Chapter VI: Boadicea (1)

Within a few weeks came a letter from Mrs. Rowan to Edith. It is not natural for people to write in their own way--that comes with education and practice; but this letter breathed the writer's very self. It radiated a timid distress. She had surprising news to tell. Instead of being in a tenement of her own, among plain people whom she would feel at ease with, she was installed as housekeeper in what seemed to her a very magnificent establishment. Mr. Williams, her employer, was an importing merchant, and his family consisted of a daughter, eighteen years of age, and an awful sister-in-law who lived in the next street, but visited his house at all hours of day or evening, superintending minutely his domestic arrangements. This gentleman knew Major Cleaveland well, and had for many years had business relations with Captain Cary. Indeed, it was their sailor friend who had procured the situation for her, and insisted on her taking it. She had refused as long as she could, but Dick himself joining against her, she had finally yielded. Mr. Williams was very kind. He had assured her that he did not want a city housekeeper, but some quiet, honest countrywoman to be in the house with his daughter, and see that the servants did not rob him.

At the conclusion of this letter, Mrs. Rowan added that Dick sent his respects, at which Edith's heart sank with disappointment. Where was the hearty affection, the eager remembrance she had looked for?

The child would have been less indignant had she known what pains Dick was really taking for her sake. He had searched out, and borrowed or bought all the printed correspondence of famous letter-writers that were to be had for love or money, and was studying them as models. He had also invested extravagantly in stationery, and was striving to bend his clear, clerkly penmanship to something more elegant and gentlemanlike. Even while she was accusing him of forgetfulness, he was carefully copying his tenth letter to her.

But still, Edith was not to blame, though she was mistaken. Affection has no right to be silent.

After a few days, however, came his farewell before sailing for the East. Over this note, Edith shed bitter tears, as much for the manner as for the matter of it. For Dick, with an eye to Mrs. Yorke as a reader, had composed a very dignified epistle after the manner of Doctor Johnson. Poor Dick! who could have written the most eloquent letter in the world, if he had poured his heart out freely and simply.

The child had scant time allowed her for mourning, for her studies began immediately. The family were all her teachers, and she began at once with music and languages. The common branches were taught indirectly. Geography she learned by looking out on the maps places mentioned in their reading or conversation. History she learned chiefly through biography. For arithmetic, some one gave her every day a problem to solve. She added up household expenses, measured land, laid out garden-beds, weighed and measured for cooking. Her study was all living: not a dead fact got into her mind. She read a great deal besides, travels, all that she could find relating to the sea, and poetry. As her mind became interested, she settled once more into harmony with herself, and her feelings grew quiet. The impression left by Dick's strange behavior after their parting faded away, and she remembered only his last fervent protestation: "I'll climb, Edith, I'll climb!" How it was to be, and what it really meant, she knew not; but the old faith in him came back. "What Dick said he'd do, he always did."

She associated him with all she read or heard of foreign lands and waters. He had sailed through phosphorescent seas by night, under wide-eyed stars, while the waves tossed in fire from his prow, and trailed in fire in his wake. He had lain in the warm southern ocean, where the tides are born, had held his breath during that pause when all the waters of the earth hang balanced, and swung his cap as he felt the first soft pulse of the infant tidal wave that was to grow till its rim should cast a wreath of foam on every shore from the North Pole to the South. Palms and the banyan-tree, pines almost huge enough to tip the earth over, each in turn had shaded his head. His venturesome feet had trod the desert and the jungle. Jews and Moslems had looked after him as he sauntered through their crowded bazaars--the bright-eyed, laughing sailor-boy! Norsemen had smiled as they saw his hair blown back and his face kindled by the tempest. It was always Dick to the fore of everything.

On one of those spring mornings, Carl, wandering through the woods, came out into the road in front of an old school-house that stood at the edge of the village. The door was open, and showed a crowd of children at their studies inside. On the green in front of the door lay a log, and on the log sat a deplorable-looking little man. He was neither young nor old, but seemed to be stranded on some bleak age which time had forgotten. His clothes were gentlemen's clothes cut down and patched. A hat that was too large for him reached from his forehead to his neck. It was not crushed, but it was shabby, and drooped sorrowfully in the brim. His hair was thin and long, and patted down. Tears rolled over his miserable face as he sat and looked in at the children saying their lessons in a long class. He did not cover his face in weeping, but lifted his eyebrows, wiped the tears occasionally, and continued to gaze.

Carl was one of the last persons in the world to intrude on another, or allow any intrusion on himself, but after a moment's hesitation he ventured to approach this pitiful little figure, and ask what ailed him.

The man showed no surprise on being addressed, but poured out his grief at once. His name was Joseph Patten, he was poor and had a large family, and was obliged to receive town help. As a condition of that help, he must give up one of his children to be bound out to work, or adopted into a family. The parents were allowed to choose which child they would part with, and "Joe," as he was called by everybody, was now trying to make up his mind. His story was told in a whimpering voice, and with many tears, and the listener was quite as much provoked to laugh as to weep.

"It isn't easy to part with your own flesh and blood, sir," said Joe. "There's Sally, my oldest girl, named for her marm. She helps about the house. My wife couldn't get along without Sally. The next one is Joseph. He's named for me; and I don't want to give up the child that's named for myself, sir. Then John, he's got the rickets, and is used to be fed and taken care of. You couldn't expect a man to send away a child that's got the rickets, and let him drop all his food before he gets it to his mouth. Then Betsey, she's named for my mother. How am I going to send away the child that's named for my own mother, when she's dead and gone, and let her live among strangers? Jane, she's homesick; she cries if she is out of her marm's sight a minute. She'd cry herself to death if she was to be carried off. Then there's Jackson, named for General Jackson. You don't suppose I could give away a child that's named for General Jackson! And George Washington, named for the father of his country. Why, I could do without any of 'em sooner than I could without George Washington. And Paul, he's named for the 'postle Paul. It would be a sin and a shame to give away a boy that's named for the 'postle Paul. And Polly, she's the baby. You can't give a baby away from its own mother."

There had been several other children who had died, chiefly from unwholesome little fevers, to which they seemed addicted.

Carl was unable to assist the man in his choice; but he comforted him somewhat by promising to visit his family soon, and left him weeping, and gazing through the door at his children.

That same afternoon Carl and Melicent went out to visit Joe Patten's family. It had occurred to the young woman that she might be able to train one of the pauper's boys for a house-servant, and thus benefit them and her own family at the same time.

The Pattens lived directly back of the Yorkes' place, about half a mile farther into the woods, and their house had no communication with the public ways save by a cart-road. Joe's sole income was derived from the sale of little snags of wood that he hauled into the village, and exchanged for groceries. In Seaton wood was a drug in the market. A man must cut his beech and maple into clear split logs, and season it well, if he expected to get two dollars a cord for it.

The walk through the woods was a pleasant one, for nature was stirring all alive about them. This nature was no Delilah of the tropics, and to one who loved a bold and gorgeous beauty it was poor. But for those who like to seek beauty in her shyer, hidden ways, it had a delicate and subtle charm. The profuse snowy bloom of wild-cherries showed in a cloud here and there against the red or salmon-colored flowers of maples and oaks. Silver birches glimmered through their shining foliage, like subsiding nymphs, and the tassels of the larch swung out their brown and gold. Violets blue and white opened thickly in wet places, sisterhoods of snowdrops stood with their drooping heads tenderly streaked with pink, little knubbles of land were covered thickly with old and young checkerberry--"ivry-leaves" the children called them, drops of gum oozed through the rough bark of spruce and hemlock, brooks rushed frothing past, and birds were returning to their nests or building new ones.

Soon they heard sounds of human life through the forest quiet, the loud voice of a scolding woman and a confused babel of children's voices.

Carl smiled mockingly. "A troop of dryads, probably," he remarked.

Suddenly they came out close to a small log-house that stood in an irregular clearing; and now the scolding and the babel were plain to be heard.

"I'll lick you like a sack if you don't bring some dry sticks to get supper with!" cried a woman's voice, and at the same instant a ragged little boy bounded from the door, helped, apparently, by some outward application, and ran for the woods, his bare feet seeming insensible to sticks and stones. Then, all at once, there was silence, and clusters of two-colored heads in the windows, and peeping from the door. The visitors had been discovered. As they approached the door, a large, wild-eyed Boadicea came to meet them, and invited them in with great ceremony and politeness. She had an unwholesome, putty-colored skin and black hair and eyes. In one corner sat Joe, with the baby in his arms, and his hat on his head. This he removed, half-rose, and performed a salution which was more a courtesy than a bow. But he uttered not a word. "In this house clearly,

'Madame d'Acier est le père,'"

thought Carl.

With a sweep of the arm she banished the children all into one corner of the room (the house contained but one room), brought two strip-bottomed chairs, from one of which her husband had meekly fled at her approach, and, dusting them off with her apron, invited her visitors to be seated.

"You must excuse the confusion reigning in my poor mansion," she said with great suavity, and a very good accent. "Children are always disorderly. Sarah!" raising her voice, "bring the besom and sweep up the embers."

Melicent turned a look of dismay on her brother, who was taken with a slight cough. Sarah, otherwise Sally, came bashfully out from behind her father, where she had been crouching on the floor, and swept up the hearth with a brush broom.

The poor woman, anxious to do all honor to her visitors, and, also, to show them that she was above her circumstances, knew no other way than by using the largest words she could think of. Her idea of polite conversation was to make it as little as possible like anything she was accustomed to.

Melicent stated her errand at once, and the mother, with many thanks, and lamentations on her misfortunes, called the little ones forward, and placed them at the lady's disposal. She stopped in her compliments to dart a threatening look toward the door, where the boy who had been "named for the 'postle Paul" stood with his burden of dry sticks. He dropped them instantly, and came forward, and his mother as instantly resumed her smiling face. She could change her expression with remarkable facility.

Melicent fancied this boy at once, and promptly concluded a bargain to give a week's trial to him and his eldest sister. They were to go to "the hall," as Mrs. Patten politely called it, the next day, and begin their training. They would work for their food and clothing, and perhaps, after a while, when she should think them worthy, they might receive wages.

This settled, Miss Yorke and her brother departed, followed by Mrs. Patten's compliments to the door, and stared after by all the children. Joe's only movement on their going was to perform another courtesy like that with which he had received them.

"Poor souls! they are delighted to have their children with us," said Melicent, when they were out of hearing. "But I hope the mother won't come to see them often. Betsey says she is half-crazy."

"I respect her for it!" Carl exclaimed. "You can see that she has some talent and ambition, and that she has read some, though she is absurdly ignorant of the ways of the world. With such a husband, such a troop of children, and such poverty, I repeat I respect her for being crazy. She can't have a person to speak to but her own family, immured in those forest solitudes, as she says."

Mrs. Patten looked after them as long as she could see them, her face glowing with pride. Then she went into her house, went to the fireplace, and withdrew a pair of iron tongs that lay with red-hot tips in the coals there. "There is no need of them now," she said exultingly.

These tongs had been kept red during the last week for the better reception of any town officer who should venture to come for one of her children. Mrs. Patten did not by any means propose to submit tamely. Then she turned tragically, and faced her husband with a look of withering contempt.

"I was meant to be such a lady as that!" she exclaimed, with a grand gesture of the arm in the direction where Melicent Yorke had disappeared. "And yet, I sacrificed my birthright--fool that I was!--to marry you, Joe Patten!"

Joe shrank, and hugged the baby up to him. "I know you did, Sally!" he said deprecatingly--"I know you did!"

"And you never knew enough to appreciate me!" she continued in a tragic tone.

"I know I never did," answered Joe in a trembling voice--"I know it, Sally."

"Learn to respect me, then!" she said, drawing herself up. "Call me Mrs. Patten!"

"Yes, I will, I do, I have," whimpered Joe. "I--"

"Hold your tongue!" commanded his wife. "Paul, bring me those chips." And she proceeded to get supper.

Poor Sally Patten was not nearly so cruel as she appeared. In truth, she had never laid the weight of her hand upon her husband. But, then, he was always afraid she would.

TO BE CONTINUED.

MEXICAN ART AND ITS MICHAEL ANGELO.

The society of Mexico has become a ruin in which it is necessary to search with some labor to discover monuments of literature and art. Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, though for her time an extraordinary woman, is unknown to the greater portion of the continent of whose letters she seems to have been the true morning star. Of Siguenza, mathematician, philosopher, historian, antiquary, and of Velasquez Cardenas, the astronomer and geometrician, the world knew little until Humboldt praised their remarkable talents. Not without a shrug of surprise, we imagine, did the readers of half a century ago accept his assurance that "M. Tolsa, professor of sculpture at Mexico, was even able to cast an equestrian statue of King Charles the Fourth; a work which, with the exception of the Marcus Aurelius at Rome, surpasses in beauty and purity of style everything which remains in this way in Europe." Miguel Cabrera, a greater artist than Tolsa, and the most vigorous imaginative genius which Mexico has produced, has yet to be adequately recognized in America. The art of our northern republic boasts the names of Trumbull, Stuart, Allston, Inman, Vanderlyn, Sully, Neagle, Hamilton, Rothermel, Church, Crawford, Powers, Akers, Greenough, Hosmer, and others; but we doubt if among all these can be found an artist as praiseworthy as was this Mexican Cabrera. Do we exaggerate? No; we are addressing a practical public, much in love with its own works and ways and ideals, and not too well disposed to imagine the difficulties of a Mexican artist one hundred and thirty years ago.

But, first, let us describe, so far as we may, the scene and circumstances of his artistic labors. Mexico, as compared with our northern cities, is a wonderfully old-fashioned capital. The walls of its houses have been built to last till doomsday, and its doors are like doors of castles. Many of its flat fronts boast stuccoed ornaments: all are painted with tints ranging from yellow to pink and pale blue--colors of art which, as applied in particular cases, are seldom at once tolerable to a foreign eye, but which find their reason in necessity as well as taste, and partly in the dull, unlovely character of the building material. This is often a kind of lava-stone or tezontle, a stone the volcano itself seems to have supplied for the purpose of resisting earthquake, and which defies the insidious action of Mexican damps. The churches are instances of colored architecture. La Profesa is yellowed; the cathedral's chapel is browned. San Domingo, San Agustin, and, in fact, all the Mexican churches are tinted more or less, the favorite hue being a mild and not offensive yellow, qualified by white plasters. One remembers gratefully that neutral tint which makes a long range of Mexican houses, with their balconies and tasteful awnings, quaint and elegant letterings of signs, and flags hung out at shop-doors, so picturesque, so pleasant, and so characteristic. The perspective of a Mexican street, especially toward the close of the day, enjoys a repose of many colors well blended with such lines of substantial houses as cannot but impress the eye of the musing stranger. Their architecture, so simple and massive, but so different from a certain wide-awake familiarity which is written upon the houses of the North, best assimilates in his view with some mood of twilight. Yet, seen at dawn or at dusk, or under the moon, the city of Mexico never loses its one decided charm of picturesqueness. It was this exceeding quality which doubtless delighted the eye of Humboldt when he praised Mexico as one of the finest of cities. He had, perhaps, beheld from its cathedral's steeple a most unique capital--a city set not on a hill, but in one of the dreamiest of valleys near one of the dreamiest and shallowest of lakes, with Popocatapetl and Ixtaccihuatl, snow-crowned and heaven-seeking, for monuments of its guardian valley.

In such a scene, Cabrera and his contemporary artists did their work. Their school was the church. What this church was in their day the splendid traditions of art found even now in its corridors and near its altars bear faithful witnesses. Something from their hands has gone into every community of Mexico, and, if war has spared one-half the relics of her art as it existed one hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago, the republic is still fortunate in one respect. The cathedrals of Puebla and Mexico, and La Profesa, were perhaps the chief homes of that genius of painting which was manifested not merely in one, but in a number of Mexicans. Who are the artists of the exceedingly fine pictures which may be seen in the church at Puebla the stranger rarely ascertains. The tradition that Velasquez, the great pupil of Murillo, and Cabrera, the native Mexican, sowed the religion of the New World with their pencils some centuries ago, supplies him with the morsel of vague knowledge with which he reluctantly leaves a building full of rich and curious shrines. Mexico is to all appearances singularly deficient in a proper memory of her noblest painters. Go into one of the city's oldest churches, and your friendly guide, though he be a priest, may not be able to tell you who painted the saints on the walls and the heads of the apostles on the shrines. The information possessed outside of the church respecting its treasures of art has, under stress of various revolutions, dissipated into vague generalities. Three or four remarkable names are known, and a few famous pictures; but who can at once point out to us the masterpieces of any of the five or six painters whose works are worth remembering, or tell us near what shrines, outside of the capital itself, we are likely to find rare pictures? Nevertheless, art is almost the chief boast of Mexico, aside from its natural endowments, though, like so much else in a land subject to all manner of vicissitudes, the boast is to some extent shadowy and unsubstantial. In successive revolutions, it is conjectured, those true homes of fine art, the convents, have been despoiled, and the saints and angels of their galleries sent hither and thither, to be kept by natives or to be sold to foreigners as Joseph was sold by his brethren. Another spoliation, and perhaps a searching and sweeping one, is said to have taken place under the eye of the French during their mercenary intervention. How or by whom robbed and mutilated in the last half-century of wars, Mexican art is but the wreck of what it was. That so much of it still survives is a proof of its original abundance and vitality.

But, notwithstanding the whirlwinds of revolution, art in the country of Cabrera has retained a number of impregnable and indestructible asylums. Altar ornaments of gold or silver may have been stolen from the cathedral, but apparently no sacrilegious criminal has ever carried away its pictures. These treasures of the church are set fast in their places round the shrines, so closely and plentifully that, wherever they are most congregated, the altar-places seem walled and tiled with them. Not all of them are worthy of Cabrera or Xuarez or Ximenez, let alone Murillo and Velasquez; but all have their value as portions of a chapter in art the like of which is not to be seen elsewhere on the American continent. Confused and perplexed as the real beauties of many of these paintings are by the endless bedizenments of altars, it is impossible to ignore or conceal the richness, delicacy, and even tenderness which belong to their best specimens. The extravagance of gilding, the wilderness of carved flourishes, which the taste of the sixteenth century placed at the back of the altars, do not form the best repository for the subdued beauty which a noble picture acquires with age. The great back altar-wall of the cathedral is from floor to roof one mass of most ingenious carving and gilding, out of which what seem to be pious aborigines, associated with warriors and saints on the same background, blossom in paint and gold. Our modern and practical tastes do not easily give room to an ornamentation as loud and prodigal as figures in this great recess; but it is nevertheless a rare and meritorious work in its way. Other shrines display the same gilding in an inferior degree; and we must divest ourselves of some prejudice, artistic and otherwise, before we appreciate the merit of extreme elaboration in their ornaments, and discover, notwithstanding this lavish wealth of surrounding decoration, the modest worth of the best pictures of the church.

The cathedral is well constituted to be the ark and refuge of religious art. It is about 428 feet long and 200 wide, while its general height is almost 100, that of its towers being nearly 200 feet. These dimensions argue an interior vast enough to enclose three or four such churches as we may see on Broadway, without taking into account its large adjoining chapel. Its exterior is a congregation of heavy masses crowned by great bell-shaped towers, but wanting a grand unity and exaltation. Nevertheless, the charm of picturesqueness which belongs to so many solid monuments of the sixteenth century has rested upon this cathedral, in spite of its dinginess and heaviness; and a view of it under the magic of a moonlight which Italian skies could not more than rival is one of the finest of a series of Mexican lithographs. Gothic height, space, and freedom are the prime qualities of the cathedral's interior. Not less than twenty-two shrines are there visible in an extent of two aisles and twenty arches, the columns of which are each quintupled. The high porphyry columns, the range of the apostles, the burst of gilded glory, and the outspread angels over the principal altar are exceedingly impressive, notwithstanding an exuberance of colors. The choir, altogether the best architectural feature of the great building, rises rather toward the middle of the church, and up from the floor, in a high and luxurious growth of oaken carvings and embellishments. Inside is the assembly of the saints, finely panelled. Cherub and seraph are busy apparently with the superb organ-pipes, and make merry overhead with all the instruments of an orchestra, while impish faces beneath them seem to be out of temper. The nobleness of the choir as a work of art is, in great part, due to its gravity, though it is as ingenious, perhaps, as anything of the kind need be, without seeking comparison with the mightiest fancies of the Old World.

Even to an ordinary observer it is plain that the old cathedral is well endowed with pictures. The pure olive-faced Madonna, over the nearest and most popular altar, is said to be Murillo's; it may be Velasquez's. She is a mild, meek lady, with a boy in her lap, veritably human in feature. Out of the rich shade of a great old artist's mood cherubs seem to swarm upon them. In the fine gloom of Vespers, when only the face of the Madonna is seen, the religious mildness of this picture is especially venerable. Other altars have many curiosities, more or less associated with art. There is at one a Man of Sorrow, sitting and leaning in wretched plight; at another, a sallow and agonized Redeemer on the cross; and painted statues and crucifixes only less realistic and distressful than these are common throughout the church. The ghostly figure of what may be a dead saint is laid out in wax, as upon a bed, at one shrine, and elsewhere what seems to be a dead Redeemer is altared in a glass case. In the chapel the artistic character of the cathedral is repeated, save that its high altar-columns, its cross-bearing angel, its splendidly-rayed apotheosis of the Blessed Virgin, its statues of Moses and John the Baptist, have a more modern workmanship. The Madonna, in lady-like wax, with a crown upon her head, and holding daintily a babe in her arms, is the principal figure of one of the auxiliary shrines, though not the best specimen of an art in which Mexicans excel, and which, as represented in a black-robed figure of the Mother of Sorrows, is sometimes admirable and religiously effective. These instances, though but a few of the numberless curiosities of wood and wax amid which the painters have found their abiding home, will serve to illustrate the very mixed artistic complexion of the Mexican cathedral. The statues and paintings are of all sorts, colors, and styles. But the shadowy picture of a sad, nunlike face of Our Lady of Sorrows; the quaint-hooded countenance of the Blessed Virgin, apparently wrought in tapestry of the middle ages; or that of our Lord, after he had been scourged, plainly apprise us that the sincerity of art, first consecrated by the church, has become a part of its own consecration. These are sacred pictures, truly. Weary and wretched, his head bound with thorns, our Lord leans in agonized contemplation, while an apostle looks up to him in tears. The elements of this exquisite painting are gloom and pathos developed out of Murillo-like colors and shadows. Another painting, equally reverend, pursues the same theme and mood. To whose genius do we owe them? Perhaps to Velasquez, of whose works the church, it is said, possesses a noble number; perhaps to Cabrera. Who shall decide? One of the fathers or cathedraticos might tell us, but which father and which professor? The condition of topsy-turvy succeeding a revolution is not favorable to the pursuit or the memory of art; and, as we have hinted, the proper rediscovery of Mexican art must be a matter of unselfish and laborious search. Mexico does not, perhaps, even yet know its proper historian.

Yet some thing we do know of Cabrera. The fine head of St. Peter, pointed out to the writer by a padre of San Hypolito, is by him. One of three immense canvases in the sacristy of the cathedral is also his surprising handiwork. It is a pictorial homage to the Pope, wherein the successor of St. Peter, gray and grave, sits on the topmost seat of a ponderous car of triumph, which is pushed by giants of the faith led by heroes and saints. What seems to be the genius of history has a seat in the van, and disporting cherubs hover on flank and rear, while the aged Pope is being ministered to or counselled by a saint or apostle. This picture, perhaps the largest, though not necessarily the best, painted by Cabrera, is very remarkable for its vigor and variety of form. The other great canvases are by Xuarez and Ximenez, both Mexican painters of genius. One represents the victory of Michael celebrated by the angelic powers; the theme of the other appears to be the reception of the Holy Lady in heaven. Pictures of this extensive character are certainly calculated to display the energy of artists, but not always to develop the highest expression of religion. There can be no question of the vigor of these paintings, especially of Cabrera's; but probably we shall have to seek among smaller canvases and less complicated subjects the true masterpieces of Cabrera, Xuarez, and Ximenez. Some years ago they might have been found in the Convent of La Profesa or of St. Dominic, or, perhaps, in the Academy of San Carlos; but where are they now? That academy, once, doubtless, the finest of its kind in America, and still among the best, does contain, it is true, some master paintings by Xuarez, Rodriguez, Joachim, Ludovicus, bearing date after the close of the sixteenth century; but these do not give us assurance of being the best examples of what was done about Cabrera's time. The walls of San Carlos, we may remark in passing, contain a very large, melodramatic descent from the cross by Baltasar de Chaue, and a beautiful Shepherd Boy, by Ingies, whose simplicity recalls the fact that the Lute Player, one of the few genuine Murillos said to be in the country, is in the possession of a Mexican club.

But what of Cabrera? Alas! that the walls of San Carlos should tell us little or nothing; that the padre who guides us through La Profesa knows about as much! The poor muse of painting has been a good-for-nothing these many years, a wretched Cinderella sitting at a ruined hearthstone, or, rather, sweeping up the rubbish in the corridors of confiscated and despoiled convents. La Profesa, however, is an asylum of art. As it now stands, it is a fine old church, whose rigid and antiquated countenance many a praying Mexican woman knows for that of a mother. Nothing of its ample, simple, sturdy architecture has crumbled in the last two centuries. Its plateresco--the "frolic fancy" which sixteenth-century art put upon the front of churches, and of which the _façade_ of the cathedral presents an immense example, entangling cherubs and bewildering saints in the ingenuity of its small sculptures--still remains intact. The apostles are in their niches, and "Nuestro Señor" is invoked in a text cut on the outside walls. Not many years ago, La Profesa was not merely a church, but, as its name indicates, a house for religious women, and that, too, one of the richest and most extensive in Mexico. Many courts, many corridors and fountains, and some pleasant gardens, with eaves-haunting birds to remind one of St. Francis's gossips, the sparrows, were no doubt among the possessions of this convent as of other convents in the capital, from whose now deserted walks and cells one may hear the flow of fountains and the song of birds. But a few corridors of the many that belonged to the house have been left to the church out of a general ruin made necessary for the cutting of a wide street through what was once a vast building or number of buildings. These corridors and the church itself were in 1868 visited by the writer in company with a courteous young padre, but he could learn comparatively little of the unmistakable riches of art deposited there. Who painted the superb heads of the apostles framed in an altar near the sacristy? Cabrera or Velasquez? The padre did not know. As we entered the first of the wide, heavy stone corridors, two old men, looking like pensioners, were saying their prayers aloud before a shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. We stood opposite a mammoth scene of the crucifixion, wherein Christ and the thieves are most painfully individualized on the gloom of Calvary. Age and neglect had seemingly eclipsed the larger portion of this canvas, and left no shade of the painter's identity in the mind of our student of the cloister. In another ill-lighted corridor were paintings by Cabrera, Xuarez, Ximenez, Joachim, Correa, Rodriguez, and some others, all Mexicans, it is said, and evidently men of decided gifts. Here was a picture by Xuarez of the Saviour in apparition among the apostles--a presentment in tenderest and most luminous colors of ethereal gentleness. The finest picture in the gallery, entitled St. Luke, might have been by a pupil of Murillo, but really the padre could not tell. Another corridor more neglected than the rest seemed to be a very charnel-room for art--a place for the rags and lumber of unhung, undusted, unrestored pictures. The distracted church has been a sorry sexton for its dead painters. After all, the best efforts are not certain of immunity from the outrages of time and ignorance. Well enough if the great unseen critic applauds.

Nowadays the common visitor to La Profesa searches not at all for Cabrera, but looks at a dome brilliantly painted with scenes from the life of the Saviour by the Spanish Mexican Clavel. Except the dome of Santa Teresa's by Cordero, there is perhaps nothing of the kind, at least in the three principal cities of Mexico, to compare with Clavel's work. Cordero, whose picture of Columbus at court received all the honors of an exhibition in the palace of Prince Poniatowski at Florence, and who has received high encomiums from his brother artists in Italy, is by some regarded the best of existing Mexican artists. Like the two Coras, who, with Tolsa, appear to be the most noted of the sculptors of Mexico, Cordero is a native of the country. To Jose Villegas Coras, who was born in 1713, the city of Puebla owes those statues of our Lord and Our Lady, which one of his admirers declares have a sublimity of expression and a grace in details not easy to find in the best schools of Europe. Jose Zocarias Coras, his nephew, was less an idealist, says his critic, but more faithful to nature, and is distinguished by his sculptures of the "Crucified," in which are exhibited a profound agony. The two statues which crown the towers of the cathedral are also the work of the younger Coras, who died in 1819, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. The work of these men was ill-requited, like so much else in Mexican life and industry. The writer is not able to speak of them upon personal or from a very common knowledge of their sculptures; but it is well to note them here as artists who are thought worthy of a place in that scarce and not too steady literature, Mexican biography. It may serve others who visit Mexico to know that, in the latest phase of art at the capital, Clavel, Rebull, Cordero, and the sculptor Islas, with some others, have distinguished themselves.

Let us now speak freely of Cabrera, the father and master of Mexican art--of him whose pictures are at once so numerous and so scarce, whose fame is so well-founded, yet of whose life so little is known. The first important fact in his biography is, that, like the greatest ruler which the country has produced, its greatest artist was an Indian--a Zapotec Indian, too, from the native country of Benito Juarez, Oaxoca. The next is that, under the patronage of the Archbishop Salinas, he painted those many admirable pieces which are the reproachful glory of his country. According to a modern Mexican writer, Señor Orozco, works of Cabrera may be found in the churches of Mexico and Puebla especially, and in the convents of San Domingo and La Profesa, but we have seen under what circumstances. His masterpieces, if we may credit the intelligent opinion reported by Señor Orozco, are contained in the sacristy of the church at Tasco, where a whole life of the Blessed Virgin is portrayed, the scene of the Nativity being distinguished by its light and freshness of color. The same writer assures us that Cabrera wrote a treatise on the celebrated picture given to the Indian Juan Diego during the Marvellous Apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and in it he concurs with other painters of his day in affirming that the miraculous painting, which he had examined carefully in the light of art, is not the work of human hands. This is the judgment of an Indian artist respecting a wonderful revelation made to one of his race, and, however it may be viewed by those who discredit all supernaturalism of a later date than eighteen hundred years ago, gives the stamp of conviction to the faith of Guadalupe. What the opinion of Cabrera was worth in a question of art, what the artist himself should be worth in the estimation of mankind, is signified to us in the following extraordinary notice of his genius by Count Beltrani, an Italian traveller:

"Some pictures of Cabrera are called _American
wonders_, and all are of eminent merit. The life of St.
Dominic, painted by him in the cloister of the convent
of that name; the life of St. Ignatius, and the history
of the man degraded by mortal sin and regenerated by
religion and virtue, in the cloister of La Profesa,
present two galleries which in nothing yield to the
cloister of Santa Maria la Nueva di Florencia, and
the Campo Santo of Pisa. I hazard even saying that
Cabrera alone, in these two cloisters, is worth all the
artists joined who have painted the two magnificent
Italian galleries. Cabrera possesses the outlines of
Correggio, the animation of Domenichino, and the pathos
of Murillo. His episodes--as the 'Angels,' etc.--are of
rare beauty. In my conception, he is a great painter.
He was, moreover, an architect and sculptor; in fine,
the Michael Angelo of Mexico."

What say our American pilgrims to Italy of this report of an Italian pilgrim in America? Here, then, was an Indian Michael Angelo of whom few artists of the New World know anything whatever. We need not strain an objection that Count Beltrani's dictum may be an exaggeration, for there are not many travellers who care to praise Mexico, and very few to overpraise her--at least, in respect to art. The fact remains that the country which gave birth to Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, perhaps the most remarkable character in all American letters, also had for its native the greatest painter of the New World, and one of the most singularly meritorious in an age when great painters were numerous. In judging of Cabrera, we must fairly consider the time, the place, the elements in which he wrought; for schools, masters, models, emulation, royal encouragement, and proper recompense and fame were all denied to him, in a greater or less degree. Cloistered as a great artist must necessarily be at any time, he would have felt, perhaps, especially abandoned in far-off Mexico in the sixteenth century. That Cabrera did suffer this abandonment the facts of his life attest. Yet, to speak a literal truth, Cabrera has no biography. It is not known when he was born or when he died, and, says a Mexican writer, "we only know that he lived in the eighteenth century by the dates of his paintings." Alas! for fame; alas! for genius!--and this, too, in the eighteenth century! We know more of Shakespeare, more of Lopé, more of Sor Juana, more of Alarcon--he, too, was born in Mexico, yet we know his birthday--than of Cabrera, who could not have died more than a hundred and twenty-five years ago, and respecting whom it was said: "There is hardly a church of the republic which does not contain some work of his distinguished pencil." Alas! for work and worth! How much of all this may have perished or vanished beneath the storms of the last fifty miserable years of Mexican life, overridden by swaggering pronouncers, stolen by intervening robbers, the torch of genius extinguished in the dust raised by defiant nobodies. Yet Cabrera survives, as few artists can, a veritable wreck of matter. Happily for him, it may be, his only biography is in his works; and they are full of life, and of life better than his own, yet in some respects received into it--lives of saints, apostles, angels, the Blessed Virgin, and the Divine Redeemer. Let these speak for his life to men, and commend his work to the unseen Master.

"THE SERIOUS, TOO, HAVE THEIR 'VIVE LA BAGATELLE.'"

Gay world! You may write on my heart what you will
If your laugh-shaken fingers but trace
The dream, or the jest, with that fairylike quill
That ciphers the wood-sorrel's vase!

Fair world! You may write on my heart what you will;
But write it with pencil, not pen:
You are fair, and have skill; but a hand fairer still
Soon whitens the tablet again!

AUBREY DE VERE.

WHAT OUR MUNICIPAL LAW OWES TO THE CHURCH.

The wisdom and bravery of our forefathers having at length enabled them to sever the ties which had bound the original thirteen colonies to Great Britain, their experience, knowledge, and foresight were called into requisition to form a government for the new nation, and adopt a code of laws which, avoiding the complex and erroneous features of those of the Old-World countries, the necessary result of centuries of contradictory legislation, would confirm to the people their newly-acquired liberties, and guarantee to every citizen not only justice from the state, but, in their relations with each other, ample protection for life and liberty, property and reputation. As a foundation for this new system of jurisprudence, the statesmen of the Revolution selected the English code almost in its entirety, partly because the late colonists had been familiar with its workings on either side of the ocean, but mainly because they considered it, comparatively, at least, humane and liberal, and the most suitable for a free government. Many statutes and customs peculiar to monarchies were at the time necessarily omitted, and several enactments have since been passed by our national and local legislatures liberalizing ancient laws, as intended to keep pace with the rapid development of our industrial resources, which, from time to time, creates new and complicated relations between individuals. Still, to all intents and purposes, our body of laws is fundamentally identical with that of England in the last century, is founded on the same general principles, and has the same origin and history. Therefore, in speaking of the jurisprudence of our republic, we also speak of that of Great Britain, for whatever applies to one as a whole equally applies to the other.

Our municipal law, consisting of the common law (_lex non scripta_) and the statute law (_lex scripta_), springs from three distinct sources, each of which in its degree has materially contributed its share to the general stock which goes to make up our legal system, which, for completeness and enlightenment of spirit, may well challenge the admiration of mankind. These three sources are--the ancient common law of England, the civil law of the Roman Empire, and the canon law of the church. Though originating at distinct periods and places, and intended primarily to operate on diverse elements, the provisions of these three codes have in process of time become so interwoven, one with the other, in the body of the English law, that it is often difficult and sometimes impossible to discriminate between them.

The common law, in its general acceptation, is composed of the ancient customs of England, beyond which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, of reports of cases and decisions of judges thereon, and of the writings of persons learned in the law. Sir William Blackstone, the celebrated author of the _Commentaries on the Laws of England_, is by universal consent the greatest expounder of the common law. With the legal profession, his opinions have a force little less binding than that of a positive enactment, while his definitions, whether borrowed from his predecessors or his own creation, are accepted by the learned of all classes as the most comprehensive and satisfactory in the language on this branch of study. Unhappily for posterity, but more unfortunately for his own reputation, Blackstone lived and wrote in an age when it was the fashion to introduce into every department of English literature the most absurd calumnies against the church, and to advance the most preposterous claims in favor of the so-called Reformation. The wild fanaticism and lust of plunder with which that stupendous rebellion against God's authority was inaugurated had in a great measure subsided in the middle of the last century, and it behooved those of its advocates who attempted to look back into the past to justify present crimes by maligning their Catholic ancestors, or, when that could not be hazarded, by imputing the worst of motives for the best of actions. The great commentator, with all his perspicacity and legal acumen, was nor above resorting to this dishonest method of bolstering a sinking cause, and hence we find in his otherwise invaluable work that he loses no opportunity, in or out of season, to ignore the transcendent merits, misrepresent the conduct, and misconstrue the intentions of the ecclesiastics of the early and middle ages of the church, who, in their time, had done so much to reduce our laws into something like system, and make them conform in justice and equity as much as possible to those revealed by the Creator. Surrounded by the mists of doubt and dissent, the emanation of a hundred jarring creeds, he failed to see beyond the horizon of his own generation, or to perceive the reflux of that wave of heresy which, in the sixteenth century, submerged England, and threatened to inundate the whole of Europe. As an expounder of law, Blackstone still holds a position in the front rank of our jurists, but so warped are his views by the prejudices of the epoch in which he lived that, before the enlightened spirit of our time, he is gradually but surely losing his vantage-ground as an impartial authority, even on questions upon which he is really most reliable. Another defect in the writings of this able professor, but one of much lesser importance, is his constant tendency to exaggerate the merits of the Anglo-Saxon lawgivers, and to attribute to them the credit of originating many laws which were wholly unknown in England till many years after the conquest; but as we have the authority of Hallam for saying that his knowledge of ancient history was rather superficial, we may attribute this fault more to a deficiency of historical knowledge than to a wilful intention to deceive.

The civil law is founded principally on the ancient regal constitutions of Rome, on the laws of the twelve tables, the statutes of the senate and republic, the edicts of the prætors, the opinions of learned lawyers, and on imperial decrees. So numerous, however, had these various enactments become, and so contradictory in terms and penalties, that the study of them was the labor of a lifetime, altogether beyond the ability of the great mass of the governed to overcome. It was therefore found necessary in the reign of Theodosius, about A.D. 438, to codify them, and, by rejecting all superfluous matter, to greatly reduce their bulk. About a century later, under the Emperor Justinian, they were again submitted to a similar process, the Institutes being reduced to four books, and the Pandects, containing over two thousand cases and opinions, to fifty. To these were added a new code, being a continuation of that of Theodosius, the novels or decrees of that emperor and his successors, as well as those of Justinian himself. These taken together formed the _corpus juris civilis_ of the Eastern and Western Empires. It is in the new code and the novels that we first begin to perceive the influence of the church in civil legislation. From the time of the conversion of Constantine, the emperors, with one or two exceptions, were the fast friends, and, in matters spiritual, the obedient children of the pontiffs. The laws of pagan times, particularly those respecting distributive justice and the domestic relations, were utterly unsuited for the government of a Christian people, and, as the church was recognized as the sole arbiter of right and wrong in the abstract, it is natural to expect that the Christian emperors before and after Justinian not only conformed to the dicta of the church in their decrees and decisions, but frequently consulted their spiritual advisers on matters affecting conscience in their twofold capacity of legislators and judges. Justinian in particular appears to have borrowed many of his ideas of temporal law from the church, for we find him paraphrasing or adopting bodily many of the canons of the early councils.[59] Hence we easily perceive that much of the more modern portion of the _corpus juris civilis_, though bearing the impress of imperial authority, is in reality little more than a copy of the rules laid down previously for the spiritual and social guidance of the children of the church, and that those grand principles and delicate distinctions which are as true to-day as in the time of the apostles, and are as applicable to our advanced state of civilization as they were then, are simply the result of the infusion of the spirit of Christianity into the civil polity of a once pagan people. Thus we find the Institutes or Elements of Justinian commencing with the solemn invocation, "In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ," and ending with the equally edifying aspiration, "Blessed be the majesty of God and our Lord Jesus Christ," and in harmony with this pious disposition we find among other laws relating to the rights of the church the following: "Those things which have been consecrated by the pontiffs in due form are esteemed sacred; such as churches, chapels, and all movable things, if they have been properly dedicated to the service of God, and we have forbidden by our constitution that these things should be either aliened or obligated unless for the redemption of captives."[60] A novel of Valentinian, in A.D. 452, in recognizing the right of bishops to try cases of only temporal concern where the parties were in orders, extends their jurisdiction over laics who have power to "oblige themselves to obey the sentence of the bishop," which sentence, if necessary, was to be enforced by the civil authorities.[61]