with the blessed message of Christ's free mercy, be maligned. While again, is it not needful that they who resent these harsh sayings, should themselves study a conscientious moderation? Let us not be mistaken. If there be any man among us who is bold to proclaim"I cleave to the Church of this land merely because the providence of God has so placed me on that account alone I worship not with Rome," let him be anathema; if a layman, he is ignorant, or worse; if ordained and sworn to our truth, he vaunts his own perjury besides! If there be any who, weak and wanton, sighs for a service more gorgeous and glittering than our chaste and solemn order-if a layman, let us pray that God may heal his folly; if a cleric, and he dare to intrude his unauthorized fancies into our churches, let the strong hand of God's consecrated servants, the bishops, be bold to restrain and to punish! If any man with heart, forsooth, too large to be contented with the brotherhood of our ample and still increasing Church— with desires for universal unity that would boldly rush before the providence of God-longs to behold us at any cost clasped in the serpent-twine of false and erring Rome, pitied or repelled be such adviser! abjured such mockery of Christian charity! as if without the bond of truth the members of the Lord's body can ever meetly be conjoined; as if our light could find fit fellowship with her darkness, or any thing come of the combination of the two but a dim, disastrous twilight darkening speedily into midnight over the earth. But far within these lines there is much surely which we may calmly consider. As long as we retain even a faint doubt of our own absolute perfection, let us beware of pronouncing all admonition necessarily an insult. Let us be cautious how we trust the clamorous outcries of those brawlers whose very livelihood depends on maintaining the public excitement that maintains them. And when, on whichsoever side we array ourselves, we feel tempted to be very

bitter towards those who have our own end in view, but deem they can see some better way to reach it, let us bethink ourselves in Whose Presence we all stand and labour, and whose judgment is threatened so awfully against those that "judge."

To our own clergy of this kingdom, could we venture to exhort them, we would say (for the transition is not unnatural to the wider topic; one of the very movements of which we have been speaking arose out of the last great abridgment of the offices and the revenues of the Irish Church; and who can speak of religion at all in these times, without thinking of the dangers that surround the main guardians of religion in our own land?)— to our own respected and excellent clergy then we would say-be earnest in the labour of your office, not only in the sight of God, but even of men also! A time of trouble seems at hand, and the strength of character is the only earthly defence you will have to meet it. They who endeavoured to strip you before, have already announced their inclination to revive their efforts at the first moment that Providence shall put it in their power. They will be urged and driven to their work by those, your bitter and unrelenting enemies, who will control their policy here. In such a day let conscience be empowered to console you by the remembrance that persecution found you in the path of duty! We do not doubt it; for your enemies themselves publicly confess that in you they find no fault, though they trace all the misfortunes of the country to the pittance that supports you. The peasantry are starving, beggary increasing, the country justly inflamed from end to end, British capital withdrawn, Ireland, in her complication of miseries, a byword to the world—all without exception arising out of the insufferable calamity that each of some thirteen or fourteen hundred confessedly quiet and charitable gentlemen inherits, on an average, much less than their three hundred a year* by a title older than

that of any landed proprietor in the kingdom, and so inherits this enormous wealth (every shilling of which is spent in the country), that if they were all deprived of it and consigned to the poor-house next month, no peasant in the kingdom would be sixpence richer for the change, while the sick and needy in every parish would feel themselves the poorer. Marvellous power of obstinate and persevering falsehood! This is industriously reiterated by parties who personally hate these invaluable annuitants, till it is actually believed by men who on other subjects betray no indication of idiocy. Hard indeed is your case! In vain are your charities known and undeniable; your door the first in the parish sought by the poor Romanist in his hour of distress; your impartial affection to the humblest of the people manifest and acknowledged; shrewd and unwearied enmies poison the heart of the very peasant who is coming relieved from your gate; and the parched lips that have been moistened with your cordials are taught to use their first recovered powers to curse you as something hateful and English-as the heretic Saxon, and "the devil's priest." Your very friends become weary of refusing to believe that there must be some truth in what is so stubbornly re-asserted, and take pensive refuge in the sad necessity of "conciliation." Be it so. Relax neither faith nor charity on that account.

Whether

they will see it or not, you hold Ireland for Britain; you are the garrison at once of England's faith and England's influence, and that your enemies well know, though your friends may sometimes seem to forget it. Sacrifice

the parson, and what hold has the landlord? If the one succeeds an

exploded priesthood, the other holds a forfeited estate. If the predecessor of the Protestant rector was expelled for corrupt theology, the predecessor of the Protestant landlord was outlawed for rebellious politics. In mere equity the clergy's case is the stronger of the two; for the state and the Irish bishops, the representatives of the unreformed Church, made the one change, the state alone made the other. A Protestant bishop undeniably succeeds St. Patrick in Armagh. How many generations can the landlord count back to the date of his titledeeds? But there is a lower depth in the absurdity of this injustice. The Romanist landlord boldly proclaims the unfairness of the Protestant clergy holding the tithes of the Roman Church; the fact is not so; but let that pass. He is applauded by hearers among whom are probably the starving heirs of the man from whom his own estate was escheated, and whom, on his own principle, he lives by plundering; if the parson be a receiver of stolen goods, what is he? The same arts will answer to oust the clerical and the lay proprietor, and the landlord is the more tempting victim of the two. In "fixity of tenure" the conflict has already begun. There is no more reason why that measure should be ultimately refused by the legislature than the abolition of Church cess, or the deduction of a fourth from clerical incomes; it might certainly be made far more plausible in point of equity than either. But enough of this; we must not permit ourselves to be betrayed into mere politics any further. Suffice it to say, the Irish clergyman contends for a Church which, if she be struck down, all that is best in the land infallibly goes down with her!

EVERY traveller who has visited Catania must have remarked the magnificent monastery of St. Nicholas, with its lofty cupola, and its wondrous gardens, artificially based upon a foundation of lava; nor can he have failed, where he has been fortunate enough to partake of the lavish hospitality of the brotherhood, to admire, not only the excellence of their cuisine, and the luxuriousness of their fare, but also the persevering, and above all, the successful ingenuity with which they have gradually emancipated themselves from all the more rigid and distasteful habits of their order. But, although he may have feasted and idled with the worthy community in their noble halls, and among their delicious orangeries, where, as in the enchanted cave of Aladdin, the laden boughs appear to be heavy with jewels-it does not consequently follow that he may have heard there exists, far higher up the mountain, the extensive ruin of what was originally the home of the brotherhood of St. Nicholas. Even in his ascent of Etna, after passing the frontier village of Nicolosi-for such it may in truth be called, standing as it does upon the last portion of cultivated land considered to be tolerably secure from the incursions of the lava-he may chance to take a different path, and thus remain in ignorance of the existence of such a relic of the past.

There are few more beautiful things, even in Sicily, than the Gulf of Catania, with its blue sea and its laughing city, where little remains to remind its present inhabitants that it has once been swallowed up by earthquake, and once overwhelmed by a lava-flood. Latterly, its impunity from further visitations of the like description, appears to be a decided question with the Catanians; who feast, and sport, and build, and plant, in as happy carelessness of the past, as though it were a matter with which they were perfectly unconnected. And who would venture to marvel that it should be so, when he contemplates the villages that hang upon the sides

of the mountain, some leagues above the city, as if to court the ruin, which, come when it may, must assuredly sweep them to destruction?

But this is no moment in which to moralize. We would rather tell a tale than indite an essay.

Equally opposed in habit and feeling as the merry monks of to-day from the stern ascetics of the commencement of the last century, are the gorgeous temple of St. Nicholas as it now exists in Catania, and the remains of the pile that first bore his name, and which still cumber an elbow of the mountain. In the city the full-fed brotherhood eat, drink, and pray in peace. Their magnificent organ, said to be one of the finest in the world, collects in their splendid chapel all the fashion and beauty of the country. Bright eyes and rosy lips smile recognition on every side; compliments are bandied, and engagements of love and pleasure definitively arranged to its magic music; and should an alarm of fire be raised in the busy streets, hundreds of the population are ready to devote themselves to the preservation of the gorgeous abbey of St. Nicholas.

Far otherwise was it in the olden time with the convent on the mount. Vast, dreary, and desolate in its wild stateliness, the Benedictine monastery occupied the extreme boundary of earth, on which herb or root would maintain a languishing and reluctant existence. Erected at the entrance of the second region, nearly a league above the village already named, its brotherhood had no spectators of their holiness, save occasionally a peasant from the hamlet, who came to obtain a shrift, or to perform a penance; and the small band of mountain beggars who assembled periodically to receive alms at the convent gate; and when the mighty crater bellowed forth its rage in a stream of living fire, bounding and roaring down the sides of the declivity, and carrying destruction with it, rushing on and on, over the track of that which had done its task of

Nor was this the only danger to which the Benedictines of that century were exposed, nor even the most appalling one to the imagination of many among them; for more than once a mighty avalanche came thundering down the mountain, and the huge mass of snow, driven against the monastery, destroyed large portions of the building, rendering the whole edifice so insecure that the community, gradually sacrificing their character for self-denying austerity, to a more human sentiment of terror, commenced the erection of the noble abbey which they now inhabit. For a time they still spent their summer months upon the mountain, and even made a show of repairing the ravages of the snow; but ere long they abandoned the place altogether, and by a singular and strange contrast it ultimately became the head-quarters of the celebrated and redoubtable troop of Sicilian bandits, of whom the noted Gaetano (afterwards taken and hanged by the English) was the captain.

All this detail has been necessary, in order to show that it required a much more determined vocation to become a Benedictine of Mount Etna a century ago, than it does to take the cowl and cassock in Catania at the present day. Nothing, indeed, could be less attractive than the mountainmonastery. The austerity of the order, which forbade all communication between the brotherhood on the termination of their noviciate; the frightful penances; the broken rest; the unnatural silence, dispelled only by the voice of prayer, the crush of subterranean convulsion, or the shock of the yielding avalanche; the desolation of all around, rendered even more palpable and appalling by the contrast afforded from the distant aspect of the blue Mediterranean Sea, gracefully and joyously heaving up its silvercrested billows to the sunshine; the

laughing city afar off, at whose sights, and sounds, and pleasures, the cowled ascetic could only guess, and even that by the commission of a sin to be sternly expiated; the pretty villages of Gravina, Santa Lucie-di-Catarica, Mananunziata, and finally Nicolosi, all hanging on to the side of the mountain, and half hidden among their vines, their orange and olive trees, their blossoming oleanders, and their perfume-laden magnolias; each too distant for companionship, even had companionship been permitted to the serge-clad recluses, yet all sufficiently near to keep up within the heart that yearning towards its kind which has been implanted there as a principle of human nature.

As yet I have, however, only painted the desolation of a day in summer, when, as he stood with his sandalled foot upon the sharp edges of the unyielding lava, the monk of St. Nicholas could still feel the balmy breathing of the sweet southern breeze upon his brow, and watch the flitting of the fleecy vapours as they sailed like whitewinged angels across the stainless bosom of the bright sky above his head; when he could see the habitations of men; the luxury of vegetation; the glorious results of human industry; and thus find a theme for worship and for praise; ay, even for happiness in the aspect of the happiness of others; when, his heart softened, and his memory awakened by the far-off glimpses of the world beneath him, basking in light and beauty, he could fall back upon the past, and conjure up fond and holy images of his infancy, his boyhood, and his youth, and so live over again in spirit a thousand blessed and unforgotten hours. But there was a harsher and a sterner season, and one of far longer endurance for the inmate of St. Nicholas; for, even in the beautiful climate of Sicily, there were nine weary months of winter upon Mount Etna; months of vapour, storm, and dreariness, when the rolling clouds loomed out black and murky; when the snow-banks bounded the horizon with a lurid tinge; when illomened birds shrieked their defiance to the tempest; and the tortured winds howled in the spent craters of the mountain like imprisoned spirits.Then, indeed, all was arid, desolate, and companionless, above, beneath, and around the recluse. There were

faces

joyous hearths in the city, aye, even in the villages; with fair young clustered about them, and happy laughter, and the help of the strong man given to the boy and the aged; and light labour and willing toil, made still more easy by being shared by others. And there were hopes, and fears, and, above all, something to pray for. But as the brother of the Benedictines stood and looked forth into the midst of the natural ruin whereon he had made his home, there were none of these. He was alone, without hope, almost without fear, cut off from all human interest, unloved, unpitied, and, in most cases, forgotten.

Did not such a destiny as this, indeed, need a vocation ?

It was late on a July evening, at the close of the seventeenth century, that an unusual excitement prevailed among the superior monks of the Benedictine abbey of Mount Etna. The father, or governor, of the novices had been instructed to cause, not only the highaltar, but also all the lateral shrines in the chapel, to be profusely decorated with fresh flowers, for which purpose a mule, carrying two empty panniers had been despatched at day-break down the mountains to Nicolosi and Mananunziata; the soil of the convent garden, sickened by its near neighbourhood with the sulphurous lava upon which it abutted, yielding its produce so grudgingly that it did not suffice for such a demand; and the evening meal had been more carefully arranged, and the general of the order had more than once left his apartment, and traversed the cloisters, looking right and left, as if to assure himself that every stone was in its place, and every "station" supplied with its shares of holy water.

It was evident that some unaccustomed circumstance, trenching upon the uniform monotony of the community, was about to take place; but, nevertheless, the brotherhood moved silently, and to all outward appearance, uninterestedly about, with passive faces and downcast eyes. Some with their folded hands hidden under their wide and hanging sleeves, seemed to walk to and fro the cloister-court in a sort of waking dream, a moral apathy, a mindless, passionless luxury of repose, on which neither thought nor care sought longer to intrude; a calm,

purchased in most instances by years of struggle and regret; others, as noiseless, but less self-conquered, and still clinging to a cold blank species of companionship, less terrible than utter isolation, had seated themselves upon the edge of the basin which occupied the centre of the quadrangle, and were feeding the fish that rose to the surface with the fearlessness of habitwith fragments of bread, reserved for that purpose, from their own scanty meal; while others again were endeavouring to refresh a few languid flowers which they had fostered into unhealthy bloom, by pouring water over them from the hollows of their hands. To an inhabitant of the outward world this would have seemed a weary and a Sysiphus-like task, but it was on that account only the more welcome to the Benedictine brothers. It was an occupation which they could extend over an hour at least, that of dipping for water, palmfull by palmfull in the lava-bordered basin, and then walking carefully with it fifty or sixty paces to pour the little which remained of it when they arrived at the given spot, over a scentless rose, or a stunted carnation; and there was something strangely sepulchral even in the movement that was going forward in that vast dull cloister, with its dark archbound pillars, its sickly vegetation, its dank basin, and its dreary stillness, amid which glided the monks, in this their hour of recreation, without a word, without even a look of recognition, like beings between whom there existed neither sympathy nor similarity, save in their outward garb.

A loud peal at the great entrance of the abbey surprised the superior in his survey, and he immediately, and with unusual haste, retired to his private room. The wide gates, flanked with colossal statues of St. Benedict and St. Nicholas, tall, and grim, and rigid, fit guardians of the place, fell back upon their ponderous hinges, and a large, unwieldy vehicle, gaudily and coarsely emblazoned with heraldic bearings surmounted by a ducal coronet, most ostentatiously displayed, rolled, with a sound like thunder, into the court yard.

The two brothers, whose annual duty it was to receive all strangers, were in readiness to welcome the newcomers, who were escorted by four