err,' and then certainly a squire is infallible." What follows however must have been still more unpalatable than the remembrance of a saying only worthy of a Sir Fopling Flutter: "But in his next scolding paragraph he is more unhappy in his anger, and quarrels with the honourable person for saying he was now fettered in business of more unpleasant natures, which he will have to be state matters. But the squire was very much mistaken, for I by accident once heard that honourable person complain that two tedious suits in chancery had almost deprived him of the right use of any time; and yet I think he need not be ashamed of those services he endeavours to do his king and country; so that either way the squire's displeasure is very unjustly ap. plied and, above all men, this angry squire ought not to be his interpreter: but his fortune and that of the honourable person's are different; for the squire mis takingly charges him that the corruption of a poet was the generation of a statesman; but, on the contrary, the squire having been employed as a penny statesman under his father, a zealous committeeman, and Sir Gilbert Pickering, a crafty privy-councillor in the late times, it may more properly be applied to the squireThat the corruption of a statesman is the generation of a poet laureate." Dryden was fond of the notion that there are genealogies in sense as well as in nonsense. Shadwell is the son of Flecknoe : Thus Tom the second reigns like Tom the first. "Milton," he says, "was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax. Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transferred into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease." Marvell, who died Flecknoe, in a well-known poem; and in 1678, speaks contemptuously of in the same year Dryden refers to him in print, as a poet of scandalous memory, just then dead. Malone supposes that Flecknoe died in 1678. Marvell tells us that he played upon the lute, and Dryden has immortalised his skill upon the same instrument :— My warbling lute, the lute I whilom strung When to King John of Portugal I sung a passage in Mac Flecknoe which Scott was unable to illustrate. That Flecknoe had tried to " allure" (to use Marvell's expression) King John of Portugal with his lute we may safely assert, for never stranger he says was more indebted than he to Joam IV. of Portugal. If R. F. was not Richard Flecknoe, who then was he? I cannot suppose that the initials were chosen at random, or even employed as a disguise. Shadwell and Theobald and Cibber were pilloried for other offences than their dullness, and so I conceive was Flecknoe, and, as I see reason to believe, pilloried, as Shadwell's predecessor, for this very letter. PETER CUNNINGHAM. LEGENDS OF THE MONASTIC ORDERS.* THERE is only one ground on which the Church of Rome may properly be styled Catholic. Its claim to pre-eminent authority is altogether visionary; its boasted unity falls to nothing when properly investigated; its pretended doctrinal certainty does not exist. But it is Catholic in this, and in this only-that by the exercise of the very perfection of worldly wisdom it has been able to apply every power and faculty of man, every superstition and imagination, every passion, prejudice, and fear, to its own account and purpose. It has imprinted the character of its system upon them all; it has applied them all to the maintenance of its wonderful and comprehensive scheme. This kind of Catholicism is peculiarly obvious in the portion of her interesting subject which is dealt with by Mrs. Jameson in the beautiful volume before us. From a very early period there have been, as it was natural to suppose there would be, several classes of persons * Legends of the Monastic Orders, as represented in the Fine Arts; forming a second series of Sacred and Legendary Art. By Mrs. Jameson. Sq. crown 8vo. 1850. who have loved to seclude themselves from the world. There have been first the Visionaries. The active duties of family, station, and society were a weariness to them. "Man delighted them not, nor woman neither." Dwelling in thought on the mysteries of our being, longing with ardour irresistible to pierce through the veil which separates the visible from the unseen, panting for communion with the spiritual, and wildly imagining that that communion could be more easily obtained in the solitary desert, or in the solemn cloister, than in the peopled city, such enthusiasts have in all ages sought to live a life of dreams. Another class of persons to whom solitude has been especially attractive is composed of those whose meek spirits have been worsted in the combat with a heartless world. These long to quit the field on which they have waged an unsuccessful war. They are the wounded deer who leave the flock, and, in the depths of a self-sought seclusion, languish forth the remnant of their disappointed lives. To both these classes solitude is a state of dreaming self-fostered and indulged, and the dreams of both of them partake of the character of their dispositions and of their past histories. To some their dreams bring a sweet and happy peace, to others a wildness almost of despair. The visions of some have in them a bright morning radiance which seems a foretaste of coming glory; those of others tell of nothing but madness and debasement both of body and soul. The brightness of an open heaven, peopled with saints and martyrs, and the sight of angels ascending and descending in their willing ministry towards mankind, lure on these Zionward travellers, and are thought to be revealed for the encouragement of the weak in faith; whilst imaginary demoniacal struggles with powers of darkness, deadly combats with the Prince of Evil, typify, if they do not attest, the strength of the bondage of Satan, and the difficulty, even to the verge of what is possible for man, to regain a freedom once bartered for the pleasures of sin. During the middle ages the monastic life was sought by another class of persons-men and women who were but lightly influenced either by the mysticism of the eastern Dervish or the weariness of a broken and a contrite spirit. beautifully remarks, "there existed for the thoughtful, the gentle, the inquiring, the devout spirit, no peace, no security, no home, but the cloister. There, Learning trimmed her lamp; there, Contemplation 'pruned her wings;' there, the traditions of Art, preserved from age to age by lonely studious men, kept alive in form and colour the idea of a beauty beyond that of earth,-of a might beyond that of the spear and the shield,-of a To this we may add another and a stronger divine sympathy with suffering humanity. claim on our respect and moral sympathies. The protection and the better education given to women in these early communities; the venerable and distinguished rank assigned to them when, as governesses of their order, they became in a manner dignitaries of the Church; the introduction of their beautiful and saintly effigies, clothed with all the insignia of sanctity and authority, into the decoration of places of worship and books of devotion, did more, perhaps, for the general cause of womanhood than all the boasted institutions of chivalry." "For six centuries," as Mrs. Jameson To these classes must be added the pretenders and impostors who were as rife in the seclusion of a cloister as in the world at large; the lazy and worthless, who assumed the cowl but dreamt little of its duties, bringing discredit by their misconduct upon the religious profession which they assumed. In considering these various phases of monastic seclusion the Church of Rome has done little in the way of endeavouring to discriminate between them. She has adopted them all, accepted them all, and put her stamp of, so-called, Catholicity upon them all. The pretender who feigned revelations to get the benefit of a name, the wild recluse who in the visions of a disturbed imagination saw more devils than vast hell can hold, the amiable enthusiast who peopled his cell with angelic visitants, and the philanthropist who never passed beyond his cloister save for the performance of marvels of holy love or self-denying charity, have all found equally easy access to Rome's roll of saints. They have all been embraced within that wide portion of the pale of her belief which to the uninquiring members of her church is the region of superstitious faith, and to persons of intellect is a debateable land of scepticism, and not unfrequently even of contemptuous infidelity. All alike have been commended both to the devotion of the faithful and to the genius of the artist. It is in the last of these characters that they are here regarded by Mrs. Jameson. She commences her book with St. Benedict and the early Benedictines, alike "first in point of time, and first in interest and importance, not merely in the history of art but in the history of civilisation." "The annalists," she tells us, "of the Benedictine order proudly reckon up the worthies it has produced since its first foundation in 529; viz. 40 popes, 200 cardinals, 50 patriarchs, 1,600 archbishops, 4,600 bishops, and 3,600 canonized saints. It is a more legitimate source of pride that by their order were either laid or preserved the foundations of all the eminent schools of learning of modern Europe." St. Benedict is most certainly to be known amongst the saints represented by art, by one or all of the following emblems-1. By a raven, which is the shape in which the devil haunted him, disturbing his devotion by hovering over his prayer-book and suggesting evil thoughts; 2. The raven has sometimes a loaf of bread in his beak, to indicate an attempt made to poison the saint with the staff of life; 3. A broken glass containing wine alludes to a similar attempt to poison the saint with wine. In each instance Benedict made the sign of the cross, when in the one case the raven appeared and flew away with the exorcised bread, and in the other the glass cracked and expelled the poisoned wine. 4. A thorn-bush commemorates the saint's achievement of rolling himself in a prickly thicket in order to overcome the sinful suggestions of his demoniacal tormentor, the raven. Bushes which have been propagated from the very briars thus consecrated by the saint are shown to the faithful at Subiaco. His 5th emblem is a broken sieve, the history of which is that when he was a child his nurse borrowed a sieve, and was unlucky enough to break it. The accident however was of little moment, for the youthful saint dried her tears, GENT. MAG. VOL. XXXIV. and repaired the sieve by speaking a word. Of Benedictine saints who are interesting to English people, the first to be mentioned is St. Bavon, the patron of Ghent and Haarlem, of whom we have a fine sketch in our National Gallery. Mrs. Jameson tells us that he was a nobleman born about 589. He was converted by the preaching of St. Amand, and retired from the world to a hollow tree in the forest of Malmedun, near Ghent, and there he lived as a hermit, his only food being the wild herbs, and "his drink the crystal well." "The chapel erected in his honour is now the cathedral of Ghent, for which Rubens painted the great altarpiece. It represents the saint in his secular costume of a knight and a noble, presenting himself before Amand bishop of Maestricht; he is ascending the steps of a church; Amand stands above under a portico, and lower down are seen the poor to whom St. Bavon has distributed all his worldly goods. The original sketch for this composition [in the National Gallery] is the more valuable because of the horrible ill-treatment which the large picture has received from the hands of a succession of restorers." Of his emblems a huge stone, emblematical of the burden of his sins, and which the saint is endeavouring to carry, is the one best known. Of St. Giles, another saint known in England, it is said by Mrs. Jameson that he " appears to have been a saint by nature," so early did his sanctity manifest itself. He was a royal Athenian, but forsook crown and sceptre, and dwelt in a wilderness in the South of France, where he lived upon the herbs and fruits of the forest, and upon the milk of a doe which took up her abode with him. The doe, being wounded by archers, was tracked, and thus the saint was discovered living in a cavern. He is often represented as himself pierced by an arrow aimed at the doe. St. Helena, born in Britain, the mother of Constantine, and whose name is "inseparably connected with the discovery, or the invention' as it is not improperly termed, of the holy cross at Jerusalem," will always be recognised by her imperial robes and the cross which she upholds with her hand. St. Alban is represented "in 4 H hand. some old effigies which remain," like him, and the King has a label from his mouth on which is written, 'Bring ye him before me.' In the third and fourth he is in the presence of the King, who kneels at his feet, and grants him as much land as between sun and sun he shall encircle by a furrow drawn with his plough, to which he is to yoke two stags caught wild from the forest: the inscriptions, 'Go, take them and tame them,' Go home and take ground with the plough.' In the fifth compartment he is ploughing with two stags; the inscription is, 'Here St. Robert ploweth with them.' St. Edmund, the king and martyr, bears, as Mrs. Jameson informs us, an arrow in his hand (as in the diptych at Wilton), and is sometimes accompanied by a grey wolf crouching at his side, in memory of the tradition that an animal of that species was found watching over the saint's severed head at the time of the discovery of his remains. Mrs. Jameson relates the legends of St. Dunstan, but has not met with any historical pictures relating to his life. She gives a reduced transcript of the curious drawing attributed to himself which is in the Bodleian, and was engraved in Hickes's Thesaurus, in which the saint is represented kneeling at the feet of the Saviour. Under St. Edward the Confessor we have a notice of the legendary sculptures at Westminster, and an engraving of the Wilton diptych, in which the Confessor is represented with the Baptist and St. Edmund as the guardians of Richard II. In treating of St. Thomas à Becket Mrs. Jameson relies too implicitly upon Lord Campbell. Mr. J. G. Nichols has shown that he was not slain at the foot of the altar, and that the relics which she states were burned were mere fabri cations. The proclamation, also, by which the prayers in his name were ordered to be put out of all books, is stated by Mrs. Jameson very inaccurately, probably upon the authority of the same noble historian. She adds, "This decree [proclamation?] was so effective in England that the effigies of this once beloved and popular saint vanished at once from every house and oratory. I have never met, nor could ever hear of, any representation of St. Thomas à Becket remaining in our ecclesiastical edifices; and I have seen missals and breviaries in which his portrait had been more or less carefully smeared over and obliterated."-p. 114. Of the saints of the other monastic orders but few are connected with England. In the choir of Lichfield cathedral, as Mrs. Jameson informs us, we have a representation in stained glass, brought from the abbey of Herenkerode, near Liege, of that fanciful tradition in the life of St. Bernard, the great founder of the Cistercians, that he was nourished by milk from the bosom of the Virgin; and at Alton Towers is a remarkable picture, by Alonzo Cano, of St. Antony of Padua holding the infant Saviour in his arms. The Virgin appears just to have relinquished the child, who looks up, as if half-frightened," to his mother. "This is one of the finest pictures of the Spanish school now in England, but is too dramatic in the sentiment and treatment to be considered as a religious picture." (p. 300.) Rogers has the original drawing of a picture by Pesellino, which represents another incident in the life of the same saint. He was preaching at the funeral of a rich man, remarkable for avarice and usury. 66 Mr. "He chose for his text, Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also,' and, instead of praising the dead, denounced him as condemned for his misdeeds to eternal punishment. His heart,' he said, 'is buried in his treasure-chest; go, seek it there, and you will find it.' Whereupon the friends and relations going to break open the chest, found there the heart of the miser, amid a heap of ducats; and this miracle was further established when, upon opening the breast of the dead man, they found his heart was gone."—p. 296. In this running commentary we have collected together explanatory illustrations of some of the most celebrated pictures of monastic saints which chance to be in our own country, and are mentioned by Mrs. Jameson; but in so doing we have given but little idea of her book. Her biographies of these shadowy mythic heroes and heroines, half fact half fable, are very animated and clever, and it is unnecessary that we should commend her criticism upon the works of art which come under her notice. Her book is also full of choice and racy extracts from the legendary stores of Rome-the substitute which the Church of the Middle Ages provided for the purer teaching of the Bible. In the anxiety to de fend or palliate Roman error which is now-a-days so common, it is asserted that these legends were accepted as poetical fictions, and were no more believed, nor designed to be believed, than the journey of Bunyan's Pilgrim to the celestial city. This seems to be only partly accurate. Bunyan's Pilgrim was put forth from the first "in the similitude of a dream." “As I slept I dreamed a dream," are the words of its opening paragraph; "I dreamed, and behold I saw." Here the writer explained his purpose, and the reader was desired to accept the story as it was intended. Such was also the case with many of the legends of the Church of Rome; for example with the following beautiful Dominican apologue :— "A certain scholar in the university of Bologna, of no good repute either for his morals or his manners, found himself once (it might have been in a dream) in a certain meadow not far from the city, and there came on a terrible storm; and he fled for refuge until he came to a house, where, finding the door shut, he knocked and entreated shelter. And a voice from within answered, I am Justice; I dwell here, and this house is mine; but, as thou art not just, thou canst not enter in.' The young man turned away sorrowfully, and proceeding further, the rain and the storm beating upon him, he came to another house, and again he knocked and entreated shelter; and a voice from within replied, I am Truth; I dwell here, and this house is mine; but, as thou lovest not Truth, thou canst not enter here.' And further on he came to another house, and again besought to enter, and a voice from within said, 'I am Peace; I dwell here, and this house is mine; but, as there is no peace for the wicked and those who Then he went on further, being much fear not God, thou canst not enter here.' afflicted and mortified, and he came to another door and knocked timidly, and a voice from within answered, 'I am Mercy; I dwell here, and this house is mine; and, if thou wouldst escape from this fearful tempest, repair quickly to the dwelling of the brethren of St. Dominick; that is the only asylum for those who are truly peni tent. And the scholar failed not to do as this vision had commanded. He took the habit of the order, and lived hence forth an example of every virtue."-p. 373. If we allow (which is a good deal) that such stories were no more proposed as subjects for literal belief than the parables of our Lord, or the Pil |