world knoweth that the order set down in that book be commonly broken by every minister at his pleasure and observed almost nowhere, yet small punishment hath ever ensued thereof. The Catholic religion less favoured than any, and though hitherto the penalties have been paid by her Majesty, yet lately there have been terrible examples of dying in prison, the rack, &c. ; yet Catholics are not disloyal.'

At fol. 59 this work contains the following remark:

'Wherefore that which hath been given out (as is said by some great men), that the Pope, by his letter to her Majesty, did offer to confirm the service of England, upon condition that the title of supremacy might be restored him again, is impossible to be so. So that if any such letters came to her Majesty's hands they must needs be fayned and false.'

We must not omit to notice one more interesting piece of information contained in the last despatch of Mendoza to the King of Spain, dated December 28, 1579, which scarcely tallies with the accounts generally given by English historians of ecclesiastical proceedings in this reign. The concluding words of the ambassador's letter are as follows:

The number of Catholics, thank God, is daily increasing here, owing to the college and seminary for Englishmen which your Majesty ordered to be supported in Douai, whence there has come in the last year (and from the college of Rome) a hundred Englishmen who have been ordained there, by which means a great number of people are being converted-generally persons who have never heard the truth preached before. These priests go about disguised as laymen, and although they are young men their good life and zeal in the work are admirable. They exercise their duties with great good sense and discretion, in order not to give the heretics a chance to impede them. God's grace is clearly witnessed in the way they are led on by His hand in this ministry, and in the joy and fortitude with which they offer themselves for martyrdom, whenever they are called upon to suffer for the Lord's sake. Some have suffered thus with invincible firmness and ineffable content, following in the footsteps of so many of their predecessors. Of the old ones very few now remain, and they are imprisoned strictly. This was the cause for the great decay of religion, as there was no one to teach it; and none professed it, excepting those who had special grace given to them to persevere in it out of pure zeal. This is being remedied by means of those who have recently come hither, who pray continually for your Majesty, recognizing that God has been pleased to make you His principal instrument in this great work. During the last three months they have converted five of these [Protestant] preachers, which conversion they believe will bear rich fruit, as they [the converts] have begged to be sent where they may study and confirm themselves in the faith, in order to return hither and preach it. God give them grace to do so.'

ART. VII.-SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI.

1. History of St. Francis of Assisi. By the ABBÉ LÉON LE MONNIER. Translated by a Franciscan Tertiary. With Preface by H. E. CARDINAL VAUGHAN, Archbishop of Westminster. (London, 1894.)

2. Life of St. Francis of Assisi. By PAUL SABATIER. Translated by LOUISE SEYMOUR HOUGHTON. (London, 1894.)

IT is by a somewhat singular coincidence that two new Lives of St. Francis of Assisi have been presented almost simultaneously to the English reader. Each of them was originally written in French, and has doubtless lost something of its verve and freshness in the process of translation. Each suggests many points of comparison and contrast with its contemporary, as the two authors approach their fascinating subject from opposite standpoints-M. Sabatier writing with all the freedom of ultra broad Continental Protestantism, M. Le Monnier with the restraint natural to a beneficed Abbé who seeks the approbation of the supreme Pontiff and of the Minister-General of the Franciscans. Each writer deserves ample praise for the pains and research he has devoted to his work, although in this respect M. Sabatier should, we think, carry off the palm. M. Le Monnier's biography might have been written by a conscientious student who had never stirred beyond the walls of a great library, and, with all attainable literary authorities at his command, had then carefully composed his narrative. M. Sabatier formed a very different estimate of the preparation requisite to a due fulfilment of his self-imposed task. He has spent some time on a pilgrimage to Assisi, and has visited in turn the various spots hallowed by association with the tenderest memoirs of the founder of the Friars Minor. He is thoroughly imbued with the genius loci. He has breathed the air, and mixed with the monks and peasantry of Umbria, whose lives even yet retain somewhat of the spirit of by-gone centuries. He finds the truest reminiscences of St. Francis, not in the gorgeous cathedral which represents the miraculous powers and the traditional glory of the canonized saint, but in the simpler retreats of Portiuncula and Rivo Torto, in the solitudes which recall the rude hermitage, and the wayside chapel, and the saint's daily life of meanest toil; and when to such efforts to secure a realistic picture there is added minute

and critical study of all the literary sources, it will be seen that most of the elements of a satisfactory biography have been steadily amassed. Of course, the theological position of each writer affects the light in which he regards his hero, and gives its colour to his narrative. To M. Sabatier's thinking, the movement originated by St. Francis was an emphatic protest against the exclusive pretensions of the Roman clergy; and, although he honoured their official position, and knew the sanction of the Pope to be essential to the stability and success of his aims, these were really designed to vindicate what, in modern parlance, would be termed the priesthood of the laity. According to M. Le Monnier, the career of St. Francis was uniformly guided by that implicit subordination to clerical authority which is the very highest virtue known to modern Romanism, and his complete self-renunciation was transfigured and enhanced by undeviating submission to every faintest suggestion from his spiritual directors.

The two volumes before us furnish no inapt illustration of two contrasted methods of biography, and this not because the inmost conviction of their authors is widely distinct, but because their conception of their task and the method of its execution are essentially different. We do not wish to undervalue M. Le Monnier's work. It is written in a conspicuously fair spirit by one who has mastered the authorities on the subject, and does not accept with easy and unquestioning credulity every legend that has gathered round his story. His book is a good honest piece of straightforward biography, unillumined by any flash of genius or brilliancy of imagination. He takes considerable pains to bring out the personal characteristics of St. Francis; but his analysis hardly results in distinct and well-defined portraiture, and the thoughtful reader will learn in his pages all that is recorded about St. Francis, but will hardly gather from them a vivid realization of the saint himself. M. Sabatier has more ambitious aims, or perhaps we should say keener powers of vision. He is not content without attempting to throw his hero into high relief upon a background which reproduces the conditions under which the Poverello of Assisi lived and moved. He has pondered the circumstances of the time and realised its spiritual needs and the efforts of St. Francis to supply them, until he has become possessed with a sympathy which makes him keenly appreciative of the saint's motives, and singularly intelligent in describing and upholding them. The sparkle of genius lights up M. Sabatier's pages. He is, in its earlier sense, the poet as much as the historian, and his imagination

and insight endow him with artistic power that results in the presentation of a portrait whose every feature is distinct and characteristic. With his own religious opinions, so far as we can gather them from his pages, we are profoundly at variance, but his conception of St. Francis and his times stands out in singular breadth and clearness of outline, and we see the living man before us, toiling, preaching, fasting, suffering, until his image is impressed indelibly on our minds.

Nothing simpler-as it would have reasonably been supposed-than to draw up the biography of one whose character was transparently sincere, whose life from the period of his conversion was lived in the presence of admiring associates, whose pursuits called for little of the finesse and wariness which in after years might be requisite in transacting the affairs of a widely scattered community, and whose singleness of purpose was evidenced in the undeviating thoroughness with which he resisted every inducement to modify the absolute poverty he had deliberately embraced. Yet by a strange destiny much uncertainty for many years overshadowed the life of St. Francis, owing to dissensions between those brethren who desired to relax the stern discipline of the founder and those who would have pushed its rigour, at all hazards, to still greater extremities. Two Lives by Thomas of Celano, and the Legend of the Three Companions, were written at first hand, and would have furnished convincing testimony of the true intentions of St. Francis, but for this very reason their suppression became indispensable in the interests of peace. In his 'Critical Study of the Sources,' M. Sabatier explains the circumstances which led to so abnormal a necessity. The struggle between the two parties of the Franciscans was so acute that it threatened to rend the order asunder, and St. Bonaventura composed a Life on the basis of compromise, which was forthwith imposed as authoritative and exclusive. The anxiety caused to St. Francis, towards the close of his life, by some who chafed against the rule of absolute poverty, as recorded by Thomas of Celano, had to be suppressed, not (pleads M. Le Monnier) with any evil intention, but to promote concord; with what consequences the more orthodox of the two authorities before us shall describe in his own words:

'St. Bonaventura's aim was perhaps legitimate; nevertheless history has suffered thereby. The evil would have been only half as bad if the primitive Lives had remained in everybody's hand. But, as was to be feared, the same reasons which had held back the Doctor's pen, soon led the brethren to think that minds could never

be pacified if others were allowed to say what Bonaventura had thought right to keep silence upon. They therefore resolved, at whatever cost, to forbid the reading of the entire "Ancient Legend," as it now began to be called, that is to say, of the works of Celano, of the Three Companions, and of their abbreviators. In 1226, when assembled in Paris at the Chapter-General, they formulated the following decree: "The Chapter-General orders, in the name of obedience, that all legends of the blessed Francis written previously shall be destroyed, and that even outside the Order the brethren shall do their best to make them disappear, if they find them, seeing that the one lately written by the General has been written from the testimony of those who, having lived constantly with the Saint, have had certitude of the facts, and know that it contains nothing but what is approved." This trying decree at once became the law of the Order. It is true that here and there a few refractory ones were found. The Chronicle of the twenty-four Generals even informs us that, long after, they continued to read the "Ancient Legend" in the refectory of the Convent of Avignon, with the connivance, and even by the orders, of the General Gerard de Oddo. But this was an exception that must have been due to some special reason. In general, the will of the Chapter was executed. The old authors, if they were allowed to exist, were hidden away in the dust of libraries. There they were so thoroughly lost that, for more than five centuries, no one knew what had become of them. Their names alone survived.' 1

There is the less reason for enlarging upon the deficiencies of Bonaventura's Life and its consequences, because M. Sabatier has devoted an Appendix of a hundred pages to the Bibliography of St. Francis. Few lives in history are so abundantly provided with documents for its elucidation, yet few present more numerous or perplexing problems, so that it is admitted in learned circles that the essential elements of the biography have 'disappeared or have been entirely altered' (Sabatier, p. 349). A fatality of blundering might seem to have pursued alike the most laborious and the least prejudiced of his admirers; and Wadding, who gathered all the Franciscan records into a vast compilation of many folios, is equally with M. Renan convicted of glaring errors. These facts, on which we cannot now enter more fully, amply justify the efforts of Sabatier and Le Monnier to produce a more satisfactory history, and augment the debt of gratitude due to them for thus supplying a vacant place in modern hagiology.

The early life of St. Francis need not detain us long. His father, Pietro Bernadone, was a wealthy cloth merchant. His mother, Pica, the daughter of a noble family, was of French

1 Le Monnier, pp. 12, 13.