j-jr"? NIVERSITY OF CA HIVERSIDE, LIBRARY 3 1210 01658 7592 1 RIVERSIDE , The Traveller's Library. Contents of the TRA.VELLER'S LIBR.iRT, now complete in 102 Paris, price One Shilling each, or in 50 Volumes, price 2s. 6d. each in cloth, — To be had also, in complete Sets only, at Five Guineas per Set, bound in cloth, lettered, in 25 Volumes, classified as follows : — Xn Europe. Authors. A CONTINENTAIi TOUR J. BARROW. ARCTIC VOYAGES AND DIS- COVERIES F- MAYNE. BRITIANY AND THE BIBLE I. HOPE. BRITTANY AND THE 'CHASE I. HOPE. CORSICA F- GREGOROVIUS. GERMANY, ETC.; NOTES OF A TRAVELLER S. LAING. rCELAND P. MILES. NORWAY, A RESIDENCE IN S. LAING. NORWAY, RAMBLES IN T. FORESTER. RTTSSIA MAEdCis De CUSTINE. RUSSIA AND TURKEY J- R. M'CULLOCH. ST. PETEESBURGH M. JERRMANN. EUSSIANS OP THE SOUTH.... S.BROOKS. SWISS MEN AND SWISS MOUNTAINS R. FERGUSON. MONT BLANC, ASCENT OF ... . J. AULDJO. SKETCHES OF NATURE IN THE ALPS F. VON TSCHUDI. VISIT TO THE VAUDOIS OF PIEDMONT E. BAINES. In Asia. Aufhort. CHINA AND THIBET ABBEHUC. SYRIA AND PALESTINE "EOTHEN." THE .PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.. P. GIRONlEhE. In Africa. AFRICAN WANDERINGS M. WERNE. MOROCCO X. DURRIEC. NIGER EXPLORATION T. J. HUTCHINSOM. THE ZULUS OF NATAL G. H. MASON. In Auterica. BRA-^L E. WILBERFORCE. CANADA MRS. JAMESON. CUBA W. H. HURLBUT. NORTH AMERICAN WILDS .. C. LANMAN. In Australia. AUSTRALIAN COLONIES W. HUGHES. Round the 'World. A LADY'S VOYAGE IDA PFEIFFEK.. HisTOii'sr wA.isrr> BioGmA.ra^s'- MEMOIR OF THE DUKE OP ■WELLINGTON. LIFE OF MARSHAL TURENNB T. O.COCKAYNE. SCHAM7L BODRVSTEDT and WAGNER. FERDINAND I. AND MAXIMI- LIAN II RANKE. P. ARAGO'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY THOS.HOLCaOPT'S MEMOIRS CHESTERFIELD Si, SELWYN A. HAYWARD. SWIFT AND RICHAP.DSON. . . . LORD J EFFREY. DEFOE AND CHURCHILL J. FORSTER. ANECDOTES OF DR. JOHNSON MRS. FIOZZI. TURKEY AND CHRISTENDOM LEIPSIC CAMPAIGN Ret. G. R. GLEIG. AN ESSAY ON THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF THOS. FULLER HENRY ROGERS. Ess^a.-5rs B-!£- X.OI?,X> 1>/LA. still an excommunicate person, on the 23rd of February, 1077, his crown was to be transferred to another. Till then he was to dwell at Spires, with the title of Emperor, but without a court, an army, or a place of public worship. The theocratic theory, hitherto regarded as a mere Utopian extravagance, had thus passed into a practical and sacred reality. The fisherman of Gralilee had triumphed over the con(iueror of 3G HILDEBRAND. Pharsalia. The vassal of Otho had reduced Otho's successor to vassalage. The universal monarchy which Heathen Rome had wrung from a bleeding world, had been extorted by Christian Rome from the superstition or the reverence of mankind. The relation of the Papacy and the Empire had been inverted ; and Churchmen foretold with unhesitating confidence the exaltation of their order above all earthly potentates, and the resort to their capital of countless worshippers, there to do homage to an oracle more profound than that of Delphi, to mysteries more pure than those of Eleusis, and to a pontificate more august than that of Jerusalem. Strains of unbounded joy resounded through the papal city. Solitude and shame and penitential exercises attested the past crimes, and the abject fortunes, of the exile of Spires. But against this regimen of sackcloth and fasting, the body and the soul of Henry revolted. At the close of the Diet of Tribur, he had scarcely completed his twenty-sixth year. Degraded, if not finally deposed, hated and reviled, abandoned by man, and com- pelled by conscience to anticipate his abandonment by Grod, he yet, in the depths of his misery, retained the remembrance and the hope of dominion. The future was still bright with the anticipations of youth. He might yet retrieve his reputation, resume the blessings he had squandered, and take a signal ven- geance on his great antagonist. And amidst the otherwise uni- versal desertion, there remained one faithful bosom on which to repose his own aching heart. Bertha, his wife, who had retained her purity unsullied amidst the license of his court, now retained her fidelity imshaken amidst the falsehood of his adherents. Her wrongs had been such as to render a deep resentment nothing less than a duty. Her happiness and her honour had been basely assailed by the selfish profligate to whom the most solemn vows had in vain united her. But to her, those vows were a bond stronger than death, and indissoluble by all the confederate powers of earth and hell. To suffer was the condition — to pardon and to love, the necessity — of her existence. Vice and folly could not have altogether depraved him who was the object of such inalien- able tenderness, and who at length learnt to return it with a de- votion almost equal to her own, after a bitter experience had taught him the real value of the homage and caresses of the world. In her society, though an exile from every other, Henry wore away two months at Spires in a fruitless solicitation to the Pope to receive him in Italy as a penitent suitor for reconcilement with the Church. December had now arrived ; and, in less than ten weeks, would be fulfilled the term, when, if still excommunicate, he must, according to the sentence of Tribur, finally resign, not the prerog- II1LDEBII.\ND. :rr atives alone, but with tliem the title and rank of Head of tlie Emijire. No sacrifices seemed too great to avert tliis danger ; and history tells of none more singular than those to which the heir of the Franconian dynasty was constrained to submit. In the garb of a pilgrim, and in a season so severe as, during more than four months, to liave converted the Rhine into a solid mass of ice, Henry and his faithful Bertha, carrying in her arms their infant child, undertook to cross the Alps, with no escort but sucli menial servants as it was yet in his power to hire for that desperate enter- prise. Among the courtiers who had so lately thronged his palace, not one would become the companion of Ms toil and dangers. Among the neighbouring princes who had so lately solicited his alliance, not one would grant him the poor boon of a safe-conduct and a free passage through their states. Even his wife's mother exacted from him large territorial cessions as the price of allowing him, and her own daughter, to scale one of the Alpine passes ; apparently that of the Great St. Bernard. Day by day, peasants cut out an npward path through the long windings of the mountain. In the descent from the highest summit, when thus at length gained, Henry had to encounter fatigues and dangers from which the chamois-hunter would have turned aside. Vast trackless wastes of snow were traversed, sometimes by mere crawling, at other times by the aid of rope-ladders, or still ruder contrivances, and not seldom by a sheer plunge along the inclined steep ; the Empress and her child being enveloped, on those occasions, in the raw skins of beasts slaughtered on the march. The transition from these dangers to security, from the pine forests, glaciers, and precipices of the Alps, to the sunny plains of Italy, was not so grateful to the wearied travellers as the change from the gloom of Spires to the rapturous greetings which hailed their advance along the course of the Po. A splendid court, a numerous army, and an exulting populace, once more attested the majesty of the Emperor ; nor was the welcome of his Italian sub- jects destitute of a deeper significance than usually belongs to the paeans of the worshippers of kings. They dreamed of the haughty Pontiff humbled, of the see of Ambrose exalted to civil and ecclesiastical supremacy, and of the German yoke lifted from their necks. Doomed as were these soaring hopes to an early disappoint- ment, the enthusiasm of Henry's partisans justified those more sober expectations which had prompted his perilous journey across the Alps. He could now prosecute his suit to the Pope with tlie countenance, and in the vicinity of those zealous adherents, and at a secure distance from the enemies towards whom Hildebrand was already advancing to hold the Gontemplated Diet of Augsl)urg. D 3 38 HILDEBKAND. In the personal command of a military escort, Matilda attended the Papal progress ; and was even pointing out to her guards their line of march through the snowy peaks which closed in her northern horizon, when tidings of the rapid approach of the Em- peror at the head of a formidable force induced her to retreat to the fortress of Canossa. There, in the bosom of the Apennines, her sacred charge would be secure from any sudden assault ; nor had she anything to dread from the regular leaguer of such powers as could, in that age, have been brought to the siege of it. Canossa was the cradle and the original seat of her ancient race. It was also the favourite residence of the Grreat Countess; and when Gregory found shelter within her halls, they were crowded with guests of the highest eminence in social and in literary rank. So imposing was the scene, and so superb the assemblage, that the drowsy muse of her versifying chaplain awakened for once to an hyperbole, and declared Canossa to be nothing less than a new Rome, the rival of that of Eomulus. Thither, as if to verify the boast, came a long line of mitred penitents from Grermany, whoin the severe Hildebrand consigned on their arrival to solitary cells with bread and water for their fare ; and there also appeared the German Emperor himself, not the leader of the rumoured host of Lombard invaders, but surrounded by a small and unarmed retinue — mean in his apparel, and contrite in outward aspect, a humble suppliant for pardon and acceptance to the communion of the faithful. Long centuries had passed away since the sceptre of the West had been won by Italian armies in Italian fields, and Henry declined to put the issue of this great contest on the swords of his Milanese vassals. He well knew that, to break the alliance of patriotism, cupidity, and superstition, which had degraded him at Tribur, it was necessary to rescue himself from the anathema which he had but too justly incurred, and that his crown must be redeemed, not by force, but by submission to his formidable an- tagonist. And Hildebrand ! fathomless as are the depths of the human heart, who can doubt that, amidst the conflict of emotions which now agitated him, the most dominant was the exulting sense of victory over the earth's greatest Monarch. His rival at his feet, his calumniator self-condemned, the lips which had rudely sum- moned him to abdicate the Apostolic crown now suing to him for the recovery of the Imperial diadem, the exaltation in his person of decrepit age over fiery youth, of mental over physical power, of the long-enthralled Church over the long-tyrannising world, all combined to form a triumpli too intoxicating even for that capacious intellect. HILDEBRAXD. 89 The veriest sycophant of the Papal Court, even in that super- stitious age, would scarcely have ventured to describe, as a serious act of sacramental devotion, the religious masquerade which fol- lowed between the high priest and the imperial penitent; or to extol as politic and wise, the base indignities to which the Pontiff subjected his prostrate enemy, and of which his owu pastoral letters contained the otherwise incredible record. Had it been his object to compel Henry to drain to its bitterest dregs the cup of unprofitable humiliation — to exasperate to madness the Emperor himself, and all who would resent as a personal wrong an insult to the sovereign — and to transmit to the latest age a monument and a hatred alike imperishable, of the extravagances of spiritual des- potism, — he could have devised no fitter course. Environed by many of the greatest Princes of Italy who owed fealty and allegiance to the Emperor, Gregory affected to turn a deaf ear to his solicitations. His humblest offers were spurned ; his most unbounded acknowledgments of the sacerdotal authority over the kings and kingdoms of the world were rejected. For the distress of her royal kinsman, Matilda felt as women and as monarchs feel ; but even her entreaties seemed to be fruitless. Day by day, the same cold stern appeal to the future decisions of the Diet to be convened at Augsburg, repelled the suit even of that powerful intercessor. The critical point, at which prayers for re- concilement would give way to indignation and defiance, had been almost reached. Then, and not till then, the Pope condescended to offer his ghostly pardon, on the condition that Henry would surrender into his hands the custody of the crown, the sceptre, and the other ensigns of royalty, and acknowledge himself unworthy to bear the royal title. This, however, was a scandal on which not even the proud spirit of the now triumphant priest dared to insist, and to which not even the now abject heart of the Emperor could be induced to submit. But the shame which was spared to the Sovereign, was inflicted with relentless severity on the Man. It was towards the end of January. The earth was covered with snow, and the mountain streams were arrested by the keen frost of the Apennines, when, clad in a thin penitential gar- ment of white linen, and bare of foot, Henry, the descendant of so many kings, and the ruler of so many nations, ascended slowly and alone the rocky path which led to the outer gate of the for- tress of Canossa. With strange emotions of pity, of wonder, and of scorn, the assembled crowd gazed on his majestic form, and noble features, as, passing through the first and the second gateway, he stood in the posture of humiliation before the third, which re- mained inexorably closed against his further progress. The rising 40 IIILDEBKAND. sun found him there fasting ; and there the setting sun left him stiff with cold, faint with hunger, and devoured by shame and ill- suppressed resentment. A second day dawned, and wore tardily away, and closed, in a continuance of the same indignities, poured out on Europe at large in the person of her chief, by the Vicar of the meek, the lowly, and the compassionate Eedeemer. A third day came, and, still irreverently trampling on the hereditary lord of the fairer half of the civilised world, Hildebrand once more compelled him to prolong till nightfall this profane and hollow parody on the real workings of the broken and contrite heart. Nor was he imwarned of the activity and the strength of the indignation aroused by this protracted outrage on every natural sentiment, and every honest prejudice, of mankind. Lamenta- tions and reproaches rang through the castle of Canossa. Murmurs from Henry's inveterate enemies, and his own zealous adherents, upbraided Grregory as exhibiting rather the cruelty of a tyrant, than the rigour of an apostle. But the endurance of the sufferer was the only measure of the inflexibility of the tormentor ; nor was it till the unhappy monarch had burst away from the scene of his mental and bodily anguish, and sought shelter in a neighbour- ing convent, that the Pope, yielding at length to the instances of Matilda, would admit the degraded suppliant into his presence. It was the fourth day on which he had borne the humiliating garb of an affected penitent, and, in that sordid raiment he drew near on his bare feet to the more than imperial Majesty of the Church, and prostrated himself, in more than servile deference, before the diminutive and emaciated old man, " from the terrible glance of whose countenance," we are told, " the eye of every beholder re- coiled as from the lightning." Hunger, cold, nakedness, and shame had, for the moment, crushed the gallant spirit of the sufferer. He wept and cried for mercy, again and again renewing his entreaties, until he had reached the lowest level of abasement to which his own enfeebled heart, or the haughtiness of his great antagonist, coidd depress him. Then, and not till then, did the Pope condescend to revoke the anathema of the Vatican. Cruel, however, were the tender mercies of the now exulting Pontiff. He restored his fallen enemy at once to the communion, and to the contempt, of his Christian brethren. The price of pardon was a promise to submit himself to the future judgment of the Apostolic See ; to resign his crown if that judgment should be unfavourable to him ; to abstain meanwhile from the enjoyment of any of his royal prerogatives or revenues ; to acknowledge that his subjects had been lawfully released from their allegiance ; to banish his former friends and advisers ; to govern his states, should IIILDEBKAND. 41 lie regain them, in obedience to the papal couuselb; to enforce all papal decrees ; and never to revenge his present humiliation. To the observance of the terms thus dictated by the con([ueror, the oaths of Henry himself, and of several Prelates and Princes as liis sponsors, were pledged ; and then, in the name of Him who had declared that His kingdom was not of this world, and as tlie suc- cessor of Him who had forbidden to all Bishops any lordship over the heritage of Christ, the solemn words of pontifical absolution rescued the degraded Emperor from the forfeit to which he had been conditionally sentenced by the confederates at Tribm-. Another expiation was yet to be made to the injured majesty of the Tiara. He in whom the dynasties of CiBsar, of Charlemagne, and of Otho had their representative, might still be compelled to endure one last and galling contumely. Holding in his hand the seeming bread, which (as he believed) words of far more than miraculous power had just transmuted into the very body which died and was entombed at Calvary — "Behold!" exclaimed the Pontiff, fixing his keen and flashing eye on the jaded countenance of the unhappy Monarch, " behold the body of the Lord ! Be it this day the witness of my innocence. May the Almighty Grod now free me from the suspicion of the guilt of which I have been accused by thee and thine, if I be really innocent ! May He this very day smite me with a sudden death, if I be really guilty ! " Amidst the acclamations of the bystanders, he then looked up to heaven, and broke and ate the consecrated element. " And now," he exclaimed, turning once more on the awe-stricken Henry that eye which neither age could dim nor pity soften ; " if thou art conscious of thine innocence, and assured that the charges brought against thee by thine o\^^l opponents are false and calumnious, free the Church of God from scandal, and thyself from suspicion, and take as an appeal to heaven this body of the Lord." That, in open contradiction to his own recent prayers and pen- ances, the penitent should have accepted this insulting challenge, was obviously impossible. He trembled, and evaded it. At length when his wounded spirit, and half-lifeless frame, could endure no more, a banquet was served, where, suppressing the agonies of shame and rage with which his bosom was to heave from that moment to his last, he closed this scene of wretchedness, by accepting the hospitalities, sharing in the familiar discourse, and submitting to the benedictions, of the man who had in his person given proofs, till then uniraagined, of the depths of ig- nominy to which the Temporal chief of Christendom might be depressed by an audacious use of the powers of her Ecclesiastical head. 42 IIILDEBKAND. The Lombard lords who had hailed the arrival of their Sovereign in Italy, had gradually overtaken his rapid advance to Canossa. There, marshalled in the adjacent valleys, they anxiously awaited, from day to day, intelligence of what might be passing within the fortress, when at length the gates were thrown open, and, attended only by the usual episcopal retinue, a bishop was seen to descend from the steep path which led to their encampment. He an- nounced that Henry had submitted himself to the present dis- cipline and to the future guidance of the Pope, and had received his ghostly absolution ; and that on the same terms his Holiness was ready to bestow the same grace on his less guilty followers. As the tidings of this papal victory flew from rank to rank, the mountains echoed with one protracted shout of indignation and defiance. The Lombards spurned the pardon of Hildebrand — an usurper of the Apostolic throne, himself excommunicated by the decrees of German and Italian Synods. They denied the authority of the Emperor, debased as he now was by concessions unworthy of a king, and by indignities disgraceful to a soldier. They vowed to take the crown from his dishonoured head, to place it on the brows of his son, the yet infant, Conrad ; to march immediately to Rome, and there to depose the proud Churchman who had thus dared to humble to the dust the majesty of the Franconian line, and of the T^ombard name. In the midst of this military tumult, the gates of Canossa -vyere a^^ain thrown open, and Henry himself was seen descending to the camp, his noble figure bowed down, and his lordly countenance overcast with unwonted emotions. As he passed along the Lom- bard lines, every eye expressed contempt, and derision was on every tono-ue. But the Italian was not the German spirit. They could at once despise and obey. Following the standard of their de- graded monarch, they conducted him to Reggio, where, in a con- clave of ecclesiastics, he instantly proceeded to concert schemes for their deliverance, and for his own revenge. Within a single week from the absolution of Canossa, Gregory was on his way to Mantua to hold a council, to which the Em- peror had invited him, with the treacherous design (if the papal historians may be credited) of seizing and imprisoning him there. The vigilance of Matilda rescued her Holy Father from the real or imaginary danger. From the banks of the Po she conducted him back, under the escort of her troops, to the shelter of her native mountain fastness. His faith in his own infallibility must have undergone a severe trial. The Imperial sinner he had pardoned was giving daily proof that the heart of man is not to be penetrated even by Papal eyes. Henry was exercising, with ostentation, the IIILDEBRAND. 43 prerogatives he had so lately vowed to forego. He had cast off the abject tone of the confessional. All his royal instincts were in full activity. He breathed defiance against the Pontiff — seized and imprisoned his legates — recalled to his presence his excommuni- cated councillors — became once more strenuous for his rights — and was recompensed by one simultaneous burst of sympathy, enthu- siasm, and devotedness, from his Italian subjects. To balance the ominous power thus rising against him, Gregory now received an accession of dignity and of influence on which his eulogists are unwilling to dwell. The discipline of the Church, and the fate of the Empire, were not the only subjects of his solicitude while sheltered in the castle and city of the Tuscan heroine. The world was startled and scandalised by the intelligence, that his princely hostess had granted all her hereditary states to her Apos- tolic guest, and to his successors for ever, in full allodial dominion. By some sage of the law, who drew up the act of cession, it is as- cribed to her dread of the Emperor's hostility. A nobler impulse is ascribed to the mistress of Ligui-ia and Tuscany, in the hobbling verses of her more honest chaplain. Peter, he says, bore the keys of heaven, and Matilda had resolved to bear the Etrurian keys of Peter's patrimony, in no other character than that of doorkeeper to Peter. With what benignity the splendid inheritance was ac- cepted, may also be learned from the worthy versifier. At this hour Pope Gregory the Sixteenth holds some parts of his territorial dominion in virtue of this grant. Hildebrand is one of the saints of the Church, and one of the heroes of the world. He, therefore, escapes the reproach of so grave an abuse of the hospitality of the Great Countess, and of the confidence she reposed in her spiritual guide. The coarser reproach in which it has involved them both will be adopted by no one who has ever watched the weaving of the mystic bonds which knit together the female and the sacerdotal hearts. It was the age of feudalism, not of chivalry. Yet when chivalry came, and St. Louis himself adorned it, would he, if so tried, have resisted the temptation under which St. Gregory fell ? •It is, probably, well for the fame of that illustrious prince that his virtue was never subjected to so severe a test. Canossa, the scene of this memorable cession, was, at the same time, the prison of him to whom it was made. All the passes were beset with Henry's troops. All the Lombard and Tuscan cities were in Henry's possession. His reviving courage had kindled the zeal of his adherents. He was no longer an outcast to be trampled down with impunity ; but the leader of a formidable host, with whom even the Vicar of Christ must condescend to temporise. In the wild defiles of the Alps, swift messengers from the Princes 44 IIILDEBRAND. to the Pope hurried past solemn legates from the Pope to the Princes — they urging his instant appearance at Augsburg — he exhorting them to avoid any decision in his absence. Mitred emissaries also -passed from Gregory to the Emperor, summoning him to attend the Diet within a time by which no one unwafted by wings or steam could have reached the place, and requesting from him a suicidal safe-conduct for his pontifical judge. The Pope was now confined to the weapons with which men of the gown contend with men of the sword. His prescience foreboded a civil war. His policy was to assume the guidance of the Grerman league just far enough to maintain his lofty claims, not far enough to be irrevocably committed to the leaguers. A plausible apology for his absence was necessary. It was afforded by Henry's rejection of demands which were made only that they might be rejected. To Otho and to the aspiring Eudolf such subtleties were alike imfamiliar and unsuspected. Those stout soldiers and simple Germans knew that the Pope had deposed their King, and had absolved them from their allegiance. They doubted not, therefore, that he was bound heart and soul to their cause. Or if, in the assembly which they held at Forcheim, a doubt was whispered of Italian honour or of Pontifical faith, it was silenced by the presence there of Papal legates, w^ho sedulously swelled the tide of invective against Henry. At first, indeed, they dissuaded the immediate choice of a rival sovereign. But to the demand of the Princes for prompt and decisive measures, they gave their ready assent. They advised them, it is true, to confer no hereditary title on the object of their choice. Yet when, in defiance of that advice, the choice was made, they solemnly confirmed it in the name, and by the authority, of Gregory. They did not, certainly, vote for the elec- tion of Eudolf ; but, when the shouts of the multitude announced his accession to the Teutonic throne, they placed the crown on his head. That Hildebrand did not disavow these acts of his repre- sentatives, but availed himself of the alliances and aids to be derived from them, appeared to these downright captains abundantly suffi- cient to bind him in conscience and in honour. That the Pope had not the slightest intention of being so bound, unless it should chance to suit his own convenience, is, however, past dispute. Even in the nineteenth century he has found, in M. I'Abbe Jager, an apologist who absolves him from all responsibility for the acts of his legates at the Diet of Forcheim, because they were adopted without awaiting his own personal arrival. The Diet might just as reasonably have awaited the arrival of the Millenniiim. The decretals of Rome, of Tribur, of Canossa, and of Forcheim, IIILDEBR^VND. 45 were now to bear their proper fruits — fruits of bitter taste, and of evil augury. At the moment when the cathedral of jNIentz was pouring forth the crowds who had just listened to the coronation oath of Rudolf, the clash of arms, the cries of combatants, and the shrieks of the dying, mingled, strangely and mournfully, with the sacred anthems and the songs of revellers. An idle frolic of some Swabian soldiers had kindled into rage the sullen spirit with which the partisans of Henry had gazed on that unwelcome pageant ; and the first rude and exasperated voice was echoed by thousands who learned, from those acclamations, the secret of their niunbers and their strength. The discovery and the agitation spread from city to city, and roused the whole Grerman people from the Ehine to the Oder. Men's hearts yearned over their exiled king. They remembered that, but twelve short years before, he had been basely stolen from his mother by churchmen, who had yet more basely corrupted him. They commemorated his courage, his courtesy, and his munificence. They pardoned his faults as the excesses of 3-outh, and resented, as insults to themselves, the indig- nities of Canossa, and the treason of Forcheim. In this reflux of public opinion, the loyal and the brave, all who cherished the honours of the crown, and all who desired the independence of the state, were supported by the multitudes to whom the papal edicts against simony and clerical marriages were fraught with disaster, and by that still more numerous body who, at all times, lend their voices and their arms to swell the triumph of every rising cause. To this confederacy Rudolf had to oppose the alliance of the princes, secular and ecclesiastical, the devoted zeal of the Saxon people, and the secret support, rather than the frank and open countenance of the Pope. The shock of these hostile powers was near and inevitable. In the spring of 1077, tidings were spread throughout Germany of the Emperor's arrival to the northward of the Alps. From Franconia, the seat of his house, from the fruitful province of Burgundy, and from the Bohemian mountains, he was greeted with an enthusiastic welcome. Many even of the Bavarians and Swabians revolted in his favour. His standard once more floated over all the greater citadels of the Rhine. He who, six months before, had fled from Spires a solitary wanderer, was now at the head of a powerful array, controlling the whole of Southern Germany, laying waste the territories of his rivals, and threatening them with a signal retribution. Amidst the rising tempest the voice of Gregory was heard : but it was no longer trumpet-tongued and battling with the storm. The supreme earthly judge, the dread avenger, had subsided into 46 HILDEBRAND. the pacific mediator. In the name of Peter he enjoined either king to send him a safe-conduct, that he might, in person, arbitrate between them and stop the effusion of Christian blood. A safe but an impracticable offer; an indirect but significant avowal of neutrality between the sovereign he had so lately deposed and the sovereign whom, by his legates, he had so lately crowned ! Thus ignobly withdrawing from the contest he had kindled, Hildebrand returned from Canossa to the papal city. The Great Countess, as usual, attended as the commander of his guard. Eome received in triumph her new Grermanicus, and decreed an ovation to his ever faithful Agrippina. While the glories of Canossa were thus celebrated by rejoicings in the Christian capital, they were expiated by blood in the plains of Saxony. Confiding in the solemn acts of the Pope and his legates, the Saxons had thronged to the defence of the crown of Kudolf, and they had sustained it undauntedly. But the bravest quailed at the intelligence that Gregory had disowned the cause of the Church and of their native land ; and that, even in the palace of the Lateran, the ambassadors of Henry were received with honours, and with a deference denied to the humbler envoys of his rival. Sagacity far inferior to that of Hildebrand could, at that time, have divined that the sword alone could decide such a quarrel — that the sword of Henry was the keener of the two — and that, by the cordial adoption of the cause of either, the Pope might draw on himself the vengeance of the conqueror. To pause, to vacillate, and to soothe, had therefore become the policy of the sovereign of the papal states ; but to be silent or inactive in such a strife would have been to abdicate one of the highest prerogatives of the Papacy. Pontifical legates traversed Europe. Pontifical epistles demanded the submission of the combatants. Pontifical warning denounced woes on the disobedient. But no pontifical voice explained who was to be obeyed or who opposed, what was to be done or what forborne. Discerning readers of these mandates understood them as an intimation that, on the victorious side (whichever that side might be) the pontifical power would ulti- mately be found. The appeal from these dark oracles to the unambiguous sword was first made by the rival kings in the autumn of 1078. They met on the banks of the Stren, on the plains of Melrichstadt. Each was driven from the field vnth enormous loss; Henry by his inveterate antagonist Otho; Eudolf by Count Herbard, the lieutenant of Henry. Each claimed the victory. An issue so un- decisive could draw from the circumspect Pontiff nothing more definite than renewed exhortations to rely on the Holy Peter; and IIILDEBRAND. 47 could urge him to 110 measure more hazardous than that of con- vening a new Council at the Lateran. There appeared tlie Imperial envoys with hollow vows of obedience, and Saxon messengers in- voking some intelligible intimation of the judgment and purposes of the Apostolic See. Again the Pope listened, spoke, exhorted, threatened ; and left the bleeding world to interpret as it might the mystic sense of the Infallible. To that brave and truth-loving people from whom, at the distance of four centuries, Luther was to rise for the deliverance of man- kind, these subterfuges appeared in their real light. The Saxon annalist has preserved three letters sent by his countrymen on this occasion to Gregory, which he must have read with admiration and with shame. " You know, and the letters of your Holiness attest (such is their indignant remonstrance) that it was by no advice, nor for any interest of ours, but for wrongs done to the Hoi}'' See, that you deposed our king, and forbade us, under fearful menaces, to acknowledge him. We have obeyed you at great danger, and at the expense of horrible sufferings. Many of us have lost their property and their lives, and have bequeathed hopeless poverty to their children. We who survive are without the means of sub- sistence, delivered over to the utmost agonies of distress. The reward of our sacrifices is, that he who was compelled to cast himself at your feet has been absolved without punishment, and has been permitted to crush us to the very abyss of misery. After our king had been solemnly deposed in a Synod, and another chosen in virtue of the Apostolic authority, the very matter thus decided is again brought into question. What especially perplexes us simple folk is, that the legates of Henry, though excommunicated by your legates, are well received at Rome. Holy Father, your piety assures us that you are guided by honourable, not l)y subtle views; but we are too gross to understand them. We can only explain to you that this management of two parties has produced civil war, murder, pillage, conflagration. If we, helpless sheep ! had failed in any point of duty, the vengeance of the Holy See would have overtaken us. Why exhibit so much forbearance when you have to do with wolves who have ravaged the Lord's fold ? We conjure you to look into your own heart, to remember your own honour, to fear the wrath of God, and for your own sake, if not for love of us, rescue yourself from responsibility for the torrents of blood poured out in our land." To these pathetic appeals Gregory answered slowly and re- luctantly, by disavowing the acts of his legates at Forcheim ; by extolling his own justice, courage, and disinterestedness ; by in- voking the support of all orders of men in Germany; and by 48 IIILDEBKAND. assuring them, in scriptural language, of the salvation of such " as should persevere to the end." But the hour for blandishments had passed away. The day of wrath, and the power of the sword, had come. The snow covered the earth, and the frost had chained the rivers, when, in the winter of 1079-80, the armies of Henry and Kudolf were drawn up, in hostile lines, at the village of Fladenheim, near Mulhausen. Henry was the assailant, but Rudolf, though driven with great loss from the field, was the conqueror ; for in that field the dreaded Otho again commanded, and by his skill and courage a rout was turned into a victory. The intelligence arrived at Rome at the moment when Grregory was presiding there in the most numerous of the many councils he had convened at the Lateran. Long-suppressed shame for his ignoble indecision, the murmurs of the assembled prelates, a voice from Heaven audible, as we are told, to his sense alone, and above all the triumphant field of Fladenheim, combined to over- come his long-cherished but timid policy. Rising from his throne with the majesty of his earlier days, the Pope, in the names of Peter and of Paul, " of God, and of his holy mother Mary," ex- communicated Henry, took from him the government of his states, deprived him of his royal rank, forbade all Christian people to receive him as their king, " gave, granted, and conceded " that Rudolf might rule the Grerman and Italian Empire ; and with blessings on Rudolf's adherents, and curses on his foes, dissolved the assembly. Then, moved, as he believed by a divine impulse, he proceeded to the altar, and uttered a prediction that ere the Church should celebrate the festival of the Prince of the Apostles, Henry, her rebellious outcast, should neither reign, nor live, to molest her. A perilous prophecy ! Henry was no longer the exile of Tribur, nor the penitent of Canossa. Yet his own rage, on hearing of this new papal sentence, did not burn so fiercely as the WTath of his adherents. With the sanction of thirty bishops, a new Anti-Pope, Guibert of Ravenna, was elected at Brixen ; and, at every court in Europe Imperial embassies demanded support for the common cause of all temporal sovereigns. In every part of Grermany troops were levied, and Henry marched at their head to crush the one German power in alliance with Rome. But that power was still animated by the Saxon spirit, and was still sustained by the claims of Rudolf, and by the genius of Otho. On the bright dawn of an autumnal day his forces, drawn up on the smiling banks of the Elster, raised the sacred song of the niLDEBRAND. 49 Hebrews, — "God staiidetli in the congregation of princes; lie is a judge among Gods ; " — and flung themselves on the far- extended lines of Henry's army ; who, with emulous devotion, met them with the hardly less sublime canticle, — " Te Deum laudamus." Cries more welcome to the demons of war soon stilled these sacred strains ; cries of despair, of anguish, and of terror. They first rose from one of Henry's squadrons, which, alarmed by the fall of their captain, receded ; and, in their retreat, spread through the rest a panic, a pause, and a momentary confusion. That moment was enough for the eagle glance of Otho. He rushed on the wavering Imperialists ; and, ere that bright sun had reached the meridian, thousands had fallen by the Saxon sword, or had perished in the blood-stained river. The victory was complete, the exulta- tion rapturous. Shouts of glory to the God of battles, thanks- givings for the deliverance of Saxony, paeans of immortal honour to Otho, the noblest of her sons, soothed or exasperated the agonies of the dying ; when the triumph was turned into sudden and irre- mediable mourning. On the field which had, apparently, secured his crown, Eudolf himself had fallen. He fell by an illustrious arm. Godfrey of Bouillon, the hero of the Jerusalem Delivered, struck the fatal blow. Another sword severed the right hand from the arm of Eudolf. " It is the hand," he cried, as his glazing eye rested on it, " with which I confirmed my fealty to Henry my lord." At once elevated by so signal a victory, and depressed by these penitent misgivings, his spirit passed away, leaving his adherents to the mercy of his rival. The same sun which witnessed the ruin of Henry's army on the Elster, looked down on a conflict, in which, on that eventful morning, the forces of Matilda, in the Mantuan territory, fled before his own. He now, once more, descended into Italy. He came, not, as formerly, a pilgrim and an exile ; but at the head of an army devoted to his person, and defying all carnal enemies, and all spiritual censures. He came to encounter Hildebrand, destitute of all Transalpine alliances, and supported, even in Italy, by no power but that of Matilda ; for the Norman Duke of Apulia was far away, attempting the conquest of the Eastern capital and Empire, But Henry left in his rear the invincible Saxons, and the hero who commanded them. To prevent a diversion in that quarter the Emperor proposed to abdicate his dominion in Saxony in favour of Conrad, his son. But Otho (a merry talker, as his annalist informs us) rejected the project with the remark, that "the calf of a vicious bull usually proved vicious." Leaving, therefore, this implacable enemy to his machinations, the Emperor pressed forward; and before the summer of 1080, the citizens of Rome saw, E 50 IIILDEBEAND. from their walls, tlie German standards in hostile array in the Campagna. In the presence of such danger the gallant spirit of the aged Pope once more rose and exulted. He convened a Synod to attest his last defiance of his formidable enemy. He exhorted the Ger- man princes to elect a successor to Eudolf. In letters of impas- sioned eloquence, he again maintained his supremacy over all the kings and rulers of mankind. He welcomed persecution as the badge of his holy calling ; and, while the besiegers were at the gates, he disposed (at least in words) of royal crowns, and distant pro- vinces. Matilda supplied him with money, which, for a while, tranquillised the Roman populace. He himself, as we are assured, wrought miracles to extinguish conflagrations kindled by their treachery. In language such as martyrs use, he consoled the part- ners of his sufferings. In language such as heroes breathe, he ani- mated the defenders of the city. The siege, or blockade, continued for three years uninterruptedly, except when Henry's troops were driven, by the deadly heats of autumn, to the neighbouring hills. Distress, and, it is alleged, bribery, at length subdued the courage of the garrison. On every side clamours were heard for peace ; for Henry demanded, as the terms of peace, nothing more than the recognition of his Imperial title, and his coronation by the hands of Grregory. The conscience, perhaps the pride, of Gregory re- volted against the proposal. His invincible will opposed and silenced the outcries of the famished multitudes ; nor could their entreaties, or their threats, extort from him more than a promise that, in the approaching winter, he would propose the question to a Pontifical Synod. It met, by the permission of Henry, on the 30th of November, 1083. It was the latest council of Gregory's pontificate. A few bishops, faithful to their chief and to his cause, now occupied the seats so often thronged by mitred churchmen. Every pallid cheek and anxious eye was turned to him who occu- pied the loftier throne in the centre of that agitated assembly. He rose, and the half-uttered suggestions of fear and human policy were hushed into deep stillness as he spoke. He spoke of the glorious example, of the light affliction, and of the eternal reward, of mar- tyrs for the faith. He spoke, as dying fathers speak to their children, of peace, and hope, and of consolation. But he spoke also, as inspired prophets spake of yore to the Kings of Israel, de- nouncing the swift vengeance of Heaven against his oppressor. The enraptured audience exclaimed that they had heard the voice of an angel, not of a man. Gregory dismissed the assembly, and calmly prepared for whatever extremity of distress might await him. IIILDEBRAND. 51 It did not linger. In the spring of 1084 the garrison was over- powered, the gates were thrown open to the besiegers, and Gregory sought a precarious refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo. He left the great Church of the Lateran as a theatre for the triumph of his an- tagonist and his rival. Seated on the Apostolic throne, Gruibert, the Anti-Pope of Brixen, was consecrated there by the title of Clement the Third ; and then, as the successor of Peter, he placed the crown of Grermany and of Italy on the brows of Henry, and of Bertha, as they knelt before him. And now Henry had, or seemed to have, in his grasp the author of the shame of Canossa, of the anathemas of the Lateran, and of the civil wars and rebellious of the Empire. The base populace of Eome were already anticipating, with sanguinary joy, the humilia- tion, perhaps the death, of the noblest si^irit who had reigned there since the slaughter of Julius. The approaching catastrophe, what- ever might be its form, Gregory was prepared to meet, with a serene confidence in God, and a haughty defiance of man. A few hours more, and the Castle of St. Angelo must have yielded to famine or to assault ; when the aged Pope, in the very agony of his fate, gathered the reward of the policy with which he had cemented the alliance between the Papacy and the Norman conq\ierors of the South of Italy. Eobert Guiscard, returning from Constantinople, flew to the rescue of his Suzerain. Scouts announced to Henry the approach of a mighty host, in which the Norman battle-axe, and the cross, were strangely united with the Saracenic cimeter, and the crescent. A precipitate retreat scarcely rescued his enfeebled troops from the impending danger. He abandoned his prey in a fever of disajspointment. Unable to slake his thirst for vengeance, he might perhaps allay it by surprising the Great Countess, and overwhelming her forces, still in arms in the Modenese. But he was himself surprised in the attempt by her superior skill and vigi- lance. Shouts for St. Peter and jNIatilda roused the retreating Im- perialists by night, near the Castle of Sorbaria. They retired across the Alps, with such a loss of men, of officers, and of treasure, as disabled them from any further enterprises. The Emperor returned into Germany to reign undisturbed l)y civil Avar ; for the great Otho was dead, and Herman of Luxemburg, who had assumed the Imperial title, was permitted to abdicate it mth contemptuous impunity. Henry returned, however, to pre- pare for new conflicts with the Papacy — to drain the cup of toil, of danger, and of distress — and to die, at length, with a lieart broken by the parricidal cruelty of his son. No prayers were said, and no requiem sung, over the unhallowed grave which received the bones of the excommunicated Monarch. Yet they were com- E 2 52 IIILDEBRAXD. mitted to the earth with the best and the kindest obsequies. The pity of his enemies, the lamentation of his subjects, and the un- bidden tears of the poor, the widows and the orphans, who crowded round the bier of their benefactor, rendered his tomb not less sacred than if it had been blessed by the united prayers of the whole Christian Episcopacy. Those unbribed mourners wept over a Prince to whom Grod had given a large heart and a capacious mind ; but who had derived, from canonised Bishops, a corrupting educa- tion, and from a too early and too unchequered prosperity, the de- velopment of every base and cruel appetite ; but to whom calamity had imparted a self-dominion, from which none could withhold his respect, and an active sympathy with sorrow, to which none could refuse his love. With happier fortunes, as, indeed, with loftier virtues, Matilda continued, for twenty-five years, to wage war in defence of the Apostolic See. After a life which might seem to belong to the province of romance rather than of history, she died at the age of seventy-five, bequeathing to the world a name second, in the annals of her age, to none but that of Hildebrand himself. To him the Norman rescue of the Papal city brought only a momentary relief. He returned in triumph to the Lateran. But, within a few hours, he looked from the walls of that ancient palace on a scene of woe such as, till then, had never passed before him. A sanguinary contest was raging between the forces of Eobert and the citizens attached to Henry. Every street was bar- ricaded ; every house had become a fortress. The pealing of bells, the clash of arms, cries of fury, and shrieks of despair, assailed his ears in dismal concert. When the sun set behind the Tuscan hills on this scene of desolation, another light, and a still more fearful struggle, succeeded. Flames ascended at once from every quarter. They leaped from house to house, enveloping and destroying what- ever was most splendid or most sacred, in the edifices of mediseval Eome. Amidst the roar of the conflagration they had kindled, and by its portentous light, the fierce Saracens, and the ruthless North- men, revelled in plunder, lust, and carnage, like demons by the glare of their native pandemonium. Gregory gazed with agony on the real and present aspect of civil war. Perhaps he thought with penitence on the wars he had kindled beyond the Alps. Two-thirds of the city perished. Every convent was violated, every altar pro- faned, and multitudes driven away into perpetual and hopeless slavery. Himself a voluntary exile, G-regory sought, in the Castle of Salerno, and under the protection of the Normans, the secuiity he could no longer find among his OAvn exasperated subjects. Age HILDEBRAXD. 53 and anxiety weighed lieavily upon him. An unwonted lassitude depressed a frame till now incapable of fatigue. He recognised the summons of death, and his soul rose with unconquerable })ower to entertain that awful visitant. He summoned round his bed the Bishops and Cardinals who had attended his flight from Eome. He passed before them, in firm and rapid retrospect, the incidents of his eventful life. He maintained the truth of the great principles by which it had been governed from the commencement to the close. He named his three immediate successors in the Papacy. He assured his weeping friends of his intercession for them in heaven. He forgave, and blessed, and absolved his enemies, though with the resolute exceptions of the Emperor and the Anti- Pope. He then composed himself to die. His faltering lips had closed on the transubstantiated elements. The final unction had given assurance that the body, so soon to be committed to the dust, would rise again in honour and incorruption. Anxious to catch the last accents of that once oracular voice, the mourners were bending over him, when, struggling in the very grasp of death, he collected, for one last effort, his failing powers, and breathed out his spirit with the indignant exclamation — "I have loved right- eousness, and hated iniquity : and therefore I die in exile ! " It was not permitted, even to the genius of Hildebrand, to con- dense, into a single sentence, an epitome of such a life as his. It was a life scarcely intelligible to his own generation, or to himself, nor indeed to our age, except by the light of that ecclesiastical history in which it forms so important an era. It had ill beseemed the inspired wisdom of the tent-maker of Tarsus, and of the Gralilean fishermen, to have founded on any other than a popular basis, a society destined to encounter the enmity of the dominant few, by the zeal of the devoted many. From the extant monuments of their lives and writings, it accordingly appears that they conceded to the lay multitude an ample share in the finance, the discipline, and the legislation of the collective body. The deacons were the tribunes of the Christian people. This was the age of Proselytism. In the sad and solemn times which followed, ecclesiastical autho- rity became austere and arbitrary, and submission to it enthusiastic. IVIartyrs, in the contemplation of mortal agonies, and of an opening paradise, had no thoughts for the adjustment and balancing of sacerdotal powers. They who braved the wild beasts of the amphi- theatre, or the ascetic rigours of the wilderness, were the heroes of the Church. The rest sank into a degraded caste. But all laid bare their souls at the confessional. All acknowledged a dominion E 3 54 niLDEBEAND. which, discountenanced by the state, sustained itself by extreme and recondite maxims of government. In virtue of such maxims, the Episcopal order encroached on every other. The vicarious attri- butes of Deity were ascribed to those who ministered at the altar. There, and at the font, gifts of inestimable price were placed, in popular belief, at the disposal of the priest ; whose miracles, though unattested by sense or consciousness, threw into the shade the mightiest works of Moses and of Christ. This was the age of Persecution. Heretics arose. To refute them from the sacred text was some- times difficult, always hazardous. It was easier to silence them by a living authority. The Bishops came forth as the elect deposita- ries of an unwritten code. Tradition became the rule of the Christian world. It might crush the errors of Arius, but it might sustain the usurpations of Ambrose. This was the age of Contro- versy. Constantine saw the miraculous cross, and worshipped. He confirmed to the Christian hierarchy all their original, and all their acquired, powers. This was the age of the Church and State alliance. The seat of empire was transferred from the Tiber to the Bos- phorus. The Eoman bishop and clergy seized on the vacant inhe- ritance of abdicated authorit}^ The Pope became the virtual sovereign of the Roman city. The Greeks and Latins became ecclesiastical rivals. Then was first heard the Roman watchword, and rallying cry, of the Visible Unity of the Church. This was the age of Papal Independence. Groths, Vandals, Huns, Bulgarians, Franks, and Lombards, con- quered the dominions of Csesar.» But they became the converts and tributaries of Peter. The repulse of the Saracens by Charles Martel gave to Europe a new empire, to the Church a second Con- stantine. This was the age of Barbaric Invasion. Europe became one vast assemblage of military states. The lands were everywhere partitioned by the conquerors among their liegemen, who, having bound themselves to use their swords in their lords' defence, imposed a similar obligation on their own tenants, who, in turn, exacted it from their subordinate vassals. This was the age of Feudalism and of Hildebrand. He ascended the Apostolic throne, therefore, armed with pre- scriptions in favour of the loftiest claims of the hierarchy, thus reaching back almost to the apostolic times. But he found in the Papal armoury other weapons scarcely less keen, though of a more recent fabric. Of these the most effective were the intimate alliance of the Roman See with the monastic orders, and the re- IIILDEBRAND. 55 appearance, in theological debate, of that mystic word which, seven centuries before, had wrought such prodigies at Nicasa. He wlio first taught men to speak of an Hypostatic change beneath unchanging forms, may have taught them to use words without meaning. But though he added little or nothing to the received doctrines of the Church, he made an incalculable addition to the sacerdotal power. To grasp, to multiply, and to employ these resources in such a manner as to render the Eoman Pontiff the suzerain of the civilised world, was the end for which Hildebrand lived — an unworthy end, if contrasted with the high and holy purposes of the Gospel — an end even hateful, if contrasted with the free and generous spirit in which the primitive foimders of the Church had established and inculcated her liberties — yet an end which miglit well allure a noble spirit in the eleventh century, and the attainment of whicli (so far as it was attained) may be now acknowledged to have been conducive, perhaps essential, to the progress of Christianity and civilisation. To the spiritual despotism of Rome in the middle ages may, indeed, be traced a long series of errors and crimes, of wars and persecutions. Yet the Papal dynasty was the triumphant antago- nist of another despotism the most galling, the most debasing, and otherwise the most irremediable, under which Europe had ever groaned. The centralisation of ecclesiastical power more than balanced the isolating spirit of the feudal oligarchies. The Viissal of Western, and the serf of Eastern Europe, might otherwise, at this day, have been in the same social state, and military autocra- cies might now be occupying the place of our constitutional or paternal governments. Hildebrand's despotism, with whatever inconsistency, sought to guide mankind, by moral impulses, to a more than human sanctity. The feudal despotism with which he waged war, sought, with a stern consistency, to degrade them into beasts of prey, or beasts of burden. It was the conflict of mental with physical power, of literature with ignorance, of religion with injustice and debauchery. To the Popes of the middle ages was assigned a province, the abandonment of which would have plunged the Church and the World into the same hopeless slavery. To Pope Grregory the Seventh were first given the genius and the courage to raise himself and his successors to the level of that high vocation. Yet Hildebrand was the founder of a tyranny only less odious than that which he arrested, and was apparently actuated by an ambition neither less proud, selfish, nor reckless, than that of his E 4 56 IIILDEBKAXD. secular antagonists. In the great economy of Providence, human agency is ever alloyed by some base motives ; and the noisiest success recorded by history, must still be purchased at the price of some great ultimate disaster. To the title of the Czar Peter of the Church, conferred on him by M. Guizot, Hildebrand's only claim is, that by the energy of his will, he moulded her institutions, and her habits of thought, to his own purposes. But the Czar wrought in the spirit of an architect who invents, arranges, and executes his own plan : Hildebrand in the spirit of a builder, erecting by divine command a temple of which the divine hand had drawn the design, and provided the materials. His faith in what he judged to be the purposes and the will of Heaven, was not merely sublime, but astounding. He is everywhere depicted, in his own letters, the habitual denizen of that bright region which the damps of fear never penetrate, and the shadows of doubt never overcast. To extol him as one of those Christian stoics whom the wreck of worlds could not divert from the straight paths of integrity and truth, is a mere extravagance. His policy was Imperial; his resources and his arts Sacerdotal. Anathemas and flatteries, stern defiances and subtle insinuations, invectives such as might have been thundered by Grenseric, and apologies such as might have been whispered by Augustulus, succeed each other in his story, with no visible trace of hesitation or of shame. Even his professed orthodoxy is rendered questionable by his conduct and language towards Berengarius, the great opponent of transubstantiation. With William of England, Philip of France, and Eobert of Apulia, and even with Henry of Germany, he temporised at the expense of his own principles as often as the sacrifice seemed advantageous. " Nature gave horns to Bulls." To aspiring and belligerent Church- men she gave Dissimulation and Artifice. Our exhausted space forbids the attempt to analyse or delineate the personal character of the great founder of the spiritual despo- tism of Eome. His acts must stand in place of such a jDortraiture. He found the Papacy dependent on the Empire : he sustained her by alliances almost commensurate with the Italian Peninsula. He found the Papacy electoral by the Eoman people and clergy : he left it electoral by a college of Papal nomination. He found the Emperor the virtual patron of the Holy See : he wrested that power from his hands. He found the secular clergy the allies and dependants of the secular power : he converted them into the inalienable auxiliaries of his own. He found the higher ecclesiastics in servitude to the temporal sovereigns: he delivered them from IIILDEBRAXD. 57 that yoke to subjugate them to the Eoraau Tiara. He found the patronage of the Church the mere desecrated spoil and merchandise of princes : he reduced it within the dominion of the Supreme Pontiff. He is celebrated as the reformer of the impure and profane abuses of his age : he is more justly entitled to the praise of having left the impress of his own gigantic character on the history of all the ages which have succeeded him. 58 SAINT FEANCIS OF ASSIST. It was a noble design which died with Eobert Southey. His History of the Monastic Orders would not perhaps have poured a laro-e tribute of philosophy, divine or human, into the ocean of knowledo"e; but how graceful would have been the flow of that transparent narrative, and how would it have reflected and enhanced the beauty of every rich champaign, and of every towering pro- montory, along which it would have swept ! Peremptory and dogmatical as he was, he addressed himself to the task of instruct- ino- his own and future generations, with a just sense of the dignity, and of the responsibilities, of that high ofiice. He was too brave a man, and too sound a Protestant, to shrink from any aspect of truth ; nor would he ever have supposed that he could promote a legitimate object of ecclesiastical history, by impairing the well- earned fame of any of the worthies of the Church, because they had been entangled in the sophistries, or the superstitions, of the ages in which they flourished. M. Chavin de Malan has adopted the project of our fellow- countryman, and is publishing a Monastic History in a series of frao-ments, among which is a volume on the founder and the pro- o-ress of the Franciscan Order. Though among the most passionate and uncompromising devotees of the Church of Rome, M. Chavin de Malan is also in one sense a Protestant. He protests against any exercise of human reason in examining any dogma which that Church inculcates, or any fact which she alleges. The most merciless of her cruelties affect him with no indignation, the silliest of her prodigies mth no shame, the basest of her super- stitions with no contempt. Her veriest dotage is venerable in his eyes. Even the atrocities of Innocent the Third seem, to this all extolling eulogist, but to augment the triumph and the glories of his reign. If the soul of the confessor of Simon de Montfort, retaining all the passions and all the prejudices of that sera, should transmigrate into a Doctor of the Sorbonne, conversant with the arts and literature of our own times, the result might be the pro- SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSTSI. 59 duction of such an Ecclesiastical History as that of wliich M. de Malan has given us a specimen — elaborate in research, o-lowing in style, vivid in portraiture ; utterly reckless and indis- criminate in belief; extravagant, up to the very verge of idolatry, in applause ; and familiar, far beyond the verge of indecorum, with the most awful topics and objects of the Christian faith. The episode of which M. Chavin de Malan disposes in his Life of Francis of Assisi, is among the most curious and important in the annals of the Church ; and the materials for svich a biography are more than usually copious and authentic. First in order are the extant writings, ■ — ■ consisting chiefly of letters, colloqiues, poems, and predictions, — of the Saint himself. His earliest biographer, Thomas of Celano, was his follower and his personal friend. Three of the intimate associates of the Saint (one of them his confessor) compiled a joint narrative of his miracles and his labours. Bonaventura, himself a Greneral of the Franciscan Order, wrote a celebrated life of the Founder, whom in his infancy he had seen. And lastly, there is a chronicle called Fioretti di San Francisco, which, though not written till half a century after his death, has always been held in much esteem by the hagiographers. Within the last thirty years a new edition of it has been published at Verona. On these five authorities all the more recent narratives are founded. Yet the works of Thomas de Celano, and of the " Tres Socii," with the writings of Francis himself, are the only sources of contemporary intelligence strictly so called ; although Bonaventura and the chronicler of the Fioretti had large oppor- tunities of ascertaining the reality of the facts they have related. How far they availed themselves of that advantage, may be partly inferred from the following brief epitome of those occurrences. The city of Assisi, in Umbria, was a mart of some importance in the latter half of the twelfth century. At that period it could boast no merchant more adventurous or successful than Pietro Bernadone di Mericoni. Happy in a thriving trade, and happier still in an affectionate wife^ he was above all happy in the pros})ect of the fixture eminence of his son Francisco. The foremost in every feat of arms, and the gayest in every festival, the youth was at the same time assiduous in the counting-house ; and though his expenditure was profuse, it still flowed in such channels as to attest the princely munificence of his spirit. The brightest eyes in Assisi, dazzled by so many graces, and the most reverend brows there, acknowledging such early wisdom, were alike bent with complacency towards him ; and all conspired to sustain his father's belief, that, in his person, the name of Bernadone would rival the proudest of those whom neither Transalpine conquerors, nor the 60 SxVINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI. Majesty of tlie Tiara, disdained to propitiate in the guilds of Venice or of Pisa. Uniform, alas ! is the dirge of all the generations of mankind, over hopes blossoming but to die. In a combat with the citizens of Perugia, Francis was taken prisoner ; and, after a captivity of twelve months, was released only to encounter a disease, which, at the dawn of manhood, brought him within view of the gates of death. Long, earnest, and inquisitive was his gaze into the in- scrutable abyss on which they open ; and when at length he returned to the duties of life, it was in the awe-stricken spirit of one to whom those dread realities had been unveiled. The world one complicated imposture, all sensible delights so many polluting vanities, human praise and censure but the tinkling of the cymbals, — what remained but to spurn these empty shadows, that so he might grasp the one imperishable object of man's sublunary existence ? His alms became lavish. His days and nights were consumed in devout exercises. Prostrate in the crowded church, or in the recesses of the forest, his agitated frame attested the conflict of his mind. He exchanged dresses with a tattered mendicant, and pressed to his bosom a wretch rendered loathsome by leprosy. But as he gradually gathered strength from these self-conquests, or as returning health restored the tone and vigour of his nerves, his thoughts, reverting to the lower world, wandered in search of victories of another order. Walter of Brienne was in arms in the Neapolitan States against the Emperor ; the weak opposed to the powerful ; the Italian to the Grerman ; the Gruelph to the Grhibelline ; and Francis laid him down to sleep, resolved that, with the return of day, he would join the " Grentle Count," as he was usually called, in resisting the oppressor to the death. In his slumbers a vast armoury seemed to open to his view ; and a voice commanded him to select from the burnished weapons with which it was hung, such as he could most effectually wield against the impious enemy of the Church. The dreamer awoke; and in prompt submission to the celestial mandate, laid aside the serge gown and modest bonnet of his craft, and exhibited himself to his admiring fellow-citizens armed cap-a- pie, and urging on his war-horse towards the encampment of his destined leader. At Spoleto fatigue arrested his course. Again he slept, and again the voice was heard. It annoimced to him that the martial implements of his former vision were not, as he had supposed, such as are borne beneath a knightly banner against a carnal adversary, but arms of spiritual temper, to be directed, in his native city, against the invisible powers of darkness. He listened and obeyed ; and Assisi re-opened her gates to her re- SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSIST. 61 turning warrior, resolute to break a lance with a more fearful foe then was ever sent by the Emperor into the field. To superficial judges it probably appeared as if that dread an- tagonist had won an easy triumph over his young assailant. For Francis was seen once more the graceful leader of the civic revels, bearing in his hand the sceptre of the king of frolic, and followed by a joyous band, who made the old streets echo with their songs. As that strain arose, however, a dark shadow gathered over the countenance of the leader, and amid the general chorus his voice was unheard. " Why so grave, Francis ? Art thou going to be married? " exclaimed one of the carollers. " I am," answered Francis, " and to a lady of such rank, wealth, and beauty, that the world can- not produce her like." He burst from the jocund throng in search of her, and was ere long in her embrace. He vowed to take her " for his wedded wife, for better for worse, to love and to cherish till death should them part." The lady was Poverty. The greatest poet of Italy and the greatest orator of France have celebrated their nuptials. But neither Dante nor Bossuet was the inventor of the parable. It was ever on the lips of Francis himself, that Poverty Avas his bride, that he was her devoted husband, and the whole Franciscan order their offspring. His fidelity to his betrothed lady was inviolate, but was not un- assailed by temptation. Pleasure, wealth, ambition, were the syrens who, with witching looks and songs, attempted to divert him from his Penelope ; and when he could no longer combat, he at least could fly, the fascination. Wandering in the Umbrian hills, he wept and fasted, and communed with the works of Grod ; till raised to communion with their Maker, he knelt in a rustic church which the piety of ancient times had consecrated there to the memory of St. Damiano. The voice which directed his path in life was heard again. " Seest thou not," it cried, " that my temple is falling into ruins ? Eestore it." Again the spirit of interpretation failed him. Instead of addressing himself to renovate the spiritual, he undertook the repairs of the material fabric — an arduous task for the future spouse of Poverty ! But obedience was indispensable. Eising from his knees, he hastened to his father's warehouse; laded a stout palfrey with silks and embroideries ; sold both horse and goods at the neighbouring town of Foligno ; and laid down the money at the feet of the officiating priest of St. Damiano. The more cautious churchman rejected the gold. Francis indignantly cast it into tlie mire ; and vowed that the building so solemnly committed to his care should become his dwelling-place and his home, till the Divine behest had been fulfilled. G2 SAINT FEANCIS OF ASSISI. During all this time hallucinations of his own, thougli of a far different kind, had haunted the brain of the respectable Pietro Bernadone. Grouping into forms ever new and brilliant, like spangles shaken in a kaleidoscope, the ideas of bales and bills of lading, of sea risks and of supercargoes, had combined with those of loans to reckless crusaders and of the supply of hostile camps, to form one gorgeous El Dorado, when intelligence of the loss of his draperies, his .pack-horse, and his son, restored him to the waking- world and to himself. The goods and the quadruped were gone irrevocably. But as the exasperated father paced the streets of Assisi, a figure emaciated with fasts and vigils, squalid with dirt, and assailed by the filthy missiles of a hooting rabble, approached him, and as it moved onwards with a measured tread, an uplifted eye, and a serene aspect, it revealed to the old merchant, in this very sorry spectacle of dignified suffering, the long-cherished object of his ambitious hopes. What biographer even now can tell the sequel without a blush ! Francis was hurried away from his persecutors and his admirers, in the grasp of the elder Bernadone, and, from his vigorous arm, received that kind of chastisement under which heroism itself ceases to be sublime. The incensed judge then passed a chain round the body of the youth, and left him in a kind of domestic prison, there to satiate his love for penances, until his own return from a journey to which the in- exorable demands of his commerce had summoned him. Wiser far and more gentle was the custody to which Francis was transferred, and a voice was heard in his penitentiary full of a more genuine inspiration than any of those by which his steps had been hitherto guided. It was the voice of his mother, soothing her half- distracted child in accents as calm and as holy as those which first broke the silence of Eden. It spoke to him of maternal love, of reconciliation, and of peace. But it addressed him in vain. He was bound to leave father and mother, and to cleave to his be- trothed wife, and to the duties of that indissoluble alliance. Con- vinced at length of the vanity, perhaps trembling at the impiety, of any further resistance, his mother threw open his prison doors, and permitted him to escape to his sanctuary at St. Damiano. In those hallowed precincts Francis found courage to oppose, and constancy to disarm, the rage with which he was pursued by his father. Gfradually, but surely, the mind of the old man embraced the discovery, that, though dwelling on the same planet, he and his son were inhabitants of different worlds. From that conviction he advanced with incomparable steadiness to the practical results involved in it. Why, he inquired, should a churchman, to whom all earthly interests were as the fine dust in the balance, retain the SAINT FKAXCIS OF ASSISI. 03 price of the pack-horse and of his pack ? The priest of St. Daini.-uio immediately restored the scattered gold, which he had providently gathered up. Why should a youth, Avho despised all treasures, hut those laid up in heaven, retain his prospective right to a sublunary inheritance? A renunciation of it was at once drawn up, si