to leave their master without some one at his side. This evening hè attempted to rise from his seat, resting one hand upon a bureau, and seeking with the other a support from the cord attached to the wall, and intended for this purpose ; but, having risen with difficulty, the holy father was unable to reach the cord, and fell upon the marble Aoor, between the table and the elbow chair. His head did not reach the ground; the left side door sustained the entire weight of the fall. They ran in at his cries, placed him upon the bed, and, at the first visit, the surgeons pronounced that the socket of the thighbone was fractured. During the night the patient was restless, but without fever. This accident took place on the anniversary of the fatal sixth of July 1809. The surgeons ordered that the state of the fracture should be concealed from the patient; nevertheless he himself asked for the viaticum. It was after this ceremony that, being fatigued by the attentions of Cardinal Bertazzoli, he used these remarkable words, ' Andate : voi siete veramente un pio seccatore!' It was, indeed, indiscreet to think of counselling more piety, greater resignation, to the most pious, the most resigned of men.... “ The patient was sufficiently tranquil on the 18th (Augnst); but on the 19th the most alarming symptoms appeared: the pope pronounced vaguely the words Savona and Fontainebleau ; his voice soon altered, and from the sound of some Latin words they knew that he was constantly in prayer. The churches were thronged with pious persons; one universal feeling of regret reigned everywhere. There was no appearance of any other feeling but that of grief. In the evening it was no longer possible for the patient to take the slightest nourishment; and, on the 20th August, at five o'clock in the morning, this life, so pure, so wise, so courageous under every difficulty, was extinguished.”—vol. ii. pp. 600-5. Thus died Pius VII, aged eighty-one years and six days, after a reign of twenty-three years five inonths and six days; one of the most eventful which the Christian Church has ever We may return at some convenient time to the history of particular characters and epochs in this attractive period; but the brief outline which we have given, partly from Chevalier Artaud's admirable work, partly also from sources less easily accessible, will enable the reader to estimate sufficiently its general interest. In some particulars we doubt not the English reader will be disappointed : he will look in vain for the memorable discussion of the veto, to him of such interest as a national question. He may conceive, on the other hand, that an undue share of attention is given to the affairs of France. But it is fair to remember, that, as in politics and war, so also in religion, France was the great theatre to which every eye was turned ; the centre from which, for good or for evil, the fortunes of the fairest portion of Europe emanated : nor could the biographer of Pius be supposed to have executed seen. his task with fidelity, if he did not ample and ungrudging justice to that subject, which, even amid the indignities of his exile, was ever present to his heart, and to which the greatest labours of his pontificate were directed. But it is not in its details of individuals or of countries, engrossingly interesting as they are, that the philosophical student of history will consider the reign of Pius VII; not as it regards France, or Italy, or England, or Ireland; but as forming an integral portion of the universal annals of the human race. And what a portion ! Nearly half a century has now elapsed since, by the choice of an exiled and mutilated conclave, he was called to the precarious occupancy of the tottering-and to human eyes, fallen-chair of Peter. What a wondrous volume of instruction does the interval present ! In the ordinary course of mortal things all the characters have changed upon the scene. The persecutor and the persecuted have been called to their account; the tyrant, with him whom he made his slave! The infidel and anti-social republic is blotted from among the nations; the mighty empire is numbered among the things of the past. France, the self-constituted arbitress of the fortunes of Rome, has taken upon herself new and varied forms, which a breath may again dissolve into the wild elements of which they are fashioned ! All has changed around ! But Rome-eternal Rome “ Tal è, qual era, quando fu stabilita "the same upon the day on which the murdered Braschi perished in a wretched exile, and on that on which his courted successor entered in triumph to resume his throne! the same amid the persecutions of Savona and the lavished honours of Fontainebleau !-maintaining ever that mysterious pre-eminence which the common policy of all her enemies would seek to overthrow ! “Sedet eternumque sedebit!" Well was it written by the Protestant Hurter, when, with the map of history unrolled before his gifted eye, he contemplated this moral miracle of immutability: “When we look back upon past ages, and behold how the papacy has outlived all other institutions, how it has witnessed the rise and wane of so many states--itself, amid the endless fluctuations of human things, preserving and asserting the selfsame unchangeable spirit, can we wonder that many look to it as to that Rock which rears itself unshaken amid the beating surges of time!" VOL. X.NO. XIX. H ART. III.- Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Serenteenth centuries. By necessarily a history of the human mind during that period. It is therefore by no means sufficient to array in chronological order the various literary and scientific productions which have illustrated it; the reader requires some more rational method than an arbitrary division of time. He requires something continuous, by which he may be able to thread the complicated sinuosities of this inextricable Jabyrinth. Without such a guide, it becomes almost impossible to impress upon the memory the order of succession, much less the moral dependance of those innumerable facts which constitute the materials of such a history. There can be no doubt, that, in the history of the progress of the human mind, there exists a certain logical unity, which the very terms-the human mind, and humanity, themselves imply. In order, then, to seize that unity, and to employ it as the basis of a method, it is necessary to have some fixed system of philosophy, by the aid of which, this multifarious and chaotic matter may be reduced to order, and arranged in one vast and comprehensive synthesis. Such system can, according to our views, be no other than the Christian philosophy, by which we of course understand, that Christianity which is complete in its details, and possessed of a sufficient sanction to satisfy the understanding; in a word, that which is based upon Catholic tradition and supported by the authority of the Church, There is perhaps something odious, or, to say the least of it, something which appears wanting in that urbanity which should ever characterize the intercourse of men of education, in dragging for ever before the public, the distinctions of Catholic and Protestant ; for the angry cavillings of three centuries have communicated to those terms an irritating quality which is anything, but favourable to the calm investigation of truth. We should prefer on all occasions, were the thing in itself possible, entrenching ourselves in some more comprehensive generality, which might exclude all such invidious distinctions. Both Catholics and Protestants are alike mem . bers of that universal family, which has one and the same a origin, and over which a benevolent Creator extends with an impartial hand his paternal solicitude; and, as far as regards the more numerous body of our readers, are we not all the common offspring of the same great and generous people? We avow it openly, we consider life as 100 short and too thickly beset with sorrows, to afford us either time or fitting opportunity to indulge those angry feelings, to which harsh recrimination gives birth ; and therefore gladly would we have avoided, upon the present occasion, the introduction of any such distinctions; and the more particularly so, as the work before us is neither political nor theological, but purely of a literary character; but we feel, at the very outset, that in so doing, we should not only be pushing the spirit of for. bearance to the very limits of the ridiculous; we should moreover deprive ourselves of the opportunity of taking a just and comprehensive view of the subject before us; for the litera, ture of a people, or of an epoch, can never be separated from the history of their philosophical and religious opinions. The simple circumstance of Mr. Hallam's having comprised the sixteenth century in the period which he has chosen for his literary history, would alone have forced upon us those matters which separate the Catholic and the Protestant; for how are we to pass over the principal feature of its history, that Reformation, which, upon the one hand is regarded as an emancipation of the human mind from antiquated errors, and on the other, as an emancipation-we have no wish to quarrel with a word—but an emancipation from those salutary restraints, without which, we fall into an interminable series of errors, in philosophy, in religion, in social polity, and even in literature itself. . But this is not the sole motive which has guided us; we shall have occasion to point out the frequent failures of this very learned and elaborate work, which can only be ascribed to the circumstance of its being written in a Protestant spirit. Not that we intend by any means to insinuate that this work is written in a spirit particularly hostile to Catholics, for such is by no means the case. Mr. Hallam is evidently a man of too great a mind, to allow himself to be carried away by the petulant calumnies of a sect; he is however a Protestant, and apparently a Protestant upon principle, and, as such, is entitled to our most unqualified respect : le may have taken from time to time a hasty—perhaps a partial view of certain controverted questions ; but we are not of the number of those who require perfection in any human production ; we pass lightly over the faults of others, in order that our own a may meet with a similar indulgence. What we mean here by a Protestant spirit, is, the undue preponderance of a method, which not only accords an exaggerated importance to the process of analysis, but which may be said to exclude entirely the no less necessary process of synthesis ; without which, the former is but labour lost, as it can never lead to any useful result. The only philosophical result of an exclusive use of the process of analysis, is that form of scepticism, which, if carried out into its logical consequences, becomes in its turn dogmatical, by asserting its own exclusive superiority, and by denying the existence of any contrary theory. It appears, however, to us, that no man who has observed the course of human events with a certain degree of attention, can have failed to remark a certain fixed element, which, in every age, pervading the institutions, the habits, and the literature of various nations, serves as it were to establish the genera of the moral world, and render a classification possible. This harmony, as all harmony in general, implies a certain fixed and immutable unity, around which, that which is various and contingent, adapts itself, according to some general law. In the history of mankind, whether we consider it in its collective form, under the general title of humanity, or whether we select from the whole any particular people, we shall find that this centre of the moral world, is no other than the revealed will of God; for at the origin of every people who have any pretension to the possession of their history, we find, under some form or other, a revelation, or religion of Divine origin. Without the lamentable lessons of experience, we should then be inclined to doubt the possibility of error, in the presence of a formal manifestation of truth. When, for instance, in the physical world, we have once discovered the will of its divine Creator, or in other words, the laws which govern its phenomena—where is the man who is rash enough to strive against unlimited power? Yet in the moral world, we see men constantly setting at defiance its fundamental laws, and then complaining of that disorder, which is the sole fruit of their own perversity. Has he who conceals fire in bis bosom, a right to be astonished that it should consume him? or he who abandons his field without culture, to complain that it produces only thorns and briars? Our search after the cause of this apparent anomaly, will not be long; it is to be found in that blindness and perversity of the human will, the result of a primitive fault, the history of which stands inscribed in the annals of every people. |