HER BIRTH-PLACE.

There are not many chapters of history more extraordinary and more perplexing than that which relates the story of St. Catherine. Very perplexing it will be found by any, who may think it worth while to examine the record;—which is indeed well worthy of examination, not only as illustrative of one of the most obscure phases of human nature, but also as involving some highly interesting questions respecting the value of historic evidence.

Of such examination it has received but little. Among Catholics the "legend" of the Saint is to this day extensively used for such purposes as similar legends were intended to serve. Orthodox teachers have used the story unsparingly as stimulus, example, and testimony. But orthodox historians have passed over it with the lightest tread and most hurried step; while such Protestant readers as may have chanced to stray into the dim, despised wilderness of Romish hagiography, have in all probability very quickly tossed the volume aside, compendiously classing its subject in their minds with other dark-aged lumber of martyrs, who walked with their heads in their hands, and saints who personally maltreated the enemy of mankind.

Yet a very little consideration of the story will show, that it cannot with fairness be thus summarily disposed of. After seeing large solid masses of monastic romance and pious falsehood evaporate from the crucible of our criticism, there will be still found a very considerable residuum of strangely irreducible fact of the most puzzling description.

It is to be borne in mind, moreover, that the phenomena to be examined are not the product of the dark night-time of history, so favourable to the generation of saints and saintly wonders. Cock-crow was near at hand when Catherine walked the earth. The grandsons of her contemporaries had the printing-press among them; and the story of her life was printed at Florence in the ninety-seventh year after her death. While the illiterate Sienese dyer's daughter was working miracles, moral and physical, Petrarch and Boccaccio were still writing, and Dante had recently written. Giotto had painted the panels we still gaze on, and NiccolÒ of Pisa carved the stones we yet handle. Chroniclers and historians abounded; and the scene of the strange things recorded by them was at that time one of the centres of human civilisation and progress. We are there in no misty debateable land of myth and legendary song; but walk among familiar facts of solid well-authenticated history, studied for its lessons by statesmen, and accepted as the basis of theories by political philosophers. And yet, in the midst of these indubitable facts, mixed with them, acting on them, undeniably influencing them, we come upon the records of a story wild as any tale of Denis or Dunstan.

When once launched on the strange narrative, as it has come down to us, it is somewhat difficult to remember steadily how near we are all along to the solid shore of indisputable fact. Holding fast to this, therefore, as long as may be, we will approach the subject by endeavouring to obtain some idea of the material aspect of the "locus in quo."

No one perhaps of the more important cities of Italy retains the visible impress of its old republican medieval life to so remarkable a degree as Siena. Less favoured by fortune than her old enemy, and present ruler, Florence, she has been less benefited or injured by the activity and changes of modern days. And the city retains the fossilised form and shape which belonged to it at the time when its own stormy old life was finally crushed out of it. The once turbulent, energetic, and brave old city, sits there still, on the cold bleak top of a long spent volcano—emblem meet enough of her own nature and fortunes—grim, silent, stern, in death. The dark massy stone fronts, grand and gloomy, of old houses, built to defy all the vicissitudes of civic broils, and partisan town-fighting, still frown over narrow streets, no longer animated by the turbulent tide of life which filled them during the centuries of the city's independence.

The strange old "piazza," once the pulsating heart, whence the hot tide of the old civic life flowed through all the body of the little state, still occupies its singular position in the hollow of what was in some remote ante-Etruscan time, the crater of a volcano. Tall houses of five or six stories stand in a semicircle around this peculiar shell-shaped cup, while the chord of the arc they form, is furnished by the picturesque "palazzo pubblico," with its tall slender tower of dark brick, and quaintly painted walls. Like the lava tide, which at some distant period of the world's history flowed hence down the scored sides of the mountain, the little less boiling tide of republican war and republican commerce, which Siena was wont to pour out from the same fount, is now extinct and spent. But such lazy, stagnant, unwholesome life as despotism and priestcraft have left to Siena, is still most alive in and around the old piazza.

Up the sides of this doubly extinguished crater, and down the exterior flanks of the mountain, run steep, narrow, tortuous and gloomy, the flagstone-paved streets of the old city. So steep are they in some parts, that stairs have to take the place of the sloping flagstones, which are often laid at such an angle of declivity as to render wheel-traffic impossible. On the highest pinnacle of the rim, overlooking the hollow of the once crater, stands the Cathedral, on such uneven ground, that its east end is supported by a lofty baptistery, built underneath it on the rapid descent. In the most ornamented style of Italian-gothic architecture, and picturesque, though quaint, in its parti-coloured livery of horizontal black and white stripes in alternate courses of marble, the old church still contains a wonderful quantity of medieval Sienese art in many kinds. Carving in wood and in stone, painting in fresco and in oil, inlaid work and mosaic, richly coloured windows and gilded cornices, adorn walls, floor, and roof, in every part. The whole history of art from the early days, when Sienese artists first timidly essayed to imitate barbaric Byzantine models, to its perfect consummation in those glorious ages which immediately preceded the downfall of Italian liberty, is set forth in this fine old church, as in a rich and overflowing museum. Some half dozen popes sleep beneath sculptured tons of monumental marble in different parts of it,—among them two of the very old Sienese family of Picolomini.

On another peak, or spur, of the deeply seamed mountain, stands the huge unornamented brick church and monastery of St. Dominic, so situated, that between it and the Cathedral is a steep gorge, the almost precipitous sides of which the old city has covered with stair-like streets. Deep at the bottom of this gorge, near a gate in the city wall, which runs indefatigably up and down the mountain ridges and ravines in its circuit around the spacious city, now a world too wide for its shrunken population, is that old fountain, which one passing word of the great poet has made for ever celebrated. Here is still that Fontebranda,[1] which, with all its wealth of sparkling water, the thirst-tormented coiner in the thirtieth canto of the Inferno, less longs for than he does to see in torment with him those who had tempted him to the deed he was expiating.

The Dantescan pilgrim, who, among his first objects at Siena, runs to visit this precious fountain, finds, not without a feeling of disappointment, a square mass of heavy ugly brickwork, supported on some three or four unornamented arches on each of its four sides. Within is a large tank, also of brick, the sides of which rise about two feet above the level of the soil; and this is perennially filled by a cool and pure spring from the sandstone side of the mountain, which there rises in a broken cliff immediately behind the ungraceful, though classic building. Descending the steep street in search of this poet-hallowed spot, with the Cathedral behind him, and St. Dominic's church high on its peak above and in front of him, the visitor finds that he is passing through a part of the city inhabited by the poorer classes of its people. And near the bottom of the hill, and around the fountain itself, it is manifest to more senses than one, that a colony of tanners and dyers is still established on the same site which their forefathers occupied, when Giacomo Benincasa was one of the guild.

The general aspect of this remote and low-lying corner of the city is squalid and repulsive. Eyes and nose are alike offended by all around them. And the stranger, who has been attracted thither by the well-remembered name of "Fontebranda," hastens to reclimb his way to the upper part of the town; probably unconscious, perhaps uncaring, that within a few yards of him lies another object of pilgrimage, classic after another fashion, and hallowed to the feelings of a far more numerous body of devotees. For a little way up the hill, on the left hand side of the poverty-stricken street, as one goes upwards, among the miserable and filthy-looking skin-dressers' houses, is still to be seen that of Giacomo Benincasa, in which his daughter Catherine, the future Saint, was born, in the year 1347, and lived dining the greater portion of her short career.

The veneration of her fellow citizens during the two centuries which followed her death, has not permitted the dwelling to remain altogether as it was when she inhabited it. The street front has been sufficiently altered to indicate to any passenger, that it belongs to some building of more note than the poor houses around it. Two stories of a "loggia," or arcade, of dark brick, supported on little marble columns,—four arches above, and four below,—run along the front of the upper part of the building. On the ground-floor, a large portal, like that of a chapel, such as in fact now occupies the entire basement story, sufficiently shows that the building within is no longer a poor dyer's habitation. On the side is a smaller door opening on a handsome straight stone staircase, eight feet wide. By this entrance visitors are admitted to gratify for an equal fee their Catholic devotion or heretic curiosity.

The whole lower floor of the house, once, as tradition, doubtless correctly, declares, the dyer's workshop (as similar portions of the neighbouring houses are still the workshops of modern dyers), is now a chapel. "Virginea Domus," is conspicuously carved in stone above the portal, somewhat unfairly ignoring the existence of poor Giacomo in his own workshop. The walls are covered with frescoes by Salimbeni and Pachierotti, and a picture by Sodoma adorns the altar. Ascending the handsome flight of stone stairs, the visitor finds most of the space on the first floor occupied by another chapel. This was the living room of the family, and is nearly as large as the workshop below. But at the end of it, farthest from the street, and therefore from the light also, there is a little dark closet, nine feet long by six wide. It is entered from the larger room by a very low door, cut in a very thick wall, and has no other means of receiving light or air. This was Catherine's bedchamber. The pavement of the little closet is of brick, and on this, with a stone—still extant in situ—for a pillow, the future Saint slept. The bricks, sanctified by this nightly contact with her person, have been boarded over to preserve them from the wear and tear of time, and from the indiscreet pilfering of devout relic-hunters.

Various treasures of this sort, such as the lamp she used to carry abroad, the handle of her staff, &c., are preserved on the altar of the adjoining chapel: and one or more other oratories have been built and ornamented in and about the Saint's dwelling-place. But the only spot which has any interest for a heretical visitor is the little dark and dismal hole—Catherine's own chamber and oratory—the scene of the young girl's nightly vigils, lonely prayers, spiritual struggles, and monstrous self-inflictions.

"Surely," cries the pious pilgrim, "as holily penetential a cell, as ever agonized De profundis rose from to the throne of Grace!"

"Truly," remarks the philosophic visitor, "a dormitory well calculated, in all its conditions, to foster and develop every morbid tendency of mind or body in its occupant!"