uproar by all the brotherhood of the ancient hills. Helm Crag gave, the poet tells us, this laugh of Joanna to Hammer-Scar, Hammer-Scar to Silver-how, and so leaping onwards it passed in turn Silver-how, Loughrigg, Fairfield, Helvellyn, Skiddaw, and Glaramara, till it settled wearily down at last at Kirkstone. In these Soledades Gongora spoke probably from experience when he called ceremony that profane custom, which wastes in salvoes of impertinence our most necessary time.'

It is difficult to determine whether Gongora has been more praised or blamed by his own countrymen. The great Lope worshipped him, as he worshipped Cervantes, with his mouth, but probably his heart was far from him. His panegyrics in the Laurel de Apolo are not to be trusted. That piece reminds the reader of Colman's Odes to Oblivion and to Obscurity in the matter of Gray. The Andalusian giant need not necessarily be understood of Gongora's mind. His body is described by Hozes his friend, who has intoned the plain song of his life with no little skill, as that of another Saul, eminent by head and shoulders over his fellow-students at Salamanca. When Lope wrote that Gongora's wit is no less lively than that of Martial, and much more decent, and that all his works are distinguished by erudition-sincerity may have directed his pen, but surely irony alone could have induced him to say that Cordova has as much to boast of in Gongora as in his compatriots Seneca and Lucan. Lope speaks of him as dying a swan and living a phoenix, but in his comedy Las Bizarrias de Belisa, in which Belisa is the antitype of Aminte or Polixène of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, he apparently includes him in the category of those reprobates who painted with rouge not only cheeks but noses, bringing all good things by the road of extremes to the gulf of ruin. In revenge, Gongora in his Pyramus and Thisbe, referring to the 'crannied hole or chink' as the player in Bottom's company called it, the player who had some plaster or lime or rough cast about him to signify wall, and was the wittiest partition that ever Demetrius heard discourse-Gongora, availing himself of the double sense of rima, says it was clearer than the rhymes of a certain person,' meaning, very likely, Lope. He also alludes to the followers. of Lope, in one of his sonnets, as ducks dabbling in the slop which inundates their flat (vega) master. This is one of the instances, very numerous in Gongora, and adding to his intricacy, of a pun, a term which, like the tongue of a jackdaw, speaks, as it has been affirmed, twice as much for being split. He goes on to advise Lope's acolytes, and so presumably Lope himself, to sail quacking down the ancient channel, as a rabble rout never likely to attain to Attic style or Roman learning, and concludes by beseeching them to worship the swansthat is, of course, Gongora and his school.

Cervantes in his Voyage to Parnassus calls Gongora agreeable, beloved, acute, sonorous and solemn above all poets that Apollo has

seen, and declares him to hold the key of a grace of style unequalled in the universe. This seems, in spite of the well-known hyperbole of Spanish panegyric, too magnificent to be sincere. Other critics are undoubtedly favourable. Quintana, who says we must distinguish between the brilliant poet and the extravagant innovator, calls Gongora in Romances a king. Don José Pellicer, who pecked at everything in Madrid with his satirical pen, puts his genius, curiously enough, on a par with that of Pindar, and Saavedra Fajardo calls him the Muses' darling, and corypheus of the Graces.

Though many may take exception to Antonio's estimate of his style as ad Cleanthis lucernam elucubratus, and to his use of appositissimè in the sentence Latinorum vocabulorum pluribus appositissimè usurpatis pomaria Hispanæ linguæ quodammodo extendit, yet few can help endorsing the opinion of that eminent critic, when he says that Gongora was vir ingenio maximus, if not poeta ad cæterorum omnium invidiam.

JAMES MEW.

THE SACRIFICE OF THE MASS

THE controversy in which I find myself engaged with Mr. George Russell originated in Mr. Birrell's very natural inquiry, 'What, then, did happen at the Reformation ?' His contention was that this is a question which has never been settled, which must be faced, but which requires for its solution a study of contemporary evidence beyond the power of the ordinary individual who desires to learn the truth. No one who has made history his study will, I think, venture to dispute this proposition. Putting aside for the moment the works of rival theologians, we find in Dr. Lingard the champion of Rome, in Mr. Froude the apologist of Henry the Eighth. It is not to these that we can turn. And yet, as has been recently said by Professor Maitland of Domesday, the true story of the Reformation, if not 'the known,' is at least 'the knowable.' There is no reason why it should not be possible to do for the great struggle of the sixteenth century what my friend Professor Gardiner is doing for that of the century which followed: it is only for the man that we wait.

In the meanwhile, I endeavoured, in my article, to illustrate the importance and extent of that contemporary historical evidence which is now being brought to light, and which bears directly on the subject of Mr. Birrell's inquiry. Starting from Mr. Gladstone's position that the Church of England must fall back' on the Elizabethan settlement, 'in giving an account of herself,' I dealt, not with the changes and reactions of the three preceding reigns, but with the Elizabethan religion,' as I deemed it might historically be termed. As might be expected, this style pleased neither 'high' nor 'low' in the Church; but its justice, I think, is fairly established by this reluctant admission in a tractate on the 'Anglo-Catholic' side:

It is not a topic on which Churchmen love to dwell, but from 1558 to 1580 the dominant factor in our Reformation was Queen and Council; and, to speak in homely phrase, the Queen and Council, by means of the bishops, took the Church by the nose and drenched her.2

The expression is not mine; I do not say that it is pretty; but

1 Nineteenth Century, April 1896.

2 Bishop Guest, by the Rev. G. F. Hodges (1894).

it forms an effective comment on the tale that the Church reformed herself.

And now, as to the Mass.' Mr. Russell, replying to Mr. Birrell's view of the difference between a Catholic country and a Protestant one' at the present day, thus defined the position :

'It is the Mass,' he says, ' that matters; it is the Mass that makes the difference.' And here it seems to me that Mr. Birrell attaches to the word 'Mass' some occult or esoteric meaning for which, as far as I know, he has no warrant. . . . The Reformers regarded the words as synonymous. The Mass, then, is the service of the Holy Communion, nothing more and nothing less.3

...

As to the 'order' there is no question: Mr. Russell admits that it has been 'largely and repeatedly modified' in the service of the Holy Communion Office, which differs accordingly from the Mass. This much is obvious. But, apart from the question of these changes, is 'the Mass,' as Mr. Russell persists, a 'perfectly colourless and indescriptive' name for the Sacrament? The facts are simple. I

proved, in my previous article, that the Elizabethan reformers (with whom I was there concerned) violently denounced 'the Mass,' not 'private' Masses, not superstitious ideas' about the Mass, but the Mass' itself, sans façon. I also proved that 'the Mass' was recognised as the distinctive feature of the old religion, and, as such, was suppressed and extirpated by law.

4

Mr. Russell, however, appeals to Ridley as an 'orthodox, learned, and authoritative' man, whose words triumphantly prove that his above assertion is correct. To Ridley, therefore, he shall go. Even in 1550, Ridley forbids, in his injunctions to his clergy, any counterfeiting of the popish mass . . . in the time of the Holy Communion,' and abolishes the altar that the form of a table may more move and turn the simple from the old superstitious opinions of the popish mass.' Of his views on April 15, 1557'5-a year and a half after his death-Mr. Russell alone can speak. I only know that, when in prison with Latimer his fellow-martyr-Latimer who said of 'Mistress Missa' that 'the devil hath brought her in again '—he held that

things done in the mass tend openly to the overthrow of Christ's institution.. ... I do not take the mass as it is at this day for the communion of the church, but for a popish device, whereby . the people of God are miserably deluded."

...

The most extreme of modern Protestants could not go further than this. Again, in his farewell epistle penned before he went to the stake, this great reformer, whose 'language,' Mr. Russell reminds us, 'was remarkable for its theological temperateness,' wrote of the altar' and of the mass' thus:

In the stead of the Lord's holy table they give the people, with much solemn disguising, a thing which they call their mass; but in deed and in truth it is a

Nineteenth Century, xl. 35-6.

P. 422, supra.

Ridley's Works, ed. Parker. Soc., pp. 121, 120.

Ibid.

very masking and mockery of the true supper of the Lord, or rather I may call it a crafty juggling, whereby these false thieves and jugglers have bewitched the minds of the simple people... unto pernicious idolatry."

And then, turning in his agony to his own see of London, he who was to fight that 'candle' for England, cried, as if in vision:

O thou now wicked and bloody see, why dost thou set up again many altars of idolatry, which by the word of God were justly taken away? Oh, why hast thou overthrown the Lord's table? Why dost thou daily delude the people, masking in thy masses, in the stead of the Lord's most holy supper?

Such is the witness of the man on whom Mr. Russell relies! He does not know when Ridley died; he does not know what Ridley wrote; and he then comes forward 'in correction' of my statements of the English Reformation.

It is beyond dispute that Masses are only mentioned by the Church of England in connexion with blasphemy, while its bishops, as we shall see, associated the term with idolatry. As to modern days, we need not travel further than Johnson's Dictionary-as brought up to date by Dr. Latham (1870)—for that occult or esoteric meaning ' which came as a surprise to Mr. Russell. For we there find 'Mass described as the 'Service of the Romish Church at the celebration of the Eucharist.' And who are those who would re-introduce the word 'Mass' among us? Notoriously, only that extreme school, of whom, in his last charge, Archbishop Longley said:

It is no want of charity to declare that they remain with us in order that they may substitute the Mass for the Communion; the obvious aim of our reformers having been to substitute the Communion for the Mass (p. 46).

This, which was merely the view of the Primate of all England, will be treated with the ridicule it deserves by an expert like Mr. Russell, who is able to assure us that 'the Mass is the Service of the Holy Communion, nothing more and nothing less.'

Now, this is a point that must be driven home, for Mr. Russell's position is a juggle. And, as a juggle, it is a perfect type of the policy of the sacerdotal party. We have only to ask ourselves what would happen if, instead of denouncing 'the squire and the parson,' 8 Mr. Russell suddenly took to describing the villagers as 'villains.' His ingenuous surprise that anyone should object to a term which originally meant only a túnesman or dweller in a village (villa) would scarcely avert the wrath of his hearers who attached to it the strange esoteric meaning' of 'a clownish, a depraved person, a scoundrel.'' And yet, it is with no less artless innocence that he

Ridley's Works, ed. Parker Soc., p. 409.

• Hansard (1893), xviii. 123.

• Skeat's Etymological Dictionary, where the development in the meaning is traced.