This new failure of his memory, the name associated with so many painful recollections and uttered in so distressing a manner, put an end to all the gaiety of the evening. The effect of so much agitation and fatigue on the professor was not regarded as very serious, but it left a painful impression, especially on Fleurange, who had fresh reasons for feeling his words.
Clement, who had been informed by Steinberg of what had occurred at Florence, silently entered into her feelings, and once more the flash of joy that lit up his heart vanished in a night darker than ever.
But he could not foresee that a public event of serious import was at that very hour transpiring far away, in a different sphere from his, which would have an important and painful influence on his humble destiny.
To be continued.
Review of Vaughan's Life Of S. Thomas.[2]
It is but too seldom that the reviewer has to welcome a work like that which we have already had the pleasure of introducing to our readers, and to which we now desire to render more fitting honors. An original life of a saint, and of an epoch-making saint like Thomas of Aquin, treated on a scale adequate to its importance, in the English tongue, by an English Benedictine monk, is a refreshing novelty to those who, like ourselves, have so much to say to what is slight, or frivolous, or common, or hostile. The contemplative reviewer, looking at the two thick volumes of the English edition, feels inclined, like a man who guesses before he opens a letter, to conjure up fancies as to what he will find in this new life of S. Thomas of Aquin. Two volumes, each consisting of more than 800 pages, are a great deal, in these days, for one saint. They are a great deal to write, and what is perhaps of more importance, they are a great deal to read. But no one can suppose that they are too much for such a saint as Thomas of Aquin. Considering that his own works, as printed in the splendid Parma edition lately completed, would make up some forty volumes of the size of these two goodly ones, it is not much. Considering that Thomas of Aquin has been more written about by commentators for four or five centuries than any other [pg 032] man, except perhaps Aristotle, who ever lived—considering that every student of theology is always coming across his authority, and that he has been the great builder-up of the vast building of Catholic philosophical and theological terminology, it is not much that he should have two volumes. Indeed, when we look into the book, we expect to find Prior Vaughan not seldom complaining of being obliged, through want of space, to leave out a great deal that he would have wished to say. And this leads us to notice the author's name. Father Bede Vaughan, though fairly known by reputation in England, is perhaps a stranger to the greater number of American Catholics. It is sufficient to say at present that he is a brother of the Very Rev. Dr. Herbert Vaughan, whose presence in this country lately, in connection with the mission to the negroes, will have made his name familiar to many even of those who had not the pleasure of personally meeting him. Father Bede Vaughan is Prior of the Benedictine Cathedral Chapter of Newport and Menevia. A cathedral-prior is a novelty, not only in literature, but absolutely. There were a great many cathedral-priors in England once upon a time—men of power and substance—wearing their mitres (some of them) and sitting in the House of Lords. Whatever be the lands and the revenues of the only cathedral-priory in English-speaking hierarchies of the present day, it is pleasant to meet with the old name, and to meet it on the cover of a book. That a Benedictine should have written a sterling book will not surprise the world of letters. It is perhaps a little new to find the great Dominican, the Angel of the Schools, taken up by a member of an order which S. Thomas is popularly supposed to have in set purpose turned his back upon. But this is a point on which the work itself will enlighten us. Meanwhile, on opening the first volume we catch sight of a portrait of the Saint. It is a reproduction, by photography, of a painting by the Roman artist Szoldatics, which was painted expressly for the present work. It represents the well-known scene in which the crucified Master, for whom the great doctor has written and taught his life long, asks him what reward he would desire. Portraits of S. Thomas of Aquin are not uncommon. We are all familiar with the large and portly figure and the full and mild countenance, the sun upon his breast, the black and the white, and the shaven crown of the Order of St. Dominic, the open book and the immortal pen. Some of the representations of the saint exaggerate his traditional portliness into a corpulence that almost obliterates the light of genius in his face. On the other hand, there exist many which give at once the large open features and the look of inspiration and of refinement. Those who have turned to the title-pages of the best Roman or Flemish editions of his life or works will remember these. The new portrait, photographed in the first volume, is very successful. Thomas of Aquin had Norman blood in his veins, and the fairness of his skin and the contour of his head are not those of the typical Italian. The artist has managed to convey very well that massive head, in which every lobe of the brain seems to have been perfectly developed and roomily lodged, thus furnishing the intelligence with an imaginative instrument whose power was only equalled by its delicacy. In the corresponding place in the second volume there is a photograph of a meritorious engraving, from a picture or engraving unknown to us, [pg 033] in which, however, the head of the Saint is not so noble or refined.
Passing, however, to consider the substance of the work itself, it is not too much to say that, as a life of S. Thomas of Aquin, it is perfectly original. We do not mean, of course, that the writer has found out new facts, or made any considerable alteration in the aspect of old ones. But his plan of working is new. He has had the idea of giving, not merely S. Thomas, but his surroundings. Some saints, even of those who have spent themselves in external labors for their fellow-men, require but little in the way of background to make their portraits significant. Ven. Bede's biography would not gain much light from discussions upon Mohammedanism, or upon the state of England or of Europe during his life. To understand and love S. Francis of Sales, it is not necessary to study the growth of Calvinism, to follow the steps of the De Auxiliis controversy, or to become minutely acquainted with the character of Henri IV. But it is very different with S. Thomas of Aquin. Opening his mouth, like a true doctor of the church, “in medio ecclesiæ,” he had words to speak which all Christendom listened to, and acted upon, too, in one way or another. He was a power at Paris, at Cologne, at Naples. Every great influence of the thirteenth century felt the impulse of his thought: S. Louis the Crusader, Urban IV., Gregory X., the Greek schismatics, the Arabian philosophers, the opponents of monasticism, the mighty power of the universities. Prior Vaughan thus speaks in the preface to the first volume:
“The author has found it difficult to comprehend how the life of S. Thomas of Aquin could be written so as to content the mind of an educated man—of one who seeks to measure the reach of principle and the influence of saintly genius—without embracing a considerably wider field of thought than has been deemed necessary by those who have aimed more at composing a book of edifying reading, than at displaying the genesis and development of truth and the impress of a master-mind upon the age in which he lived. It has always appeared to him that one of the most telling influences exerted by the doctor-saints of God, has been that of rare intellectual power in confronting and controlling the passions and mental aberrations of epochs, as well as of blinded and swerving men....
“The object which the author of these pages has proposed to himself is this: to unfold before the reader's mind the far-reaching and many-sided influence of heroic sanctity, when manifested by a man of massive mind, of sovereign genius, and of sagacious judgment, and then to remind him that, as the fruit hangs from the branches, so genius of command and steadiness of view and unswervingness of purpose, are naturally conditioned by a certain moral habit of heart and head; that purity, reverence, adoration, love, are the four solid corner-stones on which that Pharos reposes which, when all about it, and far beyond it, is darkness and confusion, stands up in the midst as the representative of order, and as the minister of light, and as the token of salvation.