Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Castel Gandolfo—Its Gardens—The Sabine Hills—The Reverendo—An Expedition into the Hills—The Campagna in the Early Morning—“Our Lady of Good Counsel”—Ancient PrÆneste—Italy’s Landscape—Struggles of the Colonna—Destruction of Palestrina—Boniface’s Revenge and Expiation—Olevano, the Haunt of Artists—“Picturesque Utility”—The Wrong Train—Romance of a Pebble—The Work of the Saints.

We had chosen Castel Gandolfo for our summer quarters and had spent two delightful months in the Villa BrazzÀ, situated on the lower edge of the town, which climbed up the gentle slope behind, and having for ourselves the open view of all the Campagna below us, before. The house did not look large from the road, but very little of it showed itself to the road at all. When one had passed under the arched “portone,” one found a great rambling residence with a long terraced wing stretching down into the garden, and in the garden itself pavilions, grottoes, terraces, all bowered in flowers and so artistically disposed that every one seemed isolated and only approached by long winding walks delightfully shady and green. Where the chief sitting-room opened towards the garden there was a small terrace, completely shaded from the morning sun, with a fountain so disposed that it fell all down one wall like a waterfall, and round it clambered and waved the wreaths of a hundred creepers, ivy and stephanotis and jessamine and maidenhair fern, all wet and blooming in the gentle moisture of its spray. To the left the wing, in which my own rooms were situated, ran far down, affording shade and coolness; a stairway led up to its roof, where vast beds of petunias gave out their sweet perfume and were visited every evening at sunset by humming-bird moths, who fed on the honey in the white and purple chalices till they could scarcely fly away.

The house had been full of guests through July and August and the summer had been divinely bright and cool. Through it all I had looked, day after day, over towards the Sabine Hills, so remote and mysterious for all their nearness to Rome, and a great desire was upon me to penetrate into those blue fastnesses. They had been friends—at a distance—all my life, since I could remember anything, and probably before that, for the big eastern window of the room where I was born looked straight towards them, and doubtless their sun-smitten peaks were the first outside objects my eyes ever beheld. They are our Sibyls, in Rome. They reflect every change of sun and wind, and very early I learnt to tell the signs of the coming weather which they infallibly gave us.

I made up my mind to reach them at last, and with some difficulty persuaded my brother and my stepfather to come with me. We were joined by a friend, an elderly English clergyman, much loved by us and always known as the “Reverendo.” He came of exceedingly well-known people, but was a younger son with no money—and no encumbrances, and he had long amused us with his quaint ways. He was rather elderly, very tall, with a paganly handsome head—and a quiet way of saying incredible things that made me love him much, and work him hard, for I was a rather spoilt young person in those days and allowed myself unlimited whims, which my blessed family helped me to carry out in the most exemplary way. I always had a very tender spot for the “Reverendo,” and it became something uncomfortably near pity when I heard, from our servants, of certain straits to which he was put in order to appear properly at the little gatherings to which we were always inviting him. He lived a long way from our house, and his means quite forbade the luxury of cabs, so in all weathers he came on foot. The carefully turned-up evening trousers could be kept out of the mud, but not so the shoes below; so the Reverendo brought clean ones—and evening socks—with him. The porter’s lodge was just inside the porte cochÈre, and he would turn in there, regardless of what the inhabitants might be doing, sit down, pull off the condemned foot-gear, toss it into various corners, put on the clean things, and walk upstairs—all without a single word to the porter’s wife and children, who put him down, quite smilingly, as another “mad Englishman.” When the function upstairs was over he would reappear, change once more, and depart, always in perfect silence. But one evening Mrs. Porter told my maid she could have wept for the poor gentleman! He came in as usual, sat down and pulled off boots and socks, flung them away, and then discovered that he had forgotten to bring fresh ones. Quite meekly he gathered up the muddy articles, put them on, and disappeared into the night, to return, nearly an hour later, with his forgotten properties and go through the whole ceremony over again.

Like so many quiet, cultivated Englishmen whom circumstances more than taste have landed in the “Establishment” for life, he had the social instinct very strongly developed, loved bright society, and never refused an invitation. He caught gladly at the idea of riding through Sabina with us, and I knew that our expedition would be a success, which it might not have been without the little spice of interest that an outsider always brings into an otherwise too strictly family party.

So, one divine September morning we four rode forth, my dear mother almost crying at our temerity in facing the brigands who were then supposed to haunt the Eastern Hills. “Do bring back your ears with you!” was her parting recommendation, and I know that during the days of our absence she constantly dreaded receiving the grim packet of severed ears which the old-time brigands were in the habit of sending, with their little account for ransom, to the relatives of those they had captured. Years before, when we children were making expeditions from Rocca di Papa, we had, to our immense joy, been provided with big formidable-looking toy pistols, which we were enjoined to carry “in evidence”—so that the report might go about that the party was always strongly armed! The only brigand we ever caught sight of in our rambles through the lonely country would be an occasional outlaw who had escaped from the police to take hiding in the woods (where he was charitably maintained by his sympathising fellow-townsfolk) and who would scuttle away like a startled hare at the approach of a big party of young foreigners whose yells would probably reach to Rome itself if anybody interfered with them. The brigand of Romagna is, or was, a poor creature, very easily disposed of; his cousin in Calabria or Sicily is quite a different kind of person, a resolute, unscrupulous gentleman whom it is not at all pleasant to meet.

In one of his Roman books, Mr. Hare speaks of the unearthly beauty of the Campagna and its surrounding hills in the first moments of the dawn, and deplores the fact that so many travellers come and go away again without ever having risen early enough to see it. I think dear Mr. Hare made the discovery late in life himself, for, if I remember rightly, it was during a journey of exploration that we made together somewhere that the fact struck him—and I and my sister regarded him then as distinctly middle-aged. My poor Annie was always a late riser, and vehemently deprecated the unripe hours of the morning, as she did every other kind of discomfort; but to me they were hours of purest romance, and seldom have they seemed more perfect than on the day when I and my three cavaliers rode away from Castel Gandolfo through the woods towards Genazzano (not Genzano) where we were to halt on our way to Palestrina.

Have you ever ridden through deep chestnut woods when the sun is still so low that it only strikes the under branches of the trees, and creeps up their trunks like a rising bath of gold? When every dell is still a mist of cool emerald, and on the banks the level beams are kissing open the tightly whorled fronds of the fern, filling the tiny cups of the moss with topaz wine and turning its million-feathered spikelets into an upstanding frieze of fairy spears, each strung with a yellow pearl?

Where some stream has cut its way deep through the rich soil, the forget-me-nots have grown so high and thick that they almost meet across the water; their blue is too dreamy yet to reflect the sky; they look up to that with the calm unseeing innocence of a newborn child that as yet knows not day from night. Ah, look well then, for later in the day the jealous treetops will take all the light to themselves, and every lovely detail, below, only visible in that first fleeting hour, will be lost in the deep forest shadow that is neither light nor darkness, but all one quivering mysterious green.

We four rode through the woods silently, drinking in the crystal freshness of the air; and then, almost before we knew it, we were out in a blaze of heat, leaving the Alban Hills behind and crossing the plain that divides them from the Sabines, one of the old roads to Naples. In that first week of September it was like an unroofed hot-house, vines and corn and pomegranates crowding against each other till one would hardly have known where to get in the shears or the sickle; the dust from our horses’ feet rose in golden clouds as we went along, and everywhere was the whirr of wings and the long droning note of the cicala. We were glad enough to reach Genazzano and pause in the shade before the old Church; but we had had some difficulty in penetrating so far, the Piazza and every street leading to it being full of peasants, who had come in from all the surrounding district to pay their respects to the Madonna del Buon Consiglio, on this the 8th of September, our Blessed Lady’s birthday. Of course the greatest concourse takes place here on April the 25th, the especial feast of Our Lady of Good Counsel, but the people are always glad to repair to this famous sanctuary, and on the day we visited it the little town was full of the brilliant costumes which one very rarely sees now. The picture round which so much devotion centres is a very sweet one, rather Byzantine in character, as is natural, for it came to Italy from the other side of the Adriatic—miraculously transported, probably at the time when all that country came under Moslem rule. It was thus that the Holy House of Loreto, when the Holy places of Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Turks, was carried by the Angels to Christian shores, and thence to Italy, the dwellers near its last Eastern resting-place mourning despairingly round the deserted spot from which it disappeared between dark and dawn on the night of the 9th of December, 1294. I am writing of Genazzano and not of Loreto just now, but I must pause to remark that this miracle of the transportation of the house of the Blessed Virgin is far more clearly attested than many events in our own modern history; yet there are people, who would stake their lives on the truth of those events, who dismiss the miracle of Loreto with a smile of incredulity.

This picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel would not interest them. Yet I would advise even such persons to go and have a look at the beautiful copy of it in St. John Lateran’s. It is quite small, a half length or less; the Blessed Mother holds the Child in her arms, and he is reaching up to whisper in her ear; she listens, with her heart in her deep sweet eyes, and the “counsel” is stored up for the children who appeal to her in their perplexities. There is an exquisite expression of confidence and familiarity on both the celestial Faces. Our Holy Father Pius X has such a great devotion to Our Lady of Good Counsel that, as all Catholics know, he has added the invocation “Mater Boni Consilii, ora pro nobis,” to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.

From Genazzano we went on to Palestrina, arriving there in time to go and watch the sunset from the ruined terraces of the Temple of Fortune. The place has passed from hand to hand, used as a fortress at one time and another since the fourth century before Christ; but to me its interest never lay in those comparatively modern developments. It is the story of times lost in the mist of ages, when those first cyclopean blocks were fitted together without the aid of cement—when a race, whose only traces are these mute huge stones that suggest all and tell nothing, lived and fortified itself on this outpost of the mountains—that is the story that I want to hear. There at Palestrina, when the sun was sinking into the level gold of the sea—forty miles away, but so clear and calm—I leaned over the stone bulwark, red in the sunset, hot to my hand (had it not baked in four or five thousand years of sunshine?), and felt that unearthly thrill of a revelation palpitatingly near, yet still withheld. It has come only a few times in my life—once at Torcello, once among the lost tombs of Etruria, there at Palestrina, and in the great hall of the unmarked sepulchre of the last Ming Emperor in Pechilia. That was modern, indeed, a Seventeenth Century affair, but the ancient spirit was there—something that brooded over a lonely, mighty country, unchanged, untampered with, before the beginnings of history.

At Palestrina—or to give the place its right name, PrÆneste—the Emperors were mere upstarts; Camillus, who took it and made it an appanage of Rome four hundred years or so before this time—Marius and Sulla, and the Roman ladies who had summer villas here and left those amazing “vanity boxes” (such arsenals of cosmetics and beautifiers as surprise even our modern beauty-artists) behind them—all these seem vulgar intruders on that sacredly ancient ground.

For, of all the cities of Romagna, PrÆneste has, I think, the most perfect situation. It seems to have grown out of the wall of the hills to watch over the southern roads to Rome. Before it the Campagna stretches away to the sea and to the north, the horizon there brokenly outlined by the low Volscian and Ciminian Hills. Not so towards the sea; in the near distance a castle or a single tower breaks the plain, midway Rome shimmers like a net of pearls thrown down across the Tiber; but the West is the empty West always, left to the sun and the wind, with the wide Heavens above and that one long sword of light laid on its further bound where the tideless Mediterranean laps against the shore. To the south, at an almost direct angle, rise the Alban Hills, near, familiar, friendly, with their symmetrical volcanic slopes so restful to the eye; where they sink to the plain farthest from Palestrina the Appian Way leads on to Naples, and that is the way most of the world travels; but the more beautiful road is the one which leads, right past the foot of the Sabines, through the level valley which separates them from the Alban range, to Anagni and Valmontone and Frosinone, following the classic Liris as it takes an almost straight course through the garden it has ploughed and watered. Seen from the Campagna, the Albans seem to be a range running east and west, thrown up to make a frame and background for Rome; but travel down the Liris and you will realise that all we see from Rome, Monte Cavo, and his lesser brethren, with their scores of white towns, is simply the culmination of a long branch of the Apeninnes, set up like a screen between the central range and the fever-haunted seaboard called Maremma. When about two-thirds of the distance to Naples is accomplished, the range rises in the isolated peak of Rocca Monfina to the height of nearly four thousand feet and becomes merged in the central Apeninnes once more. The railway runs through now, but it is still a wild, remote country, very feudal in its ways, with half-ruined castles on every point of vantage, scowling down on a land that needs them no longer, where fighting has ceased, and the good soil that has had its way for centuries has brought forth those stores of corn and wine and oil which seem to be South Italy’s inalienable dower.

From Palestrina, looking down on that September evening, the bursting richness of it all seemed almost incredible. Right at the foot of the hills a deep, abandoned watercourse was a golden river of standing corn, bordered far on either side with dense greenery fringing off into vineyards so teeming with fruit that, seen from above, it was like a great mantle of dark amethyst patterned here and there, where the white grapes grew, with jade. The woody slopes of the Sabines sank into the rich carpet, and rose, away to the north, in stormy outlines, now softened into dreamy rose and lilac, against the clear evening sky. As the sun sank, even the cold silver of the olive trees, standing tier above tier on their shallow terraces, took on the flush, as if bathed in wine, and the darker foliage of oak and chestnut burned with sombre yet vivid intensity. Then the sun touched the sea—lingered, a ball of living crimson, for an instant, and plunged out of sight. One star hung its newborn silver against the paling west; another and another answered it, till all the dying blue overhead was pierced and patterned with the faint sparklets in their eternal dance. Then from behind the wall of peaks a broad fan of misty silver was thrown up against the sky, growing, spreading, washing purple and crimson to one untinted sheen; another moment, and the harvest moon heaved a golden shoulder over the crags, rolled up, rounded itself, and hung, a great honey-coloured globe, flooding the hills and the Campagna and the distant sea with calm, all-embracing effulgence.

At the time of my first visit to Palestrina I was still sufficiently attracted by the Middle Ages to find much romance in the struggles of the Colonnas and their contemporaries, struggles which dragged the harrow over the vast Temple of Fortune—reputed the biggest in the world,—threw its stones one upon another, and left the place merely a beautiful tomb. Since then, I confess, my interest has died away. I can feel no sympathy with the noble cut-throats—Sciarras, Colonnas, Orsinis—whose deeds are written in blood over every page of the time. I used to weep over the sufferings they inflicted on Boniface VIII, but, apart from the outrage on his sacred office, which can never be condoned, one cannot help feeling that he deserved something of what he got, and that, in spite of his high courage and notable intellect, he had treated those his enemies very basely and cruelly. His election in 1217 had been bitterly opposed by two Colonna Cardinals—Giacomo and Pietro—who were furious at the thought that the Papal chair should be filled by one of the Gaetonis of Anagni, the hereditary rivals and enemies of their own family. The election went through, in spite of them, and they, fearing the new Pope’s wrath, fled to Palestrina, taking every member of the family with them. This was an open declaration of war, and the Pope realised that there would be no peace for his realm till they were subdued. With truly mediÆval promptitude, he at once confiscated all their estates and called on all good Christians to take up arms against them. Their other strongholds fell one by one into his hands, but Palestrina, with its tremendous defences and commanding position, resisted every attack of the besiegers. It seemed impregnable. Then Pope Boniface remembered that the most victorious and ruthless leader of the day, Guido de Montefeltro, was down on his knees in a convent at Ancona, praying to be forgiven some of his deeds of blood before death should call him to judgment. He commanded him to leave his retreat and come to give his advice as to the reduction of Palestrina. Very unwillingly the old soldier obeyed, and returned to that world which he had left just in time to save his wicked soul. He went and looked at the Colonna fortress, examined the defences with the eye of an expert, and returned to the Pope, who was at Rieti. He told him that there was no hope of taking Palestrina by force of arms. “What, then, am I to do?” cried Boniface. Guido knew, but was unwilling to say. The Pope insisted on his giving his opinion, and the crafty old fighter proffered the counsel for which Dante with some justice put him in Malebolge—“Prometter lungo e tenere corto!” “Promise much—fulfil little,” it would run in English.

Boniface instantly acted on the advice. The Colonnas were promised full forgiveness. They thought it wise to accept and submit. In all the habiliments of mourning repentance they issued from the stronghold they were never to see again, and came in a body to Rieti. The Pope received them, pronounced their crimes against himself forgiven, and kept them at Rieti as his guests. But prudence, as he apprehended it, forbade that he should leave that eyrie and refuge of rebellion standing for them to fly to the next time they picked a quarrel with him. So, while they were sunning themselves in his favour in the mountain city of the South, he secretly despatched a faithful friend, Ranieri, the Bishop of Pisa, to wipe Palestrina off the face of the earth. Nothing was to be spared, except the Cathedral. And very thoroughly did Ranieri do his work. Every vestige of the fortress and palace and the big town which had grown up with them was destroyed—“a plough was driven over the ruins, the ground was sown with salt, and even the famous marble staircase of a hundred steps, up which people could ride their horses into the palace,” was swept away.

Then the Colonnas, landless, homeless, penniless, understood how much the Pope’s forgiveness was worth, and they fled from his domains to nurse their wrongs and wait for revenge.

That came in good, or rather very evil, time, and Boniface paid in full during the awful days at Anagni, days so dreadful that one quarrels with Dante for not regarding them as sufficient expiation for the harassed Pontiff’s one great sin. He was driven into a quarrel with Philippe le Bel, the King of France, and Sciarra Colonna, the Head of the proscribed House, caught at the chance and offered his services to the French. In company with their leader, William de Nogaret, he broke into Anagni, Boniface’s own city where he had taken refuge, and, but for the opposition of Nogaret, he would, apparently, have murdered his great enemy on the spot.

Here Boniface showed all the valour of his race and place. He prepared to meet death with the dignity of a priest and the courage of a soldier. “If I am to die, I will die like a Pope,” he said. Every friend, every Cardinal and chaplain and courtier fled as the shout of “A Colonna, a Colonna!” rose from the lower streets of the mountain town. Not a soul was left in the palace but the Pope. He put on his pontifical vestments, placed the tiara on his head, and mounted his throne, where he sat like a statue, awaiting certain death. Colonna and Nogaret, with three hundred steel-clad men at their heels, clanked into the hall, and stood dumb for a moment at the sight of their great enemy, who neither spoke nor moved. Then they rushed upon him and Sciarra Colonna assailed him with a fiery torrent of abuse, his anger feeding on itself till it ran through him like a flame, and he struck the Pontiff on the face with his mailed hand. Nogaret protested—Boniface said no word. He meant to suffer for his sins in silence, because so had the Redeemer suffered for sins not His. They dragged the Pope from his throne, hustled him out into the Square, all black with the gaping, cowardly crowd of his own subjects, put him on a vicious horse with his face to the tail, and led him with outbursts of derision through the streets. Not a hand was raised to defend him, not a protest was heard. Then his conquerors brought him back to his palace and locked him up, without food or drink, for three miserable days, during which they sacked not only the palace, but every house in the town, riding away at last glutted with plunder, destroying what they could not carry off, and leaving literally nothing but bare walls behind them. Then, all danger being past, Boniface’s loving subjects bethought themselves of letting him out. They found him fainting from exhaustion, crying like a starved child for a morsel of bread and a cup of water. The women wept over him then, and ran to minister to his wants; not so much as a water-jar had been left in the palace, and they emptied their bronze concas into a wooden chest. Boniface died soon after, in Rome, broken-hearted, and the carnival of anarchy in high places, with its raging hate and its fury of bloodshed, went on for many a long year afterwards.

Truly, mediÆval history makes depressing reading! How gladly the mind reverts from it to the dawn of the centuries, when men fought for their cities and their wives and children, but not for mere hatred of their kind. And what a relief it is to turn from the endless carnage of the later Middle Ages to the history that is not written in blood and that charms and dominates us still, the history of strange holy lives every pulse of which was an act of love to God and mankind. It is but a step from one to the other—from Boniface VIII and the Colonnas and the Orsinis to Benedict and Scholastica—from smitten Palestrina to cloistered Subiaco behind it in the hills.

On the way thither one stopped for a day in Olevano, to me the least Italian, the most completely “foreignised” spot in all that country. It has been for so many years the haunt of artists of every nationality that it has none left of its own. Its beauty there is no denying; it laughs in sunshine and prosperity, and for that, in these bad times, one is grateful to it. But it is no more Italian than a fine piece of staging at the Haymarket. The background is perfect, and the inhabitants are healthy and handsome, but the moment they see a traveller coming they throw themselves into paintable attitudes; all naturalness seems gone; everything and everybody is harnessed to the service of picturesque utility. The famous inn, about which Gregorovius and Mr. Hare raved so enthusiastically, resounds with Northern tongues and with that ear-splitting affliction known as German Italian. The walls are a visitors’ book, of untold price, where almost every notable artist of the last hundred years has left his signature in sketch or portrait. At every turn you are tripped up by easels, wet canvases, and artists’ umbrellas, and in the evening the beer flows freely and the jolly brotherhood talks about itself at the top of its German voice, till Italy—our shy, melancholy Italy—fades into the background, and a weary traveller trying to sleep, in one of the bedrooms which all open out of the central dining-room, is led to believe that he has taken the wrong train and been transported unawares to the scene of a “Kneipe” in Munich or Dresden.

Talking about “wrong trains” reminds me of an absurd incident that happened in England. A wayfarer who had taken a little more than was good for him wandered into Victoria Station, having quite forgotten the name of the place he wished to make for. But he could remember what it was not. Into every train that came along he climbed—and then asked the guard for what point it was bound. None of the answers satisfied him and he tumbled out on the platform again and again, wailing, “Wrong train! wrong train!” At last, however, he struck the right one, the guard’s answer to his query brought back the memory of his domicile, and, much relieved, he sank down against the cushions and began to smoke. At the first station on the road a clergyman got into the compartment, and the train steamed on. Harder and harder the reverend gentleman stared at his companion, who showed all too plainly the evidences of his spree. Pretty soon, just as they were pulling into another station, the Christian’s conscience bade him admonish his erring brother.

“My friend,” he began in solemn tones, “do you know where you are going to?” The overtaken one was all attention at once, and his monitor went on, “You are going straight to Hell!”

“Oh, Lord!” moaned the sinner on the opposite seat. “Wrong train again!” And he sprang out of the carriage and stood weeping on the platform while his one chance of getting home sped away from him into the night.

We were little troubled by railways in the Sabines in my young days; such innovations had not ever been contemplated, and all our travelling was done on horses or mules. It was rather a long ride from Olevano to Subiaco and I was very tired and stiff when our little party straggled into the road leading up to the town. But—what is youth without some impossible romance? My “romance” had marched that way the year before, with his company of Zouaves, condemned to garrison duty for three dreary months in the hills; and this (“parents, do you think you know your children?”) was the utterly idiotic motive which had made me drag my three unsuspecting men to Subiaco! I wanted to pick up a stone that had been touched by the adored one’s foot! Very gingerly I climbed down off my weary beast, selected a fine smooth pebble from the side of the road where I knew my idol must have passed, and, with much difficulty, scrambled up again. The pebble was afterwards polished, cut, and set in Etruscan gold, as a pendant, marked with a mystic inscription signifying a challenge to fate to lessen the ardour of my attachment; and when I found it among my trinkets, long years after my real fate had found and claimed me, I could have wept for the delicious rainbow-tinted sorrows of first youth!

But the treasure once secured, and the luxury of tears reserved for some future unoccupied moment, I gave myself up to the magic of the consecrated cleft in the hills, and, in spite of my own profound ignorance in those days, in spite of the sceptical attitude of my Presbyterian stepfather and the Anglican Reverendo, and my dear Marion’s bubbling fun and laughter—for he was a mere boy then, of the most irrepressible kind—the “Sacro Speco” made a profound impression on me.

It was as if a door leading out of some gay ballroom, all lights and flowers and dance music, had suddenly been opened and I had passed through it from the things of time to those of eternity. Fifteen hundred years were wiped out—I saw St. Benedict, the “beloved, called from the cleft in the rock,” praying, rejoicing, hiding from men to be alone with God. And that seems to me the most wonderful thing in the lives of the great Founders—they had not at first the smallest forethought of their mission. They only knew that they must save their souls in fear and trembling, and in blind humility they withdrew from all occasions of sin and prayed for purification. It forms a curious contrast to the life led by most of us who consider ourselves pretty decent Christians in the eyes of the world. Our question is, “How much pleasure and amusement can I get in without actually falling into mortal sin?” and many a dangerous permission we grant ourselves or wring from our unwilling directors, that refused would have prevented, or at least delayed, a hundred falls. It is so terribly easy to do what all the rest are doing—to go and see the problem play, read the interesting bad book, pay the visit at the country house where the old admirer will meet us and spread the old snares for our destruction and his own! We know all about it; it has happened so often; but we go ahead, telling our hearts the lie they know so well: “Oh, it doesn’t matter! I know just where to stop!” Steeped in affection to sin—with, at the best, ages of Purgatory awaiting us—we add every straw we can gather to our already huge burden and imagine we can lay it down with a good deathbed confession and slip into Paradise with the best!

Very different was the point of view of the great Saints. For one who was converted late in life, we read of scores to whom Perfection called in the very dawn of reason; and it is precisely these, who never committed a mortal sin in their lives, who were most severe with themselves—most nervous, as we should say—about their final salvation.

Their sight, never clouded by any consent to evil, saw even in the most trifling failings a heinous offence against the Divine Majesty, and Its infinite Purity, visible to them, made their own fallen nature black by contrast. So they took that nature in hand, these athletes (called Benedict, and Francis, and Anthony, and many another blessed name written in the “Libro d’Oro” of the recording Angel), and thought a lifetime would not be too much to give to the task of subduing it. And the Heavenly Father bade them go on and be of good courage; and never, till the predestined moment came, did He let them dream that their years of prayer and fasting were just a preparation for generalship in His army, that in humbly striving to save their own souls they were fitting themselves to save millions and millions of others. The first symptom one notices about them is their complete disregard of the natty little idol we call “respectability”—the Church calls it “human respect.” We quite understand that great men should kick it out of the way—whoever heard of Wellington or Kitchener asking, “What are people going to say?” Their gifts and their calling place them above the reach of considerations by which we ordinary mortals are content to regulate our actions. We admire, rave over, their splendid carelessness. But when it comes to the Saints we take our shrunken measure, try to fit it to their conduct, and shake our heads. Their whole-heartedness is eccentricity, they thought nothing of inflicting most damaging shocks on public opinion—what a pity! And if we see any of our acquaintances beginning to follow in their steps we look the other way, as if the poor dears had come out into the street half dressed. I wonder how many of her friends cared to bow to the late Countess of Denbigh when, a few years ago, she took Bridget’s place at the crossing near Farm Street and swept it diligently, and stretched out her blessed hand for the pennies, and never thought she was doing anything heroic—just keeping old Bridget’s crossing for her while she went to Mass! I believe the very Angels wanted to throw down their shining mantles for her to walk over when she went to Heaven—but I am sure some of her friends on earth thought she was putting them in a most embarrassing position.

Lady Georgiana Fullerton, in her “Life of Santa Francesca Romana,” has described very truly and sympathetically these—to us—puzzling stages in the development of saintship. They vary in degree, of course, in each individual case, but the same note runs through all: “Permission to labour first,—the result far distant, but clear; the vision of that result when once He had said, ‘Begin and work.’ To tarry patiently for that signal, to obey it unhesitatingly when once given, is the rule of the Saints. How marvellous is their instinct! how accordant their practice! First, the hidden life, the common life; the silence of the house of Nazareth; the carpenter’s shop; the marriage-feast, it may be, for some; and, at last, ‘the hour is come,’ and the true work for which they are sent into the world has to be done, in the desert or in the cloister, in the temple or in the market-place, on Mount Tabor or on Mount Calvary; and the martyr or the confessor, the founder or the reformer of a religious order, comes forth, and in an instant, or in a few years, performs a work at which earth wonders and angels rejoice.”