Church to the littleness of the individual, instead of imparting to the individual the stature and the faith of the whole mystic body.".

Aubrey de Vere's most important theological essays have been collected in a little volume called Religious Problems of the Nineteenth Century. Besides these there are a few less formal pieces of devotional and philosophic prose-his discourse on sainthood for instance, and on The Human Affections in the Early Christian Time. This very beautiful prose-poem purports to be an epistle written, A. D. 410, by the Eremite Ambrosius to Marcella, a young virgin about to become a wife. Something of its charm may be gathered from these fragments: "On all sides Infinitude doth gird us in; and all virtues are infinite. By nature the terrestrial life is the lower; but grace consecrateth nature and raiseth the low. . . Faith keepeth vigil on the mountain; and again, in the valley Faith lieth down and taketh her rest, because the Lord sustaineth her. From innocence thou goest, but unto innocence. Thou advancest from virtue to virtue-from the virginal honors unto the matronly . . . from the straiter commune with God to the wider commune with God. . . . The ties of mortal life image the ties of the life immortal-for what else mean when we say that God is our Father, and Christ our Brother?" If more than one of de Vere's poems may be called theological disquisitions, this modest little "epistle" should certainly rank as an epithalamium of surpassing grace and loveliness.

It was a strange providence that during the same years of the century just passed, English-speaking peoples beheld three powerful yet vastly different apologists, working for the advancement of Catholic truth. They were all converts: John Henry Newman, Isaac Hecker, and Aubrey de Vere. Newman's appeal was to the past: to Patristic evidences, to the unity (including of course, the development) of primitive Christian faith. Father Hecker's appeal was to the present: to the natural laws upon which the supernatural rest, to that "heart's hunger and soul's thirst" which vital Catholic truth alone can satisfy. To Aubrey de Vere there seemed no past or present in religious experience. In theology, as in all departments of thought, he was a psychological critic. His appeal was to the

*This same theory is expanded in de Vere's essay on The Philosophy of the Rule of Faith.

intuitive sense and "spiritual discernment" first of all; and then, because Catholicity included these, to authority and to human nature. And he regarded life and art from a standpoint equally soulful. His own intensely spiritual nature, and long habits of analytic thought, necessitated this. We find him making fine and delicate distinctions in words (which are always at the same time istinctions of thought) as between reasoning and reason, pleasure and enjoyment; we find him pointing out how "in Coleridge's poetry the reasoning faculty is chiefly that of contemplation and reflection; in Wordsworth's the meditative and discursive prevail "; we find him weighing the Elizabethan drama by psychological standards, where Ruskin would have used ethical, and Arnold esthetic values. And throughout his entire critical work, we notice the moral and artistic elements constantly interpenetrating. All minor verities, whether of sense or intellect, resolved themselves into one immutable and comprehensive truth; and man, however minutely studied, became a symbol of mankind. De Vere has observed that the Greek knew no landscape, although he delighted in detached objects of natural beauty. He himself saw all details as part of some glorious whole; nor could his view stop short of the distant horizon. In a measure, this comprehensiveness is part of all criticism, but with de Vere it was a distinct characteristic. It almost became the measure of his personal equation"; and it goes far toward explaining why he could so thoroughly interpret Spenser or Wordsworth, while of Patmore's poetry he was merely appreciative and not illuminating. De Vere was unusually quick to recognize traces of a solid, universal greatness; he was less sensitive to beauties of an exotic or esoteric character.

We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love;

And, even as these are well and wisely fixed,
In dignity of being we ascend-

These words, loved by de Vere and chosen as the text of his Essays Chiefly on Poetry, strike the keynote of his attitude towards letters and toward life. His criticism as a whole was overwhelmingly constructive; and while ever fearless in denouncing "sensual" or "sensational" literature, materialistic and unsound philosophies, and whatever wars against the soul's

life, he still and to the end "enjoyed praising as inferior men enjoy sneering."

In the matter of style, de Vere's prose is almost impeccable. Its charactetistic merit is one of philosophic dignity and clearness, but it possesses lesser merits as well, as in the passages where we are reminded of the elusive nicety of Walter Pater-or those others (notably at the opening of Literature in its Social Aspects) where the splendid musical harmonies of Sir Thomas Browne seem floating about us. Always it is noble, and even its merriment has a note of the sedate. This comes less from self-consciousness-which, indeed, would have corrected it-than from a scrupulous preoccupation with the matter rather than the manner of his discourse.

We have earlier spoken of Aubrey de Vere's versatility, If we consider this as a temperamental quality-as a practical form of sympathy and imagination—we recognize its presence as very real, and in one sense an explanation of his close and varied friendships. But still, it is less notable than his earnestness or his consistency or his unworldliness. If we refer to his literary work-in itself only part of his life-it is far otherwise. We find this one man bequeathing us eloquent political briefs, literary and theological criticism of the first order, delightful reminiscences, and a whole body of high and noble poetry. And instead of rejoicing (after the fashion of some) in his own plenitude of power, de Vere seems to have been so absorbingly interested in other things and other people that he scarcely thought of himself at all. His genius was almost as unconscious, and almost as spacious, and altogether as soaring, as one of the great English cathedrals. It is difficult to describe him briefly, save by transposing Steele's immortal tribute and declaring: To have known him was a liberal education!

*This was de Vere's own comment on Landor.

VOL. LXXXVI.-2

ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN.

AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.•

BY FRANCIS AVELING, D.D.

CHAPTER I.

PROLOGUE.

RE the sheep all folded, Brother ?"

The voice was a strong and masterful one; a little rasping, perhaps, in its decided accent of Norman-French; the speaker, a powerful, wellproportioned man in the prime of life. His brown habit, of a coarse woolen material, hung straight from the shoulder to ankle, with a narrow strip of the same cloth before and behind, and was held in at his waist by a leathern girdle. The keen moorland air had given a patch of color to either cheek; otherwise his face, like his voice, proclaimed him what he was a Frenchman. His eyes were dark and restless, his nose aquiline, his bearded lip and chin of such a stamp that it needed his dress, as well as a certain habitual placidity and repose in his bearing, to proclaim him a lay brother of the famous Cistercian house of St. Mary of Buckfast.

In sharp contrast to him was the brother whom he addressed. A little, wizened old fellow, whose wrinkled and puckered face, tanned like a skin by long exposure to wind and sun, spoke of the wild moors, of yellow gorse, and purple heather. His twinkling eyes looked over the stone walls of the fold and rested with a certain pride and affection upon his flock. It was his boast that he had never lost a single lamb; that he knew every inch of the vast moorland pastures belonging to the Abbey; that he could lead his sheep through fog and mist, straight as the bird's flight, from point to point of the desolate expanse, until they were safely enclosed in the great fold of Brent Moor. And there was something in his boast, too. The brothers told strange tales of Brother Peter, this quaint little lay brother whose patched

* Copyright in United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. The Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle in the State of New York.

and repatched habit hung always awry, and whose shrewd eyes twinkled under a rugged thatch of eyebrows and hair that had once been red, but were now bleached to a nondescript sandygray.

be,

"He had a familiar

"Not so pious as he might

and had dealings with the little folk of the moor." So some of them said. But Brother Gregory was nearly right when he said, in his sing-song drawl, that Brother Peter knew his sheep as well as if they were Christians. He told them where to go, to be sure, and there they went, obedient to their shepherd, just as Brother Gregory's bees obeyed him, staying in their hives when he whispered to them that a monk of the Abbey was dead.

Brother Gregory was a man of the soil, too, like Brother

Peter.

He tended his bees behind the Abbey Church, in the fair green meadows that slope down gently to the Dart; and he, if any one, ought to know. For, like Brother Peter, he was very close in touch with Nature, and understood a great many things that the wise choir-monks could not learn, try as they might, from the great tomes in the Scriptorium. But Brother Peter lived closer to Nature even than Brother Gregory. Up in the great heart of the moor, where Nature herself breathes and palpitates, he had lived from his boyhood-save when he went down to the great Abbey to learn his Paters and his Aves and to make his novitiate as a lay brother of the Cistercian Order. He knew where the speckled trout lay in the shallows of the little rivers that purl and dash and bubble over the bosom of Dartmoor, and when the silver salmon were coming back again from their journey to the sea, to flash and leap from pool to pool until they reached once more the sandy gravel beds where they first wriggled out of the egg. He knew -none better-the favorite haunts of the red deer, and where the bees went to find the sweetest honey. Every beast and plant and stone of the moor he knew-and loved. He was a moor-man born and bred. But he loved none so well as his own sheep. They were, for him, part and parcel of the whole -just as he was himself. So, perhaps, Brother Gregory was not so far wrong when he said that Peter's sheep understood him.

"Yes, Brother"; he answered simply.