For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club the LIVING Age with another periodical. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. SONNETS BY PETRARCH. LAURA'S BEAUTY. HER golden hair was floating on the breeze, one sees. Perchance 'twas but a lover's fantasies, Yet seemed I in that visage fair to trace The lineaments of more than mortal grace. What wonder that I bowed to charms like these? She seemed no denizen of lower earth,. But some bright visitant from spirit-sphere. Her silvery voice, in sorrow or in mirth, Fell like an angel's whisper on the ear. So did I recognize its heavenly birthSo owned my stricken heart that sovereignty dear. SPRING MEMORIES. FRESH from the murmuring leaves this vernal air, Which coolly fans my flushing cheek above, Reminds me of the day when early love First greeted me in language rich and rare. I seem to see once more that vision fair That knew no jealousy or high disdain, I see the glory of that golden hair Or gathered into many a tangled knot; While from the magic of each separate tress A spell across my stricken bosom shot, Filling it now with olden memories, Which only with my life can ever be forgot. DEAD. HER life is spent: gone are my happy days. And whelms me in an ocean wild and deep, That seemed secure in port; the helmsman dead, The masts and shrouds both shivered; whilst all dark The starless skies are looming overhead. My heaven, once so bright, without one spark Life's light the only light I loved-for ever fled! MY LIFE. Tinsley's Magazine. LITTLE tho' my life may be, Music floating very near Light of moon or starJust because I see and hear, Are the things they are! Every life, if viewed as such, Something no one can define, Very weak and very small You may deem the whole; But it is the all in all Of a deathless soul. DOST thou think I captive lie To a gracious, glancing eye? Good Words. Dost thou think I am not free? All the world could not undo I care nought for eyes of blue; From The British Quarterly Review. THE FAILURE OF THE FRENCH REFOR MATION. look back on the brief record of the unlucky Ravenna scholar, and are touched with pity. We can picture him, earnest SOMETIME in the tenth century, when and studious, drinking in the philosophy the Papacy was at its lowest point of deg of Horace, the virtuous wrath of Juvenal, radation, when Christendom was only and the music of Virgil, not yet the enjust recovering from the shock of the chanter. The things he reads are wiser Magyar invasion, and when the light of than those taught in the schools or in learning had dwindled to a spark, there the churches. And see he knows lived at Ravenna a certain scholar, named! Vitgard. He was, we are told, one of those Italians who cultivated the art of grammar with more zeal than discretion. Accordingly, he became a person very open to the temptations of the Devil, who sent him one night three emissaries, in the shapes of Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal. They assured the astonished nothing about dates—there is not a word of Christ from beginning to end; not one word of the Apostles, nor of the Pope, nor of the Church. Bewildered and agitated, he thinks there can be but one solution. The divine teachers of the world, they are these three; to them we must look for guidance; they alone can teach mankind to live and die. Presently the possession of this grand secret becomes too much for him; he reveals it, bit by bit, to clerks and students; finally, he preaches it in the streets. Then authority interposes such authority as remains in anarchic Italy -- and consumes him, with his heresy, in the flames. scholar that he was destined to be the herald of their immortal glory; they persuaded him that his name should be associated with their own; they admonished him to proclaim to the world that it had been blinded and deceived, that Christianity was a cheat and a snare, and that the only true gods were themThe centuries roll on; strange hereselves. Deceived by their assurances, sies rise and are crushednone like the unhappy Vitgard began, at first se- this of Ravenna - until we find ourselves cretly, to teach these pernicious doc- in the full Renaissance. It is on the eve trines, and drew a small circle of disciples of the greatest struggle the world has around him. Then he taught the same ever seen, between the old, - strong in thing openly, and, the heresy beginning veneration, union, fear, and custom, and to attract attention, he was arrested by the new, weak, torn by internal disthe authorities, and punished in the sension, and strong only in being a step usual fashion, that is, he was burned. nearer to the truth. And now history On further investigation, it was found the obscure old repeats herself, and that there were many others, "especially heresy rises from the dead. in Sardinia," who held and taught similar doctrines. Reading this queer old story by the light of common sense, we can very well understand how, when the Bible was an unknown book, some stray scholar, geting hold of the Latin authors, and finding the wisdom that was there but nowhere else might set up their authority above that of the religion he professed. We • (1) Gerard Roussel. Par C. SCHMIDT. bourg: 1865. (2) Brantôme, Vies des Dames Illustres. (3) Etienne Dolet, Les Euvres de. (4) Michelet, La Renaissance. (5) Bonaventure des Périers, Les Œuvres de. (6) Rabelais, Euvres de. Stras (7) Clement Marot, Life of, by PROFESSOR HENRY MORLEY. In the first thirty years of the sixteenth century the world is slowly resolving itself into two camps. No bugle note has yet sounded to summon the soldiers to their colours, nor do they even suspect the approach of the inevitable battle. In France, with which we have to do, the people are reading the Scriptures in the vernacular, in spite of priestly prohibition; scholars are bringing to bear upon the Church the artillery of the new learning; Erasmus has his Encomium Moriæ; Ulrich von Hutten has his Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum; Louis de Berquin boldly picks out passages from the works of the zealous Beda himself, most orthodox of the Sorbonne, and in twelve propositions accuses him of ness, reading the Bible, and praying that heresy, whereat the world of Paris shrieks and the Reformation is begun. Things look fairer in France than in Germany; we are to have reforms in doctrine, with perfect freedom of inquiry and discussion, and we are to abolish all monks. A fair beginning, a goodly show of blossom: where, after fifty years, was the fruit? The story of the failure of all this glorious promise is too wide a subject to occupy us here. But apart from the main streams of political influences, Court in trigues, national profligacy, priestly craft, there are certain undercurrents in the history of the time, which, certainly not less than the forces known and visible to all, contributed from the very first to render the cause of the French Reformation a hopeless one. For the day of St. Bartholomew, we maintain, did not kill French Protestantism. Massacres cannot crush a creed, so long as it has any vital power, unless, which is next to impossible, they are thorough and complete. That these malign influences were a kind of subtle poison that attacked the cause at the very beginning, we intend to show by the consideration of two or three men of the time, little known. Remark first that very early in the century, when Caivin and Farel the fiery first lifted up their voices, they were not alone. Side by side with them, poμúxo, stood others - scholars, prelates, great and learned men. After ten years look again. These men have left them. Some are in the enemy's camp, silent, ashamed, cowed; some are on neutral ground, scoffing, sneering, laughing. truth may prevail. Round her gather the And her own religion-what was it? Like thy Master's shape thy days; Vain ambition's crooked ways. Joys forego that once were dear; He is kind and fair to see; As thy life is dear to thee. Find thy gain in every loss; Canst thou canst thou-bear the cross? Read, too, her" Miroir de l'Ame Pécheresse," that work of pure and exalted devotion, and remember the fact that in the Heptameron the Lady Oisille spends part of each day in reading the Bible, The former are the men of Queen Mar- while every story in the collection is garet's Court the personal friends of made somehow to point to the same that woman whose character, so sweet moral, and inculcate the same teaching, and lovely, stands out in such strong re- She was a Protestant in the sense that lief amid the blackness of her surround- she held what we call distinctively Prot ings. In a selfish — an abnormally self- estant opinions; but she remained all ish time her whole life is spent in sacri- her life in the Church, and neither wished fice for others. In an impure time, she to leave it herself, nor to see her friends alone, the daughter of a vile woman, the leave it. For her whole heart lay in the sister of a profligate man, is pure. Amid design of a great Gallican Church like all the babble of tongues and confusion that of England, of which her brother, of disputants, she sits, with her calm, in whom she never quite lost faith, should beautiful face weighed down with sad-be the supreme head. It was to be a church where pure doctrine was to be den there, only for the pure of heart to taught, but all in due form and order. discover by the aid of faith and prayer. The people were to be educated, but not He poured out his soul in contemplations to dispute on points of faith. Their duty and mystical treatises. He held that was to live "the life," and read the Bible. nothing was to be enforced which could There were to be no monks, no friars, not be found in the Bible; he urged the no vicarious piety, no pilgrimages, no necessity of personal holiness and purity; belief in masses, saints, nor any of the but he rejected nothing in the Roman accumulated rubbish of the Roman Church, wherein he had been brought up. Church. Had her circle of friends been He would not leave the Church of his men of coarser grain of more coura-childhood, though she would have burned geous heart she would have had her him-improba mater- had she been wish. But about all of them there was able. And a Catholic he died, after a life something feminine. They caught her of more than ninety years. tone, but they did not impart their own. They wished and hoped when they should have acted; prayed when it was time to fight; conceded when the time for concession had passed away. Another of Margaret's friends was Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, one of the most zealous of Lefevre's disciples. He was the first who dared to use his own cathedral church for the promulgation of Foremost among them was Jacques the new doctrines. Meaux, about twenLefevre d'Etaples, the eldest and per- ty-five miles from Paris, was then a flourhaps the best of the French Reformers. ishing manufacturing town; and the He was already fifty years of age when quiet weavers, disposed to think and disthe bells rang in the newly-born six- cuss, like all persons whose sedentary teenth century. He learned Greek in occupation gives them opportunity for Italy, such Greek as one could then thought, eagerly embraced a teaching learn. His long life, protracted far be- which gave the individual man a dignity yond the allotted threescore years and and importance previously unknown to ten, was spent in labours almost Hercu- him. The Bishop got Farel, Roussel, lean. Among his works are commen- and the aged Lefevre himself, to preach taries and editions of Aristotle, in whose in his church-the same which years society he passed his first half century; afterwards echoed back the silvery tones books on arithmetic; geometry, includ- of Bossuet. "See to yourselves!" cried ing an edition of Euclid; and, during the Briçonnet from his pulpit, strong in the last forty years of his life, a mass of the- resolution of enthusiasm and hope, "see ological works, the mere contemplation to yourselves! and if I change my docof whose titles makes the ordinary brain trines, look that you stand firm." Alas! stagger and reel. But among all his la- when persecution came, it was the Bishop bours now forgotten, though they bore that bent before the storm, while his poor good fruit in their day, and were the hon-weavers went unshaken to the flames. est work of a great man, there is one for Henceforth he took care to make no which France owes him an everlasting noise, being a watched and marked man. debt of gratitude; for he it was who first Only he continued his correspondence presented his country with a complete with Margaret, finding in mysticism some translation of the Bible, "La Sainte Bible consolation for the reproaches of his en Françoys, traduite selon la pure et conscience. A good and holy man, but entière traduction de S. Hiérome." It too soft for the work which he tried to came thirty years after the first German undertake. translation, and, though full of faults, is But by far the sweetest character yet a wonderful work for one man unaid- among Margaret's friends is that of Geed to accomplish. Lefevre was of a re-rard Roussel, whom she made Bishop of tiring meditative disposition. He loved Oleron when she married Henry of to search in the Scriptures for that se- Navarre. He is the ideal reformer, cret meaning which, he taught, lies hid-according to Margaret. Pure and blame |