turbata est valde; sed tu, Domine, succurre ei. Ubi est nunc præstolatio mea? et patientiam meam quis considerat? Tu es, Domine, Deus meus."

Yet he who hath made the nations of the earth curable* leaves no man without the sustenance which is required for the peculiar wants of his soul, and without the means of salutary exercise. In the worst of times there are redeeming features, and objects of imitation, such as what the Roman historian specifies "ipsa necessitas fortiter tolerata; et laudatis antiquorum mortibus pares exitus."† And though our pomp must needs admit the pale companion, though in desiring the return of the reign of truth, we have but "wishes and tears, poor fancy's followers;" yet still are left some of those that have St. Thomas for guardian, to comfort and direct us on our way. We may not be able to enjoy the lot of Samuel, who departed not from the temple; but there are chapels on the distant hills from before whose bright altars, setting forth into the darkness of night, having the stars for companions, and no other solace but to chant again by the way some of the sweet melodies which seem still to linger around us, we may travel homewards, and hope that each step has been reckoned by an angel. We may not be able to frequent the assemblies of the holy people who worship in vast cathedrals, and repeat with innumerable voices the solemn hymn which marks the yearly return of some most holy time, but we can walk alone in the woods, and sing the Stabat Mater, while the nightingale will lend her long and plaintive note to deepen and prolong the tones of that sweet and melancholy strain, and then our tears will fall upon the wild flowers, and we shall feel in communion with the holy dead; with those who so oft had sung it, sad and sighing, like the Beatrice of Dante, in such a mood "that Mary, as she stood beside the cross, was scarce more changed." Yes, beloved land, that would so smile on gentle, lowly spirits, land twice converted,§ too fair to be for ever lost, thou art still dear to all thy sons, but doubly so to such of them as lament thy sad destiny: for thy sweet meadows would cover themselves with the enamel of flowers to grace the progress of Jesus Christ in the victim of the altar; thy solemn woods would give shelter to the lonely eremite, and thy bright streams would yield refreshment to the tabernacles of the just ;-thy gardens would give roses to scatter before the adorable sacrament, and thy towns and hamlets would send forth their cheerful youth, children fair as the race of primal creatures, to commence their flowery sprinkling. Thou art still a noble instrument, though now mute or discordant. Ignorant and unskillful hands have played upon thee till they broke thee into a

* Sanabiles fecit nationes orbis terrarum. Sap. c. I.v.14. Purg. XXXIII.

Tacitus, Hist. Lib. I. 3

The priests of England bore upon their albs, on the left shoulder, "quasi socipes de panno serico super assutas," the upper closed, in sign of there being but one faith, but the lower divid ed, as a sign of their having been twice converted to the faith, first by the missionaries of Pope Eleutherius, and secondly by St. Augustine. Chronicon Monasterii S. Bertini, cap. 1. Par. 1. Martene Thesaurus Anecdotorum, tom. III.

thousand parts; but, though thus broken and disarranged, let but the master arise who can revive the Catholic chord, and thou wilt again send forth the sweetest music.

In

It is the remark of Frederick Schlegel that a love for the romantic world of the middle ages, and of their chivalry, has continued to characterize the poetry of England, even while the negative philosophy of her sophists has maintained its ground.* And though, at the same time, for reasons which do not require a sphinx to explain, the complaint of learned foreigners is most just, that the literature and antiquities of our ancestors have been nowhere throughout the civilized world more neglected than in England; yet it is equally true, and still more remarkable, that in this country several old Catholic customs of the middle ages have been transmitted down to us, as if protected in ice, to be the astonishment of other nations. It is true they have lost all the qualities of life; there is no spirit to vivify, no mind to direct them, but still the form, though dead and motionless, has something in it imposing and majestic; nay, even pleasing and amiable. deed, a book might be composed on the latent Catholicism of many natives of this country, where every thing solid and valuable is, after all, either a remnant or a revival of Catholic thinking or institution. Methinks it would not be too much to suggest, from general principles, that youth, at least even in such a country, can never be essentially opposed to Catholicism. Cold, dry negations and that disdainful mood, however well it may suit the breasts that wear it, are not congenial with its warm and generously confiding nature. If it has heard the words of the blessed Gospel, which children can understand better than proud scholars swollen with vanity; if it has been familiarized with the paintings of Catholic artists, which a taste for the fine arts may have incautiously suffered to appear before it; if it has had on all sides the images and memorials of saints and martyrs; if it has been reared in a land abounding, in spite of fanatical and commercial Vandalism, with the ruins of sacred edifices and memorials of ancieut faith; if it has visited the desolate cloister, and beheld the lofty cathedral, and heard the solemn bell; and if it has learned by accident to repeat some affecting incident connected with the sanctity and grandeur of times gone by, some beautiful passage in the wondrous lives of the meek men of God, and to feed its imagination with the mysterious lessons of sweet Christian poesy, in vain will pedagogues and worldly teachers have required it to adopt the protestations of men who doubt and deny and refuse to hear the Church. It is Catholic in heart, in genius, in modes of thinking, and even in many of its habits of life, and it must continue to be so until age and the world shall have tarnished its golden nature. These considerations again will justify my former position, that the study to which I purpose directing attention in these sheets will have a peculiarly domestic interest. Some, indeed, their conscience dimmed by their own or others'

* Philosophie der Geschichte, II. 250.

shame, may feel that parts are sharp, but notwithstanding as Cacciaguida says to Dante, the whole vision shall be made manifest,

And let them wince, who have their withers wrung,

What though, when tasted first, the voice shall prove
Unwelcome; on digestion, it will turn

To vital nourishment.*

Pindar sings truly, making allowance for the unblessed style, that "the ancient virtues recover fresh strength which had been changed with the ages of men. For neither does the black earth produce her fruit in ceaseless succession, nor do the trees send forth their odoriferous blossom in every period of the year, but only at certain intervals, and in the same manner also is the strength or virtue of mortals subjected to the government of fate." Meanwhile, the display of the ancient virtues which belonged to ages of faith, and the diligent search into the customs and manners of Christian antiquity must be peculiarly valuable to those upon whom the iniquity of the proud is multiplied. For it is by remembering the blessed spirits

That were below, ere they arriv'd in heav'n,

So mighty in renown, as every muse

Might grace her triumph with them,

That they learn to feel the wretchedness of those that are on earth,

All after ill example gone astray;

I myself have found, while living in a Catholic country, that these instances, taken from the middle ages, of the customs and manners of a Christian life, of charity and zeal, of holy penitence and angelic innocence, of wealth and time, beauty and service devoted to God and to the poor, lost half their interest, because they differ in nothing from what passed actually around men, and from what was as familiar as the ordinary occurrences of domestic life; but in faithless lands, unless within the walls of a college, or in some singularly favored family, they seem to be wholly historical, if not a part of poetry, to belong to another world, or to a time gone by for ever. It is by the study which recalls the images of former sanctity, and the former prevalence of truth, that men are enabled to draw lessons from the very stones of their ruined abbeys, which will seem to dictate that solemn prayer, "Salvum me fac, Domine, quoniam defecit sanctus, quoniam diminuta sunt veritates à filiis hominum."§ Nor is it an advantage unworthy of regard which will result from studying the history of ages of faith, that it may be made even a source of consolation and support in our last hours: for how sweet, then will be the thought that, perhaps, through grace of highest God we may be admitted to behold the crowd of great and holy men, with whom such studies will have

*Paradise XVII.

Nem. Od. XI.

Dante, Paradise XVIII.

SPsal. II.

made us long familiar! to enter that country whither have already journeyed all who have ever been the objects of our love and reverence! There will be the princes under whose happy reign the Church had peace and freedom, there the meek confessors, and there the lowly ones who ran to follow Christ. Truly in vain will have been these studies if we cannot derive this consolation from them; for

What to thee is others' good,

If thou neglect thy own.*

Mabillon, in his preface to the fifth age of the Benedictines, speaks of those who had assisted him in the labor of this vast enterprise, and mentions in particular, one young man, John Jessenetus, (who had begun to furnish some illustrations,) a youth of the greatest hopes, who was cut off by a sudden death, while on a journey, returning with him from the Lotharingia. Mabillon adds these effecting words, “I wish that his meditation on the glory of the saints may have been profitable to him for a better life! I wish it may not return to my confusion, that after being occupied during so many years on the acts of the saints, I should be so far removed from their examples."

But I return to speak in general as to the course and object to be pursued in the following research. It has often been a subject of astonishment and complaint, that a direction almost exclusively classical, should be given to the studies of youth in modern times, and though it might not be difficult to detect the real cause which has operated to produce this partiality, which certainly must be sought elsewhere than in the supposed barrenness and barbarism of the ancient Christian literature, it may be sufficient here to bear testimony to the justice of such complaints. For, in fact, what can be more unreasonable than to maintain that an acquaintance with the histories and manners of the ancient Greeks and Romans is more essential to complete the instructions of Christians than the like knowledge of the habits and institutions of their own national ancestors and fathers in the faith; that an English student should be familiar with Livy without having ever even heard of Ingulphus, or a William of Malmesbury; that he should know by heart the sentences of Demosthenes, without being aware that St. Chrysostom was, perhaps his equal in eloquence and grandeur; and that he should be afraid of corrupting his latinity by looking into St. Jerome, of whom Erasmus said, that if he had a prize to award between him and Cicero, he should be tempted to give it to the Christian father rather than to the great orator of Rome. Ah! could these mighty spirits of the ancient world give utterance to conviction which now possesses them in answer to the multitude of voices which continually are raised from earth to speak their praise, they would counsel their fond admirers to place their affection upon Diviner models; they would speak in words like those of the shade of Virgil, when he first meets Dante. "We lived

*Dante, Purg. X.

in times of the false and lying gods; we sung of earthly conquests, but why dost thou return into this fatal region? why not scale this delicious mountain, which is the beginning and the cause of all joy?"

es,

At Rome my life was past,

Beneath the mild Augustus, in the time

Of fabled Deities and false. A bard
Was I, and made Anchises' upright son,

The subject of my song, who came from Troy,
When the flame preyed on Iliam's haughty towers.
But thou, say wherefore to such perils past

Return'st thou ? Wherefore not this pleasant mount
Ascendest, cause and source of all delight? *

I am aware, indeed, that books have of late been written, (and how many it skills not to say), with the professed object of instructing men in the spirit and manners of the middle ages; but without wishing to delay in sounding forth my own praisand in condemning the works of others who have already written on this subject, after the manner that we used to hear censured of Anaxilaus and Theopompus, who are known to have thus launched forth in their prefaces to their histories. -I may be allowed to urge that complaint against some of our contemporary historians, which Dionysius expressed in reference to men, "who had dared," as he says, "to compose histories with the sole object of making them agreeable to barbarous kings who hated Rome, to flatter whom they wrote certain gracious books, which were neither just nor true."+ For these great men of the earth, though barbarous, who so cordially hate Rome, there continues to be no want of corresponding writers, whom no reverence of the keys restrains. The ancients have left us an excellent example, in evincing a most lively interest in all that related to the antiquities of their country, and the customs of their ancestors. Cicero says that he had written an elaborate work "De moribus, institutisque majorum et disciplina ac temperatione civitatis." Dionysius says, in the first book of his history, "I shall begin from the most ancient stories, ἀπὸ τῶν παλαιοτάτων μύθων, which former writers have omitted, and which cannot be found without great pains and difficulty;" though he speaks elsewhere of one writer who had made a collection of these ancient stories.§ Plautus improves upon the counsel of Pindar, and says that they are wise, "qui libenter veteres spectant fabulas." Now it is not certainly too much to affirm, that the customs and manners of the middle ages are deserving of quite as much attention from us, as that Homeric way of life, and those Pythagorean manners spoken of by Socrates,¶ that their literature might supply most interesting variety to those who may very well think that they have heard enough of the hard Eurystheus and the altars of the illaudible Busiris, and the other verses which continue to arrest so many vacant minds; and that these our

* Hell, Canto I. Dionysii Halicarnass. Antiquit. Rom. Lib. I. 4. Tuscul. Lib. IV. 1. Plato, de Repub. Lib. X.

§ Lib. I. 68.

| Prolog.