lutism, the sublimated corrosiveness of which has been steadily gnawing away with deadly edge every element of organic independence. For what is wholly incompatible with the nature of the Jesuit system is an element of independence. Much as has been said about the intellectual eminence of the Order, as shown in educational institutions, its scholastic efforts have uniformly been directed to substitute for the occasionally exaggerated manifestations attendant on a vigorous nature that monotony which accompanies stagnant life-the dead-level of general mediocrity. Independence of character, of mind, of research, are objects fatal to the Society, which must be expelled, and in lieu of these it has evolved a system of pseudo-culture, studded with the counterfeits of science-playthings adapted to natures that are being carefully nursed to grow up with stunted strength. A glance at the Ecclesiastical annals of the last centuries is enough to reveal the increasing sterility within the officially recognised area of the Latin Church.

In the seventeenth century, the French clergy, then eminent above all others for Catholic tradition and conviction, not here and there individually, nor yet under the mask of timid-hearted anonymousness, but in corporate declarations with their names appended thereto, over and over again protested against, and stigmatized as outrageous, the theological maxims propounded by Jesuit divines. From no section of the great Catholic community has there, however, been heard any protest in recent times against enforced inoculation with such doctrine. If some individual has spoken an occasional word in disapproval, he has been instantly darted upon and ostracized as a rebellious sheep; but of collective protest from any quarter that might claim to represent an element of weight in the Church, there has been no sign.

This fact gives a measure to what degree that fibre of honourable self-respect, which was the best bulwark at once for the grandeur and the liberties of the Church, has been crushed out. Silently, but ruthlessly, that stealthy organisation which calls itself the Society of Jesus-in grim pursuit of what it also calls the Greater Glory of God-has laid siege to, broken into, and razed those glorious and venerable sanctuaries, in Italy, in Germany, and above all in France, whence during generations there had beamed forth across the wide plain of the Catholic world, with the calmly luminous glow of purified light, the mellow gleam of a religious sentiment, which did not divorce the fervour of Catholic piety from candid learning and heartfelt attachment to liberties, any more than it considered it essential for the triumph of the Faith to propagate a belief in coarse superstitions, and to fortify the Church by a network of trickeries. Having

succeeded

succeeded step by step in outlawing every element that betrayed a feeling for organic freedom, the Society of Jesus, in our time, has set the cope-stone on their work by that momentous stroke in the Vatican Council, which has dogmatically identified the Church with the Order, and has practically transformed, at all events for the present, the organisation of the former into an enlarged house of the latter.

This is not the place to enter upon the proceedings through which this result was achieved, and the consequences which it is reasonable to infer may flow therefrom. Amidst much that is controverted, one fact is positive. The outcome of the Vatican Council was wholly in accordance with what had been strenuously striven for by the Order. It was a signal and emphatic victory for the Society. But the very magnitude of this triumph instantaneously evoked peril in the alarm instinctively instilled into the Civil Power at sight of this inflation of ecclesiastical pretensions. In consummating the conversion of the Latin Church into a synonym of the Jesuit Order, in vesting in the Pope absolute direction over a universal organisation, and in having ensured through careful preparatory enervation that, at the critical moment, all the forces in this organisation acquiesced in becoming obsequious agents at the beck of the Pontifical Cæsar, the authors of this transformation wrought a modification in the Church's Constitution, that materially altered the aspect presented by it towards the Civil Power. In the instinctive sentiment of the Civil Power, that it is being confronted by an organisation bristling with menacing sentiments, is to be found the key to the state of public feeling-most marked in Germany, but unmistakeably running along the whole line of modern governments-which looks on the new Constitution of the Latin Church with uneasiness, and singles out the Society of Jesus as the Prætorian Guard of a dangerous ecclesiastical Cæsarism. How things may shape themselves during the course of the conflict that has been fairly joined, it would be vain to speculate. This much, however, may be affirmed, that the deed which consummated the mischief was rendered feasible only because the ever-increasing spread of the influences specially represented by the Society of Jesus had thoroughly saturated and made subservient those who needed only to have protested, firmly and persistently, in order to have saved the liberties of the Church; and that the recovery of what has thus been lost from failure of courage, can be hoped for only when there is in the body of the Catholic community a revival of the spirit now apparently quenched.

ART.

ART. III.-The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort. By Theodore Martin. With Portraits and Views. Volume the First. London, 1875.

'To, his volume to the Queen, 'biography, while

me,' says Mr. Theodore Martin, in his admirable dedi

one of the most fascinating, has always appeared one of the most difficult branches of literature. How difficult, the few master-pieces in that kind, of either ancient or modern time, are enough to show.' In view of much that has of late years been given to the world, the remark is peculiarly appropriate. A good biography demands very special qualities in the writer. As a primary requisite, he must enter thoroughly into the mind and character to be portrayed. He must also have so lived into the circumstances, and become imbued, as it were, with the atmosphere of the life of the man whom he has undertaken to describe, as to be able to look upon its incidents with the same eyes, as nearly as may be, as his. At the same time he must have the power of holding himself so far aloof as to scrutinize all its details with a judgment at once calm and penetrating, to discriminate the relative importance and significance of every detail with which he has to deal, and to assign to each its due place and relief in working out the picture which is to reproduce in the minds of his readers the conception to which conscientious research and long meditation have given a definite shape within his own.

Nor does the difficulty end here. We are a mystery,' as Mr. Martin truly says, 'to ourselves; how much more, then, must we be a mystery to each other;' and he illustrates his proposition by Keble's beautiful lines, which remind us, that

'Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knows half the reason why we smile or sigh.'

An almost womanly sympathy and tenderness of touch are, indeed, required for the subtle half-tints that make up much of the charm of a good biography. But no biography will be good which is not also distinguished by a manly sincerity, no less than by the wise reticence of sound taste, and by an austere judgment that holds in check the writer's enthusiasm. For enthusiasm he must have; or the book will want that underglow of life, without which the reader's sympathy is not to be arrested or retained.

These considerations, and they are only a few of those which enter into the question, have had little weight with the mass of recent biographers. A quantity of crude materials, some

good,

good, some bad, some utterly worthless, are thrown together without method and without selection. All sorts of petty details, in themselves of the most insignificant kind and valueless as illustrative of character, are gone into, often at intolerable length. Things are not unfrequently divulged, which might make the miserable subject of the narrative turn in his grave with horror. His weaknesses, the mere accidents, it may be, of broken health, are recklessly laid bare, and the dearest secrets of his heart turned into a theme for vulgar gossip. To drag his frailties from their dread abode,' would seem to be the main object in view; and they who should protect the man, whose life they have set themselves to manufacture into a book, do him as much mischief by their inconsiderate babble, or clumsy vindications, as the malevolent cynic does to the man and woman he has happened to know, who leaves behind him, as a legacy to mankind, a journal of the vilest gossip of his fellow cynics, which he dared not publish in his own lifetime, to be published after his death as materials for history.'

Happily a swift oblivion inevitably overtakes biographies into which so little conscientious study and artistic skill have gone. Charles Lamb, fortunately for himself, had sunk into his grave before some of the chief offenders in this line had thrust their chaotic octavos upon the world, otherwise these would, to a certainty, have been included with Court Circulars, Statistical Reports, Beattie's and Soame Jenyns's works, and the like, in that famous catalogue of his books, which are no books.' It is with a very different order of book that we are now called upon to deal. In the Life of the Prince Consort' by Mr. Theodore Martin, we have a book which is a book-a book fitted to be as welcome in the drawing-room as in the library,—and which Charles Lamb would certainly not have included in his catalogue of biblia a-biblia, for he would have been sure to have been delighted, not less with the delicate insight into character which it affords, than with the thoroughly artistic skill which has gone to its production.

Mr. Martin's task was one of supreme difficulty.

The events

in which the Prince played an important, though often unnoticed part, were still recent; the passions of old party strife had not as yet wholly cooled down; men were still alive of whom it was difficult not to speak, but who could not fail to be deeply sensitive about whatever was said in any work which appeared with Her Majesty's sanction. Much had to be set right, as to which the public were either inaccurately informed or wholly in the dark. To write a life of the Prince, which did not deal fully with public affairs both at home and abroad, which did not

grapple

grapple with the motum civicum, gravesque principum amicitias, which are at all times a theme of peril, would have been to write a life from which what constituted its main elements of interest was omitted. Yet how might a writer hope to hold the scales so evenly as not to give offence, or, what in such a work was to be still more deprecated, provoke controversy in which possibly the Sovereign might be involved?

Then Mr. Martin, as he tells us, 'had not the happiness or the good fortune to know the Prince personally,' and he had therefore to enter upon his task in total uncertainty whether he should be enabled by the information to be placed at his disposal to overcome this disadvantage, or to satisfy his instinct as a writer of experience, that nothing was withheld, which an honest chronicler' ought to know.

From the latter difficulty Mr. Martin assures us he was at once relieved by the generous unreserve with which Her Majesty placed every species of information at his disposal—an unreserve which this volume enables us to estimate in all its extent, while it shows at the same time, by the prevailing discretion and good taste with which Mr. Martin has used his materials, how fully the confidence has been repaid. One thing at least is evident, from what Mr. Martin has written, that the relation which has subsisted between himself and his Sovereign, with reference to this work, has been one of entire frankness on one side, and of unconstrained independence on the other. Mr. Martin has obviously not been asked to withhold the frankest expression of the convictions at which he has arrived from the facts and documents before him; and he has not hesitated to speak out with the fearless loyalty of a man who felt sure of a generous estimate from a Sovereign whose truthfulness and directness of character are no secret to her people.

With such materials as have obviously been placed in Mr. Martin's hands he was well qualified to deal. The pages of this Review have, on more occasions than one, contained evidences of his power to place eminent men of a past day before us in their habits as they lived.' And his admirable Monograph on Horace had satisfied the most fastidious that his knowledge of men and things, and his quick spirit of imaginative sympathy, were likely to bring vividly before us the salient points of the history of the days in which the Prince's lot was cast, and to show the Prince himself moving and working among them with all the animation of a living picture. have the expectations of those who were familiar with Mr. Martin's powers as a writer been disappointed. Even from this first volume the world will be enabled to know the Prince as he

Nor

has