[60]. The Abbé Perreyve.
[61]. “Could you but know how small a thing is life, and also by what sweetness death is followed!”
[62]. More is naught to me; naught is aught to me more.
[63]. After religion there is certainly no greater means of civilization than commerce; and commerce in the middle ages began with fairs, at which merchants employed the seductions of minstrelsy and music to draw numbers together, and thus be able to display and sell their goods.
[64]. This plaintive Psalm was turned into most musical English verse by Donne, who makes it touchingly suggestive; and later, and better still, by Aubrey de Vere in his beautiful drama, Alexander the Great.
[65]. A person who was present has feelingly described the deep effect produced on some of our poor wounded soldiers who had been brought to a church in Fredericksburg on their way North, after one of the battles in the Wilderness, when some person sat down at the organ and played “Home, sweet Home.”
[66]. Blessed Peter Claver, Apostle of the Negroes, used to contrive that the sufferers in the hospitals at Cartagena, in South America, should be solaced with music; and for centuries it has been a custom at Santo Spirito, in Rome, to have the magnificent organ which is set up in the main ward play three times a week for the patients.
[67]. The adventure of Ulysses and the melodious Sirens was a subject early seized upon by Christian art within the Discipline of the Secret to convey an idea of the cross (Ulysses attached to the mast of his vessel), the church (under the figure of a ship), and the seductions of the world (of the flesh particularly) in this voyage of life. See De Rossi's Bulletin of Christian Archæology for 1863, page 35, in which a curious monument bearing on this strange rapprochement is described.
[68]. One of these old statues having come to light in good condition while the palace of Monte Citorio, designed by Pope Innocent XII. for the seat of the higher tribunals of law at Rome, was being built, it was appropriately placed on the landing at the head of the great stairway. The Italian Deputies have doubtless removed it, as too significant of divine vengeance.
[69]. We find in this story the origin of the Phrygian cap which came to be a symbol of slavery and degradation among the Romans, by whom the Phrygians were considered a stupid people—whose rulers even had asinine qualities; and it never quite lost this character, but was used in France up to the time of the Revolution by galley-prisoners, and it is well known that an irruption of escaped convicts into Paris during the Reign of Terror, carrying one of their caps at the end of a pole and singing the Marseillaise, gave rise to the absurd custom of the liberty-pole and cap now so common.