was done instantly, and the physician directed an extra dose of the opiate to be administered. Scarcely, however, had the patient taken the medicine, when a violent attack of apoplexy supervened, which terminated fatally in the course of a few hours. The Rev. Mr. Brownbill, S. J., whose residence in Hill street was not far off, was called in, and attended with the utmost rapidity, but the sufferer was unable to speak. It is, however, consolatory in the extreme to know that within three weeks the deceased had received the sacraments of the Church from his confessor, the Very Rev. Mgr. Magee, and that he was in a condition to receive the last sacrament when Mr. Brownbill arrived. May his soul rest in peace.

Maurice O'Connell was the eldest son of the man who emancipated the Catholics of the British empire from the cruel bondage of Protestant ascendancy, and inherited much of his immortal father's talents and all his good nature.

In the month of June, at Paris, Cardinal Garibaldi, papal nuncio at the French court, aged 56 years.

On the 9th of May, at Paris, Mr. Choiselat, Treasurer of the Association of the Propagation of the Faith.

Monseñor Jose Torres Estans, Bishop of Pamplona, New Grenada, and exiled by the radical government for maintaining the liberties of the Church, died on the 19th April in Venezuela.

PERSONAL.-Very Rev. Bernard Hafkenscheid, Provincial of the Redemptorists in the United States, and Rev. Mr. Condenhove, of the same congregation, sailed for Europe, on the 29th of June.

The Most Rev. Cajetan Bedini, D. D. Archbishop of Thebes and nuncio to Brazil, arrived at New York, on the 30th of June, and after spending a few days in that city, he visited Washington and then Baltimore. He is accompanied by Rev. Mr. Virtue. We learn from the Cath. Telegraph the following notice of this distinguished ecclesiastic. "M. Bedini was for many years secretary of Prince Archbishop, now Cardinal, Louis Altieri, nuncio near the imperial court of Vienna. On his return to Rome he was sent as Internonce to Rio Janeiro, where he acquired merited fame as a diplomatist, but especially by his uncompromising and able defence of the rights of a colony of German Catholics who had been induced to immigrate into that country, where they were exposed to the shipwreck of faith from the envoy of the unprincipled manufacturing company who took them thither from their fatherland. The sermon published on that occasion by M. Bedini, who was still but in priest's orders, in Portuguese and German, on the Primacy of the Holy See, of which we had a copy re-published in German in the Wahrheitsfreund of this city, proved to the poor emigrants that in him they had a friend in that distant land on whom they could safely rely, and to their foes that they could assail no Catholic, or Catholic doctrine, with impunity.

"The consummate ability displayed by M. Bedini in those secondary offices pointed him out to the sagacity of the Holy Father as the fittest, if not the only, man, to whom to entrust the government of the city and legation of Bologna, where scenes of blood had been enacted by rebels and anarchists, which we shudder to think on. The peace and prosperity in which he soon established that long distracted province, where his memory and name are in benediction, and where we who write this article have enjoyed his munificent hospitality and seen him revered as a law-giver and loved as a father, were among the many motives which induced the Holy Father to raise him to his present high rank among the princes of the Church and confide to him the honorable and responsible post of Nuncio to Brazil."

Their Eminences Cardinals Donnet, Archbishop of Bordeaux, and Morlot, Archbishop of Tours, arrived at Rome on the 17th June, there to receive the Cardinalitial hat. The Consistory was fixed for Monday, the 27th.

THE NEW GENERAL OF THE JESUITS.-We learn from L'Ami de la Religion, that the Very Rev. Father Becks, Provincial of the Province of Austria, has been elected Superior-General of the illustrious Society of Jesus, in place of the late lamented Father Roothaan. The present Superior is the twenty-second General of the Order since its foundation by St. Ignatius of Loyola.

TIME was when in the vast collection of English poets, the Catholic, with a Catholic heart and Catholic feelings, might wander almost in vain for something to satisfy him. All was pagan, and this though some of England's greatest poets were Catholic. Crashaw and Southwell were certainly religious, but as poets they are almost unknown. Dryden, Pope and Moore are popular not for what savors of religion, but for what panders to passion, although the Paradise and the Peri of Moore is wonderfully pure and extremely beautiful. Patriotism, conjugal love and repentance are arrayed in all their beauty, as most deserving the approval of heaven, and the whole allegory is a beautiful development of the Saviour's words, “There shall be joy before the angels of heaven upon one sinner doing penance." The poem is too well known to need citation here.

If we pass to poets of later date, Southey in his Roderic and some of his minor pieces has truly Catholic pictures, but they want mellowness; there is a sharpness and asperity about them which displeases, reminding us too strikingly that the author had wielded the pen of controversy.

Still later the present poet-laureate Tennyson won the admiration of many by his St. Agnes; yet it is dreamy and vague, like the same poet's idolatry of his fair mistresses, the Adelines, Margarets, Orcanas. His St. Simeon Stylites is a far nobler piece, showing a more due appreciation of the Catholic idea of penitential works than is often to be met with. The real idea is there beautifully evolved, and no one can read it without some compunction for the sneers he may perhaps have bestowed upon the occupant of the solitary column.

Turning to our own land we find Whittier in his Mogg Megone giving us the character of Father Rasle, the Jesuit missionary. In its development there is evidently a desire to be truthful, but a want of acquaintance with Catholic thoughts, ideas, rites, and ceremonies, induces a vagueness that is quite unsatisfactory, and many palpable errors. The confession of Ruth Bonython is a perfect anomaly, and the conduct of Rasle not that of priest, and historically unlike the celebrated missionary. His character might have been beautifully developed whether Whittier does or does not believe the charges against him. In his St. John he brings in a Jesuit again,

46

"A pale priest of Rome in his cloak and his hood!"

VOL. I.-No. 8.

and actually tells us in a note that Catholics had then found protection from Puritan gallows ropes under the jurisdiction of Delatour.

In this little poem and in Mogg Megone he puts a Jesuit on Mount Desert Island; there was indeed a Jesuit there in 1642 and 1724, and he is still there; but that Jesuit is Du Thet whom Argal murdered there in 1613.

Another of our countrymen, however, has studied our faith more deeply. Indeed we often put to ourselves the question: Is the author of Kavanagh, like that of Lady Alice, on his way to Rome? Is Longfellow a Catholic in heart, or is this the result of mere artistic study of his subject? If the latter, it is a most wonderful instance of successful art. Take his Evangeline;* not only is the whole Catholic in its thought and plan, the story still told by the descendants of the departed Acadians, for it is true, but in all his comparisons and incidental expressions, Longfellow employs ideas which could arise naturally in none but a Catholic mind, and which not every Catholic, to our shame be it spoken, dare give expression to even

now.

If he describes the scenery, we have

"Columns of pale, blue smoke, like clouds of incense, ascending;”

Or the church,

"The bell from its turret

Sprinkled with holy sounds the air, as the priest with his hyssop
Sprinkles the congregation and scatters blessings upon them."

And the children who stand at the door of the forge and watch the sparks glitter and expire,

"Merrily laughed and said they were nuns going into the chapel." And in the priest's address to his people, as he turns to the cross,

he says,

"Lo! where the crucified Christ from His cross is gazing upon you."

In all these we recognize a familiarity with conventional thoughts and feelings peculiar to ourselves.

But where did he ever learn in describing his beautiful Evangeline, to give a touch so striking, so real, so new as this:

"But a celestial brightness,-a more ethereal beauty,

Shone on her face and encircled her form when after confession
Homeward serenely she walked with God's benediction upon her.
When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.”

This thought, we shall see, was caught up too by a Scottish poet, a favorite of

ours.

But to speak of the whole. The story is briefly this. During the French war a British admiral and some other officials suspecting the fidelity of the Nova Scotia farmers of French origin, who had in the previous war passed under the English yoke, suddenly proceeded to their villages, and confining the men in church, disarmed them and compelled all, men, women and children, to embark: after which they fired their houses and ravaged the whole place. The curse of the homeless be on the spoiler! So harshly was this deportation carried out that families were separated, and father and child, brother and brother, parted never to meet again. Among those thus separated were Gabriel and his betrothed Evangeline, for whose

* Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie, by Henry W. Longfellow. Ticknor: Boston, 1849.

marriage the village was already preparing. They were landed far apart. Gabriel and his father finally settled in Louisiana, Evangeline with one party after another of exiles pursued him, and for years, each seeking the other, roamed far and wide, till both were grey and stricken by years. Then amid the pestilence, she as a Sister of Mercy finds stretched on a bed of death, the betrothed of her childhood, and they were united in death, who had been divided in life. Through this long life of patient wandering the poet follows her,

"Not through each devious path, each changeful year of existence;
But as a traveller follows a streamlet's course through the valley;
Far from its margin at times, and seeing the gleam of its water
Here and there in some open space and at intervals only."

The village before the arrival of the spoiler, the ruin of the place, the deportation, are a pastoral in beauty and life-truthfulness superior to any thing we know. And throughout her wandering occur pictures of pastoral life of exquisite finish. It is a book, which despite its somewhat unwieldy verse, deserves to be familiar to every Catholic house. The influence it will exert cannot but be beneficial, and we trust that ere long Evangeline will be as familiar as any fairy tale of childhood. Some indeed would have had Father Felician more of the ascetic and less of the friend in his advice and encouragement, but we must confess we love him more as the parish priest dear and endeared to his flock, than he would have been if portrayed as the more ascetical member of some religious order, who looked but to the perfection of the soul, unswayed by the feelings of affection which grow up between the aged pastor and his flock, in the quiet and retired hamlet.

The anachronism of making Evangeline a Sister of Mercy is too slight to blemish the truthfulness of its Catholic portraiture. So complete is it as a whole, that we forbear to cite passages, as any of moderate length, like a delicate flower torn from its stem and its associations, would be inadequate to convey an idea of its beauty.

"The delicate shells lay on the shore;

The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;

I wiped away the weeds and foam,

I fetched my sea-born treasures home;

But the poor, unsightly noisome things

Had left their beauty on the shore,

With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar."

Charmed with Evangeline, we turn to "Frontenac," by A. B. Street.* With all our impressions of the "Gray Forest Eagle," we take the book with pleasure and pause to think who Frontenac was. The husband of a reigning belle of the French court, he preferred hard service and a distant government to her society amid the follies of Paris. His was no easy character for an uncatholic AngloSaxon to seize, from the fact that it is one which is never seen in England or her colonies. An Englishman will rush into vice, but his religiousness goes with it: once his moral tone is lost, all is lost; there is no apparent elasticity in the character to enable him to recover. Not so the continental of Latino-Celtic origin. His religiousness is seldom lost with his innocence: it may be pressed down for years by a burden of vice, but on the slightest advantage will recover its tone. And often in life, the two will sway to and fro in so strange a mode as to excite the

*Frontenac or the Atotarho, a Metrical Romance by A. B. Street. Scribner, N. Y.

utter amazement of such as know only their national character and have never sought to study or analyse any other. An Italian bandit praying is just as natural as an English highwayman would be unnatural. Yet few can comprehend this. Frontenac was eminently religious: he made his annual retreat, and spent several days in perfect seclusion each year in a portion of the Recollect convent which he himself erected: and yet he carried on so vigorous a crusade against the clergy that he actually, in the private theatricals of his officers, got up Molière's Tartuffe, and went around to the parlors of the various convents and religious houses and had it performed there in ridicule of the inmates. Here is a character to develop, to study out, and in his intercourse with French and Indian, to watch the operation of his character under its various phases. Let us open the book. In the description of scenery we recognise the author of the Gray Forest Eagle, and this is undoubtedly the forte of Mr. Street. Indian customs have been evidently deeply studied by him, more so than the chronicles of the time, and yet there are some strange errors. The Atotarho is not a war-chief, nor a runner to the tribes to bid them arm for war. The calumet could hardly at that period have been in use among the Iroquois. In all that relates to the French characters there is a want of definite drawing, and he constantly makes them surprised in the same way by the Iroquois. The concealment of Lucille's sex is purely impossible, and the idea of the burning at the stake as practised by the Iroquois entirely wrong, as may be seen by studying any of the old accounts. As actually performed, the prisoner was always stripped previous to being tied to the stake, and in no case that I can recollect, was it intended to consume the person alive. But we are not discussing Indian archæology. The prayer to the blessed Virgin, beginning "Mary, mother! from thy dwelling," is perfectly lackadaisical. Scott's Ave Maria! maiden mild, or Margaret's prayer in Faust, is worth a score of them. And as to the meaning or object of the prayer, we are completely at a loss. The worst cantique in a French Mois de Marie is superior to it. Convinced that Mr. Street has not entered into the sphere of Catholic feelings, we run over the book and light on the last stanza of the last canto entitled "Mass for the dead," and how, good reader, do you imagine it begins? Every body knows that mass-going, at least on week days, is associated with certain unpleasant ideas of uncomfortably early hours; or hours uncomfortable at least in winter. Let us see how Mr. Street begins:

"Sunset again o'er Quebec

Spread like a gorgeous pall,

And again does its rich glowing loveliness deck

River and castle and wall.

Follows the twilight haze,

And now the star-gemmed night,

And outbursts the Recollect's church in a blaze

Of glittering spangling light."

You are impressed with the idea of mass beginning just about the time when people are returning from the concert, and we spare the reader the rest of the mass, which is as good a description of a dedication, coronation or anything else, as it is of a mass, the whole being confined to music and incense. But the close betrays a still greater acquaintance with our service,