You are a blockhead if you can't see it; you are a socialist, a red republican, an atheist, if you won't. The nature of man is not sufficient even for domestic, social, and political comfort; by himself he cannot live decently even for a natural, nay not for an animal end; without the grace of Christianity he cannot be respectable as a son, husband, father, or citizen he cannot be a brave soldier, or an honest tradesman, or an honourable gentleman, or a sturdy labourer. Man cannot live the life even of a tolerable animal unless he is also a Christian. They never think whether they can prove their thesis or not; they only fear that if they can't, it is all up with them; so they must, they will prove it,—sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas.

For ourselves, we are more and more convinced that the protest against this school is becoming day by day more necessary. It is a school which pretends to occupy the whole front of the religious battle in France; and the impudence, vanity, conceit, and inaccuracies of its leaders leave it open to tremendous blows, which are hailed by the irreligious party as so many wounds to religion, and which sensible men feel so difficult to answer because they know them to be partially deserved...

But, however this may be, we cannot conclude without expressing our sympathy with those who, like Dr. Margotti, are fighting the battle of religion in Piedmont: our anger at their mistakes is in proportion to our anxiety for their success; the wounds they receive pain us; whatever they suffer, we suffer with them. If they ever see our criticism, let them receive it as the warning of a brother. We have more experience of the battle with Protestantism than they have; we know our enemy; and though we know it to be the most deceitful politician, the most artful and adroit trickster, the most monstrous liar in the universe, we know also that its familiarity with these virtues gives it a sharp eye to detect them in others; and that no falsehood, no inaccurate representations, no weak, inconclusive, or sophistical arguments, are of use against it; they will be turned against ourselves; we are only priming the petard with which we shall be hoisted. With regard to God, it always holds good—but here it is good with regard to men also, that the cause of truth is not served by our lies, no, nor yet by our weak, ill-considered, though well-meant, attempts to defend her.

Neither can we deny that much may be said in extenuation of Dr. Margotti's mistakes. In a sudden danger men catch the nearest means of escape, without much inquiry into the nature of these means. When the treachery of your

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pretended friends has plunged you, thinking of any thing but such a danger, into the thick of a battle, you do not stay to prove your arms, but fight with whatever comes to hand. Now, it is just the pretended admirers of England in Piedmont that have brought Dr. Margotti to this pass; with the name of liberty on their lips, with a feigned respect for the opinion of the majority, they are determined to make their own ideas prevail in spite of the majority opposed to them, and to leave no liberty to contrary sentiments. There are periods when this can be done. William Cecil and Queen Elizabeth proved its possibility. With two-thirds of the people of England against them, they found means so to play off counties against boroughs, and to intimidate or cajole their opponents, that they crushed the religion of the national majority by a parliamentary majority of three voices, and England was astonished at finding herself Protestant. The finesse, the acuteness, the consummate wickedness of these doings, furnish a lesson which the parliamentarians of Piedmont have well learned. They are better at these weapons than Dr. Margotti. Lying is not his line; the education of a priest and a doctor of theology is not one to teach him how to do it with effect. Accordingly his misrepresentations are gross, open, palpable, clownish, unartistic, objectless, useless. For the rest, we beg him to leave these weapons to those whose calling it is to use them, the ministers of irreligion: and immorality.

Literary Notices.

Marie Stuart et Catherine de Médicis. Par A. Chéruel. (Hachette et Cie., 1858.) A book containing some new facts and many old falsehoods. The author had the good luck to discover, in a country-house in Normandy, a number of letters of French ambassadors at the court of Elizabeth, of the years 1575 to 1586. The majority are from Castelnau (Mauvissière), of whose correspondence during his first embassy we gave a specimen in our last Number. They are interesting chiefly for the light they throw on the policy of France in the drama which terminated in the death of Queen Mary. M. Chéruel, however, who shows no particular vocation or competency for the task of judging her conduct, has appended so much of his own matter as was wanted to make up a goodly volume. As the letters he has published are really valuable, we can only regret that he should have thought fit to add any thing of his own. In order to show what his opinions are worth, we need only say that he calls Mignet "the most conscientious" of Mary's biographers (p. 49), "whose learning and impartiality it is impossible to question" (p. 46).

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It was the fate of Mary Stuart to be the victim of a party who have always been the foulest calumniators that ever agreed in a lie. The writers by whom their accusations have been repelled, extended to her character the interest which her fate excites. But the day is past when a writer who accepted the judgment of her enemies, or the enthusiasm of some of her admirers, could lay claim to the title of an historian. the middle ages historians, as well as naturalists, kept their eye upon the action of God in the world, and discerned in all things the manifestation of His power. Their attention was not distracted by the multitude of details. Then came the time of minute research, in which the study of details concealed the unity of idea, and the action of Providence was lost sight of. This was a subordinate view both of nature and history: in the one it led to materialism; in the other to the disappearance of the design and action of God behind the conflict of human will. It gave a prominence to individuals, by which the unity of the subject was destroyed. The explanation of human intentions, and character became the key to all history, all disputes turned upon the merits of individuals, and there was an endless field for the exercise of partisan ingenuity. But now men have learnt that there is a greater drama enacting than that which is presented by the fate of the individual actors. In a play, or a novel, the general public are content with details: they tremble with Partridge at the ghost, and remember of Falstaff only his paunch and his jokes; few are able to distinguish the idea which it is the design of the author to bring out in his whole work. So in history it is characteristic of a popular and superficial view to discuss the lives and fortunes of particular persons, and to overlook the great stream of universal history. There are so many trees, says a German proverb, that one cannot see the wood. Partiality in judging great historical characters, and anxiety to identify principles and persons, implies a very imperfect idea of history, and, among Catholics, a very imperfect trust in religion it shows that they cannot distinguish that which is essential from that which is accidental,-the greatness of God from the weakness of man. It can rarely happen that a principle must stand or fall with the reputation of an individual; and, in the case of Catholics, the cause is always immeasurably above the champion,-we judge men by their fidelity to the cause, not the cause by the virtues of its defenders. No Catholic is as good as his religion. It is the only case in which there is not the slightest inducement to represent friends and enemies otherwise than as they are. Hence perfect impartiality is possible only among Catholics; but among Catholics it is also imperative. Because St. Thomas died a martyr, we are not tempted to deny that he wavered at Clarendon; nor because St. Augustine was the greatest doctor of the West, need we conceal the fact that he was also the father of Jansenism.

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So it is with Queen Mary. Almost every action of her reign proved her unworthiness to be the protector of the great cause with which her fate was identified. She owed that position to her birth only; not to her fitness for it. Her whole character betrayed the influence of that state of European society which was the chief secondary cause of the progress of the Reformation. For nearly half a century before that event the condition of religion, even in Italy, was deplorable. Men like St. Francis of Paul and Savonarola shone like meteors in the midst of an all but universal depravity. The Catholic reformation

began at the head before it reached the members. Most providentially Luther, and not Calvin, was the leader of the Protestant movement when Leo X. presided over the church. The Lutheran Reformation was followed by a visible deterioration of morals; when, a generation later,

Calvin appeared at the head of a reformed party, conspicuous for sternness, consistency, and moral power, he encountered at the head of the Church a spirit very different from that of Leo, and there was never even an apparent moral superiority on the part of the reformers over the rulers of the Church. In France the temper of the Medicean age survived by fifty years its disappearance from the court of Rome. When Mary lived and reigned in Paris, the Council of Trent, the Jesuits, and the religious wars, had not yet infused the spirit of the Catholic revival into the court and nation. It was the character of the place where she had been educated,-not, indeed, in its worst form, but with all its levity, thoughtlessness, and sensuality, that she carried with her to Scotland, to encounter the most powerful, devoted, and consistent fanatic that Calvinism ever inspired. In the fatal conflict that ensued between Protestantism, in its most formidable champion, and the feeblest defender of the Church, we cannot always bestow our respect and sympathy on the side which has our wishes. It is only the expiation of her last years, her captivity and death, that invest Mary Stuart with the interest which attaches to her name. We may apply to her an admirable saying of Burke, when reproached by a cynical friend with his eulogy on Marie Antoinette (Works, vol. i. p. 573, ed. 1852): "I really am perfectly astonished how you could dream, with my paper in your hand, that I found no other cause than the beauty of the Queen of France (now, I suppose, pretty much faded) for disapproving the conduct which has been held towards her, and for expressing my own particular feelings. I am not to order the natural sympathies of my own heart, and of every honest breast, to wait until all the jokes of all the anecdotes of the coffee-houses of Paris, and of the dissenting meeting-houses of London, are scoured of all the slander of those who calumniate persons, that afterwards they may murder them with impunity. Am I obliged to prove judicially the virtues of all those I shall see suffering every kind of wrong and contumely and risk of life, before I endeavour to interest others in their sufferings; and before I endeavour to excite horror against midnight assassins at back-stairs, and their more wicked abettors in pulpits?"

Atlantis. No. 2. (London, Longmans.) Mr. O'Hagan's essay on "Joan of Arc" goes far to remove the shame we have long felt at the disgraceful manner in which Dr. Lingard has treated her story. Although he was entirely unacquainted with continental history, his ignor-` ance is nowhere more conspicuous and more discreditable than here. The commonest authorities which had appeared before his time were not used; and he made no attempt to improve his account in the later editions. He goes so far as to say, that the English would have been justified in putting her to death without a trial (History of England, vol. iv. p. 41). Mr. O'Hagan's article is founded exclusively on the valuable and comprehensive compilation of Quicherat, in particular on the acts of the second trial.

Guido Görres, the author of the best life of the Maid of Orleans that has yet been written, had the provoking good fortune to discover these acts after his own work had appeared, and the still greater annoyance of seeing himself anticipated by the publication of the French edition. Although no satisfactory work has since appeared incorporating the new matter, it has been made use of in the Revue des Deux Mondes by the distinguished Catholic historian Carné. Since the appearance of the Mystik of the elder Görres, it is inexcusable to neglect the light which is thrown upon the history of Joan by the comparison of similar cases.

The lecture in which the learned physician Hecker, of Berlin, explained the medical phenomenon, has unfortunately been overlooked by all later writers. The present article offers nothing either of historical or psychological research to bring out more distinctly than before the character of her whose marvellous career is the most striking sign that nations are protected by the same Providence which watches over the Church. One of her biographers gives a list of above four hundred works that have been written about her. It is hard to believe that M. Quicherat's five volumes can contain all that is worth consulting by the historian of an event. which has employed the labours of so many writers.*

In the next article, Mr. Arnold undertakes the vindication of a rather more questionable character. Alcibiades, he says, has been unfairly dealt with by the moderns, in consequence of their admiration for the Athenian people and institutions, with which he was constantly at variance. Niebuhr, indeed, whom Mr. Arnold quotes in support of his view, compared Alcibiades, in his lectures of 1826, to Catiline. But since Niebuhr's time the current of opinion has changed greatly in his favour. The tone of his recent biographers has been such as to render Mr. Grote's unfavourable judgment an exception, and a new defence almost superfluous. Nor is it quite true that Alcibiades "was constantly at variance with the great majority of his countrymen." The difficulty of understanding his real character has arisen rather from the facility with which he changed sides, according to the interests of the moment, than from his opposition to the Athenian democracy. As Phrynichus truly said, Alcibiades was really attached neither to oligarchy nor democracy (Thuc. viii. 48); and Thucydides himself says that the cause of the enmity he encountered was the jealousy of his rivals (vi. 28). In enumerating the passages in which Alcibiades is mentioned by contemporary writers, Mr. Arnold has omitted a remarkable passage in Plato (Repub. vi. 494), in which, though not named, there is no doubt that Alcibiades is described. In the same enumeration we are sorry to see the second Alcibiades referred to among other platonic dialogues, without a hint as to its spuriousness. The reputation of English critical scholarship has been lately dragged through the mire by such writers as Sir George Lewis, Colonel Mure, and Mr. Gladstone. We should have hoped to find it upheld by a more rigorous tone of criticism amongst the accomplished members of the Catholic university. The second Alcibiades not only has no friends among the moderns, but was rejected as unplatonic even by the ancients (Athenæus, xi. 506). The Romans, the bravest and most patriotic of nations, showed their estimation of Alcibiades when they placed his statue in the forum, together with that of Pythagoras, as the wisest and the bravest of the Greeks (τὸν φρονιμώτατον καὶ τὸν ἀνδρειότατον Ελλήνων, Plutarch, in vit. Numa, viii.).

Ít has been the rare good fortune of this country, in our time, to possess what neither France, nor Spain, nor Italy, can boast of,-two great theologians. Both have been richly endowed with the greatest qualities of the divine, and with such personal qualities as gave them an extraordinary influence over the best and ablest of their countrymen : masters in an equal degree of the two great pillars on which the science of theology reposes, philosophy and history,-and of that classical learning which is the basis of all higher cultivation: one more remark

* We should have noticed Bishop Gillis' eloquent panegyric of Joan, preached in the cathedral of Orleans, May 8th, 1857, and published, with notes, by Dol man and by Beattie.

VOL. X.-NEW SERIES.

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