"SIDNEY'S SISTER, PEMBROKE'S MOTHER."
We much fear, that after all this, the author of the work before us will have no reason to thank us for our praise. On the contrary, there may be danger of involving him in the displeasure, which we may draw upon ourselves from that same cabal, which has its members on both sides of the Atlantic. "Ca me; Ca thee," is the order of the day. If half the praise be due, which is lavished on the works that daily issue from the press, we may live to see the writings which instructed and delighted our youth, laid on the same shelf with Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Men can no more read every thing than they can eat every thing; and the petits plats, that are handed round hot-and-hot, leave us no room to do honor to the roast beef of old England, nor to the savory Virginia ham. But these are the food by which the thews and sinews of manhood are best nourished. They at once exercise and help digestion. Dyspepsia was not of their day. It came in with French Gastronomy. Are we mistaken in thinking, that we see symptoms of a sort of intellectual dyspepsia, arising from the incessant exhibition of the bon bons and kickshaws of the press?
Well! here is something that will stick by the ribs; a work of which we would try to give a sort of outline, but that it cannot be abridged. The machinery of the story is not intricate, but each part is necessary to the rest. To leave anything out is to tell nothing.
It might be too much to say that this novel is, in every sense of the word, original. The writer is obviously familiar with English literature, and seems to have taken at least one hint from Sir Walter Scott. The use made by that writer of the records and traditions of times gone by, has suggested this hint. It naturally occurred to Manzoni, a native of Italy, that much of the same sort of material was to be found among the archives of the petty Italian states, now blotted from the map of Europe. It is obvious that the collisions of small states, though less interesting to the politician than those of mighty nations, must afford more occasion for a display of individual character, and the exercise of those passions which give romance its highest interest. But what is known of the great and good men who nobly acted their parts in these scenes, when the very theatre of their acts is crushed and buried beneath the rubbish of revolution? To drag them from beneath the ruins, and permit the world to dwell for a moment on the contemplation of their virtues is a pious and praiseworthy task. It is sad to think how the short lapse of two centuries can disappoint the hope that cheered the last moments of the patriot and the hero. "For his country he lived, for his country he died;" his country was all to him; but his country has perished, and his name has perished with it. With the civil wars of England we are all familiar; and our hearts have glowed, and our tears have fallen, in contemplating the virtues and the sufferings of those who acted in those scenes; but, if we may credit the traditions imbodied in this book, a contemporary history of the Italian Republics would display characters yet more worthy of our admiration and our sympathy. The Cardinal Borromeo is an historical character. The writer obviously means to paint him as he was; and the annals of mankind may be searched in vain for a more glorious example of the purity, the enthusiasm, and the inspiration of virtue.
We might suspect that something of a zeal for the honor of the Romish Church had mingled itself in the rich coloring of this picture. But Manzoni was as much alive, as Luther himself, to the abuses of that church. In an episode, which will be found at page fifty-eight, he discloses some, of the precise character of which we were not hitherto aware. We knew that something was wrong, but what that something might be, was never certainly known. The author has unveiled the mystery. He has withdrawn a curtain, behind which we had never been permitted to look. We had guessed, and we had read the guesses of others; but we never knew precisely what was there. The moral coercion, more cruel than bodily torture, by which a poor girl, the victim of the heartless pride of her parents, without command, without even persuasion, (for both it seems are forbidden) is driven to the cloister, that her brother may have more ample means to uphold his hereditary honors; this was a thing inscrutable and inconceivable to us. In reading such works as Mrs. Sherwood's Nun, we feel that we are dealing with conjectures. We turn to the scene exhibited in this work, and we know it to be real life. We would gladly grace our pages with it. It would probably be read with more interest than any thing we can say; but it is before the public, and we have no right to discharge our debts to our readers, by giving them what is theirs already. We will only pray their indulgence so far as to offer a short extract, as a specimen of the writer's power. It is a picture of some of the horrors of the plague, as it raged in Milan in the year 1628. It may serve to show us that the pestilence, which lately stooped upon us, was in comparison, an angel of mercy.
The cars spoken of in the following extract, are those in which the uncoffined bodies of the dead were borne to a common receptacle, "naked for the most part, some badly wrapped up in dirty rags, heaped up and folded together like a knot of serpents." The "monalti" were men who, having had the plague, were considered exempt from future danger, and were employed to bury the dead.
"A lady came from the threshold of one of the houses, whose aspect announced youth advanced, but not yet passed away. Her beauty was obscured, but not obliterated, by distress and mortal languor; that sort of beauty, at once majestic and soft, which is so conspicuous in the Lombard race. She walked with pain, but did not stagger; her eyes shed no tears, but bore marks of having done so abundantly. There was, in her grief, a something inexpressibly quiet and deep, betokening a soul imbued and filled with it. But it was not her own appearance alone, that in the midst of so much wretchedness, marked her especially for commiseration, and awakened in her favor a feeling now deadened and worn out in all hearts. She bore in her arms a girl about nine years old,—dead, but dressed in a white frock of spotless purity, with her hair divided in front, as if her own hands had adorned her for a feast, long promised as the reward of her goodness. She held her, seated on one of her arms, with her breast upon the lady's breast; and she might have been thought to be alive, but that her young white hand hung heavy and lifeless on one side, like wax-work, and her head lay upon her mother's shoulder, with an air of abandonment heavier than that of sleep. Her mother! If the resemblance had not proclaimed the relation, the distress of the survivor announced it too plainly.
"A coarse monalti drew near the lady, and silently offered to relieve her from her burthen, but with an air of unwonted respect and involuntary hesitancy. But she, with an action betokening neither disgust nor scorn, drew back, and said, 'No; do not touch her now; I must lay her on that car myself; take this.' She opened her hand, showed a purse, and dropped it into his. She then continued: 'Promise me not to take a thread from her, and to suffer no other to do so, and to put her in the ground just as she is.'
"The monalti placed his hand on his breast, and then with an obsequious zeal, rather like one subdued by a new and strange emotion, than as if prompted by the unexpected gift, he busied himself to make room on the car for the little corpse. The lady placed her there, as on a bed, laid her straight, kissed her cold brow, spread over her a white sheet, and then spoke for the last time. 'Adieu, Cecilia! Rest in peace! This evening we meet again, to part no more. Pray for us, my child, and I will pray for thee, and for the rest. You,' added she to the monalti, 'when you pass again at vespers, will come and take me too, and not me alone.'
"Having said this, she re-entered the house, and presently appeared at the window, holding in her arms a still younger darling, alive, but with the marks of death on its face. She stood, as if contemplating the unworthy obsequies of the first, until the car moved, and while it remained in sight, and then she disappeared. What remained, but to lay her only surviving babe upon the bed, place herself by her side, and die with her; even as the stately blossom, with the bud beside it on its stem, falls before the scythe that levels all the plants in the meadow."