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mutettu' on the same subject; to quote from which at random :

They are all spoiled-they are all corrupted-Devils all-Jesus be with us!

one...

As to modest matrons-they are scarce as is the phoenix which is said to be unique-but I do not know of They are food for pigs-for pigs and baboons-for madmen and cowards. (Su pastu di porci, Di porci e pappuni; Di pazzi e putruni.) . Happy is the man-who can remain alone. . . . Thanks be to Christ-I quarrel no more-I have no more a master to give me bother-I am become a lion... I am like a rabbit-that stands within his hole.

And so he proceeds, giving a description of his solitary happiness (how, for instance, when he is in bed, he can roll himself up into a ball, or fling himself on one side, without being found fault with); then denouncing fresh evils on those who shall frequent womankind; and ending by prophesying that some day, with good instruments-with (single) voices and in duets. . . the crowd in its time' will repeat his burden, that it is best to be away from women.

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Not the least remarkable part of the book, however, consists of the last three pages. These comprise

five sonnets, or quasi-sonnets, two of them signed with initials, and which appear to have been addressed to the author by the admirers of the first edition of his work. The first speaks of the great rejoicing' that was made in Paradise when this author was placed on the list of poets. A quick Muse,' the sonneteer tells us, lifted this book to the public gaze-and Apollo, who read it and put his seal to it, said: This author is a fifth evangelist.' (Dissi stauturi e un quintu vangelista.) The second sets forth how it is seen in this book that woman is the fountain-head of griefs,-the world's plague, a tiger in hell-an asp, a basilisk, a wandering shadow,-a cheating, venal fury of Avernus-a live death,' &c. A third shows how From this book, learned, acute, humane,-much fruit is drawn, and wisdom-as if one had the Bible in hand. (Comu s'avissi la Bibbia in manu.) So sincere is the sentiment of it, it is worthy to stand in the Vatican-bound in gold, between silver clasps. Live then for ever,

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Damianu,-who has left this wise warning.' We omit the last two.

But enough of irony. In a free country, where a lunatic at large, with money in his pocket, could always purchase the use of types and the services of pressmen, to give his ravings to the world, the work of Antoninu Damianu di Carini' might pass unnoticed, as an outpouring of that precise character. But we dare not treat it as such. Even supposing it to have been got up at the author's expense, it is a second edition, published after the lapse of several years. It has been canvassed and defended. Damianu, as we have seen, complains of having been attacked,—of the malice of an unjust writer' (la malizia di cui scrissi cu ingiustizia). On the other hand, a second womanhater, Anatolio Mitinno, has written a clear and pretty bookling (librettu chiaru e linnu) in its support. Nor can I fairly suspect the appended sonnets-the two at least which are signed with initials-of being written by himself. Modesty may not be his forte, but I doubt if he would have thought of styling himself a fifth Evangelist.' His doctrines have clearly an admiring public of their own.

And who, indeed, is 'Antoninu Damianu?' Judging from various circumstances, I should infer one of the regular clergy. Note the Don prefixed to his name in the title-page (D. Antoninu Damianu). Note the visibly priestly initials appended to the first eulogistic sonnet: 'R. P. (Riverendo Padre) M. T. dei Pr.;'-would a Sicilian priest so honour a layman? Note the strongly ecclesiastical cast of the greater part of the learning which he displays, the monkish pedantry of the whole. Note the monkish rabidness and licence which pervade the work from beginning to end, and which seem to mark unmistakeably the member of a privileged class, amongst an slaved people,-one accustomed to rant and rave at his flock with all the unbridled insolence of a Romish regular. But the strongest internal evidence of the fact consists in his not unfrequent appeals to the experience of the confessional. Of the three mischiefs which ruin

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women, as he tells us-the first being vanity and the second superstition, the third is their cursed mouth, for they hold it close and fast with their confessors, nor confess their errors or the nature of their sin, how it was committed, and how it took place, but formalize it all.' Take again his enumeration of ladies' excuses for those conjugal peccadilloes, the dreaming of which, according to the Art of Making oneself Rich,' signifies scandal given,' and which is not without humour or right feeling.

The

married woman now, he tells us, excuses herself by her husband's conduct. He it is who gives her occasion to err; he is sophistical, suspicious, or cross-grained, and a grumbler, malicious, making of a mote a beam; he is never quiet, does not supply his wife with wearing apparel, does not provide for the house when she is sick, will not work, gambles away his money. She has suffered so much!-she did not foresee!-she is loaded with children!-she saw herself in despair! -the Lord knows if she is in pain for her transgressions! And so she wants to receive absolution, to be forgiven and pitied—a fine way of confessing and purging away sin! (bellu modu di purgari Li piccati, e confissari.) For in their ignorance they believe that when their lusts are once confessed, absolved, and forgiven, confession alone is enough to earn them salvation. Similar evidence, I think, is supplied by the writer's strictures on other female sins, the taking away of others' honour, of which no one accuses herself, though she were scrupulous and diligent in her devotions, for it seems nothing to her,'-and again, the revealing of secrets. So, lastly, as to his details of ladies' pilgrimages, which fill several pages. Some, he tells us, are wont to feign sickness, in order to make 'curious vows,' 'mountain vows,' pilgrimages to country saints (for to city saints never a woman will go'); with their sham illness they

go to St. Rosaly, and scarce entered into Palermo, the sick are cured; and by this easy pretext they go to enjoy the festa. All these are points, as it seems to me, which belong essentially to the experience of a Romish priest-possibly of some middle-aged monk or friar, once a fashionable town-preacher, who has seen the pretty faces drop one by one away from around his pulpit and his confessional, and takes his revenge by abusing the sex to his heart's content. But this would perhaps be dealing too hardly with Don Antoninu, who seems (though his experience of women, and of the results of frequenting them, are decidedly suspicious) to be, on the whole, a not unrighteous man. One should be thankful to any priest in a Romish country who has yet clearness enough of insight into God's truth to be able to warn his penitents that God in every penitent soul not only seeks for grief over past transgressions, but also for a firm will no more to sin.'

But whether he be a priest or regular, or not, his teaching is clearly the teaching of the Romish Church in Sicily. Either what he speaks he speaks on its behalf, or he speaks what he has learned from it, with its permission and approval. The thoroughgoing clerical tendency of the whole work cannot be gainsaid. Heresy and schism are the objects of Damianu's supreme horror, damnation his habitual and most dreadful threat; obedience to the Church an article of implicit faith for all; and Reverend Fathers' accordingly hold him up to admiration as a fifth Evangelist.'

Now let us look back.

At Naples, a Reverend Revisor officially approves of, a Council of Public Instruction officially authorizes, a work which may be termed an astrological handbook for lottery players, into which a text of Scripture is blasphemously stuffed.* Ất Palermo, with the tacit sanction at least of Church and State, a monk or friar, or the apt pupil of such, puts

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forth amongst priestly plaudits the second edition of a work, I suppose sincerely as well as professedly intended for the moral guidance of youth, and which is but one long libel on one half of the human race, unparalleled, so far as I know, since the wildest days of monkish asceticism in the middle ages, and of which the most charitable thing to say is, that one would fain hope the blustering ranter who wrote it has never known a mother or a sister.

us

And it specially concerns Englishmen to know that this work gives evidence of the systematic lying and slander with which Romanism defiles our national history, where it dares do so. I pretend to no affection for Queen Elizabeth; but I say that the man who first invented the loathsome lies which Damianu puts forth unchecked concerning her, and all who knowingly retail them, go far to justify all penalties against the exercise of Romanism devised or enforced during her reign, and from that time henceforward, and give a pretext which nothing else could to the caterwaulings of Spoonerites about Maynooth; the worth of which institution is, nevertheless, at all events, that however bad its teachings may be, they cannot, under Government control, be as bad as they would be if all check were removed. And of this D. Antoninu Damianu di Carini be my witness. Such, then, is the intellectual and moral training which a fatherly government and a motherly church in the Two Sicilies give to their subjects and their children. The Vera Arte di Farsi Ricco and the Vivu Mortuare indeed but, as it were, two bricks out of an edifice of which the celebrated Catechismo Filosofico, per uso delle Scuole Inferiori, quoted from by Mr. Gladstone in his letters to the Earl of Aberdeen, supplies in part the plan. That

set forth in express terms the theory of an absolute government, where the sovereign is dispensed from the observance of all oaths which he deems to impair his rights of sove

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reignty. Here we have samples of the ignorance and the falsehood, the superstition, the blasphemy, the mad inhuman asceticism, by which a people are sought to be kept in obedience to such a sovereign. And

so one priest blesses lottery tickets, another sanctions astrology, a third exalts a foul-mouthed pedant into a fifth evangelist, whilst in Nisida or Ischia dungeons-or rather in that huge dungeon, for all who would fain speak truth and do right, called the kingdom of the Two Sicilies-festers (to use Mr. Gladstone's words, now five years old, alas!) a mass of human suffering as huge and as acute, to say the least, as any that the eye of heaven beholds.'* And Europe waits, and wonders that it has to wait so long, the fiery issue of all this evil; when, glancing from above, or bursting forth from below, the sure spark of Divine vengeance shall suddenly kindle up all the slowly heaped-up fuel-mountain of wrongs and agonies, of vices and of hatreds, on which King Ferdinand thinks his throne well set. In that dreadful day, if the Neapolitan people should prove too far unmanned to be generous or self-respecting- if its blows are struck with mad undiscerning rageif its feet reel like those of a drunken savage, instead of treading the firm and measured step of a race freeborn, let it not be forgotten that it has been fed with astrology, intoxicated with gambling-let it not be forgotten that it has seen family ties and the blessed holiness of women spit upon by mad ascetics; that it has been taught by priests to see in the sovereignty exemption from law and from the obligation of an oath.

And for us Englishmen, meanwhile, let the lesson remain (which officialism and Carlylism-two, as, under editorial rebuke, I venture to think, correlative shapes of falsehood -tend or strive daily to make us forget), that of all social evils accursed of God and man since the world was, and whilst it shall be, these two are those which sum up all the rest within themselves-an absolute government and an absolute church.