Transcriber’s Note:

Footnotes have been collected at the end of the text, and are linked for ease of reference.

The Catholic World, Vol. XXVII

The Catholic World, Vol. XXVII

A Monthly Magazine Of General Literature and Science

Vol. XXVII.

April, 1878, To September, 1878.

Copyright: Rev. Isaac T. Hecker. 1878.

New York:

The Catholic Publication Society Co.,

9 Barclay Street.

1878.

Contents.

Poetry.

New Publications.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXVII., No. 157.—APRIL, 1878.

A SOUL’S HOLY WEEK.

PALM SUNDAY.

What shall I spread beneath thy feet, dear Lord,

Meek Son of David drawing near to-day

With wide hearts’ worship for thy king’s array,

With love’s full measure for thy blessing poured?

How shall my weakness its deep longing prove?

Not mine the martyr’s fadeless branch of palm,

Nor mine the priestly olive giving balm,

For hearts’ consoling, healing wounds with love.

Alas! not mine baptismal robe unstained

To offer thee with pure and child-like trust:

Dark are its folds with clinging wayside dust.

Yet even this poor raiment, world-profaned,

Thou wilt not scorn, since veils it heart contrite

Grieving so sore its trespass in thy sight.

MONDAY.

Rabbi, one little moment only, wait

Till I kneel down and wet with tears of shame

Thy blessed feet, thy garment’s sacred hem—

O thou so long unheeded, loved so late!

Let me pour forth the ointment of my soul,

The precious store wherewith thou fill’st my vase,

My love’s devotion and my sorrow’s grace;

Withholding naught from thee that givest all.

The more I give the richer grows my share,

Since unto thee one cannot give and lose.

Thou givest e’er; we but thy gifts diffuse.

Worthless all gold unless thy stamp it bear.

Worthless my tears unless their source be thee:

What gem shall, then, outshine their purity?

TUESDAY.

I dare not wish that my life’s days had been

When thou, O Christ! didst come in human guise

As seeming weak as poorest child that lies

On mother’s breast in infant sleep serene;

When thou the Father’s wisdom unto men

Didst speak with lips of little more than child;

Didst preach the kingdom of the undefiled;

Didst pardon sin and pity human pain.

I know thee now, although I have not seen.

Perchance in those old days I had denied,

With Bethlehem’s matrons turned my face aside,

Spurned from my threshold heaven’s chosen Queen,

And—O dread thought!—my God a mockery made,

Even as Judas with a kiss betrayed!

WEDNESDAY.

“Thy Saviour cometh.” O my soul, behold!

Arise and greet Him smitten for thy sin,

Wounded for thee the Father’s grace to win,

True Shepherd, stricken for the frightened fold.

Art thou asleep, my soul? Art thou afraid

To meet the sorrow of that face despised?

Ah! see the love with which thy love is prized:

He bleeds for thee that hast so oft betrayed;

His soul is sorrowful to death for thee,

For thee is borne the crown of pitying thorn,

For thee his people’s cruel taunts are borne,

Carried the heavy cross to Calvary.

He weeps thy sins: weep thou his infinite woe.

What have we done that he should love us so?

HOLY THURSDAY.

Was’t not enough, dear Lord, that thou shouldst give

Thy body to the scourge, the thorn, the reed,

That thou in dark Gethsemani shouldst bleed,

The purple garment from rude hands receive,

But that thou still must give thyself to bear

New stripes, new Calvary in that dim life

That is our refuge in the weary strife

Earth offers all who seek thy life to share?

O Love divine! was’t not enough to hold

Thine own so dear thou lovedst to the end,

Deep-wounded hands on Calvary to extend,

Seeking poor earth in Love’s wide arms to fold,

But still thou giv’st thyself, Love’s sacrament,

As with thy love and sorrow uncontent?

GOOD FRIDAY.

Dear Mother, unto thee I come to-day,

Because I dare not look upon the face

Of Him in whose least wound my sins I trace:

Dear Mother, for his love’s sake bid me stay.

He calls: “I thirst.” Ah! offer him my tears

Repentance hath made pure of all their gall.

Tell him, who nothing has would offer all,

But yet to bring the gift unworthy fears,

Lest so some added thorn be wreathed within

The crown wherewith the wounded brow is bound,

The mocking people’s sovereignty’s round

That saints, with joy, shall lose all life to win.

Mother, thy Son gives me in thy fond care:

Fold thou my helpless hands in perfect prayer.

HOLY SATURDAY.

“This day in Paradise.” O fortunate thief!

What strange surprise, what happiness, was thine

In that dim land to see the Sun divine,

To win so soon the crown of late belief.

This day in Paradise! O soul released

By cleansing sign of Resurrection cross,

Earth may bewail thy Lord: thine is no loss,

With fresh forgiveness holding wealth increased.

Soul, hast thou hung on Calvary’s cross with him,

Thou, justly, like the thief, for thine offence,

Breathe thou thy prayer of humble penitence:

Glory of dawn shall break thy shadows dim,

’Mid which the Sun of Justice glad shall rise—

Poor pardoned thief!—this day in Paradise!

EASTER SUNDAY.

Through Lent, dear Lord, I seemed to walk with thee

As thy disciples once; thy tender voice,

From Mary won, making my soul rejoice

E’en through the sorrow of Gethsemani,

Though oft I wept such infinite love to grieve.

And seemed thy human life to mine so near

That ever shadowed all my joy the fear

The end must come, and thou that life must leave.

To-day with Magdalen I weep once more—

My Lord is risen and my life’s love lost.

O silly soul, on sorrow’s ocean tossed,

Does he not tell thee, as to her before,

“Be not afraid”?—to thee is he less near?

Dead, yet arisen; crucified, yet here!

THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY IN THE SIX CENTURIES BEFORE CHRIST.

The period of six centuries before Christ may be taken as the immediate period of preparation for Christianity—not in a precise numerical sense of exactly six hundred years, but as a general term denoting an epoch whose beginning is somewhat vague and indeterminate. Some of the great events are prior to B.C. 600, and the larger number of those which are important are much later. What we would do is to describe an historical cycle including the great prophetic cycle of Daniel, which embraces seventy weeks in the mystical numeration of Holy Scripture—i.e., a period of four hundred and ninety years; beginning at the rebuilding of the city and temple of Jerusalem, and ending with the promulgation of the New Law to the nations of the earth by St. Peter. We consider this last event as the culmination and ultimate term of the preceding historical period of preparation, from which history takes a new point of departure, thenceforward moving directly towards its final consummation through its last period, the one in which we live. These six centuries comprise what is specially the pre-Christian historical period. The greatest part of ancient profane history is taken up with the record of its events. The history of the ages going before is vague and scanty, and even the chronology is uncertain. A few dates will show how great a portion of what is known to us from childhood as historical antiquity is comprised within this relatively recent and modern period.

Herodotus, the father of history, is said to have recited parts of his history at the Olympic games, B.C. 456, and Thucydides, who was then a boy, to have heard him; and this is also the date of the death of Æschylus. The date of the battle of Thermopylæ is 480, of the death of Socrates 399, of the birth of Alexander 356. The period of Confucius, Lao-Tseu, and Pythagoras is in the vicinity of the year 550. The beginning of the Persian Empire under Cyrus was in 559. The common date of the building of Rome is 753 B.C. Carthage was destroyed in 146. Julius Cæsar began his career in the year 80. Within this period occurred also the restoration of the Jews to their own country, the founding of the Jewish temple and community at Alexandria, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, the rise and triumph of the Asmonæan dynasty of the Machabees, the usurpation of Herod, and the beginning of Roman supremacy in Palestine.

We now proceed to show the relation between this period and its great events, as making the most important chapter in ancient universal history, with the origin and extension of Christianity. The modern rationalist theory of a purely natural origin of the Christian religion by development from previous stages of purely natural phases of the human intellect, should be refuted by a true exposition of the connection between the natural and the supernatural causes which concurred in producing the great historical phenomenon of Christianity. The history of the one true and revealed religion, and specifically of its latest form in Christianity, is not isolated and separate from the general history of mankind.

It is a topic in universal history. The Christian era succeeds by a close historical connection to the period which preceded it, and that period was the outcome of the ages going before. These preceding ages appear to us historically under a merely natural aspect. That is to say, the nations of the earth have no divine revelation or religion. Their religions are different and national, mere human creations, and their polity, morals, philosophy, and literature are products of natural intelligence. Their early history loses itself in obscurity or fable. Hence the manifest connection of the Christian period with the ages foregoing gives some plausible ground for the hypothesis that the origin of Christianity is natural, that it is only an outcome of mere natural progress and development. When we proceed to show a preparation for Christianity in the ages immediately preceding, we may be asked if we do not thereby tacitly admit and argue from this hypothesis. If God created all mankind for a supernatural destiny, under a supernatural providence; needing a divine revelation, in which a divine religion, one, unchangeable, demanding absolute, universal faith and obedience, is made known and imposed on the intellect and will of man as obligatory; how is it that we seek for the causes and events which prepared the way for its promulgation in a previous state of things so unlike that which we declare God intended to produce by Christianity?

The answer to this is easy. God began by giving a revelation and a divine religion to all mankind. The general falling away from this primitive religion was not so far advanced as to make it necessary for God to select a special race as the recipient and preserver of a renewed form of the divine religion until two thousand years before Christ. The period of the old and universal form of religion, therefore, embraces all the time from the calling of Abraham to the creation of man, at least two thousand years, and, according to the opinion of many, from two thousand five hundred to four thousand years. During the entire period of human history, therefore, from the creation of man to the present moment, embracing from sixty to eighty centuries, the divine religion derived from revelation has been more or less universally promulgated, with the exception of its mediæval portion—that is, during a time including from two-thirds to three-fourths of the whole time in which the human race has existed. The period in which the mass of mankind was left to itself apparently, without the law of God manifested by revelation—the period called by St. Paul “the time of ignorance which God winked at”—embraces only the remaining third or fourth part of time, that is, twenty centuries. This state of ignorance was not original, and not natural in the sense of being conformed to the exigencies of human nature and human destiny, or intended and directly produced by the Author of nature. It was the result of an apostasy, a degeneration, a wilful departure, a rebellion, a schism, a voluntary fall from the primitive state. Moreover, in this very state of apostasy, the principles of all the good which remained, the principles of civilization, science, virtue; political, social, and personal well-being and improvement; were all remnants from the first period in which the divine religion was universal. Therefore, when we point out in heathendom the preparation for a new promulgation of the universal religion, we are not tracing Christianity back to its natural causes and to its origin, but are tracing the movement of humanity along its re-entering curve, from the ultimate term of its departure, to its point of contact with a new motive power, the true and divine cause of the re-conversion and restoration of mankind through Christ, qui restauret omnia.

In addition to this, we must remember that it is only wilful ignorance and sophistical perversion of historical truth which assigns the origin of the human race and its institutions to an unknown, pre-historic chaos. Far back of the period of written, profane history, of hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions, of the scattered, uncertain records of every kind which we can gather up from the remote past, the authentic, written documents of the people of Judea throw a clear light on the beginning of things. Divine revelation is in possession from the beginning. Profane history is modern history. We alone are ancient; and we may say to the infidel, as the Egyptian said to Solon: “You have neither knowledge of antiquity, nor antiquity of knowledge.”

Even during the period of the universal excommunication of mankind from the church of God that church existed, the divine revelation was preserved and increased, and the line of continuity between the past and the future was kept unbroken, in the nation of the children of Abraham. It was from Juda that the Lawgiver and the law came forth to the subjugation of the nations. The historical and rational basis of the supernatural origin and power of Christianity reaches down, therefore, to the first foundations of the world and the human race. So, then, we can have no fear of searching after and pointing out any natural and concurrent causes in the progress of human events which have prepared the way for Christianity and facilitated its universal conquests. The state of heathendom is not to be considered as a normal, natural, and necessary stage in the evolution and progress of mankind, from which Christianity was educed. The plan of divine Providence proposed to conduct mankind from one degree of development to another, until the perfection of religion and civilization was attained in the Catholic Church and carried forward to its last results in the universal resurrection and the everlasting kingdom of heaven, for which all the progeny of Adam, without exception, were destined. According to this plan, the church would always have been one and universal, and whatever might have been the special mission and privileges of the people of Israel, the covenant of God with them, and the possession of divinely-revealed doctrine, discipline, and worship would not have been exclusive. The national and exclusive constitution of the church in the posterity of Abraham and Jacob through the Law of Moses was a dispensation established on account of the general apostasy of mankind, a measure of protection against an absolute and final defection of the human race. And the preparation which went on in heathendom for the new promulgation of the divine law to all the world by Jesus Christ was also a measure of remedy and rescue, a “second plank after shipwreck,” thrown to the nations who were drowning in a sea of errors and miseries.

The object of that preparation was to furnish a sufficient ground and territory for the kingdom of Christ, the Catholic Church; to make ready the people who were fit to receive his law and doctrine; to produce the conditions and circumstances requisite for the universal conquest and permanent dominion of Christianity in the world. The discipline of divine Providence over the nations during the long centuries of their wandering through the waste and howling wilderness of ignorance, error, sin, warfare, and misery of all kinds, is like that over the children of Israel during their wandering of forty years in the desert which lay between Egypt and Palestine. They were condemned to this wandering as a punishment for their unbelief and disobedience. This punishment was nevertheless made the means of their training and education as a nation, and a better generation, born in the wilderness, was formed, which was fit to go into, conquer, and possess the Promised Land. We can also draw an illustration front individual examples, of which history furnishes a great number. A youth, highly gifted, brought up in faith and virtue, well educated, and with every kind of means and opportunity for pursuing a noble career to the glory of God, the welfare of men, and his own highest advantage both in time and eternity, comes to the morning of his manhood, with the straight path of duty stretching out its narrow and ascending course before him. Instead of pursuing this path steadily from the beginning, he is seduced to turn aside and wander over the more pleasant lands which are on the border of his right road, following the illusions of ambition, of pride, and of pleasure. For a while God leaves him to his wanderings, but his mercy does not abandon him. Through circuitous paths, through the lessons of experience, through trials, disappointments, and sufferings, he is led back to the right road. He becomes a hero, a saint, an apostle. The science, the fame, the influence, the wealth, the experience he acquired during those years, and which he labored to acquire for a low and unworthy end, are all now made the means and instruments of fulfilling a noble and holy purpose. Even his errors and sins serve as a warning lesson to others, and cause in himself a more vivid appreciation of the goodness of God, the value of divine faith and grace, and the happiness of a holy life.

In like manner the human race, in its youth, went forth from the cradle-land of Armenia to take possession of the wide inheritance of the earth. Carried away by the illusions of the senses and the imagination, in the pride of its youthful strength, the human race sought to find its destiny and create its paradise on the earth, forgetful of God, of his law, of his doctrine, and of his promises. The colonization of new countries, the foundation of empires and cities, the cultivation of science, literature, art, and every sort of commerce, handicraft, and industry, all that is included in the term civilization, employed the energies of that portion of mankind whose doings find a place in universal history, until everything was accomplished which was possible to man and God saw fit to permit him to achieve. As for his relations with the world above this earth, with the duration which is beyond time, and with superhuman and divine powers, since he could not ignore them or confine his intellect of divine origin and immortal destiny to merely temporal and earthly things, he invented religions, or sought by the light of reason to discover the truth about the supersensible world. The result of all was that a state of things was produced in which mankind, unable to proceed further, dissatisfied and sighing after something better, cried out for God to come and accomplish the work which was too much for man. A young man or a young woman, feeling deeply the emptiness of all the enjoyments to be obtained by wealth, gives up his or her fortune for charitable purposes. A prince, tired of war and politics, devotes his castle and domain to the foundation of a monastery and assumes the religious habit. An artist, a poet, an orator, a great scholar, convinced of the futility of chasing the shadow of earthly glory, consecrates his gifts and acquisitions to religion. In like manner all that the human race had gained in civilization, in empire, in wealth, in philosophy and literature and art, was so much material accumulated for the spirit and genius of Christianity to appropriate and employ in the work of the regeneration of mankind.

This statement is, of course, restricted to that part of the human race which forms the principal subject of universal history and is included within the sphere of the Greco-Roman intellectual and political dominion. The Chinese, and the nations of similar origin and character, are a nullity in universal history. The Hindoos have remained to this day outside of the current of the catholic movement of Christianity. The barbarian and savage races have only been capable of receiving Christianity together with civilization from nations previously civilized. What conquests Christianity may yet make among the great mass of the heathen who constitute the numerical majority of mankind, only the future can disclose. Probably the dominion of European intelligence and political power will be a necessary condition for the extension of the spiritual dominion of the Catholic Church in those regions of the world, if it is ever accomplished. Leo says of the Mongolian races:

“It seems to us that it is only their conversion to Christianity which can entitle them to admission into the domain of universal history as we have conceived its plan, and this conversion can hardly become general except through some kind of political subjugation and dependence. Certainly, the place of these nations in history is one foreseen by God; but the period of their intellectual importance for us has not yet arrived, and will perhaps never come until they are conquered by the Caucasian race and mingled with it. It is therefore only upon the Caucasians, in their great division of Semites, Japhetians, and Chamites, that we can direct our view, as being hitherto the workmen whose labors are recorded by universal history.”

It is only with the past history of that select portion of the human race which has advanced steadily on the road of progress toward the completion attained in Christianity that our theme is concerned. Even some portions of the Aryan race, as the Hindoos, have but little connection with it. And in that later period upon which our attention is at present specially directed, the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans make the principal factors in producing the result which we wish to estimate—viz., the preparation for the actual conquest and extension of Christianity as a universal religion, which has been thus far achieved, and has become an historical fact. Jewish faith, Hellenic intellectual culture, Roman polity, were the chief agents in preparing the way for Christianity as the world-religion and the world-subduing power. The Hellenic philosophy and literature we leave aside for the present. The Roman imperial and universal monarchy is the topic to be specially considered in this article. This great world-subduing power is historically and logically connected with the great monarchies of a similar character which preceded it, and which are all presented under one figure, that of a colossal statue, whose members are cast from different metals, in the celebrated vision of Nabuchodonosor, interpreted and recorded by the prophet Daniel. It is remarkable that this vision, which presents emblematically a summary of the universal political history of the world in prophecy, was given to the monarch of the great Assyrian Empire, yet in such a way that it passed before his mind like an evanescent flash. He could not understand or even remember it until the great prophet of Juda repeated and explained it. The date of this vision is a little later than B.C. 600, just at the beginning of the period we are considering. “Thou, O king! didst begin to think, in thy bed, what should come to pass hereafter: and He that revealeth mysteries showed thee what shall come to pass. Thou, O King! sawest, and behold there was, as it were, a great statue: this statue, which was great and tall of stature, stood before thee, and the look thereof was terrible. The head of this statue was of fine gold, but the breast and the arms of silver, and the belly and the thighs of brass: and the legs of iron, the feet part of iron and part of clay. Thus thou sawest, till a stone was cut out of a mountain without hands: and it struck the statue upon the feet thereof, that were of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces: but the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.”

Daniel then interpreted the vision as a prophecy of the destinies of the world under four universal monarchies, the Assyrian being the first, represented by the head of gold. The other three are manifestly the Medo-Persian, Macedonian, and Roman. The weak feet and toes of the statue are the extension of the empire among the barbarians of the West. The prophet finishes by declaring that after the decadence of the last empire God will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed or transferred to another power, but which shall destroy entirely the whole fabric of world-monarchy which was represented by the statue of gold, silver, brass, and iron, terminating in clay—i.e., the Babylo-Roman Empire. Thus, at the very beginning of the course of events which took place during the six centuries of the period preceding the Messianic epoch, the great prophet who is inspired to foretell with minute distinctness the times of the Messianic kingdom is made the counsellor and prime minister of the last monarchs of the Assyrian Empire, and of the first of the succeeding Medo-Persian kings, and Nabuchodonosor and Cyrus are instructed by divine revelation in the designs and purposes for which God has raised them up to prepare the way for the coming and reign of his Son upon the earth. The great world-empire, whose seat is first established in Babylon, and afterwards transferred to Rome, has a mission to accomplish, and, when that has been fulfilled, it is finally abolished to make way for the Catholic Church and the Christendom of which it is the nucleus, the Christian political, social, and moral order, the unification and restoration to one universal fraternity of the regenerated human race.

The Roman Empire, the inheritor of all the power, the civilization, the intellectual and material wealth and grandeur of its predecessors, with its own new and specific force in addition, made of the whole world one dominion, brought the East into subjection to the West, and established in Rome, the Eternal City, the permanent capital of the earth. Thus the way was prepared, by the general diffusion of the Greek and Latin languages, by universal commerce and communication between all nations, by the organizing and educating force of political and military discipline, and by many other efficient agencies, for a rapid and irresistible transmission of the spirit, the doctrine, the moral law, the entire supernatural and regenerating grace of Christianity throughout the civilized world. At the same time the civilizing power was brought into contact with that great mass of European barbarians who were destined to form the most vigorous portion of Catholic Christendom. Julius Cæsar is considered as the great author of modern European civilization. The empire reached its acme in the reign of Augustus. Near the close of his reign, and somewhere in the vicinity of A. U. C. 747, the Temple of Janus was closed, and the epoch of universal pacification, the effect of irresistible, triumphant Roman power, came to a world which was expecting the advent of the Prince of Peace, and made a moment’s stillness, a brief pause of silent wonder through the universe, while the mystery of the incarnation and human birth of the great King was accomplished.

Let us turn now to Judea, whose mission was much higher in the order of moral grandeur, though not so dazzling to the imagination as that of Rome. Daniel foretold the end of the captivity of the Jews when a period of seventy years should be completed, and the birth and death of the Messias after another period of seven times seventy years from the rebuilding of the city and Temple. The schism and captivity of the ten tribes had freed the kingdom of David from putrescent parts and given a more pure and healthy life to Juda. The corruption of Juda found a severe and efficacious remedy in the captivity which befell that tribe also at a later period. A purified remnant, the élite of the nation, were restored to their own land under Cyrus. The city and temple were rebuilt. Alexander the Great extended the same favor to the Jewish nation which had been granted by the Persian monarchs. Under his successors, the kings of Syria and Egypt, Judea flourished both in a political and a religious sense for three centuries, although not exempt from vicissitudes, a second temple was established in Egypt, and in Alexandria, the new capital founded by Alexander, the Jews became numerous and attained to great consideration and importance. The Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek and the important books of the second canon were written. Under Antiochus Epiphanes a new crisis arrived, which threatened the total extinction of Judaism. A large portion of the priests and people were infected with the corrupted Greek civilization of that period, the practice of the Mosaic law was forbidden and suppressed by the most oppressive edicts sanctioned by the most cruel penalties, and Jerusalem was changed into an apparently heathen city. The sacred ark containing all the hopes of the world in the ages to come seemed about to be wrecked. But God raised up the heroic family of the Machabees to rescue once more Jerusalem and Judea from the ruin which seemed to be imminent.

There is no greater and more wonderful hero in all history than Judas Machabeus, a new and more sublime Leonidas, standing with his small but invincible host in the world’s Thermopylæ, as the defender, even unto death, not of Greece but of all mankind; the saviour, not of mere national and temporal interests, but of the precious inheritance of faith, the supernatural treasure by which all men were to be enriched with those blessings which are eternal. The history of the Asmonæan dynasty, its period of glory and of decay, and, next, of the Idumæan usurpation in the person of the cruel tyrant, Herod the Great, a mere creature and dependent viceroy of the Roman emperor, brings us to the end of the dispensation of Abraham and Moses, to the epoch of the new Prophet, Priest, and King, who teaches, sanctifies, and rules mankind by his own personal and inherent might and right, as the Emmanuel, who is both the Creator and the Redeemer of the world.

St. Paul declares that the mystery of divine Providence respecting both the Jews and the Gentiles, made known in the full Christian revelation, was to “establish all things in Christ, in the dispensation of the fulness of times” (Eph. i. 10). We infer from this statement, that all the ages preceding the birth of Christ were a preparation for the foundation of the Catholic Church, which was completed at the epoch of his coming. The work of Judaism was done and its mission completed. Henceforth it was only an obstacle in the way of the universal religion which it had been created to serve. The oracles of God which it preserved and transmitted, the faith which it inherited from Abraham, its genuine spirit, the essence of religion which had been embodied in its outward organization, were transmitted to Christianity. The lifeless mass which was left behind was only fit to be buried as a putrescent carcass. The mission of the Roman Empire was also completed, its destruction decreed, and dimly foretold by the apostles. The entire Greco-Roman civilization, with its philosophy, its literature, its religious superstitions, had run its course, and its ultimate result was an intellectual and moral abyss of vacancy and unfulfilled longing for the truth and the good which alone can fill the frightful void in the human soul and in universal humanity caused by the absence of God. St. Paul says that Christ, having first descended to the lowest depth, ascended to the highest celestial summit, “ut impleret omnia”—that he might fill all things. The Emmanuel, the God in humanity, the very sovereign truth and sovereign good impersonated in a twofold nature, divine and human, is the only fulfilment of universal history, of human destiny, as the term and expression of the thoughts and purposes of God. His kingdom on the earth, the Catholic Church, is the instrument and medium by which he extends his action through time and upon universal humanity during the period of universal history which is now in the process of fulfilment. The material part of the substantial essence of this new Messianic empire was furnished by the commingling of the elements of Judaism and Greco-Roman civilization. The vital and informing principle was supernatural and divine, inspired into the now organic structure by a new out-breathing of the creative and life-giving Spirit.

This supernatural character of Christianity is capable of a rigorous historical and rational demonstration. Rationalists, as they call themselves, having first made themselves their own dupes, have duped the great mass of the unlearned and the unthinking in this age, and even imposed to a greater or a lesser degree on numbers of Catholics whose instruction in sound Christian knowledge is defective and superficial, by a shallow and pretentious system vaunted under the name of scientific criticism. Like the pseudo-Smerdis, its pretence to be the true, legitimate possessor of dominion, and heir to the acquisitions of reason and experience historically transmitted from the past, is founded on an illusory semblance of likeness to genuine science. As the impostor who passed himself off on a credulous people for the son of Cyrus was detected and exposed by stripping off the royal head-dress which he had stolen, and showing that his head had long since been deprived of the ears as an ignominious punishment for crime, so this base-born rationalism, when the logic of facts and sound reasoning seizes hold of it, meets the fate which befell the Persian usurper under the iron grasp and death-dealing sword of Darius, the son of Hystaspes. It is an old culprit, long since marked by the sword of truth, and doomed to perish under the blows of the genuine offspring of the noble, ancestral chiefs in the intellectual kingdom. Christianity is historical and rational, resting on the principles of contradiction and of the sufficient reason. That which has occurred and which exists cannot be denied or doubted, and must be referred to a sufficient reason and an adequate cause. The facts and events of the religion of Christ, as well those which preceded as those which have followed his human birth, are historically certain. The flimsy hypotheses of sceptical criticism have been destroyed by critical science. The penetrating acid of critical investigation, a solvent which is destructive of all counterfeits and semblances, has only made more manifest and clear of all accidental adhesions the real substance and imperishable solidity of the great historical structure of the primeval and universal religion. The books of Moses and his successors, the four Gospels and the other apostolic documents, together with all else that is accessory and corroborative of sacred history in the genuine records and works of antiquity, have come unscathed, and with brighter and clearer evidence than before, out of the restless and audacious researches of that modern school of rationalists who have sought to destroy all ancient science and belief, to make way for a new fabric of hypothesis which they call modern science and philosophy. Their visionary systems stand confronted with unassailable facts and convicted of falsehood. These great facts, from the creation of man to the resurrection of Christ, and from his resurrection to the present, actual existence of the Catholic Church, irresistibly, and with all the force of invincible logic, demand the recognition of their sole, assignable sufficient reason, a supernatural cause. It is because of this necessary connection of the great facts upon which Christianity is founded with a supernatural cause that rationalists deny, in so far as that is possible, these facts. But, as they cannot deny altogether the reality of all, they deny the principle of causality itself, like Hume and the whole sceptical sect of pseudo-philosophers, or, at least, by their hypotheses, ignore and subvert the principle of causality, through the contradiction of necessary deductions from the principle which is contained in these hypotheses.

The fact of Christianity cannot be denied, because it is too immediately present and evident before the minds of all men. Unless one avowedly abjures reason, it must be accounted for. The hypothesis of the rationalists supposes that a young man of Galilee, without education, evolved out of his own mind and the Scriptures of the Old Testament a doctrine which he taught for about one year to the people of Judea and Galilee, and was then crucified as a teacher of false doctrine and a disturber of the religion of his country. The effect of his moral excellence and heroism in dying for his convictions, together with that of his teaching of a few simple and sublime doctrines of theology and ethics, was the astounding revolution which has resulted in historical Christianity. This is a theory of lunatics. The birth of Jesus precisely at the period which was the fulness of the times, the promulgation of a universal religion which appropriated and subjected to its dominion and utility all the results of previous preparation, combined opposite elements into a new form, conquered and regenerated the human race; and all the phenomena of the origin and progress of Christianity; prove the intervention of the same power which created the world and has governed it since the beginning. The divine mission of Jesus is proved by the work which he accomplished. The precise nature and comprehension of that mission and work, as God intended it, and as Jesus Christ revealed it to his apostles, is proved by the effect actually produced, by the argument a posteriori, from the effect to the cause. The religion which actually became universal is the religion which is founded on the confession of the Trinity, the true and proper divinity of the Son of God, his assumption of human nature by a miraculous birth from the Virgin, his redemption of the human race, fallen through the sin of the first Adam, by the cross, his absolute sovereignty over the earth and the whole universe, and his delegation of authority to the apostles under their prince and head, St. Peter. The conversion of the Roman Empire to this religion demands a sufficient cause, and the only cause to which it can possibly be traced is the divine power of its founder, Jesus Christ. The law did not go forth from Sion and Jerusalem to the whole world by virtue of any power which Judaism put forth. The Roman imperial power did not undergo a transmutation into the kingdom of Christ. Catholic theology was not the fruit of Greek philosophy, and the regeneration of mankind was not the natural result of Greco-Roman civilization. All these forms were overmastered and supplanted by a superior force which overcame a most violent and stubborn resistance on their part. They had only prepared the way, and were destroyed when their work was done. Jesus Christ proved himself to be the possessor of that divine power which had employed them to prepare his way before him, by establishing his new kingdom upon their territory, and making their work subservient to his own conquest and dominion. Rome was made the seat of his own Vicar, the monarch of his spiritual kingdom. The thirteen great dioceses of the Roman Empire were parcelled out to the great princes of the church, the patriarchs, exarchs, and primates, who received a delegated share of the supremacy of the Sovereign Pontiff of the city of Rome. The great provincial cities were made the seats of the metropolitans, and the thousands of minor cities the sees of the bishops of the Catholic Church. This great work was substantially accomplished within three centuries from the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. One must be demented not to recognize a supernatural cause for this effect, and, as directed by and concurring with this first, supreme, efficient cause, a chain-work of second causes extending through all previous history backward to the origin of the human race and of the great nations of the earth.

Mgr. Delille, Bishop of Rodez, thus contrasts the theory of universal history which presents the incarnation of the divine Word as the central fact of the whole circle of human events with that of modern rationalism:

“In presence of all the remains of the past actions of the human race which are buried in the catacombs of history, only two theories can be found by which to account for them—the theory of chance or fatalism, and the theory of a divine plan.

“The first explains nothing, because it professedly ignores the final destination of humanity. Sitting amid the ruins, with its back turned to the future, it contents itself with making an inventory of the bones of the defunct generations, and weighing their dust. As the conclusion of this fruitless and melancholy work, it says: Things were thus and so, because they had to be so; they are either games of chance or evolutions of the universal substance. It is quite otherwise with that theory derived from the revelation of the divine plan by the way of faith, in which all the events of the world are viewed as an execution of a pre-conceived design of Providence, being nothing else than the restoration of fallen humanity by the Mediator. This is the true philosophy of history, illuminating the past of which it furnishes the explanation, and the future of which it gives foresight. In accordance with its results, the ancient era of the world can be defined, the preparation for the reign of the Messias, and the modern era, the reign of the Messias.”

In this present article it is especially some parts of the preparation which immediately preceded the epoch of the Messias that are presented to the reader’s consideration. It is one of the most interesting and useful fields of exploration upon which any one who has taste and time for solid reading can enter. There are not wanting in our modern literature some excellent works in which the desirable information can be obtained. In the German language the Universal History of Leo, in the first part, on ancient history, presents a condensed but most complete, learned, and philosophical sketch of the great historical events of the pre-Christian period, conceived entirely in accordance with the idea we have here endeavored to present. In French, the History of the Universal Church, by Rohrbacher, has remarkable merit in this respect and is very full in its details. This subject is treated most explicitly and comprehensively in a work by M. l’Abbé Louis Leroy, entitled Philosophie Catholique de l’Histoire. In English the learned works of Father Thébaud, and a recent one entitled De Ecclesiâ et Cathedrâ, by Colin Lindsay, are especially valuable. As a French bishop, Mgr. Angebault, of Angers, has said: “For the last hundred years an effort has been kept up to make history lie by perverting it; it is requisite that men of learning and sound faith should bring it back into the right path from which it has been drawn away.”

History, like all the treasures of the past, belongs to Christianity and the Catholic Church. A few years ago some marbles belonging to Nero, which had been laid aside and become buried under the accumulated deposit of ages, were unearthed, and became the property of Pius IX. as sovereign of Rome; who made use of them for decorating a church. In like manner it is our right to claim all the costly materials we can find and dig out of the dust of all foregoing centuries, and our duty to use them in adorning the walls of the temple of God on earth, his universal and eternal church.

ST. CEADDA.

Hark! what sweet sounds beneath these lonely skies!

St. Mary’s Convent deep in yonder dell

Lies hidden. Echoes thus the minster bell

Through the thin air? or hear we litanies

That, sung by monks at even-song, arise

And heavenward, full of holy rapture, swell?

No; but within the walls of yonder cell,

Where, near his death, God’s faithful servant lies,

Led by his brother’s soul, an angel throng

Welcomes St. Chad, whose prayerful life is o’er.

His feet shall tread the Mercian vales no more.

His work is done. Hark! fainter sounds their song,

While his glad spirit leaves its frame outworn,

And homeward turns, on seraph-wings upborne.

THE HOME-RULE CANDIDATE.
A STORY OF “NEW IRELAND.”
CHAPTER III.
THE RIVALS.

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

On the return to Kilkenley I placed my guest beside Father O’Dowd in the car, as I saw that the former was bursting with impatience to get at the Home-Rule question. During the luncheon he had made several ineffectual attempts at drawing out the priest, which were deftly shunted off in favor of lighter subjects; but having extracted a promise from Father O’Dowd that during the drive he would discuss the “idea” with him, no sooner had the horse commenced to tear up the gravel in the little lawn than the member for Doodleshire opened fire by asking if there was any real issue at stake in the question.

“What is Home Rule? Is it Fenianism veiled or unveiled? Is it Repeal? Is it less than Repeal or more than Repeal? Is it a surrender or—ahem!—a compromise of the national demand, or is it a demand founded upon the—ahem!—supposed necessities of the country at this present time?”

“I must go back a little in order to reply to your queries; as the French say, Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter—one must draw back a little, in order to make a better spring. You have heard, Mr. Hawthorne, that the law of defeats separates the vanquished into two or three well-defined parties or sections: one party more bitter in opposition than ever, one party quietly put out of the way, who retire upon their shields, and a little party who recognize no defeat. This is just the outcome in Ireland of forty-eight and forty-nine. The Young Ireland movement in forty-eight was never national in dimensions or acceptance—”

“Thrue for ye, father darlint,” exclaimed Peter O’Brien from his coigne of vantage, and whose heart and soul were in the discussion. “The boys wasn’t riz properly.”

Without noticing the interruption Father O’Dowd continued:

“O’Connell’s movement was from forty-two to forty-four; but from that date, although Smith O’Brien and John Mitchel came to the front, the country was not at their back.”

“Did not the Young Irelanders break with O’Connell on a war policy?”

“That is a fallacy. They had no war policy, nor had he. It was the blaze of revolution lighted in Paris in forty-eight that set men on fire here. They seceded from O’Connell on the point of the celebrated test resolutions, which declared it would not be lawful to take up arms for the recovery of national rights. The non-acceptance of this declaration led to the Irish Confederation. The confederates were decidedly unpopular, especially after the death of O’Connell, whose demise was laid at their door, and they themselves became the victims of secession. John Mitchel and his following were for preparing the people for war against England. Thus we had three parties and no real national movement. When Paris hurled Louis Philippe from the throne, the pulse of Ireland became intensely agitated, and two schools of insurrectionists were to be found in the new insurrectionary party: one that declared that Smith O’Brien wanted a rose-water revolution, the other that Mitchel was a Red and wanted a Jacquerie. The refusal to rise for the release of Mitchel led to bad blood, and the subsequent rising resulted in a fiasco. The men who ordered it had no command from the nation, and were but a fraction of a fraction.”

“Were you opposed to them, father—I mean your order?”

“Assuredly not in a combative sense, but in the sense of a decided disapproval of the insurrection. They had also against them the bulk of the Repeal millions.”

“But the cities—”

“Yes, the cities became imbued with the spirit of the revolution and a desire to see it out, but, beyond their national antipathy to English rule, the rural population had little or no participation in the forty-eight movement.”

“They wor aisy enough beyant in Kilpeddher, where they bet Mickey Rooney wud his own pike-handle an’ called him a bladdher-um-skite, no less,” cried my coachman.

“Peter, be good enough to keep your observations to yourself,” I said, struggling with a laugh.

“Faix I will, thin, Masther Freddy, for sorra a word the darlint father is spakin’ I’d like for to lose. But as for th’ other omadhaun,” lowering his voice to a confidential whisper, “I’d as lave be spakin’ to—”

“Silence!”

“After the forty-eight movement had exhausted itself in transportations and expatriations,” continued Father O’Dowd, “and the flower of Ireland’s intellect and patriotism was literally pining away in England’s penal settlements, the gaze of the country turned instinctively toward one man, Charles Gavan Duffy, and behind him crouched the terrible problem: ‘What next?’”

“Is this—ahem!—the Mr. Duffy who holds a somewhat prominent position in Victoria?”

“Only that of prime minister,” laughed the priest.

“And what was his—ahem!—policy in the crisis you mention?”

“A retreat all along the line. He tried the original Irish Confederation policy, but received no support. He at last got together a party under the banner of ‘tenant right.’ This was a move that brought the Presbyterians of Ulster to take counsel with the Catholics of Munster; it brought Repealers, and Anti-Repealers, and men of every shade of politics and religion upon one common platform, and an organization was formed to compel Parliament to pass a measure which would prevent the eviction of the tenant farmer, except for the non-payment of rent, and to prevent also the arbitrary raising of the rent.”

“That’s me jewel!” cried Peter, in an ecstasy of approbation. “Faix ye’d think it was on th’ althar he was.” This latter observation being addressed to me.

“You flooded us in the House, if I remember—ahem!—rightly, with a very strange set of representatives as the outcome of this movement,” observed Mr. Hawthorne.

“Yes, we sent you about thirty-five or forty members, returned at the instance of the Tenant League and to work out its programme. They used the new shibboleth to suit their own ends, and many of them being both corrupt and dishonest, the pass was sold and the party bought up through its leaders, Sadlier and Keogh. Some of us thought it was a goodly step in the right direction to see Catholics on the bench, and lulled our consciences with this soporific; but the cause of the poor tenant was lost, and we grasped the shadow while the substance floated beyond our reach.”

“The curse o’ Crummle on Sadlier and Billy Keogh! Amin,” muttered Peter.

“A cohort of the exasperated section of the forty-eight party now came to the front, who, seeing the utter and shameful defeat of the Gavan-Duffy following, instantly raised their voices for war to the knife, war to the bitter end, and out of this cry arose the Fenian movement.”

“I should like to hear your ideas upon this insane movement,” observed the M.P., endeavoring to face Father O’Dowd, and succeeding only in jerking himself partly off the car, to the hand-rail of which he clung with the tenacity of an octopus. “What support did it receive?”

“It did not represent anything like the full force of Irish patriotism, or even, indeed, a considerable portion of it. The bulk of the millions who believed in O’Connell and Smith O’Brien stood with folded arms outside this movement. Its policy was disbelieved in, although the Fenians worked with an energy worthy of the highest admiration, while an honest, manly, self-sacrificing spirit of patriotism marked the men who were its martyrs. Never did braver men stand in the dock; and to the Fenians Ireland owes that stirring up of public opinion upon Irish subjects which hitherto had slumbered in a masterly inactivity. You see, Mr. Hawthorne, as we say at whist, I am leading up to your strong suit, and if I have been a little prolix—”

“My dear sir, I am receiving more information than the Bodleian Library or all the blue-books could possibly give me.”

“Sorra a lie in that! Ah! wud ye?” The latter addressed to the horse, in order to parry my inevitable censure.

“Well, sir,” continued the priest after he had duly acknowledged the compliment bestowed upon him by my guest, “we had arrived at that stage when, as Phædrus says:

Gratis anhelans, multo agendo nihil agens.

We had been checkmated, and Britannia smiled contemptuously at us from behind the glistening bayonets of the regiments with which she flooded the country. It was again the horrors of the lash and triangle, loathsome details of the treachery of informers and prosecutors, the chain-gangs at Portland and Chatham, and the terrible outrages inflicted upon men whose only fault lay in loving Ireland not wisely but too well. I shall pass over that, because there is a wicked beat underneath my waistcoat, and curæ leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent. I shall come at once to the question of Home Rule and dismiss it briefly; for there is the stable dome of Kilkenley right over beyond that group of firs.”

“Yev more nor a quarther av an hour, yer riverince, for the baste’s purty well bet up.”

“Five minutes will do me, Peter,” laughed Father O’Dowd. “The Irish passion for national existence still glowed in our bosoms, and we cried for light. A field for Irish devotion and heroism was what was wanted. We were sick of the hecatombs of victims offered up by the last sad effort. As you are well aware, Mr. Hawthorne, the Tory party came into power during the Fenian scare, and they went to their work in a spirit which would have shamed Oliver Cromwell himself. They fined, fettered, imprisoned, and hanged, until a glut of vengeance seemed an impossibility. ‘This is my chance,’ says Mr. Gladstone. ‘I’ll make capital out of this Fenian scare, and, dashing at the Church Establishment, I’ll gather in the straying bands which once formed the rank and file of the liberal party. England wants a salve, and when she finds herself doing a virtuous thing she will purge her conscience of all her recent evil-doing.’”

“I never heard of Mr. Gladstone’s having used those words,” exclaimed the member for Doodleshire pompously. “If he had used them in the House, they would have been ordered to be taken down by the Speaker.”

“They are my words, not Mr. Gladstone’s.”

“Blur an’ ages!” began Peter O’Brien, but, upon my administering no light touch of the whip to his shoulders, he suddenly pulled himself in. “Now, I ax ye, Masther Freddy, isn’t that the hoighth, now—the hoighth av an ignoraymus? Why, a turf creel—”

“Silence, sir!” I exclaimed, in a frenzy of terror lest my guest should by any possibility overhear him.

“With the war-whoop of ‘Down with the Irish Church!’ Mr. Gladstone bounded into office at the head of a majority only equalled by that of Sir Robert Peel in forty-one, and, with the faculty of persuading himself into a fervid conscientiousness upon any subject he likes, he flung himself body and soul into the disestablishment of the church established in Ireland. At this uprose the Irish Protestants, who declared that, as faith had been broken with them by the English government, they would repeal the Union by way of retaliation, and kick another crown into the Boyne. ‘Break with us,’ said they, ‘and we’ll break with you. We’ll become Irishmen first and anything else afterwards.’ Well, Mr. Hawthorne, the Irish Church was disestablished—”

“I am happy to say that my humble vote was recorded in favor of that measure,” interrupted the M.P.

“More power to ye for that, anyhow,” muttered Peter.

“And a good vote it was, Mr. Hawthorne. Well, sir, the Irish Protestants were in a craze of indignation, and eagerly sought a vent for their feelings of revenge. They wouldn’t touch Fenianism, and their minds insensibly reverted to eighty-two, and to such Protestants as Grattan, Flood, Curran, and Charlemont. Some of our most influential Protestant countrymen were now prepared to take up the cudgels—peers, dignitaries of the Protestant Church, large landed proprietors, bankers, merchants, deputy lieutenants, and even fellows of Trinity College. This was no Falstaffian army, no mere food for powder, but a band of men who had a vast property at stake in the country, who saw a thousand reasons why Irishmen alone should regulate Irish affairs. And now Mr. Butt comes upon the stage.”

“The sorra a shupayriorer man in the counthry,” observed Peter, despite my previous admonition. “An’, be the mortial, me own first cousin wud have got six months for delayin’ Jim Fogarty’s ould ram from goin’ home wan night, an’ he as innocint as a cluckin’ hin, av it wasn’t for the shupayrior spakin’ av Counsellor Butt. ‘There isn’t a bigger rogue in the barony, me lord,’ sez he, addhressin’ the binch, ‘but this wanst, me lord, he wasn’t in it at all, at all.’ That’s what I call spakin’ up.”

“Mr. Butt, in addition to defending Peter O’Brien’s kinsman,” said Father O’Dowd, “was called to the front from an obscurity into which a wild recklessness had hurled him, to defend the Fenian prisoners in sixty-five. Mr. Butt became then a centre figure, and through the meetings of the Amnesty Association, larger than any since Tara and Mullaghmast, a centre figure he remained. The Protestants, who now chafed under the disestablishment, were many of them Butt’s old comrades, college chums, and political associates, and to them he turned, urging them no longer to act the secondary rôle of an English garrison. ‘Act boldly and promptly now,’ he said in one of his powerful addresses, ‘and you will save Ireland from revolutionary violence on the one side and from alien misgovernment on the other. You, like myself, have been early trained to mistrust the Catholic multitude, but when you come to know them you will admire them. They are not anarchists, nor would they be revolutionists if men like you would but do your duty and lead them—that is, honestly and faithfully and capably lead them—in the struggle for constitutional liberty.’ Mr. Butt made a great impression, but of course was met with the old cry of ‘wolf,’ ‘Catholic ascendency,’ ‘the tools of the priests,’ ‘yoke of Rome,’ and all that sort of low Orange claptrap. The incidents of the defeat of ‘honest John Martin’ for Longford are too recent to bore you with now, but in that election you saw a Catholic people fighting their own clergy, who had foolishly pledged themselves to support the Fulke-Greville-Nugent candidate, as vehemently as they and their own clergy had ever fought the Tory landlords. It was an exceptional and painful incident, but it vindicated both priests and people from the unworthy sneers to which I have just alluded. You are familiar with the meeting in Dublin held under the presidency of a Protestant lord mayor, and the resolution enthusiastically adopted that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland was an Irish Parliament. And now, Mr. Hawthorne, having given you an owre true but also an owre lang tale, I am happy to find ourselves within hail of the hospitable roof of Kilkenley, and—yes, to be sure, there are the ladies awaiting our arrival upon the steps.”

“Av that discoorse isn’t aiqual to the House o’ Lords, I’m an omadhaun,” was Peter’s muttered observation as we rattled gaily up to the house.

“Papa is enchanted with the priest,” said Miss Hawthorne.

It was just before dinner, and we were standing upon a small balcony overlooking the lawn.

The moon was rising in all the consciousness of her harvest beauty.

“I am so glad.”

“He says that his reverence has the Irish question at his fingers’ ends, and gave him more information than a dozen Commons debates or ten dozen editions of Hansard. We are going over to visit Father O’Dowd, are we not?”

What induced me to say: “I shall send you with great pleasure”?

“Send us! Are you not coming?”

“I fear not. Welstone will go. He is much better company.”

What a boy I was!

She looked at me in a puzzled, inquiring sort of way.

“What a glorious moon!” I said, bitterness in my heart.

“Don’t you find it a little chilly?” was her reply, as she turned into the drawing-room.

My own, shall I call it temper, or insanity, or what? lost me this chance, for which I had been longing with such fervent yearning. I felt terribly irritated with myself and angered against her. She should have expressed sorrow at my being prevented from going over to Father O’Dowd’s. Had she cared one brass farthing she would have declined the expedition; but instead of this she silently accepted Welstone’s ciceroneship, and exclaiming, “Don’t you find it a little chilly?” left me standing all alone, like the idiot that I was. And yet had I not acted strangely, rudely, in intimating my intention of remaining at Kilkenley? Was I not her host, and should I not make every effort within the scope of my power to render her visit as agreeable as possible?

I followed her into the drawing-room. The light of two moderateur lamps muffled in pink shades threw a delightfully tender glow all over the apartment. Our furniture was very old-fashioned. It bad all been purchased when my great-grandmother had been brought home, and was esteemed a wonder of its kind then. The rosewood settees and spider-legged chairs were upholstered in the richest flowered brocade, very faded now, but highly respectable in their antiquity. The mirrors were oval in gilt frames, an eagle holding a chain, to which was appended a golden ball, surmounting each. A sofa large enough to seat a dozen people in a row graced one wall, while a thin old-fashioned card-table, over which many hundreds of guineas had changed hands, adorned the other. In the alcove, in a stiff, formal, uncompromising arm-chair, so utterly different from the inviting lounges of to-day, sat Mabel, turning over the leaves of a scrap-book that had been made up by my grandmother.

Dressed in simple white, with a sprig of forget-me-not in her golden hair, she looked so lovely that my heart flew to her.

“I hope you haven’t caught cold. Shall I close the window, Miss Hawthorne?”

“Oh! dear, no; it was just a passing sensation, a shiver.”

“Somebody was treading upon your grave,” I said, alluding to the popular superstition.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked.

When I had told her, “I should like to know where I shall be interred.”

“I know where I shall be, if I am not hanged or lost at sea.”

“Where?”

“In the little churchyard close by; it’s in the domain.”

“Are all your family interred there?”

“We have head-stones since 1650. Cromwell’s troopers destroyed everything, digging up the graves in the hope of finding armlets and golden ornaments of our race.”

“I should like to visit the churchyard.”

“By moonlight?” I said laughingly.

“Oh! yes.

“‘If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,

Go visit it by the pale moonlight,’

sings Scott.”

“Your wish shall be gratified.”

“When?”

At this moment Mr. Hawthorne entered the room, carrying in his hand two telegrams.

“Startling news!” he exclaimed.

“What is it, papa?” asked his daughter somewhat affrightedly.

“Nothing alarming, my dear.” Turning to me, “Your county member is dead.”

“Dead?” I cried.

“Dropped dead on the steps of the Carlton Club.”

“Is it Mr. Bromly de Ruthven?”

“Yes.”

“That’s awfully sudden. I had a visit from him not ten days ago. He was quite a young man, and, for his party, a rising one.”

“I cannot agree with you there, Mr. Fitzgerald,” said my guest in his usual pompous style. “His speech—if speech it might be called—on the malt question was a tissue of illogical absurdity. But now, Mabel, I have a big surprise for you. The great conservative party—I call them great, sir, although in opposition—have not been idle, and already has a candidate been selected.”

“That’s rather quick work, Mr. Hawthorne.”

“Military machinery, sir—one man down, the next man forward. And whom do you think they have selected, Mabel?”

“How should I know, papa?”

“Guess.”

“I cannot. Some of the rejected at the last dissolution.”

“No; guess again. A friend of yours.”

“A friend of mine?” somewhat surprised.

“A particular friend, who telegraphs me to say that he will arrive here to-morrow,” with a knowing smile.

I guessed the name. My heart told it me with a pang of envy.

“Not Wynwood Melton?” she said.

“The very man!”

I knew it.

“I’m so glad!” she cried, clapping her dainty hands together. “It will be great fun to have him in the house! What capital imitations he will give us of Gladstone, Disraeli, Bright, and Whalley! And what stories! Mr. Fitzgerald,” she added with considerable earnestness, “you must vote for him.”

I think I was about to pledge myself to do so, forgetful of the dire consequences of such a proceeding on my part, when her father interrupted:

“He cannot, my dear. Mr. Fitzgerald is one of us—a liberal.”

“I am a liberal,” she laughed.

“I presume he will have a walk-over,” said Mr. Hawthorne.

“Who will have a walk-over?” asked Father O’Dowd, who had entered unperceived.

“My friend, Mr. Wynwood Melton.”

“For a seat in Parliament?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a vacancy?”

“Yes.”

“In an Irish constituency?”

“You have not heard the news, then?”

“Not a word; and I may exclaim with Horace, Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia.”

“Well, reverend sir, your county member, Mr. Bromly de Ruthven, is dead.”

“Dead!”

“Dead, sir. And Mr. Wynwood Melton is to have a walk-over.”

“Is he?” asked Father Dowd with a quiet smile. “Who says so?”

“Well, I suppose so. He is young, clever, rich, and, better than all, the nominee of the Carlton Club, which means, of course, the De Ruthven interest.”

The priest gave a short laugh.

“Mr. Wynwood Melton will not have a walk-over; I promise you that. Neither will he win the election; I promise you that, too.”

“Is there another candidate in the field?”

“There will be, please God.”

“Are you at liberty to name him?”

“I shall name him now, as I mean to carry the county for him; and,” taking me by the shoulder, “a very good figure he will cut in St. Stephen’s.”

My heart gave one beat backward. Of name and fame I thought nothing. To defeat Wynwood Melton I would give half my life. Here was a chance—one of those marvellous chances which the whirl of the wheel turns out occasionally to fit into the exact moment. It was a high stake, but I would play for it. It was my solitary hope for an advantage over the man whom Mabel Hawthorne loved. Yes, I would stand the hazard of the die.

“Mr. Fitzgerald dislikes politics,” observed Mabel.

“You may bring a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink,” added her father.

“Besides, he will not be ungallant enough to oppose my nominee,” she laughed.

“I shall be greatly disappointed if my young friend will not stand in the gap for the old county and the old faith,” said Father O’Dowd.

“How can you expect to carry him in the teeth of the overwhelming majority which the conservatives possess in this county?” asked the M.P.

“Thank Heaven! we have the ballot, and now or never is the time to try its efficacy.”

“Well, Mr. Fitzgerald, may I hope to meet you in St. Stephen’s?” asked my guest.

“You may.”

“To oppose my nominee?”

“Yes.”

I braved even her displeasure in my agony of anxiety to cross swords with my rival.

“Bravissimo!” cried Father O’Dowd. “The day is ours. I knew you had the Fitzgerald pluck, dashed with the hot blood of the Ormondes. I look upon victory as certain. All the tenants on the De Ruthven estate are good Catholics and will vote with us—I know it. All the Derryslaghnagaun people will come up to a man. Father Brady and Father Tim Duffy will work the northern side of the county; Father Quaid and Father Ted Walsh will carry the southern side; I’ll take the Ballytore district, and—but no details now; dinner, and then I’m off. We’ll send the ‘hard word’ round like wild-fire, and, Miss Mabel, you’ll see real Irish bonfires on the hills to-morrow night. Tell your friend to stay where he is, Mr. Hawthorne; for with Virgil I may say, Animum pictura pascit inani. Why, I feel like a war-horse:

“‘My soul’s in arms, and eager for the fray.’”

“What’s all this about?” asked my mother.

“Allow me to present to you the Hon. Frederick Fitzgerald Ormonde, M.P.,” gaily exclaimed Father O’Dowd, informing her in a few words of what had happened and what was expected to happen.

“God bless my boy!” she faltered, and, bursting into tears, kissed me as if I had been in my cradle.

It was a moment of fierce inner glow. I almost tasted the sweets of victory—of victory over Mabel, for whom, had I consulted my own self, I would have sacrificed anything—everything.

“We haven’t a minute to lose,” exclaimed my Mentor, all ablaze with excitement. “We shall have to rush out and fight helter-skelter. A surprise has been sprung upon us. Oh! for one week. My brave people will be taken at a disadvantage if we be not up and stirring. Every dexterity will be used to outwit us, every dodge resorted to, bribery especially. We must arrange committees in every town and village to sit en permanence until you are elected. We must have special messengers by the hundred. Ormonde, you will place all your horses at my disposal. North, south, east, and west we must nail the Home-Rule flag to the mast. North, south, east, and west the cry Pro aris et focis must go forth. This is our first genuine election under the ballot. We allowed ourselves to be cozened by false promises when Mr. Gladstone sprung his mine last year, but now the ballot, and free and fearless voting. No more coercion, no more intimidation by landlords, no more bullying or bribing. At last we have a chance of freeing the country from the yoke which has been put upon its neck for centuries, and now we have a chance of letting its voice be heard and to pass a verdict on the Act of Union.”

“I do wish Mr. Melton was not in the field against you,” almost whispered Mabel as I led her into dinner.

There was a something in her tone, like a faint note in melody, that vibrated through me. What was it?

Father O’Dowd would only swallow a few mouthfuls of food. “Up, guards, and at them! Eh, Mr. Hawthorne?”

“The duke never uttered those words. I can give you exactly what occurred. When Napoleon was advancing at the head of the remnant of his shattered army the duke—”

“Excuse me, my dear sir, but I have to marshal an army for my Waterloo. Animum curis nunc huc, nunc dividit illuc—this way and that way my anxious mind is turning. Ormonde, you’ll come over to me to-morrow, and be prepared to address a meeting of your constituents. Don’t be later than one o’clock. And now sans adieux all!” And the worthy priest, buttoning up his ulster, sprang upon the car.

In vain we implored of him to stay. In vain I asked to be permitted to accompany him. No. “I am all aflame,” he cried. “I go to light a fire that will not be extinguished until the high-sheriff is compelled to declare a Catholic and a Home-Ruler the member for this Orangest of all Orange counties. I feel like one inspired. Nemo vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit.” And with this quotation ringing in our ears Father O’Dowd sped upon his mission out into the night.

“An’ so yer goin’ for to be the mimber? Good luck to ye, Masther Fred darlint!” exclaimed Peter O’Brien, who was wild with delight at the intelligence, regarding the election as a foregone conclusion.

“I hope so, Peter.”

“For to repale the Union, Masther Fred?”

“Not quite so fast, Peter.”

“Och, murther!” he groaned, with disappointment delineated in every feature. “I thought ye wor for tee-total separation like Dan.”

“I’ll go as near to it as I can.”

“Do, avic; an’ begorr, av ye don’t take the consait out av some av thim on th’ other side, I’m a boneen, no less. Mind the dalin’ thrick, and keep your thumb on the ace av hearts—the card that always is thrumps.”

On the following morning, as I was preparing for my drive over to Father O’Dowd’s, and endeavoring to pull my ideas together on the burning topic of the hour, my mind being a prey to love, jealousy, politics, and despair-a crushing mélange—an outside car whirled up the avenue, and gracefully lounging upon the back cushion, attired in the fulness of fashionable travelling costume, a cigar in his mouth, and dainty lavender-colored kid gloves upon his hands, sat, or lay, Mr. Wynwood Melton. I recognized him even before he came within clear eye-shot, and, despite my bitter feeling against him, could not help paying him an involuntary tribute of admiration.

I knew what brought him to Kilkenley. It was not to seek my vote, it was not to visit Mr. Hawthorne—it was to see Mabel; and now, with a dull, dead ache at my heart, I should play host to my rival in love and my opponent in the hustings. I hastened downstairs and met him in the hall. I resolved that no one should come between me and my devoir as a gentleman.

Melton was a pale, finely-featured, almost effeminate-looking young fellow, whose Henri Quatre beard and thin, dark moustache set off a round, carefully-groomed head—one of those heads that reveal the execution done by double brushes and hand-mirrors, as a woman’s bespeaks the delicate manipulations of the fille de chambre. He was quite pictorial in his get-up, from a Vandyke collar to black velveteen coat, knee-breeches, purple stockings, and shoes with great strings almost resembling those coquettish rosettes so much in vogue with ladies whom nature has blessed with Lilliputian feet. He might, but for his soft plaid woollen ulster, have represented one of the old portraits of my ancestors that hung in the dining-room; and as he stood thus I could not avoid contrasting my own homely appearance with his, and bitterly flinging the heavy odds into the scale against myself.

“Mr. Melton?” I said.

“Yaas,” with a drawl and a bow.

“You are welcome to Kilkenley,” extending my hand.

“Mr. Ormonde! Ah! glad to meet you. What a drive I’ve had, over such roads and such a vehicle! Caun’t say I like your cars. Per Bacco! one’s spine gets divided into sections during the drive. You’ve got old Hawthorne here. I suppose he has bored you to death. I expected to find this place like the enchanted wood—everybody asleep, even the princess.”

“Whom you would like to awaken as in the fairy tale,” I added bitterly.

“Don’t care for kissing. How does Miss Hawthorne like this precious country?”

“I assume she will like it all the better for your arrival.”

I was going to resent the impertinence, but withheld the burning retort that rose to my lips.

A self-sufficient smile appeared as he almost yawned:

“I should hope so.”

At this moment Mabel appeared upon the steps.

“Ah! Mr. Melton,” she exclaimed, a bright, happy flush upon her lovely face; “this is a surprise,” shaking hands with him.

“Agreeable?”

“Of course. You have introduced yourself, I see, to Mr. Ormonde.”

“How’s the governor?” not noticing her observation.

“Papa is wonderfully well; his trip has agreed with him à merveille. He will be able to encounter the late hours of the coming session without flinching.”

“They shau’n’t catch me sitting up, except at the club. You know what brought me over?”

“Oh! dear, yes.”

“I saw the De Ruthven lot, and, as I could have been elected without leaving London, I’m doosid sorry I came away, except,” he added, “for the pleasure of seeing you.”

“Are you quite sure of being returned?” she asked.

“Rather,” with a quiet, self-satisfied smile.

Miss Hawthorne glanced at me.

“You are to be opposed,” I said.

“Haw! haw!” he laughed. “That for opposition,” flinging away his cigar-butt.

“But I tell you it will be a fierce fight, Mr. Melton,” exclaimed Mabel. “You’ve got a foeman worthy of your steel.”

“Some cad of a farmer’s son or a briefless Irish barrister. Ireland wants Englishmen to sit for her and upon her.”

“I am going to oppose you, Mr. Melton,” my heart beating very fast as I uttered the words.

“Aw!” And extracting an eye-glass from the folds of his coat, he deliberately stuck it in his eye and coolly surveyed me from head to foot.

I would have knocked him heels over head, if Miss Hawthorne had not been present.

“Fire away,” he said; “but, if you take my advice, you will not run your head against a stone wall.”

“And if you take my advice,” I hotly retorted, “you’ll take the next train en route for London, for you have come upon a bootless errand.”

“Nous allons voir,” with a shrug.

“Yes, we shall see the outcome.”

“You don’t mean to go on?”

“To the bitter end.”

“The sinews of war are at my command.”

“The sinews of the county are at mine; but come,” I added, suddenly recollecting my position of host, “let us talk the coming campaign over a cutlet and a bottle of champagne.”

We entered the house together. Mr. Hawthorne met us in the hall.

“Glad to see you, Wynwood, although,” with a ponderous laugh, “I find you in the camp of the enemy.”

As I proceeded cellarwards to look up the wine I heard Mr. Melton say: “That cad; I’ll lick him into a cocked hat.”

“You’ll eat those words, my fine fellow,” I muttered, “or my name isn’t Ormonde; and for every sneer against Ireland you’ll have my riding-whip across your shoulders.”

I couldn’t play the hypocrite, I couldn’t act the Arab, and, while sharing bread and salt with mine enemy, plot his downfall as soon as he quitted my tent; so, making a very plausible excuse, I betook myself to my gay little dog-cart, and was about to give the mare her head when Peter O’Brien whispered to me:

“Isn’t that the spalpeen that’s cum over for to thry a fall wud ye, Masther Fred?”

“That is Mr. Melton,” I replied.

“That’s enough. The boys is waitin’ for to ketch him below at the crass-roads; and faix it’s little he’ll be thinkin’ av Parlimint if Teddy Delaney wanst gets a rowl out av him.”

“Peter,” I said, “if there is any insult offered to Mr. Melton while on my land, I’ll take it as to myself, and I will not contest the county. I pledge my honor to this.”

“Shure a little bit av a fight wudn’t be amiss.”

“I won’t have it.”

“The pond below is convaynient.”

“Silence, sir!”

“Tim Moriarty, the boy that dhruv him from the station, only wants the word for to land him in Brierly’s Pool”—a great slimy ditch about half a mile from the gate lodge.

I’m afraid I swore at my retainer.

“Wirra, wirra! is there to be no divarshin at all, at all?” he muttered to himself as I ordered him to let go the mare’s head.

Miss Hawthorne suddenly appeared upon the steps.

“Bon voyage,” she gaily cried. “Go where glory waits you.”

“I am going to lick that cad into a cocked hat!” I fiercely shouted, dashing from her presence like a lightning-bolt.

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.

REGIONALISM VERSUS POLITICAL UNITY IN ITALY.[[1]]

Matters do not run smoothly in United Italy. There is a screw of considerable magnitude loose in the national machine. It jerks in its motion, pitches, staggers, and men who affect a knowledge of the mechanism of nations predict for Italy—unless the screw adverted to receive proper attention—a dead, disastrous standstill. There are fashions in politics nowadays, as there are in the styles of dress, just as capricious, just as irrational, equally expensive in their own sphere, but unconscionably malicious. It is the fashion, then, in the politics of Italy, to attribute to the Papacy the only obstacle to the full enjoyment of political unity and its consequent blessings. The deep-rooted antipathy of the Vatican to a nationality in Italy, its traditional hatred of new institutions, and its equally prolonged and powerful influence over the people—who, after all, are the mainspring of action—all this is adduced by the liberal party in explanation of the palpable want of unity in Italy.

The explanation may be satisfactory to conceited sciolists, especially if a hatred of the Papacy be one of the component parts of their moral constitution. Latterly, however, a veritable enemy to the political unity of Italy has begun to assert itself, in a manner so striking as to alarm even the most sanguine liberals. Not a spectre but a startling reality assists at the deliberations of the Italian legislature, and, insinuating itself with deadly effect into every department of governmental administration, produces jealousies, feuds, and schisms which threaten ultimately to dismember the nation. This danger is what is called Regionalism.

Solomon’s apothegm on the newness of nothing under the sun is applicable to Regionalism. It is of ancient birth in Italy, albeit of recent manifestation, at least in its present form. It may be defined as the interested affection which an Italian has for the geographical part of the Peninsula in which he was born—for the abode of his domestic gods, so to say, with its surroundings. The affection must be interested, and of its very nature aim at effecting the prevalence of the interests, moral or material, of his own region over those of the others. A Platonic affection for one’s own natal region does not, according to the liberals, constitute Regionalism; for, say they, such an affection merely contemplates historical rights, and the love of one’s rights is purely Platonic. Moreover, this affection should be directed to the region and not to the city or town of one’s birth. An interested affection for the latter has its own appellation already, being known as amore di campanile, and bears the same relation to Regionalism as a part to a whole. But the Regionalism of today, which threatens to produce fatal consequences in Italy, is referable to those portions of Italy which in times past formed separate states, or at least notable portions of an independent state, which, in its history, its traditions, its genius, its style of speech, and its interests, differed from the other states of Italy—as, for instance, Tuscany from Piedmont, the two Sicilies from Lombardy and Venice, or even the island of Sicily itself from continental Sicily, Venice from Lombardy.

Having explained our terms, we would remind the reader of the fact that, when the question of uniting Italy into one body with Piedmont at the head was first mooted, a formidable obstacle at once presented itself in the shape of the difficulties arising at once from the different and almost contradictory elements to be united. It was argued—and with reason, too—that to build up a new state upon the foundation of new institutions, and annul disparities which had existed for centuries, was easier to plan than to carry through. The conflict of interests, of local affections and jealousies, notoriously characteristic of the Italian states, was pronounced by the distinguished statesmen of Italy and Europe a fatal obstacle, if not to the formation, at least to the preservation, of unity. Count Cavour himself was of the number of those who proposed such a consideration, and, for his own part, expressed himself perfectly satisfied if Lombardy and Venice were but annexed to Sardinia. But the liberals and sectarians were urged on to the unification of Italy by the irresistible force of Mazzini’s mind, and to do so quickly, even without Venice and Rome, because the arms of Napoleon III. were at their disposal. A happy opportunity had presented itself, and they seized it. They obviated the difficulties alleged above by a heroic compact. Arrogating to themselves the right of representing the sentiments of the Italian people at large, and assuming the moral personality of the various regions to which they belonged, they proclaimed to the whole world that the all-absorbing desire of the people was to be united in one nation, and that they sacrificed for ever upon the altar of their country the interests, traditions, jealousies, and local affections which had hitherto divided them, and swore to seek no other glory for the future but the one only glory of Italy united.

Cavour resigned himself with so much tact to the situation that he seemed to have created it. And thus, by assiduous application of his maxim, that, in order to make Italy, morality must be put aside, and of that other, promulgated by Salvagnoli, one cannot govern and tell the truth, the great undertaking was accomplished. Two Italies soon began to exist, the legal and the real, which, as Iacini, a minister of the Italian Cabinet, wrote, are directly contradictory to each other. Legal Italy, the supplanter, conquered, and real Italy had to bow the head and submit to a series of civil and fiscal persecutions without example in modern history. But Regionalism was immolated to unity, and the world lauded the sacrifice.

Italy is a land of promise, or rather a promissory land. Promises are given with amazing facility—only to be equalled, however, by the reluctance with which they are fulfilled. While it was a question of sacrificing the interests of some one else—the majority of the liberals who labored in the construction of the national fabric had very little of their own to sacrifice, but everything to gain—all went well, especially while the novelty of the situation lasted. But when the excitement consequent on the formation of the nation had subsided, people began to perceive that the much-vaunted political unity of the country was not real. The promissory notes of the liberals touching the eternal sepulture of provincial differences remained unhonored. The practical sacrifice was impossible. It is now more than eighteen years since the promise was given, and during that time Venice and Rome have been added to the kingdom of Italy, with a view of consolidating for ever the nationality. But the great obstacle remains unmoved, ay, and avows itself, by the eloquence of facts, immovable.

We assert this much on the authority of a member of the Italian Parliament. In an address to his constituents, delivered on the 9th of September last, Federico Gabelli said: “Do differences and divisions exist in the country? Yes, great ones; and no wonder. We have had in Italy different histories, different glories, different sufferings, and different styles of education. We have ideas, habits, tendencies, and characters, different in different regions. For many years we were unknown to one another. The sole fact of our accomplished unity—the living together, so to speak—has revealed to us the existence of these great diversities. But the most profound diversity has been constituted by the material wants of the different parts of Italy. I do not take into account the petty desires of municipalities. I look at the matter very broadly. A real difference exists between the wants of the northerners and southerners, greater still between the demands of the two parties. There, the great word is said, the fearful phrase pronounced—a real and profound disparity between meridionali and settentrionali (southerners and northerners). But why hide it? Is it possible to hide it? This division is felt by all, but all are afraid to declare its existence. They are afraid (and their fear is honorable, because inspired by the holy love of country) to compromise, by the declaration, the grand fact of the unity of Italy.”

Great was the scandal produced among the liberals by this declaration of Gabelli, and greater still when he subsequently made a careful diagnosis of the evil, and prescribed a remedy—nothing less, by the bye, than a confederation similar to that proposed by Pope Pius IX. thirty-one years ago.

When the first Italian legislature assembled in Turin it was observed that nearly all the deputies formed themselves into groups, separate and divided, not politically in parties, but geographically in regions. There was the Tuscan group, the Sicilian group, the Neapolitan group, and later on the Lombard and the Venetian groups, which were the occasion of constant lamentations on the part of the Piedmontese. Then began the general struggle for power, to the almost incurable laceration of poor, real Italy. All the martyrs and confessors of the country clamored for offices in compensation for their heroic sufferings. As their number bordered on the infinite for such a puny state as Italy, so infinite was the number of positions created, and, consequently, infinite was (and continues to be) the number of peculations. But with masterly tact the Piedmontese element maintained the preponderance in power, and so great was the fury of the other patriots that they finally, with one accord, devoted all their energies to the extermination of Piedmonteseism. The molestations and bitternesses which fell to the lot of Count Cavour in the struggle that ensued were, in the opinion of many Piedmontese, among the causes which hastened his death. Whenever a new ministry was to be formed, to the personal rivalries which are inseparable from such an occasion were superadded the jealousies, the intrigues, and the pretensions of the different regions. Every region clamored for the exaltation to the ministerial bench of its own representative, not as the exponent of a political principle, but as the defender of some provincial interest. The Unità Cattolica, apropos of this, observes (September 21, 1877): “When it is a question of forming a cabinet in England, in France, in Spain, do they take care to have representatives of the various English, French, and Spanish regions? Certainly not. Personages are chosen according to their opinions, not according to the regions from which they come. But here in Italy a ministry cannot spring into existence but there enters at least one Piedmontese, one Neapolitan, one Lombard, one Sicilian, one Tuscan. Examine all our ministries, from 1861 down, and you will find that they were formed more on a regional than a political basis.” This is quite true as regards the past few years. Formerly, however, as we have already intimated, the Piedmontese held the majority in the cabinets, to the unquenchable ire of the other provincials.

Another cause of jealousy to the provinces, and the occasion, at least, of the pre-eminence of the Piedmontese, was the existence of the capital at Turin. The Peruzzi-Minghetti ministry, however, according to the convention with Napoleon III. of September 14, 1864, succeeded in having the capital transferred to Florence. This roused the hatred of the Piedmontese against the Tuscans, and was the cause of some bloody scenes in Turin. But Lanza and Sella, both Piedmontese, vindicated their countrymen by bearing the national lares away from the banks of the Arno, and enshrining them for ever, as they thought, on the banks of the Tiber. Nor did the evil disappear with the annexation of the Venetian province and the Pontifical territory. The Venetians constituted another group in Parliament, and, if the Romans did not do likewise, it was simply in default of the necessary elements, considering the aversion of the Eternal City and the neighboring provinces for the invaders. Rome became what the Baron d’Ondes Reggio predicted—a very Tower of Babel. The war of interests broke out afresh and was carried on with redoubled fury. The combatants ranged themselves into two grand divisions of northerners and southerners. The Tuscan group alone enacted the part of moderator. The Piedmontese element asserted its pre-eminence anew in Rome, and invaded not only every department of state, but extended its ruling influence even over municipal matters. The patriots of meridional Italy prepared themselves, during the intervals when a common attack against the church did not withdraw their attention from provincial feuds, to give battle to the Piedmontese, whose ascendency was stoutly maintained by Ponza di San Martino, Lanza, Sella, and General Cadorna. The language of the southern papers was in something like the following tenor: “Here we are at last in Rome! It is high time now that the patronage of the Piedmontese should be suspended, and a check put upon that political monopoly which they arrogate to themselves as a right of conquest. They gave us a dynasty—good. They also gave us a constitution, but we mean to perfect it and adapt it to the demands of progressing civilization. But in Rome Italy belongs to the Italians, not to the Piedmontese. Piedmonteseism oppresses us. Everything in the kingdom has a subalpine odor—the organic laws, bureaucratic systems, fiscal arrangements. The administrative machine is run entirely by Piedmontese. The ministers, their secretaries (with rare exceptions), the supernumeraries who lackey these—all Piedmontese. The secret offices are given to Piedmontese, and the Piedmontese enjoy the sinecures of the secret funds. The national bank itself is but a transformation of the old subalpine bank. The army is in the hands of the Piedmontese, with a Piedmontese as the Minister of War. In short, the nerve and fibre of government is Piedmontese. There must be an end of this!”

It took seven years of laborious intrigues, amalgamations, and combinations of parties to effect the downfall of the Piedmontese. Their obituary notice is dated March 18, 1876. On the same day began the reign of the Neapolitans, and within the short space of nineteen months they have so thoroughly disposed of Piedmonteseism in every branch of civil and military administration that even the word Buzzurri (chestnut-roasters), applied seven years ago by the Romans to their new masters, has become obsolete. The Venetian Gabelli has given us a description of the condition of affairs at present. In the discourse alluded to he proposes a league of the septentrionals. He says: “There is nothing, gentlemen, that drives people to an abuse of power more than the certainty of having so much of it that there is no danger of being made responsible for the abuse. The meridionals are in this position to-day, because they are supported therein by the division of the septentrionals. A part, and a great part, of our votes and forces is subordinate to the votes and forces of the meridionals. But is it true that in Parliament they vote for regional interests?” He answers in the affirmative, and adduces a series of amusing yet startling facts to prove his assertion. He then continues: “I might go on indefinitely with the enumeration of facts proving the existence of the struggle of interests between the northerners and the southerners. This struggle is real and active. Many preach that, even admitting the unfortunate existence of these divisions in the country, they should be kept secret, should not be proclaimed or discussed; above all, they should not be considered as a test in government. What would you say, gentlemen, of the logic of a physician who would reason in this wise: ‘I have a patient prostrate with typhoid fever. But, as this disease is very serious, I will hide it from myself, deny its existence; and because this disease can terminate fatally for my patient I will treat it as a simple inflammation of the bowels.’ That physician would be a fool. But would those rulers be more logical who, recognizing the existence of a condition so serious for the country, would persist in governing without taking it into account? The struggle of interests is an evil. Let us cure it. But to cure it let us begin with an exact diagnosis, and with a recognition that the evil exists. Without an exact diagnosis an efficacious cure would be a miracle. I am for unity. But the unity, and even the existence, of Italy might be threatened by mistrust in our systems of government, by the ever-increasing discontent. The country will always be governed badly, unless consideration be had for its actual condition. I am for unity. But I hold it to be fatal for Italy to pass through a crisis determined by the war of northern and southern interests. What the vicissitudes of this war will be, or who will prevail, no one can foresee. If we northerners remain united and form a compact party, our more advanced civilization, and, let us speak frankly, our honesty, more extensive and serious, will ensure for us a just predominance. If we continue to be divided, while the southerners form one phalanx, we will have to submit to the law of their interests, to the influence of a social condition entirely different from our own.”

We have said nothing in reference to Regionalism—of that faction in the liberal camp which is always conspiring against the monarchical unity of Italy, with a view of substituting a regional confederation of independent republics; nothing of the multitude of liberals who are clamoring for administrative decentralization, as a restoration, in part, of the independence in administration which was taken from the individual regions by political unity; nothing of the absolute impossibility of having a territorial army in Italy, for the reason that Regionalism might assert itself in a more material style, to the imminent peril of the government. We have simply narrated facts furnished by the liberals themselves—by legal Italy, which assumes to be the nation. Narration has the force of demonstration in this instance, and clearly establishes the fact that Regionalism exists in the very core of Italy, nay, rules supreme, regulating politics, constituting parties, biassing every discussion, and threatening, in the long run, not only the unity of the nation but the monarchy personified in the unity.

This much established, a very reasonable doubt may be put forth as to whether the unity of Italy be accomplished, even among the liberals, who arrogated to themselves the right and the faculty to unite it, spite of the nature, the history, the traditions, the genius, and the diverse and contrary interests of the Peninsula. That there is a species of unity we do not question. But it is neither moral nor organic unity, such as forms one whole, ordained to a living purpose, founded on the same principle, agreeing in its operations, harmonious in its members. It is a mechanical and artificial unity, without bonds of life, without order in purpose, without concord in action, without harmony in its parts; in short, it is merely fiscal, not national, unity. This is a logical conclusion, derived entirely from a consideration of legal Italy.

Our conclusion does not assume a more favorable aspect for the unity of Italy if we consider its passive subject—that is to say, the immense number of Italians who were united against their own wish; who never entered into the calculations of the demagogues; who, in deference to the Unity described above, have been outraged in the tenderest affections of the heart and in the most sacred rights of nature; who have gathered no other fruits from unity than regional, municipal, and domestic impoverishment; who perceive that, in the name of this unity, their nation is perverted and their religion vilified, and who consequently recognize in the government naught but an enemy of their purse, their conscience, their family, and their liberty.

From what has been said already the absurdity and, we will add, the malice of the accusation that the Papacy is the only obstacle to the perfection and enjoyment of political unity in Italy become quite apparent. The most powerful obstacle to such unity is not in the Papacy, but in the very nature of things; it is in the history of ages, in the varied character of the people, in the contrariety of the material and moral interests of the different portions of the country. Let liberalism eradicate from its bosom the gnawing worm of Regionalism; let it reconcile opposing interests, quiet regional passions, which are the seeds of civil war; and, having done this much, let it effect a unity with the real country. Until this much be accomplished, to charge the Papacy with the ill success of the national unity is absurd. It is malicious, also, inasmuch as it manifestly tends to separate the people from the Catholic Church, making them regard the spiritual head of the church and their father in the faith as an enemy of their country. Nay, were the liberals successful in effecting their daring purpose, which is the separation of the people from the see of Peter, then indeed would the political unity of Italy receive its death-blow; then indeed would the bond which unites the Italian people be severed, the bond of one faith, the bond of the only unity they really can boast of—religious unity. It were well if the demagogues of Italy bestowed the necessary consideration upon the incomparable uniting force of religion to a people, instead of promoting and hailing with delight every measure devised to destroy it. Since they deem it advisable to affect Prussian and Russian ways and means, why do they not perceive the manifest wisdom of Bismarck’s measures against the Catholic Church?—measures the fundamental purpose of which is not the extinction of the church, as much as the establishment of a firm and lasting basis to the unity of the empire in a uniformity of worship—Protestant, of course. And with this intent were the Falk laws promulgated. Russia, too, fully alive to the importance of a religious uniformity as the indestructible basis of political unity, has peopled Siberia and the squalid prisons of the empire with non-conformists to the so-called Orthodox creed of the land. Never yet was there a dynasty which did not find its main support and perpetuation in the religious unity of its subjects. True or false though the religion may have been, the principle of support was there. And Italy’s patriots, with the connivance, not to say the active concurrence, of a petty provincial dynasty, would perpetuate unity by sowing religious discord among the people; by making of a people, one in faith, in baptism, and actual religious profession, a discordant, divided multitude of Evangelicals, Calvinists, Waldensians, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Methodists. The discord produced in Italy to-day by Regionalism is a great and, in all probability, a fatal evil to the unity of the country. Add the religious disunion of the people to that caused by Regionalism, and the result will be simply chaotic.

The reader may add to these conclusions: If the Pope came to terms with Italy, as she now exists, would not the political unity of the country improve, not to say receive its formal perfection, in consequence? We answer, the hypothesis is inadmissible. Waiving the fact that, as governments are conceived nowadays, the Pope cannot be the subject of any one of them, and that he cannot in conscience accept terms from the Italian government without compromising rights which he is bound to maintain—though in fact they be trampled under foot and no human probability predict their restoration—it is sufficient for us that he declares a Non possumus. But admitting the supposition of a reconciliation, of a cession of imprescriptible rights, would the confusion which now predominates in Italy give place to order? Would the only beatitude to which Italy now aspires be realized? Would the political unity of the nation be established for ever? Would the war of interests cease? Would the interests themselves change their nature? Would the “more civilized” northerners of Italy leave off increasing their prosperity at the expense of the southerners, and these be content with contributing as taxpayers of the land, not as rulers? Would Sicilians and Calabrians live en famille with Venetians and Ligurians? Would Turin, and Venice, and Modena, and Parma, and Florence, and Naples forget that they were once the flourishing capitals of separate, independent states, and be beatified in their present condition, simply the residence of a prefect, and he a favorite of an ill-favored ministry? The glory of being made the capital of Italy presumably satisfies Rome. Think you, however, that the old city is never retrospective? If the puny provincial cities and regions, in struggling for their own regional interests and asserting their importance, cause people to yield to dark forebodings, and to re-peruse and reflect upon the history of the Italian states, what confusion could not the mistress of the world produce, were she to fall back upon her eighteen centuries of glory as the centre of Christendom?

The great obstacle to the enjoyment of political unity in Italy is not in the Vatican, but in the character, genius, history, traditions, and conflicting interests of the Italians themselves, and it is called Regionalism.

AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.
VIRGIL AND HORACE.—IV.

In passages of quiet beauty such as the first six books are full of—the Odyssey, we may call them, of the Æneid, as the last six are its Iliad—Conington is almost always happy. Take, for instance, the picture of the happy valley in Elysium (book vi. 703):

“Meantime, Æneas in the vale

A sheltered forest sees,

Deep woodlands where the evening gale

Goes whispering thro’ the trees,

And Lethe river which flows by

Those dwellings of tranquillity.

Nations and tribes in countless ranks

Were crowding to its verdant banks;

As bees afield in summer clear

Beset the flowerets far and near,

And round the fair white lilies pour,

The deep hum sounds the champaign o’er.”

In such lines, too, Mr. Morris, judging from his own poetry, should be at his best; and here again it is hard to choose between him and his predecessor:

“But down amid a hollow dale, meanwhile, Æneas sees

A secret grove, in thicket fair, with murmuring of the trees,

And Lethe’s stream that all along that quiet place doth wend;

O’er which there hovered countless folks and peoples without end.

And as when bees, amid the fields in summer-tide the bright,

Settle on diverse flowery things, and round the lilies white

Go streaming, so the fields were filled with mighty murmuring.”

Hypercriticism might here point out as a blemish the use of the same word “murmuring” to express the different sounds indicated in the Latin by the words sonantia and murmure; these are just the delicacies to be looked for in Virgil and not to be overlooked by his translator. Moreover, the line,

“A secret grove, in thicket fair, with murmuring of the trees,”

asks considerable good-will and knowledge of the Latin to make it sound quite reasonable, and “diverse flowery things” we have some private doubts about. But “hovered” is certainly a better equivalent for “volabant” than “crowded,” which gives no hint of the shadowy, unsubstantial nature of these dwellers in the realms of Dis—animæ, quibus altera fato corpora debentur:

“Là, les peuples futurs sont des ombres légères,”

as Delille puts it by an anticipative paraphrase. Here Mr. Cranch may meet his antagonists on somewhat better terms, though still we seem to miss in his lines the poetical flavor, which he rarely catches throughout:

“Meanwhile, Æneas in a valley deep

Sees a secluded grove, with rustling leaves

And branches; there the river Lethe glides

Past many a tranquil home; and round about

Innumerable tribes and nations flit.

As in the meadows in the summer-time

The bees besiege the various flowers, and swarm

About the snow-white lilies; and the field

Is filled with murmurings soft.”

The pathos, too, of his author—that exquisite pathos of Virgil which pervades the Æneid like a perfume, which one feels not more in the eloquent compression of the En Priamus wherewith Æneas recognizes his country’s painted woes on the walls of the Carthaginian temple, or the passionate heartbreak of the

“O patria, o divûm domus, Ilium, et incluta bello

Mœnia Dardanidum,”

or the subtle, touching beauty of the epitaph on Æolus, scarcely to be read even now without a quiver of the eyelids:

“Domus alta sub Ida,

Lyrnessi domus alta, solo Laurente sepulcrum,”

than in the

“Vivite felices, quibus est fortuna peracta

Jam sua,”

of the farewell to Helenus, or the manly fortitude of the hero’s admonition to his son:

“Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,

Fortunam ex aliis”

—the pathos of the Æneid Prof. Conington has not been unsuccessful in preserving, as we might show in more quotations than we have room for. But for the expression of sublimity or intense emotion the octosyllabic verse is scarcely so apt; and in striving to do justice to the tragic grandeur of the second book, the passionate despair of the fourth, and the elevated majesty of the sixth, or even the splendid rhetoric of Juno and Turnus in the tenth and eleventh, Prof. Conington must often “have been made sensible,” as he says in his preface, “of the profound difference between the poetry of Scott and the poetry of Virgil.” In the battle-scenes, however, he takes his full revenge, and in his nimble-footed verse Turnus falls on with a fire and fury, or swift Camilla scours the plain with a grace and lightness, which most of his competitors toil after in vain. And in rendering those epigrammatic turns of phrase of which the Æneid is full, and which are so characteristic a feature of Virgil’s style, we know of no version which surpasses his. Take such examples as these:

“Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem”:

“No safety can the vanquished find

Till hope of safety be resigned”;

“Mixtoque insania luctu

Et furiis agitatus amor et conscia virtus”:

“A warrior’s pride, a father’s pain,

In mingled madness glow”;

“Sed neque currentem se nec cognoscit euntem

Tollentemve manu saxumque immane moventem”

(how well in the heavy movement of the last line the sound echoes the sense!—a beauty which the translator certainly misses):

“Running, he knew not that he ran:

Nor, throwing, that he threw”;

the description of Turnus’ horses in book xii.:

“Qui candore nives anteirent, cursibus auras”:

“To match the whiteness of the snow,

The swiftness of the breeze”;

or Corœbus’ appeal to his comrades in book ii.:

“Dolus an virtus, quis in hoste requirat?”

“Who questions, when with foes we deal,

If craft or courage guides the steel?”

Have we not here all needful fidelity united to the air of genuine poetry? Compare Mr. Cranch’s versions of the first and last of these examples:

“The only safety of the vanquished is

To hope for none”;

and

“Whether we make use

Of stratagem or valor who inquires

In dealing with an enemy?”

If Æneas and Corœbus had harangued their fellow-Trojans in this wise, we doubt if they would have helped them so gallantly to make some of the finest poetry in the Æneid. There is no trumpet in such lines as these.

Nevertheless, in spite of many suspicious flavors of prose in his version, Mr. Cranch, we suppose, is to be called a poet. The Boston muses are liberal to their votaries, and do not ask that a man shall be Shakspere or Milton before crowning him with all their laurels. At least, we may fairly say that he is a gentleman of accomplishments and—we should be tempted to add culture, the proper term, we believe, for a person “in society” who knows all the things that are proper for “persons in society” to know, were it not that glib dilettanteism and newspaper sciolists have well-nigh sent that much-abused word into the Coventry of cant. Mr. Cranch is, moreover, a writer of much poetic taste and no little poetic faculty, as he has shown in many pleasant essays in many varieties of metre. Among the kinds of metre which he can write, however, his version of the Æneid has not convinced us that blank-verse is included; or, to put it more agreeably, if not more justly, we are not persuaded that the kind of blank-verse he writes is best fitted to do justice to Virgil.

So much we are led to say, because in his preface Mr. Cranch hints that only a poet can or should attempt to translate the Æneid, and asserts that only in blank-verse can it be fitly translated at all. Into that interminable controversy as to whether any but a poet can translate a poet, or whether rhyme is a curb or a spur, a help or a hindrance, to the judicious translator who knows how to follow its inspiration, we do not propose to enter. But Mr. Cranch, in declaring against the rhymed couplet of Dryden and his followers, delivers himself in a way which to us seems to imply a curious misconception of Virgil’s manner, and leads us to anticipate on the threshold one of the points in which Mr. Cranch’s version most strikingly fails. “The incessantly-recurrent rhyme,” he says, “gives an appearance of antithesis which disturbs the very simplicity and directness of the original.” Adjectives are apt to be used somewhat vaguely—or, as our Western friends would say in their delightful, breezy idiom, “to be slung about with a looseness”—in speaking of the style of ancient writers, of which so few of us nowadays know enough to be justified in speaking at all. We have no desire to meddle more than is needful with these dangerous epithets, double-edged weapons as they are. But unless we have read Virgil quite amiss, he is especially fond of antithesis, which Mr. Cranch seems to think he is not; and he is not especially simple or direct, which Mr. Cranch seems to think he is. Not that he cannot be, as in truth he often is, both simple and direct; but that simplicity and directness are not the features of his style which we should select to characterize it, as we should select them, for example, to characterize the style of Homer. Whatever simplicity Virgil has belongs, we think, to the general conception and conduct of his story, by no means to the manner of his telling it, to the general quality of his thought or style. What directness he has belongs to the general movement of his verse and the necessities of epic composition, and is in spite of a tendency to dwell curiously on incidents not in the track of his narrative, to turn, as it were, from his epic path and linger over wayside flowers of rhetoric or sentiment—a tendency illustrated by that subtlety of allusion which all his critics have remarked, and the habit of hinting at two or three modes of expression while employing one. These characteristics of his poetry would naturally have resulted from the quality of his genius—the genius of taste the Abbé Delille calls it; he was the first of the racinien poets, says Sainte-Beuve[[2]]—and the character of his time. The age he wrote for was one of extreme literary and social refinement, of keen philosophical speculation; the Latin he wrote in was already a literary language—as much so as the French of Racine or the English of Pope. The age of Augustus, in many points, was strikingly like that of Louis XIV. in France and of Charles II. or, still closer, of Queen Anne in England, as has been more than once pointed out. Sainte-Beuve, with his usual insight, has seized upon this resemblance to explain why Virgil, in the account of the shipwreck in the first book (vv. 81 seq.), which is an ingenious cento from the Iliad and Odyssey, should have dropped two of Homer’s most striking similes: that the pilot, struck by the falling mast, went overboard “like a diver,” and that the scattered swimmers—rari nantes in gurgite vasto—were borne like sea-birds on the wave. Virgil omits these images, says the French critic, just because they are so salient, so life-like, so frank and real. “Comparisons of that sort the age of Augustus, like the age of Louis XIV., rather eschewed. They were by no means to the taste of Frenchmen in the days of Saint-Evremond and Segrais (I use extreme terms purposely)—men of society, of the drawing-room, nice scholars who had been often in the Hôtel Rambouillet but little at sea, and to whom divers and sea-birds were unfamiliar sights. The Frenchman of that time preferred general descriptions to images too minutely particularized, and so, too, in a measure, did the Roman of the time of Augustus and the circle of Mæcenas. Mæcenas is not so far, either in taste or philosophy, from Saint-Evremond.”

With some reservations, much the same thing applies to the ages of Dryden and of Pope—to Pope’s age and to Pope himself more strictly, perhaps, than to Dryden or his time; so that one is half inclined to think it a caprice of literary destiny that Pope should have been set to translate Homer, and Dryden Virgil, rather than the reverse. Not that the result would have been a better Homer, if we may judge from Dryden’s sample work in the first book of the Iliad; a better Homer than Pope’s was perhaps not to be looked for in an age which in its poetry thought it fine to call a spade—about which it was apt to be only too plain-spoken in free fireside prose—an agricultural implement, and the bucolic person who wielded it a swain. Pope’s famous ironical essay in the Guardian on his own and Ambrose Phillips’ pastorals is a curious illustration of the then passion for putting Nature into hoops and periwig. Phillips, in a dim, blundering way, is nearer right with his Cecilias and Rogers, who talk at least like ploughmen and milkmaids, than Pope with his gentle Delias and sprightly Sylvias, who converse like masquerading duchesses; but as all the world happened to be masquerading, the laugh was with Pope.

Yet, as between the Greek and Roman poet, it should seem that the former ought to have been more congenial to Dryden, and the latter to Pope. In many of the points where Pope was farthest from Homer he was nearest to Virgil—not least in his love of antithesis, his epigram and point, his brilliant rhetoric, the studied elegance, nay, the artifice, of his style. Even in his most didactic vein he would scarcely have been so far from Virgil as in his most epic strain he was from Homer. Virgil is not averse to a bit of sermonizing sub rosa; he writes with a moral; his Æneas is a sort of fighting parson born before his time. One cannot help feeling, too, in his most impassioned moments, that he is writing with his eye on his style, as Pope always is, as we can never fancy Homer doing. Is the rhetorical artifice any less plain in

“O dolor atque decus magnum rediture parenti”

than in

“Daphne, our grief, our glory, now no more”?

Is the antithesis less pointed in

“Qui candore nives anteirent, cursibus auras”

than in

“Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind”?

There are hardly more lines of the kind in Pope than in the Æneid.

When, therefore, Mr. Cranch tells us that he has taken blank-verse rather than the rhymed couplet in order to avoid the appearance of antithesis, and to secure the clear simplicity and directness of his original, he shows us where to look for some of his failures. His simplicity is too often baldness, his directness not seldom prose, and to the pointedness of the Latin he does much less than ample justice. His blank-verse seems to us monotonous in its modulation and is not always correct. Lines like the following occur too often:

“Thou seekest counsel, gracious sovereign,

In matters which to none of us are dark

Nor needing our voices. All must own

They know what best concerns the public good,

Yet hesitate to speak.”

Indeed, we must confess that we are at a loss to know what Mr. Cranch means by saying: “I am far from pretending that my versification may not frequently fail to convey the movement of the Latin lines to the ear of those to whom they are familiar.” If he means that his versification often, or even sometimes, or at all, conveys the movement of the Latin lines to his own ear, then his ear must be as curiously constructed as the “arrected ears” he bestows on Æneas in the famous shepherd simile in the second book.[[3]]

But it is ungracious to linger on faults which we have only dwelt on because they seemed to flow from what we must take to be a misconception on the part of Mr. Cranch of the true spirit of his author. His version has certainly the merit of fidelity to the sense of the original, though this, it seems to us, is sometimes bought by a sacrifice of the spirit. His verse is, for the most part, what he claims it to be, smooth, flowing, and compact, though it does not recall to us, as to him, the best models of blank-verse, and he does not sin, as one other of our translators does, against that “supreme elegance” which is Virgil’s chief fascination. We find him best in the least essentially poetic passages, which is, perhaps, not so bad a sign as it appears. The speech of Juno in the tenth book is no unfavorable specimen of his best style:

“... Then, stung with rage,

The royal Juno spake: ‘Wherefore dost thou

Force me to break my silence deep, and thus

Proclaim in words my secret sorrow? Who

Of mortals or of gods ever constrained

Æneas to pursue these wars, and face

The Latian monarch as an enemy?

Led by the fates, he came to Italy;

Be it so: Cassandra’s raving prophecies

Impelled him. Was it we who counselled him

To leave his camp and to the winds commit

His life? or to a boy entrust his life

And the chief conduct of the war? or seek

A Tuscan league? or stir up tribes at peace?

What gods, what unrelenting power of mine,

Compelled him to this fraud? What part in this

Had Juno or had Iris, sent from heaven?

A great indignity it is, forsooth,

That the Italians should surround with flames

Your new and rising Troy, and that their chief,

Turnus, should on his native land maintain

His own, whose ancestor Pilumnus was,

Whose mother was the nymph Venetia.

What is it for the Trojans to assail

The Latins with their firebrands, and subdue

The alien fields and bear away their spoils?

Choose their wives’ fathers, and our plighted brides

Tear from our breasts? sue with their hands for peace,

Yet hang up arms upon their ships? Thy power

May rescue Æneas from the Greeks, and show

In place of a live man an empty cloud;

Or change his ships into so many nymphs.

Is it a crime for us to have helped somewhat

The Rutuli against him? Ignorant

And absent, as thou sayst, Æneas is;

Absent and ignorant, then, let him be.

Thou hast thy Paphos, thy Idalium too,

And lofty seat Cythera. Why, then, try

These rugged hearts, a city big with tears?

Do we attempt to overturn your loose,

Unstable Phrygian state? Is it we or he

Who exposed the wretched Trojans to the Greeks?

Who was the cause that Europe rose in arms

With Asia, or who broke an ancient league

By a perfidious theft? Did I command

When the Dardanian adulterer

Did violence to Sparta? Or did I

Supply him weapons and foment the war

By lust? Thou shouldst have then had fear for those

Upon thy side; but now too late thou bring’st

Idle reproaches and unjust complaints.”

In rendering the phrase fovive cupidine bello (“or battles flame with passion fanned,” says Conington) Delille has a characteristic touch almost worthy of Segrais:

“Me vit-on allumer, pour embraser les terres

Au flambeau de l’amour les torches de la guerre.”

In the speech of Turnus in the eleventh book the Trojans become “brigands” and “barbarous assassins,” quite as if the Rutuli chief were a deputy of the Left Centre addressing his friends on the Right. If the good abbé had written a few years later he would no doubt have made them Communists. But his speech of Juno, though rather free, has many fine touches; and, indeed, the French seems to hit off the women’s part of the Æneid better than our English. Thus, the dumb rage with which Juno must have listened to Venus is well hinted in the line,

“Junon muette écoute auprès de son époux,”

though it is by no means so literal as Cranch’s.

Of the three translators of Virgil we are now considering, Mr. Morris certainly brought to his task the greatest natural and acquired gifts. Nay, had we been asked from the ranks of living English writers to pick out the one who could give us Virgil most fitly, with least loss of majesty or beauty, in an English dress, we think we should have named the author of Jason and the Earthly Paradise. For Mr. Morris is not only a poet—a poet of very nearly the first order; whereas Mr. Cranch, we are constrained to say in the teeth of the Boston muses, is hardly more than a poet by brevet—he is also a classical scholar who, in point of general acquirements at least, is a rival whom even Prof. Conington would respect. Since the time of Dryden, and not excepting him, we know of no English poet—unless, perhaps, Pope and the present laureate—whose natural genius should seem to have fitted him so well as Mr. Morris to interpret the Æneid. His own poetry shows many of the most distinctive qualities of Virgil’s verse: its elegance, its pathos, its pregnant allusiveness, above all the pensive grace, the under-note of tender sadness, that runs through all the strain of the Æneid, the underlying motif of its theme. And though the form of narrative verse, in which Mr. Morris has chiefly exercised his powers, is sufficiently remote in tone and spirit from the tone and spirit of epic narrative, yet here and there, as in passages of Jason and of the Lovers of Gudrun, he has come as near to striking the true epic note as any modern poet we recall, unless it be Mr. Matthew Arnold in his admirable and touching fragment of Sohrab and Rustum. Add to this his minute and well-digested knowledge of classic mythology and legend, and his rare mastery of the Saxon and Romance elements of the language, in which so much of its tear-compelling power resides—what Joubert might have called les entrailles des mots—his possession of the secret, so hard to learn, of the sweetness of short and simple words,[[4]] and we had every reason to expect from Mr. Morris a version of the Æneid which should be in the highest degree original, elegant, and fresh, which should even take rank as the best English translation of Virgil’s poem that had yet appeared. That pre-eminence, indeed, has by many English critics been assigned to it; but to their verdict we cannot assent.

Fresh and original this version certainly is; for it is altogether unlike any that has preceded it, in conception, in method, in treatment, we might almost say in metre, since Mr. Morris’ long Alexandrines are, in metrical effect, no more the Alexandrines of Phaer than those of Chapman. Elegant it is, too, so far as regards artistic workmanship and finish; that everything that Mr. Morris sets his hand to is sure to have. But it is not the elegance of Virgil; it is not even the elegance of the Earthly Paradise. The final grace of proportion and fitness it has not, and in spite of many and singular beauties—of beauties which scarcely any living English writer that we know of, except Mr. Morris, could give us—it is not to us, upon the whole, a satisfactory version. Nay, it is most unsatisfactory, and it is so because of the two qualities which should otherwise have made its chief charm—its freshness and its originality; because to the attainment of these Mr. Morris seems to us to have sacrificed the most important quality of all in a translation—fidelity to the spirit of his author.

We need go no farther than the title-page to read the story of his design and, as we incline to hold, his failure. “The Æneids of Virgil done into English verse” is what he offers us, and the affectation of the title runs through the performance and mars it. If from the result we may derive the intent, Mr. Morris set out to produce such a version of the Æneid as might have been written anywhere between the time of Chaucer and Phaer, had any poet then lived who joined to the simplicity and freshness of his own age the culture and self-consciousness of ours. At least, this is the only way we can account for Mr. Morris’ choice of the peculiar style in which he has seen fit to couch, we might almost say to smother, his version—a style which is not, indeed, the style of Chaucer, or of Phaer, or of Chapman (to whom it has been rashly referred by an English critic in the Saturday Review), or, for the matter of that, of any other English author we are acquainted with, living or dead; but which is nevertheless plainly inspired by the same effort in the direction of mediævalism and the earlier manner that has borne such pleasant fruit in the author’s former productions. But the effort is here carried, it seems to us, to “a wasteful and ridiculous excess,” and is, besides, quite out of place in a translation where the writer is not free to form his own manner, but is bound to the manner of his original; unless, indeed, Mr. Morris finds in the style of Virgil the same effect of quaintness and antiquity which he has striven but too successfully to give his translation, and that he is too good a scholar to permit us to believe. Virgil’s style was that of his age, and his unfrequent archaisms, such as faxo for fecero, aulai for aulæ, and the like, can scarcely have produced on the reader of the Augustan era any stronger impression of quaintness than such poetical forms as “spake” and “drave” and “brake” produce on us when we meet them in English poetry today. We must, therefore, assume that Mr. Morris aimed at some such reproduction of the literary manner of a past age as Thackeray gives us in Esmond, or Balzac, with still greater ingenuity but much worse art, in the Contes Drolatiques. This, and a resolve to use only Saxon words as far as possible—a right idea in the main, perhaps, for translation from the Latin, certainly a most interesting and instructive one—and (a less useful idea) to say nothing in the common way which could at all be said out of the common, seem to have been his controlling influences. To these he has subordinated all else but verbal fidelity, and the result is a queer composite production of a strong mediæval flavor—a romanticized Æneid which one of the seekers after the Earthly Paradise might have told his comrades

“Under the lime-trees’ shade

By some sweet stream that knows not of the sea,”

but which, except for fidelity to its meaning, seems to us hardly nearer being Virgil’s Æneid than Pope’s Iliad was to being Homer’s. Close it certainly is; we may say marvellously close. Indeed, so far as we have been able to collate, it surpasses in this respect all previous rhymed versions, even Conington’s, and falls but little below any of those in blank-verse. Not only does it render the Latin line for line—no trifling task, even for the Alexandrine, with its unvarying fourteen syllables against the average fifteen of the hexameter—but not seldom word for word. Moreover, notwithstanding its exactness, it reads as smoothly and as spiritedly as an original poem; it is everywhere set off with those verbal graces of which Mr. Morris is a master, and the metre, which has many merits for the purpose, is throughout handled with admirable skill. Wherein and how, then, does it fail of giving us Virgil?

Because, we answer, not only is Virgil’s tone—his coloring, his local atmosphere-conspicuously absent from Mr. Morris’ translation, not only is the tone of the latter as unlike the tone of the Æneid as can well be, but it is even carefully, studiously, nay, laboriously, removed from it. It may be taken as a rule in translation that any word is out of place which violently disturbs the associations that belong to the original, the train of ideas raised by the original in the reader’s mind. For instance, when Mr. Theodore Martin makes use of the word “madrigal” in his translation of the Carmen Amœbæum of Horace, we somehow feel that he has struck a false note; we are sensible of a discord. The word to the English reader brings up associations wholly foreign to Horace and his time, turns the thoughts of the English reader into a widely different track, and dispels the Horatian effect. Mr. Morris not only does this in single words, but his very design is based on doing it as often as he can; his entire vocabulary is carefully selected with a view to doing it uniformly throughout his work. From the stately towers of Ilium, city of the gods, the arces Pergameæ and incluta bello mœnia Dardanidum; from the splendid temples of Carthage; from the fertile plains of Hesperia, the royal city of Laurentum, and the mighty hundred-pillared palace of Picus; from the Ausonian battle-fields, ringing with the clatter of chariots, the clang of sword on helm and spear on buckler, the shouts and shocks of the contending heroes—from all the scenes and characters so familiar to us in the Virgilian story, Mr. Morris ushers us into a strange, remote, wild Westland, where all the famous doings we thought we knew so well are transformed in the most grotesque fashion. It is a land of “steads” and “firths,” of “meres” and “leas” and “fells,” he takes us into, inhabited not by a people but by “a folk,” who are not named but “hight”; who dwell in “garths” and “burgs” and worship “very godheads” in “fanes”; who never by any chance go anywhere, but either “wend” or “fare” when they are not engaged in “flitting”—a mysterious kind of locomotion which they sometimes achieve by means of “wains”—and who hold converse among themselves not in words but in “speech-lore,” which they at times condescend to speak, but very much prefer, when the rhyme will give them the ghost of a chance, “to waft” through “tooth-hedge” (ore locutus). In this mysterious region are neither times nor numbers, but only “tales” and “tides”; what would be mere tillers of the soil (agricolæ) in Virgil are here become “acre-biders” or “field-folk,” who for cattle have “merry, wholesome herds of neat” (læta boum armenta), and for horses “war-threatening herd-beasts.” Here things are rarely carried, but, like the “speech-lore” above spoken of, are “wafted” whenever humanly possible, and are never done or made when they can by any means be “dight.” Here we are puzzled to recognize our old friends, the Muses, under the disguise of “Song-maids”; we fairly cut those amiable sisters, the Furies, when they are introduced to us as the “Well-willers”; and of the heroes who roar and ruffle so gallantly through the battlefields of the Æneid we have scarcely a glimpse, but instead a “tale” of “lads of war,” “begirded” with “war-gear” and led by “Dukes of man,” who are for ever falling on and smiting or being smitten by a “sort of fellows” dight in “war-weeds,” who fare around in “war-wains” and “deal out iron-bane” (dant funera ferro) with “shot-spears” or “weapon-smiths” and “wound-smiths” instead of simple javelins and swords. Following Mr. Morris’ lead, in short, we find ourselves in a land where Virgil would be as much at home as he would in Asgard or Valhalla, or as the hero Beowulf might be in Elysium. It is a pleasant land enough in its way, and the folk are entertaining folk, but we feel that we have left the Æneid behind us.

It is far from our wish or aim to set Mr. Morris’ work in an unworthy or ridiculous light. Our respect for him is too great, our admiration too sincere, to treat any performance of his lightly. But some such impression as that we have given above is the chief one left on our mind by reading his Æneids. We are no longer in Italy but in Norseland, or, if in Italy, an Italy after the Gothic irruption; Æneas and Turnus, Pallas and Lausus, fortisque Gygas fortisque Cloanthus, are no longer Trojans or Rutules, but Norse jarls and vikings. They bear their Latin names, but that is all that is Latin about them: the hand is the hand of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob. What associations connect themselves in the mind of the English reader with such words as “garth” and “burg” and “firth”? Are they not as unlike as possible to any that belong to Virgil? Do they not disturb and trouble, even totally obscure, the effect the English reader habitually derives from Virgil—these incongruous words dropped into the clear current of the poet’s manner—as a stone flung into a limpid pool may trouble and obscure it? What is there in common between Morris’ “lads of war in vain beleaguered” and Virgil’s nequidquam obsessa juventus?—between Morris’ “very Duke of man” and Virgil’s ipsis ductoribus? (v. 249). What impression is the English reader apt to get from phrases like “flitting by in wain”? It is certainly not that of a hero rushing to battle, but, if any—and we are not sure that upon our own mind any very tangible impression is left at all—rather of a bucolic ghost disappearing somewhere in a spectral hay-cart. To say Carthage is to be “Lady of all lands” is surely to produce an utterly different effect from that of dea gentibus esse (i. 17); and they must have shrewder eyes than ours who can find in such lines as

“Lo! what was there to heave aloft in fashioning of Rome,”

or

“Those fed on good hap all things may because they deem they may,”

anything more than the shell of Virgil’s

“Tantæ molis erat Romanam condere gentem”

or,

“Hos successus alit; possunt quia posse videntur,”

where the pretence of verbal fidelity only makes the verbal affectation more annoyingly weak. These ever-recurring eccentricities of phrase tease the reader and spoil half his enjoyment. In a translator whose daily speech was of “trowing” instead of “trusting,” of “tale” for number or “sort” for company, of “wending” and “wafting,” and “folk” in the singular, and who used “very” rather profusely, and on slight provocation, as an adjective, and “feared” and “learned” as transitive verbs, and agreed with some modern great men in thinking grammar generally a bore, such lines as

“O Palinure, that trowed the shies and soft seas overmuch”;

“These tidings hard for us to trow unto our ears do win”;

“In all thou needest toil herein, from me the deed should wend”;

“A hundred more, and youths withal of age and tale the same”;

“There with his hand he maketh sign and mighty speech he wafts”;

“From the open gates another sort is come”;

“And her much folk of Latin land were fain enow to wed”;

“Hard strive the folk in smiting sea, and oar-blades brush the main”;

“The straits besprent with many a folk”;

“To Helenus his very thrall me very thrall gave o’er”;

“So with their weapons every show of very fight they stir”;

“But learn me now who fain the sooth would wot”;

“About me senseless, throughly feared with marvels grim and great”;

“And many a saying furthermore of God-loved seers of old

Fears her with dreadful memories”;

“Nor was he worser than himself in such a pinch bestead”

—such lines in a translator to whom this dialect was still a living language would not seem unnatural. They would be simply the expression of the effect made by Virgil on the mind of that age, and so far, since every age has its own idiom, they would not necessarily be un-Virgilian at all. Even such extraordinary phrases as

“An ash ...

Round which, sore smitten by the steel, the acre biders throng,

And strive in speeding of the axe,”

for

“Ornum

Cum ferro accisam crebrisque bipennibus instant

Eruere agricolæ certatim”;

or

“When Jove, a-looking down

From highest lift on sail-skimmed sea, and lands that round it lie,

And shores and many folk about in topmost burg of sky,

Stood still,”

for

“Cum Jupiter, æthere summo

Despiciens mare velivolum terrasque jacentes

Litoraque et latos populos, sic vertice cœli

Constitit”;

or

“An ancient mighty rock, indeed, which lay upon the lea,

Set for a landmark, judge and end of acre-strife to be,”

for

“Saxum antiquum, ingens, campo quod forte jacebat,

Limes agro positus, litem ut discerneret arvis”;

or,

“No footstrife but the armed hand must doom betwixt us twain,”

for

“Non cursu, certandum sævis est comminus armis”

—such phrases as these, if to any translator at any time they could have seemed a natural way of saying things, would not then, in such a translator’s version, have struck us with more than the passing and not unpleasant sense of quaintness which is part of the charm we find in the diction of a past age when used by its lawful owners. But when a poet of the nineteenth century sacrilegiously invades the tomb and seizes upon this castoff and moth-eaten verbal bravery of buried ages to bedeck himself withal, it is much as if he should come to make his bow in a modern drawing-room arrayed in the conventional dress-coat, Elizabethan ruff and trunks, Wellington boots, and a Vandyke hat. The novelty might please for a moment, but the incongruity must offend in the end. In the very time which Mr. Morris so much admires they knew this to be false art. “That same framing of his stile to an old rusticke language,” says Sir Philip Sidney in his Apologie for Poesie, speaking of The Shepherd’s Calendar, “I dare not alowe, since neither Theocritus in Greeke, Virgile in Latin, nor Sannazar in Italian did affect it.”

Still worse is it when our amateur of second-hand finery, the bric-à-brac of language, selects such a poet as Virgil—Virgil, whose name is a synonym for supreme, for perfect elegance, whose “taste was his genius”—as a lay figure to drape with these shreds and tatters of an obsolete, fantastic verbiage, “mouldy-dull as Eld herself”—to quote and illustrate at once from Mr. Morris[[5]]—and smelling of the grave. This persistence in going out of the way to hunt for archaisms at once—to repeat a word which best hits our own feeling—teases the reader and distracts him. We seem to feel Mr. Morris amiably tugging our coat-sleeve at every turn to point out this or that fresh eccentricity of language. We fancy we see him chuckling and rubbing his hands gleefully here and there over the discovery of some more than usually exasperating way of violating the usages of modern speech. So vexed and harassed, it is impossible to get much taste of the Æneid; through this word-jugglery we catch such glimpses of it as of the painted scene a conjurer has set behind him to throw his tricks into relief Of a piece with this laborious renaissance of a forgotten tongue are the studied mispronunciations, such as Ænĕas for Ænēas and Erāto for Erăto:

“So did the Father Ænĕas, with all at stretch to hear”;

“To aid, Erāto, while I tell what kings, what deedful tide”;

the false rhymes, such as “wrath” and “forth,” “poured” and “abroad,” “abroad” and “reward,” which might be forgiven to the stress of so long and difficult a task had we not such reason for suspecting them to be intentional; the occasional use of phrases familiar, even low, and totally at variance with Virgil’s lofty and cultivated style, such as “gobbets of the men” for frusta, iii. 632; “Phrygian fellows” (Phrygii comites); “those Teucrian fellows”; “the other lads” for juventus; “but as they gave and took in talk” (hac vice sermonum); “he spake and footed it afore” (dixit et ante tulit gressum); “unlearned Æneas fell aquake” (Horruit ... inscius Æneas)—surely a most undignified proceeding for a hero; “so east and west he called to him, and spake such words to tell” (dehinc talia fatur)—the list is long, scarce a page but would swell it; or the compound epithets which Mr. Morris—herein, no doubt, taking his cue from Chapman, but not so happily or with such good reason—has coined profusely. “In the Augustan poets,” says Prof. Conington, “compound epithets are chiefly conspicuous by their absence, and a translator of an Augustan poet ought not to suffer them to be too prominent a feature of his style.” This assertion must be qualified with regard to Virgil, who, in imitation of his model, Homer, and in obedience, perhaps, to a supposed law of epic composition, has too many compounds to permit it to pass unchallenged—such, for instance, as armisonus (Palladis armisonæ—“Pallas of the weapon-din”), velivolus (“sail-skimmed”), legifer (legiferæ Cereri—“Ceres wise of law”), letifer (“deadly”), cælicolus (“heaven-abider”), laniger (“woolly”), noctivagus (“nightly-straying”), and the like. Yet, not content to render these by English compounds even where it is not always expedient—since the compound form in our own language will often, from its strangeness in a familiar tongue, seem strained and awkward, where in the less familiar Latin it seems only natural and elegant[[6]]—Mr. Morris has introduced many other compounds of his own invention for which there is no authority in Virgil at all, which in many instances are discordant with his style and not seldom downright grotesque—such combinations as “hot-heart” for ardens, or “cold-hand in the war” (frigidus bello) or even “fate-wise,” “weapon-won,” “war-lord,” “battle-lord,” “air-high,” “star-smiting,” “outland-wrought,” “heaven-abider” (cœlicolus), “like-aged,” “goddess-led,” etc., which meet us at every turn. And what are we to say of such inventions as “murder-wolf,” “death-stealth” (“on death-stealth onward the Trojan went”—hic furio fervidus instat), “dreaming-tide” for somnus, “war-Turnus,” “weapon-great,” “helpless-fain” for nequidquam avidus, “hero-gathered stone” (lapis ipsi viri), “anger-seas,” “wounding-craft,” “bit-befoaming,” “speech-masters,” or those others, if possible still more extraordinary, already mentioned, “weapon-smith,” “wound-smith,” “tooth-hedge”? These, and scores of other such we have marked for notice, are surely as little like Virgil as they are like any English that is spoken to-day; and they are scarcely less potent than Mr. Morris’ archaisms in disturbing and altering the Virgilian tone. Of a like effect are the quaint and unconsequential translations now and then of Latin names—as of Musæ into “Song-maids,” Eumenides into “Well-willers,” Avernus into “Fowlless,” and soon—whereby for a perfectly familiar and intelligible term of the Latin is substituted in the English a grotesque and puzzling word, and which again stops the current of the story until the reader can readjust his mind to the novel ideas it awakes. The most unclassical of readers has his notions formed of the Muses and the Furies, at least, if not of the Eumenides; but of these Song-maids—who might as well be milk-maids—and of these Well-willers—who rather suggest well-diggers—he must form a new notion as he reads. And one might add, at the risk of seeming to split hairs, that in thus translating the word Eumenides we lose much of the effect of that euphemism with which the Greeks, like all strongly imaginative peoples, sought to keep disagreeable subjects at arm’s length—the form τι παθεῖν, as a synonym for dying, is exactly paralleled by the Irish phrase “suffered,” applied to an executed rebel—or perhaps to ward off the wrath of these ticklish neighbors, as Celtic races, again, are in the habit of calling fairies “the good people.” A more substantial objection is that Mr. Morris seems capricious in the matter, for we see no particular reason for his translating one such name and others not at all—-why he should not give us Quail-land for Ortygia, or Chalk Island for Crete, as well as Westland for Hesperia, or Fowlless for Avernus.

It is a result of these affectations, or—for we are loath to press the charge of affectation against a poet whose own writing is so genuine and sincere—of these peculiarities of style, which have on the reader all the seeming and effect of affectation, that the pathos of Virgil, the one quality to which Mr. Morris should have been best fitted to do justice, he has greatly impaired. Affectation is fatal to pathos; one cannot have much feeling for the woes which are carefully set forth in verbal mosaic. Take but a single example—a passage in Virgil already referred to—which sets forth admirably that faculty the Latin poet has to so curious a degree of infusing sadness into mere words, but in which Mr. Morris is little behind him. It is the death of Æolus, which Mr. Morris renders thus:

“Thee also, warring Æolus, did that Laurentine field

See fallen and cumbering the earth with body laid alow;

Thou diest, whom the Argive hosts might never overthrow,

Nor that Achilles’ hand that wrought the Priam’s realm its wrack.

Here was thy meted mortal doom: high house ‘neath Ida’s back—

High house within Lyrnessus’ garth, grave in Laurentine lea.”

It only needs to compare this with the original to see how far it misses the pathos of the Latin; it needs only to compare it with Mr. Morris himself, where he has forgotten or failed to be sufficiently archaic, to see the reason of the miss. Take, again, the passage from the shipwreck in the second book already referred to:

“Now therewithal Æneas’ limbs grew weak with chilly dread;

He groaned, and, lifting both his palms aloft to heaven, he said:

O thrice and four times happy ye that had the fate to fall

Before your fathers’ faces there by Troy’s beloved wall!

Tydidĕs, thou of Danaan folk, the mightiest under shield,

Why might I never lay me down upon the Ilian field?

Why was my soul forbid release at thy most mighty hand,

Where eager Hector stooped and lay before Achilles’ wand,

Where huge Sarpedon fell asleep, where Simois rolls along

The shields of men and helms of men and bodies of the strong?”

The word “wand” for telo has an odd look, but that may be forgiven to the rhyme; and the rest is simple, emotional, and true. In like happy moments of oblivion we catch an echo of Jason, as in the opening of book vii.:

“The faint winds breathe about the night, the moon shines clear and kind;

Beneath the quivering, shining road the wide seas gleaming lie....

The fowl that love the river-bank and haunt the river-bed

Sweetened the air with plenteous song and through the thicket fled.”

The rising of the Rutules in vii. 623 is an animated picture unmarred by too many of the mannerisms we have spoken of:

“... All Ausonia yet unstirred brake suddenly ablaze;

And some will go afoot to field, and some will wend their ways

Aloft on horses dusty-fierce; all seek their battle-gear.

Some polish bright the buckler’s face and rub the pike-point clear

With fat of sheep; and many an axe upon the wheel is worn.

They joy to rear the banners up and hearken to the horn.

And now five mighty cities forge the point and edge anew

On new-raised anvils: Tibur proud, Atina stanch to do,

Ardea and Crustumerium’s folk, Antennæ castle-crowned.

They hollow helming for the head; they bend the withe around

For buckler-boss; or other some beat breastplates of the brass,

Or from the toughened silver bring the shining greaves to pass.

Now fails all prize of share and work, all yearning for the plough;

The swords their fathers bore afield anew they smithy now.

Now is the gathering trumpet blown; the battle-token speeds,

And this man catches helm from wall; this thrusteth foaming steeds

To collar; this his shield does on, and mail-coat threesome laid

Of golden link, and girdeth him with ancient trusty blade.”

Passages like this—and, indeed, there are many of them—only deepen our regret that Mr. Morris should let a whim of doubtful taste deprive us of what might have been otherwise the best rendering of the Æneid yet. One other passage we will give, and then cease to tax longer the patience of the reader. It shall be the gallant picture of Turnus sallying forth to battle (xi. 486), which, as it is taken from the like description of Paris, near the end of the sixth Iliad, will permit us to compare Morris’ manner with Chapman’s:

“Now eager Turnus for the war his body did begird:

The ruddy gleaming coat of mail upon his breast he did,

And roughened him with brazen scales; with gold his legs he hid;

With brow yet bare, unto his side he girt the sword of fight,

And, all a glittering, golden man, ran down the castle’s height.[[7]]

High leaps his heart, his hope runs forth the foeman’s force to face;

As steed, when broken are the bonds, fleeth the stabling place,

Set free at last, and, having won the unfenced open mead.

Now runneth to the grassy ground wherein the mare-kind feed;

Or, wont to water, speedeth him in well-known stream to wash,

And, wantoning, with uptost head about the world doth dash,

While wave his mane-locks o’er his neck, and o’er his shoulders play.”

Compare Chapman, Iliad vi. 503 (Οὐδέ Πάρις δήθυνεν ἐν ὑψηλοῖοι δόμοιοιν):

“And now was Paris come

From his high towers, who made no stay when once he had put on

His richest armor, but flew forth; the flints he trod upon

Sparkled with lustre of his arms; his long-ebb’d spirits now flow’d

The higher for their lower ebb. And as a fair steed, proud,

With full-giv’n mangers, long tied up, and now his head-stall broke,

He breaks from stable, runs the field, and with an ample stroke

Measures the centre; neighs and lifts aloft his wanton head,

About his shoulders shakes his crest, and where he hath been fed,

Or in some calm flood wash’d, or stung with his high plight, he flies

Amongst his females; strength put forth his beauty, beautifies,

And like life’s mirror bears his gait: so Paris from the tower

Of lofty Pergamos came forth.”

Is not the modern older in style than the ancient?

We lay aside Mr. Morris’ book with a mingling of admiration and regret. The critical and poetical ability shown in it is of the first order—no man could have spoiled Virgil so thoroughly as we think Mr. Morris has in places who did not know him au bout des ongles, just as a clever parody shows true appreciation of an author—and its ingenuity is amazing. But one feels it to be a wasted ingenuity, and the predominant sentiment with which we leave the book is one of annoyance that a man should so wilfully do ill what his very errors prove him capable of doing so well. Yet for all that the book wins upon us as most of Mr. Morris’ work has a way of doing; and if one could but get reconciled to a Norseland Æneis, we should no doubt find it pleasant enough.

Perhaps we cannot better dismiss our subject than by saying, in the old-time fashion of comparison, that of these three translations Conington’s will probably be read for the story by those who know Virgil not at all; Mr. Cranch’s for its literalness by those who half know Virgil and are willing to know him better; and Mr. Morris’ for its very ingenuity of perversion by those who know Virgil so well that to see him in any new light, even a false light, only adds a fillip to their love for him.

ST. CUTHBERT.

Behold the shepherd lad of Lammermuir

Tending his small flock on the uplands bleak.

Alone he seems, yet to his young heart speak

Voices that none may hear except the pure.

His dreaming eyes—where duller souls, secure

Of earth alone, see naught—are quick to seek

Angels howe’er disguised; and week by week

The higher call within grows clear and sure.

Now see him, humbly clad, with staff in hand,

Thread the wild vales of Tweed and Teviot,

To bear God’s Word through a benighted land,

And bless with prayer each peasant’s lonely cot.

Brave soul wert thou, though few thy worth may sing,

Thou chosen saint of England’s noblest king.

PILATE’S STORY.

Caligula was reigning, C. Marcius was prætor at Vienne, in Dauphiny, when a litter, escorted by a number of cavaliers, one evening entered the triumphal gate of this metropolis of Gaul. Many gathered together at the unusual display. On the door of the modest little house before which they stopped, and which stood close by the Temple of Mars, was the name of F. Albinus in bright red letters. An old man, tall in stature, but now bent with age and fatigue, alighted from the litter, and, preceded by two of his attendant Hebrew slaves, entered the reception-room, where he was greeted by his friend, the master of the house.

After having bathed and received the usual attentions at the hands of the slaves, he proceeded with his host to the supper-room to enjoy the evening meal. The lamps were lighted, and Albinus was alone with the new guest, with whom he entered into conversation as soon as the dish of fresh eggs was placed before them.

“Many years have passed since we separated,” said Albinus; “let us empty a cup of Rhone wine to your return.”

“Yes, many years!” sighed the old man; “and cursed be the day whereon I succeeded Valerius Gratus in the government of Judea! My name is unlucky; a fatality is attached to all who bear it. One of my ancestors left the stamp of infamy on the name of Roman when he passed under the yoke in the Caudine Forks, after fighting against the Samnites; another perished in Parthia, fighting against Phraates; and I—I—”

The wine remained untasted, while his unbidden tears fell into the cup.

“Well! you—what have you done? Some injustice of Caligula exiles you to Vienne; and for what crime? I read your affair in the tabularium. You were denounced to the emperor by your enemy, Vitellius, the prefect of Syria; you punished a few Hebrew rebels who, after assassinating some noble Samaritans, entrenched themselves on Mount Garizim. You were accused of doing this out of hatred to the Jews.”

“No, no, Albinus; by all the gods! it is not the injustice of Cæsar which afflicts me.”

“What exactions did you impose?”

“None.”

“Did you carry off any Jewish women?”

“Never!”

“Did you gibbet any Roman citizens, as Verres did in Sicily?”

Pilate did not reply.

“I always took you to be good and sensible,” continued Albinus; “hence I did not hesitate to proclaim aloud in the city that your spoliation and exile were an outrage. It was never referred to the senate. The whole affair was evidently owing to some caprice of Vitellius.”

“Albinus, let us talk of other things. I am tired, having just arrived from Rome. Serious things for to-morrow, says the sage. This Rhone wine is exquisite.”

“Beware of it, Pontius; it disturbs the brain.”

“So much the better. But I am not afraid of it. I am accustomed to the wine of Engaddi; that is a potent Bacchus.”

“As you please. But tell me, you who come from Rome, what stirs men’s minds there? Have you aught to interest my ear?”

“The auguries are bad. I did not recognize Rome; she no longer goes forward, but steadily sinks!”

“What say you?”

“I say what is. From here you cannot detect the mysterious subterranean noise which rumbles as with the approach of that invisible, superior power now irresistibly pushing the empire to its ruin. Our gods are vanquished; they abandon us. Listen, Albinus; let me this evening throw a smile to your Penates, and no more words of what is sorrowful. Night is the mother of sadness, but the triclinium counsels gayety. Tell the child to turn me a cup of wine of Cyprus, and ask the slave to bring my sandals and prepare my bed. I love not the gloom of night; let us haste to sleep, that the day may sooner come.”

Albinus bowed, and the desires of Pilate were complied with. As the slave approached him with a silver hand-basin for washing his hands, Pilate’s face turned pale as with fright, while the light of his eyes was terrible to behold.

The next day was the eve of the kalends of August. Pilate took a walk with Albinus in the Roman city of Vienne, and listened abstractedly to the conversation of his friend, who pointed out the various localities as they passed along, and the many splendid monuments rising on every side.

“There is left no trace of the domination of the Allobroges here,” said Albinus. “Since the death of Julius Cæsar they have ceased to disturb the city. Life is quiet and peaceable at Vienne, and you can spend here the years which the gods still grant you in secure contentment.

“Here before us is the palace of the emperors; it is not so grand, so sumptuous as that on Mount Palatine, but it is good enough for those who never visit it. Look to the left, and see the temple of Augustus and Livia; unless your eyes are weakened by the sun of Judea, you can read, from here, the inscription: Divo Augusto et Liviæ. Beyond is that dedicated to the Hundred Gods. If we go down to the river we can get a little fresh air on the bridge. Vienne, as you may have already remarked, is a very pleasant place of residence; the climate is quite mild, being so thoroughly sheltered by the surrounding mountains from the violence of the winds. We are only fifteen leagues from Lyons; and by the Rhone our away to both Marseilles and Arles is shortened. These three important cities are under the government of Vienne, as Tiberius has decreed; so thank fate, which has sent you to so pleasant a place of exile.”

Albinus remarked a look of trouble in the face of the old man, whose eyes were fixed on a point of dust in the direction of the river-bank, and from which were seen gradually to emerge horsemen with armor glistening in the sun.

“It is the prætor,” said Albinus; “he has been visiting the works at the amphitheatre. That is his daily ride.”

“Let us avoid the prætor,” said Pilate; “may he never know my face!”

As they reached the “Quirinal” street on the way back, they were met and separated by a crowd of idlers who, attracted by the trumpets, had gathered from every side to witness the passage of the prætorian escort. Pilate found himself isolated, and soon became an object of interest, as is the case with one who seeks alone to stem a popular current. His dress was enough to attract insulting remarks. For from his long sojourn in Judea Pilate had insensibly adopted Hebrew fashions in dress, gesture, and deportment. His very figure, black hair, and dark complexion (he was of Iberian origin) betrayed more the Hebrew than the Roman.

“Let the Jew pass; he is going to the synagogue,” said one at his side.

“Mothers! watch your little ones,” said another; “the wolf is out of the Quirinal.”

“We had better take him and crucify him,” muttered a third.

But nothing further was done to molest him, and Pilate passed safely through the crowd, with head sunk upon his breast and suppliant bearing, as far as the head of the street, where a different scene awaited him.

Seeing a house which closely resembled that of Albinus (for a number of them were similar in construction), and finding the door standing open, he hastily entered, glad to find its shelter at last, and closed the door behind him.

A fearful cry chilled the blood in his very veins; he heard his own name uttered, and thrust his fingers in his ears at the ominous sound.

The master and his family were at their daily labor, as basket-makers, beneath the interior peristyle called the impluvium. When he entered the master recognized Pilate, for he knew the more than famous name of the stranger whose exile to Vienne had been made public. “Pilate! Pilate!” he cried; and the women and children dropped their wicker-work as they, too, repeated this formidable name, stained with the blood of God himself. The family were Christians.

Pilate asked an asylum, but they did not understand him, as he spoke a sort of Hebrew-Latin and they were Gallic Allobroges. Still, as they caught the name of Albinus twice or thrice repeated, the father made signs to the rest of the family to be seated, and, as if recalling some divine precept of charity learned in the secret assembly of the faithful, he approached Pilate and quietly showed him the house of his neighbor Albinus. Pilate crossed the street and entered his friend’s house.

Albinus was not over-displeased when the rude crowd separated him from a companion whose appearance bade fair to compromise him before the public. Like a good courtier he prudently stayed to see the prætor, shouted Vivat imperator! and praised the rare magnificence of the escort and the beauty of the horses; after which he quietly returned to his house, where he found his friend in an agony of despair.

“I am recognized,” cried Pilate as Albinus entered; “the little children pointed their fingers at me on the street. O Albinus! remember that our lips as very children uttered words of friendship; remember that we played together on the banks of the Tiber; that we have sat at the same banquets and raised our cups in the same libations. Remember the past and protect me beneath the inviolable shelter of thy roof. I seek a refuge beneath the sacred wings of thy hospitality.”

Albinus was too moved for utterance, and silently pressed the hands of Pilate.

“There are Christians, then, at Vienne also?” asked Pilate, as he passed his hand over his aching brow.

“Oh! yes, as there are everywhere,” replied Albinus, “except in our temples. You are afraid of those people, then?”

“Ah! yes, yes. I fear them. I fear everybody. Jews, Romans, Pagans—all are odious, terrible to me! The Romans see in me a criminal fallen into disgrace before Cæsar; the Jews, a severe proconsul who persecuted them; and the Christians, the executioner of their God!”

“Their God! their God! The impious wretches!”

“Albinus, have a care what you say!”

“They adore as a God that Jesus of Nazareth who was born in a stable and put to death on a cross?”

“They would not adore him if he had dressed in garments of velvet and lived in princely halls.... Albinus, I am about to submit my life to your judgment; you will see whether I am worthy of the hospitality which you offer me.”

Changing his seat for one more comfortable, Pilate continued:

“Albinus, order your doors to be closed, and let a slave watch at the porch, as when a young virgin first enters the doors of her spouse. The ear of Cæsar is everywhere on the alert. And now listen. All my misfortunes spring from the death of this man, this Nazarene. Tiberius cursed me because of him; Caligula now exiles me because of him; for this boldness of the Christian sect, which to-day threatens the empire, began at the foot of Calvary. If Jesus had not been put to death, his followers would never have crossed the Jordan nor the sea of Cæsarea. It is the death of that man which has made so many martyrs. But could I prevent that death?

“When I was about to set out as successor to Valerius Gratus, Sejanus summoned me to the Palatine and gave me his instructions. ‘You are intimate,’ he said, ‘with the Roman policy; hence a few words will do. Judea is a beautiful country; after completing its conquest we must strengthen its possession by a paternal government. Let all your care be to draw blessings down upon the Roman name. We have left the Jews a king of their own race, their temple, their laws, their religion. They are a brave and haughty race, with heroic deeds inscribed in their history, and which they well remember. Govern them wisely, that they may regard you more as a stranger visiting than as a master holding the reins.’

“I set out with my wife and my servants. When near the quarter of the Tres tabernæ I met Tiberius, then returning from Pannonia. Recognizing the imperial escort, I immediately alighted to salute Cæsar. He had received at Brundisium my nomination, and confirmed it, and now, offering me his hand most graciously, he said:

“‘Pontius, you have a fine government; let your hand be firm and your speech conciliatory. Act in public matters according to your own good sense, and never forget the eternal maxim of the Romans:

‘Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.[[8]]

Go and be happy.’

“The auguries were favorable, you see.

“I reached Jerusalem, took solemn possession of the government, and gave orders for a splendid feast, to which I invited the tetrarch of Judea, the high-priest, and the other Hebrew dignitaries and princes of the people. At the appointed time not a guest appeared! This was a mortal affront. Some days later the tetrarch deigned to honor me with a visit, but he was cold and full of dissimulation. He pretended that their religion did not permit them to sit at our table nor offer libations with Gentiles. I thought best to accept this excuse graciously; but from that day the conquered were in declared hostility with the conquerors.

“Jerusalem was, at that time, the most difficult subject-city in the world to govern; the people were so turbulent that from day to day I was always expecting a sedition. To suppress this I had only a centurion and a handful of soldiers, so I wrote to the prefect of Syria to send me a reinforcement of troops, but he answered that he had hardly enough for himself. Ah! what a misfortune that the empire is so large; we have more conquests than soldiers.

“Among the thousand rumors which circulated about me there was one that attracted my special notice. Public rumor and my secret agents alike reported that a young man had appeared in Galilee with a remarkable sweetness of speech and a noble austerity of manner, and that he went about the city and the borders of the sea, preaching a new law in the name of the God who had sent him. I at first thought that this man intended to arouse the people against us, and that his words were preparatory to a revolt. But my fears were soon dissipated; Jesus the Nazarene spoke as a friend rather of the Romans than of the Jews. Passing one day, in my litter, near the pool of Siloe, I saw a large gathering of people, and remarked in the midst a young man standing with his back to a tree and quietly addressing the crowd. I was told that it was Jesus, but I could have guessed it at once, so different was he in appearance from those who listened. He seemed about thirty years of age, and the wonderful reddish-blond tint of his hair and beard gave a luminous appearance to his noble countenance. Never have I seen so mild a glance, so calm a face; he was a striking contrast to the dark skins and black beards of his auditors. From fear of disturbing the liberty of his speech by my presence I passed on, leaving my secretary to mingle with the crowd and hear his words. This man’s name was Manlius; he was grandson of that chief among the conspirators who awaited Catiline in Etruria, and, having dwelt many years in Judea, understood perfectly the Hebrew tongue. He was, moreover, sincerely devoted to my interests, and I could always trust him. On my return home I found Manlius awaiting me with a detailed account of the speech which Jesus had pronounced. Never in the Forum, never in the books of sages, have I met anything comparable to the maxims which had that day reached the ears of Manlius. One of those rebellious Jews such as abound at Jerusalem having asked if tribute were to be paid to Cæsar, Jesus answered him: ‘Render under Cæsar what is Cæsar’s, and unto God what is God’s.’

“Thence the great liberty which I gave to the Nazarene; it was doubtless in my power to arrest him at any time, put him on a galley, and send him to Pontus, but I should have felt myself acting against justice and good Roman sense. The man was neither seditious nor rebellious. I gave him, perhaps without his knowledge, the benefit of my protection; he was free to act, to speak to the people, to fill a whole square with his audience, to create a legion of disciples to follow him from city to desert, or lake to mountain, and never did an order from me interpose to trouble either orator or auditory. If some day—may the gods forefend!—if some day the religion of our fathers fall before the religion of Jesus, Rome will pay a noble tribute to her own generous toleration, and I, unhappy I! will be called the instrument of what the Christians call Providence—what we call fate.

“But this great liberty which Jesus enjoyed from my protection displeased the Jews—not the common people, but the rich and powerful. True, they were the very ones whom Jesus did not spare in his discourse, and that was for me an additional political reason for allowing him free speech. He told them—that is, the Scribes and Pharisees—that they were a race of vipers and no better than whited sepulchres. And another time he sharply criticised the ostentatious charity of the rich man, saying that the mite of a poor widow woman was far more precious to God. New complaints against the insolence of his speech came to me nearly every day. Deputations came with their griefs before my tribunal. I was told that he would be assaulted; that it would not be the first time that Jerusalem had stoned those who called themselves prophets; and that if the prætor refused them justice they would appeal to the emperor.

“So I was beforehand with them. I at once wrote letters to Cæsar, and the galley Ptolemais carried them to Rome. My conduct was approved by the senate, but I was refused the reinforcement of troops which I asked, or at least I was given to hope that the garrison of Jerusalem should be strengthened after the war with Parthia was terminated. That was an interminable delay, for our wars with Parthia never end.

“Being too weak to repress a sedition, I determined to make a move which would pacify the city, without obliging me to make any humiliating concessions; so I at once sent for Jesus of Nazareth.

“He received my messenger with due respect, and came straightway to the prætorium.

“O Albinus! now that age has weakened every part of my bodily frame, and that my muscles in vain ask a little vigor from my thin and cold blood, I am not astonished if Pilate occasionally trembles; but I was younger then, and my Spanish blood, mingled with the Roman which coursed through my veins, was proof against any ordinary emotion of fear. When I saw the Nazarene enter my basilica, where I was walking, it seemed as if a hand of iron held me to the marble of the pavement. I thought I heard the very bucklers of gilt-bronze, dedicated to Cæsar, sigh as they hung against the columns. The Nazarene was as calm as innocence itself; he stood before me, with a single gesture, as if to say: Behold me. For some time I remained contemplating, with mingled terror and admiration, this extraordinary man, type of a physical perfection unknown to any of the innumerable sculptors who have given face and form to so many gods and heroes. ‘Jesus,’ said I at last, when my emotion had subsided—‘Jesus of Nazareth, for nearly three years I have allowed you freely to speak in public and everywhere, nor do I now regret it. Your words have ever been those of a true sage. I know not whether you have ever read Socrates or Plato, but there is in your language a majestic simplicity which raises you far above even those great philosophers. The emperor has been informed of it, and I, his humble representative at Jerusalem, count myself happy to have allowed you the toleration of which you are worthy. I must not, however, disguise from you that your words have provoked against you powerful and terrible enemies; be not astonished that you have thus become an object of hatred, for so was Socrates to those who encompassed his death. Your enemies are doubly irritated, against you and against me: against you, because of your sharp criticisms; against me, because of the liberty which I have allowed you. I am even accused of complicity with you to destroy what little civil power has been left to the Hebrews by Rome. I give you no commands, but I charge you seriously to spare the pride of your enemies, that they may not stir up against you a stupid populace, and that I may not be obliged to detach from these trophies the axe and the fasces, which should serve here only as an ornament and never as an occasion of fear.’

“The Nazarene answered me:

“‘Prince of the earth, thy words spring from a false wisdom. Tell the torrent to stop midway on the mountain-side, lest it uproot the trees of the valley. The torrent will tell thee it obeys the voice of God. He alone knows whither goeth the water of the impetuous stream. Amen, amen I say unto thee, before the roses of Sharon bud the blood of the just shall be shed.’

“‘I do not wish your blood to be shed,’ I exclaimed hastily. ‘You are more precious in my eyes, because of your wisdom, than all those turbulent and haughty Pharisees, who abuse our Roman patience, conspire against Cæsar, and mistake our forbearance for fear. The dolts!—not to know that the wolf of the Tiber sometimes conceals himself under an innocent fleece! But I will defend you against them; my prætorium is open to you as a place of refuge. You will find it an inviolable asylum.’

“He shook his head quietly with an air of godlike grace, and replied:

“‘When the day comes, there will be no shelter on earth, nor in the depths, for the Son of Man. The only asylum of the just is above. What is written in the books of the prophets must be accomplished.’

“‘Young man,’ said I, ‘I have just made you a request. I now give you a command. The preservation of order in the province confided to my charge requires it. I demand that the tone of your speech become more moderate. Beware of opposing my will! You know my intentions; go and be happy.’

“With these words my voice lost its severity and became mild again, for it seemed that a harsh word could not be uttered before this extraordinary being, who calmed the storms of the lake with a motion of his head, as his own disciples testified.

“‘Prince of the earth,’ said he, ‘I do not bring war to the nations, but charity and love. I was born the very day when Cæsar Augustus proclaimed peace to the Roman world. Persecution cannot come from me; I expect it from others, and do not flee before it. I go before it, in obedience to the will of my Father, who has appointed my way. Keep thy foolish prudence. It is not in thy power to stop the victim at the foot of the altar of expiation.’

“Saying these words, he disappeared like a luminous shadow behind the curtain.

“What could I do further? Fate could not be averted. The tetrarch who then reigned in Judea, and who has since died, devoured by worms, was a foolish and a wicked man. The chiefs of the law had chosen this man to be the tool of their hate and vengeance. To him the whole cohort addressed themselves in their thirst for vengeance against the Nazarene.

“Had Herod consulted only his passion, he would have put Jesus to death at once; but although he regarded his impotent royalty as a matter of importance, still he shrank from an act which might injure him with Cæsar.

“Some days later I saw him coming to the prætorium. He began a conversation with me on indifferent subjects, in order to conceal the true object of his visit; but, as he rose from his seat to go, he asked, with an air of indifference, what I thought of the Nazarene.

“I replied that Jesus seemed to me one of those grave philosophers such as arise among the nations from time to time; that his language was by no means dangerous; and that it was the intention of Rome to leave to this sage perfect liberty of speech and action.

“Herod smiled at me with malignity, and with an ironical gesture departed.

“The great feast of the Jews was near at hand, and their leaders determined to take advantage of the popular exaltation which is always manifested at the Paschal season. The city was crowded with a turbulent rabble, who shouted for the death of the Nazarene. My emissaries reported that the treasure of the Temple had been used to stir the popular feeling. The danger was imminent, and my very power was insulted in the person of my centurion, whom they hustled about and spat upon.

“I wrote to the prefect of Syria, then at Ptolemais, and asked for one hundred horse and as many foot-soldiers, but he reiterated his former refusal. I was alone, in a mutinous city, with a few veterans, too weak to suppress the disorder, and with no choice but to tolerate it.

“They had already seized Jesus, and the triumphant people, knowing that they had nothing to fear from me, and hoping, on the word of their leaders, that I would tacitly acquiesce in their designs, rushed after him through the streets, shouting: ‘Crucify him! crucify him!’

“Three powerful sects had coalesced in this plot against Jesus: first the Herodians and the Sadducees, who had a double motive—hatred against him and impatience at the Roman yoke. They had never forgiven me for entering the holy city with the banners of the empire; and although I made them an unwise concession in this matter, the sacrilege still remained in their eyes. Yet another grief stood against me, because I had wished a contribution from the treasures of the Temple towards certain buildings of public importance, and which had been coarsely refused. Then the Pharisees, who were the direct enemies of Jesus: they did not trouble themselves about the governor, but for three years they had angrily heard and endured the severe language of Jesus against their weaknesses. Too weak and pusillanimous to act alone, they eagerly embraced the quarrel of the Herodians and Sadducees. Besides these three parties, I had also to struggle against a crowd of those idle, worthless beings who are always ready to rush into a sedition out of love for disorder and a taste for blood.

“Jesus was dragged before the council of priests and condemned to death; after which Caiphas, the high-priest, made a hypocritical act of submission by sending the condemned man for me to pronounce the sentence and have it executed. My answer was that as Jesus was a Galilean it did not concern me; so I sent him to Herod. The wily tetrarch pretended great humility, protesting his remarkable deference for the lieutenant of Cæsar, and left the fate of the man to be determined on by me. My palace resembled a citadel besieged by an army; for at every moment the seditious crowd was reinforced by fresh arrivals from the mountains of Nazareth, the cities of Galilee, the plains of Esdrelon. It seemed as if all Judea had invaded Jerusalem.

“My wife was from Gaul, and had, like most women of her nation, the gift of reading the future. She now came, and, throwing herself in tears at my feet, exclaimed: ‘Beware of laying a violent hand on this man. His person is sacred. I saw him in a dream this night; he walked upon the waters, he rode upon the wings of the wind, he spoke to the tempest, to the palm-trees of the desert, to the fish in the waters, and they all responded to his voice. The torrent of the brook Kedron was as blood before me; the imperial eagles were in the dust, and the columns of this very prætorium were crumbled, while the sun was in darkness, as a vestal at the tomb. There is misfortune about us, Pilate; and if you do not believe in the words of the Gaul, listen hereafter to the maledictions of the senate and of Cæsar against the cowardly proconsul!’

“Just then my marble staircase trembled, as I may say, beneath the steps of the angry multitude. They had returned with the Nazarene. Entering the hall of justice, followed by my guards, I demanded in a stern voice of the crowd: ‘What will ye?’

“‘The death of the Nazarene!’ shouted the mob.

“‘What is his crime?’

“‘He has blasphemed; he has predicted the ruin of the Temple; he calls himself the Messias, the Son of God, and says that he is the King of the Jews!’

“‘The justice of Rome does not punish these crimes by death!’

“‘Seize him! Crucify him! crucify him!’

“Their ferocious cries seemed to shake the very foundations of the palace, and but one man amid all this tumult was calm: it was the Nazarene! One might have taken him for the statue of innocence in the temple of the Eumenides.

“After many useless efforts to withdraw him from the hands of the self-willed multitude, I had the fatal weakness to command what, at the time, occurred to me as the only thing that might perchance save his life. I ordered him to be beaten with rods, and, calling for a basin, washed my hands before the crowd, which, if not hearing my voice, might at least catch the allegorical meaning of my act.

“But they would have his life. Often in our civil troubles I have seen what an angry crowd can be capable of, but all my memories and experience of the past were effaced by what I saw then. I might almost say that Jerusalem was peopled by all the infernal spirits of Hades, and as they crowded about me there seemed an odor as of sulphur exuding from their bloodshot eyes and inhuman countenances. Their very movements were not as of men, but, like the waves of an angry sea, they rolled and dashed, in ceaseless undulations, from the prætorium to Mount Sion; yelling, shouting in a most unearthly manner, such as never in the troubles of the Forum or the seditions of the Pantheon assaulted a Roman ear.

“The day had slowly darkened, as in a winter evening, such as we saw it when the great Julius died—’twas also near the ides of March—and I, the mortified governor of a province in full and unrestrained rebellion, stood leaning against a column, gazing through the gray, unnatural light at the infuriated spirits who bore the innocent Jesus to his death.

“It became gradually quiet about me, for the whole population had followed to the place of execution, leaving the city as silent and as mournful as the tomb, even my very guards having disappeared, save the centurion alone. I, too, felt alone; isolated from the rest of mankind, and in my strangely-excited heart, I understood that what was passing around me pertained rather to the history of the gods than to that of men. The sounds brought by the wind from Golgotha announced to my horrified ear a death-agony such as never human nature underwent before. Dense leaden clouds shrouded the pinnacle of the great Temple, and thence seemed to envelop the vast city as with a veil of impenetrable darkness. Terrible signs of perturbation were manifest on earth and in the air, prodigious enough to make Dionysius the Areopagite exclaim: ‘Either the Author of nature suffers or the whole universe is being dissolved.’

“At the first hour of the night I wrapped myself in a cloak and walked down into the city towards the gate leading to Golgotha. The sacrifice was consummated! The attitude of the people was no longer the same, for the crowd re-entered Jerusalem, disorderly, of course, but silent and moody, as if filled with shame and despair. Fear and remorse were in every heart. My little cohort passed by, as silent as the populace; the very eagle had been draped as in mourning, and in the last ranks I heard some soldiers talking in a curious manner of things which I could not comprehend. Others were relating prodigies somewhat like those that have often terrified Rome by the will of the gods. Now and then I came across groups of men and women in grievous sadness as they moved over that sorrowful way, or as, in some cases, they turned back towards the mount of expiation, expecting, perhaps, some new prodigy.

“Returning to the prætorium, my own breast seemed to embrace all the desolation of this painful scene, and as I climbed the stairs I saw, by the lightning flash, the marble still covered with His blood. There stood, awaiting me in most humble attitude, an old man, accompanied by several women, sobbing in the darkness.

“Throwing himself at my feet, the old man wept.

“‘What do you ask, my father?’ I said in a mild voice. He answered:

“‘I am Joseph of Arimathea, and I come to beg, on my knees, the favor of burying Jesus of Nazareth.’

“Raising him up gently, I promised that his wishes should be complied with. At the same time I called Manlius, who went with some soldiers to superintend the burial, and to place a few sentinels over the grave, that it might not be profaned. A few days afterwards the grave was empty, and the disciples of Jesus published everywhere that their Master had risen again, as he had foretold.

“There now remained for me a last duty to perform: to send a full account of this extraordinary event to Cæsar, which I did that very night; and the minute relation which I gave was not yet completed when daylight appeared.

“The sound of trumpets drew me from my task, and, glancing towards the gate of Cæsarea, I saw an unusual stir among the soldiers and sentinels, and heard in the distance other trumpets playing Cæsar’s march; it was my reinforcement of troops, two thousand in number, who had, in order to arrive more promptly, made a night-march. ‘Oh! the great iniquity had to be completed,’ I cried, wringing my hands in despair. ‘They arrive the next morning to save a man who was sacrificed the day before. O cruel irony of fate! Alas! as the Victim said on the cross: ”All is consummated.“’

“From that moment, invested with abundant power, I set no limits to my hatred against the people who had forced me into both crime and cowardice. I struck terror into Jerusalem. And, as if further to excite my vengeance, I shortly afterwards received a letter from the emperor, wherein he blamed my conduct very severely. My official account of the death of Jesus had been read before a full senate, and had excited a profound sensation. The image of the Nazarene, honored as a god, had been placed in the sacred place of the imperial palace. The courtiers, who were opposed to me, seized the pretext to begin that long series of accusations which now, years after the death of Tiberius, have at last brought me to this city of exile, where my life is to go out in anguish and remorse.

“I have told you all, Albinus, and my words have opened to you my innermost soul; you will surely do me the justice to say that Pilate was more unfortunate than wicked.”

The old man ceased; tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks, while his fixed and hollow eyes seemed to gaze with fright upon some scene, invisible to other eyes, the lugubrious phantasm of an ever-present past. Albinus was wrapt in sombre thought, seeking in what manner of speech to simulate pity for his guest.

“Pontius,” said he, “your misfortunes are not ordinary ones, yet there may be a balm for the ulcers of your memory and heart. You must invoke the Fates, whose good-will may disarm the anger of the gods.”

Pilate gave such a smile, amid his tears, as distressed the prudent Albinus.

“The city is a bad place for you,” pursued Albinus; “hatred is at home in public assemblies, and Janus, who watches at the threshold, cannot protect the domestic hearth against violence from without. Why not ask of our mountains the quiet and peace which seem refused to you here? The air of the fields invites repose and counsels forgetfulness of canker care.”

“I fear to understand you,” said Pilate, turning suddenly pale and with quivering lips. “Yes, I am afraid I comprehend your meaning too well; like a serpent, you take a long turn to attain your end. You wish to close the door of your house against the old man!”

“The gods, whom I invoke, and who hear me,” said Albinus, “know that I have never violated the sacred laws of hospitality, but—”

“Yes,” interrupted the old man—“yes, towards others, but towards me you will find an excuse for violating them. I understand—do not finish! I must spare a friend the embarrassment of words which his lips refuse to utter. Albinus, I feel the spirit of a Stoic revive in me; the waxen torch flashes up yet once before going out. Listen; I am about to salute your Penates. I will depart.”

Albinus lowered his eyes and was silent.

“Well! well! your silence speaks, as Marcus Tullius says. I will call my servants.”

“Your servants?” said Albinus, as Pilate rose from his seat. “Your servants? You have none; they have fled from you!”

“It is well!” answered Pilate.

“One alone has remained faithful—an old soldier.”

“Ah! that is Longinus; I know him. Tell the servant to call Longinus, and permit me to blow out your lamp; the oil is exhausted, and here is the dawn.”

“Oh! blame me not, Pontius. Let not your farewell insult my household gods!”

“I blame you? No, I pity you. The blood of Rome weakens in every vein; there are no Romans now. Let altars be everywhere erected to Fear; the house of Albinus is built on the very threshold of the Temple of Mars!”

And Pilate uttered a loud, hard laugh, which ceased at the entrance of the soldier.

“May your fidelity be rewarded, Longinus! You did not follow the deserters. Albinus, do you know what this soldier did? He was in the spearmen; he was at Golgotha, at the foot of the gibbet, when the Nazarene died; he pierced his heart with his lance. Longinus will die a Christian. Have you girded on your sword, old soldier, my last friend?”

The soldier made a sign of assent.

“All is, then, ready.” And Pilate saluted Albinus.

An hour after these two men had reached midway the side of a mountain overlooking the city of Vienne. The sun was rising in all the calm beauty of a summer morn; its first rays glistened upon the gilt-bronze dome of the Temple of Victory and the marble roof of the Temple of the Hundred Gods. Mysterious night still reigned in the sacred woods which crowned the dwelling of the Immortals. The city, inclined towards the Rhone, seemed listening in unbroken silence to the harmonious murmurings of the stream; the hill-tops floated in an atmosphere of molten gold, while the noise of cascades, the song of birds, and the countless melodies of a fresh, delicious morning, rising from valley to mountain-top, filled all whose hearts were light with joy and gratitude to the Powers above.

Pilate halted, his eyes fixed on a dark chasm which, yawning, stood before him. In the depths below could be heard the mournful plash of waters, to the eye unseen; dense brush, interwoven with dwarf oaks and the wild fig, hung over and, half-concealing, yet increased the horrid abyss, and a piece of the rock, detached and hurled over, struggled and tossed awhile among the resisting vines before dropping into the gloomy waters to send up a series of ill-boding, mournful echoes.

Pilate smiled at the gulf of horror, then turned to contemplate the immense sublimity which surrounded his agony of despair; he thought of the death of the Nazarene—that death so calm amid the universal distress of nature—and wept bitterly.

“Longinus,” said he, “put up your sword; I do not need it. I can die without you; I do not wish you to soil your hands with my blood, for you are yet covered with another blood which will never be effaced. Yes, Longinus, the Sage of Golgotha was one of the superior intelligences; retain that belief. All who stained their hands with his blood have perished miserably; think of Herod and Caiphas. Tiberius likewise was suffocated in his bed at Capreæ, and I yet survive—I! See how I imitate them!”

And he threw himself into the abyss. Longinus heard the interlacing branches crack, but saw only the torn remnants of a toga here and there adhering to the thorny plants which grew upon the sides. He heard the dull bound of the body from rock to rock, and a last unearthly cry of agony, enhanced by echo, and fading to the splash of water as its disturbed surface leaped and glistened in the rays of the now penetrating sun.

So died the man under whom Christ suffered.

ON CALVARY.

SUGGESTED BY A PAINTING BY J. L. GÉRÔME.

In the strong sunshine lies Jerusalem,

Undarkened yet by shadow of the doom

That hideth in the terror-freighted gloom

Lying afar along the low hills’ hem.

Twinkle the silver-leavèd olive-trees,

Resting in garish light ’neath heaven’s cloudy seas.

From Calvary’s Mount descends the winding train;

Glitter the Roman eagles in the sun,

Leading the soldiers and the people on

To tread the city’s dolorous streets again,

Whose blood-tracked stones would cry, had they but breath,

“Woe! woe! Jerusalem, for this day’s deed of wrath.”

Almost unheeding passes on the crowd,

Save, here and there, turned from the populace,

Rests look of doubting or malignant face

On That we see not in death’s anguish bowed.

Wild cries of hate mount up and break the still

And ominous glare that broodeth dumbly o’er the hill.

Our sad hearts hear the very footsteps fall,

The horse-hoofs striking hard against the stones,

And distant echoes of heart-broken moans—

Jerusalem’s daughters mourning so the thrall

Of Him, their fairest one, to death betrayed,

The hands that blessed their little ones so sore arrayed.

Where is the dying King the cross uplifts?

We cannot see him, and our upraised eyes

Meet but the awful gloom in far-off skies,

The lurid moon dull gazing through the rifts

Of gathering darkness; here the waiting glare

Of cruel sunshine making all the city fair.

Fain would we kneel with Magdalen and weep,

Clasp wounded feet in passionate embrace,

Win with the loved disciple word of grace,

Vigil with God’s woe-stricken Mother keep:

We cannot find Him, and blaspheming cries

From that retreating train still in fierce chorus rise.

Is He not here? Lo! sadly looking down,

Just at our feet a shadow strange we trace

Falling across the sunlit grassy place—

The likeness of three crosses darkly thrown,

And His, the centre one, e’en so most fair

Through semblance of a form divine it dim doth bear.

Here, ’gainst the sunshine traced, lie those bent knees

That knew the sorrow of Gethsemani

As trembled they ’neath its dread mystery;

Here droops the thorn-crowned head in silent peace,

And here, in the unswerving shadow lined,

Are stretched the arms that bear the ransom of mankind.

So rests unseen the presence of the Lord

Whose shadow seems as blessèd aureole,

A holy writing on a sacred scroll,

Rich oil from consecrated vessel poured—

All merit his, the Infinite Son of God,

Whose death so lightly falls on earth’s poor, soulless sod.

Within the painted shadow is no life,

Save in the grassy sward whereon it falls.

Beyond arise the city’s firm-built walls.

With spring’s swift-coursing sap the boughs are rife

Of the gnarled olives with their silver leaves

Shining against the dusky veil the storm-wind weaves.

We see the wild-faced moon in skies far-off,

The bare and weary light of undimmed sun,

And Caesar’s glittering eagles leading on

The thoughtless people, who, with jeer and scoff,

An abject God in proud derision scorn,

Alike from barren shade and living presence turn.

O weary thought! hath earth lost sight of Him?

And do her children with dulled vision grope,

With fain-believing heart and doubting hope,

His cross a parable with meaning dim?

A shadow resting in the feeble clasp

Of them that fear the bitterness of truth to grasp?

Is all that sorrow of the Son of Man

A dreary darkness shutting out the light?

Poor human pain dwarfing eternal might?

An o’ergrown bramble with its prickly span

Piercing the delicate leaves of earth-born flowers,

And blighting with harsh touch kind nature’s generous powers?

Alas! that men that Infinite Love should fear,

Should dread its glory and its shade despise,

Banish its semblance from imploring eyes,

Give men but empty shadow to revere—

Blind beggars leaving them unto whose cry

None answereth when He of Nazareth goes by.

Of this sad modern world of ours to-day

The artist’s picture seemeth counterpart,

When men erase old lessons from the heart,

Striving who farthest from the cross may stray—

Swift, swift descending ’neath the eagles’ shine,

Some longing face still turned to meet the gaze divine.

In her long-ordered way the earth moves on,

The moon doth change with steady law her face,

Swift-growing grass still hides our footsteps’ trace,

And dew falls softly when the day is done:

All nature’s tale seems old, but one thing strange—

The Christ of God a shade the westering sun shall change!

Nay, fear not! Stand to-day as e’er of old

The faithful Maries, who brave vigil keep,

The loved disciple with a love as deep

As in old days lay shrined in heart of gold;

And rests God’s patience till from shadowed sod

The piercing cry break forth, “This was the Son of God.”

A BISHOP’S LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE IN THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.[[9]]

The diocese of Paderborn is one of the largest in Germany. Its bishop, Dr. Conrad Martin, has just published a little work[[10]] which may vie with Silvio Pellico’s Le mie Prigioni, being an account of a three years’ banishment from his see. It is not “poetry and truth,” remarks the writer of this pamphlet in his preface, “but only the truth which is written down in these pages.”[[11]] And true to his statement, the bishop tells us in dispassionate language of his captivity, of its joys and sorrows, of the friends who were so true to him in his adversity, of the whole Catholic Church, who shared his banishment in a measure, and of that most august prisoner whose sympathy is so freely given to his suffering brethren, and whose captivity is in itself, perhaps, a pledge that they too must taste of his own chalice.

With the presentiment of future events, or rather of the storm which was about to break over their pastor on account of the Kulturkampf, the people of Paderborn came in large numbers in the spring of 1874 to assure him of their love and devotion. The demonstration began on the 25th of March, when the train deposited five thousand pilgrims in the ancient city of Paderborn. They repaired to the bishop’s house, and terminated the meeting by simultaneously falling on their knees to recite aloud the Apostles’ Creed. These deputations lasted for two months, and on one occasion the number of deputies amounted to fifteen thousand. It is not an insignificant fact to see how well and bravely the flock stood by the pastor in his hour of need. But at last the cloud burst. Repeated infringements of the May Laws were laid to the bishop’s charge; and the fine in proportion rose to a sum altogether beyond his means, and a corresponding term of imprisonment was the only alternative. Here an unknown, and therefore doubly generous, benefactor interposed, and paid the money required without the bishop’s knowledge. But, to use his own simple language, Dr. Martin, “from higher considerations, thought he could not accept the benefit,” and protested against it,[[12]] whereas the local authority said that he could. At last an answer came from Berlin deciding that he should submit himself to imprisonment. As the bishop would not consent to that, force was used, and on the 4th of August, 1874, he was taken from his house through a dense crowd of sympathizers to his prison, where he was witness of a scene “not to be described by words.” Bouquets of flowers fell at his feet from all sides, and the steps leading up to the abode of his sorrow were thick with them. Two works had been near his heart as a pastor—the establishment of ecclesiastical institutions for the fitting education of the clergy, and the labor of love which is expressed by the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This touching devotion was therefore one of the first-fruits of his own workings, and it has become widely known through the world. But never before had the bishop of Paderborn shared the prison common to malefactors of every degree. The prisoner was then conducted to his two cells. One he describes as “certainly not roomy, but still not wholly unpleasant”;[[13]] the second was to serve merely as a bed-room. Loneliness is the prisoner’s trial, and when first the bishop heard the lock and key tell him of his utter solitude, sad thoughts pressed themselves upon him. Many years before he had paid a pastoral visit to this same prison, and his own encouraging words spoken then came home to him now. “Could you only have imagined then,” he said to himself, “that you yourself should be confined in the same dungeon, and come to need the recommendation to resignation and patience which you gave to those prisoners? Oh! what a change, what a comparison then and now—then, when there was no Kulturkampf, but an undisturbed and joyous peace. O tempora, o mores!”[[14]] But the angel of consolation was at hand. The thought of that divine Providence whose care of us is so beautifully specified in Holy Scripture brought peace. “Every hair of our head is numbered.” The bishop determined upon active endurance, and during those first few hours of his imprisonment planned for himself an order of duties for the coming solitary days. That night the breaking of a pane of glass in his bed-room window, caused by the hurling of a stone from an unknown hand outside, was a little alarming, and, in spite of inquiries on the subject, it could not be discovered whether the missile was directed by a friend in a serenading spirit, or by a foe who might have taken umbrage at the demonstrations of intense affection on the part of the people of Paderborn.

For the rest the bishop, according to his own account, had small cause for complaint during his confinement at Paderborn.[[15]] His food was provided and sent from his house. He was allowed to read and write when and what he liked. Strict supervision was, however, exercised on his correspondence and on the visits which he received. These were permitted in the presence of a third person only, and letters might be read and sent under the same condition. The Holy Sacrifice, which was his daily refreshment, supplied many deficiencies in that lonely heart. But the “body of death” had still to suffer much from privation of air and exercise. It is true that once a day the prison bolt was withdrawn for an exercise of two hours in the court-yard. This had to be taken in common with the other prisoners, in a very limited space, so that the bishop often preferred to sit by an open window in his room, there to enjoy what air he could get.

On the 17th of August, the eighteenth anniversary of his episcopal consecration, the widowed cathedral of Paderborn was filled with an assembly of the bishop’s faithful children, who celebrated the occasion by heartfelt prayers for him to God. Flags adorned the houses of the Catholic inhabitants. But the pastor’s heart was further gladdened by the intelligence that from the very first day of his captivity a certain number of the faithful gathered every evening in the Gaukirche to offer up the rosary for their oppressed church. And now, after the lapse of three years, the same practice is kept up, and who would be so presumptuous as to say that the divine Head of the whole body will not allow pleading so constant finally to bring about the desired end? It reminds us of that supplication of the infant church to remove Peter’s chains, or of a case which was brought before our personal observation in Germany.[[16]] Our Lord’s presence in the Holy Eucharist had been banished from his sanctuary through the working of the May Laws, but the villagers succeeded each other during the day in unremitting prayer before the altar where he once dwelt.

Upon the bishop’s six weeks of confinement followed eighteen of custody. The only distinguishable difference between the two consisted in the non-bolting of the prison-door from the exterior. On the outset he was saddened by the command to surrender his office as bishop. The summons came to him through the Oberpräsident von Kühlwetter, whose attitude to Dr. Martin from the beginning of the Kulturkampf had been most hostile. One act in particular of the bishop’s seems to have roused the enmity of the non-Catholic party, but the principle of authority must fall to the ground where demands wholly contrary to his conscience are urged upon a spiritual ruler. The act in question had been a certain pastoral letter in the affair of the Old Catholics. The bishop replied immediately that “devotion to the Catholic Church had been his first love, and that it would be his last.” Ten days of respite were allowed for the reconsideration of the question, under the threat of ultimate expulsion from his dignity. But, thanks to an energetic nature and the quiet peace which is the fruit of a brave determination, it had small influence over the bishop. He labored to finish his work on the Christian Life, and time, which is so often the greatest trial of the prisoner, passed rapidly away. His feast-day was the next small event to break the monotony of his life. From his window he could see the festive appearance of some neighboring houses, and from far and wide came wishes of sympathy and affection. The telegraphic messages and letters of congratulation numbered over eight hundred on this day, and proved a provision of encouragement for several succeeding days. They were the flowers of persecution, and as such most dear to the bishop’s Catholic spirit.

Oppression does indeed often bring the work of the Lord to a timely and palpable development, and we may echo the prisoner’s words: “Would years of hard work have given evidence of so close a union as well as this short and fleeting sorrow?”[[17]] At the same time two other addresses reached him which were a source of particular joy: the one from a good number of Belgian noblemen, who thereby drew forth a remonstrance on the part of Prince Bismarck, the other from two imprisoned bishops of the far west who were themselves confessors of the faith, and protesting by their personal suffering against the evil spirit of Freemasonry. They were the bishops of Para and Pernambuco, who, profiting by the journey of a priest to Europe, took occasion to express their love and sympathy to the fellow-sufferer in Germany who was bearing the self-same testimony to Catholic truth as they themselves. Comfort, too, came from the Holy Father, who sent first a gold medal, and then, on the feast of St. Conrad, a telegraphic message of greeting and good wishes. But the price of these favors was suffering and greater suffering. The threat on the part of the secular power to depose the bishop was now carried out. Many and grievous had been his shortcomings, according to the standard established by the May Laws, and amongst the accusations brought against him was the erroneous charge that he alone amongst the German bishops had worked in favor of the Papal Infallibility at the Vatican Council. Extensive quotations from his pastoral letters were given in the indictment, whilst the words he had addressed on various occasions to his faithful children, their constant devotion to him, the legal measures recently carried out, and the cause now pending were alleged as the ground why he could not continue to exercise his office. He was invited to appear on the 5th of January, 1875, to answer these charges, after which day, and having simply refused to accept the act of deposition, it was nailed to his door inside. There it remained quietly hanging, says the bishop with dry German humor, “without my casting one single glance upon its contents.”[[18]] The feast of Christmas, which occurred in the midst of these cares, found him not altogether joyless. The prison chapel bore for him a resemblance to the lonely grotto of Bethlehem.

The bishop fancied that after enduring his twenty-four weeks of imprisonment he might hope for fresh air and liberty. That hopefulness was rather surprising. Instead of the accomplishment of this expectation, his house was stripped of its furniture (which was afterwards sold), and he himself was conveyed on very short notice to the fortress of Wesel, it being explicitly stated that this penalty was the consequence of the before-mentioned pastoral regarding the Old Catholics. The same sympathizing crowd met him on his way to the station, and his private secretary accompanied him by choice to the scene of his new imprisonment. It was on the 20th of January, 1875, that the bishop entered on the two months’ penalty at Wesel, and there he seems on the whole to have been better off than at Paderborn. He could walk freely on the ramparts, and enjoy to a certain extent social intercourse with the other prisoners, who were in most cases priests of his own diocese. Three cells were assigned to him for his use; the third was an act of thoughtfulness on the part of the commandant, who had reserved it for the bishop’s daily Mass. If, indeed, it had not been for the Holy Sacrifice—for every day, Dr. Martin remarks, “holy” Masses were said up till ten o’clock by the imprisoned priests[[19]]—the fortress would have borne a resemblance to the middle state where souls are detained for a time on account of their sins. The supervision exercised was slight, beyond the visitation of all the cells twice every day. Once when the bishop was taking exercise on the ramparts which overlooked the Rhine—in itself like the face of an old friend to Dr. Martin—some of the faithful who descried him in the distance knelt for his blessing. The act, the bishop knew not how, was communicated to the commandant, who forbade him in writing to repeat it. At Wesel correspondence was free, and even newspapers of all kinds were permitted. Feelers were sent out by the government to test the bishop’s sentiments with regard to his civil deposition, but his consent could never be obtained. And he was cheered and supported by an address which was brought to him towards the middle of March by a nobleman on the part of his diocese. It contained these words: “It is true that your lordship as bishop has been deposed by the Royal Court of Justice in Berlin, but you are, and will remain, our bishop, and we will be faithful to you until death.”[[20]] Two thick volumes bore the signatures to this statement, and they numbered ninety-six thousand.

After his life in the fortress the bishop was refreshed by a little breathing-time in a friendly house in Wesel itself. His host had just married and taken his bride to Rome. On their return they brought to the exiled pastor a new token of sympathy from the Holy Father in the shape of another gold medal. The days passed pleasantly for the bishop, as far as that was possible out of his diocese, until he made the discovery that he had not yet paid the entire penalty of the famous pastoral. He was sentenced to another month’s imprisonment in the fortress. “I had always thought,” he writes, “that for one offence it sufficed to be punished once. But the powers of the state said no.”[[21]] Summer had come, and a return to the fortress in that season was no small penance. The sun’s penetrating rays made the prisoner’s little cells almost intolerable, and the bishop’s health began visibly to decline. He lost his appetite and his sleep, and the only remedy, according to the doctor, to produce return of vital power would have been change of air and a course of sea-baths. But for this desired end he learned from the mayor of Wesel that it would be necessary to undergo an examination from the district doctor, and to procure a written statement that such treatment was necessary. Moreover, it was enjoined that the place chosen for the cure should be at least twenty miles distant from the diocese of Paderborn. A Protestant district doctor was accordingly consulted, and his opinion exactly corresponded with the bishop’s own account of his state, whereupon Dr. Martin gave himself up to the pleasant hope of soon being able to leave Wesel. “I wished for haste the more,” he says, “as my state became worse from day to day. The continual agitation in which I was kept helped to aggravate things. For day after day I received tidings of new ruins which the unhappy Kulturkampf worked in my poor diocese.”[[22]] In the autumn of 1873—that is, after the promulgation of the May Laws—the bishop had given faculties to four newly-ordained priests. This is the most natural and harmless action of a bishop, for what spiritual act can take place without that exercise of his jurisdiction? Pronouncing a priest competent for the care of souls is analogous to the action in law of giving a brief to a barrister. What if the church should require a barrister to present himself to the bishop for approbation before he received such a brief? But the May Laws completely confuse spiritual and temporal things. The bishop was accused of breaking article fifteen of those regulations, which runs that “spiritual rulers are bound to present such candidates as are about to receive a spiritual office to the Oberpräsident, whilst at the same time the office is specified.” If the barrister obtain briefs after he has been called, the bishop does not meddle with him; but because the priests in question had exercised their faculties Berlin thought well to condemn the bishop to a further imprisonment of six months.

But now a new phase began in the life of Dr. Martin. Having “waited and waited” for the permission to follow out the cure which a disimpassioned authority had pronounced absolutely necessary, he resolved to act in spite of the law, and to fly from Wesel. He considered this course not only allowable, but even obligatory, seeing two principal reasons. His health was seriously endangered, if he could not have the required treatment, and that health belonged not to himself but to his diocese. Furthermore, in Wesel his movements were so closely watched that one single act of the pastoral office might give the government a plea for still more rigorous measures. Therefore on the 3d of August he wrote an official letter stating his intended departure from Wesel on the morrow; and so, as the clock struck the hour of midnight, he was quietly crossing the bridge over the Rhine, and on the following day, the 5th of August, he was received at the Castle of Neuburg by the family of Ausemburg. How full his heart was of his appointed work we may gather from the attempt to return to Paderborn. At Aix-la-Chapelle two railway authorities recognized him, and he was counselled by a valued friend to go back to Holland in “God’s name!” The document which reached him a few days later proved the soundness of the advice. It was from the Minister of the Interior at Berlin, announcing to him the fact that he was from henceforth an outlaw in the eyes of his country. The May Laws further exhausted their bitterness against him by the warrant which was issued from the district court in Paderborn for another imprisonment of six months. But it seems that these punishments did not affect the bishop’s peace of mind. Amidst tokens of universal love and devotion he was spending his time chiefly with the Ausemburg family, occupying his leisure with writing on religious subjects, amongst which one was Devotion to the Sacred Heart. After his fruitless attempt to join his bereaved flock he had directed his efforts in the first place towards his own physical restoration. After a three weeks’ cure in Kattwyk, which worked a wonderful change for the better in his state, he visited the bishops of Haarlem and Roermond, and rejoiced his spirit by witnessing some of the fruits of the new and vigorous Catholic life which has been promoted in Holland by the re-establishment of the hierarchy. Whilst Dr. Martin was with the bishop of Haarlem he received intelligence of the dreadful fire which the “dear Paderstadt” had sustained.

These peaceful days, however, were not of long duration. They were shortened by one of the bitterest experiences which a pastor can be called upon to endure—that is, an unfaithful friend. A priest of his diocese (the only one besides Mönnikes, he remarks) had gone over to the enemies of the church, and vainly had the bishop tried the power of loving exhortation. He was obliged at last to use that spiritual weapon which has ever been obnoxious to a world impatient of restraint, and to pronounce excommunication, fully conscious of the possible consequences of the step, and therefore prepared to accept them. The government of Holland was too weak to protect an exile. It gave way under more powerful pressure, and the bishop was ordered to leave.

“I prayed to God for light,” he says. “I asked St. Joseph (it was in March, 1876) to lead me where I should go.”[[23]] His steps were directed to Catholic Belgium; but whatever the character of the population may be, that of the policy of its government is rightly defined by the bishop as the effort to keep out of the way of Prince Bismarck’s complications, which effort is the ne plus ultra of political wisdom. He was not, therefore, much astonished when he received orders to leave the Belgian frontier.

A homeless, houseless exile, the bishop once more wandered forth in strict incognito, we are not told where, but the place must have been wisely chosen, for there he remained in great retirement from April, 1876, till the following April. Then it was that Rome, the home of all Catholic hearts, once more awoke his desires; but, owing to the well-known sentiments of the Italian government, he was aware that the journey had its dangers for a bishop under the ban of the Kulturkampf. He set out, nevertheless, and on his journey through France experienced numberless consolations and the warmest reception from the French bishops. Persecution imprints on the heart the device, Cor unum et anima una.

On the 24th of May, 1877, the feast of St. Monica, he arrived in Rome for the fifth time. Men are trying to make even the Eternal City new, and as the bishop walked through the familiar streets he felt that the voice might indeed be the voice of Jacob, whilst the hands were the hands of Esau. The Colosseum, consecrated by remembrances so heart-stirring, now appeared to him as a dearly-loved face whence the spirit had fled. It is the nature of Rome to be the most conservative of cities, and never are natural laws overturned with comfort. These were the German bishop’s thoughts as again he compared what had been to what was, the more so as he found the improvement wholly exterior and material, and, along with finer streets in course of erection, was obliged to notice a lowering of moral tone in their inhabitants. Even the faces of the men he met seemed to have altered; for, he says, they are mostly not Romans, but a kind of heterogeneous mob gathered from all quarters of the globe.

When Pius VII. returned to Rome after the persecution which had threatened to annihilate his power, he invited his enemy’s family to partake of hospitality in that city, as the land of great misfortunes; but now the Holy Father, his successor, could offer nothing but an affectionate greeting to a bishop who had borne so noble a witness to the truth. The shadow of Pius IX.’s captivity must fall upon all his children. An exiled bishop sought refuge in Rome as the home of his father, and Rome could not give him what he sought. By the advice of several cardinals Dr. Martin changed his residence and went out only in secular dress, but not before he had been denounced by unfriendly papers as one who was under arrest. On the 24th of May, in consequence of continued persecution from the press, and in honest fear of more serious ill-treatment, strengthened by the loving farewell and the apostolical blessing of the Holy Father for himself and his diocese, the bishop of Paderborn set out for an unknown place of exile, happy at least in his resemblance to One who, coming unto his own, was not received by them.

The early church wrote the acts of her martyrs, in order that the remembrance of their deeds should never perish, and the church of the nineteenth century may be allowed to record the struggle of her confessors not only for a perpetual memorial of them, but also that others who are not in the fight may realize at once the presence of the battle-field and the nature of the warfare. We have seen that it exists; its nature cannot be better defined than by the words of him whose confessorship we are recording:

“The Papacy is in fact the one and only point round which the Kulturkampf is raging, and I am convinced that if the ‘deposed’ and banished bishops were to break off their connection with the Papacy to-day, to-morrow they would be re-established in all their honors and privileges.... On the 3d of August last it was three years since I parted from my beloved flock. After God that flock is daily my first and last thought. My prayers, my anxieties, my studies, and my occupations of whatever nature belong to it. I will be true to it till death, and I hope by God’s grace that it will be true to me. Hours of temptation come upon me sometimes, it is true—hours when the painful doubt suggests itself whether I shall ever return to it. But I take courage to myself again through a trusting look up to God. He has counted every hair of our heads, and, if my return is in accordance with his providence, no Kulturkampf will have power to prevent it. But should it be his good pleasure that I close my eyes to this world separated from my flock, I say with most humble resignation: May His will be done!

“But even supposing that all we ‘deposed’ and exiled bishops should die in banishment, the church, and the church in our German Fatherland, will finally conquer. He to whom all power in heaven and on earth is given is her protector; and, let her enemies be as numerous and powerful as it is possible to be, an hour will come when of them also it will be said: ‘They who sought after her life are dead.’”[[24]]

MONTSERRAT.

O streams, and shades, and hills on high,

Unto the stillness of your breast

My wounded spirit longs to fly—

To fly and be at rest;

Thus from the world’s tempestuous sea,

O gentle Nature, do I turn to thee!

—Fray Luis de Leon.

No one visits Barcelona, or ought to visit it, without going to Montserrat, the sacred mountain of Spain, and one of the most extraordinary mountains in the world: the naturalist, to study its singular formation and the thousand varieties of its flora; the mere tourist, to visit its historic abbey and explore the wonderful grottoes with which the mountain is undermined; and the pilgrim, as to another Sinai, torn and rent asunder as by the throes of some new revelation, where amid awful rifts and chasms is enthroned its Syrian Madonna, like the impersonation of mercy amid the terrors of divine wrath. It is one of those wonderful places in Catholic Christendom around which centres the piety of the multitude. Hermits for ages have peopled its caves. The monks of St. Benedict for a thousand years have served its altars. Saints have kept watch around its venerable shrine. The kings and knights of chivalric Spain have come here with rich tributes to offer their vows. And the poor, with bare and bleeding feet, have, century after century, climbed its rough sides out of mere love for their favorite sanctuary.

Poets, too, have come here to seek inspiration. Several Spanish poets of note have celebrated its natural beauties and its legendary glory. Goethe could find no more suitable place than this wild, mysterious mountain for the scenery of one of the most wonderful parts of Faust—the scene where he makes the Pater Ecstaticus float in the golden air, the hermits chant from their mystic caves, and the bird-like voices of the spirits come between like the breathings of a wind-swept harp.[[25]]

We took the Zaragoza railway, and in an hour after leaving Barcelona were in sight of the towering gray pinnacles that make Montserrat like no other mountain in the world. It rises suddenly out of the valley of the Llobregat more than three thousand five hundred feet into the air, and looks as if numberless liquid jets, sent up from the bowels of the earth, had suddenly been congealed into colossal needles or cones. These cones unite in a rocky base, about fifteen miles in circumference, which is cleft asunder by an awful chasm, at the bottom of which flows the torrent of Santa Maria. The base of the mountain is fringed with pines, but the cones are ash-colored and bare, being utterly devoid of vegetation, except what grows in the numerous clefts and ravines. This serrated mountain, standing isolated in a broad plain, strange and solitary, seems set apart by nature for some exceptional purpose. It looks like a vast temple consecrated to the Divinity. Even the Romans thought so when they set up their altars on its cliffs. It is the very place for the gods to sit apart, each on his own pinnacle, and talk from peak to peak, and reason high, and arbitrate the fate of man.

The sharp needles which give so peculiar an appearance to the mountain are mostly of a conglomerate stone composed of fragments of marble, porphyry, granite, etc., and not unlike the Oriental breccia. Some say that these enormous clefts have been produced by the agency of water or volcanic force; others, that the mountain, like Mt. Alvernia in Italy, where St. Francis received the sacred stigmata, was rent asunder at the great sacrifice of Mount Calvary, of which these profound abysses and splintered rocks are so many testimonials. Padre Francesco Crespo, in a memorial to Philip IV. on the Purísima Concepcion, says of it: “Astonishing monument of our faith, divided into so many parts in sorrowful proof of the death of the Creator!” And Fray Antonio, a Carmelite monk: “And in Montserrat is verified that which was spoken in St. Matt. xxvii.: And the earth did quake and the rocks were rent.”

We stopped at the station of Monistrol, two miles from the town of that name which stands at the very foot of the mountain, and walked along the banks of the Llobregat by an excellent road, often bordered with olives at the right, while the other side was overhung by cliffs fragrant with rosemary and wild thyme. We passed several cotton manufactories, for this is the region of contrasts: Industry is running to and fro in the fertile valley, while Contemplation kneels with folded palms on the rocky heights above. But what divine law is there that makes physical activity superior to moral, or productive of greater results, as so many would have us believe in these cui bono days? Who knows what rich returns the cloud-wrapped altar above has rendered to these heavens? or how much the proud world owes to the solitary Levite who in the temple keeps alive

“The watchfire of his midnight prayer”?

Monistrol derives its name from monasteriolum—a little monastery, which was built here by the early Benedictines. It is said that Quirico, a disciple of St. Benedict, came to Spain in the sixth century, and, hearing of an extraordinary mountain in the heart of Catalonia, called Estorcil by the Romans, he came to see it and said to his disciples: “On this mount let us build a temple to the Mater pulchræ dilectionis.” His project was not realized till three centuries after, but he is believed to have built a small convent at the foot of the mountain.

It was late in the afternoon when we drew near the spot where St. Quirico and his disciples set up their altar, and the little white town of Monistrol lay closely hugged in at the foot of the mountain, behind which the sun sets by two o’clock, so that it was already in the shadow. On the outskirts we were surrounded by a swarm of swarthy gipsies ready to tell our future destiny for a real, as if we did not already know it! We crossed one of those bombastic bridges so common in Spain, as if there were a flood for the immense arches to span, and just beyond met the cura—a tall, thin man, with an abstract, speculative look, but who proved himself able to give good practical advice, which we followed by going to the little posada hard by for the night, and awaiting the morning to ascend the holy mountain. It was a clean little inn, but as primitive as if it had come down from the time of St. Quirico. Not a soul could we find on presenting ourselves at the door, and it was only by dint of repeatedly shouting Ave Maria Purísima! that a brisk little woman at length issued from some cavernous depth, as if called forth by our magical words. She gave us a dusky little room, with a crucifix and colored print of St. Veronica over the bed, and, after exploring the town, we took possession of it for the night while the tops of the mountain, that rose up thousands of feet directly behind the house, were still flushed with light.

The following morning was warm and cloudless, though in the middle of February. The tartana came at ten o’clock—a wagon with a hood, drawn by three stout mules—and we set off with two men and three women, all Spanish, and all as gay as the crickets on the wayside. If their forefathers ascended the mountain with streaming eyes and unshod feet, they, at least, went up on stout wheels, and with many a song and quirk, though perfectly innocent withal. They were light-hearted laborers, released from toil, going with their lunch to spend a holiday at Our Lady of Montserrat’s. Just after starting we passed the little chapel of the Santísima Trinidad, built, as the tablet on it says, to commemorate the happy ending of the African war in 1860. We soon left Monistrol below us. The view at every moment became more extended as we wound up the steep sides of the mountain. At the right was always the towering wall of solid rock, while the left side of the road was often built up, or at least supported, by masonry. Vines and olives clung to the crags as long as they could find foothold, and here and there was an aloe on the edge of the precipice. The bells of Monistrol could be heard far below. The plain began to assume a billowy appearance, swelling more and more to the north till lost in the mountains. The air grew more exhilarating. In two hours’ time we came to a chapel with a tall cross before it, and nearly opposite suddenly appeared the abbey of Our Lady of Montserrat, seven or eight stories high, with a cliff rising hundreds of feet perpendicularly behind, divided by deep fissures, and terminating in needles that looked inaccessible, but where we could see a hermitage perched on the top like the nest of an eagle. There is no beauty about the convent, or pretension to architecture, but there is a certain austere simplicity about it that harmonizes with the mountain. The narrowness of the terrace has prevented its extending laterally, so it has been forced to tower up like the peaks around it. The mountain, as M. Von Humboldt says, seems to have opened to receive man into its bosom. But nearly everything is modern, and everywhere are ruins and traces of violence left by the French in their ravages of 1811. Passing through an arched gateway, we found ourselves in a close, around which stood several large buildings for the accommodation of pilgrims. These are of three classes, according to the condition of the visitor, and named after the saints, such as Placido, Ignacio, Pedro Nolasco, Francisco de Borja, etc. The poor have two houses for the different sexes, where they are lodged and fed gratuitously. Bread is distributed to them at seven in the morning; at noon, more bread with olla and wine; and at night the same. Pilgrims of condition sometimes go to receive the bread of charity, which they preserve as a relic. No one, rich or poor, is allowed to remain over three days without special permission. Even the better class of rooms are of extreme simplicity, containing the bare necessaries for comfort. They are paved with brick, and the walls are plastered, but not whitewashed. A man brought us towels, sheets, and a jug of water, and left us to our own devices. The visitor offers what he pleases on leaving. Nothing is required. Meals are obtained at a restaurant at fixed prices. After taking possession of our rooms we went to pay homage to Our Lady of Montserrat.

The first thing that struck us on entering the large atrium, or court, that precedes the church, was a marble tablet recording one of the greatest memories of Montserrat:

B. Ignativs—A—Loyola—

hic-mvlta—prece—fletv-