Inquisition yet more ennobled a noble life by the fiery gift of martyrdom.❜ GOWER. I can well imagine what a basilisk eye the Inquisition must have kept on these lay-priests-these indefatigable writers and preachers to the people in the forbidden vernacular -these Friends of God, Beghards, and Waldenses; and on those audacious Ishmaels, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, most of all. I fancy I see it, lurking always on the edge of any light, watching and watching, as they say the Indian lizard does, crouched in the shadow just outside the circle of light a lamp makes upon the ceiling, to snatch up with its arrowy tongue the moths which fly toward the fascinating brightness. WILLOUGHBY. And do not let us forget that even those pantheistic Brethren of the Free Spirit, with all their coarseness and violence of exaggeration, held at least some little truth, and might plead a large excuse. If some of them broke blindly through all restraint, they made at any rate a breach in priestcraft better used by better men. GOWER.-Just as the track where buffaloes have made their huge crashing way through the forest, has often guided the hunter of the backwoods. ATHERTON. We must not think that the efforts of such a man as Nicholas were fruitless, whatever the apparent success of his persecutors.— GOWER.-Though history has paid him too little attention, and though the Inquisition paid him too much. How I love to find examples of that consoling truth that no well-meant effort for God and man can ever really die—that the relics of vanished, vanquished endeavours are gathered up and conserved, and by the spiritual chemistry of Providence transformed into a new 2 Schmidt's Tauler, pp. 205, &c. Mosheim gives the passage in Nieder relating the apprehension and death of Nicholas:-'Acutissimus enim erat (says this authority) et idcirco manus Inquisitorum diu evaserat.'-Mosheim de Beghardis et Beguinabus, cap. iv. § 42, p. 454. c. 9.] The Fate of Nicholas. 361 life in a new age, so that the dead rise, and mortality puts on immortality. The lessons such men scattered, though they might seem to perish, perpetuated a hidden life till Luther's time; like the dead leaves about the winter tree, they preserved the roots from the teeth of the frost, and covered a vitality within, which was soon to blossom on every bough in the sunshine of the Reformation. ATHERTON. Our fourteenth century, so full of mysticism both in East and West, has some other mystical products to show, principally of the visionary, theurgic species. There is St. Brigitta, a widow of rank, leaving her Swedish pine forests to visit Palestine, and after honouring with a pilgrimage every shrine and relic in southern Europe, fixing her residence at Rome, to the great pecuniary advantage of the faithful there. She writes a discourse on the Blessed Virgin at the dictation of an angel, who visited her punctually for the purpose: indites bombastic invocations to the eyes, ears, hair, chin, &c., of the Saviour; and ditto to ditto of the Virgin; and, what was not quite so bad, gives to the world a series of revelations and prophecies, in which the vices of popes and prelates are lashed unsparingly, and threatened with speedy judgment." WILLOUGHBY. It would be interesting to trace this series of 3 See Revelationes Selectæ S. Brigittæ (Heuser, 1851).-This is a selection for the edification of good Catholics, and contains accordingly the most Mariolatrous and least important of her writings. Rudelbach gives some specimens of her spirited rebuke of papal iniquity in his Savonarola, pp. 300, &c. In her prophetic capacity she does not hesitate to call the pope a murderer of souls, and to declare him and his greedy prelates forerunners of Antichrist. She says, 'If a man comes to them with four wounds, he goes away with five. Like Savonarola, she placed her sole hope of reform in a general council. A common mode of self-mortification with her found an imitator in Madame Guyon :-the Swede dropped the wax of lighted tapers on her bare flesh, and carried gentian in her mouth -Vita, p.6. The Frenchwoman burned herself with hot sealing-wax in the same manner, and chewed a quid of coloquintida. The Revelationes de Vitâ et Fassione Jesu Christi et gloriosæ Virginis, contain a puerile and profane account of the birth, childhood, and death of our Lord, in the style of the apocryphal Gospel of the Infancy, professedly conveyed in conversations with the authoress by the Mother and her Son. reformatory prophets, male and female. From the twelfth to the close of the fifteenth century there is a succession of them, called forth by the hideousness of ecclesiastical corruptionHildegard, Joachim, Brigitta, Savonarola. GOWER. Do not forget Dante. ATHERTON. You hear them all executing variations, plaintive or indignant, menacing or despairing, on the old and never antiquated theme Curia Romana non petit ovem sine lanâ, GOWER. And, to silence these complaints, the Church found inquisitors and censors of service, but most of all—her pattern children-those enthusiasts whose painful labours were employed to quiet the croaking, much as the lord in old feudal times would often exercise his right of compelling a vassal to spend a night or two in beating the waters of the ponds, to stop the frog-chorus there, and procure his master an easy sleep. Obedient enthusiasm toils all night that cardinals may snore. ATHERTON. Angela de Foligni, who made herself miserable -I must say something the converse of flourished-about the beginning of the fourteenth century, was a fine model pupil of this sort, a genuine daughter of St. Francis. Her mother, her husband, her children dead, she is alone and sorrowful. She betakes herself to violent devotion-falls ill-suffers incessant anguish from a complication of disorders-has rapturous consolations and terrific temptations-is dashed in a moment from a seat of glory above the empyrean to a depth so low that the floor of hell might be its zenith. She tells us how, on her The Virgin tells her, in reference to her Son,quomodo neque aliqua immunditia ascendit super eum; and that his hair was never in a tangle(nec perplexitas in capillise jus appa ruit). c. 9.] Angela de Foligni. 363 way to Assisi, the Saviour addressed her, called her his love, his sweet, his joy; and manifested himself within her soul as he had never done to evangelist or apostle. On one occasion, her face shone with a divine glory, her eyes were as flaming lamps; on another, a star proceeded from her side, broke into a thousand beautiful colours, and glided upwards into the sky." WILLOUGHBY. A notable example of mystical pyrotechny. ATHERTON. Her etherialised olfactories were gratified by odours of indescribable fragrance; and to her exalted taste, the consecrated wafer became almost insupportably delicious. Visions and ecstasies by scores are narrated from her lips in the wretched Latin of Arnold the Minorite. All is naught! The flattest and most insipid reading in the world-from first to last Angela de Foligni. See Beata Angela de Fulginio Visionum et Instructionum Liber; (recens. J. H. Lammertz; Cologne, 1851.)-The account of the wonderful star is given by Arnold in his Prologue, p. 12. At one time it is promised by the Lord that the 'whole Trinity shall enter into her,' (capit. xx.); at another, she is transported into the midst of the Trinity. -(Capit. xxxii.) In chapter after chapter of monotonous inflation, she wearies and disappoints the curious reader by declaring her 'abysses of delectation and illumination' altogether unutterable, such as language profanes rather than expresses-'inenarrabiles,' 'indicibiles,' &c. So the miraculous taste of the host to her favoured palate was not like bread or flesh, but a 'sapor sapidissimus,'-like nothing that can be named.-—Capit. xl. The following act of saintship we give in the original, lest in English it should act on delicate readers as an emetic. She speaks of herself and a sister ascetic-Lavimus pedes feminarum ibi existentium pauperum, et manus hominum, et maxime cujusdam leprosi, qui habebat manus valde fætidas et marcidas et præpeditas et Et corruptas; et bibimus de illâ loturâ. In her Instructions,' she lays it down as a rule that none can ever be deceived in the visions and manifestations vouchsafed them who are truly poor in spirit,-who have rendered themselves as 'dead and putrid' into the hands of God. (Capp. liv. lv.) She says that when God manifests Himself to the soul, 'it sees Him, without bodily form, indeed, but more distinctly than one man can see another man, for the eyes of the soul behold a spiritual plenitude, not a corporeal, whereof I can say nothing, since both words and imagination fail here.' (Capit. lii. p. 192.) Angela died in 1309. a repetition of the old stock phrase, 'feelings more readily imagined than described.' She concludes every account by saying, 'No words can describe what I enjoyed;' and each rapture is declared to surpass in bliss all the preceding. LOWESTOFFE. Enough! enough! ATHERTON. Catharine of Siena WILLOUGHBY. No more, pray. ATHERTON. Only this one. Catharine of Siena closes the century. She is a specimen somewhat less wretched, of this delirious mysticism. Her visions began when she was six years old, and a solemn betrothal to our Lord was celebrated, with ring and vow, not very long after. She travelled through the cities and hamlets of Italy, teaching, warning, expostulating, and proclaiming to assembled crowds the wonders she had seen in heaven and hell during that trance in which all had thought her dead. She journeyed from Florence to Avignon, and back to Florence again, to reconcile the Pope and Italy; she thrust herself between the spears of Guelph and Ghibelline—a whole Medieval Peace-Society in her woman's heart-and when she sank at last, saw all her labour swept away, as the stormy waters of the Great Schism closed over her head." GOWER. What a condemning comment on the pretended tender mercies of the Church are those narratives which Rome delights to parade of the sufferings, mental and bodily, which her devotees were instructed to inflict upon themselves! I am reminded of the thirsting mule, which has, in some countries, to strike with its hoof among the spines of the cactus, and drink, with lamed foot and bleeding lips, the few drops of milk which ooze from the broken thorns. Affectionate suffering natures came to Rome for comfort; but her scanty kindness is only to be drawn with anguish from the cruel sharpness of asceticism. troduction to Diepenbrock's edition of Suso, p. 96. 5 'Catharine of Siena. Görres gives a short account of her in his In |