Volume 25 / Part 2 — DE VERE’S “MARY TUDOR.” PART II.

We said, in our last article,^[41] that the Catholic reader would find this second play much more painful than the first. We are sure, too, that the non-Catholic reader will deem it inferior in point of interest. Yet we do not agree with the London Spectator that there is an “artistic chasm” between the two plays. At any rate, whatever constructive defects are to be found in the present performance, there is no falling off in dramatic power.

The play is preluded by an “Introductory Scene,” in which Mary is discovered prostrate on the tomb of Jane Grey. This does not at all surprise us after the remorse we have witnessed in the last scene of the preceding play. Holding herself criminally responsible for the execution of her cousin, it was natural for her to perform “penances severer than the Church prescribes.” The gentle Fakenham—now Abbot of Westminster—may well express anxiety for his penitent.

“Pray God

Her mind give way not: sorely is it shaken.

These tearful macerations of the spirit,

These fasts that chain all natural appetites,

Nor mortify the sinful flesh alone,

Must be restrained: or death will close the scene.”

While he is soliloquizing Gardiner enters with Elizabeth. Fakenham has requested the latter’s presence.

“Whate’er hath passed,

Be sure her Grace hath ever truly loved you.

Therefore we trust your coming may dispel

The baleful visions that enthrall her spirit;

Dispersed, as fiends before rebuking Saints.”

Elizabeth answers:

“You hope too much. Awakened jealousy

Preys on her, like the Egyptian’s asp.”

But she is mistaken; for presently the queen, on recognizing the “veiled mourner,” says tenderly:

262“I part

The tresses on thy brow; and gaze upon thee

With the strong yearning of a blighted love.

I know thee, sister! Take me to thine arms—

And let me weep.”

The weeping revives Mary’s energy, but that energy takes a shape in which we see the old despair combined with a new fanaticism.

“Elizabeth. These mingling tears wash out

All venom from past sorrow—”

Queen. “Not from mine!

Immedicable evil hath infected

The fount of life within me. I shall die

In premature decay; and fall aside

As withered fruit falls from a blasted branch.

I, like a mother by her dying babe,

Have closed the eyes of hope; and o’er my heart

Torpid despair fans with his vampire wings.”

Then, suddenly apostrophizing the “Eternal Majesty,” she appeals, as one “hemmed in by dark conspiracies” and “baited by schismatics,” for “prescience to detect” and “strength to control them”; deeming herself, once more, “the Lord’s Vicegerent,” to execute his judgments.

“Fly, brood of darkness! for my prayer hath risen:

And God will hear, and smite, as once he smote

The sin of Korah: and the earth shall ope

And swallow blasphemy; and plagues leap forth

Consuming impious men: even till the Church,

Swinging her holy censer in the midst,

Shall stay the pestilence, God’s wrath appeased!”

This is a fine allusion to the destruction of the three schismatical upstarts in the wilderness; and it is surprising to see a Protestant author attribute to Catholics so much knowledge of the Bible. Nevertheless, poor sinful mortals never make a greater mistake than when they fancy themselves ministers of what they call the “justice” of Him “whose thoughts are not as our thoughts.”

Perhaps Fakenham was about to make some such reply; for this poet-created Mary Tudor—after pausing, we suppose, to take breath—continues:

“Answer me not. I rise from this cold grave,

My penitential couch, with heart as frozen

As the dead limbs beneath, and will unbending

As this hard stone that shuts her from the world.”

Thus we are fully prepared for anything she may do; yet, in fact, she proves singularly innocuous.

The play opens with a discussion between Gardiner and Fakenham on the subject of the queen’s marriage. Both are agreed that she ought to marry, for the good of State and Church; but either has his eye on a very different candidate for her hand. The abbot’s candidate is Reginald Cardinal Pole—a character to whom our author does full justice as among the loftiest of his time. Fakenham thus describes him as a “student at Padua”:

“A nobler presence

Never embodied a more gracious soul:

Ardent, yet thoughtful; in the search of knowledge

Unwearied, yet most temperate in its use.

Whate’er he learned he wore with such an ease,

It seemed incorporated with his substance;

And beamed forth, like the light that emanates

From a saint’s brow.”

And again:

“Oft have I watched him sitting

For hours, on some rude promontory’s edge,

Wrapt in his mantle, his broad brow, sustained

With outspread palm, o’ershadowing his eyes.

And there, as one of Titan birth, he lingered

In strange community with nature; mingling

With all around—the boundless sky, the ocean,

The rock, the forest—looking back defiance

Unto the elements: as some lone column

Beneath the shadow of a thunder-cloud.”

For the thought in these last six lines Sir Aubrey seems indebted to Lord Byron, that poet “of Titan birth”—who, indeed, would have sat for the picture far better, we imagine, than Pole; except that, instead of “looking defiance at the elements” (an attitude for which we see no reason in Pole’s case either), his face would have shown ecstatic joy at “mingling with all around.”

“Ye elements, in whose ennobling stir

I feel myself exalted!”

(Childe Harold, canto iv.)

The way Gardiner sneers at Fakenham’s candidate, and then introduces his own, affords us an opportunity 263of correcting the author’s misconceptions of this prelate. First, then, there is no proof whatever that Gardiner was blood-thirsty, or even severe. Had he been the relentless persecutor he is popularly represented, his own diocese of Winchester would have become the scene of numerous executions for heresy; whereas, in fact, not one such execution can be shown to have taken place there. Neither, again, is there any more evidence that he egged on Mary to acts of cruelty. If he did make the attempt, he failed signally; for the real Mary Tudor was personally guiltless of a single act of intolerance even. The only authentic instance in which Gardiner played the part of evil genius to the queen was when he urged her to retain the Royal Supremacy established by her father—her title and authority as head of the English Church—a counsel which elicited the witty reply: “Women, I have read in Scripture, are forbidden to speak in the church. Is it, then, fitting that your church should have a dumb head?” At the time of giving this bad advice Gardiner belonged to the anti-papal party—which, of course, was therefore schismatical, though nominally Catholic. And this time-serving adhesion was the one great sin of his life. He repented of it some time before his death, and publicly lamented it in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross, preached on occasion of the reconciliation of the kingdom with the Holy See; nevertheless, the memory of it so weighed upon his conscience when he lay on his death-bed that he asked to have the Passion of Our Saviour read to him, and, when the reader came to the denial of Peter, said: “Stop! I, too, have denied my Lord with Peter; but I have not learned to weep bitterly with Peter.”

We may here remark that, had our author been acquainted with the above facts of Gardiner’s history, he would not have sacrificed truth to poetic effect by making him die suddenly after the burning of Cranmer; nor, again, have put into his mouth such an un-English argument as this against Pole’s fitness to share the throne with Mary:

“He is but an Englishman:

And ’tis an adage older than the hills

That prophets are not honored in their land.”

One so anxious, as Gardiner must have been at that time, to keep foreign domination out of England could never have advocated the marriage of his sovereign with “Spanish Philip,” nor, indeed, have been likely to call the latter’s father

“That wisest monarch, most devout of Christians,

Potent of captains, fortunate of men.”

But, of course, the poet stands to his colors. Having selected Gardiner for the villain par excellence, he makes him welcome even foreign domination in the person of a bigoted prince, who, he knows, will imbrue his hands in the blood of heretics.

Philip does not come upon the scene till the third Act; but the intervening scenes form a prelude to his advent.

First we have the queen in council on the question of her marriage, and particularly of the Spanish prince’s suit. While asking Gardiner’s advice she betrays her love for Reginald, and is quickly crushed into abandoning that hope by the chancellor’s daring assurance that her cousin is certainly Pope. Accordingly, she yields reluctant assent to the prayer of Philip’s ambassador. Then, in the same scene, 264follows a “patient hearing” of Ridley and Latimer, whose contumacious spirit is well shown by the dramatist. Mary treats them with great forbearance, and leaves them to ponder what she has said. The closing passage of this scene is noteworthy. Latimer boasts:

“O queen! that day is past

When spiritual knowledge was confined to priests.

Our very babes drink knowledge as they suck.

Each stripling, as he runs, plucks from each bough

The fruit of knowledge.”

Mary’s reply is of surprising force and beauty:

“Ah, sirs, have a care!

The tree of knowledge was an evil thing,

With root in hell, and fruitage unto death.

But in the self-same garden likewise grew

Another mystery, the tree of life.

This too bore fruit, unseen till after-time:

And this was Christ. Children of Adam, we,

Condemned to cultivate what first we stole,

Must tend the second tree with watchful love,

Or perish by the poison of the first.”

The remaining scene of this Act and the opening scene of the next are taken up chiefly with the disturbance occasioned by the approaching nuptials. Underhill, the “Hot-Gospeller,” is introduced, together with riotous citizens and the antagonists Sandys and Weston. Underhill is an honest fellow, and loyal to his queen, whose panegyrist he becomes at the play’s close. Though the rioters are in the minority, the rebellion becomes strong enough to attack Whitehall Palace, where Mary is seen at the opening of the second Act. Her masculine valor is here displayed. First she leans from the window to encourage her soldiers, then actually sallies forth to head them in person, and wins the day by thus risking her life. In the second scene Underhill excites the indignation of Sandys by his chivalrous defence of the queen not only as the one

“Whom the Lord gives to rule o’er Israel,”

but for her clemency.

“Underhill. The queen is not well served.

You heard yourself

How, leaning from the Holbein gallery,

Where she so long stood target to your shafts,

She bade her furious knights to spare, and spake

Peace to the suppliant throng.”

“Sandys. Yet your fierce captains

Do ramp along the streets with bloody staves,

Hunting the white-faced citizens like rats;

Or at their own doors summarily hang them.”

“Underhill. Not fifty thus have died: a sorrowful sum

If measured by domestic pangs, yet small

If balanced by the evil of their plots:

Small if contrasted with the precedents

Of former feuds. In Henry’s time, they say,

Full seventy thousand their viaticum

Had from the hangman.”

But our author does more than make Underhill her apologist. He seems anxious, every now and then, to remind us that he privately thinks much better of his heroine than the history he has read allows him to represent. He sets off the gentler side of her nature in strong contrast to the vindictive, and, indeed, attributes the latter to inherited qualities for which she is not responsible. Accordingly, in the third and fourth scenes of the second Act Mary’s generous forgivingness, and especially to Elizabeth, shines out gloriously.

Count Egmont, Philip’s envoy, has placed upon her finger his master’s betrothal ring, when Renaud, the Spanish ambassador, strikes in with:

“Permit me

To be so bold as to suggest ’twere prudent

His Grace delayed till treason be put down.

Too many prisoners your Grace releases.

Queen. It was the custom of my forefathers

To pardon criminals upon Good Friday.

Renaud. Pardon me: there may be

Some guiltier. Our prince must be kept back

Should your Grace yield to mistimed clemency.

Forgive my plainness. Can King Philip come

While criminals remain unjustified?

Your sister waits her trial.

Gardiner. Let me speak.

While she, the princess, lives, there is no safety

For England, for the Church.”

Here Bridges, Lieutenant of the Tower, enters with a sealed warrant.

265“Bridges. Your Grace will pardon, if, in a case like this,

Your servant feels misgiving. This sealed warrant

Commands me yield the princess—to be dealt with

As sentence shall direct.

Queen. O thou good servant!

Thy queen, on her heart’s knees, thanks and rewards thee.

Whose is this deed? By God’s death, answer me!

Ay, Gardiner, thou shalt answer for this thing,

If thou hast done it.

Gardiner. Let me see the paper.

A sorry trick to fright the princess! Trust me,

I had no hand in it. [He tears the warrant.

Queen. Inhuman hounds!

That worry your poor victim ere you slay it.

But I shall balk your malice. Silence, Gardiner!

Too much already hath been said: your tongues

Are deadlier than poison. Bridges, through you,

Who pitied poor Jane Grey, I shall henceforth

Secure my sister. You have known and loved her.

You are my servant now. Receive your knighthood.”

Thus foiled in their design, Renaud and Gardiner pretend, of course, that they did not for a moment mean the death of the princess, but only her removal; and the Spaniard goes on to explain that this “removal” was to be effected “by a bridegroom’s sweet compulsion”—mentioning Philibert of Savoy as a suitor—and then, finding that offer contemptuously rejected, suggests “the kind keeping of the Hungarian queen.”

“Queen. Be content, sir.

My sister hath but one friend in this council—

Myself, companion of her youth. It may be

She hath compassed ill against me: yet will not I,

Who fostered her lone childhood, now destroy her

By death or exile. You are malcontent.

Conform ye to my will: I shall not swerve.”

In the following scene, where Mary and Elizabeth have it all to themselves, the generosity of the former is the more touching by reason of her reproaches, which Elizabeth can only answer by acting a part which such a dissembler could very easily feign. Mary shows strong grounds for suspecting her loyalty, but nobly acquits her and replaces on her finger the ring which was the pledge of love between them, saying:

“Or innocent or guilty, I forgive you.”

We regret that space does not allow us to transcribe this scene in full.

We pass to the third Act, which introduces the two best-drawn characters of the play—Philip and Reginald Pole.

In these two men the author has illustrated—perhaps unconsciously—the antipodal extremes of the moral results of the Catholic religion. In Pole we see a character perfectly Christlike in its mixture of majesty with gentleness; in Philip one who has degraded faith into superstition, and made doctrines and means of grace the instruments of selfishness and passion. The greater the good in a system, the greater the evil into which it may be perverted. The amiable Fakenham tells Gardiner, in the previous scene, his mind about the Spaniard’s portrait:

“A moody man,

Whose countenance is ghastly, bearing dismal:

For ever wrangling, rude. His glance is sinister,

Stealthy: his laughter a sardonic sneer.

I would rather face a vulture o’er a corpse,

Than such a man, whose hell is in himself.

He is a tree of death.”

Gardiner may well wince as he replies:

“You have a caustic brush:

The canvas burns beneath it.”

Yet poor Queen Mary fondly looks forward to the coming of her affianced as (to borrow Byron’s exquisite metaphor)

“the rainbow of her future years—

Before whose heavenly hues all sorrow disappears.”

Neither does she betray any foreboding in consequence of the storm that ushers in her wedding-day. The bridegroom, on the contrary, peevishly exclaims:

“A sorry day for our solemnities!

I kiss this crucifix. Avert the omen,

Most holy James of Compostella!”

266He does not see in this conjugal union

“The cloud-compelling harbinger of love.”

The “omen” is not unfelt, though, by some of the spectators, particularly when Doctor Sandys gives tongue about it. The wedding-scene is simple enough. The queen says, very prettily, when Philip offers a diamond ring:

“Nay, my lord:

I would be wed, like any other maiden,

With the plain hoop of gold.”

It is the remaining half of the play which makes the whole so inferior to the first play. Not that, as we have said, there is any deficiency of dramatic power. Philip and the cardinal are masterfully handled. Full justice, too, is done—from the author’s stand-point—to the characters of Gardiner, Cranmer, and the rest. But a thick gloom overhangs the entire picture; and the glaring historical untruth of much of it is no relief to Catholic eyes.

Philip and Pole clash instantly. The Spaniard has a presentiment of this at the moment when Sir John Gage announces

“The cardinal legate’s boat hath touched the beach.

Queen. The cardinal arrived! My dear, dear cousin!

Go, my lord chamberlain—go, Sir John Gage,

And bear our greetings to his Eminence.

Let his legantine cross be borne before him;

And all appliances of holy state

Attend his blessed footsteps. This our king,

And we, shall welcome him on Whitehall stairs.

Philip. You are right gracious to the cardinal.

In Spain we condescend less.

Queen. Ah! you’ll love him,

As I do, when familiarly you know him.

Philip. I somewhat doubt it.”

In the next scene, when the cardinal has congratulated the queen on the return of England to the faith—telling the nation:

“Be sure

The light devolving from great Gregory

Still shines from Peter’s chair. Who turns from it

Renounces hope. Peace ripens in its beams”—

and Mary has joyfully responded:

“Here stand we without question, king and queen;

And, with our Parliament, implore the pope

For reconciliation. Take this missive:

It is sincere. Kneeling we crave your blessing!”—

Philip interjects:

“Your Eminence shall pardon my stiff knees—

Stiff, Spanish manners. Ha! I cannot kneel.”

No wonder the queen faints as the cardinal blesses her.

Philip, having thus early begun with insolence, loses no time in showing the mixture of brute and devil that he is. He threatens to leave England because his sanguinary counsels are not taken; whereupon we are rejoiced to see the author make Mary as well as Pole defend the policy of “free discussion.” Of course Gardiner supports Philip eagerly. Presently—so outrageous is Philip’s conduct to his wife—the cardinal’s indignation can contain itself no longer, and his dignified remonstrance stings the king into exclaiming:

“Were I a basilisk, I’d look thee dead!”

Gardiner urges Pole to retire; but the hero answers:

“Not so. My heart is strong:

And like some stalwart wrestler, who hath need

Of exercise, and doubts nor heart nor limb,

I shrink not from the combat. He who carries

His cross, a daily burden, well may stand

In front of any giant of the ring

Who boasts he can move spheres.”

And again he warns the monster:

“Ay: you are great

Above us by your station, as the vulture

Upon his mountain pinnacle. What then?

The arrow makes a pathway in the air:

The peasant’s hands can reach the feathered tyrant,

And from the vale quench his despotic eye.”

—“Vulture,” mark: not eagle.

We find a profound study in Mary’s love for Philip, and particularly in its persistence. How she could feel toward such a man anything beyond wife-like duty—she, too, who had loved Reginald Pole from her childhood—is mysterious indeed. It will doubtless be said that the poet intends this 267new love for a part of her madness—like her passion for the worthless Courtenaye: her craving for love being such as to invest any spouse with “Cytherea’s zone.” Then, again, the treatment Pole receives at Philip’s hands, and his sublime bearing under it, ought to have the result of alienating her affections from the Spaniard even more than the latter’s behavior to herself. Hear her cry, one moment:

“Poor heart!

Thou wilt not break! Insult unmitigated!

Witnessed—by him!—by Pole! O Reginald!

Avenged!”

And the next, see her so overjoyed by an usher announcing “the king” that she springs up from the suppliant posture in which she has just been praying

“that even as the thief

On the third cross I may have peace in heaven”—

springs up, and exclaims wildly:

“The king! King Philip!

O speed him hither! Stay: here’s for thy news—

A jewel from my finger. Haste thee, friend.”

And again, though his Majesty enters “moodily,” she can actually greet him thus:

“O Philip. Philip! art thou come to me?

And shall there not now be an end of weeping?

I was thinking of thee—whom else think I of?

I talked of thee—of whom is all my talking?

But thou art here again: and my poor heart,

Like a caged bird, is beating at its bars,

To fly forth to the comfort of thy bosom.

Speak—speak—my soul! and give me peace.”

Verily, this is madness! Who has ever seen so extraordinary a picture of woman before? Has not the poet drawn something impossible? Not at all. He simply displays, we think, an unusual knowledge of the feminine heart. A much less acquaintance with that organ should prevent surprise at any phenomena it may exhibit—particularly in the shape of undeserved love or unreasoning constancy.

Of course the poor woman’s fondness only irritates her lord, instead of appeasing him; so he tells her bluntly what he has come for—to deliver his ultimatum; which is, first, the removal of the legate; and, secondly, the death of the heretical prelates. Of his feeling towards the cardinal he says:

“Call it not hatred, but antipathy:

Such as the callow chicken feels for hawks,

Or wild horse for the wolf. Aversion call it:

That wraps me in a cold and clammy horror

When we approach. I know he cannot harm me;

And have small doubt he would not if he could.

But still, my flesh creeps if I do but touch him,

As when one strokes a cat’s hair ’gainst the grain.

Odious is his garb

Of ostentatious purple; jewelled hands;

That beard down-streaming like the chisel’d locks

Of Moses from the hand of Angelo.”

Like a gleam of sunshine, for a moment, comes a happy description of a visit from Elizabeth to the queen. Underhill is the narrator. It is in the ninth scene of this too long third Act.

“Her royal barge

Was garlanded with flowers, festooned around

An awning of green satin, richly broidered

With eglantine and buds of gold. The bright one

Beneath this canopy reclined in state,

Fairer than Cleopatra with her Roman.

Her royal sister on the bowery shore

Of Richmond met her, kissing her 'tween whiles;

Her wan cheek flushing to a healthier glow.

With hospitable care, and love, she led

Elizabeth to where, shrined in green leaves

And flowers, a tent, curtained with cloth of gold

And purple samite, stood; whose folds were wrought

With silver fleur-de-lys and gold pomegranates.

The music they so love breathed in their ears

Like amorous blandishment: and when the morn

Rippled along the wave with soberer ray,

The princess stept once more into her barge,

And floated down the current like a swan.”

Yet one more quotation from this Act; for we shall have but little to cite from Acts fourth and fifth. The cardinal, after arguing with Gardiner against the severe measures that are being taken under his and Bonner’s supervision, and defending the queen from the charge of approval—her consent having been forced, and things of which she was ignorant done in her name—finds 268relief in conversing with Fakenham, whose virtues he thoroughly appreciates. The latter speaks of his friend’s failing strength; and Pole, at a loss to account for it, says he has “heard of vampire poisons,” but instantly suppresses the suspicion. They have been up all night, apparently.

“Cardinal. A sudden sunburst!—Lo!

God’s Image in our heart is as yon orb

Unto the universe; the eye of nature,

Dispersing rays more eloquent than tongues;

Beams that give life as well as light; whose absence

Wraps in cold shadow all that moves and breathes.

At times that Image walks through spheres remote;

Unobvious to the largely wandering eye:

Then nightmare darkness sits upon the soul:

Then, by its own shade mantled, waits the soul,

Like some dark mourner, lonely in his house.

But the harmonious hours fulfil themselves;

And sunrise comes unlooked for, peak to peak

Answering in spiritual radiance. This is indeed

So palpably to meet Divinity,

That hence the Pagan erred, not knowing God.”

In the fourth Act we have, first, the recall of Pole to Rome, contrived by Philip and Gardiner. The queen refuses to let him go; but while, in obedience to her, he remains in England, he resigns his legateship in submission to the interdict. Then comes the picture-scene, which is admirably contrived. The poor queen stops before Philip’s picture and talks to it as if it were a shrine. The original enters and brutally disenchants his worshipper. After a bitter interview, in which Mary accuses him of conjugal infidelity, the Spaniard takes his departure, answering her “Begone!” with a sudden “For ever!”

“Queen (alone). I submit to God’s decree.

Was it for this my maiden liberty

Was yielded?—to be spurned, despised, and still

Bear on without redress? O grief! O shame!

[She approaches the picture of Philip.

Back, silken folds, that hide what was my joy,

And is my torture! Back!—See, I have rent you,

False, senseless idol, from thy tinselled frame!

I wrench thee forth—I look on thee no more!

And thus—and thus— [she tears up the picture]

I scatter thee from out

The desecrated temple of my heart! [A pause.

My brain is hot—this swoln heart chokes my throat

Yet I am better thus than self-deceived.

Die, wretched queen! O die, dishonored wife!

I pant for the cold blessing of the grave!”

Next follows the trial of Ridley and Latimer. Cranmer, too, is present, and disputes, but is not on trial. The contrast between Gardiner and Pole is admirable. Mary, too, is represented as sedulously just. Ridley and Latimer speak, of course, as if perfectly conscientious and worthy of martyrdom, but make no attempt to disprove the principle of submission to authority, insisting solely on their own infallibility. The cardinal is at last compelled to say of them:

“This is very grievous!

Madam, so please you, these be heated men,

Who may not be convinced, and will not bend.”

He has better hopes of Cranmer; but his gentle earnestness is lost upon him no less.

Here be it remembered that it was the secular, and not the ecclesiastical, arm which inflicted the death-penalty for obdurate heresy. This penalty was the law in those days—days when every kind of felony was more severely punished than now. Whatever we moderns may think of this law, we must not forget that heresy is the greatest and most pernicious of crimes; and, again, that it was only formal and aggressive heresy that got itself arraigned and condemned. Moreover, what made the civil power so severe upon it was the fact that it was always coupled with sedition and treason.

But before we close our remarks upon the executions in Mary’s reign, let us look for a moment on the beautiful scene which intervenes between the one we have been examining and the prison-scene at Oxford—the last of the fourth Act.

Mary and Reginald are closeted together. The holy priest seeks to comfort his cousin.

269“Poor soul!

Be to yourself more charitable. Think

That One there is who answers for your faults

And multiplies your merits.

Queen. Hope rests there:

Or I were mad.

Cardinal. All men are born to suffer.

What are the consolations of the Scripture,

The fruit of exhortation and of prayer,

If now you quail? No, you shall quail no more.

Queen. My web of life was woven with the nettle.

My very triumphs were bedewed with tears.

What now is left?

Cardinal. Religion. As the sunbow

Shines in the showery gloom and makes the cloud

A shape of glory, in thy path she stands

A herald of high promise. Blessed emblem!

Religion bids thee hope. This gloomy life

Must be amended. We must draw thee hence.

Queen. Thanks be to God! time works while

we grieve on.

Deprive not sorrow of the shade she needs,

The sad quiescence of desponding thought.

Job also raised his voice, and wailed aloud,

And so was comforted. Remember, also,

In weeping I can pray. Should I not?

Cardinal. Yea.

Pray with thanksgiving: ’tis the sum of duty.”

The sublimity of this passage needs no comment. The rest of the scene is equally touching. Mary speaks for an instant of Philip. She is still obliged to say:

“Whene’er I turn my thoughts to God, one image

Stands between me and heaven. Instead of prayer

A sigh for Philip trembles on my lips.

Cardinal. To pine thus for the absent, as men mourn

The dead, is sinful.

Queen. Speak no more of him.

Thoughts holier be my guide.”

Then Reginald teaches her what it is

“To stablish thrones on bounty; reign through love.”

The chief of greatness is surpassing goodness:

And that outsoars the ken of mortal eyes—

Hidden with God.”

She offers him the archbishopric of Canterbury. He answers musingly:

“He who hath stood

Upon the first step of the papal throne,

And vacant left the Vatican, may look

With eye undazzled on the chair of Lambeth.”

Then he accepts, and presently the queen observes:

“I have long thought it strange that you refused

The greater honor though the heavier burden:

The proffered crown of Rome.

Cardinal [after much agitation]. Look not alarmed. [A pause.

You touch the mind’s immedicable wound.

O God! that I had died before I knew thee!

Pardon me—pardon me!

Queen. We both need pardon.

Let us forget the past. God strengthen us!

Cardinal. Fear not. Henceforth we gaze upon each other,

As the two Cherubim upon the Ark—

The living God between.

Queen. Then take my hand.

It will be colder soon. May God be with you!”

This “immedicable wound” is the poet’s Protestant fancy, yet the pathos of the scene is exquisite.

The prison-scene at Oxford gives us, first, Masters Ridley and Latimer taking leave of Cranmer; then Cranmer watching their execution from the window, and Gardiner, unobserved, watching him. The famous recantation number one takes place; and the subsequent despair of the wretch closes the fourth Act.

The fifth Act we do not care to analyze minutely, so much of it is sickeningly untrue. Mary has become fanatical again. Pole tells her that “the poor, by thousands, perish in the flames.” This is utterly false. All the executions under Mary’s government did not amount to more than two hundred and seventy-seven, and “from this list of 'martyrs for the Gospel’ must be excluded,” says a learned writer, “the names of those who suffered for political offences or other crimes.” Dr. Maitland, the celebrated librarian of Lambeth, in his Essays on Subjects connected with the Reformation in England, speaks of “the bitter and provoking spirit of some of those who were very active and forward in promoting the progress of the Reformation; the political opinions which they held, and the language in which they disseminated them; the fierce personal attacks which they made on those whom they considered as enemies; and, to say the least, the little care which was taken by those who were 270really actuated by religious motives, and seeking a true reformation of the Church, to shake off a lewd, ungodly, profane rabble, who joined in the cause of Protestantism, thinking it, in their depraved imaginations, or hoping to make it by their wicked devices, the cause of liberty against law, of the poor against the rich, of the laity against the clergy, of the people against their rulers.” From this rabble, then, came the “poor” who “perished in the flames.”

As to Oxford’s pretended “martyrs,” Ridley and Latimer were inciters of sedition and brought upon themselves the vengeance of the law; while Thomas Cranmer was, without exception, the most unmitigated miscreant in the whole disgraceful business of what is called the Reformation. Who will question that he richly deserved the stake after bringing to it so many victims, in Henry’s reign, for denying doctrines which he himself was secretly denying at the time? There are living Anglican writers who rejoice in calling all these boasted reformers a set of “unredeemed villains.”

Of course, as we said in our review of the first play, we acquit the author of all conscious prejudice. The last words he puts into his heroine’s mouth—“Time unveils Truth”—are an appeal to “the avenger,” who will not fail to do her justice yet. It was a noble thought to make Underhill, the Hot-Gospeller, her panegyrist. Oxford vaticinates:

“Awful queen!

Hardly of thee Posterity shall judge:

For they shall measure thee—

Underhill. Let me speak, sir:

For I have known, and been protected by her,

When fierce men thirsted for my blood. I say not

That she was innocent of grave offence;

Nor aught done in her name extenuate.

But I insist upon her maiden mercies,

In proof that cruelty was not her nature.

She abrogated the tyrannic laws

Made by her father. She restored her subjects

To personal liberty; to judge and jury;

Inculcating impartiality.

Good laws, made or revived, attest her fitness

Like Deborah to judge. She loved the poor:

And fed the destitute: and they loved her.

A worthy queen she had been if as little

Of cruelty had been done under her

As by her. To equivocate she hated:

And was just what she seemed. In fine, she was

In all things excellent while she pursued

Her own free inclination without fear.”

NANETTE. A LEGEND OF THE DAYS OF LOUIS XV.

I.

A police report is scarcely the place where one would look to find an idyl—least of all a French police report. But just as one comes at times upon a shy violet nestling in the dusty city ways, even in such an unpromising quarter, and in the records of a still more unpromising time, did the present writer stumble upon a veritable romance—

“Silly sooth

That dallies with the innocence of love

Like the old age.”

Let the reader judge if it be not a genuine violet.

Of the many strange functions of the Parisian police in the days of the well-beloved Louis XV.—and altogether most worthless of his name—one of the strangest appears to have been that of furnishing for the amusement of the royal circle regular reports, or rather novelettes, of all episodes, striking or romantic, that came under their notice. The French have always had a taste for the dramatic aspect 271of the law, and to this day a procès-verbal reads often like a feuilleton of Ponson du Terrail. It may be supposed that, in the narratives which thus tickled the languid leisure of Louis, a rigid adherence to truth was not deemed essential where a slight embellishment enhanced the interest. But all had probably a basis in fact, which one is fain to hope was more than usually broad in so innocent and touching a history as that of Nanette Lollier, the Flower-Girl of the Palais Royal.

In the year 1740 there dwelt in the parish of St. Leu, at Paris, an honest, hard-working couple named André Lollier and Marie Jeanne Ladure, his wife; the former of whom held a subordinate position in the Bureau of Markets, while the latter attended to their fish-stand. Between them they earned ample to keep the pot boiling comfortably, had it not been for the prodigious number of small mouths that daily watered around that savory and capacious vessel; and when there came a sixteenth, it is to be feared that honest André received it rather ruefully and altogether as a discord in the harmony of existence—a blessing very much in disguise. So despite the new-comer’s beauty and precocity and countless pretty baby ways, her aggrieved parents were only too glad to accept her godmother’s offer to take her off their hands and to bring her up. By that good lady—who seems to have been really a most kind-hearted person, although she was a beadle’s widow—the little Nanette (so the child had been named) was carefully instructed in such branches of learning as a young person of her station was at that time expected to know, and which, in truth, were not very many. There is little doubt that one young lady of Vassar would have put the entire faculty of St. Cyr to rout.

But Nanette was soon found to possess a fine voice, and pains were taken to cultivate it—so successfully that when, at the mature age of twelve, the youthful chorister made her début in a Christmas anthem at the parish church, everybody was delighted. And when during the following Holy Week she sang a Stabat better than many persons four times her age, everybody said at once she was a prodigy.

Now, we all know what comes to prodigies. The praises, pettings, and presents this prodigy received turned her small and not very wise head. Good Mère Lollier wished to make a fish-mongress of her; mademoiselle spurned the proposal. What! she, a genius, a beauty, a divine voice, waste her life on horrid, ill-smelling fish? (She made no objection, you will observe, to dining on them when her mother cooked them for her, but that was quite a different matter.) She soil her pretty fingers with scales, haggle over herrings, or dicker about dace? Perish the thought! Her mother did it, to be sure, but then—her mother was not a genius. (Do young ladies nowadays ever reason thus?) No; she would be a flower-girl and sing her nosegays into every buttonhole—or wherever else they then wore their nosegays—in Paris. The manners of the fish-market even then lacked something of the repose of Vere de Vere, and Mère Lollier’s only answer to this astounding proposal was a slap and—we regret to say—a kick. She was not aware that genius is not to be kicked with impunity. She 272soon discovered it to her sorrow; for in her way she loved Nanette, and kicked her, we may be sure, only in kindness.

Shortly after this affront Nanette disappeared, and from that moment all trace of her was lost. Word came to her parents from time to time that she was well, but of her whereabouts their most persistent efforts could gain no tidings. Her absence lasted three years; how or where passed no one—we sniff the touch of the embellisher here—could ever discover, nor would she herself divulge. At last one fine morning comes a message to Mère Lollier that her daughter is at the convent of the Carmelites, and will be handed over to them in person, or to any priest who comes with an order from them.

Beside herself with joy, Mère Lollier, with just a hasty touch to her cap—even a Dame de la Halle is, outside of business, a woman—rushes off to M. le Curé with the great news. In those days M. le Curé was the first applied to in every emergency of joy or grief: perhaps it would have been better for Paris if the custom had not been survived by others less wholesome. The good priest lent a sympathetic ear; for the piety and industry of the Lolliers had made them prime favorites with him, and he had, besides, taken a lively interest in the fate of his little chorister. A fiacre is called at once, and the curé and Mère Lollier, with her eldest son, a strapping sergeant in the French guards—not then such pigmies as absinthe has left them now—fly to the convent at such a pace as only the promise of a fabulous pourboire can extract from a Parisian cab-horse. The lady-superior greets them in the convent parlor and presently ushers in a lovely young girl—what! a girl?—a princess, to whom Mère Lollier with difficulty represses an inclination to courtesy, while M. le Curé wipes his spectacles and the gaping sergeant at once comes to a salute. But the princess speedily puts an end to their doubts by embracing them all in turn with the liveliest emotion. It is indeed Nanette, but Nanette developed into such beauty and grace and sprightliness as many a princess might envy. Nor is her moral nature less improved. She is now as modest and docile as before she was vain and headstrong; only—she will still be a flower-girl. And yet women are sometimes called weak!

Before the young lady’s appearance in the parlor the superior had explained to her wondering auditors how a strange lady the evening before had brought Nanette to the convent—“Hum!” says M. le Curé dubiously, taking snuff—and on leaving her had left at the same time 20,000 francs for her dowry, if she wished to become a religious—“Ha!” says M. le Curé thoughtfully, brushing away the snuff that has fallen on his band. Then he beams upon Nanette, rubbing his hands encouragingly, while Mère Lollier nods acquiescence and the sergeant shifts to the other leg and gapes. But Nanette, in spite of these diverse blandishments, respectfully but firmly declined to be a religious. Her vocation was to be a flower-girl, and a flower-girl she would be.

“’Tis the devil’s trade,” cries the curé, quite out of patience.

“All roads lead to heaven, my father,” answers Nanette mildly.

So a flower-girl she becomes; and it must be confessed that, in spite of Undine, beauty seems more at home with the flowers than with the fishes.

273

II.

One bright morning in the summer of 1756 the loungers under the chestnuts which then adorned the garden of the Palais Royal—that forehanded and long-headed (though, long as his head was, he could not keep it long) personage, Philippe Égalité, thought shops would be more ornamental as well as more useful, so he put the chestnuts in his pocket and built that splendid colonnade which is the wonder and delight of the wandering American—the loungers in the shade of the Palais Royal chestnuts were conscious of a new sensation. Not that sensations were just then going begging. By no means. One or two royal gentlemen, by laying their crowned heads together, had already contrived that famous misunderstanding which was to turn a large part of three continents into a shambles for the next seven years; to cost the “well-beloved,” in Canada and India, the brightest jewels of his crown, and to make of Montcalm, for losing one and his life with it, a hero, and of Lally-Tollendal, for having the bad taste to survive the loss of the other, a traitor or a martyr as you were for him or against him. So often is it that for precisely the same services a grateful and discriminating country decrees to one of her sons a monument, to another a halter. Perhaps there is not so much difference between the two—to the dead men, at least—as some folks imagine.

But the heroes we are to deal with are by no means of the stuff of martyrs, and fighting, beyond an ornamental pass or two in the Bois de Boulogne, they vote vulgar and bourgeois. Here under the chestnut blossoms is a sensation much more to their taste. It is a new flower-girl. But what a flower-girl! Figure to yourself, then, Mme. la Duchesse, a flower-girl arrayed in silks and laces and jewels a marchioness would give her head for (marchionesses’ heads were rated higher then than they came to be before the century was over), with a golden shell for her flower-basket, lined with blue satin and suspended by an embroidered scarf from the daintiest waist in the world—a flower-girl with the face of a seraph and the figure of a sylph, with eyes of liquid light and hair of woven sunshine, with the foot of Cinderella and a hand—a hand only less perfect than that of Madame, which your humble servant most respectfully salutes.

News so important must be sent post-haste to Versailles. A score of noblemen sprang to the saddle and rushed to lay their hearts and their diamonds at the feet of this strange paragon. But Nanette, young as she was, could tell base metal from good. The jewels she took from her adorers with smiling impartiality; the other sort of trinkets—sadly battered by use, it must be confessed, and not worth much at any time—she rejected with equally smiling disdain. Always gracious, gay, and self-possessed, sparkling with raillery and wit, she yet maintained a maidenly reserve that abashed the boldest license, and her reputation grew even faster than her fortune.

And the latter grew apace. She became the rage. Her appearance on the Palais Royal, followed at a little distance by footmen in livery and her maid, gathered about her straightway all the gallants and wits in Paris. Her basket was emptied in a trice, and emptied again as often as refilled by her servants. It was deemed an honor to receive 274a nosegay from her pretty fingers, and more louis than half-franc pieces repaid them.

Great ladies came to her levées—for such they really were—and even deigned to accept from the beautiful flower-girl the gift of a rose or a violet—gifts always sure to be recompensed in noble fashion with jewels or costly laces, rich silks or pieces of plate. Within two years Nanette had thus accumulated in houses, lands, and rents an annual income of forty thousand francs, besides loading her kindred with presents.

Naturally, this circumstance did not cool the ardor of the followers whom her beauty had attracted. One of these was particularly noticeable for his assiduity. He was a young man about twenty-two years old, of distinguished air and handsome features, tinged with that shadow of melancholy thought to be so irresistible to the feminine imagination. His clothes, too, were in his favor; for though irreproachably neat and faultlessly cut, they had plainly seen their best days. We all know what a sly rogue Pity is, and how untiringly he panders for a certain nameless kinsman. Every afternoon found the melancholy young man at the garden awaiting the flower-girl’s coming. On her arrival he would advance, select a flower, pay a dozen sous, exchange a word, perhaps, and disappear till the following day. Once he was absent, and the fair florist’s brow was clouded. In other words, Nanette was extremely cross, and many an unlucky petit-maître was that day unmercifully snubbed for presuming on previous condescension. The garden trembled and was immersed in gloom. But presently the laggard made his appearance, Nanette’s lovely face was again wreathed in smiles, the garden breathed freely once more, and the petit-maîtres were astonished to find their vapid pleasantries received more graciously than ever. From this remarkable circumstance the sagacious reader will doubtless form his own conclusion; and we do not say that the sagacious reader will be wrong.

In point of fact, we may as well admit at once that Nanette, without knowing it, was already in love with this handsome, melancholy stranger, of whom she knew nothing, except that he was noble, since he wore a sword. She would have given half she was worth to know even his name, but she dared not ask it. As often as the question trembled on her tongue she felt herself blushing violently and unable, for the life of her, to open her lips. Her modesty had not been educated away by a season in the civilizing atmosphere of the court.

Chance at last befriended her. One evening the brilliant Marquis de Louvois, after talking awhile with the unknown, came up to the Count de la Châtre, who was seated beside her, and said to him:

“This ass of a De Courtenaye puts me out of all patience. The king has asked why he does not come to Versailles. I repeat to him his majesty’s flattering question. Well! it goes in one ear and out the other. Can one so bury one’s self in Paris?”

Think of that, good Americans, before you die! In the year of grace 1756 Paris was only a burying place for Versailles! So that 1870 had a precedent.

“What else is he to do?” asks the count. “It takes money to live as we do, and his father, poor fellow, left him nothing but a name, which, although one of the first in France, 275is rather a drawback than otherwise, since it won’t permit him even to marry for money anything less than a princess; and rich princesses like to get as well as to give.”

“True, true,” murmurs the compassionate marquis. “I had forgotten. More’s the pity; such a good-looking fellow as he is—”

“And a connection of the royal family.”

“Faith, the king is not over and above kind to his cousins.” And the gentlemen dismiss the royal poor relation from their noble minds as they would brush a grain of snuff from their ruffles, and stroll off, humming an aria from the latest opera of the famous Favart, the little Offenbach of his little day. Forgotten art thou now, O famous Favart! and thy immortal airs are as dead as Julius Cæsar.

But not so easily did M. de Courtenaye’s tribulations pass from the mind of Nanette, who had lost not a word of this conversation. She thought of him all through a wakeful night; she was still thinking of him the next morning—having arisen for that fond purpose long before the household was stirring—when she was startled by feeling a kiss upon her arm. She sprang up with a little cry of anger and alarm; but her frown changed to a smile when she recognized the offender. It was Marcel, the handsome Marcel, her favorite brother, a year her senior, but so like her they were often mistaken for twins.

“O Marcel!” she cried, “how you frightened me. How was one to look for such gallantry from one’s brother?”

“But if one is the brother of Nanette?” says Marcel still more gallantly.

Marcel has been in good company and flatters himself he has quite the bel air. As an apprentice to M. Panckoucke to learn the bookseller’s trade, wherein his sister, when he got old enough, was to set him up for himself, he had many opportunities of seeing and hearing the wits of the capital, not without profit to mind and manners. Indeed, he fairly considered himself one of them already.

“Yes, my dear little sister,” he added with a patronizing air, “you are positively the talk of the town. Go where I will—and you know I go into the best circles,” he says pompously, adjusting his ruffles as he has seen the dandies do—“I hear of nothing but the beautiful, the witty Nanette. Why, it was only the other day I was at M. de Marmontel’s”—the ingenuous youth did not deem it essential to state that he had been sent in the honorable though humble capacity of “printer’s devil” with a bundle of proofs for correction (the proofs, indeed, of the Contes Moraux: the dullest, surely—always excepting the delightful, interminable romances of the incomparable Mlle. de Scudéry—ever penned in the tongue of Montaigne and Molière,) but his sister understood his harmless vanity and did not so much as smile—“at M. de Marmontel’s with the Duke de Nivernais, the Count de Lauraguais, M. de Voltaire, and the Prince de Courtenaye.”

Nanette started slightly, but her brother did not perceive it. It is the way of brothers, and this brother, besides, was for the moment rapt in contemplation of the greatness reflected upon him by association with these great names. He fairly grew an inch in stature as he rolled them out, dwelling fondly on the titles. It is something to have a king speak to you, if only to ask you 276to get out of the way. Marcel continued:

“The talk was all of you. M. de Lauraguais, not knowing me to be your near relation, presumed to deny your wit and to question your virtue.”

Nanette’s beautiful eyes flashed in a way that would have made the slanderer uncomfortable had he seen it.

“Insolent!” she murmured, clenching her little fists.

“You may imagine how my blood boiled,” went on Marcel. “I was on the point of doing something rash when M. de Courtenaye took up the cudgels in your behalf. 'M. de Lauraguais,’ he said with grave severity, 'is it possible that you, a gentleman, can give currency to the lies set afloat by baffled libertines or malicious fools against the reputation of a defenceless girl? My life upon it, Nanette is as pure as she is lovely; and were proof of her innocence needed, I should ask none better than these stories of lovers whom no one has seen, or can even name. Why, had Nanette a lover, all Paris would ring with it in an hour.’ The impassioned earnestness of the prince made the company smile; but M. Diderot, siding with him, said he was sure you were better than the best that was said of you.”

Nanette’s eyes filled with tears. Had the youthful pedant been less intent on showing his familiarity with fashionable life, he must have had his suspicions aroused by her agitation. As it was, he was not even enlightened when Nanette, suddenly flinging her arms about his neck in a tender fury, kissed him twice or thrice passionately. He took the kisses complacently as a guerdon for his story. Fraternal obtuseness in such cases is simply limitless. “By the way, Nanette,” he added, “why wouldn’t it be a good idea to thank the prince by sending him some of your prettiest flowers? I can take them to-morrow with some books I am to convey to him.”

“Nonsense!” says Nanette incredulously. “I don’t believe you even know where he lives.”

“Don’t know where he lives?” cries Marcel indignantly. “Perhaps you will tell me next I don’t know where the Hôtel Carnavalet is, or how to find the Rue Culture Ste. Catherine? Don’t know where he lives, indeed!” And Marcel flings out of the room in a state of high dudgeon that his acquaintance with a great man should be doubted, and, worst of all, by Nanette. We are sorry to say he slammed the door after him. The best of brothers will do such things under strong provocation. But Nanette only smiled—the wily Nanette!

III.

The next morning, at his frugal breakfast in a rather lofty apartment of the Hôtel Carnavalet, the Prince de Courtenaye read with much amazement the following letter:

“My Dear Cousin: I am an old woman and your near relation. I have long observed with pain the poverty which keeps you from assuming your proper station. I have wealth, and not many years to keep it. What is a burden to me will be a help to you. Suffer me, then, from my superfluity to relieve your necessity—I claim it as the twofold privilege of age and love—and accept as frankly as I tender it the 25,000 francs which I enclose to procure you an establishment suited to your rank. On the first of every month 4,000 francs will be forwarded to you in addition.”

Some commonplaces of civility ended this remarkable but not unpleasant 277epistle—would that such a one some celestial postman might leave at the door of the present writer, to whom documents of a far different nature—but this is a painful and unnecessary digression. Let us continue. The prince read the queer communication with conflicting emotions, in which wonder predominated. He was not aware of any wealthy aunt or female relative particularly prone to this sort of furtive benevolence; but his connections were legion, and women were odd fish. Still, his honor seemed to him to forbid his accepting a fortune so acquired. But older and wiser heads stifled, or at least silenced, his scruples; and secretly resolving to leave no stone unturned to discover his mysterious benefactress, and to return to her or to her heirs every sou of the money, which in his heart he accepted only as a loan, he resigned himself to his good-luck with tolerable cheerfulness. Henceforth no more elegant equipage was to be seen than the Prince de Courtenaye’s. He became the fashion; he was the life and talk of every salon—as we should say, the success of the season. Nevertheless, he failed not to go every afternoon to the garden of the Palais Royal for his nosegay, with this difference only: that he now paid francs instead of sous.

A year sped away, spent by the prince in buying nosegays and in sharing the gayeties, though not the dissipations, of the court; by Nanette in continuing to perfect herself secretly in all the feminine accomplishments of her time, so that now, at the age of nineteen, she was not only peerless in beauty, but as cultivated as Mme. de Sévigné and as learned as Mme. Dacier—no, not as Mme. Dacier—no mere mortal was ever so learned as Mme. Dacier; but let us say as Mme. de La Fayette, who could set Father Rapin right in his Latin and silence Ménage. Was it for herself she underwent these prodigious labors? It is not known that she ever mentioned. But she still sold nosegays and still reaped a golden harvest.

One evening the Count de la Châtre was again sitting beside her when the Marquis de Louvois once more accosted him.

“My dear fellow,” said he, “what the mischief ails Pierre?” (he spoke of De Courtenaye). “He must be going mad. Have you heard his latest freak? Mlle. de Craon, one of our wealthiest heiresses, with a royal dowry and a princely income, is proposed to him, and what do you think? He refuses her—positively refuses. What bee is in his bonnet?”

“Love.”

“Love! Is it one of the Royal Princesses, then?”

“I imagine not.”

“Who then? Some divinity of the coulisses, I’ll wager.”

“Louvois,” said the count gravely, “you wrong our friend. De Courtenaye, as you know, abhors vice, and I am much mistaken if she whom he loves is not a virtuous woman.”

Louvois shrugged his shoulders as only a certain kind of Frenchman can. Virtue was a word not in his dictionary.

The next day the prince received this note, the second from his unknown relative:

“My Nephew: Why do you decline to marry Mlle. de Craon, who unites all that is illustrious in birth and splendid in fortune? I will provide you with the capital of the income I now allow you. Accept also as a wedding-gift for your intended the jewels I send herewith.

“If you consent, wear for eight days in your buttonhole a carnation; if you refuse, a rose.”

278With the letter came a handsome jewel-case containing a million of francs in bills—it is well for the romancer to be liberal in these matters—and a magnificent parure of diamonds of the purest water, valued by the Tiffany of the time at 100,000 more.

That afternoon it was noticed in the garden that Nanette was unusually pale and silent. The Prince de Courtenaye entered at his usual hour; the nosegay in his buttonhole bore neither pink nor rose. He drew near the flower-girl, who offered him a posy with a hand she vainly tried to make steady. Like his own, it had neither pink nor rose.

The prince examined Nanette’s offering attentively, smiled sadly, stood for an instant in a musing attitude twirling the bouquet in his fingers, and then suddenly, as one whose mind is made up:

“My child,” he said, “will you make me the present of a rose?”

Nanette fainted.

IV.

When the flower-girl recovered she found herself in her own room, her family around her. But her eyes sought in vain the one face she most wished to see. Her mother and sisters told her with prodigious clamor and excitement, all talking at once at the tops of their voices, how she had fainted—“from the heat,” the gentleman said. “Yes, from the heat,” murmured Nanette softly, closing her eyes—how a great nobleman, the Prince de Courtenaye, had raised her, and how, without waiting for a carriage, and rejecting all aid, he had borne her in his arms to her house near by.

Nanette listened with closed eyes and a happy smile. All this was balm to her poor, sorely-tried heart. She even ventured to ask what had become of the kind gentleman. He had waited, they told her, to hear the doctor’s report giving assurance of her safety, and had then gone away, invoking for her their most zealous care. Presently the prince’s valet came to inquire after her health; but he himself did not come. Nanette was wounded, but she said nothing. Even pain in such a cause was too sacred a thing to be shared with another. Woman-like, she hugged her grief as though it were a treasure, and smiled, without knowing why, at the empty compliments of a crowd of petits-maîtres, who, after the fashion of the time, had rushed to pay her their condolences, and who ransacked Dorat for their vapid homage. Each took the smile to himself and redoubled his insipid gallantries. But Nanette was too much in love, if she had not been too clever, to heed them. So she contented herself and them by smiling.

At heart she was happy, in spite of the prince’s neglect. At least he would not marry; so much was secure. But the future: might he not have surprised her secret—she blushed as she thought it—and would he seek to abuse his power? No, she felt he was too noble for that, and, come what might, she would enjoy the present hour, the happiest she had known. So in vague, delicious hopes, and doubts not less delicious; in fluttering fears and half-formed, undefined resolves; in pain that seemed to be pleasure and pleasure whose sweetest element was pain—all the exquisite mélange of confused and dreamy emotions which take possession of a young and innocent heart so soon as it has fairly admitted to itself it 279loves—Nanette awaited her prince. She knew he would come; her heart told her so. And she was not deceived.

Early the next day he was announced. She essayed to rise as he entered, but sank back into her chair, half from weakness, half from agitation, murmuring incoherent excuses for her awkwardness. In an instant the prince was at her feet.

“Ah!” he cried, “I have found you out at last, my good cousin. But I am not come to return you your benefactions; only to beseech you to make it possible for me to keep them by adding to them a still more precious boon.”

“And that is—?”

“This fair, kind hand. Ah darling! you cannot refuse it me when you have already given me your heart.”

In sacrificing his name to this obscure young girl the prince was no doubt conscious of doing a noble and magnanimous act. And so it was—how noble, can only be realized by those who know the measureless distance which, in the days of Louis XV., divided the nobility from the people, or the insolent disdain with which the former looked down on the latter—a disdain commemorated to this day in the use of the word peuple to indicate a vulgar fellow. But if he thought to conquer Nanette in generosity, he was mistaken. The flower-girl, after a moment’s reflection, begged her lover to give her till to-morrow to answer. He consented reluctantly, but not doubting the result. Who could have looked in the eighteenth century to see a fish-monger's daughter refuse the hand of a French prince?

De Courtenaye arose the next morning satisfied with himself and with the world, and more in love than ever. He longed impatiently for the message which should summon him to the feet of his adored mistress to receive the seal of his happiness. At last, after, it seemed to his eagerness, an age of waiting, his servant brought him a letter. He glanced at the superscription; it was in the well-known hand. He pressed the dear characters to his lips and tore the missive open with trembling fingers. This is what he read:

“Love blinds you. A marriage with me would dishonor you. You love me too well for me to refuse you the most convincing proof of my love. I give you up, and I give up life for you. When you read this the flower-girl Nanette will have quitted the world for ever. Do not scruple to keep the money you have received, in your aunt’s name; it is yours by right. A kinsman, who accomplished your father’s ruin, simply made me the instrument of his tardy atonement. I leave to my family a fortune ample for their wants. Adieu! Think of me sometimes in the cloister, wherein I take refuge from my heart, and where I shall never cease to pray for you.”

So ends the history of Nanette Lollier. The Archbishop of Paris in person, it is said, conducted her to the convent of her choice, and the Palais Royal went into mourning. The prince was almost wild with grief; but his prayers, his supplications, his almost frenzied entreaties, could not shake Nanette’s resolve. He never married. The allusion in the flower-girl’s letter recalled to him certain rumors current at the time of his father’s death; but, as our chronicler shrewdly surmises, the story of the kinsman was simply a device of Nanette’s affection to disarm her lover’s pride.

This is the romance of Nanette, the flower-girl of the Palais Royal, as it is recorded in a chronicle of the time. In the foul and fetid 280annals of that most polluted reign, barren alike of manly honor and womanly virtue, it comes to us like a jewel we lift from the mire, or a fresh-blown rose we rescue from the kennel. Let us not ask if it be true. Stories of disinterested love, of magnanimity and devotion, let us rather accept as always true, saving our incredulity for narratives of another sort. For our own part we had rather believe Tiberius to be a myth than that Cordelia is a fiction; that Nero never fiddled in his life than that Henry Esmond never put his birthright in the fire to spare his benefactress pain.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Classic Literature, principally Sanskrit, Greek, and Roman. With some account of the Persian, Chinese, and Japanese in the Form of Sketches of the Authors and Specimens from Translations of their Works. By C. A. White, author of The Student’s Mythology. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1877.

We find on p. 12 of this new Hand-book of Classic Literature, as it is entitled on the back, among the “most commendable maxims” of the Pancha-Trantra—a work on morals composed by Hindoo sages—the following: “As long as a person remains silent he is honored; but as soon as he opens his mouth men sit in judgment upon his capacity.” The young people who will make use of this book, which is principally intended for their benefit and pleasure, must be the final judges of the capacity of its author to make classic literature intelligible and interesting to their minds. The author appears to understand them, and to have acquired that experience and skill in adapting instruction to the juvenile mind, by practical familiarity with young students in the class-room, which is almost necessary to ensure success in preparing a good text-book. The Hand-book of Classic Literature is not intended as a manual for lessons and recitations. It is not exclusively intended for those who study Latin or Greek; and we are not aware of any considerable number of young people who are studying Sanskrit, Persian, or Chinese, so that evidently no such class of pupils could have been in the eye of the author. In fact, the aim of the author is to give some general notion of the ancient authors and their principal works, and some fine specimens of the best translations which have been made into English, to those who do not study the ancient languages at all, or at most learn only the rudiments of one or two of them. Three-fourths of the volume are devoted to the Greek and Latin classics. The remaining eighty pages are divided between the Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese, with a brief notice of the Japanese. The most elaborate and valuable portion of the work is that devoted to Greek literature. The author has made use of the best critical works and selected a large number of the most excellent translations. So much learning, pains, skill in faithful and idiomatic rendering, and even poetic genius, have been expended by English scholars in translating the Greek classics that any reader of intelligence and taste may understand and enjoy to a very great extent these ancient masterpieces without learning a word of Greek. We notice as particularly discriminating and just the criticisms of the author on the three great tragedians. Specimens of several different authors who have translated Homer are presented, and a number of extracts from Aristophanes and others of the generally less known poets. There must be many whose curiosity will be excited by these choice morsels to read the entire translated 281works themselves. Next in interest to the sketches and translations from the Greek are those from the Sanskrit and Persian, on account both of the novelty of the subject-matter to the generality of readers, and also the intrinsic beauty of the selected passages. The author writes enthusiastically about Zoroaster, and we think with great justice. The song of the tea-pickers, from the Chinese, pleases us extremely, and is one of the prettiest and most touching of the minor pieces in the volume. The author has shown remarkable judgment and good taste in making this compilation, and writes in all that part of it which is of original composition in a style of peculiar accuracy and felicity of diction. The strict and conscientious regard in which the old saying Maxima reverentia debetur pueris has been kept throughout is an example for all those who write for the young. There is nothing which can endanger the faith or damage the moral delicacy of the young Christian pupil in all this volume filled up with the literature of heathen nations. On the contrary, its effect is salutary, and shows beautifully not only the great obscurity in which those gifted pagans lay from the want of a clear revelation of truth, but also that the human mind everywhere, in all times, naturally Christian, longs for the light.

The mechanical execution of the Classical Hand-book is remarkable for beauty and accuracy. We have noticed only two or three typographical faults in the whole volume. It is a most attractive book to take up and read. We have said that it is not properly a class-book. It is a reading-book for higher pupils, and a companion for lectures, suitable for reference or use in class-readings. We recommend it most cordially to all higher schools, especially academies for young ladies, and others where classical studies are not made one of the chief branches of instruction. The great number of choice and elegant extracts from the best writers, many of which are unfamiliar, as well as the historical notices and criticisms, make this book equally suitable for use in families and literary circles, especially for reading aloud, as for schools. We wish for the author the best reward which can be bestowed on one who is devoted to the culture of young pupils—the love and gratitude of their generous, affectionate hearts.

The Cradle of the Christ: a Study in Primitive Christianity. By Octavius Brooks Frothingham. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1877.

The author of this volume is one of the representative men of the left section of Unitarianism in this country. He is distinguished by a clear style, a finely-cultivated imagination, and his writings are characterized by a pervading placidity which is only occasionally ruffled by a mocking scepticism that suggests the too close proximity of Dr. Faust’s intimate friend.

The volume abounds in sweeping assertions, slovenly-expressed ideas, and lacks throughout the cement of a sound logic. It fosters on Cardinal Wiseman and Dr. Newman opinions which can only be accounted for on the supposition of the author’s inaccurate scholarship or his contempt for the intelligence of his readers. (See preface, page 5.) Among other things, he informs his readers that “it has been customary with Christians to widen as much as possible the gulf between the Old and the New Testaments, in order that Christianity might appear in the light of a fresh and transcendent revelation, supplementing the ancient, but supplanting it” (page 10). The custom of St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Catholic theologians generally is precisely the contrary. There is a remarkable book by a Catholic on this very point, published in our own day, entitled De l’Harmonie entre l’Eglise et la Synagogue, par Le Chevalier P. L. B. Drach, a converted rabbi. The rabbi, in his two volumes, aims at showing that a Jew, in becoming a Catholic, does not deny or change his religion, but follows out, completes, and perfects it. The Jewish Church and the Catholic Church are identically one, and the former is to the latter as the bud to the full-blown flower.

With a criticism that kills beforehand the life it would dissect, Mr. O. B. Frothingham ends by coolly telling his readers that Christianity is extinct. And with a self-satisfied air he naïvely exhorts them, by the efforts of their imagination, to build up a new and superior religion to Christianity. His readers will, we opine, politely decline this task, and leave to him who had the genius to conceive the idea its accomplishment. What a pity he did not tell them what he means by the imaginative faculty! 282For if in this, as in other things, he follows his foreign masters, we have no reason to expect as the result of its exercise in this direction, other than an additional illusion to the long list of religious vagaries given to the world, from Simon Magus down to Joe Smith and the Fox girls.

A scholar who has read the volume describes its contents as “theological, philosophical, and speculative old shreds picked up in German and French tailor-shops and cunningly sewed together in the shape of a cloak by a 'cute’ Yankee apprentice, in order to cover the nudity of the latest form of the unbelief of New England.”

The book before us shows no mean literary skill, but contains nothing original in the way of thought or erudition, not even an original error, though its errors are many more than the number of its pages.

The Problem of Problems, and its Various Solutions; or, Atheism, Darwinism, and Theism. By Clark Braden, President of Abingdon College, Ill. 8vo. pp. 480. Cincinnati: Chase & Hall. 1877.

Recent scientific research has at last put the orthodox world on its mettle and elicited expressions of opinion from all shades of believers. Coquetting with dangerous premises, even in the guise of science, toleration of views implicitly or indirectly infidel, and a general disposition to compromise, are not indicative of a healthy tone in any organization avowedly Christian. Yet such tendencies have for a long time characterized the relation of the various Protestant sects towards scientism, and one of the greatest outcries raised against the Syllabus proceeded from its alleged intolerance of, and general hostility to, unhampered scientific inquiry. But coaxing and cajoling, and a concurrent cry against the stupidity of Catholics, had no weight with Messrs. Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, and Draper, who went on just as ever dealing their blows against revelation and all positive forms of belief, as though his Lordship of Canterbury were a myth and his faith a sham.

At length consistency compelled the representative men of the various denominations to resist the further encroachments of an irreligious philosophy, and they are beginning to do so with the bitter consciousness that they were the very ones who most ridiculed the sagacity of the Holy Father when he censured the tone and tendency of modern scientism. But it is better late than never; and if the gentlemen who, from Princeton to Abingdon, feel themselves called upon to do the work will only graciously allow that they are eleventh-hour workers, we will find no fault with their intention, but confine ourselves to a criticism of its execution.

The Problem of Problems is the latest addition to the religio-scientific controversy, and it is entitled to serious consideration because of the earnestness of the author and the elaborate character of the work. This elaborateness is, however, more apparent than real, and consists in a measure of diluted thought and diffuse expression. Whether it is unfortunately a peculiarity of Western authors to strip a thought entirely bare and leave nothing to suggestion, as the charge is made, we are not prepared to say, but certain it is that Mr. Clark Braden has gone far towards justifying such a suspicion. He is not satisfied with a placid presentment of his own views, nor with a brief arraignment of what he deems to be the errors of others, but he must reiterate, emphasize, and in general lash himself into a state of incandescence not at all needful for his purpose. Dignified opposition, even if a little tame, is somewhat more congenial to the frigid tastes of persons living east of the Alleghenies than those fervid utterances which mistake sound for sense. This, however, is an error of form which does not necessarily militate against the intrinsic value of the work, nor do we think that an allusion to it is likely to discompose the learned author; for in a little prologue, addressed to “Reviewers and Critics,” he courts and solicits dispassionate and impartial criticism. In addition he requests that all publishers send him a copy of what their imprimatur has allowed critics to say concerning his book. We presume this is right; but when the request comes coupled with the condition that every one undertaking to comment on his work must not do so before having read it from cover to cover, we fear that it will not always be faithfully complied with, or that he will have to read some pages in which gall and wormwood abound more than the milk of human 283kindness. The reason of this we have hinted at. The book is prolix and repeats to a fault. Many excellent thoughts are covered up in a mass of verbiage which emasculates and obscures them. We wish the author had the academic fitness to cope with his antagonists—whose culture has made their productions marvels of composition and terribly enhanced their influence for evil. We are sorry that this charge should be the main one to prefer against a book which was prompted by the best of motives and which really exhibits rare evidences of argumentative power. Take even the opening sentence, and we find ourselves face to face with a flagrant grammatical inaccuracy: “One of the wise utterances of one whom his contemporaries declared spoke as never man spoke was, that no wise man, etc.” Here, apart from the slovenly repetition of “one” we find no subject for the first “spoke,” unless it be “whom,” and that is in the objective case. Similar mistakes occur throughout, and give painful evidence that Mr. Braden began his scientific investigations before he had made himself familiar with Blair or Lord Kames. We would, in connection with this same matter of style, suggest that the too frequent use of interrogation not only mars the beauty of a page, but has an inevitable tendency to wearisome diffuseness. Lest, however, we may be suspected of harshness towards the author, we select a passage at random, that the reader may judge for himself how little Mr. Braden is acquainted with the quality of a good style. On page 171 he says: “We have no horses on the pampas of the New World, although they existed as the most adapted to horses of any portion of the globe for ages, and there were equine types in the New World for several geologic epochs. Multitudes of cases might be given where man has carried animals into places where they did not exist and they flourished, and even improved, thus showing that the conditions were especially fitted for them, yet had not produced them, although they had existed for vast ages. Hence conditions have failed to evolve what was especially fitted to them, and just what they would produce, did they produce anything.” We submit that these sentences are not only clumsy in construction, but are positively ungrammatical, and no one who undertakes the guidance of others along the thorny paths of scientific research has a right to tax the general patience with slipshod composition of this kind. Such examples as those given are not isolated, but disfigure nearly every page. On page 87 we find the following; “There was at first use of bodily organs in appropriating food and slaying for food animals, and the use of spontaneous productions of the earth, like animals.”

So much for the form of the book. The matter is indeed better, though necessarily much impaired by the many faults of style. In consideration of fair play towards the author we will not accept his own standard of judgment while passing an opinion on his book; for we would then have either to mistrust our own intelligence entirely or to utter unqualified censure of all that he has written. In his appeal to “Reviewers and Critics” he says: “If there is censure or condemnation of what is written, let it be only after the critic understands what he condemns, and because he understands it.” Now, we do not propose to condemn any portion of the book because we understand it; for we freely confess that there is much valuable thought to be found in its pages, and the author gives proof of having a good logical mind, not hampered, indeed, by the subtleties of Port Royal or the Grammar of Assent, but sturdy and vigorous, with a Western breadth and freedom. We have not space to give even an outline of the plan Mr. Braden has mapped out for himself. Method is an important feature of a scientific and argumentative work, and, when judiciously adopted, goes far to promote the purpose of the author.

Clearness, natural development, logical sequence of thought, and ready conviction are the results of a suitable method, while confusion, weariness, and dissatisfaction follow from a neglect thereof. Mr. Braden’s lack of method will do much in the way of injuriously interfering with the effect of his book. Divisions and subdivisions without number, irrespective of reason, may swell the dimensions of a work, but do not certainly contribute to the satisfaction of the reader.

If all Mr. Braden has written in the present volume were presented in a more orderly and attractive manner his book would be a valuable contribution to polemics, but the faults we have indicated will constantly militate against its usefulness.

284In the Appendix both Draper and Huxley come in for a share of censure, but while the author utterly fails to make a point against Draper, he so overloads with irrelevant matter his review of Huxley’s three lectures, delivered in this city, that the reader rises from the perusal of it with a tired memory and a dissatisfied mind.

The Childhood of the English Nation; or, The Beginnings of English History. By Ella S. Armitage. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1877.

The authoress of this “little” book tells us, in her preface, that when she began to write it “no short and simple history of England had appeared which made any attempt to give unlearned people an insight below the surface of bare facts,” but that “since then numerous works of the kind have appeared.” Yes, indeed, too numerous; yet, as far as we know, not one of them so pretentious as this. With a very readable style and a great show of erudition (an appalling “list of authorities” is appended to her volume) she sets up for “an interpreter to those who have no knowledge of history,” taking for her theme what she is pleased to call the “childhood of the English nation”—by which she means the history of England “till the end of the twelfth century.” Of course, therefore, she has to deal largely with the work and influence of the Catholic Church. Now, when those who are not Catholic undertake to expound a philosophy to which they have not the key—to wit, the philosophy of any part of history with which Catholic faith has been concerned—we can pardon their mistakes, provided they evince that humility which is the mark of fair-mindedness. But, if this condition be wanting, we can only regard their attempt as a piece of insufferable impertinence; their very concessions to our cause—a trick quite fashionable of late—but making them the less excusable.

Here, then, lies our quarrel with the writer of this book. She goes out of her way to theorize on matters she does not understand, instead of confining herself to “bare facts.” For example, after acknowledging (p. 19) that “there is no saying how long the English might not have remained heathen if Pope Gregory I., in the year 597, had not sent missionaries to bring them to the faith of Christ,” she must needs endeavor to account for the Papacy as follows:

“Gregory was Pope or Bishop of Rome from 590 to 604. In his time the popes of Rome had not yet risen to the position of universal bishops and supreme heads of the church, though they were tending towards it. All men were agreed that there must be one, and only one, visible, united church, but all had not yet made up their minds that the Bishop of Rome was to be the head of that church. The church of the Welsh, for example, and that of Ireland (!), owed no obedience to Rome. The pope himself did not dare to call himself universal bishop: 'Whosoever calls himself so is Antichrist,’ said Gregory I. Still, it was natural that Rome, which had been the ruling city of the one universal empire, the queen of the West, should be the chief centre of the one universal church, and that the Bishop of Rome should become the head of the church, and all other bishops should bow to his authority. This was what did come to pass in time, but at the time of which I am now speaking it seemed very uncertain; for things had sadly changed with Rome. She had no emperor now; the emperor was at Constantinople; Italy was invaded by barbarians, Rome herself was scourged by plague and famine. The Bishop of Constantinople tried to set himself up as Universal Bishop and Head of the Church; and that the popes afterwards won the day in this struggle was largely due to the great influence which Pope Gregory I. gained by his wisdom and his powerful character.”

The cluster of absurdities contained in this passage would be “matter for a flying smile,” were it not that the ignorance displayed looks too much like perverted knowledge. Can the lady have really failed to perceive the transparent nonsense of supposing that such a power as the Papacy originated in people making up their minds that the church ought to have a visible head, and that the Bishop of Rome was the right man because, forsooth, Rome had been the seat of empire? If, again, she knows what St. Gregory said to the ambitious John of Constantinople, why does she not quote a few more of his remarks? “The care of the whole church,” said he, “was committed to Peter; yet he is not called 'Universal Apostle.’” “Who does not know that his see (of Constantinople) is subject to the Apostolic 285See (of Rome)?” St. Gregory, like his predecessor St. Pelagius, refused the title of Œcumenical Patriarch, or Universal Bishop, for himself out of humility; how, then, could he tolerate the assumption of it by a bishop who did not sit in Peter’s chair?

But we need not cite this book further to show that it is valueless in Catholic eyes.

Dr. Joseph Salzmann’s Leben und Wirken Dargestellt von Joseph Rainer, Priester der Erzdiöcese Milwaukee, Professor am Priesterseminar Salesianum. St. Louis: Herder.

The Salesianum is an ecclesiastical seminary near Milwaukee which enjoys a very high reputation for the learning of its professors, the solidity of its course of studies, and the strictness of its discipline. Near it there is a Normal College for the training of school-teachers, and another college for the intermediate education of boys. The man who was the principal founder of these excellent institutions was the Very Rev. Joseph Salzmann, D.D., an Austrian priest, who came to Wisconsin as a missionary thirty years ago and finished his earthly course in January, 1874, honored and regretted throughout the United States. The venerable Archbishop of Milwaukee first conceived the idea of founding a seminary to educate priests for the Northwest more than thirty years ago, while praying at the tomb of St. Francis de Sales, and this is the reason of the name Salesianum by which the seminary was christened. The first rector was the present learned Bishop of La Crosse, Dr. Heiss. Dr. Salzmann succeeded him in office in 1868. The Rev. Professor Rainer, in the little volume before us, gives an interesting account of the whole life of Dr. Salzmann, but especially of his great and arduous work of founding and establishing the Salesianum, which we may truly call a heroic achievement. He was a thoroughly learned and accomplished scholar, a man of sacerdotal dignity and personal attractiveness, an eloquent preacher, with fair and seductive prospects before him in his own beautiful Catholic land. He was well fitted to adorn those positions in the church which are surrounded with the most outward éclat, and give the opportunity of enjoying all the ease, comfort, and pleasure in literary pursuits and quiet seclusion which are lawful and honorable in the priesthood. Nevertheless, he chose the life of a Western missionary, and devoted the greater part of his time and energies, not to the intellectual and attractive employments of preaching and instruction in the sciences, but to that most repugnant and arduous work of collecting money and looking after the drudgery of building, providing, caring for the material wants of new, poor, struggling institutions. It is not possible for any who have not been brought up in some one of the old Catholic countries of Europe to estimate the sacrifice made by young men of refined character and education, and strong love of home and country, when they devote themselves to missionary labor in a new country, and to its hardest, most repulsive departments. There are special difficulties and hardships to be encountered by those who work among our German population. When they are bad or indifferent Catholics, they are the most obstinate and unmanageable people with whom a priest can have to deal, and very difficult to reclaim. Apostate and infidel Germans have a brutality in their hatred to the Catholic Church and all religion which is extremely odious and cannot be fully appreciated by one who has not come into personal contact with that class, whose only god is beer and whose church is the lager-beer saloon. Zur Hölle is the appropriate motto we have seen over one of these dens in New York. When thoroughly imbued with the Catholic spirit, the German people are admirable. The wonderful work of Christian civilization wrought out among them in past ages is known to all readers of true history. Dr. Salzmann, and others like him, are worthy successors of the apostolic men whose names are recorded in the history of the church. They are the men who carry on the true Cultur-Kampf in the vast realms of our Western territory. Their acts are worthy to be classed with those so charmingly related in The Monks of the West and Christian Schools and Scholars. A keen Western speculator said that “a bishop was worth as much as a railroad to a Western town.” All that is wanted to repeat in the immense regions of our new States and Territories the creation and development of great civilized and Christian communities 286is the virile force, the manhood, of those early times. Land and material resources exist in prodigal abundance. It is men that are wanted—masses of people with strength and spirit to abandon our crowded cities and old States and colonize new domains, and men with the ability and virtue of leaders, guides, founders, instructors, legislators, rulers, and benefactors. We trust that the modest recital of the life of one generous young priest who left his charming Austrian home to engage in this work may find its way among the educated young men and young ecclesiastics of Germany. There is work here for some among the hundreds of such young men, full of vigorous health, full of intellectual vigor, full of sound learning, who are at a loss to find a sufficient sphere for their activity in their own country.

The greatest and noblest project of Dr. Salzmann was one which he could not even begin to carry into execution—that of founding a university, a new Fulda, for the Germans of America. We do not think that such an institution could or should remain permanently an exclusively German university. We desire, nevertheless, to see this grand idea carried out, as a special work of our Catholics of German origin and language, under the direction of a corps of learned German professors, and with special reference to the education of youth who are of the same descent or who wish to study the language and literature of Germany. Time and the course of nature will eventually blend all our heterogeneous elements together, but we do not believe in violent efforts to hurry on the process. All that we can borrow from any European language or literature, all the recruits we can gain from the nurseries of scholars or population in the Old World, is so much added to our intellectual, social, and political strength and breadth. Of course the English language and literature, American history and institutions, ought to be assiduously studied by the learned foreigners who are domesticated among us, and taught to their pupils of a different mother-tongue. This may be done without abdicating the advantage which they possess, and which others must acquire at the cost of great labor, by being born heirs to the inheritance of their own immediate ancestors.

The great practical question of the moment is that of Catholic education. The advocates of compulsory secular education are the enemies of religion, of their country, and of true culture. The seminaries, colleges, and schools where Catholic priests, youths, and children are trained in sound religious knowledge, morality, and science are the fortresses and the centres of real civilization. Whoever does a great work in the cause of Catholic education is a benefactor to the church and the country. Such a noble and meritorious man was Dr. Salzmann, a priest powerful in word and work, a model for the young ecclesiastics of the Salesianum to imitate, an encouraging example for all who are laboring to found and perfect similar institutions. The diocese of Milwaukee was a poor and feeble little bishopric when the venerable Dr. Henni was consecrated in 1844. Now it is a metropolitan see, with above 190,000 Catholics in its diocesan limits, above 180 priests, several flourishing institutions for the higher education of both sexes, and schools in almost every parish. The Salesianum, where the first rector, Dr. Heiss, was professor of Greek, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and moral theology, numbers thirteen professors and two hundred and fifty students. Surely, the prayers and labors of a good bishop, seconded by those of able and zealous priests, can work wonders now as well as in the best ages of the past. Indeed, works which a St. Francis of Sales was unable to accomplish are now successfully performed within a short time and with comparatively little difficulty. Assuredly, we cannot fail to recognize a special benediction of God upon the church of the United States.