-> ^..iiir. S'"^ - % o 4- '.> v v »!«-' •^ ^, ;• V*° .*:«*. <%._£ Brotber at 1bome Bno flby Sister in a foreign Xanfc, CONTENTS. I. She Wouldn't, But She Did ... 1 II. At Peter's Chair ..... 4 III. Under Peter's Dome 11 IV. The Unspent Force of Michael Angelo 24 V. Our Lady or Italy 33 VI. Citizen-Saints and Glorious Tombs . . 48 VII. Two Noble Roman Ladies .... 64 VIII. The Shadow of the Cross in Italian Sunshine ...... 77 IX. Benedetto and Others 87 X. Jerusalem in Rome 96 XI. New Rome and St. Joachim's . . . 104 XII. Catholic Remains and Ritualist Churches in London 117 XIII. A Glimpse of the Second Spring . . 128 XIV. Oxford and the Leading of the Kindly Light ....... 140 XV. The Rector of Campion House . . . 149 XVI. English "Continuity" in Rome . . 160 XVII. Rome's English Memorials of Thirteen Centuries ....... 170 XVIII. Ireland and America in Rome . . 192 XIX. Glimpses of the Alps 197 XX. Wood-Carving and Dolls' Houses . . 202 XXI. Notre Dame de Namur 207 XXII. A Bit of Irish Ivy 216 XXIII. A Literary Fairy Godfather and Other People of the Pen 222 XXIV. Religious Well-Springs in Ireland . 236 XXV. Contrasted Voyages 247 new footsteps in Well-trodden lUays. i. She Wouldn't, But She Did. There were three people on the good ship, New England — the Lest boat on the sea — who by all right and title should have crossed the Atlantic many a time — but who were going over for the first time in the early days of September, 1898. They confessed to one another their common dis- credit ; and interchanged pledges not to reveal it to the man from South Africa who had crossed nine times between Port Elizabeth and Liverpool, and made a tour through the United States and Canada besides. One of them made a firm resolution not to give a lecture on the trip ; and another pledged her- self not to make a new book thereon. But "tell us how this or that impressed you" was urged so often on the latter that she yielded in wonted fashion to the solicitation of circumstance ; and now breaks her good resolution by reprinting these notes of a trip in which sight-seeing was lim- ited by diminished strength and heart for it, and a secret sympathy with the pilgrims who were fain, for the time being, to fill the fountain of Trevi from the river of Lethe. She promises, however, not to attempt a consecu- 1 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN tive relation of experiences new to her, but familiar, in their backgrounding, at least, to most of her readers ; but to take, here and there, a leaf from her memory's tablets, in which some fortunate incident may be of interest to others as recalling some pleas- ant reminiscence of their own. " Whatever else you do, go to Rome and see the Holy Father," said a friend, who glories above all else in being a child of the Church. To Rome I went, hastened on my way by an early chill in the air of London ; nor tempted for any but the briefest resting in Paris — which, beauti- ful and fascinating as it is — is too like the hard, shrewd World of a forsworn Trio, when one is not in the mood or with the opportunity to get behind its gold and crystalline glitter. To Rome, with brief rests at Chambery and Genoa, storing in my mind many pictures, of the Savoy Alps and the quaint towns and villages in valleys or on mountain slopes ; of Italy's vineyards, olive orchards, and orange groves ; glimpses of the Mediterranean blue under the bluest of skies, and the goldenest of sunshine; black, with flat, low- sliding white-edged waves, under the moonlight — The tideless, dolorous, midland sea of Swinburne's poem in which France is "the land of sand and ruin and gold," and things have gone to the bad generally. WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. But Rome, at last, with its very modern electric- lighted station, and the new city as incongruous against the old as an Eiffel Tower beside an Alpine peak. A brief tarrying in a hostelry which to all intents and purposes might have been plucked up by the foundations out of New York or Boston, and dumped in Rome ; and presently I found myself in the heart of old Rome, beside the Minerva, with the Pantheon in sight, the American College within easy reach, and a guide, philosopher and friend at hand to bring me by short cuts to the realities of certain long-cherished dreams. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN II. At Peter's Chair. " But the Holy Father?" says the namesake of St. Teresa, with a suspicion of impatience in her bird- like accents. " Don't set your heart on seeing his Holiness," said a good friend in high place and power, on my first day in Rome, " for now, with his advanced age and infirm health the possibilities of an audience are not what they used to be." Fortunately, however, the Holy Father was stronger during the month of October than for some months previous ; and the opportunity hardly hoped for came. On October 14, the Pope received a little band of devout English and English-speaking Catholics, in which the Bostonian had the privilege of being in- cluded. The audience was given in one of the small halls of the Vatican. Just before starting she appeared before her men- tor in the Spanish church-going costume, which is the toilette of rule for a Papal audience, and enquired whether her objects of piety for the Pope's blessing were too much in evidence. " Nonsense ! There will be portmanteaux." That meant as to quantity, however. Think you 4 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. that these earnest children of Holy Church, albeit from a land of paler sunshine and less demonstrative manner, would be outdone at the Chair of Peter by any fervent Frenchman or enthusiastic Italian? The ladies wore girdles for the sole purpose of attaching their scores of rosaries thereto, and the gentlemen had no reluctance in carrying full as many on their arms. All had brought as many cruci- fixes and other objects of piety as their hands could hold ; so that the solitary Bostonian was conspicuous chiefly for not bringing the possible devout storage of a steamer trunk. The audience was fixed for eleven o'clock ; and for nearly an hour before, the favored ones were in place, all eyes turned expectantly to the door through which His Holiness would presently be borne in. At last there was a slight movement, and, his mod- est retinue seeming to fall away as we looked, as the frame shades off from the picture, I saw in his chair of state, Leo XIII., the Visible Ruler of the Church of God, the latest in the long unbroken line through whose hands still thrills the touch of Christ as He placed the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven in the hands of Peter. I stood directly facing the door above mentioned, and had for a moment an unobstructed view of the Holy Father. Let me say, at once, that most of his pictures give a very imperfect idea of him. Think first, to get an adequate idea of his appearance, of a 5 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN human body, blanched and etherealized by the exter- nal friction of the years and the inward burning of the thought, yet conveying no impression of sickness nor senility ; a large, grand head, that has never bent under the weight of the Triple Crown, the beautiful white hair of a patriarch to soften the strong, clear- cut features ; large, young brown eyes, alert and full of fire ; a brow the throne of a high directive intelli- gence ; and the chin of an indomitable will, modified by the singularly gentle and indulgent smile into which the firm ascetic mouth relaxes so easily. The chair-bearers halted towards the head of the apartment, so that the Holy Father commanded a full view of the people who stood in line about the apart- ment, leaving all the centre free. His little court grouped about him. Archbishop Stonor stood on the right, and Father Whitmee, the rector of S. Sil- vestro, behind him to announce the names as each one was presented. But first the Holy Father made a brief address, in which he referred to his first and only visit to London more than fifty years ago, and the flame of desire then enkindled in his heart, and burning only the stronger with the flight of time, for the conver- sion of the English people. His Holiness spoke in Italian, with much energy, constantly gesticulating with his long, lean hands. You would wonder at the strength of his voice, seeing the attenuated, spirit- like body. Archbishop Stonor translated the Holy 6 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Father's words into English, and Father Bannon led the " bravas " at every pause. Then His Holiness graciously received every in- dividual with a kind word or a fatherly touch of the hand in benediction. When the Bostonian came and was presented in character, he took the hand from which the pen had slipped so wearily a few weeks before, in a strong, warm grasp, more like that of a man in vigorous middle age than of one verging on ninety. Then I had the blessing of his own venerable hand sanctified for its office, and by daily touch of the " Bread which giveth life to the world," which has traced words of peace to the na- tions, of freedom to the oppressed, of Christ-like com- fort and encouragement to the laborer heavy laden. It was a memory for a lifetime to be so near, even for a moment, to the High Priest who has, besides the prerogatives of his office, so many claims to the gratitude of the world, and the affectionate venera- tion of every child of Holy Church. The thought of it all made me silent. Contrary was the effect on an enthusiastic Irish girl who came next, and who after her presentation and bless- ing, turned back to press a bunch of rosaries against the Holy Father's hands, and returned to her place expressing her willingness to die on the moment ! At the close of the audience, the Holy Father extended to all an invitation to visit the Vatican Gardens ; but the rain began to fall, and few of 7 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN the ladies were prepared to brave it. We con- tented ourselves with looking into the gardens from the windows, and had the privilege of visiting the Vatican Library with a party of American friends resident in Rome, under the guidance of Mgr. Ugolino, the librarian. I would like to tell you of some of the wonderful things herein guarded. Certain MSS. of tremen- dous literary or historic value held me long at their glassed cases — and I saw the handwritings of Dante, Petrarch, Michael Angelo, and Raphael; of Martin Luther and of Henry VIII. of England, in sundry love letters to Anne Boleyn. Then the cases which were not glassed, containing the Archives of the Vatican. What a magnificent act of faith on the part of Pope Leo XIII. to throw open this library and these archives to the scholars of every race and religion ! " But," interrupts one more interested in the Papal audience than in the library, " what did the ladies wear?" Every one knows that there is a special costume for Papal audiences. The gown must be black, but it may be of any material, and white trimming on the bodice is admissible. One may also wear jew- elry, at one's discretion. A mantilla or veil is of obligation. One may not wear gloves. Gentlemen wear evening dress. Little children may wear white. 8 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. At the pilgrimage of French working people, which was received by the Holy Father in St. Peter's, the week before the audience just described, and at which the Bostonian was present as an on- looker, several Normandy peasant women were ad- mitted in their ordinary costumes. On that occasion I saw the Holy Father borne up the aisle to the altar at which he received the ad- dresses of the deputation. As he bent forward with his hand raised in blessing, visibly delighted at the great and enthusiastic assemblage, he seemed in the firm statuesque whiteness of his aspect, as if he were made of the alabaster of Maderna's mar- vellous St. Cecilia. There were other interesting audiences, of which I heard details from the favored recipients during the four weeks of my stay. One was accorded to an Australian priest who, accompanied by his niece, was conducted to the Pope's presence by the rector of the Irish college. His Bishop had requested the dignity of Monsignor for the priest, in recognition of his services to relig- ion and education, and the Holy Father himself announced the granting of this mark of favor, in a very kindly fashion. " Would you like your uncle to have a new dig- nity ? " he asked gently, of the Dean's relative ; and then he bestowed it, with a not-to-be-forgotten gra- ciousness and appreciation of the hard-working and NEW FOOTSTEPS IN self-denying missionary who had wrought so well for God and for souls, far from his native Erin. The Greek Patriarch was in Rome in October, and had a long private audience with His Holiness. Afterwards, when his suite was admitted, there came with them a young Canadian priest of a famous missionary order. The Pope's keen eyes singled him out, and he entered into a brief conversation on the Manitoba School Question, showing a full grasp of it, and alluding to the audience he had granted Premier Laurier in the same apartment a few months before. There is not the slightest sign of mental deca- dence about Pope Leo XIII. , and even his physical strength seems great for a man of his years. There is nothing ghastly about his whiteness ; the prompt decisiveness and energy of his manner, tem- peramental evidence, are unchanged, say those who have seen him often since the beginning of his Pon- tificate, nearly twenty-two years ago. In the course of nature, the flame of that great life should soon escape its lamp, but the transition hour is not yet. Would that it might be far off ! WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. III. Under Peter's Dome. Once again I looked at the great Angel sheathing his sword on the summit of the Castle of St. Ange- lo; and I thought of David's vision of that other Angel of the Lord, standing between Heaven and earth with a drawn sword turned against Jerusalem. Worse evils than the material pestilence of David's or of Gregory's day have fallen upon the Holy City of the New Covenant. How long till the sword is indeed safe in its scabbard, the bondage of the Church broken, and the great High Priest and the multitudes going up again in splendor to offer the Supreme Sacrifice in the grandest Temple of the Most High God ! I went slowly over the bridge of St. Angelo, look- ing towards the Dome of St. Peter's, and thinking of the hosts which Dante saw going and returning upon it, at the first Jubilee in 1300, almost six cen- turies ago. But Dante saw not the St Peter's upon which we gaze today, else he had not left to Byron to be its laureate. I stood before it on the line of the begin- ning of the colonnades. Like you, dear, possibly un- travelled readers, I had seen it in pictures, and read of it in books. That day, however, I stood, as you on a future day will stand, before the reality, and just 11 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN as unprepared as you will be for its overwhelming grandeur. I looked at the colonnades, and beyond the glorious fountains and the flawless obelisk to the church, and I said in my soul, " This is not a work of man, but a work of Nature" — nor knew that Mendelssohn had said just this before me " Don't hurry me," I said to my friend who had been a thousand times in St. Peter's, but was renew- ing his first emotion again in mine. My heart beat loudly; my throat fluttered; I felt as if Eternity were taking hold of me, as I moved forward to the fountains. I will not tell you how much ground St. Peter's covers ; nor how many pillars Bernini allotted to the colonnades ; nor how high the fountains throw their silvery spray, rainbow-crowned when the sun shines on them ; nor how many steps lead up to the great bronze doors. That is all in the encyclopaedias and guide-books. I wish I could instead make you feel the spirit which has created it ; the lives of the men of genius — Alberti, Rosselini, Sangallo, Bramante, Raphael, Peruzzi, Michael Angelo, Bernini — which are build- ed into it ; the virtue of the Apostles and Doctors of the Church, whose dust it shelters ; the magnificence of the symbolism of the Faith whose best visible ex- pression it is ; and the adoring love of the myriads who have worshipped within its walls that Divine 12 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Presence which abides equally in the humblest church in Christendom. Was St. Peter crucified on the site of this great Basilica? That is the old and well-founded tradi- tion, though there is another in favor of the site of St. Peter's in Montorio. At all events, a temple to the Living God has stood upon this site since the Oratory built here by Pope St. Anacletus, A. D. 90 ; and the remains of SS. Peter and Paul, and of many of the Apostles and their successors, and the Doctors of the Church rest beneath its roof. Colossal figures of Christ and the twelve Apostles confront your gaze, above the facade of the Basilica. You see the martyrdom of SS. Peter and Paul, on the central bronze door of Constantine's Basilica; you see the Navicella — the ship of the Church which no storm can wreck. So much for a brief glance at the spiritual. On either side of the vesti- bule, Constantino and Charlemagne, colossal eques- trian figures, commemorate two great sons of the Church, (the one built the first Basilica of St. Peter, the other was crowned in it) who put forth their power as Christian rulers for the defence and extension of the Faith. Among the statues in the vestibule, which would make a great church in itself, is a beautiful allegor- ical female figure, bearing the symbols of the Papacy. Some Protestants beholding it say that 13 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Pope Joan was no myth ! Have they not seen her statue in St. Peter's ? But lift the leathern curtain and enter the church itself. Have you not heard people say they were disap- pointed in St. Peter's? That is not what they mean. They want to say that they were bewildered, as I have been, and as you will be when that vast interior opens to you, and the great pillars seem to rush together, obliterating the spaces between, and in your eyes is a confusion of altars and tombs and statues, and myriad-hued mosaics and golden vaults and arches, and endless length and breadth, light in the midst and shadow at the ends. The first brass line on the floor tells you the length of St. Paul's, London, — 520i feet, or nearly a hundred feet shorter than St. Peter's. I have seen it, and it strains the mind to realize that it could be easily enclosed in St. Peter's. This fact once grasped, it is no effort to believe that the Pan- theon can be swung under Peter's dome, as Michael Angelo promised. Those doves of the Pamphili-Doria are the size of eagles. The Barberini bees are as big as robins. If those cherubic infants upholding the holy water fonts rose up erect, you would see them eight feet high. The statues of the Apostles and founders of the religious orders are gigantic. They seem of normal size, — but how small the people look up 14 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. about the Confession of St. Peter, around which nearly a hundred bronze lamps are burning all the day. It is a long walk up to the High Altar where the Pope alone has the right to celebrate Mass. Over it is Bernini's baldachino of bronze taken from the roof of the Pantheon. Look down into the glowing circle of the lamps, and see Canova's glorious statue of Pope Pius VI. kneeling at the foot of the stairs facing the Apos- tles' Tomb. Then, look up into the Dome, "the vast and wondrous Dome, To which Diana's marvel was a cell — Christ's mighty shrine above His martyr's tomb." Read the inscription blue, on a rich gold ground : " Tu Es Petrtjs, et super hanc petram (EDI- FICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM, ET TIRI DABO CLAVES REGNI CCELORUM." The Evangelists shine down on us. The adopted Roman citizen beside us tells us that the letters in the inscription are six feet long, and the pen in the hand of St. Luke is seven feet. What matters it ? We are fast getting away from time and space. Our hearts shall wonder and be enlarged. Now we go in behind the High Altar, and up to the Altar of the Chair in the apse. The bronze chair (enclos- ing St. Peter's episcopal Chair) rises high above the altar, upborne on golden clouds. Beneath it, are colossal bronze statues of the Greek doctors, SS. 15 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Athanasius and John Chrysostom, and the Latin doc- tors, SS. Ambrose and Augustine, with their hands upraised, as if supporting the Chair. We look closer. What would happen if they withdrew their hands? The Chair would stand as strong as ever, for it is upheld by the power of God, typified by the golden clouds, and Peter himself di- rected by the light of the Holy Ghost, which streams (in figure) from above it from that oval of pale golden alabaster against which the Heavenly Dove opens its wings. What a sublime conception, sublimely expressed ! Now look down the whole length to the portals. But thou, of temples old or altars new, Standest alone — with nothing like to thee — Worthiest of God, the holy and the true, Since Zion's desolation, when that He Forsook His former city, what could be Of earthly structures in His honor piled, Of a sublimer aspect ? Majesty, Power, Glory, Strength and Beauty, all are aisled In this eternal ark of worship undefiled. Yet we have seen but little of St. Peter's. Let us note the beautiful fitness (with the memory of the Holy Relics of the Divine Redeemer's all-atoning Sacrifice enshrined here) of the magnificent statues in the niches which support the Cupola, of St. Lon- ginus, St. Helena, St. Veronica, and St. Andrew. The life of St. Peter does not abound equally with that of St. Paul in dramatic and picturesque 16 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. incident, as yon will realize by-and-by, after you have seen the interior of St. Paul's out side-the- walls. The only oil painting in St. Peter's represents the Fall of Simon Magus ; it is by Francesco Vanni. The mosaics, from pictures of the great Masters, representing among other events, the giving of the keys to St. Peter, the healing of the cripple at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, the deaths of An- anias and Sapphira, the raising of Tabitha from the dead, and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, are of enor- mous size. Events in the lives of other Apostles ; other martyrdoms, the most painfully impressive be- ing perhaps that of St. Erasmus; saints especially dear to the Roman heart as St. Jerome and the sol- dier-saint Sebastian, are also portrayed in these great fadeless mosaics. When you come, dear reader, will you forget all the other beautiful commemorations of the Blessed Virgin Mother in St. Peter's — before the Pieta, wherein the young Michael Angelo embodied for the comfort of the time-long succession of world- wide human sorrow — the sorrow of the most afflicted Mother? Do not stay too long before it this first time, but go on where you can look up at the " Triumph of the Cross *' on the ceiling and remem- ber that " God sees the end, while we only see the way." Presently we were standing within the space which had been enclosed for the holding of the Vati- 17 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN can Council, and trying to people it again with its participants. We heard chanting, sweet and faint, as from a long distance. u Vespers are being sung in the Canons' Chapel," said the Roman citizen. " Wouldn't you like to go in?" After a long walk across the church we came to this large and splendid Capella del Coro. A goodly representation of dignitaries, in their scarlet and violet robes, were in the grand, carved stalls. The long bench in front of the altar, under which the ashes of St. John Chrysostom rest, was occupied by people, evidently of the humbler rank of life. Of such, too, were the men, women and children who sat on the steps of the stalls. Only one person of visible worldly consequence had come early enough to secure a seat. Good Catholics stood here and there in groups, following the Vespers. Curious tourists sauntered in, stayed a few minutes, and then resumed their wanderings over the vast interior of the church. They would have been put out of Westminster Abbey for walking about during a service, and with some cause. But in St. Peter's, who noted the clatter of their feet on the marble, or the folly of the speech of most ? Both were lost in the vastness of the place, as the buzzing of insects would have been. 18 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. The Roman people, the whole world's people, make themselves marvellously at home in St. Peter's. It is indeed, " the genial mother-hearth " of Julia Ward Howe's poem. We saw a tiny dark-skinned boy of three or four years of age, clothed in a tight little scarlet gown, with his older sister at the Vespers. When he got tired in one position — as small boys, puppies and kittens must very soon — he rose up and danced quietly on the pavement. Then his sister, distracting her lovely eyes from the Immaculate Mother of Bianchi's beautiful thought above the altar, would pull him down beside her into a moment's quietness. Before the little fellow resumed his innocent gymnastics, we saw a sweet little maiden of seven or eight years, with long golden hair, unhid by hat or veil or handkerchief, advancing slowly in front of the stalls for a better view of something which interested her. She stood right under the eyes of a high Papal dignitary to satisfy her curiosity, but he was undisturbed by her, and she was utterly unconscious of him. Presently Vespers were over, and we followed the procession of ecclesiastics to another chapel for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Thence we crossed once more to the altar of St. Petronilla (St. Peter's daughter either according to the flesh or the spirit — authorities disagree) and gazed upon the beautiful picture of her martyrdom and triumph. The man who vainly loved the young 19 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Virgin Martyr of Christ stands sorrowfully at her open grave. Above she appears in the heavens, and presently he will be comforted by the vision God lets her give him of her glory, and the hope she holds out to him of sharing it. This was the picture at which Hawthorne's Hilda lingered on that eventful day before she made up her mind to lay down the burden of her sorrowful secret in the confessional. Let us walk across to the left side wing, and see that formidable array of confessionals, for strangers of amiost every tribe and people and tongue, and find the Pro Lingua Anglica with Hilda. The westering sun is illumining the church with broad shafts of golden light ; and we realize with Hawthorne that the comparatively small plain glass windows, so high above us, mean a new perfection in the edifice. A young mother has thrown up the curtain of a confessional and sat back in one of the penitents' places. Her beautiful brown baby is sleeping on her knees. The Bostonian is caught with a surprised look in her eyes. " They often bring their babies in here for a good sleep," says the Roman citizen indifferently. Indeed, it would be a very sick or restless bambino whom the equable climate of St. Peter's would not soon lull into a few hours' forgetfulness of his little miseries. 20 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. But are these people behaving with fit reverence in this holy place ? They would answer you, if they thought it worth while to trouble themselves about the narrow notions of pilgrims from un-Christian lands, speaking, how- ever blamelessly, the harsh tongue of misbelief, that they are children in their Father's House. Why should not yonder poor mother nurse her bambino under the eyes of the good God who gave it to her, and made it so much more beautiful than the babies of the English and Americans ? There is nothing exclusive about St. Peter's — no family chapels — no deference to wealth. Its habitual attendants are humble people. It is chiefly the babies of the poor that are baptized in that noble font made from the cover of the Mausoleum of the Emperor Adrian. After you have come many times and lingered long and lovingly within, you will begin to grasp the spir- itual and material immensity of the " World's Cathe- dral," as Hawthorne happily calls it, and appreciate Byron's thought when he had grown at home in it : — its grandeur, overwhelms thee not ; And why ? it is not lessened ; but thy mind, Expanded by the genius of the spot, Has grown colossal, and can only find A fit abode wherein appear enshrined Thy hopes of immortality ; and thou Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined, See thy God face to face, as thou dost now His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by His brow." 21 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN St. Peter's, as you know, dear reader, is not the Cathedral Church of Rome. That is St. John Lat- eran's. St. Peter's is the Temple of Christendom — the World's Cathedral wherein the population of a goodly city can be gathered. It holds easily 60,000 people. Poor and rich, tourists and residents of Rome, drift into and all over St. Peter's, all day and every day ; and yet, it is so beautifully, so exquisitely clean and bright. You are entreated in a respectful notice at the entrance, not to bring your dog into St. Peter s ; but we saw now and then, a well-fed, sleek and dignified cat stalking across the sunlit spaces under Peter's Dome. I have seen only one thing anywhere to remind me of the freedom of the people in St, Peter's ; and that is the freedom of the people about the Federal build- ings in Washington. But the shadows are deepening. A minute more and the Ave Maria will chime from St. Peter's belfry and hundreds of others, and the great bronze doors will close until another sunrise. In St. Peter's, you feel for it the security of the Alps. Shall the Pope indeed be singing Mass at its High Altar when the trumpets of the Last Judgment sound ? I give a farewell pat to the paws of Canova's splendid lions on the tomb of Clement XIII., and 22 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. stop for a farewell prayer at the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament — only to come back at every chance during my month in Rome, and go away sadly at the last, because I have seen St. Peter's so Inadequately after all. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN IV. The Unspent Force of Michael Angelo. Of the host of great men whose memories and monuments bring pilgrims to Rome and to Florence, there is surely one, who, though he passed from earth more than three centuries ago, is still felt in both cities as an unspent force and inspiration. Michael Angelo Buonarroti still lives intensely in the mighty works of chisel and brush with which he adorned the capital of Christendom and the city of his birth. You are astounded, overawed, by the vastness of his intellect, the variety of the manifestations of his genius. Architect, engineer, painter, sculptor, poet, whatever man of artistic temperament can be, he was, easily and always greatly. He is superhuman, almost, in the directness of his aim, the strength of his will, the concentration of his intelligence. Do you need to see his portrait, painted by his own just hand, in the Uffizi Gallery in his native Florence, to realize his scorn of everything less than the best ; the fire of creative passion which at once sustained him and wasted him? It burns in those sombre, deep-set eyes ; it explains the sharp lines on the brow and cheeks of his maturity ; the half-sad, half-dis- dainful mouth : his fierce virility and austere self- restraint. 24 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Was there any passion or power of created being beyond his understanding and expression ? Then he had mastered all the learning, all the literature of his time ; though it is easy to see what, in the latter, was most congenial to his nature. He is a brother of Virgil and Dante. In his expression of the his- torical facts and Divine Mysteries of Holy Writ, one would be tempted to believe that the Almighty Creator, Law-Giver, Avenger, Christ the inflexible Judge, appealed more to him than the all-loving and forgiving Father, or the suffering Redeemer, till one remembers his Annunciation and his Pieta. What a beautiful Eve he gives us in his grand frescoes of the Creation on the vault of the Sistine Chapel! Yet why does he make the serpent look down from the tree about which it is entwined, on our ambitious and credulous First Mother, with the face and flowing hair of a lovely woman ? We find Eve's temptation treated in precisely the same manner in one of Raphael's pictures in the Vatican, and again in the stone sculptures in the porch of the Cathedral of Cologne. Had he a thought of the myth of Lilith, the witch- wife of Adam? "Not a drop of her blood was human, But she was made like a soft, sweet woman." According to the legend, she was jealous of her supplant er, and determined to destroy her happiness. She would not have gone about the affair just that 25 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN way, I fancy. Anyhow, Michael Angelo was too faithful to Revelation to take thought of the old Talmudic story. Rather was it his intent, I imagine, to put forth unmistakably the Scripture teaching that the temp- tation of our First Parents was intellectual — " Ye shall be as gods, having the knowledge of good and evil." Satan's beautiful disguise was to help him in his quest of an honest partner for a swindle — not half so hard to find as the Oriental Samith would have us believe ! Turning from his majestic Patriarchs and Prophets and his mysterious Sybils, we shudder away from his " Last Judgment." Yet back to it we go, irresistibly drawn, terribly fascinated, lingering till we store its details in our memory. Dare I essay my poor de- scriptive powers on what master-pens have written of so well before me? What an intellectual "Last Judgment " it is ! It excites an intellectual, not a fleshly horror, wherein it is in strong contrast with Fra Angelico's " Last Judgment " in the Bell' Arti, in Florence. Michael Angelo makes no ostentation of impreg- nable prison-bars, and flames, and brute-headed demons with terrible eyes, and the lost gnawing their flesh till the blood runs in red rivers, as they realize that their woe is forever ; but somehow his picture leaves a more lasting and fearsome impression on the mind. 26 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Is this inexorable and omnipotent Christ the same who lay in the white, pathetic stillness of death, on the knees of His broken-hearted Mother? Is this timid creature who veils her face before the awful Judge, the same who was erst so motherly-free with the prone head and helpless hands of her Son, the dead Saviour ? It is only by contrasting his Pieta and his Last Judgment that one can even faintly estimate the range of Michael Angelo's genius. The Pieta is as exquisitely beautiful as the loveliest of Greek sculptures, and as sorrowful and tender as the dream of some sweet woman-saint, herself a mother, of the sorrow of the sinless Mother of the Divine. The Last Judgment excludes all idea of beauty. It is horrifying but sublime. In the lower right-hand division the resurrection of the dead is depicted with marvellous movement and energy. You can see them crowding up against one another out of the earth, and actually watch the flesh covering the bones again. The lost drop like plummets to their doom. The saved ascend in far greater multitudes than Fra Angelico suggests in his picture ; but Michael Angelo does not lighten the gloom of his Last Judgment by any glimpse of the blessed in Heaven, as the saintly Dominican artist does. Certain characters of the Old Testament made especial appeal to the genius of Michael Angelo. Note his young David, which some have called his masterpiece, in the Beir Arti, in Florence. Not only 27 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN is this David a youth of beautiful countenance, but an athlete as strong and graceful as any who ever won the laurels in the old Olympian games. Then his magnificent Moses, on the Mausoleum of Pope Julius II., at San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, which is most truly his masterpiece. Grander than the grandest Pagan conception of Olympian Jove, is the great Lawgiver and Leader of the Chosen People, seated in majesty. One hand rests on the Tables of the Law, the other grasps his flowing beard. His brow is bent. His eyes look forth sadly, as if he saw in prophetic vision, the coming rejection of the obstinate people whom he had so loved, and from whom and for whom he had so greatly suffered. It is the very embodiment of the majesty of the Divinely given Law. It is the only adequate representation of that Prophet like unto whom none rose again in Israel ; him whom the Lord knew face to face, and talked with as friend to friend ; the greatest man in the Scripture narrative save only the God Man. See how the genius of Michael Angelo sets off this sublime figure. In the niches on each side of it are two beautiful Hebrew women of an earlier age ; Leah who holds proudly up her deftly-swaddled baby, as if it were indeed the sceptre of the tribe of Judah ; and her fairer and more beloved sister Rachel, prayer- fully uplifting empty arms. The individuality of all Michael Angelo's feminine 28 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. creations is remarkable. Raphael, even in his Madonnas, falls far below him in this. The Italian masters never wearied of portraying the Annunciation ; and in what a variety of attitude and occupation have they depicted the Virgin of Nazareth at the coming of Gabriel ! Some represent her kneeling in prayer. Era Angelico's Virgin is seated in devout meditation. Some make much of her domestic character, and put a work basket or a spinning wheel near her. Barrochi has a cat curled up asleep on a cushion in the foreground of his Annunciation ! But Michael Angelo's Virgin — oh, such a lovely contemplative, scholarly young Virgin ! is standing at a reading desk, on which are spread the Sacred Scriptures, and turns from the inspired page — was it of the Virgin of Isaiah's prophecy ? — to greet the Angelic Messenger. Michael Angelo's long day was the day also of Leonardo da Vinci, of Bramante and Raphael; of Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence ; Popes Julius II., and Leo X., Clement VII., and Paul III. in Rome — all five his patrons. His relations with Pope Leo X. were not alto- gether as satisfactory as with that Pontiff's immediate predecessor and successors. Michael Angelo would hardly accept suggestion, much less dictation, in the matter of his art, even from the supreme authority in the Church, or so refined a judgment in the arts 29 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN as Leo X. undoubtedly possessed. This Pope found Raphael a much more congenial character. Michael Angelo' s relations with Pope Clement VII. began unauspiciously ; for, in the troubles between Rome and the Republic of Florence follow- ing on the sacking of Rome by the Constable de Bourbon in 1527, he made the fortifications which enabled his native city to hold out for nine months. When it fell, through treachery, its great defender fled ; but the Pope promptly pardoned him, recalled him to Rome, and loaded him with marks of appreci- ation. Indeed, he showed his sense of the value of the treasure which the world possessed in Michael Angelo, by sending him a brief, on the completion of his statues of " Night and Morning," commanding him under pain of excommunication, to take good care of his health. Another Pope, Julius III., receiving him one day, rose at his approach, seated him at his right hand, and disregarding the Cardinals and ambassadors present, conversed with him as with a close and equal friend. It was under Pope Paul III. that he was appointed chief architect of St. Peter's, and wrought marvels in this capacity that overshadow all his other works. Who but one of the mighty Intelligences, for which he was so well named, could have surpassed u The hand that rounded Peter's Dome And groined the aisles of Christian Rome ? " Though the man, Michael Angelo, was reserved, 30 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. almost to sternness, his true life aloof from men, in his own world full of the creations of his genius ; inaccessible to flattery — almost inaccessible to friend- ship — yet all men acknowledged his exalted motives, his stainless honor and integrity. One creature, at least, found his human heart, and for her he was a poet. Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, widow of the commander who conquered Francis I. at the battle of Pavia, was the inspiration of those wonderful sonnets which prove Michael Angelo great in poetry as in all else. She was a most beautiful, gifted and devout woman. They still show you her house in Rome, and a street is named for her. Wonderful, indeed, she must have been to please him who was overwhelmed with divine discontent in view of the best attainments of his own or others' genius ; and to win from him such tribute as this : — " The might of one fair face sublimes my love, For it hath weaned my heart from low desires ; Nor death I heed, nor purgatorial fires. Thy beauty, antepast of joys above, Instructs me in the bliss that saints approve ; For oh ! how good, how beautiful, must be The God that made so good a thing as thee. So fair an image of the Heavenly Dove. Forgive me if I cannot turn away From those sweet eyes that are my earthly heaven, For they are guiding stars, benignly given To tempt my footsteps to the upward way, And if I dwell too fondly in thy sight, I live and love in God's peculiar light." 31 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN They never came to a closer union than this high and affectionate friendship. Hermann Schneider has made a picture of Vittoria Colonna sitting at the feet of the statue of Moses, while Michael Angelo stands at the other side of his masterpiece, conversing with her. Perhaps it is symbolical. His art, after all, came between himself and the fulness of human love. At any rate, he outlived the one woman who in some sort shared his mind and adequately wor- shipped his genius. She died in 1547 — and for seventeen years longer, he wrought on in the " sad sincerity " of his lonely heart, for the after delight of a world whose utmost praise was less to him than the breeze above the laurel trees. WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. V. Our Lady of Italy. Longfellow makes Prince Henry in the Golden Legend, soliloquise as he and Elsie come into Italy, " This is, indeed, the Blessed Mary's land — Virgin and Mother of our dear Redeemer." Yet we must not claim too much even for lovely Italy. Spain is also " the land of the Most Holy Mary." In the vision of Catherine Laboure as you will remember, the rays from the outstretched hands of the Blessed Mother of God, fell most abundantly on her native France. Even in England of today, still so largely Protestant, it is easy to find from her ancient churches, and the customs and traditions which linger among her people, a reason for her olden title, " Our Lady's Dower." Nevertheless, they love the Blessed Virgin Mother in Italy with an exceeding great and most human love. They do not adore her. Make no mistake on that point, my possible non-Catholic reader ; no matter what Protestant tourists, ignorant of the Faith, the language, and the nature of the Italians, may tell you to the contrary. The humblest woman or child of them all under- stands Our Lady's place in the Church. Look at 33 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN yonder young peasant mother, with the awful grief in her dark eyes ; listen to her, as she lifts imploring hands, and sways back and forth in the passion of her prayer, seeking the intercession of her dear Madonna for a sick child or a wayward husband in some favored shrine : " Help me ; you can do it, you understand my need, because you are a woman and a mother" The Italians have supreme devotion to the Eternal Father, the Divine Creator, who gives the bountiful harvests and the handsome and strong bambinos. In singular evidence of this devotion, you see the traditional artistic representation of God the Father, the Provider, as the emblem on the doorways of Life Insurance Companies. But the Eternal Father represents also the rigorous laws of Nature, even the innocent transgression of which brings sorrow. He is not only the Avenger of evil-doers, but the mysterious Providence which so severely tries the just. Sometimes for the punish- ment or the perfecting of His children He seems to turn His face from them, to veil His tender mercies — "Thou hast covered Thyself with a cloud, And our prayers may not come through." The creature writhes helpless under the pressure of Almighty Power ; he dashes himself in vain resent- ment against the barrier of an inexorable Law ; or lies down without hope or heart that the iron wheel 34 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. of inevitable Consequence may go over him ; till, suddenly he bethinks himself of his sinless Sister, and, ' ' — Not venturing to draw near With his requests an angry Father's ear Offers to her his prayer and his confession, And she for him in Heaven makes intercession." She can move again the heart of the Father for His erring child ; yea, even her prayer is potent to sus- pend the Law or break the wheel of Consequence. To the Italian, " the dear Redeemer " is always the Son of His Mother, alike on Calvary as in Beth- lehem ; and to their logical minds, he who praises the Son, be it ever so fervently, and disparages the Mother, is not a Christian. One must realize all this as the foundation of the Italian devotion to Our Lady, to appreciate its recti- tude, fervor and poetic beauty. In Rome alone nearly one hundred churches are dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, from the Basilica, Sta. Maria Maggiore, in the Esquiline — one of the four patriarchal basilicas — to the little circular chapel, Our Lady of the Sun, in the Velabrum, supposed to be an old-time Temple of Vesta. Sta. Maria Maggiore is a very ancient church, dating from the reign of Pope Liberius, a. d. 352. Our readers know the story of its origin — the vision of John the Patrician and his wife, the chosen site covered with snow in summer, in memory of which 35 NEAV FOOTSTEPS IN miracle the church keeps the feast of Sta. Maria ad Nives — Our Lady of the Snow — on August 5. Every year, when this Basilica celebrates its birth- day, rose-leaves are made to fall through the dome during the Mass, in token of that wondrous snowfall of the olden time. In this church is the Borghese Chapel, the largest and most magnificent family chapel in the world, whose decorations are an exposition of the Catholic teaching in regard to Our Lady : conceived Immacu- late, Mother of Christ, ever Virgin. One of the Madonnas, attributed to St. Luke, is above the altar. The four great prophets, leading with Isaiah, who foretold the Virgin Mother, are in the pendatives of the dome. Aaron and David, her priestly and her kingly ancestors ; St. J oseph, her spouse, and St. John the Evangelist, her adopted son, are commem- orated in statues ; St. Luke, who gives the sufficient foundation of all Catholic devotion to her in the first chapter of his Gospel, is the subject of a large fresco- The Doctors of the Church who wrote best of her, the spiritual and military conquerors in her name, the defenders of her Immaculate Conception, her poets, and the women-saints, who, like her, were wedded virgins, are all depicted in this chapel. Most prominent of all the frescoes is the Madonna of the Immaculate Conception, to which Longfellow's lines would apply, as well as to the picture for which they were written. 36 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. " Bright angels are around thee ; Their hands with stars have crowned thee ; Thou peerless queen of air, As sandals to thy feet the silver moon dost wear." The forest of white pillars in the nave of the Basilica, the first American gold in its ceiling, speak eloquently in fact and symbolism in Our Lady's honor. Yet Sta. Maria Maggiore, in its vastness and whiteness, oppressed and dazzled me. Much more appealing and devotional I found Santa Maria in Trastevere — titular church of His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons — which for the mosaics in the sanctuary and some other points of family resem- blance, I called a little sister of St. John Lateran's. Another church of Our Lady, in which my Ameri- can soul delighted for the name's sake was Santa Maria del Popolo — Our Lady of the People — so called because it was built by the offerings of the common people. Our Lady under this title is the subject of a striking picture by Frederigo Baroccio, in the Ufnzi Gallery, Florence. The Virgin Mother, with her Divine Child, ap- j)ears in the heavens to a crowd of poor men and women, peasants and artisans, in the costumes and with the implements of their condition and trades. " When wilt Thou save the people, O God of Mercy, when ? Not crowns and thrones, but nations ; Not kings and lords, but men." 37 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Far greater the need today to invoke Our Lady of the People, when the poor are oppressed as perhaps never before in Italy — nothing but water and air escaping taxation — for the maintenance of an Army and Navy in wild disproportion to the country's legitimate needs. The church is built on the site, it is believed, of the tomb of Nero, and in one of its chapels is the exquisite Nativity by Pinturicchio — where the Divine Babe is playful under the eyes of His young Mother. As Goethe says of another Holy Family : " What joy that sight might bear To him who sees them there, If, with a pure and guilt untroubled eye, He looked upon the twain, like Joseph standing by." Two other famous churches of Our Lady, best known, however, by their ancient Pagan names, are the Pantheon, St. Mary of the Martyrs, and the Minerva, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, which being interpreted, means St. Mary's Church on the Temple of Minerva. It seems to me that there is a fit symbolism here, in foundation and superstructure, inasmuch as Min- erva, the Virgin Goddess of Wisdom, was a Pagan prototype of the created Virgin Mother of the Christian Dispensation whom we invoke as " The Seat of Wisdom." The Minerva was the spiritual home of the Bos- 38 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. tonian in Rome, and there was opportunity to note many characteristic manifestations of the love of these simple people for their dearest Patroness. The chapel of Our Lady of Consolation was a favorite shrine ; and I often saw suppliants give a farewell kiss to the picture of the Blessed Mother outside the railing, as they concluded their prayer, just as if they were taking leave of some dear one in the home. A little child would run in from the street, reach up and kiss the Blessed Mother, and run out to its play again. The Rosary devotions were celebrated with special fervor — it is a Dominican Church — and drew crowds. A feature of the parish festival, the Ma- ternity of the Blessed Virgin, which took place during my visit, was a serenade to Our Lady at one of her street shrines outside the hospital. The street-shrines in honor of the Blessed Mother of God, in Rome and its neighborhood, are almost countless. Scarcely a building for public or private use in Old Rome, but has its picture of the Madonna painted somewhere on the outer walls. Often you see the angle of a corner smoothed into a narrow flatness, and to this is attached a picture of Our Lady, glassed over to protect it from the weather, and with a lamp burning at night before it. Pictures of the Blessed Virgin are generally to be seen in conspicuous places in shops and restaurants ; in offices and inns. 39 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN I noted a lovely one in the court-yard of the Quirinal. The representation is nearly always of the Virgin Mother with the Divine Child. The Italians seem to have no fondness for pictures of Our Lady alone. From the simple picture on the house-wall, to the glorious creations of the masters in the Vatican Gallery or the wonderful galleries of Florence, it is always " Vergine e Bambino." So are the Child and His Mother in the hearts of the people. Her statues surmount churches and convents raised under her invocation ; or are uplifted on pillars or towers. Perhaps the most notable of the statues is Bertelot's upon the Colonna della Vergine (column of the Virgin) in front of Sta. Maria Maggiore. This is the last remaining column of the Basilica of Constantine, and was erected in this place by Pope Paul V., in 1613. Every time I went my way from the Minerva to St. Peter's, I saw the noble mediaeval Torre della Sciniia, which every reader of Hawthorne calls u Hilda's Tower," and looks for at once in Rome; and the statue of Our Lady whose light the sweet Puritan maiden so faithfully tended, the while she grieved that her own cold creed offered no Heavenly Mother to whom a motherless girl could pray for sympathy and counsel. Going north from Rome, you find the street shrines still in Florence, but not in evidence in Milan. 40 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. There is an association in my own mind of religious reserve and Gothic churches. I have named but a few of the churches of the Madonna, even in Rome. Readers who have visited the Eternal City may wonder why I have not spoken of the Ara Coeli, or these twin churches of Our Lady at the opening of the Corso — St. Mary of the Miracles, and St. Mary of the Holy Hill, and the interesting legends connected with their building. We were leaving Santa Maria del Popolo, which is very near these two, and the Roman citizen had just shown me the neighboring house of the Augus- tinians in which Martin Luther lodged on the occasion of that visit to Rome which preceded his apostacy. Strange that few should have rendered more elo- quent testimony to the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady than this poor heresiarch! and that the last descendant of his marriage with Katharine von Bora should, a few years ago, have become a Catholic ! Besides the churches specifically dedicated to the Virgin Mother, she has in all churches, of whatever title, her own chapel, and her favored shrines. " Come with me," said the Roman citizen, inter- rupting my reflections on Luther, " and I'll show you one of the most beautiful things in Rome." We wended our way to San Agostino — near Hilda's Tower again — and entering, saw beside the west en- trance, a most wonderful evidence of devotion to the Blessed Mother and testimony to its exceeding efficacy. 41 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Raised on a platform set against the wall is the great bronze Madonna of Andrea Sansovino, called the Madonna del Parto. She is seated, throned and crowned, so to speak, holding her Divine Child, and circled with lights, from the tiny taper to the wax- light as thick as a child's arm. A gracious queenly face looks down upon her clients, and the Baby King of Kings puts His power in her hands. The recipients of her favors have covered her neck and bosom with necklaces of jewels, and chains of gold and silver. She is more than triple-crowned. Her arms are covered with bracelets and her fingers with rings to the very nails. The Divine Babe is literally swaddled with gold chains and rosaries richly jewelled, crowned, braceletted, and ringed till His little body can bear no more. The whole west wall is covered up to the ceiling, with votive hearts and crosses of gold and silver, silver arms and legs, silver ships, with pictures, crude enough, but most realistic, representing remarkable cures, or escapes from perils of sea or land. We saw bridal wreaths — thank offerings doubtless for the happy ending of certain tangled love affairs ; beautiful suits of baby clothes — even a white satin bow in a frame, the greatest sacrifice, perchance, that some poor girl could make in acknowledgment of some answered prayer. I lighted a wax candle as thick as my wrist, and set it in the outer radiance about the Madonna del Parto. 42 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. " I don't like it !" said a dear little Catholic Puri- tan. Puritanism to-day, dear reader, is not a sect but a spirit, as Archbishop Corrigan once expressed it ; and there are many Catholic Puritans in the cold North, on both sides of the Atlantic. Do not bring any Puritanism to Rome; for you will lose many devout and poetic inspirations, and be uncomfortable besides, while your icicles are thawing ; for thaw they must, if you stay in " the City of the Soul " more than a week. For me, I love this tropical efflorescence of devo- tion and gratitude ; these proofs of the power of that Faith that can move mountains. Do not tell yonder Italian girl that it is better for her to resign herself and prepare to face the inevitable. " The inevitable doesn't always happen," she will answer triumphantly, and show you that silver ship or golden heart, and tell you a wondrous story of last minute help in proof. Somehow I think Heaven does not love best those pious women with fateful eyes, and ready acquies- cence in dismal portents, and illustrations from the trees that bear fruit after their kind, and the rivers that must run down to the sea ; but rather those child-hearted, and normal women, who flouting the French cynic, confidently entreat Heaven that two and two shall not make four, — and sometimes get their prayer ! Evidently, the Madonna del Parto has a tender 43 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN heart for desperate eases and persistent feminine pleading. " But I don't like these people's expression of their devotion," says the little Puritan again, with a last look of strong disfavor at the almost barbaric splendor of Our Lady's environment. Yet she loves the Blessed Virgin as devotedly as any Italian of them all, and says her Rosary of tener, perhaps ; only her faith would take expression in a pure white statue, adorned with New England's delicate tinted flowers and with characteristic reserve in accessories, and moderation in lights. Nor will she like the Madonna del Gaboro, whose shrine at Albano, in the Church of Santa Maria del Rotundo, I visited with other friends some weeks later, just before leaving Rome. Here are some startling votive offerings — six wooden cases full of murderous daggers and pistols, hung up on the walls of the little sanctuary. The road between Albano and Rome was at one time infested with brigands. In some remarkable renewal of religious fervor in the church above-named, many brigands were converted, and the better to guard themselves against returning to their old, bad ways, gave the instruments of their wrong-doing to the Madonna, as a substantial pledge of their reformation. Here is a touch of chivalry which is rather appealing. Similar tokens from converted brigands are found, I believe, in a shrine of Our Lady at Subiaco. 44 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. The silver hearts are the most frequent of votive offerings, and I never saw chapel or shrine of the Madonna in Italy without a goodly number of these testimonies of granted prayers. Naturally the shrines of the Madonna as the Mother of Sorrows or Our Lady of Consolation — after such famous ones as are referred to above — attract the most devotion ; for the old, old fashions of grief and death prevail in sunny Italy as else- where, and the Most Afflicted Mother never lacks the victims of sin or sorrow to pray before her, like poor Margaret in Goethe's world-story — " Incline, Maiden, Thou sorrow-laden, Thy sacred countenance upon my pain." Great sculptors and painters have adorned the churches and shrines of the Madonna with marvel- lous statues and paintings and frescoes in which every historical or legendary incident in her life is por- trayed. Will you quarrel with the humbler people, if they often turn from the works of Michael Angelo, Raphael, Perugino, Pinturruchio, Fra Angelico and the rest to say their prayers and lay their votive offerings at some shrine where the art is of the crud- est, and the taste the most questionable that you can think of ? Here is a little Bethlehem behind glass doors in the Minerva — Our Lady wears a red gown and a blue mantle. St. Joseph is clothed in a pur- ple garment and carries a silver watch at his belt. 45 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN The Divine Babe, dressed in a linen slip, reposes on a bed of votive hearts. It is not beautiful to artistic eyes ; but it raises many a humble heart heavenward quite as effec- tively as Corregio's Nativity with its light-giving Babe, and its light-reflecting Mother. But the simple Italian folk love Our Lady in rai- ment which they can take hold of. It seems to bring her nearer to them ; and they want her close at hand in life and death. " Mother, is this the darkness of the end, The Shadow of Death ? And is that outer sea Infinite, imminent Eternity ? And does the death pang by man's seed sustained In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend Its silent prayer upon Thy Son, while He Blesses the dead with His hand silently To His long day which hours no more offend ? " So at the sight of Leonardo da Vinci's " Our Lady of the Kocks," was poor Dante Gabriel Rosetti moved in his own heart, and for other hearts. May she of whom he sang so oft and well have shone up- on the difficult pass when his sad soul went — " blindly shuddering through " ! But the humblest wayside statue, the crudest wall picture, the most inartistic Bethlehem or Calvary in some poor chapel, flashes into the warm Italian heart a vision of the Lady of fair love and of holy hope, more beautiful and more comforting than 46 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. brush can paint ; for he sees her holding in her own the hand of her Almighty Son, while she opens to her earthly children the heart of a woman and a mother. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN vn. Citizen-Saints and Glorious Tombs. Going from place to place in Rome, you see the huge oval of the Coliseum as often as you see the vast dome of St. Peter's ; and entering, it is not hard to picture the immense enclosure as it must have looked on any of the frequent occasions when Christians were martyred to make a Roman holiday. The Coliseum was begun a. d. 72, under the Em- peror Vespasian, and finished by Titus, after his return from the final conquest of Jerusalem ; its architect, saith tradition, being a Christian, Gauden- tius, who afterwards suffered martyrdom within it. The first authenticated martyrdom in the Coliseum, however, was that of the aged St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, who many years before was the child " set in the midst " by Christ, at one of His most memorable exhortations to His disciples ; and, later, the disciple of St. John the Evangelist. Sienkiewicz has made the highly civilized, luxuri- ous and profligate Rome of Nero to live again for the modern reader ; and Rome changed little from Nero's day until that day, nearly three centuries later, when the purifying Cross came out of the Catacombs to be set on high and draw up the hearts of men. 48 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. The scene in Nero's amphitheatre, so graphically described in " Quo Vadis " when the rank and wealth and beauty, of Rome, as well as its rabble, assembled to see Lygia and Ursus die, was duplicated in the Coliseum for St. Ignatius, and for the host of brave Christian men and women of every age, and condi- tion, who, after him, went to Heaven by way of the lions, or by those other crueller ways which the ingenuity of malice devised. The great ones of that day, secure in their own place and power, and with due measures taken to send their names down to posterity, looked calmly on the death-struggles of these obscure people — followers as they would describe them of a young Jewish Rabbi who preached an impossible doctrine and closed a short life with an ignominious death, in an insignificant conquered province — and accounted their lives foolishness, and their deaths without honor. Today, however, it is the prisoners of the Mam- ertine, the martyrs of the Coliseum, the victims of every outbreak of Pagan fanaticism in every prov- ince of the old Roman Empire, whose memories are enshrined in religion, in art, in literature ; whose glorious sepulchres are the term of never-ending pilgrimages ; while their persecutors are forgotten, or owe their place in the world's memory to the broad mind of that Church against which they wage;! unavailing war. 49 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN The portrait busts of the Roman Emperors are in the Capitol — some in the Vatican as well ; the wicked faces of Nero and Caligula as prominent as the benignant ones of Augustus, of Vespasian, or the oft-sculptured Trajan ; but outside, Christ, with His two greatest Apostles and the two SS. John, His kinsmen, rise high over the Lateran, as if to guard and bless the Seven-Hilled City ; Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception looks down on the Barcaccia, or stone-boat of Domitian; St. Peter surmounts the Column of Trajan ; St. Paul that of Marcus Aurelius. The stones of the Coliseum would long since have been scattered in the top of every street but for the care of Peter's successors. Rome is very truly the City of All Saints; yet the Romans have a natural predilection for their citizen-saints, native or adopted. St. Peter, of course, comes next in the Roman heart to the dear Madonna, and wherever you find him, beginning with his World-Cathedral, you find St. Paul also — together, types of the universality of the Church's mission, and in the sense of their per- sonal relations, of united hearts and opposite char- acters. The altar tombs of two great Greek doctors of the Church, SS. Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom, of St. Leo the Great, subduer of Attila ; of SS. Leo II., III. and IV., are in St. Peter's with the tomb of that Roman citizen and Pontiff, St. Gregory the Great, who left to his successors his own 50 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. favorite title of " Servant of the Servants of God," who sent St. Augustine to England, and gave to the Church her majestic chant, which she calls by his name to this day ; of the Countess Matilda, of Tus- cany, who deserved this honor as the defender of the Papacy in the days of Pope Gregory VII. (Hilde- brand), and reconciler of Henry II. with that Pope. St. Peter has his other churches, including the little " Quo Vaclis " Church on the Appian Way ; and his share, of course, in all the churches of St. Paul. By the way, it seems not a little strange to find him with his Roman attributes even in the Protestant Cathedral of St. Paul in London. " You must see St. Paul' s-outside-the- Walls," said the Roman citizen. "All the Americans go there." My readers know that there is a large body of American Catholics — perhaps themselves are of that body — who regard St. Paul as an American himself, born out of time, so to speak, and with a great interest in printing-presses, rapid transit, and electric lighting. His eager spirit, his marvellous adapta- bility, his unresting pen, and constant Apostolic journeyings, must be the foundation of this faith. To St. Paul's we drove on a bright October after- noon, accompanied now and then for a piece of the way, by little, large-eyed boys, who smiled most beautifully and turned the most amazing somersaults on the receipt of a few centimes. 51 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN We passed the vineyard of the noble Roman lady, the sweet Saint Frances, wherein disguised, she used to gather fagots and distribute them after among the poor; and the little chapel which marks the parting-place of SS. Peter and Paul, as each was taken his separate way to martyrdom. Presently the pure white marble pillared portico of St. Paul's — which, curiously enough, is being completed by the Government — rises before us. When this is finished, St. Paul's will be one of the not numerous Roman churches whose exterior pre- pares you for the beauties within. It chanced this afternoon that the Bostonian was the only American visitor at St. Paul's, the others being the lingerers from the great French pilgrim- age, the leaders of the little English pilgrimage, and a Greek Archbishop with his attendants. Very suggestive it was to see the English and the French ecclesiastics, in the sombre clerical attire of the West, pressing forward for the blessing of the swarthy, bearded Oriental, in his much more con- spicuous churchly raiment. St. Paul's-outside-the-Walls dates from the days of Constantine. Time was when it surpassed in size and splendor the ancient Basilica of St. Peter. Destroyed by fire in 1823, it was rebuilt under Pope Leo XI L, on the original plan, and consecrated, in 1854, by Pope Pius IX. Many of the ancient treasures of the Church, 52 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. saved from the flames, are in evidence, contrasting strangely with the brilliant modern paintings in the nave, illustrating the eventful life of St. Paul. Be- neath these are medallions of the whole succession of Popes from St. Peter to Leo XIII. , with spaces for just a few more. We see the ring of lighted lamps about the Con- fession of St. Paul, in front of the high altar, under which a part of his body rests, and his colossal statue with his inseparable companion, St. Peter. The Czar of Russia and the Viceroy of Egypt have given the malachite pedestals and the trans- lucent gold and white alabaster columns that sup- port the canopy over the high altar. In the Order of the Garter, occurring among its decorations is a memorial of the day when the sove- reigns of England were the protectors of this Basi- lica. The statues of Henry IV., in the vestibule of St. John Lateran, and of Charles V., in the vesti- bule of Sta. Maria Maggiore, testify to similar dignities of the French and Spanish sovereigns, in connection with each of these Basilicas. The statues of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, and of Pope St. Gregory the Great, proclaim the Benedictine association with St. Paul's, which dates back many centuries. We admire the strength and majesty of the eighty granite columns, which mark the division of the nave and aisles. We are fain to linger before the 53 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN fragments of mosaics dating from the days of Hono- rius and Arcadius ; but we are already satiated with marbles and alabaster, gold and silver and jewels, paintings and mosaics, lavished for the beauty of God's house and the place where His glory dwelleth. Today, we are fortunate enough to find the great Chapel of the Relics open and brilliantly lighted, for the sake of the Oriental dignitaries and the pil- grims. This Basilica possesses the remains of St. Timothy, the dear disciple of St. Paul, for whom he drew the portrait of the Christian Bishop. It has also a large piece of the True Cross, encased in a cross-shaped frame of solid gold, the veritable chains of St. Paul, and many other interesting relics of the Apostles and first disciples of Our Lord. All these we were permitted to look at as long and as closely as we desired. A comparatively modern object of devout interest is the Crucifix in the chapel of the Crucifixion, before which St. Brigid of Sweden, the holy widow and religious foundress often prayed, during the years of her life in Rome, and from which Christ Himself is believed to have spoken to her, as she meditated on the sufferings by which He redeemed the world. It is an awe-inspiring Crucifix, and who shall say what Voices they may not hear who have risen even in this life to that spiritual height whereon the clamor of earthly desires has ceased to sound ! A majestic statue of St. Brigid by Maderna stands 54 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. in a niche in this chapel. Here, too, is the Madonna (in mosaic) before which on April 22, 1541, St. Igna- tius Loyola and his first companions took their vows. Two other favorite saints always young, and always associated in the artistic and the popular mind in Rome and throughout Italy, are St. Stephen, the first martyr, and St. Laurence, the deacon. St. Stephen appropriately has a beautiful chapel in the Church of St. Paul, once his persecutor ; and a church, S. Stefano Rotondo, with realistic pic- tures of martyrdoms, far surpassing in horror even those in the triforium of the church of the English College. St. Laurence (S. Lorenzo) has besides the Basilica of S. Lorenzo-outside-the- Walls, five other churches in various parts of Rome erected under his patronage. To him also is dedicated the Cathedral of Genoa. In the first-named of these Roman churches, near the Campo Santo of the same title, and dating from the days of Constantine, are the " Confession " con- taining his relics, surrounded by the usual ever- burning lamps, Fracassini's frescoes of scenes from the lives of SS. Stephen and Laurence, and the splendid Mausoleum of Pope Pius IX., formerly the atrium of the ancient church, with its frescoes of the definition of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Mother of God, and of the Vatican Council. S. Lorenzo in Lucina has for altar-piece Guido Reni's Crucifixion. 55 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN There is not, in the wide world, I believe, any- thing which conveys to the beholder so adequate an idea of the infinite desolation of the dying Christ, as does this masterpiece. There are no accessory figures at the foot of the cross ; no attending angels above it. The white body, blood-depleted ; the beautiful drawn face, with the death film gathering over the up-looking eyes, absorb the sight and the thought. I came out of that church with no clear idea of anything else in it but this wonderful picture. Among its relics my companion told me, is the gridiron of St. Laurence's fiery martyrdom. You often see realistic pictures of this terrible scene, and in all pictures of this saint, the gridiron appears. St. Laurence and St. Stephen are frequently intro- duced in pictures of the Madonna, with St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist ; not sel- dom with St. Sebastian, the Soldier, and St. Jerome, two saints of surpassing popularity in Rome. Some of my readers may be able to recall a time when a " pet nun " or charming Sunday School teacher endeavored to wean them from the high- strung fictions of Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., or dime novels of the Indian-fighting and pirate variety, with the ascetic delights of " Fabiola " and " Callista." They will remember, too, that after a perfunctory reading or a free-minded skipping of all those descriptive pages of solid print about the catacombs, etc., they 56 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. came at last on the fascinating characters of Sebas- tian, the soldier, dear little Agnes, and Fabiola herself. After hearing of so much that was poor and lowly in the membership of the early Church, it was de- lightful to come on saints like these, who were " in society,'' and went to dinner-parties and other festiv- ities in the best of style. The grave author yields a little to the romance of the situation, and you saw that Sebastian was young and as handsome as a Greek god, with the laurels of his early victories upon him, the favorite of the Emperor Diocletian, and the beloved of the Roman women — of none so much, though so secretly — as of the noble and beautiful, though most proud and reserved Fabiola. It was evident that Fabiola thought always of Sebas- tian, while Sebastian thought only of the coming chance to proclaim his Faith and win the martyr's crown. Then that memorable scene after Sebastian has announced his Faith, suffered his first torments, and has been again apprehended, when Fabiola hum- bles herself to beg his life of the Emperor, and knows that she has spoken in vain ; and through all the refined cruelty of Diocletian's compliments to her- self, realizes that the sad secret of her hopeless love is plain to him, and that he is enjoying her abase- ment and her grief. You would not have taken away Sebastian's palm, and had him settle down with Fabiola to the com- 57 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN monplace happy domesticity of Vinicius and Lygia ; but you did think he might have cared for Fabiola, and have let her know it, before he went to his doom, that she might have had some human comfort to carry into the long days of hospital building, in her after Christian life ; as in the case of those martyr-lovers, St. Adrian and St. Natalia. The hero was more human-hearted in Cardinal Newman's romance ; and the beautiful Greek hero- ine was a woman with a past, who eventually became a martyr-saint as such a one does, sometimes. But "Callista" on the romantic side, pleased you vastly better than Fabiola; for you wanted warmth and color, and found it hard — "to breathe in that cold air That pure severity of perfect light " ; though frankly admitting that had you been in Fabiola' s place, you would have done just the same thing. Well, St. Sebastian, martyr, is as dear to the Roman heart, — masculine and feminine alike — today, as while his martyr palm was new in his hand in Heaven, and the fame of his courage still fresh on earth. In picture galleries and churches, you constantly come on the picture of his first martyrdom — he truly suffered two — the beautiful athletic youth, bound to a stake, and transfixed with arrows — no evidence of agony in the face, but with eager eyes WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. uplifted to the heavens, whence an angel comes clown with a palm' branch. Was it for some parallel in their common youth and beauty, emphasizing a fierce contrast in other things, that the converted Romans set Saint Sebas- tian over against Apollo in their minds ? Apollo was beautiful but maleficent. His emblem was the arrow, and he afflicted mankind with pestilence. Long after he had been dethroned alike from men's fear and hope in Christianized Rome, St. Sebastian began to be invoked against pestilence, and, at least, in one memorable year, 680, the plague immediately ceased on the erection of an altar in his honor, at S. Pietro ad Vincola. We have seen the ancient mosaic of St. Sebastian, and the tablet u To St. Sebastian, dispeller of the pestilence," in this church. Pictures of St. Sebastian by Caracci and Guido are in the Capitol. St. Sebastian appears con- stantly in pictures of the Blessed Virgin and her Divine Child, by Titian and other celebrities, in the Vatican galleries. He has his Basilica on the Appian Way, with a grand almost colossal statue from Bernini's designs ; and chapels in many Roman churches besides. This Basilica was founded by the Emperor Con- stantine on the site of the house and garden of the pious Roman matron Lucina, who nursed Sebastian back from his first martyrdom (by the arrows) ; 59 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN and after his second, when he had been beaten to death by clubs and thrown into the Cloaca Maxima (the great Roman Sewer) recovered his body, and buried it in her own grounds. Lucina, you will remember, figures also in " Fa- biola." She was the widow of a martyr, and the mother of the lovely boy, Pancratius, who, for his stalwart faith, was exposed to a panther in the Coliseum, and so won his crown. St. Pancratius has a noble church in Rome. He was greatly venerated in England in the old Catho- lic days ; and one of the ancient churches of London — St. Pancras — still bears his name ; and gives the name also to the neighboring railway station ! But let us come for a little while to the Basilica of St. Agnes-outside-the-Walls — she has a church within the city as well — and see how the Romans still cherish this brave, beautiful Roman girl — " the loveliest child in Christian story" who lived and suffered nearly sixteen hundred years ago. She has passed into the Christian life as the very symbol of meekness and purity, a little white lamb of God. You know the story of her precocious sanctity and choice of the virginal life ; of the vain wooing of the Prefect Sempronius ; of her miracu- lous escape from the fate worse than death with which in his unmanly revenge he threatened her ; finally of her martyrdom by the sword. The Basilica of St. Agnes, built over the Cata- 60 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. comb of St. Agnes, dating also from the days of Constantine, has retained more of its ancient aspect than most of the old churches, though some changes were made in the decorations at the rebuilding of the monastery by Pope Pius IX., in thanksgiving for the miraculous escape of himself, and many dignitaries, and the students of the American Col- lege, when a staircase fell in, dragging them all down, on April 14, 1855. A large fresco in a chamber on the right of the courtyard records the event, and on each side are the names of the favored ones. You descend a long flight of steps lined with in- scriptions from the Catacombs and then come on the beautiful interior. Under the baldachino, over the High Altar of the Basilica, stands a lovely statue of St. Agnes, of Oriental alabaster and gilt bronze, about the size of the girl of thirteen that she was. Below is her tomb, with the usual circle of lamps about it. There is a Seventh Century mosaic in the sanctuary representing the apotheosis of St. Agnes. One of her chapels has a head of Christ attributed to Michael Angelo. St. Stephen and St. Laurence have a chapel whose mosaic altar and relief date back to 1490 ; and the foster-sister of St. Agnes, St. Emerentia, another youthful martyr, has also her chapel, and appears in a fresco above the altar, a beautiful girlish figure in a greensward, with a tall white lily beside her. 61 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN In this Basilica, on the Feast of St. Agnes, Jan- uary 21, are blessed the lambs from the wool of which the Archbishops' palliums are made. Before the Italian occupation the Pope used to go to St. Agnes' for this beautiful ceremony. In these days, however, the lambs have a little private audience of their own, being brought from St. Agnes' to the Vatican for the special blessing. St. Agnes has been always a favorite saint of young girls, of painters and poets. She is impar- tially invoked for religious vocations and for holy matrimony, and one of the most picturesque poems in the language, Keats' " St. Agnes' Eve," turns on the popular superstition of old English days, that if a girl would go to bed supperless and with certain other observances on that night her future lover would appear to her. A poem more in keeping with the traditions of St. Agnes is Tennyson's beautiful one, beginning : " Deep on the convent roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon." St. Agnes, with her lamb, is seen almost from the beginnings of Christian art. The great painters introduce her into nearly all their pictures of the blessed in glory. She is frequently an attendant figure in pictures of the Madonna and Child. Whose picture of St. Agnes, I wonder, suggested an exquisite poem by Mary E. Mannix, beginning : 62 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. " It is but a simple picture just above my table resting — Child-like face upturned in longing to the promise of the skies, With a something nigh to sadness the sweet lips and forehead cresting, And a look of Heaven dwelling in the beautiful dark eyes." The poem tells the story of the Saint's martyrdom and its message for to-day, ending with these lines : "Mine eyes are not so blinded that they cannot see the shining Of illimitable brightness in the pathway of the Cross ; And my heart is not so narrow that its faith is past divining In earth's short-lived compensations, Heaven's irreparable loss." St. Agnes is often pictured with St. Cecilia — another darling saint of the Romans — but while the former is always "a slip of a girl," as the Irish would express it, St. Cecilia is the very ideal of beautiful and fully developed womanhood. The life of no saint is better known than hers, nor more read- ily lends itself to art. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN VII. Two Noble Roman Ladies. We were standing in the sudatorium of St. Cecilia's baths. This, with another apartment of her palace, forms a portion of her church, which rises on the same site in the Trastevere. In all the essentials of its original purpose, steam-pipes, heat- ers, etc., this hot-air bath is unchanged from the days of her martyrdom. " They really had a very fair idea of a bath-room in those days," said the Bostonian, after a critical mental comparison of it with the " modern improve- ments " of the average American home. She re- membered, in a second, that Rome of today gets its water supply through the aqueducts of the Emperor Claudius; the magnificent ancient bath-tubs, espe- cially an enormous one of pink and white marble in the Vatican museum; and the fact that the bath reached a sort of glorification, unduplicated as yet by the moderns, in imperial Rome. The bath not of cleanliness but of luxury — an aggravation of the finest club-house of New York — washed out, indeed, the foundations of the Roman Empire. The Roman citizen interpreted the troubled mind of the Bostonian. "No matter. You Americans can't help your 64 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. utilitarianism. Why, even we have to rest our minds after long contemplation of Heavenly things, by an abrupt descent to earthly trifles. See how our great masters often put some homely detail into a conspicuous place in a great composition. Don't you remember the cat and the dog in the foreground of RossehTs > Last Supper,' in the Sistine Chapel ?" So, 1 turned somewhat comforted, to the fresco, representing the astonishment of executioners and Christians alike, at finding the gentle but intrepid Roman lady alive in this very room after her three days' bleeding from the headsman's ineffective strokes. You know the story of Cecilia, a Christian and a vowed virgin, who, in her father's palace, in the third century, devoted herself to the service of the poor, and to the praise of God in sacred music. She invented the organ for God's exclusive service, and played and sang so sweetly that angels came down to listen. Her parents, Christians though they were, gave her in marriage to the young Pagan noble, Valerian ; but such were his natural honor and virtue, that she easily won him to respect her vow and embrace the Faith. Returning from baptism, he found her at prayer, and beheld her Angel guarding her. He knelt beside her, and the Angel crowned them both, with bridal flowers fram Para- dise, and at Valerian's prayer, obtained from God the conversion of his dearly loved brother Tiburtius. The high rank of these converts enabled them for 65 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN a time to practice their Faith freely, and do much for the poor and persecuted among their brethren. Finally, however, the religious test was applied to them. They refused the heathen rites, and Valerian and Tiburtius, and their jailor Maximus, whom they converted, were beheaded together. Cecilia buried their bodies in the cemetery of St. Calixtus — I have visited the very spot. Then her own time came. The prefect Almachius, coveting her patrimony, and the additional wealth bequeathed her by her husband, denounced her as a Christian. She was condemned to be smothered with hot air in her own bath-room. The door was sealed, and the steam filled it. Three days later, the door was opened to bring forth her remains. She was alive and unhurt. Then lest a tumult should arise at the public execution of one so young and beautiful, so noble and charitable, as the beloved Cecilia, the prefect sent a lictor to behead her privately. Giving the three strokes permitted by the law, he only wounded her deeply in the neck. She lived long enough to receive the visit of her spiritual father, Pope St. Urban, and bequeath her fortune to him for the poor, and her palace to be made into a church. This was done, and the church consecrated by Urban, soon after her death, a. d. 280. The church was rebuilt by Pope Paschal L, in 821, and modernized in 1725. Many bits of Pagan architectural beauty have been utilized within, 66 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. and without, it keeps its Twelfth Century campanile. The life-story of the saint is told in fresco and mosaic within the church. Cecilia, Valerian, Tibur- tius and Urban, are pictured together in the altar canopy and sanctuary, and with them still another sainted Pope, Paschal L, already mentioned, to whom was revealed in a vision the place in the Catacombs where the uncorrupted body of Cecilia rested with her martyred companions, and who had them removed to her church in the Trastevere. To Cardinal Sfondrato of the sixteenth century, whose titular church this was, we owe Maderna's miracle of sculpture, which now rests upon her tomb, and has been so often copied as to be widely known. Sfondrato had Cecilia's tomb opened, and she was found just as Pope Paschal had found her over six centuries before, even her rich vesture unspoiled by the grave. A new coffin of cypress wood and silver was prepared for this blessed body, but before it was hidden from men's eyes, Stefano Maderna made it an ever-living beauty in the marble. We look upon this lovely effigy, resting under the altar over her tomb, and realize that we see her just as she lay in the first stillness of death, sixteen cen- turies ago. The beautiful oval face is almost hidden. We get just a glimpse of the curve of the cheek and chin, the shell-like ear, and the soft waving hair. The wound in the throat is hidden by a circlet. She is modestly composed in sleep, the long, slim hands - ' 67 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN lightly crossed. What is there comparable with this in Rome, except the sculpture's own Pieta in St. John Laterals, or Michael Angelo's, in St. Peter's? Ninety-six silver lamps, ever burning, mark the circle before the High Altar, enclosing the descent to St. Cecilia's tomb. She lacks not votive offerings of enduring value from her loving clients ; but the vase of fresh flowers, just brought her as a thank offering on the day of our visit, was still more eloquent testi- mony to her tender interest in the cares of her fellow Romans of today. We visited her chapel in the Catacombs, where her remains rested for several centuries before the vision of St. Paschal, and our friends told us of the out- pouring of Roman enthusiasm here and in the Traste- vere on St. Cecilia's Day, November 21. I thought of Raphael's St. Cecilia in ecstasy, with her holy companions about her, and the instruments of her art at her feet ; and of all the other attempts to portray her beauty, under which the canvas has glowed. A family picture, a family name wherever civilization has reached, is the dear patron saint of the divine art, the beloved daughter, wedded maid and martyr of Holy Mother Church. Chaucer and Dryden and a host of lesser poets have sung the angelic romance of her young life, the heavenliness of her music, the steadfastness of her Faith. But she has a greater fame than this. Every day, 68 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. at every one of the quarter of a million Masses offered up the world over, her name is mentioned among the glorious company of Apostles and mar- tyrs, into whose fellowship we hope one day to be admitted, " Felicitas, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia." Back to time immemorial this honor — forward to the day of doom. Fame? Was ever fame like this ? Near St. Cecilia's Church is the Palace of the Ponziani family — the house to which, in 1396, young Lorenzo Ponziani brought home his child bride, Francesca di Bassi, now honored in the Church as St. Frances of Rome. It has little enough of a pala- tial aspect to-day, but the chapel in St. Cecilia's, in which the Ponzianis were buried, is still as interest- ing and beautiful as in the days when St. Frances offered here her fervent and availing prayers. Here we saw the tomb-stone of little Evangelisto, St. Fran- ces' second son. Do you know the life of St. Frances, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton ? It is a long time published, nearly forty years, I think, and I believe it was the pioneer of a new order in the writing of the lives of the saints for folk of English speech. Father John Talbot Smith justly complains of the devout writers who have presented the saints of God to us as if they were freaks, not human beings. Here is a life so abounding in the extraordinary, not to say the miraculous, that it could have been made most dis- 69 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN couraging to the ordinary Christian reader. But Lady Fullerton has written of St. Frances in a way to draw all hearts to her. The mistress of a lordly house, keeping up, when needful, like the dear St. Elizabeth of Hungary, befitting state in her attire and environment ; the gentle and loving wife, the tender mother ; and yet the marvel of austerity, like St. Monica ; the miracle-working and vision-favored, like St. Catherine of Siena ; the intimate of the blessed spirits, like St. Cecilia herself. It is recorded of St. Frances that, for many years of her life, she lived in the constant visible presence of her Guardian Angel. After her little boy died — Evangelisto, the inscription on whose tomb-stone in St. Cecilia's we easily read after all these centuries — he came back to his mother, bringing her by God's decrees, another and mightier Guardian Angel, to be with her till that day, when she, too, would behold the face of the Father. The unbeliever smiles, scoffs, mayhap, at things like these. The weak or little educated Catholic shrugs his shoulders, and says, " Thank Heaven, it isn't an article of Faith." But every day, we all say with our lips at least, " I believe in the Communion of Saints." How might not that article of faith become a matter of sight for any one of us, if we but took the shutters off the east windows of our soul, and kept them clean and clear for the Divine in-shining ! 70 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. As the so often Catholic-minded Tennyson says : " How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affections bold Should be the man whose thought would hold An hour's communion with the dead. In vain shalt thou, or any, call The spirits from their golden day, Except, like them, thou too canst say My spirit is at peace with all." I like that " sound in head." St. Frances was as eminently practical as St. Teresa ; and was wont to say that a woman in family life should always be ready to leave God in the devotions of her choice to find Him in the duties of her state. It is told of her, that once, while she was at the Office of the Blessed Virgin in her oratory, she was called away five times by her husband, during her attempt to recite the first verse of a single psalm. Returning the fifth time, to the interrupted prayer, she found the psalm written in letters of gold. Or, as Eleanor C. Donnelly tells it, in her grace- ful poem, "The Golden Psalm" : The fair young wife no second summons needed, Nor showed unwillingness in word or look : But with angelic patience took the skein Of tangled duties from her spouse's hand, And, smiling, wove them silken-smooth again, Upon the precious reels of self-command. The sweet task done, And on her bended knees once more begun The interrupted psalm (0 bliss untold !) Upon the sacred page beneath her eyes, Sparkling and glowing with the sweet surprise, " Beatus Vir " was writ in lines of gold ! 71 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN In sight of the majestic ruins of the Forum, and just beyond the Basilica of Constantine, is the Church of Sta. Francesca Romana, to speak her name and title for once in her own sweet Italian tongue. It is a very old church, originally built by Pope St. Sylvester on the site of a temple of Venus. You know that this goddess was exorcised from the popular heart, largely through the substitution in her shrines and groves and promontories of the most pure name and effigy of the Blessed Mother of God. So this church was long dedicated to the " Mother of fair love," first under the title of Santa Maria Antica, then of Santa Maria Nuova. St. Frances had been all her life a frequent worshipper in this holy place, and here, in 1440, her body was brought for burial. Writes Lady Fullerton of those marvellous obse- quies : " The popular feeling burst forth on the occasion ; it was no longer to be restrained. Francesca was invoked by the crowd, and her beloved name was heard in every street, in every piazza, in every corner of the Eternal City. It flew from mouth to mouth, it seemed to float in the air, to be borne aloft by the grateful enthusiasm of a whole people, who had seen her walk to that church by her mother's side in her holy childhood ; who had seen her kneel at that altar in the grave beauty of womanhood, in the hour of bereavement, and now in death, carried 72 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. thither in state, she the gentle, the humble saint of Rome, the poor woman of the Trastevere, as she was sometimes called at her own desire." St. Frances was buried under the High Altar ; and so many and wonderful were the miracles attest- ing her sanctity, that she was canonized without delay ; and the name of the church changed to Santa Francesca Romana. The Saint had foimded a community of women, who are generally called the Oblates of Tor di Specchi, from the name of their principal convent. After the death of her husband, she retired thither, and made herself the least in the house. Her tomb was built from designs of Bernini in 1648, by a sister of Pope Innocent X., Donna Agata Pamphili, herself an Oblate. Meli's beautiful statue of St. Frances and her Angel is at the foot of the steps of her Confession, amid the usual circlet of lighted lamps. She wears the habit and the ample veil of the Oblates, and the grave sweetness of her aspect has been well expressed in the marble. The convent of the Oblates on Via Tor di Specchi, was not far from the Minerva. My limited time did not, however, permit me to visit it, much as I desired this privilege, after reading Lady Fullerton's descrip- tion of its bright and beautiful interior, and the souvenirs of St. Frances to be seen there. It stands in a very close built part of old Rome, a narrow 73 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN street running up almost in front of it to the famous Tarpeian rock. So do the ancient, the mediaeval, and the modern, crowd on one another in Rome, suggesting the strangest contrasts and comparisons. The Roman nobility, which claims descent not from the Roman Emperors, but from the much more ancient Roman kings, keep the tokens of their antiquity, even in such names as Flavia and Tullia for their daughters. Did the Vestal Virgins of their Pagan days in some sort prefigure the Oblates ? The Oblates do not make the three vows of religion, but simply a promise of obedience to the Mother President. They may go forth from the convent, with due permission, may enjoy their income, etc. The membership is restricted to women of the higher The convent affords the privileges of a devout life, and a not too rigorous seclusion to ladies who do not feel called to the complete renunciations of the Evan- gelical Counsels ; and the providing of this " middle state," so to speak, where such ladies can live holy lives and utilize their gifts in the educational work of the Church, is another proof of the largeness of the Church's mind. St. Frances is most distinctively "of Rome." It is said that she never left the city and its environs in her life. Her various residences and favorite places of prayer, her vineyards, the scenes of her 74 WELL* TRODDEN WAYS. miracles, are pointed out by the people as if she had died but yesterday. In her church is the tomb of Pope Gregory XI., by Olivieri. This was the Pope who restored the Papal court to Rome after its long exile in Avignon, through the urgency and with the help of St. Cath- erine of Siena. A bas-relief represents the Pope's triumphant return, with the saint, in her Dominican habit, preceding him. St. Catherine of Siena, though but an adopted citizen, is another very dear to the Romans. Her body rests un- der the High Altar of the Minerva, with ever-burning lamps at its head and feet and rich votive offerings. For a week she was my only woman friend and neighbor in Rome. Speaking of " citizen saints," and the antiquity of the special feeling for them in Rome, it may be re- called that after the Church had been established in peace and glory, the relics of St. Flavia Domitilla, a niece of the Emperor Vespasian, and of SS. Nereus and Achilles were brought from the Catacombs, to the church which bears the names of the two last. These holy remains were honored with a triumphal procession, and one of the inscriptions on the arches under which they passed, was this : " To St. Flavia Domitilla, and to the SS. Nereus and Achilles, the excellent citizens who gained peace for the Christian Republic at the price of their blood. " That was nearly fifteen centuries ago. 75 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN During the past year, the harvests at Viterbo were threatened. The Cardinal Archbishop ordered de- votions in honor of St. Rose of Viterbo. The har- vests were saved, and, indeed, were most abundant. Then the people were invited to give thanks to God for this mercy " granted through the intercession of our illustrious fellow-citizen, St. Rose." Isn't this a lovely touch of Christianized human nature? WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. VII. The Shadow of the Cross in Italian Sunshine. The Italians love life. They love to sit in the sun and listen to music. They love to dance and sing. They love beauty of body and soul. They revel in lovely scenery, and are delicately apprecia- tive of the beauty of art. They love to be in love. Is not Italy the land of Romeo and Juliet ? They shrink from everything that is painful or unlovely, and have euphemisms for death, like the Greeks. Yet they have a wonderful esteem for the relig- ious life of sternest bodily austerity. They are devoted to " hard saints," as we sometimes call them ; and will flock in crowds to gaze upon holy relics which are much more suggestive of the humiliations of the grave than of the triumphs of Heaven. In an earlier chapter, I spoke of St. Jerome as a favorite Roman saint. He is a favorite subject of the great artists, and sometimes the companion of St. Sebastian, the soldier, oftener of St. John the Baptist, in the decorations of churches and in sacred pictures generally. "St. Jerome's Last Communion," by Domeni- chino, in the Vatican Gallery, is one of the world's 77 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN greatest pictures. St. Jerome, when he was about to die, had himself carried into the church at Bethlehem, and knelt, supported by his attendants, to receive Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. It is hardly possible to imagine a more faithful image of old age, emaciation and fast-coming death. You can count the bones ; the thin old hair shows the death-sweat ; the mouth is sunken, the cheeks fallen in, the eyes filming, and over all the cold bluish-gray of dissolution. What a contrast to the strong, fair dignity of the young priest in his rich robes ; and the serene beauty of SS. Paula and Eustochium, who, kneeling, pray for the passing soul of their spiritual father ! The introduction of these saints is in one sense an anachronism, as they long preceded St. Jerome to the grave. He died a. d. 420. But the splendid faith in the Communion of Saints of these old Christian masters levelled the boimdary walls of time, and explains many a grouping of holy ones chronologically inexplicable. Why might not St. Paula have come from Heaven to the death-bed of her spiritual father and master in sacred lore? The lion is there in the foreground — such an amiable lion, with big, grieving brown eyes ! A copy of this great picture, in mosaic, is in St. Peter's. I recall, from a Florentine gallery, another St. Jerome in the Desert, a fearful picture of penance. The saint worn to the bone beats with a huge stone his fleshless breast, and the lion looks up as if in WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. alarmed protest against such extremity of self- inflicted suffering. The lion which is never absent from representa- tions of this saint, is accounted for by the legend that the poor beast came to the gate of the monas- tery with a thorn in his foot. All the monks naturally fled away ;. but Jerome extracted the thorn, and tended the wound till it was healed. The lion attached himself to the saint, and became a sort of guard — a very effective one ! to the humble property of the monastery. After the saint's death, it grieved its life away on his grave. In all the pictures of St. Jerome the physical signs of his penitential life are insisted upon ; but in many he has the Sacred Scriptures spread out before him, to commemorate the great work for which he is especially honored in the Church — his translation of the Bible, commonly called " The Vulgate." In the pictures of the desert-saint, we have the man of prayer and penance ; in the others, " the greatest doctor, divinely raised up to interpret the Scriptures ": to quote the praise of Holy Mother Church herself. What a grand figure he is in Raphael's " Disputa ! " Both aspects of the saint are harmonious. His was a tremendously strong, fierce nature — his lion is sometimes held to be merely a symbol of this — and it needed his auster- ities and prayerful solitude in Bethlehem, to drown the syren voices of the luxurious Roiua of his 79 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN youth ; to teach him to make the ancient classics in which his soul delighted, the servants of the Word of God ; and to fit him to transcribe the Book of Christ amid the very scenes of Christ's life and labors. By the way, have the semi-educated people who represent the Catholic Church as hostile to the Bible ever heard of St. Jerome? The Church ha'd things all her own way in these days, and if the Scriptures were hostile to her claims, would it not have been common prudence to have engaged St. Jerome to collect the various copies and feed them to his lion, instead of encouraging him to make this splendid authentic edition, ready to the hand of the monastic transcribers, or the type-setters of a later day? What was the sense, further, of employing sculptor and artist to make of Cathedral and monastery church a very Bible in stone and fresco and mosaic and stained glass, till the personages and events of Holy Writ were as well-known to the people as their family histories? But this is a digression. St. Jerome is also honored in the Church for his advocacy of the monastic life ; and he has a further claim on the consideration of our own age as a practical believer in the higher education of women. To what in- tellectual as well as spiritual heights he led Paula and her daughter Eustochium, Marcella, and other noble Roman ladies associated under his direction ! It was an austere training, but it did not wither the 80 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. kindly human heart. What a beautiful letter the Saint of penance and study wrote to Paula on the death of her daughter ! The Church of St. Jerome in Rome is on the site of St. Paula's house ; and in the portico of the Church of St. Onofrio, served by Jeronymite Fathers, I have seen the beautiful frescoes by Domenichino, protected by glass, in which the epochs in the life of the Saint are eloquently pic- tured ; among them his vision of Judgment — won- drous commentary on the relative value of profane and sacred science, when comparison as of equals, instead of subordination as of handmaid to mistress is nsisted upon ! There are frescoes from the same hand of the Saints of the order, among whom Saints Paula and Eustochium are included. St. Onofrio, another saint of penance, is depicted in this stern character on the walls of the cloister, leading to the monastery. In this church, which is exceedingly rich in works of art, is the beautiful tomb of the poet Tasso and the tomb of the wonder- ful linguist, Cardinal Mezzofanti. We set out to speak of the Italian devotion to austere saints, and of the fruitfulness of this sunny land in heroes of penance. The shadow of the Cross lies large across its flowery meadows and vine- clad slopes, and if you listen well, the moan of the Miserere, the wail of the Dies Irce, will pierce through the music of the dance and the love-song. 81 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN It seems a far cry from St. Jerome to St. Paul of the Cross, but there is a connecting link in Rome, material as well as spiritual. Crowning the Coelian Hill in sight of the Coli- seum, the Forum, the Arch of Constantine and many of the most interesting ruins of ncient aRome, stands the Church of SS. John and Paul (San Gio- vanni e Paolo), erected by Pammachus, the friend of St. Jerome. SS. John and Paul were Romans, brothers, and officers in the service of Constantia, daughter of Constantine. For their fidelity to their Faith they incurred the wrath of Julian the Apostate, but they were popular men, and — like the prefect in the case of St. Cecilia^ — he feared the consequences of a pub- lic execution. So the executioners were sent to behead them privately in their own house. The church is erected where the house once stood, and the very stone on which the saints were beheaded is to be seen in the centre of the floor, surrounded by a railing, and bearing this inscription : "Locus Martyrii SS. Joannis et Paolo in cedibus pro])riis." The church has a twelfth century bell-tower which reminds you of similar ones seen in England ; and while you are thinking of this, somebody tells you that the ancient granite columns in the portico are contemporary, the gift of the only English Pope, Adrian IV. This church is served by the Passionist Fathers, 82 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. whose monastery adjoins it ; and last year, the pres- ence of the Very Rev. Father Fidelis (Dr. James Kent Stone, author of " The Invitation Heeded,") who was filling- the office of Consultor-General, and attending to the interests of the English-speaking provinces of the congregation, was a magnet for American visitors. He was very kind to the Bostonian, and you must know how she saw him in his fortress-like sanctuary. Out by the Coliseum, under historic arches, along by venerable ruins which, like the Coliseum, have a flora of their own, up a steep cobble-stone road to the hill-top, and out at the monastery door. As I knew no better, I rang the monastery door- bell, which woke echoes from long and hollow dis- tances. A young poor woman with a sickly little girl climbed the hill and sat down in the sun on the door-step. I saw a little aperture in the door with a slide back of it. Hence, in mediaeval fashion, food is passed out to the poor, and these were the advance guard of the monastery's beneficiaries. Presently a small door in the other side of the wall opened, and a grizzly old serving man, suggest- ing a fierce little ferret, looked out between the bars. Perceiving that it was a woman, not after the dole, he shut the door with a snap, giving barely time for my meek articulation of " Father Fidelis." In the sunny and oppressive silence, I heard his retreating footsteps on the flags, and by-and-by, a 83 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN double pair of advancing footsteps. In a moment, a majestic Passionist stood in the open doorway, and my friend beside him, with serious face but laughing eyes, properly directed the footsteps that had gone astray. "Go down the hill, walk on a little on the road, climb the other lull, and stand at the iron railing in front of the church. The man will go over and open it, and admit you." These rites duly performed, I was received at the threshold of the church, within which the sacristans were busy, and taken to one of the reception rooms opening off it. Herein I relieved my mind, as to the superiority of any and all American monasteries and convents over their European elder brothers and sisters, before I told Father Fidelis of the fortunes of his regiment, the Second Massachusetts in the Spanish- American War; but I have not learned that my well-meant suggestions have led to any radical changes at San Giovanni e Paolo. It was a fitting thought to place this austere abode in the midst of the remains of the architectural wonders of the old civilization, and the most beauti- ful scenery. There is abundant food for meditation on the fleeting vanity of the world ; and — was it St. Teresa who spoke of breakfasting on a beauti- ful landscape ? The dwellers in this monastery do so habitually, I believe ; and almost any Italian can do it often. 84 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. But I fear the American would never rise above wanting coffee and rolls thrown in. Yet the Passionists are a modern order. St. Paul of the Cross, their founder, finished his mortal course in the year of the Declaration of American Inde- pendence. His was a life lived in presence of Christ on the Cross — an almost incredibly penitential life — and the aim of the brethren of the Congregation which he founded is to live and preach Christ cruci- fied to a world self-indulgent and weak of faith. This Passionist Congregation would be the last, one would say, for utilitarian and pleasure loving America, for France, for England, yet how it has flourished in all these countries ! It has consecrated our own hill-tops with its Retreats, its every pulpit a Calvary ; and its conquests everywhere are not merely the better life of hereditary Catholics, but many and eminent converts. North America has sent it to South America — a most welcome gift. Father Fidelis showed me the splendid chapel of St. Paul of the Cross, built in 1868, and the em- balmed body of the Saint under the altar. The thin, aged face has the gentlest and kindest expression. How strange it must seem to this lover of poverty, that his body should rest in death amid the glory of gold and silver and rarest marbles, with lamps forever shining before it ! But " their sepulchres shall be glorious," said the Holy Spirit, of men like St. Paul of the Cross. 85 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Here we saw the twin columns of gold and white alabaster, soon to become familiar to us in other shrines. The Khedive of Egypt gave twelve, I think, of these to Pope Pius IX., and the two above- mentioned were the Pope's gift to this chapel. The Cross was a sign of light in a dark sky to Constantine. It comes as a saving shadow across the world's glare to other eyes. But whether as light or shadow, it is the Conqueror's Sign in Italy and in the world. WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. IX. Benedetto and Others. He used to come into the reading room for his com- radely lesson in English, from his dear house-friend, who was also the well-tried friend of the Bostonian. And so, we all three became comradely, in those pleasant evenings after dinner, when we chatted, with pauses for a glance at the newspapers, or a sip of coffee, at the little round tables, the tinkling of the fountain making a subdued accompaniment to our words and thoughts. He was in his early twenties, of medium height, a clear olive pallor, large lustrous slate-colored eyes, and a bearing marked by an unmistakable, though digni- fied and unobtrusive satisfaction in having been born a Roman. He was of a child-like innocence and a phenomenal inexperience in the ways of the world ; without the faintest conception of what the manner of life might be outside of Rome or a typical Italian town ; with as keen a sense of humor as an Irish or American youth might have, — held in check, however, by a reverent spirit, and the sweetest inborn courtesy and consideration ; intellectually keen, hard-working, de- vout, with an ascetical tendency. At the age of four- teen, he had left home to join an austere religious 87 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN order. Brought back because his family needed his services, he had fitted himself for his filial duty, and become an efficient clerk in the government's service in Rome. He had some thought of going to America, if his dear comrade and his family would go too. Hence his special interest in learning English ; although these Continental folk acquire a language on general principles, at every opportunity and with the greatest ease. Benedetto, however, did not admire the English language, nor did he admire the people to whom it was native, except in a very discriminating manner, and with somewhat of benevolent condescension. There was something to be said in justification of his attitude. At the time of which I write, a party of English Non-conformist tourists had possession of the house. It is true that they had their own dining- room, and a clergyman of their own persuasion to head their austere table; but in the evening they poured into the common reading-room and distinctly depressed the temperature. You remember, perhaps, how the ingenuous John Ridd in " Lorna Doone " used to distinguish the Catholics in a public gathering — they looked well- nourished and as if they were having a good time. This was when English Protestantism was deeply tinged with the Puritan spirit. He could have separated his Protestants and Cath- WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. olics on the same simple plan, at any time during the stay of these tourists, as we had not more than one or two Episcopalians to shade off with in between. Never have I seen thinner and grimmer women. All of them, apparently, had been born middle-aged and critical. They were angular and badly dressed, and the men matched them in all things. They dis- approved of Rome, of its Basilicas, of its art galleries, of its ruins — they " did " them all in a week — most of all, of its people. " Nothing can change my mind about the Catholic Church, " declared one especially severe-looking woman, after a visit to the grandeur and radiance of St. Peter's. I fear she held the Pope personally re- sponsible for the condition of every tiny Roman who looked as if it needed a bath. Well, Benedetto would contemplate these people, through his long lashes, and in long silence of even- ings, to the manifest detriment of his lessons. For- tunately, his knowledge of English was too limited for him to understand their talk. Fortunately, per- haps, for them also, his occasional ejaculations were equally lost on them. Sometimes, we would see a painful contraction of his smooth forehead, as some particularly disagree- able tourist did some particularly awkward act, and he would murmer softly : " O Madonna Santa ! " or - Santa Maria ! " or " Mama Mia ! " But with native consideration and chivalry he was NEW FOOTSTEPS IN tender to the womankind, no matter how unpleasant they might be in aspect or bearing. I ventured a remark to him once which almost any American youth would have appropriated as a just tribute to his own personal fascinations. But he repelled it sweetly — " We do not give good things to donkeys," he said. All this time the British men and maids were superciliously pitying the benighted Italian ! Benedetto had all the Italian passion for physical beauty ; and the conviction, of course, that the Italian type is the model of all beauty. If the child of an Italian mother happens to be unbeautiful, she is likely to regard it as a mark of God's displeasure. But nearly all Italian children are beautiful ; and the young girls and the women in their early twenties, have glorious dark eyes, soft, delicately-tinted skin, and beautiful curves and dimples. I never knew what the poets meant by " dusky " hair, till I saw it waving back from the broad low foreheads of Italian girls. It is not the black, solid, smooth, shining, hair of the north, but a soft, fluffy growth that shades away from the clear olive brow and temples in a quite indescribable manner. And then the tragic, fateful sort of beauty on some of those softly shaded faces! To be sure, the Italian women of the humbler classes mature early and fade early ; and it is hard to believe that any of the witchlike crones you see in 90 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. the doorways of poor tenements could ever have re- sembled their cherubic grandchildren playing on the street. But these women have had their beauty and enjoyed it to the full, and take a disinterested pleas- ure in seeing the later flowering of their inherit- ance. Benedetto was interested in America, in view of his possible emigration thither ; but it was clear that he had the vaguest ideas even of the mere extent and wealth of the Land of the Free. So I tried to give him some points as to our mani- fold natural advantages, the size and splendor of our cities, the race-lines of our citizenship, citizen oppor- tunities, etc., etc. He listened as if some credible person were describing the manner of life in the planet Mars. In the small matters of life, Americans were always exciting his wonder. He could not under- stand, for example, our fondness for animals. In Rome there are so many bambinos to be petted, that there is little affection left to be spent on the backs of dogs and cats. I experimented on a Roman cat, and it turned on me a face of mingled surprise and alarm, that I shall never forget. The cats in the Vatican gardens, how- ever, were sleek and fat and evidently used to notice ; for four came up to us together one day to be petted — voluntary victims. Benedetto was too polite ever to manifest surprise 91 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN at anything his friends thought proper to do ; though it was certainly a problem to him that we could amuse ourselves for an hour with the antics of the little dogs of the Minerva. But one day, when we were driving in the neigh- borhood of St. Peter's and one of the party was diverting the rest — we had had many hours of strenuous sight-seeing — by noting every stray dog, cat, and donkey on the road, Benedetto sat silent as his wont was, but with a look of amiable satisfaction on his pleasant face, till he, too, was appealed to on the appearance of about the fifty-first cat on our line of vision. " But there are so many cats," he said, kindly, though with a weary smile. Whereupon I told him of the Boston lady who left a fortune to endow a home for cats. " It is another world," he answered, trying hard not to look shocked — for was not the Signorina also a Bostonian ? and we heard no more from Benedetto the rest of the evening — not even when we reminded him of the Madonna's cat in Barocchi's " Annunciation " in the Vatican. What an experience it would be, if exchange of personalities could be made among us, to see America with Benedetto's ingenuous eyes ! If it were possible for English self-satisfaction to receive a salutary check, it should be in Italy. English institutions, even Royalty itself, is a joke in 92 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. France, but the Englishman, pure and simple, is the clown of the Italian stage. The Italian is utterly unimpressed by the English- man's serious self-importance. To the Italian, the Englishman is not a scholar because he is not a linguist ; he is not a Christian, because he is not a Catholic. If an Italian wants to amuse a group of friends he " does the Englishman " for them. This consists in showing the Englishman on a visit to one of the great churches, for example. He does not recognize the sacred places ; he goes coldly by the favored shrine of the Madonna ; he blunders into forbidden spots, and when the sacristan comes forth to warn him off, courteously, but with an infinity of gesture and grimace, he raises his monocle, drops his mouth, and stares uncomprehendingly before him. The Italian can do this last to perfection. In an Italian theatre in a rural town, the play is such as will appeal to the country-folk of Romeo and Juliet. But just when every one is wrought up to concert pitch, when the men are wiping their eyes, and the women faint with emotion, the curtain falls and rises again on the British father of a family stalking across the stage, with monocle, side- whiskers and silk hat, followed by his stout little wife, who looks just like Queen Victoria, and five or six lanky sons and daughters with their Bsedeckers and umbrellas. The tension is at once relieved ; the 93 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN English are duly put through their paces, the Italian, of course, always "getting the best" of them, and every one goes home happy. Invariably throughout Italy, the advertisements of the various tourists' agencies display the British husband and wife, as already described, with their tall, narrow-shouldered daughter, with sailor-hat, shirt-waist and guide-book, standing between them. All three, with their mouths dropped at precisely the same angle, are staring at the rising sun. The Italians thus assert their superiority; the English do not always understand, and don't worry when they do, and. everybody is happy. The trouble is, though, that the Italian seldom distinguishes between the people of England and the people of English speech. " But I am not English, I'm Irish," says one. "And I am not English, but American," says another. But the bi-lingual salesman and guard, and the polyglot proprietor and conductor, only shrug their shoulders. Three nations, and all with the same language ! It is too difficult. To be sure, there are peculiarities by which after a time an American may be distinguished. The average Englishman frankly takes no trouble to make one understand his barbarous tongue. He thinks every one should know it. 94 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. The American, on the contrary, thinks he can make one understand by talking loud. The American sits in long rows at luncheon or dinner, drinking cold water. The Englishman does not do this incredible thing ; nor, on the other hand, is he so lavish of his lire to waiters and porters. The Englishman, by the way, has his own opinion, not a favorable one — of his alleged "cousin," who has taught hotel-keepers to put the vin ordinaire among the extras, and servants to expect large gratuities. He can hardly be blamed. How delightful it was at that little inn with the grand name, up in the Savoy Alps, where the English and Americans seldom rested — where they gave you a better dinner than you would ordinarily get in Paris, wine included; the softest of beds, though you had to get up on a chair to climb into it, and a wax candle as thick and nearly as long as a broom-stick ; where they wel- comed you and served you as if you had come down from Heaven to them ; and where on your bill, there were but seventy-five centimes for extras. Such places are growing fewer and further between year by year. Shall any at all be left, after our quarter of a million Americans have been at the Paris Exposition ? NEW FOOTSTEPS IN X. Jerusalem in Rome. " If I were of the Jewish race, I should be the proudest man in the world!'' said John Boyle O'Reilly. A friend present begged to know if it were possible to elevate race-pride to the nth power ; as anything to exceed Mr. O'Reilly's pride in his Irish blood had not come under his rather extensive observation. Another recalled the tradition of the descent of the Irish race from the Lost Tribes of Israel, and suggested some striking points of resemblance between the Chosen People of the Old Dispensation, and the Chosen People of the New. " Modest ! that latter term of comparison ! " said another. " Seriously, though," continued Boyle O'Reilly, " what a grand thing to be of the race which gave Moses to the world ; and " very reverently, " of which Christ Himself came." Then we all agreed that the ideal thing were to be of the Jewish blood and the Christian Faith. I thought of all this in Rome, one day, in the Church of S. Andrea della Frate, at the Shrine of the Blessed Mother of God, in which she herself appeared to Alphonse Ratisbon, the Jew, who becom- 96 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. ing a Christian, subsequently founded the Order of our Lady of Sion. I think the Jews, even those who are most obdurate in their antagonism to Christianity, have nevertheless an intense pride in the fact that it is from their race — all fallen and proscribed though it be today — that the Christ of the Christian's love and hope has come. You can find it in the impassioned poems of Emma Lazarus, of whom, by the way, it is whispered that she died a Catholic. I recall the story of the Jewish merchant, in one of the great Catholic cities of Europe, who, on the occasion of a public observance of some festival of the Blessed Mother of God, felt that it would be unwise for him to let his establishment, the largest and finest in the city, remain dark amid the multi- tude of illuminated buildings. So he illuminated, like the rest ; but he also saved his pride of race. Tow- ering over all other festal devices, he had above his building in letters of light the name, " Mary," and just below, in equal radiance, the inscription, "She Was a Jewish Woman." Another characteristic story is told in one of Theodora L. Teeling's charming sketches, of Father Hermann, a converted Jew, who entered the Carmel- ite Order. At the visit of some great dignitary to the house of the Order in Paris, Father Hermann and two other priests, also converted Jews, were standing together under the Crucifixion in the assem- 97 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN bly room. The dignitary approached this group, and the Superior, presenting them by name, added : "Three sons of Abraham — " " Four ! " said Father Hermann, with a magnifi- cent gesture towards the Crucifix. In Heaven itself, amid the hosts of the redeemed, there are many souls to thrill with a double pulse of exultation on those days when, at a myriad Chris- tian altars, the priest intones the Gospel beginning, "The genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the son of Abraham." Who cannot, therefore, sympathize with Pascal when he says that the Christian attitude to the Jews should be one of "chivalrous antagonism !" Certainly in Rome, even during the comparatively brief existence of the Ghetto — Paul IV., 1555, to Pius IX., 1848 — and its discriminatory statutes, the Jews were better treated than anywhere else in Europe. Even in the Ghetto, they were in some measure a self-governing community, and the laws of Rome secured their abodes to them on perpetual leases, thus protecting them against the possible caprice or rapacity of Christian landlords. There have been Jewish settlements in Rome since the days of Pompey the Great, but the first Jews were brought thither as slaves. The Jews lived on imder the Pagan Emperors with varying fortunes, con- founded in the beginning of Christianity with Chris- tians, as Jews and Christians equally refused to pay 98 WELL TRODDEN WAYS. divine honors to idols or to Emperors ; later oppos- ing the Christians with their own small strength ; still later, before the abolition of Pagan power, suf- fering banishment, or mayhap worse, in some sort like the Christians. In the early days of Christian power, and even in the thirteenth century, they lived in considerable numbers and prosperity in Rome, and the Pope's physician was oftentime a Jew. In the days of St. Gregory the Great — sixth century — some over-zealous Christians attacked the Jews and captured their synagogues at Cappa- docia and Terracina. When this exploit was made known to the Pope, he at once bade the victors return this captured property to its lawful owners, observing, in effect, that coercion is not conversion; that men should be won to the True Faith by gentle- ness and charity. In later years, the stern Sixtus V. treated the Jews kindly because, as he reminded the Romans, they were u the family from whom Christ came." Always at the accesion of a new Pope, the freedom of the Jews to practice their religion was renewed with this ceremony : the Israelite school awaited his return from St. John Laterals, in a richly decorated balcony, and presented him with a copy of the Pen- tateuch, which he at once blessed, and took with him. Doubtless their faculty for money-getting and money-keeping, had something to do with the antag- 99 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN onism kept up so long against the Jews in all Chris- tian countries in the much enduring name of religion. Howbeit, in Rome, Pope Pius IX. destroyed the enclosure of the Ghetto, which no longer exists in its ancient form, and revoked every vestige of the laws which discriminated against the Jews. There are now several Jewish quarters in Rome, but they remain numerously in the neighborhood of the Ghetto and within its olden limits are two syna- gogues and several schools. Opposite to the place where stood the gate of the Ghetto, is the Church of the converted Jews. There is a painting of the Crucifixion on the out- side walls, and above its portals this inscription, taken from Isaiah, (Chapter LXV.) in Hebrew and in Latin : " I have spread forth my hands all the day to an unbelieving people, who walk in a way that is not good, after their own thoughts." It was almost twilight when we entered this little church — to which not one visitor in a hundred thousand ever thinks of going, as the Roman citizen told me — and I could not get a satisfactory view of it. The church is very small, but beautiful in marble and frescoes. The large frescoes on the side walls, as I remember them, commemorate the supper of St. Gregory, and the giving of the deed of the Church. 100 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. What impressed me more than these, however, was the picture above the High Altar, which caught the fading light from the windows, and the upward gleam of the sanctuary lamp. It was the Eternal Father attended by angels. I know not what its artistic merit may be, but there is a beauty of fitness in it that goes to the heart, as if it said : " Fear not ; it is the Lord God of your Fathers who calls you thither." And the Madonna below with the Divine Em- manuel in her arms, is in her dark beauty a verit- able Daughter of Judea. A few devout women were praying before this little sanctuary. We looked into the synagogues near by, which were lighted for the evening service, and found only men on the lower floor. The women were in the galleries. A red curtain with symbolical devices embroidered in gold hangs before the recess, be- tween the marble columns in the wall opposite to the Rabbi's desk. It conceals what they call " the Holy of Holies," which contains among other ven- erated objects, a parchment copy of the Pentateuch. Among the decorations in the frieze and else- where are the seven-branched candlestick, the sacred vessels of Solomon's Temple, the Harp of David, etc. The Rabbi began the prayers in a mournful, long-drawn chant, and the men responded in the same key, with a curious minor fall at the end. 101 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN It was to me all so inexpressibly dim sad, futile. Outside, about the thronged business stands, and the shabby houses, there was life and activity enough ; but sordid and unbeautiful — the utter humiliation of the Daughter of Sion. The actual confining walls of the Ghetto, which had their advantages and were not especially dis- tasteful to this proud and exclusive people, were not half so strong a barrier between them and the Christians, as those raised by their own obstinate spirits. Else never had there been a Ghetto. It seems incredible that in the place of all places where the sculptor's and the painter's art should have called all they who passed by the way to see the bond between the Old Law and the New in fig- ure and reality, in prophecy and fulfilment, Israel alone should continually go on with unseeing eyes and hardened heart ; that Abraham, and Moses, and David, and the prophets who wept over the foreseen obstinacy and final casting off of the Chosen People, should in vain beseech them to enter and see the glory of the Lord, and the honor of His servants — the men of their own blood — in the temples of the New Covenant. But so it is ; and this nineteen centuried obstinacy, this world-wide dispersion, this marvellous preserva- tion of the racial type and the Olden Law, in them- selves witness most powerfully — if unintentionally — for every claim of the New. 102 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Then there is a promise and a hope dear to every Christian heart that shares the loving solicitude of the Heart of Christ for the people of whom He took His Humanity. Not forever vain the Divine entreaty, which cries through the Christian world at every recurrent Passion-tide : "Jerusalem ! Jerusalem ! be converted to the Lord Thy God." They will come back, those erstwhile favored children, whom the Lord has preserved through all vicissitudes, after whom He yearns so fatherly. They will come back, albeit, late in the World's long day. And they will be established in their own land, and the unbloody Sacrifice which their prophet foresaw, shall be offered in the place of the ancient prefigur- ing victims. "And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set His hand again the second time to recover the remnant of His people, which shall be left, from Assyria and from Egypt, and from Pathros and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the isles of the sea. And He shall set up a standard unto the nations, and shall assemble the fugitives of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah, from the four corners of the earth." And in those days, Jerusalem and Rome shall sing the same hosannas to the Son of David. 103 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN XI. New Rome and St. Joachim's. One day, on the road between Genoa and Pisa, looking inward from the sea, I was painfully im- pressed by the less than half-cultivated aspect of the land, and the dilapidated look of the country villages. Nature had done so much ; men were doing so little. Dwellings were going utterly to ruin, or were repaired in a slovenly, half-hearted manner. The fields were lonely looking ; the olive and grape harvest rather scant ; even the little churches had an uncared for look, as if half the people had passed away, and none had come in to take their vacant places. The brilliant sunshine, and the fresh, fragrant air only intensified the sadness of the scene. Something of what I felt must have been evident, as I looked away again to the blue Mediterranean, for the Italian artist beside me said : " You are thinking of our badly tilled land and depopulated villages." He spoke English with great correctness, and only a slight accent, though he had never been in England or America. " Yes ; " I said, " what does it mean ? " 104 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. "It means," he answered, bitterly, "our great navy, our standing army, the Triple Alliance — in other wods, a poor country trying to live on equal terms with rich ones." " Then," I said, " United Italy is a failure." " No, no ; " he answered, quickly, " I cannot grant that ; but we are the worst-governed country in the world. The men who ought to be tilling the fields and repairing the houses are forced into the army and navy. We gain nothing outside by our over-developed militarism ; and at home the land is going to ruin." I often heard similar sentiments after I arrived in Rome, and from persons, anti-Papal, as this young artist apparently was, as well as from the heartiest adherents of the Pope. Italy is depleted of the flower of her manhood ; over-taxed, half-cultivated and half-starved ; and the new education, because so tinctured with irreligion, is playing into the hands not of an enlightened popular movement for a gradual betterment of con- dition, but of a destructive anarchism, which would pull down what oppresses at the cost of any amount of incidental and uncalled-for destruction. The King would gladly have his people religious, if only religion in Rome did not necessarily involve a standing protest against the spoliation of the Patrimony of the Church. Religion is seen to be the only effective barrier against the destructive 105 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN social forces : but it must be had at a smaller cost than the surrender of Rome to the Pope. When the day comes that the Government is willing to make the surrender, it may be too late for the safety of Rome ; or, the change of heart may come in obedience to some imperious political necessity which involves the solution of the Papal difficulty anyhow. Religion is taught in the State Schools, when the parents demand it. But the perfunctory catecheti- cal instruction may be given by an indifferent Catholic or by an infidel. In any event, nothing can be said which would bring into conflict the rights of the Pope and the claims of the King. Yet the Italians are Catholics — on certain points the Government is careful of their religious suscep- tibilties, as in the burial of Victor Emmanuel and the marriage of King Humbert's son. Queen Margharita is a devout woman, and would, it is said, do anything possible to soften the situation. " She might, then, have restored to the Pope his beautiful tapestries, which are kept in the State apartments in the Quirinal," said a keen little woman, Papalina to the last degree, and not at all placated by the Queen's occasional gifts to S. Silvestro. " She might do that little bit of reparation." Whether she could or not, the criticism is a fair evidence of the more devout Catholics' attitude to the Quirinal. 106 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Many of them will not enter the court-yard of that palace, even with visitors out sight-seeing from foreign parts. Protestantism makes no real headway in Rome, for all of the occasional pretentious reports to remote missionary boards. Sometimes poor Italian children are drawn into sectarian Sunday-Schools with presents of new gowns or jackets, but such " conversions " are short-lived, and are poor returns for large investments of money and lung power. Protestant missionary activity in Catholic countries, however, has usually the effect of stirring up the Catholics themselves to greater interest in their own faith, and of making the shepherds of the flock beware of taking too much for granted, in the matter of the sufficiency of religious inheritance and environment. There are many things to which one may liken Rome religiously. The symbol uppermost in my mind this moment, is of a vast forest, wherein new trees are springing from the decaying trunks of old ones ; flowers forcing their way up among fallen leaves ; and opening buds and overripe fruitage on the self-same branch. The ancient orders for the redemption of captives have no longer their olden prominence in the sight of Christendom ; but Cardinal Lavigerie's White Fathers are prepared in Rome for the New Crusade for the redemption of slaves in Equatorial Africa. 107 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN The Government cripples the Church's exisiting educational system ; forthwith, religion devises new plans to meet the spiritual needs of the children who have no choice but to attend the Government schools, and of the youth, whose sole road to a career is through the State University. The Government closes a time-honored monastery or convent in Old Rome. Presently, a new monas- tery or convent springs up in New Rome or in the suburbs. Perhaps it is of Roman origin. Perhaps it is an offshoot from some prosperous French, or German, or English-speaking Institute, which desires, as they all desire, to have a home in sight of St. Peter's. Anyhow, the indestructibility of the Church's energy is constantly manifesting itself in the Eternal City, and vain the hope of those who look to see her failing with any national decadence whatever. One of the most gratifying evidences of the rising up of the Church to meet new conditions, is the mis- sionary work of the Redemptorist Fathers in New Rome. In many respects, New Rome contrasts favorably on the exterior with Old Rome. The streets are broad, well cared for and well lighted. Indeed, it may be said of Rome in its entirety, and of all the considerable Italian cities, that they are, pro- portionately, far better electric-lighted than London. The Government, however, has not succeeded as 108 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. well in its efforts at " improving " Old Rome as in laying out the new portion of the city ; and even in this latter, there is sad evidence of the disastrous ending of sundry building " booms " just as Marion Crawford describes it in " Don Orsino." Alleged improvements in the Old City involve too often the knocking off of portions of houses, and the leaving of the broken walls and papered background of old bed-chambers. Instead of the quaint and decorous aspect of an older time, there are today whole streets which must be described as rubbishy- looking. In New Rome the inhabited buildings are whole and high, and shops with large glass windows abound. The wall-picture of the Madonna with the votive lamp before it is not seen, nor are cross-crowned edifices at first glance much in evidence. Yet as the Romans have moved out and built them- selves houses on the fields of Cincinnatus, the Church has gone with them. I wanted to see the great Papal Church of St. Joachim in Rome. " First," said the Roman citizen, " you must meet the rector, Father Palliola/' So we drove out one day, passing, as we did at every opportunity, the wonderful fountain of Trevi, on by the Quirinal, then to the new but already densely peopled and rather uninteresting section, once the " Prate " or Fields. 109 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN At the very top of one of the apartment houses, with children playing all the way up the interminable nights, we found the modest dwelling place of fche Redemptorist Fathers in whose charge Pope Leo XIII. has placed the Church of St. Joachhn. A monastery on a top-flat in Rome ! It is a temporary arrangement of course, but, for the time being, it is there, perfectly monastic in spirit, if not in aspect. A friendly lay-brother admitted us into a tiny parlor, — the only portion of the flat accessible to one of the devout sex, and I noted the crucifix, the pictures of our Lady of Perpetual Help, and St. Alphonsns in death as he lies in his episcopal robes, taking long bodily rest, until the Judgment Day. Then Father Palliola came in with kindest greeting and gentle Italian hospitality, and he spoke a little to the Roman citizen of a protege of both for whom he was getting employment ; and to the American of the " Mission Church " in Boston, and of sundry dis- tinguished American Redemptorists. A middle aged man, whose kindly and tranquil nature has left him fresh and imworn after years of severe missionary labor in a great variety of climates ; quietly cordial in manner, full of considerate interest in his guest and the topics of the hour, Father Palliola is of the finest type of Italian churchman. As we went down the long stairs with him, on our way to St. Joachim's, the little children stopped to 110 WELL -TRODDEN WAYS. kiss his hand, and his passing was like that of a gleam of sunshine among them. St. Joachim's Church stands in an open space in the historic fields above referred to. It has an eventful history; but it is enough to recall here that more than a year ago — July 20, 1898 — Pope Leo XIII. made the church over, free of debt, to the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer; and that the Redemptorist Rector-General forthwith appointed Father Palliola its first rector. The church is practically complete on the exterior; the High Altar is erected, and a few chapels equipped with essentials ; but most of the chapels still await benefactor nations for their furnishing 1 and adorn- o ment. For St. Joachim's is an International Church : a visible act of homage and reparation to the Blessed Sacrament from the nations of the earth. The grand mosaic on the facade of the church expresses this idea of world-wide perpetual adoration. The Blessed Sacrament is exposed on an altar. On one side of the altar kneels Pope Clement VIII., who instituted the Perpetual Adoration in Rome three hundred years ago. On the other side, kneels Pope Leo XIII. inviting the races of men to draw near. Shall we quarrel with the artist, Virginio Monti, for making the loveliest figure, in the most picturesque of modern costumes, represent Europe, while America is typified by the only Simon-pure American, an 111 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN aboriginal Indian, with sufficiently graceful drapery, and moccasins and feathers? Asia, who cradled mankind, is beautiful, venerable, mysterious. Africa, a somewhat idealized Ethiopian, is clothed with bar- baric splendor, and a lion at her feet. Adoring angels hover above : and in the niches on either side, are four saints who were in a peculiar way, Apostles of the Blessed Sacrament : St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bona venture, St. Juliana of Liege, and St. Clare. Above all this, upraised on a pedestal of shields, rises the statue of St. Joachim, with the Child Virgin, his daughter. St. Joachim, as my readers know, is the Holy Father's patron saint, whose name he received in baptism, and to whom he has always had a deep devotion. The statue is in bronze, a patriarchal figure, ma- jestic, long-bearded. The little, slight, veiled Maiden stands beside him, like a lily in the shadow of an oak. So we have one of the last of the saints of the Old Law over the latest world-temple of the New ; a saint less favored than Zachary or Simeon, in that he lived not to see the dawning of the Light of the World in the eyes of his Mary's Son, but far more favored in the nearness of his blood to that of the World's Redeemer. Thus, too, is shown the continuity of the Visible Church, the Old Dispensation not destroyed but ful- filled — brightening and expanding into the New. 112 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. The columns of Baveno marble which support the portico are the gifts of the Czar of Russia ; the doors of Cedar of Lebanon are from the Sultan ; the Py- renean marble of the walls, from the Queen Regent of Spain — personal associations violently dissevered elsewhere, but here abiding in architectural harmony. With the poetic beauty of appropriateness which is never so perfectly exemplified as in the Roman churches, we have beneath the mosiac figure of the Divine Redeemer, in the lunette over the portal, this inscription, taken from His discourse after the Last Supper : " Pater fuit inium sicut et nos unum sumus." (Father, that they may be one, as we also are One.) The fruit-bearing vine rising up from the Sacred Host winds the length of the entablature in circles, within every one of which is the name of a nation — I looked first for my own, of course — expressing again the unity for which Christ prayed, of all peoples in His Church : "I am the True Vine . . . abide in Me. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in Me." The vine, too, is one of the symbols of the Eucharist, so that this wonderful portico prepares you by Scrip- ture, tradition and history, by figure and symbol, setting forth in the majesty of marble and bronze, in the glory of fadeless pictures, the mysteries of the Faith, and preparing the soul for the adoration ever going on beyond these splendid portals. 113 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Entering, one takes in the vastness of the dimen- sions of the church, the massiveness of its construc- tion^ the sombreness of the marbles, gray with dark veins throughout. There is nothing to arrest the steps or withhold the eyes from the rich sanctuary, shining out from its sombre approach between the dark, strong pillars. The outer roofing of the cupola is pierced with stars of yellow crystal, which let in the light through the corresponding stars of the inner roofing, so the effect, as you look up, is of a dark blue star-lit sky. The sanctuary railing is of red marble, inlaid with porphyry and giallo antico. The altar is of red marble, richly set with gold and gems. The mala- chite in the super-altar is another gift of the Czar's. In the colonnades on each side of the throne of the Exposition, we find again the gold and white alabaster "from the Khedive of Egypt. The great painting of the apse by Monti and Cisterna, is Christ giving to the Apostles their world-wide commission. Above the head of Christ we see the Eternal Father in the opening Heavens, the Holy Spirit in the form of a Dove, and adoring angels. The inscription above the sanctuary is the Prophecy of the Eucharist: "In omni loco sacrificatur et offertur nomini meo oblatio mundi " — " In every place there shall be sacrificed and offered to My Name a Clean Oblation." By some marvellous skill of the artificer, the 114 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. marble of the sanctuary walls has the effect of vast, gray wide-drawn curtains. In brief all the precious and beautiful things of the world have been brought together in this sanctu- ary, in the spirit of David with the materials of the Temple, to give back to God of His own gifts, and to tell the doctrine and the poetry of the Holy Eucharist in the most splendid and enduring signs. "Rome is the poet among the churches," said James Russell Lowell, even with his Protestant mis- understanding of the things which fascinated his eyes. This church is the worthiest modern expression of the Faith in the Real Presence which renewed St- Peter's four hundred years ago, and covered all Central Europe and the Isles of the Sea with " c Credos ' in stone" — to borrow Father Hecker's words — at the first thousand years of the Christian Era, and a thousand years farther back put up modest altars and mystic symbols in the recesses of the Roman Catacombs. As the growth of the population in New Rome, witnesses against the alleged physical decline of the Italian people, so the building of St. Joachim's and the welcomed ministrations of the Redemptorists witness against the alleged decline of the Faith among them. It is the centre of the International Confraternity for the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacra- ment, and the nations of the earth are uniting in its 115 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN completion, even to the ignoring of religious dividing lines, as we have seen. Finally, the church is a memorial of the golden jubilee of the episcopate of Pope Leo XIII. There are many visible memorials of his Pontificate in Rome, as his enlarging and enriching of St. John Lateran's, the Beda College for English converts, etc., but the Church of St. Joachim is the grandest and most significant of all. Most fortunate is it in the man chosen to carry out the Holy Father's plans in the completion of the church and to develop its spiritual purpose. Father Palliola's personality, international experience, devo- tion and disinterestedness are magnetic, and he will see the drawing of hearts to St. Joachim's as to the sign of the Faith and Hope of Rome's and the World's New Day. WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. XII. Catholic Remains and Ritualist Churches in London. No one had told me of it ; it does not stand out in the pictures ; and I marvelled when the statue of the Blessed Mother with her Divine Child, met me at the portals of Westminster Abbey. " The Cathedral was St. Paul's, but the Abbey was Our Lady's and St. Peter's," explained a young and fervent Ritualist clergyman, later a sojourner at the same hotel in Rome, and who made a larger sign of the cross than any priest at the table. " These sixteenth century people should have done more — or less!" said another, "It was awkward to leave so many reminders of the old order, if they expected the new to prevail and stay." Nothing impressed me so much as this during my short sojourn in England; except, indeed, the de- liberate reversion to the Old Order, going on within the Anglican body itself ; and the evidence on every side of the reconquests which the Old Faith in its entirety is making. The modern Protestant parish churches keep the ancient Catholic names ; even of Our Lady and many saints of the Roman Calendar, including St. Bride, or Bridget. 117 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN In the Abbey itself you are bewildered with in- consistencies, which no one has taken the trouble to remove, or cares to explain. Here in tomb and shrine, Catholicity leaves off, so to speak, and Protestantism begins in the next breath, without a word of explanation for itself. Now that there is no longer Altar nor Sacrifice, nor Sacramental Presence here, the holiest spot in this beautiful Temple is the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor, the last of the Saxon Kings. He was the founder of the Abbey, whose very existence testifies to the closeness of England's old-time union with Rome. His predecessors, probably from the middle of the seventh century, certainly, from the beginning of the ninth, had been ofttimes numbered among the pilgrims to Rome ; and when Edward was in exile in Normandy, he did the natural thing, in vowing a pilgrimage to the Tombs of the Apostles, if God would restore him to his kingdom. His prayer was heard ; but then came grave difficulties in the way of the fulfilment of his vow ; from which, therefore, the Pope, St. Leo IX., dispensed him, on condition that he would build or restore a monastery in honor of St. Peter. So, on the site of a previous monastery, built, perhaps, by King Sebert, early in the seventh century, under the same invocation — " a place of mine in the west of London which I chose and 118 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. love" — as St. Peter in a vision, told the pious King, Edward built Westminster Abbey. It was greatly enlarged and enriched by subsequent Kings of England ; and but little of St. Edward's founda- tion remains. Here, however, he was buried, having passed away but eight days after the consecration of the Abbey. His tomb at once became a place of pilgrimage, wondrous miracles were wrought at it, and in 1163, he was duly canonized. A little more than a century later, Henry III. built the present chapel of the Confessor, and the blessed remains were translated to their new shrine ; the Saint signalizing the event by two miracles impartially in favor of an Englishman and an Irishman respectively. Despoiled as the shrine has been of votive offerings and ornaments, you can still see traces of the ancient mosaic and gilding on its rough brown surface. Still pilgrims come, but chiefly the curious, indifferent to that which makes the tomb holy. Sometimes, though, visitors come and quietly kneel undisturbed and almost unnoted — you do what you please in London, as, perhaps, nowhere else on earth — in prayer before the shrine ; and you cannot always tell, even when Roman collars are in evidence, whether they are Catholics or Ritualists. But it would be a thoughtless Catholic who would not breathe a prayer here for the return of England to the True Faith, and Mass once more under the glorious arches of Westminster Abbey. 119 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN I visited the Chapels of the Kings alone at first, to think my own thoughts amid their sombre grand- eur. But I heard a verger doing the honors once, and I could not resist joining a party. They seemed to be decent English people from the country, matter-of-fact and a little dense. The Britisher of this class lives in the present. He has apparently neither the imagination nor the historical perspective of many, even of the illiterate, across the Irish Sea. This especial party heard with profound interest, and seemingly for the first time, the verger's oft-told tale. "Ladies and gentlemen," said the verger, as we stood in the chapel of Henry VII., " This is the tomb of Mary Stuart, commonly called Mary Queen of Scots. This is her heffigy on the tomb. She was beheaded under Queen Helizabeth. This tomb was put up by Mary's son, James I. of England and VI. of Scotland." The party examined the " heffigy " — a full length reposing figure of the beautiful and unfortunate Queen — carefully. Then the verger moved on a few paces : " Ladies and gentlemen, this is the tomb of Queen Mary, sometimes called « Bloody Mary,' and her sister Queen Helizabeth. This is the heffigy of Helizabeth. There is no heffigy of Mary. This tomb was put up by James I. of England and VI. of Scotland/' 120 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. " I should think he'd a' been ashamed to put up a tomb to the woman who killed his mother," spoke up a man near the verger, with all the honest indigna- tion which might have been aroused by the record of some remarkably unfilial conduct in that morning's Times. Nobody disputed his sentiment, and the verger went on with his little stories, leaving every one to account for James' diplomacy, and the differences between Mary Tudor and Elizabeth, or to speculate on the unseemliness of their association in the grave, as he pleased. That was characteristic. In England certain facts speak for themselves in memorials or records. The native attitude is : " There they are ; make what you like of them." Nobody helps or hinders you by trying to explain violent contrasts or wild inconsist- encies. You think of this again in the lofty and beautiful Chapter House of the Abbey — where the Commons held their sessions from 1377 till the time of Edward VI. — and where the succession of Kings, Primates and Abbots is told in the pictured windows. In due course, in the lower panel of one you come on " Richard Whiting, Abbot ; " in the very next, on the first Dean of Westminster, and thence it is Deans to the present. But no one stops to say why Abbots ceased and Deans began. Would that one might look back and see West- 121 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN minster Abbey in, let us say, the first years of Henry VIII. — or, indeed, at any time before its final dese- cration ! Most majestic is the Abbey itself, and beautiful with a sombre, pensive and stately beauty. The rich, dark brown hue of everything in its archi- tecture and sculptures ; the sunshine (when there is any), warmed into myriad hues through the glorious windows, and looking like broad shafts of solid radi- ance under the far-away arches, make all your up- looking a delight. But not all on a lower level is fit for this housing. Some of the tombs are hideous ; , how hideous you realize fully after you have seen the monuments in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, and St. Peter's Rome. The monuments of the old Catholic days have a certain dignity. Then they often brought sculptors and artists from Italy. But ugliness entered with Protestantism. Catholic Art invested Death with a certain mys- terious beauty, and an active faith in the Communion of Saints has been the mother of some of the loveliest artistic expressions in painting and sculpture. Think of the beautiful Death on Canova's tomb of Pope Clement XIII. , in St. Peter's, a symbolic fem- inine figure with torch reversed, and a sleeping lion at her feet, as lovely as Religion on the same tomb, with glowing face uplifted, and cross and chalice in her hands — as you look at some of the savage Gothic 122 i WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. suggestions of the victory of the grave in Westminster Abbey. Verily, the devout, artistic suggestiveness of death is gone when one writes no longer on the tomb of the beloved or honored dead — " Requiescant in pace /" Fear not, dear reader ; I am not going to describe Westminster Abbey ! While I was in London, I got into the way of dropping in for an hour or two, and storing corners and vistas in my mind, as you have done, or will do ; but these are for my own private and exclusive picture galleries. Of course, I found Longfellow's bust in Poet's Corner, and remembered the wreath which John Boyle O'Reilly sent thither for it. I marvelled at once at the utter inadequacy of Shakespeare's statue, and at the fitness of the lines on the scroll in his hand : The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself — Yea, all that it inherits shall dissolve, And, like the airy fabric of a vision, Leave not a wrack behind. And I foimd the grey slab over Gladstone's grave, and said Requiescant there. When I arrived in London, the Ritual controversy was raging. Mr. John Kensit, self-constituted champion of ultra-Protestantism, by his ferreting out of Ritualist churches, and his violent interrup- tions of their services, had succeeded at least in 123 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN focussing public attention on the number of such churches, and the marvellous approximation of their form of public worship, to that of the Catholic Church. * I bethought me to visit some of the churches which had excited the wrath of Mr. Kensit. Like the Catholic churches, they are, as a rule, hospitably open all day, and the vergers are more than amiable. I began with St. Ethelburga's, Bishopsgate. It was at St. Cuthbert's that Mr. Kensit interrupted the Veneration of the Cross on the Good Friday preceding, and was making off with the crucifix, when he was very properly arrested and committed to jail for disturbing public worship. St. Ethel- burga's was the scene of his second attempt, when he came to the Sunday morning service, and made a charge of assault at the nearest police station, because he had come in the way of a few drops of " holy water " at the Asperges ! St. Ethelburga's is a very small church in the midst of shops. You would pass it a hundred times unnoticed. On the interior, it is like a very poor convent chapel. There is a crucifix on the altar, neat altar cloths and frontal, candlesticks, and, on the day of our visit, there were two vases of white asters. There was a picture of Saint Ethelburga, standing beside the Blessed Virgin. A processional cross stood in the corner of the sanctuary, and several small lamps were alight. *My visit was made in September, 1898. 124 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. There was a large window mostly of plain glass, but having a few small panes of very beautiful ancient stained glass, with scenes from the life of the patron saint. The verger took us into the sacristy, and showed us the vestments — my companion was an English convert of many years — and rejoiced greatly at our testimony to their identity with ours. On another day, I visited St. Alban's, Holborn. This is a beautiful church in a poor tenement dis- trict. The Ritualists gravitate to the poor. On a white marble slab, above the the main entrance, is this inscription : "Erected by a Merchant of London, for the Poor of Christ Forever." Most Ritualist churches are truly described as more or less like Catholic churches. But St. Alban's, at the first glance at the interior, showed no point of essential difference. There was everything that Catholic eyes are used to, even the Way of the Cross. The Rood Screen though faithful to ancient Catholic usage, is not, of course, familiar to American Catholics, nor are the seven lamps burning before the altar. But a profusion of lamps is common in Catholic churches abroad, not only on the Continent, but in England and Ireland. We noted four before the altar in the lovely little St. Ethelreda's Church, Ely Place, London ; and two Scriptural " seven- branched candlesticks," though with tiny ever-burning 125 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN lamps instead of candles, before the High Altar in the Brompton Oratory. So St. Alban's was only in good Catholic fashion. It was a most devont-looking church. St. Alban's schools for boys and girls joined on to it. Presently I heard the closing prayers. The teacher came to "Hail, Mary," and, in a moment, there was the familiar response, " Holy Mary, Mother of God." I felt, for an instant, quite at home. The verger showed me the memorial chapel of the founder. Here the funeral " Masses " are celebrated. This is the church whose exceedingly Catholic prayer- books for children were being reviewed in column lengths in the London Times about these days. I saw St. Mary Magdalene's, Munster Square. It is larger and richer than St. Alban's, and almost indistinguishable from a Catholic church. Its par- ishioners are very fond of its beauty and of the " Catholic" services. I think the mothers of this parish frighten naughty children with the name of John Kensit. "But if he dares to come here disturbing the peace, our men will be ready for him," said one comely British matron to me. I strayed into a beautiful choral service at All Saints'. This is not quite so advanced, though the nuns in their dark gray habits and long black veils, marshalled their flocks of school children quite as our own do ; the women courtsied before the altar and 126 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. prayed long and fervently on their knees. There were lamps galore and very beautiful frescoes all about the walls, depicting the blessedness of the saints in glory. Still there were no Way of the Cross nor confessionals in sight. To all of these churches the people flock, well-to- do and poor alike. Their clergy are ever in attend- ance. They are in strong contrast with some of the cold old English Protestant type, like St. Bride's, without even a candlestick on the communion table ; or St. George's, from whose " hard Protestant doors," as Tennyson would put it, I saw a poor young mother carrying her baby. " This is the third time I've brought him to be christened, and here again they've just locked the doors." And it was still quite early Sunday after- noon. But the Ritualistic churches are levelling up most of the other Anglican Churches, and what was dis- tinctly " High Church," a few decades ago, is ordi- nary now. St. Paul's Cathedral itself has a magnificent sculptured Crucifixion on its high altar. The erec- tion of it nearly occasioned a riot, but it worries few people today. A Catholic, seeing all these signs of the times, prays and hopes. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN XIII. A Glimpse of The Second Spring. The autumn sunshine over London was pale and lonesome to eyes used to the radiant sunshine of America. When the fog began in November, the sun showed through like a globe of gold, shorn of its beams. But ever to me, the sky was opener and the light clearer about Westminster, and about the Brompton Oratory. The Oratory is, thus far, the largest and most beautiful Catholic church in England. The new Cathedral of the Archdiocese of Westminster, whose walls were more than half way up at the time of my visit, will be larger ; and the church which the Duke of Norfolk is building near his own estate may be richer — but will either ever be so dear to such multitudes the world over? For "the Oratory" means Cardinal Newman and Father Faber, and they, by fame and soul- conquests, are not of the world of England and English blood, but of the wider world of English speech, and the widest world of Catholic Faith. Are there not some who regard the Oratorians as a peculiarly English association? Truly they have fitted the English need, as if they had been formed 128 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. for naught else ; yet they were first instituted by St. Philip Neri in Rome over 300 years ago, and were long acclimated in France before they were dreamed of in England. They are priests living in com- munity, but not bound by the vows of religion. I have visited the church of the Oratorians, Sta. Maria in Vallicella, in Rome, and the chapel of St. Philip Neri, where his remains repose under the altar, with the usual circle of lighted lamps. Over the altar is a grand mosaic of St. Philip, vested for Mass, in prayer before Our Lady, from the original of Guido Reni, in the House of the Oratorians. The English Oratory suggests somewhat this famous Roman church. Of course it has not its wealth of sculptures and paintings, nor the statues by Algardi, Yasoldo, Flaminio Vacca, and Carlo Maratta ; nor the frescoes of Pietro Da Cortona, nor the paintings of Baroccio, Alberti, and Rubens ; nor the blessed body of the saint ; but, withal, his spirit is as vital in the London as in the Roman Oratory, and that is more than all the rest. Yet the Brompton Oratory has its own art treas- ures and wealth of marble altars. There is a beau- tiful chapel, St. Wilfrid's, a memorial to Father Faber, adorned with frescoes of the great saints of England. Besides the grand High Altar, set in a noble sanctuary, there are altars of the Mother of Sorrows, of St. Mary Magdalene, St. Joseph,Our Lady of Good Counsel, the Sacred Heart of Our Lord, and 129 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN St. Patrick ; and before every one of them votive ta- pers are burning all day long, and at some are the votive hearts of silver, recalling the dear Italian shrines. Of the side altars in the Oratory, that which most impressed me was the first-mentioned, the Mother of Sorrows. The altar-piece is a very unusual picture of Our Lady. She stands with her hands dropped down, but slightly out-spread, and a face of desola- tion. There are no accessory figures. You imagine Calvary in the background, but you do not see it. You see only the bereaved human Mother of the Divine Son, saying in look and attitude : " All ye who pass by the way attend and see, if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow." There are tablets on each side of this shrine. On the left-hand one you read : Of your charity pray for the soul of Flora, Duchess of Norfolk, who put up this altar to the Mother of Sorrows, that they who mourn may here be comforted. She died April 11, 1887" On the right-hand tablet, this word from the Apocalypse : And God shall wipe all tears from their eyes. Many sore hearts have been comforted at this shrine which one afflicted mother raised for the sake of other sorrow-stricken mothers to the Mother of the Crucified. Cardinal Newman never preached in this church ; he was in it probably but twice — at its dedication, 130 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. and, with Cardinal Manning, at the funeral of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Here, too, Cardinal Manning, unable to go to the Birmingham Oratory, at which Newman spent so many years, and where his funeral took place, preached a eulogy of the illustrious Oratorian. The original Oratory, the one which knew the voices of Newman and Faber, was on the site of Toole's Theatre, in a badly adapted casino, whose very inappropriate inscriptions sometimes struggled into sight, to the no slight annoyance of priests and people. The present Oratory, however, has inherited and increased the devout congregations of those early days. So many men, even at week-day services ! The various offices of the Church are conducted with the utmost order and beauty ; the preaching is good, and the music is ideal. Never have I heard a soprano like the one who sang the solos at the High Mass there on Sundays. But never until I heard her voice in the simpler music of the Litany of Loretto, which is sung in the Oratory at five o'clock Saturday evenings, before the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, could I understand the poetic expression of music " rilling out " from a songful throat. It is not the beauty of the ritual alone, nor of the preaching, nor of the music, nor of all three of these together, that bring these serious and earnest people 131 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN so numerously and steadily. It is the Sacrament and the Sacrifice of the Altar. You feel that, and you pray for the reunion of Christendom. The house of the Oratorians is beside the church. A fine statue of Cardinal Newman stands in front of it. Across the street, is the most splendid Catholic bookstore I ever saw ; not only a fine assortment of the best Catholic publications — and how good even from the purely literary view-point these in England ! — but with a large-minded selection of the best secular literature. Such refined, beautiful prayer-books ! an evident demand for missals ; exquisite little pictures and objects of piety ; the gentlest and most intelligent attendance ! Verily, " the second spring " of England's Cath- olicity is a right forward season, largely through the number of men of social position, wealth and intel- lectual eminence who are proud and consistent con- fessors of the Old Faith before the modern world. Their example has marvellously helped their humbler fellow believers ; and it is safe to say that the influence of Catholics in England is great out of all proportion to their numbers. There are not more than a million and a half of them. The Duke of Norfolk, to be sure, is a tower of strength to them. Much as an American with Irish blood in his veins, must hate the Duke's Bourbon attitude to Irish Home Rule, one still must give him 132 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. credit for a singularly pure and charitable life, and immense zeal for the progress of the Church. Not a few, however, of the leading English Cath- olics have become converts to the Irish cause, as Lord Ripon, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and Wilfrid Meynell ; and realize the debt which they owe for their own religious freedom and progress, to the ever faithful Catholics of Ireland. There are about 300,000 Catholics of Irish blood in London ; and their first church, St. Patrick's, is very interesting and devotional. A goodly number of the priests in active service in London are of Irish birth or blood. A notable proportion of the English priests are converts, who were former clergymen of the Church of England. It is estimated that there are about four hundred of such convert-priests in the whole of England. It would be interesting to know what is the proportion of priests from the English families who kept the Faith throughout the long centuries of persecution. The double movement in that country of the return of the Old Faith, and the development and assertion of Catholic ideas in the Church of England itself, has produced a curious effect on the minds of the ordinary people of the Anglican body. "Will you kindly direct me to the nearest Catholic church?" I asked one Saturday evening of a plump and civil-looking woman, who was doing . 133 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN a brisk business in buns and tarts in her neat little bake-shop. " What kind of Catholic, lydy ? There's two of 'em near here. There's what some calls ' English Catholics,' and then there's the Catholic Catholics." I said I would have the latter, if she pleased ; and she directed me to St. Anselm's and St. Cecilia's, Lincoln's Inn Fields ; which you get at through a long lane and a court, and where you find priests of Irish names and marked English accent. There are fifty-six Catholic churches in London, to say nothing of convent and other private chapels. The pro-Cathedral in Kensington is not remark- able for beauty, though it is a very devotional church. One of the side-altars, the Altar of the Precious Blood, with its appealing picture of the thorn-crowned Christ, as Pilate showed Him to the people, remains clearest in my memory. Does it seem strange that in his long episcopate, and with his tremendous influence, Cardinal Man- ning should not have built, or, at least, begun a Cathedral worthy of his great Archdiocese ? Such a one was projected as early as 1865, and was to be a memorial of Cardinal Wiseman. Manning, then Archbishop-elect, was invited to preside at a meeting, held under the most dis- tinguished patronage, in the interest of this me- morial. He expressed his willingness to forward 134 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. the work ; but first, he must build schools for the twenty thousand poor Catholic children in London, who were 4 running wild in the streets, without know- ledge of the Faith, a prey to apostasy or immorality.' Like a great American Catholic Bishop, Manning evi- dently believed that if schools are not built for the children of this generation, there will be little need for churches for the adults of the next. He housed his neglected children, with the aid of the Westminster Diocesan Educational Fund, which he established in 1866. His policy was to scatter over London small churches, with school-houses attached. While this was doing, he contented himself with St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral at Kensington, built under his direction. Here he constantly officiated and preached, drawing crowds of non-Catholics and making many converts. All he did for the new Cathedral was to purchase its site. Its building is the work of his successor, Cardinal Vaughan. But Manning saved the people and the children with his plain little churches and schools ; and what was the Temple of Jerusalem, what is St. Peter's, Rome, to the God of the Universe, beside the soul of some little ragamuffin in the slums of London or New York? * St. Mary's, Moorfields, the Pro-Cathedral in * Since the writer's visit, this church has been sold for over a million dol- lars, it being impossible to hold the place longer against the march of traffic ; and a church and schools are being provided on another site. 135 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Cardinal Wiseman's day, had in its choir the in- scription in memory of him, written by his own hand, and his Cardinal's hat. It had also about the sanctuary walls a singularly vivid fresco of the Crucifixion of Our Lord, in which, if you con- templated it from a little distance, the figures stood out life-like. Here, in 1836, Dr. Wiseman gave those famous lectures on the doctrinal differences between the Catholic Church and Protestantism, which brought Manning (then an Anglican Arch- deacon) into the field against him, wroth especially at his " confounding the Church of England with other Protestant bodies;" and here Wiseman's obsequies were celebrated, the Catholic Manning (then Provost) preaching the eulogy. Remembering the restoration of the English hierarchy, and all the work of rebuiding done by Wiseman, there was marvellous fitness in the choice of text — a sufficient eulogy in itself — from Ec- clesiasticus : " Let Nehemias be a long time remembered, who raised up for us our walls that were cast down, and set up the gates and the bars, who rebuilt our houses." A singularly interestesting little Catholic church, dating from A. D. 1290, is St. Ethelreda's, in Ely Place. This church was the chapel of the London Pal- ace, which the Bishop of Ely built in the Thirteenth Century, against his coming up for his Parliamentary 136 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. duties, and is all that is left of the original structure. It is a good specimen of the early decorated Gothic architecture. Within this church, after Henry VIII. , the work of stealing the Faith gradually from the simple people attending it, went on "cunningly," according to Cranmer's counsel — with the interlude and restorations of Mary Tudor's brief reign — till it became on the inside a typical Protestant house of worship under Queen Elizabeth. During her last years, and through the reign of James I., the Spanish Ambassador lived in Ely Palace, and St. Etheldreda's was restored to Catholic uses. Taken again for the established religion, under Charles I., it so remained until 1879, when the whole property was sold under an order of the Court of Chancery, and the Fathers of Charity bought it in through an agent. To an Irishman named Burke fell the delightful task of taking down the Royal Arms, hanging for so long over the Communion Table, which marked the place of the old time altar. I saw this interesting relic of heavy carved oak, in the Presbytery. Underneath is this inscription : " This emblem of the Royal Supremacy was removed from the Church of St. Etheldreda, when it was restored to the Roman obedience" The crypt of St. Etheldreda's is dedicated to St. Bridget of Ireland, in memory of the ancient dedi- cation of St. Bride's, Fleet Street, and of the little chapel of St. Bridget, Baldwin's Garden's (now 137 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN obliterated by the growth of business), in one of the old Irish quarters of London. Masses are celebrated daily in the crypt, which is a favorite shrine of Catholic devotion. Its walls are ten feet thick. It is as dry as powder, as quiet as the grave ; as solemn as a look into the Life Beyond. In the church proper, above the crypt, we have St. Bridget again, in full length stained glass, companion- ing St. Etheldreda. The windows, especially the great Eastern window, with Christ as High Priest and King, His Blessed Mother and St. Joseph on either side, and angels above, are not surpassed by any in England. A grand new window, representing Blessed Thomas More, and his contemporary English mar- tyrs, adorns the vestibule. The bowl of the holy water font is one of the oldest relics of early Christianity in England. It is thought to have come down from an ancient British Church, and may have been in use before the mar- tyrdom of St. Alban, a.d. 303. St. Etheldreda (familiarly Audrey,) was a Saxon saint of royal blood, who resigned the crown for the veil of religion. St. Ethelburga (under whose in- vocation the Ritualists place their little chapel at Bishopsgate,) was her sister. The story of these royal sisters, whose queen mother, Hereswyda, was also a saint, is most marvellous and beauti- ful. How shall the restoration of St. Ethel- burga's, and St. Alban's, and the rest, be brought 138 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. about? For they are praying, just as St. Etheldreda prayed. The Church of the Immaculate Conception, served by the Jesuit Fathers, commonly spoken of as " Farm St. Church," rivals the Oratory in the splendor of public worship, and the distinction of its parishioners. At this church is the venerable Father Galwey, who is credited with 10,000 direct conversions to the Faith. Lady Georgiana Fullerton, the cause of whose beatification is already talked of in England and in Rome, was a devout attendant at this church during the later years of her holy life. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN XIV. Oxford and the Leading of the Kindly Light. " When I heard you say ' car ' instead of ' car- riage,' I knew you were an American." It was thus that one of my fellow-travellers broke the ice as we journeyed, one fine September morning, from London to Oxford. I hope I gave better proof of my nationality later. With my thoughts outstripping the express, and my eyes miraging the spires of the grand old University City, I would have been oblivious to Windsor Castle but for the ladies just referred to. " Oh, stand up and get a good look at Windsor ! If you were to go there some Sunday, you might see the Royal Family on the terrace." Alas ! these ladies who were so alert for the first glimpse of Windsor did not seem to know Oxford when it came in full sight ! Yet, to be quite fair, I must admit that this was almost the only instance winch I met of minute interest in royalty ; unless I count that of the good woman going by Westminster Abbey, who, in a strange mixture of cockney accent and Irish brogue, and to the evident interest of her less imaginative 140 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. British companions, was making out an Irish pedigree for Queen Victoria ! But — to Oxford ! Is there anything anywhere more beautiful in its architecture and its background of natural scenery ? Is there anything to make the Catholic heart at once prouder and sadder ; aught more abounding in wild contradictions, more moving alternately t<* heart-sinking and to hope ? Oxford is one of the proudest memorials of Catholic Faith and piety ; the saddest conquest of Protestantism. It is the stronghold of Protestant- ism in England ; it is the cradle of that new move- ment within the Church of England itself* which is making the very word " Protestant " odious to a large and increasing number of Anglicans ; best of all, it has yielded an outpost in the Catholic recon- quest of England, for the Jesuits have now a col- lege at Oxford, and it is Campion House, in honor of the Blessed Edmund Campion, an Oxonian, a Jesuit, too, and a martyr of the Elizabethan perse- cutions. Perhaps the claim that Alfred the Great was practically the founder of Oxford University, as building a University Hall upon the place where University College now stands, is rather unsubstan- tial ; although a recent legal decision has sanctioned this tradition, and the assumed millenary of the foundation was celebrated in 1872. Still so great and already venerable was Oxford 141 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN as a seat of learning in 1379, that William of Wykeman, Bishop of Winchester, called his munifi- cent foundation in that year, "New College." It was antedated by Hertford College, St. Edmund Hall, founded by St. Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury, Queen's College (called for Philippa, Queen of Edward III.), St. Mary's Hall, Oriel, Merton, Exeter, Worcester, and Balliol Colleges, and a number of the churches including Christ Church, the Cathedral of Oxford. From this last, we go back to Saxon times, and the Nunnery of St. Frideswide, which stood in 740 a.d., the time of her death, on the present site of Christ Church. The part of the children of the Church in the Renaissance is attested by the numerous foundations of the fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth, at Oxford, as the Divinity School, the Bodleian Library, Magdalen College School, and St. Mary Magdalen, All Souls, Corpus Christi and Lincoln Colleges, and St. John's College, founded by Sir Thomas White in the short reign of Mary Tudor. The very names suggest the distinguishing features of Catholicity; for the college last-named was pri- marily in honor of the Blessed Sacrament ; while devotion to the Blessed Mother of God had its chief, though by no means its only monument in the col- legiate church dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin; and All Souls, founded in 1437, by Henry Chichele, 142 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. one of the original Fellows of New College, and after- wards Archbishop of Canterbury, is styled in its charter " The College of All the Souls of the Faith- ful Departed, and especially the soids of Henry . V., King of England and France, and of the faithful subjects of the realm who fell in the French wars." As for St. Peter, he had two churches, St. Peter- le-Bailey and St. Peter-in-the-East, and the statues and pictures of SS. Peter and Paul, and represen- tations of Christ giving the Keys to Peter were as common as in Rome itself. The massive and picturesque ancient architecture stands out in its grand distinction amid all modern additions and restorations — the most wonderful and beautiful thing at Oxford ; the ancient names remain ; there are enough statues of the Blessed Virgin in high places to make you think of an Italian town ; indeed, there is something, perhaps those lovely old mediaeval towers, which reminds you of Grotta Ferrata. Time was, when the Vandals of the so-called Reformation had been busy enough within and with- out the churches and colleges materially to change the face of things ; statues of the Blessed Mother of God and the Saints were thrown down or mutilated ; altars removed, paintings and stained glass destroyed ; but the reverent, though not always artistically suc- cessful hand of the " restorer " has been busy for many years past ; and, on the exterior, at least, there is little to suggest Protestantism at Oxford. 143 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN It was a memorable thing to visit Oxford at all ; but to see it under the guidance of a Jesuit was a doubly happy experience. It was my good fortune to have a letter of introduction to the Rev. Richard F. Clarke, S.J., the present head of Campion House, whom some of my readers may remember from his visit to the United States, in 1883, and whom all reading Catholics know from his writings. In the morning, a clever young scholastic did the honors for me ; in the afternoon, I had the privilege of seeing Father Clarke himself. It was with the former that I came on a reminder of the still dominant Protestantism, in the " Martyrs' Memorial," erected in commemoration of Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer. Dominant, one says, yet un- easy about its domination, and not causelessly. It was begun in 1841, in the beginnings of the Trac- tarian movement, and built against the constant pro- tests of the Tractarians ; being in itself a contradic- tion, as so many things Anglican are ; a protest against Catholicity, and a witness to the revival of Catholic ideas in the Church of England itself. After the easy ascent to the cupola of the Sheldonian Theatre, there was nothing more of the Cranmer memory or suggestion, in the views from any of the windows ; unless the suggestiveness of protest, or contrast, or reversion to the Old Order, as embodied respectively in the Wesley Memorial Church, Keble College, and the Church of St. 144 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Aloysius. The views were all of unsupassed re- ligious and historic interest, the spires and towers rising up above the groves, now rich in the varied hues of early autumn. As we went down again, we viewed the Theatre itself from the undergraduates' gallery, and my companion was delightful in his enthusiastic descrip- tion of the scenes on Commemoration Day, the con- ferring of degrees, etc. But in the brief time at my disposal, I wanted chiefly to trace the footsteps of some of my heroes, as Cardinal Newman, Cardinal Manning, and Glad- stone. Balliol College, of which Manning was a Fellow, came first ; and we noted a fine portrait of him, taken in his later years, in the Dining Hall, in the oddly assorted company of John Wycliffe, Arch- bishop Tait, and Robert Browning, all Fellows of this college. Balliol dates back to the second half of the thir- teenth century, its founder being Sir John de Balliol, father of the Scotch King of that name. It is char- acteristic of that tenacious people, that Balliol is to the present day greatly affected by Scotch students. At Oxford among Manning's contemporaries were Newman and Gladstone. At the Union at Oxford, Manning scored his first oratorical triumph. Unlike Gladstone, who began as a defender of a benevolently managed slave system, Manning's first speech in 145 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN favor of free trade, showed him already a champion of the people — the " Mosaic Radical" of the com- ing time. On another occasion he distinguished himself here in a debating contest with a delegation of Cambridge students consisting of Monckton Milnes, Henry Hal- lam, and Sunderland. These young men came as champions of the School of Shelly ; Manning cham- pioned Byron, and Gladstone testifies how ably. Still another characteristic speech of Manning's, as described by Thomas Mozley, was called forth by a motion to reduce the number of American news- papers taken at the Union. But time and space forbid my lingering on the reminiscences which the name of Manning evokes in connection with Oxford. Later in the day, I visited some of the scenes con- nected with Newman's life at Oxford, with Father Clarke. I should have said that term-time had not yet begun, and college-buildings, shady walks, and sunny quadrangles were alike deserted. We looked up from the quadrangle of Oriel to the windows of Newman's old rooms. If their walls could speak, what could they not tell us of him, and of two at least of the dearest friends of his young manhood, Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Richard Hurrell Froude. Wrote Newman, on September 7, 1829, "I am now in my rooms at 146 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Oriel College, slowly advancing .... and led on by God's hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me." These rooms were his home till his appointment to Littlemore, in 1841. We visited the Church of St. Mary, the Virgin, of which Newman became vicar in 1828. It dates from the thirteenth century, and abounds in religious and historic interest. Here is the tomb of Adam le Brom, founder of Oriel. Here Blessed Edmund Campion preached the funeral sermon of Amy Robsart. Here, in 1833, Keble began the Trac- tarian movement with his sermon on England's Apostasy. Here was Newman's voice heard in his young manhood. This church is not Ritualistic, nor even very " High," for all of the sculptured Virgin Mother with her Divine Child above the portico. On the altar covering I read: "Magnificat anima mea Dominium." " Not here now," I thought ; " but surely by-and- by-" Matthew Arnold and " Tom " Hughes were Fel- lows of Oriel, and Pusey and Keble at an earlier day. But Keble, founder of the Tractarian Move- ment, Keble of " Christian Year " fame, was also a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. How Keble im- pressed Newman may be gathered from a letter of his to John William Bowden, the great friend of his undergraduate year, describing his election to a 147 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Fellowship at Oriel : " I had to hasten to the Tower to receive the congratulations of all the Fellows. I bore it till Keble took my hand, and then felt so abashed and unworthy of the honor done to me that I seemed desirous of quite sinking into the ground. " Newman cut himself away from Oxford and all its cherished associations in 1845, on his reception into the Catholic Church; but he appreciated most deeply its honors to him in his declining years, and Oxford today in her pride in the spiritual and in- tellectual achievement and the spotless life of this great son, adds the best love and reverence in her gift to those which he won after he had gone out from her at the leading of the Kindly Light. WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. XV. The Rector of Campion House. The great quadrangle of Christ Church was full of the mellow September sunshine, and the American woodbine was reddening on the massive gray stone walls. Christ Church, as my readers know, is at once the Cathedral of the (Anglican) Diocese of Oxford, and the church of the college of the same name, and the sole instance of such a union. It has a long and eventful history, beginning before the middle of the eighth century, as the Church of St. Frideswide's nunnery ; then, on a more splendid scale, the Church of the Benedictine Priory of St. Frideswide, then in the hands of Cardinal Wolsey, during his brief enjoyment of the favor of Henry VIIL, and, finally, with the dignity of Cathedral added to all its other distinctions, when this King, as head of the then Schismatical Church of England, created, in 1546, the Diocese of Oxford. We entered the church through the double arch- way in the great quadrangle, and one of us, at least, felt the soft light gratefully on eyes that had been wearied, but not satisfied, with seeing. We were in a church of ancient Catholic days, for these venerable columns and arches were witnesses to Holy Mass and monks in choir more than seven hundred years ago, 149 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN when all Christendom was shuddering at the murder of the courageous Primate of England, Thomas a Becket, on the altar-steps of his Cathedral of Can- terbury. There is a Becket window in St. Lucy's chapel, in which the head of the Martyr lias been obliterated — by order of the king who profaned his shrine and cast his ashes into the Thames. Restorations have been made very extensively in the interior of the church proper, and the various chapels, so that the old-time worshippers, could they now come back, would not feel so strange as they might have felt a hundred years ago ; but no one has dared to touch the Becket window. It is better so — as yet ; for it teaches when and how the royal supremacy in religion began, and England has not yet mastered the lesson. Christ Church is much more " advanced " than the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, as altars and win- dows and statuary show. Here Dr. Edward Bouverie Pusey, the leader in the Oxford movement, was for fifty years a canon in residence ; and under a marble slab, in the Lady chapel, with a Latin inscription that might have been written for any Catholic tomb, his re- mains rest with those of his wife and two daughters. His only son is buried in the little enclosure just be- yond the south transept of the church, and the adjoin- ing Chapter House. I read the Requiescat prayer- fully, as one must, remembering Cardinal Newman's testimony to Pusey' s sincerity. 150 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Father Clarke showed me the brass in the floor which marks the resting-place of St. Frideswide, and the Burne-Jones windows, depicting scenes in her life, the triumph of St. Michael the Archangel, St. Cecilia, St. Katharine of Alexandria. England was great in church architecture in its Catholic days, but except in its glorious stained glass, sacred art was of slow growth ; and, as in Westmin- ster Abbey, Oxford, etc., it had to call the Italian artists to its aid. Whatever chance it had of a native school of sacred art was killed by the so-called Reformation. It was only three hundred years later, and among those whose hearts were turning kindly to the faith, the practices, the art and the poetry of the Old Church, that we can trace the beginnings of a native art marked by any degree of beauty, dignity and spirituality. Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rosetti, alike in art and poetry are its first masters ; and even if there is a fantastical streak, and a queer suggestion of the " Posters " of a later day, as there certainly is in the windows of St. Frideswide, there is far more heavenly-mindedness about them than about Sir Joshua Reynolds "Angels," for example. There are ancient tombs near St. Frideswide's ; as of the devout lady who built the Latin chapel, a prior, and a companion-in-arms of the Black Prince ; their occupants, uneasily we can well believe, neighboring the dust of Protestant deans and canons. There is carved wood work of Wolsey's day here, 151 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN and in the east wall of the Chapter House the foun- dation-stone of Wolsey's College at Ipswich. When the old Priory came into Wolsey's hands in 1522, Sir Thomas More and Erasmus were the rec- ognized and most eloquent Catholic exponents of the " new learning." Wolsey would be like them, but on a grander scale, and would found a college where the aforesaid " new learning " would be splendidly culti- vated for the service of the Church. Indeed the first stone of this college was laid on July 16, 1525, and, there is a characteristic touch in its projected title of " Cardinal's College." Alas ! in less than four years, poor Wolsey was in deep disfavor with the King, and the world knew nothing more of " Cardinal's College." As Shake- speare makes his retrospect : — — " I have ventured Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders This many summers on a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth. My high-blown pride At length broke under me, and now hath left me, Weary and old with service, to the mercy Of the rude stream that must forever hide me. Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye ! " We have named Cardinal Wolsey ; another chan- cellor of England, Sir Thomas More, subsequently martyred, under Henry VIII., now invoked by Catholics, as Blessed Thomas More ; and his friend, Erasmus, who, into however unsafe paths straying, never left the Old Church. Their full-length por- 152 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. traits are in the stained-glass windows in the great mediaeval dining hall of Christ Church ; and among other distinguished Fellows of this college, honored in the same way, are Burton of the "Anatomy of Melancholy Fame," and Locke, who wrote on " The Human Understanding. ' ' Holbein's oil portrait of Wolsey is there also, and Henry VIII., with his fat cheeks and his cruel little mouth, from the same master's hand, in the place of honor. Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's contemporary and friend, was a Fellow of Christ Church ; so was the chivalrous Sir Philip Sidney. A marvellous array of English statesmen, many of whom attained the rank of Prime Minister, like Peel and Canning ; and strangely enough, three successive Prime Ministers of England's latest years, Gladstone, Salisbury, and Rosebery, were Fellows of this college. Gladstone's portrait is one of the finest in the collection. Gladstone's record at Oxford was one of the most hard-working, exemplary, and devout among the students. Like his friend Manning, he made an early oratorical fame in the Oxford Union ; and the future Prime Minister was succeeded in its presidency by the future Cardinal. I have mentioned Dr. Pusey as the leader of the 153 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Oxford movement. Earlier than he were John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism, which represented a reaction of another sort against the dry-rot of the State Church, and indirectly helped to the Oxford movement itself. So it can be easily seen what a part Christ Church has filled in the political and religious life of England. But the day was waning, and there was little more time for what I had planned to see in my first visit to Oxford. Presently we came out on a full view of Magdalen Tower with the westering sun upon it. What is there anywhere of lovelier symmetry than this ? "In old Catholic days," said Father Clarke, u Mass was said on top of the tower every May Day. A vestige of the old devotion survives in the hymn to the Holy Trinity, now chanted by the choir at five o'clock May Day morning." Over the great gateway of Magdalen College are statues of St. Mary Magdalen and St. John the Evangelist, together now in memory of their associ- ation at the Cross on Good Friday. The St. Magdalen Chapel was completed in 1480, twenty-two years after the founding of the college by Bishop William Patten, of Waynflete, and contains the tomb of the Bishop's father. Restorations have been numerous. The old sexton came in with us, and calling our attention to the host of statues of saints of the Old Law and the New in the canopied 154 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. niches of the reredos, recited the story of the de- struction of their prototypes by Cromwell. "This is Habraham," he said, indicating the venerable and majestic figure of the Father of the Faithful, but the rest of the saints of three thousand years had to be taken for granted ; and the old sex- ton gratefully saved his breath and pocketed his shilling. The altar piece is " Christ Bearing His Cross," by Ribalta, and one of the great windows has a Last Judgment by Christopher Schwartz. Among the canonized saints who were students at Oxford, was the Carmelite, St. Simon Stock, who later became General of his Order, and to whom Our Blessed Lady revealed the devotion of the Scapular. We visited the Deer Park, and saw those lovely creatures of the forest, apparently un vexed by ances- tral memories, coming up to eat a bit from friendly hands, their big, beautiful eyes uplifted fearlessly. We paced "Addison's Walk" — the poet was a Fellow of Magdalen ; but walked longer under the elms of the "Broad Walk," and finally down to the barges, in this dull time moored close to the banks of the Isis, scene of the boat races in which the University youth of two continents have such interest. In one of these barges we found many pictures of famous rowers of past times. One of them was a 155 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN young man with large, dark eyes and brown side- whiskers. Despite the difference of costume and years, I saw the resemblance. " That was you," I said to Father Clarke. He smiled faintly. " Yes," he admitted ; and then my feminine curiosity wanted more. " I am a Fellow of St. John's College," he said, "I became a parson — " " No, I was not especially ' advanced,' " in response to my visible, but unspoken question. " When I became a Catholic I was free to give myself to the service of the Church, which I did in the Society." " Isn't it a grand thing to be here again, in the scenes of your youth, as a priest, a Jesuit ? " His grave, dark face lighted up, and he said solemnly : " I thank God for it, as for the exceeding great reward of any earthly sacrifice in my life." Father Clarke is a tall, strong-looking man, de- liberate of speech, with a look of great reserve power, repressed eagerness, and intensity of feeling. I well remember the impression he made speaking from the pulpit of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, in Boston, fifteen years before. You saw the thought in his eyes before his lips uttered it. He took Protestantism very seriously, I thought. In the great American cities, even then, Unitarian- ism and an artistic eclecticism in religion, seemed so 156 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. much more ominous than the divided forces of Evan- gelical Protestantism, that it was rather startling to hear a reference to Luther. Father Clarke is a man of fine literary culture, and the author of a great number of books on relig;- ious, sociological and literary topics. One of these, " My Visit to Distressed Ireland," written after a sojourn in that country during the famine of 1881, reveals him as a strong sympathizer with the plain people, and a friend of Irish Home Rule. Father Clarke edited the London Month for years, and is still a frequent contributor to the Nineteenth Century and other high class secular publications. At the times of my second visit to London and my first to Dublin, Mrs. Humphrey Ward's " Helbeck of Bannisdale," was a prominent subject of discussion in literary and religious circles ; and none of the many articles which it inspired had won more attention than Father Clarke's in the Nineteenth Century. I found but little change in his appearance, for so long an interval as fifteen years. The jet-black hair had become mixed with grey ; but the eyes were as full of fire, there was the unchanged evidence of nervous strength, and force restrained. A notable personality to begin the succession of the presidents of Campion College. Blessed Edmund Campion, for whom it is called, 157 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN was a fellow of St. John's College, and a protege* of Sir Thomas White, its founder, Lord Mayor of London in the time of Mary Tudor. It was a bad beginning for the future martyr that, dazzled by the favor of Queen Elizabeth, and the magnates of her court, he chose the new religion, and actually took deacon's orders in the Anglican body. But hardly had he made this false step than he almost died of remorse for it — renounced the world, and became as it is justly claimed the leader of the first Oxford movement, inasmuch as he drew many other brilliant men with him back to Rome. His terrible martyr- dom took place in 1581. There was a price on a Jesuit's head, in England, in those days, and for many years after. Who in his wildest dreams then could have thought that Jesuits would ever again walk the streets of London as free men, much less set up their churches and colleges in the open, or be en- trusted with a Government scientific commission, as was the Jesuit astronomer, Father Perry — least of all, be permitted a college at Oxford, with the martyred Campion's name? But my brief day was done. After grateful farewell to Father Clarke, I took a hasty drive about the old city, the better to impress its extent and exterior beauty upon the eyes that had been able to see so little in detail ; got a glimpse of the interior of the Jesuits' Church, St. Aloysius, of the 158 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Ritualist churches, St. Bartholomew and St. Barna- bas — the latter with confessionals in the corners and the purple stoles of the clergymen, hanging over them ; saw the exterior of churches like St. Ebbe's, of immemorial Catholic foundation ; the houses of Catholic nuns, and Anglican Sisterhoods, and no end of curious old civic monuments — enough to make me long for many weeks of quiet leisure, to steep myself in the atmosphere of the place ; and carry away much more than the memory of sunset on towers, and spires, and crosses and statues ; and visions of mediaeval saints with praying hands up- lifted for the dawning of a holier day on England. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN XVI. English "Continuity" in Rome. A young Anglican clergyman, a curate of St. Mary-the- Virgin's, Oxford, was one of the dwellers under the same tent with me for three weeks in Rome. He had come earlier than I ; and for the express purpose of studying in the Vatican Library. I think he never lost from it a moment of the four hours — from nine in the morning till one in the afternoon — during which it is open to students. All his regret was, that it was not eight hours instead of four. He often went out in the afternoon to the Basilian Monastery of Grotta Ferrata, near Villa Frascati, then the summer home of the students of the American College, to consult the library there. He was eloquent on the kindness of these monks, who belong to the United Greek rite, and who not only gave him access to their valuable books and MSS., but the cordial hospitality of the monastery, whenever he chose to avail himself of it. This curate looked much younger even than his twenty-seven years. Indeed, he was distinctly boyish. A young athlete, in an unclerical grey tweed suit, tall, with a fair, open face, good, clear eyes that met yours with a child's direct and confident gaze, a bush 160 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. of light-brown hair, and a sincere voice, as little self-conscious as an oak tree or a locomotive. You had to like him and to trust him, too. To be sure, he had the English race pride in its fidness, and was rather sorry for the people whom it had pleased Providence to handicap in the struggle of life by permitting them to be born in other coun- tries — somewhat in the spirit of the kindly women in Bleeding-Heart Yard, in " Little Dorrit," towards the Italian sojourner among them. It took him some time, too, to grasp the well- within-bounds statements of the Bostonian as to the numerical strength and influence of the Keltic element in America — and the importance of its attitude on the subject of an Anglo-American alli- ance. I really wasn't satisfied with his grasp of the purely American idea on anything, at any time ! He believed implicity in his own country's present and future, and was disposed to accept without much question the thoughtless assertions of other English- men as to the decadence of Southern races. Yet, in Rome, you can hardly pick your steps in the streets, for the straight-limbed, active babies, so beautiful, many of them, that you might easily dupli- cate among them the cherub-faces in the glory of angels about Sassoferata's Madonna in the Vatican Gallery. Oh, no ! this Italian blood that ran in the veins of the world's great priests and soldiers, of her poets, and painters, and sculptors, and architects, and 161 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN engineers, and physicians, and singers, and dramatists, is not decadent, but "hath earnest in it of far springs to be," as they know, who have broad outlook, and realize its new birth in America, Australia, and England itself; and its renewing power in the place of its beginning. But the young Oxford curate had an open mind, and the Vatican Library, and the kindly Greek monks, and his cosmopolitan environment, were not lost on him. He enjoyed his daily friendly tiffs with the Bostonian, chummed with the Australian-Irish Dean, who was his vis-a-vis at table ; was comradely with the Roman citizen ; joined the little Catholic party who went out to see and hear the illuminations and Our Lady's serenade on the evening of the feast of her Thrice-Blessed Motherhood; and took us afterward to the Piazza Colonna for coffee, which we drank at one of the little tables in front of the restaurant, with a glance now and then at St. Paul, clear outlined by the electric light, on his lofty station on top of the column of Marcus Aurelius. Religiously, this curate of St. Mary-the- Virgin's was not at all " advanced." Ritual was not of great moment to him, and he was not remarkably impres- sionable to the magnificence of the Roman Basilicas. His mind was singularly devoid of prejudice and antagonism. He seemed in his researches to be 162 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. going to the very roots of things ; and while there was no evidence at all of a present turning Rome- ward, we could not but think what a conquest this straightforward, cheerful soul would be ; and wonder if he might not be an object of interest to a certain illustrious rector of St. Mary-the- Virgin's, who had looked on this same Rome with his Protestant eyes, more than half a century before, and returned to enter her communion in his native land. Hardly had the Oxford curate left us — greatly missing his sunny presence — than he was succeeded by another Anglican of different type. This was the rector of a parish in the Orkneys — a slender, pale, ascetic young man ; unquestionably priestly-looking and devout, with the Sign of the Cross and the in- vocations of Our Lady and the Saints, as natural as you please ; satisfied thus far, with his position, but prayerful for the reunion of Christendom. You know, dear readers, that in Scotland the Church of England is not the State Church ; and there, significantly enough its bishops and clergy are mostly Ritualists. In the month of my visit to Rome, October, the weather was warm but delightful ; the day broken sometimes by a couple of smart thunder-showers ; or possibly, in the evening, a little rain and hail-storm pattering on the glass-roof of our lofty and cheerful reading room, clearing up so that we could look out at moon or starlight before retiring ; but never a 163 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN long rainy day such as Boston knows so well at all seasons. Still the kindly Romans knowing the brevity of some of the visitors' sojourns, used to apologize to us for the weather ! " Oh," said the rector from the Orkneys, " with us, it rains on Sunday, it sleets on Monday, it snows on Tuesday, it rains and blows on Wednesday, it snows and rains on Thursday, it rains and hails on Friday, and sleets and rains on Saturday. Would you apologize for such weather of Paradise as you have here now?" I could imagine him in his little church above the rocks and friths, awaiting the congregation Coming through the sleet and rain to a worship that looked like that which St. Columba taught the sturdy Scots thirteen centuries ago ; or travelling among his widely-scattered flock on sick-visiting. For, indeed, the priestly ideal was in his heart. Yet the Australian Dean did not get on with him as with the young Oxford curate ; nor did the little lady who had to have her afternoon tea, though she must go a mile for it ; nor even the Roman citizen, who looked like George Parsons Lathrop ; so he and the Bostonian were fain to make friends, and dow and then have early coffee and rolls and a long chat together. " Isn't it rather sad for me here, withal," he said one Sunday morning. " I have to trudge up the hill to the English church to receive Communion at the 164 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. half -past eight celebration, and then come down to fulfil my obligation of hearing Mass over at the Minerva, or some other of your churches." " When you come to Rome again," I ventured, " I hope you'll be able to have Mass and Holy Commun- ion in the same church." He looked up quickly — " I understand you. It does not seem so to me now, but if ever I should see that my duty to God lay that way, I should go through fire to do it." He was greatly pleased to have an interview with an Archbishop of the United Greek rite, who was in Rome at the time with the Greek Patriarch ; and was most solicitous for an audience with the Holy Father. To this privilege he hoped to be helped by an old friend who had recently entered the Church and been ordained to the priesthood, the Rev. Basil Maturin, who was expected a little later at the English College. Awaiting him, he went for a brief trip to Naples, and before his return the Bostonian had taken her reluctant way northward, so we met no more. Perhaps if I had not first noted the monuments of ancient Catholic days in London and Oxford, the growth of Ritualism and the " second spring" of the Old Church herself in England, or held free daily converse with typical Anglican churchmen in the Roman environment, I might not have become so interested in the Roman testimony to England's old- time close union with the See of Peter. 165 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN " Continuity" is a sort of catchword of the English High Church people. But Rome is the place wherein to study this " continuity " aright. The Roman (adopted) citizen * to whom I have so often referred in these papers, is an authority on Rome in England, and, still more, on England in Rome. In his company I had the pleasure of tracing that golden line of "continuity" from the days of Pope St. Gregory and St. Augustine of Canter- bury until now. Of course, it is true that Christianity had a still earlier beginning in the land that is now England. Pope St. Eleutherius, at the instance of King Lucius, of the Britons, sent missionaries to England, in the second half of the second century. St. Gregory and St. Augustine knew of these ancient Christians, whose descendants by that time had been driven by their Saxon conquerors into the mountain regions of Wales, and the latter was prompt in seeking them out after his landing in Kent. But so great was their antipathy to their conquerors and oppressors that they were not willing to help Augustine in his missionary work among them, and even refused con- formity in certain matters, as to the time for cele- brating Easter, etc., which had become part of the discipline of the Church Universal ; largely because these had been accepted by the hereditary enemies of their nationality. * William J. D. Croke, LL. D. 166 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Whereupon St. Augustine prophesied that "If they would not preach to the English the way of life, they would fall by their hands under the judgment of death." This prediction was fulfilled years after the death of St. Augustine, when Ethilfrid, King of the pagan Northern English, mightily overthrew the Britons at Chester, and massacred twenty-two hundred of the British monks at Bangor, who were praying in sight of the battlefield for victory to their country- men. One cannot refrain from drawing a contrast between these Britons and the Irish of a later day. Whatever the national antagonism of the Irish to the English, who have oppressed, but never conquered them, the former have not only never refused, but have been always ready to do spiritual good to the latter. Since England's break from the centre of unity, Irish priests have helped to keep the Faith alive in England. To an Irish statesman, the great O'Con- nell, English as well as Irish Catholics owe their Emancipation. To an Irish priest, the Very Rev. Dr. Russell, uncle of the present (Irish) Lord Chief Justice of England, the Church in England owes Cardinal Newman. It was Cardinal Manning's knowledge of the fidelity of the multitudes of Irish in England to the Faith, under hard circumstances, of the generous zeal of the Irish priests in England and its colonies, 167 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN which, with his keen sense of justice and sympathy with the people, made him a Home Ruler in his later years. But this is digressing from the early plantings of the Faith in England. A pious legend tells us that England's first Apostle was Joseph of Arimathea ; that he came thither from Palestine with his son and eleven other dis- ciples, at the instance of St. Philip, one of the twelve Apostles, in the fifteenth year after the Assumption of the Mother of God. King Arviragus gave them an island called Avalon, and hereon they built a church of wooden wands — the first religious edifice, on the site of the afterwards famous Abbey of Glastonbury. Joseph of Arimathea brought with him the Holy Grail — now, by the way, preserved in the Cathedral Church of Genoa. Tennyson takes up those devout legends in one of the Idyls of the King, " The Holy Grail." Sir Percivale, who became a monk in the Abbey of Camelot, after the Quest of the Grail, tells the story to his fellow-monk, Ambrosius : "Nay, Monk ! what phantom ? " answered Percivale, ' ' The cup, the cup itself, from which Our Lord Drank at the Last sad Supper with His own. This, from the blessed land of Aromat — After the day of darkness, when the dead "Went wandering o'er Moriah — the good Saint, Arimathean Joseph, journeying brought 168 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of Our Lord. And there awhile it bode ; and if a man Could touch or see it, he was healed at once, By faith of all his ills. But then the times Grew to such evil that the holy cup Was caught away to Heaven, and disappeared. " To whom the Monk : ' ' From our old books I know That Joseph came of old to Glastonbury, And there the heathen prince, Arviragus, Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build ; And there he built with wattles from the marsh A little lonely church in days of yore." On the strength of this legend, the Kings of Eng- land claimed precedence of the Kings of France in certain ancient church councils, asserting that St. Denis, the first Apostle of France, came thither some decades after the advent of Joseph of Arima- thea to England, and that therefore they — the Eng- lish Kings, did " far transcend all other Kings in worth and honor, so much as Christians are more excellent than Pagans." But here we are, at the foot of the Ccelian Hill, and parting company with these beautiful old legends — " so old they may well be true " — are about to come among the memorials of Pope St. Gregory, the Great, to whom England and all Europe owe so much of their Christianity and civilization. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN XVII. Rome's English Memorials of Thirteen Centuries. A Roman citizen, the son of a Roman Senator, a practising lawyer, a praetor or Chief Governor of Rome for twelve years, then a Benedictine monk, an abbot, and finally Pope — Gregory I., had certainly an extraordinary preparation for the great career foreshown in vision to his mother Sylvia, as she held him, a baby, in her arms. The pictures and statues of St. Gregory are prob- ably quite faithful, as there were contemporary por- traits of himself, his father and mother, which he presented to the Monastery of St. Andrew, wherein he abode in peace for so many laborious years, and of whose holy seclusion he thought so often and regretfully during the strenuous years of his Pontifi- cate. It is the face of an aristocrat and a ruler, virile, stern almost, but modified with evidence of human tenderness about the lips, and in the lofty brow and eyes a heavenly compassion that came down from the Holy Spirit, " the Father of the Poor," whose symbolic dove ever attends St. Gregory. He kept his choir-boys in order with a strap — it is still to be seen ; but he treasured the silver cup of his own childhood, the gift of his beloved mother, 170 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. after he had parted with all his other possessions to the poor ; and the outgoing of his heart to the young English captives in the Roman slave-market, has long been the theme of song and story. The home of his youth and early manhood was on the Ccelian Hill, where his church now stands. The memory of two noble Roman martyrs, of the days of Julian the Apostate, the soldier-brothers, John and Paul, must have been very fresh in his mind ; for their church, built by Pammachus, on the site of their residence, and the scene of their martyrdom, was comparatively new in his day, and but a few moments' walk from his house ; and the near-by St. John Lateran, as the Basilica stood from the reign of Constantine, had a prominent part in his devout life, alike as layman and monk. On his father's death, he made the grand old home into a church and monastery. His widowed mother — now honored in the Church as St. Sylvia — had, of course, her share of the estate, and lived in a suitable house opposite to the Church of San Gio- vanni e Paolo. The house is in ruins, but the garden about it, wherein, no doubt, Gregory played in his childhood, and gazed across with thoughtful eyes to the Palace of the Caesars — not then in ruins — is still cared for and shown. Gregory is one of those extraordinary men whose persistent vitality will haunt the scenes of their earthly pilgrimage till the Day of Doom. After 171 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN thirteen centuries, he still lives, and in a measure, rules in Rome. Go where you will, you find him in one or other phase of his many-sided personality. Here we have to do with him only in his relation to the conversion of England. This church, outside of which we have lingered so long, was called by him St. Andrew's. A later Gregory gave to it its present title. Kneeling on the ground at the foot of these broad stone steps, St. Augustine and his companion missionaries to England — the Pope's compassion for these fair young Anglican captives was fruitful — received the last blessing of Gregory who stood in the gateway at the top of the flight. This was A. D. 597. History this. No mist of legend or unverified tradition about this great golden link then to attach England to the centre of Christian unity. The Roman Empire was falling into decadence, and Augustine and his fellow-Benedictines were bringing to a little island in the Northern Seas, not only Christianity, but the seeds of that industrial and intellectual development from which the modern successor of old Roman Imperialism was to grow. On either side of Cardinal Scipio Borghese's splendid portico, are inscriptions, the one setting forth in brief, the history of the church and monas- tery ; the other giving the names of the famous men whom the latter produced. Among them we find, after St. Gregory himself, such suggestive names as St. Augustine, Apostle of England ; St. Laurentius, 172 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Archbishop of Canterbury ; St. Mellitus, Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury ; St. Justus, Bishop of Rochester ; St. Paulinus, Bishop of York. Some goodly bits of the Rock of Peter these, to set into the foundations of the ancient English Church ! Within the church we saw Cordieri's great statue of St. Gregory (in St. Barbara's chapel), and frescoes by Viviani, and pictures by Badalocchi, commemorat- ing events in the Saint's crowded life, as the supper of St. Gregory, the miracle of the Brandeum (or Bleeding Host) ; the winning of the soul of the Emperor Trajan, etc., etc. Still more interesting to us was the monastic cell of St. Gregory, with his marble chair, and the elo- quent Latin inscription on the place where his hard bed lay. The original of Caracci's picture of St. Gregory is in England, but a good copy is in this church in the chapel of the Salviati family, with the saint's miracu- lous Madonna. A chapel to St. Andrew, with the famous frescoes of the saint before his cross and undergoing his scourging, respectively by Guido and Domenichino — recalls the earlier dedication of the church. Nor has the cherished mother of St. Gregory been for- gotten. There is St. Sylvia's Chapel, and her splendid statue, also by Cordieri, while the fresco of the Lord attended by angels is from the hand of Guido. St. Gregory as Pope was the friend of the 173 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN oppressed Jews, the opponent of all coercion of con- science, the ransomer of slaves, for whom he gave the sacred vessels of the altars to be melted and made into coin. With St. John of Matha, St. Anselm, St. Ambrose, St. Patrick, and other of the Church's holy " men of old," he had a warm place in the heart of the Quaker poet, Whittier. In one of his sweetest poems, " St. Gregory's Guest," he has enshrined two beautiful stories which connect the memory of the saint and his mother Sylvia: One day before the monk's door came A beggar stretching empty palms, Fainting and fast-sick, in the name Of the Most Holy asking alms. And the monk answered, " All I have In this poor cell of mine I give, The silver cup my mother gave ; In Christ's name take thou it, and live." Years passed ; and called at last to bear Pastoral crook and keys of Rome, The poor monk, in Saint Peter's chair, Sat the crowned Lord of Christendom. " Prepare a feast," St. Gregory cried, " And let twelve beggars sit thereat." The beggars came, and one beside, An unknown stranger with them sat. A grave, calm face the stranger raised, Like His who on Gennesaret trod, Or His on whom the Chaldeans gazed, Whose form was as the Son of God. 174 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. " Know'st thou," He said, "thy gift of old? " And in the hand He lifted up The Pontiff marvelled to behold Once more his mother's silver cup. " Thy prayers and alms have risen and bloom Sweetly among the flowers of heaven, I am the Wonderful through whom Whatever thou askest shall be given. " There are tombs of English exiles under St. Gregory's roof, and much else worth lingering on, if one's sojourn in Rome were to be counted by months instead of weeks. St. Gregory's Church figures again in English politico-religious history, but the time is nearly nine centuries ahead. Let us leave it for the present, and come to the Borgo in the Leonine City, hard by St. Peter's own Basilica. Fifty years after the landing of St. Augustine in Kent, and the founding of the Prhnatial See of Canterbury, pilgrims began to make their way from England to the City of the Popes, thus to manifest their gratitude for the Light of the Faith sent thence to their own land. Many of these were of royal blood — Alfred the Great is said to have been brought thither in his boyhood by his father — and many chose to finish their mortal course as near as they could get to the tomb of the Blessed Peter. From a. d. 650 to 800, there is little reliable data for the sequence and personages of these English pilgrimages to Rome ; but it is certain that by the 175 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN latter date there was an important English colony in the neighborhood of St. Peter's, which had had much material, intellectual and spiritual befriending at the hands of the Popes, Sts. Leo III. and Leo IV., especially the latter. The Irish also had been for at least as long numerous in Rome. The interest felt at the time of Renaissance in the history of the early English settlement in Rome is best proved by a visit to that one of Raphael's " Stanzes " in the Vatican Gallery known as the " Stanza of the Incendio del Borgo.'' The frescoes which cover the great walls are partly by Raphael himself, partly by pupils of Raphael, from their master's designs. We have the justification of St. Leo III. before Charlemagne ; the victory of St. Leo IV. over the Saracens at Ostia ; the coronation of Charlemagne in St. Peter's ; — but, most striking of all, and there- fore giving its name to the apartment, the fire in the Saxon Borgo or Burg, in 847. The fire is supposed to have started through the carelessness of certain residents. You see the group of fugitives, including the noble-looking old man carried on the shoulders of his son, the young mothers and the scantily clad children looking beyond the ineffective attempts of men to quench the flames, to the portico of St. Peter's in the distance, where Pope St. Leo IV. appears holding out the Cross with which he arrests 176 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. the progress of the fire. There is bold grouping and massing of figures, and Raphael's own splendid flesh tints. The English King Ethelwolf is introduced in the lower part of the picture with Godfrey de Bouillon. We visited the Borgo itself, with its famous Hos- pital and Medical College of Santo Spirito — still served by the clerks of the Holy Spirit. Behind it is the Church of S. Spirito, formerly St. Mary of the Saxons. We visited it and noted the altarpiece, representing the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles and the Blessed Mother of God at Pente- cost, and the bronze canopy over the altar, said to be by Palladio. It has a fine old belfry, but there is a lonely air about it all, as if it mourned the ancient days. St. Mary of the Saxons is mentioned in the Liber Pontificales, a. d. 800, and variously thereafter ; as also in Papal documents, until the reign of John Lackland. He granted its ground to Pope Innocent III., who, in 1196, built thereon the Hospital of S. Spirito, long the largest establishment of the kind in the world, as it is still among the best. Another church of the early English in Rome which boasted a great antiquity was built in 755 by Offa, King of the East Saxons, on what is now the Via Monserrato, not far from the great Church of the Oratorians of St. Philip Neri. It was destroyed by fire in 817. 177 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN The Church of San Pantaleo, near the Palazza Massimo alle Colonne, is mentioned as English under Pope Honorius III. (1216-1227), the successor of Pope Innocent III. The inscription on its bell sets forth that it was put up by English priests in 1243. St. Edmund's Hospice, on the Ripa Grande, was founded in the Fourteenth Century, for English sailo: s of merchantmen and of the Royal Navy, and existed for many years as a separate institution. Before the fifteenth century, it was merged in the Church of St. Thomas and the Holy Trinity, but its church and buildings were administered apart. In the reign of Pope Gregory XIII., the obligations of its church were transferred to the Church of the English College, a fact duly recorded on a marble slab in the sacristy. The Church of St. Edmund was pulled down under Alexander VII. ; and a great part of the buildings destroyed after 1870. A small part still remains. The Church and Hospice of St. Thomas and the Holy Trinity — on the site of the ancient church of King Offa — was founded after the Second Jubilee, 1350, by a powerful English confraternity. It developed steadily by purchase and by gift ; and was the ordinary residence of the English ambassa- dors. By 1500 it was decaying, and the so-called Reformation poisoned its life. In 1575, Pope Gregory XIII. united it with the English College already mentioned, into which St. 178 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Edmund's had been merged ; but of the career of these united institutions, more further on. We stood across from the Church of St. Chrysog- onus, on the Piazza d'ltalia, looking down into a station of ancient Roman firemen, unearthed over thirty years ago, and then, and still, in very good preservation. It is far below the street level, and consists of several chambers. There is the place of the fountain in the courtyard, and well-defined mosaics of Neptune, with his trident and sundry marine monsters, in black, on the whitish groundwork. An excellent system of water-works, baths and fountains innumerable, and an efficient fire service, here so long ago ! We were in the midst of ruins, and those below were not half so full of desolation as those about us. Not far from where we stood are the scant and fast- crumbling fragments of St. Edmund's, of which I have already written. In sight, also, are the remains of the old castle of the Anguillara family, consisting of the Torre degli Anguillara and the Arco delV Annunziata. The latter takes its name from the fresco still to be seen on the wall. It was a bright, warm day, and little green lizards came out and sunned themselves — they are used to Americans, and not easily disturbed anyhow — and little children, as agile and bright-eyed as the lizards, 179 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN but not equally irreproachable as to toilet, came out of houses somewhat less ruinous-looking than the ruins, and regarded us with smiling curiosity. " The church yonder, St. Chrysogonus', was Car- dinal Langton's titular church," said the Roman citizen. " This is rather in the line of 'continuity.' Shall we go over and see it?" I needed no urging. What visions rise at the name of Langton! The intrepid Cardinal Arch- bishop at the head of the English bishops and barons, at Runnymede, forcing Magna Charta from the weak but tyrannous King John, who yields it "for the salvation of our soul, and the soids of all our ances- tors and heirs, and unto the honor of God, and the advancement of Holy Church, and amendment of our realm "! The solemn promulgation of the people's rights, and the penalties on whoso dared infringe them, with all the splendor of the Old Faith in Westminster ! How well Whittier tells it in his " Curse of the Charter-Breakers ! " And then he looks back at it : Seven times the bells have tolled For the centuries grey and old, Since the priesthood, like a tower, Stood between the poor and power : And the wronged and trodden down Blessed the abbot's shaven crown. St. Chrysogonus was one of those soldierly, chival- rous saints, akin to St. George, St. Maurice, and 180 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. St. Sebastian, who having as best he might, protected and encouraged the noble Roman lady, St. Anastasia, through the fiery ordeal of her martyrdom under the Emperor Diocletian, was himself beheaded. He is represented in the mosaics in the tribune of his church, which is within in the basilica fashion, com- panioned by St. James the Great, and attending the Blessed Mother enthroned with her Divine Child. Among the frescoes from the history of the Trin- itarians who serve the church, we noted one of ex- ceeding beauty. A good old lay brother, so runs the story, finding himself alone in the monastery, his superior brethren being absent on their work of ransoming captives, ministering to the imprisoned and the like, still rang the bell duly for the various hours of the Divine Office, grieving that there were none to keep up the splendid service of prayer and praise. But, at last, he hears the beloved psalmody, as of old, only richer and sweeter ; and hastening to the chapel, he finds the stalls filled with angels, in the monastic garb, the distinctive cross on their hearts, and Our Lady in the Prior's place also wearing the Trinitarian Cross — Heaven thus supply- ing for the spiritual service of those who gave them- selves to the relief of the pressing temporal sufferings of the down-trodden and afflicted. The ethereal loveliness of the angels and the Blessed Virgin Mother must be seen to be appreciated. It is an abrupt diversion from English " con- 181 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN tinuity," — but the heavenly presages of our own American flag and its mission are nearer to us. How few of the hundred thousands who have read Emma C. Dawson's magnificent poem, " Old Glory," have understood the religious symbolism interwoven with it ! Well, St. John of Matha gives the explanation. Having made his studies at the University of Paris — his life began in 1154 — he was ordained a priest, and at his first celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, he beheld an angel clothed in white, with a cross of red and blue on his breast, and his hands resting on the heads of two slaves, who knelt, one on each side of him. It was to the }'Oimg priest, God's showing of his life-work. He forsook the world, and in a desert place in company with the holy Felix of Valois, drew up the constitutions of the Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives. The two friends set out for Rome together, and were most kindly received by Pope Innocent III., who had had a like vision, but a more specific one, since in his, the captives between whom the angel stood were a white Christian and a swarthy Moor, signifying that the new Order in its benefac- tions should recognize no distinction of color, race, or creed. Moreover, His Holiness decreed the dress of the new Brotherhood, and the significance of its color and emblems. The habit was white, and on the breast of it, a Greek cross of red and blue. The 182 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity were thus typified ; the Eternal Father by the white ; the Son, the Divine Redeemer by the blue, the transverse of the Cross ; and the Holy Spirit by the red. The saint's vision, his Brotherhood's institution, and his hardships in the service of the slave, moved Whittier to his noble poem, " The Mantle of St. St. John de Matha " : A strong and mighty Angel, Calm, terrible, and bright, The cross in blended red and blue Upon his mantle white ! Two captives by him kneeling, Each on his broken chain, Sang praise to God, who raiseth The dead to life again ! Dropping his cross-wrought mantle, " Wear this," the Angel said ; " Take thou, Freedom's priest, its sign, — The white, the blue, the red." Then rose up John de Matha, In the strength the Lord Christ gave, And begged through all the land of France, The ransom of the slave. At last, outbound from Tunis, His bark her anchor weighed, Freighted with seven score Christian souls Whose ransom he had paid. But, torn by Paynim hatred, Her sails in tatters hung ; And on the wild waves rudderless, A shattered hulk she swung. 183 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Then up spake John de Matha, " God's errands never fail ! Take thou the mantle which I wear, And make of it a sail. ' ' They raised the cross wrought mantle, The blue, the white, the red ; And straight before the wind off shore, The ship of Freedom sped. And on the walls the watchers, The ships of mercy knew, — They knew far off its holy cross, The red, the white, the blue. And the bells in all the steeples, Rang out in glad accord, To welcome home to Christian soil The ransomed of the Lord. So runs the ancient legend By bard and painter told ; And lo ! the cycle rounds again, The new is as the old. And the American poet read the moral to his countrymen, in the Civil War, for the freedom of the negro slave. Is not your sail the banner Which God hath blest anew, The mantle that de Matha wore. The red, the white, the blue ? Take heart from John de Matha ! — God's errands never fail. I grew familiar with the sight of the red, white, and blue of the Trinitarians while I stayed in Rome. 184 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Would that Whittier had seen the glories of the Eternal City in its memorials and its men, even as Wendell Phillips beheld St. Peter's, and the black priest at its altars of sacrifice ! But we are far from Stephen Langton, in time, if not in spirit, so we shall leave this intrepid successor of St. Augustine and St. Thomas a Becket, and stop for a few moments again at St. Gregory's, on the Ccelian Hill. Over three centuries later, when the divorce of Henry VIII. from Katharine of Arragon was pend- ing, Sir Edward Crane was one of the commissioners appointed to get the opinion of the foreign univer- sities, and especially of the Court of Rome. Kath- arine had appealed to the Pope. Crane's opinion of the King's late-felt scruples is evident from the fact that he never returned to England. Elizabeth recalled him, when she suppressed the English Embassy at Rome, but he, having a care for his head, stayed on, under the protection of Pope Paul IV., and died there in 1561. His tomb is in St. Gregory's with that of another exile for conscience' sake, Robert Pecham, who died six years later. The palace which was once the English Embassy, is now the residence of John C. Hey wood, an Ameri- can Catholic, a native of Philadelphia, and well known as poet and novelist. The English College and the Church of St. Thomas a Becket, on the Via Monserrato (St. Thomas of the 185 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN English, as the Italians call it), may now be said to sum up all the associations of England in Rome — the Borgo, St. Pantaleo, St. Edmund. The English College began to prepare for the reconquest of England to the Faith during the very- reign of Elizabeth. It was first in the hands of the Jesuits, and many a priest, including Blessed Edmund Campion, who was destined to make the "second spring " of the Church of England possible, by his mission work and martyrdom, was trained here. Among the post-Reformation guests at this college, we find record, strangely enough, of the poet Milton. The Church of the Oratorians of St. Philip Neri, Sta. Maria in Valicella, is near the English College, and I saw the place where the Saint used to stand to give his blessing to the English students, as they went their way to the lectures at the University, with the salutation, "All hail, Flowers of the Martyrs ! " It is told that once a student refused to approach for St. Philip's blessing, and that when the supreme test of his faith and courage came in England, he failed miserably, and renounced the Church. The early association of St. Philip Neri with the young English missionaries is remarkable, when it is remembered what an important part in the recon- quest of England to the Faith was awaiting his own disciples at a later day. This English College remained in charge of the Jesuits until the suppression of the Society in 1773 ; 186 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. but it did not revert to them on the Restoration. It remained under the protection of the Pope until 1798. It was pillaged and left, within, at least, in an almost ruinous condition during the French inva- sion of that year. In 1818 it was restored and re-opened, with the Rev. Dr. Gradwell as rector. Its most famous modern pupil and subsequent rector was Nicholas Wiseman, later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, England, whose connection with the college was almost unbroken from 1818 till 1840. The English College entered on another epoch of its existence in 1867, when it was reconstructed at the instance of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Manning, with the Rev. Dr. O'Callaghan, of the Oblates of St. Charles, rector. Strange to see this evident Irishman in such a place ; but the present rector, the Rev. Dr. Prior, whom I had the pleasure of meeting, a young, refined, ascetic and scholarly-looking gentleman, is also of Irish origin. Wiseman, himself, to be sure, was of Irish and Spanish blood. At the time of our visit, the faculty and students were still in villagiatura ; and the Blessed Sacrament was removed from the church. This church is exceedingly rich in historical associations. It is full of pictures of English saints. It has a notable relic of the martyred St. Thomas of Canterbury — whom the Church honors with the Gospel of the Good Shepherd in his Feast Day Mass. 187 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN It has the tombs of many English notables, both preceding and following the days of Henry VIII. Among them, we noted those of Christopher Bain- bridge, Cardinal Archbishop of York, and ambas- sador from England to Pope Julius II., who died in Rome in 1514 ; also of Cardinal Allen ; and of a little feminine prodigy of learning and piety, Martha Swinburne, 1768-1777 — with a long history of her short life, pathetic, as full of the grief of her bereaved parents, but moving to a faint amusement as well. What rank would this little wonder, who at nine years of age, was fluent in three modern languages, and had " made some progress in the Latin tongue " ; was well versed in history, geography and mathematics ; " sang the most difficult music at sight with one of the finest voices in the world " — have attained among the learned ladies of the University of Bologna, for example. Undoubtedly she would have been a rival of Laura Bassi Verrati. who towards the end of the century maintained a thesis in Latin before two Cardinals and seven professors, holding her own eloquently with them in that language of scholars. Poor little Martha! was it not infinitely better to go, while you were still eligible for the Heaven of little children, than to live to develop a brain that might have been a heavy burden over a woman's heart? We left Martha's memorial, for the most painfully interesting sight in the English College — the 188 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. pictures of English martyrdoms on the walls of the triforium of the church. I had previously seen some terribly realistic pictures — notably that of the martyrdom of St. Erasmus in the Vatican Gallery, (in mosaic in St. Peter's), and later I saw in one of the professors' parlors at Maynooth, the picture of the frightful death of an Irish missionary saint in Central Europe. But for a long, progressive, accumulation of horrors, it would not be easy to surpass this Way of the Cross of the English martyrs of Elizabeth's reign. The carrying out of the frequent sentence of hanging, drawing, and quarter ing, is pictured minutely and faithfully. If you have a vivid imagination and a weak heart, you would better not go into this triforium. But if you do not go, you lose an unexampled opportunity for reflecting on the comparatively easy terms on which we Catholics of to-day get to Heaven. These pictures are contemporary, and were witnesses of the greatest value in the case for the beatification of three hundred English martyrs by Pope Leo XIII. The modern England in Rome will have its most significant token in the College of St. Bede, which was going up rapidly in the form of an addition to the English College at the time of my visit. This is the gift of Pope Leo XIII., and is destined for the theological training and maintenance during the student period, of converts from Anglicanism who 189 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN desire to enter the priesthood. Already these are an appreciable factor in the life of Rome. The Church of San Silvestro, of which Father Whitmee, S. P. M., is rector, is another rallying point for English, or, more correctly, English- speaking, Catholics in Rome. The little garden about the residence of the Fathers, through which yon get to the church is most beautifully kept ; and the church itself is most interesting historically and artistically. The names of Michael Angelo and Vittorio Colonna are closely associated with it. In recent years, our own Archbishop Keane and Father Fidelis, C. P. (Dr. James Kent Stone) have alternated as preachers of Advent and Lenten ser- mons. Last year, the newly ordained English convert priest, Father Basil Maturin (late of the Ritualistic Cowley Fathers) preached the Lent there. Queen Margherita often worships in this church, and makes benefactions to it. There are convents of English nuns in Rome now, with schools for English-speaking girls. The Eng- lish Catholics in the Eternal City have a notable leader in the Most Rev. Dr. Stonor, Archbishop of Trebizond. The impress left by such personalities as those of Wiseman, Manning, Newman, Faber, Howard, Talbot, Ullathorne, Grant, Vaughan, to mention but a few names prominent in England's later ecclesiastical history, not to speak at all of the eminent laymen of 190 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. letters and affairs, is deep and vivid ; the interest of the present Holy Father in the reconqnest of Eng- land to the Church is a solicitude of fifty years, as I heard from his own lips ; and then, the blood of the martyrs — English, yea, and Irish — and the prayers of the virgin saints ! The long and destructive storm has subsided, and there is a rain- bow in the sky. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN XVIII. Ireland and America in Rome. Ireland, the ever-faithful and ubiquitous, is rep- resented in Rome not only by the Irish College, in whose Chapel, St. Agatha's, the heart of the great O'Connell rests ; but by a large share in the faculty and the students of the English College ; and by her buoyant blood and keen intelligence ruling and learning in the American College. But where is Ireland not represented ? A traveler once averred that there was a bit of territory of eight square miles on which no Irishman had set foot. "How in the world did we overlook it?" asked John Boyle O'Reilly. The train for Rome was an hour late at Pisa, and we continued to lose time. At Olibeto we had a long stop, and the guard said with much gesticulation, that there would be plenty of time for refreshments. It was a cool, bright night. How good a bit of beefsteak and a cup of the tea would have been ! but I saw only the usual mibuttered ham sandwiches, cakes, grapes, and half-bottles of red and white wine. Most of us left our carriages for a turn in the fresh air. I heard with gladness clear, boyish laughter and the English of the United States ; and presently 192 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. I was in conversation with a curly-headed youth with fine grey eyes, and the direct look and simple courtesy of the well-bred American. He rendered me some very welcome attentions ; and, strangely enough, came to my aid again on a memorable day, when I felt as one might feel who woke suddenly in some tremendous isolation, with all the wires between him and the rest of the world hopelessly snapped. He was a student of the American College, and was a fair specimen of the elect gathering who are growing up within its walls, to be, by-and-by, among the choicest glories of the Church in their native land. When first I came to Rome, the faculty and the students were at their beautiful summer home, Villa Frascati, at Grotta Ferrata, where the Basilian Monks of the Greek Rite have their monastery and a beautiful little church. But the President, the Right Rev. Mgr. William H. O'Connell, D. D., was frequently in Rome super- vising the improvements which were making in the college proper, against the opening of the scholastic year in late October, and the Bostonian was soon deeply in his debt for many great and much appre- ciated kindness. The college on the Via dell' Umilta has, on the exterior, the usual cloistered aspect of such institu- tions in the Eternal City. But within there is a fine court-yard garden, with 193 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN historic orange, oleander, and other flowering trees. The reception rooms are cheerful, the walls lined with pictures of dignitaries of the Church in Ameri- ca, especially of the College alumni who have risen to eminence in the Church in their own land. The rector's parlors are full of homelike suggestion to the visiting American ; and in the College refectory, the Blessed Mother of God, who, under the title of her Immaculate Conception, is the patroness of the United States, and the American shield and eagle, are associated in a way to remind one of the devout chivalry of mediaeval times. The College building is just 301 years in exist- ence, the foundation of a lady of the Orsini family, for the Dominican Nuns. It passed later into the hands of the Visitation Nuns, and evidences of this succession of devout habitations are seen in the pictures of the saints and the pious devices of both Orders in the decorations of the chapel. When first I saw the College it was in the hands of the renovators ; when I saw it last, it was in all the glory of its new electric lighting, in which it anticipated the Vatican itself by several months. It is naturally, the place to which American Cath- olics gravitate ; and far beyond even a high average of the priest's and the scholar's spirit of strict devotion to duty, and a fine sense of proportion in duties, must be the man who acceptably fills the office of rector. There is no severer test of a man 194 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. than this office, and it is high praise of the young Boston priest who was sent thither three years ago, when the best judges agree that he bears it well. Of the nobility of the spiritual and mental train- ing, under its whole fortunate succession of rectors, the church in America has many living proofs. There is sensible, large-minded care for the health of the students, coming from other climates and cus- toms ; and in the summer home at Villa Frascati, which we were privileged to see in all its beauty; and still more is the Villa Torlonia, near Castle Gondolpho, twelve miles from Rome by the Appian Way, which has since superseded it ; there is ample chance for wearied bodies and minds to refresh themselves, while souls are strengthened and uplifted through the environment of natural loveliness and the creations of faith-inspired art. One thing that a long sojourn in Italy must do for a reasoning being is to show him how much of what we Americans account indispensable to personal com- fort he is better and happier without. The spiritual and moral, even the aesthetic, parts of our nature are cramped and enfeebled by the minutiae of step-saving and bodily coddling generally, which prevail in our country ; and it seems to me not the least of the good effects of a Roman training that its happy possessor must bring home a manly contempt for certain petty creature comforts. There are the pleasantest relations between the 195 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN students of the American College and those of the Irish and English and Canadian Colleges ; indeed, between them and the students of all the national colleges ; for nowhere are the national patriotism and the spiritual cosmopolitanism which mark the true American Catholic, in nobler evidence than in the American College. WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. XIX. Glimpses of the Alps. I like best to remember the Savoy Alps. It was warmer weather for one thing ; I was alone, comforta- ble, quiet. It was a pleasure even to slip down to the floor of the railway carriage, and look up, up, up to those wonderful masses of stone, projecting over a green wall, so to speak, — for grass, and vines and shrubs grow straightly up on the steep, almost perpendicular sides — and wonder what prehistoric giant sculptor carved those wonderful facades. Even with a less vivid imagination than mine, the beholder could not miss the fortresses and battle- ments, the arrested march of mail-clad warriors, the anticipative cathedral and minster fronts, the processions of bishops, mitred abbots and cowled monks. Savoy was the country of St. Francis de Sales, and I could look across to Geneva, the scene of his marvellous episcopate — you remember that he converted 70,000 Protestants in his comparatively short life ; and think how he loved the Lake, and know that Annecy, the cradle of the Visitation Order which he founded, is near at hand. When I was in Lucerne more than a month late although the trees had not dropped their leaves, and 197 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN the sun was shining brightly, a bitter wind blew from the mountains, and during a two hours' ride beside the lovely lake, my temperature, bodily and mental, fell to the freezing point. I don't like the sunshine of cold places, which dazzles the eyes but gives no heat. I want gray skies with cold weather. Yet the scenery was grand beyond my feeble descriptive powers ; the town stretching along one side of the lake and even turning a curve with it : the snow-capped Alps, rising peak over peak, on the other. No verdure, nor suggestion of sculptor's hand here; huge masses of stone rising gradually to tremendous altitudes, the sun glinting on the ever- lasting snow, awe-inspiring, terrible. I was looking from too far off to note the black or white crosses of the Savoy Alps, near some steep foothold, with their suggestion of unforgotten tragedy, but they abounded, I doubt not, here also. And oh ! the world-history of both, from Caesar to Napoleon ! For one thing, at least, America with all her glory and diversity of natural scenery, must bow before Europe. America has no Alps. No wonder little Switzerland loves liberty, and has an undue proportion of soldier-heroes. What can men do who live in sight of the Alps, but live up to them, so to speak ? They are terribly strenuous pieces of creation, and would give one no peace. Life should be one long quest for the Edelweiss. 198 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. You begin to understand William Tell and Nicholas von der Flue only ofter you have gazed upon the Alps. What a heroic story is this of Lucerne, the little Catholic stronghold, beginning a. d. 735, from the monastic foundation of St. Leodegar — now also the Mecca of the fashionable world's summer pleasure seekers ! I saw the old flags in the Franciscan Church, near the Government Building and the Museum, which testify to the splendid share which the men of Lucerne had in the wars which won Switzerland's independence. These were the worthy descendants of the men who successfully resisted, though unto blood, when the propagators of the so-called Refor- mation tried to force an alien faith upon them. Maurice the sainted soldier of the martyred The- ban legion, who met his death on the banks of Lake Geneva, under the persecuting Emperor Maximin, shares with the monk of five centuries later, St. Leodegar, the special devotion of the people ; and statues of these patron saints are in conspicuous evidence. The Swiss have fought in the battles of many European nations, and the Lion Monument, after Thorswalden, on the face of a rock sixty feet high, not far from the entrance of the Glacier Garden, commemorates the Swiss guards, who fell before the Revolutionists in 1792, when the Austro-Prussian 199 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN army stormed the Tuileries in vain attempt to save the unfortunate French King, Louis XVI. The Lion monument is familiar through many reproductions in picture and carved wood. It is a grand Lion, wounded to death, with a faithful pathetic face — like the lion of St. Jerome. It rests its head on one great paw below the cross-emblazoned shield, and the other encircles the emblems of Lucerne. Beneath it is the inscription: "Helvetio- rumjidei or virtute." It was sculptured in 1821 by Ahorn of Constance. The monument is reflected on the quiet bosom of the small sheet of water just below it, and across from it is a little grove of noble trees. I lingered a little while in the Glacier Garden to see the "pot-holes/' There are nine of them in the rocks, and they date from the immemorial recession of the gigantic glacier, which is believed to have extended from the St. Gothard through the district of Lucerne to the north of Switzerland. The largest is thirty -one feet deep and twenty^six feet in diameter. A summer resort, however great its natural attrac- tions, has always a sadness about it after the season. It is, on a large scale, that of "the banquet hall deserted," as sung by Moore ; which, as a precocious child of my acquaintance said, brought always before her vision stacks of empty bottles, half-drained glasses, and scattered cigar stumps. The hotels fronting on the lake were on the point 200 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. of closing ; those a little farther in had a few linger- ers, mostly English people, who bear the cold better than Americans, and had need of all their fortitude ; for anything more comfortless than the average Continental hotel in cold weather I know not. Everywhere you saw deserted bandstands. The little round tables still stood in the summer houses and in the hotel gardens, but they were evidently about to be carried into winter quarters. It grew dusk early in the valley, by reason of the overshadowing mountains, and it was dim enough when I entered the Jesuits' church. Emerging, I looked up — you are always looking up in Switzerland — and what a sight met my eyes ! I had lost the sun behind the mountains an hour before. But, lo ! there were all the snow-clad peaks aflame with the after- glow, towering in their sublimity and heaven-lit splendor above the sombre pines and the shadowed haunts of men. I forgot the loneliness, the foreboding, and the bitter wind. It was the glory of a happy death cast down along the whole length of a troubled and sorrowful life. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN XX. Wood-Carving and Dolls' Houses. Would you not think that the sublime Alpine scenery would be the inspiration of the grandest works of art ? But oh ! what a drop from the art of Italy to the art of Switzerland! No Michael Angelo has risen up in the Alpine land to embody in bronze or marble suggestions from God's mar- vellous works before him. No Leonardo da Vinci, nor Raphael, nor Andrea del Sarto has even faintly caught the radiance of the sunset on the snowy mountain tops, to touch therewith an opening into Heaven, or the wings of a vanishing angel. In sight of God's masterpieces in stone men excel in the fine art of wood-carving ! So the balance is kept, and it remains true of the attractions of the lands, as it is of men's and women's, " Who least hath some, who most, hath never all." After the majestic statues and the glorious pic- tures of the Italian churches, the carved choir-stalls and the wrought-iron choir-screen of the Hofkirche or Cathedral of St. Leodegar lost in impressiveness. Yet, they are ingeniously beautiful and bear long- study. The hands that wrought so long and patiently on these, as well as on the curious carvings 202 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. of the northern side-altar over four hundred years ago, were moved by the same spirit of faith that rounded the dome of St. Peter's, or upcast the arches of the Cathedral of Cologne, or drew down for the age-long joy of earth a faint reflection of the glory of heaven in the Sistine Madonna. Those broad-faced, neutral tinted pictures of holy personages are almost painful to you after the ether- eal, delicately tinted Virgins and angels of Fra Angelico, that you left the other day in Florence ; but the votive offerings of answered prayer are at their shrines also ; and after you have seen the men and women of Switzerland and Belgium, you realize that the artist, even in his dreams of Heaven, is influenced deeply by his human environment. Behind the church — which was undergoing some renovations at the time of my visit — and between it and the residence of the canons, lies the old church- yard of St. Leodegar. There are quaintly inscribed memorial tablets on the walls of the cloister, and monuments, ingenious rather than lovely in their plan. But never was a resting place of the dead kept with more tender care or scrupulous neatness. I saw it swept and garnished, so to speak, for the near-at-hand All Souls' Day. Mural tablets, monu- ments and headstones bore those prim, long-lasting memorial-wreaths, which they are so fond of in Europe, even in the land of flowers itself. Did not an alert vender of these tributes of affection chase 208 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN our carriage almost to the gates of the Campo Santo at S. Lorenzo outside the walls, at Rome? and are they worse after all, than our own rigid floral pillars, "gates ajar," and harps? Coming down the long stone steps of St. Leodegar, I met a Philadelphia lady who had been passing the summer in Switzerland, and was getting ready to winter in Egypt. But everywhere you meet this kind of an American ; and the Australians will soon be our rivals in globe circuiting. Switzerland is the paradise of neatness. As I drove in the outskirts of Lucerne, it seemed to me that the very grass had been swept and dusted, and the dogs and cats all looked as if they had just been scrubbed and brushed within an inch of their lives. Shop-keeping was glorified here ; no dingy, one- windowed length in a block, but a pretty little one- story room, set beside the proprietor's house — not joined to it — glass on two sides, and with such dainty household goods on view, that the least domes- tic of women would be seized with a desire to start housekeeping at once. An old-fashioned New England matron would weep with joy at the neatness of the back yards ; the firewood laid close by the kitchen doors in the trim- mest, most symmetrical piles, not a weed, nor a scrap of tin, or cord, or paper in sight. It was all on a rather small scale, too, somewhat suggestive of dolls' housekeeping, and the household 204 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. goods, especially the kitchen furnishings, even in the more pretentious shops on the Alpen-Strasse, bore out the same idea. The tidiness of the women minded one of wax-work and wood-carving, and pres- ently, as I heard the tinkle, tinkle, up and down the hillsides, and the well-cared for cows came in sight, I said to myself : " Here are doll-cows to match the doll-people ;" for truly they looked as if they might have stepped out of the Noah's Arks of my childhood. In some of the churches, the precautions to ensure daily neatness, seemed to me excessive. In two of those which I visited, a railing is set up against the last pillars of the nave, so that you can enter a few feet into the church, and kneeling on the prie-dieu set against the railing, behold the altar in the distance and the light which tells of the abiding Sacred Presence ; but you cannot carry the dust of the wayside over the spotless floor, nor view the decorations at close range, except on special occasions. In Switzerland, too, you become aware of the proximity of Protestantism by the Protectant fashion of pews in the nave of the Catholic churches. There is one Protestant church in Lucerne for the benefit of the 4,000 Protestants, who, as a local pub- lication naively puts it, " live in perfect concord with the Catholic population," numbering 21,000 — and another, an Anglican house of worship was building at the time of my visit for the benefit of the numerous English summer residents professing that belief. 205 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Devout, brave, simple-hearted, frugal and laborious people these Swiss Catholics evidently are. I woke very early the morning I was to leave Lucerne, as I had to take the train betimes, if I would reach Cologne before nightfall. But earlier even than the hour at which I had to rise, I heard the footsteps of the men and the youth on the way to their daily labor. And among all the footsteps I noted those of one who walked with a spring, and whistled as he went. Such a melodious, sustained whistle — the voice of a clear conscience, a happy heart, and a sound body bearing on to a well-loved task. I see the after glow on the Alps, when I think of Lucerne, but I hear that cheery, early morning- whistle. WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. XXI. Notre Dame de Namur. You feel the kinship of the Cathedral of Milan and its still more splendid brother, the Cathedral of Cologne ; and the common blood-beat between the historic incidents of the life of the almost modern St. Charles Borromeo, blazoned on the banners in the nave of the former which holds his blessed remains, and the brief scriptural record of the Magi, or Kings of the East, whose dust is treasured beneath the glorious arches of the latter. But Milan, whose succession of Christian bishops dates from 51 A. D., is like a thriving American city, while Cologne, of later Christianity, and of a people ordinarily out-classing aught of sunny Italy in material progress, is full of the tinted mist of legend, devout, romantic, uncanny, yea, even diabolical. How well those hours of your journey along the banks, vine-clad and castle crowned, of the storied Rhine, prepare you for it ! Just as your fancy constructs a bridge from the pinnacles of the Domo of Milan to those of the Domhoff of Cologne, so does it span the spaces between the churches of Lucerne and those of 207 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Namur. For there are curious resemblances between the Alpine people and the expression of their spiritual aspirations and their material needs, and those of more prosaic-looking- Belgium. The roots of these are largely in their common faith, but also in the well developed practical, not to say, utilitarian streak in the characters of both. Great faith and devout enthusiasm, combined with hard common sense, have always marked religious founders and missionaries ; and in the production of these little Belgium almost rivals France herself. Where will you not find Belgian missionaries, whether you seek the leper settlement of Molokai, or the Congo, or Farther India, or South America, or the dwindling Indian reservations of our own United States ? And the Belgian nuns are equally generous volunteers for foreign missions, and almost equally world-spread. I had come on from Cologne to Namur to see a dear little friend in the novitiate at the mother house of the Sisters of Notre Dame. It is so common among us Catholics to see a girl in full bloom of youth and beauty, turning from all the allurements of love and the promise of intellectual distinction, and without the slightest excuse of bereavement or other great personal sorrow, to the life of religious self-denial and consecration, that we make no wonder of it. It means only that in some mysterious way a WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. glimpse has been vouchsafed her of the King in His beauty, and that all things else have fallen into insignificance. " We needs must love the highest when we see it." Walking in the quaint garden or the broad and cheerful tiled corridors of the convent with the white-veiled novice, who had in aspect dropped seven years off her short life and become a merry-hearted child again, the literary career that so easily might have been, seemed a paltry thing beside the high purpose ever before those bright, uplifted eyes — the surpassing recompense at the end of the straight, safe path on which those young feet were set. European convents do not present the cheerful exterior of American convents, and Notre Dame of Namur was no exception. But once beyond the symbolic narrow gateway and the little window in the wall, all was bright and cheerful enough to reassure even a fond mother. I had another interest beside the little novice. The Sisterhood of Notre Dame, founded, like so many other teaching religious communities, immediately after the French Revolution, all profiting in their spirit and aims of the lessons preached by that dire social upheaval, is much thought of and talked of today in American religious circles. Did its modest foundress, Julia Billiart, who fore- saw so many things, foresee that when she was sow- ing the seeds of rudimentary education for daughters 209 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN of the people in desolated France, she was also planting for the college training of girls in far America? Perhaps she did, but we are more inclined to think that it was as remote from her vision at the time, as was the idea from the minds of men in general, that the daughters of the people any- where should ever want college education. Even several decades later, daughters of the people in Massachusetts itself went to the rather limited public schools of the time for only part of the year. An effort was made, however, to do a little better for the boys. These were the days of nature in regard to the sexes. The woman suffragist had not arisen ; Tennyson had not written " The Princess," and Protestants knew not of the University of Bologna, with its occasional women professors and frequent girl students, nor how Shakespeare had come to think of Portia. In working for Heaven, we always plant or build better than we know ; and the evolution of the work of the Sisterhood of Notre Dame from the poor schools of France to the State schools of Belgium, the normal schools of England, and Trinity College of America is perfectly logical, religiously and socially. It was only seven years before Mother Julie's death that she established the mother house of her, by that time, flourishing institute in Namur, in the old- time mansion of the Counts Quarre, in the Rue des 210 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Fosses. Here are many memorials of the venerable foundress ; and in the little Gothic chapel at the end of the spacious garden, her remains rest, with those of her beloved friend, the co-foundress of the Insti- tute, Mother St. Joseph, in the world, the Countess Blin-Bourdon. Besides the brief inscriptions setting forth the lives and works of these servants of God, one sees conspicuous, the motto of the Venerable Mother Julie. Ah que le bon Dieu est bon! — "How good the good God is !" Here nuns and pupils love to come and pray, and not the least frequent of the petitions before the altar is that soon they may be able to invoke her — whose high place in Heaven and power with Him she served so well has been already miraculously attested — as "Blessed Julia Billiart." It is worth noting that even in Mother Julie's own lifetime the comprehensiveness of her daughters' work as teachers was understood. The Boarding- School at Namur was well begun, and the free schools flourished. "To help you to attain that sublime end, the Christian education of youth, more surely," said the priest who preached the Sisters' annual Retreat in 1810, " God wills you to enjoy a certain considera- tion, a reputation for learning and virtue, without which people would not entrust their children to you." 211 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN No convent of Notre Dame was founded in Eng- lish-speaking countries in Mother Julie's day, nor for long after. She died in 1816. In 1843, the Redemptorist Fathers obtained a little colony from Namur to teach the children of the Catholic poor at Penryn, London ; but it is probable that the growth of the community would have been exceedingly slow but for the Hon. Mrs. Petre, daughter of Lord Stafford, and widow of the Hon. Edward Petre, who entered the community at Namur in 1850, putting a goodly fortune at the dis- posal of the needy community and — still more valu- able — her own large-minded virtue, intellectual training and social experience in many lands. Mrs. Petre, or Sister Mary of St. Francis, as she was known in religion, was a woman of great personal beauty, and her portrait, with those of the Foundresses, is in the drawing-room of the Convent at Namur. She filled successively the offices of Mistress of Postulants, Mistress of Novices, assistant to the Mother General of the Institute, and Superior of the Convent at Namur, dying in that office in 1886. There are many nuns at Namur who had the privilege of the training and the intimate friendship of Sister Mary of St. Francis; many more in the convents in England. These now number eighteen, and she was the foundress of most of them. One of her spiritual daughters gave me many reminiscences of her ; so that I was the better prepared to appreciate 212 WELL-TEODDEN WAYS. the splendid life recently published in England and America, — and opportunely, in view of the opening of Trinity College, and the natural interest of English-speaking people in her to whom the Institute owes so much of its development in English-speaking lands. I was much interested in the thoroughness of the training of these religious for their life-work. There are two " houses of study " within the enclosure ; one for the Belgian religious, who have to make a four years' course and pass the examinations of the Belgian University before they are admitted to teach in any of the Belgian schools; the other for the English- speaking religious — American, Irish, English, and Scotch being all represented here — in which the course is three years, and the required examinations, those of Oxford, or St. Andrew's University, Scotland. The convent church is most artistic and devotional — the High Altar is of pure white marble, with adoring angels in gold bronze. The buildings devoted to the novitate and pro- fessed house are very large, and there is also a fine boarding school. The convent possesses many art- treasures, among them a Nativity, by Rubens, and an Entombment of Christ, by Vandyke. Namur can be called as Montreal is, "The City of Mary," for nowhere is devotion to the Blessed Mother of God more intense and manifest. There is 213 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN a tradition of a statue of our Lady brought thither by the first preacher of the Faith, a disciple of St. Peter himself. Don John of Austria, the hero of the battle of Lepanto — won through the intercession of Our Lady of the Rosary — is buried in the Church of St. Aubain. Long ago, St. Juliana of Liege, to whom we owe the Feast of Corpus Christi, found refuge in Namur when persecution had driven her from her own convent. The city is at the junction of the rivers Sambre and Meuse, and is crowned by an almost impregnable citadel. It was taken, however, by Louis XIV. of France, and retaken by William of Orange in 1695. There is a chapel, " Our Lady of the Ramparts." The city is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin under the title of her Immaculate Conception, and there are civic processions in her honor twice a year ; on the feasts of the Visitation and the Immaculate Conception. Namur is an exceedingly clean and bright city. I came thither on a Sunday evening. The devotions of the day were over, and, on the business streets, the restaurants, provision shops, repositories of bric-a- brac, etc., were open and brilliantly lighted. No traffic was going on, however, except an occasional purchase of necessary food. Men and women, in holiday costume, walked in groups, or gathered in 214 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. the cheerful shops to chat. There was no noise, no drunkenness. Perhaps it was very reprehensible to have these shops open. In London, at the same hour, all the shops were religiously closed. The liquor saloons^ however, were considerately opened from one to three — for the convenience of people returning from church — and again in the evening from seven till eleven. But you could not buy a cake of soap or a spool of thread. That would be to desecrate the Sunday. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN XXII. A Bit of Irish Ivy. A mother who idealized the land of her birth, who had the poetry, the music, the tragedy of it in her veins, albeit her years in it were brief, and her experience only of a little Cathedral town ; and a father who was, like many other men of Irish blood, an American born in exile, so to speak, gave the writer her earliest impressions of the Island of Destiny. She took most from her father's side, she believed, and grew up in a sublime confidence in Here and Now ; abhoring retrospection and the past tense generally, and believing that the Irish battle could be infallibly and speedily won, if only the Irish would use American weapons, real and symbolic. It is true that sometimes the minor note in a half laughing song, the queer Oriental phrase, of Scriptu- ral strength and vividness, in a ballad of humble life, troubled the depths of being and consciousness ; reminding me of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's words — "A light song overcomes me like a dirge." But it is only truth to say, that I never realized what the heritage of blood meant, until on the day- dawn when, with a knock at my stateroom door, came the magical words — 216 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. " Come on deck quickly ; we are in sight of Ireland." Then up leaped that quicksilver current, fluttering my heart, and throbbing in my temples, and filling my vision with the misty shapes of inherited mem- ories. A hasty toilette, a hastier cup of strong coffee, and I was on deck with an expectant group hushed before the beauty of the land and the sunrise. A low-lying land, sloping gently to the sea ; such a deep dark green, ribbed and crossed with brown furrows. Above it, mists of pearl and violet, shot through with the long red beams of the rising sun. It had been a clouded passage, and this was our first sunrise, almost our first sight of the sun in eight days. Far inward, Queenstown lay like a remote white marble city. On one side, over the castle-like build- ing on Roche's Point, fluttered the red pennant of the Dominion Line. On the other was a deserted stone chapel. In that early prismatic radiance, every thing had a remote, mysterious, utterly dreamlike aspect. I thought of Keats' " Fairy Land forlorn." I thought of Boyle O'Reilly's invocation : Land of Yesterday — and of Tomorrow ? But of all the poems inspired by a glimpse of the beautiful Irish coast, I thought most of Mary Eliza- beth Blake's. Not all of it fitted a mood less joyous 217 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN than its author's, but here are lines for the beat of the Irish blood, whencesoever it turns back to its fountain : Sure if I never had heard What land had given me birth, And cradled the spirit's bird On its first weak flight to earth ; If I never had heard the name of thy sorrow and strength divine, Or felt in my pulses the flame of the fire they had caught from thine, I should know by this rapture alone, that sweeps thro' me now like a flood, That the Irish skies were my own, and my blood was the Irish blood ! Proud did I hold my race, Yet knew not what pride might dare ; Fair did I deem thy face, But never one half so fair ; Like a dream with deep happiness fraught that some happier dawn makes true, Nothing was glad in my thought but gladdens still more in you, From ivied tower and wall, and primrose pale on the lea ; To vales where the bright streams call to the lilting bird In the tree. Yet I was not glad, but burdened with a strange, sweet loneliness, that followed me all the day, and brought all sorts of half-forgotten things clearly before me, as if they rose out of the water, as we journeyed presently in a strong sunshine, and with a chilly breeze across the Irish Sea. I had forgiven the soft-voiced and very communi- 218 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. cative lads who brought on yesterday's papers at Queenstown. I felt more tolerant of the past tense, a little doubtful of the immediate adaptability of American methods, and renewed my faith in " Mal- achy's collar of gold." It was two months later, however, before I actually set foot on Irish soil, and proved that, in this case, at least, distance is not needed to lend enchantment to the view. For, as Thackeray truly said, long ago, Ireland is, after Italy, the loveliest country of Europe. It has in a greater degree even than Italy, the dream-like fairyland charm. It was November when I made my little sojourn on those enchanted shores ; but with the mildness of mid-May in the air. It rained a good deal — it rains a little almost any time in Ireland, for the Weather Queen is easily moved to tears, and has much to sadden her when she looks at the human aspect of the land — but it was a warm and gentle rain, and the sun would break through the cloud and mist in a pleasant, unforeseen Celtic way. The clouds hang very low in Ireland. You would think you could almost reach up and touch them ; and they are always soft gray clouds with a veritable silver lining. Ireland is not greener than England or Wales — but while the verdure of those two lands is of uni- form tint, that of Ireland is strangely variegated. The soil of Ireland is of a rich brown hue, broken 219 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN into little knolls. On the top of these, the grass is of a deep, dark velvety hue. - On the sides, it shades off like moss into the palest greens. Then everywhere is that wonderful " Ivy of Ireland," of which Sarah M. B. Piatt once sang so sweetly. It trails on the earth with the shamrocks, it climbs walls and fences, it drapes the ruins — ah, me, there are too many ruins in Ireland ! — it swathes the newest little railroad stations. It seems to reach out to the wayfarer with clinging and caressing fingers, which would weave a spell about him if he would let them, and transport him back to the days of Deirdre and the sons of Uisne, and all the wonders of her morning twilight of which Ireland's rivers still sing and dream. It was November, but the trees in the parks in Dublin were just yellowing here and there, and had hardly dropped a leaf. The little shrubs with pink and purple berries, were growing cheerfully ; black- berries were ripening on the walls, near the Jesuits' College at Milltown. I saw a few lingering, late white roses in Jane Barlow's garden at Raheny. There was a brave show of asters and dahlias in the little walled garden of Villa Nova, at Blackrock, where Rosa Mulholland — Lady Gilbert — lives in the strict seclusion of her widowhood. Dublin is rather an English-looking city. It suggests London on a very small scale. I never saw so high an average of feminine beauty, and the 220 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. daughters of the wealthier and more cultivated fam- ilies were vastly more stylish, magnetic, and original than the English girls. There is a curious suggestion both of America and France about them, while they have their own delicious wit and pathos to individ- ualize them. Not a few Dublin women have attained distinction by their pens in the Irish Literary Revival, but many of these have made marriages which settle them in London as in the case of Katherine Tynan Hink- son and Mrs. Clement Shorter (Dora Sigerson); or are drawn thither by the literary form of the attrac- tion of gravitation, as in the case of that brilliant novelist and essayist, and althogether fascinating woman, Charlotte O'Connor Eccles. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN XXIII. A Literary Fairy Godfather and Other People of the Pen. Who has worked so long, so modestly, so consist- ently and so fruitfully for the Irish Literary Revival as Father Matthew Russell, S. J., for many years connected with the Jesuits' Church on Upper Gardiner Street, Dublin, now resident at the college on St. Stephen's Green? Here he has the offices of the Irish Monthly, through whose pages many an author now famous in all lands of English speech, first began to find a public. If you spend even a little time among the Irish literary workers, in their own country or in England, who have developed within the past three decades, you will, of necessity, hear much about Father Russell. He has been the foster-father of nearly all of them ; and who has not something to tell you of the value of his kindly criticism, his unfailing encouragement, his practical help in trying times ? " What does he look like ? " asks a young American reader ; for, indeed, Father Russell's helpful interest in young literary workers has bridged the seas, and his name is as well known and beloved among Catholics in the United States as in his native land. A man of medium height, erect and vigorous 222 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. looking, a high-bred face, devoid, however, of pride, but full of sweetness and patience ; the wholesome white and red Irish color, and abundant soft gray hair. "How old?" To this I must answer as the good old Irish woman answered, when asked a similar question about some celebrity, to whom she gave her warm- hearted, admiring loyalty. " Ah, no age at all, dear ; " for verily age has naught to do with men like Father Russell, except to make them better and more interesting. The perpetual youth of the heart and soul has a marvellous effect even upon the poor perishing body ; and, in so far forth, Father Russell is as young as the youngest of his literary proteges. I noted two traits which strikingly individualize him; his kindness and his happy heartedness. 1 cannot imagine how a human being could be kinder, more thoughtful, more unselfish. He comes of good old stock, as they say in Ireland. The Russells of Killowen have written their record large in the political and religious history of their native Ireland, and of the land which for so many centuries has dealt hardly with it. Patriots always, yet their forceful personalities compelled recognition from those who loved not Irish patriotism. The present Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir Charles Russell, is not alone a fervent Catholic, but 223 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN an open and above-board Irish Home Ruler. He is the first Catholic Lord Chief Justice of England since the days of Mary Tudor. It is a little strange that both he and his immediate predecessor, Lord Coleridge, should each have had a brother in the Society of Jesus. Lord Russell's brief visit to America, a few years ago, was chiefly to see his sister, Mother Baptista Russell, the pioneer Sister of Mercy on the Pacific Coast. She has since passed away from earth. Three other daughters of this family became members of the same beautiful religious institute. Father Russell has never visited America. Indeed, he is but little fond of travel. A few years in France when he was preparing for the priesthood, and occasional trips to London, are the only breaks in his quiet life in his beloved Ireland. And how he loves it! The devoted Irish priest is like a priest of olden Israel in this that his patriotism and his religion are inextricably blent together. To serve his nation is to serve his faith and vice versa. It was this intertwined religion and patriotism which led to the establishment of the Irish Monthly. Very interesting was it to hear Father Thomas Finlay, another brilliant Irish Jesuit, tell of the preliminary attempts (in which he was much con- cerned), at founding a literary periodical, which should be truly Catholic, and especially helpful to 224 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. the development of Irish ability in letters. Finally the Irish Monthly was evolved, and Father Russell has been its head and front, and its heart as well, from the beginning. Father Russell took as much pleasure in showing me the pictures of his contributors, which fill a great album, as would a fond father in displaying the olive-branches about his hearth-stone. Now, I humbly hold it against St. Ignatius Loyola that he was so inflexibly a man's man ; and I have known certain of his sons whose spirit to the devout sex might be aptly summed up as " Tolerari potest." But Father Russell is fatherly to the gifted daugh- ters as well as to the gifted sons of Erin, and has opened his columns to literary contributions from other lands, and even from outside the Catholic fold. How sweet is Father Russell's solicitude, not only for the literary fame, but for the personal well-being of all these ! Was there ever a man, of all our men, except John Boyle O'Reilly, who cared so much and so effectively about promoting other people's fame in literature? "He thinks of things for me that I should never have thought of for myself," said one, echoing the grateful thought of a hundred. Father Russell is an author of no small desert himself ; but the putting forth of his literary gift is a part and parcel of his unselfish spirit. He does the editor's and reviewer's work on his 225 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Monthly ; and what prompt kindly reviews, getting at the best thing in the book in a couple of lines, and saying it in the large, gracious way in which the writer would have it said ! Much of Father Russell's other prose-work and many of his poems have made their first appearance also in the Irish Monthly. His collected prose-writings and poems up to date make a charming little library ; and the reason for the being of all these books is the author's desire to share with others the happiness which he has found in God, and in the beautiful things of nature which God would have us enjoy. Father Russell gets such joy out of his religion that it makes him see everything with a sort of spir- itual color of rose. He proves in his own person that to live sincerely in God's presence, and on com- radely terms with the Blessed Ones, by no means lessens a man's love for his fellow-creatures, or his appreciation of all that is beautiful, kindly and sweet in the world about us. Literature is to him not an end, but one of the most effective means to the greatest of ends. Hence for its glorious possibilities of good he would urge it on the gifted children of his native land ; and also that their Faith and Nationhood be not reproached for their lack of diligence in the cultivation of the talents lent them by the Master. No, my dear reader, who have just been so de- lighted with " Nanno," I cannot answer all you ask about Rosa Mulholland — or Lady Gilbert, as the WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. social world knows her — for I was privileged to see her in her house of mourning, and we cannot con- siderately unveil that sacred seclusion. Rosa Mul- holland was married nearly ten years ago to Sir John Gilbert, the historian, of Dublin, and for seven years they lived a life of idyllic happiness in their rose- embowered Villa Nova, at Blackrock, a suburb of Dublin. Death came very suddenly to Sir John Gil- bert, a year ago last May, and ever since his widow lives in deep seclusion, in the home whose associ- ations, erst so happy, are now so blessed, engaged m literary work and works of charity. I have visited the scene of the daily labors of this profound scholar and thinker in the Dublin Museum, and realized, as I glanced at the heaps of folios embodying the results of his patient research and fine discrimination, what a debt his country owes him ; and, further, from the revelations of friends on both sides of the Atlantic, what close companionship with so noble and sweet a nature must have been, and what it must be to go mourning it all one's days. Blessed those unions where Death stretches but cannot break the links. I can at least tell you what Lady Gilbert looks like. She is a slender, stately, and still unusually beautiful woman of the brunette type, with a per- sonality which singularly fits the idealizing character of her work. With her fateful sort of beauty, the wistful mouth, 227 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN the large, dark, deep-set, tragical eyes, she might be pictured as the very embodiment of the romance and mysticism of her native land. She has woven the spell of literary enchantment about us marvellously in her romances, " The Wild Birds of Killeevy " and "The Wicked Woods of Tobereevil," to name but two of her most popular stories ; and how thankful we are, in these days of minute, sordid and unimportant realism in fiction, to the novelist who can take us into the realm where at once the beautiful and desirable become the intrin- sically probable and our dearest dreams come true. Our author's discoverer, in her own girlhood, and his later years, was Dickens. With all her personal beauty and magnetism, and her rare social grace, she was in these days the shyest of women ; and evaded as far as possible, all personal meetings with literary celebrities. Indeed, her desire for retirement has never left her. She travelled on the continent of Europe, loved Italy, but loved still better the green- sward and changeful skies and sea-beaten coasts of her native land. For the years before her marriage she lived with her mother and a younger sister, Clara Mulholland, who is also favorably known in literature. An older sister is the wife of Sir Charles Kussell, the Lord Chief Justice of England. Among other memorable visits in Ireland, was my afternoon in the kindly companionship of Father Rus- 228 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. sell, at " The Cottage," at Raheny, near Dublin, the abode of Jane Barlow, author of " Irish Idyls," and other Irish sketches and stories, which have attracted the admiration of many a reader who cannot boast a drop of Irish blood. Indeed, it was such a one, a publisher of fine literary instinct, who seven years ago, bestowed on me the first book of Jane Barlow's I ever saw, calling my especial attention to its merits. It was the Irish Idyls ; and presently, I was breaking my heart over the pathos, and healing it with the comedy of life in Lisconnel. It was a day in mid-November when we visited Jane Barlow, and though it had been warm and sunshiny, the slight evening chill made the open fire in the drawing-room very welcome, and the " afternoon tea" equally so. One side of the apartment was completely filled with a fine organ — the delight of Miss Barlow's brother, who is a Protestant clergyman. There was the usual dark, substantial furniture of an Old World drawing room, some good pictures, including an oil-painting of Miss Barlow's mother, whom her famous daughter strikingly resembles ; such souvenirs of travel and suggestive bric-a-brac as accumulate in the homes of cultivated and studious people. Miss Barlow's attractive sister received the expected guests most cordially. Presently Miss Barlow came in ; a slight, fair-complexioned woman dressed in 229 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN black, with abundant auburn hair, worn very simply, thin, refined features, and large blue eyes, in which her whole life and soul seem concentrated. She is a fragile-looking woman, with a low soft voice, which one does not hear often enough. She is an admirable listener, but very reserved of speech. Her vitality has gone so abundantly into her books that you feel she should conserve carefully the small amount she has left for her material wants. Miss Barlow is not a Catholic, but she has so deep a sympathy with the Irish poor, that she naturally sympathizes with the faith which makes their heroic endurance of hard conditions possible. Don't you remember that sweet story, " Mrs. Martin's Com- pany ? One is surprised to know that Miss Barlow's total residence on the Western coast of Ireland, whose scenery and people she describes so faithfully, covered less than three weeks. She has sojourned for some time in Constantinople and the country round about, and has several sketches in result. It is not strange that these are as vivid and sympathetic as the Irish sketches, for it is not hard, after all, to translate the Orientals to the Irish. They have no end of points of resem- blance. Miss Barlow, like Lady Gilbert, is also a poet, though we believe her poems are yet uncollected. If she had never written any but that heart-breaking 230 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. bit, "A Misunderstanding," suggested by the famine in Connemara in the spring of 1898, it would have given her a sure place among the poets of the human heart. Dublin has been always the centre of a charming social and intellectual life ; and this, without reference to the presence of the Lord-Lieutenant and his little court at Dublin Castle. The official circle, of course, makes a large part of the gayety of the season, and the brilliancy of the social pageant. But the Irish of intensest Nationalism have perhaps more than a pro- portionate share of the cultivation, the intellectual ability, the social grace and beauty of the city. If one wants an accurate picture of Dublin life in all its aspects, he will find it in that really notable book of last year, " A Triumph of Failure." It was my good fortune to meet people who might have been the originals of the most charming charac- ters in its pages, both among the clergy and the laity — though, unhappily for myself, I had not the privi- lege of meeting its brilliant author, the Rev. P. A. Sheehan, of Doneraile, whose name, since the publi- cation of "My New Curate," has become so well known in America. A prominent man in the political and literary life of Dublin is Count Plunkett, patriotic Irishman and devoted Catholic ; an authority on many phases of his country's chequered history, especially on the Irish part in the Jacobite Wars. 231 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Count Plunkett sojourned long and studiously in Italy, and is now a recognized exponent of the painting, sculpture and architecture of that land of beauty. He visited the United States on his wedding journey, more than ten years ago, and he and his charming wife made many friends, as their sojourn was long, and their travels naturally more extended than those of the ordinary English-speaking tourist from the other side, who is beginning to " do " America as too many of us " do " Europe, in from six weeks to two months of the summer. Count Plunkett is singularly blessed in his home- life, with the rosy little dwellers in its populous nur- sery ; and the sweet, clever and altogether womanly Agnes Deane of " The Triumph of Failure " above mentioned, has a duplicate in the ruling spirit of this happy little realm. Among the literary people, natives of Dublin, whom I met in London, I recall with especial pleas- ure an old-time literary friend, Katharine Tynan Hinkson, established in that city since her marriage. Mrs. Hinkson's poetry is very well known on this side of the Atlantic. John Boyle O'Reilly and his associates, and the late Alfred Williams of the Providence Journal were, I think, the first in America to greet the true poetry and the great promise revealed in "Louise de la Valliere " and " Shamrocks." 232 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Literary London early welcomed Katharine Tynan to its choicest circles, for William and Christina Rosetti had been greatly impressed by her poetry, and had had her for their guest. The two books named above have had many successors, both in poetry, novels, and collections of short stories and character sketches. Mr. Hinkson also devotes himself to literature, and the two so congenially mated have a pretty little home at Blenheim Crescent. Another young Irish literary worker of much personal distinction and originality is Charlotte O'Conor Eccles. Of notable Irish patriotic an- cestry, and knowing her native Dublin in its every nook and corner, in all its historic and religious associations, she is now one of the busiest of Lon- don's workers in literature and journalism. Long sojourns in France, Germany, and Austria during the earlier years of her still short life, have broadened and deepened her character and experi- ence; and her knowledge of languages, and her habits of observation and study make it impossible that she should not profit of every new outlook which the vicissitudes of life afford her. I met Miss Eccles first in Boston, when she was making a few months' visit in this country two years ago. In Boston she enjoyed exceedingly the literary people among whom her lines were cast ; and they, in turn, were charmed with the cosmopolitan-minded 233 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Irish girl, with her bright, handsome, expressive face, distinguished presence, and delightful wit. Our next meeting was in the green and white study, giving on a pretty little garden full of late September flowers in the Eccles' home in Mar- gravine Gardens, then not long bereaved of the gentle invalid mother. Miss Eccles is perhaps better known in purely literary circles by her pen-name, Hal Godfrey, under which she has published one of the cleverest and most successful novels of last year, "The Rejuvena- tion of Miss Semaphore," — a piece of delicious drollery. A more recent book, bearing Miss Eccles' own name, and published in America, is a fine translation of one of Henry Sienciewicz' most fascinating though sombre stories, " Peasants in Exile," first appearing in the Ave Maria, Notre Dame, Ind., of whose editor, the Rev. Daniel E. Hudson, she had those appreciative things to say that an American Catholic realizing the great work he is doing for literature and religion, loves to hear. Miss Eccles has a gift for brilliant, incisive, and memorable epigram. Her studies of Irish character are charming ; always sympathetic, and with a large- ness to be looked for in one of almost cosmopolitan experience. Miss Eccles' younger sister Mary is also a news- paper and magazine writer. They are near kindred 234 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. of Mother Mary Austin Carroll, the gifted author of the successive "Leaves from the Annals of the Sisters of Mercy," and a score of other books, historical, biographical, juvenile. NEW FOOTSTEPS IN XXIV. Religious Well Springs in Ireland. When one considers the small territory of Ireland, the poverty of her people, her constantly disturbed political condition, the drain of immigration, even from a time long antedating the great exodus of '48 and '49 ; and further, the most important fact that it is only seventy years since Catholic Emancipation, one's wonder grows beyond measure at the multitude of missionary colleges, and of most diffusive religious institutes which have had their beginnings in Ireland. Politically, their warmest friends cannot, alas ! cite the Irish as models of unity ; though now, with the Town Councils in operation, and the United Irish League promising a richer growth than even the Land League and the National League enjoyed in former years, much lost ground on the road to Home Rule seems to be in the way of retrieval ; and the people likely to compel unity among the leaders. But in religious matters it is quite different. Is there aught to surpass the unity of the Irish in the Catholic Faith ? How they have held to it in their poverty and multiplied martyrdoms, when rich and powerful nations fell away — untouched by schism or heresy, spiritual-minded, of cosmopolitan breadth of view, sacrificial, persevering, unconquerable ! 236 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. How wonderfully they adapt themselves to the renunciations of the priesthood, and the stern dis- cipline of the religious state ! How fruitful they are in vocations ; having always enough for home needs and something to spare for their beloved America, for England, Australia, Central Africa, and all the isles of all the seas ! Even while the penal laws were in force, religious institutes for the instruction of the sons and daughters of the poor, sprang up amid the ruins of the Visible Church in Ireland, like her own irrepressible ever- greens, and after '29, what a revival of missionary colleges, institutes of charity and education ! My stay in Ireland was too short to permit the extensive visiting of religious foundations, which would have been so proud a privilege and pleasure. I saw something of the College at St. Stephen's Green, Dublin, where Cardinal Newman had been president of the attempted Catholic University in Ireland. At least, we owe to that experiment his great book, a mine of wisdom even for the instruc- tors of youth in a humbler way, " The Idea of a University." I visited the beautiful, artistic and most devout little chapel, in which Newman habitually celebrated Mass. The College is in the hands of the Jesuits, but not the chapel, though the latter is still open to visitors, and Masses are celebrated at a fairly early hour both on week days and Sundays. I visited the Convent of Mercy, on Baggott Street, 237 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Dublin, cradle of the famous Sisterhood, which has spread in little more than fifty years into every land wherein the English language is spoken. Here that devout Catholic and exquisite lady, Catharine McAu- ley, and her companions founded a religious order without planning or premeditating so grave a step, but simply under the irresistible propidsion of the Spirit of God. The convent is dark and solid-looking without, its front flat to the street ; but simple and cheery within. The garden is in the rear, and here is the grave of Mother McAuley, with the simplest inscription on a plain marble slab. But it never lacks a few flowers from the convent's house-plants and the loving hands of the dear mother's spiritual daughters. To come here seemed like revisiting a place already familiar, for had I not eagerly read the graphic life of Mother McAuley by Mother Mary Austin Carroll, and her " Leaves from the Annals " ? There are great schools and other representations of the work of the Institute at Baggott Street, but time failed me to see them in detail. The novitiate has been transferred to Carysfort, the old mansion of the nobleman of that title, but it has been remodelled somewhat for conventual needs. Here they treasure many a souvenir of Mother McAidey. I saw the fine silver-mounted inkstand of her earlier life, duly inscribed. There is a beauti- ful chapel, approached by a long corridor, filled with WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. devout pictures and inscriptions. Withal, Carysfort seemed to me very like an American convent. I had a somewhat similar feeling for the splendid motherhouse of the Loretto Nuns at Rathmines. This flourishing institute for the higher education of girls is of Irish origin, the foundation of Mother Mary Teresa Ball, whose noble portrait bust stands in the front hall. I noticed here, among other representations of the work of the eminent Irish sculptor, Hogan, a replica of his Dead Christ, the original of which I had seen under the High Altar of St. Teresa's Church, Dublin. The convent is very beautiful, the appointments for the pupils being exceedingly comfortable and in the fine taste of spaciousness and simplicity. There were a few American girls here, and they kept their flags in evidence ! Most of the girls belong to wealthy and some to titled families. Said Father Russell, as we entered a room full of little curly-heads of six to eight years : " How many children in this room have the name of the great St. Bridget?" Three little beauties rose up proudly to claim it. It was a simple, but very suggestive incident. The religious of the Sacred Heart have a large day school in the city, and a boarding-school, which we visited, in the suburbs of Dublin. I saw the pupils at play in the spacious grounds, in their neat black 239 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN uniforms, and they looked exactly like the pupils of the same order at the Trinita in Home, or at Man- hattanville, New York. A tower of strength in its splendid unity and effective organization is this order, to the cause of religion and scholarship ; a flower of modern France, but nourishing everywhere else, as if indigenous ; at home in ancient Greece, as in Western America or New Zealand. A day or two before leaving Ireland, I spent a few hours at Maynooth, and saw something of its his- toric edifices under the guidance of the Rev. John F. Hogan, editor of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, and nephew of the Very Rev. John B. Hogan, S. S., D.D., president of our own St. John's Seminary, Boston. It was a warm November day, with sunshine of a pale rose-tint, and the late autumn flowers on every side. A short railway ride, brought me to the station ; but thence to the college, was my second ride on an Irish jaunting car. Irish poets have celebrated this national conveyance till its fame has crossed all of the seven seas. I don't like it, but I am a good climber, and an excellent holder-on. First, I saw the noble old ruin, " the castle " mantled with ivy, near the entrance of the grounds. Then through the great gates, to feast my eyes on the vast front of the college, and the stately Gothic church to the extreme right. 240 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. There was something so awe-inspiring- in the height and breadth of the pile of masonry before me that only the remembrance of a friend at court, so to speak, saved me from a too depressing realization of personal inconsequence. Dr. Hogan, whose pen has made him so well known to many who have never seen him — he is a Dante scholar and has just published a new " Life and Works" of that great poet — is a tall, dark, youthful-looking man, with regular features and kindly aspect, the worthy representative of a most virile priesthood, rather reticent, yet with no trace of distrustful reserve ; full of that intensity of conviction, purpose, feeling, held in check, which mark all men who accomplish work worth doing and notably influence their fellow men. He showed me the beautiful church ; the vestments and other gifts of the late Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who loved Ireland and its great ecclesiastical training school ; the libraries, the Aula Maxima, built by the munificence of an American alumnus, the Right Rev. Mgr. James McMahon, founder of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America ; the reception rooms and dining halls. Everywhere were portraits ; those of the thurch- men and statesmen connected with the foundation of Maynooth, in 1795, among the latter, of the great Protestant statesman, Edmund Burke, whose elo- quence prepared the way for it ; of another Protest- 241 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN ant, William Robert, second Duke of Leinster, who gave the site for it ; also of William, fourth Earl Fitzwilliam, who was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, in 1795 ; and of John, second Earl Camden, who succeeded him in the same year, both friends of Maynooth ; and as all these things befell, during Ireland's brief experience of self-government — 1782- 1800 — a portrait of still another of Maynooth's Protestant friends, Henry Grattan. Then there is a portrait of Dr. Hussey, the first president, a friend of Dr. Johnson, and of whom Boswell wrote that " he was eminent not only for his powerful eloquence, but for his various abilities and acquirements." There are more portraits of presidents, portraits of the Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, authors, scientists, who revere Maynooth as their Alma Mater. Those of later years came back to her centenary from Australia, South Africa, America, as well as from every part of Ireland and England to render her their filial homage. Grand faces, most of those displayed in corridor and reception room, some typi- cally Irish, some, though of Irishmen, showing traces of almost every nationality under heaven, as one is wont to find in every assemblage of men of Irish blood. We saw students taking their exercise in the grounds, men representing many different lands, but all slender, active, alert-looking — quite like the students of any of the American seminaries. 242 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. In a typical professors parlor some rare and beau- tiful pictures, and the glow of the open fire offset the bookcases that ran up so high, and bore so for- midable an array of gravely clad scholarship. Maynooth is a missionary college, but there were no lack of reminders that Ireland was a missionary nation before Maynooth was dreamed of. Though Maynooth was the slight concession of a Protestant government to a Catholic land, and had some government aid until 1870, this was never accounted as more than a small instalment of jus- tice, and the priests of its training were patriots always, anxious to help their poor country by every legitimate means to those rights, to which, as Leo XIII. says, it cannot be supposed that Ireland is not as well entitled as any other land. Perhaps the great Archbishop McHale, of Tuam, one of Maynooth's most illustrious sons, the devoted friend and helper of Daniel O'Connell, best embodies the patriotic spirit of Maynooth. It is not necessary to dwell on Maynooth as a citadel of rigid orthodoxy ; nor to enumerate the theological, philosophical, liturgical, scientific, and biographical works, the translations, etc., of Dr. Murray — the Protestant Whateley's great antago- nist — Dr. Crolly, Dr. McHale, Dr. O'Kane, Mgr. Russell, the Abbe Dare ; Professor Callan, Professor Molloy, Dr. McCarthy, Archbishop Walsh, Arch- bishop Carr, and others. 248 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN Every year, in the annual meeting of the Arch- bishops, after the summer ordinations, and for the conferring of degrees, the greatness of the spirit of Maynooth, and its advance on the path of true progress is strikingly manifested. There is something, however, which one can feel better than one can express, after even a few brief hours within these stately walls. It is the keen consciousness that here is concreted the peculiar religious spirit that marks the Irish race at its best. The dominant characteristics of this spirit, it seems to me, are faith and reverence. What is there like the Irish faith anyhow ? And that which keeps it strong and bright is its reverence — its holy fear. One says, sometimes, in contemplating certain aspects of the many-sided Irish character, that Ire- land would be more at home in the Mediterranean than in the Northern seas. Yet her thought of God and her expression of it is not Southern. Nothing more false to life can be imagined than the religious expressions which certain writers of fiction put on Irish lips. Whoever heard an Irish- man say " Howly St. Patrick ? " Who ever heard from anyone of Irish blood " Wid the help of the Saints ! " etc ? There is a tremendous reverent reserve — an effort, so to speak, to show the creature's distance from the Creator, in the prayerful ejaculations of the Irish. 244 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. They do not make themselves at home in God's House, like the Italians ; they do not talk familiarly of the " good God " with the French, nor of the " dear God " with the Germans. They say, Hebraically, " The Lord God," " Al- mighty God." They say, in moments of fear, " Lord have mercy on us!" "God save us!" "The Cross of Christ be about us ! " They address Our Lady as " Holy Mother of God," or, u Blessed Mother," or " Blessed Virgin." In their rare moments of religious expansiveness, they will say, especially of the little sick or dying child — " God love him ! " For with all the communicativeness of the Irish, there is a sacred reserve among them on matters of personal religious experience; as there is, too, strangely enough, in affairs of the heart. Yet, where is the confidence in God to surpass that of the poorest of the Irish in presence of trans- cendent sorrow, or of death itself ? Who says more sweetly and sincerely — "God's will be done!" or " Welcome be the will of God " ? Something of all this one feels at Maynooth, the silent wt power house," so to speak, of that electrical, religious energy which is felt from the Irish race to the ends of the earth. Not alone in Maynooth, or in other holy places, is that singular quietude felt. But elsewhere it has 245 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN not the same good cause to exist, and the American of Irish blood, restless and impatient of all delay, chafes at it in ordinary life. " But don't you know," said a clever woman not of Irish blood, to me, when we spoke of that, and of the Irish in the fastest marches beyond seas — " it is always quiet in the power-house/' WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. XXV. Contrasted Voyages. On the little steam tug which took out from Queenstown the few passengers bound for Boston to the Dominion of the Dominion Line, on that hazy, late November morning, there was a little family group which drew my eyes — a middle-aged father, a young-faced mother, two stalwart boys verging on manhood, and a little girl. They were nice-appearing, well-bred people, and were all looking forward eagerly as we approached the big boat ; and looking forward, too, I saw among a little group of nuns on deck, one leaning over the railing and wav- ing welcoming hands to the family party on the tug. I learned, after we got on board, that the lovely young nun was the oldest daughter of the little family, who had left her happy Irish home a few years before to enter the Novitiate of the Society of Notre Dame des Missions, at its mother-house in Paris. After her novitiate she had been assigned to an English house of the Society, and was now one of a party of four religious, volunteers for a mission in far-off Manitoba. Her family had come for perhaps their last chance in this world to see the face of their dear one, but they were brave, and they met with cheerful eyes. The cabin passengers withdrew, with fit delicacy, and left the little group to their own last looks and words. As we were moving out, 247 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN the little nun, pale but smiling, was still standing at the deck-rail, looking shoreward, but now at the fast-retreating boat, and soon at the mist which hid the very outline of her native land from sight. Shall she ever see it again, with those who make it home, until she looks down on it, like the Blessed Damozel, from the ramparts of God's Heaven ? But this daughter of a sacrificial people did not long look back. As the only English-speaking mem- ber of the little community, she had much to do for her French Sisters. Whose sacrifice was greatest — her mother's or her own ? A priest told me of an aged widow, living alone but for the kindly neighbors, in a little village cabin in Ireland. Her sons had died or emigrated. She had had a daughter — among the oldest of her little flock. Where was she ? asked the sympathetic visitor. kt Oh, Father, I gave her to God long ago. She's now in a convent in Texas, God be praised." " And you alone ! " "Father, when she was leaving her Irish convent long ago — I had the boys then — we exchanged crucifixes with each other; there's mine that was hers beyond. We meet in prayer every day, and it won't be long till we meet in Heaven, glory be to God ! Would I grudge her to Him at the start, or want to take her back ! " So it is that up in Manitoba, or down in Texas, or in mid-Australia, or Southern Africa, or Peru, or 248 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. Chili or Argentina, you meet the Irish priest or nun. And, all the time, ' ' The heart of the Irish mother Is as true as God, And as sorrowful as Christ." The Sisters of Notie Dame des Missions were travelling under the protection of the Rt. Rev. Bishop Legal, Coadjutor of the Diocese of St. Albert, and two Oblate Fathers, and it was in this diocese, not so very far from the Arctic Circle, that these refined and delicate women were to have their field of labor, teaching the children of white settlers or the little aborigines, as need might be. The library was at the disposal of the missionaries and the few Catholics on board, in the earliest morn- ing watches ; and there every day, long before the dawn had brightened over the waste of waters, three Masses were duly celebrated by the good Bishop and the Oblate Fathers, his companions. Never had the offering of the Holy Sacrifice seemed so awe-inspiring as in this little room, with its tiny improvised altar, and the murmur of the sea for accompaniment to the voice of the priest. One table held all the cabin passengers on this trip, and the missionaries sat together at the lower end. We all came to know them well before the voyage ended ; for, though reserved, they were kindly ^ and even the shy French nuns smiled sweetly at the 249 NEW FOOTSTEPS IN recurrent evidences of the respectful interest which they inspired. The captain who went without a wink of sleep for an incredible time, because of the dense fog which kept him on the bridge, was very kind to the little religious family on board, and his consideration was deeply appreciated. " For their sakes the sea is smooth," I said to him one day, as we had a few turns on the deck together, and he praised the brave spirit that carried them into the Northern wilds for God's sake ; for this stalwart Welshman was serious and reverent-minded. For their sakes, also, I verily believe, we got in a full day ahead of the time for which we were sched- uled, thus escaping one of the most destructive storms of many years. What a contrast this quiet return voyage to the bright outgoing, while summer heats lingered, and the skies, though clouded, were warm ! Then we filled the saloon of the New England, at meal-times, and the decks were populous with promenaders. She was taking over many English and a few Irish people of means, who had been spending the summer in the United States and Canada. A few bright American girls were outward bound for study in their several specialties in England and Germany. Several Boston physicians and journalists, worn out with hard work in an unusually hot summer, were 250 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. going over, just for the sake of the sea-voyage ; and the genial Commissioner of Boston's penal and reformatory institutions, for a brief study of foreign institutions of the same sort. There were striking individualities not a few ; young people and flirtations galore ; children who raced and climbed from dawn to dark, and had appetites as insatiable as the sea; singers and dramatic readers enough for us to organize a splendid entertainment, at which the friend of Rudyard Kipling from South Africa applauded to the echo that poem of Boyle O'Reilly's, beginning : " The world was made when a man was born ; " and at which the Lord Chief Baron Pallas, of Dublin, was our splendid presiding officer. But there were no concerts on the return trip ; no material for flirtations ; no little golden-haired mascot following her dear Captain like a pet kitten. Above all, and saddest for the writer, there was no "Club of Seven," with its moving Boston spirit serious of face, when he could control those sparkling Irish eyes. How often I thought of his immediate fraternization with everyone, including the stiffest and most literal Britishers on board ! Was it on the first night out that he played pool with Sir A. C — , and made the sturdy Liverpool merchant take him off on a lark as if he were a long lost brother ? Certainly it was not much later than the second day, that he 251 NEW FOOTSTEPS IX was presenting all the passengers to the dignified Lord Chief Baron. Many a time as I paeed the much shorter deck of the Dominion — a miniature New England — I felt as if I must meet him " looking for some one to play with," as we used to say in the mornings of the voyage out. We had an Anglo-Scotch commercial traveller on our homeward voyage, who boasted that, al- though he lived very near Charlotte Bronte's old home at Haworth, he had never visited it; still worse, had never improved his frequent opportunities to see Melrose Abbey. By force of contrast, I thought of that splendid American Scotchman on our out-going trip, with his face set towards " hame and mither," with his keen appreciation of all literature, and his patriotic pride in the literature of the land of Robert Burns. He read for us about the Old Doctor of Drumtochty, in " The Bonnie Brier Bush," at our entertainment ; and my last sight of him was with his head reverently bared, as some steerage passengers were taken off at Queenstown, saying softly, " God bless them every one." It had been warm and cloudy going out ; it was cold and cloudy coining back. I walked for hours against the breeze, longing to go back and winter in Rome. But at the first sight of the three-hilled city of my 252 WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. home, the seven hills of the Eternal City receded into cloudland; my long idle fingers twitched for the familiar feeling of a pen, and my unprecedented vacation was as the memory of a tale that is told, or of a vivid dream upon the edge of waking. THE END. W 95 w\/\ • ** v % «.» * Ay ^ "> V 1, V *J •^•d* *°*. r A* >• * "^. ",