The Catholic World Volume I Part 104

Toil is the law of the ice-clad land--toil, not to wrest from the bosom of the earth her children's sustenance, but to tear from the amphibious creatures, from whom they have learned how to shelter themselves from the cold, and whose skins cover them, the unctuous flesh, which they devour raw in enormous quant.i.ties. The Innuit are, on the whole, a gentle people, driven by the relentless need and severity of their lives into close and peaceful companions.h.i.+p. They have no king, no government, no law, no defined religion, no property; they have, for all these, custom--the oldest law; they are animated by the same spirit that dictated the reply once made to one who sat by Jacob's well: "Our fathers wors.h.i.+pped in this mountain, and we wors.h.i.+p." As "the old Innuits" did, so do their successors. They have no bread, no medicine, no household furniture; they are poor human waifs upon the wide white bosom of the frozen seas; and they have, no help or resource but in the seal, the walrus, the white bear, the rein-deer, and the wonderful Esquimaux dogs, which are by far the n.o.blest living creatures in all those sterile wastes. From the seal they have learned to make the _igloo_, which is the house of the Innuit. They eat the flesh of this animal, and drink its fresh warm blood; they kill its young, and eagerly swallow the milk of the mother, found in the stomach of the baby seal. When the sudden summer comes, and the snow melts, and leaves the surface of the ice bare, they are houseless; the igloo melts away; their home is but of frozen water, and suddenly it disappears. Then they have recourse to the _tupic_, which is a huge sheet of skins hung across a horizontal pole, supported at either end. Their bed is a snow platform, strewn with the moss which is the rein-deer's food, and covered with skins. Their choicest dainties are the fat of the _tuktoo_, or rein-deer, the marrow procured by mas.h.i.+ng the bones of the legs, and the thick, white, unctuous lining of the whale-hide.

The interior of an igloo presents a picture more repulsive than that of any African hut or Indian wigwam, more distressing to human feelings and degrading to human pride. The igloo is a dome-shaped building, made of ice-blocks, with an aperture in the roof, and a rude doorway at one side, closed {711} with ice-blocks, when the inmates are a.s.sembled. The snow platform which forms the bed is occupied by the women and the stranger. Men and women are clad in skins, put together with neatness and ingenuity. The dress of the s.e.xes differs only in two particulars; that of the women is furnished with a long tail, depending from the jacket, and has a sort of hood, in which loads and children are carried. The life of the infant is preserved by its naked body being kept in contact with that of the mother. One household implement they possess--it is a stone lamp; something like a trough, with a deep groove in it, in which the dried moss, used as a wick, floats in the seal oil, expressed by the teeth of the women from lumps of blubber, which they patiently "mill" until the precious unguent is all procured. But this lamp too often fails them, and darkness and hunger take up frequent abode with the Innuit. Days and nights are pa.s.sed by the men, sitting singly, in death-like stillness and silence, by the hole which they have found, far under the snow, at which the seal will "blow." It is strange and terrible to think of those watches, in the midst of the desolation, under that arctic sky, with the cold dense fog now swooping, now lifting, in the enforced stillness, with famine gnawing the watcher, and famine at home in the igloo, and the chance of food depending on the sureness of one instantaneous stroke, down through the snow, through the narrow orifice in the ice, into the throat of the animal with the sleek skin, and the mournful human eyes, which vainly implore mercy from raging hunger.

When the Innuit brings the seal to the igloo, a crowd invades the narrow s.p.a.ce, for the simplest hospitality prevails, and the long watch, the skilful stroke, do not const.i.tute sole owners.h.i.+p of the prize. The skin is stripped off the huge unsightly carca.s.s, and a horrible scene ensues. The flesh is torn or cut with the stone knives in large lumps, and having been first licked by the women, to remove any hairs or other adhesive matter, is distributed to the party, and devoured raw; the blood is drunk, the bones are mashed, the entrails are greedily eaten, the dogs sharing in all; and the blubber is made to yield its oil by the disgusting process already described. One turns silenced from the picture; from the sights, and sounds, and scents; from the vision of dark faces, eager with gluttonous longing, gathered round the red, flaring light; from the skin-clothed bodies, reeking with grease and filth, and the foul exhalations of the mutilated animal; from the lumps of flesh torn by savage hands, and crammed dripping into distended mouths; from the steaming blood, and the human creatures who rapturously quaff it in the presence of the white man, who sits among them and feeds with them, whose heart yearns with dumb compa.s.sion for them, who has wonderful scientific instruments in his pockets, and his Bible in his breast. As the seal teaches the Innuits the art of housing themselves, so the white bear teaches them how to kill the walrus, their most plentiful and frequent food, when the ice is drifting, and the unwieldy creatures lie upon the blocks close insh.o.r.e; then the bear climbs the overhanging precipice, and taking a heavy block in his deft forepaws, he hurls it with rare skill and nicety of aim upon the basking monster below. So brutes train men in those dreadful regions, and not men brutes. The life of the Innuits is full of such contradictions. And their deaths?

From the contemplation of these one turns away appalled, for they die in utter solitude.

When Captain Hall first heard of this horrible custom, he started off at once to see its truth; and having removed the blocks with which the doorway had been built up, entered an igloo, and found a woman who had yet many days to linger thus fastened up in her living tomb.

Again, hearing that a woman had been abandoned to die, at a great distance, he set forth, {712} and having reached the spot with immense difficulty and danger, he managed to remove the snow and the block which closed the hole in the top of the igloo, lowered himself into it, and found the woman dead, and frozen as hard as her bier and her tomb, with a sweet serene smile upon the marble face. So this is the close of a life of toil and privation--the withdrawal of every kindred face, the fearful solitude of the ice-walls, the terrible arctic darkness and silence, and the frozen corpse lying unshrouded, naked, beneath the frozen skins, until the resurrection. Surely the angel of death is an angel of mercy there, and does his errand gently, bearing away the lonely, terrified spirit to the city of gold, the gates of pearl, the jasper sea, the land where there is no darkness, physical or mental, for evermore. The earth, always pitiless to them, which never feeds them from her bosom, does not suffer her dead children of the Innuit people to sleep their last sleep in her lap. Their graves are only blocks of ice piled around and above the corpses, which remain unharmed, unless when the blocks melt, as they sometimes do, and the wolves, dogs, or bears gain access to the frozen remains. The Innuits are dying out; disease is making havoc among them; consumption, formerly unknown, is thinning their numbers by its slow, furtive, murderous advance; their children are few, and fewer still are reared; and the long story of awful desolation draws to a close.

Who can regret it? Who can do aught but desire that the giant wastes of the arctic regions should be left to the soulless creatures of G.o.d; that the great discord between them and human life has ceased to trouble the harmony of creation; that the mystery of such an existence is quietly laid at rest, among the things which "we know not now, but which we shall know hereafter?"

MISCELLANY.

SCIENCE.

_A New Kind of Mirror.--The Chemical News_ states that M. Dode, a French chemist, has introduced platinum mirrors, which are greatly admired, and which present this advantage, that the reflecting metal is deposited on the outer surface of the gla.s.s, and thus any defect in the latter is concealed. The process, which is patented in Paris, is described as follows: Chloride of platinum is dissolved in water, and a certain quant.i.ty of oil of lavender is added to the solution. The platinum immediately leaves the aqueous solution and pa.s.ses to the oil, which holds it in suspension in a finely divided state. To the oil so charged the author adds litharge and borate of lead, and paints a thin coat of this mixture over the surface of the gla.s.s, which is then carried to a proper furnace. At a red heat the litharge and borate of lead are fused, and cause the adhesion of the platinum to the softened gla.s.s. The process is very expeditious. A single baking, M. Dode says, will furnish 200 metres of gla.s.s ready for commerce. It would take fifteen days, he says, to coat the same extent with mercury by the ordinary plan.

_African Silkworm_.--A silkworm before unknown in Europe has been introduced into France from Senegal, and without suffering from change of climate. It yields a richer silk than that of any other worm known to naturalists, and its coc.o.o.ns are twice the ordinary weight. It is to be tried in Algiers, and if successful there, this new and rich silk may become in time an important article of commerce.

_Science in a Balloon_.--Mr. Glaisher has {713} given, in a lecture at the Royal Inst.i.tution, a _resume_ of his scientific experiments in balloons. Tables recording the decline of temperature with elevation, show that when the sky was clear a more rapid decline took place than when the sky was cloudy. Under a clear sky, a fall of 1 takes place within 100 feet of the earth, but at heights exceeding 25,000 feet it is necessary to pa.s.s through 1,000 feet of vertical height to obtain a fall of 1 in temperature. At extreme elevations, in both states of the sky, the air became very dry, but as far as his experiments went, was never quite free from water. From ascents made before and after sunset, Mr. Glaisher concludes that the laws which hold good by day do not hold good by night; indeed, it seemed probable that at night, for some little distance, the temperature may increase with elevation, instead of decreasing. From experiments made on solar radiation with a blackened bulb thermometer, and with Herschel's actinometer, it was inferred that the heat rays from the sun pa.s.s through s.p.a.ce without loss, and become effective in proportion to the density or the amount of water present in the atmosphere through which they pa.s.s. If this be so, the proportion of heat received at Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn may be the same as that received at the earth, if the const.i.tuents of their atmospheres be the same as that of the earth, and greater if the amount of aqueous vapor be greater, so that the effective solar heat at Jupiter and Saturn may be greater than at either the inferior planets, Mercury or Venus, notwithstanding their far greater distances from the sun. This conclusion is most important as corroborating Professor Tyndall's experiments on aqueous vapor.

Experiments on the wind showed that the velocity of the air at the earth's surface was very much less than at a high elevation. A comparison of the temperature of the dew point, as shown by different instruments, gave results proving that the temperatures of the dew point, as found by the use of the dry and wet bulb thermometers, and Daniell's hygrometer, are worthy of full confidence as far as the experiments went.

_The Eruption of Mount Etna_.--At a recent meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences, an important letter was read from M. Fouque to M.

Saint-Claire Deville on the eruption of Etna, which has presented several phenomena of great scientific interest.

The eruption commenced at half-past ten on the evening of January 31.

On the previous day two successive shakings of the earth had been noticed. Just before the eruption began a violent earthquake was felt, the wave travelling to the north-east; after this, slight oscillations continued until about 4 A.M. Large flames now rose from a point on the north-east side of Etna 5,500 feet above the snow line, and lava began to flow rapidly. In two or three days the lava traversed a s.p.a.ce of 19,000 feet, with a width of from 10,000 to 12,000, and a variable thickness, but often reaching to the depth of 30 or 60 feet. After destroying for some distance everything in its pa.s.sage, the current of lava struck one of the old craters, and then bifurcated. The stream on the west side moved very slowly, and, becoming subdivided, it nearly ceased to move; the stream on the east side fell over a deep and precipitous valley, which it soon filled, being then able to continue its progress, until finally it was stopped by a lava mound of a previous eruption.

The number of the craters is seven; of these five form a vast elliptical enclosure, the major axis of which is directed toward the north-east. A deep fissure, 1,500 feet in length, opened from the base of a former crater, Frumento, to the nearest of the present cones.

This chasm, M. Fouque shows, was probably formed by the shock at the commencement of the eruption. This fissure, and also a depression of the crater Frumento, is in a right line with the major axis of the ellipse formed by the craters. The same general fact has been several times noticed in previous eruptions.

The vapors attending an eruption have been divided into the dry, containing chiefly chloride of sodium and no water, the acid, which contain a large amount of watery vapor, the alkaline, and the carbonic. The first indicates the maximum, and the last the minimum of volcanic action. Each of these varieties of vapor, succeeding in their order, were noticed at this eruption. M. Fouque found the dry vapor upon the still incandescent lava; the acid vapor in those parts where the temperature was over {714} 400; the alkaline, where the temperature was lower, but generally over 100; and finally, carbonic acid has been detected in one of the adjacent old craters, which was at the ordinary temperature. The first three varieties of vapor were thus found upon the same transverse section of the lava, less than 150 feet distant from each other. In all these vapors the atmospheric air which accompanied them was deprived of part of its oxygen, generally containing only from 18 to 19 per cent., and in some alkaline vapors the proportion was still less.

In this eruption there was a remarkable absence of sulphur and its compounds; chemical tests as well as the sense of smell could detect no trace of them. The eruption indeed was characterized by the absence of the compounds of sulphur and the abundance of the compounds of chlorine. Hydro-chlorate of ammonia, which was found in abundance, has generally been regarded as exclusively belonging to the alkaline vapors; but here it has been discovered among the other varieties, whilst the alkaline vapors were distinguished by the carbonate rather than by the hydrochlorate of ammonia.

At the present time, M. Fouque writes, the eruption is most active in the four lowest craters; these throw liquid lava into the air, and emit a nearly colorless smoke; the three superior craters eject solidified lava and black stones, at the same time pouring out a dense smoke charged with aqueous vapor and brown-colored ashes.

The three higher craters produce every two or three minutes a very loud report resembling the rolling of thunder; the four lower craters, on the contrary, send forth a rapid succession of ringing sounds, which it is impossible to count. These sounds follow each other without any cessation, and are only to be compared to the noise produced by a series of blows from a hammer falling on an anvil. If the ancients heard these noises in former eruptions, it is easily conceivable how they imagined a forge to exist in the centre of the volcano, with Cyclops for the master workman. The lava is black, rich in pyroxene, and strongly attracted by a magnet. Since the commencement of the eruption, the central crater of Etna has emitted white vapors, which continually cover its summit. Several good photographs of the eruption have been taken by M. Berthier, who accompanied M. Fouque in his explorations, which were by no means unattended with danger.

M. Saint-Claire Deville then made some observations on this paper. He explained the almost entire absence of sulphur by the fact that M.

Fouque only examined the vapors from the lava. These nearly always contain chlorine for their electro-negative element, and scarcely show, and that not until later, sulphuretted and carbonic vapors.

After the eruption of Vesuvius in 1861, very light deposits of sulphur were found covering the hydrochlorate of ammonia, which shows that the former body is not absent from the lava. The existence of hydrochlorate of ammonia in the emanations does not necessarily exclude that of the vapors of hydrochloric and sulphuric acids.

_Magnetism of Iron-clad s.h.i.+ps_.--Staff-Commander Evans, of the British navy, and Mr. Archibald Smith, who have devoted themselves for several years to investigations into the character of the magnetism of iron-built and armor-plated s.h.i.+ps, have embodied the results of their studies in an interesting paper read at a recent meeting of the Royal Society. It is well known that iron s.h.i.+ps have been very difficult to navigate because of the disturbing effect of the iron upon the compa.s.s, and serious accidents have happened in consequence. But underwriters, and the whole naval profession, will be glad to hear that the difficulty and risk are now greatly lessened, if not entirely removed. For the results established by the paper in question are--That it is no longer necessary to swing a s.h.i.+p in order to ascertain the compa.s.s deviation, or error, seeing that it is possible to determine the various forms of error by mathematics; that an iron s.h.i.+p should always be built with her head to the south; if built head north, there is such a confused amount of magnetism concentrated in the stern as to have a violent disturbing effect on the compa.s.s; that if, after building, a s.h.i.+p is to be armor-plated, the head, during the fixing of the plates, should be turned in the opposite direction-- that is, to the north; and that especial pains should be taken while building an iron s.h.i.+p to provide a {715} suitable place for the standard-compa.s.s. Beside these particulars, the shot and sh.e.l.l stowed in the vessel, the iron water-tanks, and, indeed, all the iron used in her interior fittings, are to be taken into account; and it is satisfactory to know that the influence exerted on the compa.s.s by any one or all of these conditions can be ascertained, and allowed for, as in the other cases above mentioned.

_"Gyges" Explained_.--The London _Reader_ gives the following explanation of a curious experiment in optics which has been performed at one of the London theatres under the name of "Eidos AEides," and reproduced in New York under the appellation of "Gyges." It consists in causing an actor or an inanimate object which is in full view of the audience at one moment to disappear instantly, and then to reappear with the same rapidity. The means by which this is accomplished are very simple, and are to some extent similar to those used in exhibiting "Pepper's Ghost." A sheet of plain unsilvered gla.s.s is placed upon the stage, either upright or inclined at a suitable angle, at the place where the actor or object is to disappear. This gla.s.s is not perceived by the audience, and it does not interfere with their view of the scenery, etc., behind the plate. A duplicate scene representing that part of the back of the stage covered by the gla.s.s is placed at the wing, out of sight of the spectators. With the ordinary lighting of the stage the reflection of this counterfeit scene in the gla.s.s is too faint to be observed; but when a strong light is thrown upon the scene, the stage lights being lowered at the same time, the image becomes visible. This duplicate scene being an exact _fac-simile_ of the background of the stage, the change is not noticed by the audience, the only difference being that they now see by reflection that which they saw a moment previously by direct vision. The actor, standing a sufficient distance behind the gla.s.s, is completely hidden from view, and he is again rendered visible by turning down the light on the false scene and allowing the stage lights to predominate. When "Eidos AEides" was being performed at Her Majesty's Theatre, it was, however, possible, with a good opera-gla.s.s, to distinguish the outline of the figure behind the plate. The effects produced may of course be modified. An actor may be made to appear walking or flying in the air, or dancing on a tight-rope, by eclipsing or obscuring a raised platform on which he may be placed.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE FALL OF WOLSEY TO THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH.

By James Anthony Froude, M.A., late fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.

Volumes I. and II. 8vo., pp. 447 and 501. New York: Charles Scribner & Company.

In these two luxurious volumes we have the first instalment of an important work upon the most important period of English history. Six other volumes are to follow. Mr. Froude is a thorough good Protestant.

His main purpose in this history seems to have been the glorification of the English reformers. For the worst sovereigns of the house of Tudor he displays an enthusiastic admiration which, one is tempted to believe, is half genuine sentiment, and half love of paradox.

Catholics, of course, he could not have expected to satisfy; but he has gone too far to please even the members of his own Church. Of Henry VIII., whose apologist he has appropriately been called, he draws a flattering portrait:

"If Henry VIII.," he says, "had died previous to the first agitation of the divorce, his loss would have been deplored as one of the heaviest misfortunes which had ever befallen the country; and he would have left a name which would have taken its place in history by the side of that of the Black {716} Prince or of the conqueror of Agincourt. Left at the most trying age, with his character unformed, with the means at his disposal of gratifying every inclination, and married by his ministers when a boy to an unattractive woman far his senior, he had lived for thirty-six years almost without blame, and bore through England the reputation of an upright and virtuous king.

Nature had been prodigal to him of her rarest gifts. In person he is said to have resembled his grandfather, Edward IV., who was the handsomest man in Europe. His form and bearing were princely; and amidst the easy freedom of his address, his manner remained majestic.

No knight in England could match him in the tournament except the Duke of Suffolk; he drew with ease as strong a bow as was borne by any yeoman of his guard; and these powers were sustained in unfailing vigor by a temperate habit and by constant exercise." His state papers and letters lose nothing by comparison with those of Wolsey and Cromwell. He was an accomplished musician; he wrote and spoke in four languages; he was one of the best physicians of his age, an engineer, and a theologian. "He was 'attentive,' as it is called, 'to his religious duties,' being present at the services in the chapel two or three times a day with unfailing regularity, and showing to outward appearance a real sense of religious obligation in the energy and purity of his life." In private he was good-humored and good-natured.

But "like all princes of the Plantageuet blood, he was a person of a most intense and imperious will. His impulses, in general n.o.bly directed, had never known contradiction; and late in life, when his character was formed, he was forced into collision with difficulties with which the experience of discipline had not fitted him to contend." "He had capacity, if his training had been equal to it, to be one of the greatest of men. With all his faults about him he was perhaps the greatest of his contemporaries."

Mr. Froude does not believe that the king's scruples respecting the validity of his marriage with Catharine of Aragon were inspired by his affection for Anne Boleyn. "They had arisen to their worst dimensions before he had ever seen Anne Boleyn." But Mr. Froude's narrative of the king's early intercourse with Anne is extremely unsatisfactory, not to say disingenuous. How long Henry may have cherished his scruples in secret, our author affords us no means of guessing; but the earliest intimation which he finds of an intended divorce was in June, 1527. It was in 1525, he says, that Anne came back from France and appeared at the English court. This is an error, and is inconsistent with other statements in the same chapter; the date was 1522; and almost immediately afterward the king began to pay Anne marked attention. Her celebrated love-pa.s.sage with Lord Percy took place in 1523. Mr. Froude speaks of it as follows: "Lord Percy, eldest son of Lord Northumberland, as we all know, was said to have been engaged to her. He was in the household of Cardinal Wolsey; and Cavendish, who was with him there, tells a long romantic story of the affair, which, if his account be true, was ultimately interrupted by Lord Northumberland himself." Now what will be thought of our author's honesty when we say that Cavendish repeats again and again that the match was broken off _by command of the king?_ Lord Northumberland did not appear in the matter at all until Wolsey, by his majesty's orders, had remonstrated with the young n.o.bleman, and threatened him with dire consequences if he should persist in a pursuit which was displeasing to his sovereign. Mr. Froude carefully suppresses all allusion to intercourse between the king and his fair favorite, until the project of the divorce was well advanced,--not discussing or discrediting the statements of other historians respecting Henry's early pa.s.sion for Anne Boleyn; but simply putting them behind his back, as matters of which it did not suit his purpose to take notice. This fas.h.i.+on of writing may do for romance, but not for history.

In demanding a divorce from his first queen, Henry has, as we might suppose, Mr. Froude's full approval:

"It may be admitted, or it ought to be admitted, that if Henry VIII.

had been contented to rest his demand for a divorce merely on the interests of the kingdom; if he had forborne, while his request was pending, to affront the princess who had for many years been his companion and his queen; if he had shown her that respect which her {717} high character gave her a right to demand, and which her situation as a stranger ought to have made it impossible to him to refuse, his conduct would have been liable to no imputation, and our sympathies would without reserve have been on his side... . . His kingdom demanded the security of a stable succession; his conscience, it may not be doubted, was seriously agitated by the loss of his children; and looking upon it as the sentence of heaven upon a connection the legality of which had from the first been violently disputed, he believed that he had been living in incest and that his misfortunes were the consequence of it. Under these circ.u.mstances he had a full right to apply for a divorce."

With all its faults, Mr. Froude's book tells many wholesome truths in a very forcible manner. Here is an admission which from such an out-and-out Protestant we should hardly have looked for; he is speaking of religious persecution:

"We think bitterly of these things, and yet we are but quarrelling with what is inevitable from the const.i.tution of the world... . The value of a doctrine cannot be determined on its own apparent merits by men whose habits of mind are settled in other forms; while men of experience know well that out of the thousands of theories which rise in the fertile soil below them, it is but one here and there which grows to maturity; and the precarious chances of possible vitality, where the opposite probabilities are so enormous, oblige them to discourage and repress opinions which threaten to disturb established order, or which, by the rules of existing beliefs, imperil the souls of those who entertain them. Persecution has ceased among ourselves, because we do not any more believe that want of theoretic orthodoxy in matters of faith is necessarily fraught with the tremendous consequences which once were supposed to be attached to it. If, however, a school of Thugs were to rise among us, making murder a religious service; if they gained proselytes, and the proselytes put their teaching in execution, we should speedily begin again to persecute opinion. What teachers of Thuggism would appear to ourselves, the teachers of heresy actually appeared to Sir Thomas More, only being as much more hateful as the eternal death of the soul is more terrible than the single and momentary separation of it from the body. There is, I think, no just ground on which to condemn conscientious Catholics on the score of persecution, except only this: that as we are now convinced of the injustice of the persecuting laws, so among those who believed them to be just, there were some who were led by an instinctive protest of human feeling to be lenient in the execution of those laws; while others of harder nature and more narrow sympathies enforced them without reluctance, and even with exultation."

The following extract from an account of the feelings of the ma.s.s of the English people during the early stages of the divorce affair, must be rather unpalatable to the High-Church Episcopalians:

"They believed--and Wolsey was, perhaps, the only leading member of the privy council, except Archbishop Warham, who was not under the same delusion--that it was possible for a national church to separate itself from the unity of Christendom, and at the same time to crush or prevent innovation of doctrine; that faith in the sacramental system could still be maintained, though the priesthood by whom those mysteries were dispensed should minister in golden chains. This was the English historical theory handed down from William Rufus, the second Henry, and the Edwards; yet it was and is a mere phantasm, a thing of words and paper fictions, as Wolsey saw it to be. Wolsey knew well that an ecclesiastical revolt implied, as a certainty, innovation of doctrine; that plain men could not and would not continue to reverence the office of the priesthood, when the priests were treated as the paid officials of an earthly authority higher than their own.

He was not to be blamed if he took the people at their word; if he believed that, in their doctrinal conservatism, they knew and meant what they were saying; and the reaction which took place under Queen Mary, when the Anglican system had been tried and failed, and the alternative was seen to be absolute union with Rome, or a forfeiture of Catholic orthodoxy, proves after all that he was wiser than in the immediate event he seemed to be; that if his policy had succeeded, and if, {718} strengthened by success, he had introduced into the Church those reforms which he had promised and desired, he would have satisfied the substantial wishes of the majority of the nation."

From an introductory chapter on the social condition of England in the early part of the sixteenth century, we extract the following graphic pa.s.sage, as an example of Mr. Froude's fascinating style. Doubtless most of our readers will agree with us in wis.h.i.+ng that so graceful a pen had been more worthily employed:

"The habits of all cla.s.ses were open, free, and liberal. There are two expressions, corresponding one to the other, which we frequently meet with in old writings, and which are used as a kind of index, marking whether the condition of things was or was not what it ought to be. We read of 'merry England';--when England was not merry, things were not going well with it. We hear of the 'glory of hospitality,' England's pre-eminent boast,--by the rules of which all tables, from the table of the twenty-s.h.i.+lling freeholder to the table in the baron's hall and abbey refectory, were open at the dinner hour to all comers, without stint or reserve, or question asked: to every man, according to his degree, who chose to ask for it, there was free fare and free lodging; bread, beef, and beer for his dinner; for his lodging, perhaps, only a mat of rushes in a spare corner of the hall, with a billet of wood for a pillow, but freely offered and freely taken, the guest probably faring much as his host fared, neither worse nor better. There was little fear of an abuse of such licence, for suspicious characters had no leave to wander at pleasure; and for any man found at large, and unable to give a sufficient account of himself, there were the ever-ready parish stocks or town gaol. The 'glory of hospitality' lasted far down into Elizabeth's time; and then, as Camden says, 'came in great bravery of building, to the great beautifying of the realm, but to the decay' of what he valued more.

"In such frank style the people lived, hating three things with all their hearts: idleness, want, and cowardice; and for the rest, carrying their hearts high, and having their hands full. The hour of rising, winter and summer, was four o'clock, with breakfast at five, after which the laborers went to work, and the gentlemen to business, of which they had no little. In the country every unknown face was challenged and examined,--if the account given was insufficient, he was brought before the justice; if the village shopkeeper sold bad wares, if the village cobbler made 'unhonest'

shoes, if servants and masters quarrelled, all was to be looked to by the justice; there was no fear lest time should hang heavy with him. At twelve he dined; after dinner he went hunting, or to his farm, or to do what be pleased. It was a life unrefined, perhaps, but colored with a broad, rosy English health."