enlarged by his bounty with similar founda- | each subtle distinction in the text. Never betions. But, as Faber remarked, a still nobler fore or since was the degree of doctor in diedifice was yet to be erected on the soul of the vinity, to which he now proceeded, so hardly founder itself. The first stone of it was laid earned or so well deserved. in the duke's performance of the Spiritual Exercises. To the completion of this invisible but imperishable building, the remainder of his Jife was inflexibly devoted. Two of the brothers of the duke had been members of the sacred college, and his humility had refused the purple offered at the instance of the emperor to two of his sons. But how should the new doctor avert from his own head the ecclesiastical cap of maintenance with which Charles was now desirous to replace the ducal coronet? He fled the presence of his imperial patron; made and executed his own testamentary dispositions, delivered his last parental charge to his eldest son, and bade a final adieu to his weeping family. The gates of the castle of Gandia closed on their selfbanished lord. He went forth, like Francis Xavier, chanting the song of David-“ When Israel went out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from a strange people," adding from another strain of the royal minstrel, "Our bonds are broken and we are delivered." lived for more than twenty years from this time, and in his future missions into Spain often passed the gates of the castle, but never more re-entered them. He became a stranger even to his children, never again passing so much as a single day in their society, or even permitting himself to become acquainted with their offspring. He With Ignatius the duke had long maintained a correspondence, in which the stately courtesies of Spanish noblemen not ungracefully temper the severe tones of patriarchal authority and filial reverence. Admission into the order of Jesus was an honour for which, in this case, the aspirant was humbly content, and was wisely permitted long to wait and sue. To study the biography, that he might imitate the life of Him by whose holy name the society was called; to preach in his own household, or at the wicket of the nunnery of the ladies of St. Clair; and day by day, to place in humiliating contrast some proof of the divine goodness, and some proof of his own demerit, were the first probationary steps which the duke was required to tread in the toilsome path on which he had thus entered. It was a path from which Philip, then governing Spain with the title of regent, would have willingly seduced him. He consulted him on the most critical affairs; summoned him to take a high station in the states of Castile; and pressed on his acceptance the office of grand master of the royal household. It was declined in favour of the Duke of Alva. Had Gandia preferred the duties of his secular rank to those of his religious aspirations, Spain might have had a saint the less and seven provinces the more. With the elevation of Alva, the butcheries in the Netherlands, the disgrace of Spain, and theduchies. He would have entered Rome by independence of Holland might have been averted. As the bird set free to her nest, so hasted the emancipated duke to take his seat at the footstool of Ignatius. Yet in his route through Ferrara and Florence, his sacred impatience was arrested, and his humility confirmed, by the unwelcome honours yielded to him by his kinsmen, the reigning sovereigns of those night; but in the city of triumphs and ovations, the victorious Loyola must exhibit so illusWarned by his escape, the duke implored trious a captive. Attended by the ambassador with renewed earnestness his immediate ad- of Spain, by a prince of the house of Colonna, mission into the order; nor was Ignatius and by a long train of cardinals, priests, and willing that his proselyte should again incur nobles, the duke of Gandia advanced in sosuch dangers. At the chapel of his own col- lemn procession to the Casa Professa. There, lege he accordingly pronounced the irrevocable in the presence of his general, his wearied vows; a papal bull having dispensed during a spirit found at length the repose which the term of four years with any public avowal of most profuse liberality of fortune had been the change. They were passed in the final ad- unable to bestow. With tears of joy he kissed justment of his secular affairs. He had lived the feet of the patriarch and of his professed in the splendour appropriate to his rank and brethren, esteeming the meanest office in their fortune, and in the exercise of the bounty be- household an honour too exalted for so uncoming his eminence in the Christian common-worthy an associate; and then, in a general wealth. But now all was to be abandoned, even the means of almsgiving, for he was himself henceforth to live on the alms of others. He gave his children in marriage to the noblest houses in Spain and Portugal, transferred to his eldest son the enjoyment of the patrimonial estates of Gandia, and then, at the age of forty, meekly betook himself to the study of scholastic divinity, of the traditions of the church, and of the canons of the general councils. He even submitted to all the rules, and performed all the public exercises enforced on the youngest student. Such was his piety that the thorny fagots of the schoolmen fed instead of smothering the flame; and on the margin of his Thomas Aquinas might be seen some devout aspiration, extracted by his sacred alchemy from confession, poured into the ear of Ignatius every secret of his conscience from the dawn of life to that long desired hour. Such zeal was a treasure too precious to be left without some great and definite object; and as the duke was still the steward of some of this world's treasure, which he had devoted to sacred uses, they were employed in building at Rome the church and college afterwards so famous as the college de Propaganda Fide. Only one secular care still awaited him. His rank as a grandee of Spain, and the cross of Alcantara, could not be laid aside without the consent of the emperor. It was solicited with all the grace of an accomplished courtier, and all the fervour of a saint. But while he awaited at Rome the answer of Charles, a new alarm disturbed the serenity of the Casa Professa. | side. Long and frequent were their conversaThe dreaded purple was again pressed on him tions; but the record of them transmitted to us with all the weight of papal admonition. To by the historians of the Order of Jesus, has but avoid it, Gandia fled the presence of the little semblance of authenticity. Charles aspope, and Ignatius returned to Spain, per- sails, and Borgia defends the new Institute, formed a pilgrimage to the castle of Loyola, and the imperial disputant of course yields to kissed the hallowed ground, and then burying the combined force of eloquence and truth. It himself in a Jesuit college at Ognato, once seems less improbable that the publication of more awaited the decision of the emperor. It Memoirs of the life of the Emperor, to be soon arrived. He was no longer a duke, a written by himself, was one subject of serious knight of St. Iago, nor even a Spanish gentle- debate at these interviews, and that the good man. Solemnly, and in due legal form, he re- father dissuaded it. If the tale be true, he has nounced all these titles, and with them all his certainly one claim the less to the gratitude of property and territorial rights. Even his secu- later times. What seems certain is, that he lar dress was laid aside, and his head was undertook and executed some secret mission prepared by the tonsure for the Episcopal from Charles to the court of Portugal, that he touch, emblematic of the most awful mystery. acted as one of the executors of his will, and The astonished spectators collected and pre- delivered a funeral oration in praise of the deserved the holy relics. And now bent in lowly ceased emperor before the Spanish court at prostration before the altar at Ognato, the Fa- Valladolid. ther Francis had no farther sacrifice to offer there, but the sacrifice of a heart emptied of all the interests and of all the affections of the world. Long and silent was his prayer, but it was now unattended with any trace of disorder. The tears he shed were such as might have bedewed the cheek of the first man before he had tasted the bitterness of sin. He rose from his knees, bade a last farewell to his attendants; and Father Francis was left alone with his Creator. It was a solitude not long to be maintained. The fame of his devotion filled the Peninsula. All who needed spiritual counsel, and who wished to indulge an idle curiosity, resorted to his cell. Kings sought his advice, wondering congregations hung on his lips, and two at least of the grandees of Spain imitated his example. His spiritual triumphs were daily more and more splendid; and, if he might escape the still threatened promotion into the college of cardinals, might be as enduring as his life. The authority of Ignatius, not unaided by some equivocal exercise of his ingenuity, at length placed Father Francis beyond the reach of this last danger. They both went down to the grave without witnessing the debasement of their order by any ecclesiastical dignity. From this point, the life of Borgia merges in the general history of the order to which he had attached himself. It is a passage of history full of the miracles of self-denial, and of miracles in the more accurate acceptation of the word. To advance the cause of education, and to place in the hands of his own society the control of that mighty engine, was the labour which Father Francis as their general chiefly proposed to himself. His success was complete, and he lived to see the establishment, in almost every state of Europe, of colleges formed on the model of that which he had himself formed in the town of Gandia. Borgia is celebrated by his admirers as the most illustrious of all conquerors of the appetites and passions of our common nature; and the praise, such as it is, may well be conceded to him. No other saint in the calendar ever abdicated or declined so great an amount of worldly grandeur and domestic happiness. No other embraced poverty and pain in forms more squalid, or more revolting to flesh and blood. So strange and shocking are the stories of his flagellations, of the diseases contracted by them. and of the sickening practices by which he tormented his senses, that even to read them is of itself no light penance. But there was yet one tie to the pomp and In the same spirit, our applause is demanded vanity of this world, which could not be en- for feats of humility, and prodigies of obeditirely broken. During his viceregal adminis-ence, and raptures of devotion, so extravagant, tration, Father Francis had on one occasion traversed the halls of the castle of Barcelona in deep and secret conference with his imperial cousin. Each at that interview imparted to the other his design of devoting to religious retirement the interval which should intervene between the business and the close of life. At He had great talents with a narrow capaevery season of disappointment Charles re- city. Under the control of minds more comverted to this purpose, and abandoned or post-prehensive than his own, he could adopt and poned it with each return of success. But now, broken with sickness and sorrow, he had fixed his residence in a monastery in Estremadura, and summoned the former viceroy of Catalonia to the presence of his early friend and patron. Falling on his knees, as in times of yore, Father Francis offered to impress the kiss of homage on the hand which had so lately borne the sceptre of half the civilized world. But Charles embraced his cousin, and compelled him to sit, and to sit covered, by his that his biographers might seem to have assumed the office of penitential executors to the saint; and to challenge for his memory some of the disgust and contempt which when living he so studiously courted. And yet Borgia was no ordinary man. execute their wider views with admirable address and vigour. With rare powers both of endurance and of action, he was the prey of a constitutional melancholy, which made him dependent on the more sanguine spirit of his guides for all his aims and for all his hopes; but once rescued from the agony of selecting his path, he moved along it not merely with firmness but with impetuosity. All his impulses came from without; but when once given they could not readily be arrested. The very dejection and self-distrust of his nature rendered him more liable than other men to impressions at once deep and abiding. Thus he was a saint in his infancy at the bidding of his nurse-then a cavalier at the command of his uncle-an inamorato because the empress desired it a warrior and a viceroy because such was the pleasure of Charles-a devotee from seeing a corpse in a state of decomposition-a founder of colleges on the advice of Peter Faber-a Jesuit at the will of Ignatiusand general of the order because his colleagues would have it so. Yet each of these characters, when once assumed, was performed, not merely with constancy, but with high and just applause. His mind was like a sycophant plant, feeble when alone, but of admirable vigour and luxuriance when properly sustained. A whole creation of such men would have been unequal to the work of Ignatius Loyola; but, in his grasp, one such man could perform a splendid though but a secondary service. His life was more eloquent than all the homilies of Chrysostom. Descending from one of the most brilliant heights of human prosperity, he exhibited every where, and in an aspect the most intelligible and impressive to his contemporaries, the awful power of the principles by which he was impelled. Had he lived in the times and in the society of his infamous kinsmen, Borgia would not improbably have shared their disastrous renown. But his dependent nature, moulded by a far different influence, rendered him a canonized saint; an honourable, just and virtuous man; one of the most eminent ministers of a polity as benevolent in intention as it was gigantic in design; and the founder of a system of education pregnant with results of almost matchless importance. His miracles may be not disadvantageously compared with those of the Baron Manchausen; but it would be less easy to find a meet comparison for his genuine virtues. They triumph over all the silly legends and all the real follies which obscure his character. His whole mature life was but one protracted martyrdom, for the advancement of what he esteemed the perfection of his own nature, and the highest interests of his fellow-men. Though he maintained an intimate personal intercourse with Charles IX. and his mother, and enjoyed their highest favour, there is no reason to suppose that he was intrusted with their atrocious secret. Even in the land of the inquisition he had firmly refused to lend the influence of his name to that sanguinary tribunal; for there was nothing morose in his fanaticism, nor mean in his subservience. Such a man as Francis Borgia could hardly become a persecutor. His own church raised altars to his Other churches have neglected or despised it. In that all-wise and all-compassionate judgment, which is uninvaded by our narrow prejudices and by our unhallowed feelings, his fervent love of God and of man was doubtless permitted to cover the multitude of his theoretical errors and real extravagances. Human justice is severe, not merely because man is censorious, but because he reasonably distrusts himself, and fears lest his weakness should confound the distinctions of good and name. evil. Divine justice is lenient, because there alone love can flow in all its unfathomable depths and boundless expansion-impeded by no dread of error, and diverted by no misplaced sympathies. To Ignatius, the founder of the order of the Jesuits; to Xavier, the great leader in their missionary enterprises; to Laynez, the author of their peculiar system of theology; and to Borgia, the architect of their system of education, two names are to be added to complete the roll of the great men from whose hands their institute received the form it retains to the present hour. These are Bellarmine, from whom they learned the arts and resources of controversy; and Acquaviva, the fifth in number, but in effect the fourth of their generals— who may be described as the Numa Pompilius of the order. There is in the early life of Bellarmine a kind of pastoral beauty, and even in his later days a grace, and a simplicity so winning, that it costs some effort to leave such a theme unattempted. The character of Acquaviva, one of the most memorable rulers and lawgivers of his age, it would be a still greater effort to attempt. "Henceforth let no man say," (to mount on the stilts of dear old Samuel Johnson) “come, I will write a disquisition on the history, the doctrines, and the morality of the Jesuits-at least let no man say so who he has not subdued the lust of story-telling." Filled to their utmost limits, lie before us the sheets so recently destined to that ambitious enterprise. Perhaps it may be as well thus to have yielded to the allurement which has marred the original design. If in later days the disciples of Ignatius, obeying the laws of all human institutions, have exhibited the sure though slow developement of the seeds of error and of crime, sown by the authors of their polity, it must at least be admitted that they were men of no common mould. It is something to know that an impulse, which after three centuries is still unspent, proceeded from hands of gigantic power, and that their power was moral as much as intellectual, or much more so. In our own times much indignation and much alarm are thrown away on innovators of a very different stamp. From the ascetics of the common room, from men whose courage rises high enough only to hint at their unpopular opinions, and whose belligerent passions soar at nothing more daring than to worry some unfortunate professor, it is almost ludicrous to fear any great movement on the theatre of human affairs. When we see these dainty gentlemen in rags, and hear of them from the snows of the Himmalaya, we may begin to tremble. The slave of his own appetites, in bondage to conventional laws, his spirit emasculated by the indulgences, or corroded by the cares of life, hardly daring to act, to speak, or to think for himself, mangregarious and idolatrous man-worships the world in which he lives, adopts its maxims, and tread its beaten paths. To rouse him from his lethargy, and to give a new current to his thoughts heroes appear from time to time on the verge of his horizon, and hero-worship, pagan or Christian, withdraws him for awhile from still baser idolatry. To contemplate the motives and the career of such a man, may teach much which well deserves the knowing; but nothing more clearly than this-that no one can have shrines erected to his memory in the hearts of men of distant generations un less his own heart was an altar on which daily sacrifices of fervent devotion, and magnanimous self denial, were offered to the only true object of human worship. TAYLOR'S EDWIN THE FAIR.* Tuis is a dramatic poem full of life and beauty, thronged with picturesque groups, and with characters profoundly discriminated. They converse in language the most chaste, harmonious, and energetic. In due season fearful calamities strike down the lovely and the good. Yet "Edwin the Fair" is not to be classed among tragedies, in the full and exact sense of the expression. "To purge the soul by pity and terror," it is not enough that the stage should exhibit those who tread the high places of the earth as victims either of unmerited distress, or of retributive justice. It is farther necessary that their sorrows should be deviations from the usual economy of human life. They must differ in their origin, and their character, from those ills which we have learned to regard as merely the established results of familiar causes. They must be attended by the rustling of the dark wings of fate, or by the still more awful march of an all-controlling Providence. The domain of the tragic theatre lies in that dim region where the visible and invisible worlds are brought into contact; and where the wise and the simple alike perceive and acknowledge a present deity, or demon. It is by the shocks and abrupt vicissitudes of fortune, that the dormant sense of our dependence on that inscrutable power in the grasp of which we lie, is quickened into life. It is during such transient dispersion of the clouds beneath which it is at other times concealed, that we feel the agency of heaven in the affairs of earth to be a reality and a truth. It is in such occurrences alone (distinguished in popular language from the rest, as providential) that the elements of tragedy are to be found in actual or imaginable combination. There the disclosure of the laws of the universal theocracy imparts to the scene an unrivalled interest, and to the actors in it the dignity of ministers of the will of the Supreme. There each event exhibits some new and sublime aspect of the divine energy working out the divine purposes. There the great enigmas of our existence, receive at least a partial solution. There, even amidst the seeming triumph of wrong, may be traced the dispensation of justice to which the dramatist is bound; and there also extends before his view a field of meditation drawn from themes of surpassing majesty and pathos. * Edwin the Fair: an Historical Drama. By HENRY TAYLOR, author of "Philip Van Artevelde." London: 12mo. 1842. Such is the law to which all the great tragic writers of ancient or of modern times have submitted themselves-each in his turn assuming this high office of interpreting the movements of Providence, and reconciling man to the mysteries of his being. Thus Job is the stoic of the desert-victorious over all the persecutions of Satan, till the better sense of unjust reproach and undeserved punishment breaks forth in agonies which the descending Deity rebukes, silences, and soothes. Prometheus is the temporary triumph over beneficence, of a power at once malignant and omnipotent, which, at the command of destiny, is blindly rushing on towards the universal catastrophe which is to overwhelm and ruin all things. Agamemnon returns in triumph to a home, where, during his long absence, the avenging furies have been couching to spring at last on the unhappy son of Atreus-every hand in that fated house drooping with gore, and every voice uttering the maledictions of the infernals. Edipus, and his sons and daughters, represent a succession of calamities and crimes which would seem to exhaust the catalogue of human wretchedness; but each in turn is made to exhibit the working of one of the most awful of the laws under which we live-the visitation of the sins of parents upon their children to the third and fourth generation. Macbeth is seduced by demoniacal predictions to accomplish the purposes, by violating the commands of Heaven, and so to meditate, to extenuate, and to commit, the crimes suggested by the fiend in cruel mockery. Hamlet is at once the reluctant minister and the innocent victim of the retributive justice to the execution of which he is goaded by a voice from the world of departed spirits. Lear is crushed amidst the ruins of his house, on which parental injustice, filial impiety, foul lusts, and treacherous murder, had combined to draw down the curse of the avenger. Faust moves on towards destruction under the guidance of the fiend, who lures him by the pride of knowledge and the force of appetite. Wallenstein plunges into destruction, drawing down with him the faithful and the good, as a kind of bloody sacrifice, to atone for treachery to which the aspect of the stars and the predictions of the diviner had impelled him. And so, through every other tragic drama which has awakened the deeper emotions of the spectator or the reader, might be traced the operation of the law to which we have referred. How far 149 this universal characteristic of tragedy-the | Leolf proceeding to the north, with a part of In the fresh and dewy dawn of life, Edwin and Elgiva had been wont to rove "O'er hill, through dale, with interlacing arms, And thrid the thickets where wild roses grow, Entangled with each other like themselves." But their sun had scarcely risen above the eastern horizon when the dreams of childhood faded away before the illusions of youth. He ascended the Anglo-Saxon throne, and she plighted her troth to Earl Leolf, the commander of the English armies. The earl was "a man in middle age, busy and hard to please," and not happy in the art of pleasing. Such, at least, was the more deliberate opinion or feeling of Elgiva. In a day of evil augury to herself, and to her house, the inconstant maiden crushed the hopes of her grave, though generous suitor, to share the crown of her early playmate. It sat neither firmly nor easily on his brows. Athulf, the brother, and Leolf, the discarded suitor of the queen, were the chief opponents of the powerful body which, under the guidance of Dunstan, were rapidly extending over the monarchy, and the Church of England, the authority of the monastic orders. In the approaching alliance of Athulf's family to Edwin, the abbot of Glastonbury foresaw the transfer, to a hostile party, of his own dominion over the mind of his young sovereign. Events had occurred to enhance and justify his solicitude. Athulf's energy had enabled Edwin to baffle the pretexts by which Dunstan had delayed his coronation. It was celebrated with becoming splendour, and was followed by a royal banquet. The moment appeared to the king propitious for avoiding the vigilant eye of his formidable minister. He escaped from the noisy revels, and flew on the wings of love to an adjacent oratory, where, before his absence had excited the notice and displeasure of his guests, he exchanged with Elgiva the vows which bound them to each other till death should break the bond. They little dreamed how soon it should thus be broken. Resenting the indignity of the king's abrupt desertion of the festive board, the assembled nobles deputed the abbot and the archbishop of Canterbury to solicit, and if necessary to compel his return. They found him in the society of his newly affianced bride, and assailed them with gross imputations, which she indignantly repelled by an open avowal of her marriage. Availing himself of the disorder of the moment, and of the canonical objections to their union, founded on their too near consanguinity, Dunstan caused them to be seized and imprisoned. Elgiva was despatched to Chester, the king and Athulf being secured in the Tower of London. Whatever may have been the indignation pacific measures; and to these the archbishop, of the confederate lords, their policy dictated offended and alarmed by the audacity of Dunstan, willingly lent himself. He convened a synod to deliberate on the validity of the royal Rome for a dispensation. Long and fervent marriage, and on the propriety of applying to debate ensued. The church as represented in that holy conclave, had given strong indications of a conciliatory spirit, when, casting himself, in vehement prayer before a crucifix, Dunstan invoked the decision of Him whose sacred image it bore. An audible voice, which seemed to proceed from the cross, (though really uttered by a minister of the abbot's crimes, who had been concealed for the purpose within its ample cavity,) forbade the ratification of the royal nuptials. Rising from the earth, the holy abbot pronounced a solemn excomrents, and dismissed the assembly which had munication of Edwin, Elgiva, and their adheso vainly attempted to defeat the will of heaven, and of heaven's chosen minister. the Tower, to obtain from the captive and ex-- proaches, and at length withdrew, but not till powerful a hold on the attachment and reverBut the saint of Glastonbury possessed too ence of the multitude, to be thus defeated by any blow however severe, or by any exposture however disgraceful. A popular insurrection in his favour arrested his flight to France. He resumed his self-confidence, appeared again in his proper character, and lifted up his mitred front, with its wonted superiority, in a Wittenagemot which he convened at Malpas. There, surrounded by his adherents and his military retainers, he openly denounced war on his sovereign. moved from London towards Chester, to effect Under the guidance of Athulf, the king had tempt was not successful. Impatient of her a junction with Leolf and his army. The atprison, Elgiva had exercised over her jailer the spell of her rank and beauty, and had rendered him at once the willing instrument and the companion of her escape. Leolf was apprized of her design, and anxious for the safety of her who had so ill-requited his devotion, advanced to meet her, supported only by a small party of his personal attendants. They met.. and, while urging their flight to Leolf's army, of Dunstan, and slain. were overtaken by a party attached to the cause Leolf, who had absented himself from the coronation, was in command of the royal forces at Tunbridge, where he was quickly joined by tention at least, responsible. Alarmed by inFor this catastrophe Dunstan was not, in inAthulf, who had found the means of escaping telligence of a Danish invasion, he had become from prison. The two earls then separated-desirous of a reconciliation with Edwin, and |