acts of mortification; his wooden soup basin, which he carried to receive the doles of soup given at the various convent gates, had its rim broken,' so that most of the soup when poured in ran out (p. 99); to make his pilgrimage journeys more disagreeable, he filled his wallet with stones (pp. 29, 119); and to mortify his sense of smell, he was frequently seen saying long prayers on his knees close to the sewers (p. 124). This is the man who is styled 'questo novello Eroe di cristianesimo' (p. 165), for whom contributions are now being asked in so many churches to procure canonisation; a man living in squalid savagery, as if he had no duties to his kind, with views of the relation of man to God, or of the ends of life, scarcely better than those of an Indian fakeer. In concluding this paper, we cannot but ask ourselves. from such evidence as thus may be seen by anyone in Rome and elsewhere in the Roman Church, what hopes there are of its clearing itself from its accretions to Christianity, of its abandonment of what we must not shrink from calling errors of doctrine. The great hope is in the better education of the clergy. No doubt in dogmatic theology they are better trained than our own. But the fact of their education being entirely different from that of laymen tends not only to keep them apart, but to prevent their giving due weight to all that is going on around them in the world. We do not believe that a body of clergy who had anything like an English public school and university education could take part in such a scene as the blessing of the people with the Bambino at Ara Coli, could display solemnly such pretended relics as those at S. Croce, could put forward a man like Benoît Joseph Labré as an object for imitation. From the present Pope, if only his life and strength are spared, everything is to be hoped. He has already been moving actively in the matter of the education of the seminarists, and we believe is doing all that is possible to raise the tone of the country clergy. He has already done something, if not to put down altogether, yet at least to modify, the miserable imposture of La Salette. We cannot but see in his first promotion of cardinals the evidence of a very different line of policy than that which was his predecessor's. May God bless him in all his endeavours to feed the flock entrusted to his guidance. As to any hope of the Roman Church modifying its doctrines on any of the disputed points, so as to approach nearer 1 This is represented in the portrait prefixed to the Life. to ourselves, we fear there is no prospect as yet. There is the cruel column of the Piazza di Spagna, which proves the acceptance by Rome of that dogma, so protested against by S. Bernard, which seems to our ideas to attack the truth of the Incarnation, if not so wilfully as Nestorius himself did, yet in a very important point. There are the closed doors of the transept of S. Peter's, which remind us of the last Roman council, when the Infallibility dogma was promulgated in spite of so much opposition. All we can do is to wait and bide our time; to go on our way with the deepest sympathy for that Church which, after all, is the great mother Church of the West, but yet resolutely maintaining our position, holding our own in the sight of God and the whole world, and remembering that there is one thing still more to be valued even than Unity, and that is Truth. mith He. 19. beard. Samin sicces, the semia giocas, from: Coll: can ART. II.-S. HUGH OF LINCOLN. 1. Magna Vita S. Hugonis, Episcopi Lincolniensis. Edited by the Rev. JAMES F. DIMOCK, M.A. (London, 1864.) 2. Metrical Life of S. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by the Rev. J. F. DIMOCK, M.A. (Lincoln, 1860.) 3. Giraldi Cambrensis Opera. Vol. vii. Edited by the Rev. JAMES F. DIMOCK, M.A. (London, 1867.) 4. The Life of S. Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln, with some Account of his Predecessors in the See of Lincoln. By GEORGE G. PERRY, M.A., Canon of Lincoln. (London, 1879.) HUGH, Bishop of Lincoln, and Richard, Bishop of Chichester, share the unique distinction of being the two mediæval English bishops who, on the revision of the Book of Common Prayer in 1604, were restored to the places in the Calendar from which, together with their other canonised brethren, they had been ejected at the Reformation. The name of the former stands against November 17, that of the latter against April 3. We know that the principle of selection in this case was not 'the survival of the fittest;' but the retention of old dates ingrained in the national mind by popular festivals and parochial wakes and fairs, with which, from time imme morial, they had been connected. But although this was the avowed object of the revival of the 'black-letter saints,' we can hardly doubt that, in some minds at least, the higher purpose was associated of perpetuating the memory of truly good and holy men, who had illustrated the annals of the English Church, and thus evincing how that Church was still in spirit undissevered from the National Church of earlier years, and from the brotherhood of Catholic Christianity.'1 Of the two English bishops thus selected from the far more copious list in the pre-Reformation Calendar, we cannot for a moment question which is the more worthy of grateful commemoration. Richard of Wych,' the ascetic devotee, the upholder of ecclesiastical power against the king, the prodigal giver of alms during his life, and worker of miracles after his death,' as Prebendary Stephens has well described him, may be regarded as a specimen of 'the peculiar type of character and life which constituted a saint in the eyes of men of the thirteenth century' 2-a type, we may remark, very unlike that to which we should now be inclined to award the meed of peculiar sanctity. Hugh of Lincoln, earlier by half a century, by no means his inferior in personal holiness and unsparing devotion to duty, was withal much more of a man and less of a conventional saint than Richard, and left a far deeper influence for good on his age. Cool-headed and of excellent judgment, courageous in rebuking moral and political wrong, and dauntless in the defence of the rights of those committed to his charge; with a keen discrimination of character, and a happy tact in dealing with every variety of temper, he could meet the great ones of the world on their own ground, and 'with his ready wit and ready tongue, ever ready to utter the right and telling thing in the right and telling way,' 3 prompt to seize the right mode at the right moment, carry off the victory in his encounters with such monarchs as Henry II. and Richard Cœur de Lion. Strict Carthusian as he was, he was no gloomy ascetic; while he rigidly followed the rule of his order, making water his usual drink, never eating meat from his youth up, and hardly yielding to the orders of his physicians in his last illness; so far was this large-hearted man from entertaining any contempt for God's good creatures, or extolling abstinence as a virtue in itself, that he was famous for his magnificent housekeeping and the splendid attire of the knights, clerks, and dependants who formed his household. 1 Procter, History of the Book of Common Prayer, p. 60. His customary greeting, as he sat down at table, was 'Eat well and drink well, and serve God well and devoutly.'1 He was unsparing in the rebukes of those who, thinking to do God service, indulged in excessive fasting, and rose from table 'stomacho male confortato!' The only result of such false asceticism, he said, was sleepless nights, mental torpor, bodily weakness, and incapacity for all spiritual exercises. Grasping the grand principle that Mercy is better than sacrifice,' careless of the shock it gave to their prejudices, he would, when occasion required it, compel the clergy ministering at the altar to take a little bread and wine before assisting at the celebration, charging those who still held back with slender faith and feeble discernment, since they had neither learnt to obey when bidden, nor could see the reason of so considerate an order. His perpetual cheerfulness, his sunny face, his loquacity, his delight in a pun or a well-timed joke, his fondness for birds and pet animals, and love for little children, enable us in some measure to realise the beauty and attractiveness of his character, and to understand the powerful hold he had over the hearts of all who were brought within his influence. Even his hot temper-sharper and more biting than pepper, kindled into anger on the smallest occasion,' is his own account of himself 3 seems to bring him nearer to us, and makes us feel that he was a being of flesh and blood, not a mere lay figure in mediæval hagiology. 'An upright, honest, fearless man; an earnest, holy, Christian bishop,' the more we know of him the more we reverence him, and the better satisfied we are of the sound judgment of the arrangers of our Calendar in selecting out of the whole catalogue of English prelates such a man as Hugh of Lincoln as a representative of the medieval Anglican Episcopate. - And yet, with all his well-founded claims on our admiration and regard, till within the last few years Hugh of Lincoln was little more than a name to English churchmen. Not that biographies of him were wanting. As one of the chief English saints, canonised within twenty years of his death, celebrated far and wide for the miracles worked by his remains, a plentiful crop of 'Lives,' more or less authentic, speedily sprang up and gained wide currency. Of these biographies, the most remarkable is the Magna Vita, written, at the request of the monks of Witham, by his private chaplain, Adam. This graphic record, derived from a long and close intimacy with 1 'Bene comedatis et bene bibatis, et bene et devote Deo serviatis.’— Girald. Camb. Distinct. I. c. viii. p. 107. 3 Ibid. lib. iii. c. xii. p. 136. 2 Magna Vita, lib. iii. c. xiii. p. 140. its subject, and in many cases preserving his very words, has been the storehouse from which all the biographies of modern times have been compiled. Such are the abridgments originally published by Pezius,' and reprinted in the Abbé Migne's encyclopædic collection,2 those contained in the collections of Surius,3 Dorlandus, and others. Till recently, however, this life existed unabridged only in manuscript, and that nowhere complete; and as to the majority of readers, to quote Dr. E. A. Freeman's words of himself,' a manuscript becomes practically useful only when it is changed into the more every-day shape of a printed book,' its first real publication was in the Master of the Rolls' series of Chronicles and Memorials, under the editorship of the late Prebendary Dimock, the title of which stands at the head of this article. Next to this in value is the biography of the quick-witted, but somewhat careless and unscrupulous, Giraldus Cambrensis, who had been brought into intimate association with Hugh during the last three years of his episcopate, while residing at Lincoln for the sake of the theological lectures of the famous William de Monte, whom the bishop had brought from St. Geneviève's, at Paris, to superintend the divinity school of his cathedral as its Chancellor. This, though, as Mr. Dimock says, penned as a task, 'without his heart or scholarly labour,' has the undoubted value of a contemporary record, and contributes facts we could ill spare, though fewer than might have been looked for, towards the formation of the portrait of this great man. The latest of these almost contemporaneous biographies of S. Hugh (though the earliest in order of recent publication) is the curious Metrical Life, published by the indefatigable Mr. Dimock, from MSS. in the Bodleian and British Museums. This life was probably written by one of the canons of Lincoln in 'the first flush of exultation at the honour done to his church by the canonisation of its bishop.' It adds but little to the biography of the saint, being mainly drawn from the Magna Vita, and the Life by Giraldus. Its chief value is in its curious description of the fabric of the cathedral, which had risen from the ruins of the earthquake of 1185 at the command of S. Hugh, of whom it is the grand and appropriate monument. The grotesque symbolism, surpassing even Durandus, with which this writer makes every part of the building set forth some religious truth or holy doctrine, may provoke a smile; but its great and almost unique interest as a fragment 1 Bibliotheca Ascetica, tom. x. Ratisbon, 1733. 2 Patrologia, Ser. Lat. cliii. 4 Chronicon Cartusiense, lib. iii. 3 Nov. 17, tom. vi. p. 387, Colon. |