among them, he condescendingly assured them, nowhere, indeed, any better; but the bad were very bad, now here, indeed, any worse; and unfortunately most of them were bad. Among the oats and tares-which two, somewhat strangely to our ears, he joins together there was wheat to be sure, but there was very little of it; little grain, but an exceeding deal of chaff. The higher clergy neglected their duty in not preaching to the people, and reproving them for their sins. If they had done as they ought, he went on to say in his usual conciliatory manner, the population would not have been in the brutal and degraded state in which it was. The nation, he told them, was vile almost beyond description. As regards morals, it was wrapped up in vices like a garment; as regards religion, it was ignorant of the very rudimentary principles of the faith. Petty thefts, highway robbery, perjury, treason were the common practices of all. Neither the tithes nor the first fruits were paid; mar. riages were not contracted; incest was not shunned; the church of God was not frequented with reverence; the dead were not buried with proper rites. There is often a ludicrous anti-climax in the roll of vices which Giraldus denounces, which reminds one of De Quincey's complaint that the man who indulges in murder will soon come to think little of robbing; and that from robbing he will inevitably go on to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and finally wind up his miserable career with incivility and procrastination. It is indeed a striking illustration of the revolution through which the human mind has gone in little as well as great things, that the particular sin which Giraldus inveighed against most bitterly on this occasion will not to the majority of men seem now a sin at all. What he spoke of as being especially detestable, what was contrary not only to the faith but to common decency, was the custom widely prevalent in many parts of Ireland, of men marrying the wives of their deceased brothers. Giraldus went on to reiterate the charge that the blame for this state of things and for the condition of the laity fell mainly upon the clergy. None of them had lifted up his voice like a trumpet to warn the people of their transgressions. Rather had they all looked on in silence, if not with indifference. No word of remonstrance came from them. By them no protest was uttered against practices degrading to the body and deadly to the soul. Therefore he added in conclusion, you have confessors among you, but no martyrs; a state of things for which no parallel could be found in any other Christian country. No Irish prelate had gone into exile rather than abandon the duty he owed his church; none of them had shed his blood in defence of its rights and privileges. The nation was brutal and blood-thirsty. But opportunities so favorable had never been improved. The zeal of the ministers of God had never been sufficient in a single instance to gain for one of them the crown of martyrdom. This point Giraldus seemed to think absolutely convincing as to the negligence and sloth of the Irish clergy. The death of Becket, murdered at the foot of the altar to which he was clinging, had for him a fascination which shows itself constantly in his writings, and had the conditions been favorable would doubtless have inspired him to run cheerfully the risk of a similar fate. Apparently in his eyes no church could prove the purity and divinity of its teachings until some of its members had been murdered. He had, however, appreciation enough of a good retort not to omit one which was made to himself by the archbishop of Cashel, while talking with him on this same subject. To him he uttered his old charge of the criminal slothfulness of the Irish clergy, and the convincing proof of it that was seen in the fact of their possessing no martyrs. The prelate probably had a hearty dislike for the invaders: but his reply was as courteous as it was suggestive. "True," said he "it may be that our people is, as it seems to be, barbarous and uncultivated and cruel. Nevertheless it has always been wont to hold its religious teachers in great honor and reverence, and never on any occasion to stretch out a hostile hand against the saints of God. But now a race has come into the island which both knows how to make martyrs, and has been accustomed to make them. From this time on, Ireland, like other countries, will have its martyrs. *יי The invective under the name of a sermon which Giraldus delivered on the occasion here referred to, may be said indeed. to mark the feelings which from the beginning prevailed in the * Topographia Hibernica, Distinctio III., Chap. xxxii. conquering race toward the conquered. It is no wonder that the government was from the first a failure. Little good administration could be expected from men who talked and acted as if it had been a positive misfortune that St. Patrick, instead of converting the natives and destroying the reptiles, had not, on the contrary, spared the latter and annihilated the former. The general state of feeling on both sides Giraldus incidentally lays bare in his writings which treat of Ireland; and with a discussion of these works and of one or two others, upon which his reputation now mainly rests, carrying the notice nearly to the end of the autobiography that has been preserved, we shall finish this account of his life. ARTICLE V.-REVIEW OF PROFESSOR EBERS' NOVEL, "HOMO SUM." Homo Sum. Roman von GEORG EBERS. zig: Druck und Verlag von Eduard pp. 376. Stuttgart and Leip- GEORG EBERS, whose romance, Homo Sum, has in one year reached a fifth edition and the honor of an English translation, is an Egyptian scholar. He was formerly connected with the university in Jena, but has latterly lived in Leipzig, here also as professor in the university. He is a pupil of Lepsius, and has distinguished himself both by works of scholarship and imagination. His two earlier romances were marked by a somewhat careful effort to convey with accuracy information of Egyptian manners and thinking; and the first one was furnished with ample notes and references to authorities, by which many of the incidental statements found confirmation and elucidation. In Homo Sum we have more purely a work of imagination. Not that the background is not drawn with such clear and steady lines as to give no distorted view of the period and the region. But the lapse of time since the fourth century and the distance to the Arabian Sinai are here treated as too vast to admit of a minute painting of the surroundings without loss of attention to the story. In nearly every case where the historical novel becomes very exact history it loses a little its hold upon the imagination; and though Hypatia, with which every English reader will compare this story, is historically superior, it necessarily involves a scope so much wider, becomes so complex that except for the more ardent lover of historic movements the interest in it as a story occasionally flags. Life may be sacrificed to archæology and speculation, and the "new faces" have to be sometimes closely scrutinized before they reveal themselves clearly as the "old faces." It may indeed be considered a question to be settled by the character and size of the audience desired, as only the most cultured will apppreciate the finest lines. For each type is in its way admirable, and probably few readers will regret that Ebers, having shown his skill in the archæological novel both in The Egyptian Princess, and Uarda, has written at last a novel in which, while the customs and scenery are perfectly oriental and the conceptions antique, the historical has been refined to an atmosphere, and the emotions and characters find quick responses in the men and women of to-day, and the claims of art are paramount. Eight centuries, which include the Christian era, make an immense difference. Egyptian and Persian life, in the time of Cambyses and Cyrus, the period of Ebers' first novel, had fewer points in common with our experience than the life of the simple anchorites striving for the Christian peace. This latter life, too, requires fewer accessories, and the pictures of solitary and domestic experience in Homo Sum are very real in one sense and go straight to the modern heart. Yet one must concede that the training for and of the earlier romances, the checks which historical exactness imposed were salutary; that only by such leading strings could one learn to walk in so stately and secure a way upon the rocky soil of the Arabian desert of fifteen centuries ago. The title of the book is taken from the oft-quoted Terentian motto, "Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto." Whatever may have been the exact sense of these words originally, they are extremely un-Roman-so un-Roman in fact as to corroborate the story of Terence's Carthaginian birth. They are undoubtedly expanded in our conception far beyond what they originally meant, and yet it can hardly be an offence in Professor Ebers to take these words in their widest meaning as expressing not so much Paul's sense, as our own, of the fact that his struggles were those of a common humanity. At the same time, the hero's extraordinary devotion to others goes towards justifying the adoption of the thought in this large sense as his too, and to excuse the improbable finale of the story according to which Polycarp chiseled on Paul's monument words which the latter had written with a coal on the wall of his cave just before his death: "Pray for poor me. I was a human being." far The book is dedicated to the great archæological painter, |