alas, and alas, and alas
For the once proud people of Bauba ! "

But the bard, even if he feels, must admonish against despair;

for God

" He made his prophets poets,"

and they cannot but foretell in tuneful measures the balmy morn-
ing that will come when the night of darkness is overpast ; and
f>o he concludes:

" But, no more ! This our doom,
While our hearts yet are warm,
Let us not over-weakly deplore,
For the hour soon may loom
When the Lord's mighty hand
Shall be raised for our rescue once more ;
And our grief shall be turned into joy
For the still proud people of Bauba."

This is at last the most distinguishing characteristic of the

5oo CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LYRIC POETRY. [Jan.,

lyric poetry of Ireland its unshaken trust, amid innumerable
sufferings, in God. The Irish patriot often may feel like crying
out with the Hebrew: "How long, O Lord! how long?" but
this avails not to hinder his ever-during confidence in the ultimate
deliverance of his country through agencies that will be of divine
appointment.

Important have been the results of these attempts at the revi-
val and the imitation of the old Irish lyric poetry. Not only are
the other nations coming to understand and sympathize with the
sufferings of Ireland, but the English, the last, who ought to have
been first, are being led thus to understand and sympathize. The
cause of Ireland has become the foremost of all causes. Its
espousal by Mr. Gladstone is the most important gain that till
now it has achieved. In the late efforts of this great man in be-
half of Ireland there is a pathos not less striking than their gran-
deur. We would, and we cannot help from imagining that he
would, that he could " return to the days of his youth/' and have
again the opportunity of spending his giant strength for the
cause which so sorrowfully and so rightfully appeals for the
justice that has been withheld so long. Mr. Gladstone is gene-
rous as he is great. But in his youth who knew or cared to know
anything about Ireland ? Or if he knew, and if he cared, there
was the dread of casting away the ambitions which, to young
statesmen, it seems so important to regard. Like the son of
Gedeon, they must forbear on account of their youth :

" And he said unto Jether, his first-born, Up and slay them (Zebee and
Salmana). But the youth drew not his sword ; for he feared because he
was yet a youth."

What might he not have done if, when young and strong, he
had given his powerful support to this cause, instead of waiting
to crown his splendid career by an act of justice that now, when
on the verge of the grave, he sees to have been due long, long
ago? He has fallen because of extreme age, and because not yet,
not quite yet, is the English mind prepared to admit its mistakes
and correct them, and so yield to what all the world outside fore-
sees to be inevitable. Yet this instance of his magnanimity, more
than all his other achievements, will contribute to make resplen-
dent and enduring the glory that shall be around his name.
Meanwhile the Muse of Ireland, always sad but never despair-
ing, and now more hopeful than at any time since the beginning
of her travail, yet prays Him whom, though often sorely tempted,
she has never distrusted,

" To cast a look of pity on Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan."

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 501

A FAIR EMIGRANT.

CHAPTER XIV.
FREE.

PASTURES of dewy green, hills of buttercups and daisies,
flecks of water with heaven in their depths, and red and black
cattle grazing among sedges and yellow lilies, streaks of dark
bog-land fringed with tawny weeds, soft, violet ridges of far-away
mountains, all wreathed in shifting sunshine and shimmering mist,
passed swiftly before Dawn's eyes as she whirled through the
fertile fields of Erin. Could anything be more different from the
lofty solemnity of the dark pine forests, the far-stretching flatness
of the prairie lines?

There was a long day's travelling before she stepped out of
the train and was conscious in the clear darkness of rugged hills,
a bay with dusky shipping, twinkling lights, and a smell of fish
and tar.

Arrived at the little hotel recommended to her by Dr. Ack-
royd, she was conducted by the honest woman who owned it to
a tiny room with space just sufficient for herself and her trunk.

As she sat at breakfast the next morning in the little hotel
parlor, with her hat and shawl beside her, the door opened and a
gentleman came in. Then she noticed that breakfest was laid for
a second person at the other end of the table, and the man, whose
tea and toast were placed opposite to hers, sat down in the place
that was prepared for him and stared at her.

She reflected that farmers' daughters cannot expect to have
everything as ladies would wish, and serenely went on with her
breakfast as if no one had come into the room.

" Would you like to see yesterday's paper?" said the man ;
and then Bawn had to look at him for a moment. He was a
stoutish, pompous-looking person, holding himself very erect, his
eyes of a light, watery blue with a puffiness under them, head a
little bald, with a fringe of light-colored hair, a heavy mouth
shaded by a heavier moustache, and hands that were fat and un-
naturally white.

"Thank you," said Bawn; and, taking the paper, she held it
so as to screen herself from his scrutiny.

"Ye didn't mind the major, did ye?" said the landlady

5O2 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Jan.,

apologetically afterwards. " He's a fine man an* a rich gentle-
man ; but he's a good hand at starin', isn't he? My Mary com-
plains of it when she has to wait on him, and she isn't as hand-
some as you, mem. If it had 'a' been one o' the Fingalls, now,
ye'd 'a' been quite at home with them ; but Major Batt isn't so
nice for a young woman that does be travellin' all her lone."

One of the Fingalls ! Bawn's heart gave a sudden throb as
the name fell on her ear. That strange, long week at sea dropped
suddenly out of her life, and she was her father's daughter again,
with his good name in her hands.

She had hardly taken her seat on the long car when Major
Batt came out of the inn, looking larger than ever in a huge
ulster and soft hat crushed down over his puffy eyes. He ap-
proached the little green car with the silver harness, but, instead
of mounting it, said a few words to his servant, and then, coming
up to the public conveyance, hoisted himself with some difficulty
into a place by Bawn's side.

She thought regretfully of how his burly figure would prob-
ably shut out her view of the coast scenery. To try to see be-
yond him would be as bad as looking over the shoulders of a
crowd. Travellers round the Antrim coast are few, and no one
else appeared to claim a seat on the conveyance. The driver
cracked his whip and the car rattled out of the town.

" You see," remarked the major, " I could not think of letting
you travel all alone on this beastly car."

" Thank you," said Bawn ; " but it was quite an unnecessary
attention. We Americans are accustomed to take care of our-
selves."

" I may say, in the words of the poet : * Lady, dost thou not
fear to stray so lone and lovely along this bleak way ? ' '

A sudden turn in the road brought the wide ocean to their
f ee t a magnificent sheet of shifting silver guarded by shining,
white limestone cliffs stretching away in curve after curve into a
fairy-like distance. Major Batt sat with his broad back squared
against the scenery, and his little, watery blue eyes fixed upon all
of Bawn's face that was visible through the thickest of gauze
veils.

" I am a stranger," she said, " and this kind of scenery is new
to me. Have you any objection to letting me see it? "

" I was just going to advise you to lift your veil," was the

reply.

" It is one of our American inventions the newest help to the
eyes. I can enjoy my view better with it than without it."

1 887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 503

" With such admirable assistance you ought to be able to see
through me."

" Perhaps I can," said Bawn quietly, " but I am none the less
anxious to change seats with you."

" Think what an unpleasant move for me. The view would
engage all your attention and I should have none of it."

Bawn was silent for a few moments, and then, finding the
major's eyes still relentlessly fixed on her, she leaned back and
said to the driver:

" Will you be good enough to stop a moment? I wish to
change my seat."

The driver was at her service in an instant ; the major laughed
a little and muttered something, but offered his assistance, which
was not accepted, and Bawn, placed at the upper end of the car,
where she could keep her face turned away towards the scenery,
felt herself victorious over her obtrusive fellow-traveller.

Nevertheless the major still continued to make himself as ob-
jectionable as he could, following her up the slightly sloping side
of the car as far as was possible, though invariably getting shaken
down to the lowest corner again by reason of his own conside-
rable weight.

" I never could see anything in scenery myself," he said pre-
sently. " The only view I care about is the view of a pretty
face. And you," he continued as Bawn made no reply, intent
on watching the shifting curves of the silver cliffs folding and
unfolding far ahead u you have just deprived me of one of the
finest prospects I ever gazed upon."

As he spoke he had edged himself up the side of the car and
come as close to Bawn as he could manage. " Did you speak ?"
she said, turning suddenly. " This is not a good place for hear-
ing, though capital for seeing. The wind carries your voice over
your shoulder, I suppose."

"And your face over your shoulder, I suppose," he grum-
bled, as the back of Bawn's head was again presented to him.
At the same moment, by an artful touch, she let loose the ends
of her veil, which were driven into his face by the breeze.

" Confound it ! " she heard him ejaculate, and he was suddenly
shaken away from her and settled down in a heavy deposit at
the lower end of the car. Looking round again, she saw him
manipulating one of his eyelids and patting it with his pocket-
handkerchief. A corner of the veil had gone into his eye.

" I am afraid you have got something in your eye," she said
serenely. " It is dusty for the time of year."

504 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Jan.,

"Ah! true; so it is."

" And limestone dust is particularly irritating. What a pity
you do not wear a veil like mine."

" Thank you ; yours has been enough for me," he growled,
trying to look as if nothing had happened, but winking wildly.

After this Bawn had peace for some minutes; but, the eye get-
ting better, the major's spirits revived and his pleasantries con-
tinued.

" Now, I am sure we have met in America," he began. " I
spent last summer there, and ever since I saw you first this
morning I have felt certain we were excellent friends in New
York."

Bawn reflected a few moments and then said : " I wonder to
hear you say so, for small-pox usually changes one so much ; es-
pecially when one has only just recovered from it."

" Small-pox ! You only recovered from small-pox. But you
have no mark of it whatever."

" I can scarcely rely on your flattering opinion, as you have
not seen me in a good light without my veil."

" You must have had it very lightly."

" I cannot say I had ; but if so, it is all the worse for the per-
son who takes the infection from me. He will be sure to catch
the fiercest kind of it."

The major, who had been edging up the car, suddenly stop-
ped his ascent, and was gradually, and this time unresistingly,
shaken down to the bottom, where he sat aghast.

" But you ought not to be going at large," he said ; " it is
highly wrong."

" One must go somewhere for change of air, or one cannot
get well ; and in a thinly-populated country like this one hardly
expects to come in contact with people."

" Do you think it is very infectious ? " asked the trembling
major.

" Well, I shall never sit beside a recovered patient in a train
again ; that is all I can say," said Bawn, sighing.

" But perhaps you never were vaccinated ? "

" O dear ! yes. But I am a firm believer in the new theory
that vaccination only makes you more susceptible," said Bawn,
tucking her veil about her face and turning away to hide her
smile.

Meanwhile Major Batt sat ruefully looking askance at her
from the other end of the conveyance, occasionally casting anx-
ious glances behind to see if his own car was coming into sight.

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 505

" I think I shall walk a little," he said presently, with a comi-
cal attempt at ease of manner. " These outside cars are a con-
foundedly cold means of locomotion. Driver, stop ! Let me
off."

Off he went, and the car went on without him ; and Bawn,
looking back, saw the trim little green car hastening from the
distance, and the stout major trudging gallantly to meet it.

After that the two strong horses drawing the " long car ''
thundered along under the overhanging limestone walls with
Bawn as the only passenger. The sea washed green and pel-
lucid over its white shingle, and clouds of silver smoke rose and
filled the air with a curious fragrance from piles of burning kelp
that smouldered on the shore. Few living creatures were to be
seen, but here and there a cottage appeared in a hollow or on the
summit of a cliff.

" There's Aughrim Castle, miss," said the driver, who had
been silently chuckling over the discomfiture of the major, and
now thought it his duty to entertain the lady. " That's where
Lord Aughrim lives, miss, barrin' when he's away from home,
which is mostly always."

" Then we have got into the Fingall country," said Bawn,
looking round her eagerly.

" Oh ! faix we have, miss. Furdher on ye'll come to Glenma-
lurcan, where the gineral and his family does be livin'. Least-
ways the gineral's dead, God rest his sowl; but the family's there
to the fore, a'm proud to tell ye."

CHAPTER XV.

SISTERS.

A FEW days later two members of the Fingall familv stepped
out of the post-office of the little town of Cushendall and stood
in the village street with disappointment strongly depicted in
their faces. They were two slight young figures, clad in costumes
and caps of Donegal frieze, wearing strong boots on their little
feet, and carrying sticks somewhat like alpenstocks ; two girls
exceedingly unlike in appearance, and yet with a sisterly resem-
blance to each other.

"It is too bad, Shana dear, isn't it?" said the fairer and
softer-looking of the two, fixing a pair of wistful blue eyes on
the other's face. " How can we make them answer us ? What
can we do ? "

506 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Jan.,

" Do ? " cried Shana. " Nothing but endure their silence. To
think of our putting our ancestors in print, vulgarly trying to
turn them into money, and having them scorned for our pains
I suppose it serves us right for the sacrilege. O Rosheen ! what
would Flora say if she knew of it ? "

" But she would have had to know if the story had been pub-
lished and become famous," said Rosheen. " We could not have
gone on living with such a secret on our minds."

Shana knit her brows in impatient thought, and then suddenly
tossed her head with a little peal of careless laughter.

" We must try again, I suppose," she said. " Waste some
more paper and another bottle of ink."

" Perhaps we put too much war in it. Stories that get pub-
lished are generally chiefly about marriages, I think," suggested
Rosheen timidly.

" And evidently the publishers won't allow us to strike out a
new line," said Shana. " They would rather," she added con-
temptuously, " hear about the courting and marrying of the sil-
liest person in the world than read about the brave doings of a
hero like Sorley Boy. But I would not humor them even if I
could," she went on, with a brilliant damask glowing in her brown
cheeks. " I will write nothing but about heroes and battles.
But come along, dear ; I have to call to see Betty Macalister,
and to buy some tapes and pins at Nannie Macaulay's."

As the two girls turned their faces to the sunshine and set off
walking the difference between their faces, which were so much
alike, became more distinct. Shana was a brilliant brunette, brown
as a berry, with a delicate glow under her skin, a curling cloud of
dusky brown hair, eyes dark, keen, and sweet, set in a forest of
softening eyelashes, and an eloquent and characteristic mouth.
Rosheen was fair, a little freckled, with hair decidedly auburn,
and eyes of baby blue. Their noses were short, their brows low
and smooth, and their little dimpled chins had been cast in the
self-same symmetrical mould.

The village of Cushendall lies in a hollow among mountains,
four cross streets, with a strong old tower in the middle, and a
stream from the hills winding among trees to the sea. A savor
of turf-smoke pervades it, and it is not so clean as it ought to be.
Tiny shops show all sorts of odds and ends which country folks
need to buy, and up one hilly street are a few dwellings of the
genteeler order. As the two girls walked down the village street
every eye beamed on them. In the sight of all, from the shop-
keeper standing in his doorway to the children making mud-pies

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 507

in the gutter, the fresh-faced, free-stepping maidens were as
princesses of an ancient line, daughters of the ancient chieftains
of the glens. Nodding to every one they met, they passed through
the village and out upon the varied upland that led towards the
vale of Glenan.

All around them lay swelling knolls, Tivara, the cone-shaped,
fairy mount, rising with fantastic mien among its fellows, look-
ing fit ground for elves to dance upon, as they do on moonlit
nights. Little cots and humble farm-houses nestled in their clus-
ters of trees, their white walls gleaming here and there in the
folds of the cultivated hills. And circling around and above
these lower highlands the greater mountains rose with their dark
rough crowns and broad sides and their .curved and curious peaks.
A rich, sombre purple hung round Tibulia's beak-like crest, and
over towards Cushendun a long sweep of mountain rugged with
shrubs and heather had caught a warm crimson flush.

The girls came down along the dark red road cut through
high sandstone cliffs to where Red Bay sweeps with one majestic
curve round the opening into Glenmalurcan away to the ^reat
Garron rock, and suddenly they espied a small green car with a
fast-stepping horse and silver harness coming to meet them by
the cross-road that skirts the shores of the bay.

" O Shana ! Major Batt," murmured Rosheen in dismay.

" Now, Rosheen, your fastest walking ! " returned Shana ; and
the two little frieze-clad figures went at a pace that would not
have been amiss at a walking-match. The green car was, how-
ever, too much for them, and met them at the angle of the bay.

" Miss Shana ! Miss Rosheen ! " cried an unctuous voice, and the
owner of the car flung the reins to his servant and sprang off* with
as much agility as could be expected from a person of his build.

" This is an unexpected pleasure! " he went on after greeting
them with much effusion, trying meanwhile to keep up with the
inconvenient swiftness of their pace. " I have just paid a visit to
Lady Flora at The Rath. My disappointment was great at not
finding you at home. I thought of asking permission to join you
in a ride."

" We do not ride now," said Rosheen regretfully. " We have
given up our horses."

" Then I hope you will allow me. I think I can mount you,
if you will be so good, sometimes."

" Thank you," said Shana sturdily ; " but we much prefer
our walking. A horse can't scramble up banks and climb rocks
with you as we want to do when we come out."

5o8 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Jar.,

" No, certainly," said the major, glancing nervously at the
rough bank beside him and hoping she would not expect him to
escort her immediately to the top of it. But Shana was thinking
of something entirely different.

" Major Batt," she said with sudden and unusual earnestness,
" I am going to ask you a serious question/'

The major, for some reason best known to himself, changed
color and felt a glow of pleasure and curiosity, and at the same
time wished himself safely back upon his car.

" The times are awfully bad," continued Shana. " Everybody
is suffering; but some people must suffer more than others."

The major had become very red. "I hope I trust " he
stuttered.

Shana silenced him with a magnificent wave of her little hand.

" I am going to ask you if you know anything at all of the
old people who are still living at Shane's Hollow? "

" Nothing whatever," said the major promptly. And his
countenance cleared.

" I thought, as you are the person who bought up the last
remnaVit of their property, that you might have had some deal-
ings with them which would enable you to tell me whether they
are really starving or not."

" Starving ! " said the fat major. " Starving, Miss Shana, is a
very uncomfortable word to make use of. especially in connection
with people who once held their heads high in the county."

" It suggests that we may all come to it. You, however, need
not fear it, for a long time at least," said Shana, with a little
laugh, which the major did not altogether like. " I don't think
any of us need fear it," she added, " not even Rosheen and I, for
we should turn into honest work-women first. But seriously,
Major Batt, do you know of any means that those poor old people
have got of keeping the wolf from their door ; for their door does
open and shut still, I believe, though half of the roof is gone."

" I should say," said the major jocosely, " that they are so
accustomed to the wolf that they could not live without him.
But seriously, as you say, I only know that some two years ago
they had a little money invested somewhere, though not more
than enough to give each of them a meal in the week. I have
reason to believe that, with their usual time-honored improvi-
dence, they have sold out that moiety of property and eaten it
up in a lump."

"Then they have nothing left," cried Rosheen in dismay.
" They will die in that hole, and we shall all feel like murderers."

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 509

" My dear Miss Rosheen, I never heard your gentle lips make
use of such strong language before," said the major suavely.
''If fools will commit suicide, I don't know how they are to be
prevented."

" They used to eke out their existence in various little ways,"
said Shana. " i have heard all about it from * Hollow Peggy/
Mr. Edmund cultivated a scrap of land behind the old garden-
walls where nobody could see him, and so they had potatoes
and vegetables. Mr. Paddy broke stones in a cave, gathering
them off the hills and breaking them with a hammer. Afterwards
he sold them to Alister and others for the roads, pretending he
had a contract for supplying them. These were the only indus-
tries they attempted ; lately, I fear, even these have come to an
end. Mr. Edmund broke his leg a short time ago by stumbling
down a hole in the ruined house, and the doctor carried him off,
whether he would or not, to the poor-house hospital. Mr. Paddy
is disabled by rheumatism "

" They will all die ! " broke in Rosheen piteously.

" Let us hope not," said the major, buttoning up his coat and
speaking with a certain nervous decision. " Old people reduced
so far can live upon so little."

" The worst of it is," continued Shana, " that their pride is so
great that they will absolutely accept of no assistance."

" It is the best thing I have heard about them yet," said the
major with increased decision of manner.

*' They will not take help from any private source, nor remove
to the poor-house. The doctor removed Mr. Edmund almost by
force, because he could not risk his own life wandering through
the ruin in search of his patient. The sisters and brothers look
on his removal as the last calamity that could have befallen them.
They would be the Adares of Shane's Hollow as long as they
live, and be buried by torchlight when they die, as has always
been the custom with their family."

" And they will really accept no aid ? "

" They were tried at Christmas with money and clothes, but
all was sent back with the politest of messages and thanks."

" It is decidedly the most creditable thing I ever heard about
them," reiterated the major with satisfaction.

" I think differently," said Shana. " When people are old
and destitute they ought to own their mistakes and practise the
one virtue left to them humility. To me there is something
ghastly, absolutely inhuman, in their pride."

" You will hardly overcome it now, however," said the major.

5io A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Jan.,

" I think we ought to go on trying," said Shana solemnly ;
" and that is why I have spoken to you, Major Batt. Will you
join with Alister in asking some other gentlemen to look after
the case of the old people in the Hollow?"

" I would do anything in the world for you, Miss Shana "
began the major gallantly.

" Not for me," she interrupted quickly, " but for Christian
charity, Major Batt. When I waken in the night I think I hear
the voices of those poor old creatures crying on the wind, ' To
work I am not able, to beg I am ashamed/ Ought we to let
them die like rats in a hole?"

"Miss Shana, you are an angel!" burst forth the major;
" arid I will do anything I can. But I warn you, I believe they
have some means of existence or they could not afford to in-
dulge their pride."

" You do not know them," persisted Shana. " You are a
comparative stranger in the country, so often away, while I have
been living near them ever since I was born. That pride is
great enough to sustain them through the pangs of death by
hunger. It separated them from all who were once their
friends. It will be inexorable in consigning them to a horri-
ble grave."

" I do hope you are wrong, Miss Shana, for your sake as well
as for theirs. I never saw you in so doleful a mood before. Let
us talk of something pleasanter. Of course you go to Dublin
for the Castle amusements."

" No," said Shana, " we have made up our minds to stay at
home this season. It seems to us hideous to go about dancing
and junketing while the country is in such a miserable state."

" And besides " began Rosheen.

" We require no besides," said Shana quickly.

" But there is no disturbance in our part of the world," urged
the major.

" This island is not so large but that we must all feel what
occurs in any part of it," returned Shana. " There have been
sad doings on Lady Flora's property in the west, and we are
feeling it to the marrow of our bones."

" Lady Flora spoke as if she expected to take you to Dublin,
if not to London."

"Did she?"

" And so I will hope to meet you shortly in gayer scenes.
And now, as I am dining with Lord Aughrim this evening,
and have a long way to drive, I must tear myself away from

1 887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 511

your charming society, and wish you, reluctantly, good after-
noon."

He swung himself on to his car, which had been following
him all the way, and after he had driven off the sisters walked
some way in silence. Then Shana said : " Laugh, Rosheen !
Let us have a laugh ! I feel as if I had been putting both my
hands into Major Batt's pockets. How I did frighten the poor
creature ! I am curious to see what he will do for the Adares.
It will be a fight between his gallantry and his prudence."

" He will have something to think about all the way back to
Lisnawilly, at all events," said Rosheen joyously ; and then both
girls laughed out loud, peal upon peal of fresh young laughter,
with which they seemed to cast off all the troubles that had been
oppressing them since morning.

Their walk lay now along a narrow road at one side of the
valley of Glenmalurcan, which runs up between two stretches
of mountain, wide at its opening where the bay washes its feet,
and narrowing gradually for two long miles to the point where
the hills fold together and a fairy waterfall bursts from the
upper rocks, whirls over the ash and nut trees in its way, and
leaps into a tarn in the heart of an exquisite dell. The stream
from the waterfall descending to the sea divides the vale as it
flows, and the birds fly across it from mountain to mountain.
Just now the opposite crags of Lurgaedon were red with sun-
light, while a deep shade dropped down from the black-purple
crags above the road travelled by the sisters, darkening all that
side of the glen with one majestic frown.

The valley is fairly cultivated, and white gables show here
and there among clusters of trees. An old bridge across the
river indicates the course of an ancient road winding down the
centre of the vale. As the girls proceeded swiftly along the nar-
rowing road the trees grew thicker and the view was gained
only in enchanting glimpses between overhanging boughs.

A cawing of rooks began to be heard from the .thickly- wood-
ed distance, and their cries gradually swelled into a clamor as
the girls got right under a huge mountain crag that loomed
above the tunnel of trees they were threading and threatened to
drop down upon their heads.

And here they entered the tall, old-fashioned gates of The
Rath, and passed down the shady avenue, emerging suddenly
before the front of the house into all the dying splendors of
sunset.

5i2 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Jan.,

CHAPTER XVI.
A SISTER-IN-LAW.

LADY FLORA FINGALL sat in an easy-chair before the fire
with a book on her lap, a work-basket at her feet, and tea set
forth, with its equipage of ancient silver and delicate china, on
a spindle-legged table beside her.

She did nothing but look into the fire, however; for, though
the setting sun made red bars along the sashes of the small, high
windows, yet the drawing-room was already almost dark but for
bright patches of sunlight of fantastic shape that flecked the
many-cornered walls.

It was a pleasant reflection to Lady Flora's rather frugal
mind that she had been able to furnish her drawing-room ac-
cording to the approved mode of the day without having re-
course to the fashionable upholsterer. To bring such persons
and their productions across the Antrim mountains would have
been a difficult and expensive undertaking, and she had simply
had recourse to the garret at The Rath, out of which she had
brought forth as pretty specimens of the spindle-shank tribe as
any to be met with in Oxford Street. The old brown carved
chimney-piece running up to the be-wreathed ceiling, which had
been an eyesore to her when she came as a bride to The Rath,
had of late become a treasure ; the old dado, which she had pa-
pered over long ago, was now restored and re-painted ; and all the
grandmother's cupboards and elbow-chairs and stacks of brass-
handled drawers, which had mouldered under the eaves, dis-
graced and forgotten for so many years, were, with the help of
a little beeswax and the village carpenter, at this moment looking
handsome and dignified among sunflowers and peacocks' feathers
in this ancient, home-like, and very comfortable apartment.

Lady Flora was a plump little woman, with a good quan-
tity of fair hair, a white hand, a pretty foot, and a sharp and
ready tongue. Her dress was elegant but not expensive, for she
had a wonderful knack of getting good things cheap. Even the
richly-wrought shoes which decked her little feet had been made
at small cost by a poor old bankrupt shoemaker, who endured his
reverses in a back street in Paris, and were fashioned out of a
morsel of Indian embroidery which had been sent her by a
wandering friend.
L " I am glad to see tea," said Shana, taking off her hat and

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 513

shaking 1 back her curly, brown locks. " We had nothing for
lunch but one of Nannie Macaulay's stale buns. And I am so
thirsty ! "

" You ought to be tired," said her sister-in-law, poking the
fire till the flame lit up the darkening room; " but you look
bright and bonnie; and I heard you laughing immoderately as
you came past the windows."

" Oh ! yes ; we met Major Batt," said Rosheen, " and he al-
ways makes us laugh."

" Major Batt is an extremely agreeable and sensible person,"
said Lady Flora ; " but I confess I never looked on him as a hu-
morist."

" No," said Shana, with a sly smile, as she put down her emp-
tied cup ; " he only inclines to make humorists of other people.
How he did button up his coat to-day when I talked about
money, poor dear !" And Shana walked across the room with
her chin pushed out and set up in the air, and fingered ener-
getically at the buttons of her jacket.

"How very unlady-like!" said Lady Flora coldly. "And
pray, Shana, why did you talk to Major Batt about money ? I
hope"

"You need not hope, Flora," said Shana abruptly; "you
know I am hopelessly outspoken, and I did ask Major Batt for
money."

Flora sat up in her chair, her plump lips parted, her keen, pale
eyes fixed upon Shana with horror.

" Yes," said the girl, carrying her replenished cup to the fire-
side and seating herself on a stool by her sister-in-law's side,
" I asked him to do something for the poor old bodies in the
Hollow."

Lady Flora sank back in her seat. " I am relieved," she said.
" I thought"

" I don't want to know what you thought, Flora. Your
thoughts and mine are seldom the same."

"I am happy to say you are right there," said Lady Flora
sharply. " But there tell me about Major Batt."

" He buttoned up his coat," said Shana, sipping her tea.
" By which remark you mean to imply, of course, that he is
careful of his money; and I admit that he is. It is one of the
virtues 1 admire in him. In this wretched spendthrift country,
where people hardly ever think of to-morrow, a prudent man is
a jewel to be prized."

" Major Batt needn't think so very much about to-morrow.
VOL. XLIV. 33

5H A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Jan.,

His to-morrow will not be so long as some other people's, and
he has no one in particular to succeed to his money and lands."

" Major Batt will marry," said Lady Flora, complacently turn-
ing a pretty ring on her short, white finger, and looking as if she
was almost betraying a secret.

" Has he been making a confidence to you, Flora? He told
us he had been here," said Rosheen, sidling up to her sister-in-
law with a roguish look.

" What funny entertainment Major Batt's little confidences
would be!" mused Shana, gazing into the glowing coals, which
threw a hundred mischievous reflections into her dancing eyes.

Lady Flora ignored this observation and turned to Rosheen.

" I can't exactly say that," she said with an air of reserve,
4< but he gave me to understand a great deal."

" He generally does leave a good deal to the imagination of
the listener when he talks," said Shana.

"Ah!" said Lady Flora, smiling archly, "there will come a
day, perhaps, when he may find words enough to satisfy every
one. In the meantime, Shana, I think that, prudent as he is, he
will respond to your appeal to his generosity."

" I hope he may, for the sake of the poor old Adares," re-
sponded Shana readily ; but her color became heightened and a
look of displeasure passed across her expressive brows.

" For somebody else's sake," said her sister-in-law quietly.
" I will not say for which of you."

" You have fallen asleep at the fire and dreamed a bad dream,"
said Shana gravely. " Forget it, Flora."

" I never dream," said Lady Flora. " And I had Major
Batt here all to myself for more than an hour."

" Poor Flora ! " said Shana, with a heavy groan.

" I must say he thinks much more highly of you both than
either of you deserve."

" Did he come to say he would marry, he didn't care which ?"
laughed Shana. " Come, Flora, you don't mean to say you
would sell us to Major Batt ? "

*' Unfortunately, he cannot marry both of you," said Lady
Flora, a spot of anger reddening her cheek ; " but if either of you
were to refuse such an offer I should wash my hands of you."

" Let me ring for a basin and some scented soap on the ii
slant," said Shana seriously.

" Shana, you only say these things for the sake of appearing
clever. I know you value money, for I have heard you wishing
you were a man, that you might make it. And all I can say,

i88/.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 515

that we are on the subject, is, that if so excellent an opportu-
nity should occur of providing for either of you, you will not be
so mad as to put it away. With my children in the nursery, and
little or no rents to be had ; with Alister so weak in his dealings
with the people, and all expenses to be covered by the income of
such money of mine as happens to be invested in English securi-
tieswith this state of things staring me in the face, 1 will say
that it would be extremely inconsiderate, not to say ungrateful,
if either of you were to refuse to become settled advantageously
in life."

Shana's cheeks were now glowing like the coals in the fire.
She drew away her hands, with which she had covered her face
while her sister-in-law was speaking.

" I own, Flora," she said earnestly, "that it is very hard on
you' having me and Rosheen to do with, now that our fortune
which our father left us is gone ; that Alister's property also
should be so embarrassed, and that we should all depend on you "

" You know I would wish to deny you nothing," interrupted
Lady Flora ; " but with my own young children "

" I have thought about the children I am always thinking
about them," said Shana, with burning eyes; "and, believe me,
Flora, Rosheen and I intend to provide for ourselves."

" Major Batt is a capital parti'' said Lady Flora. "And I am
sure I should not have spoken to you so plainly except for your
own good ; and I expect that when he asks he will not be dis-
couraged."

" As you say, he cannot ask to marry us both," muttered
Shana meditatively.

'* One will be enough ; but as I am not at all sure which of
you he prefers, I desire that you will both be prepared," said
Lady Flora.

Rosheen pouted and hung her head. Shana rose and walked
to the window, and stood looking out into the growing darkness
for a few moments, then came back to the fire and said distinctly:

" If Major Batt makes choice of either of us, I hope it will be
of me."

" Come, now, that is better," said her sister-in-law in pleased
surprise. " I always knew, Shana, that you had a fund of good
sense somewhere if you would only condescend to make use
of it."

Rosheen stared at her sister in astonishment, but said noth-
ing. Shana rested her elbow on a ledge of the mantel-piece and
went on :

A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Jam.,

" But I warn you, Flora, that I do not believe he is thinking
of doing- anything of the kind. In spite of his mature years and,
let us say, solid appearance, Major Batt is fond of flirting, or
doing something that he fancies is flirting. He is one of those
persons who always put before them to achieve the most diffi-
cult enterprises, and so he is always trying to make himself
agreeable "

" By the way," interrupted Lady Flora, "I told him he might
expect to meet you in Dublin."

" That you must not think of, Flora. Ball-dresses and all
that expense at such a time ! "

" That is my affair," said Lady Flora graciously.

" No, Flora," said Shana, drawing her sister's little hand
through her arm, " it is my affair and Rosheen's. This, at
1'east, must be left to ourselves. We will not go. It is bad
enough to eat the children's bread "

" Nonsense ! " said Flora shortly. " How exceedingly literal
you are ! Who talked about bread ? I must say it is very un-
amiable of you to take me up so sharply. And now I advise you
to go away and dress. Alister is in his study, buried, as usual,
in a book all day would not even come out to talk to the visi-
tors. Oh ! that reminds me what does bring that engineering
young man, that young Cailender, about the place so often ? He
was here again to-day."

Shana and Rosheen had reached the door, and Shana turned
suddenly round and looked steadily at her sister-in-law.

" I suppose he comes because Alister asks him," she said.
" I am sorry we did not see him."

" I consider him rather an intrusive person," said Lady Flora
coldly, but avoiding Shana's shining eyes. " I do not like him,
and I do not object to let him see it. There, do not keep stand-
ing in the doorway, girls. Bernard is coming in with the lamps."

The two young sisters went, linking together, up the dark, old
winding staircase, dimly lighted here and there by an old-fash-
ioned lantern, and, descending a few steps on the other side of
the first landing, entered their own particular apartments. These
were first a long room with a slanting ceiling and low walls, an<
a small, square window at each side, set up high under the eaves.
This was their old school-room, which, as they no longer needed
a governess, they had turned into a sitting-room, making use ol
their own ingenuity and needlework to effect some considerable
improvement in its arrangements. It was a very old room ; the
Walls were panelled in dark brown; the windows had deep brown

1 887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT.

seats; the sunflowers, of the girls' own making, on the short,
brown stuff curtains made a grateful gleaming of gold in the
brownness of the place. The furniture was ancient and worm-
eaten, and the long, dark, oaken school-room table, with its row
of drawers, still held its time-honored place all down the middle
of the floor.

A large bottle of ink and some pens stood upon it, and a row
of old book-shelves held a store of shabby-looking books. Two
pretty work-boxes stood on the table, and a basket of apples and
an old-fashioned china jug full of brilliant winter leaves. A peat
fire burned low on a flagged hearth, and Shana knelt before it
and began to take turf logs from a large wicker basket by the
fireside and set them on their ends on the tiles.

Rosheen came and knelt beside her, and they laid their heads
together.

" Shana, why did you say you hoped Major Batt would make
choice of you ? " said the younger sister in a whisper of reproach
and awe.

" Because, darling, I should be able to fight my battle better
than you," said Shana.

" Flora thinks you meant that you would accept him."

" I am sorry, then ; but she ought to know me better. I
merely said what occurred to me to say."

They were silent a few minutes, each feeling the sympathy of
the other, and then Rosheen said :

" O Shana ! if Shanganagh Farm were only let ! That would
bring us a little income of our own, and we need not feel so
dreadfully when she talks about the children."

" Even in that case we should still be dependent," said Shana ;
" though, of course, it wduld be better than nothing. But no-
body is coming to take Shanganagh while the times are so bad,
and I fear, I fear the times are not likely to mend."

Shanganagh was a farm on an upper level of the mountain,
about half a mile from The Rath. It was a part of a property left
to the girls by their father, and had been lying unlet for the last
two years. All the land belonging to them except this lay in
disturbed districts, and it was the last blow to the sisters when
Shanganagh was left on their hands.

" Nobody is going to take Shanganagh," repeated Shana.
' The people are all flitting to America, and this place is so far
out of the world."

" What are we to do then, Shana? "

" Something," said Shana with a frown, and kissed her sister

A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Jan.,

hastily and stood up. And Rosheen said no more just then.
She did not always know what to make of Shana.

Then they rose and went up a few steps to their bedroom,
a very large room, plainly furnished, but adorned with all the
little odds and ends of prettiness that girls love, with two white
beds in opposite corners, and a tiny crib in between for the use
of their eldest niece, who was the darling of the voung aunts.
Here they assumed their well-worn black silk frocks and the
simple pearl ornaments left them by their mother, and returned
to chat by their sitting-room fire till it was time to go down-
stairs for dinner.

Alister Fingall, sitting at the foot of his dinner-table, seemed
for the first few minutes to be still living in the book that had
enchained him all day. He was a slight, fair man with dreamy
eyes and a sweet, lazy smile. In the company of others he re-
quired time to come to the surface of the conversation. After he
had eaten his soup his eyes rested with pleasure on the fresh
faces of his young sisters, gleaming and glowing with the pure,
cool tints which are produced by exercise and mountain air.

"Any news in the village, girls?" he asked. " I hear you
have travelled half the county to-day."

" No news," said Shana, " except that Betty Macalister talks
of giving up her holding and emigrating. She cannot see her
way to paying her rent."

A shade crossed Alister's face.

"Betty must not go; anybody but Betty. Who is her land-
lord, by the way."

" Major Batt," said Rosheen, with a stolen glance at Lady
Flora.

" She can go to the Land Court now like others," said Alister,
"and get her rent reduced, if it be too high."

" I must say," said Shana, " that I don't think Major Batt is to
be particularly blamed in this matter, for Betty seems to think
that she and Nancy are unable, on any terms, to manage their
land."

Lady Flora gave Shana a glance of approval.

"Major Batt is a most worthy gentleman," she said, "and,
unlike some others, will be able to stand against the worst
attacks of the Land Court. His fortune is too substantial to
be undermined by any number of defaulting tenants."

"'Others,' meaning your unhappy husband," laughed Alis-
ter. " What a pity we were not all born to an inheritance in
the three per cents like you, Flora!"

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 519

Lady Flora arranged her bracelets and said nothing, and
the children came into the room for their share of dessert.
There were six of them, the eldest being Duck, a little maiden
of eight, who walked straight up to her Aunt Shana and fixed
a pair of inquisitive eyes on her face.

" Where were you all day, Shana? The house is not nice
when you are out all day."

"What will you do when I go away altogether, Duck?"

" I will go with you," said Duck emphatically, and dived
with her head under Shana's elbow.

" Duck, you nearly upset Aunt Shana's raisins into her lap! "
said her father.

" It was Shana's own hand that was shaking, papa," said
Duck. " I saw it before I poked her with my head."

That night the wind roared as usual round The Rath, coming
down with many a swoop and rush from that near, overhang-
ing mountain, and hurtling strangely over the girls' low, slant-
roofed rooms. A sound as of blowing of organ-pipes was going
on in the chimney, and Shana and Rosheen lay awake listening
to the rude, familiar music, and Duck lay sound asleep in her
crib between them.

" Shana," said Rosheen, in a pause of the wind, " why does
Flora dislike Willie Callender?"

"Say Mr. Callender, Rosheen. It is not nice, dear, to call
young men by their Christian names."

" But we know him so well. What does Flora see in him
to dislike?"

" He has no money in the three per cents," said Shana
grimly.

"O Shana!"

" Nothing but an honorable name and a profession," con-
tinued Shana; "so what is there for any one to like about
him ?"

" I should think," said Rosheen, " that when a young fellow
has such a pleasant face and such a kind, gentlemanly manner
any one might get on without disliking him."

"Well, dear, he is nothing to us, so we had better not talk
about him."

" I am sure he thinks a great deal of you, Shana."

But Shana pretended to be asleep.

Rosheen was soon asleep in reality, and, after lying long
awake thinking, Shana got up and, lighting her lamp, dressed

52O A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Jan.,

herself. Passing by Duck's bed, she held the light above the
little face, and then knelt beside the child and kissed her ten-
derly.

" Eat your bread, my darling?" she murmured in an ag-
grieved whisper. " Stand in your light? Encroach on your lit-
tle worldly inheritance ? No, my Duck, your Shana has more
pride for herself, more love for you than that ! Come, then,
Shana, and try what the storm will tell you this lively night!"

She passed into the sitting-room and closed the door of the
sleeping-chamber softly behind her. Shading her lamp and
rousing up the fire, she opened a drawer in the old school-
room table and took out some paper and pens. A cup of
strong tea stood ready on the hearth to scare away the natural
sleep from her young eyes. Having drunk this, she settled her-
self at the table and listened for inspiration in the hurtling of
the wind.

"Rosheen was right," she said. "There ought to be love
in it. But how can I write on such a subject?" As she lis-
tened a tale of love and sorrow and struggling grew out of
the sobbing voices round the window and came to her. A
smiling face with fair curls, a manly young face, a cheerful
voice came across her thoughts not the sort of hero for a
harrowing tale.

" I must make my hero exactly the reverse of that vision,"
she said with a smile, and then, as the wind bullied on through
the trees and piped weird ditties through the ancient sashes,
Shana drooped her head on her hands and struggled with a
serious and unexpected difficulty that of keeping a certain liv-
ing individuality out of the interesting tale she was hoping to
write.

TO BE CONTINUED.

1887.] THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CONVENTION. 521

THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CONVENTION.

THE Episcopalians in this country form a most respectable
body ; and, as they are of a religious character, they ought to
influence public opinion, and produce a conservative effect upon
the nation. To a certain extent they should have the credit of
such a beneficial influence. We are glad when we hear them
announcing any correct principles or expressing a belief in any
of the truths of the Christian creed. Still, we must admit that
from the point of doctrine they are most unsatisfactory. Some-
times we hear them proclaim articles of faith ; but when we look
for the practice which should follow such profession we are dis-
appointed. Sometimes we are led to hope that they will, when
they meet in convention, assert some principles which might
lead the sincere to the knowledge of the whole truth ; but just
when we expect to hear something certain, we listen and hear
nothing but unmeaning generalities. They beautifully draw
near to the boundaries of a Christian profession, and then
quickly, with an assumption of dignity, draw back. They will
sometimes defend a practice which is in accordance with Catho-
lic belief, and we might look to see them standing by our side in
the battle with infidelity. But whatever they profess they are
unwilling to be found in alliance with us. Some of them will
even turn against us in contradiction to the principles they
teach. And the reason of this inconsistency is to be found in
the fact that, whatever they call themselves, they are essentially
a Protestant body. Each of their members is as independent as
is the whole body. Their ministers and their bishops have only
the power of their personal influence. They do not agree in
matters of faith, and even when they recite the same creeds each
one has his own interpretation of them. It could not be other-
wise. God alone can make unity ; and there is only one divine
body on earth which possesses it. With all its pretensions, and
with due justice to all its merits, the Episcopal Church is per-
haps most distinguished by the fact that it embraces under one
name the most widely differing beliefs. In some of their churches
doctrines are taught which are contradictory of those which are
professed in other churches ; and yet they agree to let every man
have his own liberty. One minister puts on vestments which are
those of the Catholic Church, and professes to celebrate Mass.

522 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CONVENTION. [Jan.,

Another minister of equal authority declares his brother to be an
idolater. Yet both are good Episcopalians, and enjoy " the
liberty wherewith Protestantism has made them free." The best
way to settle disputes is to let every one do as he chooses ; and
this is the true Episcopalian way. There is a minister in good
standing in New York who has spoken of our adorable Lord as if
he were a mere man, and has criticised his words and deeds. Yet
no one dares to try him for heresy because, as a churchman of
the High kind informed us, there was no way to detect and de-
fine heresy. These remarks introduce the few words we have to
say about the convention. It was, as far as we can see, worthy
of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

The Convention opened with much ceremony. According
to the journal, a crucifer led the procession. In the old times we
never heard of such a minister, and we are very glad the Episco-
palians have found him, even though he bears a Latin name.
The sermon at the opening of the deliberations was preached
by Bishop Bedell. It is a most remarkable one. It informs us
that " the church to which he belongs has existed for six thou-
sand years," that his ministry has been in existence for the same
period of time, and that " the sacraments have been the divinely
ordained means by which men have been acknowledged as mem-
bers of the family of God beyond the memory of man." He tells
us that "the Passover was in every sense a sacrament," that " the
sacrifices ordained by God in the patriarchal church were of the
nature of a sacrament," and that when Christ came "the faith
was not changed, and those whose hearts were one in Christ
Jesus learned that forms are not of the substance of religion, and
may and ought to be unified in such wise as to produce peace and
love among brethren." He says that the theory of Darwin had
nothing to do with this; and that " he knows of no principle of
natural selection which could have produced such a constant se-
ries of events." We confess we do not understand these re-
marks. We do not see how the Jewish and the Christian faith
were the same, and we are sure that the Episcopalian Church
is not six thousand years old. Fortunately or unfortunately,
neither Adam, nor Noe, nor Abraham knew anything of it.
Still, the bishop might as well claim this great antiquity, as
claim to be in any way a representative of the Catholic Church.

Proceeding upon this great claim, one of the first movements
of the deputies was to change the name of their church. How
so very old a church came to have a false name is quire strange.
A resolution was offered that " the name Protestant Episcopal is

1887.] THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CONVENTION. 523

too narrow and exclusive a designation of a branch of the one
Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and should be expunged."
Another resolution was "that this church in the United States
by her descent from the Ecclesia Anglicana is the Ecclesia Ameri-
cana, and therefore should be called 'the American Catholic
Church.'' We always like the use of Latin, but we do not see
the sequence. The " Ecclesia Anglicana" might not be the Ca-
tholic Church, and it might have offspring which, even accord-
ing to Episcopalians, are not churches. We humbly beg to state
that the reasoning is not conclusive. However, it was not per-
mitted to these churchmen to change their name, as the majority
of the house was opposed to it. We sympathize with the mem-
bers of this " Ecclesia Americana "; but, as Bishop Bedell said,
" forms are not of the substance of religion, and ought to be uni-
fied." We would advise them not to despair, as the happy day
may come, and in this country a man may call himself anything.
The name Catholic covering any species of Protestantism would
be a strange anomaly. Perhaps the crucifer, were he well di-
rected, might lead to this in some way.

Another resolution which seems extraordinary to us, though
no doubt well meant, was the proposition to welcome to their
unity all mankind and any who would conform to a few condi-
tions, just the most simple in the world. We give the text be-
cause it was queer, though it did not pass:

"The Church is also willing to receive into union any congregation of
Christian people who will give satisfactory pledges touching these four
points to wit :

" i st. That they' accept the definitions of the faith as set forth by the
undisputed general councils.

" 2d. That they will have, and continue to have, a ministry of aposto-
lic succession, given either hypothetically or absolutely.

" 3d. That their members will receive Confirmation at the hands of a
bishop ; and

"4th. That they will use only valid forms in the administration of the
two great sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist."

It is queer because no body on the face of the earth which has
"a ministry of apostolic succession" recognizes that of the
Episcopal Church ; and, secondly, because we fear the Protes-
tants who do not believe in the apostolic succession will not
run to them in large numbers.

Of the same nature was the resolution offered by Rev. Dr.
Phillips Brooks :

" Resolved, That the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal

524 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CONVENTION. [Jan.,

Church sends cordial greetings to the assembly of the Congregational
Church now in session in this city, and expresses its devout hope that our
deliberations, though separately conducted, may minister together to the
glory of God and the advancement of our common Christianity."

Upon this resolution there was a discussion which became
quite animated. One gentleman said that "it was an approval
of a schism from the Catholic Church." Another remarked that
it was "the place of this branch of the Holy Catholic Church
to make efforts to bring back again those who have gone off."
Another member thought " this was an invidious discrimination
against our Unitarian brethren, who were also in session in Chi-
cago." The Rev. Dr. Harris made the following appropriate
remarks :

" Mr. President, a person of high authority in the Holy Catholic Church
wrote, many years ago, ' There are differences of administration, but it is the
same Lord,' and ' It is the same God that worketh all in all ' ; and if any one
holds the doctrine of the Incarnation as the very fundamental doctrine of
Christianity, he is a Christian brother, albeit his 'administration' may be
modelled otherwise than our own, and we may stretch out to him the hand
of Christian brotherhood. It seems to me that those who speak so con-
stantly of the Holy Catholic Church, and would apply that title exclusively
to themselves, would do well to remember that the whole Western Church
is in a state of schism. There is not a correct copy of the creed called the
Nicene set forth for use in the whole Western Church."

Finally, in place of the original resolution, the following was
carried unanimously :

"Resolved, The House of Bishops concurring, that we send our Congre
gational brethren, now in this city, our cordial greeting, and beg them to
unite with us in prayers for the peace and unity of Christendom."

We do not hear that the Congregationalists sent back any
message, nor that they were flattered by the notice taken of
them. If they pray for Christian unity they will do so, no
doubt, in their own way, and invite the Episcopalians to come to
them. On matters of faith their platform is equally broad, and
in matters of discipline it is broader.

The House of Bishops seem to have at heart the effort to
draw to the Episcopal Church any and all of the Protestant
bodies. So in the fulness of their charity they publish a declara-
tion, first attacking, as a matter of course, the Bishop of Rome.
They do not desire any unity with the Catholic Church, but
they wish to throw the shield of their protection over those

1887.] THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CONVENTION. 525

who protest against it, using their private judgment without
limit. They do not seek "to absorb other communions, but
rather to co-operate with them on the basis of a common faith
and order." All they ask is that they shall accept what they
believe, and let them teach them ; that they shall hold the episco-
pate of Elizabeth and Barlow to be essential to the church. It
is very little for them to ask, and we do not see why they should
ask more. They only demand that all Protestants shall be-
come Episcopalians. When shall we see that blessed day ? There
is only one thing which strikes us unfavorably when they de-
mand an " historic episcopate." They should amend this by
beginning their history with their great queen and founder or
their illustrious grandfather, Henry VIII. We doubt if Protes-
tants generally will be pleased with this kind of episcopate, so
much so as to go after it. We candidly admit that the whole
*' declaration " sounds like words without meaning. It reminds
us of the one juror who called the eleven obstinate because they
would not adopt his opinion. We recommend to the venerable
body the remarks of the Rev. Mr. Davenport, which are enter-
taining as well as instructive :

"The Protestant theory of theology has been from the very inception
I speak historically that true theology is the evolution of the individual
mind. If this be so, then there is no standard of truth, and truth becomes
only what a man troweth or thinketh, as Home Tooke has said in the Di-
versions of Purley? published in 1776. Now, sir, this man comes and asks
you this question. What answer shall you make ? If the house will par-
don me, I trust it will not be too undignified if I recount a personal expe-
rience. I was once talking with an Irish Jesuit father, sharp, shrewd, a*id
cunning. I was trying to do the act which a great many Episcopal ministers
do, of proving to him that I was a Catholic, but used a Protestant Episco-
pal Prayer- Book. * Well,' said he, ' my friend, let me give you a little advice.
If you send your card up to me in a public-house, John Smith, don't you
expect me, when I meet you, to believe that your name is Wm. Brown ; if
you Protestant Episcopalians believe you are Catholic, do not send out
your card labelled Protestant.' Well, I am free to confess that it was
rather a hard argument for me to answer. Of course I proceeded to ex-
plain to him that we did not mean anything by it, that we really were Ca-
tholics. Of course I explained to him that we were Catholic in theory,
although we might be Protestant in name; but his only answer was : ' Don't
send out your card labelled Protestant.' "

How a Protestant body can ask others to give up their dis-
tinctive opinions and embrace its doctrines on the principle of
authority is a mystery to us.

There were many discussions in regard to the alteration of

526 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CONVENTION. [Jan.,

the Prayer-Book and the discipline of bishops and presbyters.
We believe nothing- was definitely settled, but that the most im-
portant questions were referred to the next convention. At any
rate, these matters have no general interest. There was some
deliberation on " marriage and divorce," and on the subject of
" Christian education." Some good and true things were said,
and we wait with patience to see if the action of this convention
will have any permanent results. Both these subjects touch the
great evils of our day, and any religious body which has a belief
of its own, and any desire to propagate it, cannot speak with any
uncertain words. Our divine Lord says: "He that gathereth
not with me scattereth." " He that is not with me is against
me."

In regard to the subject of " marriage and divorce " several
canons were presented, none of which were adopted. One pro-
posed to adopt the impediments of the Mosaic Law, as in Levi-
ticus, xviiith chapter. Another forbids divorce except (or adul-
tery or fornication, and permits re-marriage only to the innocent
party. These canons were to be enforced by ecclesiastical penal-
ties. No legislation was, however, deemed expedient, and all the
result of the debate was the adoption of the following resolution:

"Resolved, Toward restoration of American civilization, decaying al-
ready at its root ; for the promotion of stability in church and state; for
the protection of social purity and order; for the sake of natural good
morals ; in advancement of the glory of our Lord Christ, who is head over
all things to his body, which is the church, that this house will not aban-
don the subject of marriage and divorce until legislation upon it be effected
in accordance with the law of God as set forth in nature and revealed in the
Word; and that it appoint a committee, to consist of three presbyters, of
whom its president shall be one, to sit during the next three years, take
into consideration the whole subject, and report to the next General Con-
vention as early as possible in its session."

This is surely encouraging. Three years hence there may be
another postponement. One would think that a body calling
itself " Ecclesia Americana " might have definite rules on the funda-
mental question of marriage.

The bishops in their pastoral make the following declaration:

" Separation in any form should be regarded, and is regarded by the
church, as a last and dreadful expedient, only to be justified by the gravest
considerations, and, as it were, conceded to the unfortunate beings whose
position constrains the grant of such relief. But no separation carries with
it the right to seek another alliance ; nor, except in one case, can a subse-

1887.] THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CONVENTION. 527

quent marriage be permitted. To parties who have been lawfully joined to-
gether, according to the will of God, divorce with permission to marry again
is not conceded by the church, unless the ground of divorce be adultery,
and in that case the guilty party is absolutely excluded from marrying again
during the lifetime of the other, and to the innocent party only is permis-
sion conceded to contract another marriage."

We would respectfully ask the bishops if they believe that
adultery breaks altogether the bond of marriage. If it does, why
is not the guilty person free to marry? And we would commend
to their study the words of St. Paul, i. Cor. vii. 39: "A woman
is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth : but if her husband
die, she is at liberty." The words of our Lord are even more
plain : " Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for for-
nication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery; and he
who shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery" (St.
Matt. xix. 9). These words of our Lord, according to the uni-
versal explanation of the church, permit a separation for adultery,
but affirm that death only can solve the tie of marriage. Any
other interpretation would make the context absurd and directly
contradict the language of the apostle : " The law hath dominion
over a man as long as he liveth. The woman also is bound to the
law whilst her husband liveth. Wherefore if she be with another
man while her husband liveth, she shall be called an adulteress "
(Rom. vii. 1-3). To say, as the bishops seem to do, that the mar-
riage tie can be dissolved by the sin of either party is to put
divorce into the hands of the vilest, who can free themselves from
their wives or husbands whenever they choose to be unfaithful.
And, as we remarked, the tie cannot be broken for the innocent
unless it is broken for the guilty. It is not a question of disci-
pline. It is simply a question whether there shall be a marriage
or not. Surely a man, according to the law of Christ, cannot
have two wives at the same time, nor can a woman have twohus-
ban.ds.

We wish that the Episcopal Church would make some laws in
regard to marriage which its ministers would feel bound to obey.
It is a source of many evils, and often a grief to us, that Catholics
who are forbidden to marry for just reasons by their own pastors,
who are even prevented by serious impediments, have only to go
to Episcopal ministers to be married. This is not true of all
the ministers, but surely there ought to be some law. Such dis-
obedient Catholics know that their marriage is sinful, and some-
times null. We have known one of the principal Episcopal
churches in this city opened for the solemn celebration of a mar-

528 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CONVENTION. [Jan.,

riage between a Catholic and an infidel unbaptized who had hardly
a belief in a God.

The subject of education received some notice also. With
much that was said in the debates we are pleased, and would be
consoled if such discussion would lead to action. The bishops
in their address utter these appropriate words :

"The Church of God must change her attitude, must take higher,
stronger, more definite ground in regard to the education of the young life
entrusted to her, as well as of the young life in the broader sphere of the
nation. She has a message to deliver, a duty to discharge in this matter.
Too long already have both been held in abeyance. At the close of this first
century of her own and of the country's history, so full of solemn warnings
as well as of great achievements, let her voice go forth, declaring that,
whatever others may do, she cannot without protest and resistance allow
the salt of Christ's Gospel to be cast out, little by little, from the education
of the children of this land ; that she cannot without disloyalty to her di-
vine commission acquiesce in what has grown to be the policy of the day
on this subject, which, because of its inability to agree upon the fundamen-
tals of religion to be taught in the public schools, has lapsed into the peril-
ous heresy of modern secularism, that these schools can best do their pro-
per work when giving no religious teaching whatever. We are the friends
of these schools, sustained by such liberal expenditure; and because we are
so, we desire all the more to see them placed on the only basis which will
be at once enduring and beneficent. It is not to be denied that we are con-
fronted with tendencies in the training of the children of the church and of
the nation which indicate changes in the feeling and opinion of this genera-
tion as dangerous as they are profound changes which strike at the church's
hold upon the loyalty and love of the children now being nurtured in her
bosom, and threaten to inflict an incurable wound upon the moral interests
of the nation. We are drifting into an apostasy from the eternal law of
righteousness, the supreme factor in the making of public and private
character, which can end only in an eclipse of the noblest hopes and
franchises of a humanity redeemed by the Precious Blood of the Son of
God."

These words are strong and high-sounding. But what do they
mean? It is evident that they condemn the public schools as
they are at present administered. Do they mean that their
people ought not to frequent them until religion be taught in
them ? Will they command their members to take their chil-
dren from them ? Or will they wait until in some way an ex-
purgated Christianity, very little more than deism, can b - taught
within their walls? For this, even, we think they will have to
wait a long time. And in the interim what will become of their
children ?

If we are not mistaken, the Episcopal Convention some
time ago passed a resolution recommending parochial schools.

1887.] A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. 529

Will any one tell us if many have been established ? And will
any one explain why Episcopalians are generally in favor of the
public schools, and take sides with the unbeliever and the athe-
ist on the subject of education, seeming- at least to favor the
divorce of religion from education ? We venture to hope that
the words of this pastoral will have some effect.

Before we close these few remarks we will express some re-
gret that no rules of discipline were made to govern those min-
isters who profess to say Mass and to hear confessions. Does
the Episcopal Church permit any of its ministers to put on the
vestments of the Catholic Church, and to adopt ceremonies which
are expressly forbidden by the Book of Common Prayer? They
must give an answer to the question. If they say nothing, then,
in effect, they say yes. If so, what is the use of the Prayer-Book
or of the Articles of religion ?

As to confessions, it is a very serious and practical question.
If Episcopal ministers are to hear confessions ought not some
rules to be adopted for the dignity, safety, and, we will say, de-
cency of the ceremony? We well know that their absolutions
ate utterly invalid ; but all the more is it unsafe for any man or
woman to trust his or her conscience in their hands unless strin-
gent rules be enforced.

What we have said has been said in the spirit of justice and
true Christian charity. We will hope for better things at the
next General Convention, and in the meantime we will hope that
even the little that has been resolved will be put into practice.

A "BLACK" CHRISTiMAS.

IT began to look like it towards the middle of December.
We were enjoying our afternoon tea on a certain Thursday
when some one came in with the news that a very dense fog was
settling, gradually creeping about Kensington and blotting out
all prominent objects from view.

" It looks like the thing the oldest inhabitant talks about," said

"Suppose it should engulf us for Christmas." Two of our

party knew a London fog only theoretically, and were inclined 10

be cheered by the prospect of enjoying the genuine article this

season; but alas! the others had experienced every variety of

"black" weather, and knew too well what would be the result

even in the midst of the most hilarious Christmas cheer and

VOL. XLIV. 34

530 A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. [Jan.,

good- will. The evening of that day deepened our forebodings;
the next morning the dark mist had increased, and I am inclined
to think that all those who remember London in that special
Christmas-tide will bear witness that never was such a terrible
envelopment of gloom as greeted our little world the day before
Christmas eve. We had made some peculiarly American pre-
parations for the day ; stockings were to be hung up and the ser-
vants' presents given in Transatlantic fashion. But here was an
unexpected misery. Who could be cheerful Christmas day with
gaslight indoors and an absolute veil of blackness shutting out
every object from view without. The records of notable events
go to prove that in more than forty years such a fog had not
been known. Leaving my own house to make a call in the im-
mediate neighborhood I found myself absolutely lost, and that
peculiar sensation which all who have experienced it understand,
of losing calculation of time or place, points of the compass and
distance, etc., overcame rne, and staggering blindly on in this
dreadful vapor I found myself at last at least a quarter of a mile
out of my way, having had no consciousness of anything but
movement, carried along in the whirl of the black mist in and out
of which now and then came the flash of a lantern or the sudden
sound of a horse's hoofs as some cabman pulled up his steed,
against which I was stumbling. After that I made no attempt
to penetrate the mysteries of the vapor, but there settled upon
our minds a conviction that to spend Christmas in London under
these circumstances would be to deprive our little circle of all
its literary or artistic vitality for months to come. Decisions for
what we called a " wander" were always easily made, since there
were to be only the suggestion of a destination, some careless
discourse while a railway map was studied, a few desirable ele-
ments or qualifications jotted down, and behold we were en
route; light-hearted travellers who knew or cared only for a spice
of novelty and adventure set up against a background of some-
thing fair in the landscape and interesting in the traditions of the
place to which we wandered.

I have no remembrance of our deciding to go to the cathe-
dral city of Winchester for that Christmas when we left Lon-
don. It is true that somebody had been reading aloud Henry
Esmond, and our enthusiasms had found expression the week
previous ; that we had skirted Kensington Square, looking up at
the yellow stone houses, which are said to be quite unchanged
since the days of the Castlewoods, and our talk had been of the
hero dear to our hearts who had ridden forward out of Kensing-

1887.] A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. 531

ton Square, journeying- down to " Walcote," Lady Castlewood's
quaint manor-house near to Winchester city. And had not Es-
mond left his horse at " The George Inn " ? And was not " The
George " a place of traditional importance? Winchester teemed
with the story and romance of kings. Winchester had been the
Camelot of King Arthur. In that same city had not Queen
Emma walked triumphantly over the red-hot ploughshares?
There had Canute hung up his crown after commanding the
waves to do his bidding. There, on a quiet bridge, the " White
Ladies" were wont moonlight nights to appear; there had the
curfew been rung- and the Domesday Book compiled, and more-
over about the ancient city cluster associations far less remote
than all of these, but scarcely of less interest, since they suggest
the form and features of Jane Austen, whose work, carelessly
received more than half a century ago, was just now the talk of
certain London circles.

To Winchester, therefore, we took our way, qualifying the
decision to remain there only by a reserve in case the fog should
hold the town also in its drear embrace. But we had not been
twenty miles out of London before the vapors seemed to roll
away. With them all our depression vanished, and it was a
merry little party who arrived in the biting cold of a starlit
night in the old cathedral city. Quaintness in architecture being
the first necessity in the mind of one of our company, we chose
an inn which might have been a monastery in its day, and
which certainly presented now as curious a mediaeval aspect
as the heart of technical artist could desire. But the service was
wretchedly inferior. We languished through an evening meal;
we retired to barracks of sleeping apartments, cold and comfort-
less in spite of heavy oaken carvings, deep window-seats, and
yawning fire-places. It was Christmas eve, and we determined
that Christmas day should see us elsewhere, for this was assuredly
not "The George" of Esmond's knowledge. Of all Christmas
mornings it seems to me that which dawned on us in Winchester
was the brightest, the crispest and clearest I have ever known.
The air as I went along the old streets to early Mass seemed
fairly vibrating with tidings of good-will, of cheerfulness and
vitality. The old year would certainly die vigorous if this fine,
crisp weather would continue. The church to which I went,
quite by chance, was one little known to tourists I fancy, and yet
it had all the charm of mediaeval antiquity in form ; indeed a sug-
gestion of earlier days, of having been the crypt of some ancient
edifice. A band of quaintly-dressed school children passed under

S3 2 A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. [Jan.,

the low-arched doorway just in advance of me. Their round,
blooming faces, encased in little caps, looked the most fitting of
Christmas countenances ; the smile which the season evokes on
every human face, I believe, who recognizes the meaning of the
day, touching the childish lips and cheeks, bringing dimples and
that charming air of suppressed merriment which is so captivat-
ing in small people. Two by two they demurely passed in, tak-
ing their places in the rear of the church, presently caroling forth
a happy-hearted sort of hymn while the sunlight of the winter's
morning streamed in through the painted windows, bringing into
prominence the quaint old stone carvings, the faded frescoes, fall-
ing aslant upon the altar itself, while the wreaths and arches of
green holly caught beams enough of the morning's glory to
make them look thoroughly what they meant to be emblems of
good cheer and peace on earth to men of good-will. It was a
simple, comforting service. The priest addressed a few words to
his flock, thanked them for certain Christmas liberality they had
displayed, and put himself, as it were, tenderly in sympathy with
their feelings in this happy festival, and then the organ played
the Christmas carol once again, the children's voices were raised,
and I went out filled with that protective sense which our ser-
vices in any land or on any occasion produce in the loneliest
or weariest of hearts.

To " The George Inn " we took our way about ten o'clock on
Christmas morning. Down a queer old street we went, passing
under an archway to the entrance.

We fancied Esmond loitering here in the flagged courtyard
of " The George" for a moment, filled, no doubt, by thoughts
of Beatrix and his fair mistress, of his lord laid dead upon that
cruel field of voluntary battle ; and it was with a confusing sense
that the associations of romance were the most real after all that
we turned to answer the polite inquiries addressed us by a pomp-
ous head- waiter, who presently conducted us up a staircase at the
left and down a wide, somewhat gloomy hall to a suite of rooms
which contained an imposing sitting-room overlooking a fine
street and displaying the usual works of art, horsehair furniture,
large centre-table, and bright coal fire which are to be found in
every country inn in England. Lord Nelson dying confronted
Queen Victoria in her coronation robes, and a hunting morning
glowed finely in a colored print above the chimney-piece. I have
often thought of that waiter at "The George." He was not un-
like an attendant whom Mr. Aldrich once so cleverly described
in a Dover street hotel. He ushered us into this sitting-room

1887.] A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. 533

with the air plainly of a man who would form his estimate of us
solely upon the manner in which we accepted the luxuries of the
hotel. Tall, portly, calm, and dispassionate, he measured us
every one, and from that first moment we yielded him a submis-
sion which only grew less the very last half-hour of our stay, for
at that late moment his whole attitude and manner towards us
was changed. The rash generosity of one member of the party
in repeating- a fee and casting from his own purse a guinea sud-
denly transformed John James into what might have been our
slave had we remained longer, but, alas! at that moment we were
starting from the archway of the door, and we have only been
able to speculate as to what we might have demanded of that
abject menial, a last vis ; on of whom we had standing in the door-
way, gazing upon us with a smile that was positively fond and a
manner which was almost maudlin.

It was somewhat difficult, in spite of the clear, cold weather, to
create a domestic feeling of Christmas-tide over the dinner which
we left John James to provide. Every one knows how hard it is
to be spontaneous on such an occasion on the proper subjects, but
there was hilarity enough, and the banquet at an end, we started
out for a saunter through the town. The grand old town, with
its narrow streets dignified by solemn architecture, its wide and
open spaces, the central of which is dominated by that cathedral
which has witnessed so much that is romantic, picturesque, pa-
thetic, and tragic in England's history. The sombre tones of
winter were here and there modified by the perennial green of ivy
and other foliage of the season, and at no time in the English
country is there an idea of gloom to be connected merely with
the cold months of the year. The steep high street of the town
has a solemn look of the past which even Christmas-tide did not
brighten ; but it was on that very afternoon that we saw members
of a company of people who were to provide for us next night
such an evening's entertainment as I would go many miles to
enjoy again. Two of these people, a man and a woman, were
standing near the open doorway of a sort of hall, and their atti-
tude, or a something dramatic in their manner, suggested to our
minds the strolling players we had once seen and, oh, how
heartily enjoyed! in another count)'. I forget which one of our
very indolently contented party spoke to the gentleman, but I
remember that we were soon in possession of the interesting fact
that he was to perform Macbeth the following night. There were
no programmes, but he mentioned to us, with a sort of Macready
manner, that the play would be given with Lock's music. Now,

534 A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. [Jan.,

as very seldom at Drury Lane, or Booth's Theatre in New York,
or possibly the Chicago Opera House, could we hope to see
Macbeth so lavishly put upon the stage, we decided immediately
to secure places for this, to us, unique entertainment, and, being
a party of four people, we spent two shillings at once for reserved
seats.

I fear that comments on the traditionary greatness of Win-
chester Cathedral would be superfluous, since the subject has
been treated of so often and in so masterly a manner; but it is
not possible to pass by unrecorded the feeling of solemnity and
awe with which we found ourselves standing on the very ground
which had been consecrated for one of the first Christian churches
in Great Britain. The seal of St. Augustine was laid upon the
place. Here were, buried those Saxon kings of Wessex who held
the faith of Christ in its integrity ; here Edward the Confessor
was crowned, and here WilHam of Wykeham knelt many an hour
in that prayer for enlightenment with which he began and ended
his great work of education of the English people. It is not
possible for the Catholic heart to rest tranquil when standing
within an English cathedral consecrated, as is that of Winchester,
by memories which can turn to dust and ashes the uses of to-day.
All present associations seem to drift away from eye and mind,
all appeal to the imagination and fancy which the service here
presented might make elsewhere is of no avail. Back hundreds
of years the Catholic intelligence must travel, and, behold! it is a
king crowned and anointed by the successor of St. Peter whom
we see here ; it is a saint whose prayers we seem to hear; it is a
Catholic bishop and a scholar the man of progress and learning,
ne of the innumerable blazing torches lighted by the church in
ages which indeed would otherwise have been dark whose pre-
sence seems to animate the place.

Of the original edifice very little remains, but the new cathe-
dral, as it is called, was begun in 1079. It was completed in 1093,
when the monks, in solemn procession and in presence of nearly
all the bishops and abbots of England, entered to offer thanks to
God on taking possession of the sacred building. In length the
cathedral of Winchester exceeds any other in Great Britain, and
if the vast enclosure seen on entering the western part produces
an impression of coldness from the lack of color, one soon learns
to appreciate the exquisite beauty of form in arch and pier, the
balustrade of the triforium producing an exquisite effect, whether
viewed from a distance or near by. Cromwell and his troops
did not, of course, pass by Winchester in their devastations, but

i88;.] A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. 535

they defaced less here, no doubt, than elsewhere, since the traces
of their raid were soon done away with. In Winchester cathe-
dral the honored dead represent lives and periods as various and
as remote from each other as the centuries which separate them.
Think of the transition from William Rufus to Mrs. Montagu,
founder of the Bas-Bleus in the London of the last century; from
Beaufort, Shakspere's cardinal, to Jane Austen, whose gentle life
of genius ended in the town of Winchester, 1817! Izaak Walton's
tomb is here, with an inscription written by Bishop Ken, and which
runs as follows :

"Alas! he's gone before,
Gone to return no more.
Our panting breasts aspire
After their aged sire,
Whose well-spent life did last
Full ninety years and past ;
But now he hath begun
That which will ne'er be done.
Crowned with eternal bliss,
We wish our souls with his."

Dr. Hawkins, who was son-in-law to that " prince of fisher-
men," was prebendary of Winchester in the latter part of the
seventeenth century, and Walton died at his house, not far from
the Itchen, so that the neighborhood still resorted to by peace-
fully-minded anglers is full of associations connected with the
genial author of works which will be classics as long as the lan-
guage endures.

From the cathedral to the college seemed a natural transition.
Christmas day found us in almost solitary possession of this inte-
resting public school. We passed under the gateway and found
the porter in his lodge, quite ready to show us through the
college. A day or two before had seen the exodus of boys for
the holidays, and so we wandered about the buildings of this
famous " nursery school " of Great Britain, free to gaze at the
places of master and scholar and brood over the associations
which belong to the college which William of Wykeham founded
as a preparatory place of instruction to his college at Oxford.
King Egbert, it is true, had chosen Winchester as a school for
his son Ethelwulf, and Alfred the Great had received instruction
here from St. S within. Wykeham himself had studied in Win-
chester in a grammar school near the Minster gate, where he
must have formed the idea of establishing a school on an im-
proved and altogether superior model. We are told that the

A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. [Jan.,

first stone was laid in 1387. In 1396 the buildings were com-
pleted. Once under that gateway, a grand procession passed
when Prince Arthur, son of Henry VII., was born in Winchester
Castle; and again when Henry VIII. , accompanied by Charles
V., paid a royal visit to the city and to the college; and, again,
Edward VI. stood in the hall to receive Latin verses written for
the occasion. With the visit of Henry VI II. is associated an-
other special point of interest to the tourist who goes to Win-
chester. In the old palace there exists a hall built by Henry III.
in the thirteenth century, and which now is used as the county
court. Thither we bent our steps chiefly to gaze upon what is
known as the Round Table of King Arthur. It hangs at the
eastern end of the hall above what was formerly the royal seat,
and is simply the round disc of a table painted, as is supposed,
early in the sixteenth century, a double rose red and white in the
centre, above which is the figure of King Arthur. Twenty-four
rays extend from the rose, in each of which is the name of King
Arthur's knights. Tradition asserts that this is the original
table of the blameless king; but as everything of the Arthurian
romance is shrouded in mystery no historian or chronicler is
willing to assert any facts connected with it prior to the reign
of Henry VI. Hardyng alluded to it as " still hanging in Win-
chester," while a Spanish historian present at the marriage of
Philip and Mary alludes to it as a piece of antiquity. Certain
it is that Henry VIII. and his royal visitor examined it with inte-
rest as a relic from some previous epoch. The next visit of roy-
alty to Winchester was that of Henry's daughter, Mary, and her
bridegroom, Philip ; the nuptials were celebrated at the cathedral.
Sixty thousand Spanish grandees and cavaliers attended Don
Philip to the altar, the queen having her own train of ladies and
the principal nobility of England. The Spanish ceremonial at
an end, Don Philip, we are told, took the queen by the hand and
conducted her back to the episcopal palace, the services in the
cathedral having lasted from eleven in the morning until three
in the afternoon. The chair on which Queen Mary sat during a
portion of the service is still shown in the cathedral, it having
been sent to her from Rome for this purpose. A gorgeous ban-
quet, presentations, and dancing occupied the rest of the day and
evening, although it is said that in the suburbs of Winchester
party feeling ran high, and the liveliest of quarrels went on be-
tween the Protestant and Catholic attendants of the royal people.
The next day, however, the Spanish fleet sailed for the coast of
Flanders, some four thousand Spaniards, who had come over

1887.] A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. 537

with Philip, being compelled by the marriage articles of the
queen to return to their own count ry, or at least to pledge them-
selves not to remain in Great Britain. The next day the queen
and her spouse retired to Basinghouse, the residence of Sir Wil-
liam Paulet, created Marquis of Winchester by Edward VI., a
place well known later for its being the refuge of many a pro-
scribed and hunted-down Catholic. During Cromwell's time
this house became a refuge for the royalists. In 1645 Cromwell
writes to Speaker Lenthall that " he thanks God he can give a
good account of Basing," which may be interpreted as meaning
that the Parliamentary troops had stormed the loyal place, re-
ducing it nearly to ruins, while the plunder of the soldiers was
enormous. Not very long ago some skeletons, cannon-balls, and
coins were found by excavators in the neighborhood, supposed
to have been buried there when Basinghouse was taken. A
week after her marriage Queen Mary left Winchester for Wind-
sor Castle, and the place seems to have known her no more.
But Elizabeth visited it later, making use of Basinghouse as a
residence.

We spent the day after Christmas in idle saunterings that
proved very pleasant, since they included walks about the town
and suburbs, down some country roads and lanes such as abound
in the neighborhood. The hedgerows of this part of Hampshire
are especially dear to the lovers of the spring-time, since they are
noted for the early bloom and the shelter they give to the wild
flowers which appear in abundance directly the first frosts of the
season have departed. We reserved a visit to Holy Cross, how-
ever, for the next day, and remembered, as we lingered over our
six o'clock dinner, that we had reserved seats for the performance
of Macbeth.

The strolling player, pure and simple, is supposed to be ex-
tinct in England, but on no less than three occasions was it our
good fortune to come upon types of this class in the profession
which afforded us richest material for studies of human nature
ami the most hilarious amusement. We had seen a company in
Surrey perform a melodrama based on Miss Braddon's novel of
Lndy Audleys Secret, and considered it the very height of bur-
lesque absurdity ; but our acme of enjoyment was reserved for this
' Boxing Night" performance of the immortal William's tragedy
of Macbeth. The performance took place in a sort of hall, the
auditorium having benches of a careless character, on the first one
of which we took our places, beholding a drop-curtain and a stage
rather suggestive of very small amateur theatricals. Lock's music

53$ A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. [Jan.,

is a treat, and as the curtain rolled up disclosing a woodland scene
we could not help wondering how it would fare with these wander-
ing minstrels. Apparently this sylvan grove before us was the
background for the witch scene. Presently there entered a strange,
uncouth individual dressed without the slightest regard for con-
cealing his sex, having a full beard, wearing a vest turned inside
out and drapery made of chintz which did not conceal heavy gray
trousers underneath. He was cross-eyed and had his head bound
in a sort of bandanna handkerchief, and it was with a slight start
of surprise that he began the lines of the first witch, taking hold of
his impromptu petticoat, if I may so call it, and executing a little
mild dance between the dreadful statements concerning the caldron
which he made, and treated us to various dreadful rollings of his
crooked eye and an occasional gleam of angry and irregular teeth.
He presently remarked, "When shall we three meet again?" and,
executing a few more steps in his dance, beckoned another figure
attired much like himself upon the stage, clasped hands with him,
and danced around, muttering things about the thunder, light-
ning, and rain, and, leaving his companion for an instant, he darted
around, appearing by another entrance, and, with a very slight
variation of costume, impersonated witch No. 3. This intimidat-
ing spectacle was followed by the entrance of King Duncan
and -such of his suite as the company could afford for the time
being, the murderer of Donalbain, I may as well mention, being
performed by a very watery-eyed youth, who doubled and quad-
rupled his part throughout the play, becoming to us finally worse
than any ghost of Banquo, since we never knew when he made
an exit how or why or wherefore he was to return and confront
us with a new impersonation, the only indications of change being
the manner in which he wore a short canton-flannel cloak or ex-
changed a velvet cap with a plume like a quill pen in it for a kind of
Roman scarf bandaged about his head, while some of the company
contrived to introduce a statement concerning the part he was
performing, and we knew, for instance, that, instead of Donalbain,
he was one of the three men " who were resolved," or possibly
Fleance, or even Seyton, the attending officer. He was very tall
and very thin and very young, and we concluded that the man-
agement regarded him in the light of an animated stage-property,
and, out of what two of the party insisted upon calling apprecia-
tion of his versatility, he was wildly summoned back by applause
from our bench whenever such a thing was possible, and in his
various characters called before the curtain to be stimulated to
new variety. Perhaps the predominant effect of the performance

1 88;.] A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. 539

was its solemnity. The music began very soon, and all that we
can say of it was that it wandered through the entire performance,
sometimes in uncontrollable bursts of song or melody, at others
like incidental music in the melodrama, ushering on Lady Mac-
beth or her spouse, or the three military people in a sort of First
Empire costume who formed Macbeth's retinue and army, gentle-
men and retainers, etc., etc. Lady Macbeth made her first ap-
pearance fairly flying on to the stage, and did the letter scene so
madly that the dramatist who was in our party declared she mis-
took it for the night- walking horror. She gave her lines with fear-
ful energy, considering that the original text of Shakspere was
followed scrupulously. In fact we concluded that an early British
Museum copy of the play must have furnished these conscien-
tious people with their parts. She was a very haggard-looking
woman, somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age, and
she wore a rather tawdry ball-dress with artificial flowers and
rosettes of ribbon, and her hair was elaborately puffed and frizzed.
Her idea of Lady Macbeth's sentiments regarding her husband
was evidently that of a snappish, irritable wife, and she com-
manded him to the deed of darkness and subsequently jeered at
him in a manner which was simply aggravating. We thought
the murder scene the most interesting until there came that of the
banquet. Although we had already counted up the number of
people in the company, we were hardly prepared for the small
attendance of one guest, and this the person who had performed
the part of Hecate, and who, with but a slight change of cos-
tume, sat at a small kind of restaurant-table, while Lady Macbeth
occupied a large cane-bottomed arm-chair on a platform whence,
when the time came for Banquo's entrance, she acted tragically.
It was rather disheartening to have Banquo enter and, on Mac-
beth's saying " The table's full," to have the guest answer " Here
is a place reserved, sir" ; and Macbeth's tragic " Where? " was a
curious remark considering the very informal character of the com-
pany, while Lady Macbeth's mandate to stand not upon the order
of going, but to go at once, was an invitation which the solitary
guest greeted with intense relief and the utmost agility in disap-
pearing. It was useless after this to expect composure from the
benches during the night-walking scene and the final tragic war-
fare of Macbeth and Macduff; but I well remember the sort of
concert hall manner in which Macbeth cried out " Lay on, Macduff,
and damned be he" with a Pike County sort of manner "that
first cries, Hold, enough ! " accompanying this bit of tragedy
with certain steps of a dance not unlike that of witch No. i.

540 A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. [Jan.,

If we left this hall in a hilarious frame of mind it was not to
be wondered at. nor that some of our company waked the echoes
of "The George " rehearsing- the performance by the aid of the
antimacassars from the sofas of our parlor for drapery of head
and shoulders, while the inimitably burlesque manner of Macbeth
and his bloodthirsty wife, of the witch and the bony Donalbain
were reproduced, one of the party finally making sketches of the
scenes and characters which I have before me now.

I fear, even in spite of John James' withering manner, our
good spirits were not subdued by the dawn of another day, for
we started for Holy Cross hospital in a frame of mind which was
not worthy of the tourist who, as one of us remarked, really and
conscientiously desires to be informed and have his mind im-
proved.

Every one knows how these old hospitals or almshouses of
England were founded, and this one of St. Cross is notable as
being far and away the most interesting of all such foundations
in England. In 1136 Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester,
built the hospital for the maintenance of thirteen men, "decaved
and past their strength." William of Wykeham and Cardinal
Beaufort carried on the charity, greatly increasing it, and add-
ing an "almshouse of noble poverty "; but in the sixteenth cen-
tury the widow of one of the stewards of the hospital destroyed
certain of its ancient charters and grants in order to cover up
her husband's defalcations. After innumerable disputes rules
were drawn up and put into execution, and at present the man-
agement is in the hands of twelve trustees, who elect the thirteen
brethren and govern the institution. To each brother five shill-
ings a week in money is allowed ; a small domicile, consisting
of two rooms and a pantry, with a certain daily allowance of
meat, bread, and beer, while the ancient rule still in practice
provides an extra supply on festival days, plum-porridge and
huge mince-pies. On Good Friday, after service, they all par-
take of a hot liquid known as the u Judas sop," the ceremony
being quite an impressive one. On the feast of Holy Cross,
May 3, doles of wheaten bread are given out to the poor, but. the
provision which is most entertaining or interesting to the tourist,
and which animated our party with a reckless kind of hilarity,
is what is called " The Wayfarers' Dole," almost, the very last
relic of mediasval customs of the kind kept up in England in its
integrity. This, we were told, would consist of a horn of beer
and a slice of bread to all travellers who chose to demand it at
the porter's lodge. One of our company declared that no human

i88;.] A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. 541

respect or false pride should deter him from making this demand,
but when we presented ourselves at the gate leading into a small
court he was rather overcome by the way in which the porter re-
ceived a demand rarely made nowadays, but which was calmly
and firmly insisted upon as a right by this audacious visitor. A
swift Nemesis, however, followed, since the horn of beer and the
slice of bread proved almost impossible to consume, the quality
being abominable and the quantity beyond our friend's capacity
to swallow, while the porter stood by glowering upon our party,
wondering, no doubt, why hunger and thirst had seized us in that
moment and decidedly inclined to let us go no further.

We passed through the gate, whence was a view of buildings
around three sides of a quadrangle, in and out of whose doorways
the brothers were seen coming and going. Beyond was the
church picturesquely grouped, and a glimpse of fertile meadow-
land and grand old trees, a cloister forming one side of the quad-
rangle, and which we learned was one of the best examples of
transition Norman existing in England. It led to the church
built by Henry of Blois, and which has an interior worthy of
the most careful study, the windows, screens, and carvings, the
choir and transepts, displaying various forms and periods in
decoration and architecture extending over three centuries,
while in the hall the master's house and the cloister are evi-
dences of the original building which give both dignity and
grace to the hospital as it now stands. We speedily found an
ancient brother who was glad to show us his own rooms and
conduct us through the buildings, talking with garrulous plea-
santry of his own lite, many years of which had been spent here.
These "decayed gentlemen " always take a great pride in their
hospital, and feel themselves rather better than the Iriends at
home who have not such preferment as enables them to spend
their declining years in the security of a lodging and allowance,
which has its dignity and meaning in ancient custom and tra-
dition. They are curious studies tor the most part; aged men
or women who seem to have lost all sense of the lite that ebbs
and flows without their mediaeval gateways, and who, as it were,
have entered upon an existence which conforms to the customs
of long ago, creating, as it were, a sort of mediaeval centre oi life
and feeling 1 in the very heart of a nineteenth-century town. The
boisterous spirits of our party were subdued in sauntering about
this quiet cloistered retreat. The old boy in his black gown, and
wearing his cross as a proud badge, might have been one of
William of Wykeham's pensioners, although certain decorations

542 A "BLACK" CHRISTMAS. [Jan.,

in his room betrayed that his spirit was or had been a martial
one, and connected with soldiering days as recently as the war
of the Crimea. We idled away an hour or more with him and
drove back over a brown and golden road to Winchester, and
to our farewell dinner at " The George," on which occasion
John James did his very noblest, presenting to our minds a
picture of superb but tolerant compassion for people who ap-
parently cared only to " eat, drink, and be merry," and who
took Christmas time and " The George " in so frank and jovial a
spirit.

It was, I think, about seven o'clock when we started for the
train, after bidding farewell to the people of " The George,"
that we produced the exhibition of weakness on the part of
John James which I have mentioned before. The night was di-
vinely starlit; the air crisp, clear, and cold. The heights of the
cathedral seemed to pierce the moonlight, and the town as we
drove over it lay bathed in a transfiguring and, we could not
help feeling, gloriously Christmas kind of radiance. The stars
seemed telling one to another the message of the season; in one
great wind-swept space of the heavens we could almost fancy
the figures of those triumphant angels who sang their carol of
peace on earth, good-will to men, and it was with a sense of
purely Christmas joy that we departed from the old cathedral
city, forgetting that we had ever known or seen a London fog,
and quite prepared for the transformation which seemed to have
taken place in the Kensington to which we returned. The
vapors had rolled away and the new year was coming towards us
with open brow and vigorous tread ; icicles hung upon the trees
in the old gardens, but the sun that was to rise on the morrow
was making his way joyously and untrammeled by the misty
veils of the earth.

1 887.] ACT A CONCILII NEO-EBORACENSIS IV. 543

ACTA CONCILII NEO-EBORACENSIS IV.*

THE Acts of the Fourth Provincial Council of New York have
been published in a very accurate, tasteful, and even elegant form
by the Catholic Publication Society Co., which deserves our
thanks for what it has so well done. The Council was celebrated
in 1883, but has only now been promulgated, with the approba-
tion of the Holy See. It was a model for all similar councils in
respect to the quietness and harmony with which its deliberations
were conducted ; and as to the solemn public ceremonies, the
discourses delivered from the pulpit of the cathedral, and, above
all, the pathetic dignity which the presence of the dying cardinal
gave to the whole majestic scene, no one who was present will
easily forget the impression made on the mind and heart of every
beholder of the sanctity and glory of the Catholic Church.

The decrees of the Council, so far as they directly concern the
whole body ot the laity in the province of New York, were made
known, as to their chief points, through the Pastoral Letter which
was read in all the churches.

We propose now, for the benefit of those who cannot read
these decrees as published in the Latin language, to enumerate a
certain portion of them those, viz., which seem to us to be of
the most practical importance to the faithful generally, or which
have some special interest.

The first chapter of the decrees relates to Faith. It is not
within the powers of a provincial council to make those defini-
tions in matters of faith and morals which are of themselves in-
fallible and universally binding. It belongs to the Holy See and
oecumenical councils to issue decrees of this kind requiring the
exercise of supreme authority.

The bishops of the province of New York, in the exercise
of that subordinate authority which they possess as judges and
teachers in matters of faith and morals, have only repeated and
enforced the doctrines already defined and inculcated by the su-
preme authority in the church. From the whole body of the
decrees contained in the first chapter, " De Fide," we select one
as specially important at this particular time. The principal part
of it i.e., all which is contained between quotation-marks is an

* Acta et Decreta Concilii Provincialis Neo Eboracensis IV. New York : The Catholic
Publication Society Co. 1886.

544 ACTA CONCILII NEO-EBORACENSIS IV. [J an -

extract from the encyclical of His Holiness Leo XIII. entitled
Quod Apostolici Muneris :

Art. III. Moreover, we detest and anathematize all heresies condemned
by the sacred canons, by general councils, and by the Roman Pontiffs,
whether openly showing themselves under their original name or masked
under a new and fallacious appellation, but especially those false doctrines,
or rather negations, which at this present time even among the members
of our own flocks are insidiously spreading like a cancer, such as are Ag-
nosticism, which denies reason itself ; Materialism, which denies the spirit-
ual nature ; Naturalism and Rationalism, which subvert the sacred Scripture
and supernatural revelation; finally, Socialism and Communism, whose
adherents, "scattered through the whole world, and closely bound together
by a mutual compact of iniquity, no longer seek for a safe shelter in the
obscurity of secret assemblies, but, openly and boldly coming forward
into the light, strive to accomplish the design which they had long ago
agreed upon viz., of overthrowing the foundations of every kind of civil
society. It is this sort of men who, as the divine oracles attest, defile the
flesh, and despise dominion, and blaspheme majesty (Ep. Jud. v. 8). They
leave nothing intact or entire which has been wisely decreed by divine and
human laws for the security and adornment of life. They disown obedience
to the higher powers to which the Apostle admonishes us every soul ought
to be subject, and which have been entrusted by God with the power of rul-
ing, and they proclaim the equality of all men in rights and duties. They
degrade the natural union of man and woman, which is sacred even among
barbarous nations ; and weaken or even abandon to lust the bond of that
union by which chiefly domestic society is held together. Finally, allured
by cupidity of present goods, which is the root of all evils, and which some de-
siring have erred from the faith (i Tim. vi. 10), they attack the right of pro-
perty which is sanctioned by the natural law, and, committing by so doing
a heinous crime, while they appear to provide for the necessities of all men
and to afford them what will satisfy their desires, they strive to seize and
hold in common whatever has been acquired by the title of lawful in-
heritance, or by intellectual and manual labor, or by economy in living."

The third chapter, " On Certain Obstacles to Faith," speci-
fies among the causes of the weakening or loss of laith and of
moial corruption 4< the incautious reading of books and periodi-
cals which revile religion as superstition, praise at least indirect-
ly vice and describe it immodestly, vituperate or deride virtue."
All are admonished to beware of this poison and to remove it
from the reach of those over whom they have authority. But,
besides this, the provision and perusal ol books distinctively Ca-
tholic, pious, and religious, of those which are in various ways
instructive, and of those which afford mental relaxation and
amusement without endangering the faith or morals of the read-
er, are recommended as a positive remedy against bad literature.

This is a most important matter, and one in respect to which

1 887.] ACT A CONCILII NEO-EBORACENSIS IV. 545

by far too great a laxity prevails in many circles. Yet, in order
that the vigilance and admonitions of pastors, teachers, and pa-
rents may be wisely and efficaciously directed, they need to
guard against a too indiscriminate censure of popular books
and periodicals. For this reason, as well as others, it is impor-
tant that clergymen should make themselves acquainted with the
literature of the day a point which has been very strongly and
ably urged by the Rev. Dr. Barry in the Dublin Review, as well
as by other writers of note elsewhere.

In respect to societies which are of doubtful legality, the
Council of New York gives certain cautions against hasty and
particular condemnations by pastors and confessors, and suggests
the propriety and necessity of awaiting the decisions of episcopal
authority. The Council of Baltimore has made provision for
this by reserving judgment on these matters to the metropoli-
tans, not deciding and acting singly but collectively.

The Masonic Society, and others like this, are absolutely and
undoubtedly condemned, and their members must be deprived of
the sacraments. There are societies which are good, and others
which are harmless. It does not follow, however, that a society
must be so certainly unlawful as to make it obligatory on a
priest to exclude its members from the sacraments, in order that
it should be more prudent and safe for a Catholic to keep out of
it. The safe rule is to shun all risk, and to join only such a so-
ciety as is in all respects really beneficial to its members, or at
least a means of innocent relaxation, and also exempt from any
danger either to faith or morals.

The third chapter, "On Certain Aids to Faith," prescribes
the erection and sedulous care of Catholic schools, in which mas-
ters and mistresses from religious societies are in general to be
preferred, though, for sufficient reasons, lay persons who are
competent teachers and of exemplary morals and piety may be
employed.

One most timely and important admonition is given to all
rectors viz., that "the rector should omit no effort to make his
schools in no respect inferior to the public schools of the neigh-
borhood, but rather in many respects superior to them."

The late Diocesan Synod of New York, in obedience to the
direction of the Council of Baltimore, has adopted one important
measure for securing this result. Two commissions of clergy-
men have been appointed in each of the four deaneries into
which the diocese is divided, for the examination of teachers
and the inspection of schools.
VOL. XLIV. 35

546 ACT A CONCILII NEO-EBORACENSIS IV. [Jan.,

The Council also strongly recommends that, besides the ser-
mons at High Mass on Sundays and festivals, short sermons
should be preached at Low Masses and at other public offices.
It is in place here to remark that there is much room and great
need for improvement in preaching, and for a much more careful
training of ecclesiastical students in the composition and delivery
of sermons. Rather than to omit preaching, to hurry it over in
a perfunctory manner, or to deliver a slipshod apology for a ser-
mon, it would be better to read a good sermon from a book.

A great part of the seven ensuing chapters relates to the
clergy, and we pass it over in silence, with the exception of one
point viz., the direction given concerning the study of Latin
and Greek in colleges and Preparatory Seminaries where the
young ecclesiastics are educated for the Greater Seminaries. It
is ordered that both these languages should be learned, not in a
merely elementary manner, but so that a " prompt understand-
ing" of both should be acquired, and, moreover, an easy use of
the Latin. By this we understand that the alumni at their gra-
duation should be able to read Greek easily, and to read, speak,
and write Latin with the same facility as they do their mother-
tongue. It is true that the continual use of Latin through a
long course of study and afterwards does give a fair knowledge
of this language to all who are able to pass their examinations
for orders, and a very thorough and facile use of it to those who
range above the line of mediocrity. In respect to Greek, we
doubt if the actual, average grade of scholarship is near the mark
set by 'the Council. If we consider the quantity of time and
labor spent upon Latin and Greek by all students who go through
college or through an equivalent course, whether in the Catholic
or the non-Catholic schools and colleges of the United States, it
is our opinion that the result gained is not equal to the expendi-
ture. In regard to the colleges and academies of the highest
class under the improved methods adopted during the recent
period, we write under correction from those who know more
about them than we do. It has been, however, and we think
still is the case, in a general way, that instruction in Latin and
Greek, especially in Greek, has not been up to the mark of the
instruction given in Europe. English graduates who have been
reasonably diligent have gained a much better knowledge of the
Latin and Greek classics, and a much greater facility in reading
them at sight, than American graduates, a few of the best scho-
lars excepted. We have been told by one of our college presi-
dents, who made his whole course in France, that those who

1887.] ACTA CONCILII NEO-EBORA CENSIS IV. 547

passed the final examination in his college were expected to read
any Greek author at sight. In American colleges the quantity
of Latin and Greek read is far too small, and the manner of read-
ing too much after a school-boy fashion. We do not think these
languages so very difficult that they cannot be mastered in a rea-
sonable time by a good method. Mr. Lowell, in a speech at the
Harvard sesqui-centennial in favor of the classical course, for
which every scholar must thank him, implies that the method
is faulty, beginning at the wrong end. We understand him to
mean the same thing meant by a friend, an Oxford graduate,
who has recently expressed his opinion that the common method
makes the language an illustration of the grammar, whereas the
grammar ought to be used to illustrate the language. We hope
that those who have the direction of these studies will put their
heads together and propose an improved method. But, at any
rate, let us have the recommendations of our councils practically
enforced, so that not only Latin but also Greek may be tho-
roughly taught in our colleges.

In chapter xi., " On the Sacraments," it is ordered that a lamp
be always kept burning before the Blessed Sacrament, which
must be fed with olive-oil, if that can possibly be had, and other-
wise only with some kind of vegetable-oil.

Also, that at Mass, Benediction, and Exposition the num-
ber of candles required by the rubrics must be of wax, and that
never must any gas-lights be put upon the altar. All persons
who have good taste and some idea of symbolic propriety must
be rejoiced at the disappearance of sham Paschal candles, sperm
candles, and odious gas-lights. It is to be hoped that all the su-
pernumerary candles lighted on altars will be also of wax, and
that the hideous tin tubes which do duty in the large candelabra
as candles will be banished. If nothing better can be done, it
would be an improvement on the present fashion to have can-
delabra made tapering in their upper part, like a slender spire
rising from a church-tower, with an ornamental tube at the apex,
in which the largest kind of wax candle that can be conveniently
used can be inserted. We also venture to suggest to the ladies
in convents who have charge of their chapels and altars that
they should make themselves thoroughly acquainted with all ru-
brics and ritual directions which are obligatory, and observe them
strictly.

In regard to Baptism, the faithful are admonished that infants
should be brought to the font as soon as possible after their birth.
Deferring baptism for months, or even weeks, where there is a

548 ACTA CONCILII NEO-EBORACENSIS IV. [Jan.,

convenient opportunity for its speedy reception, is a grievous sin
in those who know their obligation and yet neglect to fulfil it.

The Sacrament of Matrimony receives the attention due to its
great importance.

The publication of banns is insisted on with urgency, a dis-
pensation from all the publications being only sanctioned where
very grave reasons exist ; and the publication is required in the
two parishes of the bridegroom and the bride, in case they have a
different domicile.

The contracting parties are reminded of their obligation to
confess before marriage ; this supposes, however, that they have
need of the Sacrament of Penance in order to make them morally
certain of receiving the sacrament of marriage in the state of
grace. They are also earnestly exhorted to receive Holy Com-
munion, and to have the ceremony of marriage performed with
the celebration of the Nuptial Mass, when the rubrics allow it ;
and, if this may not be done, that the ceremony be performed
after an ordinary Mass and after Communion. Priests are ad-
monished to make every effort to eliminate the custom of cele-
brating marriages in the afternoon or evening, and are forbidden
to marry persons at home without special permission of the
bishop.

In virtue of a decree from Rome the nuptial benediction be-
longing to the Nuptial Mass may be given to those who did not
receive it at their marriage, at any time afterwards ; provided,
however, that the woman can receive this benediction only once
in her lifetime. Married persons are exhorted to ask for this
benediction, and converts already lawfully and validly married
are advised to receive it after their reconciliation to the church.
Of course it must be distinctly understood that the sacrament of
marriage is not identical with this benediction, and that those
who are already married are not remarried when the solemn
blessing on their marriage is afterwards given.

In the case of mixed marriages for which the bishop has
granted a dispensation, it is decreed :

1. That the non-Catholic party must sign a written promise
to grant to the Catholic party full liberty of conscience and prac-
tice of religious duties ; and

2. To bring up the children of the marriage, of both sexes, in
the Catholic religion, even in case the Catholic parent should die
in their infancy.

3. That the Catholic party must promise to endeavor to
obtain the conversion of the other.

1 88;.] ACT A CONCILII NEO-EBORACENSIS IV. 549

4. That assurance must be had that another form of marriage
will not be gone through with before a minister.

5. That the priest must not perform the marriage in the
church or sacristy, wearing stole or surplice, or making use of
any sacred rite.

In respect to ceremonies and religious exercises belonging to
divine worship in the church there are several decrees and in-
structions. One of the most important is the following, which
we translate literally and entirely (chap, xii., " On Divine Wor-
ship," Art. v.):

Whereas churches, even though they have received only a simple bene-
diction, are truly houses which Almighty God deigns to regard as his
earthly habitations, it is becoming that nothing should be enacted in them
which does not directly pertain to the exercise of divine worship or tend to
the awakening of the devotion of the faithful people. We regard as far
removed from these objects the custom, or rather abuse, of holding, in these
places dedicated to God, so-called sacred concerts, musical oratorios, and
similar performances, which are not intended for the increase of the piety
of the audience but merely for their entertainment, although this is done
for the sake of aiding pious causes by the means of the money received
for admission. Therefore we reprobate and prohibit this practice; and we
admonish in the Lord all rectors of missions that henceforth they never
derogate in this way from the sanctity of the te.mples of God, whether the
Blessed Sacrament is present in the tabernacle or has been removed from
it. *' My house is a house of prayer."

In Requiem Masses it is forbidden to put black drapery upon
an altar where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved ; also to sing
hymns in the vernacular at the Offertory or during the other
funeral rites.

It is forbidden to sing hymns in the vernacular during the
celebration of High Mass, Vespers, or Benediction. Neverthe-
less hymns and prayers in the vernacular are not forbidden
while Low Masses are said, before and after public offices, or
on the occasion of extra-liturgical religious exercises. The
bishops of England are about to issue a collection of ap-
proved prayers for such occasions. It would be desirable to
have a similar manual for use in this country.

The Council strongly recommends the chanting of every part
of High Mass and Vespers, discountenances a certain style of
florid, unchurchly music which has been in vogue, forbids the
curtailed Vespers at which two or three psalms are sung in the
long-drawn-out, operatic style, and recommends the Gregorian
chant according to the form contained in the books published with
the approbation of the S. Congregation of Rites at Ratisbon.

55o Acr A CONCILII NEO-EBORACENSIS IV. [Jan.,

It is, nevertheless, the opinion of many in England, chief
among whom is Bishop Vaughan, of Salford, and also of at least
some in this country, that in churches where the office of Ves-
pers cannot be made sufficiently solemn and beautiful to attract
the people and satisfy their devotion, it would be well to substi-
tute some form of devotions in English. When Vespers can be
duly and properly rendered there can be no objection to have
these additional devotions in English, German, or French for
the people to whom these languages are their vernacular tongue.
In fact, they are in common use already, with the sanction of ec-
clesiastical authority, and this is the case also in all parts of the
universal church and in Rome. The question of substituting in
certain cases such devotions in the place of Vespers is one which
it belongs to the bishops to decide.

In respect to funeral rites, it is the mind and law of the
church that the faithful should be buried in consecrated ground,
from which all others are excluded. Those who are pervaded
by a Catholic spirit attach great importance to the privilege of
being buried in consecrated ground. All the legislation and in-
fluence of the church tends in the direction of inducing and en-
forcing a strict observance of the entire Catholic law in regard to
the burial of the faithfu4 departed.

Nevertheless, the Holy See and the Plenary Council of Balti-
more have sanctioned some mitigations of this law on account of
peculiar circumstances existing in this country.

Catholics who have burial-places in uncatholic cemeteries
purchased before the law of the Council of Baltimore in 1853,
or who have purchased them since that time in good faith i.e.,
in ignorance of the law may still retain and use them.

Converts whose families have such burial-places may also
make use of the same.

Those who have vaults or lots in Catholic cemeteries may
bury the non-Catholic members of their family in the same.

Where a Catholic lately deceased has provided for his burial
in a non-Catholic cemetery contrary to the law, but in good faith,
or where the members of the family do the same, the priest may
remain passive in the matter and leave them to carry out their
arrangements, though he may not accompany the funeral arid
perform any sacred rites at the tomb.

In all except the cases mentioned, a rector cannot sanction
burial in an uncatholic cemetery without special leave of the
bishop, which it is to be supposed he will grant for sufficient
reasons.

1887.] ACTA CONCILII NEO-EBORACENSIS IV. 551

The Council of New York earnestly recommends that bodies
should be brought to the church, and a requiem Mass celebrated
for the deceased.

It reprobates the extravagant display and worldly pomp of
funerals, the use of floral decorations at the funerals of adults,
the use of the more solemn modes of performing funeral obse-
quies over the bodies of persons who have led scandalous lives
and whose repentance before death is doubtful, and the scanda-
lous custom of wakes. It is also recommended that the custom
of celebrating the funeral rites of young children with white vest-
ments and appropriate ceremonies of a joyous character be in-
troduced.

The decrees of the recent Diocesan Synod of New York con-
tain the statutes of previous councils and synods in an abbreviated
and codified form, with a few special statutes for the diocese in
addition. The English, Irish, and American councils of the last
quarter of a century are worthy of the best ages of the church,
and may be compared even to the councils of Milan under St.
Charles Borromeo, which are considered as the most perfect
models. The system of legislation contained in them is so com-
prehensive and complete that in future little remains to be
done except by way of perfecting details. The acts of plenary
and provincial councils, brought down to practical application by
the statutes of diocesan synods, are put into a convenient and tan-
gible shape, so that rectors of parishes have a plain and sufficient
rule for their administration. Their effect does not reach the
laity so immediately by a direct acquaintance with the statute-
book. It is through the pastorals of bishops and the instruc-
tions of the parochial clergy, chiefly, that they learn the spirit
and letter of the ecclesiastical law, and by the administration of
those who are set to rule and teach in the church that they re-
ceive the practical benefit of the legislation of councils. The
ideal and theory of Catholic life have been admirably expressed
in the decrees and instructions of the bishops; it is to be hoped
that both clergy and laity will faithfully work together under
their bishops to reduce this rule of doctrine and morals to
practice.

S5 2 TOT A PULCHRA Es. [Jan.,

TOTA PULCHRA ES.

HARK ! from earth a song of gladness

Floating through the golden gate
Floods with Joy veiled seraphs bending

Low at Mary's throne of state.
Hark ! to dulcet harp and cymbal

Angel voices swell the lay i
"Tota pulchra es Maria;

Macula non est in te ! "

Long ago y when evening breezes

Leafy shades of Eden fanned,
Pure of soul and fair of feature,

Fresh from his Creator's hand,
Man met God like friend rejoicing

Greeteth friend. O wondrous grace I
God conversed in sweetest union

With his creature face to face f

Sad, sad end to blissful friendship !

Soon those bright hours fade away :
Serpent-tempted, longing, sinning

(Ah that woful, woful day t),
Man's fair soul, by sin defiled,.

Loseth its white robe of grace ;
Sin's sad plague-spot darkly tainteth

Every scion of his race.

But a light dispels the darkness I

Many thousand years have rolled,
And to sad earth angels welcome

One whom prophets had foretold.
Eve's fair daughter, pure and spotless,

Wholly free from every stain,
Brings to humankind, long fallen,

Grace and dignity again.

1887,] 7107^ PULCHRA Es. 553

As, when Jordan's swollen waters

High as mountain cliff were rolled,
Israel's priests, on dry land treading,

Bore the ark on staves of gold ;
So that new ark God's own dwelling

Pure from sin's defiling waves
Staining every child of Adam

God in signal mercy saves.

Mary, Mother ! in the fountain

Of my dear Redeemer's blood
Cleansed was I from every stain-spot

Of that foul, all-reaching flood.
Angels stooping down from heaven,

With all holy rapture glad,
Saw me, once so dark and loathly,

Now in shining raiment clad.

Spake God's priest in that blest moment :

" Keep thy white robe free from stain,
Till thy God, when life is ended,

Take thee to himself again ;
Till the angel's clarion pealing

Call thee to the great white throne :
Till thine everlasting portion

To the listening world be known."

Ah, my Mother ! dark and toilsome

Seemed the road I had to tread,
Rough the stones and sharp the brambles,

Lowering dark the skies o'erhead.
Red, red roses, sunny meadows,

Lure my careless feet astray ;
Mire of sin and thorns of passion

Rend and stain that white array.

But a fountain still is open

Floweth yet that healing stream
Whose forestalling virtue robed thee

In thy purity's fair gleam.
Lead me to that fount, O Mother !

Washed therein, full well I know,
Though my sins be red like scarlet,

They shall be as white as snow !

554 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

Cleansed in Sacramental laver,

Keep me, Mother, free from stain ;
Never let the serpent's temptings

Draw me from my path again.
Then at thy pure feet in heaven

I may hope to sing one day:
" Tota pulchra es Maria;

Macula non est in te."

A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

A NOVEL written nowadays by a man who has Faith is worthy
of grave consideration. Mr. Randolph's Mostly Fools : A Romance
of Civilization, just published at London by Sampson Low, Mars-
ton, Searle & Rivington, is such a novel. It is worthy of con-
sideration because society is depicted in it by an artist who has
on his palette all the colors necessary for the making of a perfect
picture. The novels of our time have value so far as they reflect
the society of our time, so far as they keep before us high ideals,
and so far as they give us the clue to the present unrest which
permeates society and suggest a remedy ; for it has come to pass,
so busy are men and so hastily do they read, that the novel has
come to be the surest method of reaching the greatest number
of people in the civilized world. There are many English wri-
ters who "make books " for the market without thought and
without hope except that a balance at their publisher's may be
on their side of the account. Among these are nearly all the
English "lady novelists," whose stock in trade is a generous
supply of " passion," a knowledge of millinery, and ink, pen, and
paper.

Three late novels, representing two different schools, are the
work of thinkers. Mr. Mallock's The Old Order Changes, which
we noticed last month, has the virile force that distinguishes
Mostly Fools, without the coarseness of the latter. Mr. Mai lock
and Mr. Randolph are of the same school the school of men
who think deeply on the issues below the surface of society.
Mr. James seems to think only of what he is writing. He is an
" impressionist," and his late novel, The Princess Casamassima
(New Yoikand London: Macmillan & Co.), is an "impression-

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 555

ist " view of certain phases of life in their relations to what is
called Socialism.

It is worthy of remark that in these three novels of English
contemporary life the encroachments of the people on the limited
and privileged classes form the main points in the story. In Mr.
James' novel the Princess Casamassima, who does not represent
her class, is only a singular personality, with nerves and a crav-
ing for excitement, but no heart ; she says she is a Catholic, but
this is only testimony, not evidence, probably because Mr. James
has not seriously thought of the influence of the church on such
a character. In Mostly Fools there are several Catholics the
hero, Roland Tudor, being one of them. They are more or less
eccentric and objects of the author's cynical gibes, but it is plain
that Mr. Randolph's belief in the church and the saving power
of the church in social as well as spiritual matters is impregnable.
But his views of the present action of the church on society at
large are more pessimistic, if possible, than those of Mr. Mallock.
They both admit Mr. Mallock with the coolness of reason, Mr.
Randolph with more heart-warmth that the church holds the
remedy for the social ills that threaten English society with the
convulsions which, in France, were foreshadowed by the sarcasm
of Beaumarchais. Mr. James does not pretend to see a remedy
anywhere. Mr. Mallock thinks that the church will have to
adapt her measures to a new phase of social evolution without
precedent. Mr. Randolph despairs of her exerting the power
she possesses. He pretends to view the present condition of
English society as a thing of the past, but this is an unworthy
trick; he even takes us into the twentieth century. And this is
his summing-up of Roland Tudor's state of mind after he had
tried to lead a lay Catholic body to the rescue of the social
world :

" All through the night he travelled on ; the next day he was again in
London. He was met by the news of the appointment of the man he had
feared to the primacy of the church in England. It was the old story
misrepresentation at Rome from influential quarters ; the real state of
things concealed ; the Pope persuaded against his better judgment. This
had been tried with disastrous effect in the Irish episcopate, but never be-
fore in England. An accredited envoy had now been installed at the Papal
Court (with a nuncio at St. James'). The move had come as a necessity.
England, who had to govern in person a few odd millions of Catholics
not all of the most governable sort woke up one day to the conviction
that the greater the governing prestige in her hands the easier it would be
for her. The importance of the post could hardly be over-estimated, but
it cut both ways. Secular interference and advice as to the selection of
the bishops was the least desirable outcome of it. He had hoped to see his

556 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

church a shining light on the questions of the day, but he found it likely
to be hid and obscured by every species of contemptible fashion, and a fac-
tor of no public use or account whatever. Had it been otherwise, or could
he have made it otherwise, he would have stayed ; as it was, he shook the
dust from his feet and washed his hands of the catastrophe to be."

In this pessimistic condition Roland Tudor, an English gen-
tleman and an ardent Catholic, leaves England and forms a plan
for the renaissance of South America. As he has said a sad
and last good-by to Miss Grey, whom he devotedly loves, the
usual interest of novels has ended, and the ordinary novel-reader
will not care to follow him through his career of conquest in this
new country. In The Old Order Changes the hero and Consuelo
become man and wife, to devote themselves to the salvation of
humanity. In Mostly Fools Roland Tudor gives his fiancee up,
to introduce a new social system, somewhat after the manner of
Henry George's, into South America, after having conquered
the States composing it.

" In the re-founding of the South American States the church was given
no advantage over the veriest conventicle of ranters. He had been heard
to affirm that the progress of faith must be from within, not from without ;
that advancement of other description must necessarily be false ; that in a
fair field the truth must prove itself, and could stand at no odds."

The election of the Cardinal Archbishop of New York to the
see of St. JPeter has the happiest effect in the South; but Mr.
Randolph does not tell us more of this interesting occurrence.
Miss Grey has become a nun, having been an aesthetic Pantheist,
and Ronald Tudor dies at the end of an awful battle between
the North and the South.

Let us hope that Mr. Randolph does not represent the Young
English Catholic way of looking at things or the Young English
Catholic manner of writing about them. He is both cynical and
coarse. Miss Austen showed us how fools could be not only
tolerable but delightful. Mr. Randolph's are vulgar, and his
method of portraying them leaves one under the impression that
he has been looking at a group of repulsive idiots. His hero
who has been educated under the best influence and had every
opportunity of perfecting himself turns in weak despair from
doing the work before him in his own country, and seeks for
new lands. Nevertheless, Mr. Randolph has faith, and though
we may be offended at his broad and crude treatment of certain
episodes, where he mistakes unconventionally for originality, we
must admit that he has hope as well as Faith, though his attitude
is pessimistic.

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 557

He has a vigorous style, full of muscle, keen wit, and none of
that simulation of humor which has become a disease of modern
stylists. His book, in spite of a tendency to sensuousness, is a
tonic, and not a poison. Lord St. Maur, with his wonderful at-
tributes and gorgeous house, is a figure of the romantic aristo-
cratic kind that Disraeli invented. Lady Victoria Gage and the
Squeeds are hateful people whom the sensitive reader will re-
gret having been introduced to. The first volume is decidedly
the strongest and freshest. It deals principally with Roland
Tudor's life at a Catholic college, and the picture is true and
graphic. Mr. Randolph's testimony to the purity of Catholic
boys in Catholic schools, and also to the only danger of these
schools, is valuable:

" Under this new regime he was thrown with an entirely new set,
foreigners for the most part, and Frenchmen young men of some
means who had come to the college solely to learn English, and who
were mostly scoundrels of a very finished type. Unhappily, St. Augus-
tine's "was sadly in want of funds, and these paid well. It was the rector's
idea to place a series of saints in marble outside the building, but to achieve
it it was necessary to fill the inside with sinners in the flesh. Roland's
eyes were speedily opened to things he had never heard nor dreamed of
previously. Every liberty was given to these young men, who were under
private tuition, and who rejoiced in the name of 'philosophers.' They re-
ceived him with open arms as a likely addition, but a few days' companion-
ship showed him their hand ; the sort of thing was not to his taste, and he
quietly withdrew, marvelling less at the idiocy of these gentle youths than
at the blindness of the authorities. One fact should be recorded ; if well-
nigh incredible, it is true : until he reached this stage he never heard an
immoral word spoken through the whole of his college life."

Mr. Randolph, a Catholic in spite of his radicalism a fault of
youth and his sneers at the multiplication of " foreign " devo-
tions, asserts that the world can only be saved from a horrible
revolution by the church. Mr. Mallock, an Epicurean, who ac-
knowledges the greatness and purity of the church, insists that
she alone can protect the world against humanity without a God.
Mr. James even makes Prince Casamassima say the same thing,
though without much emphasis. The last thing gives us hope
that American writers whose philosophical culture begins and
ends with Schopenhauer may come to see as all thoughtful
Englishmen see the importance of the church as a prime factor
in civilization.

Mr. Randolph's Mostly Fools is a book of hope, though it does
not bear the burden of hope. When a young Catholic, bred in a
Catholic school and firm in the Faith, can write such a novel as

558 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

this, it is a positive proof of the vitality of a movement of which
this young Catholic, because he is young and impatient, despairs.
Bat the despair of youth leads invariably to the forceful conser-
vatism of later years. Tt is the most paradoxical despair on earth.

Mr. James' Princess Casamassiuia is the best thing he has done,
if we leave out his short stories. It does not end at all, though
the hero commits suicide. The princess, a beautiful young per-
son, is the wife of an Italian. She is exceedingly restless ; she de-
serts her husband, an honorable, simple-minded nobleman, and
comes to London to get as close as possible to the "lower class-
es." She has no principle, no constancy, no morality ; but she
is clever and interesting. Hyacinth Robinson, whose unknown
father was believed to be a lord, and whose mother was a
murderess, is investigated as a member of the " lower classes."
He is a type, perhaps somewhat too refined, of the state of mind
to which unsuitable education and impossible aspirations, joined
with a taste for luxury, bring a great class of young men. He is
singular only in having skilled hands and in using them as a
workingman in love with his work. He is led by the princess
into loving her. He and she are both entangled in secret socie-
ties she to amuse herself, he because he has been drawn into
them. He has sworn to commit an assassination, and, when the
time comes, he, left without hope or object in the world, assassi-
nates himself.

The studies of the Socialists, Paul Muniment who sees his
way to power through destruction or a threat of destruction
the Germans, and Eustache Poupin, the French Communist, are
exquisitely careful and true. When Hyacinth is suspected of
cooling in "the cause," Poupin, a workman of fine words, tells
him that it is between him and his conscience. The Commu-
nist says:

" 'The conscience of the individual is absolute, except, of course, in those
classes in which, from the very nature of the infamies on which they are
founded, no conscience can exist. Speak to me, however, of my Paris ;
she is always divine/ Poupin went on. But he showed signs of irritation
when Hyacinth began to praise to him the magnificent creations of the
arch-fiend of December. In the presence of this picture he was in a ter-
rible dilemma ; he was gratified as a Parisian and a patriot, but he was dis-
concerted as a lover of liberty ; it cost him a pang to admit that anything
in the sacred city was defective, yet he saw still less his way to concede
that it could owe any charm to the perjured monster of the Second Empire,
or even to the hypocritical, mendacious republicanism of the regime before
which the sacred Commune had gone down in blood and fire. 'Ah ! yes,
it's very fine, no doubt,' he remarked at last ; ' but it will be still finer when
it's ours ! 'a speech which caused Hyacinth to turn back to his work with

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 559

a slight feeling of sickness. Everywhere, everywhere he saw the ulcer of
envy the passion of party which hung together for the purpose of de-
spoiling another to its advantage. In old Eustache, one of the ' pure,' this
was particularly sad."

Mr. James' affectations, so obnoxious in his international
books and so tiresome in The Bostonians, are not apparent in the
Princess Casamassima. The novel has no story; but the play
of character on character is direct, and there is little tiresome
analysis. The prince and Madame Grandoni, the honest Ger-
man lady with the Italian name, are genially painted, and are as
true to their national natures as Thackeray's De Florae. It is
regrettable that Mr. James should prefer realism to idealization
and offer us only a finely-limned panorama with all the apparent
indifference of a showman who disdains even to introduce into his
exposition one ideal sentence or one line of poetry. The tone of
the book is that of a mind that sees the present without caring for
the past or the future a tone of doubt so settled that it does not
care to ask even Pilate's question.

A Modern Telemachus (New York: Macmillan & Co.) is a new
story by Miss Charlotte M. Yonge, who, the older she grows,
seems to be losing that fierce dislike to the Catholic Church
that marked her earlier historical romances. A recent one,
The Armorers Apprentices, was exceedingly sweet and elevating,
and did justice to the character of Sir Thomas More. A trans-
lation of the narrative on which A Modern Telemachus is founded
appeared in THE CATHOLIC WORLD in July, 1881. It was the
sketch of the adventures of the Countess de Bourke and her
daughter. It enabled Miss Yonge to correct in her preface an
error into which she was led by "a person named Scott," who,
"in the true spirit of the eighteenth century, thought fit to sup-
press " that certain Catholic priests were at Algiers at the time
of Mademoiselle de Bourke's captivity among the Cabeleyzes, and
helped, according to the purpose of their order to relieve captives,
to rescue her. Miss Yonge has made a beautiful and pathetic story
out of the adventures of this French-Irish family. The pathos of
it is true and heart- moving, and the beautiful heroism of Estelle
and her willingness to be martyred for the Faith is told with the
truest art. One could wish that the Scotch Protestant, Arthur,
were less uncompromising in his comments on " popery"; but,
if the test of a good book is its effect in elevating the thoughts to
higher things than the work-a-day world, A Modern Telemachus
is an extraordinarily good book.

Sir Perceval (New York: Macmillan & Co.) is a Quietist rhap-

560 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

sody by Mr. Shorthouse, the author of John Inglesant. There is
a young lady in it, remotely connected with Port Royal in some
manner, as everybody in the book seems to be. She delivers
herself in this modern way :

; ' I suppose/ she said, ' that mankind will always find some incentive to
moral action in symbols. So long as the Christian faith is admitted to con-
sist of mere symbols, I do not know I really do not know that I should
object to it much. Some of its shadow music is beautiful quite beautiful.
But when these shadows are imposed on us as realities, then it becomes the
highest duty of us all to show that these dogmatic idols have no greater
value than the productions of men's hands the stocks and stones which
they have replaced.' "

Into Sir Perceval, too, the questions of Positivism and Social-
ism enter, but no answer is made to them. The Positivist girl
with Socialistic tendencies dies.

" ' She is gone,' I said, ' to that God whom she loved when a child. She
is gone to that God whom she died serving, though she fancied that she
did not know him.' "

One can scarcely blame her for refusing to accept the shadow
of a religion which Mr. Shorthouse's personages offer her a
religion beginning and ending with the right of each person to
read the Bible from his point of view. However, Mr. Short-
house's Quietistic religion, though a vague and uncertain heresy,
is better than no religion at all. Most of the novels that fall
into our hands remind us of a speech in one of M. Augier's
plays. A marquise says : " I was surprised even to-day by a
shameful temptation. Where shall I find help? Who will save
me ? " To which an old marquis replies : " In my time we had
God."

In our time and in the literature of fiction God has gone out
of fashion.

Mr. George Alfred Townsend (" Gath ") has written a new
novel, Katy of Catoctin ; or, The Chain-Breakers. He calls it, too,
"a national romance." It is founded on the events preceding and
succeeding the assassination of President Lincoln. The move-
ment is rapid and the interest well kept up, in spite of its length,
which stretches over five hundred pages. There are some notice-
ably good passages in it. For instance, of the theatre :

" That mimic world, between this world and both the worlds to come,
so seductive and so deadly : joy of the senses, rest of the inquests of toil
and intellect, framework of folly and of grandeur, home of genius and de-
ceit. It lifted the mind to heaven and sunk the habits to the shadows of
hell. It made shame and ignorance look angelic, like pedlars' jewels in
pinchbeck gold."

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 561

Katy, the heroine, is loved by a Catholic ecclesiastical stu-
dent, who performs the marriage ceremony, that " she may not
suffer." Naturally he regrets it and takes to a " secular occu-
pation, fearing the legal and eternal consequence of his sacri-
lege." Rome, according to Mr. Townsend, out of regard for a
certain Abel Quantreli and " for the poor privilege of closing his
eyes in death and numbering him among its distinguished con
verts," allowed this young Jesuit scholastic to be ordained on
condition that he would become a monk! Rome, too, to make
Katy's marriage " straight," courteously ante-dated his ordination,
so that Katy might seem to have been married in the presence
of a priest! " The Sisters of the church," adds Mr. Townsend,
"resolved to have the secular law punish Fenwickfor personating
a priest, if he refused to become a monk."

Mr. Townsend does not explain who the " Sisters of the
church " are ; he merely gives this as an historical fact. " No-
thing," writes Mr. Townsend sagely, " showed the legal and
worldly incapacity of neophytes and priests more fully than the
behavior of Fenwick and his enemies in this matter, and proved,
while -denouncing secret societies, the church forgot its tendency
that way."

Even " Gath " must have his wicked, wicked Jesuits ! It is an
unpleasant book a mixture of facts, observation of life, sentimen-
tality, and clever sayings. It is published by the Appletons.

Miss Sarah O. Jewett's Deephaven (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
is a series of quiet studies of life in a New England seaboard
town. It has many charming bits of humor and tenderness; and
the description of the old house at Deephaven is worthy of Haw-
thorne, with a touch of womanly sentiment. Among the contents
of faded Miss Katharine's escritoire

"There was a box which Kate was glad to find, for she had heard her
mother wonder if some such things were not in existence. It held a cruci-
fix and a mass-book and some rosaries, and Kate told me that Miss Katha-
rine's youngest and favorite brother had become a Roman Catholic while
studying in Europe. It was a dreadful blow to the family ; for in those days
there could have been few deeper disgraces to the Brandon family than to
have one of its sons go over to popery. Only Miss Katharine treated him
with kindness, and after a time he disappeared without telling even her
where he was going, and was only heard from indirectly once or twice
afterward. It was a great grief to her. 'And mamma knows,' said Kate,
4 that she always had a lingering hope of his return, for one of the last times
she saw Aunt Katharine before she was ill she spoke of soon going to
be with all the rest, and said, 'Though your Uncle Harry, dear' and
VOL. XLIV. 36

562 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

stopped and smiled sadly; 'you'll think me a very foolish old woman, but
I never quite gave up thinking he might come home.' "

Goldsmith's always new comedy, SJie Stoops to Conquer, has
been illustrated by Mr. Abbey so exquisitely that the lines one
knows by heart take more emphatic meaning. Messrs. Harper
& Bros, have printed these pictures with marvellous vigor and
clearness. The setting of the text is tasteful ; the volume is a
good example, needing no comment, of the progress of the arts
and of art in the United States since 1876.

The only book of poems this month is Mr. James Jeffrey
Roche's Songs and Satires (Boston : Ticknor & Co.) A very
ordinary woodcut of the moon shining through palm-trees does
not add to the value of this beautiful little volume. There is
ease, grace, wit in the satires, but higher qualities in the songs.
" If," in the satires, seems to be influenced by Swinburne's
" Interlude," and " Ad Lydiam " ought to have no place in a
book that holds " Andromeda." The songs fix Mr. Roche's place
among the poets, and high among them. The force and fire, the
intense passion and exact expression, of " Andromeda " one of
several poems of the highest order make it worth quoting, as a
better incentive to the reading of Mr. Roche's book than a dozen
lines of description :

" They chained her fair young body to the cold and cruel stone ;
The beast begot of sea and slime had marked her for his own;
The callous world beheld the wrong, and left her there alone !
Base caitiffs who belied her, false kinsmen who denied her,
Ye left her there alone !

" My beautiful, they left thee in thy peril and thy pain ;
The night that hath no sorrow was brooding on the main.
But lo! a light is breaking of hope for thee again ;
'Tis Perseus' sword a-flaming, thy dawn of day proclaiming

Across the western main :
O Ireland, O my country, he comes to break thy chain ! "

" Hubert the Hunter " is a ballad with the right ring and swing.
In fact, Mr. Roche has both genius and taste.

The late Admiral Hobart Pasha's Sketches of My Life (New
York : D. Appleton & Co.) are as full of strange adventures and
vicissitudes as one of Captain Marryat's novels or Lever's Con
Cregan. Hobart Pasha seems to have gone anywhere, every-
where in search of a fight. He found that the sneers and calum-
nies of enemies of the government established by the Spanish

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 563

Jesuits in Paraguay were the result of malice or prejudice. He
was delighted with the result of the plan of government ar-
ranged by the Jesuits " the respect for the clergy, the cheerful
obedience to laws, the industry and peaceful happiness one saw
at every step, made an impression on me I have never forgot-
ten." Hobart Pasha was a messenger from Lord Palmerston to
Pope Pius IX. just before the departure of the Holy Father to
Gaeta. The ship Hobart Pasha was in was at Civita Vecchia,
" partly," he writes, " with the object of taking that half-hearted
part in religious politics which has always been such a humiliat-
ing r61e for England. We did not, and we did, want to inter-
fere."

Hobart Pasha's experience during the late civil war and in the
service of the sultan are told with frankness and entire enjoy-
ment of adventure and danger. He was a moiern free-lance.

A Demi-god (Harper & Bros.), which bears the motto Ere%
"EnTpadiov, is an anonymous novel written on the supposition
that a perfect man may be gradually " evolved" by several gene-
rations of careful selection of ancestors and fortunate circum-
stances. Probably this experiment will never be tested in real life
until each individual succeeds in choosing his own ancestors.
An English physician living in Amsterdam was several centuries
ago smitten with the Dutch mania for the " evolution " of per-
fect tulips a mania similar, and no doubt as expensive, as the
fashionable mania for orchids. Hector Vyr was the result, in
this century, of Dr.Vere's application of the theory of improving
the race by artificial selection, suggested by the Dutch burghers'
success with their tulips. An American group, consisting of the
irascible Major Wellington, whose mildest oath was " Boswell's
Life of Johnson! " his daughter Madeline, her Aunt Eliza and her
lover, a Mr. Griffin, invade Greece. They are taken by brigands,
who sneer at England and America, and defy their own timorous
government. The captives, unable to raise the fifty thousand
dollars demanded, are almost in despair, when Hector Vyr, the
demi god, arrives, puts the brigands to flight, and rescues the
Americans.

The demi-god speaks English ; he admires Miss Madeline and
asks to look at her teeth it is a tradition in his family to exa-
mine the teeth of ladies they admire. The teeth of the charm-
ing young Boston lady were probably false, as they were so
perfect ; but the author does not mention it, and Hector shows
himself to be such a simple-minded demi-savage that Miss Wei-

564 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

lington perhaps preferred that he should keep his illusion. The
doctor's policy of selecting a handsome Greek barbarian shows
its results in the intense stupidity of Hector, who is anything but
a demi-god in mind. Of course he and Madeline the first Bos-
tonian to enter the Vyr family are married, and modern and
ancient Athens become one, as it were. The author stops here,
unable, no doubt, to bear the dazzling future which must come
to Greece from the marriage of this elaborately-cultivated demi-
god and a Bostonian of the proper circle !

Towards the Gulf : A Romance of Louisiana (Harper & Bros.)
touches the problem of heredity, too. The scene is laid in New
Orleans, and the narrative is straightforward, scarcely contain-
ing a superfluous word: the author's brevity has prevented it
from being suffused with the glow and color of Cable's Louisi-
anian stories. A Louisianian marries a beautiful young woman,
seemingly of English descent. Celine, an old negress, warns him,
before his marriage, that she has negro blood in her veins. He
does not believe it. Later he finds that it is true ; and his wife,
discovering the cause of his depression, commits suicide, because
the author says " it is easy for the descendant of a self-murder-
er to commit suicide." The Louisianian has a son left. His hor-
ror of the tainted blood in this boy, and the fear that he may re-
vert to some original African type, are dispelled by the sudden
death, by an accident, of the boy. The author of Towards the
Gulf seems to look on heredity in the light of fate. The will,
and the action of grace on the will, do not seem to be dreamed
of in his philosophy. This is a pity ; for, with a less narrow
scope, the story might have been made very powerful. As it
is, it drops into the commonplace.

1 887.] NE W PUBLICA TIONS. 565

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE LIVES OF THE APOSTLES, THEIR CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS.
By S. F. A. Caulfeild. With an Introduction by the Rev. S. Baring-
Gould. London : Hatchards.

It is a gratifying sign of progress that this book should have been pub-
lished by the Messrs. Hatchards. That a publishing-house so distinctively
" Evangelical " should issue a work which is so Catholic in its tone and char-
acter is a sign that the movement towards the truth outside the church is ex-
tending the area of its influence. The object of the author, as indicated by
Mr. Baring-Gould in his introduction, is to make the belief in the Commu-
nion of Saints an active principle and to lead to the reverence and love of
the saints; to teach that the saints " are not petrifactions in an historical
cabinet, but living brothers, active members of the one undying body, sym-
pathizing with him i.e., the man who is a true Catholic pleading for him,
obtaining for him many blessings." Although the lives comprised in this
volume are those of the saints of the first three centuries, the spirit in
which they have been chosen is not that of the Protestant, who limits the
life of the church to this or even' to a shorter period. For, as Mr. Baring-
Gould goes on to point out, " God's ways are not, as our ways, finite. Man
runs in a rut. God's course is varied. This is a fact which Protestant
historians and theologians have failed to grasp. They point to the first age
of the church, the sole type of perfect Christianity, and they repudiate every
subsequent type as an innovation, a departure from the original form.
They would freeze the brook, lest it should become a river and finally a sea ;
. . . they would make the plant live with iced leaves only. . . . But be it
remembered that the church, like a living body, is moulded and adapts
itself to outward conditions." And he proceeds to show how the church
grew and developed in subsequent ages, living and energizing in all.
Would that he could see that she is as full to-day of the divine life as in any
preceding period, and not, as he says, " tossed in the tempest of doubt, wait-
ing for God's touch on the harp-strings of life."

We have not left ourselves room to say much of the work itself. With-
out, of course, committing ourselves to every statement it contains, we are
able heartily to commend it. The lives, while written in a popular and
pleasing style, give evidence of accurate and thorough scholarship, and
form a valuable addition to already existing literature. Worthy of special
commendation is the discussion of the evidence for St. Peter's visit to
Rome.

THE GLORIES OF DIVINE GRACE : A Free Rendering of the Original Trea-
tise of Eusebius Nierenberg, S.J. By Dr. M.Jos. Scheeben. Translated
from the fourth revised German edition, by a monk of St. Meinrad's
Abbey, Indiana. New York : Benziger Bros.

This book belongs to that higher kind of spiritual reading of which St.
Francis de Sales' Treatise on the Love of God is a type. It embraces and
mingles into one the doctrinal and the ascetical principles of the Christian
Mfe a method frequently pursued by the early Fathers of the church. It

566 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Jan.,

is evidently the best, one might say the ideal, method. The bare know-
ledge of doctrine however complete, or the bare knowledge of the ascetical
principles, even when joined with some amount of practice of them, leaves
the soul in the one case in a state of theoretical barrenness, and in the
other subject to the delusions of ignorance or fanaticism. No man ad-
vances far in the way of Christian perfection except he acquires by some
means or other a true spiritual insight into the fundamental doctrines of
the Christian faith. The ascetical practices by which the wildness of na-
ture is tamed into subjection to Reason, and Reason brought under control
of the Holy Spirit, must have a firm basis in the understanding. They
must either be accompanied by a study of theology, or one must trust to
the supernatural infusion of knowledge ; and this cannot be counted on ex-
cept by a presumption altogether fatal.

Now, the value of this book of Nierenberg's, as interpreted by Dr. Schee-
ben, is that the doctrinal light it pours into the soul is gifted with a warmth
which follows the roots of the intellect down into the will. This makes the
work of special interest for those who have never made a regular course of
theology or philosophy. Bright minds, especially those living in the world,
yearning to devote themselves to God's love, longing to practise mental
prayer, hungering for the fruits of the inner life, will find in this book a full
statement of the divine plan in the elevation of the human soul to the par-
taking of the divine nature, and at the same time a devotional treatment of
the ascetical principles full of unction and of sufficient fulness for the pur-
pose in hand. If there be any royal road to the fulness of divine love it is
that of intelligence, and it is shown in this book.

The translation is well done, the English is good, the theological and
Scriptural passages correctly rendered. In reading these pages it has oc-
curred to us that the translator could do a great service to the cause of
intelligent piety by translating another book somewhat similar to this
one ; we refer to Lessius' work De Perfectionibus Moribusque divinis. It is
called the Liber Aureus of its great author, and (omitting a chapter or two
on the knotty controversy De Auxiliis) is as inspiring to the love of God
as it is profoundly instructive on the doctrine of the divine attributes.

POPE LEO XIII. : His Life and Letters, together with useful, instructive,
and entertaining information for the Catholic people. Edited and com-
piled by Rev. Jas. F. Talbot, D.D., Cathedral, Boston. With an intro-
duction by Rev. P. A. McKenna, Pastor of the Church of the Immacu-
late Conception, Marlborough, Mass. Illustrated. Boston : Martin
Garrison & Co.

This is a subscription-book, large, well printed, and beautifully bound.
Besides a sketch of the Holy Father's life, it contains a pretty full collection
of his encyclicals, making the book of value for reference. The publishers
have added, by way of appendix, much information valuable for general
reference, including the distribution of Catholic population, list of popes,
cathedrals of the world, growth of the Catholic press, councils of the
church, and a small cyclopaedia or Catholic dictionary.

SIMPLE READINGS ON SOME OF THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST.
, By G. G. G. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. (For sale by the Catholic
Publication Society Co.)
A little book modestly presented to the public, but of much worth.

1 887.] NE w PUB LIC A TIONS. 567

Nearly all the parables are treated of, and in a way to show the hand of a
master of homiletics. Nothing indicates the advance now being made in
preaching more than the fact that such books are published and sold ; for
they are at once the effect of careful and practical study of the art of reli-
gious popular oratory and the school of good preachers. One whose voca-
tion is to instruct could use these eighteen little discourses pretty much
the whole winter or summer through with great comfort to himself and
equal profit to his hearers.

APPLIED CHRISTIANITY : Moral Aspects of Social Questions. By Wash-
ington Gladden. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

In this well- printed little volume the author, a Protestant clergyman,
has undertaken to explain the social questions now pressing for answer,
and to suggest the Christian solution ; although we cannot say that his
treatment is profound, it is certainly intelligent. His view of actual facts
is generally fair; he really knows and seems to appreciate the state of
antagonism between owners of money and owners of labor. He is also
fair in his estimate of the shortcomings of Protestant Christianity (the only
form he considers) and its failures in dealing with the people. " Your pre-
sent industrial system," he causes Christianity to say to the rich, p. 15,
" which fosters these enormous inequalities, which permits a few to heap
up the most of the gains of this advancing civilization and leaves the many
without any substantial share in them, is an inadequate and inequitable
system, and needs important changes to make it the instrument of right-
eousness." Very much is gained when a representative Protestant can thus
admit the need of searching reform in social relations. " The time may
come," he says, p. 17, " when the nation will be compelled to take under its
control, if not into its ownership, the railroads and telegraphs, and admin-
ister them for the common good." Again, p. 18 : "Certain outrageous
monopolies exist which the state is bound to crush. It is an outrage on
public justice that half a dozen men should be able to control the entire
fuel supply of New York and New England. . . . The coal-barons must not
be permitted to enrich themselves by compelling miners to starve at one
end of their lines and the operatives to freeze at the other. In like manner
the great lines of transportation from the West, etc."

As to just how the Protestant religious world shall stand relative to the
toiling world the author has much good advice to give, chiefly bearing
upon the private duties of rich Christians and rich churches. Beyond the
private action of single men and separate churches, Protestantism can
hardly extend its influence upon the people generally, for it lacks the power
of a great public organism. But what Protestant Christians can do, and that
easily, Mr. Gladden shows to be very much indeed ; but, in our opinion, to
carry out his views and apply his moral remedies will call for an amount of
heroism scarcely to be expected from the present condition of Protestant
Christianity. At any rate, the continuance of the present system of work
and wages will, he is persuaded, be felt by the " masses " to be slavery, and
as such be resisted and peaceably or forcibly abolished.

We are glad that the religious standpoint is taken by such fair men and
such vigorous writers in studying social problems. Protestantism has in-
stant need to look for some true explanation of the reason why the stream of

568 NE w PUBLICA TIONS. [Jan.,

American humanity has swept past it, leaving its churches idly drifting
backwards in the eddies along the shore. Mr. Gladden is prophet enough
to know that the main business of zealous Protestants should be to catch
the ears and win the hearts of the common men and women, and that if
they fail to do so their churches will go completely down. As to the Catho-
lic Church, thank God! she has the common people in her very bosom,
close to her heart. Let us trust that Catholics of public spirit, and of all
grades of society and of office, are fully aware that unless the church shall
maintain her influence over the minds and affections of common men and
women, down they go to ruin, and down she herself goes into companion-
ship with the petty sects of error and caste.

APPARATUS JURIS ECCLESIASTICI, IN USUM EPISCOPORUM ET SACFRDOTUM
PR^SERTIM APOSTOLICO MUNERE FUNGENTiUM. Auctore Zephyrino
Zitelli. Romae. 1886.

This work, as its title indicates, is a summary of Canon Law, intended
chiefly for missionary countries all over the world. It does not, of course,
enter into the details of the peculiar legislation of any particular country,
but confines itself generally to giving that which is common to all mission-
ary countries. Hence the reader in this country cannot expect to find in
this work anything like a specific treatment on the ecclesiastical law of the
United States, particularly as perfected by the Third Plenary Council of
Baltimore. Nevertheless, the author explains a number of points peculiar
to us. Every country, even missionary, has, besides the general law, certain
peculiar laws and customs. Hence canonists, especially of late, have found
it necessary to write and adapt their works for a special country. Rev. Dr.
Smith has done this for the United States by his Elements of Ecclesiastical
Law, a new edition of which, revised completely in accordance with the
Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, is now in press.

But to return to our work. The author, Mgr. Zitelli, is Capo Minutante
of the S. C. de Prop. Fide, and is well known by several works already pub-
lished by him. He is, therefore, well qualified by his position and learning
to write a work on canon law for missionary countries. His style is clear
and concise. The book is divided into three parts. The first isde personis;
the second, de rebus ; the third is an appendix giving several other matters
not contained in the other parts.

In the first part the author treats of bishops, parish priests, and other
ecclesiastics exercising sacred functions, especially in missionary countries.
In the second he discusses the Sacraments. In the appendix he speaks of
intercourse of Catholics with Protestants in missionary countries. The
work cannot fail to be highly interesting also in this country. It is ably
written and deserves a large patronage. We sincerely congratulate Mgr.
Zitelli on his learned work, and commend it cordially to the reverend clergy
of this country.

THE BIBLE AND BELIEF : A Letter to a Friend. By the Rev. William Hum-
phrey, S.J. London : Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. ]886.

This is a clearly and ably written piece, and in substance conclusive and
satisfactory. The explanation given of the Catholic dogma that God is the
author of the Bible appears, however, to depreciate or neglect another side

1887.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 569

of the complete truth in this matter viz., that each inspired writer is also
the author of his own work, sometimes in a more and sometimes in a less
comprehensive, but always in a true sense.

Again, the predicate " infallible " is applied in a sense not approved by
the best philosophers to our natural faculties of cognition, which, although
not liable per se to error, are thus liable per accidens. The argument for the
necessity of an infallible authority is somewhat strained throughout, and we
think that the author would have better proved his main thesis, the moral
necessity of an infallible interpreter of the Scripture, if he had not aimed to
prove quite so much.

THE IRISH QUESTION: I. History of an Idea; II. Lessons of the Election.
By the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P. for Midlothian. New York :
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1886.

This is a statesmanlike paper. It adds one more to the proofs of the
consummate ability of Mr. Gladstone. It holds out great encouragement
to the friends of Ireland. The author seems to anticipate that the work of
carrying out the policy which he recommends may be reserved to a Tory
government. They may have the political wisdom to take this work out
of the hands of the Liberal party and begin it, even if they do not carry it
through to completion. Perhaps the necessity of engaging in war and the
internal troubles of Socialism may help to drive them into this course. If
this be so, Mr. Gladstone magnanimously exhorts the Liberals to sink party
interests and give them a generous support. Mr. Gladstone estimates that
twenty-eight per cent, of the English voters are favorable to Home Rule for
Ireland, and that in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales it is favored by seventy-
five per cent. Of the actual Parliament he says: "Without reckoning,
then, on any Tory help, we seem to have in this anti-Home-Rule Parlia-
ment a real majority ready to act in the direction at least of Irish wishes, and
to run the risk of seeing the grant of a portion used as a leverage to obtain
the residue." As to the Land Bill, he states that this and the Home-Rule
Bill were bound together like the Siamese twins during his administration,
owing to peculiar causes, but that a final severance has been effected. Mr.
Gladstone's conclusion is : "If I am not egregiously wrong in all that has
been said, Ireland has now lying before her a broad and even way in which
to walk to the consummation of her wishes. . . . She has now a full consti-
tutional equipment of all the means necessary for raising and determining
the issues of moral force. She has also the strongest sympathies within
as well as beyond these shores to cheer, moderate, and guide her. The
position is for her a novel one, and in its novelty lies its only risk. But
she is quick and ready of perception; she has the rapid, comprehensive
glance which the generals she has found for us have shown on many a field
of battle. The qualities she has so eminently exhibited this year have al-
ready earned for her a rich reward in confidence and good-will. There is
no more to ask of her. She has only to persevere."

To one who has' taken some notice of Irish affairs for fifty years, the
fact that such an utterance has been made by an Englishman who has been
prime minister is simply phenomenal. It is impossible that the Irish
people should be finally defrauded of their just hopes and demands. What
Mr. Gladstone says of the sympathies they have in foreign countries we

57 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Jan.,

affirm to be simply true in regard to this country. It is not true that the
sympathy in America is merely that which resides in the bosom of our
Irish population. The writer of this notice is not an Irishman, but an
American having a descent of two hundred and fifty years. We profess the
warmest sympathy for the Irish people in Ireland and in America, though
without any desire for the injury of the British Empire. It may be thought
that American Catholics are biassed by their religion in favor of Ireland;
and why should we disclaim honoring and loving the Irish people chiefly for
their heroic fidelity to their ancestral faith ? But we aver that the Ameri-
can people, as a whole, sympathize with Ireland, and take her part in her
demand for the repeal of a Union brought about, as Mr. Gladstone says,
by means "unspeakably criminal, for utterly insufficient reasons." We are
on the side of Ireland because her cause is just. It our cause against the
crown of England in 1776 was a good one, the cause of Ireland is still
better. She has more to complain of than we had, and she demands much
less than we did. Our condition and our well-being made it necessary for
us to declare independence and gain it by war. We do not think it possible
or desirable for Ireland to become independent of the British Empire. It is,
however, desirable, and it seems to be possible and feasible, for her to gain
Home Rule. We Americans are bound in consistency to give our moral
support to a demand so just, so reasonable, and so important to her welfare
and that of the whole British Empire. We are consistent and generous
enough to give our sympathy, and we do give it sincerely and cordially.

EMINENT AUTHORS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY : Literary Portraits
by Dr. Georg Brandes. Translated from the original by Rasmus B.
Anderson, United States Minister to Denmark. New York : Thomas
Y. Crowell & Co.

It is interesting to learn what foreigners think of our celebrated men.
This volume consists of literary portraits of nine writers and thinkers of our
own times, of six different nationalities, drawn by a well-known scholar of
Denmark, who, if he has not had a personal acquaintance with all of them,
has at least had a close view. These writers have been chosen as represen-
tatives of the " modern " mind. The portraits which will be of the greatest
interest to American and English readers are those of John Stuart Mill,
Renan, Flaubert, and Hans Christian Andersen. The account of Mill is
based on impressions derived from a number of visits made to Mill in Paris
and in England. In our opinion these impressions are very just and fair.
Particularly interesting and somewhat amusing is the way in which he
depicts the attitude which philosophers of our day hold to one another.
Our author was brought up in the University of Copenhagen. His pro-
fessors, while they were mutually opposed to one another, had all at first
been theologians, had become Hegelians of one school or another, and
then had been emancipated from Hegelianism, yet looked upon the errors
of Hegel as more valuable than the truths of other philosophers. In their
eyes, to Germany belonged of right in modern times the study of philoso-
phy and the right of teaching it, and neither in England nor France had
it even existence. Educated in these notions, our author goes to J. S.
Mill; finds that he thinks so little of German philosophy that he has not
thought it worth while to learn German ; has read Kant only in a transla-

1887.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 571

tion ; has not read a single line of Hegel in his own works, and knows him
only at second-hand. He has formed, however, a decided opinion of his
philosophy, and it is "that everything metaphysical in what he has writ-
ten is sheer nonsense." Bearing in mind that this volume is written by
one who has not the faith, and has for its subject those who for the most
part were also without the faith, the work will prove interesting as a
portraiture, by a thoughtful and intelligent man, of certain "modern"
prophets and teachers.

SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE CITY OF
NATCHEZ, Miss., on the Occasion of the Consecration of the Cathedral,
Sept. 19, 1886.

The early history of Catholicity in Natchez goes back to the year 1682.
During the last two centuries it has seen many vicissitudes. Martyrdoms,
burning and massacre, the visitations of pestilence and war, changes of
dominion from France to Spain, England, and the United States, confisca-
tion, poverty, obstacles of all sorts, are recorded in the annals of the church
of Natchez. The long series of events narrated in the pamphlet before us
terminates auspiciously with the dedication of the cathedral, and we trust
that the future of this diocese will be one of prosperity.

THE PREACHING OF THE CROSS. Part I. By H. J. Coleridge, S J. Lon-
don : Burns & Gates; New York: The Catholic Publication Society
Co. 1886.

This part describes the events of our Lord's public life from the first
announcement of the Passion to the supper in the home of Lazarus, Martha,
and Mary Magdalene. We have given so many notices of Father Coleridge's
work on the occasion of the publication of the foregoing parts that it is not
necessary now to repeat what has been already said in praise of its many
excellent qualities.

LIFE OF FATHER BARBELIN, SJ. By Eleanor C. Donnelly. Philadelphia:
F. A. Fasey. 1886.

Those who were familiar with the affairs of Catholicity in Philadelphia
during the time of the present archbishop's predecessors will remember
well Father Barbelin, and the swarming, busy beehive of St. Joseph's Church
in Willing's Alley. We feel assured, from personal knowledge, that Father
Barbelin was a saint, and a very amiable as well as original saint of marked
individuality and wonderful activity. The gifted lady who has written his
biography has made it very readable and vivacious, and has filled it with a
great number of historical and personal reminiscences.

THE GREAT MEANS OF SALVATION AND OF PERFECTION : Prayer ; Mental
Prayer ; The Exercises of a Retreat ; Choice of a State of Life, and The Vo-
cation to the Religious State and to the Priesthood. By St. Alphonsus de
Liguori, Doctor of the Church. Edited by Rev. Eugene Grimm, C.SS.R.
New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis : Benziger Bros.

Those at all familiar with the ascetical writings of St. Alphonsus know the
value he places upon prayer. " Pray, pray ; never cease to pray,'' he says ; " for if
you pray your salvation will be secure." This volume of the centenary edition of

572 NEW PUBLIC A TIONS. [Jan.,

the works of this glorious Doctor of the church contains the saint's treatise on
prayer.

The subject is treated as only a master in the spiritual life could have done ;
he exhausts his subject. His whole soul is in this work, which he deems of the
very highest importance. " I have published several spiritual works," he says,
" but I do not think that I have written a more useful work than the present, in
which I speak of prayer as a necessary and certain means of obtaining salvation
and all the graces that we require for that object. If it were in my power I would
distribute a copy of it to every Catholic in the world, in order to show him the
absolute necessity of prayer for salvation." How well he has written on prayer
is a matter of world- wide repute, and needs no further comment. But we wish to
call attention to the subject of vocations, taken up towards the end of the volume.
There is food for thought for young men and young women, and especially for
those who think of entering upon the ecclesiastical state. Let them read and
consider and weigh well the words of wisdom the saint there gives them ; per-
haps the hours employed in that occupation may prove the best spent of their
lives.

EUCHARISTIC HOURS : Devotion towards the Blessed Sacrament of the Wise
and of the Simple in all Times. Gems from the treasury of the church's doc-
trine and the deep mines of her history, offered to them that hold and to them
that seek the Gospel pearl of great price. By the author of Legends of the
Blessed Sacrament. London : R. Washbourne. (For sale by the Catholic
Publication Society Co.)

Eucfiaristic Hours is an exceptionally good book. It may be compared to a
necklace of jewels, each precious by itself, but the whole enhanced in value by the
arrangement and the setting. The author does not claim originality. Yet she
presents to English readers a very original book. She has drawn from the Fathers
and Doctors of the church, from the lives of the saints, from ascetical and mysti-
cal writers, all that her volume contains. The testimony of the ages is adduced.
The love of men for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and the burning words that
gave evidence of that love, are given to us to inspire in us like sentiments. From
the early days when the church lay hidden in the earth until this our own day,
praise of the King, his tenderness to us, his lowliness for our sakes, have been the
themes of the best of men. And the best that they have said concerning the
greatest evidence of God's love the Blessed Sacrament is given in Eucharistic
Hours. We hope this book will be widely read and appreciated as it deserves.

MARY, THE QUEEN OF THE HOUSE OF DAVID AND MOTHER OF JESUS :
The Story of her Life. By Rev. A. Stewart Walsh, D.D. With an in-
troduction by Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, D.D. Illustrated. New York :
Henry S. Allen.

There are more ways to the union of Christendom than comparison and ad-
justment of creeds ; that is essential, but it may be itself brought about by indirect
means. One of these is to make an effort to agree on the general features of the
divine plan in the mediatorship of Christ. Indispensably necessary to a proper
appreciation of this is a study of the office of that being, Blessed of all genera-
tions, whom the Father chose to be the mother of his incarnate Son. When Ca-
tholics and Protestants can sit down together and extol the virtues of Mary in
concord, when they can feel their hearts thrill with equal pride in her exalted
office and in her most extraordinary holiness, they have advanced one good step
towards fairly reaching agreement a step all the firmer because springing from

1887.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 573

the gentler force of the affections as well as the imperative demands of the under-
standing.

We know that all that this Protestant minister writes of the Blessed Mother
of God cannot be true, yet he doubtless means to tell no lie ; and he means to do
very great honor the greatest he considers proper to one dear to every Catholic
heart. May she be mindful of him before the throne in heaven, and of all who
seek to know her Son's truth through her own entrancing loveliness !

GEMS OF CATHOLIC THOUGHT : Sayings of Eminent Catholic Authors.
By Anna T. Sadlier. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co.;
London : Burns & Gates.

The second title of this little volume gives a better indication of its contents
than the first. It is made up of the " Sayings of Eminent Catholic Authors "
rather than " Gems of Catholic Thought." We open the book at haphazard, for
instance, and find a thought like this : " No two persons ever read the same
book or saw the same picture." Now, this can hardly be called a gem of Catho-
lic thought, although it is a saying of an eminent Catholic author, Mme. Swetchine.
It also might be objected that some of the quotations from the poets are too brief
at times to fully express the thought in the author's mind. The book bears evi-
dence of extensive reading, and is published in a neat and convenient form.

LITTLE COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON, AND OTHER TINY RHYMES FOR
TINY READERS. By Eleanor C. Donnelly. New York, Cincinnati, and St.
Louis: Benziger Bros. 1887.

Between the pretty covers of this book are many simple and charming verses
for the little folks. Under the title of " Little Compliments of the Season "
are selected and arranged, as the sub-title explains, " simple verses original,
selected, or translated for name-days, birth-days, Christmas, New Year, and
other festive and social occasions." Under the title of " With the Babies," " At
Play," " At Work," and "At Prayer," Miss Donnelly has collected from various
publications for children, and has herself contributed, many pleasant rhymes sure
to be given a cordial reception by the little ones. It is a pity that the illustrations
in this book are so far below the mark of those of the many beautiful children's
books that are published nowadays.

GENIUS IN SUNSHINE AND SHADOW. By Maturin M. Ballou. Boston :
Ticknor & Co. 1887.

The title of this book is somewhat misleading, for one imagines that he
will find between its covers a record of the ups and downs in the lives of
great men, and be able to arrive at an estimate of the effects that prosperity
or adversity had upon their characters. Instead, it is a sort of olla podrida
of facts in the lives of great men, chiefly great literary men and artists, with
a good deal of small gossip thrown in. The author suggests in his preface
that the volume might better, perhaps, have been entitled "Library Notes,"
which title gives a clearer idea of the contents of the book. There is too
much small gossip, too many minute and not interesting facts recorded,
such as that one great man was fond of figs, and that another great man
had a liking for roast pig. Altogether, though some wheat is found
among the chaff, the book is too loosely constructed, and lacks dignity
and definiteness of purpose.

574 NEW PUBLICA TIONS. [Jan.,

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROMAN CONSTITUTION. By Ambrose Tighe.
New York : D. Appleton & Co. 1886.

This little book is one of the series of History Primers issued by Apple-
ton & Co. Within its pages is condensed in a clear and lucid manner much
useful information concerning the Roman people and Roman law. It is
based chiefly upon Mommsen. It will be found a valuable handbook for all
young students of Roman history.

MICROBES, FERMENTS, AND MOULDS. By E. L. Trouessart. International Sci-
entific Series. New York : D. Appleton & Co.

Had Alexander the Great lived in these times he need not have sighed for new
worlds to conquer. The microscope has revealed to us worlds within worlds ; and
could Alexander have bent his mighty intellect to the conquering of any of these,
he would have performed a real service to mankind. Had he invented a method
of destroying the microbes that are said to impair or destroy the vitality of man,
instead of himself helping to destroy his fellows, he would indeed be deserving of
the title of Great.

The book is written in a lucid manner and can be readily understood by the
public in general for whom it is intended, being not overburdened with scientific
terms. The importance of knowing something about microbes is pointed out by
the author in one of his opening paragraphs. After dwelling upon the microsco-
pic fungi which are useful in the general economy of nature, he says :

" But, in addition to these useful microbes, there are others which are injurious to us ;
while they fulfil the physiological destiny marked out for them by Nature. Such are the mi-
crobes which produce diseases in wine, most of the changes in alimentary and industrial sub-
stances, and, finally, a large number of the diseases to which men and domestic animals are
subject. The germs of these diseases, which are only the spores or seeds of these microbes,
float in the air we breathe and in the water we drink, and thus penetrate into the interior of our
bodies.

" Hence we see the importance of becoming acquainted with these microbes. Their study
concerns the agriculturist, the manufacturer, the physician, the professor of hygiene, and, indeed,
we may say that it concerns all, whatever our profession or social position may be, since there is
not a single day nor a single instant of our lives in which we cannot be said to come in contact
with microbes. They are, in fact, the invisible agents of life and death, and this will ap-
pear more plainly from the special study we are about to make of the more important among
them."

However, it is well to add that this germ theory of disease, though it has many
distinguished advocates, has not yet been absolutely proven. Many physicians
consider that when microbes are found in the blood they are neither the cause of
the disease nor the vehicle of contagion. Among the opponents of the microbian
theory are Robin, Bechamp and Jousset de Bellesme, and Lewis and Lionel Beale.
Mr. Trouessart maintains in this book, however, that Pasteur's microbian theory
is the only one that explains all facts.

TECHNIC : A System of the Most Necessary Daily Exercises to Produce a
Perfect Piano Technic in the Shortest Possible Time. By Hugo L.
Mansfeldt. San Francisco : A. Waldteufel.

This is a capital work. The author has succeeded in condensing into
a very small compass a vast amount of study. He discards entirely the
old-fashioned " five-finger exercises," and substitutes for them in the first
part of the work a series of exercises on five notes in close, extended, and

i88;.l NEW PUBLICATIONS. 575

contracted positions in all the keys, having for their objects the strength-
ening of the weak fingers of the hand and securing the utmost mobility of
the thumb. The second part consists of exercises for rendering the hands
and fingers independent of each other. They seem to be constructed so as
to preclude the possibility of committing them to memory, thus compelling
the pupil to read every note. The third part consists of twelve series of
exercises in all the keys and ranging over the whole field of execution.
The arrangement of the whole work is very clear, and ample explana-
tions are given of the mode of practising, etc.

ANECDOTES ILLUSTRATIVE OF OLD TESTAMENT TEXTS. (Clerical Library.)
New York : A. C. Armstrong & Son.

While there are many things in this volume which the preacher will
have to reject and discard, and much unsound and erroneous doctrine,
there are not a few things of which he will be able to make use. The
greater number of the anecdotes have been taken from Protestant evan-
gelical sources, a few are derived from the lives of the saints, and even
artistic, political, and scientific celebrities of our own times have been made
to contribute. There are in all 529 anecdotes, arranged according to the
order of the Old Testament. Two useful indices of subjects and of Scrip-
ture texts are appended.

FROM MEADOW-SWEET TO MISTLETOE. Verses with pictures. By Mary A.
Lathbury. New York : Worthington & Co.

This is one of the loveliest Christmas books for children that we have seen
for many a day. The pretty little poems for children which it contains are each
illustrated with a large full-page picture, very soft and delicate in execution.
The spirit of happy and innocent childhood has been caught in a deft manner by
the author's pen and pencil, and the result is a book so charming as to make one
almost envious of the children who will receive it as a present.

EARTHQUAKES AND OTHER EARTH MOVEMENTS. By John Milne. Interna-
tional Scientific Series. New York : D. Appleton & Co.

Although this volume bears the marks of great care and wide research upon
the part of the author, it is somewhat disappointing, because the science of seis-
mology seems to be mainly hypothetical and scarcely as yet an inductive science.
Professor Milne, who holds the chair of mining and geology in the Imperial Col-
lege of Engineering, Tokio, Japan, appears to be furnished by the Japanese
government with every appliance for the furthering of his work, and is situated in
a very favorable district for the observation of earthquakes, so that he has been
enabled to make observations concerning the characteristics and effects of earth-
quakes, and has furnished a number of formulae which may some day bear rich
fruit and help to place seismology upon a solid basis.

THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. By Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Illustrated.
Boston : Ticknor & Co. 1887.

There are books which are made for the parlor-table, and there are books
which are made to be read anywhere and to be carried about as companions.
The former are the ornamental, the latter the useful class. The book before us is

57$ NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Jan., 1887.

a parlor-table book too large to be read with comfort, but it will be always looked
at with pleasure. It is beautifully printed, and contains a great number of illus-
trations, of uneven merit, by some of our prominent American artists. Mr. St.
John Harper contributes the frontispiece and some excellent full-page drawings.
One of these, representing Fair Margaret watching from the turret, is very lovely,
although the face of Margaret lacks expression and is not the face that haunts us
in the poet's lay. Some of the landscapes which are scattered throughout the
book, reproducing the famous localities of the poem, are well worthy of praise.
There are very many, no doubt, who will be glad to find an old favorite decked
out in so choice a garb.

DIARY OF A TOUR IN AMERICA. By Rev. M. B. Buckley, of Cork, Ireland.
Edited by his sister. Dublin : Sealy, Bryers & Walker.

An entertaining book by an intelligent and sympathetic observer of
men and affairs. The author, deceased a few years ago, was an Irish priest
who made a hasty journey through the United States and Canada, and
whose sister has here collected and published his observations, especially
interesting in reference to the industry, enterprise, and native genius of
his countrymen in America.

A TREATISE ON PLANE AND SPHERICAL TRIGONOMETRY. With Logarith-
mic Tables. By J. Bayma, S.J., Professor of Mathematics, Santa Clara
College. San Francisco: A. Waldteufel.

It would be hardly correct to say that this is a contribution to the sci-
ence of trigonometry, for that is a complete science; but it is a contribu-
tion to the study of it, being a neat, compact little work by a very distin-
guished mathematician.

OTHER BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

MONTH OF THE SOULS IN PURGATORY ; or, Practical Meditations for each day of the month of
November. By the Abbe Berlioux. Translated from the French by Emily Cholmeley.
With Preface by His Eminence Cardinal Manning. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son.

THE DRAGON, IMAGE, AND DEMON ; or, The Three Religions of China. By Rev. Hampder

C. Du Bose. New York : A. C. Armstrong & Son.

REMINISCENCES AND OPINIONS OF SIR FRANCIS HASTINGS DOYLE 1813-1885. New York :

D. Appleton & Co.

PASTORAL LETTER ADDRESSED BY THE ARCHBISHOP OF NEW YORK TO THE FAITHFUI
OF HIS CHARGE on occasion of the celebration of the Fifth Diocesan Synod, November
17 and 18, 1886. New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. By Rev. Louis Cornelis. Milwaukee and Chicago : Hoffn
Bros.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XLIV. FEBRUARY, 1887. No - 26 3-

SOCIAL PROBLEMS.

THE Catholic politicians in the Congress at Liege during the
last days of September, endeavoring to find some remedy for
the evils of society, held out Catholic faith and practice as
the unerring guides for solving the social problems. After the
reading of a brief of Leo XIII., in which the pope referred
to the Christian lessons to be found in his encyclicals disclos-
ing the foundation of true social philosophy, the local bishop
developed the subject in the same direction. He spoke of the
excessive luxuriousness of living and desire for pleasure and
amusement among the educated and wealthier classes, the mis-
chief arising from which is increased enormously by the sel-
fishness, the indifference for others, and the greed of wealth
rampant among the upper and middle ranks :

"These things provoke naturally the envy or hatred of those who are
dependent; they diminish the means available for benevolent and useful
objects ; and, what is worst of all, the evil example from above works the
demoralization and corruption of the lower classes."

The bishop dwelt on the obvious elementary duties imposed
by the profession of Christianity. The church was a great society,
and all were bound to take an interest in it, and to help what was
of advantage for their parish, their province, and their country.
He exhorted his hearers to support Catholic associations, espe-
cially the Society of St. Vincent de Paul ; to do all in their power

578 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. [Feb.,

to secure Catholic education in all its branches, for the Christian
education of the young was the first step to restore a Christian
life.

M. Woeste, an ex-cabinet minister of Belgium, professed his
belief that no genuine solution of " social problems " could be
found outside of Catholic principles, and declared his approval
of "arbitration committees" between employers and workmen,
adding that he would prefer to see a little more of individual
action, and referred earnestly to the idle, aimless life of the un-
employed educated youth of the day.

The resolutions adopted were very practical. Agricultural
societies are to be set up to promote friendly relations between
land-owners and tenants, and to raise the condition of the agricul-
tural laborer ; people's banks are recommended ; the observance
of the Sunday is to be promoted, and public works on that day
to be stopped ; mutual benefit and insurance societies are to be
encouraged, which would assist men in illness, procure them
employment, and aid them when out of work. The Bishop of
Treves expressed himself decidedly in favor of the restoration of
guilds or trade-societies, but in a way adapted to the conditions
of our time, and leaving ample liberty for individual action. Re-
solutions were also passed demanding protection for the morality
of girls and women employed in workshops and manufactories,
and also the institution of schools for the children of workmen.

The Liege Congress took these topics for discussion on ac-
count of the fearful riots which had recently burst forth in differ-
ent parts of Belgium, the most thickly-settled country in Christen-
dom. The members of the Congress admitted that there was not
only a great deal of impiety and vice amongst the working-classes
(so-called), but that their condition was so hard, and they were
so pressed for the very means of existence, that it was no wonder
they broke out, and that unless something was done, and that at
once, asocial earthquake might be expected, and " to- morrow it
would be too late." As similar symptoms even in our own thinly-
settled country betoken like causes for discontent, it behooves us
to consider what may and must be done for the " working people."
Even self-interest binds us to this, for, to use a colloquial meta-
phor, " we are all in the same boat," and if the sailors get mad
and make a hole in the ship's bottom or set her on fire, down we
all go. Hence we must see that the men before the mast are
properly fed and well treated.

But " here's the rub." The Declaration of Independence
says, and says truly, that we are "created free and equal," which

1887.] SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 579

is commonly interpreted to mean that we " are all free and
equal " ; and, indeed, as the law views us, so we are. Every man
has but one vote, and manhood (as distinguished from property
and from womanhood) is the only requisite for suffrage in the
citizen. Now, one feels delicate about taking care of his '* equals,"
just as the equals feel delicate, even rebellious, at the idea of
being taken care of. Hence our equality forces us apart. The
mistress of the house dare not suggest to her " help " a less ex-
pensive attire, because the latter will at once assert her right to
dress as well as any one else ; and the tramp asks us for a loan
instead of an alms, at once reminding us of the propriety of get-
ting security before we pass over the money. Now, as self-
defence and the law will tax us to support the servant-girl and
the tramp when their extravagance and their idleness cause them
to break down and enter the almshouse, it would seem but just
that we should be enabled to prevent their reaching that state of
dependence (on us) by forcing them to dress according to their
means and to work while their health allows. But no. " This is
a free country. Paternal government is not desired. Let every
one do as he pleases and take the consequences." Yes; but the
sober, industrious people must pay for these same consequences.

This same spirit of personal freedom and equality, and the
peculiarities of our political system, are often exemplified in this
manner: Here is a man, with a wife and children, who spends all
his money for drink, most of his time in saloons, and comes home
for no other purpose than to reproduce his own beastly image in
other and yet other subjects. The superintendent of the alms-
house is a political officer; he gives the " relief" at his discretion.
The priest and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul provide
flour and meal for the ever-increasing mouths of the undesirable
family. But why not put the axe to the root ? Why not place
this worthless man, this enemy of society, in jail, and thus pre-
vent his begetting any more images of his disordered self, and
compel him to work for the maintenance of those already gene-
rated ? You can't. He's a voter ; and, besides, you'll be con-
sidered "too hard on the poor." The difficulty is shown in
another example. You see many people out of work, many on
the list of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and you say : " I have
a hill in that field that might be better in the hollow. I don't
care particularly about it, but I will give these poor men fifty
cents a day and let them dig away at it ; it is better than to have
them getting flour and meal in alms, and it will save them from
the dangers of idleness until spring opens." " What! he offers us

580 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. [Feb.,

fifty cents a day ! No, sir." " But this is not regular work ; it is
an alms." " It makes no difference. I'll not work, nor will I allow
any man to work, at such rates. I'll never work for fifty cents a
day. Td rather starve." And if you let him starve he'll break
out into riot and burn the town, and thus make work at full
wages. So, in order not to interfere with his ideas of indepen-
dence, you must let him remain idle and his family suffer, un-
less you are willing to smuggle the flour and meat secretly into
his house while he is away at the saloon running up a bill for
whiskey, or on the corner talking politics. Let us give another
example : In a remote country district, after the first snow in the
year 1886, comes along what is known as a tramp. " Father,
would you have a pair of boots ? These I have are 'most worn
out, and my feet are nearly on the ground with them." " No,
I have no boots; but wouldn't you like to earn a pair? We are
husking corn now. I'll give you board, lodging, and forty
cents a day." " No, father. I'll not be like one of them
Italians that are ruining this country. I belong to the Knights
of Labor, and cant work for nothing." " Very well. Good-
day ! " Was this a true Knight of Labor? Should we pension
such men during the winter, or provide work for them at a
high rate of wages, and tax the community proportionately?
According to ordinary thinkers we should provide work for
them, if they cannot, on account of exceptionally hard times,
tide over the winter for it were not well to relieve them of
the burden of caring for themselves; but the rate of wages should
be proportioned to the need and value of the work proposed.
And then we should legislate in such a way that the whiskey-
business, gambling-saloons, and such institutions shall not exhaust
the pockets of the laborers and force the community to the alter-
native of suffering riot and arson or else of providing employ-
ment.

Do we, then, claim that they are wrong who hold that the
poor should be supported by the community ? By no means.
Else we would have to condemn all our public institutions of
benevolence, our almshouses, hospitals, orphanages, etc. Only
we do not say that justice, as the word is commonly understood,
obliges us to maintain such institutions. It is charity. Hence
the expression used of these establishments in New York : " Pub-
lic Charities and Correction." Does it make the obligation less
that it should arise from charity and not from justice? Not at
all. For the same God that imprinted the law of justice on his
tablets and in our hearts said to all : " Thou shalt love thy neigh-

i88/.] SOCIAL PROBLEMS. . 581

bor as thyself." But the "quality of mercy is not strained," and
so neither is charity to be exercised with the same machinery
as justice, but belongs properly to the individual; and it is a
sad commentary on modern society in England and the United
States that the government is forced to assume. the duty of the
private citizen and tax him for its fulfilment. If we were all
Catholics this would not be the case. We are wanting in our
duty, and lose the great privilege and merit of God-like bro-
therly love, when we merely pay our percentage of tax, leave
the poor to the politically-installed functionary, and never go to
"feed the hungry," to " visit the sick," or to " bury the dead "
ourselves. But the individual here has and does neglect the duty
of chanty or love, and therefore rightly does the state with its
Christian traditions force him by taxation to provide for his in-
firm and disabled and helpless brethren.

Another difficulty in the way of solving our problem by pri-
vate charity is this: Respectable people that is, people worthy
of respect like to be independent. This laudable, God-given
feeling relieves society immensely, as it throws every family and
individual more or less on himself; for there is scarce any one who
can bear to be called a dependant, much less a beggar. On the
other hand, it is inconvenient when we wish to economize in the
care of the poor, because no individual wants to go into the alms-
house, nor even to room with another acknowledged dependant,
and every family wants to have its own privacy and " decency"
preserved, or else will not accept alms at all. All this is intensi-
fied in our democratic system, where on election-day the voters
are sought even in the poor- houses and brought in carriages, to
exert the same weight in the fate of the country as the richest
man in it by casting their ballots. Then, again, people want self-
government, and will not be content with beautiful homes, good
wages, libraries, cleanliness, and peace, unless they have a per-
sonal influence in providing and regulating all these things.
Witness the Pullman City experiment near Chicago, and its not
unexpected failure. The writer knows an almshouse one of the
rules of which obliged the inmates to bathe every two weeks.
The result was cleanliness and health, but the result was also to
increase the hatred of the poor for the institution. A railroad
laborer, injured by a blast, was brought to a clean, comfortable,
cosey hospital, where he was tended by kind, womanly hands, and
treated by the best physicians, all purely for Christ's sake. He
stood it for a few weeks, but at length requested the doctors to
discharge him. It was the middle of winter. " Give me a bottle

582 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. [Feb.,

of that liniment/' he said, " and let me go. I'll rub it on myself
in the shanties." And to the comfortless shanties he went, this
wifeless, childless, homeless man doubtless because he felt more
independent there, and freedom was dearer than food, cleanliness,
and warmth.

Yet another difficulty: While the poor, like the rich and, in-
deed, more than they love liberty, they are quite as gregarious
in their inclinations and habits. Hence poor people want to live
not only near each other, but actually with each other. The lack
of education, culture, and wealth, with all the surroundings these
united can command, renders the poor laborer more dependent
on the society of his fellows for that genial companionship and
sympathy for whose absence nothing can entirely compensate.
Therefore it is that the poor congregate and crowd and "pile"
into the great cities, and cling ever closer to the city's heart, as if
loath to lose the enjoyment of the strong life-pulses that beat
there, anxious to be in the very head and front of every social,
human movement. The equal rights of all have been, in theory
at least, recognized in the greater part of our territory ; but the
trouble is either that all are not equal themselves, or else that
their instincts and prejudices and preferences drive them to
house like bees. It is getting to be in Chicago, a prairie city,
very much as it is in New York. Why live a hireling's life in
any city when one may easily become an independent farmer on
the broad bosom of Illinois or Minnesota? Does the reader know
how many families the enthusiasm of Bishop Ireland and the elo-
quence of Bishop Spalding induced to leave the loathsome tene-
ments of New York and accept the sweet air, the rich land and
comfortable homesteads of the West, offered almost as a gift?
We doubt if they made one single convert in the metropolis for
every time they jointly occupied the platform or the sanctuary.
No tenements! Is the reader aware that since the establishment
of rapid transit it has become easy for multitudes to own their
own homes outside of New York, on Long Island or in West-
chester or New Jersey? Yet how hard it is to persuade them to
abandon the wearing, nerve-destroying noise and the unhealthy
stench of the great city, and lead a healthy, quiet, natural, and
virtuous life in the near suburbs ! What is the use of speculating
without taking account of human nature? There was a time,
and that not long past, when it was the poor who were called ig-
norant, and even senseless and perhaps rightly for swarming
into tenements. .But now the rich even, and the very rich, are
guilty of the same folly, and even in a far greater degree ; for

1887.] SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 583

whereas the houses in Mott street seldom reach seven stories, the
"apartments" on our finest avenues run up to eleven or more.
And these families pay a higher rent for one single flat in such a
dwelling- than would, and sometimes actually did, obtain them a
beautiful mansion with several acres of garden and meadow out
in God's country. And it is true of these latter-day abominations
called " apartment-houses " that they also are injurious to the
physical and moral health of the race ; in many cases are in fact,
or soon will be, reeking pest-hills, which will gradually work the
ruin of their occupants and reduce their physique and their
morale to the level of that Paris whence their idea has been taken.
" Let us take a walk out in the fields," said Boswell. " Oh, hang
the fields! " replied the doctor. " Let us take a walk down Fleet
street! One field is like another field." It is useless, then, to
blame the poor for preferring the cities ; the rich do likewise.
Nay, even with the educated and refined the passion for living
in the midst of society is so strong that, amongst the clergy, a
country mission will be accepted willingly only by the philoso-
pher or the saint. Now, where people will crowd in this manner
it is inevitable that sickness, intemperance and other vices, pov-
erty, filth, and death shall prevail, and to such an extent that it is
simply impossible to reduce these evils to natural limits. The
exercise of charity thus becomes immensely more difficult than it
would be if the population were more scattered. But what rem-
edy is there ? Legislation forbidding crowding can do a great
deal. Why doesn't it? We shall see later on.

Another reason why it is hard to help the needy is because so
many are in want by no one's fault but their own. One-half the
race lives off the other half ; or perhaps it would be truer to say
two-thirds of the race live upon the remaining third.

We maintain that if the poor would only practise temperance
they would in a multitude of cases infallibly rise out of, or escape
falling into, poverty. Why ? The answer is in the statistics of
the saloon business. Further, because the rich would find a
motive of natural attraction, in addition to the divine command
enjoining brotherly love, if the poor were blameless for their
misery, and it would be not only easier but delightful to help
the needy. Every one knows that " decent " poor people find
friends in their distress. If they sometimes do not it is because
they are hidden in a repulsive crowd, or because the presump-
tion is that their condition is accompanied by filth, profanity, and
intemperance that is to say, that they are not " decent," and it
would require the love of St. Vincent de Paul to draw near and

584 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. [Feb.,

help them. How then? Do we insist that the poor shall prac-
tise the four cardinal virtues before they may be helped ? No.
We must help them, such as they are.

Here comes in the need of those Christian principles ad-
vanced in the Congress of Liege, and by which alone is temporal
well-being equally with eternal happiness to be gained. Let
these but prevail and every one will take an interest in his bro-
ther, for we would be all brethren, children of one Father, who
would have us love one another and will ask each: "Where is
thy brother?" And this is natural as well as positive law.
Like loves like. Men are naturally beneficent, and it is only
because they fear theft, or dislike filth, or hate drunkenness, or
fear strife that they avoid each other's company ; and we think
that the rich man would be quite willing, as a rule, to " consider
the poor," if both he and his poorer brother were honest, sober,
neat, and peaceable.

Having so far looked over the field of private effort for the so-
lution of the social problem, we are now to consider that which
is public. We have said that legislation might do something to
remove or remedy some of those circumstances which make the
exercise of charity difficult. Yes, the government might order
at least the worst of those huge tenements to be removed, and
forbid more than a certain number of people to live under one
roof. Why doesn't it? Because the people don't want it. But
the tenements are destroying their occupants. There are only
two ways of remedying that : either persuade the voters of the
evil and let them elect men pledged to reform it, or else call in
Bismarck. But you can't do the former; then you must put up
with the evil. We are bound to practise charity anyhow, and
if we changed our form of government we might indeed get rid
of the tenements and run splendid boulevards over their ruins,
but you would have the tyrant and the standing army eating up
your people instead. So the young men won't be sober, and will
spend their wages in vice and folly instead of laying in a stock of
good health and morals, and making to themselves a comfortable
home for a long and happy life. Persuade them to vote for
honest officials who will make and enforce good municipal laws,
or else abandon your democracy and let Draco rule and devour
us. So the remedy is in a great measure in the hands of the
people after all? Certainly it is. If they want the crowded tene-
ments abolished next year let them elect men pledged to this. If
they want to get rid of the occasion of sin which they are un-
able to resist, let them vote for local option and then sweep

1887.] SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 585

away the saloons. But this, you say, they will never do. Very
well, then. You can't remedy their ills by any artificial arrange-
ment : there is no use of taking quinine while the green, stagnant
pond is still behind the house.

But before adverting further to the means whereby the duty
and practice of charity may possibly be facilitated, we would
again insist on the fact that the voters can, if they will, bring
about some necessary reforms which we ourselves, brought up
in New York, know well the need of. They can have play-
grounds for the children. It is merely absurd to answer by
pointing to the meadows in Central Park when you consider
the size of the city and the number of young Manhattanese who
have the desire and the right to play base-ball. So they can
have a dozen more free baths for every one they now have.
Even these are a great improvement on the state of things in the
writer's boyhood, when we got a swim at the risk of imprison-
ment, and washed ourselves at the imminent peril of a clubbing
from a guardian of the peace (bless the mark !), or pitched our ball
in mortal terror among the logs in Webb's shipyard. They can
prevent that special legislation which makes over to the owners
of the Hudson's lovely banks the ownership also of the river-bot-
tom, so that no one dare anchor anywhere above low-water mark
without the consent of the riparians. We will not discuss the
strict justice of such a law, but surely it appears uncharitable
something like various practices prevalent in that woebegone
country, Ireland. So, too, the Hudson is intended by God for
men to drink of, to sail on, to admire, and to bathe in. Hence
they should have frequent and free access to its waters, and not
be forced to walk six miles fora lane leading down to it, nor ask
permission of some proprietor who perhaps never bathes except
at Newport or in his own mansion before they can enjoy their
rightful prerogative.

We know a small city with a beautiful and well-stocked read-
ing-room maintained by taxation, a delightful place to spend a
couple of hours, especially of a winter's night. Now, the library
is closed punctually at eight o'clock in the evening, precisely at
the hour when it would be useful to those who need it most, as
they have no such resources at home, and must either accept the
alms of the Y. M. C. Association, instead of enjoying what they
are taxed for, or else go and stay, at more or less expense, amid
the smoke and profane vulgarity and temptation of the saloon.

Why don't the voters remedy these things? We did not see
our way clearly to follow the now famous "sixty-eight thou-

586 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. [Feb.,

sand " of New York's last election ; but it is a consolation to know
that sixty-eight thousand men had the courage to give up the
" two dollars a head " that it is said they usually get for their
votes, and follow their own judgment at the ballot-box at least
once. It is a good sign, if democracy be indeed a stable and
reliable system of government. The people generally are mon-
archists in practice, though democrats in theory, and follow a
" boss "as they used to follow a king. Or else, like children,
they want to eat their cake and have it at the same time ; sell
their sacred right of voting, and then complain because they
are deprived of its proper fruit. They remind us of a man we
met in California who was shouting, " The Chinese must go!"
" Why don't you begin here? " we said. " Here are five Chinese
laundrymen in a village of one hundred and fifty inhabitants, and
not a single family, of a surety, that did not do its own wash-
ing before the Chinese came. Why not wear your shirts for a
month, as you did formerly, or let your women-folk do the
washing just for four weeks, as they used to? Or else pay the
rent of the store occupied by the Asiatics for a few weeks, and
so force them to go." "No," he said, "the people won't do
that. They want the government to put them out." There it
is again. They want to pass for self-governors, and are proud
of the name of democrat ; yet they throw the care and respon-
sibility on the shoulders of whoever has ability and the decision
to seize and play the part of father, master, boss, or king.

However, even if we all cast our votes conscientiously, honor-
ably, judiciously, and properly, there will be always room for the
exercise of charity that is, of brotherly love. The curse is upon
us, the curse of original sin, and therefore there will be actual sin
and its consequences poverty, disease, filth, insanity, crime in
the world. While the publicist is training the voters to correct
some of the social wrongs by the ballot, why can't the well-to-
do, God-fearing, man-loving Christians unite in organizing and
systematizing and developing the ever-needful work of charity ?
Christians, say we? Nay, why not unite the Jew and the Samari-
tan, the Catholic and the infidel, in this virtue ? Are we afraid of
losing faith by practising charity? Or do some of our readers
think, perhaps, that it would be a communicatio in sacris, and
therefore forbidden? It does not appear so to us, nor, apparent-
ly, to that apostolic man, the Archbishop of Westminster, who
joins hand and word and purse with every one who is engaged
in works of beneficence. As yet we Catholics have hung back
from aiding in the collections of Hospital Sunday. Why ? Is it

1 887.] SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 587

because our people don't avail themselves of the good results ?
Everybody knows that as we have most of the poor, so a great
share of this alms is bestowed on our members. Or is it that, be-
ing mainly composed of the poorer classes of society, we do not
feel called on to contribute? Yet we build fine churches and
splendid hospitals and asylums of our own. The writer may be
mistaken, but that policy strikes him as narrow, false, and in-
jurious which prevents us from joining our fellow-citizens in any
movement that is really good, even though the direction of it
be not placed in our control. What is the cause of this holding
back? and is it really to the greater glory of God and our neigh-
bor's good ?

Now, suppose that the priest and the Levite in the parable had
said : " We have no means, and cannot undertake to provide for
that poor man ; but as you, good Samaritan, are rich and willing
to do it, permit us to offer our little contribution also, because he,
being a Jew, is even more our brother than yours ; in any case
charity binds all of us together." Do you think Jesus Christ
would have blamed them or allowed them to fall into temptation
or lose their faith in his true church for such co-operation?
What are we afraid of, then, or what prevents us from uniting
with our fellow-citizens in every good work? Enlightened co-
operation in public charity will not only save us from the re-
proach of incivism, which will, until it is removed, be an almost
insuperable obstacle to the conversion of our country, but it will
tend to bring the guidance of every good work under the high-
est principles. Far from us any selfish motive, but we know a
priest who joined, as far as he might laudably, with one of those
" charity organization societies," and who in a very brief time
became one of its chief officers, although the other members
were exclusively non-Catholic. For those people know that the
church is the best manager of such institutions. As a Protestant
preacher said to us : " We are only copying your Society of St.
Vincent de Paul." But we cannot expect them to come and beg
us to organize and take them under our direction. We ought to
be very grateful for the Christian spirit that prevails, and that
shows itself in those various societies for the diffusion of benefi-
cence, the suppression of vice, the prevention of cruelty, the pro-
motion of temperance ; and if we do not misinterpret the words
of Leo X11I. in his encyclical of November i, 1885, our joining in
such movements is in harmony with his advice to "take part in
public affairs, . . . not in order to approve what is not right, . . .
but to change it into sound and true provision for the public

588 ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. [Feb.,

good, having- a fixed determination to infuse into all the veins of
the state, as most wholesome sap and blood, the wisdom and vir-
tue of the Catholic religion."

Our space is already outrun, and we have only broached these
vast and deep and difficult yet vitally interesting subjects, but are
glad of a chance to urge on their study that they maybe pursued
to a successful issue, so that our progress may be real and sound.
The best country for the poor man is the country where he is
least likely to starve to death. Even the France and Italy of to-
day are, by this criterion, superior to England and the United
States. Let us do our duty at the polls, and we will save demo-
cratic institutions from disgrace and from the sneers of titled
aristocrats and kings. Let us join hands with all our fellow-citi-
zens to practise the divine virtue of chanty. So shall we be
free indeed, because God's truth shall be practised amongst us
and shall make us free ; so shall all nations acknowledge that
Liberty hath indeed enlightened and elevated us, and the more
easily and speedily shall she then proceed on her mission of
" Enlightening the World."

ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS.

SELFISHNESS is the world's master-sin. Using the word
" sin " in its colloquial sense, apart from its theological bearings,
selfishness is the fens et origo of all the evils which are commonly
called social. Nay, selfishness is the cause of most of the vices
of men's lives, of their own lives and of the lives of those who
know them. Is this going too far ? Not one inch. Let us con-
sider selfishness in its effects on a man's self, as well as in its
effects upon others.

Selfishness is the preference of a man's weaker disposition to
such as is stronger or more pure. It is the choosing, perhaps
listlessly or half-consciously, what occasions him least trouble,
most pleasure. It is the putting aside such suggestions of force
as come from what is nobler in nature, and the heeding only such
impulses as say, "Ah ! this will be agreeable; this will get rid of
that bore." Carry out this disposition to its full behest; spread
it over a lifetime over seventy years ; permit it to comprehend
the two spheres of human action commonly known as the " natu-

1 887.] ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. 589

ral " and the " spiritual," and you have the disease which blasts
the whole of a career and nips every perfection in the bud. It
will be well to avoid in the present paper any allusion to " the
supernatural virtues," because the present writer, being a lay-
man, has no pretension, no fitness, to speak of high matters which
are beyond him. It is as a man of the world he would speak of
selfishness ; and a man of the world knows what it is. Selfishness
corrodes every heart. There is but the question of the degree.
More or less, a man is only half of himself, because the whole of
a man's self ought to include every relation towards those who
are brought into contact with him. No Ego can be complete in
itself. Ego is only fractional or relative. A man who is " wrap-
ped up in himself" is not a whole but a part. It is said of water
that it is formed of rounded particles, and that its unity is the
harmony of its innumerableness. Its rushing music is only the
voice of myriad embraces ; its sweeping waves are the one mo-
tion of all the atoms. Water is, therefore, a symbol of social
unity. How very unlike to society ! Human Egos, when rub-
bing together like mites of water, make anything but a sea of one
idea. Indeed, mind the human Ego by some inscrutable mys-
tery, cannot intuitively apprehend other Egos. It can only ap-
prehend them by great effort. For example, two persons pass
each other in the street ; possibly they may be strangers, per-
haps acquaintances. They are endowed with like capacities, like
affections. They have everything in common but one thing,
and that one thing happens to be self. One of the two persons
is perhaps intent on his own enjoyment ; serenely comfortable
in the assurance of his own income ; or mightily wrapped in
some passion of self-indulgence, to which he is about to give full
swing. The other person, perhaps superior in disposition and
also in the merit of his career, is full of sadness from some little
common want which the happy person could supply to him with-
out effort. Yet the happy person passes the unhappy person in
the street, without knowing, without so much even as suspect-
ing, that the unhappy person would envy him his superiority ;
or, if he does suspect it, is not in the least degree disturbed by
the thought that his own Ego is the happier. Now, morally this
cannot be said to be culpable, for the simple reason that it is quite
unavoidable. It only shows how very small is the human Ego.
Naturalists tell us that there are some creatures of the " instinct-
world " (" reason " is assumed to be man's monopoly) which in-
tuitively apprehend each other's moods ; so that if one instinct-
stranger meet another instinct-stranger he or she shows both

59 ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. [Feb.,

knowledge and sympathy. Such instinct is a bit bigger than
human reason! Not one man in a hundred busies himself for a
moment in the interior longings of a perfect stranger. How
should he, it may be asked, seeing that from morning to night
he might have to busy himself a million times? This is true;
yet there is a something which is humiliating in such oneness of
the individual career. If I am so one that I can pass by a hun-
dred men, all of whom are less happy than myself, yet can pass
them so serenely, so opaquely as to be either unconscious of or
indifferent to their sufferings, I cannot feel proud of my sympa-
thetic capacity, which is locked up in my own Number One.
A fortiori, if I know another's sufferings and have it in my
power to lessen them, yet am too lazy, too feeble in inward ac-
tion to put myself out of the way to do good, I cannot regard
myself as a superior being superior to those little insects who
have sympathy. St. Paul says (and it sounds like a bitter sar-
casm): "We are every one members one of another"; and
again : " If one member suffer, all the members suffer with it."
This might be rendered, in the modern-world sense : " We are
members only of our immediate surroundings ; and if any mem-
ber suffer who is not allied to me by interest, I really cannot suf-
fer with him, nor even feel with him." Indeed, it is not too much
to say that the misfortunes of others are sometimes even consola-
tory to ourselves. Thus, I can ride in my carriage, and can be
happy in my wealth, without being made unhappy at sight of
woe. So far from being made unhappy because I know that my
own opulence will make the beggar to feel more houseless, more
hungry, I am, on the contrary, rather pleased with the considera-
tion that " the public " will admire me as being well off. (Hu-
man nature likes to be respected for being prosperous.) There
may be no question of my willingness to " relieve " woe, if woe
bend the knee in supplication ; but the fact remains the same
that my knowledge of existing woe does not impair my fruition
of my own goods. I am not made uncomfortable by the cer-
tainty of the fact that my comfort stirs pain in the less fortunate.
This is selfishness. This is the mood and temper of human na-
ture. And if it be not disgraceful that it should be so and it
can hardly be called disgraceful, because it is but the natural
smallness of that strange mental compound, the human Ego it
is nevertheless a subject for humiliation, a sound reason for intel-
lectual modesty, and a ground for suspecting that possibly, in
another world, I may have to walk, instead of riding in my car-
riage.

i88/.] ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. 591

Let us say that the three great troubles of this life are Dis-
grace, Bodily Sickness, and Poverty, and let us consider how
selfishness affects them all. As to Disgrace, it means the con-
sciousness that the undisgraced look down on the disgraced from
a lofty eminence >that is, they look down on them, not from any
real eminence, but from the eminence of not being themselves dis-
graced. They may be gross sinners, but they are not disgraced ;
and mere sin is not what the world scorns. We may illustrate
our meaning by a few examples, so as to work out the anatomy
of selfishness. Take the commercial world, the men of business.
Not one man in a hundred is always scrupulously ingenuous in
his dealings with that cosmic vagrant, " the public." A wine-
merchant will mix wines (or will mix tartar and sugar with a
distillation of raisins and currants) while charging for " the prime
vintage of '65 "; or a "'cute" tradesman will take advantage of a
brother-tradesman's misfortunes to buy his goods of him for a
smaller sum than they are worth ; or a jeweller will sell poor
stones for good stones ; or a horse-dealer will know a defect, but
will not mention it. The tricks of trade are the real sources of
half the profits. But then all this is quite strictly " within the
law." No policeman can arrest you for any amount of legal
fraud ; he can only " want " you for such fraud as is illegal. So
that the man of business can defraud everybody all day long
and a vast number of business men do so provided only that
he do the thing legally. Now, in regard to disgrace the dis-
grace of being punished it is manifest to the philosopher that
the punishment is no disgrace; what was disgraceful was the dis-
ingenuousness. Yet men of business rather respect a man for
being " 'cute " (that is, for getting the better of his fellow), while
they shut their doors on any " thief " who has been found out
that is, found out so as to be punished. Yet the sole difference
is that the " thief " breaks the law, whereas the " 'cute man " (who
is the more immoral of the two) is too selfish to incur any such
risk.

To pursue, then, the anatomy of this selfishness, so as to see
where the Ego most offends : First, in the visiting disgrace on a
" fellow-thief" (the expression is offensive, but most just) who had
not the science or the opportunity to rob legally, the disingenu-
ous man poses as a perfectly innocent man, who has himself never
taken advantage of any other man. This, to begin with, is a lie ;
and a lie is the cowardice of selfishness. But this posing as a
perfectly innocent judge is invariably followed by prolonged cru-
elty ; for in refusing compassion to one who has sinned, after he

59 2 ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. [Feb.,

has been punished for his sin, there is the commission of a flagrant
injustice, since a man who has been punished has done penance
for his sin, and ought, therefore, to be restored to social credit ;
nay, morally he is in a better position than are the majority of the
unpunished, for he has made atonement to God and to society.
In England, if a man has been convicted he is socially and finan-
cially damned, no matter what his sorrow may be; indeed, the
English system of " social ostracism for ever" is the greatest of
all incentives to repeating crime. Now, this injustice is a most
cowardly form of selfishness. It involves falsehood, hypocrisy,
malignity. It assumes that we ourselves are perfectly free from
all offence (for no one who has ever broken one Commandment of
God can have the right to judge his fellow for breaking another
Commandment) ; and by withholding assistance and compassion
from the penitent it compels the outcast to remain always the out-
cast, although he has done full penance for his sin. It monuments
itself as typically moral and just by the very censure it passes on
the punished, saying: " Look at me ! I never broke a Command-
ment ; whereas this wretch not only breaks one but is found out."
Yet, that we may bring this particular selfishness still more
home, let us take a not uncommon illustration. A man has made
a fortune by wrong means no matter whether by cruelty or dis-
ingenuousness. He is mightily honored by society, which dines
with him, and not only dines with him but goes to church with
him, and is delighted to marry its daughters to him. Now, one
of this rich man's poor dependants, under the impulse of tempta-
tion (illegally) abstracts one dollar from his purse. He is sent to
prison and is ruined. Society makes no inquiry after him. Poor
wretch ! he did not know how to rob legally ; his education in
disingenuousness had been imperfect ; besides, he had not the
rich man's opportunities. Society therefore punishes him for his
clumsiness. Society that pretentious mass of selfishness, which
worships successful craft but hates punishment says: " Disgrace
is not in thinking what is wrong, not in doing what is canny or
equivocal, not in ruining the widow or the orphan that you may
pile up your own gold on their debris ; disgrace is not in being
cruel to dependants, or in using others' flesh and blood for your
own gain : disgrace is in doing wrong so very clumsily that you get
caught and sent to prison for your clumsiness." This is the vul-
gar sin which is unpardonable. " Go, and sin no more," is what
God says. "Sin as much as you like, but do sin like a gentle-
man," is what disgrace-hating society calls " respectable." Now,
the essence of this social doctrine is selfishness. In order to pose

i88;.] ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. 593

as being virtuous it is necessary that prosperous men should
consent with one accord to disgrace crime. But the crime must be
of a kind which "no gentleman" would commit, not of a kind
which every Christian should abhor.

So much in regard to disgrace. Of Bodily Sickness it will suf-
fice to say here that human nature shrinks from it with horror;
and where others are so afflicted human nature keeps away
human nature untouched by something higher. How terrible is
the thought that as we walk through the streets, admiring the
bright shops and gay equipages, and smiling at the jocund
tripping of young men and young women who are bent on the
full enjoyment of the hour, within many of the houses are per-
sons lying in suffering ; some persons actually entered on their
last agony ; some bodies just bereft of their souls ! Now, true, it
is not disgraceful to forget this ; it is only perfectly natural, per-
fectly human. Human nature is but egoism in flesh. Let us not
blame it for what it is. Oblivion is more facile than sympathy.
I may know, perhaps, that in this very street there lives a lonely
sick man who would love that I should call to ask him how he is ;
or who, bed-ridden, would experience a touch of paradise were I
to take to him some flowers or some fruits. I cannot do it. Life
is so full of trouble, even of my own trouble. And sickness is so
repellant to my robustness that I must keep the one joy which I
have unalloyed that of forgetting that my time of sickness must
come. Do you tell me that I am selfish because I do not visit
the sick? Well, if I were asked to do so I would do it. But it
upsets me to enter a sick-room. Besides, priests do it, and doc-
tors, and nurses; and I am never sure that my visits would be
welcome. True, I have known what it is to lie on a sick-bed, to
hear the laughter of children under my window, to envy the
birds which flitted happily past my prison, and to long for sym-
pathy from all whom I loved. But I try to forget all that now.
And is this selfish ? Perhaps it is. But it is natural ! Sickness,
like disgrace, is a violence done to nature ; for nature abhors
everything but joy.

As to Poverty, it is certainly the master-trouble, because it
makes all other troubles so much worse. Sickness and disgrace
are both worse for it. If we consider selfishness in its relations to
poverty we open out a world of deep reflection. We are almost
afraid to enter upon it. A rich man and a poor man need not be
opposites, because mere poverty need not make a man unhappy,
any more than mere riches must make him happy. What we
mean by poverty the affliction of poverty is that state of acute

VOL. XLIV. 38

594 ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. - [Feb.,

want which might easily be removed by a little effort of kindness
and sympathy. Yet selfishness will not rouse itself to this effort.
Selfishness prefers always to make excuses: " Oh ! it is his own
fault " ; or, " I have helped him before " ; or, " You may do such
an enormous amount of injury by encouraging habits of depen-
dence in the struggling classes" ; or, " I am so absorbed in my
own affairs, and in my family affairs, that I really have not time
for other people's/' And so on, according to the ingenuity.
Now, observe that in all excuses three attitudes of selfishness are
invariably combined and most pronounced. First, there is the
Judicial attitude, which finds it easier to judge a poor man than
to take the real trouble of personally knowing him. Next, there
is the Vain attitude, which assumes superiority in self; for how
else can any prosperous man judge a poor man? Thirdly, there
is the Lazy attitude, which has plenty of time for self, plenty of
time for pleasure and dissipation, plenty of time for lounging and
shop-studying, or for even less innocent or exalted pastimes or
wanderings ; while for another who is in trouble oh ! no, not a
quarter of an hour, not the time even for politely answering a let-
ter, not the interest or the sentiment to care as much for a suffer-
ing pleader as one cares for a favorite dog or a good cigar. Thus
the selfishness which neglects poverty has three disgraceful atti-
tudes : the Judicial, which presumes to judge a (possibly) supe-
rior; the Vain, which imagines itself to be all-deserving ; and the
Lazy, which gives less care to active virtue than it gives to the
choice of a champagne.

II.

In the anatomy of selfishness it is obvious that we must look
for motive, so far as selfishness can be said to have motive. Now,
motive lies at the very bottom of the soul, while complacency
floats upon the top of it. To detect this motive, to dig it up
out of the depths, we must draw the curtains upon life, and
die living. Keeping clear, however, of purely religious conside-
rations (for the supernatural, as has been promised, shall not be
touched upon, since this would be to preach, which would be
out of the question), let us try to detect the motives which may
be set down as being selfish, by the counter process of detecting
the motives which are generous.

A generous man is one who will shut the eyes of his soul,
from the pure delicacy of his moral sensibility, upon the faults,

1 887.] ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. 595

even the defects, of another person, whenever he is called upon
to do good to that person do good in any real sense of the word.
Say he knows that a person is " undeserving " ; that u it is his own
fault " ; that he is a gross sinner, if you will, or at the least weak.
The first feeling of the generous man is: " I do not judge. I
judge myself, because I know all about myself; but it is impos-
sible for any one, save Almighty God, to know the all of another
person's merit." Temperament, constitution, education, surround-
ings ; the accidents of human circumstances or the decrees of the
Divine Will ; health, provocation, temptation, wear and tear,
with the exceptional influences of exceptional trials on excep-
tional minds will not philosophy, magnanimity, and a profound
acquaintance with mental phenomena know that all these must be
taken into the reckoning before any man dare to say, " I judge " ?
So that generosity will begin with big brains or, to put it more
truly, with a big soul and will make its starting-point the axiom
that, as it cannot know the all, it is bound, in simple justice, to
believe the best. Father Faber said that there was more good
than evil in every man ; only evil rises to the top and good keeps
down below, and we see a good deal more of the top than of the
below. Generosity will believe in the below, and will not form
its conclusions from the top. It is perfectly hideous to hear
many men judging others for particular faults which have been
babbled by the unthinking, taking for granted what is injurious
or depreciative, but never assuming what is favorable or apolo-
getic. Let any one judge them in the same way, and they will
exclaim, " How unjust, how uncharitable ! " But a generous
man will always look on the bright side. As St. Paul says, he
"thinketh no evil." His science of the human heart makes him
contemptuous of small judgments on the superficies of a man's
outward, seeming self. He knows that the human heart is a deli-
cate instrument, which the east winds of a bitter world put out
of tune, and he remembers well a thousand occasions when, but
for unmerited rescue, he would himself have fallen a victim to
horrid woes. This is true in every department of human evil,
the physical and the financial, the social and the domestic, nay,
even the religious or the spiritual. " Ne judicas" will be the
generous man's motto, and his philosophy will be all one with his
wide heart. Indeed, philosophy is only that bigness of human
wisdom (philosophy in regard to human judgments) which, tak-
ing everything for what it is, makes the best of the very worst,
and prays : " Let me forgive another his sin as easily as I forgive

596 ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. [Feb.,

myself my own sin." It is marvellous with what facility we can
forgive ourselves, or how leniently we can pass sentence on our
convicted conscience ; and generosity will simply transfer the
same facility, the same leniency, to our judgments upon the frail-
ties of our acquaintances. Generosity, intellectually, will not
apply its own two-foot rule to the measurements of the mental
processes of any one else ; morally, it will take some details of its
own weaknesses, and will build up a good defence of others from
them alone ; socially, it will remember its own acute sensibilities
when there is the opportunity of receiving homage or of receiv-
ing coldness ; financially, it will act on a favorite axiom of Ed-
ward III., " Qui non dat quod habet, non accipit ille quod optat " ;
sympathetically, it will always forecast the possible yearnings of
another's mind, so as to anticipate every mood, every desire.
Turn all this upside down, and you have selfishness ! Selfishness
does not forecast another's thought. It does not go without a
dinner once a week to give a dinner to those who dine only once
a week. It does not dive into the hiding-places of the scorned to
rebuild the opportunities which have been lost. It does not say
to society, " You are a sham " ; nor to respectability, " You are a
most decorous impostor." Selfishness has not the pluck to be
manly. It cringes to the social tyranny of false maxims. It is
supercilious to the crowd of the unlucky, but genuflectory to the
favorites of fortune ; gives costly presents to the already too
possessive, and a few cents to those who are without a home ;
sits in a front seat in a church, near the sanctuary, and turns its
back on the free-seat victims of " unholy poverty " ; and gene-
rally regards life as an institution which is intended to enable
every man to use others for his own benefit. Selfishness is the
brute part of man. Man is the most voracious of all beasts of
prey. Other beasts limit their eviscerating propensities to a cer-
tain range of living things not of their own kind ; man alone de-
vours his own kind (in a score of senses), as well as every other
kind that suits his palate. Human selfishness means preying
upon other persons when we happen to have an appetite for
what they value. Let us take one particular example of this kind
of "preying" an example which is as popular as is immorality.
A person has got hold of a bit of scandal. Perhaps he is the
only person who knows it. He is sole possessor of the dynamite
of disgrace. If not sole possessor, he knows that there are but
few persons among whom the scandal is at present known. If
he keeps the scandal to himself but very little harm will be done.

1887.] ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. 597

If he talks the cannon's roar will wake the echoes. Now, to
make known this scandal is a selfishness which is as imbecile as
it is grossly, almost infinitely, immoral. There is, first, the self-
ishness of doing unknown harm to thousands by the immensity
of the evil thought which is occasioned. There is next the self-
ishness of seejking to monument our own innocence by pretend-
ing to be so shocked at another's sin. Thirdly, there is the self-
ishness of gratifying our own craving for a most delicious bit of
abuse of another person. To repeat a scandal may be more
criminal than to originate it. Temptation, provocation, may ex-
cuse the scandai**t>/r / selfishness is the sole high principle of
the scandal monger. Tongue-wagging about the sins of other
people implies the relish of the sin which is wagged about, plus
the affectation of being ourself loftily superior to the possibility
of a grave offence of any kind. It is an act of selfishness involv-
ing vanity as well as meanness, cruelty as well as moral imbe-
cility, with an utter scorn of the edification of society. Yet this
kind of selfishness is common among "good" people, who realize
truthfully what De la Rochefoucauld meant cynically : " In the
misfortunes of even our best of friends there is a something
which does not displease us."

Two more bits of anatomy shall be hazarded. Say that in-
terest, vanity, love, are the three principal levers of the natural
life. Interest is egoism in the act of calculation the arithme-
tical cultus of Number One. Vanity is egoism in the act of
self-worship. Love (that is, the passion called love) is egoism
watching the reflection, as in a mirror, of whatever it most ar-
dently admires, and longing to possess it, as its own ideal.

Secondly (and though the allusion is religious, the anatomy
is equally just in the natural senses), the seven deadly sins are
seven different expressions of the greatest foe of man's nature
his selfishness. Pride is the undue inflation of the Ego. Anger
is the wild disturbance of selfishness. Luxury is the lower aban-
donment to selfish pleasure. Sloth is but the indolence of the
higher self. Envy is the preferring self before another. Covet-
ousness is the passion for self-aggrandizement. Gluttony is self s
delight in selfs palate. So that, religiously, it may be said that
the anatomy of selfishness is all one with the anatomy of sin.

III.

To glance for one moment at a modern " philosophy." Mr.
Frederic Harrison has at least this apology for his " Humani-

ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. [Feb.,

tarianism," that it is better to worship unselfishness than to wor-
ship self. Yet we fancy that if we spelt Unselfishness with a big
U it would make a much better cult than does Humanity. We
must be glad, however, that in these selfish days a " philosopher "
of modern thought dares to start with these two supreme pos-
tulates : the one, that the age is intensely selfish ; the other, that
it ought not to be so. We must, however, part company with
Mr. Harrison the moment he gets beyond such first platitudes.
To worship Humanity is, poetically, pretty. But Unselfishness
does not worship Humanity ; on the contrary, it compassionates
it profoundly. And it does so, not from contempt of others' self-
ishness, but because it is painfully conscious of its own. Had
Mr. Harrison inverted his philosophy, bidden us aim at perfec-
tion within ourselves instead of worshipping the supposed vir-
tues of other people, he would have placed his virtue cult in the
only shrine where it is needed ; though, as to a religion, mere
virtue-cult is not one. No man can make a god out of creature-
virtues. If he could do so he could make a god out of his own
virtues. And this would be the very essence of selfishness. The
principle for which we contend in this brief essay is that unself-
ishness is in the proportion of modesty, just as selfishness and
dull complacency are twins.

Yet if we wanted to build yet one more human altar in the
already crowded temple of human cults, we should build an altar
to Unselfishness, as the most neglected of divinities, compared
to whom mere Humanity has many votaries. Even Charity might
kneel humbly at that altar that is, Charity in its modern signi-
fication. And here let it be noted since Chanty and Unselfish-
ness ought to be, but are not, twin sisters that the word charity
is most offensively misused. People use it in the spirit of con-
descension, as in the act of stooping to do unmerited favors (the
very essence of the attitude of rotten selfishness !), whereas the
highest privilege known to mortals the purest exercise of un-
selfishness is to make others' happiness their own business.
Charity has come to wear the pomp of a feeble selfishness ; as
Mr. Ward says, it puts on the " clothes of Christianity " : it atti-
tudinizes in cant and hypocrisy ; delivering lectures from plat-
forms upon philanthropy ; giving cents to a person who has no
shoes (while giving jewels to a person who keeps a carriage) ;
subscribing to this or that u charity," with one's name publicly
advertised ; and, generally, thinking of self, not of others.
Whereas, Christianly, what is true charity but unselfishness?

1887.] ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. 599

For, after all, it is but modesty in operation, justice in doing for
others what God does for us, gratitude in return for our own
blessings, love in seeking to imitate the blessings-Giver ; and all
this is the flower-family of unselfishness very unlike to the con-
ventional idea of popular alms-giving ! We might imagine, from
the normal tone of professing Christians, that charity was a sort
of poor-law necessity, or a gracious bending of the superior self
to the less fortunate, instead of being the luxury of the true gen-
tleman, precisely as it is the perfection of the true Christian.
What is a gentleman ? An unselfish man the man who, think-
ing least of himself, does most by act and word for every one
else ; the peacemaker, the merciful, the self-suppressing, the
kindly judging, is the gentleman, because he is the Christian.
There is not any real difference between the two.

It is obvious, then, that in the anatomy of our own selfishness
(never mind the anatomy of other people's!) it would not be safe
to begin the process save by summoning to our judgment-bar
all our weaknesses, our omissions, our littlenesses, our unkind-
nesses, our shams, our deceits. Plenty of them ! In the imagi-
nation alone lie worlds of selfishness in- the dreamland of the
unreal, the fantastic. The spear of Ithuriel as Milton so well
pictured when it touched the angelic form of the Evil One,
made him start into his truthful appearance. Modesty is pro-
bably the only Ithuriel spear which can make selfishness start
into its true proportions. But since the world, or say Society,
has made it a primary canon to use selfishness as its coat of
armor against trouble, it is not easy for the individual to live in
an atmosphere of selfishness, and at the same time to hate the
atmosphere which he breathes. We are all of us so malleable, so
impressionable, that we take the stamp on our minds of others'
mottoes ; and because Jones, Smith, and Brown think and act in
a particular way, we take it for granted that their ideas are good
enough. If /am selfish may well argue Number One well, so
is the whole world, that is, human nature ; and I really cannot
create a human nature for myself: I must take life precisely as I
find it. Besides and Number One actually says this in some of
the pet philosophies of modern thought all such points, my
dear sir, are metaphysical. Selfishness, like appetite, is only or-
ganic; and to attempt to formulate a philosophy out of the bias
of a constitution is only a pretty, virtuous vagary of the imagina-
tion, and won't hold water in the real business of life. Here we
are, and here we must grovel, and here we must eat and drink

6oo ANATOMY OF SELFISHNESS. [Feb.,

and go to sleep, and here we must (legally) extract money out
of other people's pockets in order to fill our own mouths and
our children's. Do not indulge in rhapsodies about unselfish-
ness. It is perfectly true that ants, when they come to ford
water, drown themselves to build a bridge for surviving ants.
Pretty poetry ! You don't catch me drowning myself for my
survivors, because I know that not one of them would do it for
me. My dear sir, unselfishness is Utopian. It is only fit to be
written in stanzas; it is not meant to be mottoed on larders.
And our modern-thought Number One is perhaps right that is,
from his own point of view. Selfishness is life's primary law.
But is it life's primary object? One of the saints was asked:
" Do you think that most souls go to Purgatory?" He said:
" Yes, because the selfishness of human nature can scarcely be
eradicated in this life." But if it cannot be eradicated it can be
subdued. And the greatest man in the world is he who lives
most for others, and therefore lives most for himself. Paradox as
this seems, it is true. No subtlety of objection can get rid of the
fact that the larger the sphere of a man's sympathies, the greater
amount of happiness he must confer, and therefore the greater
amount of happiness he must enjoy ; unless, indeed, he be consti-
tutionally contemptible. It was said at the beginning of this brief
essay that selfishness is the cause of most of the vices of men's
lives, of their own lives and of the lives of those who know them.
But in the proportion as you excite vice in other people by
your own irritating and demoralizing egotism, you must increase
the sphere of misery around you, and so must lessen your own
sphere of happiness. Unselfishness is selfish! Sweet paradox!
Let us glory in the truth that every act of unselfishness is the
sowing the seeds of a ripe harvest of our own enjoyment; for it
is the widening of our own intellect, the increasing of our self-
respect, the fortifying of our best and bravest faculties, and the
living more like God than like man.

1 887.] THE TURNING-POINT IN IRISH HISTORY. 601

THE TURNING-POINT IN IRISH HISTORY THE
LEINSTER TRIBUTE.

IF there ever was a country that suffered from ignorant and
incompetent writers of history, that country is assuredly Ireland.
Some dozens perhaps we'might say some scores of men have,
during the last hundred years, written either histories or histori-
cal sketches of Ireland. Men with no knowledge of the language
in which the ancient annals and literature of the country are
written, and which alone contains all that is necessary for the
elucidation of its history, have published books on Ireland's
past, and have given their opinions about it with as much posi-
tiveness and boldness as if they could read a Gaelic manuscript
of the tenth century as easily as an article in THE CATHOLIC
WORLD. The fact is, in the words of Eugene O'Curry, " the
history of Ireland has yet to be written." Even Keating's history,
although written by a learned man and a profound Gaelic scholar,
is not at all what it should be, and what it probably would have
been had it been written four hundred years earlier. The age
in which Keating lived was probably the darkest and most dismal
that Ireland had ever seen. Religious persecutions on one side,
and violence and uncertainty on every side, had so degraded the
persecuted and brutalized their oppressors that one shudders as
he reads about the Ireland of the seventeenth century. Arts,
science, and literature were. well-nigh blotted out, and it is no
wonder that one feels disappointed with Keating's History of Ire-
fandand with \\\t Annals of the Four Masters. Profoundly learned,
not alone in Gaelic but in other languages, as the compilers of
these works undoubtedly were, and precious as their books are to
Ireland, they seem, nevertheless, to have been suffering under the
blighting influence of the seventeenth century when they wrote
them. It was an age of decadence, and both Keating and O'Cleary
were under its influence ; where they should have given us facts
they give us legends, and about some of the most weighty and
salient parts of Irish history they are either silent or skip them
over with most unaccountable brevity.

The imposition of the Leinster Tribute is beyond all doubt the
weightiest and most important event that Irish history tells of.
Nine-tenths of Ireland's misfortunes, politically and socially, can
be traced back to it. Keating mentions the imposition of the

602 THE TURNING-POINT IN IRISH HISTORY. [Feb.,

Leinster Tribute, but makes no attempt to draw conclusions from
it. He leaves us to think what we like about the matter; and we
are forced to believe that although the Book of Leinster was com-
piled live hundred years before either he or O'Cleary was born,
neither of them had ever seen it ; if they had, they should have
seen the tract it contains on the Tribute and its causes, and they
would have given more particulars about it. The Annalyof the
Four Masters do not mention the imposition of the Tribute at all.
Here is all they say about the king who first levied it :

" A.D. 106. Tuathal Teachtmhar, after having been thirty years in the
sovereignty of Ireland, was slain by Mall, King of Ulster."

This omission by the Four Masters, and by such a learned man as
Michael O'Cleary, the chief amongst those by whom the Annals
were compiled, is most extraordinary and unaccountable, and is
all the more so from the fact that he is obliged to mention the
Tribute many times in relating the events of subsequent Irish
history, for battles almost innumerable were caused by it for more
than five hundred years after it was imposed on the people of
Leinster. Keating's narrative of the imposition of the Tribute
agrees pretty closely with the following one, now for the first
time printed in full; but it is plain that he got his information
about it from some other and, in all probability, less trustworthy
source. The Leinster folk would be the most likely to possess
the documents that gave the most reliable and most detailed
account of a matter which pressed so heavily on themselves.

This article contains something never before published in any
American periodical namely, the translation of a historical epi-
sode from an ancient Gaelic manuscript, the Book of Leinster.
The precious manuscript from which it was taken has been handed
down to us from the time when Ireland had real " home rule."
The exact date of its compilation is unknown, but that it was in
existence before the Anglo-Norman invasion is a certainty. Irish
antiquarians believe that it was compiled, or in a great part tran-
scribed, from much more ancient documents in the monastery of
Kildare in the early part of the twelfth century. The language
in which most of it is written is what Celtic savants call " Middle
Irish " to distinguish it from a more ancient form of the language
which was in use until about the ninth century. The translation
now given is as literal as it could be made without doing too
much injustice to the English language. I have endeavored, as
far as I could, to preserve the quaint style of the original. The

1887.] THE LEINSTER TRIBUTE. 603

title of the tract is Incipit Borania "The Commencement of the
Tribute" :

"An arch-king took possession of Ireland, to wit, Tuathal Teachtmhar,
the son of Fiachra. It was this same Tuathal that took Ireland by force.
By him was killed Ellim, the son of Conrach, in the battle of Aichle, near
Tara ; and he defeated the Ultonians in twenty-five battles, and the Leinster-
men in twenty- five others, and the men of Munster in thirty-five, and the
Connacians in twenty-five. In revenge for that, his father and grandfather
were killed by the Atha-Tuatha* of Ireland, for it was the Atha-Tuatha that
Tuathal defeated in all those battles. He was at Tara after that, so that the
parliament of Tara was made by him ; and the people of Ireland came to it,
men, women, boys, and maidens, so that they gave an oath by all the ele-
ments that they would not contend for the kingship of Ireland with him or
his seed'for ever.

" These are the kings of the provinces that were at that parliament, to
wit : Eogan, King of the province of Conrui ; Fergus Febail, King of Ulster ;
Eochu Domlen, King of the Leinster-folk ; Conrach, King of Connacht, etc.
Now, Tuathal had two beloved daughters Fithir and Darine were their
names until Eochu, the son of Echach Domlen (King of Leinster), took the
daughter that was the elder, namely, Fithir ; for it was not customary in
Ireland at that time for the younger to marry before the elder. Eochu
then took his wife with him to Rath Immil in Leinster. A dear foster-child
to the King of Connacht was that daughter of Tuathal. Howbeit, the
Leinster-folk said to Eochu : ' Better is the daughter thou hast left.' So
after that he went northward again to Tara and said to Tuathal : ' The
daughter that I took with me is dead/ quoth he, ' and I would like to take
thy other daughter.' Then Tuathal said : ' If I had fifty-and-one daughters
I would give them to thee, to the last woman of them.' After that the other
daughter, namely Darine, was given to him. She was foster-daughter to
the King of Ulster, and he took her with him to Rath Immil, where the
other daughter (Fithir) met her. Now, when Fithir saw Darine, Fithir died
immediately of shame, and as she (Darine) saw the death of her sister, she
died of grief. After that the sepulchral mound of the two daughters was
made, and every one said : ' Rough is this mound.' Hence is said : ' Rough
burial mound.'

" After this the truth of that news reached Tuathal at Tara. Then word
was sent from Tuathal to the King of Connacht, to wit, to the foster-father
of Fithir, and to the King of Ulster, the foster father of Darine. These
gathered their forces with them to the place where Tuathal Teachtmhar
was. When they were gathered together in one place Tuathal said : 'Great,:
quoth he, ' is the deed of the King of Leinster; the death of my two daugh-
ters to be brought about by his treachery.' Thus was he saying, and he
made a poem :

u ' Fithir and Darine, two daughters of sorrowful Tuathal :
Fithir died of shame, and Darine died of her grief.
They are the grindings of injustice ; I say it was bold
To promise their protection by the wise in an assembly of sages

* The Atha-Tuatha, or Atticots, as some writers call them, are supposed to have been a
race not of Milesian origin. Others believe them to have been a sort of first -century socialists.

604 THE TURNING-POINT IN IRISH HISTORY. [Feb.,

Their lamentation by the wise at another time by their death !
Of one birth (?) were they born, the two daughters of Tuathal of herds.
Fithir, beautiful amongst the daughters of the high King of Tara,
Perfect was her marriage, the woman the King of the Barrow* took.
If Darine is killed by the King of Leinster of numbers,
I take anger of mind ; to me it belongs to avenge her.
As my daughters have fallen, I say to you no foolish saying,
Let them be avenged on Leinstermen, on the warriors of the Liffy.' t

" What the men of Connacht said was that they would not go from the
Leinster-folk without a fight. The Ultonians said but the same. Then the
King of Ireland said : ' It is not pleasant for me,' said he, ' to give battle to
the men of Leinster; however, if it be your advice, let all go against them.'
Now, their whole number (that of the allies) was twenty-two thousand. The
Connacht provincial forces passed by Quala to Naas, and camped there.
The army of Tara with the King of Ireland moved by Grifrend, by Buaid-
gein, by Righe, by Magh Nuadhat (Maynooth) to Naas, and went into camp
there. The forces of Ulster went by Esa, by Odba, by Fithairt, by Foen-
drum to Lethduma, and made their camp there. Now the Leinstermen
gathered together in company and made battle on the Ultonians, and Fer-
gus Febail, King of Ulster, was killed in it, together with the savagery of
Ulster in general. The forces [of the allies] moved and burned Naas and
Alind, Maistin, and Rairind ; and they destroyed the boat of Bresal, a boat
of undecaying wood that was made by Bresal, brother [or near relative] to
the king of the world [the Emperor of RomeJ. The Leinstermen gathered
together, nine thousand their number, and fought the battle of Ocrait,
which is called the ' Garbhthanach ' to-day. A fierce, extraordinary battle
was fought between them, until the Leinstermen were defeated, for they
had not an equal number of men under arms. Eochu, son of Echach
Domlen, King of Leinster, was killed in this battle, and twenty [sub] kings
along with him. From the beginning of autumn to the beginning of No-
vember the forces of Leath-Chuin (the northern half of Ireland) were devas-
tating Leinster. The Leinstermen made peace at last with Tuathal, that is
to say, they gave him a fine for his daughters, and the kingship of Leinster
was left to Ere, the son of Echach Domlen. Now, this was the fine, to wit,
three fifty hundred (i 5,000) cows, three fifty hundred pigs, three fifty hundred
mantles, three fifty hundred wethers, three fifty hundred chains of silver,
three fifty hundred copper caldrons, a great copper caldron that would
hold twelve pigs in the house of Tara itself, and twelve ags, t and thirty
white, red-eared cows with their calves of their color, with bronze tyings
and bronze fetters, and with the rest of their bronze tyings."

In proof of the extreme antiquity of the above extract it will
be only necessary to point out the fact that of the eleven places
through which the allied armies are said to have marched, only
two namely, Maynooth and Naas can now be identified ; and it

* King of the Barrow this is only a poetical name for the King of Leinster, the Barrow
being the principal river of that province.

t The meaning of some parts of this poem is very obscure, and I would feel obliged if some
Celtic scholar would point out any errors I may have made in its translation.

\ Twelve ags I cannot find out what sort of creature an a^-was. The word is entirely ob-
solete. O'Reilly says, in his Irish Dictionary, that an ag was " an animal of the cow species."

1887.] THE LEINSTER TRIBUTE. 605

is fair to conclude that the tract was copied into the Book of Lein-
ster from a vastly more ancient manuscript, the language of
which was modernized by the transcriber to that extant in his
own time.

The reader has in this extract, translated literally from a
language which, according to some " Irish patriots," contains
" nothing worth reading," the history of the imposition of the
Tribute so clearly and graphically put before him that he can
understand its every phase. The part translated is not one-tenth
of the entire article contained in the Book of Leinster ; the re-
maining part gives an account of the kings who raised the Tri-
bute, and of the battles that were fought because of it, and those
battles were well-nigh innumerable. It was evidently the agree-
ment between the contracting parties that the Tribute was to be
paid every year, and the Book of Leinster says so plainly ; but the
unfortunate Leinstermen very naturally resisted paying it when-
ever they could. The article gives a list of the kings to whom
it was paid, and it would appear that nearly all of them had to
fight in order to get it. We are told that such a king demanded
the Tribute, and that <c he did not get it without a fight." It was
paid, however, on and off for over five hundred years, but was
at length temporarily remitted through the intercession of St.
Moling in the seventh century. Keating, in treating of this,
says :

"The province of Leinster was delivered from the payment of this
tax by the intercession of St. Moling, who obtained from the monarch,
Fianachta, a forbearance till Monday. The saint, it seems, had an equivocal
evasion, for he meant the Monday of Doomsday, by which artifice he over-
reached the king, who remitted the Tribute."*

To understand fully the immensity of the Tribute we must
bear in mind that ancient Leinster was little more than half the
size of the modern province of that name. Its southwestern
boundaries were the same in ancient times as at present, but it
reached no farther north than Dublin on one side, and Clonmac-
noise, on the Shannon, on the other side. The whole of the pre-
sent counties of Meath, Westmeath, Louth, Longford, with the
northern parts of Dublin, Kildare, and the King's County, be-
longed to the province of Meath. It would to-day tax to the
utmost the resources of the territory embraced in ancient Lein-

* La Luain is the phrase generally used by speakers of modern Gaelic to express the day of
judgment or the end of the world. The same words also mean Monday. This pun made by
St. Moling is one of the most ancient on record. -

606 THE TURNING-POINT IN IRISH HISTORY. [Feb.,

ster to pay such a tribute every year. The largest fair held in
any town of modern Leinster does not generally contain forty-
five thousand head of pigs, sheep, and cows. Then there are the
fifteen thousand silver chains, the fifteen thousand cloaks, and the
fifteen tfiousand copper caldrons to be taken into consideration,
and also the fact that silver was worth at least twenty times more
then than at present. It must also be remembered that the silver
chains were not watch-chains; they were in all probability three
times the size of an ordinary watch chain, and were worn round
the waists or shoulders of the upper classes. In fact, the Leinster
Tribute, sad and ruinous as it was for Ireland, shows unmistak-
ably that that country, even in remote pagan times, was wealthy
and civilized greatly beyond what is generally believed. It
shows also how high the position of women was in ancient Ire-
land. We need not go back to ancient history to find stories of
women of high rank that were worse treated than Fithir and
Darine were, and no wars or difficulties followed. It is evident
that if those daughters of Tuathal had not been brought up in a
pure moral atmosphere they would never and could never have
taken their degradation so much to heart as they did ; and if
a high idea of morality had not generally prevailed in the
country at the time, public opinion for it must exist in a greater
or lesser degree in all countries would never have sanctioned
even an over-king in taking such extreme measures for reveng-
ing the insult and indignity suffered by his daughters.

It is to be hoped that no more attempts will be made to write
histories of Ireland until some one is found with a sufficient
amount of industry to read what remains of "the host of Ireland's
ancient books." This phrase was used by Aongus the Culdee when
speaking of the ocean of literature that existed in Ireland in the
eighth century. O'Curry, in his splendid work, Manuscript Ma-
terials for Irish History, has shown clearly how utterly untrust-
worthy most modern histories of Ireland are, and how impossible
it is to compose a true history of Ireland until all its ancient re-
cords are thoroughly searched and understood. It is pleasant to
be able to say that the work of elucidating Irish history is mak-
ing steady progress. The progress is, however, much too slow.
Take, for example, the Book of Leinster, out of which the transla-
tion in this article has been given. Of the nearly five hundred
pages which it yet, in its incomplete state, contains, probably not
fifty pages have been translated, although it is nearly ten years
since the fac-simile issue of it was published. But the Book of
Leinster hardly contains a twentieth part of the amount of ancient

1 887.] THE LEINSTER TRIBUTE. 607

untranslated manuscript matter yet extant, and with which one
should be thoroughly familiar before attempting to write a his-
tory of Ireland. It may be said that a very large part of ancient
Irish writings is mere legends and fables. What if it is? Are not
the writings of all ancient nations in the same state? Who can
thoroughly separate fact from fable in the histories of Greece,
Rome, or Egypt ? It ought to be a source of joy rather than
sorrow to an Irishman that the documents bearing on the history
of his country are, in the matter of containing fictions as well as
facts, like those of all other ancient peoples, for it proves them to
be natural. The office of the historian is to discriminate between
fact and fable, and this, unfortunately, is what Keating has not
done ; if he had, his history would have been a noble literary mon-
ument, instead of being regarded as of little real historic value.

Before speaking of the disastrous effect the imposition of the
Leinster Tribute had on Ireland, it may be interesting to say
something about the manner in which the fac-simile copy of the
celebrated Book of Leinster is got up. Nothing can exceed the
perfection and thoroughness with which this great repository of
ancient Celtic learning has been put before the public. It is an
absolute reproduction of the original manuscript, minus its dis-
figuration and blackness, the results of nearly a thousand years
of existence. It should be said, however, that while the material
on which the original was written is vellum, the fac-simile is on
paper. The book was edited by Mr. Atkinson, who is, perhaps,
the only Englishman living that understands the Irish language.
He is not, in the meantime, infallible, for he has made some mis-
takes in the preface to the fac-simile; only one of them will be
noticed here. In his notes on the tract relating to the Leinster
Tribute he says that the fine was 350 cows, etc. If Mr. Atkinson
had read the tract carefully he could not possibly have made
such a mistake. The words are tri coicait cdt bd that is, three
fifties of hundreds of cows, or fifteen thousand. By no possibility
could the Gaelic words given above be construed into meaning
" three hundred and fifty cows."

It is thought by some Irish historians that fully half a mil-
lion of lives were lost in the battles brought about by the Lein-
ster Tribute. For nearly six centuries it filled one portion of
the island with bloodshed, and its baleful influence was felt
from one end of Ireland to the other. It does not appear that
the people of Munster had anything to do with the first impo-
sition of the Tribute ; but it is the opinion of some of those best
acquainted with Irish history that in later times Munster claimed

6o8 THE TURNING-POINT IN IRISH HISTORY. [Feb.,

her share of the spoils wrung from Leinster, and some are of
the opinion that the invasion of Leinster by Cormac MacCul-
linan, King of Munster, in the year 903, had for its sole object
the reimposition of the ancient Tribute. Owing to the destruc-
tion of so many Irish manuscripts by the Danes, and the frag-
mentary state of such of them as have been preserved, it is very
hard to find out the exact truth about the affairs of Ireland in
ancient times. However, fragmentary and incomplete as these
manuscripts may be, when they are all translated a flood of
light will be shed on the history of ancient Ireland.

In spite of what Keating says about the Tribute having been
abolished at the instigation of St. Moling in the seventh century,
there are good reasons for believing that many attempts con-
tinued to be made to enforce it down to the tenth century, and
even later. What Keating says about St. Moling's having been
the means of abolishing the Tribute is in the main true ; but we
can read between the lines of Irish history that it was abolished
only for a time, for almost from the day when the Danes got a
firm footing in Ireland, until their military power was crushed at
the battle of Clontarf, we find them and the Leinstermen in an
almost constant alliance against the four provinces of Ireland.
The Danes and Leinstermen warred on one another at first, and
the Danes burned and plundered some of the most famous seats
of piety and learning that ancient Leinster contained ; but they
seem very soon to have found out how matters stood between
Leinster and the rest of Ireland, and in the long run Leinster-
men and Danes became fast friends. Keating and almost all
other Irish historians acknowledge this. Without the aid of the
people of the harassed province the Danes never could have got
a firm foothold in Ireland. It was quite natural that the Lein-
stermen should form an alliance with the Danes ; barbarous and
cruel as they might be, they could hardly be worse than the
tribute-raising men of the four Irish provinces. Keating says :
"The Danes, notwithstanding the discomfitures they met from
the natives, continued their hostilities, and were supported by
the army of Leinster." And so we find it down to the memora-
ble battle of Clontarf in 1014; twelve thousand Leinster soldiei
fell there fighting for the Danes and against their country, and all
on account of an evil deed committed by one of their kings near-
ly ten centuries previous !

But the influence of the accursed Tribute did not end at th<
battle of Clontarf. Still reading between the lines of Irish hii
tory, we can trace it down for a century and a half after the great

1 887.] THE LEINSTER TRIBUTE. 609

fight near Dublin ; and there seem to be strong grounds for be-
lieving that the banishment of Dermott MacMorrough was not
caused by the wife of O'Ruarc, but by the Leinster Tribute.
If the Four Masters * are to be relied on, MacMorrough must
have been banished for some cause other than having eloped
with Dearbhorgil, for, according to them, that affair took place
about thirteen years before his banishment. The fact seems to be
that MacMorrough was banished, not because he was an ardent
lover, but because he was a distinguished warrior, and Roderick
O'Connor and the provincial kings wanted him out of their way,
as they seem to have thought that the reimposition of the Lein-
ster Tribute was in order. To make this matter clear it must
be borne in mind that at the time MacMorrough was banished
Danish power was at a very low ebb in Ireland. The Danes
never recovered their defeat at Clontarf. They made strong
efforts to do so, but, from some cause or other, they failed,
and were constantly getting weaker and weaker, until in the
time of MacMorrough they had dwindled to a handful of
traders; their military power was gone, and they could do
but little to help the Leinstermen. The four provinces wanted
to raise the Tribute ; but MacMorrough was a fighting man, and
might prove a difficult one to subdue, so he was banished.

But the disastrous influence of the Tribute was not yet end-
ed, for no sooner did Strongbow arrive with a handful of fol-
lowers than the whole population of Leinster gave him their
support, and he was able to face Roderick O'Connor with an
army nearly as large as that of the allied Irish, and in the end he
made himself master of the denationalized province, and Irish in-
dependence was no more.

Thus we see what woes the Leinster Tribute brought on Ire-
land. It totally denationalized nearly one-fourth of the island,
and made its harassed inhabitants welcome any one, Christian
or pagan, that would be likely to free them from the intolerable
wrongs they had suffered for so many centuries. They wel-
comed the Danes first and the Normans afterwards. It has
often been said of the Irish, by those who write but do not
know Irish history, that any nation that would allow a few
hundred adventurers, were they ever so brave, to take away
its liberty, was not fit to be free and deserved no sympathy.
But those who are really acquainted with Ireland's history will
not pass so harsh a judgment ; they will know that a single false

* According to the Four Masters, the wife of O'Ruarc was taken from MacMorrough in
1153, an d he was not banished until 1166.

VOL. XLIV. 39

6 io THE LEGEND OF ST. LONGINUS. [Feb.,

step, taken perhaps in a moment of thoughtlessness or passion,
may ruin the whole after-career of a nation as well as of an indi-
vidual. The great false step that Ireland took was when a pro-
vince was made responsible for the wrong-doing of its ruler.
When all the manuscripts that treat about ancient Ireland are
translated, and when a proper history of that country is written,
it will probably be found that of all the causes of Irish political
weakness and misfortune the Leinster Tribute was the first and
greatest.

THE LEGEND OF ST. LONGINUS.

THE legend saith that when on Calvary

Christ, God and Man, for man's redemption died,

That soldier who transpierced His heart was he
Who later, conscience-smit, in anguish cried,

When earthquake split the rocks, and o'er the sod

That darkness passed, " This was the Son of God."

It saith that at the instant of his crime

Blindness from God on that centurion fell ;

That on his knees he sank and knelt long time ;
That cure there came to him by miracle :

That with that blood which stained his spear, in awe

Taught from above, he touched his eyes, and saw.

" Sinners shall look on Him they crucified "
The legend saith his eyes, thus opened, turned

Straight to that wound purpling the Saviour's side ;
That more than eyes can see his heart discerned ;

That, ranged so late with sinners with the worst

That soldier made of Christ confession first.

He rose ; in wrath he cast that spear away :
Foot-bare he fled to Cappadocia's shore ;

There dwelt at Cassarea : day by day

He wept ; ere passed a year his head was hoar :

1887.] THE LEGEND OF ST. LONGINUS. 611

There thirty years he lived, and by his word
And by his life drew many to his Lord.

For evermore he preached to man and maid,
" Cling to the cross ! That cross retrieveth all ;

Raised on his cross, Christ for his murderers prayed :
He prayed for me, the last and least of all."

And still to Christ he sued : " Since thou for me

Didst pray in death, grant me to die for thee ! "

Nero ruled Rome: for sport that Rome he fired ;

Then from a tower, while up the smoke- wreaths curled,
Sang to his lyre, and feigned himself inspired ;

Next day, to shield a hated head, he hurled
Abroad that charge, " The Christians' Crime," and dyed
With innocent blood the ruins far and wide.

At last to Caesarea reached that cry :

" If any scorn upon our gods to call,
Why cumbereth he earth's pavement? Let him die! "

Longinus entered first the judgment hall :
There sat the Roman prefect, robed and crowned ;
Twelve statued gods were ranged that court around.

Thereof the lower half that hour was thronged

By men in Caesarea one time great
And wealthy still ; to them her lands belonged,

And they to Rome, their army, and their state ;
Rome had required their presence there that day :
They loved her not, yet dared not disobey.

Lightly that prefect spake : " More serious task

Than that of scourging fools, good friends, is mine :

Longinus, speak: thou wear'st, I think, no mask,

Rome's soldier once; her gods, remain they thine ?"

He answered : " Mine they were that day gone by :

My Christ forgave my sin ; and His am I."

Then fell on all a great astonishment :

Across that prefect's face there passed a leer ;

Far back upon his gilded throne he leant,

Then thus : " What further witness need we here ?

612 THE LEGEND OF ST. LONG IN us. [Feb.,

Yon man has courage : what he lacks is sense :
Death by the axe ! Ho, Lictors, take him hence ! "

Of various minds that throng till then had stood :
Most part were zealous for the pagan rites ;

Whilst others shrank from shedding brothers' blood
For themes which, shrouded on the cloudy heights

Of thought for so they deemed had never once

To questioner given oracular response.

But when her voice was heard whose voice was one,
Whose Law o'er-ruled all laws, whose will unflawed

Spake to all lands, " Do this," and it was done,
There came to them a change : not only awed,

But with a servile rapture filled, aside

They cast all doubts : " Death by the axe ! " they cried.

Sadly the captain of the Lictor band

Approached to lead the sentenced to his death :

Calmly Longinus drew from out his hand

The axe ; he spake, yet scarce above his breath :

" I die : 'tis well ; but first I will to show

If these be gods ye worship ay or no."

Forward he stepp'd ; sudden up-heaved on high
O'er him, that statued Jove, his battle-axe,

And smote. From each stone idol rang a cry
Piteous and shrill. Then, frail as shapes of wax,

Those twelve great gods fell shivered to the ground,

While all who saw it stared in panic round.

Their panic changed to anger. Where was now
That fixed resolve and single, theirs so late,

To stand with Rome close bound by will and vow ?
A single moment can precipitate

A thousand jarring motions into one :

A thread gives way : their unity is gone.

That panic changed to anger : madness fell

On those who thronged that hall, both guard and guest.

1887.] THE LEGEND OF ST. LONGINUS. 613

Each smote at each : that hall seemed changed to hell ;

Its inmates into men by fiends possessed :
One only in the midst, serene and high,
Stood up unmoved that man condemned to die.

Unmoved he stands ; who is it before him kneels
Forth lifting, like some drowner in the wave,

Hands ineffectual, agonized appeals,
To him, the sole, who, if he wills, can save ?

That prefect on the sudden stricken blind !

His victim thus made answer meek and kind :

" I blame thee not ; according to thy light

Thou madest decree : by law that word must stand.

Fear nothing! God will give thee back thy sight ;
Let two young children take thee by the hand,

And be to thee as eyes, and with soft tread

Conduct thee to my tomb when I am dead.

" There kneel, and register thy vow ; and I,

If God gives grace, will prop with mine thy prayer ;

For though, ere regioned yet in yonder sky,

Christians plead well, they plead more strongly there

Where He who grants each prayer that prayer inspires,

The nearer nursling of His heavenly fires."

Next, turning to that raging host, he raised
His hand, and made the Venerable Sign :

And straight the tempest ceased. They stood amazed ;
Then, drawing to the sentenced, knelt in line ;

And thus he spake, as one who speaks with power :

11 Spirits impure, where dwelt ye till this hour ? "

Then came an answer : " There where Christ is not,
Where no man makes His Sign, or names His Name,

We dwell ; but most in idols deftly wrought:
In them our palace-fortresses we claim ;

In yon poor wrecks for ages we had rest,

Houseless through thee this hour, and dispossesed."

6 14 THE LEGEND OF ST. LONGINUS. [Feb.,

To whom the conqueror : " Think not that for long
Ye shall retain man's godlike race your thrall ;

For Christ, Who drave you forth so oft, is strong,
And strong the house of them that on him call."

He spake ; then passed, with lictors girt around,

To that fair hill-side named the " Martyrs' Mound."

Softly it rose, half-girdled by a wood,

Open elsewhere to every wind that blew,
And violet-scented. On its summit stood

A company of grave-stones some were new
Grav'n with dear names of those in days gone by
Who died in Christ, rejoicing thus to die.

In those old days the name of " Holy Rest "

That hill sustained : but when the Roman sword

Went forth 'gainst all who Christ their God confessed,
The " Martyrs' Mound " they named it, to record

That laureled band which braved an empire's frown.

Of these Longinus wore the earliest crown.

They read the process : he no word thereof

Noted : in heart he stood on Calvary ;
Looked up again upon that Lord of Love ;

Followed the Eternal Victim's wandering eye :
Saw it once more upon him fix. It said :
" Centurion, fear not; I for thee have prayed."

Ah ! then well knew he that Christ's potent word,
His prayer, though spoken by the eye alone,

The hour he spake it had in heaven been heard,
Likewise another, later prayer his own

Rushed on his memory back : " Since thou for me

Didst pray in death, grant me to die for thee."

They read the sentence : straight there fell such grace

On that centurion from the Crucified,
Such splendor from the Eternal Father's face,

Full well he knew the moment ere he died
Those proud ones, late from demon bond set free
Through prayer of his, Christ's servants soon would be.

i88;.] THE LEGEND OF ST. LONGINUS. 615

When the third morn, brightening the horizon's bound,
Touched first the snow-white portals of that tomb

New raised upon the holy " Martyrs' Mound,"
A stately man drew near it. Twilight gloom

Between him and its bosky bases lay ;

The grave-stones on its summit laughed in day.

Why should a man so stalwart pace so slowly?

Why should a port stamped by habitual pride
Sustain the shadow of a grace so lowly ?

What boys are those his doubtful steps who guide?
Each clasps a hand a little lags behind,
Though zealous, shy. The man they lead is blind.

Is this the man on whom, but three days since,

All Csesarea hung for life or death,
In name a prefect, yet in power a prince ?

Whence came the change? Alas, how slight a breafh
Can shake the light leaf from the autumnal tree !
When summer flushed his veins how strong was he !

Before that tomb the vanquished Strong One knelt ;

Down on that grave his head discrowned he laid;
With each blind hand its lintels cold he felt ;

He-raised his sightless eyes: to God he prayed :
At idol shrines he made that hour no plaint :
To God he prayed ; to God and to his Saint.

In heaven God's Saints fasten their eyes on God ;

Yet, as a man beside a lake's clear mirror
Notes well the trees behind him sway and nod

In that still glass reflected without error,
So, in the mirror of God's knowledge high,
His Saints the things of earth in part descry.

Longinus from the haven of his rest

Descried that supplicant bent, and with him prayed,
While prayed with both the synod of the Blest ;

Since God, sole source of Love and loving aid,
Wills that his creatures, each to each, should bear
His gifts ; and what He gives concedes to prayer;

616 THE LEGEND OF ST. LONGINUS. [Feb.,

That so in heaven and here on earth alike
All creatures may be links in one great chain

Down which His gifts, innocuous lightnings, strike
From loftiest to the least. Unmeasured gain

Is this, since thus God's creatures, each and all,

One temple grow through love reciprocal.

A sinful soul is ofttimes not so far

From God as worldly men of faith suppose :

The sea rim brightens though unrisen the star
In him a star of hope thus gradual rose :

He mused : " The Christian's God may help me yet !

Thus spake Longinus: he will not forget."

Strong in that hope the blind man raised his eyes
O wondrous change ! Where lately all was black

Flashed the green wave and laughed the purple skies :
The sun had risen : the night, a cloudy wrack,

Fled like some demon host repulsed with scorn ;

Glad as a pardoned spirit rejoiced the morn.

But he, that man late blind, the child of Rome,

What heart was his? That world, his own once more,

Seemed less the earth we tread, our ancient home,
Than pledge of worlds to be ! That sword, of yore

Barrier 'twixt man and Eden, was withdrawn :

Beyond there lay some new Creation's dawn.

Old songs he heard, sung by his Hebrew nurse :
" God stands around our Salem like the hills :

His light is Truth : He made the Universe:
Like the sea-chambers are his oracles :

Who shall ascend his Holy Mountain ? They

Whose eye is single ; undefiled their way."

On that vivific Vision long he gazed ;

Then, shivering, sank upon his face, with eyes
That sought once more the darkness, splendor-dazed,

Still as some creature bound for sacrifice.
Wondering those children stood. He rose at last
And spake : " A Task is mine. The Past is past/'

i88/.] THE LEGEND OF ST. LONGINUS. 617

To Cassarea straight his steps he turned :

Near it a throng came forth to greet him ! They

Who sinned like him that sin to expiate burned :
The madness of a life-time, not a day,

At once had left them. To themselves restored,

Self they renounced, and found, instead, their Lord.

They stood with countenance glad, yet wonder-stricken,
Like face of one who some great sight hath seen,

And still, with heart whose pulses ever quicken,
Seeing no more, fronts the remembered sheen.

Silent they stood, their eager eyes wide bent

On him, with hands forth held in wonderment.

With him returned they to their ancient city :

A light till then unseen upon it shone ;
Christ they confessed : they sought nor praise nor pity :

Sharp was the conflict; the reward soon won:
The " Martyrs' Mound " holds still their hallowed dust :
Their spirits abide with Him in Whom they placed their
trust.

Farewell, Longinus ! Thou one hour didst seem

Of all mankind, save one, unhappy most,
Yet lived'st, reserved from Satan to redeem

Not one poor sinner but a sinful host ;
Pray well for men sin-tempted to despair:
Lift up thy spear and chase the fiends their souls that scare !

6i8 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

A FAIR EMIGRANT.

CHAPTER XVII.
GRAN.

TOR CASTLE stands on a breezy height a quarter of a mile in-
land above the bold promontory of Tor Head, opposite the Mull
of Cantire. Here have dwelt for generations the elder branch
of our Fingall family, at present represented by a young man,
cousin of Shana and Rosheen, and by his grandmother. [Gran,
a striking and well-known figure in the district, is also grand-
mother to Alister and his sisters, and a fond great-grandmamma
to Flora's children.]

Between The Rath and Tor Castle lie miles of beautiful coun-
try : romantic Glenariff and Glenan, the lovely shores and
strange caves of Cushendun, the rugged and splendid headlands
of Cushlake, with their rocky climbs and flowery ravines. Far
below Tor Castle the waters of Moyle wash the rocky walls of
the great Tor Head fairy Moyle, haunted in days of eld by the
enchanted swans, the princess Fionnuala and her brothers. Scot-
land looks so near that, on a fine day, one would think a ferry-
boat might bring one across in a quarter of an hour, and from the
windows of Tor Castle the exquisite outlines of the hills of Jura
show their fantastic outlines on the bosom of the glittering sea.

Gran is the real head of the clan Fingali, loved by rich and
poor. Her tall, spare, and still active figure is often seen moving
from cottage to cottage about Tor, her stately old head with its
snow-white curls stooping to enter at their lowly doorways. She
is a rigidly upright, God-fearing, and charitable soul, kind rather
in her deeds than her words, though a rare tenderness sometimes
shines out of her keen and penetrating eyes. A slight degree of
sternness in manner and demeanor deceives no one as to the
quality of her heart, and it is never forgotten that she has known
a terrible sorrow in her life.

On certain days the whole of the Rath family were accus-
tomed to come all the way from Glenmalurcan to spend a day
and stay a night with Gran. At other times Tor Castle was
empty and silent enough, even when Rory, the master of Tor,
was at home he and Gran making but a small family to occupy
it ; but when The Rath people appeared it became as busy and

1 887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 619

merry as a hive. Such stirring- visitations were the delight of
the old lady's life ; and preparations, in the airing of rooms and
providing of sweets and good things for the children, were begun
many days before the expected guests arrived.

On a bright May day the usual migration from The Rath
to Tor was taking place. Lady Flora had gone early in her
brougham with the nurse and two youngest children, leaving
Shana and Rosheen and the elder babes to follow, walking, and
riding on the family car.

The drawing-room at Tor had not been restored and re-re-
stored like Lady Flora's ; the ancient furniture had performed no
journeys up and down the garret-stairs, had known no period of
ignominious seclusion : there it stood just where it had been since
the beginning of all things, as might be imagined the old bu-
reaus, and tables, and china-presses, and sconces, black with age
and bright with well-polished brass. The round, convex mirrors
which Lady Flora had once thought so hideous, but worshipped
now, hung where they had always hung, except when removed
for purposes of cleaning ; the carpet was so worn that, but for
rugs adroitly spread, it would have shown too plainly the marks
of its valuable antiquity ; the curtains had no particular color left
in them, but .had a ghostly dignity in their folds better than the
richness of many modern fabrics. The well-wrought brasses
about the fireside shone with a comfortable splendor when the fire
glowed all across its width between the high-shouldered pilasters
and carved panels of the time-darkened chimney-piece.

All the chambers at Tor were furnished in the same style ot
unquestionable antiquity. They and their contents seemed as
old as Tor Head and the waves that beat against it; and they
suggested the truth that more dignity than money belonged to
the inheritance of the ancient clan Fingall. Gran, who prized
every stick and stone in the castle, saw nothing amiss; but Flora
perceived keenly with her more worldly eyes that Rory would
have to marry an heiress, as Alister had done, if only that he
might restore and replenish his ancient home.

Even in bright May weather the breeze that blows up from
the great Tor is sharp and cool, and Gran and her granddaughter-
in-law sat in two grim arm-chairs facing each other by the fire.
Gran looked like some old queen in a historical picture, with her
white head posed against the carving of her high-backed chair,
and her long black draperies flowing round her on the ground.

" I am glad you arrived first," she was saying, u because I
want to talk to you apart from the girls. If Manon comes here

620 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

I should not like them to have heard a word to the prejudice of
her or her mother."

" Certainly not," said Lady Flora; "and I do not know why
any one need be prejudiced. You did not like her mother when
you knew her as a young woman, but her grandmother was your
friend. The girl is of good birth and an heiress. Why should
she not come to you, if her mother wishes it?"

"Why should she not ?" said Gran reflectingly. "But then
why should she do so? I mean, what is the reason for her wish-
ing it? Aimee was a young woman I could not bear sly, un-
truthful, cold-hearted."

" But she was charmingly beautiful and married the son of
a wealthy marquis," laughed Lady Flora ; " and that ought to
cover a multitude of sins."

Gran sighed and fingered the letter she held in her wrinkled
hand impatiently. Hers was not a worldly mind like Lady Flo-
ra's, and she had not been thinking of the position of this mother
and daughter who were putting themselves forward to claim her
friendship, but of their moral worth. It had once been a trouble
to her that she could not like the daughter of the friend of her
youth, and now it was vexing her that she might have to dislike
the granddaughter as well. True, the grandchild might repro-
duce the estimable and lovable qualities of the grandmother;
but then why did Aimee, the mother so worldly, so cunning,
and always, in former days, so unsympathetic with Gran herself
now ask to send her child under her roof, into the undesirable
seclusion of the Antrim highlands?

" I cannot guess her motive," said she, folding and unfolding
the letter. " Manon is handsome and an heiress, and in France,
in Paris, she ought to have the world at her feet. The grand-
mother is long dead the only link between me and this mother
and child ; and even while she lived Aimee took but little interest
in her mother's friend. And now she writes to me like this:

"'DEARLY LOVED FRIEND OF MY DEPARTED MOTHER:

" * My darling Manon, of whom you have heard tell as the

heiress of her grandfather, the late Marquis de -, husband of

your dear friend my lamented mother, is now of age, and the
world is full of snares and attractions for her. I have taken a
strange fancy, sentimental if you will, to place her under your
care for some few months before launching her on the dangers
and pleasures of life ' '

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 621

" There now ! " cried Flora. " What would you have more
unworldly than that? If not very wise herself, she has a high
opinion of you, and would like her daughter to have the advan-
tage of your friendship."

A little color stole into Gran's dear old face, partly at the sug-
gested praise of herself, and partly with pleasure to think that
Aimee's motive might, after all, be a high one.

" I do not consider myself a very good person, Flora. I
tremble to think of how much better I might have been if I had
tried."

Flora made a little mouth behind her fan. In her opinion
Gran was a great deal too good "too high-flown," as her grand-
daughter-in-law would have called it.

" Any virtue I have had has been too much of a negative
kind," the old lady went on. " One cannot be very bad, always
looking at Tor Head and the sea. But I would be glad to think
that Aime*e had some delusion on the subject, for better a mis-
take of that kind than no desire to look up to any one. Aimee
has lived in the midst of the gay world, with its snares and temp-
tations, and her daughter will probably do the same "

"Why?" asked Flora coolly, putting down her screen and
looking Gran in the face. " If Manon comes here with her
mother's graces, her French noble birth, and her grandfather's
money, why need she ever return to France, except for a visit as
Rory's wife?"

"Flora!" exclaimed the old lady, grasping both arms of her
chair and looking indignantly at her granddaughter-in-law.

" Dear Gran, don't f fly up the chimney with horror at my
depravity. I don't mean that we are to entrap and capture the
young woman, force her into a marriage behind her mother's
back; but all I can say is that, under the circumstances, such an
event as Rory's marriage would be very likely to ensue from
Manon's stay in his house. When her mother sends her here she
knows that there is an unmarried master of Tor, thirty years old,
and if she makes inquiries she can discover that he is not unat-
tractive"

" Stay, Flora. You run away with me. I fear I was think-
ing of wrong to Rory more than wrong to Manon."

" The heiress of a marquis, young and lovely ! " exclaimed
Flora.

" We have yet to judge of the personal charms of Mademoi-
selle Manon," said Gran. " I was thinking of her qualities of

622 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

heart and head. I put the heart first, you see, Flora, though I
do like a woman to have a few grains of sense."

"So -do men, dear Gran," said Flora, with a slight sneer.
" Such a thing was never heard of, you know, as a man marrying
a pretty face with nothing behind it. They always inquire about
a girl's brains and right feelings before they look at her eyes or
feet."

Lady Flora set up her own pretty feet before her on a foot-
stool as she spoke, and Gran glanced at them and then at her
face with a slight sigh. But the mistress of The Rath had not
meant at all to imply that she herself had neither brains nor
heart.

"If," began Gran, slowly and earnestly, after a pause "if
Manon should prove to resemble her grandmother rather than
her mother, and if she and Rory were to love one another, I
should be happy to see such a marriage ; but if she be worldly,
vain, and deceitful " (Gran frowned as if confronting a well-
remembered image which rose before her mind's eye), " rather
then would I see Rory dead than standing by her at the altar."

Lady Flora shrugged her shoulders and glanced slightly
round the bare, faded, noble old apartment.

" At all events," she said, " I do not see how you can refuse
to receive the granddaughter of the friend of your youth. Rory
is in London at present, and as the girl is coming there with
friends he can escort her across the Channel. He will thus have
an opportunity of discovering even sooner than ourselves
whether she is a wretch or a saint."

" Of course, as you say, I cannot refuse to receive her,"
said Gran gravely ; " but, at all events, I will write to her mother
at once to tell her exactly how I am circumstanced here, and
warn her of how little the girl can expect in the way of en-
tertainment."

CHAPTER XVIII.
THE BACKWOODS-WOMAN.

WHILE Gran came to this conclusion the rest of the family
from The Rath nurses, children, and aunts were proceeding
along the romantic road towards Castle Tor. Shana and Ro-
sheen, being capital walkers, only needed "a lift" now and again,
and when within about a mile of their destination they sent on
the roomy family car without them, keeping Duck by their side
at her own urgent request.

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 623

As the girls trudged along, laughing, talking, glowing with
exercise, a figure appeared suddenly on the slope above them
gnd began rapidly to descend a fair-haired young man, who
pulled off his cap as he leaped to the road and stood smiling
before them.

"O Wil " began Rosheen, and checked herself, glancing at
Shana.

"How are you, Mr. Callender?" said Shana gravely, giving
him her hand.

"It is so long since we have seen you!" pouted Rosheen.
"What have you been about?"

" Mr. Callender called yesterday when we were out, Rosheen,
and he has been so busy. It is very hard and absorbing work
bringing a narrow-gauge railway down the side of a mountain, is
it not, Mr. Callender? Rosheen does not consider," said Shana
briskly.

" It is not, perhaps, as hard as it looks," said the young engi-
neer, who did not feel as if he had much to say just for the first
two or three moments. A few minutes ago he had been walking
through the heather with sad enough thoughts, and lo ! here he
was looking in the face that was everything to him in the world.

" O Rosheen ! " cried Duck, " do get me some of those sky-
flowers down in the hole there ! "

"Nonsense, Duck! Sky-flowers!"

" Flowers like bits of sky, I mean. O Rosheen ! "

"If I get you three will they content you?"

" Six," said Duck. " I do so love them."

"Three!"

"Twelve!"

"You little extortioner! There, I will get you six, but not
one more, for the rest are too far down." And off scampered
aunt and niece, dropped over the roadside bank, and began to
do what Duck called "slithering" down the seaward slope,
while Shana and Callender walked on together.

" Miss Fingall Shana!" began the young man eagerly, "I
want to tell you, if I may, why I must for the future refrain from
visiting at The Rath. I have thought much about how to tell you.
I had hoped yesterday to find an opportunity ; I was disap-
pointed then, but chance now favors me. I hope it is not wrong
of me to speak at all events, I must. I cannot allow you to
think I am careless of seeing you, even if you do not care

"I do care,"- said Shana abruptly. Then she added, "I like
to see my friends."

624 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

"Ah! your friends. Well, Lady Flora has been so cold to
me, has in fact so snubbed me on several occasions when you
were not present, that I feel I cannot again force myself into her
house. When your brother invites me I will come gladly and
endure Lady Flora's slights, but I cannot enter The Rath unin-
vited any more."

" You are right," said Shana quietly.

"O Shana! if I may say a little more. Ah! I will .say it,
come good or come ill. Shana, I love you. Unfortunate beggar
that I am, with a couple of hundred a year, and my fortune yet
to make Shana, I love you, I love you ! "

A flash of brightness and color suffused Shana's face, and
she trembled, but she said nothing.

11 1 know I am an idiot to speak, for I dare not ask you to
marry me now. I dare say I am very wrong. I may be a
dreamer to hope I may one day be able to give you a place in
the world worthy of you. At present I can say nothing except
that I love you, and perhaps I ought not to say it. But, Shana, I
love you, I love you ! "

Shana had conquered her trembling and lifted her grave, dark
eyes steadily to his.

" And I love you, too, Willie Callender," she said with a still
earnestness of manner, as if she were uttering a vow. " I am
glad you have spoken to me, and you need not fear to have done
me a wrong."

" O my love ! I do fear it, I do fear it."

" Come good or come ill, I am yours," she went on steadily,
" whether you can claim me or not. If you were to die to-mor-
row, and I were to live to be a hundred, I should never love an-
other man."

" Shana ! Shana ! do you know what you are saying ? Do
not say it rashly. 1 shall live on your words, and work on the
strength they will give me."

" I have said it," said Shana, a radiant smile breaking over
her face. " I have given my promise to you, Willie Callender,"
she went on, as they stood with clasped hands, looking in one
another's eyes, "and now my life will be full of light and my
future glorious. Come when you like, stay away when you like,
Shana will welcome you, wait for you, trust you, work with you.
Now here are Rosheen and Duck, and we must go on to Castle
Tor."

"Are you going to leave us so soon?" cried Rosheen, as
she saw Mr. Callender turn away from Shana.

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 625

" The men are waiting- for him yonder on the road," said
Shana. " He is out surveying, and has no more time for us."

" Good-by, Rosheen ; good-by, Duck," said Callender wist-
fully, and as he raised his hat his eyes flew back to Shana's, still
shining with the light his impulsive words had kindled in them.

" Good-by," he repeated in an altered voice, and was gone.

" How oddly he looks ! " said Rosheen. " What could you
have said to him, Shana, in such a little moment to make him
like that?"

Shana smiled. " Perhaps I told him not to break his neck
leaping down hills," she said. " One can say a good deal in a
little moment, sometimes."

" It is a good deal, from you, to express even so much in-
terest in him as that," said Rosheen, " so I don't wonder it over-
whelmed him."

" I hear hoofs!" said Shana abruptly. "Duck, do you think
papa can be coming?"

Duck believed it possible, and in a few moments Alister Fin-
gall galloped up and sprang from his horse, crying :

" I have good news for you, girls. Guess "

" Major Batt is married," said Rosheen with sudden solem-
nity.

" No," laughed Alister; " as far as I am aware, he is still in a
position to flit from flower to flower."

" Betty Macalister has got her rent."

" Hopelessly wrong. I see I must tell you. There is an
offer for Shanganagh Farm."

" The farm ! "

" Alister ! What delightful news ! "

Alister stood smiling at his sisters, watching their pleasure
grow as they realized the welcome truth. That the letting of
the farm was very important to them he knew, but of all it meant
to their proud young spirits even he was unable to imagine. In-
dependent bread, a shield from Flora's taunts, power to look
Duck and her following unremorsefully in the eyes, composure
of mind with regard to the fate of the novel just begun these
were but a few of the boons which the rent of Shanganagh,
paid regularly every half-year, would bring into the lives of its
young-lady landlords.

" What kind of tenant are we to get ? " asked Shana, radiant.
" And will he pay ? "

" It is not a he," said Alister. " It is a she,"

VOL. XLIV. 40

626 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

" Really! But of course she has a man of some kind to act
for her."

" It seems not ; and there is nothing very odd in a woman
taking a farm, if only she knows how to manage it. Miss In-
gram writes "

" Writes? Have you not seen her?"

" I only got her letter just before I left, and thought best to
show it you before seeing her. She is in lodgings at Nannie
Macaulay's."

'* Where has she dropped from ? We were in Nannie's a few
days ago."

" She is an Irish farmer's daughter from Minnesota, come to
Ireland with the little savings that her parents left her. She
wants to live in the country of which she heard so much from her
father. Immediately on arriving she made inquiries about lands
to let, and applied at once for Shanganagh."

" Without seeing it ? "

" Oh ! I believe she has been to see it. These Americans lose
no time ; and from the tone of her letter I gather that she is a
woman who knows what she is about. She thinks she under-
stands farming; and let us hope that she is right."

" What women these Americans are ! I suppose she is a sort
of female grenadier."

" No matter what she is, if she be solvent. Her only reference
is to a Dr. Ackfoyd, in St. Paul. She is willing to wait till I
can get an answer from him."

" Is it necessary to wait ? "

" We may be able to judge about that when we have seen
and heard her. She offers either to come to interview me at The
Rath or to receive me at Nannie Macaulay's."

" Oh ! let her come to The Rath," cried Rosheen. " I do so
want to see an American farmeress ! "

After this news Shana and Rosheen were impatient to re-
turn to The Rath, and the days at Tor Castle with Gran seemed
longer than such days were usually found. Shana had a great
deal on her mind, and longed for the seclusion of the old school-
room in which to think out her thoughts. Here she had not a
moment alone to realize the fact that Willie Callender had spoken
to her, and that her life had gone out of her own keeping. Smil-
ing quietly at Flora from the opposite side of the great Tor
hearth-place, she wondered what her sister-in-law would say or
do if she knew what had happened to her that day. But Shana
was not much afraid of Flora. And the letting of Shanganagl

1 887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 627

made it easier to be brave. Alister left Tor the morning after
he had brought his news, promising to see the proposed tenant
and to invite her to come on a certain day to The Rath.

"Ask her to come in the evening," said Shana. " Major Batt
is dining with us, and her visit will be a welcome interruption.
And all hours must be the same to a farmer who has travelled
from Minnesota."

Back in their own sanctum, the sisters hugged one another
and laughed aloud. That Heaven should have sent them an
American farming-woman to pay them the rent of Shanganagh
and make them independent of Flora seemed too delightful to
be true. On the eventful evening of her expected visit they
dressed early, even though Major Batt was in the drawing-room,
and hurried into his presence, eager to get a word with Alister
about the heroine of their dreams.

" Well, what is she like?" asked Rosheen, sidling up to her
brother as soon as he appeared.

Alister's face was twitching all over with fun.

" As like a backwoodsman in petticoats as anything you can
imagine," he said. " Big, brown, and bony. Swings her arms
as if she was accustomed to carry a hatchet, and walks like a
dragoon."

" Exactly what I pictured her," said 'Rosheen triumphantly.

" I did not think she would be quite so bad as that," protested
Shana; "I fancied her a short, thick-set person with a knowing
expression and a nasal accent."

" Add the knowing expression and the nasal accent to my first
sketch," said Alister, "and you will have her to the life."

" I don't think you need have brought her here," complained
Lady Flora. " A person like that ought to be dealt with in an
attorney's office."

<c I am not an attorney and I have not got an office, and you
know I never take more trouble than I can help. It is easiest
to do the business in my own way. If she bullies us too much
Major Batt and I will be able to manage her. Eh, major ? "

" Oh ! certainly ; anything you please," said the major ner-
vously. *' Though in the case of a woman "

" American females from the backwoods hardly count as wo-
men, major, do they ? " said Alister. " Oh ! by the way, girls, I
told her you could put her up for the night."

" For the night!" A look of blank dismay overspread the
faces of the three ladies, dismay developing quickly into indigna-
tion on Lady Flora's countenance.

628 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

\ " Most inconsiderate," she pronounced. " Where do you think
we could put such a person ? unless she will go among the ser-
vants."

"There is the brown room," suggested Shana. "If she has
been invited we must welcome her."

Lady Flora turned her bracelets on her white wrists, which,
with her, was a sign that all the family knew. What the savage
man means when he dances his war-dance, that Lady Flora meant
when she turned her bracelets. She would not have that Ameri-
can farmeress sleeping in her house.

" If you are afraid," said Alister, " we can lock her in and put
a couple of the dogs outside her door."

A peal of the bell was heard, and everybody started.

" By Jove ! there she is," said the master of The Rath. " I
begin to feel nervous. Only that Major Batt is here

" Don't be ridiculous, Alister," said his wife. " As you have
brought her here, you must make the best of her. Only please
send her word that the car must wait. I will not have her here
for the night."

" It's Miss Ingram, sir. Wants to see you, sir," said the but-
ler confidentially in his master's ear.

" Will you receive her in the drawing-room, Flora?" asked
her husband ; and then, seeing the bracelets turning, he said to
the servant :

" Show her into the library. I will be with her immediately."

CHAPTER XIX.
IN THE ENEMY'S CAMP.

BAWN stood on the hearth in Alister's library, looking round
her with the most lively interest. She had now been several days
in the Glens, and had walked and been driven in various direc-
tions, making acquaintance with her father's country. Each
evening she had returned to Nannie Macauiay's and mounted
the bit of narrow stair that led to her nest over the needle-and-
tape shop, with her heart and imagination vividly impressed by
the scenery through which she had been moving all day. All
over it she saw the sorrowful details of her father's history, and
every creature she met on the way seemed an actor in the tra-
gedy of his youth.

Afraid to ask many questions, lest those around her should
guess her identity and purpose, she contented herself with hearing

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 629

the general remarks of the car-drivers, and encouraging Nannie
Macaulay to gossip when she brought her her tea. Like most
people who live absorbed in one idea, she fancied every word and
look of others bore in some way on the question so present to her
own mind. How could persons who had once known or heard
of Arthur Desmond outlive their interest in him, or suffer the
life of the present moment to thrust him and his story far into
the background of their thoughts ?

Now she had penetrated into the very camp of the enemy, and
stood upon the hearth of a Fingall. Nannie Macaulay had not
been slow in pouring forth, almost unasked, the pedigree of Alis-
ter, the master of The Rath, and of Rory, master of Castle Tor.
Her own wit and previous knowledge had discovered the exact
relationship between these living men and the Roderick whom
Desmond was supposed to have killed. Nannie had not men-
tioned the murder, nor touched at all upon the tragedy. She
had only hinted at it by saying that the old lady at Castle Tor
had known a terrible sorrow in her life. And Bawn knew that
Gran must be the mother of Roderick, and that Alister and Rory
must be the sons of his brothers, now dead.

In making her way from American prairies to Irish glens she
had not counted upon coming at once into such close contact with
the family so intimately connected with her father's misfortunes,
the descendants of those " friends " who had condemned and
forsaken him. When Alister Fingall, seeing her young and a
lady, had asked her to come to The Rath and there conclude the
arrangements for the farm with his sisters, her landlords, she had
at first shrunk from accepting his invitation, disliking to enter his
house. Curiosity, however, had overcome her hesitation, and she
was here.

Now she stood under the roof that must have sheltered her
father on many a happy day before the horror came. These walls
had heard his laugh, these old books must have been touched by
his hands. This fireside, towards which she instinctively stretched
her fingers after the chill drive on an outside car through the
evening mists of the glen, must often have reflected its flame in
his eyes and welcomed it freely among its own. And the friends
who had sat here by his side had deserted him in his misfortune,
had cast him forth out of their home and their hearts.

She withdrew herself from the warmth of this fireside of a
Fingall, and stood aloof, frowning round the quiet, comfortable
room with its book-lined walls, felt-covered floor, reading-lamps,
reading-desk, and pictures.

630 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

Here they had dwelt, the cruel ones, all this time, happy, hon-
ored, beloved, and at ease, while he whom they had persecuted
wasted his life in an alien country, pining under the calumny
with which they had helped to load him. After a few minutes
these thoughts so grew and wrought in her mind that had she
been left much longer in the room alone she might have walked
out of it and made her escape from the house. Fortunately for
her reputation as a sensible woman, very desirable to her at pre-
sent, she was prevented from so acting by the entrance of Alister
Fingall.

" Miss Ingram, pardon me for keeping you waiting. My sisters
will be with us shortly. In the meantime sit down, please, and
let us discuss our business. Have you thought over all I said to
you this morning?"

" I have thought it all out long before this morning, Mr.
Fingall. One does not cross the ocean without knowing why
one comes. The desire that brought me here was to possess a
farm in Ireland. You have a farm to let, and I will give you the
rent at which you value it."

" You are very young and excuse me for being so personal-
very fair to enter upon so bold and independent an undertaking."

Bawn inclined her head with a stately movement, and a slight
look of impatience crossed her smooth brows.

" If your father" (Bawn started) "had lived he would prob-
ably have advised a different course. I am older than you, and I
have young sisters. I should not like to see one of them place
herself in the position you are so anxious to take up."

"Your sisters are young ladies, Mr. Fingall, brought up in
luxury and holding the place of ladies in the world. I am a
farmer's daughter, hardily reared, understanding my father's
business and wishing to practise it, and with no family traditions
to be hurt by my plebeian occupation."

Alister Fingall observed her attentively as she spoke, and
followed the imperial wave of her white hand, from which she
had forgetfully removed the coarse glove it pleased her to wear.
He thought the would-be tenant of Shanganagh Farm did not
look exactly like a humble farmer's daughter. However, he
could interfere no further on the score of the girl's apparent gen-
tility. His remonstrances took another form.

" Farming is different here from what you have seen in Minne.
sota, and you will be obliged to trust servants to manage your
business. If you lose your money in a year or so, have you con-
sidered what you will do?"

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 631

" I will not lose it," said Bawn with decision. " And, at all
events, I have made up my mind to try this venture. However,
if you think me an unsafe and uncertain tenant, please say so at
once, and I shall seek for what I want elsewhere."

" I have no objection to you as a tenant on the contrary. It
is not easy to let land just now, and a solvent tenant is highly
welcome to my sisters at this present moment. Anything I have
said to dissuade you has been for your own sake alone."

He spoke with an accent of sincerity which Bawn, despite
her prejudice, could not mistake. But she said to herself that
she did not want his friendship, and that she had already repaid
his courtesy by explaining to him her views with regard to her
own position a piece of confidence which she had intended
vouchsafing to nobody.

" As you have quite decided, I will now introduce you to my
sisters," he continued, and rang, and sent a request that the
young ladies would come to the library.

Shana and Rosheen came into the room, each in her own char-
acteristic manner. Rosheen hovered behind her sister, glancing
inquisitively into the room, half-frightened and half-hoping for
fun. Shana held her head well back and her eyes well open to
take in the whole situation, and resolved that this brawny
backwoods-woman who had come to their rescue should be
treated as a friend, however disagreeable she might unfortu-
nately be.

Both sisters paused speechless on the threshold at sight of
Bawn, whose heart at once throbbed involuntary approval of
these fresh, sparkling-eyed, white-armed girls in their graceful
though well-worn black silk frocks, and their simple and virginal
ornaments of pearl.

" Miss Ingram, these are my sisters, the Miss Fingalls, who
will be your landlords. Shana, this is your new tenant if all
goes well. Miss Ingram will not be dissuaded by me from the
difficulties and responsibilities of farming."

" I am a farmer's daughter," said Bawn, turning on the two
girls a warm, broad smile which lit up her whole face and
showed it in a new aspect to Alister. " I cannot persuade Mr.
Fingall of all that that means. I have taken my little fortune in
my hand, and I wish to turn my American gold into Irish butter
and wheat. If you will trust me with Shanganagh, Miss Fingall,
I will do my best to prove a desirable tenant."

Shana had by this time recovered from her astonishment.

" Forgive me for staring at you," she said pleasantly, " but I

632 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

expected to see such a different person." And she cast a re-
proachful glance at Alister.

" To tell you the truth, Miss Ingram," said her brother, " we
were all dying with curiosity to see a back woods- woman. And
we could not picture her without a hatchet."

" Will not a spade do? " said Bawn, with a smile. " I shall be
at work with that implement soon."

" Not with your own hands?" protested Rosheen, who had
been standing rapt in admiration of Bawn's changing counte-
nance and golden hair.

" Perhaps you will be so good as to come and see," said
Bawn, forgetting her enmity to the Fingalls for the moment.
She had never seen any one of her own sex look so temptingly
companionable as these charming girls. " At all events, if you
will give me the key of Shanganagh I will enter into possession
at once."

" But who will live with you there ? " cried Rosheen.

" I think I have found some one. The person with whom I
lodge recommends" (here Bawn grew grave and cold) "a Mrs.
Macalister and her daughter. They were thinking of emigrat-
ing, and will be glad to take a home with me instead."

"Betty Macalister!" cried Rosheen, clasping her hands.
" O Shana ! what a shower of good luck at once ! "

" I am exceedingly glad," said Shana, fixing grateful eyes on
her future tenant. " You hardly know what good you will be
doing there. And Betty is a faithful soul."

" Yes," said Bawn, the grave look on her face deepening
almost to sternness, " / believe she is a faithful soul."

The brother and sisters noticed the sudden alteration in
Bawn's countenance and tone, and thought her mind had been
crossed by a sense of her own loneliness among strangers.

" And now will you come up-stairs and take off" your hat
and shawl?" said Shana, quickly resolving that she would brave
Flora's displeasure rather than send this delightful stranger back
through the miles of Glen to Cushendall that night. She must
be warmed up and made to forget her loneliness. Rosheen, al-
ways an admirer of her sister's superior audacity, heard her now
with satisfaction.

But Bawn was not to be suddenly led into the bondage of
friendship like this. The mention of Betty Macalister had recalled
her to herself and reminded her of her cause against this house.

" You are very kind ; but my car is waiting and I must go.
I have business in the morning which must be attended to."

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 633

And in spite of renewed and pressing invitations she got upon
her car and was driven from the door of The Rath.

" Well, have you dismissed the backwoods-woman?" asked
Lady Flora, who, notwithstanding her interest in Major Batt, was
rather tired of her tete-a-tete with him.

" O Flora ! what a pity you did not see her," cried Rosheen.
" She is simply glorious ! "

" With ugliness ? "

" With beauty."

" Alister, has this girl gone crazy ? "

" She has lost her head about Miss Ingram, evidently. "What
would have become of the major, if we had introduced her here ?
Our new tenant is a young woman eminently fitted by nature for
the breaking of susceptible hearts."

" Is she really handsome ? "

" Really."

" And young ? " asked Major Batt.

" And young."

" And what is she going to do at Shanganagh ? "

" Waste her money, I am afraid ; but as she will not be ad-
vised, we must allow her to pay us the rent. You might as well
have been civil to her, Flora."

" I do not like handsome women who go gadding about the
world alone," pronounced Lady Flora. " When did she get
here, and how ? "

" Oh ! a few days ago, and by the car round the coast."

" Humph ! " said the major. " My dear Fingall, I think I
know the lady. It was extremely improper for her to come
here. She has just recovered from the small-pox."

" Small-pox /" cried Lady Flora, horrified.

" I travelled on the car with her, and she told me of her mis-
fortune," said the major. " A handsome young woman, as you
see her through a veil."

Shana and Rosheen laughed and exchanged glances.

" I think Miss Ingram has her wits about her," said their bro-
ther slyly. " Are you sure she did not want to get the car to
herself, major ? "

" I am very sure she did not," said Major Batt stiffly.

" At all events, this decides me that I will not have her com-
ing here," said Lady Flora. " Small-pox in' a household like this !
Audacious creature, to subject us to such a risk ! "

634 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

CHAPTER xx.

A LITTLE REACTION.

SHANGANAGH FARM lay on the opposite side of Glenmalurcan,
looking- from The Rath. To reach it one followed the old road
by the river up the middle of the glen, and turned off into a by-
road or " lonan," climbing the hill by easy zigzags between haw-
thorn-hedges to the bit of table-land, midway up the mountain, on
which the farm-house stood. The beetling crags hung imme-
diately over it as over The Rath, but the farm lay full in the
sun green fields, old mossy orchard of gnarled apple-trees, strips
of tillage, and a house with whitewashed walls and yellow thatch.

Except for a few scrambling, fragrant cabbage-roses, rakish
larkspurs, and ragged, spicy gilliflowers rooted long among the
apple-trees at the end of the wild slip of orchard, there was
not a flower about the place, as Bawn remarked, missing the
flushing flower-growths to which she had been accustomed.

Here, if she wanted color, she must lift her eyes to the oppo-
site mountain-ridges and view the violet and saffron tints, the
orange and rose and crimson hues, cooled by grays, infinite in
variety of depth, which hung for ever between the plains below
and the mid-heavens above her head. Now that it was nearing
summer the whole vale of Glenmalurcan, from its mountain-tops
to the sea, was steeped in color. Of the ponderous gloom of its
winter days Bawn as yet knew nothing.

Inside, the house consisted of four rooms, opening out of one
another on a flat, and a dairy and store-room behind. The house-
door led straight into the kitchen, and off the kitchen was Bawn's
sitting-room, and off that her bed- room. Overhead was a ser-
vant's apartment, under the roof, and a loft for apples, and for the
hanging up of sweet and bitter herbs in bunches to dry from the
rafters. Of this simple dwelling Bawn and her serving-women,
Betty Macalister and her daughter Nancy, took possession dur-
ing the week that followed Miss Ingram's visit to The Rath.

Having with much difficulty procured sufficient furniture, the
new tenant went to work to try and make what she called her
" shanty " a little habitable ; and it was well this occupation lay
to her hand, as, her fields being already sown, she had little out-
door employment in this season, and disliked the idea of sitting
down to think.

Even as it was, while she stained her parlor-floor brown, and

1 887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 635

waxed it bright, and spread ijt with the goatskins of the country,
she found it hard to keep the sailing away for ever of that steam-
er out of her mind, to suppress a voice in her heart that accused
her of treachery to a friend.

Where had those ardent, dark eyes sailed to out of her life,
and what bitter things against her was that brave, brown man
thinking now as he reflected on the trick she had played him ?

Well, he was gone. One cannot both have one's loaf and eat
it, and she had swallowed her bread, sour and bitter as the mouth-
ful had been. She had thought the swallowing of the morsel
everything, but it had left a taste on her mouth which was nei-
ther nice to endure nor easy to get rid of.

Even so, would she give up the position she had now gained,
the footing on which she stood, the hope of accomplishing her
purpose which seemed already floating all round her in this
mountain atmosphere? As she hammered a nail home in her
house-place she declared that no, she would not own to any desire
that she had been weak enough to relinquish her enterprise, or
suffer herself to wish for a moment that she was back on the high
seas with still the option of holding for life the lover who had so
strangely, suddenly, extravagantly loved her.

When a few unexpected tears dropped on the nails she drove
in, almost as heavily as the blows of her hammer, she told herself
they had welled from the depths of her heart solely because she
was lonely, home-sick, all forlorn in a land of strangers; and also
because, curiously enough, now that she was here in the scenes
so long dreamed of, had kindled her hearth-fire on the mountain-
side looking towards Aura, had spoken with the descendants of
those whom she considered her father's enemies, she found it
more difficult to realize certain dire events in the past than when
sitting by a solitary grave on the now far-distant prairie.

The people here all seemed so utterly unconscious of Des-
mond's tragedy. Even Betty Macalister kneaded her cakes and
arranged her pots and pans as if all memory of it had passed
away from her mind.

For what, then, had Bawn come here, after all? To what end
had she quenched for ever a light that had unexpectedly shone on
her out of a stranger's eyes, warming her who had not known
herself cold till the warmth was withdrawn ?

These were sore questions, such as she had never thought to
be beset with, and for the moment she was not able to answer
them.

And meanwhile, as she was at work with her women, putting

636 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

her house in order, cleaning and polishing, and arranging her
scanty furniture, a storm broke over the mountains and rolled
down the glens, hiding away the opposite ridges behind sullen
'cloud and tattered mist, and lashing the walls of the farmhouse
with a scattering rain. A noise like thunder roared in the wide
chimneys, and angry drops hissed into the fire, and in the midst
of the tempest Bawn wrestled with her own regrets, which were
as fierce and unexpected in their onslaught on her heart as the as-
sault of the elements on her dwelling.

But Betty and her daughter proceeded with their tasks as if
nothing was the matter, only called to each other a little more
loudly than usual, so as to be heard above the hurly-burly of the
wind and rain.

No one came near the farm for a week, and when the week
was at an end Bawn had grown visibly thinner, and thought that
she must already have lived a year by herself at Shanganagh.

CHAPTER XXI.
BETTY SPEAKS.

AT last one day the wind ceased to bully, the rain dripped
and stopped with many a wild sob, and late in the evening the
clouds opened overhead and a great, broad, burnished moon
looked over at Bawn from The Rath side of Glenmalurcan.

Never before had night appeared to her in such lovely and
romantic guise. She went out and walked up and down before
her door, trying to fathom the o'ershadowed glen with her eyes,
which magnified the height of the dark mountain ridges against
the moon-illumined sky ; to measure the depth of the apparently
bottomless valley, the bottom of which seemed to have been
swept away into the bowels of the earth. She was in a new
world, as new to her as the ocean had been, with the worshipping
lover it had brought to her feet and carried away with it again
into infinite obscurity.

Do what she might, this reality would not seem real. This
promised land which she had striven to reach and had touched
would not feel solid under her feet. Something had risen to
make mischief between her and herself of a month ago. " It can-
not be that this will last ! " she thought. " If it should last, what
is going to become of me? Does one's own imagination ever
baffle one, even after every tangible thing has failed ? "

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 637

All her romance had been born with her and was of a well-
braced, close-knit fibre, quite opposed to weakly sentimentalism.
It was so well disguised from herself in its garb of home-spun
that she neither fostered it nor was afraid of it, and only knew
it under the name of common sense.

Her father being her hero, and his troubles and wrongs hav-
ing always been sufficient to feed the flames of her young enthu-
siasm, she thought herself the least likely woman in the world to
fall at the feet of any other idol, to concern her whole being
about any mere beginner of a man whose story should be all in
the future instead of in the past.

That women with purposes will make fools of themselves by
hurling their whole souls into the identity of some masculine
creature, losing their individuality of heart and intention, she
was not unaware, but she had not classed herself with the women
who so act. Having triumphantly escaped from her importunate
fellow-traveller, she had proved herself self-contained and not
easily interfered with ; and now because of a week of loneliness,
shut up with a tempest, her will seemed to have gone off its
wheels, her imagination was playing her wild tricks. Was she
even seeing ghosts, or what the Irish call " fetches "

For, turning sharply to take a fresh turn on her rude terrace
above her fields, she thought for an instant that she saw Somerled
of the steamer coming swiftly along the path to meet her.

There he was, his height, his gait, his brown face looking pale
in the moonlight, now grown dim behind a cloud-veil, his deep-
set eyes darting anger. She thrust out her arms before her to
push away the vision, and as she did so a thought of her father
and Roderick Fingall on Aura flashed across her mind. Was it
a man who had passed so near her, or had she really gone crazy
and fancied that one of the gnarled old apple-trees had moved?
She stepped quickly inside the open door and nearly stumbled
over Betty and Nancy, who were sitting on three-legged stools
by the threshold, bent, like herself, on enjoying the sudden
beauty of the night.

" Mistress, what's the matter with ye ? Did you see a ghost ? "
" Have people the right to come past here at night, Betty ? "
"They haven't the right, but they take it niakin' foot-pads
and short-cuts up the glen."

Bawn came forth again and began resolutely to think of her
work as she walked. To-morrow she would begin to make
butter, comparing ways and methods of her own with those of
her handmaidens.

638 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

" Nancy," said Betty's voice, coming- distinctly to her across
the silence of the night, " if it was the banshee I heard a minute
ago I wouldn't wonder. Many's the time this week I thought of
the ould Hollow cratures. How much of the roof fell in, d'ye
think, this wheen o' days back? I always know by the banshee
when one o' them's gone. Sich a screech as she let the night the
poor gentleman died in the poorhouse ! An' small blame to her
to be mad at the disgrace. But there was sich squeals in the
storm itsel' all this week back I couldn't tell whether she was
cry in' or not."

Bawn listened. The "ould Hollow cratures." The " Hollow
fokes " of Betty's letters written so long ago to Desmond in
Minnesota; this very Betty, sitting here so tranquilly on her
three-legged stool and maundering about the banshee! How
was it to be believed? In what way was she to join these broken
fragments of life, past and present, and patch them into any whole
thing and make them hang together? The woman must be
speaking of the Adares of Shane's Hollow. Some of them were
alive, as Bawn had learned, and still living in the ruin of their
home over yonder behind that black ruggedness of mountain,
not so far away either when }^ou consider " foot-pads " and
" short-cuts."

Was it not to make the acquaintance of these crumbling re-
mains of a rotten humanity, to wring their secret, if they had a
secret, out of their faithless souls, that she had crossed the sea?
If they had a secret? Of course they had a secret. Bawn
threw up her hands and pushed the ruffled gold hair away from
her feverish forehead. If they had not a secret, or if Luke Adare
should be dead should the banshee have already screeched for
his soul's flight from its long purgatorial imprisonment behind
yon mountain then, again, she must ask herself why in the
name of Heaven had she been so mad as to come here, wandering
over the ocean to search a casket that had already been rifled,
disembarking secretly at Queenstown, stealing away from a
friend like a thief in the night

"Betty," she said abruptly, "you are always talking about
'hollow people/ Do you mean people hollow inside like a
penny whistle? You make me exceedingly curious."

Hitherto she had been afraid to ask questions of Betty*
Many good opportunities she had deliberately lost during the
past week, always feeling that her time would come, and fearing
to do anything rash. Now she spoke with what she considered
extraordinary cunning.

1 887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 639

" Lord love you, misthress, they're hollow enough, I'm feared,
if you mane emp'y. But Hollow 's the name of a great ould
place that wanst was. A great, grand family in their time, miss.
Nancy and me were talkin' about them."

" And why are they hollow, if it means empty ?"
"I was manin' hunger, misthress, savin' your presence."
" Tell me about them, Betty ; I want to hear a story."
" Och ! misthress dear, sure you're young an' hearty an'
well-to-do in yourself, an' you little know what it is you're axin'
about. It's an ould story, an' badness is the best of it. They
were great an' grand, but cracked with pride; and pride always
gets a fall, I'm thinkin', from Lucifer down to Luke Adare. Sure
the father of them wouldn't take money from the tenants,
wouldn't touch it with his fingers, till his steward had washed it
in a basin before his eyes. No good comes of insultin' the poor
o' God. Then the sons had the curses o' women draggin' round
their feet, an' where could their road go to but down hill, any-
way? It's at the bottom they are now an' sure enough. They're
shut up in the trees yonder so long by theirselves that the very
dogs has forgotten them. Nobody but Peggy an' the banshee
takes any heed o' them. The world's that set away from them
that I would walk over there to look afther them a bit myself,
only for the rheumatis an' a grudge I have against them. Many
a grudge is against them as well as mine. But mine's enough
for myself."

Bawn gazed on the picture which at Betty's suggestive words
had sprung up in vivid colors before her eyes. It seemed there
were other tragedies in the world besides Arthur Desmond's.
The Adares of Shane's Hollow would not appear to have fat-
tened on their ill-doing. But what about Betty's well-treasured
grudge against them? Come, now, let her be bold and probe
for Arthur Desmond in an old woman's memory.

"What is your particular grudge?" she asked carelessly.
" Did they turn you out of their house, or anything of that
kind?"

" Och ! dear, no. They never were my landlords. Little land
they've held these long years back; it all went from them : too
many graves they put in it. But they were sore an' hard on
wan I had a regard for, long before you were born, misthress.
An' I could never forget it to them, though it was none o' my
business."

"Tell me about it, Betty. I love to hear tales about long
ago."

640 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

" Well, it's such an ould story, misthress, an* most people for-
gets about it, an' wants to forget it, too, on account o' the Fin-
galls. You're a stranger here, an' I wouldn't like you to be
talkin' about it."

" I have nobody to talk to ; and, as I am a stranger, I feel
curious."

" Surely, surely. An' why shouldn't I tell you about poor
Misther Arthur God be good to him?"

"Poor Mr. Arthur!" Dawn's heart thrilled and her eyes
grew moist. She had touched the link that connected the father
she knew with the tragedy of his youth, had heard his name
familiarly pronounced by one who had spoken to him in the day
of his trial. There was that in the old woman's tone pronounc-
ing those three words which hinted of unforgotten sympathy.
Bawn hardly restrained herself from throwing her arms round
Betty's neck and crying, " Faithful heart ! tell me about my
father." But she was learning to place a bar between her ac-
tions and her impulses.

" Who was he ? " she asked, as soon she could attune her
voice to the tone of a mere gossip.

" He was a young gentleman from Kerry that come here ;
soft in the tongue an' sweet in the eyes, so he was, an' made our
hearts jump with the pleasant way he had. An' Miss Mave over
there in the Hollow good Lord ! to think what she was then
an' is now she took him for her sweetheart, as any young lady
he had 'a' fancied couldn't ha* helped doin'. An' they might have
been happy an' rich though the Adares was goin' down-hill
even then for there was a quare foreign gentleman

" Old Barbadoes," thought Bawn.

" With a dale o' money, that was thought to be goin' to lave
all he had to the pair. But, ochone ! to think o' the muddle that
everything got into with them. Roderick Fingall, away at Tor "
(here Betty dropped her voice), " he was for Miss Mave too, an'
went clane mad because she took up with Mr. Arthur Desmond ;
an* he was a bullyin' fellow, though good-natured enough when
he was at himself. The long an' the short of it was that the
two young men were both walkin' on Aura wan evening, an'
somethin took place, an' Roderick's dead body was found at the
bottom of a precipy. It got whispered about that Arthur mur-
dered him to get him out of the way, partly on account of Miss
Mave, and partly bein' afeared ould Barbadoes would lave him
the money ; for there was always great talk about which of the
three he would lave it to."

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 641

"Who were the three? Arthur Desmond, Roderick Fin-
gall-"

" And Luke Adare. The ould man had give out that wan of
jist them three should get his money."

" Well ? "

" Faix, I don't know what way to tell you about it. It would
take bigger words nor I know how to use. Poor Mr. Arthur
was hunted out of the country for the murder; even Miss Mave
Heaven forgive her ! she has put in her purgatory since she
believed the lie against him "

" Was it a lie ? " asked Bawn sternly.

" 'Deed an' nobody but a fool would ask the question. I beg
your pardon, misthress. I forgot you were a stranger an' not
born at the time. Anybody that ever knowed him would know
it was a lie."

" But these people knew him the Fingalls and the Adares."

" Ay ; an' it be the divil that bewitched them. Some
people praised them because they wouldn't lay han's on him ;
though may be it would ha' been betther they had, for then he
could ha' spoke up for himself. Anyhow, they let him go under
a bad name, an' he took himself off to America an' never was
heard of no more."

Bawn stood silent for a few minutes, struggling with her
heart. At last she took up her questioning again with a steady
voice.

" It is a very sad story, Betty. What did the young lady do
after he was gone? "

" Just fretted herself into an ould woman, she did ; wouldn't
look at man of mankind, but sat in a corner like a dummy, while
her brothers was sportin' an' spendin' about the world, an' up
an' down the country, pickin' up all the curses that money
could buy. For ould Barbadoes, he left Luke his fortune.
Roderick and Arthur were both out of the way, and to be true
to his word he was bound to lave everything to Luke. But
little good it did the Adares ; they only sunk it in more sin an'
sorrow. It ran through their fingers like sand ; an' before many
years was out they were as pinched as ever they were before.
There they are now, beggars that's too proud for the poorhouse.
It's a'most enough to make a body forgive them, so it is, in spite
o' their sins ; though wan would need to be nearhand as good as
God himself to do that same. Och ! dear, sure if the poor's
poor, it was the Lord that made them poor, an' that's their com-
fort ; but when the rich makes themselves poor with wicked-
VOL. XLIV. 41

642 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Feb.,

ness, there's no oil at all can be got out o' that crule rock o' deso-
lation."

Bawn's mind was not in a condition to pity the Adares. It
was fit and proper they should be miserable. Her thoughts ran
on to the conclusion of Arthur Desmond's story.

" Has nothing ever occurred since to throw light on the mys-
tery of Roderick Fingall's death ?" she asked. " If Arthur Des-
mond did not kill him, how did he die?"

" Troth an' nobody knows, barrin' he fell down the clifts. As
for light, it would take light from the other world to clear people
now of believin' that Arthur done it. As I said before, if they
had took him an' put him on his trial he might ha' had a
chance ; but whispered guilt 's the hardest to get shut of. He
was too proud to defend himself from what he was not openly
accused of. He held up his head as long as he could, but when
he saw Miss Mave was gone against him like the rest I think it
crushed him like. He got a down, melancholy look, an' the
people said it was guilt that ailed him. You see there was
Roderick Fingall's mother an' brothers, an' whatever was the
reason, they were firm set on believin' that Arthur had mur-
dered Roderick. They were that mad they could hardly be
kept from tearing him in pieces

Bawn stepped forward suddenly with a wild glance at the
talking old woman.

" Is anything the matter with you, misthress ? "

" I am only horrified at this story. Don't mind me, but go
on. Was there no one in all the place to take his part ? "

" Nobody but Luke Adare. I raged an' swore myself ; but
quality dozzint mind a poor body like me. It was said that, only
for Luke, Arthur would ha' been laid han's on an' hanged. It
was the only good turn I ever heard o' Luke

" The villain ! " burst forth Bawn. " He knew that if Arthur
Desmond had been put on his trial the character might have been
cleared that he had whispered away ! "

Betty stared at her mistress in astonishment.

" Whisht ! " she said. " Sure, as I said, that's what many's
the time I thought myself. But Lord, my dear, don't you take
the whole of it so terribly to heart. It's an ould story now, an'
may be poor Mr. Arthur made himself happy afterwards in an-
other country. He was young enough to get over the trouble,
and he had no bad conscience, I'll go bail, to keep him down.
America's a grand country, from all I hear, for puttin' everything
right that goes wrong in other places. There's not so many

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 643

crooked turns in it as there is here ; all's plain sailin' and plenty
of room. Whether he's there now or with God above, he's safe
an' well, I'll be bound, an' a young crature like you, that never
seen him, an' come into the world long after his trouble, needn't
be vexin' so sore about him."

" It's a story that would pain any one," said Bawn, trying to
control the passion that Betty's recital had roused in her.

" Och ! dear, it pained many's the wan ; but a stranger like
you oughtn't to feel it so bad."

" No," thought Bawn; "she is right. A stranger like me
oughtn't to feel it so bad. If I show feeling about it I shall
attract attention."

She turned her back on Betty and gazed over at the black
mountain behind which lay Shane's Hollow with its sins and
secrets, and then suddenly wheeled round on the old woman
with a smile.

"At all events you have told me a story," she said "just
what I wanted. You see we Americans have a way of wanting
to know about everything. My father was an Irish farmer an
emigrant, as I told you before and all the old stories of the hills
and the people interest me. I'd like to hear more about the
Adares, and Fingalls, and Arthur Desmond ; but it is late now.
Another time you must tell me more."

" Nancy," said Betty Macalister to her daughter that night
in bed, " the misthress has a good heart. There she was in a red-
hot passion, all about poor Mr. Arthur Desmond thirty long
year ago. An* she may say what she likes about being only a
farmer's daughter, but she's a rale lady. That comes of bein'
born in America, I'll be bound. All the shillin's is pounds there,
an' why shouldn't all the women be ladies?"

" If the Lord hadn't sent us the rheumatis we might have
gone there an' been ladies, too, you an' me ; an* I might have
wore my parasol, like Kate Maginnis, that only went out last
year," grumbled Nancy, half-asleep.

" Spake for yourself," said her mother. " I'd rather have the
rheumatis in ould Ireland than wear a parasol in America. An'
I'm thinkin' America has done well enough for us when it sent
us a misthress like yon "

Bawn went to rest feeling that Betty had administered to her
:he tonic she had been much in need of. Somerled had sailed
quite out of sight in his steamer, and the real hero of her dreams,
Arthur Desmond, with his sorrows and wrongs, had arisen again
to fill his rightful place. As she laid her head on her pillow she

644 HOW SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS? [Feb.,

was free from the bewildering pain that had shaken her for days,
and in the arms of her old and settled purpose she fell asleep,
satisfied that in outwitting her troublesome fellow-traveller she
had escaped a very formidable danger.

TO BE CONTINUED.

HOW SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS?

How shall we support our orphans? is a question for church
and state alike. For Catholics especially it becomes daily more
serious and interesting in view of the many theories which are
offered by philanthropists for the betterment of the dependent
classes. Conventions are held in the various States and in the
nation ; plans are elaborated and discussed ; conclusions are
reached or pointed out as advisable ; State boards of correc-
tions and charities are formed and endowed with various pow-
ers more or less extensive all this and much more is done by
the philanthropists of our country, by the lovers of the state.
But does this reach the question ? Does this afford the proper
means whereby to support the orphans in our charge ?

If orphans were material beings only, and not composed of
spirit also, such a plan might prove sufficient. If they were to
be imbued with merely natural science, or the science of created
things alone, again we might not take exception. But they are
more than such a view would make them ; they have greater
claims upon their fellow-men. Orphans are children, and there-
fore need education. Hence it is that in the orphan question
the church must have her proper place; hence it is that this
question, like the troublesome school question, pertains, under
certain conditions, to both the church and the state in their
respective spheres. The church will not give over to a godless
education the child whose parents are still living ; much less,
then, will she consent to such a course in the case of children
who have a double claim upon her.

Under God the child belongs to the parent, the church, and
the state in the order named. Hence, in the first place, the
parent is responsible for the proper development of the child
until it reaches the years of emancipation. Should the parent
fail in this respect through death or inability, and the child in

I88/.] HOW SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS? 645

consequence be left alone, the church should next assume the
burden. Because, however, the child is destined for the state
as well as for the church, and actually belongs to it even when
under the government of its parents, the state is bound to assist
the church to an extent proportioned to the benefits which it
may expect to derive from the child in later years. The state,
nevertheless, may not presume to go too far, may not invert the
order laid down by God himself: the state, unaided by the
church, may not assume the education of orphans.

Education is threefold physical, intellectual, and moral.
Whatever may be said of the physical and intellectual develop-
ment afforded its orphans by the state, it must be confessed that
its vocation is not to instruct in the principles of morality and
the truths which bind man back to his Creator. This is the mis-
sion of the church, and, like her God, she is jealous of it. This
question has a history, and the state should curb its over-zealous-
ness to help the orphan to the exclusion of the church. Were it
not for the church the state undoubtedly would treat the orphan
to-day exactly as it did two thousand years ago. In the light of
history the state is building without prudence. Its excessive
zeal to take to itself the entire responsibility for the child tends
but to bring society back to the condition from which the church
delivered it in the cruel centuries of the past.

Before the establishment of the church among the Gentile na-
tions there was not an institution of any kind for the benefit of
orphans. More than this, throughout all the nations of antiqui-
ty we fail to find even one benevolent institution, no matter what
its purpose. The ancients had two methods which Christians
have not to rid themselves of the poor and the unfortunate
infanticide and slavery. " The exposure of infants," says Aristo-
tle, " was permitted, and was a common practice throughout all
Greece except at Thebes." But here their fate was not much bet-
ter, because the government took them in charge only to make
them the slaves for life of any one who was willing to rear them.
We learn from Grote, in the History of Greece, that " the most
shameful mutilation of children was seen with melancholy fre-
quency in the domestic life as well as in the religious worship of
Phrygia and other parts of Asia." This heartless treatment of
poor and unfortunate children was not confined to Asia, the cra-
dle of the human race, and to Greece, the most civilized and
highly polished of the ancient nations, but was characteristic also
of Rome, the mistress of the world and of the provinces depen-
dent on her. Justin, the great apologist, in his defence of Chris-

646 HOW SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS? [Feb.,

tianity upbraids the emperor and the senate, and glories in the
assertion that the Christians of the empire never abandon their
offspring, and that they look with horror on the abominable pa-
gan practice of casting their children out to die or to be picked
up by strangers. He goes on to say :

"Should they die we would consider ourselves guilty of murder; but
should they be gathered up, as is often done by you, into flocks, kept in
the same manner as your herds of oxen, or goats, or sheep, or horses, we
would dread even more the unspeakable horrors which go along with the
support of such evil troops of children. The seraglios composed of such
wretched foundlings, and maintained in all nations, should be exterminated
instead of being made, as you Romans make them, a source of taxation and
revenue.''

Sad indeed was the condition of the orphan when the church
began to leaven the material progress of the ancients with super-
natural charity. Familiarized as we are with a universal system
of beneficence, it is difficult to realize the effort required to uproot
the cruel customs of pagan antiquity. The benign influence of
the Gospel has changed the face of the world. The church has
saved the orphan from destruction. True religion and true be-
neficence connote each other. We cannot, then, exclude the
church from a share in the bringing-up of orphans. Civilization
without religion will soon be civilization without beneficence ;
and history, repeating itself, will bring us back to pagan times.

The church, agreeably to her history and to the purpose of
her existence, not only has the right to participate in the educa-
tion of orphans, but is strongly bound to do so. Her reason for
existence is to lead men to God by supernatural means. Her
history is one continuous chain of bright actions having the
necessitous of all conditions, but chiefly the widow and the or-
phan, for their object.

From the time of the apostles, who set apart the seven dea-
cons for the charitable work of providing for the widows and
orphans of the early church, down to the present day, we find
numerous laws and regulations which attest the spirit and the
action of the church in this regard. She was not satisfied with
inculcating the support of orphans as a work of charity, by con-
sidering them, in the words of the Apostolic Constitutions, " altars
for holocausts (the greatest of sacrifices) in the temple of our
Jerusalem "; but in succeeding years, when her influence for good
was felt in the legislation of semi-barbarous Europe, she reserved
to herself and her bishops the jurisdiction of all cases which
involved the interests of widows, orphans, minors, and all persons
known to be helpless and miserable.

1 887.] HO W SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS? 647

From the sixth century religious communities were also estab-
lished whose chief object was to provide assistance for the de-
pendent classes. The Protestant Bishop Tanner says that in
England, before the separation from Rome, " there were in every
county about twenty monasteries belonging to such communi-
ties, the produce from whose lands and property was in fact the
portion of the poor, the infirm, the aged, the widow, the orphan,
the stranger, and all the necessitous ; which portion was lodged
in the hands of the clergy for just and wise distribution." Many
of these communities still exist, in spite of the greed and perse-
cution of the governments which they greatly benefit. In three
of the Catholic countries of Europe Italy, France, and Spain
we find over fifty thousand heroic female religious whose work is
charity to their neighbor. The number of men who give their
lives to similar works will, if counted, also reach the thousands.

In the United States the record of the church for charity is
one that may well invite inspection. She has institutions for
nearly every kind of misery to which mankind is subject. She
has hospitals for the sick, hospices for strangers, refuges for the
foundling, houses for the poor and the unfortunate, asylums for
the insane, homes for the aged and the young, protectories for de-
linquents, and asylums for orphans. As her name implies, she
is catholic in her charity. Of the two hundred and twenty-five
orphanages which belong to her in this country, some are for
colored and Indian orphans as well as for white. Some, again,
are destined for those whose parents were English speaking,
while others are set apart for those of German, French, Belgian,
or Polish descent.

It is not without reason that in the census report of the United
States we find a mark designed for the institutions of the Roman
Catholic Church. Her institutions for the reformation of delin-
quents are thus distinguished from the State, municipal, and pri-
vate ones. If the census report contained a list of orphanages
and other charitable foundations which we are sorry to find is
not the case it would thence be evident what the charity of the
church is doing for our country. From the information we have
been able to obtain regarding the orphan asylums of the sects
and of the state, we doubt not there are more orphan asylums
conducted by the Catholic Church in this country than by all the
other religious denominations and the state combined.

The Lutherans seem the most anxious of the sects to have
their orphans brought up in asylums of their own. In 1885 they
had throughout the United States twenty-six orphan homes, con-

648 HOW SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS? [Feb.,

taining in all twelve hundred children. Very few of the other
sects have any asylums, and the state also has few in proportion
to our population. The church, however, can point with lawful
pride to her work in behalf of the orphan. Wherever she exists
her spirit, which is that of charity, causes her to look upon the
orphans as a precious charge. Hence she has gathered one hun-
dred and seventy-five thousand of them into her asylums in the
United States.

Orphan asylums are the outgrowth of circumstances. In
former times it was the practice of the church to distribute
charity from the Diaconias, or chapels of mercy, which existed
in Rome and other episcopal cities. In order to exclude " pro-
fessional beggars" from the fund of charity, the worthy poor and
the orphans, on the recommendation of some well-known person,
had their names enrolled on the list of beneficiaries which was
prepared and kept in the chapels for reference. In later years
the monasteries also had their regular dependants. The portion
designed for needy orphans was handed over at times to their
relatives or friends in whose families they chanced to live.
Abuses thus crept in, and what was intended to relieve the
orphans sometimes went to increase the store of their greedy
kinsfolk. Gradually the religious communities received orphans
into their convents to provide them with a better education, be-
cause they expected novices from among their number, or be-
cause the orphans had no relatives, and consequently no home
which they could call their own. So natural and at the same
time so advantageous was this method of support that soon a
portion of the convent was set apart for orphans, or an asylum
built contiguous to the cloister. Many of the orphanages in the
United States have an origin similar to the older ones of Europe.

After religious communities were established with the special
object of nursing the sick and supporting the orphan and the
foundling, numerous asylums were built in the cities at a distance
from convents with the view to provide homes for orphans which
might be easily reached. As necessity required these orphan-
ages were enlarged or new ones built. At present there are in
the United States two hundred and twenty-five orphan homes
under the management of the church. Their charity supports
one hundred and seventy-five thousand dependants a number
which is greater than the total of inhabitants of either Delaware
or Oregon, and about three times as great as that which the
census reports for the State of Nevada. Surely this exhibit
made by the church merits well of the State.

1887.] HOW SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS f 649

The chief, and in many cases the only, means whereby these
orphans are supported is chanty. There is scarcely one asylum
which derives its support from endowments. Our richer Catho-
lics seem to forget in their wills those whom the Saviour was
pleased to call his own. The bequests occasionally received
seem all the greater because of their rarity. However, the inex-
haustible fund of Catholic charity at present well supplies the
place of rich endowments, and gives rise to the delicate question
whether in benevolent institutions of the present time it is not
more advisable to let uncertain daily charity take the place of
periodically accruing interest. Reasons may be advanced on
either side. Undoubtedly a firmer reliance on the providence of
God and greater faith must be the effect of the more precarious
method of voluntary donations, which always seem to come when
needed most. Still, it may be urged that if orphanages were
richly endowed they could with greater safety receive more or-
phans and provide them with more advantages. Possibly ; but,
on the other hand, these institutions might then forget the object
of their being, which is to afford, not a permanent abode, but a
temporary stopping-place, as Bishop Maes puts it, where the
children remain out of reach of immediate want, squalor, and
wretchedness, temporal and spiritual, until homes are secured for
them among Catholic families. Later on, and perhaps even now
in some of the larger cities, when orphans, become so numerous
that homes cannot be provided for them, and asylums must con-
sequently supply their need, large endowments may be of greater
benefit and necessity than in general they seem to-day. The fact
that an asylum depends for its support on charity causes its di-
rectors to receive only those children for whom family homes
cannot be procured. Ordinarily the friends who apply for the
admission of orphans to asylums will not see them neglected, and
at times they apply simply as a matter of convenience. Where
there are no orphanages the case is rare in which homes cannot
be obtained for the pleading little ones. Orphanages are a ne-
cessity, but they should not increase the necessity by an unwise
reception of applicants. Asylums are the exception ; family life
is the rule. Merit is judged, not by the greater number who are
received and kept within an asylum, but by the manner in which
its proteges are prepared for after-life and its temptations. In
the United States, however, we need fear no danger from the ex-
cessive endowment of our Catholic asylums. They are not en-
dowed, not even partially. The danger for them is not an excess
but rather an insufficiency of earthly goods. Were they par-

650 HOW SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS? [Feb.,

tially endowed they would be assured of their own existence and
thus be freer to gather means for the support of their dependants.

The asylums of the church seem to realize well the end of
their existence, for the general method of disposing of orphans is
to procure good homes for them in Catholic families. This is
done as soon as possible, and seldom are the orphans retained in
any institution after completing their thirteenth year. From
many they are placed out long before this time. It is the expe-
rience of most of the Western asylums, and of many of the East-
ern ones also, that there are more applicants desirous of adopting
orphans than there are children to meet their wishes. Naturally
the weakly and deformed ones, as well as those whose habits are
somewhat vicious because of their surroundings before they
were received into the asylum, cannot be given out to families,
and must prove a burden on the authorities of the orphan home.

The Home for Destitute Roman Catholic Children in Boston
may be taken as an instance of the working of our asylums in
Eastern cities. In the course of the year 1884 it took in and
cared for nearly five hundred children, while during the same
time it sent out four hundred and fifty to excellent family homes.
A large proportion of this number was sent to the Middle and
Western States. Similar is the practice of the New York
Foundling Asylum. Many of its proteges are to-day becoming
prosperous citizens in the West. In Baltimore, likewise, the
Dolan Children's Aid Society has for its specific object the pro-
viding of homes for indigent and orphan children. It has an
asylum, but this is truly only a " stopping-place," for the children
are easily given out to good families. If they who adopt them
prove recreant to their promises, the children are withdrawn, re-
turned to the asylum for a time, and provided with other and
more suitable homes. With such facility in procuring good
family homes for the orphans even of our crowded Eastern cities,
there seems no need of our orphanages being anything but " tem-
porary stopping-places."

Orphanages, however, are necessary in our present social con-
dition, and, because they are necessary, are entitled to support.
Whether it is preferable to raise the money required for them
by taxation on our parishes or by voluntary collections seems a
vexed question in many quarters. The solution of it may depend
greatly on circumstances. What is advisable in one place may
be detrimental in another. Some asylums are private, while
others are diocesan. This fact necessarily implies a difference
in their claims upon a diocese. If a certain amount of money is

i88;.] How SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS? 651

required to support the orphans of a diocese in an asylum of its
own or by arrangement with a private one, and a pro rata assess-
ment made on each parish tends to compass this result satisfacto-
rily to all concerned, such a plan is good for that diocese. Dif-
ference of circumstances, however, may render it impracticable
for another diocese or for the same in later time. Such a plan
does not eliminate charity, though at first it may appear to do
so, for the parishes are left free to raise the money by collections
or by other means, as they judge best. The assessment, though
fixed, is raised by voluntary charity. This question, like many
others in our country, seems the natural outcome of our anoma-
lous condition, which, being very different from that of earlier
times, necessitates new ways of action.

Institutions for the support and education of orphan and de-
pendent children are beneficial not only to the church but also to
the state. If the one hundred and seventy-five thousand inmates
of our Catholic asylums were turned over to the State to be sup-
ported, the latter would have no reason to complain. These chil-
dren have a natural right to demand what is necessary for their
sustenance, and the State is bound to grant it. They have, more-
over, a natural and constitutional right to religious instruction,
which the State is bound to respect and not infringe. With us
the State may not impart religious instruction or make discrimi-
nation between particular creeds. Hence private or sectarian
asylums are necessary to an equitable solution of the question of
supporting dependent children. By these asylums the claims
of the child, the church, and the State are equally satisfied. If
greater physical and moral assistance can be rendered by them
than by State institutions, it is prudent and politic, as well as just
and equitable, that needy children be entrusted to their care.

England has tried the system of granting state aid to private
institutions, and has found it highly successful. Schools which
are found combining industrial features with the elements of
common-school education, and which clothe, feed, and lodge their
pupils, may be certified after proper examination and enrolled
among the beneficiaries of the government. In some of our
States the same plan has been introduced and gives eminent
satisfaction. Louisiana, until the second year of the late war,
granted a yearly appropriation to its benevolent institutions.
New Mexico at present allows ten dollars a month for each child
supported in the Catholic Female Orphan Asylum of Santa F6.
California yearly donates one hundred dollars for each orphan
and seventy-five dollars for each half-orphan or abandoned child

652 HOW SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS? [Feb.,

cared for in its asylums. In order to obtain this allowance the
certified register of the orphanage must be presented and the
management be subject to the inspection of persons delegated
by the State Committee on Asylums.

In New York also the State contributes to the maintenance
of orphan and delinquent children. Various State and municipal
funds are applied to this purpose. The allowance is made per
capita, and some institutions, on account of their character, are
enabled to draw from several funds. St. Michael's Home, which
was incorporated in 1883, receives from the excise fund of the
city of New York two dollars a week for each child committed
by a magistrate. The Catholic Protectory draws a per capita
allowance from the city and county of New York, from the Com-
missioners of Public Charities and Corrections, and from the su-
perintendents of the poor for Westchester County. The Orphan
Society of Brooklyn receives a per capita assistance from the
Board of Education of that city and from Kings County, which
sends some of its pauper children to the Catholic asylums to be
supported. However, the per capita allowance is received for
only five hundred of the sixteen hundred dependants ; the eleven
hundred others are diocesan charges.

The statutes of Illinois provide that when a child is found
dependent it may be committed by a magistrate to an institution
or training-school, and the county from which it is sent is bound
to pay a reasonable sum for its support therein. The amount
allowed ranges from seven to ten dollars a month. All religious
denominations may found institutions under this statute, and
when approved by the governor they become entitled to State
aid.

The Board of Public Charities appointed by the Legislature
of Pennsylvania in 1870 to examine and report on the subject
advised the adoption of a similar plan, and seriously questioned
the advisability of establishing State schools for the support of
dependent children. It says : " The State should do her part in
educational work by making moderate per capita allowances to
schools and homes established by private and philanthropic en-
terprise wherever they are needed for the industrial training
and education of the class referred to." The International Con-
gress of Charities also warmly approved and recommended this
system.

Private institutions have many advantages over those con-
ducted by the State. Not the least of these is freedom from po-
litical influences, which can scarcely ever be predicated of the

1887.] How SHALL WE SUPPORT OUR ORPHANS? 653

State asylums. Nice theories are advanced on this point, but
theory is one thing and practice quite another. Moreover, it is
a fact well grounded on experience that the guardians of State
asylums, who necessarily draw upon the property of others far
more largely than upon their own, are tempted and yield to a
prodigality which is anything but real beneficence ; while at the
same time the apparently inexhaustible fund tends to increase the
number of those who desire to draw therefrom. Again, the assis-
tance rendered through private institutions establishes no legal
or political right in the recipients of it, though a moral claim to
such support is recognized and respected.

Private institutions are more economical than those of the
State. In Massachusetts we find that the cost of maintaining
children in the public pauper establishments is in many cases
over three dollars a week for each child, while the cost of sup-
porting each child in the Home for Destitute Roman Catholic
Children is only $i 26 a week. Moreover, the children in the
latter institution are well fed, comfortably clad, and in every re-
spect healthy and happy. Similar is the experience of Michi-
gan. It requires much less in proportion to support the orphans
of the diocesan asylums than those of the State Public School at
Coldwater.

And what a difference in this support ! The support granted
by the State is politic and cold ; that furnished by private insti-
tutions is warm and charitable. Children are quick to appreciate
the difference between those who care for them from mercenary
motives and those who support them through charity and love
of God. Herein, then, is found the reason why the asylums con-
ducted by private benevolence are immeasurably superior to
those of the State for purposes of real reformation and educa-
tion. There is no aversion in the heart of the child, and love is
met by love.

The natural, logical, equitable, American way of providing
for our dependent children is to place them in temporary stop-
ping-places, called asylums, until good homes can be procured
for them. In these asylums, which should be private, they ought
to be maintained by voluntary charity, assisted to a certain ex-
tent by a per capita allowance from the State.

634 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Feb.,

SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS.*

SECOND SERIES.
No. III.

BIOLOGY THE HYPOTHESIS OF EVOLUTION THE DOCTRINE OF FAITH-
SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST EVOLUTION THE MONISTIC
AND ATHEISTIC FORM OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION THE ORIGIN
AND PLACE OF MAN IN THE COSMOS THE TRUE DOCTRINE OF DEVEL-
OPMENT.

AFTER the consideration of the formation of the universe, of
our own particular world, and of the planet we inhabit, during
the azoic period, conies the investigation of the origin and de-
velopment of life on the earth. The science which treats of these
topics is named Biology. It is full of obscurities and difficulties.
Let us say, at the outset, that for the present all consideration of
the origin of man is excluded. We intend to speak, not of human
life, but of vegetable and irrational animal life, of non-sentient
and sentient living beings, the flora and fauna of our earth.

And, first, what is life, in its primary and most generic sense,
as the essential difference which distinguishes organic from inor-
ganic corporeal beings? To begin with its lowest form, in what
is a vegetable essentially different from an inorganic material
substance ?

Scientists of the highest class affirm that there is a vital prin-
ciple, distinct from and superior to any element or composition of
elements which is made known by chemical analysis. It eludes
all mathematical laws, generates movement from its own centre,
is constructive and reproductive. Its virtue, beginning with a
germ, will produce the gradual growth and perfection of a tree,
for instance, with its leaves and fruit, which will generate other
individuals of its kind.

What this vital principle is they confess they do not know,
and they do not seem to expect that their successors will ever
know. It looks like an inscrutable secret. It has often been
called a vegetable soul. Certain eminent philosophers affirm that
it is an immaterial, simple, substantial form, distinct from its or-

* In the last number correct Leeser's rendering of Gen. i. 2 to read : And the Spirit of
God was waving over the face of the deep.

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 655

ganized matter, but not capable of existing separated from it,
giving it specific nature and life, making with it a substance hav-
ing its quantity, qualities, passive and active potencies, and differ-
ent in kind from every inorganic substance. But this description
does not clearly and distinctly define what is a substantial form
or a vital principle of vegetative life. The terms " vital principle,"
" vegetable soul," " substantial form," merely give names to an
unknown somewhat.

The vital principle of a sentient being or animal is something
which discloses its simple, immaterial, substantial or quasi-sub-
stantial character, as a somewhat which is distinct from and su-
perior to the organic stuff of the body which it animates, in a
much more unmistakable manner. It is hard, if not impossible,
to draw an exact line between protozoa and vegetables, and to
designate the point where sentient life begins and leaves off. But
as we ascend from the lowest living species which are probably
sentient to the higher forms, the properties of living beings be-
come much more distinctly marked and wonderful in the rising
scale of sensitive cognition and spontaneous action. These
phenomena reveal to us most certainly the existence of a soul,
irrational, it is true, yet cognoscitive through sensitive organs, in
a wonderful way, a way which adumbrates intelligence and rea-
son. What this soul is the best philosophers are unable to tell us,
except in vague and obscure terms. They say it is a form, quasi-
substantial, the active principle of the body, having its existence
and operation dependent on the organic structure, incapable of
surviving the death of the body, educed by generation from the
potentiality of matter, containing in itself whatever is in the prin-
ciple of vegetative life, together with the active force which
makes the animal specifically different from the vegetable. After
all has been said, the ant, the dog, the elephant, remains a puzzle
to science and philosophy.

There is no explicit teaching of revelation and faith on this
head. Whatever may be implicitly or virtually involved in the
doctrines of the Christian religion in regard to the principle of
life in plants and animals, it is free ground for the questionings
and discussions of philosophers, and such answers as they may
be able to afford to our intellectual curiosity. Some of these an-
swers are grotesque and extravagant in the highest degree.
None of them, in our judgment, are perfectly clear and satisfac-
tory.

The fact that it is not clearly known what life is makes the
question of its origin one which cannot be absolutely determined

656 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Feb.,

a priori. That God is the author and giver of life is, of course,
certain by philosophy and by faith. That life first appeared on
the earth after its inorganic structure had attained a sufficient
stage of development is a certain fact. The wonderful exuber-
ance and variety of the flora and fauna which began to cover the
earth in the palaeozoic period, and which have continued to
adorn it to the present time, science has delighted in describing.
But as to the origin of life viz., whether a new creative act
was necessary in order to give existence to a new principle of
vital organization, or merely a new formative action upon inor-
ganic matter evolving life from its dormant potency science
cannot say a word. So far as science thus far has learned
anything certain about the possibility of bringing organic life
out of the potency of inorganic matter, it cannot be done by
human art. Moreover, there is no evidence of any living being
having been actually produced except by generation from a prior
living being. These living beings must have had a beginning.
There must have been an origin of the first activity of the principle
of life which was manifested in the earliest flora and fauna that
appeared on the surface of the earth, whatever that principle of
life may be, and whatever may be the cause, the law, the process,
of the differentiation of the various species of the flora and
fauna which exist or have formerly existed upon our planet.
Science cannot concern itself with the origin of life ; it begins
with the actual development of life from this origin, as far back
as it can find the remains or traces of organic structures from
which to make its inductions, and thus deduce its general laws
and construct its probable theories.

One fundamental fact and law of the development of life over
the earth, from the first living beings to the appearance of man,
is universally admitted. This is the law of constant, organic
progress in respect to the entire collection, if not in respect to
all its parts.

In respect to the method by which this development has been
effected, the traditional doctrine which has been dominant until
the most recent period has been that of the invariability of spe-
cies, and the development of distinct species, each within its
own limits, from its own distinct, original creation. That is, in-
dividuals of each species were at first created, or were created
by successive interventions of divine power in the different geo-
logical epochs.

During the last half-century another doctrine has come into
great vogue viz., the theory of the transformists, which starts

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 657

from the notion of the indefinite variability of species. This is
the theory of evolution, or derivation of species from species, by
a slow and long process, beginning from a few or even from one
single primordial organic type, one or several living germs, from
which all the species and individuals of the earth's flora and fauna
have proceeded.

M. de Saint-Projet has given an excellent exposition of the
arguments for and against the general theory of evolution or
transformation of species, which is fair and impartial. We will
now present an abstract of the same in a condensed form.

ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF EVOLUTION.

1 . Geological, palczontological, and geographical arguments. There
is a continuity of organic forms running through the geological
periods. New intermediate forms are being constantly discov-
ered, showing a passage from one form to another by such insen-
sible degrees that the discrimination of fossil species often be-
comes difficult. Although numberless intermediate varieties
which must be supposed to have existed are absent, this can be
explained by the paucity of specimens which geology furnishes.

The gradual progress of species in perfection, and the in-
crease of their numbers in an ascending series from the lower to
the higher strata, is in harmony with the transformist theory.

The animals of a geographical division of the globe resemble
the fossils of the same region, but present marked differences
from those of different countries, although there is a sufficient
analogy between these various forms to show a common origin.
This is explained by the migration of species into different con-
ditions producing these divergencies of form. Analogous proofs
are found in the vegetable world.

2. Arguments from physiology, morphology, and embryology. The
conformity of structure and the resemblances existing between

>rganic forms of different groups, together with the types of
ansition intercalated between some of them, prove a common
lescent.

Another proof is derived from the numerous rudimentary or-
gans found in the higher animals.

The resemblance between the embryos of different species
furnishes another proof. This is much relied on by transform ists.
They insist on the analogy between the development of the indi-
vidual from its germ, and the development of species from primi-
tive types. Just as embryos which cannot be distinguished from
VOL. XLIV. 42

658 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Feb.,

each other by any specific differences develop into the most di-
verse organic forms, so from homogeneous primitive types the
numerous and diverse species may have originated by transfor-
mations like those which are undergone by embryos in their
development.

Akin to these are the phenomena of the transformation of
larvae into insects. The grub becomes a butterfly. Larvae which
seem to be exactly alike turn into insects which are totally differ-
ent, not only in their outward appearance, but also in their or-
ganic structure.

ARGUMENTS AGAINST EVOLUTION.

i. Arguments from. paleontology and geology. A general, syn-
thetic view of the history of life on the earth seems to favor the
theory of transformation. Yet a closer, more analytical exami-
nation of each telluric epoch dissipates this semblance and con-
ducts to an opposite conclusion.

For example, a plateau in the centre of Bohemia presents a
complete series of strata of the Silurian period, overlying each
other in their regular order. Joachim Barrande, after a thor-
ough examination, pronounces its results totally incompatible
with the transformist theory. Completely organized trilobites
appear of a sudden in the primordial fauna, without any transi-
tory forms or known predecessors before them. Barrande found
six thousand specimens of some of the three hundred and fifty
different forms of trilobites, which he examined. Ten only of
these species show a trace of variations. The rest are invariable
during the whole duration of their existence as species. More-
over, these variations do not efface the characteristics of the
species, and, instead of becoming more accentuated, they disap-
pear after a time.

Similar statements are made by Davidson, Carruthers, Pfaff,
Gousselet, and Grand 'Eury respecting other fossils of the flora
or fauna of the Silurian, Devonian, early Triassic, later Tertiary,
and other periods. This is an argument which has never been
answered, and which appears to be the strongest of all against
the theory of transformation.

Moreover, the continuity of structure in the series of organic
groups, observes Agassiz, does not correspond with the chrono-
logical order. And Pfaff remarks that various species, classes,
and orders appear simultaneously through vast geological
regions.

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 659

Forms of transition ought to be expected in vastly greater
numbers than those of definite species. They are entirely want-
ing. The so-called intermediate forms are only species connect-
ing other species by a gradation. It is not sufficient to allege the
sparse and incomplete materials furnished by actual discovery,
and make a hypothetical credit out of future discoveries which
may possibly be made. Although only small slices of the strata
of the earth have been subjected to investigation, yet these slices
are from every one of the strata and from many parts of the
earth. They are alike in furnishing the same sudden apparitions
of perfect organisms, and in their lack of intermediate forms.
Among the regular types there are others which are aberrant,
and some which are in their form intermediate make their ap-
pearance long after the types of the two extremes.

Arguments from embryology. The relation between the genesis
of species and the genesis of individuals is merely analogical.
The inability to distinguish between embryos of different species
in their earliest stage of existence is no proof that they are really
alike except in a remotely generic sense. They are determined
to a specific development by the specific nature of the parent
stock, and when the development has proceeded far enough for
discerning what their specific nature is they show their differ-
ences.

There are several other physiological arguments and facts
brought forward by M. de Saint-Projet which we omit. Some
of them are very interesting and conclusive. But they are
chiefly against certain specialties of Darwinism, which is only
one of a number of different forms of the evolutionary theory.

So far as the authority of scientists is concerned, which, after
all, has more weight with the majority than evidence or argu-
ment, the men of highest eminence are divided in opinion in re-
spect to the genesis of species by transformation, while the ver-
dict of the greater number of the minor devotees of science ap-
proves the Darwinian hypothesis. The great scientific bodies
have withheld their approbation. This hypothesis has, there-
fore, no claim to be ranked among the certitudes or even the
most probable theories of science. It rests on conjectures, and
suppositions which are unverified and, at the present time at
least, are incapable of verification. The solid, scientific basis of
observed facts is wanting. And it is, by its very nature, rele-
gated to a region and a period so remote from observation as to
be inaccessible to observation. The most that can be said of it is

660 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Feb.,

that its advocates have accumulated a vast number of facts, not
such as can furnish data for a conclusive induction, but which by
ingenious grouping present plausible analogies. One of the
most plausible arguments in its favor is of a doctrinal and not of
a scientific nature, and is thus presented by a Catholic writer in
La Controverse (October, 1884):

"It would be strange to admit that the Creator, discontented with his
work, had partly destroyed it, afterwards had recommenced it to destroy
it anew, each time making it more perfect. ... Is it not certain, on the
other hand, that nothing in nature appears suddenly in a complete and
finished manner, nothing begins in an adult age, but everything com-
mences in a nascent and rudimentary condition, arriving later at a more
perfect state ? "

This reasoning has a corroboration from the fact, as stated by
Gaudry in Les Enchainements Du Monde Animate, that all the
epochs, from the Cambrian down to the secondary period inclu-
sively, " are connected together by entire fauna and flora " which
are similar, so that " it is difficult to doubt that there were con-
catenations between the beings of the Cambrian period, etc."-
z>., that is, that these successive fauna and flora which resemble
each other were derived by natural descent and were not the
product of separate creations.

F. Delsaux (in Les fLcrits Philosophiques de M. Tyndall) remarks :

"The theory of evolution, taken in its general acceptation, has always
had an irresistible attraction for me. This theory, if it were true, would
correspond better than the easier doctrine of successive creations to the
ideas I have formed of the divine wisdom and omnipotence. Have we
not in astronomy the evolution of worlds? ... I am only fearful lest,
in searching after the truth on this head, foreign tendencies may come to
be substituted for the demands of reason."

The theory of evolution in a wide, general sense, and, if de-
velopment be taken as not synonymous with evolution, the theory
also of development, cannot reasonably be discarded from physi-
cal science, philosophy, or theology. So far as we can determine
with certainty, or even with sufficient probability, what are the
exigencies of reason, operating within due limits by its own na-
tive faculty alone, or, beyond those limits, with the aid of divine
illumination, we can construct a theory which either demands or
persuades our assent. If we can detect and eliminate all foreign
tendencies which are alien from science or philosophy or theo-
logy, or from two or all three of these, we can discriminate be-

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 661

tween the genuine and the pseudo-science, retain the truth, from
whatever source it comes, and reject the error, which can only
come from the deficiency or the abuse of reason. These foreign
tendencies may be alien from science, and give rise to hypotheses
which are not essential to the general theory of evolution or de-
velopment. It is the work of science itself to correct its own
accidental aberrations. No one will dispute the fact that in the
universal genus of terrene, organic, living beings, and in the two
universal species of non-sentient and sentient living beings, ther is
a variability, produced by natural and artificial causes, within cer-
tain limits not precisely determinable. There is no decisive rea-
son for asserting that these limits have not been wider in remote
periods than in the more recent ones. Within certain lines, from
certain points of departure and toward certain points of arrival,
evolution has its play in a progressive movement. If we confine
ourselves to the limits of inorganic substance, we must admit that,
from all existing matters, whatever is contained in the poten-
tiality of matter can be educed from it into actuality. Moreover,
if the organic world is potentially contained in the inorganic, it
can be educed from it by a series of substantial generations, ter-
minating with the most perfect animal, and including the vital
principle of vegetable life, whatever that may be, and the most
perfect animal souls. There is no impossibility, therefore, a
priori, admitting the premise just supposed in the first clause of
the last sentence, that the law of transformation should prevail
throughout the corporeal universe without a single exception.
The scientific question relates to the fact. Does this law prevail?
Is its prevalence proved by induction from observed facts? It
does not follow from the possibility that it is necessary and
actual. In the inorganic world the process of evolution de-
scribed in the nebular theory, and in respect to our planet by the
science of geogony, does not imply or even permit the recogni-
tion of any law of transformation which develops, in a regular
series from the lowest to the highest, all the potentiality of all
matter. There is no evidence that the chaos was made to go
through all the stages of substantial generation from the simplest
to the most complex chemical or mechanical combinations. The
most inferior single bodies or worlds did not generate others in
an ascending series. All kinds started forth from the chaos and
went their way of progressive development in a simultaneous
multitude, independent to a great extent of each other. The
general la\v of development does not determine the origin of
single bodies or classes of bodies from parent bodies by a genesis.

662 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Feb.,

This linking of members of a series by generation is effected by a
particular law, which must be inferred in each case by an induc-
tion founded on the observation of particular facts. If it can be
proved that the satellites have been generated by their primaries,
it does not follow that the planets have been generated by the
sun. In the case of the flora and fauna of the different geological
epochs, the question of their origin and development must be in-
vestigated by an examination of facts, and theory must be based on
induction. The theory of evolution cannot be positively proved
or positively disproved by means of such an induction, on purely
scientific principles, by purely scientific methods. In the face of
such a state of things the attitude of Barrande and several other
distinguished scientists seems to be the most judicious. They ab-
stain from deciding how the succession of fossil flora and fauna
has occurred. They consider, as Barrande expresses it, that
u the harmony of the ancient organic worlds, the complications
and apparent irregularities which are found in them, exhibit a
transcendental order of things, embracing infinite combinations in
time and space, inaccessible to human intelligence."

So far as the relation of the hypothesis of evolution to the
faith is concerned, this is the judgment of M. de Saint-Projet:

"What ought we to conclude in the name of the faith ? Nothing, ex-
cept that the faith is completely disinterested in the controversy, and that
no one has a right to engage it in a dispute which is purely scientific.
There is not a word in the Sacred Scripture which is opposed to the hy-
pothesis of an evolution ; nothing has been revealed in regard to the man-
ner in which the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom have been
produced and developed. Neither can tradition be appealed to in the dis-
pute, for we are in the presence of a new question " (p. 305).

As a mere biological hypothesis, therefore, evolution occupies
a perfectly free ground, and the field is open to the effort of
working out a solution of the problem. In itself considered, it
seems to us that the problem is one of only secondary interest and
importance. The foreign issues connected with it have caused
the enthusiasm of its advocates and aroused the vehemence of its
opponents. These foreign issues are tendencies, not inherent in
the theory or natural to it, which have been violently forced upon
it in the interest of atheism and materialism tendencies alien
alike to science, philosophy, and theology.

The monistic theory of evolution, a monster like the fabled
centaur, is the embodiment of these alien tendencies. It is called
monistic because it reduces all being to one category namely,

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 663

matter and refers all facts in the physical, intellectual, and moral
order to one origin, mechanical evolution from atoms of eternal
matter in motion, according to a blind, necessary, irresistible
law. It is not only alien from any reasonable theory of evolu-
tion, but altogether pseudo-scientific, anti-rational, and of course
diametrically contrary to all faith and theology.

In the two preceding articles it has been shown that the first
elements of the cosmos, atoms in movement, are unthinkable,
except as created by the First Cause, and that cosmic evolution
producing the harmony of the worlds equally demands the im-
pulsion and direction of supreme intelligence and power. The
origin of life allows only one alternative: spontaneous generation
of organisms from inorganic matter, or the intervention of the
Creator to give the principle of life to the pre-existing subject
capable of receiving it. There is not the slightest scientific evi-
dence of spontaneous generation, or of any development of life
except from some previous living germ. Suppose the hypothe-
sis of evolution to be true, the progress of development by evo-
lution into a multitude of fixed species and of individuals having
a specific nature is only the way by which the Creator deter-
mines the potential to assume an indefinite number of different
forms of actual existence. Even spontaneous generation is un-
thinkable, without a direct act of divine power determining the
transformation of inorganic matter into organic substances.

The atheistic theory of evolution is no scientific hypothesis
at all, but a mean and monstrous sort of metaphysics. It is a
chimera, an aberration of the human mind, the most ignoble and
absurd of all the vagaries which have ever deluded for a time a
crowd of human, foolish dupes, to become afterwards an object
of universal scorn and derision. It deserves the unmitigated
contempt which Carlyle heaped upon it, and the equally con-
temptuous though more calmly expressed condemnation pro-
nounced upon it by M. Faye. We venture to predict that in the
next century the prevalence of the degrading system of material-
ism in the present age will be esteemed by the common consent
of all educated persons as the greatest blot on the nineteenth cen-
tury. Genuine science is in nowise irreligious or anti-Christian,
and we expect that a time will come when scientists as a class
r ill resent such an imputation as an injurious calumny. Atheism
lever is or can be more than a temporary aberration of the hu-
lan intellect, caused by moral disease, as delirium is caused by
fever.

It remains to say something of human biology i.e., of the

664 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Feb.,

origin and nature of the life of man, the highest and most per-
fect of living beings on the earth. The monistic form of the
evolutionary hypothesis, which makes eternal matter and atoms
of matter eternally in motion the only origin of the inorganic and
organic world, of course reduces all intellectual, moral, and spi-
ritual qualities, powers, and acts of human nature to the level of
sensitive, animal life and the category of material phenomena.
The process which eliminates creative intelligence as first cause,
working toward and for the sake of a final cause or end, necessa-
rily eliminates intelligence as effect and second cause. There is
a close connection between atheism and the denial of the spirit-
ual nature of man. Man is made in the image of God, in respect
to his intelligence and rational will, and in respect to the rela-
tions of paternity and filiation in that high order of human gene-
ration by virtue of which rational and immortal beings transmit
life to other beings who are rational and immortal, in a mutual
relation of love. Take away the original and the image disap-
pears with it. Moreover, it is in and by the image of God in
himself that man knows that God is, and, after an analogical
manner, apprehends what he is i.e., his essence and perfections.
Deface the image and the original can no more be seen in it.

The vestiges of the Creator are left upon all his works, ani-
mate and inanimate. But the irrational creature cannot be con-
scious that it is a creature and know its creator. It is only the
rational creature, man, who, among all living beings on the earth,
can rise by the contemplation of the works of God and by reflec-
tion on himself as he becomes self-conscious in his acts of intelli-
gence and will, to the contemplation and worship of God. The
two things go together : the idea of God as supreme intelligence
and first and final cause, and the idea of man as being in his high-
est part, his vital principle which is the form of his body, a spirit,
whose essence and nature subsists and acts in and of itself, is not
derived from the body and not dependent on it, in respect to
existence and operation, but only for a secondary mode of these
viz., organic life. The human spirit, indeed, contains in its
pure, simple, spiritual essence the virtues which are in the prin-
ciple of vegetative life, and the animal soul. Therefore it has
an aptitude and an exigency for informing and vivifying an or-
ganic body. But it is not confined within the limits of vegeta-
tion and sensation. It communicates to the body all that it is
capable of receiving, organic life of a kind higher than that which
is found in any lower order. But this lower life in which the
soul and body communicate in a natural and personal unity is

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 665

only the least part of that life which is intrinsic to the soul. It
transcends the material, it is akin to celestial spirits and to God.
Its sphere is the invisible, the intelligible, the unchangeable, the
eternal. It reads the thoughts of God as expressed in his works,
participates with him in the eternal reasons after which they
have been fashioned, is enlightened by a ray of the light of his
own intelligence, and is capable of pursuing by its own sponta-
neous and voluntary acts the same end which God proposes to
himself.

Man is like a swimmer, whose body is immersed in water
while his head is above it. In respect to the organic, corporeal
part of his essence he is akin to the inorganic and organic bodies
of the earth which is his birth-place and temporary abode. The
individual man is generated from the first parents of all mankind
through a series of ancestors. The bodies of these first pa-
rents were formed by the act of God upon pre-existing matter,
and made organically fit to receive rational and immortal souls
as their informing, vital principle. Taking the whole man to-
gether, in his integral, human nature, he is not immediately cre-
ated out of nothing, but derives his origin through a long series
of second causes from the first, creative act which gave existence
to finite being in the beginning. In this respect anthropology,
or the science which treats of man as its object, belongs to phy
sics. Chemistry, mechanics, biology, whatever science investi-
gates facts and phenomena and laws of material substances, of
organic structures, of vegetative and sensitive life, are within their
legitimate sphere when they take the human subject, in so far
as he belongs to this sphere, as one of their objects of study and
experiment. Yet, notwithstanding this, the very best and most
eminent scientists demur against the pretension that anthropology
is to be included under zoology as a subaltern branch of science.
There is such a chasm between the highest animals and man
that anthropology may justly claim to be a science apart.

Psychology, or the science of the soul, has properly been as-
signed to its place as a branch of special metaphysics. This is
the principal part of anthropology, to which the other parts are
logically subordinate. It is the soul which gives life to the body,
the same soul which is spiritual and intellectual. It is rationality
which is the specific difference of the human essence. Man is
therefore a kingdom by himself. Physical causes cannot give
him being. They can only furnish the matter of that organism
to which the soul gives life and a specific nature. Whatever it
may be allowable to suppose concerning the origin of merely

656 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Feb.,

sensitive life, and the nature of that vital principle in animals
which animates their organs of sense, the hypothesis of evolu-
tion must stop short of man. The human soul is something
which cannot be educed from the potentiality of matter. It is
an axiom that operation follows essence. Such as the essence or
nature is, so is the operation. And such as the operation is, so
must be the essence. The operation of the human mind tran-
scends all material things, and has for its adequate object all being
in all its latitude. It is a separate, an inorganic, a purely spiritual
operation. Voluntary action, whether merely spontaneous and
necessary, or free and self-determined, follows the intellectual
action and is indissolubly connected with it. Here is a life
which is above the senses and transcends all corporeal bounds.
It cannot proceed from matter. It demands a principle, a sub-
stance, from which it proceeds and in 'which it resides, which is,
like itself, spiritual. Yet the human soul is also the form of the
body, substantially united with it, the principle of organic life.
It has its organic operation as well as that which is inorganic,
and the two are intimately associated in one human nature and
personality. There are not two or three souls in man, but one
soul. The human individual is one throughout, although compo-
site, and this unity is given to him by the one vital principle, the
soul, which is rational and at the same time possessed virtually
of all that constitutes the sentient and vegetative principles of in-
ferior beings. Whatever the merely physical links may be
which connect the human person through the body with the ma-
terial world, man, whose species is determined by his rational,
spiritual soul, can be no product of evolution. Spirit cannot be
derived from matter. One spirit cannot generate another by di-
vision of its own substance. For it is simple, indivisible. One
finite spirit cannot give first being to another by creation, for
this is beyond the power of a creature. There is no pre-existing
matter or subject of any kind from which God can form or
evoke into existence a spirit, by an act similar to that which
transforms inorganic matter into an organic substance. It re-
mains, therefore, that each individual human soul must be im-
mediately created by God out of nothing, at the instant of its
infusion into a bodily germ which is sufficiently prepared to re-
ceive from it vital influence which gives it human life. Intelli-
gence, intellectual will, life which transcends the senses and the
sensible, and is a participation in the life which God has in him-
self, can only come directly and immediately from God, and sub-
sist in a subject of the same order which God immediately ere-

1 887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 667

ates. The only great importance of the earth is derived from
the fact that it is the birthplace and the temporary abode of the
human race. The animal life of man is only secondary, and his
earthly period of existence is transitory. Science teaches that
organic life on the earth and there is no scientific evidence that
it exists elsewhere and the conditions which make that life
possible, are rapidly going on toward extinction by the extinc-
tion of the light and heat of the sun. The other suns of the uni-
verse are also burning up, so that whatever organic life may
possibly exist in other worlds is likewise transitory and must
cease after a time. Evolution, whether of worlds or of organic
beings, is therefore something of minor and secondary impor-
tance. Evolution within the bounds of organic species on the
earth, supposing the evolutionary theory to be proved, is merely
one way in which development of life proceeds for a time on this
planet. Its limits and extent must be determined by evidence.
It cannot be extended and exalted by analogy into the rank of a
sole and universal law of the origin and progress of the universe
and all the beings which are contained within its bounds.

This universal law is more properly called the cosmical law
of order and development. The seat of this law is in the su-
preme intelligence and will of God. In his intelligence are the
ideas and types of all that is possible beyond his own necessary,
eternal, infinite being. In his will is the act from which all the
possible which in his infinite wisdom and goodness he determines
to bring into act, is brought into actual existence by his infinite
power. The order is the gradation of all the beings which he cre-
ates in time and space, from the lowest to the highest, their relation
to each other, their subordination and determination to the end for
which he has created them. Development is the explication in
time and space of the plan of God, from a beginning, through
successive stages, to the consummation. When that is reached
the universe will be a true cosmos, in which nothing inordinate
will remain. The real value and dignity of man consists in this,
that he is destined to a high place in this cosmos, the everlast-
ing kingdom of God. As for the miserable monistic and athe-
istic hypothesis which for God substitutes a blind force moving
material atoms in a never-beginning and never-ending dance of
death, and for noble, immortal, godlike man substitutes a stupid
and vicious beast, we may apply to it the negro proverb : The
noise made by the wheels is no measure of the load in the wagon.

668 A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. [Feb.,

A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES.

THE justice which has to do with the acknowledgment of
spots on the sun has its supplement and complement in display-
ing the jewel in the toad's head. Montaigne somewhere claims
it may be said of a thief that he has a handsome leg. Is there
any consideration that should deter a vagrant thinker from delv-
ing for hereditary generosity in Commodus? or any argument
against confronting the perfections of an American's mythical
Washington with the oaths and bottles wherewith sublime Wash-
ington in the flesh sometimes regaled himself ? Every one has
the right to speak his mind of a name that carries interest with
it, for better or worse, though to the sanest only falls the privi-
lege of being heard and remembered. Let all the good and all
the bad, temperately spoken, be brought before the Areopagus.
We shall readily divine which is the severest judgment, which
the most evasive, the most hasteful, the most lenient; but how
shall we say which is nearest, amid the thousand solutions of the
enigma of a man, to the one everlasting clue held by the high
gods? When there cannot be question of applause or sympathy
there is one of humanity ; and so it is that the Cinderella-folk of
history, to whose genius we do not owe so much that gratitude
dazzles us as we take their moral measure, come in for the best
word allowable, and for a leisurely after-testimony which, scorn-
ing to influence the extreme verdict, yet helps others, in reword-
ing it, towards wider knowledge and toleration. As a bit of
special pleading, nil nisi bonum is injudicious sentiment and of no
lasting accidental value, unless it be, too, nil nisi verum, so far as
finite honesty may detect both good and truth. The text will
serve anon for a wretch of a peculiar type, who might have
slipped into a blameless, nay, perhaps a renowned, grave, but for
the perversity of circumstances which made him a king.

That is a point to be considered. Now, a king is scarcely so
satisfactory as a hod-carrier, taken at haphazard ; for the latter is
what he is, at least, by no irrational and radically mistaken prece-
dent. But Hod-carrier works out his little fortunes in neutral
colors ; his praise and dispraise are apt to stay where his forgot-
ten neighbors put them ; microscopes are not brought to bear
upon the nails in his slipper-heel, and academies care not a straw
for his habitual treatment of vowels. Rex, being a man of busi-

i88/.] A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. 669

ness under delicate and complex circumstances, gets everlasting
charm from his indissoluble connection with a multitude of be-
lieving hearts and their web of intellect and passion. An idler,
glancing at history, is caught first by the exploits of kings, just
as, thrust suddenly upon a gallery of paintings, his eye takes in
the paramount blues and yellows. Royalty, whatsoever else it
may be, is^ noticeable, and sits for ever, as our spirit-summoning
agents do not, with " lights on."

Behold a piece of ostentatious roguery, descended from the
"guidman " James V. of Scotland and very like him, made of
fair material, well put together (" Such ability and understanding
has Charles Stuart," said his own jester, " that I long to see him
employed as King of England ! "), who may be worth examination
on the sunny side. His career is a genuine collapse and anti-cli-
max. Posterity ignores himself and his triflings. Pilgrims do
not molest his slumbers at Westminster with any salaams. His
name partly because he was "the Lord's anointed" and not
a wag of the laity has a sorrowful after-sound since his waste-
ful life ended over two hundred years ago. But Charles II.
never posed for better than he was ; not for so good spare the
mark ! as he was. Neither has he suffered from too lenient
apologists ; justly held up, rather, to the unsparing disdain of
mankind. The picturesque conditions of ancestry, and his sepa-
rate wildfire bacchanal of a reign, draw attention from an eye in
search of diversion ; yet a critic must needs run into philosophiz-
ing, and, taking the most generous and impersonal view, find
himself sliding into reproof. For, equipped and placed precisely
where he was, logically deduced from his own premises, Charles
should have been a king to be valued and remembered, above
accidentals, as a man of worth. Many crowned heads, like his
father, failed for lack of certain qualities; but he, first and last,
for lack of using them. Leave his graver offences unnumbered
and unrevived ; even then one cannot face his memory with a
laugh on the lips. The lightest review of his old comings and
goings is a thesis on evaded responsibilities ; and it is hard to
think of that jocose and wayward spirit in any mood of levity or
extenuation. Those who would keep a partiality for him, as
Samuel Johnson, sturdy moralist that he was, did ever, must be
saddened at his shameful indulgence, impatient at his childish
frolics, worried at his torpor, distrustful of his promises, angered
over his manly faculties held in abeyance, and over every weary
procrastination of his life. Or disclaim partiality, and call it
only a clearer vision which makes allowance with all men for the

670 A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. [Feb.,

good that is consciously thwarted in them, and which, remem-
bering what any gifted and ruined nature might have been, really
brings in a judgment more severe and awful than the harshest
stricture of time. A soft word sometimes is condemning beyond
a curse.

When Charles I. set out from St. James' Palace, Westminster,
at the head of a triumphant train, to return thanks at the cathe-
dral of St. Paul for the birth of an heir, on the 3Oth of May, 1630,
a noonday star was clearly shining. The people saw it, to recall
it long afterwards at the Restoration, and were wild with super-
stitious joy. The poets struck their festal lyres with redoubled
zest for that happy omen. " Bright Charles ! " Crashaw began,
and old Ben Jonson's voice arose in welcome :

" Blest be thy birth
That hath so crowned our hopes, our spring, our earth !"

And Francis Quarles, not long after, quaintly and deferentially
dedicated his Divine Fancies to the " royall budde," " acknowledg-
ing myself thy servant ere thou knowest thyself my prince."
Little Charles was the delight of the house, in that house where
all the children were fondly measured and painted and chroni-
cled from year to year, but "full of gravity," as his mother wrote
to Marie de Medicis. Storms broke, and at fourteen the boy
was leading an army in the west of England, steady, courageous,
self-contained. He was shy and observant during his adventur-
ous youth, cutting a rather awkward figure among the gilded
courtiers of France ; standing reticent, lamp in hand, more than
once as his admired Mademoiselle Montpensier the great prime-
ministerial mademoiselle flirted her satin gowns back and forth
before his exiled mother's discriminating eye. He made his own
plans and broke those of his enemies, and hurried hither and
thither, an outcast orphan, fired with zeal for his inheritance. At
the battle of Worcester his magnificent pluck and fortitude,
through the perils preceding his final escape, make the most
stirring tale and the heartiest romance of the seventeenth cen-
tury. But decadence soon fell upon him. A century later his
kinsman and namesake, the brilliant Prince Charlie of loyal Scot-
tish toast and song, again exemplifying the astonishing inter-
resemblances of the Stuarts, ran the same hazard with the same
glory, and lapsed likewise, before the noontide of his days, into
the same Asiatic lassitude and oblivion.

" In due time," says a chronicler, " the providence of God
brought about the king's restoration; and then began a new

1 887.] A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. 671

world, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,
and out of a confused chaos brought forth beauty and order ;
and all the three nations were inspired with new life and became
drunk with excess of joy." Our graver diarist pictures the
wondrous procession from London Bridge to Whitehall, through
thousands, " scarce one of whom," says Macaulay, " was not weep-
ing with delight" ; the king, whom the Speaker of the House of
Commons was about to salute as " King of Hearts," riding, on
his thirtieth birthday, in its midst past the long waving of scarfs
and the glitter of Spanish rapiers, bowing to right and left like
a tall pine in the wind ; "the ways strewed all with flowers, bells
ringing, steeples hung with tapestries, fountains running with
wine, trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking, and two
hundred thousand horse and foot brandishing their swords and
shouting with inexpressible joy." Joy ! This was the atonement
for all the wretchedness of dissension and war, for the upheaval
of traditions, r the death of the first-born, long heart-break and un-
rest. The historic documents of the Protectorate were burned
amid cheers. Virtuous men like Cowley went into the frenzy
of commendation at the outset of the " dancing, drinking, and
unthinking time " ; sensible men like Evelyn praised Heaven with
seraphic devotion for each exhumation and execution wherewith
Charles felt bound to inaugurate his reign. There never had
been in mistaken England such a fever of national enthusiasm,
such an outburst of impassioned loyalty, shaking the skies with
acclamation and thanksgiving. The principles of the Common-
wealth and its nobler spirits were eternally right ; their appli-
cation of them, perhaps, biassed and untimely. Protestations
beat in many breasts, as in that of the whimsical clerk of the
Temple " who never could be brought to write Oliver with a
great O." The people at large clamored against the judges
and thirsted for the king ; and, like Saul, he came tall, robust,
straight, suave, comely with the curse of retrogression behind
him.

When, in 1660, General Monk furnished, in Walpole's phrase,
44 the hand to the heart of the nation " and brought Charles II.
to his ancestral halls, the man reared in adversity, familiar with
danger, able through exceptional intelligence and opportunity
to be the salvation of distracted England, had already, in great
part, unfitted himself for that superb charge. It was not long
after his auspicious entrance that he put, discipline and govern-
ance again behind him, unbarred the gates to his fantastic favor-
ites, and began, at the expense of many who trusted him though

672 A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. [Feb.,

he refused to regard himself as so doing an unbridled, wild,
reparative holiday. In credulous faith and delight those whom
the king had come to rule exacted no pledge to defend their in-
alienable rights from encroachment. Saving precautions, abso-
lutely moderate and wise, urged in the House of Commons by
Hale and Prynne, had been set aside by Monk and overruled.
Yet Charles would have bound himself to any reasonable condi-
tion in the hour of his acceptance. A loyal understanding then
between prince and people would have saved England the neces-
sity of the revolution of 1688.

With the taste for whatever was beautiful and imposing, he
revived at his coronation, for the last time and with incon-
ceivable splendor, the ancient custom of proceeding from the
Tower to Westminster ; he also endeavored to revive the
Masque, the most charming form of court entertainment, around
which linger ambrosial associations, and which had not been
in vogue since the earlier part of the reign of the first James.

Charles had the temperament which fitted him for the service
and companionship of men of genius. Possessing mental endow-
ments of the highest order, but insuperable aversion to industry
and training, he fostered every intellect more assiduously than
his own. Like his father and his great contemporary kinsman
of France, he had (though in less degree) the tact of drawing
forth talent and of keeping it active. He had a cordial and
almost reverent appreciation of Christopher Wren, though he
never lost the chance of a gay, unbarbed jest at him. He listen-
ed eagerly to Pelham Humphrey when the chorister-boy came
back from over seas, with his heresies of time and tune, to be
" mighty thick " with the king ; and sat absently in chapel, nod-
ding his head approvingly to Master Humphrey's rhythmic mea-
sures, and laughing at a dissonance in the anthem before the
singers themselves were half-conscious of the slip. If his lean-
ing was rather towards the development of French music, then
first introduced in London, than towards the growth of the native
art in its genial promise, it may be urged in his favor that it was
he who re-established cathedrals, replaced the banished organs,
and opened the way for the return of those beautiful choral ser-
vices which have had a potent influence over later English music.
It was Charles II. who gave the charter to the Royal Society, who
started the Observatory at Greenwich and the Mathematical
School at Christ Hospital. He himself was a good mathematician
and a good draughtsman ; he was fond of violin music, and under-
stood the sciences of fortification and shipping. Cowley, sweet-

1887.] A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. 673

minded, modest Cowley, who, in Charles' own phrase, " left no
better man behind," once lapsed into a pretty conceit as follows:

" Where, dreaming chemics ! are your pain and cost?
How is your toil, how is your labor lost !

Our Charles, blest alchemist (though strange,
Believe it, future times !), did change
The Iron Age of old
Into this Age of Gold ! "

Would that the blast king-, who had a taste for chemistry, and
who, in the very month he died, was running- a process for fixing
mercury, had remained politically the " blest alchemtst " he
seemed to be at the Restoration ! How easily could he have
verified Cowley 's loving faith, which now is merely something
for the cynic to snarl over!

Above all Charles prized poetry and poets. He walked fami-
liarly with Dryden, two of whose strongest epics were under-
taken at his solicitation ; he enjoyed the man Waller, his slippery
politics, and his gallant verse; he understood the peculiar charm
of Sedley's style ; he was drawn by the sweet conversation of
Andrew Marvell, and may be credited with the honest wish,
frustrated by Marvell's own independence, of befriending, not
of buying, him.

At the king's coming he found all the May-poles down, all the
shows over ; races, dances, and merry-hearted sports cut short ;
the theatres were dismantled, and the sole public appreciation
which actors got or hoped for was at the whipping-post. Quick-
ly and thoroughly the whirligig of time brought about his re-
venges. One of the first thoughts of Charles was for the London
stage ; and then the way was cleared for those dramas of Con-
greve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, which manager and critic must
now handle, as Thoreau said of a certain newspaper, " with cuffs
turned up," but which, despite their hopeless build and basis,
have never been surpassed for wit, vitality, and mastery of inci-
dent. The plays which our friends Mr. and Mrs. Pepys saw
from the middle gallery were nearly all equipped at the expense
of the gentry and the king, and brought out with nicety of de-
tail, costly scenery and costuming. Charles, indeed, Queen Ca-
therine, and the Duke of York gave their coronation suits to
the actors. When Nokes played Sir Arthur Addle, in 1670,
before the beautiful Duchess of Orleans, young Monmouth
loosed the jewelled sword and belt which he wore, and enthu-
siastically clasped them upon the comedian, who kept both until
his dying day.
VOL. XLiv.43

674 A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. [Feb.,

The King's Theatre, under Killigrew, on the precise site of
the present Drury Lane, was opened in 1663, its main entrance
on Little Russell Street. Kynaston, the comely youth who
played women's parts, was of the company. On one occasion
he caused a wait which annoyed the courtiers. The king had
a call made for him. The manager came out with apologies.
" May it please your majesty/' he said, " the queen has not done
shaving." It did not take much to mollify that mirth-loving
audience, and the laugh which the swart king led and closed
sealed Kynaston's reprieve. The rival Duke's Theatre stood at
the back of what is now the Royal College of Surgeons, in
Portugal Row, south of Lincoln's Inn Fields. Here played Bet-
terton, and Jo Harris the perfect Andrew Aguecheek and
Samuel Sanford, whom Charles prized for " the best stage-villain
in the world." One of the king's latest acts was to suggest to
the poet Crowne, and obtain from him, the exquisite comedy of
Sir Courtly Nice. He also suggested the plot of Dryden's Secret
Love ; or, The Maiden Queen, and called it his play ; it was splen-
didly enacted at King's by Mohun, Hart, and Burt, Mrs. Mar-
shall, Mrs. Knep (whom our ubiquitous Pepys knew), Mrs.
Eleanor Gwyn (Anglice " pretty, witty Nell"), and Mrs. Covey,
in 1666. Of Nell's Florimel Pepys says : " So great a perform-
ance of a comic part was never, I believe, in the world before."

What was, surely, never in the world before, besides the ac-
cord between gallants on opposite sides of the curtain, was such
a republic of fast-flying and eccentric revelry. The stage re-
flected the melodrama and farce of real life. It may be com-
mended, on a subtle, unforgettable moral of Browning's, that they
were consistent and heart-whole, these sorry Restoration-folk,
and went through their carnival with a devotion worthy of any
holier cause that can be named. Silence is charity to their effer-
vescent lives ; but, such as they were, they were lived to the brim.
No time in history, because of the bitter contradiction between the
outer sparkle and the inner rottenness, is more fascinating. There
seemed to be an astonishing dearth of dull people. The tribe
of the commonplace vanished by mutual consent, like moles from
the noontide light. It is a commentary at once sad and humor-
ous that so soon as art began to be lifted from its shackles, and
while yet authorship lacked the inestimable service of the Spec-
tator, out cropped the numerous and revivified obscure

"The toads and mandrakes, and ducks and darnels,"
who cancelled the supremacy of the bad and bright by being vie-

1 887.] A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. 675

toriously good and stupid. Such cleverness, such dazzling un-
reason ! such a rippling, jesting, laughing, intriguing time ! when
all that was salutary in the psalm -singing code of the Puritans,
along with its gloom and wrath, had been pruned away ; when all
established custom, reverence, tradition, and respectability itself
were sent spinning to some new, wild tune,

" Like madrigals, sung- in the streets at night
By passing revellers."

" Charles II. ! " wrote Hazlitt in his genial enjoyment. " What
an air breathes from the name ! What a rustle of silks and wav-
ing of plumes! What a sparkle of diamond earrings and shoe-
buckles ! What bright eyes ! (ah ! those were Waller's Saccharis-
sa's as she passed). What killing looks and graceful motions !
How the faces of the whole ring are dressed in smiles ! How the
repartee goes round ; how wit and folly, elegance and awkward
imitation of it, set one another off! " These are the days when
young Henry Purcell sits for hours at the Westminster Abbey
organ, and Child, Lock, Lawes, and Gibbons are setting ballads
to entrancing old cadences, and conveying them to Master W.
Thackeray, the music-printer at The Angel, in Duck Lane ; when
a certain worthy clerk of the Acts of the Navy, curiously scan-
ning the jugglers and gymnasts on the leisurely way to his
office, sails along in a " camlett coat with silver buttons " ; when
town-loving Rob Herrick, dean prior in Devonshire, raises his
bell-like voice to ask for a last glass, and stands watching through
the tavern window-pane the laced and jewelled king pacing the
greensward with Hobbes and Evelyn or humming lyrics over
D'Urfey's shoulder ; when Walton angles with kindly Charles
Cotton in the Dove, and Herbert prays at Bemerton ; when the
clink of duelling-swords is heard in the parks at sundown ; knots
of affectionate gentlemen sway homewards by the fainter morn-
ing ray ; coaches roll by with glimpses of pliant fans and of Sir
Peter Lely's languishing faces ; and my lady in her boudoir con-
fers mysteriously by letter with Monsieur le Voisin over in
France, to whom the casting of horoscopes and the concocting
of philters are, as Hamlet has it, " easy as lying." In and out of
this whirl of thoughtless life move the august figures of Sir
Thomas Browne, and " that Milton who wrote lor the regi-
cides," and, later, of Sir Isaac Newton ; the healing shadow of
Jeremy Taylor, and the childish footsteps of Addison, regene-
rator, as he grew, of all its evil ; the vanishing presence of the
chancellor, Clarendon ; of the patriots, Russell, Algernon Syd-

676 A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. [Feb ,

7 , glorious Vane ; of Roscommon the student, Bunyan the pri-
soner ; of the great bishops ; of the fighters, Fairfax and Rupert ;
and of the choir of poets, idle flutterers of an idle day, who waste
their sweet, spirited numbers on the phosphorescent decay of a
memorable reign. It is the high noon of pleasure deified and
splendid energies squandered. Extravagance is eating away the
substance of the kingdom ; the Dutch hurl defiance in the teeth
of English ships ; fire and plague arise and vanish ; Jeffreys sits
high and warm, while good men are languishing in dungeons or
kneeling at the block; but still the banquet and the moth-hunting
go on. Dabit Deushis quoque finem. The merry-andrews scatter,
and the heavy-headed race of Hanover comes in and stays.

Charles II., with his soft voice, his grace of person, and his

apparent lack ."of any austere characteristics whatsoever, had a

countenance brown as a Moor's, singularly reserved and for-

bidding. His long hair had been of raven hue, ample and grim ;

but at thirty he was already " irreverendly gray." When he

turned suddenly upon you, says Leigh Hunt in his novel, Ralph

Esher, it was as if a black lion thrust his head through a hedge

in winter ! The king had little personal vanity, and left foppish-

ness to his retainers. " Od's-fish ! but I'm an ugly fellow ! " he

sighed, with comical admiration, standing before the gaunt por-

trait of himself by Riley. He had a healthful fondness for foot-

racing, angling, and for all out-of-door sports. His chief diffe-

rence from Beranger's Roi d'Yvetdt, whom he laughably resem-

bles, lay in his habit of early rising and of morning activity. He

partook of the endurance and agility of his father, who was the

best horseman and marksman of his day. Up with the lark,

Charles strode about the grassy walks at a tremendous pace,

loitered, with his dogs about him, to feed the ducks and swans,

or occupied himself with tennis a game commended by Bacon

as conducive to a quick eye and a ready body weighing himself

after exercise and measuring the gain of thew and muscle. From

a garrulous chronicler we learn that his lonely leisure was some-

times utilized by admiring and afflicted subjects. " Mr. Avise

Evans," according to Aubrey, " had a fungous nose, and said it

was revealed unto him that the king's hand would cure him ; so

at the first coming of King Charles II. into St. James' Park he

kissed the royal hand and rubbed his nose with it ; which did

disturb the king, but cured him ! "

. For ceremony and trammels of all kinds Charles had a tho-
rough disrelish, and passed his time but resignedly amid "the
pomp of music and a host of bowing heads." He had as many

1887.] A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. 677

pranks as harlequin. Imagine the profound gravity with which
the mercurial scapegrace propounded his famous query to the
Royal Society concerning the relative weight of fish dead and
living, and with what unbetrayed enjoyment he watched the
wiseacres argue, delve, theorize, and quarrel, without ever sus-
pecting the impish fiction he had put upon them ! He liked to
forego his dignity, and to come as a disinterested spectator into
the midst of a solemn debate. " It's as good as a play," he sard.
He would get down from his throne in the House of Lords to
stand with folded arms by the fireplace, drawing a crowd about
him and breaking up the order and impressiveness of the place.
Any slight from his favorites the king took with supreme suavity.
He kept no grudge, and merged his sensitiveness in a laugh. He
relished the deftness of Waller's astute answer when rallied on
his fine Cromwellian strophes. Rochester's peerless epigrams he
set off with banter and repartee. Making his toilet, he turned
on Killigrew, who sat in the great window reading aloud one of
his plays. " What shall you say in the next world in defence of
your idle words?" he asked, with a s % udden severity habitual to
him. " I shall be able to make a better defence for my idle com-
edies than the king for his idle promises, which cause more ruin in
the world," answered Killigrew, seriously as well. No reply,
were it but sufficiently pungent, jarred upon him. "Shaftesbury,
Shaftesbury ! I do believe thou art the wickedest fellow in my
dominions!" " Of a subject, sire, mayhap I am." Libels and
satires only brushed by him. Mistress Holford, a young lady of
the court, seated in her own apartment, warbles the savorv ballad
of Old Rowley the King at the top of her silver voice. A gentle
rap comes at the outer door. " Who's there? " she asks with un-
concern. " Old Rowley himself, madam ! " in the " plump bass"
of Carolus Secundus. The well-worn anecdote of Busby, of the
Westminster School, with the reversed conditions of his majesty
and the dominie, is characteristic on both sides Charles all
humor and toleration ; the little man, stiffened with conscious rec-
titude, wearing his cap heroically even before visiting royalty,
lest the boys should think there lived a greater than himself!
But a prettier pass yet was between the Merry Monarch and that
impregnable Quaker, William Penn. Penn came to audience
with his hat, on the principle of the eternal fitness of things,
firmly fixed on his brows. Tne king stepped down the broad
stair, away from his attendants, in his gleaming dress, slowly and
ceremoniously baring his head. "Friend Charles!" said Penn
in meek surprise, " why dost thou take off thy hat? " " Because

678 A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. [Feb.,

it has long been the custom here," said the king-, with his serenest
smile, "for but one person to remain covered at a time."

He was seldom moved, angered, or roused. But the ties of
kin seemed to be strong with him. He loved his brother James
much and Monmouth more, and forgave the latter his unrestful
treasons. How sacred the affection, how magnanimous the par-
don, none can tell. Charles' good parts, like his evil ones, were
mainly the outcome of urbane carelessness. He showed his
better self by side-lights, and, copious talker as he was, had no-
thing to say of his deep-sea emotions, preferring to pose as one
who dispensed with such commodities. It would have terrified
him had one subject in his realm taken him too seriously. He
grew morose as he grew older, and sought amusement more and
more. He was poor; he was bound by miserable obligations;
he was aware of his weakness, his betrayals and indolent wrong-
doing; and all these memories had to be stifled in one way or
another. He beguiled the thing he was with perpetual cap-and-
bells.

All readers know James Shirley's noble dirge,

"The glories of our birth and state,"

taken from the " Contention of Ajax and Ulysses for the Armor of
Achilles," and placed on the lips of Calchas as the body of
Ajax is borne into the temple. Charles II. knew it, too, and
was paradoxically fond of it. Many a time old Bowman stood
before the solitary king, and, at his bequest, sang again and again
its austere and mournful measures. The true semblance of the
king, undreamed of by Gibbons or Lely, would be his portrait as
he sat listening in a tapestried alcove to that magnificent touch-
ing text, with its sweet closes, on the vanity of earthly pride ; his
stern, dark eyes fixed on the unconscious singer, the motley some-
how fallen from him, and a momentary truce set up between him
and his defrauded, thinking soul. How the court which he had
taught, the court with its sarcasms and sallies, would have
laughed at the preposterous situation ! None other sermon we
know of, not good Ken's nor Stillingfleet's nor Tillotson's, could
keep his majesty awake in chapel, partly because in chapel his
majesty had spectators and could not disedify his own.

Charles was a sharp observer, sifting all ambassadors, minis-
ters, and persons of quality ; himself, when he chose, impervious
as rock. Yet he was apt to place a lazy and superfluous reliance
on his advisers, often taking their word for any measure, and
signing papers from them without so much as a casual reading.

1887.] . A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. 679

Despite his irresponsible air and his ease-loving, unimperious in-
dividuality, the king- was a man of potent personal influence.
Just as he whimsically turned dress-reformer in 1666, bringing
the whole court, as a spectator records, to habits of simplicity,
and just as there were no more slashed doublets and fantastic
shoes until he saw fit to resume them, so could he have turned
the tide of public morals and public taste, and brought a clean
gayety out of the morbid, covenanting cant which bad been per-
vading England. Society copied him in all his shortcomings-;
and it borrowed also his tolerance, accessibility, life, spirit, and
gracefulness. He was popular in the extreme an admirable
prince, if measured only by Martial's test that it is a prince's
main virtue intimately to know his subjects. Tradition does not
aver that by any exertion of his privilege ''he ever helped one
follower towards beauty and integrity of living. But nothing
quite. broke the faith of the English people in their heedless head.
Thousands outside his own roystering circle watched him with
longing and regret, never without extenuation and certain hope
of change. But he lived on, the underhanded king of compro-
mises, the secret pensioner of France, stunting his higher in-
stincts, squandering his fifty-four precious years like a vagabond
creature whose frolic means the ruin of everything valuable
about him, Answerable, in part, for the misuse of capabilities ex-
traordinary as his own. There were many, like him and like
Rochester, who died in their sober senses, crushed and appalled,
and hardly wishing life save for wisdom and for penitence. Un-
der the glitter and whirl of this immemorial Restoration are
things of pitiful human interest ; masks, one by one, fall away,
and the ungodly hornpipes turn to misereres, and so

" Break, falter, and are still."

Charles once told Burnet, in a mood of transient earnestness,
that he considered cruelty and falsehood the most heinous of all
sins. He was, at his best, frank and blunt ; and though he did
some scoundrelly lying never malicious, however perhaps he
felt with Lamb that " truth is precious, and not to be wasted on
everybody"; for, by preference, he sheathed such truth as he
cared to speak in a jest. Humane he was, through and through,
and hated the sight of suffering. Taking a vital pleasure in
natural history, he loved animals, especially dogs and horses,
and they obeyed him. His real gentleness and chivalry for the
weak was a trait in his character fair and unexpected as a water-
IMy in a slimy pool.

680 A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. [Feb.,

The Stuarts were an ungrateful race, and " unthinking
Charles,'* through his deliberate avoidance of care and painstak-
ing, must rank with his clan. Thanks to Buckhurst, he carried
Hudibras about in his pocket ; but his fatal carelessness forgot
Butler and his poverty until it was too late. He was always
kind when the chance of being so was obvious and opportune ;
remembering to be kind was his unlearned art. His adherents,
from the first hour of his landing to his death, made never-ceas-
ing claims upon him, some exaggerated, the majority just. The
king granted innumerable pardons and restitutions; "hearing
anybody against anybody," sure to be of propitious bent, when
petitions forced their way to him personally. But he carried no
memoranda. As his apologist, Roger North, put it in plain
Saxon: " He never Would Break his Head with Business." The
Penderells, at least, the unbought hearts of Boscobel, who

"Hid the king of the isle in the king of the wood,"

Charles never forgot, and extended his largesses to every branch
of the family.

His letters show his strength and severity of will, expended
chiefly on the appointment of maids-of-honor ! To the last he
had something left of self-command, which all but perennial mis-
use had not shrivelled. He could rend his ignoble shackles, and
did rend them many times. He was verily, as Thomas Campbell
wrote, " asleep on the throne," and yet, whatever darker blame
attaches to him for it, able to be awake and alert. The great fire
brought out for a season his readiness, judgment, and presence of
mind. Not content with planning, he went among the workmen,
acted with incredible energy, and wrought the saving of London
hand to hand with them. He led his unhappy queen a life of
martyrdom, all the bitterer inasmuch as she had become sincerely
attached to him. But he had a last forlorn sense of honor in
that he would hear no ill word against her. The celebrated
Roos divorce case was shaped so as to give the king latitude and
precedent; his juster feelings reviving, he rejected both with
scorn, to the discomfiture of his worthy council. Torpor left
him twice or thrice, as if to prove itself, despite its dominance,
incidental.

Charles, aware of the reverence in which the memory of his
father was held by the Royalists, would not allow his relationship
to that estimable person as we say in expressive common par-
lance to be " thrown at " him. Once, when censured by a

1887.] A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. 68 1

monitor for swearing, he shouted with boyish retaliation: " Your
Martyr swore twice more than ever I did ! " which was a shock-
ingly brusque statement and quite undeniable. Atheism and infi-
delity the king would not abide. Controversies he stopped with
a wave of his hand. " No man," says Roger North again, " kept
more decorum in his expressions and behavior with respect to
things truly sacred than the king. . . . And amongst his liber-
tines he had one bigot, at least (Mr. Robert Spencer), whom he
called Godly Robin, and who used to reprove the rest for pro-
fane talking." We need not doubt North's accuracy here. But
while Charles would not allow religion to be abused in his
presence, neither would he permit any of its influences to be
brought to bear upon him. In truth, he was occupying a false
position temporizing, making matters of policy out of his heavy
heart's desire. Every historian of the times has set forth that his
instincts, when he paused at all, were for his mother's faith the
ancient, tabooed faith of England. Tradition, the desire of peace
and security, his moral inertia, forbade him to declare himself.
His uneasy brother James was a Catholic, and no less a hypo-
crite ; had Charles been the first he would not have been the
other. But by hushing up wrangles, by occasional attendance
at the Established churches, by obloquy and exile equally of the
undaunted dissenters and of missionary priests, he quieted sus-
picion ; and by acted disregard of nearly every Christian precept
he consummated the inexcusable wrong of his life and sold his di-
vine calling for conscience is none other, whithersoever it point
for the rose-leaves and musk of a crown. He was stricken
down after a feast, amid gorgeous color and song, dice, basset-
tables, courtesans, " inexpressible luxury and profaneness," on a
wintry Monday, at Whitehall. " Six days after," writes thought-
ful Evelyn, "all was in the dust."

Singularly enough, the king took his sudden summons and his
lingering pain with unrepining fortitude. Joy-bells and bonfires
bespoke the people's feeling at the report that he was conva-
lescent. But the three kingdoms hoped for him and besought
for him, "sobs and tears interrupting the prayers of the congrega-
tions," in vain. On the sixth day, after begging pardon of those
whom he had injured, and who fell on their knees beside him ;
after blessing his subjects, giving his last commissions, and mak-
ing smiling apology to his watchers, with the old exquisite grace,
for being so " unconscionably long in dying," calm, contrite, and
consoled, in the arms of John Huddleston, the Benedictine, who
once had saved his life, on the 4th of February, 1684, died Charles

682 A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. [Feb.,

II., and the curtain was rung- down on "the only genius of the
Stuart line " and the most tragic failure of history.

No sooner was he gathered to his fathers than the flood of
flattery and panegyric, which he had never liked, and which he
had held back considerably while he lived, burst forth over Eng-
land fond, steady, hyperbolic, universal, overwhelming eulogy
and sorrow, unstemmed, moreover, by any welcome or affection
for the ascendant Duke of York. Dryden in the " Threnodia
Augustalis," Otway, Montague Earl of Halifax, and a hundred
poets more, intoned his requiem. In a stanza of Richard Duke's
came an apotheosis which only the shortsightedness of genuine
grief could save from audacity. Following Dryden in his quasi-
invocation, he named his royal master as " Charles the Saint ";
and, wherever the poor ghost chanced to be, that surely hurt
him like an arrow. For their worthless king the citizens wept
and wore mourning, as if light and cheer had gone with him.
With lifelong wantonness he had broken the hope and the heart
of England ; yet England cherished him to the end for his com-
passion, his bravery, his gentle temper, his lack of malice and
vengefulness, and, with sadder reason, for his latent powers.
Says Lingard : " During his reign the arts improved, trade met
with encouragement, the wealth and comforts of the people in-
creased. To this flourishing state of the nation we must attri-
bute the acknowledged fact that, whatever were the personal
failings or vices of the king, he never forfeited the love of his
subjects. Men are always ready to idolize the sovereign under
whose sway they feel themselves happy." Charles was weighed
down to some extent by inherited faults. In his deliberate choice
of moving in an atmosphere of insincerity he was the grandson
of James I. ; in his want of what Knight calls " the highest char-
acteristics of an English gentleman a firm, religious observance
of his word, an unswerving fidelity to duty and to truth " he
was the son of Charles the Martyr, as he was. also his son in per-
fect courage and unpretentiousness, and in steadfast appreciation
of gracious and inspiring things. Charles II. was not a legisla-
tor, like an Edward ; not a victor, like a Richard or a Henry ; not
a scholar and a domineering force, like Elizabeth. The Merry
Monarch belied his nom de guerre : he was not merry at heart.
He was neither great nor good ; but it is the prime aggravation
of his exasperating career that he was, beyond caption, lovable.

One of the household portraits painted by Vandyck for Charles
I. with whose copies we are familiar brings to us the vision of
three radiant children standing hand-in-hand, upon whom the

1887.] A KING OF SHREDS AND PATCHES. 683

chronicler looks with beclouded eyes. For the youngest, turned
towards his stately little sister (fated to be the mother of that
William who shall dethrone him), is James, perhaps the most un-
sagacious and intolerant of English kings. The elder boy, of
finer mould, whose nature, sweet and conciliating, like Tito Me-
lema's, ran all the more readily to riot and decay, is he who after-
wards professed the horrible belief that the honor of each man
and of each woman had its price ; who for money's greed and
need made the alliance with the house of Portugal and the barter
of Dunkirk ; who wavered and dissimulated, by a strange twist
of temperament, whenever he had the more congenial chance of
being "nobly right" ; whose heaviest blame is not that he laid
on his proud country the defiling yoke of a foreign ruler and
lavished the splendid opportunities of his reign in Capuan plea-
sures, but rather that he did these things in the broad daylight
of his better knowledge and in defiance of the mind and the con-
science, ever beaten down and ever resurgent, which God had
given him. Against this six-years child whom Vandyck drew,
and his incalculable promise, rises many a black arraignment,
cited to student after student at the threshold of history. So let
it be. The sunnier annals of his wit, his keenness and urbanity,
his bodily strength and skill, give no palliation to the tale of what
he was when England needed the guidance of a faithful king.
To rehearse them now is to toss a single rose where the shower
of stones has long been hissing from the crowd the merciless,
approved verdict of the world, the stones ; the rose itself but the
sarcasm of a bystander, the melancholy satire on garlands never
woven which might have fallen softly in their stead.

684 THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION [Feb.,

THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION A LAYMAN'S VIEW.

THE Triennial Convention of the Protestant Episcopal
Church according to some, and of the American Catholic
Church according to others, has lately closed a lengthy session
in Chicago. An Episcopalian convention, like an Anglican con-
vention, is generally not devoid of a humorous element. The
monstrous claims of the High- Church party, the reactionary views
of the Z0ze>-Church members, and a dash here and there of Broad-
Church doctrine give to the proceedings of this geometrical
aggregation a charming variety not to be found in similar gather-
ings of other Protestant sects. To one not of that communion
the chief interest centred in the efforts of the High-Church party
to drop the name Protestant and adopt that of Catholic in some
form or other, which were finally defeated. Some of the reasons
for the proposed change are here given in the words reported to
have been used by a lay deputy who has always been an enthu-
siastic advocate of it :

"The name Protestant Episcopal implied that this same church was or-
ganized and existed for the purpose of protesting against something or
other. Now, this was an untruth, and as such should not be allowed to
blot the name of their fair mother. . . . They believed in one baptism
for the remission of sin : why not call the church ' The Church of the Holy
Baptism ' ? . . . It misled those of the Latin race who only believed in
the Catholic Church. It was impossible to convince them that the Protes-
tant Episcopal Church was not one of the sects created during the past few
hundred years. There was another reason : ... to bring the name of
the church in harmony with the name that had been since the time of the
apostles."

The effort of a section of non-Catholics to drop the name
" Protestant" is not without some show of reason ; for, at the
rate that High-Churchmen are adopting the doctrines and prac-
tices repudiated by their forefathers a few centuries ago, it will
not be long before there will be scarcely anything- left to Rome
worth protesting against. A change of name, any more than an
adoption of the doctrines and ceremonies of Catholicism, will not
bring them any nearer to the Centre of Unity ; but a delusive
appearance may prove a stumbling-block in the way of many, on
the principle that a counterfeit is the more dangerous the nearer
it approaches to the genuine article. It is fatal to the claims of

1887.] A LAYMAN'S VIEW. 685

Anglicans and Episcopalians that they do not agree among them-
selves as to the nature of their church or the time when it came
into existence. While some scorn the idea of its being a product
of the "Reformation," or of its being any less than divine in its
authority, others are less lofty in their pretensions. Even in the
Convention was the singular spectacle of a lay deputy in regular
political style claiming everything for the Episcopal Church,
and per contra a clerical deputy denying the apostolic succes-
sion in that same church ! A Catholic Church without the apos-
tolic succession would be of the invertebrate order. The Rev.
Dr. Elliott, Dean of Bristol, and (if I mistake not) later a bishop,
in a volume of sermons published some years ago thus defines
the position of his church :

" The Church of England is created by the law, upheld by the law, paid
by the law, and may be changed by the law just as any other institution
in the land."

And, as if to prove the sincerity of his belief, h.e adds:

" I cannot desire you to accept either what I affirm or what the church
affirms as undoubtedly true, or as the only true interpretation of the mys-
teries of God/'

This would be more satisfactory had the good dean given a
definition of truth, so that his readers might form an idea of the
number of " true interpretations," there could possibly be.

To aid a consideration of this iimportant subject the follow-
ing facts and arguments are respectfully submitted to earnest
Episcopalians:

That Christ established a church on earth is admitted by
High and Low Churchmen. That this church at some time
departed from the apostolic teaching and fell into error is assert-
ed by both. I will leave out of consideration the promise made
by Christ to his apostles of the abiding presence in his church of
the "Spirit of Truth" which, to most minds, should be a suffi-
cient guarantee against the possibility of error and will follow
another line of argument. The body of doctrine or teaching
committed by Christ to his apostles constitutes the " deposit of
faith," which, from its being intended for the guidance and sal-
vation of all men, is called Catholic faith or doctrine ; and the
church that holds and teaches this in its entirety can alone have
a valid claim to be The Catholic Church. The marks or signs % of
this body of doctrine, as laid down by Vincent of Lerins, are,
if I am rightly informed, accepted by Anglicans : " That which
has been believed everywhere, alzvays, and by all men." Judged

686 THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION [Feb.,

by this standard the Anglican and Episcopal churches have not
the shadow of a claim to the above title.

If the Book of Homilies is to be believed, the Anglican Church
is not only not the Catholic Church or a part of it, but there is
really no such institution in existence. In the " Homily against
the Peril of Idolatry " we find the following: " Laity and clergy,
learned and unlearned, all ages, sects, and degrees of men, wo-
men, and children of the whole of Christendom, had been at once
drowned in abominable idolatry, and that for the space of eight
hundred years and more. ' Such a sweeping calamity never be-
fore in any form visited the human race, in whole or part. From
the waters of the deluge were saved Noe and his family ; from the
fire and brimstone rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrha Lot
and a few others escaped, and so on in other cases ; but from
this cataclysm of idolatry not even a child escaped ! That the
worship of the true God, faith in Christ, and the Christian vir-
tues could exist in the same individuals along with " abominable
idolatry " is too great an absurdity for a sane mind to enter,
tain. The conclusion is, then, inevitable that the church estab-
lished by Christ ceased to exist. Was it ever re-established ?
And if so, by whom ?

As the first five centuries of Christianity are admitted to
have been ages of faith, it follows that if the Anglican Church
" was not one of the sects created during the past few hundred
years," it must, in common with the rest of Christendom, have
been " drowned in abominable idolatry," and consequently lost
the character of a church of Christ claimed for it. When did it
regain this character? And in what manner? Furthermore, it
may be asked, what object was gained by Christ's coming into
the world, if mankind were to be in a worse condition than be-
fore? Under the old dispensation, at least a few tribes of the
chosen people worshipped the true God, although surrounded
bv idolatrous nations; and faith in the promise of a future Re-
deemer caused a ray of hope to enlighten one spot of a cheerless
pagan world. But, just a few centuries after the coming of the
promised Light which was to enlighten the world, mankind sud-
denly became helpless unbelievers, without consolation in the
present or hope for the future.

This homiletic picture gives a dismal view of more than one-
half of the Christian era. It would be hard to say how many
Anglicans believe in its reality ; but as the 35th Article declares
that " the Book of Homilies doth contain a godly and whole-
some doctrine, and necessary for these times," and as all clergy-

1 887.] A LAYMAN'S VIEW. 687

men of the Church of England are required to subscribe to the
Thirty-nine Articles, it remains an authority that cannot be alto-
gether ignored. Despite this let us suppose the church to be
still in existence, and consider the claims of the Anglican Church
on the basis of immutable truth.

The variations of the Anglican creed during the past three
hundred years are scarcely credible except to those who have
made a study of the matter. The Supremacy of the Pope,
Transubstantiation, " the Sacrifice of the Mass for the living
and the dead," Purgatory, Invocation of the Saints, Prayers
for the Dead, Extreme Unction, and Auricular Confession have
at some time or other been enjoined by either Parliament or
Convocation. This has been followed in each case by a denial
and condemnation of the same doctrine by one or the other
authority. Thus in 1559 the Mass was declared "a blessed pri-
vilege," and in 1632 it was condemned as " a blasphemous fable."
In 1534 Parliament declared that the pope had no jurisdiction
in England. In 1536 the Convocation at York declared that
" the King's Highness nor any temporal man may not be the
head of the church by the laws of God," and that " the Pope of
Rome hath been taken for the head of the church and Vicar of
Christ, and so ought to be taken " (Strype's Eccles. Mem., vol. i.
part ii. pp. 266, 267). In 1552 this was condemned and the king
made the supreme head of the church. In 1559 both houses of
Convocation asserted the pope's supremacy, which was again
condemned by Parliament in the same year, and the queen made
the supreme head of the church. In the first edition of the Book
of Common Prayer, compiled by Cranmer and others ^ with the
aid of the Holy Ghost" Extreme Unction and prayers for the
dead are enjoined. In the next edition the former was pro-
nounced " the corrupt following of the apostles."

In this connection I would ask any fair-minded, reasonable
individual, of any or no religious belief, what should be thought
of the following articles of doctrine, both promulgated by the
same authority, "the supreme head of the Church of England":

"As touching the sacrament of the altar, we will that all bishops and
preachers shall instruct and teach our people committed by us unto their
spiritual charge that they ought and must constantly believe that under
the form and figure of bread and wine, which we there presently do see and
perceive by our outward senses, is verily, substantially, and really contained
and comprehended the very self-same body and blood of our Saviour Jesus
Christ, which was born of the Virgin Mary, and suffered upon the cross for
our redemption ; and that under the same form and figure of bread and
wine the very self-same body and blopd of Ghrist is corporally, really, and

688 THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION [Feb.,

in the very substance exhibited, distributed, and received of all them which
receive the same sacrament " (Articles of 1537).

" Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of bread and wine)
in the Supper of the Lord cannot be proved from Holy Writ, but it is re-
pugnant to the plain words of Scripture, and hath given occasion to many
superstitions. . . . And since (as the Holy Scriptures testify) Christ hath
been taken up into heaven, and there is to abide till the end of the world,
it becometh not any of the faithful to believe or profess that there is a real
or corporal presence (as they phrase it) of the body and blood of Christ in
the holy eucharist. The sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not by
Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped " (Arti-
cles of 1552).

This latter article by no means settled the doctrine concerning
the " Lord's Supper," as the following extract from Burnet will
show :

" It was proposed to have the communion-book (1559) so contrived that
it might not exclude the belief of the corporal presence ; for the chief de-
sign of the Queen's Council was to unite the nation in one faith, and the
greatest part of the nation continued to believe such a presence " (Hist.
Reform., p. 573).

Thus, while an article of faith denied the reality of a " corporal
presence," the communion-book would not "exclude the belief"
of it a contrivance that (under the circumstances) could hardly
fail to be appreciated. Can a church, it may be asked, that has
been a doctrinal weathercock, strenuously affirming at one time
that which was as strenuously denied at another, put forward
any claim whatever to be the custodian of divine revelation ?

The above-noted variations would be bad enough had the
Anglican Church settled down to the doctrines contained in the
Thirty-nine Articles, interpreted in a " literal and grammatical
sense " ; but even this has not been done. It is only a few years
since the famous Gorham case caused intense excitement in reli-
gious circles. The decision of the highest authority that clergy-
men of the Church of England might believe or not in baptismal
regeneration, just as it suited them, should be sufficient to con-
vince High-Churchmen of the absurdity of their claim.

In the " Resolutions " signed by the leaders of the party in
1850 it was declared " that by such conscious, wilful, and de-
liberate act such portion of the church becomes formally sepa-
rated from the Catholic body, and can no longer assure to its
members the grace of the sacraments and the remission of sins."
Yet seven out of the thirteen signers inconsistently remained
in a church in which they admitted that salvation was (to say the
least) rather doubtful. The Gorham decision has been improve

1887.] A LAYMAN'S VIEW. 689

on by the Episcopal Church in the United States, which in 1872,
by its bishops assembled in convention, decided that by regene-
ration no moral change was implied. From these decisions it is
clear that both the Anglican and Episcopal churches would en-
counter as many difficulties in establishing a claim to the title of
" Church of the Holy Baptism " as they do to that of " Catholic."
The Church of the Holy Contradictions would be a more appro-
priate title, and one the right to which none would dispute.

To continue the argument, let us admit that the Angli-
can and Episcopal churches have uniformly held the doctrines
laid down in 1632, and examine their claim to be the church of
the apostles and of the early ages of Christianity. To establish
such a claim involves a harmonizing of the Thirty-nine Articles
with the doctrines of the early church attested by the ecclesiasti-
cal writers of that time. This experiment was once tried with
disastrous results to Anglicanism. A little more than fifty years
ago a body of learned men in one of England's great universities
applied themselves to a systematic study of the writings of the
early Fathers those " silent witnesses to the faith and practice
of the church." Century after century they followed through
ponderous tomes the exposition of ancient belief, of truths af-
firmed and of errors condemned ; all, however, gradually point-
ing to the opposite direction in which Anglicanism, and in fact
all Protestantism, lay. At last the crucial test was made and the
Articles subjected to a grammatical dislocation. It was an utter
failure, though attempted by a master mind. It was more than
the majority of Anglicans were prepared for, had it been success-
ful. Condemnation by the church authorities followed, and it
was soon apparent to the more logical of the leaders that the
church of the Fathers must be sought on the Seven Hills and
not at Westminster or Canterbury. There it was found and
hailed as a haven of rest after years of anxiety and doubt by
those earnest men, who were in search of truth and determined to
embrace it, whatever the cost. The " tide which then set in Rome-
ward " has continued to bear on its bosom others who, like those
before them, have found "peace through the truth"; and the
efforts of a few loyal churchmen to infuse the vital spark into a
lifeless institution, and invest with divine authority a mere crea-
tion of the state, has resulted largely in swelling the ranks of
" Rome's recruits."

VOL. XLIV. 44

690 CREEDS, OLD AND NEW. [Feb.,

CREEDS, OLD AND NEW.

As the recovery to health of a sick man is not possible with-
out the restoration to vigor of the weakened vital forces, as the
social evils of to-day can be cured only by the maintenance of
the rights of individuals and the rights of government, so the
evils which afflict Christian society can be removed only by the
eradication of false doctrines and bad morals.

Doctrines of faith and principles of morality are as intimately
united in the Christian system as intellect and will in man. A
perfect moral implies a perfect doctrinal system in Christianity.
Unity in divine charity and hope presupposes unity in faith.
This truth was well expressed by the late Professor J. L. Diman,
of Brown University, in his lecture on " Historical Basis of Be-
lief."* " Catholic unity," he says, "can never result from mere
agreement in practical aims ; it must rest on the hearty recog-
nition of one truth. That there exists such objective truth in-
dependent of every man's opinions must be granted by all who
would not reduce religion down to simple individual conscious-
ness."

Let us consider on what the foundations of faith rest. If we
are shut up to mere abstractions of subjective consciousness, if we
have no means of finding out whether or not our conceptions of
truth have any objective reality, belief is manifestly only a delu-
sion. Belief ought to be the result of knowledge. There must be
an objective fact which determines the mind before it can proper-
ly judge. Christianity, then, is a system of objective truths, or
it is nothing. Belief which is in conformity with these objective
truths alone constitutes true faith ; yet it must be borne in mind
that belief may, in certain instances, be materially erroneous by
no fault of the believer, but this in no way changes the principle
that objective truth ought to be the only authority for belief.

What means have we of knowing whether or not our belief
is in conformity with objective truth ? If it be granted that there
is objective truth, an external as well as internal criterion, which
testifies to the conformity or non-conformity of subjective belief
with the objective truth, will be found, and these two testimonies
necessarily confirm each other.

* Boston Lectures, 1870. Historical Basis of Belief. By Rev. J. L. Diman, Professor of
History in Brown University,

1 887.] CREEDS, OLD AND NEW. 691

Rev. Daniel Curry, D.D., in his paper "On the Present Ne-
cessity for a Restatement of Christian Doctrines," read before the
Cleveland Congress of Churches and published in the Methodist
Revieiv for September, 1886, bases his argument for the necessity
of restatement of Christian doctrines on what he calls the " mu-
tability of men's conceptions " of the objective truths of Chris-
tianity, which objective truths, as he says, are always the same.

If the objective truths of Christianity are unchangeable, how
can our conceptions of them be mutable and be true? Would
not this mutability of conception evidence non-conformity of the
conception with the external fact? A true conception is one
which corresponds with the fact, and is unchangeable because
the objective truth is unchangeable. Our conceptions of facts
can never change. It is only our conceptions of theories that
are mutable. Fact cannot revert to theory. A revelation is not
a revelation if our belief or knowledge of it is not immutable.

What, then, is the nature of the creeds of Christianity ? The
authoritative creeds and formularies of the Catholic Church are
certainly not inspired, like the Sacred Scriptures, for the church
might have expressed the truths of revelation in different lan-
guage, but the substance of her doctrines could not be different ;
yet, as promulgated by the church, the adopted creeds and for-
mularies are of themselves irreformable, and any attempts of in-
dividuals to restate or modify them can only result in further
disintegration of belief.

The Augsburg and Westminster Confessions of faith did not
professedly assail the teaching of the Apostles' Nicaeno-Constan-
tinopolitan and Athanasian creeds, but denied their divine au-
thority ; and the breach of Christian unity made by the early
followers of Luther and Calvin was not so wide as that presaged
to-day by the advocates of a " new theology." Such changes as
Dr. Curry proposes in the interests of Christian unity are only
so many attempts at the further dissolution of Protestantism.
He is advocating unity and disruption in the same breath ; for,
instead of seeking unity in the unbroken body of the original
Christian society, he turns to the fragmentary portion of Chris-
tendom ; for, he argues, the necessities of the age, the change in
the forms of religious thought of our day, require a modification
of the formularies of Christian doctrine, and he asserts that Pro-
testants have a fuller and clearer understanding of Christian doc-
trines than the Holy Catholic Church, and are the " best minds of
Christendom." The symbols of the Christian faith, he tells us,
should be re-examined and restated not once but from time to

692 CREEDS, OLD AND NEW. [Feb.,

time. Is not this nostrum for dissension a strange formula for
unity ?

According to Protestants the Roman Catholic Church has
only been guilty of changing and adding to the faith, but Dr.
Curry and the new school would do worse than they accuse us
of having done they would have perpetual creed-evolution as
their principle!

Protestantism, he tells us, from the beginning has been an
" unstable equilibrium." He is right. The Reformers were in
fact evolutionists in doctrine ; but a nothing could produce some-
thing, an effect could be without a cause, if they or any others
could evolve a lost truth of Christianity. But Dr. Curry wishes
that the evolution had been greater, and laments that so many
Protestants have been only partially emancipated from the thral-
dom of the Western Church, and actually considers it a blessing
that theCalvinistic churches became more widely separated from
the Roman Catholic Church through adopting a false doctrine
on divine predestination and free will while the Catholic Church
had the true doctrine.

He wants unity of all Christians, but at the same time he
wants, as his theory of creeds shows, the breach between Pro-
testantism and Catholicism widened. He holds to " the right of
personal free thought in all religious matters," which principle
would lead to a perfectly creedless religion, if such a thing were
possible. If "personal free thought in all religious matters" is
man's right and privilege, then all the creeds of churches are
tyrannical impositions ; yet he says that " a basis of theological
opinions made up of the great fundamental truths and doctrines
of the Bible unmixed with fatal misbeliefs, set forth in plain and
comprehensive truths, is necessary to the best interests of the
church." What criterion has he for determining what doctrines
and truths are fundamental and what are " fatal misbeliefs "? If,
for example, Christ has given his church the power of binding
and loosing, as by far the greater number of Christians believe,
is not the contrary doctrine a fatal misbelief? Catholics have
both internal and external evidence that Christ did give this
power to his church, while Dr. Curry has only the subjective
opinions of men for his belief to the contrary. Whoever denies
the external authority of the church sweeps away the objective
criterion of what is true and false teaching in religious matters.

The theory of creed-evolution is the very opposite of the
Catholic teaching. The old creeds that is, the Catholic creeds
are unchangeable and irreformable, while he new creeds of

1887.] CREED s, OLD AND NEW. 693

Protestantism are perpetually changeable, and are so ex professo.
The reason is plain: the former declare divine facts and truths,
the latter only human theories about these facts and truths.

Not only is creed-evolution opposed to Catholic teaching-, but
to the very idea of Christianity as a system of objective truths
and facts. It directly tends to destroy faith, which can only have
certainty as its basis. Happily this principle of Protestantism has
not been carried out in practice. The positive teaching of Pro-
testantism derived from Catholicism has been its mainstay. The
Apostles' Creed is the strongest form of words in the Methodist
statement of belief. It may be said in general that among all the
Protestant sects those which have most tenaciously held to the
old creeds have been most vigorous. To-day the new-departure
theologians of all the sects are the subverters of those sects.
Whether a reaction in favor of the old Catholic doctrines will yet
take place among the Lutherans, Calvinists, and Wesleyans, as it
has among the Anglicans, it is hard to tell. Possibly the unity
movement, like the Oxford Tractarian movement, may yet lead
great numbers of sincere souls into the Catholic Church. The
Catholic Church to-day is fast outstripping all the sects in this
country, as the great mass of baptized Catholics hold strongly to
their faith, while the mass of non-Catholics are not adherents of
any church. The Catholic Church, also, probably receives as
many adult converts as any Protestant sect receives of the same
class; and the spread of the Catholic faith will tend to check the
growth of new creeds.

As to our faith we are secure. That " the gates of hell shall
not prevail " against his church is the promise of Christ. The
old creeds will never be superseded.

694 " CLIFFORD ABBEY" [Feb.,

"CLIFFORD ABBEY."

" IT is a marvel to me, my dear friend, that you do not spend
more time at the Abbey. To my mind it is the fairest of your
possessions." So spoke the Hon. Edward Marsden, M.P., ad-
dressing- his college intimate, Lord Clifford.

The two gentlemen, comfortably ensconced in antique arm-
chairs of carven oak, were idly smoking, and chatting with the
ease and frankness appertaining to old friendship.

" I see," said the host in reply to his guest, " that this ancient
library has a charm for you ; yet my lady regards it with positive
aversion. Not that she fears the good monks who once inhab-
ited the Abbey still haunt these old cloisters with their ghostly
presence, but because of the tragic fate of a later owner. The
place, as you know, was bestowed by Henry VIII. upon one of
my progenitors, who basked in the* sunshine of the royal favor.
Its legend is a weird tradition, credited by many of the county
folk of high and low degree, and instilled into my lady's mind
when she visited here as a child. I have occupied a few random
hours in writing the story from a sketch found in the journal of a
gentlewoman of the time." So saying, his lordship unlocked a
quaint cabinet, took from a drawer a manuscript yellow with age,
and another freshly written, and gave them to his friend.

u As at college you were something of a poetic dreamer," sai<
he, " perhaps you will be interested in this dramatic record,
which I have rendered into more modern English. It will serv<
to pass the time while with the steward I go over the business oi
the estate."

Left alone, Marsden leisurely took up the sombre history an<
read as follows :

The Lady Katharine Clifford reigned at the Abbey reigne(
as imperiously as Queen Bess upon the royal throne. A beauti-
ful widow, with one child, the heir to the fertile Abbey lands, sh<
ruled in isolated grandeur, though at times she was wont to mil
gle with the gay society of the court. Yet what more coul<
she desire from the favor of the sovereign? Young, fair, am
wealthy, why was she not happy in governing- her own domain?

Few, in that age, would question her right and that of hei
boy to the estates bestowed upon her whilom lord by roy<

1887.] " CLIFFORD ABBEY" 695

bounty because of the return to the ancient faith of the noble-
man who had held them in the time of " bluff King Harry."
Her titles were clear enough to content the wooers who knocked
at the Abbey gate, attracted by the charms of the lady and the
glitter of her gold. But she looked coldly upon these gallants,
for her day-dreams were ever of the young Lord Harold, whose
handsome presence and courtly address had won him high favor
with Elizabeth, despite the rumor, which had not, perchance,
reached the royal ear, that he, like his father, the former lord of
the Abbey, was a Nonconformist.

For many reasons he was the hero of Lady Katharine's fancy.
His appearance had captivated her imagination ; while, soltened
by tender musing, she felt that by a marriage with him she
might render him tardy justice for the loss of his most valuable
inheritance. Then came the alarming consideration: What if,
from fear of the queen's anger, he should conform to the religion
of the court? Would not royalty restore to him the possessions
of his family? What then of her claims? Where her security?
Therefore she strove by .many arts to win the admiration and
love of the young nobleman. But in vain. The handsome cour-
tier regarded her first with high-bred indifference, then with
calm disdain, which so stung the proud spirit of the dame that
she vowed he should marry her, from fear if not from love, or
feel the power of her vengeance.

Of the Lady Katharine's plots and intrigues, however, he was
unconscious. Not the hope of bettering his fortunes, not the
promptings of ambition nor the flattery of a sovereign's favor,
held Lord Harold enchained at court; naught but the blue eyes
of Edith Somerset, a little maid-of-honor.

Edith and Harold had long been secretly betrothed, but the
troubles of the time had delayed their union. An orphan of noble
birth, the young girl had, according to the law, become a ward
of the queen, who graciously condescended to command atten-
dance upon her royal person. Singularly guileless and sweet,
Edith seemed to her lover an angel of goodness amid the vanity
and frivolity of the court. He dreaded to leave her exposed to
its noxious atmosphere, and quietly matured his plans for an early
marriage and flight into France, where together, with the rem-
nant of their fortunes, they might begin a life of happiness.
Alas ! on the eve of success these designs were mysteriously
frustrated.

Wherefore had they failed ? That were best known to Harold's
evil genius, the Lady Katharine, whose jealous rage cried for

696 " CLIFFORD ABBEY." [Feb.,

vengeance and caused him to be inexplicably denounced as a
conspirator of a supposed plot in favor of the unfortunate Queen
of Scots.

At the trial all marked the fearless and proud bearing of the
chivalrous nobleman. When informed of the charges against
him he cried : " Who dare accuse me of treason? I have ever
been a faithful subject of Her Gracious Majesty Elizabeth."

Yet in those dark days the balance of life and death was held,
not by justice, but by a capricious and imperious sovereign.
Before the setting sun Lord Harold was condemned to die to
die at sunrise of the second day.

What words can depict the agony of his betrothed, poor
Edith "Somerset, at the dreadful tidings? Struck down like a
flower, her young life blighted ere its bloom, long she lay insen-
sible, till it seemed that she would never rally from the shock.
But anon consciousness returned, and with it the courage of a
newly-awakened hope. Arousing herself, she summoned a wan
smile to her despairing face and sought the presence of the
queen.

Verily, the arts of woman are best employed in pleading for
one she loves. The death-warrant had been signed as the royal
retinue was about setting forth upon a journey to the castle of a
powerful earl one of those gracious but ruinous visits for which
Elizabeth was famed. They were now far from London, and her
majesty, after the exercise of imperial power, was in a conde-
scending, holiday mood. Edith's mention of Lord Harold's name
was, however, greeted with an ominous frown which would have
struck terror to a heart less brave. But " love is stronger than
death " ; gladly would she purchase his life with her own. Thus,
as if unconscious of the gathering storm, and as though the
young nobleman's impending fate but recalled the incidents of
by-gone days for they had played as children together she
spoke of the time when he first beheld his sovereign.

A chivalrous and romantic boy, her highness won his alle-
giance as the Queen of Beauty, to whom, with poetic enthusiasm,
he was wont to indite sonnets and sing soft madrigals as the love-
liest regal maiden that ever graced a throne. She remembered
his joy in coming to court, his assiduity in the royal service, his
silent homage and zeal in all that might minister to her comfort
or pleasure, oft in trifles which must pass unnoticed, but all from
devotion to her majesty, nothing for reward.

She spoke of gala-days when the court was a brilliant scene, a
glittering, gorgeously-apparelled throng of handsome courtiers

1887.] " CLIFFORD ABBEY" 697

and beautiful women. And when she, his child-friend Edith,
ventured to remark to him many of the well-favored maids-of-
honor, he had made answer: "I have no eyes for them, gentle
lady ; but how wondrous fair is the queen ! "

Thus with sweet art did Edith dwell upon the unwitting fol-
lies of Lord Harold's boyhood, and summon his chance words of
admiration to plead for him now with the vanity of Elizabeth.
Taught by the instincts of love, so well had the girl spoken that
the sovereign, accessible to flattery if not to pity, declared her
royal heart to be moved to compassion. Inditing a pardon with
her own hand, she despatched it in all haste to London by Sir

Robert , while Edith knelt to her in fervent gratitude, and the

court extolled her majesty's gracious clemency. Right joyfully
did the jovial knight set out upon f his mission. It was Christmas-
tide ; hence a thrice happy task to be the bearer of good tidings.
Swiftly his charger bore him along the frozen highways, past
scenes of merry-making, on through the silent forest. Thus for
leagues he journeyed, heeding neither weariness nor cold. The
twilight came, the stars gleamed in the blue vault above him, and
at last the rising moon revealed the towers of Clifford Abbey.

A light shone from the ancient library. At the sight the
pulses of the good Sir Robert throbbed with delight Oft had
he come a-wooing to this frowning mansion, unrepelled by the
contrary moods of the fair Jady of his devotion. Did not rumor
whisper that he was her most favored suitor? Why not tarry
now and greet her? He had the night before him in which to
complete the journey to London. Why not seek refreshment for
his faltering steed, relief from the chill and faintness to which he
himself seemed about to succumb?

Riding round the stone parapet till beneath the casement
whence beamed the enticing light, he paused a moment, then
in a mellow voice softly sang the first strains of a popular sere-
nade. Sweetly the melody floated upon the evening air, rang out
clearer and richer, awaking musical echoes from woodland and
hill. Ere the lay was ended the casement opened and the Lady
Katharine in courteous accents bade him a hospitable welcome.
Pages threw open the oaken portal, led away the horse, served
the knight with wine and good cheer, then left him to narrate to
his lady-love the gossip of the court and the object of his mis-
sion.

Breathlessly she listened to the tale. At the mention of the
pardon she could scarce refrain from a movement of alarm and
anger. Was, then, her cherished vengeance to be finally wrested

698 " CLIFFORD ABBEY" [Feb.,

from her? Must she still live in dread of being one day turned
away a beggar from the Abbey gate ?

"And thou, Sir Robert, art the messenger of life!" cooed
she in entrancing approval, as she poured for him a beaker of
blood- red wine. " I would that I might look upon the magic
paper granting length of days ! "

The weak noble gazed in enchantment upon the siren. The
grateful warmth of the fire, the lights, the treacherous wine, and
the sleeping-draught which she had secretly administered were
wafting him to a world of unrealities. Mechanically he placed
the precious parchment in her hands, while the soft, low tones of
her voice charmed his senses and held him spell-bound. Fainter
grew the sweet cadences, fainter, till they lapsed to silence. The
unwary Sir Robert slumbered in his chair; the midnight hour
had chimed, the fated morn had come, and London was still
many miles beyond.

" Sleep well, Sir Knight," murmured the lady mockingly.
" Well hast thou served my end ! Revenge is mine. At sunrise
Lord Harold shall die ! "

In the mad joy of her triumph she paced the long library, the
paper still within her cruel grasp. What had she to fear, sur-
rounded only by the tomes and folios of monastic days? Ranged
on dusty shelves from floor to roof of the hall, each in its dingy
binding the exact counterpart of its. fallow, they seemed like the
mummies of a former civilization. Would not they be the most
faithful guardians of her secret? Trembling and at random she
slipped the precious document between the covers of a volume,
then fled to her apartments.

But fearful spectres haunted her rest. 'Twas as though the
fiends had already obtained possession of her soul. She awoke
in terror ; the form of the condemned nobleman stood beside her,
a terrible, accusing spirit. In agony sire arose. Perchance there
might yet be time. She would not doom herself to thus endure
the horrors of perdition. She would to the library, secure the
pardon, rouse the sleeping, faithless knight, and bid him ride a
wild, mad race with death. She sped to execute her purpose.
Alas! In dismay she glanced over the countless, sombre vol-
umes. In which had she placed the paper ? One of these musty
books held the treasure she now desired above ail else in the
world "the life of the young lord" but which?

O cruel tomes, that gave no clue, guarding with fatal
fidelity the dreadful secret confided to them ! The hours pass-
ed. Lady Katharine lived ages of remorse and despair, travers-

1 887.] " CLIFFORD ABBEY" 6^9

ing the ancient library in her fruitless, hopeless search. The sun
rose cruelly bright upon as fair a day as ever witnessed so foul
a deed.

Its earliest rays fell upon the slumbering Sir Robert. He
stirred uneasily, awoke, glanced about him as though dazed and
dreaming, then started up in consternation, exclaiming: " Where-
fore am I here? Merciful Heaven! the sun! and Lord Harold?"

The wretched Lady Katharine quailed before him.

" False one, this is thy work," he cried in rage, appalled at
the crime doubtless already consummated. " The paper ! " he re-
iterated in unavailing fury " woman, what didst thou with
the paper? Accursed be thou! there is k blood upon thy fair,
jewelled hands."

In a paroxysm of remorse she clung to him, vainly striving
to stem the torrent of maledictions called down upon her head.

He flung her off, rushed into the close where waited his
charger, leaped to the saddle, and rode recklessly away away
from the Abbey, away from the court, for ever.

And Lady Katharine ?

Naught could calm the delirium of her despair. Reason had
fled. Ever and anon she grieved in heart-rending accents over
the fate of Lord Harold, then shrieked in anguish that retribu-
tion pursued her ; and again her voice was low and enticing, as
fantasy renewed the scene with Sir Robert which had won him
from his duty. For years she wandered amid the gloom of that
dreary library, ever seeking the lost parchment ever seeking in
vain. Here she raved away the remnant of existence ; here she
died, clutching an old volume the leaves of which she had been
turning with pathetic zeal and haste.

It is said that still she seeks the missing document within that
shadowy hall. Amid the fury of the wintry tempest or the mur-
mur of the summer breeze the wail of the expiatory spirit thrills
the terror-stricken villagers, and oft at eventide is the belated
traveller lured from his path by the Circean echoes that call from
Clifford Abbey.

Slowly Edward Marsden laid aside the fascinating manu-
script, musing on the tragic drama therein recorded. An un-
canny spell seemed upon him. Was it here, perchance in this an-
tique chair, that Sir Robert sat, charmed by the enchantress and
unmindful of fealty to sovereign or friendship ?

At the thought the fire appeared to burn less brightly, the
lights flickered, the shadows assumed fantastic forms. It was a

700 "CLIFFORD ABBEY^ [Feb.,

mild night, and at times a low, moaning- sound re-echoed through
the apartment. A .violent thunder-storm raged without. At
intervals the lightning illumined the nooks and crannies of the
old hall with a spectral glare.

To obtain a respite from his morbid fancies Marsden paced
up and down with measured tread. At length he paused and
glanced at the mouldering tomes which encompassed him upon
all sides like an army of gray ghosts. To dispel the illusion he
took down a volume at hazard, idly wondering what vanished
hand had penned it, what message it held for him. As he opened
and peered into its quaint pages something fell at his feet. What
could it be ? A worm-eaten, yellow parchment! In a tremor of
mysterious dread he stooped to recover it, yet stood aghast at
the sight.

Was he awake or dreaming? With an antiquarian's know-
ledge he recognized the faded characters, the royal seal, the
proud signature, "Elizabeth, Regina"

" It is the pardon," he cried, and in a frenzy of insane tri-
umph he waved the ancient parchment in his hand.

At that moment the wind shrieked with unearthly fury, a
sudden gust swept through the room, and the old library swayed
in the blast ; there was a blaze of light, a terrific crash, and the
parchment was gone.

Of course when Edward Marsden related his story to his
friend, the practical-minded Lord Clifford laughed, and said he
had dreamed a dream, from which the sudden storm had rudely
wakened him. But even to this day Edward Marsden doubts
whether that ancient parchment was snatched from him by a
ghostly hand, or whether the sudden gust had blown it up the
wide chimney-place. Certain it is that, though he instituted
careful searches, the parchment was never found.

i88;.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 701

A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

THE latest novel by Madame Durand (Henri Greville) is
Count Xavier (Boston: Ticknor & Co.) It has the false tone
of all Henri Greville's books. Love is, of course, the theme
that kind of love which absorbs morality, good manners, pro-
priety, and everything reasonable. The characters are all Rus-
sians, and very uninteresting specimens of the subjects of the
czar, without whom no modern novel seems to be complete.
Count Xavier is handsome, and he is loved by a peasant girl.
The peasant-girl begins to pine away. He meets the illegitimate
child of his uncle, called Thecla. Thecla begins to pine away
too, when her mother, with more discretion than she had shown
in her own youth, takes her from the castle that Count Xavier
has inherited from his uncle. Count Xavier concludes to marry
Thecla, and, after some complications, they are married. The
discarded peasant-girl changes her mind, does not pine away,
and becomes nurse to the child of Count Xavier. What healthy-
minded person wants to read a novel which has no prominent
quality except sentimental artificiality? The atmosphere of
Henri Greville's novels is like that of a close room impreg-
nated with heavy and cheap perfumes.

Two new novels by Ouida and Rhoda Broughton have been
sent to us, announced with a great flourish. They are both evi-
dences that unlimited audacity of language, aided by unrestrained
imaginations, will not always pass for brilliancy. In fact, when a
femme-auteur as Louis Veuillot calls the class of writers of
which Ouida and Rhoda Broughton are representative be-
gins to be slangy and immodest, she must become more so
with each book she writes, in order to hold her public, until
she merges into blasphemy and obscenity. Ouida, who has
become a worn-out writing hack, has reached this last stage.
A House Party (London: Hurst & Blackett) is a story of adul-
tery. The scene is laid among English dukes and duchesses.
The owners of an English country-house invite a number of aris-
tocratic people there, that the Sixth Commandment may be
broken with politeness. Ouida tells about this in a language
invented by herself. The French would sneer at such a book
not because of its immorality, but because of its stupidity. Dr.
iladelphia: Lippincott & Co.) is a story told wearisome-

702 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

ly in the present tense. There is a country-girl, whose vigorous
arms, pet foxes, and flowers grow more and more tiresome.
There is one of the creatures created by Rhoda Broughton, sen-
sual and silly and slangy ; and there is a vulgar married woman
who enamels her complexion, and who is divided between love
for her child and passion for a man who is not her husband. A
House Party and Dr. Cupid, and all other books by their authors,
are signs of social decomposition, like phosphorescent lights over
stagnant pools where slimy things breed and die.

Three notable novels are Sarracinesca, by F. Marion Craw-
ford ; The Ministers Charge; or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel
Barker, by William Dean Howells; and In the Clouds, by Charles
Egbert Craddock (Miss Murfree). These three authors are
Americans. Sarracinesca is a work of art, of admirable clarity
and harmony of style and truth of portraiture. Mr. Crawford's
pictures of Roman society before the spoliation are admirable.
The relations of the old Roman prince and his son are described
in a manner worthy of Thackeray. And so firm and true is Mr.
Crawford's treatment of his epoch and his personages that so
far as Sarracinesca is concerned it is impossible not to compare
him with the greatest masters of his craft. It is a pity that the
story of the Princess Sarracinesca could not have been written
without the putting into it of that illicit passion that sent Dante's
Paolo and Francesca to hell ; but it is plain that Mr. Crawford,
unlike the femmes-auteurs, does not describe passion in order to
inspire passion in others. Mr. Crawford's opening chapters, in
which he satirically contrasts the Rome of Pope Pius IX. with the
Rome of the spoliators, are delightful. His is a very strong pen ;
it is well to see it in use against the vain and superficial spirit
which is flippantly destroying at once the religion and the art of
the world.

Mr. Crawford makes an etching of the Roman as he was and
is :

" But Rome in those days was peopled solely by Romans, whereas now
a large proportion of the population consists of Italians from the north
and south, who have been attracted to the capital by many interests
races as different from its former citizens as Germans or Spaniards, and, un-
fortunately, not disposed to show overmuch good-fellowship or loving-
kindness to the original inhabitants. The Roman is a grumbler by nature,
but he is also a 'peace-at-any-price ' man. Politicians and revolutionary
agents have more than once been deceived by these traits, supposing that
because the Roman grumbled he really desired change, but realizing too
late, when the change has been begun, that the same Roman is but a luke-
warm partisan. The Papal government repressed grumbling as a nuisance,

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 703

and the people consequently took a delight in annoying the authorities by
grumbling in secret places and calling themselves conspirators. The
harmless whispering of petty discontent was mistaken by the Italian party
for the low thunder of a smothered volcano ; but, the change being
brought about, the Italians find to their disgust that the Roman meant
nothing by his "murmurings, and that he now not only still grumbles at
everything, but takes the trouble to fight the government at every point
which concerns the internal management of the city. In the days before
the change a paternal government directed the affairs of the little State,
and thought it best to remove all possibility of strife by giving the grum-
blers no voice in public or economic matters. The grumblers made a
grievance of this ; and then, as soon as the grievance had been redressed,
they redoubled their complaints and retrenched themselves within the
infallibility of inaction, on the principle that men who persist in doing
nothing cannot possibly do wrong."

It is refreshing to read this summing-up of fashionable science
and art:

" Those were the days, too, of the old school of artists men who, if their
powers of creation were not always proportioned to their ambition for ex-
cellence, were as superior to their more recent successors in their pure con-
ceptions of what art should be as Apelles was to the Pompeiian wall paint-
ers, and as the Pompeiians were to modern house-decorators. The age of
Overbeck and the last religious painters was almost past, but the age of
fashionable artistic debauchery had hardly begun. Water- color was in its
infancy; wood-engraving was hardly yet a great profession; but the
' Dirty Boy' had not yet taken a prize at Paris, nor had indecency become
a fine art. The French school had not demonstrated the startling distinc-
tion between the nude and the naked, nor had the English school dreamed
nightmares of anatomical distortion.

" Darwin's theories had been propagated, but had not yet been passed
into law, and very few Romans had heard of them ; still less had any one
been found to assert that the real truth of these theories would be soon de-
monstrated retrogressively by the rapid degeneration of men into apes,
while apes would hereafter have cause to congratulate themselves upon
not having developed into men."

Mr. Howells has neither the dramatic strength of Mr. Craw-
ford, nor his respect for the ideal in literature, nor his fluent
and correct style ; but he, like all the more important male Ame-
rican writers, has absolute purity of tone. Lemuel Barker, the
young New England rustic who goes to Boston, falls into temp-
tation, but into no temptation of the grosser kind in which the
true follower of the realists would delight to wallow. The truth
is that Mr. Howells, though he professes to be a realist and to
describe life as it is, is not a realist. He paints the life around
him as he chooses to see it. He fits his human beings for presen-
tation in the pages of a family magazine and in novels which may

704 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

be read by every young girl in the country. He impresses us as
a sincere and pure-minded gentleman who arranges his groups,
carefully chosen, each member with his working-clothes on, and
then photographs them. But this is not realism. Turgueneff,
and Tolstoi, and De Goncourt, and, above all, Zola, would repu-
diate this method and manner. When Mr. Howells aims to be
most realistic he generally succeeds in being commonplace.

His women characters are carefully photographed and gently
colored until they almost resemble the miniatures of an artist.
The trifles of life are so much a part of the surroundings of
women that when Mr. Howells describes the trifles and the
moods which turn on these trifles, we think that is, if we do not
think very closely that we recognize the woman. Statira and
'MandaGreer, the giggling working-girls of The Minister 's Charge,
are known by certain tricks of manner and speech common to the
most frivolous class of Boston working-girls. But we learn no-
thing of their inner lives if they have any. Lemuel's love-mak-
ing in the boarding-house room is innocent enough ; but we feel
that it is not Lemuel's tender New England conscience or Statira's
principles which make it innocent, but the fact that Mr. Howells
(though invisible, and with an eye to the fact that he writes for
American families) is a most careful chaperon.

The Rev. Mr. Sewall, the minister whose amiable habit of
telling pleasant fibs has brought Lemuel to Boston, is a charming
character. He is true to life and we really must admit it
something more than a photograph. He ministers to a very re-
spectable Boston flock ; he is sincere in spite of his amiable fibs ;
he wants to do right and to be father-confessor to his people,
without the faintest knowledge of moral theology or any train-
ing for the work, except a good heart and some experience of the
human race in general and the Bostonians in particular. If Mr.
Howells had intended to show how inefficient the most conscien-
tious Protestant minister is, so far as the healing of mental and
spiritual wounds go, he could not have better demonstrated it
than in showing us Mr. Sewall. Mrs. Sewall is a woman of
strong common sense, who has suffered much from the subtle
super-sensitiveness of her husband. To her Lemuel, with his
recurring mental difficulties and his demands on the minister's
time for sermon-writing, is a great trial.

Lemuel in Boston develops a gradual appreciation of the
niceties of life. He has left a sordid country home, where his
mother wears bloomers and his brother-in-law does all manner
of unpleasant things. He runs up the scale from horse-car con-

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW ROOKS. 705

ductor to reader to a cultured old Bostonian. He thinks himself
hardly good enough to marry the giggling Statira, pushed on
by her energetic friend, 'Manda Greer. And the Rev. Mr. Sewall
thinks, too, that he will throw himself away if he tie himself to
the pretty, silly, and hopelessly narrow-minded Statira. In the
meantime Lemuel meets a girl higher in the social plane an
artist and Lemuel and she fall in love with each other. Mrs.
Sewall is indignant at the concern which Lemuel's friends show
in the fear that Statira may drag him down, after the marriage
has been arranged.

" ' Oh ! his future. Drag him down! Why don't you think of her, go-
ing up there to that dismal wilderness to spend her days in toil and pov-
erty, with a half-crazy mother-in-law and a rheumatic brother-in-law, in
such a looking hovel?' Mrs. Sewall did not group these disadvantages
conventionally; but they were effective."

Lemuel himself feels that he is a martyr. He contemplates
taking his wife back to his native village, Willoughby Pastures,
and of gradually causing that place to live up to him and Bos-
ton. The young artist is in the greatest affliction. She knows
that Lemuel loves her better than he loves Statira. She asks
Mr. Sewall's advice in the matter, without mentioning names.
He gives her very unsatisfactory counsel. And so Lemuel
though Mr. Howells, everybody in the book, and perhaps the
too sympathetic reader fears that he is "throwing himself
away" drifts towards matrimony with Statira. Statira is
threatened with consumption; we are divided between a com-
ing pathetic death-bed and a possible unhappy marriage. But
when we have been made sufficientlv afraid that she shall die,
and quite as much afraid that she will live, Mr. Howells gets her
to change her mind, and she goes off with her steadfast friend,
'Manda Greer, in search of a better climate. In this way the
cunning author leaves Lemuel free to marry the young artist.

'Manda Greer is a vigorous creature, and the episode of her
attack on Lemuel because he lets Statira pine away without pro-
posing is truly natural, and in a play would " bring down the
house " at the end of an act.

Miss Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock) is not one of Louis
Veuillot's "femmes-auteurs? who have increased so greatly of late
among our neighbors, the English, that Koko, in The Mikado, as-
serts that they " never will be missed." There is " too much
paper" in In the Clouds (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston and
New York), and yet it would be hard to say what could be left
out. Miss Murfree has practically discovered the mountains of

VOL. XLIV. 45

706 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

East Tennessee and added a new world to American literature.
It is a fresh and breezy world. Nobody that has acquired a taste
for it will ever breathe the patchouli and carbonic-acid gas of
Ouida, Rhoda Broughton, and their train of " lady novelists." It
is the fashion to compare Miss Murfree with George Eliot. Why,
it would puzzle even the people who compare Thackeray with
Dickens, or Nathaniel Hawthorne with Irving, to tell. In the
Clouds is certainly as great a novel as Adam Bede, which also has
the fault of containing "too much paper." Mink, the hero of In
the Clouds, is as careful a study of human selfishness as Tito in
Romola, though Mink somewhat redeems himself in the end.
But Miss Murfree has none of George Eliot's self-consciousness,
and thank Heaven ! none of her philosophy.

The "poor whites" of the Tennessee mountains, with their
rudimentary religion, their crude manners and shiftless ways,
are painted with a sure hand, artistic skill, and a sympathy felt
by the reader, but hardly verbally expressed by Miss Murfree.
Alethea's home is thus depicted :

"The little log : cabin set among its scanty fields, its weed-grown 'gyar-
den spot,' and its few fruit-trees, was poor of its 'kind. The clap-boards of
its roof were held in place by poles laid athwart them, with large stones
piled between to weight them down. The chimney was of clay and sticks,
and leaned away from the wall. In a corner of the rickety rail-fence a
gaunt, razor backed hog lay grunting drowsily. Upon a rude scaffold to-
bacco-leaves were suspended to dry. Even the martin-house was humble
and primitive merely a post with a cross-bar, from which hung a few large
gourds with a cavity in each, whence the birds were continually fluttering.
Behind it all, the woods of the steep ascent seemed to touch the sky. The
place might give a new meaning to exile, a new sentiment to loneliness.
Seldom it heard from the world so seldom that when the faint rifle-shots
sounded in the distance a voice from within demanded eagerly, 'What on
yearth be that, Lethe ? '

" ' Shootin' fur beef down in the cove, I reckon, from thar firin' so con-
stant,' drawled Alethea.

" ' Ye dunno/ said the unseen, unexpectedly derisive at this conjecture.
'They mought be a-firin' thar bullets into each other. Nobody kin count
on a man by hisself, but a man in company with a rifle air jes' a outdacious,
jubious critter.' "

Alethea's stepmother spoke as one who had much experience
of the male sex as found in the land of hidden whiskey-stills and
moonlighters. Alethea is the heroine of the book, and a noble
one. It is a great thing to say of Miss Murfree's art that the
girl's drawl and queer pronunciation never seem ridiculous or
repel our sympathy. But never for a moment are the outside
characteristics, rude, uncouth, ungrammatical, lost sight of. She
is as noble as Jeannie Deans, and we forget her tricks of speech

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 707

and her ignorance in the greatness of her heart and her self-sac-
rifice. She has a keener sense of right than most of the moun-
taineers, whose principal article of belief seems to be firm faith
in the eternal torments to be suffered by their neighbors. Mink,
a handsome, gay, but shallow herdsman, has been making love to
her. Her stepmother thus sums up the position at the begin-
ning of the story:

' ' An' ye tired his patience out the critter had mo' 'n I gin him credit fur
an' druv him off at last through wantin' him to be otherwise. An' now
forlks 'low ez him an' Elviry Crosby air a-goin' ter marry. I'll be bound she
don't harry him none 'bout'n his ways, 'kase her mother tole me ez she air
mighty nigh a idjit 'bout'n him, an' hev turned off Peter Rood, who she
hed promised ter marry, though the weddin' day hed been set, an' Pete air
wuth forty sech ez Mink.' "

From Alethea's attempt to bring Mink up to her level, and to
make him follow the path her untutored sense of right points
out, many evils flow. Mink becomes entangled in the net of the
law, Peter Rood dies suddenly during a scene of great but re-
strained power, and Alethea's true character is brought out by
severe strain and suffering. In the Clouds is not a hopeful book,
it is sometimes sombre, but it is relieved by delightful touches of
humor. Alethea's aunt, a remarkable personage, furnishes many
of them:

" The log-cabin had heard the river sing for nearly a century. It ap-
peared for many years the ready prey of decay; the chimney leaned from
the wall, the daubing was falling from the chinking, there were holes in
the floor and roof. Suddenly a great change came over it. The frivolity
of glass enlivened the windows,-where batten shutters had formerly suf-
ficed; a rickety little porch was added; a tiny room was partitioned off
from this, and Mrs. Purvine rejoiced in the distinction of possessing a com-
pany bed-room, which was far from being a haven of comfort to the occa-
sional occupant of those close quarters. She had always been known to har-
bor certain ambitions. Her husband's death, some two or three years before,,
had given her liberty to express her tastes more fully than when hampered
by his cautious conservatism. And now, although the fields might be
overrun with weeds, and the sheep have the rot and the poultry the
cholera, and the cow go dry, and the ' gyarden truck ' defer to the crab-
grass, and the bees clever insects prepare only sufficient honey for their
own use, Mrs. Purvine preserved the appearance of having made a great
rise in life, and was considered by the casual observer a ' mighty spry wid-
der woman.' Such a one as Mrs. Sayles shook her head and spared not
the vocabulary. ' Dely,' she would observe, 'air my husband's sister, an' I
an't goin' to make no words about her. Ef she was ennybody else's sister,
I'd up and down declar ez she hev been snared in the devices o' the devil,,
fur sech pride ez hern an't godley naw, sir! nur religion nurther. Glass
in the winder ! Shucks ! She'd better be thinkin' 'bout gittin' light on sal-
vationthat she hed ! Forlks ez knowed Dely whenst she war a gal knowed

A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

she war headin' and sot agin her elders, an' run away from home ter git
married, an' this is what kern of sech onregenerate ways. Glass in the
winder! I'll be bound the devil looks through that winder every day at
yer Aunt Dely whenst she sits thar and spins. Naw, sir, yer Aunt Dely '11
remember that winder in the darkness o' Torment, an' ef she war ennybody

else's sister than my own husband's I'd say so.' "

Mrs. Purvine also has her own religious opinions. When
Mink, in hiding-, asks what she will say if they " ax her," she
promptly replies:

'"Waal, lies is healthy.' Mrs. Purvine accommodated her singular
ethics to many emergencies. ' Churchyards are toler'ble full, but thar an't
.nobody thar ez died from tellin' lies. Not but what I'm a perfessin' Chris-
tian,' she qualified, with a qualm of conscience, 'an' hev renounced deceit
in general ; but if ennybody kerns hyar inquirin' roun' 'bout my business
what I done with this little mite o' meat, an' that biscuit, an' the t'other
pot o' coffee I answer the foolish accordin' to his folly, like the Bible tells
me, an' send him rejicin' on his way.' "

The character of Judge Gvvmnan is strong, perfectly under-
stood by the author, and perfectly expressed. For a time a
slight fear arises that he may marry Alethea, by whose beauty
and nobility he is evidently moved. This could have only made
both more unhappy than they are finally left by the author; for
no observer of human life can doubt that if the judge in Whit-
tier's sentimental verses had married Maud Muller it would have
been a bad thing for both of them. Judge Gwinnan's case is
somewhat analogous. Miss Murfree's In the Clouds is an impor-
tant addition to genuine American literature.

Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson's Rodman the Keeper
(New York : Harper & Bros.) is a volume of short stories. East
Angels, clever as it was, left a bad taste in the mouth. There was
no excuse for the suggestion of immorality introduced into one
scene of that well-told story. In Rodman the Keeper there is an
intense love of color in nature. Floridian everglades, rivers, and
orange-groves start out vividly before our eyes, as the figures
do in the popular cycloraraas of the battles of the late civil war.
Miss Woolson's men, like the men created by most women
writers, are artificial and priggish. " Miss Elizabetha " is a
story in Miss Woolson's best manner. There is a refined and
soft-toned description of the quiet life of Miss Elizabetha in her
house on the Florida coast. She teaches her nephew ancient
romanzas, learned long ago, to the accompaniment of a tinkling
piano. Miss Elizabetha, once a gentlewoman of means, teaches
music, sells the product of her orange-grove, plaits palmetto
all for the sake of hoarding money for her half-Spanish nephew.
The sisters at the convent near paid her to teach, "and were glad

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 709

to call in Miss Elizabetha with her trills and quavers ; so the
wiry organ in the little cathedral sounded out the ballads and
romanzas of Monsieur Vicard, and the demoiselles learned to sing
them in their broken French, no doubt greatly to the satisfaction
of the golden-skinned old fathers and mothers on the plantations
down the coast. The padre in charge of the parish had often
importuned Miss Elizabetha to play this organ on Sundays, as
the decorous celebration of High Mass suffered sadly, not to
say ludicrously, from the blunders of poor Sister Paula. But
Miss Elizabetha" who was from the North "briefly refused:
she must draw a line somewhere, and a pagan ceremonial she
could not countenance. The Daarg family, while abhorring
greatly the Puritanism of the New England colonies, had yet
held themselves equally aloof from the image-worship of Rome;
and they had always considered it one of the inscrutable mys-
teries of Providence that the French nation, so skilled in polite
attitude, so versed in the singing of romanzas, should yet have
been allowed to remain so long in ignorance of the correct reli-
gious mean."

But after a while the half-Spanish nephew marries a pretty
Minorcan and reverts to the original type, leaving poor Miss
Elizabetha to wonder where all her thrifty training has gone.
.Miss Woolson is fond of contrasting the hard New England
Puritan with the Creole Catholic, and she succeeds very well in
this ; and Catholics have no reason to complain of her treatment
of such of their qualities as she can grasp. " Sister St. Luke " is
an improbable narrative; but the gentleness, piety, and purity of
the quaint religious are undoubted, though her simpleness is
perhaps somewhat overdrawn.

The novel of Irish domestic life has an exponent of high talent
we are almost justified in using the mighty word genius in
Miss Rosa Mulholland. Her Marcella Grace (Harper & Bros.)
is an admirable novel, in no way inferior, yet differing in quality
from two of the most charming stories of late years, The Wicked
Woods of Tobevervil and The Birds of Killeevy.

For the Old Land, by the late Charles J. Kickham (Dublin:
M. H. Gill & Son), opens with a description of an Irish farm-
interior after the manner of Gerald Griffin, and Mrs. Dwyer's
idiosyncrasies give a promise which the rest of the novel does
not fulfil. The twenty-two illustrations are mostly as bad as
they can be.

The question of satisfying the needs of the poor by curtailing
the privileges and remodelling the habits of the rich is found to
be of ceaseless interest to contemporary novel-writers. Mr.

A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

Walter Besant treats it in his Children of Gibeon (Harper &
Bros.) He does not advocate violent means. So far as we un-
derstand his theory, he means to teach the same lesson that is the
motive of The Old Order Changes and Mostly Fools, lately noticed
here. To close up the chasm yearly widening in civilization
between the rich and the poor, the rich must extend their hearts
and their hands ; voluntary self-sacrifice on their part must fol-
low a completer understanding 1 of the real needs of the poor.
Mr. Besant imagines an improbable plot, in order to make an
impressive novel. Lady Mildred Eldridge adopts the daughter
of a washerwoman who has a large family, and whose husband
in statu quo at the beginning of the story has been a burglar.
She has one infant daughter. She mixes the two girls up call-
ing one Violet, the other Valentine. They are brought up after
the manner of patrician young women. Valentine studies the
working-people in London, and as nearly as possible makes her-
self one of them, in the belief that, when Lady Mildred will de-
clare which is which, she will be found to be the washerwoman's
daughter. She gets very near to her brothers and sisters, and
learns that tracts and condescensions are not the means of help-
ing those who most need help. St. Elizabeth of Hungary taught
this long ago, as did St. Francis d'Assisi ; but our novelists do
not go to the saints for lessons. Mr. Besant does not think that
Protestantism can help the poor, and he seems to know very
little of the church. He does not say how he would keep his
working-girls good and pure after they had been well fed, de-
cently clothed, and innocently amused. After all, people who
are clean and industrious and fond of music commit hideous
crimes ; therefore, though Mr. Besant does not seem to see it,
something more is needed to save the world. Marcus Aurelius
was a keen philosopher and a plausible one ; but Jesus Christ
alone could take away the curse from life and the sting from
death. Valentine turns out to be the patrician, and she elects
to live and work among the poor ; Violet clings to riches and
shudders at the coarseness of poverty : education has triumphed
over plebeian blood. Mr. Besant's people are clear-cut and in-
dividual. His sneers at the confessional are perfunctory. His
novel is worth reading and thinking about.

Mr. Henry Hamilton's The Poet's Praise (New York : G. P.
Putnam's Sons) is a delicate and poetic symphony in praise of
that art at which the vulgar and who is so vulgar as the sneer-
ing, jeering, hard-pushed newspaper comic man ? are gibing.
Mr. Hamilton's new book is a decided advance on America. It is
high in tone, well sustained, and, as to phraseology, modulated

1 887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. . 711

by rhythmical skill and a good ear. Mr. Hamilton, to his honor,
holds in a doubting world that God's best messages have, when
delivered through the medium of words, come in the form of
poetry.

It is to be hoped that the women of France may not be judged
by the impression given of celebrated Parisian females by Octave
Uzanne in The Frenchwoman of the Century (New York: George
Routledge & Sons). It is a pity that the Messrs. Routledge al-
lowed the book to be injured by several abominably indecent
prints which have no connection with the text, and which give a
false impression of the volume. M. Uzanne's work has value as
a warning from history as to the depth of frivolity and luxury
womanhood may reach when the elevating influence of religion
is disdained.

Chronicles of Paris during the French Revolution show us
horrible pictures of the ferocity of women how they calmly
knitted at the foot of the platforms where the guillotine plied its
ceaseless blade ; how they were more cruel than the men of the
Terror, if possible. But even in that awful delirium of blood
and terror the voice of motherhood was not entirely hushed, and
when Marie Antoinette was accused, before the Convention, of
crimes that no mother could commit, she appealed to the mothers
present, and not in vain. But in the scenes of fashionable life
painted by M. Uzanne it seems that frivolity more surely kills the
last true instinct of womanhood than ferocity.

When Robespierre died Paris had grown tired of blood-let-
ting. It turned to dancing. All the old refinement and cultiva-
tion which had culminated in that perfect system of social and
courtly etiquette which Madame Campan so fondly regretted,
and which Napoleon I. tried so hard to imitate, had disappeared.
A bastard paganism had taken the place of Christianity, and an
artificial classicism that of good manners. As to morals, there
were none. The men were stupidly frivolous, the women im-
modestly so. Under the Directory Madame Tallien and her set
tried to wear as little as possible. The woman most nude was
considered to have made herself the most distinguished. There
were quadrilles des victimes in those times. These dances were
fashionable; they were supposed to be made up of people who
had lost friends in the Revolution. The men wore crape, the
women pieces of red ribbon around their throats, to symbolize the
cut which the headsman's axe ought to have made if they had had
their desert! People whose sympathies had been with the mur-
derers rather than with the murdered now pretended to have
suffered at the hands of the Revolutionists only to be in the

712 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

fashion. M. Uzanne's picture of life under the government of
" purified " France shows that unspeakable corruption among the
fashionable Parisians of the day had not even that quality which
Juvenal and modern cynical satirists might have considered re-
deeming the quality of cleverness. The highest Parisian circles
were as corrupt and as stupid then as they were later under the
Second Empire, when, according to M. Uzanne, luxury and vice
hid God out of sight. As a series of examples of what the eman-
cipation of women from the influence of the church results in,
M. Uzanne's Frenchwoman of the Century is worth consideration
by the student of society. But unless the vulgar prints are cut
out of it, it can have no place among the books of people who re-
spect themselves.

How to Form a Library. By H. B. Wheatley, F.S.A. (Lon-
don: Eliot Stock.) Mr. Wheatley gives a great deal of informa-
tion for book-lovers, and includes a synopsis of the principal lists
of one hundred good books recently published by the London
Pall Mall Gazette. Of these Mr. Ruskin's is the most interesting
and edifying, though it is rather an attack on what Sir John Lub-
bock wrote than ja list pure and simple. Mr. Wheatley, in his
chapter on a " Child's Library," says : " It is a rather wide-spread
notion that there is some sort of virtue in reading for reading's
sake, although really a reading boy may be an idle boy. When
a book is read it should be well thought over before another is
begun, for reading without thought generates no ideas." This
is true. The reading craze has helped more than anything else
to form a generation of idle-minded people. They have actually
so lost the power of thinking that an effort to think is pain, and
they take refuge from themselves in the opiate of print. Mr.
Wheatley declares that children ought to be taught how to
handle books. " It is positive torture," he writes and his words
find an echo in the heart of many a book-lover who has seen the
modern savage maul a precious volume " to a man who loves
books to see the way they are ordinarily treated. Of course it
is not necessary to mention the crime of wetting the fingers to
turn over the leaves, or turning down pages to mark the place ;
but those who ought to know better will turn a book over on its
face at the place where they have left off reading, or will turn
over pages so carelessly that they will give a crease to each
which will never come out." Mr. Wheatley 's account of the
theological libraries of the United Slates is taken from the
U. S. Report on Public Libraries (127-160), in which Catholics are
credited with two, the Baptists with three, the Congregational-
ists with two, the Protestant Episcopalians with three, the Lu-

188;.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 713

therans with one, the Methodists with two, the Presbyterians
with seven, the Reformed Dutch with two, the Reformed Ger-
man with one, and the Unitarians with one. " And, if we include
those libraries which contain less than ten thousand volumes, the
list of different denominations to which they belong is extended
to fifteen or sixteen."

The gem of Mr. James Russell Lowell's collection of ad-
dresses, which he calls Democracy (Boston : Houghton, Mifflin
& Co.)j is his sympathetic analysis of Don Quixote. It is written
in that style, both sure and firm, plastic and flexible, of which he
possesses the rare secret. " It is also good for us to remember,"
he says of Cervantes, " that this man, whose life was outwardly
a failure, restored to Spain the universal empire she had lost."

Giovanni Dupre was the sculptor of the statue of St. Francis
placed before the cathedral at Assisi, and also of the dead Abel
in the Pitti Palace a figure so pure, so expressive that it
ought to have made the artist famous wherever truth in art is
revered. Mr. Henry Simmons Frieze has done good service by
giving us a sketch of the life of this Catholic sculptor of modern
times, so poor in Catholic artists. We must congratulate Scrib-
ner & Wei ford on the entire adequacv of the illustrations. The
two dialogues on art by Augusto Conti are thoroughly satisfac-
tory ; every line of them is an unconscious rebuke to false
sestheticism, affected sincerity, and the art that strives to ignore
God:

" I have been censured," says Dupre in the first dialogue, " because in
my Ferrari monument in San Lorenzo the body of the youth is almost
nude."

" Bear it patiently, Giovanni," answers Amrio; "in that instance the
critics are right. If the statue of the mother at his side could speak she
would say to her son : 'Cover your shame.' This utterance of the people
tells the whole, especially for sacred places. As for the rest, ' who makes
not errs not.' "

"/ erred," answers Dupre, "in not considering that sculptors do not see
with the same eyes as other men"

This is true and well said.

The life of this sincere Italian sculptor, with Conti's dia-
logues, is a much-needed antidote to the artistic twaddle of the
group of dilettanti of the Vernon Lee type, who drown all sense
in a sea of sound, and who cry out that there is no God because
they cannot see the expression of his existence in the very
painters' work they pretend to love, and which he alone could
inspire. With Dupre", as with Dante and the noblest Italians,
theology and art went hand-in-hand.

714 NEW PUBLICA TIONS. [Feb. ,

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS. By A. B. Bruce, D.D. New
York : A. C. Armstrong & Son.

Dr. Bruce is a professor in the Free Church College at Glasgow. The
work whose title is given above contains a course of lectures which he de-
livered in the Union Theological Seminary of New York. It is the ortho-
dox thesis which Dr. Bruce defends in these lectures. He shows an inti-
mate and thorough acquaintance with the modern works on the opposite
side, whose sinuous windings of argument he follows closely and patiently,
unravelling and breaking their threads with dexterity and strength. The
compliments which he bestows on the "charming" and "genial" books
which he is tearing to tatters seem rather overdone. There is an under-
tone of deference toward the infidelity and scepticism of the age which
suggests an apprehension on the part of the author that the cause of
Scottish orthodoxy is in a precarious condition. The picture which he
draws in the last lecture of the residuum which would be left to the world
in a " non-miraculous Christianity," is as dreary as it is true, and reminds
us of some things which have been said by Mr. Mallock. Nevertheless,
he writes: "Anything that clears the air of cant and hypocrisy and tradi-
tionalism is a matter for thankfulness. It may be I do not believe it, but
I am willing to concede that the popular Christianity of the present time
has so much of the 'evil element in it that a general cessation from pro-
fession of the Christian faith for a generation would be a relative good.
. . . When all this happens, Christianity, done to death by unworthy faith
and by scientific unbelief abhorrent of the supernatural, will repeat the
miracle of the resurrection, and will run a new career fraught with glory to
Jesus and with manifold blessings to men " (pp. 387, 388). We know no-
thing of Dr. Bruce's opinions except from these lectures. We cannot see
in them positive evidence of his belief in the genuine doctrine of the
divinity of Christ, and there are many signs of a positive antagonism to
genuine Christianity in the concrete />., to the Catholic religion. Not-
withstanding the ingenuity and validity of a great part of his reasoning,
we do not think that the author has furnished in this volume a practically
efficacious antidote against the poison of unbelief which is eating into his
own and every other Protestant church.

MEMOIRS OF THE REV. J. L. DIMAN, D.D. By Caroline Hazard. Boston
and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1887.

The printing and editing of these Memoirs have been carefully and well
done. They are in many ways interesting and agreeable souvenirs of an
able, genial, highly respected gentleman, who was chiefly a professor in the
branches of history and political economy at Brown University, a lecturer
of considerable renown, and an author of good repute, but also for a time a
parish minister in the Congregational denomination, and devoted, during
all his public life, more or less to the work of preaching. Professor Diman
was of the oldest and most respectable New-England stock, and remotely
in part of French descent. His father was at one time governor of Rhode

1 887.] NE w PUBLIC A TIONS. 7 1 5

Island, and he was also a collateral descendant of Benjamin Franklin. His
maternal great-grandfather was both a minister and a surgeon, having
served in both capacities at once in the army during the Revolutionary
war. He was, besides, on the mother's side, one of the numerous de-
scendants of John and Priscilla Alden, who have been immortalized in the
poetry of another descendant, Mr. Longfellow. Professor Diman's bio-
grapher says : " In him all the virtues of the various lines seemed to unite.
His noble bearing spoke of the sturdy Puritan ; his grace of manner, of his
livelier French blood ; his philosophic mind was the true descendant of the
first American philosopher; his tenderness, of his saintly mother!"

The history of the boyhood and youth of Professor Diman, of his early
studies and travels, and of his later personal and domestic life, is a pleas-
ing narrative, well told.

His talents and scholarship were of a high order, and the best proof of
this is given by the fact that he was invited to fill several high and im-
portant positions besides the chair in Brown University. Without men-
tioning any others, it is enough to say that he was offered professorships
in Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities.

There is nothing to attract much attention from the world at large in
the quiet life of a worthy parish minister or respectable pedagogue in New
England who keeps within the limits of his local traditions. But the elite of
this " Brahminical caste," as Holmes calls it, are very interesting as a study.
The finer specimens of the educated men of '-New IJngland, in whom re-
mains the salt of Puritanism, though liberal culture, travel, and original
thought have widened their range and mollified their prejudices, are men
whose intellectual and spiritual tendencies are very important and must
exercise an increasing influence on the future religious state of their coun-
trymen. Professor Diman was not confined within the trammels of any
sector party. The biography states that his paternal grandfather "was
deacon of the Catholic Congregational Church for over twenty years." This
is a very peculiar phraseology, and we can only take it as signifying that
the author derived from Professor Diman a sort of undefined longing afte r
some kind of spiritual communion with the church universal transcending
narrow, sectarian bounds. Mr. Diman had drawings toward the ancient
church. He thought at one time of seeking orders in the Protestant
Episcopal Church. " In the ' deep view ' which he says he loved, and the
'constant struggle after unity,' he refused to recognize Congregationalism
as the one church indicated by the Apostles, answering, to the confusion of
his questioners (i.e., at his examination as a candidate for settlement as
pastor of a Congregational church at Bro6kline, Mass.), when asked what
church then was indicated : ' Without doubt Episcopacy.' " Mr. Diman had
also some opposite proclivities. He had no hesitation in exchanging fel-
lowship with Unitarians, and he was sounded in reference to a call to two
Unitarian parishes. He was not, however, a Unitarian or a rationalist.
Dr. Fisher says that he believed the Nicene Creed. The two forces, centri-
petal and centrifugal, counteracted each other and kept him at a kind of
dead-point between Catholicism and rationalism. Still, the most 'positive
element in Mr. Diman's thought and life was Christian. His position was
one which cannot be accurately defined, because it really was undefined,
indeterminate. His former pupils regarded him with great respect and

7i6 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Feb.,

love, as did many others who knew him. Reading his biography gives us
the impression that this high esteem was well deserved. Though not equal
to Hawthorne, Longfellow, and their compeers, he belongs to their class.
The history of his intellectual and moral life, like that of all men of this
class, beyond the mere special interest which it has for all who live in his
particular circle, has a more general value, because it exhibits in one in-
stance the common tendencies of the religious world in New England, and,
indeed, everywhere, among non-Catholics. There is the tendency toward
unity, toward a universal Christianity, toward positive, definite faith in the
supernatural, together with hesitation, restlessness, dissatisfaction with
sectarian formulas and organizations, and another tendency toward ration-
alism and scepticism. Which way the movement will be directed, and to-
ward what goal, is the question which we must wait for the future to an-
swer. On our part we have no doubt that the only alternative of a return
to the ancient and universal Christianity, to the faith and communion of
the Catholic Church, is an accelerated downfall into the abyss of scepticism.
Omen, quod Deus avertat !

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS AT THE FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE
SOCIETY OF ST. VINCENT DE PAUL in the United States and Canada.
Held in the city of Washington, D. C., on June 8, 9, and 10, 1886.

In these pages there is much to edify, encourage, and instruct. That
delegates, about two hundred and sixty in all, from superior and particular
councils of the society in New York, Albany, Washington, Philadelphia,
Louisville, Dubuque, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Providence (R. I.), Jersey
City, New Haven, Trenton, San Francisco, and eleven isolated points be-
sides, and from four cities in Canada, should meet, after an interval of ten
years, to harmoniously confer on important matters connected with the
maintenance and progress of their work, is gratifying evidence of the
growth of the society, and one of the signs of the progress that the Catho-
lic faith has made in our land. The method followed for the despatch of
business was wise and practical. The presidents of councils and confe-
rences throughout the United States were invited by the Superior Council
of New York to make suggestions for the consideration of the assembly.
From these a selection was made and embodied in the form of a schedule
of business. Persons wishing to express their opinions upon any matters
mentioned therein were required to state them in writing and send the
manuscripts to New York not later than the ist of May. Extemporaneous
debate was considered undesirable and to be avoided. The manuscripts,
after having been submitted to selection, were arranged under proper heads,
read in due order, and referred to the committees appointed for the pur-
pose. Twelve topics, all of importance, were considered, of which the prin-
cipal were the first, relating to aspirant conferences, "their uses, their
needs, and their works " (aspirant conferences are intended to provide for
recruiting members among young people growing up) ; the second, pertain-
ing to efforts for recruiting the conferences largely from young gentlemen
of education and means ; the third, to the care to be exercised in the admis-
sion of members ; the fourth, to the danger that the society may degenerate
into a mere organization for almsgiving ; and the eighth, to the special works
of the society. All the papers published in the book show careful thought

1 887.] NE w PUB LIC A TIONS. 7 i 7

and able preparation. Addresses were made by the Most Rev. Arch-
bishop of Baltimore ; Rev. W. F. Clarke, S.J., of Loyola College, Baltimore ;
Rev. Father Fidelis, Catholic chaplain of New Jersey State Prison ; Rev.
John Joseph Riordan, of Castle Garden ; Rev. J. A. Doonan, S.J., of George-
town College ; Rev. Wm. J. Hill, of Brooklyn ; and Rev. J. F. Kearney, of
this city. Mr. H. J. Spaunhorst, of St. Louis, revealed the interesting fact
that among the twenty-two conferences in that city there is one composed of
colored people. B.

TALKS WITH SOCRATES ABOUT LIFE. Translations from the Gorgias and

the Republic of Plato. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 1886.

This is the third small duodecimo, in the neatest and most tasteful style,
published by the well-known firm of the Scribners and printed at the model
press of Riverside, in which choice translations, together with abstracts
done in the best manner, from Plato's Dialogues, have been offered for gene-
ral circulation and perusal. The first two volumes were noticed and com-
mended in this magazine. They received other very strong commendations
from high quarters. We have the sanction of competent judges for the
opinion we formed by reading these translations, and which we have ex-
pressed in our previous notices, that they are the best which have been
made into our language. The present volume is up to the mark of its pre-
decessors. The prefaces, connecting abstracts, and notes in this and in the
two foregoing volumes add much to their value, and are extremely credita-
ble to the author, whose name is still withheld, though we hardly think it
can have remained for so long a time unknown.

How much the preceding translations from Plato have been circulated
and read we know not, but it would be interesting to have information on
this point. We wish to do what little is in our power to promote their cir-
culation by giving a cordial recommendation to this new issue, and renew-
ing the one before given to its companions.

The "Talks with Socrates " are about Life, the true end and happiness
of Life, and the obligation of " looking onward to the Truth." The low
maxims of cunning, selfish politicians, scheming pettifoggers and voluptua-
ries, are exposed and lashed with keen humor and merciless ridicule. We
have the same miserable set of people and the same base, low maxims in
our own society. Such reading as is furnished by these wholesome moral
treatises of Plato must be useful to our growing-up young men as an anti-
dote to the poisonous influences to which they are exposed. The effort to
popularize such high-class writings is most praiseworthy, and we wish it
success.

There is one note, however (Note 86, p. 115), to which we must take
exception. In this note the author says : " The early Fathers of the church
held the teachings of the divine Plato in scarcely less reverence than those
of the inspired writers, and it is very probable that the conception of Pur-
gatory, so foreign to Hebrew thought, was evolved from the description
of the intermediate state contained in this myth and in similar passages."
The Fathers respected Plato as a philosopher. But there can never be any
human writings worthy to be ranked anywhere near the Word of God in
the mind of a Catholic. The Fathers drew their theology from the Scrip-
tures and tradition as the only sources of sacred doctrine never from pa-

7 1 8 NEW PUB LIC A TIONS. [ Feb. ,

gan writers. As for the doctrine of the Hebrews concerning departed
spirits, both the Scriptures and the other writings of the ancient Jews
always speak of them as going down into Sheol never of their having as-
cended into heaven.

Drach, who was, before his conversion, a rabbi of high rank and con-
summate learning, says : " The synagogue from the most ancient times, as
well as the church, not only prays for the dead, but also has recourse to the
intercession of those among them whom she regards as saints " (De VHar-
monie entre rglise et la Synagogue, torn. i. p. 16). The Catholic doctrine
of Purgatory is derived from Scripture and apostolic tradition. The prac-
tice of praying for the dead is based entirely on this doctrine, and nothing
is more certain than the custom of praying for the souls of the faithful de-
parted during the liturgy, as is proved by all the liturgies from the days of
the apostles. The doctrine of Plato concerning Purgatory, like every other
Catholic doctrine taught by pagan philosophers, proves only that the dic-
tates of sound reason, and the traditions which survived from the patri-
archal age among all nations, are consonant with the teachings of the
divine revelation given to the Jewish and to the Christian Church.

PAPERS IN PENOLOGY. Published by the Reformatory Press at Elmira,

N. Y.

This publication contains eight articles treating of the methods followed
in the institution above mentioned ; and it is easy to gather from it that the
problem of how to Reform criminals becomes very much more difficult in
countries in which, as in our own, there is a great diversity of religious belief.
Positive religious teaching cannot have the prominence which is so neces-
sary, and is relegated to such opportunities as can be obtained under a dual
s)-stem. Great stress is laid by the Elmira management on a compulsory edu-
cation which emhfraces, besides the rudiments, " a course in English litera-
ture as thorough as in any school," and " Shakspere and Chaucer and other
masters " are said to be studied by the men " with keen diligence and
relish." On " Sunday morning the casuistry or practical-morality class,
numbering about two hundred, meets in the chapel, and free but orderly
discussion takes place." The teachings of Socrates are one of the leading
text-books used, and it is stated that on one occasion the study of the mo-
rality of Socrates led the class naturally to "a study of the morality of Jesus
and the New Testament, though not all as a religious inquiry." On one
occasion one of the pupils expressed in writing his doubts about his having
a soul, and desired " to be convinced of the fact" ; and it took him a year
to make any progress towards conviction. We join in the inquiry said
(p. 71) to have been made by " a very practical friend " : " Well, after you
have got through with your moral and intellectual gymnastics, what is
there in these men to show it? What is the final outcome of sharpening
the wits of such men with your high-toned discussions ? " There is a Catho-
lic and Protestant chaplain attached to the institution, and the superinten-
dent, Mr. Z. R. Brockway, deserves to be gratefully remembered by Catho-
lics for having introduced Catholic instruction "at the date of opening the
Reformatory, not at their request, but at his solicitation?' But it is plain
that the facilities for Catholic inmates to get instruction and training are
insufficient and need to be enlarged. The Catholic chaplain holds a cate-

1 8 87.] NE w PUB LIC A TIONS. 7 r 9

chism class for his co-religionists on only two evenings, and celebrates
Mass only once in the month. Why not have it every Sunday, as in
Rochester, and every festival day besides? Why not try the good that
a mission might do? Is it not time also to form a Catholic Prison As-
sociation ? B.

NOVISSIMA; or, Where do our Departed Go? By Bernard O'Reilly, D.D.
Baltimore : The Baltimore Publishing Co.

' l If 1 have," says the author in his preface, " in answering the question,
Where do our departed go ? only treated of everlasting rewards, it is not
because I feared to consider the subject of eternal punishment." But he
adds : " I confess that the labor of writing about the supernatural destiny
of man, about God's infinite generosity and 'the unsearchable riches of
Christ 'bestowed on us in part in this life, but more especially reserved
for the life to come has been to me a more congenial work than that of
fathoming the divine justice in its awards to the wicked."

Reserving, therefore, the subject of eternal punishment for another
treatise, the author gives us an intelligent and very instructive and enter-
taining book on Heaven. We heartily recommend it to our readers. They
will find it full of solid matter for meditation ; the author's literary reputa-
tion guarantees a pleasing style. It seems to us that priests could make
excellent use of it in preparing sermons, especially so on account of a
very full synopsis of each chapter. ^The book is particularly well printed
and bound.

PURGATORY: Doctrinal, Historical, and Poetical. By Mrs. J. Sadlier.
New York : D. & J. Sadlier & Co.

We know not any tender emotion which this book may not elicit from
the human heart. The purest natural affections and the highest superna-
tural aspirations can be aroused and ministered to by its varied and valu-
able selections. We know not whether the doctrinal and historical com-
pilation or the devotional and poetical is of greater value. No one can
read the former without deep interest and without gaining much informa-
tion, and the latter is a bouquet of the sweetest flowers that bloom in the
garden of the heart. We regret that this book did not reach us in time
to be recommended for the November devotions.

MORE ABOUT THE HUGUENOTS. A review of Prof. Wm. Gammell's Lec-
ture on " The Huguenots and the Edict of Nantes." By William Stang,
priest of the diocese of Providence. Providence Press Co.

The massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes have in recent years been thoroughly investigated as to the motives
which induced them, their actual occurrence, and their results ; and the
Huguenots are by no means the better off for the industrious researches
of historians and the fairness which has in many cases characterized their
decisions. But for these two^ events French Protestantism in history
would be no different from German Protestantism a party to the great
revolution, civil, social, religious, and literary, that recast the elements of
European life into the modern mould. But the massacre enabled Protes-
tants to claim Huguenot martyrs, and the Revocation enabled them to claim
Huguenot exiles for conscience' sake. Buckle, however (to mention but
one historian in this connection), demonstrated that the Revocation of the

720 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Feb., 1887.

Edict of Nantes was provoked, and that the provocation was such as the
absolute government of France could not be expected to tolerate. Father
Stang, in the forty-six pages of his pamphlet, has made a calm and clear
statement of historical facts, many of them drawn from German writers of
characteristic thoroughness of research. He has more than answered Prof.
Gammell ; he has given a summary, in excellent English, of the state of the
whole Huguenot controversy as made known by the latest and fairest his-
torians.

AN ARABIC MANUAL. By J. G. Lansing, D.D., Gardner A. Sage Professor
of Old Testament Languages and Exegesis in the Theological Seminary
of the Reformed Church at New Brunswick, N. J. Chicago : American
Publication Society of Hebrew.

The following extract from the preface of this work explains its learned
author's purpose: ''The need of an elementary Arabic grammar which
should be more complete than elementary grammars heretofore published,
and yet not so exhaustive in treatment as such standard works as those of
Wright and Palmer, has been variously felt and expressed. To meet to
some extent this need this Manual has been prepared. This need has
come to be experienced largely through the recent revival in Hebrew and
Semitic studies generally. With such a revival there has been awakened,
necessarily, a great interest in the Arabic as in the other cognates. .' . .
That the Arabic should come to occupy a most prominent position in such
a revival is evident. The author subscribes to the conviction, for many
years repeatedly expressed by the most learned Arabic scholars, that, all
points considered, the Arabic occupies the first place of importance in the
study of the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Bible."

FROM A. R. Mowbray & Co., Oxford, England, we acknowledge the
receipt of some Christmas-cards which really have a Christmas meaning.
Instead of the gaudy colored cards bearing pictures of birds and flowers
that do not appear at Christmas times, and bits of frivolous verse not at all
appropriate to the season, we have here cards of quiet and delicate tints,
upon which are pictures and verses which speak of the true significance of
Christmas the birthday of the Saviour. Christmas-cards which do not
bear a true Christmas message have no reason for existence.

OTHER BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

MARY STUART : A Narrative of the first eighteen years of her life, principally from original
documents. By the Rev. Joseph Stevenson, S.J. Edinburgh : William Patterson.

UNIVERSALISM IN AMERICA: A History. By Richard Eddy, D.D. Vol. II. Boston: Uni-
versalist Publishing House.

VIEWS OF ARBITRATION AS A MEANS OF SETTLING LABOR DISPUTES. Rochester: Union and
Advertiser Co.'s Print.

REGENSBURGER MARIEN-KALENDER FUR DAS JAHR DES HEILES 1887. New York : F. Pustet
& Co.

THE ANIMAL WORLD : A Monthly Advocate of Humanity. Vol. XVII. London : S. W. Par-
tridge & Co.

BAND OF MERCY. Vol. VIII. London : S. W. Partridge & Co.

NOTES IN REMEMBRANCE AND LAST RELICS OF AUGUSTUS LAW, S J. London and New
York : Burns & Gates.

A LECTURE ON CATHOLIC IRELAND. By the Rev. I. P. Prendergast. Dublin : M. H. Gill &
Son.

DER FAMILIENFREUND, KATHOLISCHER WEGWEISER FUR DAS JAHR 1887. St. Louis :
" Herold des Glaubens."

MEMORIALS OF DR. RICHARD ROBERT MADDEN, formerly Colonial Secretary of West Aus-
tralia, etc. Dublin : John Falconer.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XLIV. MARCH, 1887. No. 264.

THE NEGRO PROBLEM AND THE CATHOLIC

CHURCH.

IN the Southern States there is a wide difference of opinion
regarding the future of the negro race, both as to its civil and
religious aspect. What will be the future status or modus vivendi
between the white and negro races, particularly in those South-
ern States in which the negroes preponderate ? (According to
the census of 1880 there were 176,850 more negroes than whites
in Mississippi.) Will one race drive or push out the other? If
not, what will be their mutual relations ? What steps must the
church take to gain a firm foothold among the negroes? Which
race, the white or the colored, should furnish priests and teach-
ers ? If the latter, what methods are to be used to obtain them ?
And, lastly, what means are needed to carry on the work?

Each of these questions is of vast importance. Priests who
live and labor in the ministry of the church in the South, and
who feel no little interest in the welfare of the colored race,
scarcely know how to answer. Men of intelligence and obser-
vation, when asked what they think of the above questions, either
hesitate to give an opinion or express themselves in very doubt-
ful terms on the subject. There is certainly no unanimity of
opinion on these grave questions among the thoughtful men of
the South. The writer of this article, instead, then, of giving his
own opinion, will simply note down some of his observations
which he believes to be substantially correct, and leave it to
wiser heads to draw therefrom just and reasonable conclusions.

CIVIL ASPECTS. Between negro and negro there exists a

/22 THE NEGRO PROBLEM AND [Mar.,

wide difference, and in this distinction there is no reference made
to the different tribes of Africa which at first furnished the for-
mer slaves of this country. The variations in physiognomy
among pure negroes indicate different tribes. The one type is
tall, erect, regular in features, muscular, and well built ; the
other class is small, has a ponderous head, high cheek-bones,
broad lips, and distended nostrils. The former type is indicative
of far more intelligence than the other. However, intermarriage
has tended to gradually obliterate tribal characteristics of these
classes.

Again, there is a vast difference between, for instance, the
Maryland, Virginia, or Creole negro, and the one from the lowlands
of the Mississippi valley. The slaves of the former class were
reared on the plantation in close contact with their master and
the children of the family ; the master and mistress knew them
by name, cared for them individually; the children of the two
races played together; and, if slaves, they were slaves in the mas-
ter's family. On the other hand, the unruly, bad slave was sold,
and thought good enough for the cotton-fields and sugar-planta-
tions of Mississippi and Louisiana. In these rich fields the mas-
ter knew the number but he scarcely knew the names of his
slaves, his family was rarely in their midst, and they were left in
the hands of overseers without any civilizing influence.

Will the negro supersede the white race in some of the South-
ern States and form the "Black Belt," as some writers assert?
We have made the following observations for Louisiana and Mis-
sissippi : In those counties which are poor and in which the ne-
groes are comparatively few, they are better off, more prosper-
ous, and frequently possess some land ; whereas in rich counties,
where they make plenty of money, they spend it even faster,
and so live in poverty the whole year, a few months excepted, and
scarcely ever own a foot of land. In some instances a few ac-
quired tracts of fine land ; but these have been quicker lost than
acquired, as the owners then became averse to labor and seemed
unable to manage a large estate. Here and there, however, and
particularly in cities, some colored persons have acquired and
yet retain property and wealth ; but these few are generally
mulattoes.

In counties where the negro population stands to the white
as eight, nine, or even twelve and thirteen to one, the blacks have
less political influence than in counties where their number is
much smaller. Political influence is not always gained by nu-
merical strength. Lack of civilization, a reckless carelessness as

1 887.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 723

to the manner of living-, and consequent lack of interest in poli-
tics, leave most of the civil offices in the hands of the white popu-
lation. The best modes of living belong to the white race, and,
if we except the lower and less remunerative occupations, rail-
roading, steamboating, telegraphing, manufacturing, merchandis-
ing, managing and overseeing plantations, and levee-building are
exclusively in the hands of the whites.

Before the war and for some years after it Southern boys
scarcely ever learned trades ; now, however, our boys are begin-
ning to take hold of most of the. trades formerly in a great mea-
sure filled by the negro such, for instance, as carpentering,
plumbing, blacksmithing, engineering, ginning cotton, and run-
ning sugar, rice, and lumber mills. Whatever, in a word, requires
greater intelligence and more patient endurance, whatever is more
lucrative, is in the hands of, or is about to fall into the hands of,
the white race, and is very likely to stay there. Young men who
are sober and industrious need not leave the South, but can find
as lucrative employment there as elsewhere in the States. It
would be a great misfortune to the negro to live removed from
the white man, and both civilization and religion would thereby
greatly suffer. In many of the Southern States the whites need
the colored people, but the latter also need the former. Whether
the future will or will not change this state of affairs it is difficult
to predict.

RELIGIOUS ASPECT. Maryland and Creole negroes have been,
as a rule, Catholics for generations. The teachings and practices
of the church have left a deep impress upon them ; they were
well, instructed in their religion, they loved the church, and,
even when sold and far a way. from priest and church, they kept
the faith as well, perhaps better than white Catholics would
have done under similar circumstances. Others, reared under
scarcely any religious influence in slavery times, and now and
formerly entirely under Protestant sway, are grossly ignorant of
the church and are deeply prejudiced against her doctrine and
ministers. It is clear that the Catholic Church must present
herself in different ways to these diverse classes of negroes.

The negro is supposed to be very emotional in his religion :
shouting, handshaking, swaying of the body to and fro, stamp-
ing with the foot and clapping with the hands, are no extraor-
dinary ways for the non-Catholic negro to give expression to his
religion. Has he learned this from Methodist camp-meetings,
where the whites adopt quite as extravagant manners to give
vent to their feelings of " being converted " ? Surely the negro
born and bred in the church is scarcely more emotional than his

724 THE NEGRO PROBLEM AND [Mar.,

white brother. Whilst the latter class of negroes may delight in
worshipping in the same church and in the same manner as their
white brethren, it may well be doubted whether the former class
of negroes would feel at home there.

I have seen it somewhere stated that only one-eighth of the
negroes are mulattoes ; but whoever confines his observations to
cities and towns would doubt the statement, for there he will
find at least as many and more mulattoes than pure-blooded
negroes. There is far more temptation for the negroes, espe-
cially for the women, in the town than in the country. Modesty
and purity are scarcely expected of them. Fondness for dress and
of amusement, an easy way of making a living, and slowness to
marry are so common among them that dissipation becomes a
natural consequence. In the country, however, most of the
temptations are avoided ; there they marry early in life, and chil-
dren are no disadvantage, but are rather helps in the field.
Hence new missions for the negroes might probably be more
successful in the country than in towns.

How is the Catholic Church to reach them? It is compara-
tively easy to retain those that have from infancy been reared
within the fold. A zealous priest who looks after them with
-care, founds schools, and establishes societies will keep them as
part of the whole flock, white and colored. But what of the
great mass that has never come under the influence of the church ?
As a rule, parishes in the South are poor, priests are few and
scattered over a great extent of country, and they have no little
labor to keep intact what the Lord has entrusted to them. What
can be reasonably expected of them ? Very little indeed. It is
difficult to obtain priests for the poor Southern mission ; how
much more difficult to secure missionaries to open a field, new
and unpromising, which will present a life of hardship, of disap-
pointment, and of continual self-sacrifice ! May the Lord of the
harvest raise up men for this work ! But may not and should
not the colored man himself be the instrument in the hand of
God to evangelize his colored brethren? Wherever the church
has sent her missionaries, one of the great cares, after the first
preaching of the faith, has ever been to erect seminaries to train
a native priesthood. Not only is this the case in China and
Japan, but also in Africa among the negroes and among the
aborigines of Oceanica. There are always several negro stu-
dents in the Propaganda. Slavery has long been abolished ; the
growing generation has not felt its yoke, and its stigma is re-
moved. A colored man who respects himself is truly honored
by the whites in the South, even more so than in the North.

1887.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 725

The permanent improvement of the negro race should come from
within, should be brought about by the best men of their own
race, who will be stimulated by the example of the white people
in whose midst they live. The colored race, though living har-
moniously with the white race, mistrusts anything carried on for
their benefit by the whites, unless the colored men are them-
selves allowed to act the principal parts. They think they can
manage their own affairs ; they are free now and reject anything
whatever that bears any semblance of tutelage of the white race
over them. And this spirit manifests itself principally in things
intellectual and spiritual education and religion. This is the
feeling of the bulk of the colored people at present. They do
not want white preachers, and I do not know of any white
preacher (outside the Catholic Church) who has ever exercised
any religious influence over them, whilst, on the other hand,
the colored preacher is, as a rule, highly respected and willingly
obeyed by his congregation. Colored teachers are preferred for
their schools, and they are daily taking the places formerly occu-
pied by white teachers. The church cannot lose sight of this
fact. There are numbers of bright colored boys that have more
than sufficient intelligence to become priests. And as to morali-
ty, it is a sad fact that after our white boys leave school and
college many follow the ways of sin and neglect their Christian
duties till they marry. But, on the other hand, many too who
are trained in a special manner for the priesthood keep them-
selves free from the contamination of the world, and as young
men lead pure lives. Why should not a colored boy who re-
ceives a special religious training obtain the grace from God to
lead a pure life? And if, once a priest, he feels he has to work
for his own people, he knows their character and peculiarities ;
he can suit himself to their manner of living ; he will feel the in-
conveniences and sacrifices less than white priests ; he will elevate
his own race and show his people that the Cathoiic Church alone
is the church of all nations, that she recognizes " neither Jew nor
Greek, Roman nor barbarian," neither race nor color.

It is out of the question to expect the Southern dioceses to act
where a large amount of money is needed. They have it not,
and unless more favored dioceses come to their aid nothing of
consequence can be done. Bishops and priests elsewhere are
apt to say : " Southern bishops and priests do nothing for the
negro." But how can they ? Alas ! they of the South, having
been unaided for so many years, are now apt to think that they
can do nothing for the conversion of the negro. It is undoubted-
ly a difficult task, but it should be tried. Part of the collection

726 IN PORT. [Mar.,

to be taken up for the negro and Indian missions could not be
put to a better use than to erect a normal school for colored
boys, where they may be fitted out to be teachers, and where
.Latin also should be taught. Thus any boys that show indica-
tions of a religious vocation may be grounded in that language
until they be segregated from the others and receive a special
training preparatory for the priesthood. It is the experience of
some religious orders that novices, lately baptized and not reared
from infancy by Catholic parents, find the religious life galling
and rarely persevere. Hence it might be well to receive in the
proposed normal school none but colored youths that are Catho-
lic by tradition and training. Doubtless many that feel a deep
interest in the welfare of the colored race will differ from the
above observations and the conclusions drawn therefrom. " Du
choc des idees jaillit la verite." If this article should draw forth
wiser observations and lead to juster conclusions, the cause of the
negro would be greatly assisted.

IN PORT.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES OF A RECENT CONVERT.

THE story I am about to relate is one of those slow conver-
sions, a succession of timid steps of one groping her way alone
through darkness, a protracted voyage, but which, despite its
tardiness, has, by the grace of God, ended by the ship, against
all contrary winds, reaching the desired haven.

Conversions are of as many kinds as there are individuals,
and each may be said to have its own particular character and
teach its own lesson. The one under consideration presents so
far an exceptional phase as it is self-developed, deriving its
stimulus from thoughts and emotions wholly independent of
such outward control as proselytism or controversial elo-
quence.

Caroline R was born in France, of French parents, on

the very threshold of the new era that made away with the
ancien regime. The elder branch of the Bourbons, in the person
of Charles X., had abdicated ; the younger, in that of Louis
Philippe d'Orleans, had come into power. The political atmos-
phere was permeated with entirely new ideas and aspirations.
Feudalism had said its last word. The nobility was no longer

1 887.] IN PORT. 727

the only privileged class ; the Citizen-King was shaking hands
familiarly with high and low, and democratic aristocracy was the
political fashion of the day.

It was in the midst of this new state of things that Caroline's
childhood unfolded. Her parents' social position was such that
she could enjoy all the educational advantages of the more culti-
vated classes of society. Readers themselves, they trained their
daughter in the same direction ; and little Caroline, or Lina, as she
was always called, grew up among books as other children among
playthings. Her introduction to lesson-learning was made equally
easy. She was taught the first rudiments at home, along with
another little girl her first friend by a private tutor who came
daily to the house ; and so attractive was this elementary instruc-
tion that study became amusement, and the recreation-hours
turned into school-performances.

The little girls would often, for pastime, vie with each other
as to which could learn the quicker a fable by heart and recite
it with most effect, or invent a story on the spot. When taken
to the theatre (a not unfrequent occurrence, their parents being
play-goers) they rehearsed the next day what they had seen on
the stage, and, in default of memory, composed new speeches
and combinations. Lina's mind, thus constantly exercised, ac-
quired unusual elasticity, and turned in preference to matters re-
lated to the intelligence. That this sort of training is too one-
sided, and therefore open to objection, is unquestionably true.
In her case it developed the thinking powers at the expense of
her emotional nature. She was not, like other children, fond of
dolls or pets ; she never showed herself tenderly demonstrative,
nor was pity easily aroused in her. She had, at three years' in-
terval, seen two little coffins borne out of the parental house,
without realizing that the little baby sister and brother death
had carried off were parts of herself and had cost her mother
bitter tears. Nor did, subsequently, the birth of another sister
particularly gladden her. Some persons thought her deficient
in affection, yet was this seeming indifference scarcely anything
more than undeveloped tenderness. Her father had striven to
steel her against trouble by fortifying more especially her reason-
ing faculty ; her mother, on her side, had given her attention
more particularly to her moral qualities the acquisition of a
sensitive conscience rather than a sensitive heart. Both over-
looked much ; and had not the child been possessed of what we
are inclined to call a natural, innate piety ; possessed of a genuine
sense of God's paternal love, to which her heart corresponded in-

728 IN PORT. [Mar.,

stinctively, those gentler affections smothered in her by too in-
tellectual a training- might easily have degenerated into hard self-
ishness. That this was not the case became sufficiently evident
in her later years.

Of this innate piety, mentioned above, the following little in-
cident may perhaps give an adequate idea :

As already said, the little girls, Lina, and Stephanie her play-
mate, often amused themselves rehearsing what they had seen at
the theatre. One day, as they were so engaged in an upper
room in Stephanie's house, they grew so loud that they attract-
ed the attention of a parcel of students, companions of Stepha-
nie's oldest brother, who had his studio on the same floor. The
party came over to listen, and watched the performance through
the key-hole. One of them sportively turned the key upon the
little girls, who, when the bell for luncheon called them below,
found themselves locked in. To their heated imaginations the
situation assumed as tragic an aspect as that of the play they had
just been repeating. "What shall we do?" moaned Stephanie.
u Nobody knows where we are ; and I am so hungry ! "

"And we are not allowed to open the window, else we might
call out to the passers-by for help." Stephanie began to cry.

"Wait," said Lina, after a moment's reflection, " I know what
to do. We must pray. God always helps those that pray."
And suiting the action to the word, she knelt down and
prayed aloud for help. She would probably never have known
of the impression that prayer made on the frolicsome boys who
were listening behind the door, if, many years after, Stephanie's
brother had not told her, chaffing her at the same time about
the pedantry of her piety. Pedantic the prayer was unquestion-
ably, for she had summoned up all her learning to give body to
her appeal, -likening their situation to the young princes' in the
murderous Tower, and Count Ugolino's in the Italian dungeon ;
but, for all such conceit, it was nevertheless a true act of devo-
tion and indicative of a religious nature.

This religious nature, however, did not receive at the hands
of her parents the development it was susceptible of. Her mo-
ther was a devout Protestant, her father a lukewarm Catholic.
The child's religious training was left to the first. She was
made to read the Bible, to learn by heart long prayers which
her mother, confounding piety with eloquence, selected from
amongst the choicest in theological style and for the rest was
left to her own impressions. On Sundays, instead of accom-
panying her mother to church, she went with her father on long

1887.] IN FORT. 729

strolls in the country, and the day of rest became one of fatigue.
But it was a fatigue coupled with so much entertainment that
those Sundays live in her memory as among her sweetest recol-
lections. Through field and wood they went, to Passy or Gre-
nelle, or the St. Cloud Park ; and for refreshment they made a
short halt at one or other of the rural restaurants on the way,
where they were always sure of a comfortable little dejeuner.

Life's deeper shadows crossed Lina's path when she was
twelve in the shape of reverses of fortune and the death of her
father. Mr. R was in the wine business, and an active mem-
ber of a noted firm in those days Maison Lefebvre et Cie., en-
gaged in the exportation of French wines. They failed, and he
became involved in serious money difficulties which led to the ill-
ness that shortened his life. Then followed the anxious fears at-
tendant upon all such afflictions. But where faith and hope are
rightly anchored trouble has its limits and relief is never far.

Friendship came to the rescue. Mrs. R^ found means to meet

the first liabilities, and the clouds dispersed by degrees. Her
youngest daughter, whose delicate health suffered from the con-
finement of the capital, was placed in good hands a family living
in the country and the oldest was put into a boarding-school.
These were Lina's Lehr-jahre : the school-room no longer play-
room. Study began in earnest. Whether the ease with which
she traversed this period was due to her native buoyancy of dis-
position, or that the institution was based on home-principles and
its teachers possessed of the genius of teaching namely, to im-
part knowledge without deadening the mental life of the pupil
I am not prepared to say ; but the two years so spent went to
swell on the tablets of her memory the list of the happy recollec-
tions of her girlhood. It was during this period that her so-
called religious training took place the preparation, namely, for
her confirmation and first communion, which, being obligatory
in France, form a part of a regular education. It consists in a
two years' drill in catechism and Bible lessons. It was her first
experience in tedious school-tasks. Her pastor's learned text-
definitions failed often to win from her the candid confidence they
solicited, and she more than once incurred his displeasure by her
inattention or careless memorizing. Yet did she pass the requir-
ed examination in due time, and was received a member of the
Protestant church.

Providence in the meantime was opening for her avenues of
self-improvement than which none better could have been found,
even had fortune continued to smile on her as in the days of her

73 Iff PORT. [Mar.,

childhood. Through the mediation of friends a proposition was

made to Mrs. R by which her daughter was to share the

home and studies of three young girls of her age in Germany,
the understanding being an interchange of gifts French against
German. It was accepted.

Behold her now transplanted from the merry land of France
into an altogether foreign soil. The family of which she was to
become a member resided in one of the obscurest districts of
Bohemia. Freiherr von Slavick, its head, was the owner of a
small estate of about two hundred acres, comprising field and
woodland, and a roomy manor-house, called by the peasantry the
Schlosslein (little castle) from its belfry and tower, the only in-
dications of its feudal origin. They were Catholics and people
of culture, litterateurs and artists, and in friendly intercourse
with all the choicer society which this wild rjart of the country
afforded.

Strange and very new was the situation to the young girl, ac-
customed from her childhood to the life of a great capital, and
who knew of the country only as much as the outskirts of Paris,
the Bois de Boulogne, or Vincennes had to show. Strange and
new indeed, yet very pleasant withal. She was curious. Every
new phase of her existence had so far only revealed new benefits.
She was full of hope and trust in the future. Her surroundings,
moreover, were all she could desire : hearty kindliness, tender
sympathy, intelligent guidance. She settled down to the unfa-
miliar ways and manners of the place without an effort, and
scarcely minding the difference of religion between her and her
new friends. There was not a Protestant for hundreds of miles
around, and she knew that as to her faith she would always be
isolated; her mother, in relinquishing her to the Slavicks, having
especially stipulated that her religion should on no account be
interfered with. She asked permission to accompany the family
to Mass on Sundays, and, whilst she unconsciously drank in the
beauty of the Catholic service, fancied she could remain true at
heart to her own church. So faithfully, moreover, did her new
friends observe their treaty with her mother that at Easter, in
order that she might go to communion, they took her to Prague
or Vienna, the nearest places of Protestant worship a distance
involving (there being no railroads in that part of Austria in
those days) a journey of two and a half days of private-coach
travel.

1 have observed before that she was religiously inclined from
her childhood ; yet do 1 suspect her sentiments to have been so

1 887.] IN PORT. 73 1

crossed by imagination at that time that they partook probably
less of an affectionate than a romantic nature. She was attached
to her church in Paris, Les Billettes, because she had never known
any other. It was, moreover, an interesting edifice, having ori-
ginally been a Catholic institution of the Carmelite order, and
many were the ghostly convent stories which in her Sunday-
school days circulated among the Bible students ; but it was
completely lost in a network of old, narrow streets, and so shut
in by tall houses as to show scarcely any sky overhead. The
Bohemian chapel, on the contrary, was picturesquely situated on
a hillock, overlooking wood and field, with the romantic Rie-
sengebirge for background and a vast expanse of sky above, ap-
pealing much more to the imagination. The pious character of
the peasantry interested her also. Often on rainy or snowy Sun-
days she would watch them from her window flocking towards
the church, and carrying their shoes and stockings in their hands
to put them on dry under the porch. Thus out of reverence for
the house of God would they walk for miles in the snow in order
to present a respectable appearance. She admired also the quaint
salutation with which they greeted the stranger on the way,
" Praised be Jesus Christ," and was not a little pleased when
she was able to give distinctly the reply, " In eternity, amen,"
in the same language, so difficult to pronounce. The only time,
however, she came into close contact with them was when ac-
companying Mrs. Slavick on her errands of charity to the huts
that dotted the outlying meadows, or on their long summer
tramps when, with lunch-basket, book, and knitting, they went
to spend the day amidst the neighboring ruins, the Riesenberg
and Herrnstein two ancient castles, the original haunts of the
dread giant Riibezahl, the hero of ancient German lore. The
two ruins were still sufficiently preserved to allow tracing their
original design, and the party amused itself among their grim
walls improvising scenes of knighthood or telling tales of gnomes
and hobgoblins. To one brought up in Paris this seemed fairy-
land indeed.

Lina had a natural aptitude for languages. She acquired in
a few weeks a sufficient knowledge of the German to be able to
share in the daily exercises in history and literature. To her love
of reading there opened now a wide field. The Slavick library
was richly stocked with all that comes under the name of general
literature, and, although the reading of the young girls was under
strict supervision, only such books being placed in their hands as
favored their studies and did not encroach upon their experience

73 2 IN PORT. [Mar.,

of life, they became gradually acquainted during the long winter
evenings, when reading aloud was the chief entertainment, with
the best productions of the English and French novelists. When,
later in life, Lina came to read these authors again in the original,
she saw with what solicitous care the reader generally Mr. Sla-
vick himself had, in order to shield their innocence, skipped or
changed some of the most objectionable passages.

But this was not the only advantage she had occasion to be
thankful for. Her literary judgment, formed in that pure and cul-
tivated society, acquired a solidity it would probably never have
attained elsewhere. The several members of the Slavick family
(the family was composed of two households, Mrs. Slavick's maiden
sister and widowed brother) were all authors, musicians, artists.
Three of them were regular contributors to some of the best
periodicals of Prague and Vienna. Whenever a piece of poetry
was wanted as a prologue to the occasional musical and literary
fetes given for the benefit of the poor in the neighborhood, it was
Mr. Slavick that wrote it. Nor were these productions of a light
or superficial order. The taste of the family was severe, and,
though free from all bigotry, rooted in what we would fain call
the moral reasonableness of art. Wit was not confounded with
levity, and a bon mot received its meed of praise only so far as it
squared with decency. It may easily be inferred what, in such a
family, the general tone of conversation must have been. Lina's
mind, taste, and habits received from it a bias which they re-
tained through the rest of her life.

Among other tendencies she showed a decided leaning towards
controversial literature. She was fond of argumentation, and de-
lighted in listening to Mr. Slavick's criticisms of men and books.
Her friends often wondered, seeing her take from among the
books she had access to works of the sternest import, that she
should take pleasure in or have patience to finish them. At six-
teen she read Zschokke's Stunden der Andacht some eight or ten
volumes of the driest theological reasoning with evident inte-
rest, and, indeed, with what, from her persistency, might almost
have seemed reverent pleasure.

Her introduction to the German philosophers in the mean-
time was not of a character to much stimulate her curiosity in
that direction, and but for her native perseverance, not to say ob-
stinacy and conceit (two very salient traits in her disposition), she
might have for ever relinquished any such ambitious scholarship.
The circumstance is too droll to be passed by, and, as it sheds ad-
ditional light upon her character, I will give it in its details.

I88/-] I# PORT. 733

There was in Freiherr Slavick's library a glass case, generally
kept locked, and which contained his choicest books. They were
handsomely bound volumes, which the girls had long been told
would for many years to come be no reading-matter for them.
To ask why, though it might have occurred to them, they cared
not; for queries in the Slavick household, unless some particular-
ly. knotty point was in question, were not generally encouraged.
The Freiherr's motto was : Think first and ask afterwards. And,
indeed, even in the study-room did the Why? run but little
chance. " You do not understand ? Find out." And the cus-
tomary reference- books were pointed out. It is not to be won-
dered, therefore, that, accustomed to such Spartan government,
the young girls did not inquire further into the interdict placed
on the glass-case volumes.

It so happened that Lina, with one of her companions, hav-
ing just finished The Adventures of Jean Paul Choppart, lingered
awhile before the case, listlessly noting its treasures and won-
dering what would be their next literary amusement.

" Look ! " cried Lina, her attention being drawn to one of the
books, on the back of which she read " Jean Paul." "Another
'Jean Paul'!"

" Yes ; but," rejoined her friend, " we can't have it."

" Because, no doubt, they are so beautifully bound. If we
promised to take good care of them . . ."

" Oh ! it's no use. When Uncle Slavick has once said no, he
never says yes."

But Lina believed in trying, and she went to headquarters
and pleaded that, having taken such great interest in Jean Paul
Choppart, they would like very much to read the Jean Paul of the
glass case also.

Had the young girl had any experience in smiles and their
significance she would probably have noticed that which then
played on Mr. Slavick's lips ; but she had not, and eagerly begged
for the book. The request was granted. Never were girls more
jubilant over a prize. They hied to their favorite reading-retreat
a huge apple-tree in the orchard, the mute confidant of their
joys and disappointments and began to read. They did not read
long. Jean Paul Richter was evidently not as genial a character
as Jean Paul Choppart.

The little incident in the meantime told differently on the two
girls. Lina's companion vowed it should be her last attempt, as
it had been her first, at German philosophy ; whilst Lina, more
piqued than humbled, made it pave the way to it. She subse-

734 IN PORT. [Mar.,

quently read a number of the works of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel,
Kant, and, though it proved a hard pull and could only profit
her as an exercise of mental gymnastics, she had no occasion to
regret it.

Thus glided by four years four years of peaceful study and
gradual development. She had acquired German, had learned
some music and drawing, and made her dtbut in society. Not-
withstanding Altgedein's such is the name of the adjacent
town remoteness from all great centres, the winters were by no
means dull. The two neighboring military towns Clattau and
Thaus furnished among the officers quartered there not only
willing dancers, but also ready contributors to private theatri-
cals and chanty concerts. A thirty-mile sleigh-ride was nothing
to them.

Toward the close of the last of these happy years, however,
three great sorrows darkened again Lina's horizon and indirectly
shaped her future. She lost in close succession, and in the inter-
val of a few months only, first her bosom-friend, Stephanie,
dearer to her than a sister ; then her mother, leaving her an en-
tire orphan ; and finally her betrothed.

During a visit to Vienna she had made the acquaintance of a
gentleman in every way qualified to secure to her a happy mar-
ried life. He was a cousin of Mr. Slavick, and a lawyer by pro-
fession. Although a man of twice her age and a recluse by tem-
perament, he had divined in the young girl that graver nature
that could pair with his, and sought and won her affections.
This projected union met, besides, the wishes of the whole fam-
ily.

These successive bereavements plunged Lina into a profound
melancholy. She felt that she was henceforth alone in' the
world. With the exception of her younger sister, from whom she
had always been separated, and whom she consequently scarcely
knew, she had no near relatives to turn to. Life began to show
its sterner aspect work ; work no longer for pleasure's sake,
but for necessity's sake. Hints had already been thrown out by
her guardian in Paris that she would be called on to assist in the
education of her sister. The death of her betrothed, in dispers-
ing all thoughts of marriage, also destroyed her hopes of provid-
ing a home for her sister. There remained nothing for her to
do but bravely face the reality. Her friends kindly assured her
of a home with them, and urged her to remain; but there were
inner voices that counselled differently, and, after careful reflec-
tion, she finally resolved to return to Paris. She was well equip-

1887.] IN PORT. 735

ped for a teacher, and looked forward to teaching as a profes-
sion.

Her religious sentiments at this period of her life may be N
said to have been of a strangely mixed kind. Her passive ad-
herence to the faith of her childhood ; her interest in that of her
friends in Bohemia; her doubts about the doubts her philosophic
readings had raised in her mind all this together had gradually
gathered about her belief a sort of theological fog, of which she
took at first no notice, but which in many respects influenced
her actions and deadened somewhat her former religious ardor.

And yet here she was about embarking alone on life's fitful
voyage, and more than ever in need of spiritual assistance.

The world, with all its hardships and attractions, lay wide be-
fore her. It had never yet been unkind to her; she knew no-
thing of its temptations, its rebuffs, its rewards. She plunged
into it with all the trustfulness of inexperience, and, strange to
state, had never occasion to regret it. It is, moreover, a fact
worthy of notice that, young as she was, attractive in person, of a
lively imagination, and full of curiosity, she should have escaped
all the serious accidents that befall unguarded youth. Yet so it
was. She traversed Paris at all hours of the day without sus-
pecting its evils; and this singular protection she enjoyed all
through life indeed, so candid was her faith in mankind that,
already somewhat advanced in womanhood, she boasted of hav-
ing never yet met the person she could not cordially shake hands
with.

Two great virtues formed, so to say, the basis of her charac-
ter obedience and a profound sense of duty ; and it is to these,
no doubt, that must partly be ascribed her safe sailing through
life. A little episode connected with some of her early experi-
ences as teacher may perhaps illustrate the first. Her friends, on
her return to Paris, had secured private lessons for her; and her
pastor, interested in her movements, had in some instances mark-
ed her route. One day he met her as she was going up the steps
of the Passage Saulnier. He stopped her:
" Where are you going?"
" To the Rue Montmartre."
" What ! through the Passage ? "
' 4 Yes. I always do."

He frowned. "You must not; you should avoid all Pass-
ages." And he indicated another way. Lina was sorry. Pass-

* The Passage, in Paris, generally roofed with glass, is a great convenience to wayfarers,
as it links streets and saves distance ; but it has the ill-repute of being frequented by question-
able people, and it was on that ground that Lina's friend objected to it.

736 lx PORT. [Mar.,

age Saulnier was a short cut to the place she was bound to, and
had, moreover, among its shops a picture-gallery she was in the
habit of lingering at ; but she obeyed.

A short time after, returning from a dinner-party with a
young gentleman, the latter proposed Passage Saulnier for a
short cut. "No," said Lina ; "we must not go that way."
" Why? " " I don't know why, but Mr. Verni objects to it. He
says it isn't right; and what is not right for me isn't right for
you either."

Private teaching, in the meantime, began to tell on her
health. The long walks it subjected her to proved too fatiguing,
and her friends looked out for a situation for her in a school or
family. She was eager to learn English, and had already collect-
ed quite a little library of English books, studying the language
as well as she could alone. A situation presenting itself for her
in a clergyman's family in Winchester (England), she accepted it,
and started for her new place of destination. But whether the
climate did not suit her or that her health was already under-
mined by fatigue, she succumbed after a two months' stay, and
returned to Paris quite ill. It was her first serious illness. She
was confined to her bed for nearly five weeks. But home-air and
home-ways, rest and friendship, soon brought back her wonted
elasticity of mind and limb. She recovered. A visit to Hol-
land put the finishing touch to her convalescence, and her friends
set again about finding for her proper employment.

From her short sojourn in England she retained nothing but
pleasant recollections. She made a few new and lasting friends,
but scarcely any headway in English. She gained a knowledge
of the Episcopal Church, and had the pleasure of attending its
service in the time-honored and beautiful Winchester Cathedral.
Only the Sundays left a lugubrious memory. The French Pro-
testantism on Sundays was certainly more cheery than the
English.

Her visit to Holland again left another impression. Owing,
no doubt, to the particular individual who represented the
church of the country at Elburg, Lutheranism showed itself to
her in its narrowest form. Baron Mollerus and his family were
people of the world and broad in their views ; but the zealous
clergyman who looked after their spiritual welfare, and who was
a frequent visitor at the house, had all the characteristics of un-
compromising pharisaism, and many were the lively arguments
between him and the French visitor touching mankind in gene-
ral, and Parisians in particular. In regard to the latter the

1 887.] IN PORT. 737

worthy gentleman had conceived the most extravagant notions,
and delighted in holding up the French as examples for future
punishment.

Her stay at Zwalvenburg, the country-seat of the Mollerus
family, was, however, only intended for a short rest and a means
to re-establish her health. It added to her list of experiences in
a worldly sense, but made no other impression on her spiritual
nature except to put her on her guard against certain features
of her faith, which she began to suspect as possibly in need of
some more charity before it could be truly called Christian.

Her friends in Paris had in the meantime busied themselves
with finding for her another situation, and when she returned
she found the way paved for future usefulness. A lucrative
position had presented itself for her in a young ladies' school
in Washington. Her chief desire was still the acquisition of the
English language. Her health being restored, her mind, cruslv
ed awhile by affliction, again rebounded, and, silencing with af-
fectionate promises the objections of her friends in Bohemia, she
started for America.

What her spiritual state exactly was at that period of her
life it would be hard to clearly define. She was in a sort of
theological fog wherein the church of her childhood, the Catho-
lic chapel of Altgedein, and German philosophy formed a misty
compound to which she tried in vain to give a definite shape.
In her last conversation with her pastor touching religion in
the country she was about to visit, he duly informed her of the
numerous sects Protestantism was divided into in the United
States, enjoining upon her to hold on to her faith. But this
proved less easy than it seemed. She had heretofore known
two churches only, and in trying to discover her own legiti-
mate one amidst the crowd of different denominations she found
herself now surrounded by, she completely lost her way. She
tried the Baptist, the Presbyterian, the Episcopal, the Unitarian,
the Swedenborgian ; and in none could find that spiritual repose
and serenity she had learned to appreciate in the solitary little
chapel at Altgedein, or even in the simple-worded but clear and
intelligent service, free from all bombastic phraseology, of the
church of her childhood, Les Billettes. She was at sea. Her
soul, deprived of its accustomed food, grew torpid. She subse^
quently married, and for a while adopted her husband's views:
freedom of thought, of feeling, of taste ; freedom at any cost.
It brought no relief. She drifted farther and farther on that
desolate road that leads to the Dark Tower of Incredulity, and

VOL. XLIV. 47

738 IN PORT. [Mar.,

felt more and more the parching and exhausting influence of
that artificial heat which intellectual pride substitutes for loving
faith.

In the midst of this theological gloom came suddenly a blow
that stretched her on the ground, hopeless. She had lost two
babes before, and rallied; but the death of her only daughter,
who had reached the age of sixteen, amidst all the promises of an
accomplished girlhood, tried her soul to its innermost. O the
weary days and nights groping in the dark for a helping, lifting
hand ! The impulsive prayerfulness of her early years was, if
not wholly gone, so obscured that neither mind nor heart could
any longer unite in harmonious supplication. She was immersed
in spiritual darkness and cold.

Whether the writer catches Robert Browning's meaning in
his poem, " Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," rightly or
not, to her the picture of that weird path that leads to the Dark
Tower (Tower of Eternal Darkness) always conveys to her mind
the image of the moral misery a soul must drift into when cut
loose from all spiritual anchorage. What can she do when
brought face to face with that ominous tower, the stronghold
of the demon of Denial, and its yawning grave? Roland, en-
compassed by enemies in the Valley of Roncevaux, blew his
horn. The pilgrim soul, adrift and helpless, surrounded likewise
by invisible foes, if, in the darkness she has wandered through,
she has preserved some gleam of filial love for her Father in hea-
ven, will call also for divine assistance. And the call will be an-
swered, either here below or later above. Some light will
be sure to break through the darkness, and with that light life,
courage, and hope will return also.

I believe, O Lord ! Help thou my unbelief!

Lina, in sheer despair, called likewise for help; and help was
vouchsafed. An invisible guide led her to the works of Fenelon,
St. Augustine, The Imitation. She read diligently, fervently,
and with every step regained new strength.

Then followed reflection. Are there, then, two roads to the
kingdom of heaven two equally good, safe, and sure? Where-
in doth the path she had followed from her childhood differ from
the one pointed out by the great religious thinkers whose works
she had just perused ? They had recalled her disconsolate soul
to new life. Are they alone right, then ? Who shall decide?
She remembered how often, beguiled by the mirage of ideas, she
had been deceived. She would riot choose rashly, but read on,
watch and wait for further conviction. Old ties and memories are
dear! The conviction came apace, but, alas! again in the shape

i88/.] IN PORT. 739

of affliction. The only son, the only joy and hope left to her
husband and herself, was smitten in the midst of a bright and
promiseful career. Life hung but on a thread. She flew to his
bedside; and there through months of anxious nights she prayed
prayed as she had. never prayed before. He was spared.

It was during these agonies of fear that she realized for the
first time the helpfulness of the Blessed Virgin and the nearness
of the Saints. She had but a vague idea of the sign of the cross ;
yet, impelled by inner promptings, she made it as she best knew
how made it over the prostrate form of her son when asleep ;
made it at all hours of the day, whenever the weary soul sought
the Fountain of Refreshment. She had read and heard of neu-
vaines, and could only conjecture that they were nine-day suppli-
cations to the Mother of Sorrows ; and, untutored as she yet was,
she said a neuvaineior her son with all the fervor of a fresh hope.

Henceforth she belonged to the mother-church, and only
waited to be formally admitted ; she had thoroughly mastered
its doctrine.

A friendly priest she accidentally met during a voyage helped
her to the means the necessary books. She made ready for the
final step, knocked at the Door, and was let in.

And now, ask friends : What have you gained by leaving
us? Wherein are you the happier and the wiser? The two
roads run parallel, each to the City of God. She replies:
" Not so ; not quite parallel. I have long tried yours the one
I was brought up in tried it faithfully and in all simplicity of
heart ; and it has not only led me injto marshes where I became
the victim of their flitting will-o'-the-wisps, but it has also left
me in the lurch when I most needed help. Not till I had learned
the meaning of obedience to the divine will, absolute obedience,
did I realize the blessing of absolute peace that peace which
passes all understanding, and which can only be obtained by sub-
mission, a glad and entire submission, to the will of God."

" We recognize the same," again say the friends.

" Perhaps ; but you interpret God's will according to your
own individual apprehension. You claim liberty of judgment/
and you do not seem to see that whilst you opine one way your
neighbor opines another. The church, with its message of
peace on earth and good will toward men, becomes with you an
intellectual battle-ground, where the word of God is turned into
a war-cry, and where the poor and the feeble lookers-on, unable
to distinguish between the victors, instead of finding comfort,
only lose all faith and courage."

740 THE CHURCH AT PUTEOLL [Mar.,

" Reason was given us to judge for ourselves, and not to be
blindly led by others."

" Blindly, no ; but to take Christ's own word for the church
he came to establish upon earth is not being led blindly. St.
Paul calls it ' the pillar and ground of truth.' Its infallibility is
contained in its very commission. Without that infallibility
there would be no certainty of faith.

" In short, to return to the first query, ' What have you
gained ? ' I reply : I have gained freedom, the freedom of son-
ship instead of that of the hireling I was before. What seems to
you bondage is simply filial obedience."

THE CHURCH AT PUTEOLI.

FROM THE GERMAN OF RUECKERT.

I WENT from Naples to Puteoli ;

Huge stones along the road my course impeded
Relics of Roman pride in days gone by,

Now fallen low, unnoted and unheeded.

I left the pagan temples where they lay

Fain would I sweep their ruins from existence

When now a church uprose beside the way,
In quiet beauty shining in the distance.

A legend graven on the portal there

My gaze held fast ; in language quaint it stated
That 'neath St. Raphael's protecting care,

The traveller's friend, the church was consecrated.

Thou who Tobias* son didst lead of old
Safe to the arms of his expectant father,

Guide thou me home when dangers manifold
Around my wandering footsteps darkly gather!

Within that little wayside shrine I stept,
A coffin 'mid the solemn gloom discerning,

In which the toil-worn frame extended slept
Of some poor pilgrim into dust returning !

Saint Raphael ! him hast surely guided home
To where life's journey endeth at death's portal :

Oh ! guide us, pilgrims too, who blindly roam
Amid life's ruins, to our home immortal !

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 741

.
SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS.

SECOND SERIES.
NO. IV.

THE THEORY OF A PARTIAL DESTRUCTION OF MANKIND IN THE NOACHIAH
DELUGE THE QUESTION NOT DOGMATIC LOCAL RESTRICTION GENE-
RALLY ADMITTED REASONS FOR A SIMILAR RESTRICTION IN RESPECT
TO MANKIND EXEGETICAL PROOFS THAT THE NOACHIAN FAMILY
DOES NOT INCLUDE ALL MANKIND.

THE late Abb6 Motais, who was professor of Hebrew at
the Grand Seminary of Rennes, in his learned work entitled
Le Deluge Biblique devant la Foi, l'criture et la Science, has
presented very clearly and strongly the arguments in opposition
to the universality of the Noachian Deluge. The question
divides itself into two parts. One relates to the local extent
of the great Flood, the other to the extension of the destruction
of human life on the earth which it effected. In an article of our
First Series we have said all we think necessary respecting the
local extent. It is now very generally held that only a small
portion of the earth's surface was submerged, and consequently
that only the living beings inhabiting that portion were de-
stroyed. We take our departure in the present discussion from
this extremely probable opinion as our position, and assume it
to be true and proved. And we will now go on to examine and
explain some of the reasons for believing that the destruction of
human life on the globe was restricted to a portion only of the
race of Adam.

The question is practically reduced to an inquiry whether, at
the epoch of the Flood, the then living multitude of men were
confined within the limits of that relatively small area of the
telluric surface which was inundated. If that part only of the
globe was inhabited by man, it follows that all human beings
not saved in the ark were destroyed, and that Noah became the
second father and founder of the entire human race. If other
regions of the globe had become already peopled by the descen-
dants of Adam, these tribes or nations, whether their numbers
were great or small, survived the cataclysm, and we may affirm
that their descendants are now living on the earth ; so that a

74 2 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Mar.,

large part of the present human family, though the offspring of
Adam, are not descended from any of the patriarchs who were
saved in the ark.

At the outset it is important to determine whether the ques-
tion of the universality of the Deluge in respect to the human
race has a moral and doctrinal character, or is to be classed with
matters relating to chronology, history, archaeology, etc., with
which no dogma is involved. There are some who regard the
thesis maintaining the total destruction of all mankind except
the family of Noah, by the waters of the Flood, as dogmatic.
They consider that the truth and inspiration of the sacred
records are involved in it. They maintain that Catholic tra-
dition, the ordinary, magisterial teaching of the church, ascer-
tained by a consent of Fathers and Doctors and by the common
belief of the faithful, has really decided the question. If this con-
tention could be proved by incontrovertible arguments, if would
certainly be rash to maintain the opposite thesis. We do not
think, however, that it can be proved. It would ned a formal
and explicit decision by the competent ecclesiastical authority
to make a certain adjudication of this question in dispute, so as
to put an end to the controversy. It is not pretended that any
such decision has been rendered. The plea in bar of perfect
freedom of opinion respecting the extent of the destruction of
the human race in the Deluge is an appeal to the general, tra-
ditional consent in favor of universality. But if the question be
not dogmatic, if it is purely historical, this plea is of no avail.
In a purely historical matter, as in one purely scientific, anti-
quity and universality of tradition stand on a level with merely
human testimony and opinion ; the value and weight of the tradi-
tion are subject to rational examination and estimation. For
sufficient reasons its authority can be discarded. In the present
case, if no doctrinal or moral lesson, intended by the Holy Spirit
for the edification of all the faithful, is embedded in an historical
fact viz., that God destroyed all mankind by the Noachian
Flood, one family alone excepted then there is no matter apt
to receive the form of a doctrinal stamp of authority. It is like
the question of the length of time between Adam and Noah,
Noah and Abraham, Abraham and Moses, the question of the
year of the world or the year of Rome in which our Lord was
born, and the i exact date of the Crucifixion.

As a practical question, we think it is morally certain that
the non-universality of the Deluge in respect to the human
race can be held and defended without any rashness, or risk of

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 743

error in a matter pertaining to Catholic doctrine. The number
and character of the men who either positively maintain the
theory of restriction, or at least allow that it is an open question
for discussion, suffice to make this position a safe one.

The Abbe Motais, who is one among several distinguished ad-
vocates of the theory of non-universality, has published his work
with the official sanction of his archbishop. It is not necessary
to spend more time and labor in defending a position which few
will dispute. We must, of course, be mindful of a caution given
in the Dublin Review by Lord Arundell of Wardour, who is one
of the learned advocates of the universal theory. We are not to
assume that the universality of the Deluge is not a historical fact,
simply because it is not certain by authority that it is a dogmatic
fact. The theory of partial destruction is not proved to be true
by merely proving that one is free to argue in favor of its truih.
We do not dream of asking such an unreasonable concession.
This is not the point we wish to gain. What is gained by plac-
ing the question of universality on a plane which is outside of
the range of dogma is simply this : The great doctrinal and
moral import of the Deluge, as a dogmatic fact belonging to the
history of the grand, supernatural plan of God for the redemp-
tion of man, is raised above the level of an extensive domain of
secular history and science. The local area of the inundation is
the portion of the globe, mostly confined within Asiatic limits,
which may be designated with sufficient precision for our pur-
pose as the Caucasian centre of the development of the human
race from its origin in the first pair created by God. This region
is the local theatre of the inspired history. The rest of the earth
is beyond its scope, and we are left to the ordinary resources of
human curiosity and ingenuity to find out what we can about it.
The same area of population, the multitude of its inhabitants,
whether comprising the whole or only a part of mankind, at
any one of the earlier epochs of human history, is the moral
theatre of the events in the order of .a supernatural Provi-
dence which are narrated in the inspired record, and are to
be classed as dogmatic facts. No believer in the Scriptures
would think of questioning the moral and doctrinal import of
that great historical event, the Noachian Deluge. But all
dogmatic exigencies and relations of this historical fact are
fully satisfied by the theory which restricts the inundation to
the Caucasian area, and the destruction of life to the inhabi-
tants of that area. This was the world, and its population
was the human race, in so far as these were included with-

744 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Mar.,

in the scope of Noah, the patriarchs who succeeded him, and
Moses. The drowning of this world and of its entire popula-
tion, one family excepted, and the repeopling of this central
Caucasian area with the descendants of Noah, is a fact of im-
mense moral import, an event of great magnitude in the his-
tory of God's dealings with mankind. It is dogmatic not only
because narrated by the sacred historian Moses under the in-
spiration of God, but especially because its moral bearing raises
it to the doctrinal plane. There is no historical narrative in the
Old Testament which is more fully corroborated by evidence
from secular sources than this one. Within its own proper and
certain limits, the Deluge, as an article of Christian belief, is not
encumbered with serious difficulties or in need of the support of
elaborate controversy. It is one of the most unassailable points
of ^he Christian citadel.

The question about the peopling of other parts of the globe,
before and after the Flood, is really irrelevant in a doctrinal
aspect. The drowning of the people who inhabited the Cau-
casian area remains as an undisturbed fact, with all its moral
and doctrinal importance, whether Africa, Europe, or America
were inhabited at the time by men or were only the abode of
beasts. The history of Noah and his descendants does not de-
pend for its supreme significance and value on the xtruth of the
theory that all mankind who lived after the Flood were his de-
scendants. It gains nothing by the supposition that his family
alone were left alive when the Flood subsided, and loses nothing
by the supposition that portions of the Adamic race were living
in regions which were not inundated by the waters of the great
Deluge. Catholic dogma is involved in the thesis of 'the unity
of the human race as a species derived by generation from
Adam and Eve. But there is no Catholic doctrine involved in
the thesis of the Noachian descent of all generations subsequent
to the Flood.

The task of inculcating the moral and doctrinal lessons of the
Sacred Scripture, and of defending them against unbelievers, is,
therefore, made simpler and easier by the restriction which is
vindicated by the Abb6 Motais and his compeers.

A secondary gain is the freedom of investigation, by all
methods and in all directions, without any anxiety about com-
promising the authority of Scripture, in respect to the time and
extent of the early colonization of all parts of the world. Pos-
sibly the weight of probability may turn out to be on the side
of the hypothesis that the wandering of the race from its cradle

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 745

only began after the Deluge. Perhaps it may be proved with
great probability that it began and gained a wide extension be-
fore the Deluge. It may be that the result of all inquiries will be
that the matter is doubtful and must remain finally an unsolved
problem. This is really of no consequence, except in a scientific
point of view. But we may seek to gratify a rational curiosity,
if we please ; and, at all events, we must not make war on those
who do choose to prosecute these inquiries, if they deny or ques-
tion the truth of some venerable but purely human traditions.

A nearer and more distinct view of the reason and moral
purport of the great cataclysm will, we trust, show that there is
no cause for identifying the question of the universality of the
Deluge in respect to mankind with Scriptural doctrine. It is
true that the common view has been that God determined to
destroy all mankind, eight persons only excepted, as a punish-
ment for the universal and incorrigible wickedness of men. In
its most extreme form, this notion represented the whole human
race, collectively and individually, as doomed on account of sin
to both temporal and eternal perdition. Their bodies were
drowned in the Flood, and their souls swallowed up by the
abyss of hell, by a terrible visitation of divine vengeance upon
a world of sinners. Catholic theologians have never advocated
such an extravagant and intolerable view as this. Even on the
supposition that the intention and end of the Deluge was to
punish the whole mass of mankind for sins which had corrupted
the human race universally, exceptions must be admitted. At
least all infants must be exempted from any personal guilt. Even
if it be granted that all adults were sinners, and as such involved
in the universal destruction as a punishment, it cannot be in-
ferred that all or that any definite portion of them died impeni-
tent and reprobate. That some were saved is made known by
the Scripture itself, for St. Peter declares that Christ " preached
to those spirits who were in prison ; who in time past had been
incredulous when they waited for the patience of God in the
days of Noe" (i Ep. Pet. iii. 19). Undoubtedly the general and
gross corruption of morals was the moral cause of the Deluge.
And the Deluge, like all temporal evils which are inflicted on
account of sin, was a punishment. But the temporal chastise-
ments which are sent in the course of Divine Providence are not
merely and simply punishments. Their chief end is not to mea-
sure out, by the law of distributive justice, to individual sinners
the penalties of retribution which they have deserved by their
sins. Their grand object is to remove obstacles in the way of

74" SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Mar.,

the progress of mankind toward the great end of God's plan of
redemption. In the instance of the Deluge universal moral cor-
ruption made the destruction of all the inhabitants of the Cau-
casian region necessary. But it was necessary chiefly for a rea-
son other than an exigency of justice for the punishment of sin-
ners or the expiation of their sins.

The descendants of Seth, the patriarchal people, the " sons
of God/' who were destined to preserve and transmit the sacred
heritage of truth and morality to future generations, by becom-
ing infected with the wickedness of the depraved common mass
of Adam's descendants had become unfit to fulfil their holy vo-
cation. The sacred heritage itself was in danger of being lost.
It was necessary to begin a new race with Noah and his de-
scendants, and to make a desert around them, that the old venom
might not infect them so speedily and in such a virulent man-
ner that the religious and moral root of mankind would utterly
perish.

As for the inhabitants of remote parts of the globe, their de-
struction or survival could have no effect upon the development
of the Noachian race. Therefore the question concerning the
existence and perpetuation of these remote tribes is irrelevant
to doctrine, and can be treated like any other matter which is
merely historical. This is not to say that it is to be treated in
disregard of the authority of the sacred text in Genesis. But as,
in matters not dogmatic or moral, there is no doctrinal determi-
nation of the sense and meaning of the text of canonical books,
and as dogma is not involved in the historical question before us,
all Jhat bears on it in the text of Genesis is to be interpreted by
fair, thorough, and critical exegesis. And in this kind of criti-
cal interpretation all extraneous sources of information, such as
secular history, and the sciences of language, ethnology, archae-
ology, etc., must be consulted, their evidence must be received.

The first point of discussion which meets us at the threshold
of our inquiry is this: Does the text of Genesis unequivocally
affirm the drowning of all mankind, eight persons only excepted,
in the waters of the Flood ? This question cannot be answered
exegetically and critically, unless a prior question is disposed of.
This prior question is: Does Genesis unequivocally affirm the
submergence of the whole earth and the drowning of all living
beings on its surface, except those who were saved in the ark?
M. Motais goes into a thorough and minute examination of both
those questions. We will let them pass. It is generally ad-
mitted that the text of Genesis can be fairly interpreted in har-

i88;.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 747

mony with the theory of a restricted submergence and a corre-
sponding limitation of the destruction of animal life. The same
rules of interpretation which allow of the local restriction of the
Deluge, if fairly applied, permit also the restriction of the gene-
ral destruction of human life. This observation must suffice for
our present purpose.

We may now consider what reasons exist for supposing that
at the date of the Deluge portions of the earth's surface beyond
the limits of inundation were already inhabited.

First, there is a reason a priori. There were causes at work
from the beginning of the human race which might or must have
produced a wide colonization of the earth before any probable
date of the Deluge. Second, there is a reason a posteriori. That
is, if we go back to the year 2000 B.C., we find a great number
of facts then existing which must be traced back, as effects, to
causes long prior to any probable date of the Deluge causes
working with a continuity which does not admit of an interrup-
tion by a universal destruction of human life on the earth.

Let a person assume that the Deluge occurred in the seven-
teenth century from the creation of Adam. He may say that
the world would become peopled over a large extent of its sur-
face, from natural causes, during those i,65oyears. If he assumes
a later date, the twenty-third century, the argument will gain a
great increase of probability. Again, one who assumes that the
Deluge occurred some ten centuries before Abraham may say
that a much longer time than this would be required to account
for many facts of different kinds known to have been in exist-
ence at the epoch of Abraham a longer time, viz., of the con-
tinuity of the human race.

There is one element of uncertainty in all these calculations.
There are uncertain and variable quantities upon which they
depend. It is impossible to determine with certainty how long
after Adam or how long before Christ the date of the Deluge
ought to be fixed. Genesis does not furnish a definite chrono-
logy, neither can we find one elsewhere. The figures contained
in the tables of genealogy, which are the only data given in
Genesis for constructing a system of chronology, differ widely in
the Hebrew, Samaritan, and Greek texts. It cannot be deter-
mined with certainty which of these three texts represents the
original, authentic text of Moses, or even that any one of them is
unaltered and correct. If Moses intended to construct a system
of dates for his ancient history, and actually did insert it in the
book of Genesis, his record is blurred and defaced beyond re-

748 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Mar.,

covery. It is quite probable that his correct text, if we had it,
would not furnish data for a precise chronology. It is by no
means certain that he intended to give the complete series of the
patriarchs from Adam to Abraham. He may have selected cer-
tain names from the whole number, even if he possessed a com-
plete list ; or the genealogical tables from which he compiled
may have been imperfect. If there are some links missing from
the series, the computation of time from the addition of the in-
tervals between the births of the successive patriarchs in the line
of descent loses the value which has been ascribed to it on the
supposition that .the list is complete. The learned Jesuit, Father
Brucker, has very good reasons for his conclusion : " that Moses
had no intention to inform us what is the age of the human race,
by means of his genealogies," and "that the numbers contained
in the genealogies of Genesis do not impose any certain limit
of restriction upon serious chronologists; ... so that the re-
searches of true science remain free in the matter of the chrono-
logy of the earliest times." *

It is easy to see from what has just been said that all argu-
ments respecting the universality of the Deluge which depend
on the supposed length of the intervals of time between Adam
and Noah, and Noah and Abraham, have an element of uncer-
tainty in them On account of the uncertainty of the length of
these intervals. There is very good reason, in our opinion, for
assigning 4000 B.C. as the latest probable date which can be as-
signed to the Deluge. The force of the argument for its non-
universality in respect to man, so far as this depends on an esti-
mate of the time required for certain developments in race, lan-
guage, etc., between Noah and Abraham, diminishes in propor-
tion to the recession of the date of the Deluge. It is of this
point of advantage that the advocates of universality chiefly
avail themselves in the present state of the controversy. They
say in brief: All the time which is needed, all you can reasonably
claim, can be granted after the Deluge.

If we try to estimate the probable increase of the human
race, and the extent of its migrations before the Flood, on a priori
grounds, there is very much that is hypothetical about the whole
matter. It is impossible to determine how much time elapsed
before the great cataclysm occurred. The ratios of increase are
unknown. Some have carefully computed the population of the
earth as it was A.M. 500, estimating the probable number at
1,200,000. After eleven or fifteen more centuries, or even a

* La Contr averse, Mar. 15, 1886, pp. 392-3.

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 749

longer possible lapse of time, it is easy to suppose that the pos-
terity of Adam may have peopled the greater portion of the
world. Still, this conclusion is only a hypothetical inference
from uncertain premises, unless the fossil remains of the human
race in different parts of the globe can be taken as giving posi-
tive evidence to its truth. Curious and interesting as the inves-
tigation of the problems connected with the subject, as viewed
on this side of it, may be, it is not the line of inquiry which is
pursued by the- Abbe Motais. His arguments and proofs are
derived from a different source. He seeks for a solution by
means of a thorough, searching exegesis of the text of Genesis.
And we think that in this way he arrives at more satisfactory
results, and, indeed, at a solution of the question which is not
merely probable, but approaching to a certainty which, we may
hope, will hereafter be fully established, and accepted by a com-
mon consent of scholars.

The Bible is from the beginning to the end a Messianic book.
It begins with the promise of the Redeemer, and it ends with a
prayer for his second coming to finish his work. Its dogma is
essentially theology and Christology ; its ethics is the promulga-
tion of the Old and New Law of the Lord ; its history is a record
of the acts of " God in Christ reconciling the world unto him-
self," which is supplemented by a foretelling in prophecy of
events in the history of Redemption before they have come to
pass. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega of the Bible, which
speaks throughout of " Him first, Him last, Him midst and with-
out end." All else contained in the divine book is incidental
and relative.

When Moses, moved by divine inspiration, composed the
book of Genesis, he was possessed of all the means of informa-
tion concerning the history of mankind during that period of
probably forty-five centuries which had elapsed since the crea-
tion of Adam, which he had become acquainted with by his
Temple education, by written and oral traditions of his own
people, and by his journeys in lands beyond the bounds of
Egypt. He made use of these, but only for that end and within
that scope which were intended by the Holy Spirit, whose in-
strument he was. It was not a mere curious collection of docu-
ments and traditions which he compiled with a motive of writing
history. There is a definite purpose and plan throughout. He
begins with an account of the creation of the universe, and of
the earth in particular, in order to proclaim the great article of
faith one God, who is the Creator and Sovereign Lord ; insinu-

750 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Mar.,

ating also, in a veiled manner, the plurality of Persons in the
Godhead. The history of the creation, the primal condition in
original righteousness, and the fall of Adam follows as the first
chapter in the history of the redemption through the Incarnate
Son of God. The genealogies which follow have for their pur-
pose to show the ancestry and descent of the Messiah. In the
beginning the chosen people of the coming Redeemer includes
the whole family of Adam. But as time goes on this chosen peo-
ple becomes, as it were, a church, restricted to a part of man-
kind on account of the degeneracy and the wandering away of
the greater number. The limits of the Mosaic history become
less general and more restricted as it puts aside the progeny of
Cain and of other children of Adam, and confines itself to the
family of Seth. At and after the epoch of the Deluge the lines
are again drawn in around the family of Noah; later on the his-
toric record is narrowed to Abraham, then to Isaac, to Jacob
and the twelve patriarchs ; and after these it is a consolidated na-
tion, chosen and established as the special people of the Messiah,
with which the sacred history is concerned as written by the
successors of Moses. Throughout the entire series of ages and
events a process of the elimination of the mass which is unfit to
constitute a part of the lump which is being moulded, and a pro-
cess of purification of this precious lump of humanity itself, is
going on. We are not to infer that there is a positive, antece-
dent reprobation of the general mass of men as distinguished
from the elect. They are reprobated after they have made
themselves unworthy, and because of their unworthiness.
Neither is reprobation, in this sense, a total exclusion from
the region of the merciful providence and grace of the Divine
Redeemer. It is an exclusion from one special order of provi-
dence, involving a privation of certain special means of grace
and a relegation into another, outlying sphere. So Cain and his
posterity are banished to a distance from the posterity of Seth.
The chosen race of the Sethites is destroyed in the Flood, in
order to have a better race succeed in the place of the degene-
rate "sons of God." Abraham succeeds in his turn as the found-
er of a new nation. The inhabitants of the cities of the Plain
are destroyed, and later on the dwellers in Palestine are ordered
to be exterminated, because they were so radically infected with
vice that their existence would contaminate the moral atmosphere
which the Israelites were destined to live and breathe in. The
children of Israel were kept in the discipline of Egyptian servi-
tude for centuries, then the whole generation which went out of

1 887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 751

Egypt was left to die out in the desert, so that a people might be
prepared which was fit to go in and possess the Promised Land.
Finally the Jewish people, as a people, was cast off, and the
promises, the heritage, the Messiah, were given to the Gentiles.
The grand scheme of Redemption is not yet completed, and a
future age must show what is yet in reserve both for the mass of
the nations who have not yet been called into the church, and
also for the Jews.

To return to Moses and Genesis. The history of the Noachian
race is not a history of mankind but of a select portion of the
human race. The tables of genealogy and ethnology pertaining
to the post-diluvian period are concerned only with the white
race, and do not include the black, yellow, and red races of men.
First comes a genealogy of the three sons of Noah and a general
table of the migration of their descendants Japhet first, then
Cham, finally Shem, the eldest and the inheritor of the chief
promises. The account of the gathering and dispersion at the
Tower of Babel comes between this table of general ethnology
and the following special history of the Shemites. Probably
they only were gathered and dispersed at Babel, and the account
of this event is inserted as an incident in the history of this eld-
est branch of the Noachian family. The dispersion of the human
race considered as heretofore united in one family, and the divi-
sion of the one primitive language into many, cannot with any
grave probability be referred to the event of Babel. The record
of it merely furnishes a connecting link between the general his-
tory of the family of Shem and the particular history of the
family of Terah, from which sprang Abraham. It shows how it
came to pass that this illustrious heir of the patriarchs and father
of the faithful came from Ur of the Chaldees, and not from
Shinar.

The search for the origin of nations and of languages must
go back of Babel. Must it not also go back of the Deluge?
Many tribes and peoples, some of which were not so far removed
from the original centre as some which are mentioned in the
Mosaic table, are omitted in this table. Why so? The omission
of distant peoples with whom Moses and his contemporaries in
his own part of the world were unacquainted is easily accounted
for. But why did he omit in his table other tribes whom he has
mentioned later on in his history, or with whom it is certain that
the Egyptians were well acquainted? The supposition that he
selected the descendants of Noah and omitted the others pur-
posely, knowing that they were not Noachians, explains all.

75 2 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Mar.,

There are Rephaim, Zouzim, Zomzommim, Avvim, Emim, Ena-
cim, dispersed among- tribes of Canaanites and other descendants
of Noah. Some individuals and small groups of these indige-
nous inhabitants are described as giants, survivors of ancient
tribes of gigantic stature. There is an account of such gigantic
tribes among the antediluvians, but none of any such who were
descendants of Noah. What is more likely than that they were
of antediluvian origin? Indeed, there is a precise indication of
the descent from Cain of some of these tribes whose origin is
lost in the darkness of the most remote antiquity. Moses mar-
ried a daughter of Jethro, a priest of Midian, after his flight from
Egypt. The descendants of Hobab, the brother-in-law of Moses,
appear in the book of Judges, where they are called Cainites.
The Masoretic punctuators and the Greek and Latin translators
have changed the words Cain and Cainite into Cm and Cinean ;
but there is no good reason for this change. The Hebrew let-
ters are the same with those of the name of Cain as it appears
in the antediluvian history. Some Cainites were living among
the Midianites, intermingled and intermarried with them. It is
related in Judges (i. 16) that " the children of the CAINITE, the
kinsman of Moses, went up from the City of Palms with the chil-
dren of Judah." A little further on, in the description of the
campaign between Barak'and Sisera, it is written (iv. IT) : "Now
Heber the CAINITE had some time before departed from the rest
of the CAINITES his brethren, the sons of Hobab, the kinsman of
Moses." Balaam, in his famous prophecy, distinguishes between
the Sethites, the Cainites, and the Amalekites:

"A Star shall rise out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall spring up from
Israel ; and shall strike the two frontiers of Moab, and shall waste all THE
CHILDREN OF SETH. . . . And when he saw Amalek, he took up his parable,
and said : Amalek the beginning of nations, whose latter ends shall be de-
stroyed. He saw also the CAINITE, and took up his parable, and said :
Thy habitation indeed is strong : but though thou build thy nest in a rock,
lo ! he also, Cain, shall be exterminated " (Numbers xxiii. 17, etc.)

The Sethites who were within the view of Balaam's pro-
phetic vision, are distinctly put in opposition to the Amalekites,
described as the oldest of the nations round about, and to the
Cainites. M. Motais gives critical reasons and cites authorities
for the deviations of his rendering from that of the Vulgate.

It is certain that Moses gives no information concerning the
origin of the red, yellow, and black races of mankind. Those
who maintain that their origin must be traced to Noah are com-
pelled to seek for their ancestors among other sons and grand-

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 753

sons of Noah besides those whose names are mentioned by
Moses. This hypothesis is improbable for the reason that it sup-
poses these unknown and unnamed grandsons of Noah to have
founded races, societies, and civilizations, whose antiquity goes
considerably further back than the beginnings of similar founda-
tions traceable to their elder brothers. When the three great
divisions of the white race began to colonize distant countries,
they found them everywhere preoccupied by peoples possess-
ing already a notable antiquity. It is a remarkable fact, also,
that all the flexional languages are found among those nations
whose ancestors are mentioned by Moses as the offspring of
Noah, while all the languages of the yellow, red, and black races
are either monosyllabic or agglutinative. In the natural devel-
opment of language from its simple, primitive elements toward
perfection, complexity, and diversity, the monosyllabic form is
first and the flexional form last. From the beginning of the
human race as one family with one language, a great deal of time
must have elapsed before the different races of men, white, yel-
low, red, and black, reached their maximum of difference and
their languages attained an extreme divergence. Moreover, the
nearer a language is to a state of infancy, the nearer the time
when the people speaking it wandered away from the primitive
human family must be to the infancy of mankind. The flexional
languages of the Semitic, Chamitic, and Japhetian branches of
the white race had diverged from each other very widely long
before the time of Moses. The Chamitic language of the Egyp-
tians had already become markedly different from the Semitic
languages as early as 2300 B.C. The Sanscrit language was
already Sanscrit at the date of 2000 B.C. The common Aryan
language dates from at least 2500 B.C. And at this date the
Assyrian was already a distinct language. How much time
must it have taken to effect the ramification of the original No-
achian language into the Aryan and Semitic ? It seems as if the
theory of the descent of only those Semitic, Chamitic, and Ja-
phetic nations which are contained in the Mosaic table, from
Noah, requires all the time which can be supposed with proba-
bility between Noah and Abraham for the formation of the prin-
cipal ancient flexional languages from a common, primitive, flex-
ional language which was the idiom of the Noachian family. If a
long process of evolution from the monosyllabic stage, through
the stage of agglutinative language, into the flexional form, must
be supposed to have taken place after the Deluge, the date of the
VOL. XLIV. 48

754 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Mar.,

Deluge must be removed very far back. But if all post-diluvian
humanity is supposed to descend from Noah, his language must
have been monosyllabic, and this long, gradual evolution must
have taken place. This is physically possible, but morally very
improbable. Taken in connection with all the reasons adduced
or adducible from other sources, the argument from linguistics
makes it the more probable hypothesis that the white race alone
can trace its origin to Noah. We need to go far back of the
Deluge for the origin of the black, yellow, and red races of man-
kind and their languages, in order to account for all the facts
which are certainly or probably true, so as to harmonize with
the postulate of the unity of the human race.

We will finish this exposition of the thesis of M. Motais, which
is but a partial and superficial one because of its necessary bre-
vity, with the author's own words in concluding his volume :

" If critical science ratifies this thesis, it will be found worthy of some
degree of honor, for the reason that it has not been established under the
guarantee of profane sciences or the impulse of any hostile discovery, but
by a free and respectful effort of Catholic exegesis. No one can say that
it is a case of reason ousting faith from possession ; it is rather a perfecting
of belief by the method of faith, since it is an explanation of the sense of
Moses from his own writings.

" Those who reject the thesis, if such there are, cannot refuse to allow
it at least the merit of having been brought forth under the dominion of
high and holy preoccupations, since it has been the purpose of the author
to diminish the plausibility of objections against the Catholic faith, to tran-
quillize the minds and quiet the consciences of believers. Neither can they
deny that it is fitted to produce some happy results. It makes God to ap-
pear more benign though not less great, and the lesson it teaches is not the
less salutary because not so deeply marked with the idea of vengeance. It
places in a better light than any other theory the high destiny of Israel, the
genealogical union between the synagogue and the church which by some
is perfidiously denied, the continuous and merciful action of God in the
world to lead mankind to their Messiah. It places the grand dogma of the
Adamic descent of the human race beyond the reach of attack. It discloses
the majestic unity of the plan of Genesis, and furnishes solid support to the
authenticity of this divine book. Finally, it facilitates the offensive warfare
of Catholic exegesis against the prejudices of a kind of rationalism which
makes a perverse use to its own advantage of the imperfect light in which
some of its opponents view the matters in dispute, and the exaggerated
opinions to which they adhere, rather from an apathetic confidence in their
position than from an enlightened respect for the Scripture."

One word in addition respecting the Abbe Motais. He was
ordained at Rennes in 1862, and, after six years passed in the

1887.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 755

parochial ministry, joined a society formed by an aged and very
learned priest, the Abbe Guitton, called the Oratory of Rennes,
the object of which was the promotion of sacred studies. M.
Motais devoted himself after this chiefly to the study of the
Oriental languages and Scriptural science ; he passed a year at
Paris under the instruction of the celebrated Abbe Le Hir, and,
after three years more of preparation at Rennes, he was appoint-
ed to the chair of Hebrew and Sacred Scripture in the Grand
Seminary of that diocese. There are several minor works of
great merit from his pen which appeared during the years
1882-85, besides his last and best work, Le Deluge Biblique. He
was honored by his archbishop with a canonry in his cathedral,
and he lived and died in the best repute for sacerdotal piety and
zeal as well as for scholarship. He died at the age of forty-nine,
in consequence of the fatigue which he underwent in giving a
laborious retreat during the Advent of 1885.

The chief end which the writer of this article has aimed at is
not to make a thorough statement and defence of the thesis sus-
tained by the Abb6 Motais which would be impossible within
such a short compass but to introduce and recommend to the
studious clergy, especially to professors of Sacred Scripture in
our seminaries, this remarkable work, Le Deluge Biblique. The
discussion of its topics is becoming very active in France- and Bel-
gium, and there can be no doubt in the mind of any student of
sacred science, whichever side he may take, or if he still hesitates
between the two sides, that the question is one of great impor-
tance.

This article closes the second series of Scriptural Questions,

756 MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. [Mar.

MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER.

PART I.

To one of the counties bordering on the head-waters of the
Ogeechee River came, many years ago (from the northwestern
portion of North Carolina, he said), Ticey Blodget, bringing-
with him a few slaves, and money sufficient to make the first pay-
ment on the purchase of a considerable body of first-rate land.
About twenty-five years of age, rude in manners and speech, but
tall, well shaped, and rather handsome, he mingled little in so-
ciety at first, and seemed intent mainly on subduing the forest
that belonged to him and getting rich with all possible speed.
His residence, a little way removed from the public road, was on
the first rise as one travelled east a mile distant from Ivy's
Bridge, where were a store and a blacksmith's shop. Two
miles further on, close by the road, not far from the ford on
Long Creek, dwelt the Chiverses, a widow, with a daughter
Margaret, seventeen, and a son Thomas, fourteen years old.
The mother, who had a life interest in the estate, consisting of a
dozen negroes or so and several hundred acres of land, died
about a year after the coming of Mr. Blodget, and then it was
that he made known to Margaret his wish to marry her a wish
that he declared he had entertained ever since he first had set
eyes upon her. Mrs. Chivers had not liked the new-comer,
partly on account of his general rudeness, but particularly be-
cause of the reputation that he had made, soon after coming into
the community, of being unduly close and hard with his negroes.
But his prompt, persistent pursuit, his good looks, that peculiar-
ly receptive state of young maidenhood when in grief for recent,
sore bereavement, the minority of her brother all these were
favorable, and he married her. In the division of the estate the
homestead fell to Thomas, who, some time before his coming to
manhood, intermarried with Miss Maria Brantly.

Among the Chivers negroes was a man named Ryal, who,
though now of middle age, seemed to have lost none of his
extraordinary vigor and activity. He was of great size and
physical strength. He had been for years the leader in all

1887.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. 757

work, and admitted by everybody to be the most valuable slave
in the county. He wielded the axe, the maul, the hand-stick,
the hoe with a dexterity that it was very interesting to see.
With the plough he could run across a fifty-acre field a furrow
straight as a carpenter's ruler. Rough jobs of carpentry and
smithing he did in a manner sufficient for most plantation uses.
He was as honest and humble as he was powerful and adroit, and
with him yet was the cheerfulness of youth. He had lost appa-
rently none of his love for the Corn Song, and persons more
than a mile away from the shuckings in autumn nights could dis-
tinguish among a hundred his roar, whether leading or joined in
the chorus.

Whatever sincerity may have been in Mr. Blodget's avowal
of love at first sight for Margaret Chivers, there was no doubt
that since the first day on which he had seen this negro at work
he had eagerly wished to be his owner. With a youth like
Thomas Chivers, simple-minded, accommodating, withal devot-
edly fond of his sister, it was easy to have the man assigned to
her husband's portion, and even at a figure below his market
value.

To his new master Ryal, though he would have preferred to
remain at the old place, yet transferred without reserve the
loyalty that he had practised always theretofore, and the ser-
vices that he rendered were incalculably important. Besides
the work done by his own hands, his judgment in pitching and
tending crops, their regulation according to the varying condi-
tions of the seasons, their harvesting, the care of domestic ani-
mals and plantation-tools all services incident to his position-
made him of highest value to his master, who was fond, even to
boasting, of the pride he felt in owning a piece of property that
other people coveted.

" Mr. Blodget 'pears like he were prouder o' gittin' Ryal for
his nigger than o' gittin' Margie Chivers for his wife," said Mr.
James Lazenberry one day to Mr. Adam Ivy, one of the deacons
at Long Creek Meeting-house.

" Yes, it seem s6, and the reason is, Jemmy, that he under-
stand the value o' Ryal, and that o' Margie he don't ; and a pity
he don't. If he did, she might git some o' the worldy and keer-
nothin' savage out o' him. He's a rusher, shore, but sometimes
people rushes too rapid."

It might have been supposed that for a servant so efficient
and faithful the master would have felt some, yea much, of the
affection that was not uncommon among slave-holders, pioneers

758 MR. THOMAS CHIVER& BOARDER. [Mar.,

as they were in a new and most fertile region. He had always
lived hard. Yet, when I say that, I mean that, with exception of
a few indispensable things not of home production, he lived upon
mere necessaries. Yet of these he kept abundance, and dis-
pensed them right freely among his negroes ; for he knew well
enough that if a beast cannot do satisfactory work with insuffi-
cient food, no more can a man. His slaves and his teams, there-
fore, looked as if reasonably fed, and the former were clothed
rather comfortably in materials raised and manufactured on the
plantation.

In return for these supplies he exacted service to every de-
gree that was possible, and he punished with severity all real
or suspected derelictions. As for affection, he was without it, or
with such only as he had for his beasts. All he regarded as
chattels, belonging, with whatever they did or could possess,
exclusively and absolutely to himself, and subject to his unli-
censed disposal. After marriage his character grew more and
more pronounced. His wife, a delicate woman, submitted to
his wilful rule, visited almost none, worked hard both when well
and when sick, unless when sick to bed- prostration, and so con-
tinued to do through fifteen years. Sickness in a beast Mr.
Blodget could, because he knew he must, tolerate, and even, to
a degree, be tender withal as something that was inevitable.
But sickness in human beings, sometimes in the case of his wife,
always in that of one of his negroes, he resented, and physicians'
bills he regarded one of the chief curses to a planter's life. His
own health had been good always, for, besides being of a strong
constitution, he was of temperate habits. It often requires much
thoughtfulness on the part of such a person to be properly
sympathetic with weakness and suffering. This man never did
find out what that was.

He grew richer with great rapidity, and with the increase of
riches became more set in his ways and less regardful of public
opinion. Sometimes, when met with one or more of the neigh-
bors at the Bridge, he would run on about thus :

" Whut I got, gent'men, ef I understands my business, is
mine, and it ain't nobody else's. I worked fer whut I got, ex-
ceptin' whut come by my wife, an' the law give me that same ef
I worked fer it, too. A good law ; 'twern't for which some men
might of got married, but not me. An' my prop'ty, all of it bein'
o' mine, whut I does 'ith it, er whut I does not 'ith it, is my busi-
ness, which ef I didn't have sense enough to 'tend to it, the law
could 'p'int me g'yardyeens, an* which they could feed me 'ith a

1887.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. 759

spoon er cut up my victuals for me as a egiot. I never meddles
'ith t'other people's business myself not me, I don't ; an' it
natchel disguss me when I see t'other people a-meddlin'
'ith whut ain't theirn ner don't concern 'em. An' as for them
doctors, they gits thar livin' out o' the foolin' o' people in an'
thoo thar wives and niggers, an' special niggers, which every-
body that know anything 't all about 'em, know they're full o'
deceitfulness as they are o' laziness, and they ain't a-goin' to
work when they can keep out o' the retch o' the cowhide by
a-pertendin' to be sick. My niggers knows I know 'em, an' they
fools me as little that way as the next man's niggers, though I do
get fooled sometimes, because they're cunnin' as they're mean
an' dev'lish. But it ain't often. I allays keep on hand a jug o'
castors-oil an' one o' as'fedty. They despises to take 'em, an'
'special when thar 'lowance o' victuals is shet down on 'em when
they layin' up. As fer people a-dyin', why everybody got to do
that when thar time come, spite o' doctors, which they can't keep
thar own selves from doin' that, an' which that ought to show
people by good rights how they can be fooled by 'em. Tharfore
Tommy Chivers, an' sech as him, may spend most o' whut they
can dig out the ground on doctors, ef it suit 'em. But as for me,
I ain't a person that is willin' to have to lose a nigger, an' arfter
that to have to pay a doctor for helpin' to kill him."

This last remark was known to be meant for Dr. Park, who
had been heard to say that on at least two occasions a negro
child had died on the Blodget place because, as he confidently
believed, he had not been called to it in sufficient time. This
young man boarded and kept his office at the residence of Mr.
William Parsons, a mile beyond Long Creek. He was a native
of the county, a graduate of the medical college at Philadelphia,
and with notable success had been practising his profession for
three or four years in a circuit extending many miles on both
sides of the river.

II.

A just regard for decorum demands of me, now at least
when the brother of Mrs. Blodget was thirty years of age, the
husband of a wife and the father of children, to style him Mister
Chivers, although, to the best of his recollection, never during
all his previous life had he been so addressed ; not even by the
woman who had married him, nor by any one of the several
sweethearts who before her had received his special attentions,

760 MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. [Mar.,

nor by any of his acquaintance of any age, sex, color, or condi-
tion. This omission was owing partly to the smallness of his
stature, mostly to the simple-hearted, merry-hearted boyishness
that had been with him in childhood and now remained with
him in all its freshness. He was a favorite to the degree of be-
ing beloved of everybody that had the heart to love truly, un-
selfishly anything. White folk called him Tommy, and negroes
Marse Tommy. Although a very industrious man and a thrifty,
he had not increased his property to a degree at all approach-
ing his brother-in-law's, who had often laughed at him, sometimes
to derision, for his lack of ambition in that behalf, and specially
for his indulgence to his negroes. This treatment he had borne
without complaining, partly on his sister's account, partly be-
cause it gave him little concern. The more he knew of Mr.
Blodget the less he regarded his opinions upon most subjects.
There were times, no doubt, when he felt like remonstrating with
what seemed to him dereliction in his just consideration for his
sister ; but, convinced that such action would produce harm in-
stead of benefit, he had never done so.

Yet people used to say that Tommy Chivers, what there was
of him, was all man, every inch of it, and they were wont to
recognize it as fully sufficient for any man's needs and duties.
He worked diligently, and required his negroes to do likewise.
But he never exacted a service that was not reasonable, he fed
and clothed amply, and was as careful and considerate with the
sick and infirm in his household as a man need be. His family,
white and black, loved him dearly, and, little as he was, regarded
him equal to the greatest. If he was careful in the spending of
money, he was of undoubted integrity, and withal notably accom-
modating to persons of every class. Whenever he went to the
Bridge or on a visit of not more than two or three miles he
usually walked, always carrying a cane, but rather, as it seemed,
as a companion and ornament than for the purpose of assisting
his legs, that were as agile as they were short. This cane had
been manufactured of white-oak by his own hands with much
elaboration. About an inch and a quarter in diameter through-
out its length of thirty inches, except the handle, that was round,
it was squared and its edges neatly notched. Through a hole in
the handle a cord of stout leather was run, making a loop, from
which dangled a tassel of twisted silk. The fondness indulged
for this instrument led to its reception of a name. It seldom was
allowed to touch the ground, except by accident, but, when not
employed for special purposes, usually hung by its loop from his

1887.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. 761

left arm or rested calmly upon his shoulder. The special that is,
the most special though not avowed purpose for which Bobby
(for that was its name, bestowed in a particularly felicitous mo-
ment) was carried was to mark time, so to speak, to his owner's
music. For Mr. Chivers was a noted whistler, not so much of
known airs as others of his own composition. These airs, all of
them, it is possible, might not have been competent to undergo
the test of the strictest grammar of music ; but they were so sat-
isfactory to his own taste that he seldom travelled, if alone, with-
out giving utterance to some of them. In these whiles Bobby,
high-lifted, was flourished with a vigor and a rapid variety that
would have been in no shame in the presence of the costliest jew-
elled baton in the hand of the leader of the grandest orchestra in
this country or any other. These airs the original I am now
speaking of were given names also. They were taken mainly
from the feathered tribe. There were the Markin-bird, the Cat-
bird, the Thrasher, the Joree, the Yallerhammer, the Sap-sucker,
the Settin-hen, the Hen- and- Chickens, and roosters Game, Dun-
gle, and Dominicker. It was not worth while to argue with Mr.
Chivers that some of these birds, such as the yallerhammer
and the sap-sucker, were not singing birds ; and that as for
the settin'-hen, she, during the period of incubation, seemed
disposed to silence, solemnity, and meditation, and not to the ut-
terance of music of any sort. Mr. Chivers' imagination, exube-
rant as his spirits, opened wide the mouths of all, and the dis-
coursings of these humbler songsters were represented by his
whistle with a vivacity equal to those of the proudest.

His avowed reason for never travelling entirely alone was the
need a little fellow like himself had to be never wholly unpre-
pared for the assaults of dogs and other vicious animals, and he
claimed to wish for no better fun than to play, as he phrased it,
"a chune on a bitin' dog's head." It was after a noted victory
that he had achieved one day over a fierce cur that the thought
first occurred to give a name to his dear companion.

" It were Bill Anson's Rattler. He follered Bill to the Bridge
one Sadday mornin', an' my 'spicions- is he were fool enough to
think the Bridge belong to his marster same as his home-place,
an' it were his business to g'yard it jes' the same. Er he may of
ben one o' them fool cur-dogs that can't learn nothin' 'ithout
whut's beat intoo 'em. Anyhow, as I were a-walkin' up to the
sto' the same mornin', a-whistlin' like I 'casion'ly does to ockepy
my mind, that Rattler he see me, an I allays thought he tuck me
fer a boy that wanted to sass an' make game o' somebody, may by

762 MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. [Mar.,

him, an' so he come a-tarrin'. Bill, he were in the sto'. I says to
myself, ' I'm man enough for you, you imp'dent, oudacious son-
of-a-gun.' Look like the ornary cuss aim first at my throat, an*
as he ris I dodged an' let him have my stick back o' his head.
He tuck a turn an' made for my bres, an' I fetched him on the jaw
a wipe that wheeled him half round. That didn't satisfy him, an'
he turned an' made a surge at my legs. I begin to git sorter
riled in my mind then, though I weren't actuil hot mad, because
I knowed the creetur got no better sense, an' Bill were a mighty
good neighbor. Howbeever, as he come agin I tuck him back-
handed on his t'other jaw, an' as he whirled I grabbed him by
one o' his hind legs and 1 played the Yallerhammer on his hide to
his satisfaction. When I turned him loose he forgot his marster
were about, an' he struck a bee-line for home, a-yelpin' every
jump. Then were the time I name my stick Bobby ; an', tell the
truth, I got so I think a mighty heap o' Bobby, much as I do o'
some folks, monstous nigh, in an' about."

III.

Unhappy as it seemed for her only child that had survived
infancy, yet some people said that they thought it a blessing to
Mrs. Blodget when she fell into her last sickness. In the coarse
society of her husband she had dwindled, first in spirit, then in
health. He had never abused her directly. He had behaved
towards her rather as if he felt some pity along with his con-
tempt for the weakness that could not withstand and thrive
under the brutality that, as he knew, pained and disgusted her.
His evident displeasure, with no degree of sympathy for any
of her complainings of physical infirmities, had led her, whenever
it was possible, to withhold them. Dr. Park had felt ever an
earnest interest in her case, and he had often admonished her
husband of the importance of exercising particular care, other-
wise she might fall into a decline that could not be arrested. An
abrupt, thoroughly honorable man, he was disgusted at the little
heed that was paid for such admonition.

"Blodget is the cussedest fellow please excuse my language,
Mr. Ivy. I suppose he loves his wife. Ought to. Worth dozen
of such as him. But I can't scare him about her, no matter what
I say. Curious fellow \ He makes gods of his land, niggers, and
money, and sets, seems to me, mighty little value on the best
piece of property he's got."

" The row Mr. Blodget's a-weedin' now, doctor," answered

i88;.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS* BOARDER. 763

the old gentleman, "is one that, short or long-, will come to an
eend, an' when it do my opinions is to the effect that Mr. Blodget
'11 be disapp'inted."

A few days afterwards the physician, on meeting Mr. Blodget
in the road, said :

" Mr. Blodget, I saw your wife yesterday at Tommy Chivers',
and from what, in answer to my questions, she told me about
herself, she's what I call a sick woman, and needs uncommon,
special, most particular care taken of her, and prompt medical
attention. Good-day."

Mr. Blodget looked at him as he rode on, and, ignoring the
insult conveyed by his words and manner, muttered :

" That's the way with you all, you special that's the proudest
an' ambitiousest of 'em all. You'll ketch up 'ith women when
they gaddin* about, an' persuade 'em they're sick an' wantin' a
doctor; an' it's oft'n the case that what sickness they got comes
from jes' sech projeckin' as that."

Yet he was put into some apprehension. At his return home
that night he said to his wife :

" Dock Park, say you sick. Never told me about it. Wonder
you never told me 'stid o' him. Whut's the matter? Send for
him if you want too. I told him some time back that I were done
spendin' money on old Ryal, an' I s'pose he think he must make
it up somehow. But, in cose, in cose?' he emphasized, as if con-
scious and regretful of the hardness of his last words, "send for
him. I want him to come to you, ef you need his medicine."

" Mr. Blodget," she answered, " I am sorry you stopped Dr.
Park from coming to see Uncle Ryal. He needs his attention
more than I do. I hope I am not as bad off as the doctor seems
to think, /shall not send for him that is, for myself; but I do
hope you'll let him keep on coming to Uncle Ryal."

" That, I tell you agin, I sha'n't do."

Two days afterwards Hannah Blodget, now thirteen years
old, said to her father as he was about to leave the house after
breakfast :

" Pa, ma needs to see Dr. Park, and if you don't send I'm
going for him myself."

The courageous sense of duty that had been gradually de-
veloped in this girl had gotten from Mr. Blodget, as it usually
does from such men, a respect such as he had never felt for her
mother, and he was beginning to stand in a sort of indefinable
awe of one who was beginning to show that no force short of
physical could either coerce or restrain her when prompted by

764 MR. THOMAS CHIVERS" BOARDER. [Mar.,

the sense of honor and duty that she had inherited from her mo-
ther. It was for this that her father had yielded more ready con-
sent that she should go across the river to Dukesborough, where
she boarded and went to school. It was now a Saturday, she
having come the evening before on her monthly visit home. At
the startling speech Mr. Blodget turned and said :

" My Godamighty, Hannah ! I'm not agin sendin' for the
doctor, ef your ma need him. I told her some time ago to send
fer him, if she wanted him, and she wouldn't do it."

" She wasn't the one to send for him, pa. I wish to the Lord
I'd not gone the last time to school. If Pd been here I'd have
seen how badly she needed Dr. Park, and Pd have seen that he
came here."

"Name o' God, Hannah! I didn't know. Tell Aaron to git
orf mule Jack an' go for him."

It is just to say that he had not suspected that his wife's case
was emergent or very serious. After its sort, he had consider-
able affection which a wife so faithful, who yet kept a good share
of the beauty of her young womanhood, could not entirely fail
to inspire in a husband.

The physician came ; but the subtle malady by which she had
been attacked had gotten beyond human skill to arrest. Before
her death she obtained a promise and she knew how willingly it
was given that Hannah, when not at school, might dwell with
her uncle for at least a year or so. Then she solemnly warned
him against the neglect of Ryal. Her death affected him deeply ;
but, as in the case of other Providential distresses, the feeling that
was excited most was resentment. At the burial in the home-
stead graveyard he showed that he had been painfully shocked-
To Mrs. Parsons, who ventured to offer some religious consola-
tion, reminding him of the humble yet trustful faith in which his
wife had lived and died, and of the sure mercies of God, who
never afflicts except out of love, he answered angrily :

" Don't see why my wife should be tuck an' t'other people's
left. See no reason ner jestice in it myself. Now how my
house and smoke-house is to be kep' from havin' every blessed
thing stole out of 'em I can't see."

" Humph ! " muttered, not quite audibly, the lady, turning
away ; " he's meaner than I thought."

Hannah's face was tearless. The affliction seemed to have
made her a woman, and one whose grief was not of a kind to be
expressed or exhibited in tears. As they were beginning to dis-
perse she happened to observe Ryai leaning against a tree, his

1887.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. 765

great breast sobtfing, yet in silence. Running to him, she kneeled
at his feet and wept sorely for a brief time.

" Dar, den ; dar now, honey," he said, lifting her up tenderly.
Then she dried *her eyes and turned away.

" No, no, Aunt 'Ria," she said, as Mrs. Chivers expressed
surprise at her movement towards returning home, and besought
her to remain. " I won't stop here to-night. I wouldn't feel
right to leave pa by himself yet. I'll come over when I can get
things straightened out a little at home."

" But, Hannah darlin'," began Mr. Chivers, " it won't do, it
won't begin to do at all, for as young a girl as you ''

" Now, Uncle Tommy, you may just hush right up. I cant
stay away from home yet awhile ; and it's no use to say anything
more about it."

When she had gone he said to his wife: "'Ria, her mother
dyin' have made a grown 'oman out o' Hannah, blamed if it
haint."

" She need to be grown, with the father she have."

" That she do."

If Mr. Chivers had had in his repertory a mournful air he
surely would have tried to solace his sadness with its rehearsal,
as he turned away and began on a walk towards the creek.
Even as it was the Joree poured, though very, very mildly, as he
went slowly on ; while Bobby, unused to strains at all lugu-
brious, modestly, humbly hung low.

Few words passed between father and daughter that night.
If he felt any surprise at her insisting on returning home, he did
not exhibit it. If he sympathized with her bereavement, he had
no knowledge of how to console. At supper she took the head
of the table, and, as if she had long been so accustomed, presided
with calmness and efficiency. Her father regarded her occasion-
ally with a curious, anxious expression, but said almost nothing
during the meal. When the table things were put away by
Mandy, the house-girl, she got her mother's Bible and read it
for a considerable time, while her father paced the piazza.. Seve-
ral times he paused while passing the window, through which he
could observe her, and looked as if he would like to talk with
her ; but he could not find satisfactory words with which to
begin. Perhaps he had some notion that Hannah was in such
company as himself.could not be expected to enter. When bed-
time came he turned into the house and said :

" Hannah, you goin* to call Mandy or one o' the other gals
to sleep in your room, ain't you ? "

766 MR. THOMAS CHIVERS* BOARDER. [Mar.,

She shut the book, rising, laid it back on the table from
which she had taken it, then, lighting another candle, answered :

" No, sir, pa. I don't need anybody."

She retired to her chamber, and, for the first- time in all her
life, closed the door. This action astonished him greatly, for
heretofore she had been notably timid at night, and had always
insisted, with permission, on keeping open the door leading from
the chamber in which her parents slept to her own. When she
had shut herself in the darkness he looked as if his astonishment
had become fright. He wished that she had not returned home
from the burial ; for he felt more lonesome, he thought, than if
she had stayed at her uncle's and himself been entirely alone.
It seemed to him that Hannah was with her mother, or nearer
being there than with him. Returning to the piazza, he prome-
naded, though with greater silence and slowness than before.
Several times he crossed to the porch looking from the dining,
room to the negro quarters, paused there for a few moments,
then resumed his walking. Finally, after repairing there again,
he called a negro lad, and when he came said to him, in a low
tone, but as if he wished to be emphatic :

" Aaron, you go git your blanket and fetch it here, and you
lay yourself down in a corner of mine and your mistesses' room ;
an' whutever you do, you mind about not 'sturbin' your Miss
Hannah."

In another corner of the chamber stood a bed on which Mr.
Blodget reposed sometimes when it suited him to rest alone.
Hereon he laid himself some time after Aaron was wrapped and
asleep.

IV.

Within these last fifteen years Ryal had oldened much ; for
no man, however endowed by nature, can crowd during an ex-
tended period all the work of a much greater without falling
into premature decay. Incessant hard labor and Difficult re-
sponsibilities had made him, now sixty, appear to be seventy
years old, and to have the infirmity of one yet more advanced.
Such had been his devotion to his master's interests that, as long
as was possible, he had not heeded, but instead had ignored, the
ever-repeating warnings of decline, and often been actually
fretted by their persistence. Instead of yielding to them, as a
humane master would have required he should do, he even had
often undertaken more than was habitual, and it was pitiable to

1887.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. 767

see how he vainly strove to equal the service of his prime by
efforts to surpass it. Day and night he continued to go, until
rheumatism set in and he must stop.

In all this while not a word of sympathy or compassion fell
from the mouth of the man to whom, in the disposition of Provi-
dence, the humble slave had been consigned. Mr. Blodget had
always maintained that negroes by their nature were liars and
thieves, and that every performance of duty by them was due to
the apprehension of detection and the punishment that would
follow its neglect. It is ever true that those of one race who are
least worthy of its privileges, obligations, and destinies, vaunt
themselves higher above those of an inferior. Mr. Blodget verily
believed that his negroes had no more affection for him than he
had for them, and that in their case the best, the only just disci-
pline was that which made them feel that they were never trusted
to perform any task from a principle of duty, but that the cow-
hide or other punishment would be sure to attend every derelic-
tion. With one exception he had never laid this instrument
upon Ryal, and he had the audacious meanness to tell of this
instance to a knot of men at the Bridge one day not long after
his marriage, and to admit that he had done so for no reason
whatever except because he thought it well for the negro to
understand at once, for good and all, to whom he belonged. This
castigation, wholly, confessedly, avowedly undeserved, was sub-
mitted to without any louder or more bitter complaining than
would have been uttered by a goodly horse that had known
nothing of the cause of its infliction. The exuberant strength,
diligence, activity, and faithfulness of the negro had hindered
repetition, and, little as the master knew it, the slave felt for him
much affection. I have sometimes wondered at the strong at-
tachment shown by negroes towards masters who seemed far
from deserving it. Yet, with that race, the feeling of family was
always strong, especially among the most home-staying and in-
dustrious. Slaves of hard masters have been heard to laugh
with contemptuous incredulity, not always real, at those belong-
ing to the more humane, when the latter were boasting of their
greater privileges and enjoyments. Ryal had always felt great
pride in his master's successes, and every trust that had been
assigned to him had been executed with a fidelity and efficiency
that were simply perfect.

For all this Mr. Blodget felt no more gratitude than for the
work of his beasts or the accumulations of dollars that he had in-
vested in the purchase of other slaves and put out at usurious

768 MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. [>l ar ->

interest. He was not a type of his neighbors and countrymen.
On the contrary, he was an exception, known and talked about
far and wide. That such a man would cease to take proper inte-
rest in a slave after he had ceased to be valuable, however im-
portant the service of his fore-time, was natural as if in the case
of an aged ox or a worn-out ox-cart. With the negro's continual
failures, therefore, he found continual fault ; and when he saw him
exhausted, though far from being a man capable of murder, he
wanted him to die. Mrs. Blodget, with the means at her disposal,
had provided as well as she could for his needs, and done what
was possible to assuage his grief in the consciousness of being of
no further use to his family. On the day before she had taken
to her bed in her last sickness, when, having carried to him some
delicate morsel from her own table, he complained of the trouble
he was inflicting, she said :

" Uncle Ryal, you must not talk in that way. You have done
your part in this family the good Lord knows you have, over
and over again ; and if I had had my way you should have had
long ago the rest you needed and the care that is so important to
you. It hurts my feelings to hear you talk as you do. Then
you know, Uncle Ryal, that sickness comes of God's will, and it
isn't right to complain of that or any other affliction that he
sends. I am far from being well myself, but I cannot complain,
because it is of God's will. Don't you see?"

" Bress your heart, Miss Margy, my good, precious mistess !
I'll try to not kimplain nary 'nothei time, an' I'll try not to cry no
more dat is dat is," he continued, trying to dry with his sleeve
his flooding eyes, " arter dis one time. Godamighty bress you,
my good mistess ! Now you go 'long back in de big-ouse, honey,
an' take good keer yourself. Whut wou/dMiss Harnah do if you
wus to git down sick, an' special ef you wus to drap off an' leave
her? It natily skeer me to even think about sich a thing."

"God will take care of her, and you too, Ryal, if you trust in
him. Sometimes I think, mayby, it would be better for you
both if but God knows what is for the best. Don't you forget.
People may make mistakes, and they do ; but God never does.
His will be done ! I want you to feel about that as I do. If you
will put your trust in him he will not forsake you when you
need his help most. Good-by now. I'll come again to-morrow
to see you, if I'm well enough ; and if not, I'll send Hannah.
She'll be home to-night, and I know she'll want to run to see you
soon as she can. Good-by. God bless you ! "

She took his hand, and, holding it a few moments, turned and

1 887.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. 769

went back to the house. They never met again on earth. The
old invalid mourned her sorely. No wonder he leaned his feeble
frame against the tree in the grave-yard and wept tears that were
the better part of those simple obsequies.

The being of a man like Ticey Blodget r after the loss of such
a wife, must change gradually for the better, or it will tend to the
worse with increased rapidity. The society of such a woman,
though frail in health and subservient to a degree as to be re-
garded almost a nonentity, yet pure in heart, God fearing-, and
compassionate, will not fail of exerting some influence upon a
husband, coarse even as Blodget, however unconscious of and
however disdainful to admit it; and when it is withdrawn, unless
the warning and the lesson are heeded, he must relapse into the
evil vulgarity that was his normal condition, and then descend
headlong on the way to ruin.

Hannah put off removing to her uncle's, lingering in order to
see what arrangements would be made by her father for the man-
agement of his house-affairs. To her great surprise, instead of
assigning this to Hester, the sister of Ryal, an elderly woman
who, equally with him, had been trusted by her mother, Mr.
Blodget evinced, although he did not openly announce, his inten-
tion of appointing to the office Ryal's daughter, Mandy, about
sixteen years old. Her father, who had been a widower for some
years, had had much trouble, even with Hester's help, in con-
trolling the wilful temper of this his only offspring. Lately,,
however, he had been much gratified by being told by her and
Luke, a steady young man on the place, that with his consent
(which he eagerly gave) they had agreed to become man and
wife. The prospect of this match had been cordially favored by
their mistress ; but after the latter's death Mandy, with the levity
marked among females of that race, began to grow cold towards
Luke to a degree that grieved and offended her father much, and^
as had been his wont, he reproached her severely, and she had
the cunning to appeal to her master for protection. If Ryal had
died along with his mistress, Mr. Blodget, it is possible, might
have escaped some, at least, of the unhappy consequences that
ensued. But Ryal lingered, and he might linger for very many
years ; and the sight of him, as did to Haman that of Mordecai
the Jew sitting at the king's gate, made him feel that all that he
possessed availed him nothing. It cannot but be intensely pain-

VOL. XLIV. 49

770 MR. THOMAS CHI VERB' BOARDER. [Mar.,

ful when a man, however coarse, has to endure a long-continued
presence of one to whom, if he does not thus feel, he knows that
others regard him to have been grossly ungrateful. In the de-
fection of Mandy from her lover Mr. Blodget hoped that he saw
an opportunity. The value of this was enhanced 114 his estima-
tion when Ryal, for the first time in his life, and then with utmost
humility, undertook to remonstrate with him for tolerating Man-
dy 's behavior, that, especially since she had been expecting to be
put in control of the business of the house, had grown in inso-
lence and was now insupportable. He got for his pains a cursing
and a threat of expulsion from the premises.

The continued presence of Hannah embarrassed her father
somewhat and delayed open announcement of his purposes. He
wanted her to repair to her uncle's, and his hope was that by
some means Ryal should be made to follow her there. But one
day, to his surprise, she said to him that, after much reflection,
she had come to the conclusion that it was best for her to remain
where she was and take charge of the house. The proposal
startled him greatly.

" The very idee of sech a thing !" he said angrily. "What
could of put sech a notion as that in your head, Hannah?"

" Pa, I think it would be as well for me to keep the house as
Mandy, and I know it would look more respectable. Another
reason is that if I go away Uncle Ryai will not be attended to as
he ought."

u Who told you that Mandy " he began in an excited tone ;
but he stopped, walked up and down on the piazza fora few mo-
ments, and then, with what mildness he could employ, said :
"Your poor ma, Hannah my Lord, how I do miss her! but
she jes' broke herself down complete a-waitin' on that deceitful
nigger, which he's now gittin' to be as impident as he's deceitful.
It look like she keered more for him, an' special when he got no
'count, than for them that helt up and kep' up at their work."

" Pa," answered Hannah, and it was apparent that she spoke
under pressure of not less constraint than her father, " ma knew
that she owed too much to Uncle Ryal and in all my life I
never heard you till now call him deceitful and impudent she
knew she owed too much to him to let him suffer, if she could
help it, for anything she could do, and get for him what he needed
after he had broken down in working for her family."

"I'd like to know," he said doggedly, "if he ain't my nigger,
er ef he weren't till he got so no 'count that it make no defference
who own him now."

1887.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS* BOARDER. 771

" Yes, sir, pa. I have heard that the law gives a man all his
wife's property. Uncle Ryal at yours and ma's marriage became
your property, and he is yet."

" Yes ; well, I shall tend to that nigger accordin' to how he
behave hisself, and do sech work as, spite o' his deceitful talk and
k'yar'n on about his cussed rheumatiz, I know he can do. But if
he bother with me, and ondertake to give me his jaw about my
business, I'll cut down his rashins furder than they're cut down
now, and, more 'n that, I'll give him the cowhide in the bargain."

"And that," she said in low, trembling tones, " when what you
call jawing about your business is nothing but the poor, dear old
man's trying to do you a service that, if you'd take it, would be
worth to you more than all he ever done for you before, in warn-
ing you against his own, only child, who, with your very own
consent, treats him as badly as you do." Raising her voice high,
she continued: "O pa. pa, pa ! I wonder a man, so soon after his
wife has been put under the ground, can use such words when
talking about a servant who he knows for I heard her tell you
so was on her mind in her dying hour. It is a shame a shame
against God ! "

Her face reddened and quivered with the anguishing indigna-
tion that burned in her breast. He rose, and, glaring fiercely
upon her, said in a low, husky voice :

" Lookee here, Hannah Blodget, you know who you talking
too ? "

" Yes, sir," she almost screamed, as hot tears poured from her
eyes. " I am talking to my own father, to the husband of my dead
mother, and to the master of a poor negro whom, now that he is
old and broken down, he intends not only to neglect but to out-
rage. That's who I'm talking to."

Muttering a curse, he moved towards her, his hands extended
as if to grasp her. She rose quickly, and, covering her face with
her hands, cried aloud :

"O my mother! O my God!"

He turned abruptly away and immediately left the house.

Hannah went to her own chamber, took out and wrapped in
a handkerchief a few articles of clothing, and, after a brief visit
to Ryal, set out on foot and alone for her new home. As the old
man stood leaning upon his staff, looking after her departing
form, Mandy came flaunting where he was, and asked:

" Whar dat gal prancin' offter?"

" You imp'dent huzzy you ! You darsn't to call your young
mistess dat way ? "

772 MR. THOMAS CHIVERS" BOARDER. [Mar.,

"Whut I calls dat gal er nobody else no business to you,"
she answered, perking- her face insolently towards his. He raised
his hand, but she eluded his grasp and ran off laughing to the
house.

" Wish to God you never had o' ben borned ! " he said in
hopeless anger and shame.

A few minutes afterwards Dr. Park, who had been visiting
a patient beyond the Bridge, rode up to the gate, and, seeing
Mandy in the piazza, said : " Hello, Mandy ! tell your Miss
Hannah to step out to the piazza, a minute, if she pleases. Tell
me first how your daddy is. Never mind ; Hannah '11 know
better than you about that. Ask her to step out. Be quick
about it."

" Miss Hannah ain't here, doctor."

" Ain't here? Why, Tommy Chivers told me two hours ago,
as I rode by his house, that she hadn't gone there yet. What do
you mean?"

11 1 reckon she gone thar now, sir. She lef here I 'speck it
ben no more'n jes' about a quarter of a hour ago. She never
told me whar she were goinV

" Didn't she tell her pa?"

"Dat I don't know, doctor. Marster he lef for somewhar
not long befoe she did."

" Nobody go with her? Ride or walk ? "

" She went right dar out de gate wid a bundle on her arm
tied in a hankercher, by herself, a-walkin'."

" Didn't her pa know she was going ? "

" Don't know, sir."

" You don't, eh ? What do you know ? Can you tell me how
your daddy is ? I've no idea you can. I'll go see for myself."
He alighted, hitched his horse to one of the red-oaks near, and
walked rapidly to Ryal's cabin. In a few minutes he returned,
and as he was passing the house called to Mandy, who did not
immediately answer.

" You Mandy! " he roared, " have you got deaf since you got
so big ? Why dorft you answer and come out here ? "

She came, looking as if she had used very great haste.

"Ah! ha! Come at last? Look at me, Mandy, and try to
have sense enough to remember what I tell you. If you don't
tend better to your daddy than you've been doing since your
mistress' death, the devil will get you certain. I rather think
he's got one of his paws on you now. I knew you didn't have
much sense, but I didn't think you quite as big a fool as it looks

1 887.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS* BOARDER. 773

like you're bent on making of yourself ; but if you don't want the
devil to grab you in short, and that before you can say 'Jack
Roberson,' you attend to that daddy of yours."

VI.

When Dr. Park left Mr. Blodget's, with what speed that was
consistent with due regard for the good horse that had borne him
already over a space of many miles that day, he rode along the
road leading to Mr. Chivers'. Overtaking Hannah when she
had made two-thirds of her way, he cried :

" Tommy's right. You are a grown woman, or at least take
yourself to be one. You must have been reading about that girl
that with wands, and jewels, and crosses, and so-forths went
clipping it along by herself all over the country and nobody
took her up. But I tell you now that such travelling as that in
a country big as this is and full of wolves won't do for a girl
with nothing but a bundle of clothes on her arm. Where you
migrating to? It's to be hoped you'll tarry awhile at your
Uncle Tommy's, though there's no telling where a girl that's
been made a woman all of a sudden will fetch up at after she
once starts.'*

He dismounted, shortened the stirrup-leather on the hither
side, brought over the other, and, holding forth his open hand,
said :

" Put your foot in that hand and mount."

" Doctor," she began to remonstrate, " I'm not tired, and how
can I ride on a man's saddle, and "

" Lookee here, Hannah, if you're already done grown, you
aren't so big and heavy that I can't put you on that horse if I
have it to do, in which case I'll have to take you in my arms.
Put that foot in this hand, and catch hold of Bill's mane, if you
don't want to be hugged."

She obeyed ; he lifted her to the saddle and walked by the
horse's side the rest of the way.

" Blow for your Marse Tommy, Sooky," he said to the cook
when Hannah had alighted and gone into the house.

Sooky took down the conch, whose blast (only one she
wound), long, clear, sonorous, commanding, made soon appear
her master, who came, as usual, with hurrying tread. The physi-
cian, leading his horse, met him as he came along the road, and,
climbing the fence, they seated themselves upon a rider.

774 MR. THOMAS CHI VERB' BOARDER. [Mar.,

" How's your crop, Tommy ? " asked the visitor.
" Oh! in the grass tumble, Dock."

" Umph ! umph ! And you know, Tommy Chivers, that it's the
cleanest in the whole neighborhood. Astonishing how some
folks, and they not the worst in the world, will complain and
try to fool people about their crops. If I didn't live so close to
you I suppose you'd try to deny getting that good rain that
came day before yesterday."

" No, indeed, Dock ; but yit and I were monstous thankful
fer the rain but yit we couldn't run the ploughs tell this mornin',
and the press o' work is that "

" That I want to try to help you out a little. I made Sooky
blow you up because I wanted to talk to you about taking a
boarder. I just left Hannah at the house."

" A boder, Dock? You jokin', 'ithout you call Hannah a
boder, which / don't, ner do 'Ria, an' we both ben havin' our
mind pestered why she haven't come on along, as her mother
wanted and expected. I s'pose Blodget thought he have a use
fer her fer a while tell he got things sort o' straightened up. I
never went over to enquire, for I didn't have so powerful much to
do 'ith Blodget while Sis Margie were alive, an' sence then nother
me ner 'Ria 'pear like we got the heart to go thar, though 'Ria
said this very mornin' that ef Hannah didn't come to-day she
were goin' over thar to know whut the reasons wus. But, Dock,
we don't call Hannah no boder, no more'n one o' our own chil-
dern."

Dr. Park moved himself a trifle, and, looking sidewise at Mr.
Chivers, said :

" Tommy, the dickence is to pay over at Blodget's, as I knew
it would be. I'm not talking about Hannah but somebody else
as a boarder, and I was never in more dead earnest in my
life."

"Idee o' my takin* boders! when my house hardly big
enough for them that's in it now. That is funny, Dock."

"The boarder I'm talking about now won't be for your
house, Tom Chivers, though that is far too big for a fellow of
your size. I'm now talking about old Ryal."

"What? Thunder you say! Can't Tice Blodget take keer
of his own niggers? He ought to; he makes 'em work hard
enough."

"There's a difference, Tommy, between canning and wonting.
Tice Blodget's like that old fellow Cato, of whom may by you've
read. If you haven't, I'll tell you that he was a fellow who,

1887.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. 775

when one of his slaves got too old or too sick to work, he got rid
of him like he would have done with a worn-out horse."

" Who you say he wus, Dock? "

"Old Cato." "

" Whar did he hold out at? Anywhar's in Georgie?"

" Oh ! no. He was of Rome, in Italy, away over the Atlantic
Ocean."

" Well, wharsonever he wus, he were, to my opinions at least,
he were a mean an' a infernal ole cuss."

"Been just my opinion always, Tommy. But then he was a
heathen, and Ticey Blodget, even if he ain't a Christian, as a good
many of the rest of us poor devils ain't, yet he ought to know
better."

" Ef Tice Blodget ain't a heathen, whutever sech folks is
But whut about old man Ryal ? Have Blodget driv him off?"

" Not quite ; but it amounts to it, and I promised his wife to
do what I could in seeing him taken care of."

" So did I, bv gracious ! though Sis Margie know I wouldn't
let old Uncle Ryai suffer if I could help it. In course, Doctor
Park, if Tice Blodget drive him off, and the old feller can't do no
better, I'll do the best I can for him. 'Deed, if he is driv off, I
ruther he'd come here than go anywhere else; for pa and ma
both thought a heap o' Uncle Ryal. But I sha'n't call him no
boder, Dock, no more'n I call Hannah a boder. The very idee o'
sech a thing ! "

Dr. Park again shifted his seat, looking the while rather an-
grily at the space he had lately covered ; then, in a tone some-
what disappointed, sad, distant, said, as if soliloquizing, " I'm
afraid I'll have to make other arrangements about the poor old
fellow."

Mr. Chivers was impressed sensibly by these words. Draw-
ing up his cane and applying his mouth to the handle-end, he let
it hang down between his legs, and, placing his fingers carefully
in a row as if on a clarionet, he meditated as he moved them up
and down with great rapidity. To an imaginative person it
might have seemed as if he were essaying by this means to per-
sonate the shepherd on the Grecian urn and

" Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone."

Suddenly his visitor broke forth thus :

" Tom Chivers, I don't care what you call old Ryal when he
gets here. What I want to have understood is that you shall
not, at least with my connivance, feed, clothe, and wait on other

776 MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. [Mar.,

people's negroes for nothing. Ticey Blodget is responsible in
all this business, and I am going to make him see it to his cost.
Mrs. Parsons would let me take him there, but being a family
negro I thought perhaps you'd rather "

" In cose, in cose, Dock," said Mr. Chivers twice in quick suc-
cession, " if the poor old fellow have to forridge on other people
besides of his lawfuld owner, I'm the one for that. What I were
a-thinkin' about "

" I know what you were thinking about, but that is what I
don't intend to allow. Ryal sha'n't/0rdg* on you, as you call it.
The law of the State don't allow a man to throw off an old negro
as he would an old mule, without paying for it."

" I never heard of any sech law, and didn't s'pose they'd ever
be any needcessity fer sech a law."

" No ; because it is the first time in this section that there has
been any occasion to resort to it. I didn't know of its existence
until yesterday, when I went to see the old man Ivy who, you
know, is one of the judges of the County Court in order to ask
him if he didn't know of some way to head off Tice Blodget in
his devilment. Mr. Ivy got down The Digest and showed me
this law, which I copied. Here it is." Taking from his pocket
a paper, he read as follows :

" AN ACT TO COMPEL OWNERS OF OLD OR INFIRM SLAVES TO MAINTAIN
THEM. Approved December 12, 1815.

" SEC. i. From and after the passing of this act it shall be the duty of
the inferior courts of the several counties in this State, on receiving infor-
mation on oath of any infirm slave or slaves being in a suffering situation
from the neglect of the owner or owners of such slave or slaves, to make
particular inquiries into the situation of such slave or slaves, and render
such relief as they in their discretion may think proper.

" SEC. 2. The said courts may, and they are hereby authorized to, sue
for and recover from the owner or owners of such slave or slaves the
amount that may be appropriated for the relief of such slave or slaves in
any court having jurisdiction of the same ; any law, usage, or custom to the
contrary notwithstanding."

" Good law," said Mr. Chivers heartily ; " but what I was
thinking about is how to go about makin' charges for what little
poor old Ryal '11 eat."

" Well, what I've got to say is this : that if you don't I'll take
him somewhere else, which I know you don't want done."

" Cert'nly not, Dock Park ; but it look mighty nigh like
chargin' my own father, blame if it don't."

There's #/ to be a contract about it, Tommy," said the doc-

1887.] MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. 777

tor, looking away for a moment, " so figure away on your calcu-
lations. I consider myself the agent of the court now, and things
must be done up bang. So fire away and make it a plenty. I'm
coming to see him every day, and I mean to pile it on him to the
full visits, mileage, and medicine. What do you say to ten dol-
lars a month for yourself ? "

" Ten dollars a month ! Law, Dock Park ! he can't eat three,
to save his life, not if he was a well man."

"You don't think of what I'm talking about, man. I'm not
talking about your meal and meat. I want old Ryal to have
luxuries. He needs them to build him up from the condition to
which his master's meanness has reduced him. He's got to have
tea and coffee, chicken and batter cakes, biscuit and fritters, pan-
cakes and dumplings, rich as butter and sugar can make 'em, pie
and custard, tarts and pudding, cream and preserves, lemon-
syrup and yes, Syllabub, by blood."

" Laws of mercy, Dock Park ! Talk about all sech as that fer
a nigger ! Why, we don't, me an' 'Ria, jes* for ourselves, we
don't have p'wye more'n three or four times a week."

" That," said the doctor, as if in contempt for such niggardly
abstemiousness, "that makes not one speck of difference in the
case I'm putting to you now, Tom Chivers. I want old Ryal to
have all those things ; of course not exactly all at one meal, but
as many as he fancies, three times a day, with snacks thrown in
between whenever he wants or thinks he wants them. I know I
can trust Mrs. Chivers about that."
" Law, yes. 'Ria love to feed."

" That's what I knew. I rather thought, until hearing how
you've been going on in this case, that you were a little stingy,
Tommy, but I find I was mistaken."

" Dock Park," said Mr. Chivers, not noticing this remark,
"you talk like you want old Uncle Ryal fed up an' pompered up
the same like like, in fac', he were a fightin'-cock."

"The very word I've been trying to think of ever since I been
talking to you, by George!" said the doctor heartily, rising, and
descending to the ground. " That confounded rail kept it from
coming to me. Gemini ! You make your fence-riders sharp
as razors. Now see here, my fine landlord, besides all that,
and more too that I shall add as I can think of them hereafter,
I want you to go to the Bridge and buy the best flannel in the
store, and let Mrs. Chivers have made up some shirts and
drawers, and from time to time I'll let you know what else I
want done for him. I tell you it's going to be an expensive busi-

778 MR. THOMAS CHIVERS' BOARDER. [Mar.,

ness to keep the old man on the line of living I want him
put."

Mr. Chivers played thoughtfully with the tassel of his cane,
and revolved the questions that had risen in his mind. After
some moments he looked at his visitor, and, with the firm voice
of a man who was determined at length not to yield to an insidi-
ous temptation, said :

" Dock Park, I don't keer how you feed him, you can't make it
come up to them figgers. Now you jes' look at the itom o* meal,
and which a peck a week is the highth that any well nigger can
go, I don't keer whut his stomack ner his appetites is. Thar's
one itom."

" Look here, Tom Chivers. Look straight at me, sir. I got
no time to follow you up with your itoms, as you call 'em. All I
want is for old Ryal to live like a lord and a fightin'-cock, both ;
and when we see what the cost and the trouble will be to you,
and especially to Mrs. Chivers, we can settle on the price. But
it sha'n't be under, or much under, ten dollars, else you and I got
to have a fight that is, provided I can ever catch you without
that stick. By-by. I got to go to Jim Lazenberry's before
dinner."

He remounted and rode away. Mr. Chivers descended, and
as it was not long before his dinner-hour, and specially as he
wished to report to his wife the conversation just held, he pro-
ceeded on towards the house. The physician, hearing the whistle
that he was lifting cheerily, checked his horse for a moment, and,
turning his head towards the musician, said :

" Tom Chivers ! if I had the making of a world, to some, pro-
bably to a considerable majority, I might give longer legs, but I
swear I wouldn't make a single one of 'em any more of a man."

TO BE CONCLUDED.

1887.] KITCHENS AND WAGES. 779

KITCHENS AND WAGES.
L

" NOTHINK ails me," said Joe, the London Arab, in Bleak
House, " but that I don't know nothink, an' starwation." A
Nihilist formula in most expressive English ! And this for-
mula puts the case of many American citizens clearly and
briefly before the world. We have had our share of labor
troubles, and the irritation which they produced has set our
thinkers ruminating on causes. Many have concluded that
the workingmen are ignorant of the best methods of serving
their own interests, and must suffer accordingly until know-
ledge comes to them. Very few have thought what starvation
might have to do with chronic discontent and dangerous
agitation. We class ourselves with the few. The people who
dig for a living no doubt suffer from ignorance, but that they
are thereby driven to desperation has never yet been proved.
It has been our experience that the multitude bear with many
annoyances and privations that are bearable. Only when the
stomach is deprived of bread and the body of warm covering
do they rise up in anger against their condition.

It looks communistic to assert that in prosperous America
there is considerable starvation. But starvation is of two kinds
the direct process which destroys life within a fortnight, and
the indirect which tells only upon a generation. To live, labor,
and bring up children on food without nutrition, in clothes that
give no warmth, and in houses which afford only sham protec-
tion, is to live and labor in a starving condition. It is not tolera-
ble. Men can bear patiently almost any suffering except that of
hanging over a precipice suspended by a hair. And this is the
condition of thousands in America, who know not what fate to-
morrow holds in store for them. They rarely know what it is
to be comfortably clothed, housed, and fed ; their children rarely
feel that supreme physical happiness. What is this but slow
starvation? And where is the wonder that the multitude rough-
ly kick against so unnatural an agony? The starving of a gene-
ration is not so tragic as the starving of a man, but its results are
quite as painful.

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher is the mouthpiece of a class who

78p- KITCHENS AND WAGES. [Mar.,

believe that workingmen waste in their kitchens what might be a
provision for rainy days and old age. He has told his congrega-
tion so many times, and very emphatically repeated his convic-
tion last November. There is no doubt that many influential
people hold the same opinion. They have never been in the
kitchens of workmen long enough to study the methods of the
poor, but authorities who have been there have found some ex-
travagance and much wastefulness. Perhaps in many instances
these faults have existed. Perhaps the workers are wasteful at
times. We have found them inclined to extravagance rather
than to waste, but at no time have we discovered that their ex-
travagance brought upon them the destitution which now pre-
vails among them. Nor do we think that eminent clergymen are
justified by the facts in preaching the theory of wastefulness as a
cause of present suffering among workmen. The savings of past
years would certainly aid them in a period of hardship ; but sav-
ings have nothing to do with the justice of the rate of wages, and
if these are not always up to the proper mark i.e., a fair return
for the work done it takes but a short time to diminish the sav-
ings. Whatever may have been the faults of workingmen in the
past, it is now certain that a large and increasing number do not
receive a wage which allows of waste, extravagance, or economi-
cal saving. It is this number which suffers, and to say that they
suffer from their own ignorance is to make a false statement
and err most sinfully.

Wages are at present very low in most trades and in all parts
of the country. It is very comforting to be told by our daily
journals that they are higher than they were ten years ago, but
the figures collected by the veracious and painstaking press have
often little to do with the facts for which they stand. They serve
a journalistic purpose only. We have personal acquaintance with
the conditions of things in five business interests of the country-
farming, boating, railroading, and cotton and woollen manufac-
tures and we can honestly say that no figures that we have seen
gave any but the remotest ideas concerning the condition of their
employees. The estimates made by some of the most careful
observers have often proved fallacious, and nothing but the
closest personal scrutiny can be depended on in order to obtain
exactness.

The figures which we now give are not taken from any re-
ports compiled by bureaus and committees, nor are they gathered
from isolated workshops like that in which Mr. Beecher found
workmen spending a wage of forty-five dollars a month on beer

i88;.] KITCHENS AND WAGES. 781

and whiskey. Upon inquiry into the condition of things on the
leading railroads of the Eastern and Middle States, we found
section-hands receiving an average wage of one dollar a day,
and freight-brakemen an average of ten shillings. The boatmen
of the lakes and canals from Michigan to the Atlantic for three
seasons past received an average wage of thirty dollars -a month,
board not included, for seven months of the year. The weavers
in cotton-mills made at the same time, with extra effort, almost
one dollar a day ; the spinners one dollar and a half. Finishers
and knitters in woollen-mills received thirty dollars a month.
Farm-hands earned twenty dollars a month the year round, and
boarded themselves. Altogether the average unskilled workman
for three years past has realized one dollar per day for eleven
hours of labor, the skilled workman about thirty per cent, more,
in the occupations which we have named. This rate of wages is
from thirty to forty per cent, less than the rate of 1872 ; but the
cost of living has also lessened, though not in the same ratio.

We now offer the following problem to all those who have a
profound faith in the workman's wastefulness as a cause of his
present sufferings. Given, on the one hand, a family of six per-
sons to feed and the present cost of living, and on the other a
wage of one dollar and a quarter a day, how much would a
workman's wife be able to waste in her kitchen or elsewhere?

Observation and inquiry have enabled us to give a very pre-
cise solution to this problem. Mr. Atkinson, in the first of his
papers in the Century on the " Food Question," has estimated the
cost of maintaining one workman in the matters of food and
house-room at twenty-five cents a day. Clothing and other neces-
saries are not included. The food furnished at this rate is of fair
quality and of reasonable quantity, and consists of good bread
and butter, tea and coffee at two meals, meat and potatoes at one.
Mr. Atkinson thinks that two children can be maintained at the
same rate as one adult. A workman, then, with his wife and
four children, in order to live in the common, uninviting fashion
of boarders in a factory lodging-house, must earn one dollar a
day towards the mere housing and feeding of himself and his
family. For clothing, recreation, medicine, and education in
some cases nothing remains, in others twenty-five cents a day.

Now, where is the workman's opportunity for waste in his
wages? What he might be inclined to throw away on drink or
extravagance must be expended on clothing. The food pur-
chased for lodging-houses in factory-towns is of the plainest
kind, has little variety, and contains the commonest sort of nour-

782 KITCHENS AND WAGES. [Mar.,

ishment If a workman falls below this standard he is but starv-
ing- himself and his family. This is precisely what thousands of
workmen are doing ; for it is a well-known fact that many of
them, even on reduced wages, can find money for clothes, medi-
cine, recreation, and lay by a trifle for the rainy day. Where
this is the case two fatal draughts on the workingman's strength
are being made. He is reducing the quality of his food, and ac-
cepting low conditions of warmth and protection in heating,
housing, and clothing himself, and he is working extra hours to
obtain greater wages.

To prove this we have only to submit for inspection the fol-
lowing table of the cost of living at its minimum. We take a
workman's family of six, supported on a wage of one dollar a
day, and we give the items of expense for one year :

House-rent $60 oo

Coal and wood 25 oo

Flour and meal 30 oo

Pork 17 oo

Vegetables 25 oo

Clothing 48 oo

Shoes 10 oo

Medical attendance 3 oo

School-books 2 oo

Total minimum cost of supporting six persons.. $220 oo
Wages for 312 days 312 oo

Surplus $92 oo

The surplus exists under the best conditions, when the work-
man has worked every day of the year and sickness has not mo-
lested the family. Probably fifty dollars would be an actual sur-
plus in ordinary families, of which twenty would be spent on the
luxuries common to the poor, and the remainder placed in the
bank or as Mr. Beecher would have it wasted.

This is a good showing for the workman on the face of it; but
statistics, like the Biblical text, need strong and lucid explanation
if they are to be used for benefit, not destruction. Mr. Atkinson,
as we have said, estimates the cost of supporting one working-
man on boarding-house fare at $91 25 a year. The food-standard
in these places cannot be lowered in quantity or quality without
injury to the bodily health. Reckoning the workman's family of
six as equal to four adult persons, his expenses for food, heat, and
shelter of the plainest and most necessary kind ought to be $365

1887.] KITCHENS AND WAGES. 783

a year, whereas his total support at our minimum estimation costs
$145 less than this sum. Moreover, leaving- out the items of
clothing- and shoes, it falls to $203 less than is required for the
mere feeding and housing of four adults in New England.

It is reasonably certain from the above figures and estimates
that the workman who saves money on one dollar a day, after de-
ducting the support of a family from that wage, must be either
starving his family or working extra time. What is inferred can
be proved by examination of facts. We have not yet found the
family of six persons who lived absolutely on the sum of $220 a
year without finding them also beneath the average low condi-
tion of the poor. A house at $60 a year rental in villages where
work is moderately plentiful is always the poorest kind of a
structure, generally unfit for human habitation, and rarely re-
paired by its owner. Comfort in winter is partially secured by
excluding the air at the cost of ventilation. Decency is not al-
ways possible in its narrow rooms and sham partitions, and the
morality of those children brought up in them is questionable at
all times.

A diet of pork and potatoes, wheat-bread and mush, is filling
enough, but stales any taste except the porcine. Just what
amount of nourishment may be extracted from it we do not
know, but the effect of this diet on the steady workman is not
exhilarating. Butter is not often used, and sugar is a real lux-
ury. Tea and coffee may find their way to the table, but let us
not speak of their quality. The stomachs of workmen digest
well, but assimilation does not always follow digestion. There is
certainly some variety in the food. Soup from a cheap bone
may take the place of pork, and rice and peas and beans vary the
round of turnips and onions. We believe these things afford
considerable nourishment. We know they are filling, for we
have seen the poor satisfied with their food ; but are they suffi-
ciently nourishing ? The lowest grade of everything is bought
poor flour, indifferent pork, second-class meal; and when luxu-
ries are secured they are certain to be of the third grade.

The fuel is stinted. The stoves are often bad. A severe win-
ter tells upon the health of the children. Underclothing is rarely
used. The boys do without overcoats, and the girls either stay
in the house or are rigged out in cloaks made over from old gar-
ments. To be fully dressed in clothes of poorest quality is the
highest privilege the workman can win, which would not matter
much if the clothes were a real protection.

There is a class of people who live in this half-civilized way.

784 KITCHENS AND WAGES. [Mar.,

Ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed in childhood and youth, is not this
starving- the generation to death ? It is a starvation of the soul
as well as the body, for these families have no time to look after
their souls in the sharp struggle for mere life. Their bodies
grow up to speedy decay, and too often their souls are already
dead.

If a workman be ambitious or have received a decent train-
ing in his youth he is not willing to live on pork and potatoes
and to dress in Kentucky jean. He works overtime. His table
is well supplied, his house is warm, his clothing respectable and
abundant; but he must work thirteen hours a day to get these
things. After all, they do not save him from the fate of his lazier
or more helpless brother. He dies of premature old age.

It would be interesting to know how much work is done by
the laboring class outside of work-hours. We have seen an enter-
prising father make fifty-two days of overtime in six months, and
at the same time grow potatoes, corn, and turnips on two acres of
land with the aid of two sons not yet eleven years old. This was
working thirteen hours a day without a single interruption for
six months !

The workman of the dollar-a-day class has two courses open
to him to starve slowly or to die of overwork in comfort. The
irony of this last phrase ought to touch the hearts of reverend
preachers preaching the wastefulness of the poor, who are often
wasteful, but oftener extravagantly generous to their own and
their friends. We have made it tolerably certain in this paper
that a man cannot be either wasteful or lavish on the common
rate of wages, and we hope the foolish charge against this class
of workmen will be dropped.

II.

Overwork and starvation are one result of too low wages. It
is a striking proof of the patience of the workman that he bears
with his miserable lot as long as it can be borne that is to say,
as long as he has strength to work extra hours or to exist on un-
wholesome food. His patience is too often mistaken for content,
and his success in making ends meet for prosperity. The cruel
element in capital grows eager to lower his wages another de-
gree, and so we must continue to count on coal combinations and
Pinkerton pretorians.

This aforesaid element has many methods of destruction be-
sides the simple one of reducing wages. Adulteration is one of
its weapons, and thus it is entitled to the epithet filthy. The

i88;,] KITCHENS AND WAGES. 785

poor must buy the cheapest. The cheapest nowadays is the
adulterated cotton cloth rotten with sizing and poisonous with
inferior dyes ; woollen cloth made from shoddy ; paper leather ;
sugar, tea, coffee, and butter that poison ; canned refuse, dis-
eased meat, and some fifty other abominations that befoul the
mouth in their mention. The very liquors, wines, and beers
which degrade when at their best are mostly poisonous slop
when they reach the workman. Legitimate goods stand no
chance with them. The workman is doubly injured in their
use, for they affect the manufacturer who employs him, and at
the same time defraud the poor.

It is the very best business policy to pay the highest wages
possible. Some business men they are not numerous being
philosophical and not greedy, are believers in this policy. If it
were a national policy a goodly number of shoddy concerns,
those which draw their profits from starvation wages, fraudulent
work, and the ruin of honorable men, would go to the wall to
stay. The highest wages are those which pay a man well for a
reasonable period of labor. They enable him to support his fam-
ily in comfort and to make a decent provision for his old age.

In the first half of this article we showed what was the actual
cost of support of a certain class of laborers. We now will show
what ought to be the cost of support for the same class, if they
lived as Christians ought and as God intended them to live.
Wages should, on an average, be made to cover that cost and
leave a decent surplus. In any well-conducted business enter-
prise they do so. When they do not the business is not paying
and should be dropped.

Mr. Atkinson's table of the daily cost of food for one work-
man is as follows :

Meat (including poultry and fish, a half to one pound, accord-
ing to kind and quantity) at an average cost of 10 cents.

Milk (half-pint to pint), butter (i to i^ ounce), and a scrap of

cheese 5 "

Eggs (one every other day), at 12 cents a dozen % "

Total cost of animal food

Bread (about three-quarters of a pound) 2

Vegetables (green and dry) 2

Sugar and syrup 2

Tea and coffee I

Fruit (green and dry)

Salt, spices, ice, and sundries I

Average cost of daily ration 25

VOL. XLIV. 50

786 SORROW'S VIGIL. [Mar.,

This diet could hardly be plainer, and the cost is not extrava-
gant. Taking it as the basis of our calculation in food matters,
we think the expenses of a workman's family of six ought to be
represented by the following table :

Food $365 oo

Rent 84 oo

Fuel 25 oo

Clothing 60 oo

Sundries 10 oo

Total for one year. $544 oo

This would demand at present prices a wage of $i 75 a day for
the commonest sort of workman, and through life an average
wage of $i 50 a day, because the workman in his young man-
hood and for the first years of married life could live well on a
smaller wage, and would be assisted to some extent by his chil-
dren after they had reached their fifteenth year.

We are assured by statisticians that this country furnishes an
abundance of the necessaries and comforts of life, although so
many suffer for want of them. Are they being wasted or de-
stroyed ? The poor have little for purposes of waste, and the
prosperous are too careful of their goods to throw them away.
Where, then, is the seat of the trouble ? Has some one more
than his share ? In the midst of plenty perhaps two or three mil-
lions of people are slowly wasting for want of good food.

SORROW'S VIGIL.

IN the house where Joy lay dead
(Slain by Wrong in bitter ire)

Sorrow sat with veiled head,
Brooding o'er the dying fire.

Dripped the rain-drops from the eaves,
Moaned the night- wind through the hall

Fell the wet and withered leaves
From the lichen on the wall.

Sudden through the silence drear
Sounds of nearing wheels were heard

(Sheeted shape upon the bier

Lay, like some pale, stricken bird):

1887.] SORROW'S VIGIL. 787

In a gilded coach and four,

Driven by a liveried boy,
Came that hour to the door

Friends of poor, departed Joy-
Wealth, and Fame, and Vanity,

Humming gay a blithesome waltz,
Plumed and silken-robed, all three,

Squired by Affectation false.

Soft the coach-lamps shed their glow
O'er the court-yard's dusky tomb ;

Death's dark ensign, trailing low,

Waved from doors of spectral gloom.

Vanity her feathers preened ;

Wealth her jewels, shuddering, shook ;
Affectation backward leaned,

Cast on Fame a withering look ;

She, the bravest of the four,

Cried: "Drive on! Alas poor Joy!"

And the coach rolled from the door,
Driven by its liveried boy.

Sorrow rose, and trimmed her lamp,

Set it in the window-pane ;
Through the darkness and the damp,

Through the wind and through the rain,

Heard she, hurrying toward the light,

Sound of long-expected feet ;
Heard a voice that pierced the night,

High, and clear, and heavenly sweet,

As, with bright, uncovered head,
TRUE LOVE to the portal stepped,

Entered in and kissed the dead,
And, with Sorrow, vigil kept.

CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

THE New Princeton Review of January last has an article by
Dr. A. A. Hodge, of Princeton College, lately deceased, which
is remarkable as perhaps the nearest approach that has yet
been made by a non-Catholic to the Catholic position on the
school question.

He advocates the immense importance of religion in the edu-
cation of the young, on the ground, so often held by us, that (in
the words of Dr. Hodge) "education involves the training of the
whole man and of all his faculties, of the conscience and of the
affections as well as of the intellect," and "that it is absolutely
impossible to separate religious ideas from the great mass of
human knowledge"; the doctor holds that " every school must
of necessity be either Christian or un-Christian, and that tht-re
is no such thing as a neutral education : to be neutral in religion
it must be imperfect and faulty indeed, no education at all."
And hence he further insists that

"The infinite evils resulting from the exclusion of religion from the
schools cannot be corrected by the supplementary agencies of the Chris-
tian home, the Sabbath-school, and the church. This follows not only be-
cause the activities of the public school are universal and that of all the
other agencies partial, but chiefly because the Sabbath-school and church
cannot teach history and science, and therefore cannot rectify the anti-
Christian history and science taught by the public schools. And, if they
could, a Christian history and science on the one hand cannot coalesce with
and counteract an atheistic history and science on the other. Poison and
its antidote together never constitute nutritious food. And it is simply
madness to attempt the universal distribution of poison on the ground that
other parties are endeavoring to furnish a partial distribution of an imper-
fect antidote."

Catholics will scarcely believe their ears when they find him say-
ing further on :

"In view of the entire situation [what he considers the dangerous and
mad system of public-school education in the United States] shall we not
all of us who really believe in God give thanks to him that he has preserved
the Roman Catholic Church in America to-day true to that theory of
education upon which our fathers founded the public schools of the nation,
and which have been so madly perverted?"

He goes on to show that the plan of excluding all po^inve
religion from instruction is absolutely unprecedented, no nati -n
er race having ever before attempted it ; the experience ot all

1887.] CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 789

mankind and their conviction having been that reverence for God
and knowledge of the future rewards or punishments are abso-
lutely essential to the sustaining of parental and governmental au-
thority, unless, indeed, it be an obedience of mere fear and terror
of physical force, which, even if a government could be sustained
by it, would make it the worst kind of despotism and its subjects
the most abject and brutalized of slaves. The corner-stone of
this glorious republic was the Christian religion, as Dr. Hodge
proves by pages of quotation from the history of its general
government and of each State in particular, as well as by many
extracts from speeches and writings of its great men, none of
whom ever dreamt of building on an infidel or agnostic founda-
tion. Even Franklin and Jefferson, who might be thought of
as exceptions, never excluded God from their thoughts the
former advocating the opening of the sessions of the Federal
Convention with prayer, " since God governs the affairs of
men " ; and the latter declaring " that the liberties of a nation
cannot be thought secure when we have removed their only
firm basis a conviction in the minds of the people that these
liberties are the gift of God." Dr. Hodge therefore calls upon
''Catholics and Protestants disciples of a common Master to
come to an understanding" and save the liberties and civiliza-
tion of the United States, and not permit them to be destroyed
by the infidels who are, at least as yet, in a small minority.

The diagnosis of the disease is satisfactory, but, as usual, Dr.
Hodge, like all the Protestant doctors hitherto, shrinks from
applying the evident and effectual remedy. This would be, of
course, to do what the lauded founders of the republic did, and
what he praises the Catholics for continuing to do viz., to make
the public schools Christian. Of course we, as Catholics, would
like to have the word Christian mean Catholic, and that all Chris-
tians should freely return to Holy Mother Church, the church of
their ancestors ; but we are now dealing with present circum-
stances and trying to make the best of them, like sensible men.
Let the priests then, we say, and the ministers of all Christian bodies,
have full opportunity to train the young and influence them each
in his own way. This might, indeed, be acceptable to Dr. Hodge
were it not for the fact that the bugbear of papal dominion rises up
before the eyes of his mind, and he imagines that he sees the In-
quisition again set up, and he almost feels the scorching heat of
the fire bv which he would be publicly roasted alive by Archbishop
Corrigan in City Hall Park. So the good doctor, who, no doubt,
means well, and even deserves credit for coming so near to us,

79 CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

shrinks away and does not advise that the Catholics and Protes-
tants consent to live and let live, as they do in many reformatories
now, and as they do in England under the denominational system
of education, agreeing to disagree on points on which they differ,
while not emasculating themselves by sacrificing their tenets and
traditions, and really annihilating themselves as creeds or reli-
gious bodies. Not at all ! He only advises them

" To come to an understanding with respect to a common basis of what
is received as general Christianity, a practical quantity of truth belonging
equally to both sides, to be recognized in general legislation, and especially
in the literature and teaching of our public schools."

This would be practically creating a new denomination of peo-
ple who would be neither Protestants nor Catholics, and the same
objections can be made to it as have already been made by the
doctor to the present godless system. Firstly, such a plan " has
never yet been tried by any nation " to educate without a
religious belief. If you eliminate from Catholicity all that is
contradicted by Protestants since there is not one of its dogmas
which is not denied by some one of the countless divisions of
them; indeed, their whole raison d'etre is to protest against some-
thing taught by the mother-church what would be left to the
Catholic children to believe ? The schools would then be teach^
ing morality without any good grounds for it. First of all, hell,
or the less vulgar "sheol," would have to be closed, for presuma-
bly most Protestants have ceased to believe in that. Where, then,
would " the sanctions " be ? Christ, too, would have to be divided
and abolished, for it is fair to say that the Christ of very many
Protestants is very unlike the Christ of Catholics: the Unitarians,
for instance, do not believe in his Divinity, and other sects seem
not to recognize his Humanity, else why are they so unnatu-
ral in the worship which they pay to him, excluding from all
thought his friends and even his Mother herself? " The difficul-
ties lie in the mutual ignorance and prejudice of both parties,"
says Dr. Hodge, " and fully as much on the side of the Protes-
tants as of the Catholics." No doubt there is prejudice, but even
if it were entirely laid aside, still would Catholicity be entirely
different from Protestantism, and even irreconcilable. Take,
for instance, one only doctrine, " the Real Presence of Christ in
the Sacrament of the altar." All Protestants will admit that if
he be really present it would never do to ignore him in the
school, if we are to have a Christian education. All that the doc-
tor has said against the possibility of neutrality in education can

1 887.] CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 791

be alleged against such a compromise. For the Catholic child
it would, indeed, be "a distribution of poison on the ground that
other parties (the church and family) are endeavoring to furnish
a partial distribution of an imperfect antidote" ; and so probably
for the Episcopalian, if they have the same idea of Christ as the
Catholics have, which even in their case appears to me doubtful,
since they are formed of the wealthy and refined class almost en-
tirely, who appear to have as much horror of a speck of dirt or of
a little vulgarity of manner or speech as they have of a great crime
of heartlessness. Our Christ had a great horror of such, and
said " woe" to them. It is not likely, then, that they believe in
such a Christ any more than it is that they would have been his
disciples had they lived in his age. The Christ of the Presbyte-
rian is probably of the " Munkacsy " type a proud, contemptuous
man, very different indeed from the forgiving, meek, and hum-
ble brother of the poor who founded the Christian religion and
drew all hearts to him, especially the lowly. So, considering
that we have not even a "common" Christ, it is hard to see how
we could have a "common Christianity."

We could, however, come to an understanding with the Pro-
testant Christians in another way, and we are glad to see Dr.
Hodge maintaining that " public schools be confined to the
branches of simply common-school education," and " that they
should be kept under the local control of the inhabitants of each
district, so that the religious character of each school may con-
form in all variable accidents to the character of the majority of
the inhabitants of each district " ; as these two provisions would
make a common understanding easier. Dr. Hodge, in common
with ourselves and, as I believe, all true lovers of liberty for
minorities, declares that " ail centralizing tendencies should be
watchfully guarded against."

There is a false notion in the minds of refined people that their
services are necessary for the education of the masses, and that
vulgar ward, trustees, elected by the parents of the children in
question, are not as well suited as kid-gloved gentlemen from
Fifth Avenue to educate them. This comes from the kind of
Christ whom these people worship. They would not deny Chris-
tianity and civilization to the humble Galileans who followed
Jesus; yet whom did they resemble most in manners, dress, and
surroundings, the, by them, little understood inhabitants of the
East Side or the nice gentlemen of the West? There may be,
and I believe that there is, more Christianity in the tenements
than in the palaces, and more sincerity, purity, family spirit,

79 2 CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

honesty and kindness, and when this class has a church and
priests of its own, why should they assume that it cannot take
care of itself and educate its children in its own way ? If this can-
not be done so that, according to their own way and position in
society, they will keep the decalogue and obey the laws, it will
then be time for the state to interfere. The Catholic children
look up to and confide in the Catholic priests, religious, and in
lay teachers whom they know to be good Catholics ; and we pre-
sume that the Protestant clergy and the Jewish clergy als > exert
influence over their flocks, and this influence is in favor of the
keeping of the decalogue and of reverence for the civil govern-
ment as a power from God, for conscience* sake and not fir fear
merely. Now, what good reason can be alleged for limiting the
exercise of their valuable influence to the family and the church?
If Christianity and religion is a good thing, is it so easy to con-
quer the devil that we must bring out only a small part of
our forces? Should we not rather avail ourselves of every tra-
ditional rite, sacrament, and ceremony by which each denomi-
nation may more powerfully affect its own children for the
common end? Who doubts that even if all the priests and
ministers and rabbis are given full play at S ttan every day of
the week, but that he will be well able to hold his own and
more? Look, for instance, at the immense multitudes of Poles,
Roumanians, Czechs, etc., who are stepping ashore at Castle
Garden daily and crowding the tenements of the Tenth Ward.
In their own country they had their rabbis or priests or
ministers, as the case may be ; what sensible American de-
sires to see them emancipated from the spiritual control and
influence of these to become Anarchists or Communists, ene-
mies of the institutions which cost the blood of our ancestors?
Indeed, it would not be strange if the state were to help to
build them synagogues and churches, and encourage their
whilom advisers to follow them to this new land, and this for
its own sake. Let a branch grow on its parent ^tree ; do not
think that grafting it will be better. Let these foreigners keep
their customs and traditions when they are not bad or inconsis-
tent with their being good citizens, or you only spoil them for all
purposes. Who has confidence in the son of foreign parents who
is ashamed of his name and origin, and is always seeking to hide
it? And who would not prefer a good Jew, who keeps his Satur-
da} 7 , to the indifferentist, who believes only in the dollar? With
Catholics, at least, we know that the only result of subtracting
them from the influence of their church, and enlightening them so

1887-1 CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 793

that they will no longer believe as their fathers before them, is
to make them infidels, without even the merit of being natural
men and women ; they become mere triflers and pretenders, with
no real convictions on any subject.

Now, it is clear that Dr. Hodge believes this as much as we
do ; then why does he not advocate a system of education which
should be broad enough to take in priests and rabbis and all,
each class according to its kind, like the animals in Noe's ark,
and by its own time-honored methods working for the common
end which the state has in view the making of a good citizen?
It I can make him so by the Catholic doctrines and practices, the
Christ that I preach, the Mass, the confessional, and daily invo-
cation of the saints, why, let the state put me to work in God's

name. If Rabbi N can make him so with his reading of the

Scriptures on Saturdays rather than on Sundays, with his days
of atonement, his recalling of the history of the noble Jewish
people, why, set him at work and let him have not merely Satur-
day but every day in the week. If Rev. Mr. S , an Episco-
palian or Presbyterian, can make him so by reading of the Bible,
Westminster Catechism, traditional prayers, appeals to tradi-
tions and examples of Protestant ancestors who (in his opinion)
stood up for the right and just, why, let him, too, have full scope
and liberty.

Let us give this meaning to the words of Dr. Hodge : " The
Christianity affirmed to be an essential element of the law of this
land is not the Christianity of any one class of the Christian
population, but the Christianity which is inherited and held in
common by all classes of our Christian people." Let us grant
for agreement's sake, although as Catholics we believe that ours
is the real and original Christianity, and other bodies of Chris-
tians .have only fragmentary Christianity let us allow, for practi-
cal working, that the state should take up the Christianity which
is common to all Christians; it follows that, there being little or
nothing of Christian doctrine, as we have seen, common to all
Christians, except the decalogue and the existence of God neither
of which doctrines is peculiarly Christian, both being equally
held by the natural man the state should simply take up all
Christian denominations and help them along in the training of
children, treating them as allies and friends, just as she now
exempts them from taxation, because she feels that it is her in-
terest to encourage the formation of them, and cheaper much
than the keeping of a standing army to repress crime. What
good reason is there against adopting the denominational sys-

794- CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

tern ? One argument alleged is that it would beget confusion,
since we have not one religious belief in the republic, but very
many, and so there would be a clashing of sects and envious and
jealous grasping for the public money. To us this does not
seem to be verified by the facts. Just now, for instance, Protes-
tant and Catholic reformatories and asylums receive state aid on
a per-capita system, being subject to visitation and inspection by
state boards; and where is the clashing of sects? Sometimes it
happens that Protestant ministers and Catholic priests as, for in-
stance, at Sing Sing prison visit the same building. Do they
make faces at one another? Not at all. They are generally
good friends. Find us a prison warden who does not regard the
visit of the clergyman as an aid to discipline and reformation !

If we adopt the local-influence plan suggested by Dr. Hodge,
thus recognizing facts that, for instance, such a school is largely
patronized, or entirely so, by Catholic children, and that their pa-
rents desire to have Catholic teachers and priests influencing the
children as they themselves do in the home no injustice need
be done to children who may not be Catholic. Either their pa-
rents object to their receiving Catholic instruction or not. If
they do not, why should the state? If they do, let them be free
to send them to the other public school around the corner where
Protestants have things their own way. Then, of course, act in
the same way towards Protestants and Jews, etc. But, say some,
we want to make all the children of the rising generation Ameri-
cans, and we want to blot out foreign distinctions. Well and
good ! As far as this end is good and reasonable, there is no in-
fluence, even if exerted in a contrary direction and I have never
known it to be which can avail aught against it. The children
will be Americans beyond any doubt; they would themselves re-
sent being made foreigners ; but why need they be necessarily
infidel Americans? Why may not they be such Americans as
Dr. Hodge says founded this republic, although they were divid-
ed into many denominations ? They will be all the more united, and
love one another all the more as good citizens, for believing in
and loving God and Christ his Son. Is nobody an American un-
less he be, say, of Puritan stock and Puritan traditions? The
best American is the one who is the best man and the most hon-
est man. If he be of German origin, say, or of English or Irish,
let him know it and not be ashamed of it ; let him honor his an-
cestors and their traditions and religion. He will thus be Ame-
rican enough and soon enough without being suddenly and
abruptly cut off from the parent tree and his manhood dried up.

1 887.] CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 795

Some traditions he must have : do you want to force us all to
abandon our own and take up yours, which perhaps are English
and Protestant, as a condition of becoming Americans ? This
gives a very narrow meaning to the term American. It is a
question of having the children religious or irreligious. If we
want them to be religious we must let them belong to a religious
denomination, and make up our minds that they cannot be forced
into our style of religion without their giving up all religion.
Neither can foreigners be suddenly forced to be Americans ; they
must be allowed to grow from Irish or German to Irish-Ameri-
can or German-American, and thus at last into American pure
and simple. In what country of the world have Catholics been
less patriotic than Protestants? English Catholics are declared
by the Irish to be the most English of all Englishmen. Who
were better soldiers than the Catholics in the Revolutionary war ?
the war with Mexico? the late civil war? the war between
France, a Catholic power, and Germany, a Protestant power, on
whatever side their lot was cast? It is a mistake to suppose that
the pope is the enemy of this country or of its liberties. But as,
if Protestants were to grant us this point, it would be knocking
the bottom out of their religion, which, as such, is anti-papal
or nothing, for peace' sake, although it grieves us to hear it,
let them say that he is ; still are they forced by history to admit
that whether approved of or disapproved of by the head of the
church, Catholics may always be trusted to think for themselves
when there is question of loving their country and dying in its
defence. If it is disapproved of which it is not this ought to
make them all the more pleasing to Protestants. In England,
where Protestantism is even established as the religion, all other
denominations are recognized by law, and their legitimate in-
fluence is utilized in the education of their children. If the Ca-
tholic parents are not content with a given school they build one
themselves, and then the state visits and inspects it, and, insisting
upon a certain amount of secular teaching, it pays a per-capita
allowance for every child who passes its examination. Why
could not that be done here also ? That is the question.

We are not asking any favor, or rather any act of justice, for
the pope, or even for the American Catholics as such, but for the
American parents of American Catholic children. If the parents
of the children about whose schooling we are concerned are not
afraid of the pope or of the priest, need the parents of other or,
oftener perhaps, of 'dead-born children be more solicitous for their
spiritual safety? This is, then, an illusion and should not prevent

796 CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

our fellow-citizens, who are generally, we must admit, lovers
of fair play, from availing- themselves of the blessings of Chris-
tian education for all the children of Christian parents, let them
be Catholic or not. But this and that happened, say they, where
the Catholic Church was in the ascendency ? Let it be so. It
also occurred where a Protestant denomination had the lead.
And it may happen again ? It may one thousand years hence, and
it may not most likely not. The Catholics are willing to take
their chance of their having to suffer persecution then at the
hands of the Protestants ; and they have certainly most reason to
tremble, since they are not one in ten. Will not the other nine
be equally generous, for the sake of society and liberty, which
is threatened here and now with destruction by Anarchists and
Communists? Are Protestant Christians willing that the infidel
sect shall surreptitiously slip in and sway the destinies of this
country ?

I have already suggested a plan by which religion could be
introduced into the schools that is, the same which now is in
use in the asylums, etc., the denomination starting and manag-
ing the school, and the state paying for results in the secular
branches. If the state wishes to regulate the secular studies,
another plan or compromise, although not as suitable, might
be accepted by us. Let the state appoint Catholic teachers
for Catholic children, and Protestant teachers for Protestant
children, prescribing the present neutral system of education for
certain hours of the school-da) 7 , and giving also a fixed hour or
hours for daily religious instruction: According to the plan in
use in Poughkeepsie, N. Y., the teachers are Catholics in public
schools No. ii and 12, just as they are Protestants in the other
schools under the same board. The following is the order of
daily exercises :

845 Morning prayers.

9 to 12 Regular secular course as in other schools.

12 Short prayer; then recess.

i. P.M. Religious instruction.

1.30 Regular secular course.

3 Closing religious exercises.

The state school-hours are from 9 to 12 and 1.30 to 3, and no child
is compelled to be at the religious exercises unless by its own
parents desire. If a Protestant wishes to send his child to the
Catholic public school he may do so, and it is' taught in precise-
ly the same way as it is now in the ordinary public school.

1 887.] CHRISTIAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 797

There is no interference with it. At the same time the Ca-
tholic children have teachers who are able to give them the re-
ligious instruction and influence which their parents desire them
to receive, and which they do receive outside of state school-
hours. In Poughkeepsie the way this has been managed was bj
the church letting buildings owned by itself to the Board of
Education for their school- hours only. Where the school houses
belong to the churches this could be done generally, so that the
state may be exempted from ail expense for religious instruction.
Where, on the other hand, the state owns the school-house the
church could pay rent for its use, as for a furnished room, during
the hours appointed tot religious instruction only. The vital point
is the teacher. When the parent and the teacher are not of the
same religion, the " daily poisoning and Sunday and home anti-
dote " system, of which Dr. Hodge complains, is being carried
out, whether intentionally or of necessity, by teacher and parent.
A child is like plastic clay in the hands of a teacher, and learns
its lesson not only with its ears but with its eyes also : what the
teacher does it will do ; what she omits to do it will omit ; what
she has no belief in or respect for the child will not believe in or
reverence ; or it will try to serve two masters, the parent and
the teacher, and, serving neither, will emerge an infidel from this
unnatural process of training. For it will not regard as truth to
be accepted and acted upon a doctrine about which two such
great authorities disagree.

Will the co-religionists of Dr. Hodge come to meet us with
either plan? We do not ask the state to help the churches even
to the extent of one cent. At present the people of the United
States, Catholic and non-Catholic, are, no doubt unintentionally,
lavishly spending their money in aid of indifferentism and free-
thinking, and if it goes on much longer it must soon break up
this free republic, which, founded by Christians, can only be
perpetuated by Christians. Here are the last words of Dr.
Hodge's article : " The system of public schools must be held, in
their sphere, true to the claims of Christianity, or they must go,
with all other enemies of Christ, to the wall."

798 THE CLADDAGH OF GALWAY. [Mar.,

THE CLADDAGH OF GALWAY.

EVERY traveller who visits the west of Ireland is recom-
mended by the various guide-books to " be sure while in Gal-
way, ' the ancient Cittie of the Tribes,' not to miss paying a visit
to the adjacent fishing-village of the Claddagh " ; and the said
guide-books go on to give some of the details regarding the
Claddagh to be found in the ancient history and traditions of the
place.

The tourist usually the all-powerful, all-superior, all-know-
ing Briton his mind filled with some confused pictures of a
strange people clothed in bright blue and scarlet, always busily
engaged with bonfires, processions, and curious half-pagan rites,
inquires his way to the " Clad-a." He finds that he ,has but to
turn to the left off a wooden bridge at the west end of Gal way,
pass a little group of Navy Reserve men sitting on the wall, con-
tinue his way about one hundred yards along quite an ordinary
but very finely-built quay, to where he sees what appear to be but
a few poor-looking cabins and a little fleet of small and rather
curiously-shaped hookers at anchor in the harbor facing the
cabins. There are groups of men, looking very like ordinary
modern fishermen and sailors ; a flock or two of geese, just like
any geese, with the same way that English geese have of slowly
waddling up, gander in front, stretching out their long necks,
turning first one little inquisitive eye on the stranger, then the
other little eye, and all pouring on him a chorus of very sharp
and very searching questions, interlarded with some remarks to
each other evidently anything but complimentary to the foreigner.
He, full of dignity and superiority as he is, somehow feels a little
hurt and irritated by the utter coolness of the creatures, every
one of which, by the way, has a little tuft of the feathers on its
poll tied with a red or blue or green thread a custom peculiar
to Galway geese, which have a quiet way of strolling about the
less frequented streets and byways, and, by thus wearing the
favorite color of their owner, can be known any distance from
home.

Our tourist, having escaped in as dignified a manner as pos-
sible from the geese, goes to make his inquiries amongst the peo-
ple; but somehow or other he does not well know how to begin
or how to get at things. It is not easy to say : " I want to know all

1887.] THE CLADDAGH OF GALWAY. 799

about your curious ways and customs ; I want to see your king
and queen, and ah " He cannot think at the moment what is
exactly best to say, and so only asks : " I say, ah, is this the
Clad-a?" " Yes, sir, this is the Claddagh," one of the men an-
swers in English plain English, too ! The men are very re-
served, not offering any opening for questions; but not a rude
word or look. The Englishman suddenly gets unaccountably
shy, and it occurs to him that perhaps he is intruding; so he just
takes a stroll along the pier which stretches far beyond the vil-
lage out into the beautiful bay, admires the glorious western sun-
set away behind the Connemara mountains, saunters back into
the town, and leaves the Claddagh there, his mind fully made up
that the guide-books are humbugs, and that if ever there was
anything interesting about the place and people it must have
been a hundred years ago at least.

But let an Irish man or woman, one who understands, feels
with, and respects our poor people, go down to the Claddagh
go often, and go with a simple cordiality here and there amongst
the men, women, children, geese, and all ; go without patronizing
or condescending, or showing a sort of microscopic inquisitive-
ness into the ways of the people, as if they were the common
objects of the sea-shore, to be turned over, and poked at, and
spread out with naturalists' pins. All this would simply result in
utter discomfiture. It takes a genuine Irishman better still,
Irishwoman to understand the quick, sensitive hearts that are
common to us all, but that are peculiarly quick, warm, and sensi-
tive in our simple western people, whose Irish nature is free from
all mixture with the colder natures that have grown up in some
parts of Ireland. Any one who can go thus kindly amongst the
Claddagh fisherfolk, who knows the time and place to use the
old-fashioned but beautiful and most Christian salutations:
"God save thee," " God speed thee," " God and the Virgin bless
thee," " God save all here," " God's blessing on thy work" the
stranger whose tongue can turn these phrases in Irish, and whose
voice can give them the tone that shows the blessing comes from
the heart, need not long be a stranger, but will soon find that not
only are there still many of the quaint ancient customs alive
amongst the villagers, but will learn before long to feel a genuine
affection for, and respectful sympathy with, this kindly, intelli-
gent, and now, alas ! very suffering people.

The Claddagh (an Irish word which signifies the sea-shore)
is very pfcturesquely -situated on the southern shore of Galway
in fact, is but one of the outlets of the town, from which it is

8oo THE CLADDAGH OF GALWAY. [Mar.,

approached by two bridges : one at the end of Dominick Street,
which also leads into West Galway ; the other the remains of a
fine wooden bridge leading from the part of the ancient town
known as" Spanish Parade " directly into the fishing-village itself.
And in all Galway, picturesque and interesting as it is, there is
no spot more full of life and beauty and interest than this old,
half-decayed wooden bridge. To stand there for one hour on a
sunny market morning, to keep eyes and ears well open and a
pencil busy, would give one word-pictures and pencil-pictures
enough to fill the pages of a good-sized journal.

A little below lies the village, guarded by a large school-
house the Claddagh Piscatory School which is surmounted by
the figure of a sailor, who stands on the roof keeping a watch
out to sea, and an arm (minus the hand) raised in warning to all
little boys and girls to leave off play and come to school. Beside
the school, and shaded by a group of trees, is the Claddagh
church, Teample Vuira, where many a tearful prayer goes up to
the Father of the poor to Him who came across the waters to
the poor fishermen.

At first sight the village appears to consist of but a few houses,
or rather thatched cabins ; but on entering any of the nume-
rous openings or lane-ways the place is found to be much more
extensive, the cabins being built in irregular squares and circles
surrounding pretty little greens where the young children play,
and where the women spread out their husbands' fishing-nets for
mending and drying on round cairns or circles of stone, one of
which is on every green. The houses are very small, and many
show sad tokens of great poverty ; yet, wherever the means will
at all allow of the smallest comfort, they are neat and clean. Ow-
ing to the numerous open spaces the air is pure and free, and the
whole place commands as lovely a prospect as the heart could
desire.

Fronting the village is the quay, along which the fishing-fleet
is ranged when the men are ashore ; on the quay the Claddagh
men are at such times to be found, talking in quiet groups or
working at the repairs of their boats. Very old-fashioned boats,
but of a most graceful build ; the keel sharp as a razor, the ribs
or " knees," as a fisherboy told me to call the sides bowed out
almost to the shape of the breast-bone of a waterfowl, then sloped
in again to the edge of the vessel, the bow rising well out of the
water and curving up a little in front, give a most graceful ap-
pearance to the boat, which appears to ride on the wav*es with
the ease and buoyancy of a bird. The fishermen say that the

1887.] THE CLADDAGH OF GALWAY. 80 1

bowing- out of the "knees" gives great steadiness and security;
certainly the vessel can go through the waters at a flying pace.

To the right of the long pier is a little inlet of the sea, evident-
ly expressly designed by nature for the pleasure of the children ;
for here, in every sunny hour when school is over, all the boys
come for their natural and most engrossing amusement regattas
with their fleet of little home-made, white-sailed cutters: capital-
ly-built little boats, of quite a different make from land-boys' toy
affairs ; boats that seem related to the old bread-winners in the
harbor, for the moment they touch the water there they go!
racing, flying, tacking, as lively and as eager to win the race,
and seemingly as full of life, as their young owners running along
the bank. I have never felt such engrossing interest in a genuine
regatta as I have felt watching those lads and their toy boats.
And then with what quiet, gentle ease of manner no awkward
slouching, no free-and-easy ways either the boys, when they
came to know me, would bring the boats to show me their build, or
sit or stand around, giving instructions (often, I confess, as Greek
to me in my ignorance of boats) in the way of sketching ships!
The most patient of teachers, and the most polite they were
though only boys, I never knew one of them to laugh, even when
I got hopelessly entangled in the rigging, about which they were
very particular indeed, as well as anxious that every ship should
be represented in full sailing gear. Many a happy hour has been
spent talking with the fishermen's boys on the Claddagh pier,
and enjoying the lovely sunshine, watching it, as it moved round
to the west, light up as if with gold the broad, shining bay ; the
Clare Mountains, now bluish gray, now pale violet, now covered
with the golden mist Turner loved to paint ; the wooded heights
beyond "Lough Athalia," a pretty inlet of the bay to northwest
of the town. Close at hand the quiet fishing-village with its fleet
at anchor, some of the men gathered in groups about the chapel-
gate their favorite gathering spot others of them working at
the tarring and repairing of their boats and fishing-tackle; the
wide and rapid river, rushing and tumbling down in its hurry to
get away from the town and out into the bay ; beyond the gray
old town, losing, even at that short distance, all its air of dilapida-
tion, and looking most picturesque, its gables and peaks lit up
in the sunshine or thrown back into shadow by the many ins and
outs, turns and twists of the quaint, narrow streets; a gap in
the houses where the Corrib River winds through the town
showing the peak of a distant mountain rising above and be-
hind all.

VOL. XLTV. 51

802 THE CLADDAGH OF GALWAY. [Mar.,

And for ages this once flourishing- fishing colony has been
established here. Long before the Anglo-Norman " Tribes of
Galway " came to settle and grow wealthy in the town, the
Claddagh fishermen and their families were, as they are to-day,
a distinctly Irish people, living altogether to themselves, reli-
giously keeping up their own ways and customs, and continuing
to speak their native tongue and to wear their national dress.
When the Anglo-Norman settlers in Galway drove the Irish
from the town, enacting, and for more than two centuries en-
forcing, most stringent laws not only for keeping the natives from
sharing in the great prosperity of the town, but forbidding them
to enter its streets, even then the peaceful Claddagh folk re-
mained firmly rooted in their ancient home. Doubtless they
were spared as being very useful, necessary purveyors of food,
a people whose love for their free and strangely fascinating life,
whose ignorance of all other trade or commerce, prevented them
from becoming objects of the jealous watchfulness of their Eng-
lish neighbors. And there they have been all these ages, peace-
ful, honest, simple people; content to live the same simple
life ; loving passionately the beautiful spot in which their every
thought, every tradition, every memory, hope, and love are cen-
tred ; happy if only the greed of others did not deprive them of
the livelihood by which their fathers were able to live in quiet
comfort; content while they saw the neighboring city spring up
gradually, grow in size, beauty, and wealth, become and remain
for many generations one of the most prosperous trading cities
of western Europe. The Claddagh folk saw, too, the great trade
of Galway decline, its wealth decrease, and the once all-powerful
families of the "Tribes" sink to comparative poverty or dis-
perse to distant parts of the country, the magnificence of their
buildings decay and fall to ruin ; yet through all the fisherfolk
remained the same primitive, happy race, untouched by the busy
world so close to them, living entirely to themselves and seldom
to be seen in the streets of the town, except when the women
go there to sell their fish or to buy necessaries for their house-
holds. They have always had their own church, their own festi-
vals, and their own head or lawgiver their king, as he is styled.

In former days the king, or mayor, was elected annually with
great pomp and ceremony. He was chosen from amongst the
other men because of his intelligence and wisdom ; for his duty it
was to guide the fleet safely at sea, understand the laws of the bay
and see them enforced, while on land he was the lawgiver of the
entire colony, none of whom ever dreamt of going into a land-

i887-l THE CLADDAGH OF GAL WAY. 803

shark's law-court, but abided rigidly by every decision of their
own chief. Up to a comparatively recent period he was equally
powerful on sea. He regulated the days on which the fleet went
out and the time at which the great annual herring fishery com-
menced, before which time no strange craft dare come poaching
in ihe bay ; for should any such poacher be discovered by the
scouts kept on watch, the law was that their tackle should be
seized and destroyed. When the fleet sailed out, the king, act-
ing as admiral, led the way a color at the mast-head distinguish-
ing his boat chose the fishing-ground, and gave the signal, at
which every boat cast its nets at the same moment, so that all
might be equal sharers in the harvest God was pleased to
send.

Then, when the fleet came home the king's boat, according
to etiquette, being invariably last to come in, as it was first to go
out the boats were met at the quay by the wives, into whose
hands king and commons resigned all further care until the next
fishing, for on land the women cared for fish, purse, and home.
Unlike all other sovereigns, the Claddagh king, while supreme
in his authority, never tried to take any worldly advantage over
his fellows ; he was always a fisherman as humble as, and no
richer than, the others ; he never sought to exact tolls or levy
taxes, but lived the same simple life of brotherhood, guarding
only the interests common to all. This custom of appointing
their own ruler prevails among the Claddagh folk at the present
day, with the difference that, in place of an annual election, the
distinction seems to have become vested in one family, whose
name, curiously enough, is King. The present head of the Clad-
dagh, Padge King, is a man a little over the middle height, grave
and quiet in manner, with an honest, earnest look like that of a
man who thinks a good deal and does not talk much ; a some-
thing in his face, a good, kind look in his eyes, make one wish to
shake hands with him, and he has the natural ease and refinement
of manner so often met with in our people. To his kindness I
owe having seen and taken part in one of the most touching and
beautiful religious ceremonies that I have ever witnessed. No
pomp, no riches, no splendid ceremonials could move such deep
and reverential religious feeling as did that in which I took part
with the poor Galway fishermen the annual Blessing of the
Sea.

From time immemorial this beautiful custom has been ob-
served in Catholic countries, and the Claddagh men, who are a
deeply religious people, never begin their season's fishing until

804 THE CLADDAGH OF GALWAY. [Mar.,

this blessing of God has been asked on their labor for the com-
ing year: on themselves, that they may work with patience and
diligence, and on the sea the ''Fisherman's Garden," as they
call it that it may yield them an abundant harvest for the sup-
port ol their wives and litile ones.

Very few, even of the Galway people, know of this custom,
the Claddagh folk not wishing to make a show or parade of what
is to them a very dear and sacred religious rite. And they are
not wrong in this; it would not be well it should attract merely
curious tourists and strangers, mostly persons of a different
creed, taught, perhaps unthinkingly, to scoff and deride, or to
look upon as " mere superstition " observances founded upon
the truest and deepest Christian sentiments confidence in the
Almighty Father's daily love and care for his creatures, and a
desire to ask a blessing on all our labors. The very asking of
that benediction is an act of faith in God's providence and an
acknowledgment of the creature's entire dependence on the
Father's care.

So little, then, is known of the ceremonial that it required
great perseverance on my part to find out at what time the
Blessing of the Sea would take place. Knowing a good deal of
the superstitions of fishermen all the world over, it never occur-
red to me that I had any chance of being more than a spectator,
perhaps of watching from the quay the beautiful sight of the fleet
sailing out in regular procession, and then witnessing from afar
as much as I could follow of the ceremony, which last year was
carried out with unusual grandeur, but this year was to take
place in the simple form which has been observed for countless
years.

Having, after many trials, learned the evening and the hour, I
repaired to the Claddagh, which was alive with the bustle of pre-
paration. Every man and boy in the place was out, all busy about
their boats, those whose vessels lay nearest to the deep water al-
ready getting up their sails and manning their crafts. By and
by, as I watched from a distance, I saw the king conducting to
his own boat the clergyman, two young brothers from the con-
vent, and the priest's servant-man. Then, to my intense surprise
and delight for, though longing for an invitation, I had not dared
to ask for it King (with whom I had already made friends, and
to whom I had taken a great fancy) came along the quay to where
I stood, and invited me to sail out in his boat, that I might join
in the service I had been so anxious to see. I was full of grati-
tude for such a favor. Here was I, the first stranger, perhaps,

iSS/.J THE CLADDAGH OF GALWAY. 805

who had ever been permitted thus to share with these simple,
pious people in their beautiful ceremonial; yet, now that my de-
sire was granted, I felt, a little frightened. All the world knows
how superstitious seafaring people are; they have a few very
uncomplimentary "pisharogues " with regard to my sex : what
should I do in case no herrings were caught when the fishing
began the following evening ? 1 should perhaps be thought to
have brought the ill-luck on the boats. It was a serious conside-
ration, but still there was no resisting the longing to go, so I
comforted myself with the recollection that I have not red hair,
that the king had not met me but had come after me (so I had
not " crossed his path "), and that in general I am counted rather
a lucky body ; so, with a diplomatic hint about this latter quality,
I stepped joyfully into the little boat, which at once put off from
shore, to lead out the entire fleet on their first expedition for
the season.

Leaving the harbor, with a rapid sweep the St. Joseph
rounded the end of the pier and actually flew through the sea.
And then what a glorious race began! In swift succession boat
after boat, with exactly the same smooth, rapid curve, shot one
by one round the point and out into the bay, until it seemed as
if the waters were covered with the graceful creatures, no longer
the dead, dull, inanimate things that had lain so listlessly in rows
in the harbor, but living, breathing creatures, racing and panting
and vying with each other in their joy at being awakened and
let loose on the foamy waves ; full of buoyancy and life, they
dashed and gambolled and flew on and on in the chase alter the
leader, which still kept gallantly on at full speed, ahead of them
all. One actually looked for prancing feet pawing the water
where it surged and hissed under the prows, while the little
cralts seemed to leap and bound over the waves. Watching
them I felt such an intense excitement and delight, such a sort
of pride and joy in the strange, wild beauty of the scene, in the
sense of space, and freedom, and fresh, vivid, glorious life, as
made me suddenly realize what it is that attracts and holds the
fisherman to his calling.

I glanced round our little ark. She was going at a tremen-
dous pace; there sat, or rather half-reclined, the "admiral" in
the stern, the tiller held between his knees, both hands engaged
with the ropes of the sail, but working with the ease with which
a skilful horseman shows his power over the noble animal that
knows his hand; a look on the man's face of quiet pleasure and
pride in the fine spectacle that was exciting such wonder and

8o6 THE CLADDAGH OF GALWAY. [Mar.,

admiration in those who saw it for the first time. Beside King
sat the Dominican priest who was to pronounce the benediction,
and with whom were two young 1 novices. There were also in
the boat three fine lads " the princes of the blood royal " they
were laughingly introduced to me as and two other men. "Ay,"
King said, in reply to a remark, " they can manage their boats,
every man, as easy as a rider would turn a race-horse. You
might go the world round and not see a finer regatta than that."
Regatta ! I have seen as fine regattas as can be got up, but
they are boy's play compared to that joyous race with the Clad-
dagh fleet. For were not the poor men's hearts once more full
of hope ? For years the harvests had been getting worse and
worse ever since the trawlers came into the bay and the sor-
row and want growing harder and harder to bear. " But sure
God is good ; who knows but that He who sailed with other poor
fishermen in their boats, who slept in their midst, who calmed
the storm because they were frightened, who took pity on their
distress and gave them the miraculous draught of fishes, who
chose his greatest apostle from amongst poor fishermen who
knows but he would, in his love and mercy, take pity on these
poor fathers and hear their prayers for sufficient daily bread to
enable them to live on and bring up their children in the spot so
dear to their hearts?"

The race was over ; a fishing-ground some miles out was
reached ; the anchor of the king's boat was cast, and then com-
menced a march past, not as exciting but almost prettier, in its
way, than the race. It was " de rigueur " that every craft should
pass before that in which sat the priest, and as each vessel came
flying up she bent and curved and swept round the admiral's,
then took up her place in the immense circle that was gradually
formed by the boats, and that closed in around until the priest,
now bare-headed and wearing his stole, was exactly the centre
of the ring of crowded boats for not a man or boy remained at
home that evening. The last craft to come up and make its
obeisance was one crowded with little children; and this, " the
bark of the holy innocents," took up its position so close beside
us that our boats touched, and the row of little curly heads and
the fresh, innocent young faces completed the beauty of the pic-
ture.

When all were in place the king stood up, took off his hat,
and waved it. In one instant every human being in the fleet was
bare-headed and on his knees, and the prayers began. First the
Rosary and the Litany were recited ; and oh ! what deep faith and

1887.] THE CLADDAGH OF GAL WAY. 807

devotion, what earnest, imploring petitions, were in the voices
and in the grave, attentive faces of those men ! It was a sermon
on faith and hope such as the most eloquent preacher that ever
spoke could not so bring to the heart. The priest, used to touch-
ing scenes, could scarcely master his emotion as he sent up fer-
vent prayers for God's blessing on the poor fishermen around
him, while the responses of the soft, childish voices beside us
mingled sweetly with the deep, earnest tones of the men coming
like a chorus over the waters.

The Rosary and Litany ended, the priest arose from his knees
and read the service for the occasion, and, sprinkling the waves
three times with holy water, he implored a blessing on them in
the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

It must indeed have been a cold nature that did not join
with whole heart and soul in these prayers. What a picture that
was! Every detail of the scene was so striking as to fix itself
indelibly on the mind. The day and evening had been dull and
the sky overcast ; but as the foremost of the fleet were about a
mile out to sea, the rest still coming on and on in a continuous
stream from the harbor, the clouds across the western sky had
parted in one long streak, sending down across the sea and over
those sails nearest to the west a flood of that peculiar white,
silvery light that sometimes breaks through clouds charged with
rain. The whole effect was exquisite and seemed, I hoped, like
a good omen ; and as the prayers were said and the blessing
invoked, the flood of brilliant light still remained and formed
a luminous background to the circle of dark-sailed boats, lit up
the figures of the fishermen kneeling, their hands clasped, some
of the bared heads bowed, some raised towards heaven, others
with earnest, intent gaze fixed on the priest, beside whom knelt
the Claddagh king with bent head, and hands raised to press to
his lips the heavy cross of his ancient rosary; it lighted up the
row of little faces just appearing over the edge of the boat along-
side, while just in the shadow outside the circle lay a big for-
eign ship, from the deck of which all on board were eagerly
watching, evidently bewildered by the sight of this strange and
beautiful service in the midst of the waters.

The ceremony ended, a signal from the king told the fleet
to return to the harbor, while escorted, as a guard of honor,
by some half-dozen sail he took his guests for, as he said, " a
stroll around the bay."

As we started, a pnetty yacht that had been cruising about

8o8 THE CLADDAGH OF GAL WAY. [Mar.,

came up to try its speed. "She thinks she'll race me," said
the admiral in a tone of quiet contempt, " but she'll soon give
that over." And he settled himself in his easy attitude in the
stern, took the tiller between his knees and the ropes in hand,
and seemed as if he gave his charger leave to go at its full pace.
And, sure enough, the yacht soon found something more dig-
nified to do than trying to race the St. Joseph on board of which
was now a gay and merry party. "True," Padge said in reply
to a question, "every boat of them has a blessed name. There's
the St. Patrick, and the St. Peter, an', to be sure, all the twelve
apostles but one. An' our men are good men, too no better;
there's not a man in the Claddagh would go to sea without first
saying his- prayers an' askin' a blessing not a one of them!''
. . . . " I'm hoping that there's some signs of a good harvest, for
there were great numbers of seagulls seen off Blackhead a week
ago. Please God, we'll get some fish this year, father, for last
year was a very poor year the worst we ever had. There was
boats went out, many a night, an" the men in them hadn't a bit
of food to bring out with them ; sometimes they were ashamed
even to tell the other men that they had nothing to eat, an'
they come in again next day, after the cold, long night, with-
out breakin' their fast, an' without as much as a herring in the
nets to get food for them at home. Troth the trawlers has
ruined the bay entirely. Still, with the help of God, this will be
a better year."

In the meantime there was much fun and merriment over the
intense anxiety of the young Dominican Brothers that Peter, the
servant, should be sea-sick; while Peter, a pale, delicate, but very
good-humored little man, was equally anxious not to be sea sick,
and vowed manfully that he would not, though evidently not quite
sure that the will would be equal to the occasion, and he kept
continually calling to King that rain was coming. "There!"
(we all got a good dash of spray)," the storm would come before
his advice was taken, and we'd all be drowned." Peter, like his
great namesake, was evidently timorous, even when reminded
that it did not matter where we went, for had we not his reve-
rence on board, and does not every one know that no vessel can
be wrecked that carries the servant of God?

Stephen, the youngest of the-royal princes, a fair lad of about
fourteen years, intelligent and well-mannered, came to sit beside
me, entertaining me with a description of the light-house, of the
various vessels we passed, of the ways of life of the Claddagh

1 887.] THE DIRECTOR. 809

boys, of his school and hopes and ambitions. His ambition,
strange to say, was, not to be commander of a man-of-war, but
to be the Claddagh schoolmaster!

And so we strolled around the wide " Fisherman's Garden,"
returning, as is etiquette amongst the people, after the very hist
boat; and as I turned away after shaking hands warmly with the
kind Claddagh king, I heard him say to the good priest: "I
think, father, that, with the blessing of God, we'll go out to-
morrow evening."

I am not ashamed to say that when the fishers sailed next
night on their first expedition for the season, there was not
a poor fisher's wife in all the Claddagh that prayed more ear-
nestly than I praved that the Father in heaven might send
those anxicus families their daily bread; and when, the morning
after, the first cry I heard through the streets was " Gal way Bay
herrings ! " my very heart rejoiced.

THE DIRECTOR.

THEY beat their chords, yet weld them not in one;

They wield their parts, but yet not jointed true ;

Once more, once more the wandering strain renew,
A thousand times once more the fractured tone.
Amid the throng he stands and works alone,

Low laboring to an end they may not view ;

The form of sound long must he hack and hew,
Unrulier far than adamantine stone.
No voice he mingles through the pealing choir,

No hand among the strings, breath in the reeds ;

The discord into harmony he leads
By thwarting all attempt and all desire.
How oft he dragged them when they did aspire!

How deep he harrows, till their spirit bleeds !

What nothingness he makes their choicest deeds,
Waste of their verdure, ashes of their fire !
His touch they feel not but in check and blow :
Him and his work, when ail is wrought, they know.

8 io HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. [Mar.,

HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES.

THE fifth article of the amendments to the Constitution of the
United States, and the first article of the Constitution of the State
of New York, distinctly say : " Nor shall private property be
taken for public use without compensation." Every one knows,
from illustrations every day occurring 1 , that by " private proper-
ty " the constitutions mean private property in land as well as in
houses. It is necessary to make this observation, for recent
writers and speakers have argued that because the term land is
not mentioned in the articles quoted, as well as in some of the
works of standard authors defending the rights of property, they
cannot be interpreted to include land. The Constitution of the
State of New York, in the seventh section of the first article,
prescribes even the manner in which the State must proceed in
order legally to acquire title to land owned by a private citizen
but deemed necessary for public use.

One would naturally suppose, then, that in a great country
like ours, where good land is so cheap that it may be had almost
for nothing, and so abundant that there is enough to give every
adult American one hundred and sixty acres ; in a country in
which there are no feudal privileges, no laws of entail or of pri-
mogeniture, and in which we have tried to make all men equal,
so far as equality is possible, by universal suffrage, an attempt at
agrarian revolution would fail to get any decent support. In the
congested cities of Europe, in the nations of class-privilege and
limited suffrage, in municipalities where even honest and indus-
trious labor often fails to find either employment or fair wages,
we can understand the discontent of the peasants and laboring
classes. But that Americans, natives of the soil, should preach a
crusade against our republican rights of property, is matter for
serious reflection.

The theory of Mr. George is essentially anti-American. It is
contrary to the letter and the spirit of all our institutions. We
have grown to be a great people by individual enterprise and
exertion. It needs no proof that Individualism and not Social-
ism or Communism, decentralization and not centralization, are at
the bottom of our political and material growth and prosperity.

We have called it the theory of Mr. George, but it is really
not his except by adoption. He has merely naturalized it. He

1887.] HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. Sir

has taken it from Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher,
although in other forms it is as old as the first heresies. We
need not delay in making extracts from the writings of Mr.
Spencer to show that Mr. George has only copied the English-
man's views and given them a new dress in The Land Question
and Progress arid Poverty. Mr. George admits this himself in the
former of these two works.* We do not know but that Mr.
George has borrowed also from a Canadian writer, a certain
William Brown, who in 1881 published at Montreal The Land
Catechism: Is Rent Just? In this work the same ideas and the
same arguments are found as in Progress and Poverty ; and as
both books appeared about the same time, it is hard to say
whether Brown borrowed from George, or George from Brown,
or both from Spencer. The theory of land-nationalization, of
the destruction of private property in land, and of making the
stale the only landlord, never grew naturally out of American
soil. We incline to think, therefore, that the germ of it was
wafted either by an eastern gale from England or a blizzard
from Canada, till it unfortunately found a resting-place in the en-
terprising brain of Mr. George. f

The syllogism and Mr. George is fond of syllogisms which
underlies the whole of his book on Progress and Poverty is the
following: "The cause of poverty should be abolished; but the
cause of poverty is private property in land ; therefore private
property in land should be abolished." We shall say nothing to
the major of this syllogism, except that the reformer who under-
takes to abolish the cause of poverty has a very hard task before
him. So many are poor from their own fault, so many remain
poor even when helped, and so many will remain poor in spite of
every assistance given, that it is impossible to abolish the evil.
A greater than Mr. George has said : " The poor you have al-
ways with you"; and history shows that poverty has always
existed. We fear Mr. George will never abolish poverty until
he succeeds in abolishing the freedom of the human will and
preventing men from squandering their earnings upon their pas-
sions. Can it be that Mr. George sincerely believes that, alter
centuries of unsuccessful effort on the part of creeds and civili-
zations to abolish poverty, he alone has found the solution of the
problem by an English patent with an American stamp on its back ?

But we dismiss the major premise. The minor is the back-

* The Land Question , p. 44. New York : Lovell.

t It would be more correct to say that Fichte, the German pantheist, is the modern father
of George's theory. In his work. Materials for the Justification of the French Revolution,
Fichte defines property as George does.

8f2 HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. [Mar.,

bone of Mr. George's syllogism. Let us not be accused of mis-
representing him. Here are his words : " If private property in
land be just, then is the remedy I propose a false one; if, on the
contrary, private property in land be unjust, then is the remedy
the true one." These are his words in the seventh book of Pro-
gress and Poverty, in a chapter of which the heading is: " The
Injustice of Private Property in Land." Again in the same
chapter, after a lengthy attempt to prove his thesis, he writes:

" Whatever may be said for the institution of private property in land,
it is therefore plain that it cannot be defended on the score of justice." . . .
" There is on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive
ownership in land." "Though the sovereign people of the State of New
York consent to the landed possessions of the Astors, the puniest infant
that comes wailing into the world in the squalidest room of the most mise-
rable tenement-house becomes at that moment seized of an equal right
with the millionaires; and it is robbed if the right is denied." . . . "The
wide-spreading social evils which everywhere oppress men amid an advanc-
ing civilization spring from a great primary wrong the appropriation, as
the exclusive property of some men, of the land on which and from which
fl//must live. From this fundamental injustice flow #//the injustices which
distort and endanger modern development, which condemn the producer of
wealth to poverty and pamper the non-producer in luxury, which rear the
tenement-house with the palace, plant the brothel behind the church, and
compel us to build prisons as we open new schools."

No one would believe it, unless he had read it, that Mr.
George thus holds that not only is private property in land rob-
bery, but even the cause of other crimes the creator of the
brothel and the jail ! And yet the criminal owner of a farm and
the thieving lot-owner hold on to their dishonest possessions, and
will not yield them voluntarily to the state. And the industrious
and sober but wicked mechanic and laborer continue to econo-
mize in whiskey and tobacco in order to be able to commit the
crime <>f owning their own lots, and thus helping to send some
one into a brothel or a jail ! Thus we have Mr. George's doctrine
in his own words. Before analyzing his arguments in its favor
let us free the question from wordy ambiguity.

There was a sect in the very early ages of Christianity called
the u Apostolicals," of whom St. Augustine writes in his work on
Heresies, heresy No. 40. They held a doctrine very much like
that of Mr. George, and denied the right of any man to own pro-
perty. Prudhomme, the French Communist, adopted their prin-
ciples when he said that u property is theft." Mr. George does
not say that all property is theft; the only dishonest possession
according to him, is that of " private property in land."

1 887.] HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. 813

Now, men may differ about the origin of titles to hold land.
Some trace them to the law of nature, others to the law of
nations, and others to the law of the state. But ah hough
orthodox writers may differ as to the origin of titles to pri-
vate ownership, all admit the right itself; and whether the title
comes frotn the law of the state or from the law of nations, in
the last analysis it is sanctioned by the law of nature, for neither
the state nor the law of nations could make that which is intrin-
sically unjust, just. We have been unable to find any orthodox
writer on law or theology who denies the justice of private
ownership of land. But Mr. George, from his words quoted
above, denies that even the state can give valid title : t4 There is
on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive
ownership in land." Thus, then, even the grants of land made
by the state to soldiers after a just war are all invalid. If the
United States government had conceded to General Grant a
farm in recompense for his services in saving the Union, the act
would be invalid and the title void, according to Mr. George's
theory.

Orthodox writers also teach that while private property in
land is just, so also is ownership by a corporation or by the
state. The state is an owner, and so may be the individual or
the corporation. But the right of the individual primordially and
aboriginally precedes the right of the state. Adam was the first
owner of property ; he had logical and real rights as an indivi-
dual, even before he became the "covenanted head " of the race.
For some time he was alone in the world. When Eve was
formed to be his wife she and Adam were the only property,
owners on this earth. After they had children, and these chil-
dren begot others, quarrels about persons and property arose,
and then the families united and made the state to be, as it were,
a policeman to keep order and protect rights. The state, then, in
the form of its organization, is the creature of the family. Its
rights are therefore limited by the rights of families or of the
individuals who compose them. It is true that the authority of
the state is from God, and that the state has the right of eminent
domain, in virtue of which it can abridge or take away class-
privileges, or curtail private ownership for the benefit of the
whole community. How far this right of eminent domain may
extend we are not going to discuss. It fluctuates, like the mer-
cury in a barometer, in different political systems. The opinion
of Americans as to the extent of eminent domain is expressed by
the article of the Constitution already quoted and by other laws.

8 14 HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. [Mar.,

But the right of a corporation to own property the right of the
municipality of New York, for instance, to own the Central Park,
and the right of the state to own certain territory in no way
collides with the right of the individual to own his lot or his farm.
If Mr. George had simply taught that if we wish to be perfect
we should "sell all we possess and give to the poor " ; if he had
simply argued in favor of the superior advantages of a common
to a private ownership, no one would accuse him of holding un-
sound opinions. As far as orthodox theologians are concerned,
they would denounce as strongly the teaching that would deny
the right of a state or of a community to hold land, or the writer
who would insist that private ownership is the only one that is
valid, as they do now the theory that private ownership is un-
just. Communism in its best form has always flourished in the
Catholic Church alongside of private ownership. Mr. George
will labor long before he can establish such perfect forms of the
holding of property in common as have existed, and still exist, in
the monastic institutions of Christianity.

The right of private property is limited by the state's eminent
domain, by the necessities of other men, as well as by the univer-
sal law of charity, that makes all things common in case of ex-
treme necessity. Common sense and reason limit the extent of
private ownership, even when acquired by priority of occupa-
tion. We are not going to discuss the limits of ownership, be-
cause the question is not pertinent to the subject. The justice of
private ownership is one thing, the limits of it another, and while
the former is certain the latter is disputable.

If Mr. George's purpose were merely to improve the condi-
tion of the laboring classes by obtaining for them better wages
or shorter hours where needed, or to limit the power of corpora-
tions or curtail the influence of monopolies, no Catholic theolo-
gian would have spilled a drop of ink in trying to injure his
cause. But he says that private property in land is the cause of
poverty and is unjust.

We freely admit that poverty might, indeed, be a conse-
quence of land-monopoly used contrary to the laws of justice
and chanty ; but private ownership itself is naturally a means to
wealth. If we were to argue from history it might be shown
that common ownership has produced as much poverty as pri-
vate ownership. The wretched and impoverished condition of
the ancient Gauls and Germans, as described by Cassar* and
Tacitus,f is inferentially attributed by those writers to the hold

* De Bella Gallico, vi. ch. 22. t Germania, ch. 26.

1887.] HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. 815

ing of land in common. Tenure in common killed individual ex-
ertion and destroyed the progress to which private ownership
stimulates. When everybody owned the acre, every one shirked
the labor of improvement and threw the responsibility on his
neighbor's shoulders.

Nor does the history of the people of God favor Mr. George's
theory. We are willing to give him all the advantage he thinks
he finds in the texts of the Bible that "God hath given the earth
to the sons of men," and that " the Lord's is the earth and the
fulness thereof," and " you shall not sell the land for ever, for
the land is mine, saith the Lord." If he is going to quote Scrip-
ture for us in defence of his proposition that u private property
in land is unjust," he ought to state at the same time that his in-
terpretation of these texts is contrary to all Christian and He-
brew teaching, for both recognize the justice of private owner-
ship in land. All our Hebrews, even the most orthodox rab-
bis, like to own town lots, and if they own them they keep them,
or sell them, or transmit them to their heirs with calm con-
sciences in spite of the text, " You shall not sell the land for ever. "
Surely the whole Christian Church and the whole Synagogue are
as good interpreters of the Bible as Mr. George. The Lord is
the absolute owner of the earth. Who denies it ? God is the ab-
solute owner of every human being as well as of the earth, and
yet Mr. George derives the right of a man to property from " the
right of a man to himself, to the use of his own powers." * He
surely does not mean by this, however, that a man has an absolute
right to himself the right to commit suicide, for instance ? The
absolute dominion of God over the earth is not contradictory to
private ownership of land by a human being, any more than the
state's right of eminent domain is irreconcilable with the citizen's
right to his lot or to his farm. As to God, we are all tenants at
will, not only as to ownership of property but also as to owner-
ship of our lives. When we claim the justice of private owner-
ship in land, we do not mean that the owner can keep it in spite
of God's will, but that he can sell it, transmit it to his heirs,
and exclude other men from its possession. God, of course, has
given the earth to the sons of men, but he has not specified the
manner in which they must own it. Some of them own it in
common, others individually, but in both cases with a just and
valid title. The law of nature is equally indifferent to communal
or to private ownership.! Where does Mr. George find a text

* Progress and Poverty, p. 300. Appleton. 1882.

t This is what St. Thomas means when he says : "If you consider this field absolutely, there

8i6 HENRY GRORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. [Mar.,

that forbids private,property in land, and prescribes that the com-
munity can be the sole honest owner?

Jewish legislation on this subject was special and national,
and was never intended to be universal. When the Israelites
conquered the promised land a land specially donated to them
by the Supreme Owner, God Josue divided the whole country
into twelve provinces, giving one to each tribe. No tribe could
encroach on the land of another. Then each family got a share
by a subdivision, and the families were forbidden to alienate for
ever the portion of land assigned to them. What was this but a
law of entail, to which Mr. George is opposed? The Jews by a
special law were obliged to celebrate the Jubilee year, which
was every fiftieth. This Jubilee year was one of privileges; in
it slaves were set free, and property sold within the last fifty
years reverted to the original possessor. The right to sell land
was permitted to the Jews, and they could give title only for
fifty years. Such sale did not injure the possessor, because he
knew in disposing of it that he could sell or buy only for a fixed
period.

This special Hebrew land legislation was in order to keep the
tribes separate; for the priestly and levitical functions belonged
exclusively to the tribe of Levi, and the Messias was to come
from the tribe of Juda. After the captivity of Babylon this
land-law ceased to bind, because as only the tribes of Juda and
Benjamin, with a few representatives from the other tribes, came
back, its reason of existence ceased. The King of the Jews was
God himself. Their form of government was a theocracy, spe-
cial and isolated. To argue from the Hebrew land-laws to those
that should bind the rest of mankind is as absurd as to teach
that the rules of a Catholic monastery or convent should govern
the outside world. A man cannot justly buy what the seller
does not justly own. Now, Abraham bought a burying-ground
for ever for four hundred sides from Ephron, "and the field was
made sure to Abraham, and the cave that was in it, for a posses-
sion to bury in " (Gen. xxiii. 20). By -the Mosaic law lands always
passed to the children, or, if there were none, to the next of kin,
thus showing that private ownership was recognized (Numbers

is no reason in it why it should belong to one man rather than to another ; but if you con-
sider it in relation to the need of cultivation and of pacific use of the field, in this regard it is
opportune that it should belong to one and not to another " (za, 2ae, quaest. 57, art. iii ) As it
is not easy in an English translation to give all the shades of meaning of the Angelic Doctor, we
quote the original text : "Si enim consideretur iste ager absolute, non habet unde magis sit
hujus quam illius ; sed si consideretur per respectum ad opportunitatem colendi, et ad paci-
ficum usum agri, secundum hoc habet quamdam commensurationem ad hoc quod sit unius
et non alterius."

1 88;.] HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. 817

xxvii.) Even King Achab had not the power to take away Na-
both's vineyard without his consent (III. Kings xxi. 2). Accord-
ing to Mr. George, as no individual's title to real estate is valid,
neither can any man dispose of it by will ; for the community,
not the children or next of kin, is the true heir and owner.

The first Christians were of Hebrew race. They sold and
bought lands. They were private owners. Do the champions
of the George theory who quote Scripture forget that in Acts
v. 3-4 St. Peter reproaches Ananias, the converted Jew, with his
lie in these words: "Why hath Satan tempted thy heart, that
thou shouldst lie to the Holy Ghost, and by fraud keep part of
the price of the land ? Whilst it remained, did it not remain to
thee? and after it was sold, was it not in thy power?" When
the champions of Mr. George say that Scripture favors his theory
they are certainly following in the footsteps of Ananias.

But let us come to Mr. George's arguments from reason.
Here is his bulwark:

"The laws of nature are the decrees of the Creator. There is written
in them no recognition of any right save that of labor; and in them is
written broadly and clearly the equal right of all men to the use and enjoy-
ment of nature to apply to her by their exertions and to receive and
possess her reward. Hence, as nature gives only to labor, the exertion of
labor in production is the only title to exclusive possession." *

This is Fichte's argument long before George used it.

Mr. George is fond of syllogisms,! so let us put his argument
in the form of a syllogism. Is not this a fair one from his words:
" The only title to exclusive possession is that which nature
gives"; but nature gives such title u only to labor"; therefore
"labor in production is the only title to exclusive possession"?
Of course the reader sees at a glance that there is more in the
conclusion of this syllogism than in the premises. That more
was put there by Mr. George, not by us. But let it stand. Now
for an analysis of it. The major of this syllogism may be ad-
mitted ; but the minor is false, for, in the first place, it denies

* Progress and Poverty^ p. 302.

t This is the syllogism which our American Aristotle, Mr. George, pretended to take from
the words of the archbishop's pastoral, quoted in this article :

" The results of human exertion are property, and may rightfully be the object of individual
ownership.

" Land is property.

" Therefore land is rightfully the object of individual ownership." (See Standard of
January 8, 1887.)

Now, as the pastoral does not say that the results of human exertion alone are property,
but distinctly claims that the things themselves, " a farm, etc.," as well as the improvements on
it, are property, how can Mr. George acquit himself of the charge of false statement ?
VOL, XLIV. 52

8i8 HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. [Mar.,

the validity of title derived from priority of occupation. Of this
title Mr. George says that it is "the most absurd ground on
which land-ownership can be defended." * Mr. George, as proofs
of this dogmatic assertion, says :

" Has the first comer at a banquet the right to turn back all the chairs
and claim that none of the other guests shall partake of the food provided,
except as they make terms with him?" "Does the first passenger who
enters a railroad-car obtain the right to scatter his baggage over all the
seats and compel the passengers who come in after him to stand up?"t

This idea is found in St. Basil's sermon on Naboth's vineyard.
This is an unlucky illustration for Mr. George. It proves
against his theory instead of for it. Undoubtedly the man who
takes a seat at a banquet or in a railroad-train cannot exclude
others from the other seats, but he can exclude from the seat
which he occupies, because it is his. If Mr. George should take
the seat appointed for him at a banquet, or if places have not
been appointed but left to be taken on the principle that " the
first come should be the first served," and he should take one,
would he not consider it injustice for some one to come in and
order him out of his chair? When he enters a railroad-car he
takes an unoccupied seat, he claims a right to that particular
seat by virtue of prior occupation, and he would consider himself
unjustly treated if some one else should come in and try to oust
him. And. if all the seats are preoccupied he has to stand up.
His payment for a seat in general does not entitle him to this or
that particular seat.

The very fact that the prior occupation of the seat is felt to
give title to its possessor, and that the community respects such
prior occupation, shows that the title of prior occupation is
founded in nature. We do not claim that prior occupation gives
title to the whole earth, but it does give title to that part of it in
which a man fixes his residence, or which provides for his neces-
sary support; and from that part he can exclude others, as the
preoccupant could from the chair at a public restaurant or the
seat in a railroad-car. The universal consent of mankind, based
on natural inclination, gives title to priority of occupation. If two
boys should go to a blackthorn hedge we use this illustration,
for Mr. George is very fond of the Irish, especially at election
time to cut sticks, the one who outruns the other, and takes hold
of the best cane for his purpose, feels that he has a right to it in
virtue of prior occupation ; and the other boy respects the right;

* Progress and Poverty, p. 309. t Idem.

1887.] HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. 819

or if, on account of greater strength and evil inclination, he should
undertake to get possession of it, both feel that right is being vio-
lated. Nature tells the aggressor that he is violating the right ac-
quired by prior occupation; and the aggrieved feels that he does
no wrong by defending his right to it, even by force. If a party
of men should sail away on the ocean and discover land without
an owner, like Pitcairn Island when the mutineers of the Bounty
found it, they would feel that they had a right. They would di-
vide it, and respect each other's rights to it after the division.*
If Mr. George should find gold-dust in the dried-up bed of a
stream which belonged to no one, would he not appropriate it to
himself and claim it by the right of prior occupation ? He could
not. claim it as the result of labor, for he accidentally found it.
All the labor consisted in picking it up. Peace and good order
require that the right of the prior occupant should, with proper
restrictions, be recognized. If not, every one would be fighting
for the best place. And order is the first law of nature as well
as of heaven. Order and peace, therefore, legitimate title ac-
quired by priority of occupation.

Here is another syllogism taken from Mr. George's reason-
ing: " The recognition of private property in land is a wrong, if
there can be no exclusive possession and enjoyment of anything
not the product of labor; but there can be no exclusive posses-
sion and enjoyment of anything not the product of labor; there-
fore the recognition of private property in land is wrong." This
is but the former syllogism in a new dress. We answer it in
these calm and dignified words of the highest ecclesiastical judi-
cial authority in the State of New York : The right of property is

"the moral faculty of claiming an object as one's own, and of disposing
both of the object and its utility according to one's own good will, without

* Mr. George draws the following false conclusion from title derived from priority of occupa-
tion : " Then by priority of occupation one could acquire and could transmit to whom he pleased
not merely the exclusive right to one hundred and sixty acres or to six hundred and forty acres,,
but to a whole township, a whole State, a whole continent " (Progress and Poierty, p. 310).
How much land an individual may occupy and own is a debatable question, but there is no
dispute among orthodox writers that he can own some part of the earth. Limitation of a right
does not mean its destruction. Common sense and the necessities of our fellow-men limit occu-
pation. No one claims that a man may occupy a whole continent ; but every one should admit
that he may justly own a portion of it. How much ? That depends. Grant to the individual
the ownership of a single lot on the continent, and you give up Mr. George's theory that " pri-
vate property in land is unjust." Just as the individual may acquire title by prior occupation, so
may the state by prior occupation. Thus if the agent of a state, seeking new discoveries for her,
should find an island not owned by others, he claims it as the property of his government, and
no individual can acquire right or title in it without the consent of the state ; for the right of
the state is as sacred as the right of the individual. The same argument holds good for both
the individual and the state. But in all cases authority is from God. As St. Paul says, " All.
power is from God."

820 HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. [Mar.,

any rightful interference on the part of others. . . . Undoubtedly God
made the earth for the use of all mankind ; but whether the possession
thereof was to be in common or by individual ownership was left for reason
to determine. Such determination, judging from the facts of history, the
sanction of law, from the teaching of the wisest and the actions of the
best and bravest of mankind, has been and is that man can by lawful acts
become possessed of the right of ownership in property, and not merely in
its use. The reason is because a man is strictly entitled to that of which
he is the producing cause, to the improvement he brings about in it, and
the enjoyment of both. But it is clear that in a farm, for instance, which
one has by patient toil improved in value ; in a block of marble out of
which one has chiselled a perfect statue, he cannot fully enjoy the im-
provement he has caused unless he have also the right to own the object
thus improved."

Mr. George tries to depreciate the importance of this official
utterance by insinuating- that it has no more weight than the
utterance of a " butler" or a " butcher-boy." * Mr. George is
not a Catholic. We do not know that he is even a believer in
the -divinity of Christ. But by his own testimony he has been
paying court to cardinals and bishops, and enjoying their hospi-
tality. Why not respect one of their body? No Catholic can
sympathize with Mr. George's attack upon a bishop who forbore
to speak till the election for mayor was over, and then only dis-
charged an official duty in defending the truth. Mr. George's
abuse or insult does not disprove the logic of these words :

"But it is clear that in a farm, for instance, which one has by patient
toil improved in value ; in a block of marble out of which one has chiselled
a perfect statue, he cannot fuHy enjoy the improvement he has caused
unless he have also the right to own the object thus improved."

Moreover, if we accept Mr. George's proposition that there
can be no property except what is the " fruit of human indus-
try " or the " product of human exertion," mark the conse-
quences that follow. How can we get title to property in cattle
in that case? Man never produced horses, cows, nor asses ; will
he on that account be denied the right to own them ? How can
a man become the owner of chickens or ducks, since he cannot
produce them or the eggs from which they are hatched? How
can he become an owner of eggs since he cannot "produce"
them?

But -even accepting the theory that labor put in concrete form
on material things gives the only title to ownership, still private
ownership in land is just. If I clear a field, fence it in, build a
house on it, I have put my labor in a concrete form. A barren

* See the Standard Mr. George's organ of January 8, 1887.

1887.3 HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. 821

and useless spot that had belonged to nobody has been convert-
ed by my industry into a productive one. Now, if you deprive
me of this field, am I not deprived of " the product of human
exertion " ?

You tell me I did not produce the field. But neither has the
workman produced the raw material out of which he has made
the tool. The iron or the tree is as much a gift of nature as
land. The clay that is used to make bricks is a part of the soil.
Land requires improvement to be useful to man: it must be
ploughed, harrowed, manured, just as the iron must pass
through the foundry or wood through the sawmill to be fit for
use. Thus, then, the same argument that gives title to the maker
of the tool gives title to the cultivator of the farm. In both
cases the improvement carries with it the right to the thing im-
proved. They are inseparable in the concrete.

Again, if land cannot justly belong to a private owner, neither
can it be owned by a corporation or by a state. You say that
land is common property and belongs to the whole human race;
that every child born into the world has a right to live on the
-land. Then what right has a state to put up a barrier, and mark
out a frontier, and claim exclusive ownership of a fixed portion
of the earth ? What right have the Irish to demand that their
own country shall be governed by themselves if they must con-
cede an equal right to their land to the English, the Scotch, and
for that matter to the whole human race? Mr. George's theory
is thus directly against " Home Rule "and nationalism. If every
tramp, as you say, has a right to the Astors' city lots, then the
Manitoba peasant or Sitting Bull's Indians have as much right
to the City Hall Park as the municipality of New York, and it
is injustice to exclude them from its ownership. The Rhine,
according to your theory, is unjustly a limit to French or Ger-
man nationality and ownership ; and if the inhabitants of Africa
should find their land unable to support them, they have a right
to immigrate hither in a body and take as much of American
soil as they may need for their support, without asking per-
mission from the courtesy or the charity of the state or of the
American people. In fact, it would be injustice to oppose them,
for what right have we to exclude them from " the common gift
of the Creator "? Thus every argument against the private own-
ership of the individual tells equally against ownership by cor-
porations, municipalities, or states ; for the unorganized human
race, according to this theory, owns all the land in common. If

822 HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. [Mar.,

it is necessary to produce the earth in order to own it, one might
say that Holland and our " Harlem Flats" are privileged proper-
ty. They are the product of human exertion and " free dumps."
Every seller of a lot on " Harlem Flats " could put up a sign
as an incentive to buyers : " This lot is guaranteed by Henry
George, for it is the product of human exertion." Happy in-
habitants of " Harlem Flats " !

You grant a man the right to his house, but not to the lot on
which it stands; but the foundation of the house is often built
six or seven feet into the ground. Must we for the future build
our houses on stilts, to keep the improvement separate from the
thing improved ? How can a man separate his property, the
house, from the product of nature, the lot? Or must every man
build a house of such a character as to be able to carry it off on
his back? You concede that he may own the bricks with which
he built it, but deny that he can own the portion of earth out of
which they were made. How can he separate his property from
that of the community in this case? He can sell the house but
not the lot ; yet in the very sale of the house he gives to the
buyer the right to exclude others from the land on which it is
built. Suppose the community should insist on its rights to use
its property, the ground on which the house is erected, how
could the community do it without invading the individual's
right to the house? What absurdities !

In logic he that proves too much proves nothing. Every
argument used by Mr. George against the right of private pro-
perty in land tells equally against the right to hold all other
kinds of property. Thus on page 306 of Progress and Poverty
Mr. George writes :

" The recognition of individual ownership of land is the denial of the
natural rights of other individuals it is a wrong which must show itself in
the inequitable division of wealth. For as labor cannot produce without
the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessa-
rily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce," etc.

Now, every word of this applies with greater force to those
kinds of property the justice of which is acknowledged.
Substitute the words " raw material" and ''machinery" for
" land " in the whole paragraph, and you have the same argu-
ment, or rather the same tirade, against property. The unequal
division of the raw material, the unequal division of the owner-
ship of machinery, may as well be charged with being the cause
of poverty as the unequal distribution of land. In fact, there is

1 887.] HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. 823

greater inequality, and therefore greater injustice if inequality
be injustice, in wealth derived from manufactures, greater in-
equality in the ownership of stocks and bonds, than in the owner-
ship of land. If Mr. George, when he becomes ruler of America,
is going to rob the Astors of their real estate and give it to be
the common property of tramps and loungers, the Astors had better
sell their land at once, and invest the money in factories, stocks,
bonds, or books, so as to own a kind of property that Mr. George
will recognize as just and entirely exempt from taxation. Let
them invest in English consols or French rentes, and escape pay-
ing anything to the support of our government.

Mr. George recognizes property in improvements but not to
the land improved. But when the improvements become indis-
tinguishable from the land, then " the title to the improvements
becomes blended with the title to the land ; the individual right
is lost in the common right."* In such a case he would not
even give compensation for all the individual's labor and in-
dustry. But is not this self-contradictory ? On the one hand
he lays down the universal principle that man has a right to the
" product of his own industry." Yet when that product is iden-
tified with the land, so as to be indistinguishable from it,, he denies
the right either to the product or to compensation for it. Thus
a man might till a farm for fifty years and enhance its value one
hundred per cent. ; yet because the improvements on it were of
such a character as to be inseparable and indistinguishable from
it, the laborer could claim no compensation for his work ! Are
the farmers and laborers going to accept any such nonsense as
this ? Why should the impossibility of separating an improve-
ment from the thing improved work forfeiture of the improve-
ment or of compensation for years of patient toil and industry ?
Can a man be the laborer's friend who tells him that all his sweat
on his farm will go for naught, because the farm absorbs and ap-
propriates it? The individual, forsooth, must heroically sacrifice
the reward of labor for the benefit of a dreamer's theory ! Is
not this sanctioning the very thing which Irish peasants formerly
considered one of their greatest grievances namely, that they
received no compensation for the improvement made on their
farms, because the improvement was absorbed by the farm ?
Again, while Mr. George denies the right to private ownership of
land, he exaggerates the right of the individual to other kinds of
property. He says " that which a man makes or produces is his

* Progress and Poverty, p. 308.

824 HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. [Mar.,

own, as against all the world to enjoy or to destroy, to use, to
exchange, or to give." * Thus he gives to man the absolute do-
minion of the Creator over the work of his own hands, an un-
limited and unrestricted right " to enjoy or to destroy " what he
has made. The baker, therefore, who burns up all the loaves of
bread in his bakery ; the butcher who throws all the beefsteaks
in his shop into the furnace ; the drunken laborer who takes his
week's earnings and squanders them in the rum-shop, violates no
right of others. He has a right to destroy his property, even
though his neighbors or his wife and children should be starv-
ing. They have no right even to the crumbs that fall from his
table. What right have they to the products of another's indus-
try ? This absolute dominion over the products of human indus-
try is denied by all orthodox writers. As in every product of
human industry there is an] element not the product of human
industry the raw material created by Him who created man him-
self man has no right to destroy it when the rights of others or
the necessities of others stand in the way. When man is about
to destroy the work of his hands, say a loaf of bread, God cries
to him: "Hold! You formed the loaf, but I created the sub-
stances out of which it is formed, and I want them to be used for
the benefit of other creatures like yourself. Your rights are lim-
ited. The very instruments by which you formed this loaf, those
hands of yours, belong to me as their Creator, and to my other
creatures, your brethren." Nay, more, Mr. George's theory
leads logically to child-murder. What is more of a man's pro-
duction than his children ? He produces them by generation,
and according to Henry George you can "enjoy " or " destroy "
what you " produce." Here is the old despotism of pagan Ro-
man fathers over the life and death of their children again re-
vived.

And now a word in reference to the " unearned increment "
of land.f What is the meaning of " unearned increment," as
applied to land? It is the appreciation of land in value, owing
to the growth of the community, or its necessities or sentiments.
Now, we affirm that the " unearned increment " may be the right-
ful property of the individual owner. Even by Mr. George's
standard of ownership the community cannot justly claim the
" unearned increment." The whole community did not produce

* Progress and Poverty, p. 300.

t This idea and the]J words are taken by Mr. George from John Stuart Mill, the English
sceptic.

188/.J HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. 825

it by labor, nor is its value the " product of the industry " of the
community. It is often a mere accidental appreciation due to
sentiment rather than to the growth or the necessity of the mul-
titude. I buy a vacant lot cheap, hoping that the city or town
will grow so fast that in a few years my lot will double its value.
The city grows, and the value of the lot increases ; or the city
does not grow, but certain people take a fancy to the lot on ac-
count of its position, and again its value increases. But I have
bought the lot subject also to risk. The city may not grow to-
wards my lot, or some champion of the George theories may
own the neighboring lot, build a hall on it for a noisy socialistic
club, and then nobody wants my lot. It depreciates in value.
So there is an " unearned decrement " as well as an " unearned
increment" possible to the private owner. Now, the " unearned
decrement " may not be the community's fault, therefore I can-
not force the community to pay me for my loss. Neither, then,
shall I yield the "unearned increment "to the community, the
product of my foresight, my careful calculation, the interest on
my capital, the necessary appanage of my land and corollary of
my wise calculation. If the "unearned increment" belongs to
the community, why not make the community pay indemnity for
the "unearned decrement"? The latter action by the commu-
nity would give great satisfaction to every fool who made a bad
investment in real estate. By what title can the community con-
fiscate the increase of value on my lot, since the community is
not always the producer of this increase, and, even where it is so,
is not the necessary cause but only the accidental occasion of it?
Does the mere accident of the growth of the town up to my
lot, or the building of a railroad-station near my farm, give title
to the community or to the railroad company to confiscate the
fruit of my industry and of my foresight ?

And if you confiscate the " unearned increment " of land, why
not confiscate the "unearned increment "of all other property
which rises and falls in value according to the growth, necessi-
ties, or sentiments of the community ? The panic in stocks last
December lowered the price of sealskin sacques ; the coal-strike
at VVeehawken has raised the price of coal must the furriers of
New York charge the community for the " unearned decrement"
of their furs, and the coal-dealers forfeit the "unearned incre-
ment " of their coal-supply, in consequence of these accidents?
Is it not rational that the owner should enjoy the benefit, since
he has also to suffer the loss, if there be any, from his venture ?

826 HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. [Mar.,

The fact is, the " increment " or " decrement " is inseparable from
the thing owned. If you admit the right of private ownership
in land you cannot deny its logical consequence, that the incre-
ment belongs to him who owns the land. To take it away with-
out just compensation would be as unjust as to take away the land
itself without just compensation.

Besides, if you confiscate the " increment," to whom will you
give it? You answer, "To the community." To what commu-
nity? To the city, excluding the rest of the state? or to the
state, excluding the city ? or to both together? Which has the
right to it ? The growth of the city is caused by the growth of
the state, and the growth of the state is the growth of the whole
world, of the whole human race. Then, as your claim to the
"increment" is logically because of an increase of the commu-
nity that is, of the whole human race, whose increase has in-
creased the value the " increment " must be taken from me for
the benefit of the whole human race! And who will divide it?
Who will distribute it ? Oh ! says Mr. George after Mr. Spencer,
nationalize the land, let the state be the only landlord and rent-
collector, and let the state that is to say, the Republican or the
Democratic legislature, or the board of aldermen, as the case
may be appoint the rent-collectors to take the "increment" and
apply it where it will do the most good ! * What a scramble for
the office of rent-collectors to manage the "boodle" !

We have already used a blackthorn stick as an illustration.
It recalls associations with a people and a -race fighting gallant-
ly for private ownership of land, for the rights of farmers and
laborers against a privileged class, by invoking the state's over-
dominion and natural justice against land monopolists whose
titles are derived chiefly from the state or from unjust disposses-
sion of the original owners of the soil. The issue in Ireland is
not being fought on a Henry George platform. The Irish pea-
sant is fighting for private property in land. He wants to own
a bit of the land himself instead of seeing it all in the hands of a
monopoly. The exaggerated utterances of some Irishmen mere-
ly emphasize the power of the state against uncharitable or un-
just privilege detrimental to the commonweal. Although the
holding of property in common was general in Ireland, especially

* The state has a right to limit the " increment," as it has to regulate interest upon money
loaned, and as- it has to limit ownership or privilege. Again we observe that a right to limit a
right is not a right to destroy a right. Distinguish always between what a man is bound to do
in justice and what he is bound to do in charity.

1887.] HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. 827

when she was filled with monasteries and convents, the Irish
never denied the justice of private property in land. The Irish
missionaries, from the sixth to the ninth century, who traversed
Europe, denouncing vice and injustice, and building monasteries,
those great communes of Christianity, never attacked the right
of the individual to hold property in land. Both Columba and
Columbanus acknowledged the justice of such tenure. It is too
late in the day, therefore, to try to make the Irish race apostles
of theft and robben^. They are too sensible and thrifty to allow
themselves to be poisoned by the quack remedy for all social
evils of an English metaphysician like Herbert Spencer or an
American politician like Mr. Henry George. " Non tali auxilio
nee defensoribus istis"

But let us return to the blackthorn. It grew near a little
Irish churchyard where the bones of the owner's ancestors lie
buried. No human hand ever planted the hedge on which it
bloomed. It was a spontaneous product of nature, and belonged
to the community until he took a fancy to it. By " human exer-
tion," a hand, and an American jack-knife he cut it down. He
was the first occupier, and therefore the owner. He improved
it with the knife and a generous supply of sweet oil. He brought
it to this country. It cost him nothing originally ; now it has an
"unearned increment" to him that cannot be computed. He
would not give it for love nor sell it for money. Persons who
have seen it say it is a beauty. Some who were born near the
place where it grew have offered him ten dollars for it. One
man whose cradle was rocked near it offered him fifteen dollars
for it, but he has declined the offer. This stick, remember, is a
natural product of the soil, having had roots deeply imbedded in
it, drawing all its strength and beauty from it in short, a gift of
nature to man, and therefore belonging to the same category of
property as land itself. Now, the cane in the hedge was not and
never can be private property, according to Mr. George, because
it was not " the result of human exertion." The improvement,
however, made by the possessor's jack-knife is his property, as it
is the " product of labor." But how can he own the improve-
ment without owning the whole stick? Is he a thief for having
appropriated to his own use what belonged to the whole Irish
nation, or rather to the whole human race, every member of
which had originally as much right to it as he ? If he is, and he
should want to make restitution, how can he do so unless he give
up his improvement, which is his property by the Georgian stan-
dard? And if he give up that improvement, must the Irish nation

828 HENRY GEORGE AND HIS LAND THEORIES. [Mar.,

or the whole human race pay him for it, or rest under the charge
of having- appropriated his improvement without title? Then
as to the "unearned increment'' how much is it? Is it the
value the possessor sets on the stick.'or is it the ten dollars minus
or plus the cost of transportation from Ireland, or the fifteen dol-
lars that the patriotic and loving Irishman was willing to give
for it? And if the community confiscates this " unearned incre-
ment," which community must get it? Is it the Irish community
to which the natural cane belonged, or the American community
in which the improved stick is doing efficient service, or is it the
whole human race, the " great community/' whose growth grows
with the growth of the Irish and the American community? Or
must the " unearned increment " be divided pro rata one part
to Ireland, which has a right to the natural product, and the
other to America, in which the " unearned increment " of the
stick is so great? Or shall he follow the law of nature, of com-
mon sense, and the opinion of all civilized peoples by keeping
the stick and its value for the very same reasons which justify the
private owner in keeping his lot and its value? Certainly, it
" Cants suns pro Martino venatur" as the proverb has it, land or a
stick ought to do a similar service for its possessor.

We have avoided going into any side-issues on this question,
and have kept to the one point that private property in land
is just, and to its logical consequence, that the " unearned in-
crement " belongs to the individual. It is unfortunate that Mr.
George and his champions have ceased to argue these points, and
instead have taken to abusing the archbishop and to trying to
prejudice the laboring classes against the Catholic Church.

What has Mr. Henry George ever done for the poor that he
should pose as their champion? He has helped to make them un-
happy and turbulent, while the Catholic Church has ever been
working for their welfare. When they had no position in the state
she gave them every chance in the church. Even in the ages
of caste and feudal privilege she, with true democratic spirit,
made them cardinals, and even popes. Has Mr. George ever
built an orphan asylum or an institution of beneficence, or is he
trying to build one? No; but he is enraged because the blow
of a crosier has left a black cross on his visionary theory, and,
like a vain girl whose new bonnet had been sat upon, he goes
around crying and abusing the archbishop because he did not at
once accept his crude theories as a substitute for the Gospel of
Christ in alleviating human misery.

A FAIR EMIGRANT. 829

A FAIR EMIGRANT.

CHAPTER XXII.
VISITORS.

THE sun shone, and Bawn was herself again.

Never had she risen from sleep more serene, fair, and health-
ful in mind and body than on the morning after her first sifting
for treasure-trove in the dust-heap oi Betty's memory. The
jewels of faith and mindfulness so easily turned up there lay in
her palm and beamed in her eyes. With Betty at her side, un-
consciously to guide and warn her as she proceeded with her en-
terprise, she was in a better position than she could ever have
hoped for as a stranger here. She would make Betty's recollec-
tions her chart and compass as she steered her way through the
difficult waters which, in her cockle-shell boat she had so daring-
ly undertaken to navigate.

Buoyed up by the belief that a new power had been placed
in her hands, she felt the clipped wings of her courage grow and
spread again. That vivid interest in her own dramatic adven-
ture which a week's storm seemed to have quenched rose again
like a little sun on her imagination, and gave its wonted coloring
and light to her thoughts.

With pleasure she assumed the print dress and large Holland
apron, covering her from shoulder to ankle, in which she could
feel like the dairymaid she intended to be. Her strong, coarse
shoes and knitted worsted stockings were put on with triumph ;
even the little, common pebble brooch which fastened the strip of
snow-white collar round her throat was evidence in her favor as
a daughter of toil. Having arranged the milk-pans on the well-
sanded shelves of her dairy, discoursing all the time to Betty and
Nancy about butter and cream, as if to get the best price in the
market for those commodities was the only thing worth living
for, she walked down through the sunshine to the orchard with
its fringe of flowers, to gqt a bunch of something fragrant to
place in a jug in the dairy windows.

" Shana," said Rosheen, " there is Miss Ingram. Isn't she a
pleasant sight?"

The sisters were coming up the fields at a rapid pace, their
eyes roving joyfully over grass, trees, and chimneys of the little

830 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Mar.,

farm, which was to them as the mill that was to grind their
bread of independence. While its action had been paralyzed
they had choked at Flora's table; but now, lo ! the wheel was
turning again, and nobody's crust need stick in their throats.
This thought of theirs gave an increased radiance to Bawn's face
and figure in their eyes as she turned, with her hands full of gilli-
flowers, and saw them approaching, glanced hastily over the part
she intended to play, and advanced with eager steps to meet
them.

16 Young ladies, it is kind of you to come to see me."

" We wanted to make sure you were not blown or washed
away," said Shana. " The storm has been a rough one. My
cousin, Mr. Fingall of Tor, crossed a few days ago, and was
nearly wrecked as nearly as is possible, that is, in the Holyhead
packet. A French young lady whom he escorted to visit my
grandmother gives a doleful description of her terror. You
must have borne the full brunt of the wind here at Shan-
ganagh."

" I think we did ; but you see I have held my ground. Will
you not come in, young ladies, and rest a little and eat some-
thing ?"

" We have just been wondering whether you and Betty have
got a morsel of food between you."

" Potatoes and tea have been our chief nourishment up till
now, but this morning we have been making some butter. Betty
is downcast because I insist on using a barrel-churn, Miss Fin-
gall. What is your opinion on the subject?"

" I am as ignorant in the matter as your gable-wall," said
Shana solemnly; "but if you are going to introduce improve-
ments it will be lucky for the glen. How exquisitely clean you
have made the whole place! But }^ou want some more furniture.
There is going to be an auction near Cushendall ; perhaps you
will allow me to drive you there."

" That would be too great an honor, Miss Fingall. I think I
shall do as I am pretty well. Farmer-women from our back-
woods are accustomed to rough it, and I shall have time enough
to furnish when I have made my fortune," said Bawn gailv, as
she moved about the room in her dairymaid's apron, spreading
a snow-white cloth with the best eatables she had to offer
home-baked scones, eggs, tea in a little brown earthen teapot,
cream and fresh-churned butter, and the roses and sweet-
smelling gilliflowers in a bowl in the middle of it all.

" If you treat us like this we shall be coming here every day,"

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 831

said Shana, "devouring your produce. But please, Miss In-
gram, allow us to wait upon ourselves."

" That would hardly be proper," said Bawn demurely. " I
shall be happier if you will allow me to keep my own place."

Shana looked at her with a puzzled expression. Nothing
could be better assumed than Miss Ingram's air of humility and
accustomedness to service, and yet to the shrewd girl observ-
ing her there was something unreal about it. A thought passed
through her mind somewhat like Betty's conclusion on the same
matter a reflection that, in a well-to do country like America,
where education is cheap and prosperity widely spread, the
people of lowly station may be more highly civilized than
with us. But Shana, who was fascinated by the stranger, and
eager to be friends with her, was not inclined to magnify the
distinctions of birth between them. A certain marked difference
it must make, of course, for Shana, with all her liberality, was a
Conservative; but it need not go so far as to keep Miss Ingram
standing like a servant while she poured delicious cream into
Shana's cup of tea.

" What is your place?" asked Shana, smiling.

" The place of a tenant with his landlord," Bawn said, with
an answering smile. And then she added gravely: " You must
remember that I am a humble working farmer, Miss Fingall,"
looking at her bared arms and her apron, " while you are a
young lady of gentle blood."

" You do not speak at all like a common farmer person," said
Shana.

" I try to behave nicely in the presence of my betters," re-
turned Bawn, with an irrepressible gleam of fun in her eyes.
" But I do not mean that I am quite uneducated."

" I suppose America is a very levelling place," said Shana.

" Very."

" Well, I do not object to that, if all the farmers' daughters
are like you. .And the next time I come I hope you will sit
while you are making my tea. If she will not promise that, what
am I to do with Gran's invitation, Rosheen ? My grandmother
sends you a message, Miss Ingram, to beg you will come one
day and pay her a visit. She appreciates the boon that your
coming has been to her granddaughters "

Bawn cast down her eyes and smiled demurely. The patro-
nizing tone of the invitation pleased her well. If she could fit
fairly into the place of an inferior among these people her work
would progress the more easily.

832 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Mar.,

" She is very kind."

" She is generally very lonely and always glad to see a visi-
tor. At present my Cousin Rory is at home and a young lady
is staying there, and Tor is more lively than usual. My cousin
will take us about a little and show you that side of the country/'

" That would be too much trouble, Miss Fingall."

"Oh! Rory is always ready to do anything good-natured,"
said Rosheen. " We have been telling him already about you,
and he is quite interested in the idea of a woman's doing so
clever a thing as you are doing. And he has been to America,
too ; only just come home."

" He went in the interests of the emigrants," said Shana, ris-
ing and buttoning her gloves. " He wanted to inform himself
thoroughly as to how they are treated on board ship. He is
going to make a fuss about it in Parliament. That will give you
an idea of what he is made of, Miss Ingram. He will not think
it much trouble to show you the caves and the headlands."

" It was a gallant thing to do," said Bawn, with a sudden
vivid recollection of having heard another man say that he had
taken a similar step and for the same purpose. The coincidence
struck her as remarkable, but she had not time to think of it, as
her guests were about to leave her, and kept talking to her all the
way across the fields and through the gate that opened on the
boreen that was to lead them to the old road by the river down
the glen.

But after they had been some minutes out of sight she asked
herself :

" Do all the young men of the British Isles go out in emi-
grant steamers to learn how the emigrants are treated, and with
the intention of talking about it in Parliament? "

She stood looking over her gate, which was all out of joint,
one shoulder up and one down, and, still gazing at the road
along which .Shana and Rosheen had just tripped out of sight,
she felt a lively desire to go to Tor and see this other man who
had the same aims in and ideas about life as Somerled of the
ocean steamer that had sailed away from her. And while her
thoughts thus went out to the unknown Tor, her eyes marked
the wild beauty of the peep of mountain road descried under the
*arches of trees festooned with boughs of the scarlet- berried ash.
How richly, vividly green were the hedges, with their fringes of
grass and ferns encroaching on the way ! What a delicious
touch of purple lurked at the bottom of that leafy tunnel, boring
into infinite distance ! Three little red cows had taken shelter

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 833

from the afternoon sun beneath a row of bushy, thick-set oaks,
and stood knee-deep in a golden pool, making foreground for a
gray mountain bluff, half-swathed in ragged clouds, dazzling
with light and blotted with transparent shadow.

Bawn, whose eyes were accustomed to wider and more
monotonous pictures, delighted in these sparkling vignettes of
scenery, fresh, crisp, and deep-colored, and full of a wayward
variety.

An hour later she was watching her men, the only two labor-
ers she had as yet picked up to keep her land in order, who
were filling up the gaps in the thorn hedges through which
neighborly sheep and goats had been accustomed to jump every
day, just to see that the Shariganagh crops were coming up, and
to test by tasting the excellence of the corn.

She was in the act of looking over the hedges to comfort a
large ewe, who, with two little lambs at her heels, was standing
with disappointed meekness beyond the fast-closing gap, when
the sound of wheels caught her ear, and she saw a car coming up
the road a little green car which she thought she had seen
before.

She tilted forward a large white sun-bonnet that had been
hanging by its strings on the back of her neck, and placidly
went on watching her men with one eye, and consoling the
motherly ewe with the other.

" Miss Ingram you see I have heard your name I intended
to send in my card, but a meeting the mistress before I reached
the threshold a I may say I am Major Batt, of Lisnawiliy, and
I have called to pay my respects to a fair stranger a to inquire
if I can be of any assistance in helping you to stock a or fur-
nish a or anything of that kind."

" You are too good, Major Batt," said Bawn from the depths
of her sun-bonnet. " May I ask if you have got anything to
sell? I want a number of good milch cows as yet I have only
got one a fast-trotting pony and some kind of light cart or
phaeton in which I can drive myself about, some farmer's carls
and a couple of strong horses, a few honest and industrious farm-
servants, a quantity of rakes, spades, pitch-forks, and other im-
plements, and a multitude of cocks and hens."

" Really, Miss Ingram a I did not call altogether with a
view to business, believe me, yet perhaps I can accommodate
you. I have two fine heifers, an excellent pony, and my house-
keeper has a farmyard full of turkeys and geese. But, as I said
before, this visit is meant to welcome the fair tenant of Shan^a-

YOL, XLIV. 53

834 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Mar.,

nagh Farm." And he looked towards the house, as if he would
suggest that they should repair thither, that he expected to be
received under her roof.

But Bawn was not going to have Major Batt in her shanty.

" You must excuse me,'' she said ; " I cannot leave my work,
but, if you would like a little refreshment, we churned this morn-
ing and there is some excellent buttermilk."

" Miss Ingram a I consider buttermilk as excellent nutri-
ment for pigs."

" Oh ! is it ? Thank you for the hint. Anything of that kind
is so precious to me. By the way, as you have mentioned them,
perhaps you would look at my pigs, Major Batt. Pigs seem to
be creatures most easily procurable in Glenmalurcan. Andy
will show them to you, if you would like to see them. Andy,
show Major Batt to the pig-stye."

Andy dropped a great armful of dry thorn, with a covert
grin at his comrade, and saying, " This way, sir," trudged off
with the unwilling- major, expostulating and grumbling, in his
wake.

" Now, Andy," said the latter, as they paused at the new
wooden piggery which had been built within the last few days
within a desirable distance from the house, " tell me, what do
you think of her?"

" Tundheranouns! sich a beautiful crature niver walked about
a stye. Didn't I sell her to the misthress myself ? The makin's
of as lovely flitches as iver hung out of a roof."

" Tut, man ! I was speaking of your mistress."

" Oh ! bad scran to the bit I understood you," said Andy.
" It's not for me to be passin' remarks on the likes o' the mis-
thress. It's aisy enough to see what she is."

"Not when she wears that sun-bonnet, eh, Andy? Now, tell
me, like a decent man, is she pitted with the small- pox or not ? "

Andy burst into a roar of laughter, and then, eyeing the major
slyly, said :

4< Oh ! begorra, major, ye have hit the nail on the head. An'
it's a tar'ble pity, isn't it, now? Only for them pock-marks bad
luck to them ! she'd be as purty as she's good."

" I have won my bet, then," said the major triumphantly, pat-
ting his pocket as he strutted away from the pigs to take leave
of their inhospitable owner, " though 'pon my soul I am not sure
that I am glad, after all. There is something aggravatingly in-
teresting about her American insolence."

" The impident ould naygur ! " said Andy to himself, as he

1 887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 835

followed him back to the field, " to be passin' his remarks about
her at all at all. He'll be laughed out of his skin for this, thank
God ! or my name isn't Andy."

" And, O Major Batt ! " cried Bawn, still from the recesses ot
the sun-bonnet, calling- after the major, who was marching to-
wards the gate, half-offended and half-elated, " I will have that
pony and those turkeys and geese."

"What is the matter with you, Andy?" she said, turning
once more to her laborers, where they had begun to fill another

" Nothin', misthress. The laughin' takes me that bad some-
times that I do shake as if I had the policy [palsy]. Oh ! mur-
ther, murther, misthress ! I forgot to give the major his butther-
milk."

" Would he not have liked it, Andy?" asked Bawn gravely.

" Troth, an' it's a taste of Inishown he'd have been likin' bet-
ther."

Bawn said no more, but thought she would ask Betty in the
evening what was the meaning of the word Inishown.

CHAPTER XXIII.
AN ALARM.

BAWN was busy feeding Major Batt's turkeys, which, with the
pony and some other chattels, had duty arrived from Lisnawilly
and been paid for at the highest market price, when a boy put a
note in her hand, saying he had run with it all the way from Tor
Castle. Gran had written the invitation for which Shana had*
prepared Miss Ingram.

All the clan Fingali were evidently full of curiosity to see
something of the enterprising young woman who had come fjom
Minnesota, unprotected and alone, to pay them the rent of which
some of them stood in such need.

Bawn looked at the delicate, slanting lines of the handwrit-
ing, and thought she knew exactly the estimation in which she
was held by the aged gentlewoman who had penned them.

" I shall be in her eyes a bold American female, honest, per-
haps, but hardly proper, tolerated and even welcomed for the
sake of my usefulness to her dainty granddaughters," reflected
Miss Ingram contentedly.

She wrote her acceptance of the invitation and got through

836 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Mar.,

her day, a little excitement at prospect of the morrow's experi-
ence just quickening her pulses. Two or three times during the
course of the evening she asked herself what was the meaning of
that faint qualm of fear that at intervals thrilled through her who
knew not fear; but it was not until she awakened suddenly in
the dead of night that she was confronted by the real shape of
the thing that had been haunting her, and, staring at the blank
space of her uncurtained window, saw the form of her latent
dread.

What if the master of Tor, the cousin of her young land-
lords, the man who had been in America and was just returned
from London, should prove to be one and the same with her
Somerled, her friend of the steamer ?

Could anything be more unlikely ? She had always hitherto
been quite free from .nervous fancies, triumphantly believed her-
self utterly devoid of that kind of imagination that raises trouble-
some phantoms and sees obstacles where none exist. Yet now it
seemed that she was learning the trick of seeing ghosts.

Into her life the truism had not yet found its way that the
world is in reality very small ; to her it still seemed vast as an
eternity. London never seen by her, and Paris quite unknown,
both appeared as far away from her as St. Paul even further,
because she had never travelled along the tracks that lead to
them.

What evidence was there in favor of the idea that fortune had
played her such an unheard-of trick as this, except that both men
had been to America in the interests of poor emigrants, and that
each thought of bringing their cause before the world in Parlia-
ment? Her visitors had not even stated that their cousin's visit
to America had been very recent.

Over and over the slight evidence she went again till she con-
vinced herself that she had nothing to fear from this phantom of
trouble. For it would be a great trouble. Her heart beat fast
in the stillness as she thought over the maze of embarrassment
in which she should find herself involved if Fingall of Tor,
nephew of Roderick supposed to have been murdered by her
father, should prove to be one and the same with the lover whom
it had cost her so much to repulse.

By an effort of will she decided to think no more about the
matter, and fell asleep ; but in the morning the same menacing
possibility reappeared before her mind's eye, and she asked her-
self how could she meet the man at Tor, if he should prove to be
identical with the man who had called himself by the fantastic

1 88;.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 837

name of Somerled ? What could she venture to say to him ?
How could she endure his disgust at her treachery? What if he
should punish her by warning his family that she was a woman
who pretended to be what she was not could insinuate false-
hoods to her friends and would probably slip away some morn-
ing without paying them the much-desired rent ?

She began to cast about for some excuse for declining Gran's
invitation to Tor, and, feeling that nothing short of physical in-
capacity would be held sufficient reason for her declining such
an honor, she considered within herself how she could set about
spraining her ankle. But then if she were to sprain it badly
what a complete hindrance to all her cherished projects !

No. She would let no cowardly trepidation induce her to
inflict a bodily hurt upon herself. She would go forth boldly ;
and yet no, she would not go. Never before had she been the
victim of such a fit of irresolution. At last she wrote a note giv-
ing what she perceived to be a very insufficient reason for failing
to gratify the lady of Tor, and sent for Andy's little boy to act
as her messenger.

No sooner was this done than the utter absurdity of her con-
duct struck her in the most forcible light.

She had come all the way from Minnesota to do a certain
thing, she found herself excellently placed for doing it, and a
good opportunity had occurred for making acquaintance with
people who might perhaps unconsciously help towards the ac-
complishment of her desires. And here she was withdrawing
from taking a most natural step because she saw a " bogie " in
her path.

Let her think rationally and act with common sense. Her
friend Somerled was gone out into infinite space. Time would
never bring him back to her who had barred her heart against
him. Nothing was more unlikely in the whole wide world as
that they two should ever meet again.

As for him they called Rory, he was probably in every way
the reverse of that person who was so painfully occupying her
thoughts, though perhaps masterful enough to oblige his femi-
nine kindred to look to him as a sort of god. At all events she
must go, and see, and know. A little change would shake her
out of this incredibly fantastic humor.

And the note was burned, and the little rosy-cheeked lad who
was to have carried it departed with his pocket full of apples
from the sweet-smelling loft.

In the afternoon, in a small vehicle drawn by Major Batt's

838 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Mar.,

pony, the mistress of Shanganagh travelled the golden valley
under the long wall of purple mountain, and felt the river flow-
ing with her all the way to the sea, which after a time had to be
left behind while glen after glen was threaded before a wider,
wilder, more magnificent ocean could be sighted. The cliffs
grew steeper and bolder ; travelling the road was like climbing
up and down flights of stairs ; the way went by the edge of long
headlands sweeping to waves that foamed perpetually, and on the
sides of the ravines mowers were cutting the late grass, having
been lowered by ropes to the spot where they stood.

The deep hollows were filled with purple shadow, and Sanda
lay like a half-burnt-out cinder on the darkening sea. A bank of
smouldering fire backed the murky, fantastic silhouette of Jura,
and a light had sprung up on the thirteen-miles-distant Scottish
coast. The roar of Tor began to be heard, and as Bawn reached
the summit of a hill and felt the keen autumn air blow on her she
drew her breath quickly, startled at the lowering beauty of the
sunset-reddened nightfall.

CHAPTER XXIV.
STRANGERS.

A FAMILY party was assembled in the great, old-fashioned
drawing-room at Tor. Gran, in her own tall-backed chair, was
showing her antique watch to two of .her great-grandchildren,
and talking to her grandson Alister, while he lazily stroked the
hair of another of his babes, reclining between his knees. Lady
Flora and the young French visitor were conversing at the other
side of the fireplace, and Shana and Rosheen, hovered over by
Major Batt, were arranging the piano with a view to music
later on.

Rory, the master of Tor, stood at a distant window looking
out at the darkening sky.

" So unnecessary," Lady Flora was saying, " so overstrained
of Gran to invite a young woman like that to dinner."

" My dear, I have overheard you," said Gran, smiling ; " but
I have acted for the best. I wish to make acquaintance with the
stranger, and I cannot ask her to come all the way to Tor with-
out putting her up for the night. As to the rest, I don't think
she can contaminate our manners, judging by what the girls have
told me of her."

1 887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 839

" Oh ! of course. I don't interfere," said Lady Flora. " And
she may afford us a little fun. Do you know anything of Ameri-
can women, Manon ? "

" Nothing," said Manon. And as she spoke the firelight
flashed over all the surrounding brasses, and lit up her fine, oval
face, and set a red jewel in each of her languid dark eyes. She
was a strikingly handsome brunette, dressed rather much for the
occasion in coral silk clouded with rare black lace, and, before
speaking, had been sitting in a rather melancholy attitude, gazing
at the fire with an expression of discontent on the corners of her
delicate mouth.

" I shall presently win my bet," said Major Batt, sidling up
to where Rory stood gazing with a frowning, anxious look out
of the window. " Anything wrong with you, Fingall ? I have
got such an excellent joke. Haven't heard of my bet with
Alister about the Minnesota farmeress ? Egad, we shall see by-
and-by."

"I beg your pardon; did you speak? "said Rory, turning
from the window.

" Oh ! nothing ; only about that bet"

" Gran," said Rory, coming forward into the firelight, " I
think something must have happened to your visitor on the way.
I will go down the road and have a look about. Flora does not
like waiting dinner, you know."

He was gone without waiting for an answer, and in a few
minutes was driving along the road in a small, light tax-cart.

Having driven about a mile up and down hill, he descried in
the still lurid semi-darkness a little, broken-down vehicle stand-
ing outside a cabin.door, through which shone the glow of burn-
ing turf.

" Hum ! I thought there was a break-down," he said. " I
guessed how it would be when I heard Batt had sold her the
broken-kneed pony." And, calling an urchin to hold his horse,
he walked up the stone causeway to the cabin-door.

There he paused a moment, raised his hat and passed his
hand over his forehead, frowned, and stepped over the threshold.

Bawn was sitting on a " creepy " stool before the blazing turf,
her hat had been taken off, and her golden head was shining in the
ruddy light. A barefooted child was standing before her, finger
in mouth, staring with fascinated eyes at the beautiful stranger,
greatly to the delight of an aged man who sat shaking his head
in the chimney-corner. Two sturdy men in sou'wester hats were
directing Andy where to go for the loan of a little car to carry

840 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Mar.,

his mistress further, and a decent-looking woman was taking oat-
cakes from a " griddle."

" But, sure, here's Misther Rory himself. Never fear but the
masther '11 pull ye out of the hobble."

Bawn did not hear what was said ; she was talking to the
child, and the master of Tor had advanced and was standing be-
side her before she looked up. The gentleman stood observing
her with a strange look on his face, noting her fair, smooth brow,
her fresh, symmetrical cheeks, her laughing lips and eyes. In
her black serge dress and shawl of shepherd's plaid she was ex-
actly the same Bawn who had wrestled for her liberty with Som-
erled on board the steamer.

She looked up with an unconscious, unexpecting smile, and
saw the identical Somerled standing before her.

The smile died on her lips ; the color went out of her cheeks ;
she rose and drew back a step, and looked him in the face. Im-
pulsively trying to speak, her ready tongue was for once at fault.
She drew her shawl around her and met his eye defiantly.

" I hope I have not startled you," he said with the manner of
a perfect stranger. " I have been sent to discover if any acci-
dent had happened to Miss Ingram. You are Miss Ingram, I pre-
sume the lady who is expected at Tor."

" Yes, I am Miss Ingram, the lady who is expected at Tor,"
said Bawn mechanically.

" Will you not sit down again ? Your man is making some ar-
rangements, and then you and he can come with me in my cart."

" The shafts of mine are broken," said Bawn, "and so I must
accept your kindness." And then she sat down again, feeling
stunned, unable to speak more, or even to think. She heard him
say he would return in a few moments, and saw him go out of
the cabin-door; and then she looked round the little house despe-
rately to see whether she could not fly out of the window or up
the chimney. After he had been gone a moment or two she
asked herself if she had not been dreaming. Had her curious
panic of the last two days developed this extraordinary halluci-
nation? A gentleman who spoke to her and looked at her like
a perfect stranger had appeared, standing there in the fire-light,
to have the features and the proportions of her friend, her lover
of the steamer. When he returned she would look at him more
attentively and with all her wits about her, and doubtless she
would perceive that she had never seen this Mr. Rory Fingall in
all her life before. She stood up, put on her hat, and wrapped
the folds of her shawl tightly around her, and stepped back a

1887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 841

little into the shadows of the cabin-ingle to watch for the reap-
pearance of the man who had so frightened her.

She had not long to wait. Before his face appeared again
within the cabin she heard his voice, speaking outside to the
men the same voice that had said to her of the enterprise on
which she was now fairly embarked : "Happiness is not to be
looked for from it, comfort it will have none, difficulty and dis-
appointment will follow immediately in its train." He had said
this warningly, being in all ignorance of the nature of her enter-
prise. It might be that he had spoken with the tongue of a
prophet. As he stooped his head in the doorway and came to-
wards her a second time the cabin disappeared from her eyes,
and she saw him coming along the deck to claim her companion-
ship, to offer service, to persuade her of his love. Now, how-
ever, though this was indeed Somerled, he showed no eagerness
for her company ; love, or even friendship, kindled not his fea-
tures as he drew near her, and, though he was bent on service,
it was tendered in the most matter-of-fact manner, as if rather
from a chivalrous habit than as recognizing a specially interest-
ing individuality in herself.

He lingered to say a word to the paralyzed man in the cor-
ner, and his face softened. His eyes lit up as he patted the
child's head. She noted that he spoke to these peasants with a
touch of their own brogue, soft, rolling, and Irish, with a thread
of harsher Scotch woven through it.

"Glad to have Jim back from the land o' cakes? " he said to
the woman at the griddle.

"Ay, sur, ay. It's pleasant to have him with us whiles,"
returned the woman ; and the old man piped out:

" An* yourself, sur. Won't ye tell us how ye liked Ameri-
kay ? It's glad I am to see ye back so hearty."

"I'll look in and tell you about it another day, Hartley.
We'll smoke a pipe over it, never fear."

" God bless you, sur ! an' it's you that '11 be welcome."

Then he turned to the silent, shawled figure standing back in
the shadows, and, with a slightly sterner and colder face, said:

" If you are ready now, Miss Ingram, we will start."

She made her farewells to her humble entertainers and fol-
lowed him to the door. All the fiery lights were gone now, and
the stars looked as keen and high as they used to shine a month
ago above the breadth of the Atlantic. He took her hand,
helped her to her seat in the tax-cart, and seated himself by
her side.

842 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Mar.,

" Your man has started before us to walk with the pony to
Tor," he said. " It is but a short distance. We shall soon be
there." And gathering up the reins, he carried her off with him
into the night.

It was a tedious bit of journey, though of no great extent, for
some of the hills appeared almost perpendicular. Many times
Bawn's charioteer had to alight and lead the horse up or down
the steep incline, and once or twice Bawn herself was obliged to
descend and proceed a little way on foot. It was like a travel in
a dream. The wild, romantic scenery, all so fresh and new to
her ; the companion, so complete a stranger, and yet so familiar
that his personality seemed to take something of an almost su-
pernatural character to her senses ; the roar of Tor, growing
louder every moment ; the flash of a white breaker gleaming
occasionally through the darkness on the bit of rough sea where
weird Moyle surges into the ocean ; the salt, sharp breath of the
north wind on her face ; the silence of the man beside her, that
man who had cried to her but a month ago: " Unless you tell
me that you hate me, that under no circumstances could you
love me, I will exert every faculty I possess to make your future
one with mine. I cannot make up my mind to lose you out of
my life. A week has done for me what the rest of my years
cannot undo."

The words, well remembered, were ringing in her ears, the
cry that was in them was making her heart sore, as it had done
many times since ; and yet and yet he was here, and she was
here. Fate had in an extraordinary manner, so strange as to
give to all that was passing now that air of dream-like unreality,
delivered her a second time into his hands. It seemed that he
had lost her out of his life only to find her again, but he did not
know her, had no word to say to her, apparently had not recog-
nized her features, her voice, even her dress, which was the same
she had worn when he had loved her. She was already blotted
out of his memory, and existed no more for him than if he had
crossed from America in that steamer by which he had meant to
return and had missed.

As the impossibility of this being literally true forced itself on
her common sense she became disturbed by two other views of
the case. Either he was not Somerled an extraordinary resem-
blance had deceived her imagination, and by and by, in many
little ways, she would perceive that a strange man, one who had
been to her neither friend nor lover for a wonderful week, had
involuntarily cheated her or he was Somerled, and his disgust

1 887.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 843

at her deceit and treachery was so great that he had decided to
cut her, to ignore her, to drop deliberately out of his memory
that passage of his life in which he must now admit to himself
that he had acted with extravagant folly.

This last conclusion she accepted as the correct answer to the
sum of her calculation of probabilities, and it must be a final re-
sponse to all questions in her mind on the subject, except that
one which kept asking how it was that no involuntary start or
momentary change of countenance had betrayed even for an in-
stant his surprise at finding her here in the midst of his own'
family. He must have seen her Irom the doorway, and had
time to conceal his astonishment before she raised her eyes to
look at him. Out at sea he had not always such complete self-
control.

" Miss Ingram, I must trouble you to come down again for a
few minutes, but this is positively the last time. When we get
to the top of this hill we shall see the lights of Tor Castle. I am
sorry you have had so uncomfortable a journey."

" Thank you ; not at all. It has been very interesting to me,"
she ansvvered as she touched ground with her foot and walked on,
with the horse's head between her and him on the road. And
again the suspicion returned to her that this was not Somerled,
after all.

Had it been that friend he Would, even if he had not recog-
nized her, have called the attention of the stranger to the beauty
of the scenery, to the dark magnificence of the night in this wild,
high region, to the bursts of strange music in the air, to the re-
current gleam of that white breaker flashing beyond the great
Tor, which bold headland was now in view and standing up like
a black fortress of fantastic build and scowling over the glim-
mering ocean. This man, though he bore a wonderful resem-
blance to her former friend, and might be good and beloved in
his own place, had evidently not that ardent love of nature, that
keen appreciation of all that is beautiful in earth, sea, and air,
which had helped to make the companionship of that other per-
son so attractive. Only a very few words passed between the
travellers, and merely on the commonplaces of their journey,
until they passed in at the gates and bowled up the avenue to
the low doorway of the castle on its rock. But as he handed her
down from the vehicle, and the light from the hall within struck
into their eyes, she thought she felt a sudden flashing look turned
on her face a look that, if it were really there, revealed the real
Somerled. Before she had decided whether this was imagination

844 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Mar.,

or reality she found herself in the hall, with Shana and Rosheen
smiling on either side of her.

They took her up to a great chamber in which a mantel with
carving up to the ceiling and a gaunt, four-post bed at first seemed
the only objects, and where candles in two tall silver branches
made faint light about a narrow mirror.

" We knew something must have happened, and wasn't I
right when I said Rory did not mind trouble?" said Rosheen.
" Flora wanted to have a servant sent, but my cousin would go
himself. And you are not to be afraid to sleep in this wilderness
of a room, because there are no ghosts at Tor. Nothing evil
could come near Gran. And I hope you will be nice with Gran,
Miss Ingram, for everybody is. She had a great trouble once,
and every one remembers it."

" Rosheen dear, let Miss Ingram get her breath and wash her
hands in peace/' put in Shana. And, the visitor's simple toilet
arranged, they proceeded down the old oak staircase, lit by oil-
lamps whose faint, yellow flame swam ineffectually in the vault-
like darkness. And Bawn grudged every step she took down
the black, time-worn stair. Her courage seemed to have desert-
ed her, and she would have given all her little world to avoid the
necessity of walking in among these people whom she had come
from Minnesota to confound. Every beat of her heart, sunk
cowardly low in her breast, was telling her that Gran's trouble
was the murder of a beloved son by Arthur Desmond, of hateful
memory, and that Rory, the grandson, who now filled the place
of that son in her heart well, was he or was he not Somerled?

" He is not," she decided ; " and if he is I will ignore him as
completely as he has ignored me." And then, making a large
demand on that common sense of which she had plenty for
small daily uses, though her plans in the main might be never so
unwise, she walked into the drawing-room with head erect on her
shoulders and a serene countenance.

She was conscious, first, that Somerled was not in the room ;
next that every eye was turned on her; then that Gran had risen
from her great chair by the hearth to receive the stranger.
Gran's individuality struck her so forcibly that for the moment
she saw nothing but the fine old figure before her a face unlike
every other face ; a spotless white cap of a dignity not often at-
tained by caps; a rich but plain gown of well-worn Irish tabinet,
the folds of which somehow suggested a train and pages. But
the simplicity of character, as expressed by the eyes and by
the greeting and gesture of the spare, wrinkled hand, was un-

i8/.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 845

mistakable, and Bawn felt herself in the presence of an un-
worldly soul.

" I do not apologize for my dress. I am a farmer's daughter
I have no pretty gowns," said Bawn in a low tone to her hostess,
with a desire to say the most commonplace thing that occurred
to her.

" I see you as you ought to be, my dear," said Gran ; " and,
for the matter of that, we are no great dressers here." But as
she spoke she felt some surprise. A farmer's daughter such as
Bawn so persistently announced herself to be would have pinned
on a few colored bows, if she had nothing else, to deck herself a
little for high company. This young woman, in her black serge
and high frills, was a lady, let her come from whence she might.
And as for ornament, she had gold enough on her head to make
a crown for a queen.

" Nice-looking, yes ; not so very handsome, but too striking an
appearance to run about alone," said Lady Flora, whose eye-glass
had been levelled at the farmeress from the moment she entered
the door. " I am more than ever sure she is not everything she
ought to be. A cool young madam, by my word. It seems
they have excellent manners in the backwoods of Minnesota."

Of all this speech Major Batt, to whom it was addressed,
heard nothing. He was ejaculating to himself in the most dis-
tressed whisper:

" Egad ! the witch. Small-pox ! Never was so sold in all my
life before ! "

" Batt, I'll trouble you for that five-pound note you owe," said
Alister, crossing the room and smiling quizzically in the major's
crestfallen countenance.

" Shall have it, sir shall have it, sir ! " said the major testily.

"/will have it," said Rosheen, touching her brother's elbow.
" I want it for the poor."

" I don't see why you should be always making a poor-box of
yourself, Rosheen," said her sister-in-law snappishly. " You will
soon be as bad as Rory. Where is he, by the way ? I want to
hear his opinion of this wandering adventuress."

" Egad, she's a witch ! " repeated Major Batt disconsolately,
watching the offender all the time with reluctant admiration.

" Flora," said her husband, " don't speak so unkindly of the
girl. She may overhear "

" Oh ! nonsense. You don't suppose she is as bashful as
Manon here, for instance, would be at hearing herself criti-
cised?"

846 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

At the sound of her own name Manon started out of a reverie
in which she had been gazing- at Miss Ingram's face as she sat
conversing easily with Gran, and her eyes were raised to the
door, which opened on the instant to admit Rory. Did she also
want to know his opinion of the wandering adventuress? If so,
she did not learn much ; she only saw his eyes turn full for a mo-
ment on the stranger, then glance away with an expression of
perfect indifference.

TO BE CONTINUED.

A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

IN the interval between the last Russian translation and the
next which will probably be Tolstoi's lugubrious Death of Ivan
Ilyitch novels done into English from various languages are given
us. Among them is Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi ( The Betrothed), one
of those masterpieces of fiction which will live for ever. From
Manzoni modern realists in literature may learn what realism
means. I Promessi Sposi ought to have a place beside the Vicar
of Wakefield in all collections of books. It speaks well for the
public taste that the book which almost converted Macaulay to
the Catholic Church is becoming as fashionable as Ben-Hur.

A dreary and wearisome translation of a book that ought
never to have been dug out of its original language the Spanish
is The Martyr of Golgotha, by Enrique Perez Escrich. We con-
clude that nothing but the success of Ben-Hur could have induced
Mr. Gottsberger to print this " word-picture of Oriental tradition."
What Sefior Escrich has taken from the Scriptures is good ;
what he has added himself to the sacred story of the life of our
Lord on earth is well meant but impertinent. Adele Josephine
Godoy ladies who write would oblige reviewers by putting Miss
or Mrs. in brackets before their names has translated The Mar-
tyr of Golgotha with zeal, but not always with knowledge. For
instance, does the sycamore-tree bear fruit in Oriental countries ?
When Dimas, who is later to become the penitent thief, seats
himself under " the shade of a stout sycamore-tree," he revives his
strength by " eating some of its luscious fruit." Senor Escrich is
evidently a devout Catholic, but in possession of little skill in the
art of novel-writing. In truth, it needs the highest art to im-
prove or to make more impressive the Gospel narratives.

1 887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 847

The Miser of Kings Court, by Clara Mulholland (Burns &
Gates), is a pretty story of two children and a mysterious miser.
It is pure and pathetic, and told in good English. Annunziata ;
or, TJie Gipsy Child, by Letitia Selwyn Oliver (Dublin : Gill &
Son), is just what its title would lead the reader to expect it to
be. Annunziata has been stolen from her parents in Italy. She
is taken to England, where the woman who stole her dies. She
is educated in the English Church, whose observances she finds
tiresome. She elopes with Gerald Morton, but returns after hav
ing gone a short distance with him, because she hears that the
schoolmistress who adopted her and swore " to bring her up a
lady " is dying. Finally her parents Italian nobles, of course
discover her. She is converted, and everybody connected with
her is converted. She marries a lord, and the very improbable
story ends.

It is with great pleasure that we turn to Miss Kathleen
O'Meara's Mabel Stanhope (Boston : Roberts Bros.) It is a story
of life in a French boarding-school, and the consequences of this
life. Charlotte Bronte made a morbid and over-colored study of
the French pensionnat in Villette ; but the ill-nature of it, and the
false reasoning that everything bad in the French character re-
sults from the Catholic religion, make Villette a sad book in spite
of its genius. Miss O'Meara, having gotten nearer to truth and
nature, paints her picture with the colors of life.

Sir John Stanhope is induced to take his daughter Mabel to
a Parisian school kept by Madame St. Simon, a heartless and
clever woman, whose politeness covers a multitude of sins. Lady
Stanhope is touched by Madame St. Simon's apparent devotion
to her pupils. Sir John is rather prejudiced by madame's senti-
mentality, but he thaws enough to leave his daughter with her as
a parlor boarder. Miss O'Meara draws Madame St. Simon with
scrupulous truth to nature. This picture and another that of
Miss Jones, the starving English governess are excellently done.
Madame's ruling passion is avarice. She does all in her power
to keep her school perfectly correct ; she has a charming old
priest to visit it and to hear the confessions of the Catholic pupils.
The Protestants are taken out every Sunday to an Anglican place
of worship. But the latter grow weary of this, and protest.
Madame Lawrence, the undermistress, is obliged to say :

"'You must try and agree among yourselves, for you cannot expect
Madame St. Simon to have sittings in every church in Paris to suit your
different tastes ; besides, there is no one to go with you except Miss Jones.'

" ' Tant pis,' replied Molly Jackson. ' I'll go to the Madeleine.' ' And

848 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar,

so will I, and I,' said several of the young girls who had taken no part in
the conversation, but who secretly sided with Molly in her dislike to Mr.
Brown's doctrines, or probably to his dress, of which they were more ca-
pable of judging."

Miss Jackson, the leader in all mischief, answers Miss Jones'
objections by saying :

" One does not turn actress by going to the theatre ; and as for the
preaching, it will do us good to hear a fine French sermon."

Several of the Protestants go every Sunday to the Madeleine.
To all except Mabel Stanhope the services are part of a show
and the preaching an intellectual amusement ; but to Mabel it is
all very serious. Miss O'Meara's style, which carries one's in-
terest without a break, has only one serious defect the constant
use of French words and phrases. We can forgive parloir, al-
though parlor would have done just as well, and the funny mis-
take of Miss Jones, who tries to buy a crush-hat, asking for " un
chapeau qui saute "/ but we cannot forgive chaperon written chape-
rone. A chaperon, which means a head, is always masculine in
form, whether it be male or female in reality. A certain number
of French words may be useful in giving local color to a narra-
tive ; but if Miss O'Meara's book should reach a second edition
she might help to push it into a third by rewriting it entirely in
English. What excuse is there for using mauvaise point for bad
mark, or ling'ere for sewing-woman, or maitresse de troisieme for
teacher of the third class, or salle d'e'tude for study-hall?

In contrast to the cold, calculating, and merciless Madame St.
Simon we are shown the unfortunate Miss Jones, an old maid,
ugly, penniless, and homeless, but true, constant, and sincere.
Miss Jones is hurried to the grave by madame's parsimonious
manner of managing all parts of her establishments not seen by
the public. She is a conscientious Protestant, and a pathetic
example of invincible ignorance. She teaches English for her
board, which is the meagre quality so delightful to Mr. Squeers,
of Dotheboys Hall. Her life is divided between the duties of her
place and a greedy thirst for new French idioms. She says
" Moshu " and "Bone soir" but imagines that she has acquired
the true Parisian manner of speech. The kindness of Mabel and
the girls to her is a beautiful episode. She proves to be a true
friend to the heroine when Madame St. Simon's true colors ap-
pear. Mabel, having left school, declares to her father her inten-
tion of becoming a Catholic ; the sermons at the Madeleine have
left their impression. Sir John Stanhope, enraged, casts her off.
She goes to Paris, hoping to find a chance to teach in Madame

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 849

St. Simon's school. Madame's conduct is an example of how a
class of Frenchwomen of certain business principles but uncer-
tain religious ones might be expected to act under the circum-
stances :

" ' Le bon Sir John might be a little f trace at first, but he could not live
long without his pretty Mabel ; he would call her back, and they would
live happily ever after.' 'And papa will be grateful to me for taking care of
his pet,' was the mental conclusion.

" 'Alas ! I dare not hope it,' sighed Mabel. ' I have offended my father
beyond all chance of forgiveness.'

" ' Then, chere petite, why do you not return to the good English Church ?
Entre nous, what difference does it make, after all ? ' Mabel opened her
eyes in mute wonder. ' The bon Dieu is good ; he made me a Catholic and
you a Protestant why should we not remain as he made us ? Mafoi, all
the churches are good when we obey them,' continued this large-minded
theologian.

" ' But if we know that we are wrong, and he gives us light to see the
truth ? ' urged Mabel, in increasing amazement.

" ' Where is the truth ? ' queried Madame St. Simon, with a shrug of the
shoulders that said all a Frenchwoman's shrug can say. ' Pilate asked
the question two thousand years ago.'

" ' Yes,' replied Mabel, her face kindling ' yes, and he turned away with-
out waiting for an answer ! O Madame St. Simon ! do not think lightly of
the priceless jewel which God has given you. The faith that you prize so
little I would lay down my life rather than forfeit ! I have prayed for you
with my whole heart,' she continued fervently, ' because, after God, it is to
you I owe that blessed gift. It was here, under your care, that I first began
to see the errors of my father's creed and to divine '

" ' I must disclaim your gratitude on that score, my dear,' said Madame
St. Simon, abruptly cutting her short. ' Nothing was further from me than
to wish to shake your religious opinions.'

" ' True,' replied Mabel, ' yet I must trace the result to you, madame ;
it was in the churches of Paris I first imbibed the truths of Catholicity.
Had you not allowed me to go there I should have been a Protestant
to- day.'

" ' What ! ' said Madame St. Simon, her eyes flashing as Mabel had never
seen them flash before, 'you have said this ! You have dared to say that
it was under my care you became a Catholic ! You have slandered my
house and my name by spreading such a report! Leave my house this
moment, mademoiselle, and never dare to enter it again. Sortezf cried
the Frenchwoman, and, with a movement worthy of Roxane, she pointed
to the door."

The struggle for life in Paris begins for Mabel. She meets
Miss Jones again, poorer than herself, but not starving, thanks
to the good abbe, chaplain or, as Miss O'Meara prefers to call
him, aumonier at Madame St. Simon's. The struggle is hard
for these two homeless women who protect each other. But

VOL. XLIV. 54

850 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

Miss Jones begins to grow weak. She is taken to the Hotel
Dieu, and Mabel sells nearly all she possesses to buy luxuries for
the homeless old maid.

" ' Will you read me a chapter, dearest ? ' she said to Mabel when they
were alone. ' Sceur Philomene reads to me every day in French, but some-
how it doesn't come home to me so well. I have a longing to hear my
sweet St. John in English.' ' Mabel, will you answer me something I want
to ask you ?' said Miss Jones.

" ' Yes that is, if I can.'

" ' Tell me, if I die a Protestant will you lose all hope of seeing me
again ? ' ' No ; as I hope to enter heaven, I hope to meet you there,' she
answered solemnly. Miss Jones breathed a deep, low sigh, as if a heavy
weight had been lifted from her heart."

Miss Jones dies, not seeing the truth, but believing according
to her light, and Mabel struggles on alone with temptation and
privation. The climax of the book the discovery of the serpent
under the roses of love -is managed without false and exagge-
rated coloring. Miss O'Meara has done a good thing in giving
the world a novel which is pure, natural, and interesting.

Mr. William Henry Bishop is an American writer who has
never had full justice done him. This may be because the merit
of his later works, Choy Susan and The Golden Justice, has not
yet. made his readers forgive the woodenness of Detmold or the
lack of brilliancy in The House of a Merchant Prince. The sim-
plicity and sincerity of The Golden Justice ought to atone for
much, for an American writer without affectations of thought
and style ought to be crowned with dogwood or some native
plant. And Mr. Bishop seems absolutely honest and straight-
forward ; he does not imitate anybody; he does not seem to be
self conscious. He appears to think that his business is to tell a
story, not to found a school of fiction, so he tells his story to the
best of his ability, which The Golden Justice shows to be of a high
order; consequently we do not ask: " What is Mr. Bishop going
to do with David Lane? or, Will Mr. Bishop make Barclay marry
Mrs. Varemberg?", We say: ''What will David Lane do?
or, Will David Lane commit suicide?" What better test can
we have of Mr. Bishop's merit as a novelist than the fact that he
impresses with the will of his characters? They act ; he does not
move them.

The most unusual feature of The Golden Justice (Boston :
Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) is that it has a new plot ; the less un-
usual, that its heroine, although she has a villanous husband, re-
fuses to take advantage of the divorce laws of the liberal West.

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 851

Mr. Bishop shares with all the notable American writers that
purity of tone which does honor to our literature. The scene
of The Golden Justice is laid in Keewaydin, a city on Lake Michi-
gan. David Lane, a reputable citizen, has -unintentionally com-
mitted murder in a moment of rage by causing a collision at
the draw-bridge. He was wounded by his own act ; but he re-
covered, although in his remorse he would have preferred to die.
He tried to make reparation by caring for the family of Christo-
pher Barclay, who had been killed by his attempt to avenge him-
self on a rival corporation, and that of Zelinsky, the Polish
bridge-tender, who had also been found dead after the sup-
posed accident. He was rich, and he contributed liberally to
all the Keewaydin charities.

" It was a harrowing thought to him that the very measures intended
for reparation but added to his own prosperity. Never had he been so
flourishing in his own affairs, never so prominent in the world. What a
whited sepulchre, what a wolf in sheep's clothing he called himself ! He to
live esteemed and admired of his fellow-men, when he should have had only
chastisement and contempt. He turned back again to religion of the formal
sort, which, after a fashion not uncommon with men of bustling and active
affairs, he had long neglected. He had the Rev. Edward Brockston, of St..
Jude's a clergyman of a serious and ascetic vein, one who preached eccle-
siastical celibacy and the like to dine with him, made him the almoner of
many private bounties, and gave him a new tower for his church. He
thought of laying the whole case before this good man and offering to.
abide by his counsel ; but at the last resort he could not bring himself to
it. The very height to which he had risen in the meantime was an added
obstacle ; it but made the distance which he had to fall the greater. Still
he felt always upon him a resistless pressure towards confession ;. the mys-
tery of the destruction of two innocent human lives seemed to imperiously
demand accounting for. He was under something like that powerful ur-
gency from which the saying has arisen that ' murder will out.' He even
meditated the woful resource of suicide, and contemplated with a certain
deliberation all of its forms."

Protestantism could offer no consolation to a man tormented
in this way. The rector of St. Jude's merely played at being a
priest, and the shrewd American knew better than to confide his
dreadful secret as one man to another. Of the Catholic Church
he knew little. Its members in Keewaydin were mostly foreign-
ers, Irish and Poles, factors at election times, but of no social im-
portance; and he, the great magnate, governor and legislator,
never dreamed that he could learn anything from them. He
wrote out the confession he longed to make, and dropped it into
a receptacle for papers in the hollow of the gilded statue of Jus-
tice raised on the city-hall. He was sent as minister to a foreign.

852 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

court, his daughter made a brilliant marriage; "but there, far
back across the sea, in the place of his abode, was the Golden
Justice and his secret always awaiting- him."

His daughter, Mrs. Varemberg, comes back alone, her hus-
band, a fascinating scoundrel, having deserted her. She meets
Paul Barclay, the son of the man her father killed. She knew
him abroad. He had proposed for her, but her father, for good
reasons, had discouraged him and arranged her marriage with
Varemberg. She and Paul Barclay drift, to David Lane's horror,
into relations which cause him to think that they may marry
some time, if she should secure a divorce or Varemberg should
die. Varemberg does die, and David Lane faces the probability
of becoming the father-in-law of his victim's son. And lightning,
a cyclone, an earthquake, a fire, may at any time bring the Golden
Justice to the earth and throw open the records of his guilt.
**$ He gets himself elected mayor, that he may climb unperceived
from his office in the city-hall to the statue. The election con-
test is well described. Mr. Bishop has studied well the wire-
pulling of rival candidates in a Western city :

" Here maps were spread open and the sectional interests of the town
studied, district by district. What motives might be best appealed to ?
What springs of tradition, habit, self-interest, local pride or prejudice, caste
or nationality, might be played upon, as the musician plays upon his instru-
ment, to catch votes ? ' Shall we stir up the religious question again ? ' de-
manded Ives Wilson, with a cheerful nonchalance in these consultations.
On the whole, it was decided to do so. 'We have more to gain than to lose
by it.' ' Some old Know-Nothing' record, as it was called, of Jim de Bar's
was unearthed. He was asserted to have been hostile to immigration at an
early day, and to have said in public that he wished an ocean of fire rolled
between us and all Europe, that foreigners might be kept out. He was said
to have made remarks, apropos of a request for a subscription to a church
fair, insulting to the religious opinions of a large and worthy section of
voters."

1 The contest ends, and David Lane becomes mayor. The night
ascent of the rheumatic and fast-ageing man to the statue, and
his failure to secure the papers, are done with firmness and sym-
pathy. Mr. Bishop's careful hand saves all this from sensation-
alism. These incidents are an outgrowth of character, not, as an
inferior writer would have made them, events fastened on from
the outside. A sudden wind-storm throws the Golden Justice
to the ground, and the papers fall into Paul Barclay's hands. It
would be a pity to tell the ending of a novel which is too good
to be spoiled for the reader in that way. It is enough to say that
Barclay judges Lane according to his intention, not according to

i88/.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 853

its results. Mr. Bishop's is an American novel with a manly and
honest tone in it. Balzac's Cesar Birotteau is not a stronger or
more vividly-imagined character than David Lane.

Dr. Hammond's new novel, On the Susquehanna (D. Apple-
ton & Co.), has a mild interest. Three very good novels have
recently appeared as addenda to Lippincotfs Magazine. They
are Mr. John Habberton's Bruetons Bayou, Mrs. Burnett's Miss
Defarge, and Miss M. G. McClelland's A Self-Made Man. Mr.
Habberton is always sure of a certain succes cTestime because
of Helen s Babies, but the merit of Bruetons Bayou ought to
obliterate the remembrance of that very pleasant squib. It
shows that Mr. Habberton has solid qualities of thought and
style, as well as a keen sense of the use to which new and good
literary material may be put. The editor of Lippincotfs exhibits
fine discrimination in the choosing of his novels.

King Solomon s Mines and She (New York : Harper & Bros.),
by R. Rider Haggard, are fantastical romances of the kind now
much in vogue. They are wonder-tales, and the discriminating
critics who find psychological meanings in them are capable of
discovering hidden and wondrous messages in Baron Munchau-
sen's tales. She is luridly conceived, but written in a common-
place style. There is a suggestion of sensuousness here and
there which might have been omitted.

There is nothing more silly, nothing more vulgar, nothing
that better indicates the existence of an intellectual vacuum which
nature is always hopelessly trying to fill with idiotic scraps of
thought, than the common habit of sneering at poets and poetry.
It has gone out of fashion among decent people ; it still lingers
among those to whom the funny man of the newspapers is guide,
philosopher, and friend. It is a curious thing that the art and the
instrument which God used so often when he had messages to
convey to men should be contemned in this age, which fancies
itself thoughtful because it never knew how to think.

The young man who is incapable of the thrill that passages of
King David, of Dante, of Shakspere, of Tennyson should give
him will never know those heights of thought and emotion which
are possible to him. He may be the "heir of the ages," but he
does not appreciate his inheritance. And so when Tennyson,
grown old but not feeble in thought or style, produces a sequel-
poem to that most intense and most brilliant poem in English,
Locksley Hall, it is sickening to note the foolish jokes of the read-
ers of newspapers only, and the superficial criticism of people

8 54 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

who take a bastard cynicism for wit and cleverness. As Abbe
Roux says, since Voltaire's time we do not laugh, we grin.

Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (New York : Harper & Bros.)
has the amazingly delicate verbal music of the earlier poem, its
fervor, its force, its satire, its passion, its sarcasm, its invective.
It has less hope, for the younger heir of Locksley Hall despaired
for himself, but hoped for age. Science then seemed to be lead-
ing humanity to an earthly paradise :

" For I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be :

" Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales ;

" Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue ;

" Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm ;

"Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

" Then the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber lapt in universal law."

The poet was struck to the heart by the false Amy's treach-
ery, but he had great hopes for his age ; he longed to see

" The vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be."

Out of the pain of the madness of wounded love he cried aloud
for a chance to help the new order:

" Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day :
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

" Mother-Age (for mine I knew not), help me as when life begun ;
Rift the hills and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the sun."

In the sequel the hero of Locksley Hall looks at the wreck of
the hopes of the earlier Victorian time as perhaps Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, were she alive, might look at the antics of her
new Italians, for whom she cherished such high hopes. Sixty
years have passed since the Locksley railed passionately against
Amy as the falsest of women, and now he, grown old, receives
the complaints of his grandson over a similar misfortune, in the
same spirit of contempt and tolerance with which the old listened
to outcries of Maud and Locksley Hall years ago. The old poet

1887.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 855

smiles scornfully at the suggestion that his grandson suffers as he
had suffered :

" Amy loved me, Amy fail'd me, Amy was a timid child ;
But your Judith but your worldling she had never driven me wild:

" She that holds the diamond necklace dearer than the golden ring,
She that finds a winter sunset fairer than a morn in spring."

Amy is dead and her husband is dead, and the poet who once
scoriated them is very tender now. He tells of Edith, who filled
Amy's place without driving away her memory :

" Very woman of very woman, nurse of ailing body and mind,
She that linked again the broken chain that boun^ me to my kind."

And then the poet, sick at heart, bursts out against his time,
forgetting that his life with all its experiences is only an infinite-
simal part of it. The old bigotry which is part of Tennyson's
patriotism enters into the exclamation :

" From the golden alms of Blessing man had coined himself a curse !
Rome of Caesar, Rome of Peter which was crueller, which was worse?"

The laureate has always shown a particular weakness in his-
tory. In Harold he followed the erudite Lord Lytton, whose
historical coloring was strong but not truthful ; and in this com-
parison he is probably thinking more of Victor Hugo's Lucrezia
Borgia than of Juvenal or Suetonius. He as is natural in a poet
- understands St. Francis d'Assisi, while he is ignorant of the
age of Gregory the Great.

'* Are we devils, are we men ?
Sweet St. Francis of Assisi, would that he were here again

" He that in his Catholic wholeness used to call the very flowers
Sisters, brothers and the beasts whose pains are hardly less than ours."

His vision of progress has been shattered by sixty years of
experience. He sees that, after all, locomotives and telegraphs,
the preaching of equality, and his hoped-for parliament of men,
have made chaos more chaotic:

" Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober Fact to scorn,
Cries to weakest as to strongest, ' Ye are equals equal born.'

" Equal born ? Oh ! yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat.
Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat.

"Till the Cat thro' that mirage of overheated language loom
Larger than the Lion, Demos end in working its own doom."

A shattered wheel, the work of a vicious boy, wrecks a train.

856 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

Science has made the space-devourer possible, but it cannot
change the heart of man. In spite of it,

"There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied feet,
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousands on the street.

" There the smoldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor."

After all, he asks, in a sudden doubt as to whether his age
has soured him,

" Shall we find a deathless May ?

After madness, after massacre, Jacobinism and Jacquerie,
Some diviner force to guide thro' the day I shall not see ? "

For the diviner force men are beginning to look out their
darkness. Magians many of them are, clothed with all the
power of the application of old forces, read in the books of
what we call the new sciences, and skilled in the new arts that
are so very old, and they look for a star that is not recorded
in their new astronomy. Like Tennyson, they see the church
through darkened glass. She is the diviner force ; she alone
of all the powers on earth can bring the world to be the garden
of God's will on earth.

The Promise of May, which is bound with Locksley Hall, has
suffered much in reputation by having been acted on the stage.
It is not an " acting" play suited to modern theatrical ideas, but
nevertheless it is entirely dramatic. It, too, is a protest against
modern materialism and atheism. It is full of strong passages
worthy of the^poet's prime. Of modern Nihilism, Communism,
and Socialism Harold says :

" Such rampant weeds

Strangle each other, die, and make the soil
For Caesars, Cromwells, and Napoleons
To root their power in."

Robert Browning's Parleyings (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) is
as obscure, as harsh, and as poetic as Sordello. Browning's ob-
scurity, however, is mostly on the surface. He who runs may
not read Browning as he runs, and Browning does not write for
the runner who reads and forgets. In form, Parleyings the par-
leyings are generally between personages in the by-ways of his-
tory are somewhat like Leigh Hunt's dramatic scenes and
Walter Savage Landor's imaginary conversations. They de-
mand more space than we can give them at present, so they
will be reserved for another time.

1887.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 857

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

LIFE OF ANTONIO ROSMINI SERBATI. Edited by William Lockhart. Lon-
don : Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. 1886. (For sale by the Catholic Pub-
lication Society Co.)

The biographical part of this compilation of documents relating to the
life and works of Rosmini is agreeably written. The character of the man
who is its subject, the environment in which his early life was passed, his
public career in its various aspects, and all the other surroundings in which
he lived and played a distinguished part, are of a kind to furnish a biogra-
pher with materials of the greatest attractiveness, as well as historical im-
portance and religious edification. The biography is somewhat brief, but
it presents a clear and good picture of the subject, and of the period (1797-
1855) in so far as Rosmini was connected with its important events and
personages. He was undoubtedly a remarkably holy and a remarkably
gifted man, enlightened, magnanimous, and, to a very unusual degree even
among the saints, winning and lovable in his character.

The principal exterior work of Rosmini's life was the founding of a reli-
gious congregation which holds an honorable place and has done excellent
service in the church. He was very near entering on another and more
exalted career, as a prince of the church and a statesman. Early in the
reign of Pius IX. he was sent as a special envoy to the Holy See by the
government of Charles Albert, the King of Sardinia. The Pope resolved
to make him a cardinal, and even thought of giving him the post of Secre-
tary of State. This opening was, however, speedily closed to him by the
force of events, and he was left to resume and finish his career in the more
modest sphere of his own predilection.

Rosmini's chief title to celebrity rests, however, on the voluminous
writings, chiefly philosophical, which he produced, and which have obtained
for him a foremost place among the eminent authors who have flourished
in Italy during the present century. Liberatore says of him: "Among
the thinkers who in our time have attempted the restoration of philo-
sophical science, the illustrious Father Rosmini, in our opinion, holds the
first place. He shines among them as a bright star in a group of stars of
lesser lustre, in respect to copiousness of learning, vastness of thought, and
subtlety bf analysis. The many volumes produced by him on very diverse
and abstruse matters form an imperishable monument of the fecundity and
loftiness of his intellect, and they have secured for him perpetual renown
as one among the most diligent and clear-sighted contemplators of truth."

The devotion of the disciples of Rosmini to their founder is not to be
wondered at, considering his intellectual and personal qualities, which
were just of the kind to awaken an affectionate enthusiasm in the bosoms
of those who acknowledge and venerate him as their spiritual father.
Father Lockhart and his companions, by means of the volumes at present
under our notice, and the translations of some of Rosmini's principal
works, are laboring to bring his philosophy into the same prominence in
England and other countries where English books circulate which it has
already gained in Italy. It is not unlikely that it may come into vogue to

858 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Man,

a considerable extent, and gain a large number of adherents, both among
Catholics and non-Catholics. Will it supersede in the Catholic schools
the metaphysics of the text-books now in general use and professedly
explaining the philosophy of St. Thomas? Will Rosmini be recognized as
the great restorer of philosophy through his doctrine of the innate Idea of
Being as the light of the human intellect ? It is certain that St. Thomas
will not be superseded. The philosophy of Rosmini can never become
dominant in Catholic schools, unless it be either the most genuine and the
best explication of the authentic doctrine of the Angelical Doctor, or a
further development and, in a sense, an improvement of the same. Its ad-
herents profess that it is in substance the very metaphysics of St. Thomas,
and it is implied, in their claim of superiority over every other philosophical
system, that it is an improvement in the sense of being a clearer and more
explicit form of the doctrine substantially contained in the writings of the
great doctor. In our opinion, the ideology of Rosmini is neither a correct
restatement of the ideology of St. Thomas nor an improvement upon the
same. We regard it as really an improvement upon that modern philoso-
phy in which Descartes, Malebranche, and Kant are the great masters,
with a strong infusion from the philosophy of the ancients and of St.
Thomas. It is very excellent as opposed to the Sensism of Locke and the
Subjectivism of certain other systems of German origin. It is certainly
free from error in any matter of Catholic doctrine. Still, we think that the
illustrious author of this new philosophy of Ideal Being fell short of achiev-
ing complete success in his most laudable and pious effort to restore the
grand edifice of Christian philosophy. We do not think that the ideology
of St. Thomas needs any improvement. And we think, moreover, that it
is correctly explained by Liberatore, San Severino, Zigliara, and similar
authors, whose writings are now our standard text-books. The works of
Rosmini may prove to be very useful in many respects, and the reputation
of their author be increased and extended, but we do not think his peculiar
psychology will ever be adopted in the Catholic schools. Time will show
whether we are right in our opinion, or whether the hopes of Father
Lockhart are destined to be realized.

SAINT AUGUSTINE, BISHOP AND DOCTOR. A Historical Study. By a Priest
of the Congregation of the Mission, a pilgrim to Hippo. With map.
Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son; New York: The Catholic Publication So-
ciety Co. 1886.

It is well that a handy volume, written in popular language, giving us a
true insight into the character and work as well as the singular influence
St. Augustine exerts in the church, should be published for the edification
of the faithful. The author, besides consulting the best authorities for his
facts, has had the privilege of visiting most of the places and gaining
an intimate acquaintance with everything relating to St. Augustine. The
biography of any saint is worth careful reading, and when the life is that of
one who has always been reckoned as among the leading doctors of the
Christian religion, the interest and profit are much increased. We heartily
recommend the book to both clergy and laity as being conducive to their
intellectual and also their spiritual improvement.

There is an admirable chapter on " How to Read St. Augustine," which
will assist one to understand many of the difficulties found in his writings.

1887.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 859

THE INCARNATION, BIRTH, AND INFANCY OF JESUS CHRIST ; or, The Mys-
teries of the Faith. By St. Alphonsus de Liguori, Doctor of the Church.
Edited by Rev. Eugene Grimm, C.SS.R. New York, Cincinnati, and St.
Louis : Benziger Brothers.

St. Alphonsus wrote as he thought and prayed. Never could devotion
to the mysteries of the Incarnation, Birth, and Infancy of our Divine Lord
be expressed in words more soul- stirring than are found in this treatise-
Like all the ascetical works of the holy doctor, it can be understood by any
reader, while in sublimity of thought it is unsurpassed.

ORDO DIVINI OFFICII RECITANDI MISS^QUE CELEBRAND^ JUXTA
RUBRICAS BREVIARII MISSALISQUE ROMANI. Pro Anno Domini
MDCCCLXXXVII. New York and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co.

The Ordo published by Messrs. Pustet & Co. contains the calendar of
feasts which is followed generally by the priests of this country, and also
the Roman calendar for the accommodation of those having the privilege
of reciting the office proper to the clergy of Rome. As far as we have
observed it is correct, with the exception of the Feast of St. Agatha, which
should be celebrated on the I2th of February, instead of the 5th, which now
is the day assigned for the office of St. Philip a Jesu. The book is very
neatly printed and well bound.

THE LIFE OF JEAN-BAPTISTE MUARD, founder of the Congregation of St.
Edme and of the Monastery of La Pierre-qui-Vire. Edited by Edward
Healy Thompson, M.A. London: Burns & Gates; New York: The
Catholic Publication Society Co.

Pere Muard was a saintly Benedictine of our own times. In his foun-
dations the rule of his order was somewhat modified, so as to combine the
monastic and apostolic life in a most thorough and perfect manner. His
devotion to missionary labors, however, did not incline him to mitigate
the austerities of the institute. The directions which he gave about the
observance of poverty and abstinence were so severe that the Holy Fa-
ther, Pius IX., styled the rule as " more admirable than imitable." After
moderating the rigor of some of his prescriptions the Holy See defi-
nitely approved of the work of Pere Muard. The Sacred Heart Abbey,
established in the Indian Territory in this country in 1875, follows the ob-
servance of Pere Muard.

SADLIERS' CATHOLIC DIRECTORY, ALMANAC, AND ORDO for the year of
our Lord 1887. With full official reports of all dioceses, vicariates, pre-
fectures, etc., in the United States, Canada, British West Indies, Ire-
land, England, Scotland, and Australia. New York : D. & J. Sadlier
& Co.

This is the fifty-fifth annual publication of this indispensable directory.
Besides its usual list of contents it has this year added to the American
part an index of all the religious orders of the United States ; and to the
foreign part has been added the hierarchy and a list of all the priests in
Australia, and the names of all the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops of
the German Empire and of Austria-Hungary. The work contains cuts of
Cardinals Gibbons and Taschereau, which are so bad that they had much
better have been omitted ; they do not fairly represent the eminent men
whose names are placed beneath them. For the book itself we have no-
thing but words of commendation.

860 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Mar., 1887.

SCHOLASTIC ANNUAL for the year of our Lord 1887. By J. A. Lyons.
Notre Dame, Ind.

From the enterprising University of Notre Dame comes this compact
and well-edited Annual. Besides the usual amount of useful information
and calendars found in such publications, it contains some interesting
sketches on topics of present interest by well-known Catholic writers, and
some charming bits of verse.

THE YOUNG PHILISTINE, AND OTHER STORIES. By Alice Corkran. Lon-
don : Burns & Gates ; New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

Readers who take pleasure in that which is in itself beautiful, and which
teaches a beautiful lesson as well, will read these four stories with delight.
When we say that these tales teach a lesson we should do an injustice to
the work if we were to lead our readers to think that obtrusive moralizing
was its characteristic. The lesson is taught by the tales and by the power-
ful, pathetic, and masterly manner in which the tales are told. Of the four
stories the one placed first is, in our judgment, far from being the best. We
should be inclined to place the one which gives its name to the volume at
the top, and the others in a descending scale. We feel sure with the re-
striction already made that all who may be induced to read this little book
by our notice will thank us for having called their attention to it.

How TO STRENGTHEN THE MEMORY ; or, Natural and Scientific Methods

of Never Forgetting. By M. L. Holbrook, M.D. New York : M. L.

Holbrook & Co.

No particular system of mnemonics is advocated in this book, but what
seem good and practical suggestions are given which, if acted upon, would
no doubt prove of material assistance in strengthening the memory. The
^trouble with systems of mnemonics generally is that they are too cum-
bersome. The methods of strengthening the memory given by Dr. Hol-
brook are simple and natural, and themselves easily remembered. There
is a section dealing with a method of acquiring new languages by associa-
tion of ideas which seems as if it might be very helpful to students.

NOTE. Several notices of late books have been unavoidably crowded
out of this number, and will appear in the next one.

OTHER BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

THE LIFE OF BROTHER PAUL J. O'CONNOR. With portrait. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son.
GLIMPSES OF A HIDDEN LIFE : Memories of Attie O'Brien. Gathered by Mrs. Morgan John

O'Connell. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son.
QUARTERLY REPORT OF THE CHIEF OF THE BUREAU OF STATISTICS, Treasury Department,

relative to the Imports, Exports, Immigration, and Navigation of the United States for the

three months ending September 30, 1886. Washington : Government Printing-Office.
THE LIFE AND LABORS OF MOST REV. J. J. LYNCH, D.D., first Archbishop of Toronto. By

H. C. McKeown. Montreal and Toronto : James A. Sadlier.
RECITATIONS AND READINGS, No. 8. The Eureka Collection. Compiled by Mrs. Anna Ran-

dall-Diehl. New York : J. S. Ogilvie & Co.

TWELFTH CONVENTION OF THE CATHOLIC YOUNG MEN'S NATIONAL UNION, including ad-
dresses on Catholic Young Men and Secular Organizations, The Saloon a Danger to Young

Men, Suggestions for the use of Catholic Libraries, etc.
A THOUGHT FROM DOMINICAN SAINTS FOR EACH DAY OF THE YEAR. Translated from

the French by a Sister of Charity. New York : Benziger Bros.
THE SCHOOL OF DIVINE LOVE ; or, Elevations of the Soul to God. By Fr. Vincent Caraffa,

S.J. Translated from the French of Michael Bouix, S.J. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son.
CONSOLATION TO THOSE IN SUFFERING. By 1'Abbe Guigon. Translated from the French.

Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son.

The Catholic world

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