to another and certainly a better; they are the creations of what we know as Industrialism, and neither the one nor the other has yet a hundred years behind it.

Milan, however,-and therefore it figures in this book, -unlike Manchester, holds half forgotten within its' modern confusion many abiding and a few beautiful things that have already endured for more than a thousand years. These are our friends: they are in a very real sense a part of us, a part of our spiritual inheritance, and if our civilisation is to endure, whatever changes it may suffer, it seems to me these can never utterly pass away.

In reading the history of the Empire what often. strikes us is the age and the importance of two Italian cities, Rome and Milan, which to-day, as fifteen hundred years ago, seem, on our smaller stage, still to face each other; for the one is the political, the other the commercial, capital of the new Italian kingdom. Yet, of course, Milan owed everything to Rome in her genesis, and when she first appears in the page of our history it is as a Roman city we recognise her, Mediolanum, destined for greatness.

Her greatness, for she was perhaps the very greatest of all the great cities of the plain in the time of the Roman Empire, her vast importance at the foot of more than one great pass over the Alps, and the unappeasable and Latin energy of her always great population have all indirectly contributed to deprive her of everything but a fragment which would have assured us of her glory and her splendour in Roman days. First Uraias the Goth in 539, and then, and more utterly, Frederick Barbarossa in 1162, sacked and destroyed her; so that of the capital of Maximian Hercules, of Constantine, of S. Ambrose, of Valentinian and of Honorius almost nothing remains but those sixteen columns of white marble in the midst of the Corso di Porta Ticinese, which come to us, perhaps,

from the third century, and are all that is left of the great Baths of Mediolanum, or, as some have it, but with less assurance, of the Palace of the Emperor.

I suppose no one can pass those giant columns to-day, in all the hurry of the street, without emotion; they stand there in the midst of the modern meanness more eloquent than any pyramid, or the gaunt and deserted. towns of the plateau of Africa. Those have remembered and borne witness only in a solitude, but these in the midst of life and the face of the conqueror. Nor can anything anywhere in Italy bring home to one with a more painful conviction the contrast between the majesty and the endurance that were of old and the trumpery and ephemeral contrivances of to-day than those pillars constantly do as one passes them, well, in a tramcar on our way, let us say, to the famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele.

And yet I must confess that the one certain and enduring impression I always receive in Milan does not come to me from these beautiful and lonely columns, but from a church, the Church of S. Ambrogio, which for all that it is a building of the ninth century and of the twelfth, carries me back at once to what often seems to me the most wonderful, as it is certainly the most fundamental, of those centuries upon which Christendom has stood so strong; I mean the last century before the Barbarian invasion, the fourth of our era.

That wonderful and so fruitful age, so strangely neglected and so wilfully misjudged by our historians, is here in Milan, and especially in S. Ambrogio, brought vividly before us by the memory of the great Saint who dominated it, and whose shrine, rightly understood, the beautiful Church of S. Ambrogio, remains to this day.

I suppose that to most men S. Ambrose appears, if at all, first as one of the Four Doctors of the Latin Church, and then as a divine poet, the author for instance

of the lovely Christmas hymn, Jesu Redemptor Omnium, which coming to us faintly in the early twilight on Christmas Eve, presently in the midnight hour fills all the sky and mingles itself with the song of the angels. One remembers him, too, as the author of the ritual which bears his name, and of a certain manner of chanting named after him, and more especially perhaps as the Bishop who received S. Augustine into the Church, who baptized him and, as it is said, composed with him in antiphon the most wonderful of those proses which are wholly Christian in their origin, the Te Deum.

But S. Ambrose was something beside a poet, he was a very great man of action and a Saint. On his lips we hear not only the loveliest lines of Christian poetry, then at last come to perfection, but the most significant words of an age at least as subtle as our own. Rightly understood, the whole of S. Ambrose's life was devoted to the establishment of Europe, of Christendom, that it might endure. He was not only sure of himself, he was sure of what he achieved. As the great enemy of Arianism, he was not merely combating what our indifferent age would consider a matter of mere opinion in an incomprehensible theology, he was laying with the utmost forethought and intention the indestructible foundations of European society and civilisation, that the flood which was about to sweep all else away might not overwhelm them. Out of the ruins of the Empire we have constructed Europe, because he and the Church he served secured those foundations which are the vast monoliths of the Nicene Creed.

Of the Milan of the fourth century, of the latter part of the fourth century, then the capital of the West and in many respects the most important city in the Empire, S. Ambrose may be said to have been Father; yet he was not born there, but in Gaul, where his father, whose name also was Ambrose, was Prefect of the Prætorium, an office which gave him jurisdiction, not only in

France, but also in parts of Italy and Germany and throughout Roman Britain, in Spain and parts of Africa. This great officer had three children, all of whom became Saints: Marcellina, the eldest, a nun; Satyrus, who spent his life in his brother's service; and Ambrose, the Archbishop.

Ambrose was born in 340, and entered life in that great last century of the full and unhampered government of Rome. A story is told of his childhood, that as he lay asleep in one of the courts of his father's palace, a swarm of bees flew about his cradle, and some of them crept in and out of his mouth, and then mounted suddenly up into the air so high that they vanished out of sight. From this was argued a future greatness. His father died when he was still a child, and his mother returned to Rome with her children, for it was her native city. There Ambrose received his education, and presently proceeded with his brother to Milan, then the seat of the Prætorium and the centre of administration in the West: there they pleaded in the courts, and Ambrose rose to high office in the State, becoming at length Governor of Liguria and Æmilia, a vast jurisdiction. Now Auxentius, an Arian, had usurped the see of Milan for near twenty years, when suddenly, in 374, he died. A vast tumult reigned in the city about the new election, for the people as well as the clergy were distracted by furious parties, some demanding an Arian, some a Catholic, for their Bishop. To prevent riot, Ambrose thought it to be his duty to go into the church where the matter was to be decided and to make an oration counselling peace. While he was speaking a child suddenly cried out, "Ambrose is Bishop!" This the whole assembly took up, and both parties together proclaimed him Bishop indeed. Whereupon he stole away and made his escape and hid himself, and when the Vicar of Italy caused him to be found, he yet protested that he was not even baptized,

and declared that the canons forbade one who was but a catechumen to be promoted to the priesthood. Yet this did not avail him, for he was answered and truly that the canons gave way before an election by Grace. He was therefore baptized, and after due preparation consecrated Bishop on December 7, 374, the day on which the Church still keeps his feast. He was then about thirty-four years old.

Ambrose no sooner became Bishop than he committed the care of all his temporalities to his brother Satyrus and gave himself up to God and the care of his province. He had scarce been Bishop five years, however, when he lost Satyrus, who, attempting to go to Africa on his brother's business, was shipwrecked, and not being baptized, desired some on board to give him the Blessed Sacrament to carry with him as he swam for his life; for it was then the custom for the faithful to carry It with them on long voyages, that they might not be deprived of It at last. No one, however, who was unbaptized was allowed to see the Holy Species, therefore Satyrus begged It wrapped in a napkin. With this about him, he flung himself into the sea, and came first to land. There he sought baptism, but would not receive it then at the hands of an Arian and the Bishop's name was Lucifer-but coming into a Catholic province, thankfully received it, and, as Ambrose affirms, never forfeited the grace of that sacrament, for he died soon after his return to Milan in the arms of Ambrose and Marcellina. He was presently canonised, and the Church keeps his feast on 17th September.

It is impossible to give any real impression of what the rule of Ambrose was in Milan, or even, in such a book as this, of the Milan of that day. The most gentle of men, full of charity, learned and wise, he was yet a great statesman and a saint: his government passes before our eyes to the constant clash of arms, amid